From RT, 7 Mar, 2017
“WikiLeaks has published what it claims is the largest ever batch of confidential documents on the CIA, revealing the breadth of the agency’s ability to hack smartphones and popular social media messaging apps such as WhatsApp.
A total of 8,761 documents have been published as part of ‘Year Zero’, the first part in a series of leaks on the agency that the whistleblower organization has dubbed ‘Vault 7.’
In a statement WikiLeaks said ‘Year Zero’ revealed details of the CIA’s “global covert hacking program,” including “weaponized exploits” used against company products including “Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.”
According to the cache of documents released, the CIA’s Mobile Devices Branch (MDB) has developed multiple tools and systems to hack popular smart phones and remotely order them to send both location data as well as audio and text communications.
The phones’ cameras and microphones can also be remotely activated at will.
Such tools and techniques allow the CIA to hack social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Wiebo, Confide and Cloackman before encryption can be applied, WikiLeaks claims in the statement on their website.
The time period covered in the latest leak is 2013 to 2016, according to the CIA timestamps on the documents themselves.
“The source of the information told WikiLeaks in a statement that they wish to initiate a public debate about the “security, creation, use, proliferation and democratic control of cyberweapons.”
Policy questions that should be debated in public include “whether the CIA’s hacking capabilities exceed its mandated powers and the problem of public oversight of the agency,” WikiLeaks claims the source said.” the rest is here.
Emptywheel’s take.
It seems that this is what had prompted Wikileaks’ Vault 7 contingency plan.
soon afterward:
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
this is a placeholder of sorts for what was to be the upcoming ‘connect the dots’ war and moar war report, but the dots have been sorta connected since i’d gathered the initial links on the 3rd. but this is cool as all giddy-up, and i hope we hear the same song from the librul left post-prez-election:
♪ we love you cia
oh yes we do…
when you’re not near to us…
we’re blue-ue-ue! ♫
sung to this old tune, yanno…
“As of October 2014 the CIA was also looking at infecting the vehicle control systems used by modern cars and trucks. The purpose of such control is not specified, but it would permit the CIA to engage in nearly undetectable assassinations.”
Redactions
Names, email addresses and external IP addresses have been redacted in the released pages (70,875 redactions in total) until further analysis is complete.
1. Over-redaction: Some items may have been redacted that are not employees, contractors, targets or otherwise related to the agency, but are, for example, authors of documentation for otherwise public projects that are used by the agency.
2. Identity vs. person: the redacted names are replaced by user IDs (numbers) to allow readers to assign multiple pages to a single author. Given the redaction process used a single person may be represented by more than one assigned identifier but no identifier refers to more than one real person.
3. Archive attachments (zip, tar.gz, …) are replaced with a PDF listing all the file names in the archive. As the archive content is assessed it may be made available; until then the archive is redacted.
4. Attachments with other binary content are replaced by a hex dump of the content to prevent accidental invocation of binaries that may have been infected with weaponized CIA malware. As the content is assessed it may be made available; until then the content is redacted.
5. The tens of thousands of routable IP addresses references (including more than 22 thousand within the United States) that correspond to possible targets, CIA covert listening post servers, intermediary and test systems, are redacted for further exclusive investigation.
6. Binary files of non-public origin are only available as dumps to prevent accidental invocation of CIA malware infected binaries.
https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/
Oh, you beat me to it.
This bit:
“As of October 2014 the CIA was also looking at infecting the vehicle control systems used by modern cars and trucks. The purpose of such control is not specified, but it would permit the CIA to engage in nearly undetectable assassinations.”
Anybody remember Michael Hastings?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Hastings_(journalist)#Alleged_foul_play_controversy
(again, paranoia as legit? or sign of mental health issues?)
Soon after his death, some[who?] described the circumstances surrounding the crash as suspicious.[67][disputed – discuss]
Former U.S. National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-terrorism Richard A. Clarke said that what is known about the crash is “consistent with a car cyber attack”. He was quoted as saying “There is reason to believe that intelligence agencies for major powers — including the United States — know how to remotely seize control of a car. So if there were a cyber attack on [Hastings’] car — and I’m not saying there was, I think whoever did it would probably get away with it.”[68] Earlier the previous day, Hastings indicated that he believed he was being investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In an email to colleagues, which was copied to and released by Hastings’ friend, Army Staff Sergeant Joe Biggs,[69] Hastings said that he was “onto a big story”, that he needed to “go off the radar”, and that the FBI might interview them.[70][71] WikiLeaks announced that Hastings had also contacted Jennifer Robinson, one of its lawyers, a few hours prior to the crash,[72] and the LA Weekly reported that he was preparing new reports on the CIA at the time of his death.[73] His widow Elise Jordan said his final story was a profile of CIA Director John O. Brennan.[74] The FBI released a statement denying that Hastings was being investigated.[61]
Motor Trend technical director Frank Markus said that the ensuing fire was consistent with a high-speed car crash.[75]
There are conflicting opinions as to Hastings’ death. After his death, some[who?] media outlets recalled that Hastings claimed to have received death threats from the military after the McChrystal article.[76][disputed – discuss] Hastings’ widow, Elise Jordan, has said she believes his death to be “just a really tragic accident”.[77][78] His older brother, Jonathan, said he believed Michael was experiencing a “manic episode” shortly before his death, and that he may have had suspicions were it not for this observation.[79]
Cenk Uygur, friend of Hastings’ and host of The Young Turks, told KTLA that many of Michael’s friends were concerned that he was “in a very agitated state”, saying he was “incredibly tense” and worried that his material was being surveilled by the government. Friends believed that Michael’s line of work led to a “paranoid state”.[80] USA Today reported that in the days before his death, Hastings believed his car was being “tampered with” and that he was scared and wanted to leave town.[81]
paranoids R us. and too often, correct, as well.
ay yi yi; how embarasskin’. i just spent about 45 minutes tryin’ to scare up his name. i kept pinging barret brown, for cripessake, knowin’ that was wrong. he just got outta prison, in fact.. more embarraskin’, i knew i’d written about his death in the wayback. shouldda checked her first, dagnabbit. turns out it was july of 2013. wanna read me some of yer headspace, davidly? please?
https://shadowproof.com/2013/07/26/hackers-reveal-nasty-new-car-attacks/
.
Well, I’m personally not paranoid, but pessimistic enough to entertain the possibility that the term ‘full-spectrum dominance’ might apply here, not restricted to the military applications it refers to, but related nevertheless.
To wit: in considering the implications of the Snowden leaks, and given my disinclination to appreciate Ed for what he was being said to have been, namely, either good-guy whistle-blower or bad-guy traitor, my assessment at the time was that the ultimate effect was two-fold: it lent the optimist in each permission to believe that “the truth can ultimately win out” while simultaneously feeding same person the ugly pill that “they” can do whatever they want and there ain’t shit you can do about it. Conflicting realities, sure. But aren’t all of our realities in conflict?
So here we have another set of revelations that, just like the Snowden batch, tell us nothing we either didn’t already know, or suspect strongly enough to be considered legitimately cognizant of them. The full-spectrum being dominated here is that anyone who is inclined to resist these powers have more than a sneaking suspicion that they will never know everyone included amongst them and all that that entails, while being acutely aware that they remain under threat of operations both physical and psychological — and hence emotional and spiritual.
Es gibt kein richtigen Leben im falschen.
i’m not quite sure whether you’re replying to me or bikes can’t be remote controlled, but well said, davidly. myself, i was using ‘paranoia’ in the sense of conspiracy theorizing, many of those ‘conspiracies’ turn out to be verified (in fact, i have that category here, dunno how many things are actually in it). as opposed to plain ‘fearful, afraid’, i guess.
yes, russell tice had much of the same story on the nsa, but two things caused him not to be the guru level of snowden: first, no documents, and second, he was fat, and that offended more people than you can imagine.
now i covered the snowden files for my. fdl often, but once i watched some of the aukland town hall ‘the moment of truth’ (ptui) and listened to some of the bullshit snowden and greenwald laid out, i was done w/ their bullshit. “If people want to vote to be spied on”, and “I’d vote for any party, left, right or center as long as it was anti-nsa’.
but beyond that craptastic bilge, it was the first time i’d heard them blast the ‘bad whislteblower’ on the screen above their heads. assange was not amused, let’s say.
but i expect that you’re spot on about this: “The full-spectrum being dominated here is that anyone who is inclined to resist these powers have more than a sneaking suspicion that they will never know everyone included amongst them and all that that entails, while being acutely aware that they remain under threat of operations both physical and psychological — and hence emotional and spiritual.”
is this translation close to right? “There is no real life in the wrong.” (i’d tried both bingle and google.
Boongle gets it bout right, even though I bungled the declination (shoulda been “richtiges Leben”). It’s from Minima Moralia by Adorno. Though he may’ve meant it applied other-interpretively, I take it to mean that you can’t resist the Corps while feasting on they vittles.
thank you; i don’t know adorno. oh, yes, you give your mind/heart/spirit power, i was teasing about renting a wee bit of your memory space.
zounds: this is up jason’s alley; we’ve been discussing similar themes on another thread (concerning darpa’s brain implants):
“Adorno maintains that a good, honest life is no longer possible, because we live in an inhuman society. “Life does not live”, declares the book’s opening epigram. Adorno illustrates this in a series of short reflections and aphorisms into which the book is broken, moving from everyday experiences to disturbing insights on general tendencies of late industrial society. Topics considered include the subversive nature of toys, the desolation of the family, the ungenuinness of being genuine, the decay of conversation, the rise of occultism, and the history of tact. Adorno shows how the smallest changes in everyday behavior stand in relation to the most catastrophic events of the twentieth century.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minima_Moralia
& yeah, the reply was for you, including the general thread. I figured I was giving you “some of my headspace”?
From the Wiki: “In the mid-20th century, Adorno maintains that a good, honest life is no longer possible, because we live in an inhuman society. “Life does not live”, declares the book’s opening epigram. Adorno illustrates this in a series of short reflections and aphorisms into which the book is broken, moving from everyday experiences to disturbing insights on general tendencies of late industrial society. Topics considered include the subversive nature of toys, the desolation of the family, the ungenuinness of being genuine, the decay of conversation, the rise of occultism, and the history of tact.”
ha! we chose the same passage! very kewl, davidly. of high interest just now, especially. bless yer heart.
Tnx, wendye. Nighty night;-/
my thanks to you and all the brilliant and wise commentariat here who cause me to reach higher and higher. this was from lemoyne on that same ‘trump and co.n “drugs”. dire straits: industrial disease
and lord, luv a dook, you must be needing some sleep; so late where you are.
From the Wiki: “In the mid-20th century, Adorno maintains that a good, honest life is no longer possible, because we live in an inhuman society.
I would agree for Usian’s; but not for other countries, which are not under the U.S. jack boot.
which begs the question: how many western nations aren’t to some degree under the jackboot of the US, doesn’t it? and yes, he was writing after self-exile to the US fleeing the nazis.
All from selling of Congress during the Clinton administration on the value of requiring backdoors in software for law enforcement. “Protect the kiddies from child predators” was the battle cry 20 or so years ago. Before this leak occurred, it was widely reported in the IT press that some of the hacks attributed to criminal and even foreign national sources had in fact been developed in the US intelligence community and leaked out through the extensive US use of private contractors, who have multiple clients.
Wonder why “self-driving cars” are suddenly all the rage on the Left Coast with their technological innovators. Wonder what other vehicles will become vulnerable.
The crapification of air travel is a reality. The crapification of the internet is just behind. With the proliferation of drones, we are even witnessing the crapification of the great outdoors.
now i hadn’t remembered the Clinton Cry to Save the Kiddies from Predators; thank you! and lol on the left coaster’s recent penchant for self-driving cars.
arggh, i just read that denver int’l announced that all security tsa patdowns will be of the ‘more vigorous kind’ or some such. nation of paranoids, but fearing the wrong things, eh? talk about the modern commodification of fear…
and what’s the new ‘sell the public parks, don’t worry about profits’ statute? talk about crapification of the great outdoors!
and oh: judge boasberg ruled against the #nodapl tribes; prolly feared a drone attack on his family.
on edit: or were they hacks…or were they ‘leaks’, as craig murray had staunchly testified.
well, you guys sent me pecking thru minima moralia
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1951/mm/ch01.htm
(why do some people hate him so much?)
part 1, #33:
Far from the firing-line. – Reports of air raids seldom fail to mention the names of the firms which manufactured the aircraft: Fokker-Wolf, Heinkel, and Lancaster appear where one once talked about cuirassiers, lancers and hussars. The mechanism of the reproduction of life, its exploitation and annihilation, is immediately the same, and industry, the state and advertising are fused accordingly. The old exaggeration of skeptical liberals, that war is merely a business, has come true: the power of the state has given up even the appearance [Schein] of independence from particular profit interests and puts itself into the latter’s service, which it always did in reality, now ideologically as well. Every glowing mention of the chief firm involved in the razing of cities enhances its good calling, for whose sake the best contracts for the reconstruction are doled out.
….
The total concealment of the war through information, propaganda, commentary, the film crews in the leading tanks and the heroic death of war reporters, the mishmash of manipulated-enlightened public opinion and unconscious action, all this is another expression for desiccated experience, the vacuum between human beings and their doom, in which their doom actually consists… Human beings are turned into the actors of a monster documentary film, which no longer knows any viewers, because even the very last one has to participate on the silver screen. The genesis of the belabored talk of the “phony war” lay in precisely this moment. It originated to be sure from the Fascist technique of dismissing the real horrors of the war as “mere propaganda,” precisely in order to facilitate those horrors…
….
Weekly show at the movies: the invasion of the Marianas, among them Guam. The impression is not one of battles, but of mechanical highway and demolition work undertaken with an immeasurably increased vehemence, even of “fumigation,” pest control on a telluric scale. Operations are carried out until grass no longer grows. The enemy functions as patient and corpse. Like the Jews under Fascism, he appears only as the object of technical-administrative measures, and when he defends himself, his counter-actions have the same character. Therein is the Satanic element, that to a certain extent this war requires more initiative than war in the old style, that it costs the subject all its energy, as it were, to achieve subjectlessness. The realization of Edward Grey’s humane dream, of a war without hate, is complete inhumanity. – Autumn 1944.
first, let me say that if i’d ever seen this, i’d forgotten: “His widow Elise Jordan said his final story was a profile of CIA Director John O. Brennan.[74] The FBI released a statement denying that Hastings was being investigated
.[61]”
as to the rest, the parts of pt. I you’ve pasted in have made me cry, as have most of the italicized frags announcing the what, subjects?
yes: yer ‘the northrup grumman’s childrens hour’. i did try to find more on edward grey’s dream, but got waylaid reading extraneous stuff. for a goodnight theme, please allow me the luxury of posting kurt vonnegut’s ‘war in reverse’. may it ease the knot in my brain, and others as well. more in the mornin’ mebbe, jason my friend.
Many claim a distaste for him due to his intellectual or philosophical positions, but I think that’s often a cloak for political propaganda.
i’m not sure i grokked some of it, but shades or, uh, foreshades of orwell, foucault, etc. i read thru the non-bio part of his wiki article. i could see why some people despise him, just for his views on music alone. to probably simplify he seems doubtful of the immediacy of socialist revolution (lol. wonder why?) & that’s heresy in certain circles. the goal of philosophy is to change history not produce analysis stating to & of proletarians they are not yet purged sufficiently of bourgeois consciousness to throw off their chains.
WW2 made him pessimistic? what you tawkin’ ’bout willis? hush yo’ mouf.
but maybe in the S. Sudan the people who brought us ww2 (and 1), the crimean war, napoleon, the korean war, the iraq war, the slave trade, the global genocide of the natives, maybe these people, who have never evinced one subatomic particle of regret, maybe now in, S. Sudan, their bombs will fly true? & don’t get me started on Russia cuz i’ll on longer than the “Sorrow & the Pity.”
“If what I have read is true, then this seems to be an incredibly damaging leak in terms of the tactics, techniques, procedures and tools that were used by the Central Intelligence Agency to conduct legitimate foreign intelligence,” ex-CIA director Michael Hayden told the BBC.
“In other words, it’s made my country and my country’s friends less safe.”
yeah, as davidly said: this is about full-spectrum dominance, not ‘legitimate FI’, you asshat.
ha ha ha. Microsoft calls for a Digital Geneva Convention #CIA #Vault7 https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2017/02/14/need-digital-geneva-convention/ …
But i guess these opinions from the dutiful scribes to the empire say it all: still roosia, roosia again, trump, putin, assange.
‘To security establishment, WikiLeaks’ CIA dump is part of US-Russia battle; WikiLeaks says documents about CIA’s computer hacking tools came from US, but many perceive group as pro-Russia following role in 2016 election
“Perceptions of WikiLeaks in the west have changed markedly since it first became widely known in 2010 with the release of huge numbers of classified US documents from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, as well as US embassies around the world. WikiLeaks was widely embraced by opponents of those wars and supporters of greater government transparency.
But since its high-profile role in the 2016 presidential election, it is now viewed with far greater scepticism. Its leaks focused exclusively on Hillary Clinton’s camp, and were released at critical moments in the campaign. (Following the dump of nearly 2,000 emails hacked from the Hillary Clinton campaign, Trump told voters: “I love WikiLeaks!”)
and
‘From liberal beacon to a prop for Trump: what has happened to WikiLeaks?; A series of hacked emails appear designed to aid Donald Trump fight back against Hillary Clinton, while raising questions about Russian involvement
but thank you, fearless Pierre journalist:
“Robert Mackey of The Intercept website wrote in August: “The WikiLeaks Twitter feed has started to look more like the stream of an opposition research firm working mainly to undermine Hillary Clinton than the updates of a non-partisan platform for whistleblowers.”
“Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook told reporters on Thursday: “The Department of Homeland Security took the unprecedented step of saying … beyond any doubt that this hack and then the leaking of the emails was perpetrated by the Russian government for the purpose of intervening in the election and trying to affect the outcome in favor of Donald Trump. This is getting closer and closer to the Trump campaign itself.”
All of which raises the question: do Assange, Putin and Trump form a triangle? Are they in communication with each other or merely exploiting a coincidence of interests?”
i just checked w/ b at MOA, and he’s featured this that i’d breezed by earlier:
“The CIA’s Remote Devices Branch’s UMBRAGE group collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques ‘stolen’ from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation.
With UMBRAGE and related projects the CIA cannot only increase its total number of attack types but also misdirect attribution by leaving behind the “fingerprints” of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from.
UMBRAGE components cover keyloggers, password collection, webcam capture, data destruction, persistence, privilege escalation, stealth, anti-virus (PSP) avoidance and survey techniques.”
handy tricks, no?
yeah. another victory for the good guyz
lol. a mish-mash of copy/paste moar war diary i’m cobbling together use ‘good guys v. bad guys’ exactly that way. iirc, one thing emptywheel had said that assange could use some of them thar tools himself, athough i can’t remember if she’d said that was likely a cia fear, or just an observation.
Desiderata, STILL! : “I will splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the wind” – JFK
Otherwise, 0ur entropy perpetuates itself :
ack; that’s where the password or whatever originated? ha; great video, bruce. sick stuff, wot? “…the universe is laughing at you behind your back.” even mr. bean! thanks, i needed that.
Thank you. The spiritual cliche of the 1960s has been purged. Did some company back then really print it on toilet lids to sell to people as kitsch?
US hippie types were there, so we cant remember; but by teh ’70s “Deteriorata” was the perfect name for christening my severely dry-rotted wooden Southeaster sailboat, I rather ineptly ‘restored’.
max ehrmann: eat your heart out. ;-) every college dorm room hadda have one framed copy. hope yer boat hadn’t sunk to the ocean depths.
‘WikiLeaks revelations raise new questions about the death of journalist Michael Hastings’, wsws.org
SOC LLC bribery of CIA staff during contract bidding was reported in June 2013 to the CIA OIG. The CIA’s OIG exposed the whistleblowers to the culprits taking cash. The whistleblowers next attempted to seek assistance from the Senate oversight committee. This is why the oversight committee’s computers were hacked into. The whistleblowers were reporting on bribery, extortion, drug running, theft and espionage against the US taking place inside the CIA. The bribery information was legally audio taped and given to investigators in the CIA’s OIG office. This timeline also coincides with Michael Hastings email claiming he was onto a big story before dieing in a car accident. Michael had been fed this information in the days prior to his accident by an unknown source. In the end SOC LLC ( owned by Day & Zimmerman a big longstanding government contractor) retains the contract to this day with current large expansion into other government agencies. The agency cotar lost his job then was rehired as an independent contractor to the agency. This was done to make it look as though the CIA took action on paper. Also interesting is the fact that the Deputy Director and Director (both Clinton cronies) at the CIA advocated going after the whistleblowers. Michael Hastings was pursuing information related to this story which involved some top level people inside the US government.
(Also during this timeframe contractors were told not to talk with CODEL sent to sites in regards to any Benghazi events. Contract personnel were told if they did talk to CODEL personnel they would be fired and financially forced into bankruptcy.)
holy crow, bill; thanks for all this extra information. it’ll take my slow brain time to digest it all, partially due to the fact that i’d forgotten a lot of what was in this post after so many months.
given hastings’ exposé on mcChrystal, yeppers, they’d have known that he could deliver the goods. thanks again for adding to the thread.