USA TODAY International Edition
WikiLeaks will give tech firms access to CIA hacking tools
Authorities working to assess damage caused by WikiLeaks
WikiLeaks will allow tech companies access to much more detailed information about CIA hacking techniques so they can "develop fixes" before the information is widely published, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Thursday.
Assange spoke two days after WikiLeaks published thousands of documents it said revealed hacking tools the CIA developed to break into servers, smartphones, computers and TVs. The online news conference took place at the Embassy of Ecuador in London, where Assange has been holed up since seeking asylum in 2012.
"The Central Intelligence Agency lost control of its entire cyberweapons arsenal," Assange said. "This is an historic act of devastating incompetence to have created such an arsenal and stored it all in one place and not secured it."
Assange said the website hasn't published the tools themselves because it doesn't want "journalists and people of the world, our sources, being hacked using these weapons." The best way to avoid that, he said, is to give companies such as Apple, Google and Samsung access first.
"We have decided to work with them, to give them some exclusive access to some of the technical details we have, so that fixes can be pushed out," Assange said.
The website, when it released the documents, claimed the CIA and its Center for Cyber Intelli- gence lost its restricted access to several hundred million lines of crucial hacking code. WikiLeaks says the archive appears to have circulated among former government hackers and contractors, one of whom provided the web- site with portions of it.
WikiLeaks says the CIA hacking division involved "more than 5,000 registered users and had produced more than a thousand hacking systems, trojans, viruses, and other ' weaponized' malware."
The FBI launched a criminal investigation into the release of the document cache, a U. S. official told USA TODAY this week. The official, who was not authorized to comment publicly, said the inquiry will determine whether the disclosure represented a breach from the outside or a leak from inside the spy agency. A separate review will attempt to assess the damage caused by such the disclosure, the official said.
CIA spokesman Dean Boyd declined to vouch for the authenticity of the materials, though he defended the agency's mission to "aggressively collect foreign intelligence overseas to protect America from terrorists, hostile nation states and other adversaries.'' Boyd said the CIA is prohibited from conducting electronic surveillance targeting individuals here at home and "does not do so."
WikiLeaks has conducted a global crusade to expose government secrets through a series of controversial and sometimes embarrassing document dumps in recent years.
Assange sought asylum in Ecuador's embassy more than four years ago to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he has been accused of sexual assault, and the United States, where he fears possible espionage charges. But his position is tenuous. Guillermo Lasso, the front- runner in Ecuador’s presidential runoff set for April 2, has said that if elected he will evict Assange.