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CIA malware and hacking tools

wikileaks.org

621–630 of 1001 posts

Re: CIA malware and hacking tools

#621
post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * Someone is seeking to control the narrative. * Uh... welcome to /r/conspiracy....

Is the concept of a 3rd party attempting to steer a conversation so hard to believe?

exactly my point... it has been said for years, decades, centuries...

NO - not hard to believe... but interesting the unveiling we are seeing now...

forgive all typos as my fingers are experiencing the chilling effect ( my hands are cold... makes it hard to type)

Re: CIA malware and hacking tools

#622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that in my heart as well. However, we don't currently live in a world with a federated global government. The recent election in the US highlighted that people do divide the world into imaginary lines on maps and it had a slogan: AMERICA FIRST. It's not just the political class that sees these divisions, it's a majority of the citizens. How would you spark a revolution in people's thinking?

One must make a strong justification for why treating the citizens of the world the same as an American is good for Americans. If we treat the world like we treat our citizens, then perhaps this leads to greater prosperity, more shared understanding about the rights of man, rule of law, and how to resolve conflicts (see the lately faltering "No two countries with a McDonald's have ever gone to war with each other" ru…

> Because of this the "evangelize to the world" feelings of the Cold War have given way to "protect us from the world - we need to get OURS."

But looking from the outside -- when has the US ever done anything but put America first?

They have killed hundreds of thousands, to over a million people over the last 30 years by putting their interests first, by default.

Re: CIA malware and hacking tools

#623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The iOS attack breakdown lists a combination of vulnerabilities in very old versions of iOS, vulnerabilities first published by jailbreak teams, and a couple purchased vulnerabilities. The breakdown ends with a publicly jailbroken iOS version. The Smart TV implant appears to just be a modified version of an open source firmware replacement project.

> vulnerabilities first published by jailbreak teams, I guess we now know who is sponsoring these jailbreak guys and why.

What would be the point of the CIA sponsoring jailbreak teams? The exploits they find are generally burned very quickly.

Re: CIA malware and hacking tools

#624
post #576

It's interesting to note that Julian Assange didn't demonstrate control of the wikileaks private key during his Reddit AMA 1 month ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5n58sm/i_am_julian_as... Considering the political situation unfolding in the US and who this leak weakens, there is some evidence that wikileaks is not in the hands of a neutral party. There is clear motive right now for undermining the CIA. Th…

He very clearly explained his motives for not doing so in the AMA, and he gave an alternate POL by reading from the blockchain. This whole narrative of Wikileaks not being neutral is a very weird story, because they've never published anything that wasn't verified to be true. Since that's something they can't be attacked on, it seems that the strategy for discrediting Wikileaks has now become to accuse them of associ…

This whole narrative of Wikileaks not being neutral is a very weird story, because they've never published anything that wasn't verified to be true.

What does the one thing have to do with the other? Just because you're truthful doesn't mean you're neutral, and nobody is seriously denying the authenticity of these files.

What, exactly, have we learned here other than a spy agency knows interesting methods of spying? I mean, of course it's interesting to see they use this or that vector, but that this technology exists isn't surprising in itself.

I see two possibilities: either this has caught the CIA on the hop, in which case everyone else will harden their security and the CIA will be less effective at gathering intelligence for a while, or the CIA has already moved onto better tools and is dumping details of its older ones to see who reacts and raise the technological stakes. There's no sure way for me to know if it's compromised or not, and the only predictable outcome is another leap in the diversity and capability of malware and another round of the cybersecurity arms race.

Re: CIA malware and hacking tools

#625
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never heard the phrase "the best offense is a good defense," but I have heard a great many times the phrase "the best defense is a good offense." I don't have any data to back it up, but inclined to believe the more popular form of the statement.

"the best offense is a good defense" - 51,600 Google results "the best defense is a good offense" - 143,000 Google results, and the only one with a Wikipedia article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_best_defense_is_a_good_off...

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Re: CIA malware and hacking tools

#626

It's interesting to note that Julian Assange didn't demonstrate control of the wikileaks private key during his Reddit AMA 1 month ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5n58sm/i_am_julian_as... Considering the political situation unfolding in the US and who this leak weakens, there is some evidence that wikileaks is not in the hands of a neutral party. There is clear motive right now for undermining the CIA. Th…

> Someone is seeking to control the narrative.

China and Russia immediately come to my mind. China has been influencing american public opinion in more than subtle ways. Hollywood movies are forced or incentivises to show china is positive light. Any material manufactured in China is forced to adopt Chinese world view for example China secretly forces printers to make changes to how Taiwan or Tibet is mention in the books. NN Taleb's recent book face the same issue.

The problem with CIA or US Government in general has been they have long stopped using american ideas of freedom, transparency to their own advantage while being transparent and accountable to public. Constant lies, optimising for dubiously useful goals, financial mismanagement etc. has made them less credible and very correctly so.

I bet the next thing CIA would try to get Assange killed and facts suppressed only making themselves less and less credible and reducing freedom in the country.

When John Kennedy appeared on television during Cuba missile crisis the American public to a large extent believed their president. After what Bush did in Iraq I think American public will not trust another President like that even in the face of a real crisis.

I think that is how nations probably fail.

Re: CIA malware and hacking tools

#627

It's interesting to note that Julian Assange didn't demonstrate control of the wikileaks private key during his Reddit AMA 1 month ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5n58sm/i_am_julian_as... Considering the political situation unfolding in the US and who this leak weakens, there is some evidence that wikileaks is not in the hands of a neutral party. There is clear motive right now for undermining the CIA. Th…

> This may not have been an act of altruism like Snowden I'm still really surprised no one questions the Snowden narrative. A man who earned $200k a year, worked remotely in Hawaii with his smoking hot wife, suddenly decided he has a conscience, either collected data slowly over time or did a massive data dump and released all this information to Greenwald and Der Sepgiel. Then he flees to Russia where he openly twee…

I wouldn't say it's crazy to question it, but neither of the potential motivations you cite for faking the leak really holds up to me. The NSA didn't need to leak on itself just to flex its muscles, people are plenty scared of it as is. Not to mention many of the capabilities confirmed by Snowed were already widely speculated to exist - Wired wrote an article shortly before Snowden that touched on them[0]. Nor can I imagine they would try to claim capabilities they don't have: what would be the point? Seems pretty expensive for a psy-op without a discernible target.

Also Snowden ending up in Russia has never seemed suspicious to me - where else could he go that would protect him from both legal and clandestine extradition?

[0]https://www.wired.com/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/

Re: CIA malware and hacking tools

#628

It's interesting to note that Julian Assange didn't demonstrate control of the wikileaks private key during his Reddit AMA 1 month ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5n58sm/i_am_julian_as... Considering the political situation unfolding in the US and who this leak weakens, there is some evidence that wikileaks is not in the hands of a neutral party. There is clear motive right now for undermining the CIA. Th…

[deleted]

Re: CIA malware and hacking tools

#629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It absolutely provides the Trump Administration with cassus belli to take punitive measures against the CIA. WikiLeaks appeared to have received the dump quite recently. This is all conjecture, but this could be seen as a 'civil cyber war'. The Executive branch suffers from leaks, followed by an evisceration of the CIA hacking capabilities? Trumps love of the intelligence community is well known, and the scale of the…

It looks more like Wikileaks chose this timing to help Trump. No one is talking about his paranoid surveillance tweets now. Everyone's talking about how suddenly the CIA is in all our phones and TV sets. Trump gets to say "See, I told you!", and the world gets to witness another NSA surveillance style scandal, only this time possibly on an even larger scale.

Interesting coincidence that Wikileaks chose to help Trump during the election as well.

Re: CIA malware and hacking tools

#630
post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He very clearly explained his motives for not doing so in the AMA, and he gave an alternate POL by reading from the blockchain. This whole narrative of Wikileaks not being neutral is a very weird story, because they've never published anything that wasn't verified to be true. Since that's something they can't be attacked on, it seems that the strategy for discrediting Wikileaks has now become to accuse them of associ…

While what they are publishing is true and should not be ignored, they certainly appear to be choosing their targets and not choosing others, for example, they claimed to have information from the RNC , but they did not publish it claiming it was already published in other sources. The timing of the leaks was rather suspect too. In interviews, Assange insinuated months before during the primary that he had the emails…

> While what they are publishing is true and should not be ignored

Why does this matter? I feel like the reason people are worried about bias is that it means the source is not trustworthy. If Wikileaks is publishing true information, they should be trustworthy, even if their choice of targets is not unbiased.

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