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Following the 2016 US election, the US intelligence apparatus made it clear that the prosecution of Julian Assange was a top priority.
While it’s clear that President Trump and members of his campaign were fans of WikiLeaks during the 2016 US election – things changed following the publication of the “Vault 7” leaks in March 2017, which consisted of tools used by the CIA to hack into smartphones, computers and internet-connected televisions.
Vice President Mike Pence considered the leak equivalent to “trafficking in national security information,” threatening to “use the full force of the law and resources of the United States to hold all of those to account who were involved.”
Meanwhile, eleven days after the April 2, 2017 election of Ecuador’s new president, Lenin Moreno, then-CIA Director and current Secretary of State Mike Pompeo began using strong language directed at Assange – calling WikiLeaks a “hostile non-state intelligence service.” Shortly thereafter, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions said that arresting Assange was a “priority.”
Five months later, Pompeo equated WikiLeaks to al-Qaida and the Islamic State – arguing that they “look and feel like very good intelligence organizations,” adding “[W]e are working to take down that threat to the United States.”
To that end, WikiLeaks tweeted on Tuesday a link to a TruthDig article by Gareth Porter, as well as a tweet by the State Department featuring Pompeo meeting with the Ecuadorian Foreign Minister, Jose Valencia Amores.
Yesterday: https://twitter.com/StateDept/status/1067050192673751040 …
.@SecPompeo greets Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Jose Valencia Amores at the Department of State. @cancilleriaec @usembassy_quito @EmbajadaEcuUSA
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A 29-year-old former CIA computer engineer, Joshua Adam Schulte, was indicted Monday by the Department of Justice on charges of masterminding the largest leak of classified information in the spy agency’s history.
Schulte, who created malware for the U.S. Government to break into adversaries computers, has been sitting in jail since his August 24, 2017 arrest on unrelated charges of posessing and transporting child pornography – which was discovered in a search of his New York apartment after Schulte was named as the prime suspect in the cyber-breach one week after WikiLeaks published the “Vault 7” series of classified files. Schulte was arrested and jailed on the child porn charges while the DOJ ostensibly built their case leading to Monday’s additional charges.
[I]nstead of charging Mr. Schulte in the breach, referred to as the Vault 7 leak, prosecutors charged him last August with possessing child pornography, saying agents had found 10,000 illicit images on a server he created as a business in 2009 while studying at the University of Texas at Austin.
Court papers quote messages from Mr. Schulte that suggest he was aware of the encrypted images of children being molested by adults on his computer, though he advised one user, “Just don’t put anything too illegal on there.” –New York Times
Monday’s DOJ announcement adds new charges related to stealing classified national defense information from the Central Intelligence Agency in 2016 and transmitting it to WikiLeaks (“Organization-1”).
The Vault 7 release – a series of 24 documents which began to publish on March 7, 2017 – reveal that the CIA had a wide variety of tools to use against adversaries, including the ability to “spoof” its malware to appear as though it was created by a foreign intelligence agency, as well as the ability to take control of Samsung Smart TV’s and surveil a target using a “Fake Off” mode in which they appear to be powered down while eavesdropping.
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WikiLeaks’ latest Vault 7 release contains a batch of documents, named ‘Marble’, which detail CIA hacking tactics and how they can misdirect forensic investigators from attributing viruses, trojans and hacking attacks to their agency by inserted code fragments in foreign languages. The tool was in use as recently as 2016. Per the WikiLeaks release:
“The source code shows that Marble has test examples not just in English but also in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi. This would permit a forensic attribution double game, for example by pretending that the spoken language of the malware creator was not American English, but Chinese, but then showing attempts to conceal the use of Chinese, drawing forensic investigators even more strongly to the wrong conclusion, — but there are other possibilities, such as hiding fake error messages.”
RELEASE: CIA Vault 7 part 3 “Marble” https://wikileaks.org/vault7/?marble#Marble%20Framework …#Vault7
The Central Intelligence Agency now can mimic foreign intelligence agencies’ hack attacks by leaving electronic “fingerprints” creating the false impression of a foreign intrusion into computer networks, according to claims accompanying a new WikiLeaks document dump.
In other words, there may not be hard evidence that CIA operatives, say, used cyberspace to create a modern-day Reichstag fire to undermine the Trump administration, but it may be the case that the CIA has the technological capabilities to do such a thing, if it were so inclined.
This documentary agglomeration covers “the entire hacking capacity of the CIA,” Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks claimed in a press release, and it is only the first in a series of what he calls the “Year Zero” leaks.
The Year Zero label has a decidedly sinister quality to it and may offer clues into what WikiLeaks hopes to accomplish with these new leaks, apparently the most significant and damaging to the U.S. intelligence community since former NSA contractor Edward Snowden handed over thousands of classified U.S. documents to journalists in 2013.
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WikiLeaks has published what it claims is the largest ever release of confidential documents on the CIA. It includes more than 8,000 documents as part of ‘Vault 7’, a series of leaks on the agency, which have allegedly emerged from the CIA’s Center For Cyber Intelligence in Langley, and which can be seen on the org chart below, which Wikileaks also released:
A total of 8,761 documents have been published as part of ‘Year Zero’, the first in a series of leaks the whistleblower organization has dubbed ‘Vault 7.’ WikiLeaks said that ‘Year Zero’ revealed details of the CIA’s “global covert hacking program,” including “weaponized exploits” used against company products including “Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.”
WikiLeaks tweeted the leak, which it claims came from a network inside the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virginia.
Among the more notable disclosures which, if confirmed, “would rock the technology world“, the CIA had managed to bypass encryption on popular phone and messaging services such as Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram. According to the statement from WikiLeaks, government hackers can penetrate Android phones and collect “audio and message traffic before encryption is applied.”
Another profound revelation is that the CIA can engage in “false flag” cyberattacks which portray Russia as the assailant. Discussing the CIA’s Remote Devices Branch’s UMBRAGE group, Wikileaks’ source notes that it “collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques ‘stolen’ from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation.
“With UMBRAGE and related projects the CIA cannot only increase its total number of attack types but also misdirect attribution by leaving behind the “fingerprints” of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from. UMBRAGE components cover keyloggers, password collection, webcam capture, data destruction, persistence, privilege escalation, stealth, anti-virus (PSP) avoidance and survey techniques.”
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