Krauthammer: Down The Conspiracy Rabbit Hole

Charles Krauthammer offers his take on the WikiLeaks release of the CIA classified trove in his column in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

When he was Ronald Reagan's secretary of state, George Shultz was once asked about the CIA's disavowal of involvement in a mysterious bombing in Lebanon. Replied Shultz: "If the CIA denies something, it's denied."

Has there ever been a more dry, more wry, more ironic verdict on the world of espionage? Within it, there is admission and denial, smoke and mirrors, impenetrable fog and deliberate obfuscation. Truth? Ask the next guy.

Which is why my default view of espionage is to never believe anyone, because everyone is trained in deception. This is not a value judgment; it's a job description.

We learn, for example, from Tuesday's spectacular WikiLeaks dump that among the CIA's various and nefarious cybertools is the capacity to simulate intrusion by a foreign power, the equivalent of planting phony fingerprints on a smoking gun.

Who are you going to believe now? I can assure you that some enterprising Trumpite will use this revelation to claim that the whole storyline pointing to Russian interference in the U.S. election was a fabrication. And who was behind that? There is no end to this hall of mirrors. My rule, therefore, is: Stay away.

You can read the rest of the column via the below link:

http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/20170313_Krauthammer__Down_the_conspiracy_rabbit_hole.html 

WikiLeaks Takes Another Shot At America

The New York Post Editorial Board offers a piece on the WikiLeaks release of a trove of classified CIA information.

WikiLeaks and Julian Assange (seen in the above photo) claim they act for the public good, but their release of CIA documents proves yet again that they lack a moral compass.

The group posted a massive cache of stolen CIA documents online Tuesday, revealing agency cyber-tools for hacking smartphones, Samsung TVs, computer-operating systems, even vehicle-control systems in new cars and trucks. Officials say the info looks like the real thing.

There’s no question the document dump — apparently the largest leak in CIA history — will harm US efforts to collect vital information needed to keep the nation safe.

“This essentially gives our enemies a playbook on how we go about our clandestine cyber operations,” one ex-CIA agent said. Plus, the agency must now assess whether its tools still work and, if not, come up with new ones. That’ll cost a mint.

An even higher priority is figuring out how the agency lost the material. WikiLeaks says it came from a “high-security network” at the CIA and was given to the group by an ex-government hacker or contractor. But who knows? Maybe the agency itself was hacked.

There are positives here, too. It’s reassuring to know, for instance, that the agency has such “wonderful” tools at its disposal, as ex-CIA director Michael Hayden put it.

“There are some bad people in the world who have Samsung TVs,” he said. “You want us to have the ability to actually turn on that listening device inside the TV to learn that person’s intentions.” Kudos to the cyber-spooks who put their remarkable talents to use to develop these tools.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://nypost.com/2017/03/08/wikileaks-takes-another-shot-at-america/ 

WikiLeaks’ Reveal of CIA Hacking Trove Has Feds On Mole Hunt

Cody Derespina at Foxnews.com offers a piece on the WikiLeaks released of a trove of hacked CIA classified material.

Manning. Snowden. Whose name is next to be added to the notorious list of government leakers?

The CIA is trying to answer that question right now.

A day after WikiLeaks released what it alleged to be the “entire hacking capacity of the CIA,” the focus Wednesday began shifting to just who gave the stunning surveillance information to the anti-secrecy website.

“There is heavy s--- coming down,” said a veteran cyber contractor for the intelligence community who previously worked in the breached unit, the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence.

The contractor told Fox News that CCI has long maintained an internal database of information -- accessible to anyone with proper credentials or security clearance -- that seemed to be dumped in total to WikiLeaks. In its news release on the disclosure, WikiLeaks said CCI had more than 5,000 registered users, a number alternatively referred to as “absurd” and “a bit high” by security experts who spoke to Fox News. The CIA declined comment to Fox News.

The FBI opened a federal criminal investigation into the WikiLeaks disclosure on Wednesday, Fox News confirmed. As the probe gets underway, experts said there’s a typical incident response playbook they would use to narrow down the massive pool of suspects.

“They’re going to try to do some forensic work because those documents probably have been changed [over time], so that enables them to narrow down the period to when they were taken,” said Alex Yampolskiy, the CEO of SecurityScorecard. “Once you say ‘this seems like it was a snapshot from this particular time,’ then they can look at audit logs of who had access to the document during that time frame.”

You can read the rest of the piece and watch a video clip via the below link:

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/03/08/wikileaks-reveal-cia-hacking-trove-has-feds-on-mole-hunt.html