Vault 7 and the future of freedom
The United States is accustomed to playing god. Assange is stealing fire from the gods and giving it to the mortals. The empire must have shock absorbers of some kind, but politically, the peanut butter is on their chins.
VAULT 7, the Promethean stroke of guerilla intelligence by Wikileaks, has once again put the U. S’ global surveillance operations up for democratic scrutiny. WikiLeaks, on March 7, uploaded a cache of the Central Intelligence Agency’s vastly intrusive hacking techniques into the public domain.
The data dump code-named Vault 7 details CIA’s manipulation of technology products, including Android, Windows, iPhone and Samsung TVs, into hidden microphones.
Powered by the global penetration of these consumer electronics, CIA has squashed potentially billions of people across the world into its listening radius.
Vault 7 is a chilling disclosure of how closely the US has come to perfecting George Orwell’s prophecy of a post-privacy world.
Freedom looks under threat, inexorably depleted by the superpower’s imperial tentacles.
Prefacing its latest dump, WikiLeaks readily gives a nod to Orwell’s prescient novel, “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, whose Big Brother persona prefigures the surveillance state’s illiberal chokehold on individual freedom.
“The increasing sophistication of surveillance techniques has drawn comparisons with George Orwell’s ‘1984’, but ‘Weeping Angel’, developed by the CIA’s Embedded Devices Branch (EDB), which infests smart TVs, transforming them into covert microphones, is surely its most emblematic realisation,” writes Wikileaks.
CIA devised its attack against Samsung smart TVs in collaboration with UK spy agency, MI5. The Weeping Angel programme infests a TV and covertly turns it into a bug so that it records conversations in your room and feeds them into a CIA server.
It appears the spy agencies took a page out of Orwell’s novel with literal precision. In “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, the totalitarian, omnipresent government of Oceania uses two-way telescreens in homes, workstations and public spaces to monitor citizens around the clock.
Similarly, the Weeping Angel bug manipulates an infested television so that it never actually switches off, continuously capturing the targeted user’s activities in a “fake-off” mode.
The discreet installation of microphones and interception of mail is a familiar Orwellian stratagem but CIA is taking business a bit further. By deploying zero-day bugs into smartphones, the spy agency is able to evade the end-to-end encryption built into instant messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal.
Vault 7 significantly shores up WikiLeaks’ public record on the secret life of the world’s most powerful nation, a trove that already monumentally features the War Logs and the Diplomatic Cables.
WikiLeaks has called its latest release the largest intelligence publication in history. “Year Zero”, the first part of Vault 7 comprising 8 761 documents and files from “an isolated, high-security network”, already surpasses Edward Snowden’s National Security Agency (NSA) leaks, which were first published in 2013.
Another strikingly Orwellian stratagem in the CIA’s toolkit is the Umbrage programme. This allows the spy agency to stockpile other hackers’ methods and use them to muddy its own digital trail and so misdirect attribution when it hacks a target.
The agency’s capacity to shroud a hack in fiction has played directly into the on-going controversy about Russia hacking the US presidential elections, to privilege Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.
An investigation by the US intelligence community said Russia created the Guccifer 2.0 persona and D.C Leaks website to hack the Democratic National Convention and subsequently supplied the information to WikiLeaks.
Sceptics suggests if the intelligence community can stage a hack, there is no basis for standing on its “evidence”.
The post-truth capabilities of the CIA are a throwback to Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, a department tasked with rewriting history in the interests of the power factions.
Functionaries at the ministry are routinely seized with rewriting newspaper articles, airbrushing public archives, willing automatons into existence and erasing “fallen” historical figures out of the public record. This seems to be an all too easy task for American’s deep state with revision-capable technology and dutiful media at its disposal.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says the Vault 7 disclosure is exceptional in political, legal and forensic respects. According to the website, the source of the documents wants to start public debate about the power of the surveillance state.
“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 cyber-weapons,” writes WikiLeaks.
Whether damaging or innocuous, the leaks are a pertinent site for discussing the future of freedom and power. The intelligence community cedes considerable ground in bringing increasingly soon-to-be fugitive hacker’s playground.
With the US accustomed to playing god, Assange is stealing fire from Olympus and giving it to the mortals. The empire is expected to maintain shock absorbers of some kind but politically the peanut butter is on its chin.
It looks equally bad for the technology companies to be exposed as Trojan horses for imperial interests. WikiLeaks has previously come out against discreet requests by US intelligence services for technology behemoths such us Google to give up users’ information.
Vault 7 builds on exiled whistle-blower Edward Snowden’s disclosure of the PRISM programme which looked to secure potentially global shelf space for the surveillance state by commandeering the technology companies for its data needs.
Assange is not in doubt regarding the ethical grounds of his Promethean project.
In “When Google Met WikiLeaks”, he argues that human civilisation is built on the intellectual record, hence the obligation to make that record as large as possible, easily navigable, and resistant to censorship.
The guerrilla publisher presents the dilemna faced by misanthropic actors when leaks drag out for democratic scrutiny their secret engagement in acts which the public does not support.
Owing to the scale of their political ambitions, the organisations are bound to produce incriminating material if they wish to remain efficient. For example, a civilian leader cannot go down to whisper directives to the coalface in Baghdad. This necessitates putting things in writing and widely circulating it, a need that makes power factions susceptible to damaging leaks.
According to Assange in “When Google Met WikiLeaks,” the possibility of leaks forces power factions to relent from misanthropic activities, since the required documentation may open them up for public opposition. And without documentation, bureaucratic processes slow down and organisations are weakened by being rendered inefficient.
In the case of CIA, it is already being asked whether it is practical for the organisation to circulate sensitive information to thousands of workers and contractors and still remain secretive. On the other hand, can it scale down communication without scaling down efficiency?
WikiLeaks may claim credit for forcing such an operational dilemma, whatever the outcome
The online population is angry that CIA has stockpiled security holes in consumer electronics for use in its espionage activities instead of working with technology companies to patch them up, the commitment reached upon in the aftermath of the Snowden leaks.
Both Assange and Snowden have highlighted the irresponsibility of this approach. “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,” WikiLeaks notes.
The US’ geo-political and military mettle gains on its technological proficiency. When the tools are constantly uploaded into public domain, NSA yes- terday, CIA today, the superpower has its own security to patch.
Back to “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, the Newspeak of the media-intelligence complex in response to the WikiLeaks thread from 2010 to present implies given concepts such as global security and American exceptionalism.
A cop-out Western media echo chambers have fastened on to is that the CIA’s controversially intrusive toolkit is not being used on American citizens. In the eyes of mainstream editors, this “othering” puts paid to the ethical implications of the surveillance state’s activities.
Wars in which the poor die chanting patriotic, cultural and ideological banalities not for their honour but for the profit of the superstate override the demands of conscience on the back of the media-intelligence complex.
A subversive persona in “Nineteen Eighty-Four” says war must be fought inconclusively and perpetually because its object is to consume human labour and maintain the class disparities of the superstate.
Alibaba Group founder Jack Ma hinted as much at the World Economic Forum when he said more than foreigners taking its jobs, America had squandered its fortune on war. That is, of course, only half the story since there are oligarchs to mop new fortune from the endless wars.
It is interesting to imagine whether this drama will have a sunny ending or if it will advance “Nineteen Eighty-Four”’s strong case for pessimism. Assange currently nurses a headache over the uncertainty of his Ecuadorian asylum.
A presidential frontrunner has promised to kick him out of the London embassy where he is currently holed up. Assange has alleged that he might be slapped with a death penalty if he is given up to the US.
But it is too early to speculate whether Big Brother or the foremost bogeyman of guerrilla intelligence will have the last laugh. The latest data dump is a perfect occasion to think about the future of freedom, power and democracy.