Wikileaks ‘Vault 7’ Release Shows Vast Spying Capacity of CIA

Thursday, 9 March 2017

Wikileaks ‘Vault 7’ Release Shows Vast Spying Capacity of CIA

Posted on March 7, 2017

[ Ed. note – Do you get the feeling the people running the US government aren’t sane? It has been a day of amazing revelations. ]

Apple, Samsung, Microsoft: WikiLeaks blows lid on scale of CIA’s hacking arsenal

The major takeaway from the latest WikiLeaks dump centers around the terrifying, ‘all-seeing-eye’ surveillance project codenamed ‘Weeping Angel.’ The CIA appears to have taken espionage to a whole new level if WikiLeaks’ initial analysis is accurate.

According to the preliminary release, the CIA has the capability to hack, record and even control everyday technology used by billions of people around the world.

These include smartphones, tablets, smart TVs and even vehicles with remote control navigation systems.

On these devices themselves, the CIA can allegedly hack into some of the world’s most heavily encrypted social media and communications platforms such as WhatsApp, Weibo, Confide, Signal and Telegram before any encryption can even be applied.

For example, WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption means that only the direct participants in a conversation can read messages; not even WhatsApp is capable of reading them.

The CIA, however, was able to hack into individual private WhatsApp messages before encryption could even be applied.

Continued here

Here are a few tweets that have been posted on the subject:

Watson’s observation about the media is rather on target. The following, written by writer Ted Kaplan, was published today at Slate:

Tuesday’s WikiLeaks release exposing thousands of detailed documents on CIA hacking tools is an unbridled attack on U.S. intelligence operations with little or no public benefit.

It is of no benefit to know the government can eavesdrop on us through our TV sets or smart phones? A rather astounding assertion to say the least.