The CIA: bugging our appliances
In his novel Nineteen Eighty-four, George Orwell envisaged a world in which the government keeps constant tabs on its citizens via a “telescreen” in every home. Now, dystopian fiction appears to have become fact, said the FT. A massive haul of secret CIA documents was published by Wikileaks last week – including the revelation that intelligence experts have found a way to turn televisions into domestic spies. The programme – code-named Weeping Angel, after the predatory statues in Doctor Who – exploits vulnerabilities in the Samsung F8000 to make it record conversations in the room, even when the TV is turned off. The files also show agents discussed how to break into smartphones and operating systems; and include evidence that the CIA has been paying hackers for details of “zero day” weaknesses – coding flaws in devices such as phones – and then failing to alert the manufacturers.
Don’t panic, said David Aaronovitch in The Times: Big Brother is not watching you. Closer inspection of the Wikileaks cache suggests the security services are doing nothing unexpected, or even especially new. The Samsung TV, for example, can only be turned into a listening device through direct intervention – an agent would need to insert a USB stick into the TV to install the programme. In other words, “it’s an update of the mike in the lamp” beloved in the Cold War. The same is true of smartphones: an agent would need physical access to your phone to be able to capture and read your messages. Identifying a target and then bugging him or her is what security agencies have always done. Indeed, I’d be “pretty alarmed” if they weren’t.
The contents of this document cache – aka Vault 7 – are less “embarrassing” than the leak itself, said Julian Sanchez in The Atlantic. It puts the CIA – already embroiled in a war of words with Donald Trump over his apparent links to Russia – on the back foot, and raises serious concerns about whether our intelligence agencies can keep their own secrets. There are two possible explanations for this leak, said Toby Harnden in The Sunday Times – “both of them ominous for America and its allies”. The first is a generational problem: the CIA officers of yesteryear – Ivy League blue bloods of unshakeable patriotism – are gradually being replaced by millennial computer hackers, many of whom have a strong anti-establishment streak. The second is that having stolen Democrat campaign emails and passed them on to Wikileaks a month before the US election, Russian hackers have now infiltrated the US spy agency itself. Either way, the CIA is facing “one of the biggest crises of its 70-year history”.