JAMES GEORGE JATRAS
\nStrategic Culture Foundation<\/p>\n
The latest release of a massive trove of apparently genuine documents originating with the Central Intelligence Agency comes as Donald Trump\u2019s grudge match with the Deep State and its Mainstream Media (MSM) allies was already reaching the boiling point. It will now get even hotter, if that\u2019s possible.<\/p>\n
On the details, so-called \u00abVault 7\u00bb consists of some 8,761 documents evidently originating in the CIA\u2019s Center for Cyber Intelligence. According to Wikileaks, it shows that U.S. intelligence agencies have developed effective methods to break into devices from iPhones and Android phones to Samsung \u00absmart\u00bb televisions, allowing them to monitor communications even when devices are turned off. The documents also disclose\u00a0malware, viruses, and security vulnerabilities known as \u00abzero days\u00bb and several hundred million lines of code used by the CIA, as well as the agency\u2019s ability to break into devices and intercept messages before they can be encrypted by applications such as WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Confide, and others many people wrongly considered to be secure.<\/p>\n
In short, in case anyone had any doubts, privacy is a fiction, for any person or any organization. Not that that\u2019s much of a surprise, but it\u2019s still disquieting to see the details. Only the na\u00efve would believe that several other countries with advanced cyber-technology don\u2019t have similar capabilities as the U.S., if not exactly with the depth and breadth of those now on display.<\/p>\n
Trump and his supporters now can point to the pervasiveness and sophistication of these techniques in support of the President\u2019s claim that his predecessor, Barack Obama, bugged his communications at Trump Tower in New York. Deep State and MSM enemies of the President will cite the same evidence as support for the kind of capabilities that Russia likely also has, feeding their unsupported claims that Russian hackers tried to, and perhaps succeeded in, skewing the election in favor or Trump and against Hillary Clinton. The release of these new documents at a time when anti-Trumpers already had claimed Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn\u2019s scalp and are aiming for that of Attorney General Jeff Sessions will be taken as further confirmation of their claim that Wikileaks is a tool of Moscow.<\/p>\n
The new document cache will be picked over for some time and new conclusions drawn, but even now there are some lessons to be learned.<\/p>\n
First, Vault 7 completely demolishes the already meager claim in December 2016 from the outgoing Obama administration that evidence of \u00abRussian code\u00bb in alleged hacking of the Democratic National Committee proved Moscow\u2019s involvement. That argument was absurd on its face even when it was made, roughly equivalent to suggesting that because a gang of bank robbers used a Volkswagen for a getaway car they must have been Germans. Clearly Russian hackers would use anything but Russian software to avoid pointing back to themselves. Wikileaks now confirms the CIA\u2019s use of Russian software for false-flag effect:<\/p>\n
\u00abThe CIA’s Remote Devices Branch’s UMBRAGE group collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques ‘stolen’ from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation.<\/p>\n
\u00abWith UMBRAGE and related projects the CIA cannot only increase its total number of attack types but also misdirect attribution by leaving behind the \u2018fingerprints\u2019 of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from.\u00bb<\/p>\n
Second, Vault 7 should be scrubbed for evidence of coordination between American agencies and those of the other \u00abFive Eyes\u00bb Anglosphere countries with which the U.S. closely shares intelligence: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Why? There\u2019s a saying in Washington: never believe anything until it\u2019s been officially denied. Obama has been lawyerly definitive in his denials of ordering taps on Trump and his team or on any American citizen, ever. More precise in his language has been James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence (DNI), who states that \u00abthere was no wiretap against Trump Tower during the campaign conducted by\u00a0any part of the national intelligence community\u00bb. This begs the question of whether Trump was tapped not by a U.S. \u00abnational\u00bb agency but by one of the Five Eyes sister agencies, which then passed the information back to their American colleagues, a ploy to avoid legal prohibitions on domestic spying or even a\u00a0pro formawarrant requirement. A U.S. former intelligence official familiar with the practice tells me that such a maneuver was not only a possible means for the espionage against Trump but probable. The most likely agency to have carried out the task is the UK\u2019s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), formal counterpart of the U.S. National Security Agency and its virtual satellite.<\/p>\n