If anything, this dump proves that Wikileaks is not a “tool of Russians”. There is absolutely no reason for Russian intelligence services to make public CIA hacking techniques, tools and methods. Intelligence services very much do not want the other side to find out the extent of their knowledge of the other side’s methods and techniques.
Well everyone knows they have the capabilities – if it can be conceptualized, it can be done when it comes to hacking. Just give it time.
The real issue, always, has been what kind of relationship does the government have with its people. What kind of values do the citizens of a democracy have? Do they have libertarian values and democratic values for all, or for only 'real ‘Merikuns’? Do we make exceptions for liberty and democracy? I’m not an unreasonable binary extremist and realize that in the modern age in which non-state actors can procure weapons of mass destruction, national security agencies need to take that into account. But any ‘sacrifice’ of liberty ought to be transparent, and that’s what makes people paranoid – the lack of transparency. A government of secrecy is a government that will eventually be one of tyranny when it falls into the wrong hands.
I await with baited breath the future wikileaks release of Russian and Chinese state hacking techniques.
They are anti US to the core, first and foremost. Whatever leads to that goal, is put to the fore. Trump was seen during the election as the more dovish candidate relating to Russia and interventions in general, and since they HATE American power used abroad more than ANYTHING else, including foreign power used abroad because ONLY American power is supremely destructive and EVIL, they backed the anti Hillary releases.
Nothing has changed.
Again, I eagerly await the NON US/western world ally releases of information on hacking tools.
- Russia wants to do a deal with North Korea and this was the condition
- Russia wants to do a deal with Iran and this was the condition
- Russia wants to keep the US off-balance
- Russia wants to make the CIA look incompetent/nefarious so that no one trusts anything they do or say.
- Russia wants to make the CIA too busy to continue investigating Trump and his connections to Russia.
- Russia sees that Trump’s entourage is being stuffed with anti-Russian Republicans and so, if they’re not going to be able to get anything out of him, they may as well get revenge for the sanctions they’re stuck with.
- Trump is pissed off at the CIA for investigating him and used his back channel connection to Assange to ask him to put it to the CIA.
I could probably come up with another half dozen potentials for why Russia would want to do this right now.
And it’s possible that WikiLeaks did this without Russian intervention (as in option 7 above). Without knowing the exact relationship of WikiLeaks to Russia, it’s plausible that some things they do are for Russia and some are for themselves. They could be everything from an unwitting accomplice to 1-spit away from being an official arm of the FSB.
This dump doesn’t really narrow down the span of options by any. But certainly if most of the information comes by route of Russia and is released by Russia on Russia’s timetable, it’s fair to say that WikiLeaks is a tool of Russia, even if it doesn’t view itself as being one.
I was hoping that the Trump presidency would be enough to break the left out of their irrational trust in America’s intelligence agencies. Apparently not.
Do you not remember the CIA torturing and raping prisoners during the Bush administration? Do you not remember them bombing civilians in countries with which we are not at war during the Obama administration?
I am not left, trust in the intelligence sector and military is usually a right-wing viewpoint (though both political leanings are touch and go with it on the intelligence side of things), and that wasn’t a note of support. If we live in a country of rule of law then illegal is as good as it gets. If it’s illegal and the government is still doing it, regardless, then you’re basically boned and there’s not much more you can do about it.
But I certainly do trust the intelligence agencies more than I trust Trump.
I remember the waterboarding. We stopped. As for bombing civilians… that is a cheap statement. If you are opposed to civilian casualties in wars or assaults, fine, say the cost is too high, but your wording suggests the civilians were the target as opposed to a consequence of strikes on non civilians targets. If you think those consequences are unconscionable, then be a man and go all the way back in history and rebuke US efforts in the carpet bombing on Germany. How many civilians died in those bombings? Should we have not bombed? What war has no civilian casualties in modern times? If you answer is just don’t go to war, fine, but stop pretending you can engage in war without civilian casualties. ANYONE using the argument that civilians will DIE as an argument against getting involved in WWII against the axis powers or the korean war is morally confused. Sorry, but that is how I see it. People who would rather see the world burn than get their hands dirty. At least THEY can feel pure and noble. And if several times MORE people die because of their inaction? No problem at all. THAT is the essence of the anti war crowd, they want absolution for their inaction. If they were around in the antebellum north right before the war, they would be arguing to let the south secede and keep blacks enslaved, better THAT than a war that would lead to the deaths of civilians.
Empty, vacuous, specious, trash appeal. But civilians ! Oh ok, I guess we remove a large chunk of wars, good? bad? Who cares, civilians was invoked, so nothing is legitimate.
Not being at war with a nation has less meaning with weak/failed states with non state actors given free reign.
… my former neocon sentiments just flared up. I don’t think I will ever feel part of the non interventionist segment of the left.
I won’t ever think it’s “wrong” to depose a regime like the Kims from North Korea in a philosophical sense or because we have no business toppling that kind of slave state. I might still be opposed to it for practical reasons like the intervention doing more harm than good, but because of some intrinsic aversion to the action? No. I do not see eye to eye with such people.
You guys should come to a consensus on what lefties believe. I don’t know if I should be demonizing or irrationally trusting American intelligence agencies.
I don’t find it at all coincidental that Trump ranted about Obama tapping his phones Saturday, then 4 days later, this appears.
In Russia you watch TV, in America TV watch you.
The Russian antivirus company, Kapersky, discovered it.
The hacking of the “internet of things” was the media’s page filler off and on for the past year or so. It’s not a very shocking discovery that the CIA is in on the action.
There’s a difference between what the bitheads kick around at DEFCON and in the back pages of Wired and The Verge, qualified (as discussed above) as speculation, and fairly hard evidence of the real thing in the wild.
It’s a much bigger step from “anything that can be conceptualized can be hacked” to the actual code for getting Samsung TVs to open a portal in Joe Q. Couchpotato’s living room than those who vaguely visualize this stuff might think. Which is not disputing the narrow technical accuracy of the first statement, only that there has to be an ecosystem to support such implementation, usually one that goes beyond one basement hacker in Seoul.
That said,I’d say my awareness of reasonably mainstream discussion and acceptance (as fact or high possibility) of things like Alexa and Siri and voice remote systems being used as snooper devices can be measured in weeks, edging into months. That’s from the perspective of someone interested in the average consumer’s awareness of, reasonable grasp of and belief in such things - not those with deep technical knowhow who could, ya know, bring the net to its knees any time they felt like it. 
But it’s not just the back pages of Wired. That big netflix/google/twitter outage last October was blamed on a massive hijack of “things”, though that was just a vanilla DDOS attack.
Why it was so easy to hack the cameras that took down the web
And there’s that website that has live feeds from thousands of unsecured webcams, which I admit isn’t the same as hacking a fridge’s camera.
It is great sadness about the whole situation that I must agree with you. Is there no bottom to the depths to which we have sunk?
GW Bush has been saying some good things.
Funny how he doesn’t seem nearly so bad now. I think Trump makes Bush look good…or at least not as terrible. We have sunk so far so fast from Obama that it’s hard to see how we will keep from exploding like a submarine beyond it’s crush depth…
Dear G-d.
I don’t know. If the Putin/Trump regime needed a distraction, conjuring up a mountain of 8,000 classified documents and leaking them to Wikileaks is a lot to ask for in 4 days.
Unless Putin was sitting with these 8,000 pages under his armchair waiting for an opportune time to unleash them, in which case, he’s a far more intelligent leader than what we call our own.
Either way, the coincidence is…odd.
I believe that WikiLeaks has a number of releases all set to go. They just push the button whenever the mood hits them. Note that the release is listed as “Vault 7”, implying a vault 1 through 6 that are all ready to be opened at any arbitrary date.