Good day all. It looks like Edward Snowden version 2 has been released into the wild. This time the CIA has just had thousands of classified documents dumped on Wikileaks.
The reports on what happened are splashed all over the Drudge Report. Some of the stories are saying that this is worse than the documents that Snowden released. (As I recall, most of that information showed that the NSA was indeed spying on Americans inside the United States, despite denials from “Official quarters”) There is literally a ton of information coming out. Some of what I’ve read shows that the CIA is able to break into pretty much any electronic device with access to the internet. According to the Mirror:
WikiLeaks has claimed the CIA hacked iPhones and Microsoft Windows and worked with MI5 to turn Samsung TVs into microphones as part of a global hacking programme. The secretive organisation is about to release a huge trove of confidential documents from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency as part of its mysterious Year Zero series, founder Julian Assange claimed
Here we go again! Going over to Fox News:
The 8,761 documents and files — released as “Vault 7 Part 1” and titled “Year Zero” — were obtained from an “isolated, high-security network” at the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Va., a press release from the website said. The trove had been “circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors,” one of whom “recently” gave the archive to WikiLeaks. The CIA allegedly employs more than 5,000 people in its cyber spying operation and had produced more than 1,000 programs as of 2016.
According to the files, the CIA had found a number of bugs and security holes in various operating systems and applications. Rather than report these to the developers to be fixed, they used these holes to gain access to the devices.
The site said the CIA additionally failed to disclose security vulnerabilities and bugs to major U.S. software manufacturers, violating an Obama administration commitment made in January 2014. Instead, the agency used the software vulnerabilities — which could also be exploited by rival agencies, nations and groups — for its own ends, WikiLeaks said.
I’m not surprised at all that a commitment by Obama to report holes was ignored. We’ve learned one thing from eight years of the Great Mistake, anything Obama promises is probably a lie. One of the reasons you want to let a developer know about a security hole is to keep bad guys out. Since the CIA didn’t report these holes, I have little doubt that other “Groups” also found them and have been exploiting them to the detriment of the United States.
Digital rights non-profit Access Now said in a statement on Tuesday it was “fantasy to believe only the ‘good guys'” would be able to use the discovered vulnerabilities.
“Today, our digital security has been compromised because the CIA has been stockpiling vulnerabilities rather than working with companies to patch them,” Senior Legislative Manager Nathan White said.
Now, whoever did this is, to put it bluntly, far worse than Snowden. The information Snowden released was embarrassing and proved that the government was lying to the American people regarding clear violations of the 4th Amendment. This one is worse. It’ll be weeks at least before all the details are sorted through, but I suspect that a number of developers are going to be doing full code reviews looking into what they might have missed.
I would also place a very large wager on certain progressive types blaming this on President Trump. That one will not fly at all. Logistically, this data had to have been pulled from the CIA prior to President Trump’s swearing in, and possibly before the election. In other words, this is yet another screw up by that Stuttering Clusterf**k of a Miserable Failure, Barack H. Obama.
I would also place a slightly smaller wager that this time, they catch the person who did this, and that person will be looking at spending the next million years in a nice federal supermax prison. Oh I have no doubt that whoever did this will try the Felonia von Pantsuit defense, but that one is a custom defense strictly for the use of Felonia von Pantsuit.
Thatisall
~The Angry Webmaster~
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