THE alleged CIA hacking programme was exposed by WikiLeaks on March 7. The CIA can turn your TV into a listening device, bypass popular encryption apps, and possibly control your car, according to a trove of documents published by WikiLeaks, which, it said, came from the US spy agency. WikiLeaks said the documents showed that the Central Intelligence Agency is rivalling the National Security Agency, the US government’s main electronic spying body, in the cyber warfare, but with less oversight.

The US intelligence agencies are facing a fresh embarrassment after WikiLeaks published what it described as the biggest-ever leak of confidential documents from the CIA detailing the tools it uses to break into phones, communication apps and other electronic devices.

Germany is home to a sensitive compartmentalised information facility”, according to the leaked documents. The thousands of leaked documents focus mainly on techniques for hacking and reveal how the CIA cooperated with British intelligence to engineer a way to compromise smart televisions and turn them into improvised surveillance devices.

The leak, named “Vault 7” by WikiLeaks, will once again raise questions about the inability of US spy agencies to protect secret documents in the digital age. It follows disclosures about Afghanistan and Iraq by army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning in 2010 and about the National Security Agency and Britain’s GCHQ by Edward Snowden in 2013.

Anita Wilson

Karachi

Published in Dawn, March 13th, 2017