Current Events –
Wikileaks Claims
We’re All Being Spied On

According to Wikileaks, America is spying on Americans. Is this fact or fiction?  Read on…

Current Events
In a surprise release on Tuesday that has Americans running for the hills, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange announced that the US government has special hacking tools to monitor its citizens via their smartphones, voice-activated web devices (such as Alexa), and even Smart TVs. Wikileaks specifically named such programs as CrunchyLimeSkies, ElderPiggy, AngerQuake and McNugget, which can listen in on Skype phone calls, read PDF documents off a computer, and even steal passwords using the autocomplete function on Internet Explorer.

Although WikiLeaks did not identify the source of the documents that it calls Vault 7, it did say they had been “circulated among former US government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.”

In a statement, WikiLeaks said the source set out policy questions that “urgently need to be debated in public, including whether the CIA’s hacking capabilities exceed its mandated powers and the problem of public oversight of the agency.” It added that the source “wishes to initiate a public debate about the security, creation, use, proliferation and democratic control of cyberweapons.”

The document dump was the latest coup for the antisecrecy organization and what some intelligence sources are calling a serious blow to the CIA, which uses its hacking abilities to carry out espionage against foreign targets.

And in other news, water is wet!

Current Events
The fact is, yes, of course, the US government can hack into just about any device or piece of modern technology there is — but so can the foreign-intelligence agencies of Britain, France, Russia, and China. However, unless you’re a high-priority target, such as a terrorist, arms dealer, foreign politician, diplomat, or spy, the CIA probably has zero interest in your conversations or activities.  After all, with more than 300 million people living in America and millions more around the world, there’s just not enough manpower to monitor every person every second of the day. Also, your conversations are just not that interesting.

So, why all the commotion?

Wikileaks has a long history of working very closely with the Russian government.  In fact, they were behind the leak of the Hillary Clinton emails just prior to the 2016 presidential election that widely contributed to the election of Donald Trump. So, it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to consider that Wikileaks is likely part of a Russian campaign to undermine US intelligence agencies while lending credence to Donald Trump’s allegations that former President Barack Obama spied on him.

The thinking here is that if Wikileaks can prove to Americans that their government has the ability to spy on them without their knowledge, then certainly it must be true that Barack Obama spied on Trump without his knowledge. Then, of course, Donald Trump would be vindicated and proven to be right.

“The people who know a lot about security and hacking assumed that the CIA was at least investing in these capabilities, and if they weren’t, then somebody else was — China, Iran, Russia, as well as a lot of other private actors,” said Beau Woods, the deputy director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council in Washington. He added that the disclosures may raise concerns in the United States and abroad about “the trustworthiness of technology where cybersecurity can impact human life and public safety.”

The reality is, some of the CIA hacking tools mentioned in the WikiLeaks dump are real. However, some of them probably are not. We may never know, but even if we did, would it really matter?

For as long as we voluntarily place baby monitors, security cameras, and other monitoring devices around our homes, even if the US government isn’t checking in on us, Joe Hacker down the street probably is.

OK WASSUP! covers current events:
Wikileaks says we’re being spied on.