The US intelligence agencies are facing fresh embarrassment after WikiLeaks published what it described as the biggest ever leak of confidential documents from the CIA detailing the tools it uses to break into phones, communication apps and other electronic devices.

The thousands of leaked documents focus mainly on techniques for hacking and reveal how the CIA cooperated with British intelligence to engineer a way to compromise smart televisions and turn them into improvised surveillance devices.

The leak, named “Vault 7” by WikiLeaks, will once again raise questions about the inability of US spy agencies to protect secret documents in the digital age. It follows disclosures about Afghanistan and Iraq by army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning in 2010 and about the National Security Agency and Britain’s GCHQ by Edward Snowden in 2013.

The new documents appear to be from the CIA’s 200-strong Center for Cyber Intelligence and show in detail how the agency’s digital specialists engage in hacking. Monday’s leak of about 9,000 secret files, which WikiLeaks said was only the first tranche of documents it had obtained, were all relatively recent, running from 2013 to 2016.

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https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/mar/07/wikileaks-publishes-bigges...

This actually shows that Trump is right: these secret agencies cannot even keep their own secrets. They leak like my old plastics buckets. Is it possible that the leaks are part of a CIA deceit to let us know we don't have any secrets any more? Should we care?

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) knew about several flaws in software made by Apple, Google and Samsung and others, but did not tell the companies about them because it wanted to use them for spying, anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks says.

• Wikileaks publishes thousands of confidential files it claims are about CIA hacking activities
• Wikileaks says CIA targeted everyday gadgets — smartphones and televisions — as part of a surveillance program
• The CIA kept the knowledge to itself to use for surveillance, Wikileaks says

WikiLeaks has obtained what it says is a top-secret trove of hacking tools used by the CIA to break into phones, communication apps and other electronic devices.

Disclosing vulnerabilities to technology and software manufacturers is supposed to be common practice, so those companies could fix them before hackers took advantage of any loopholes.

But WikiLeaks said the CIA kept the knowledge of the vulnerabilities in Apple, Google and Samsung to itself to use for surveillance.

Wikileaks also claimed that the CIA:

• Partnered with other US and foreign agencies to bypass the encryption on popular messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal.
• It did that by hacking phones that use Google's Android platform to collect audio and message traffic before encryption is applied
• Targeted everyday gadgets such as smartphones as part of a surveillance program.
• Worked with UK intelligence officials to turn microphones in televisions into listening devices via a program called Weeping Angel, sending the audio to a covert server.
• read more:
• http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-08/wikileaks-releases-thousands-of-do...

From Chris Floyd

...

And now a mobbed-up casino boss has stepped into the vacuum, promising to fix it but using hatred and chaos to distract from his real purpose: letting the same rich white All-American elites who created the situation to tear the remaining bits of meat from the American carcass to fill their own bellies while the country sinks further and world burns. But somehow, these Trump voters believe that sending armed goons into homes and restaurants — even hospitals — to drag immigrants away is going to solve all this. Meanwhile, those same New Democrats will tell you that it’s all Putin’s fault, and if only the good guys of the CIA will step in, we can get back to having leaders who make pretty speeches while drone-bombing weddings, bailing out Wall Street, overthrowing governments, raising military budgets and, er, deporting millions of people, and everything will be OK.

read all:

http://www.chris-floyd.com/home/articles/the-icemen-cometh-madness-blind...

A month before the election, President Donald Trump stood before a cheering crowd at a rally in northeast Pennsylvania and declared: ‘‘I love WikiLeaks!’’

Back then, Trump loved anything that made his rival Hillary Clinton look bad - even if the information had been hacked, stolen or leaked. Trump repeatedly celebrated and shared information released by WikiLeaks, calling the anti-secrecy organization ‘‘a treasure trove.’’ During a press conference last summer, Trump even urged Russia - which U.S. intelligence agencies believe has links to WikiLeaks - to look for tens of thousands of emails from Clinton’s private server that were not handed over to the Justice Department.

But now that he’s in the White House, Trump is having to confront the threat of hacking, along with leaks from within his own administration - and, suddenly, he’s not a fan. Trump and his aides have angrily railed against leakers, threatening to find and prosecute them and urging congressional allies to investigate, while being uncharacteristically quiet when it comes to WikiLeaks.

The latest sign of how the tables have turned came Tuesday when WikiLeaks announced that it had obtained a vast portion of the Central Intelligence Agency’s closely guarded cyberweapons and began posting files online. The breach could cause massive fallout among U.S. allies and poses a serious challenge for Trump, who has been feuding with the intelligence community over probes into alleged ties between his campaign and Russia.

read more:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2017/03/07/after-loving-wikile...

Let's be real here, RUSSIA HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH WIKILEAKS REVEALS. It has all to do with people IN THE USA  who feel that the truth should be outed.  The WP, The NYT, the NYP all are lie sheets, just to name a few. On TV, the lies are thick and fast at FOX, CNN, NBC, etc... The only decent middle of the swamp news is PBS but it's swimming with its hands behind the back. Wikileaks has far more power than Google, Yahoo, Facebook and all the other peddlers of "news" and yet it works on the smell of an oil rag in a top draw of a small desk in a bedroom in the Equador Embassy in Londinum.

“Baywatch” star Pamela Anderson has gone from slow motion runs on the beach to mysterious late night visits to the embassy where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is holed up.

Anderson was most recently spotted entering the Ecuadorian safe space in London Thursday night wearing a camel overcoat, snug black top — and either a really short skirt, or no pants at all.

Anderson, 49, is a regular at the facility, coyly smiling for photographers as she struts inside to see Assange, 45, whose rogue outfit has dumped some of the US government’s most closely guarded secrets.

She refused to deny the dating rumors — saying he stimulates her more than all her “ex-husbands and lovers combined.”

read more:

http://pagesix.com/2017/03/10/pam-anderson-cant-get-enough-of-sexy-julia...

Donald Trump’s lawyer said on Monday that WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange should not be prosecuted and he compared WikiLeaks publications to the Pentagon Papers.

By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News

Rudy Giuliani, a lawyer for President Donald Trump, said Monday that WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange had not done “anything wrong” and should not go to jail for disseminating stolen information just as major media does.

“Let’s take the Pentagon Papers,” Giuliani told Fox News. “The Pentagon Papers were stolen property, weren’t they?  It was in The New York Times and The Washington Post.  Nobody went to jail at The New York Times and The Washington Post.”

Giuliani said there were “revelations during the Bush administration” such as Abu Ghraib.  “All of that is stolen property taken from the government, it’s against the law. But once it gets to a media publication, they can publish it,” Giuliani said, “for the purpose of informing people.”

“You can’t put Assange in a different position,” he said. “He was a guy who communicated.”

Giuliani said, “We may not like what [Assange] communicates, but he was a media facility. He was putting that information out,” he said. “Every newspaper and station grabbed it, and published it.”

The U.S. government has admitted that it has indicted Assange for publishing classified information, but it is battling in court to keep the details of the indictment secret. As a lawyer and close advisor to Trump, Giuliani could have influence on the president’s and the Justice Department’s thinking on Assange.

Giuliani also said there was no coordination between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks. “I  was with Donald Trump day in and day out during the last four months of the campaign,” he said. “He was as surprised as I was about the WikiLeaks disclosures.  Sometimes surprised to the extent of ‘Oh my god, did they really say that?’ We were wondering if it was true. They [the Clinton campaign] never denied it.”

Giuliani said: “The thing that really got Hillary is not so much that it was revealed, but they were true. They actually had people as bad as that and she really was cheating on the debates. She really was getting from Donna Brazile the questions before hand. She really did completely screw Bernie Sanders.” 

“Every bit of that was true,” he went on.  “Just like the Pentagon Papers put a different view on Vietnam, this put a different view on Hillary Clinton.” 

Giuliani said, “It was not right to hack. People who did it should go to jail, but no press person or person disseminating that for the purpose of informing did anything wrong.”  

Assange has been holed up as a refugee in the Ecuador embassy in London for the past six years fearing that if he were to leave British authorities would arrest him and extradite him to the U.S. for prosecution.

Read more:

https://consortiumnews.com/2018/12/31/giuliani-says-assange-should-not-b...

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http://yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/35369

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