FBI’S new mission to expose leaker
UNITED STATES: The FBI has begun preparing for a major mole hunt to determine how antisecrecy group Wikileaks got an alleged arsenal of hacking tools that the CIA has used to spy on espionage targets, according to people familiar with the matter.
The leak has rattled government and technology industry officials, who are scrambling to determine the accuracy and scope of the thousands of documents released by the group. They were also trying to assess the damage the revelations may cause, and what damage might be caused by future releases promised by Wikileaks, the sources said.
The discussion transcripts showed that CIA hackers could get into Apple iphones, Google Android devices and other gadgets in order to capture text and voice messages before they were encrypted. In one case, US and British personnel developed ways to take over a Samsung smart television, making it appear that it was off when in fact it was recording conversations in the room.
Several contractors and private cyber security experts said the materials, dated between 2013 and 2016, appeared to be legitimate.
In the wake of revelations from US Army private Chelsea Manning and former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, US officials sought to tighten security procedures, and federal agents came under greater pressure to find and prevent secrets from spilling out of the government. Now US intelligence agencies are rushing to determine whether they again have suffered an embarrassing compromise at the hands of one of their own.
‘‘Anybody who thinks that the Manning and Snowden problems were one-offs is just dead wrong,’' said Joel Brenner, former head of US counterintelligence at the office of the director of national intelligence.
‘‘If secrets are shared on systems in which thousands of people have access to them, that may really not be a secret any more. This problem is not going away.’'
It wasn’t immediately clear if the CIA had sent a crimes report to the Justice Department - a formal mechanism alerting law enforcement of a potentially damaging and illegal national security leak. Such a report would offer the FBI a road map for where to begin investigating, and whom to question.
The FBI and CIA both declined to comment.
The FBI has spent years investigating Wikileaks, and authorities are eager to figure out whether it has recruited a new, well-placed source from the US government.
Releasing thousands of pages of documents yesterday, Wikileaks indicated that its source was a former government employee or contractor.
‘‘This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA,’' Wikileaks said. ‘‘The archive appears to have been circulated among former US government hackers and contractors in an unauthorised manner, one of whom has provided Wikileaks with portions of the archive.’'
One former intelligence official said that if the claim was accurate, ‘‘there’s going to be another major mole hunt’’.
Brenner said the net effect of the new leaks could be ‘‘very dangerous to us, because they ‘‘accelerate the levelling of the playing field between the United States and its adversaries in cyberspace’'.
Snowden weighed in regarding the alleged CIA documents, tweeting: ‘‘What @Wikileaks has here is genuinely a big deal. Looks authentic.’'
- Washington Post, Reuters