Police State

How the FBI corrupted Geek Squad to spy on people.

How wiretaps theoretically work. In reality the NSA collects everything.

Bin Laden has won.

Wikileaks's Vault 7 press release. More.

17 instances of criminality documented in the CIA Vault 7 leak.

The CIA is not targeting terrorists.

"Among the list of possible targets of the collection are ‘Asset’, ‘Liason Asset’, ‘System Administrator’, ‘Foreign Information Operations’, ‘Foreign Intelligence Agencies’ and ‘Foreign Government Entities’. Notably absent is any reference to extremists or transnational criminals."

Not surprising. Terrorists promote government power.

"As Wikileaks noted, the CIA did not seem especially interested in ISIS, or drug cartels.
But the French Election did interest the CIA. We know they monitored the candidates to intercept communications. The CIA was especially interested in the prospects of French economic growth, specifically which candidates would follow “the German model of export-led growth.”"

Again, not surprising.

"The CIA mission seems to be controlling the world economy and choosing who will win elections of foreign governments. Where is the focus on Isis, China, and Iran coming from? The leaked documents specifically mention 10,000 targets from North America, Europe, and South America."

Not surprising.

"In reality, it is the CIA creating and disseminating these weapons in a disorganized insecure way that makes us all more vulnerable to whoever’s hands the cyber weapons have fallen into. We have been less safe since the CIA built the hacking arsenal."

Exactly.

"Which also brings up more questions about sketchy incidents like the death of investigative reporter Michael Hastings.
Vault 7 confirmed the CIA’s interest in taking over and controlling vehicles. Michael Hastings died in a strange and mysterious car accident.
He was preparing a report on then-CIA Director Brennan’s involvement in sanitizing Obama’s passport records. Hastings died when his car hit a tree and exploded, just three months after Brennan became head of the CIA."

Which is why suddenly everybody is developing a self-driving car.

Self-driving cars should be called hacker-available cars.

The CIA hacks make it easier for Russian, Chinese, Iranians, North Koreans, and terrorists to hack us. That sounds like aiding and abetting the enemy to me.

"When do the unlimited powers of the Intelligence/Security agencies threaten America’s domestic and global national interests? The CIA and its political enablers claim the agency’s essentially unlimited powers, partially revealed by Wikileak’s Vault 7, pose no threat to America’s interests, since they are intended to “defend” American interests.
This is the rationale presented by neocon CIA allies in both political parties: the CIA can’t possibly threaten America’s interests because the CIA defines America’s interests."

That reminds me of Nixon claiming anything done by the president is, but definition, not criminal. It also contradicts what we learned above.

Ransomware didn't lock people out of their hotel rooms, but it can lock people with smart locks out of their houses.

Tech companies in bed with CIA against Wikileaks.

CIA funded Google and Facebook.

The DoD's venture capital network.

"Total participants in the DoD’s Highlands Forum number over a thousand, although sessions largely consist of small closed workshop style gatherings of maximum 25–30 people, bringing together experts and officials depending on the subject. Delegates have included senior personnel from SAIC and Booz Allen Hamilton, RAND Corp., Cisco, Human Genome Sciences, eBay, PayPal, IBM, Google, Microsoft, AT&T, the BBC, Disney, General Electric, Enron, among innumerable others; Democrat and Republican members of Congress and the Senate; senior executives from the US energy industry such as Daniel Yergin of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates; and key people involved in both sides of presidential campaigns."

"In 1994 — the same year the Highlands Forum was founded under the stewardship of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the ONA, and DARPA — two young PhD students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, made their breakthrough on the first automated web crawling and page ranking application. That application remains the core component of what eventually became Google’s search service. Brin and Page had performed their work with funding from the Digital Library Initiative (DLI), a multi-agency programme of the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA and DARPA.

But that’s just one side of the story.

Throughout the development of the search engine, Sergey Brin reported regularly and directly to two people who were not Stanford faculty at all: Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham and Dr. Rick Steinheiser. Both were representatives of a sensitive US intelligence community research programme on information security and data-mining.

Thuraisingham is currently the Louis A. Beecherl distinguished professor and executive director of the Cyber Security Research Institute at the University of Texas, Dallas, and a sought-after expert on data-mining, data management and information security issues. But in the 1990s, she worked for the MITRE Corp., a leading US defense contractor, where she managed the Massive Digital Data Systems initiative, a project sponsored by the NSA, CIA, and the Director of Central Intelligence, to foster innovative research in information technology.

“We funded Stanford University through the computer scientist Jeffrey Ullman, who had several promising graduate students working on many exciting areas,” Prof. Thuraisingham told me. “One of them was Sergey Brin, the founder of Google. The intelligence community’s MDDS program essentially provided Brin seed-funding, which was supplemented by many other sources, including the private sector.”

This sort of funding is certainly not unusual, and Sergey Brin’s being able to receive it by being a graduate student at Stanford appears to have been incidental. The Pentagon was all over computer science research at this time. But it illustrates how deeply entrenched the culture of Silicon Valley is in the values of the US intelligence community."

Government rules tech.

Great quote:

"“Rights aren’t rights if someone can take them away. They’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country, is a bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news even badly, you know that every year the list gets shorter and shorter. Sooner or later, the people in this country are gonna realize the government … doesn’t care about you, or your children, or your rights, or your welfare or your safety… It’s interested in its own power. That’s the only thing. Keeping it and expanding it wherever possible.”— George Carlin" 

Carlin got it.

Blaming FISA for out of control spying.

"The president can order the National Security Agency to spy on anyone at any time for any reason, without a warrant. This is profoundly unconstitutional but absolutely lawful because it is expressly authorized by the FISA statute."

This critique is misguided. Spies are never limited by law, only technology. New laws merely legalize what's already being done.

Yes, the Wikileaks CIA Vault 7 leak proves we live in a police state.

"The massive infection of commonly used software and electronic devices leads to a major problem: proliferation. As these viruses and other invasive programs are unleashed on an unsuspecting public, they fall into the hands of a variety of bad actors: foreign governments, criminals, and teenagers on a lark (not necessarily in descending order of malevolence). This plague is being spread over the Internet by a veritable army of CIA hackers: “By the end of 2016,” WikiLeaks tells us, “the CIA’s hacking division, which formally falls under the agency’s Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), had over 5000 registered users and had produced more than a thousand hacking systems, trojans, viruses, and other ‘weaponized’ malware.” The inevitable end result: a world infected with so much malware that computers become almost useless – and this parlous condition is paid for by you, the American taxpayer."

Like I said, aiding and abetting the enemy.

"And one more thing: I found it extremely odd that, when the hacking of the DNC and John Podesta’s email was discovered, party officials refused to let the FBI and other law enforcement agencies examine either their server or Podesta’s devices. Instead, they gave it over to CrowdStrike, a private firm that regularly does business with the DNC. CrowdStrike then came out with the now-accepted analysis that it was a Russian job. "

That information is new to me.

Woman asks Amazon's Alexa if it is connected to the CIA. It is.

I'm sure Apple and others have fixed many of the Vault 7 vulnerabilities, but there's always new ones to exploit.

Criminal probe of Wikileaks's leak, not CIA hacking.