WikiLeaks
Part
1
Today,
Tuesday 7 March 2017, WikiLeaks begins its new series of leaks on the
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Code-named "Vault 7" by
WikiLeaks, it is the largest ever publication of confidential
documents on the agency.
The first
full part of the series, "Year Zero", comprises 8,761
documents and files from an isolated, high-security network situated
inside the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virgina.
It follows an introductory disclosure last month of CIA targeting
French political parties and candidates in the lead up to the 2012
presidential election.
Recently,
the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including
malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized "zero day" exploits,
malware remote control systems and associated documentation. This
extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred
million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking
capacity of the CIA. The archive appears to have been circulated
among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an
unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions
of the archive.
"Year
Zero" introduces the scope and direction of the CIA's global
covert hacking program, its malware arsenal and dozens of "zero
day" weaponized exploits against a wide range of U.S. and
European company products, include Apple's iPhone, Google's Android
and Microsoft's Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into
covert microphones.
Since 2001
the CIA has gained political and budgetary preeminence over the U.S.
National Security Agency (NSA). The CIA found itself building not
just its now infamous drone fleet, but a very different type of
covert, globe-spanning force — its own substantial fleet of
hackers. The agency's hacking division freed it from having to
disclose its often controversial operations to the NSA (its primary
bureaucratic rival) in order to draw on the NSA's hacking capacities.
By the end
of 2016, the CIA's hacking division, which formally falls under the
agency's Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), had over 5000
registered users and had produced more than a thousand hacking
systems, trojans, viruses, and other "weaponized" malware.
Such is the scale of the CIA's undertaking that by 2016, its
hackers had utilized more code than that used to run Facebook.
The CIA had created, in effect, its "own NSA" with even
less accountability and without publicly answering the question as to
whether such a massive budgetary spend on duplicating the capacities
of a rival agency could be justified.
In a
statement to WikiLeaks the source details policy questions that they
say urgently need to be debated in public, including whether the
CIA's hacking capabilities exceed its mandated powers and the problem
of public oversight of the agency. The source wishes to initiate a
public debate about the security, creation, use, proliferation and
democratic control of cyberweapons.
Once a
single cyber 'weapon' is 'loose' it can spread around the world in
seconds, to be used by rival states, cyber mafia and teenage hackers
alike.
Julian
Assange, WikiLeaks editor stated that "There is an extreme
proliferation risk in the development of cyber 'weapons'. Comparisons
can be drawn between the uncontrolled proliferation of such
'weapons', which results from the inability to contain them combined
with their high market value, and the global arms trade. But the
significance of "Year Zero" goes well beyond the choice
between cyberwar and cyberpeace. The disclosure is also exceptional
from a political, legal and forensic perspective."
Wikileaks
has carefully reviewed the "Year Zero" disclosure and
published substantive CIA documentation while avoiding the
distribution of 'armed' cyberweapons until a consensus emerges on the
technical and political nature of the CIA's program and how such
'weapons' should analyzed, disarmed and published.
Wikileaks
has also decided to redact and anonymise some identifying information
in "Year Zero" for in depth analysis. These redactions
include ten of thousands of CIA targets and attack machines
throughout Latin America, Europe and the United States. While we are
aware of the imperfect results of any approach chosen, we remain
committed to our publishing model and note that the quantity of
published pages in "Vault 7" part one (“Year Zero”)
already eclipses the total number of pages published over the first
three years of the Edward Snowden NSA leaks.
Source
and links:
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