Is Watching You Through Your Smart TV Enough Government Yet?

Wikileaks‘ newest data drop, Vault 7, released over 8,000 documents of different methods used to spy on American citizens. The CIA is able to hack smart phones, computers, cars, and even smart TV’s through various cyber attacks. The cyber weapons include malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized “zero day” exploits, malware associated documentation, and associated documentation.

The CIA can hack all these devices in a numerous amount of ways. Some can be remotely activated, such as convert microphones used to record everything you say. Covert microphones can be enabled on all Apple iPhone’s and OSx, Google’s Android, Microsoft’s Windows, and Samsung TV’s. For example, if you have a Samsung TV, and turn it off, it actually enters ‘Fake-Off’ mode, and activates the covert microphone, while the screen stays blank. Just think of what private matters could have been said or done in front of an audience of government bureaucrats.

There are various other methods in which the CIA can launch in attack. Just one other way, is through a program called Fine Diner. Wikileaks explains,

The attacker is provided with a USB containing malware developed for the CIA for this purpose, which is inserted into the targeted computer. The attacker then infects and exfiltrates data to removable media. For example, the CIA attack system Fine Dining, provides 24 decoy applications for CIA spies to use. To witnesses, the spy appears to be running a program showing videos (e.g VLC), presenting slides (Prezi), playing a computer game (Breakout2, 2048) or even running a fake virus scanner (Kaspersky, McAfee, Sophos). But while the decoy application is on the screen, the underlaying system is automatically infected and ransacked.

Image: Wikileaks/ CIA Organizational Chart

To make matters even worse, the CIA is not fully responsible for this as they have created several pet projects to be used in a turf war over their bureaucratic rivals in the NSA.

CIA malware and hacking tools are built by the EDG (Engineering Development Group), which is a software development group inside the CCI (Center for Cyber Intelligence), which is under another department, the DDI (Directorate for Digital Innovation), which ultimately all falls under the CIA. None of these groups even get into your smart TVs. That is the responsibility of the CIA’s EDB (Embedded Devices Branch); likewise, none of the aforementioned branches hack into your smart phone either, which is the responsibility of the CIA’s MDB (Mobile Devices Branch). If that wasn’t enough alphabet soup of agencies for you, check out the organizational chart to the right which includes all of them.

The main concern is all of these extensions of the CIA don’t have to deal with the same oversights as the CIA does. In 2016 alone, the CCI had over 5,000 registered users and created more than a thousand hacking systems. Their hackers utilized more code than is used to run on Facebook! Have you voted for any of these people? I doubt you even know one of their names.

Once a hacking ‘weapon’ is created, it exists in the digital world where anybody can steal it if they know how. This means that anyone with some knowledge of hacking, from a foreign government to a teenage kid, can steal these ‘weapons’ for no cost at all. Meanwhile, our government dishes out hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars on such programs.

Furthermore, the government has been trusted by companies such as Apple, Google, and etc. to share holes in their operating systems, so the companies can ensure the privacy of their consumers. Take one guess on if the government actually shares that information or not.

Image: Getty Images/ Hastings’s Car Accident Aftermath

Wikileaks has speculated that the CIA can hack cars too, which could be used for undetected assassinations. They can take control of a car, and for example, crash it into a tree and kill the driver. Only government can make assassinations so easy! What’s scary is back in 2013 an outspoken journalist, Michael Hastings, was killed in single car accident while writing an expose about the CIA director under Obama, John Brennan. His car exploded after it crashed into the tree.

To date, Wikileaks has only been able to track the CIA’s car hacking program back to October of 2014, but I wouldn’t be surprised if newer data drops confirm that the CIA was involved in Hastings death. In the weeks preceding his death, he grew increasingly wary that the government was following him. Helicopters would suspiciously fly around him, government officials were beginning to speak to people close to him, and he believed his car was being tampered with.

Wikileaks has proved that the CIA has rules which, when followed, will avoid their malware to have fingerprints implicating “the CIA, US government, or its witting partner companies” in “forensic review”. In other words, the CIA has the capability of disguising their malware as coming from another source. They could make malware and make it seem like Russia did it. John McAfee explained this to Larry King when the allegations that Russia hacked our election began to surface. Now do you still believe Russia hacked the election?

Conversely, Wikileaks was able to credit the CIA with targeting French political parties and candidates in to 2012 presidential election. Maybe we should stop throwing stones if we live in a glass house.

With all these revelations about the inner working of government, and the deep state, there’s one burning question I must ask: How can you believe we need even more government in our lives?

Take off all the pretty make-up, in the form of PR, and this is what you see. Evil. Corruption. Power. No matter how charming they make their rhetoric, government is an institution founded on theft, and if you believe they will ever act morally, or not in their own self-interest, naiveté is an understatement.

Bureaucracies, once created, almost never vanish. As Wikileaks accentuated with the expansion in the CIA, they, conversely, endlessly grow. This happens in every bureaucracy, with every expansion a chance for someone to immorally expand their career and their power. This is the nature of the beast.

This should end the stupid deception that government is “of the people, by the people, for the people”. This release alone should make it clear that we are not the government, we are the slaves trapped inside George Orwell’s dystopian magnum opus, 1984.

Source: Gimme Liberty

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