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CIA malware and hacking tools

wikileaks.org

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Re: CIA malware and hacking tools

#631

Post by pillowkusis »

marmot777 wrote: post #500
apo wrote: post #92

In what is surely one of the most astounding intelligence own goals in living memory, the CIA structured its classification regime such that for the most market valuable part of "Vault 7" — the CIA's weaponized malware (implants + zero days), Listening Posts (LP), and Command and Control (C2) systems — the agency has little legal recourse. The CIA made these systems unclassified. Why the CIA chose to make its cyberar…

Why do they make such monumentally short-sighted, clearly bad decisions? Is it weak technical leadership (weak political or just old fashioned weak)? What is the internal logic these people use to justify pure folly that's probably done more harm than good even to their own interests and goals? Baffling.

Nobody makes "decisions" like this in an organization with the level of complexity and bureaucracy that the CIA has. A lot of these decisions can be seen more as emergent behavior, subject to politics, short-term immediate incentives, and the pragmatic observation that any attempt to make significant changes (i.e. "change the laws around classification of documents") has such a high time horizon that it's better to bypass the law than try to fix it.

Re: CIA malware and hacking tools

#632

Post by davesque »

Honestly, what's the news here? The US's top spy agency is engaged in spy activity? This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone just as it shouldn't have surprised anyone that Russians hacked the DNC.

What's more interesting and important to consider is the way in which this is yet another move in the information war that Russia is waging with its enemies. Their intentions in this war are not to "uncover the truth" or whatever the purported mission of Wikileaks was at one point.

Re: CIA malware and hacking tools

#633

Post by anarazel »

ismay wrote: post #576
abandonliberty wrote: post #485

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.

First off, I have no opinion on whether they are neutral.

That said, your argument imo doesn't hold much sway - not publishing something wrong, doesn't at all imply that they're not selectively publishing.

And while I agree that there's some interest as describing them as partisan, I also think that some of Assanges public statements make that really really easy.

Re: CIA malware and hacking tools

#634

Post by Daishiman »

tmccrmck wrote: post #569
Daishiman wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that anyone who has been following the Wikileaks social media accounts has noticed what can only be described as a blatant subverting of those accounts by another party.

What are some examples?

The insane, continued obsession over Hillary's emails and the phrasing of the social media accounts is definitely not congruent with the clear-headed logic and essays that Assange has written in the Wikileaks manifesto, "Cypherpunks", and others.

The Wikileaks Twitter handle just used a Fox News video as evidence for something.

You could say the man's gone insane, but the theory of these accounts and the WL org being subverted by a state power sounds more plausible at this point.

Re: CIA malware and hacking tools

#635

Post by liberte82 »

FLUX-YOU wrote: post #571
djsumdog wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If Snowden was fake, and someone can make the NSA and government's response to his leaks look as genuine as they did, this is going to be someone so powerful, well-connected, and invisible, that's it's likely it's not even human. Every time you come up with a complex conspiracy theory, ask yourself how easy it would be to orchestrate that and just handle all of the logistics of it with zero leaks and 100% undying loy…

Maybe AI is already in charge. :)

Re: CIA malware and hacking tools

#636

Post by anigbrowl »

megablast wrote: post #609
abandonliberty wrote: post #485

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…

> There is clear motive right now for undermining the CIA. I think this is irrelevant and distracts from the issue. You are trying to change the narrative. If this is true, this is incredibly bad, and the CIA should be discredited.

Why is it bad? Does anyone expect spies not to have spy tools? Espionage is their job, after all.

Re: CIA malware and hacking tools

#637

Post by Cookingboy »

x1798DE wrote: post #630
noobermin wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"I feel like the reason people are worried about bias is that it means the source is not trustworthy

No, people are worried about bias because the source could be selectively publishing truth with an ulterior motive, such as pushing a predefined agenda.

Propaganda is even more dangerous when it's true, but only tell people half the story.

Re: CIA malware and hacking tools

#638

Post by defgeneric »

staunch wrote: post #550

The technology used by the CIA and NSA is all stuff people on HN can totally grok. That's kind of exciting and disappointing at the same time. Some people on this site could probably do better than the CIA and NSA is doing. Some people here probably wrote some of leaked stuff. Hah! I like the way the teams are broken up by device target but I think they should probably have an even more decentralized setup. Or maybe…

Saw this at a glance:

> Add to your Vim configuration:

    " :w!! 
    " write the file when you accidentally opened it without the right (root) privileges
    cmap w!! w !sudo tee % > /dev/null
https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/cms/page_4849889.html

Much of it is like this, little recipes ranging from building EFI executables to setting up a Debian machine and so on. Like collected stackoverflow answers.

It's interesting to see how they write up these little how-tos in a way that gets the reader very quickly up to speed and hacking on a particular problem.

Re: CIA malware and hacking tools

#639

Post by mpg33 »

badloginagain wrote: post #562
wavefunction wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you positing that Trump or members of his administration have somehow released these CIA resources? Or just that WikiLeaks is bringing attention to these resources and their current "libre" status in the wild?

Im stating the possibility that the Executive Branch made available the means to doxx the CIA. The timing, the target, and the vector of attack all line up very nicely.

So Trump is simultaneously a complete incompetent blowhard and pulling off these mastermind plans??

Re: CIA malware and hacking tools

#640

Post by Stanish »

abandonliberty wrote: post #485

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…

Hello "abandonliberty".

Keep in mind, it also very clearly serves the CIA's interests to suggest that Assange is compromised, so people should take those who push this idea with perhaps greater skepticism than they do Assange himself.

Also, control of a private key only demonstrates control of the machine on which that key exists, so it is not definitive proof of anything. It is possible Assange's machine was wiped or hacked, or that the person in control of that machine was killed or taken out of play. There have been multiple mysterious deaths associated with Wikileaks in the past couple years. It is conceivable that Assange never was in control of the private key and that one of those people was, in which case it makes perfect sense that he can make multiple convincing videos but not produce that specific key.

Finally, the question of whether Wikileaks is "neutral" (whatever that is supposed to mean) is not particularly relevant given their implacable record of truth in reporting. The leaks are most likely completely true, and as new information, should be evaluated independently/objectively.

As someone who has read a few histories of the CIA, I can say that anyone who is their enemy is my friend. Their worldview and approach to international action has caused mass human suffering on the world stage for decades, usually in the name of protecting things like unfair trade agreements, destroying unionization efforts & democracy, and eliminating political affiliations that are not in the perceived interests (in terms of world hegemony) of the US government. In popular media this is portrayed as a "necessary evil", but in reality it is a sociopathic service to power that degrades the soul of all humanity.

Syria is probably the most recent example. The CIA was envisioning an eerily similar scenario to the one that is playing out right now...in 1986. [0] I encourage you to read up on their origins and history, it is a fascinating if extremely unsettling story.

[0] - https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP86T01017...

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