It’s called Vault 7, concerning the CIA hacking tools. If you haven’t taken the time to read through it, you should. I’m going to link, paste some of the content, and comment on an article at NRO today concerning this release, but before I do, you really need this reddit discussion thread as an antidote to the jingoistic silliness in the article. There are other articles out there, but they pale in comparison to the stupidity of this one at NRO.
According to press reports, WikiLeaks today released thousands of highly classified CIA documents on methods the CIA allegedly is using to conduct cyber warfare. If these documents are legitimate, this illegal release will ruin cyber programs worth billions of dollars that the CIA was using to do battle with America’s enemies, especially terrorist groups.
The CIA officer who took the law into his or her hands to release this material justified this release by claiming this data “urgently need to be debated in public, including whether the CIA’s hacking capabilities exceed its mandated powers and the problem of public oversight of the agency.” The source also said he or she “wishes to initiate a public debate about the security, creation, use, proliferation and democratic control of cyberweapons.”
What nonsense. If the traitor truly believed this program violated U.S. law or endangered the privacy rights of America, there are numerous legal avenues he or she could have used, including the CIA inspector general and the House and Senate intelligence committees. CIA officers take an oath to protect classified national-security information. Such a massive illegal disclosure in violation of the CIA secrecy oath is not an act of courage or whistleblowing, it was “a Snowden” — an act of cowardice by a disgruntled individual who never should have been hired by the CIA.
The only nonsense is in this article. I’ve copied and pasted enough now. If you read any more, you’re head is liable to explode due to the overpressure from flow of stupidity.
So let’s rehearse what we do know, not what we can posture and preen about. First of all, Edward Snowden told us about illegal surveillance being conducted on Americans. Let’s note that again. What the NSA was doing when Snowden made his revelations was illegal, and they’re still doing it. There is absolutely no statutory basis for what they’re doing.
Next, Edward Snowden would be charged with crimes if he were to return to the U.S. If he had taken this information to the Senate or House, it would have been pushed off to a committee, hidden, and nothing done about it, right after Snowden was arrested. We know that for a fact because to this date, nothing whatsoever has been done about Snowden’s revelations. The Senate and House are all compromised in “Brownstone operations” (and we’ll rehearse that in a moment).
What Wikileaks revealed today was that not only is the NSA doing it, but the CIA is doing it as well, and not only that, they’re possibly doing it better. And no, this isn’t restricted to overseas targets or terrorists, it’s being used on literally anyone and everyone they want to target. We also know that there is absolutely no statutory basis or justification for what the CIA is doing. None.
Next, consider what the CIA is doing. They are quite literally buying the vulnerabilities in U.S.-made software. They are paying money to keep the vulnerabilities in software and hardware in order to exploit those weaknesses. One more time so you get the point. They are creating and buying zero-day exploits for systems and of course refraining from telling the manufacturers of those devices. This is irresponsible and dangerous to the point of being criminal. It isn’t negligent, it’s intentionally criminal.
This lends itself to fraud, abuse, extortion, potential convictions in a courtroom with the use of illegally obtained material, material that violates the Fourth Amendment to the constitution. Here is something else. Since some of the malware is stolen from Russia, no one can ever, ever again trust the CIA when they say something like “this malware or hacking attack has a known Russian [or any other country for that matter] signature.” Never. Not that I ever trusted the CIA anyway.
We would all love to live in a country in which we know with certainty that the men and women in responsible charge of the nation’s international security target only the known enemies of state, i.e., foreign enemies. But that’s not reality, and only a fool or simpleton believes things like that. We know that this lust for knowledge, this consuming drive for power, is emblematic of the fall in Genesis, where they wanted to be like God. Statism is a wicked religion, and jingoism is its bread and butter.
So why would this writer, who wrote the same thing at Center For Security Policy, weigh in with such an article as this? Why would he beclown himself in this way? I can think of only two reasons. The first is that he really doesn’t understand the nature of the deep state.
No, I’m not talking about the deep state in the way Bill Kristol talks about the deep state, with utter ignorance of the subject. I mean the true nature of the deep state. CIA, DynCorp (former SpecOps who handles the military operations of the CIA), the State Department, The Clinton Foundation, The Clinton Global Initiative, some FBI (e.g., Andrew McCabe and others), some generals (e.g., Petraeus), and other actors in the corporate world, have participated in nation-toppling in North Africa and the Middle East for the last ten or more years, going after oil, money, precious metals, weapons, human organs and human trafficking (read here child trafficking).
Their bread and butter for extortion is “Brownstone operations,” and their military bread and butter in North Africa has been coupling with the Muslim Brotherhood to overthrow countries and destabilize entire regions. Of course, money from George Soros came in quite handy. If this writer doesn’t know about George Webb on YouTube (who is being assisted by FBI by his own admission), the Reddit discussion threads, the Voat discussion threads, and if this writer doesn’t know about “FBIAnon” and “DHS Insider” who is assisting some of these citizen investigations, then the writer is incompetent and should be fired.
If he worked for the CIA all these years and yet doesn’t know about the current war within the IC, then he is a buffoon. On the other hand, if he does know about all of this, and if he does understand that both the NSA and CIA are engaging in illegal surveillance against American citizens, and yet he supports these programs anyway, then he is a traitor. The second possibility is darker than the first.
Either way, the MSM is chock full of articles and commentaries today on this subject, and amusingly none of the articles display any significant degree of indignation. When Nixon’s men broke into Watergate, the whole nation was outraged (except for Lynyrd Skynyrd). Today, everyone is being recorded, every text message is being sent to storage from one of a few main internet nodes, every phone call is being recorded, and every penny made is being cataloged by the U.S. government. And no one is batting an eyelid.
It’s a sad commentary on the state of affairs, a state that would have sickened our founders and caused rebellion at one tenth of what we’ve witnessed. Our founding fathers would have already burned Washington, D.C. to the ground. The war of independence was started over taxes and gun control. The saddest part is that nothing is likely to happen as a result of the revelations today. This too will pass, I predict, just like Snowden’s revelations.
John Jay has related thoughts. WRSA also links a good video.
