Assange: CIA letting files leak a ‘historic act of devastating incompetence’

WikiLeaks head Julian Assange on Thursday assailed the CIA for allowing its files to get hacked, accusing the agency of a “historic act of devastating incompetence.”

Days after WikiLeaks published the first in what it called a series of CIA-related leaks it code-named “Vault 7,” Assange held a press conference to discuss the documents. 

He claimed Wikileaks received the documents only after they had been passed around in government hacker circles and not directly from the leaker. And he ripped U.S. leaders, saying they should have informed the public that the documents were hacked.

“Did Barack Obama conceal that?” Assange asked. “Was President Trump informed?” 

{mosads}To insiders, the bombshell revelation of Tuesday’s leak was not what was in the documents, but the fact that seemingly authentic documents leaked from a secure CIA network. The FBI is reportedly working with the CIA to uncover what exactly happened, and at least one lawmaker has already called for a congressional investigation. 

The documents — nearly 1 gigabyte worth of data — included descriptions of several of the CIA’s hacking capabilities, including those for smart televisions and mobile phones. The leaks did not, however, contain the all the necessary code to execute them.

Assange announced during the press conference that WikiLeaks would share that code with tech manufacturers to allow them to patch security flaws before posting the code for the public, preventing hackers from having a chance to exploit the code before it was fixed and “affirming our role as a digital Switzerland that helps people all over the world.” 

The WikiLeaks head noted that hacking cell phones would allow the CIA to circumvent encrypted chat apps by listening to conversations before and after the app encrypted them.

He used this to argue that news outlets, such as the New York Times, that accept tips through encrypted apps like Signal were not as secure as his own. 

“We’re specialists in this area,” he said, later adding that lawyers would be susceptible to the same types of attacks.  

The New York Times, like many media outlets, offers multiple ways for tipsters to contact the paper, including a secure, anonymous leaking platform called SecureDrop, functionally similar to the leaking platform used by WikiLeaks. 

The press conference was streamed on Periscope with Assange broadcasting from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where Assange has received diplomatic protection from extradition to the U.S. and other countries for more than four years. 

Assange used the press conference to respond to a Wednesday CIA press release that argued the agency was under strict oversight to abide by rules, including rules restricting its operations to targets outside the United States.

“I think it’s an illusion,” he said of oversight efforts. 

Though Assange acknowledged that the CIA was, at least at present, using its surveillance capabilities in a targeted way — surveilling specific individuals rather than the kind of bulk surveillance done by the National Security Agency — he expressed concern that the policy might change.

The leaked documents show some work to automate the hacking process that could either ultimately make the work of hacking easier or, in Assange’s view, be converted to bulk surveillance. 

Assange had previously scheduled a press conference an hour before the release of this batch of files, but canceled it just beforehand, citing what he said were cyberattacks preventing him from streaming video.