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LONDON/NEW YORK. – WikiLeaks is to publish all of the CIA’s cyber weapons online, Julian Assange has suggested. The organisation has posted what appears to be the biggest ever leak of CIA spying secrets ever, but had previously refrained from publishing the details of the US spying agency’s weapons. Assange had argued that it would be dangerous to do so, since anyone could use them once they are made public.
But he has now announced that it will put those previously redacted weapons online.
First, Assange will give technology companies exclusive access to those weapons, so that they can be defended against. While companies like Apple and Google have claimed to have defended against the weapons revealed in the “Vault 7” files, others have said that they would not be able to do so fully until the details of the weapons are revealed to them.
Once those companies have had some time to look at the details, they will be made public, Assange said on a live stream that he posted online and appeared to be hosting from his room in the Ecuadorian embassy.
That will presumably mean that all of the CIA’s weapons held onto by WikiLeaks will either be made useless or – if they are not properly neutralised by technology companies – will be available for anyone to use.
When the Vault 7 files were published online, WikiLeaks said that it would wait until people had decided whether those weapons were made available. He said he initially refrained from doing so for fear they would find their way into the wrong hands.
“Wikileaks has carefully reviewed the ‘Year Zero’ disclosure and published substantive CIA documentation while avoiding the distribution of ‘armed’ cyberweapons until a consensus emerges on the technical and political nature of the CIA’s programme and how such ‘weapons’should be analysed, disarmed and published,” WikiLeaks wrote in its original post about the disclosures.
Instead, the Vault 7 files only made reference to the names, purposes and targets of the files. That was enough to make clear that all of the popular manufacturers of phones and computers may be liable to attack, and that those attacks could be used in a wide variety of different ways.
Assange has repeatedly said that more Vault 7 files will be released, and suggested that the initial “Year Zero” batch was just 1 per cent of all the documents that it has.
Meanwhile, the Central Intelligence Agency on Wednesday accused WikiLeaks of endangering Americans, helping US rivals and hampering the fight against terror threats by releasing what the anti-secrecy site claimed was a trove of CIA hacking tools.
A CIA spokeswoman would not confirm the authenticity of the materials published by WikiLeaks, which said they were leaked from the spy agency’s hacking operations.
Nevertheless, said spokeswoman Heather Fritz Horniak, “The American public should be deeply troubled by any WikiLeaks disclosure designed to damage the intelligence community’s ability to protect America against terrorists and other adversaries.”
“Such disclosures not only jeopardise US personnel and operations, but also equip our adversaries with tools and information to do us harm,” she said.
Horniak defended the CIA’s cyber operations, which the WikiLeaks materials showed focused heavily on breaking into personal electronics using a wide range of malware systems.
“It is CIA’s job to be innovative, cutting-edge, and the first line of defense in protecting this country from enemies abroad,” she said. – The Independent/AFP.
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