A GRIM year for American spy agencies took a turn for the worse with the leaking, on March 7th, of what appeared to be a lengthy, detailed catalogue of the CIA’s secret hacking tools for turning computers, internet routers, telephones and even web-enabled televisions into remote spying devices, and for bypassing encrypted messaging services by penetrating individual Apple and Android smartphones. The WikiLeaks anti-secrecy organisation posted nearly 9,000 documents and files dated 2013-16 in what it said was a first taste of a “vault” of CIA secrets. WikiLeaks claimed that the archive was provided by a former American government hacker or contractor eager to “initiate a public debate” about the security and democratic control of cyber-weapons, viruses and malware. The group said it had redacted computer code that could be used to launch attacks, pending such a debate.
That self-justification by WikiLeaks will only further strain relations between the intelligence community, the administration of President Donald Trump and technology firms in Silicon Valley. In the final days of the Obama era, American spy chiefs assessed “with high...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/2m2Jpur
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