On Tuesday morning, at the same time that Wikileaks was releasing the contents of “Vault 7” CIA-document dump, it was supposed to hold a press conference, which however was said to have suffered terminal technical difficulties. As a result, Wikileaks delayed it until now, at 9:45am Eastern on Thursday.
Readers can submit questions on Twitter with the #askWL hashtag.
One of the notable disclosures is that Assange will share details on the CIA’s hacking tools with the tech industry before releasing them to the general public. The WikiLeaks founder said he has much more detailed information about CIA hacking techniques and will allow tech companies access so they can “develop fixes” before the information is more widely published.
Here is that press conference:
Wikileaks has claimed claims the CIA Center for Cyber Intelligence “lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal,” more than several hundred million lines of code that provide “the entire hacking capacity of the CIA.” It has alleged that the archive appears to have been circulated among former government hackers and contractors, one of whom provided WikiLeaks with portions of it. The website says the CIA hacking division involved “more than 5,000 registered users and had produced more than a thousand hacking systems, trojans, viruses, and other ‘weaponized’ malware.”
The FBI has launched a criminal investigation into the public release of a document cache, a U.S. official told USA TODAY this week. The official, who is not authorized to comment publicly, said the inquiry will seek to determine whether the disclosure represented a breach from the outside or a leak from inside the spy agency. A separate review will attempt to assess the damage caused by such a disclosure, the official said.
As discussed last night, CIA spokesman Dean Boyd declined to comment vouch for the authenticity of the materials, though he defended the agency’s mission to “aggressively collect foreign intelligence overseas to protect America from terrorists, hostile nation states and other adversaries.” Boyd said the CIA is prohibited from conducting electronic surveillance targeting individuals here at home and “does not do so.”
