Americans should be deeply troubled by WikiLeaks breach — Central Intelligence Agency warns

This department probably has detailed instruction manuals cataloguing the various kinds of locks and safes and which tools and techniques are most effective at breaking into them. It means that if you build them, eventually you will lose them. The group also claims that the C.I.A. can break into iPhones, which are thought to be more secure devices than their Android counterparts. There’s even a BuzzFeed story quoting current and former US intelligence officers that the dump is “worse than Snowden’s”.

This point is particularly important when it comes to popular encryption apps. This is not about mass surveillance – something that should bother the vast majority of Internet users – but about monitoring specific targets.

Or consider documents describing how to turn a Samsung TV into a covert listening device.

The leaks also state that Samsung’s F8000 series of smart TVs was compromised via a hack that places the TV in a “fake off” mode, which leads the owner to believe that the TV is off, when it is actually on and recording conversations, sending them over the internet to a Central Intelligence Agency server. The CIA is doing largely what people expect them to do.

The intelligence-related documents describe clandestine methods for bypassing or defeating encryption, antivirus tools and other protective security features for computers, mobile phones and even smart TVs.

The obfuscation story is similarly unimpressive.

It’s unclear how WikiLeaks will work with tech companies touched by the purported hacks. The CIA’s internal security personnel, who apparently had not told the Federal Bureau of Investigation, were pursuing the matter, but the scope and severity of the problem was unclear until WikiLeaks posted online the roughly 9,000 documents on Tuesday, these individuals said. The move sets up a potential conflict between Silicon Valley firms eager to protect their products and an intelligence agency stung by the radical transparency group’s disclosures.

“It is impossible to keep effective control of cyber weapons”.

An intelligence official said the information, much of which appeared to be technical documents, may have come from a server outside the CIA, managed by a contractor. “Such disclosures not only jeopardize USA personnel and operations, but also equip our adversaries with tools and information to do us harm”.

A bit of advice: Run all the updates available on your personal electronics when prompted to do so – just to make sure you can take advantage right away of any security vulnerabilities that are patched.

If the leaked documents are verified, it could have major security implications for Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, and all other tech companies. The spies need the vulnerabilities to do their own work.

Snowden, who was a contract employee for the NSA before he stole and leaked secret materials, said via Twitter that the document trove “looks authentic”. Those emails were stolen by hackers connected to the Russian government, an act US intelligence agencies concluded was a Russian attempt to help Donald Trump win the presidency.

The Wikileaks disclosure has reignited a debate over whether USA intelligence agencies should disclose software vulnerabilities to companies so they can be fixed, or hoard them so they can be used for spying. It’s time for them to go beyond innuendo and anonymous leaks – they can’t beat Julian Assange at that game.