Julian Assange says WikiLeaks will give Central Intelligence Agency hacking tools to tech companies

US intelligence agencies have concluded that the hacked emails were obtained and then given to WikiLeaks as part of a cyber campaign orchestrated by the Kremlin.

Hari Sreenivasan picks up our story.

In the first 24 hours, no one has reported on an Israel connection yet and the name Israel does not obviously appear in the volumes and volumes of documents, most of which do not make much sense to persons without advanced computer coding skills, but there is a strong chance that Israeli intelligence will take a hit in the not so distant future. So far, however, the intelligence community is reacting to the data as if it is authentic and as if it’s yet another embarrassing security breach.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Wednesday that President Donald Trump is “extremely concerned” about the publication, though he declined to confirm the authenticity of the leaked materials.

For more on all of this, we turn to Leon Panetta. He noted that the review policy “existed by the grace of the Obama administration”.

“Such disclosures not only jeopardize USA personnel and operations but also equip our adversaries with tools and information to do us harm”. “We don’t know this either”.

“Snowden revealed how the NSA was surveilling all Americans”, Graham said. Weren’t there reforms taken after these things? “Should WikiLeaks work directly with them?” “Make sure if you got the iPhone you are using the thumb print. Make sure that if someone tries to get in too many times, it wipes”, he said.

But we are, clearly, living in a world in which the ability to hack has developed to a point where I happen to think that probably anything is vulnerable today. “It’s like defending from an assassin – not likely to be after you, and nothing you can do if they are”. “Given enough time, effort, and resources, a nation-state or even a well-funded cybercriminal group is capable of compromising nearly any popular system we think of as secure”. The revelation that the Central Intelligence Agency has developed modern cyber tools to do so is the least surprising aspect of this release.

Losing control of spying tools is a disaster, but these are only one piece of a larger United States arsenal that includes potent programmes run by the NSA.

The CIA has traditionally been responsible for human espionage – officially, the NSA gathers “signals intelligence” and the CIA analyzes it. There was a national commission that was established to find out why we were attacked on 9/11.

Reuters could not immediately verify the validity of the published documents, but several contractors and private cyber security experts said the materials appeared to be legitimate.

The agency said its activities were subject to “rigorous oversight” to ensure that they complied fully with U.S. law and the Constitution.

Snowden also addressed how the government might be making software vulnerable on goal, by “developing vulnerabilities in U.S. products then intentionally keeping the holes open”. When you cooperate with someone else, you are always taking a risk that intelligence you share could leak to others. Obviously, they have their interests, and we respect that.

U.S. Senator Ben Sasse (R-Nebraska), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called Assange “an enemy of the American people and an ally to Vladimir Putin” who “has dedicated his life’s work to endangering innocent lives, abetting despots, and stoking a crisis of confidence in the West”.

The WikiLeaks files also detailed numerous exploits that target users of Microsoft Windows, with programs that describe ways the agency can infect a computer with malware or viruses by hiding the malicious programs in CDs, in image files and USB sticks. I believe we can. CNET is unable to verify whether the documents are real or have been altered. The publication of the “Vault 7” classified documents once again raises questions about U.S. security agencies inability to keep their secret documents secret in the digital age.