Showing posts with label Spying. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Spying. Show all posts

Wednesday, 29 June 2022

BBC Article From 1999 Shows The NSA Were Spying on Foreign Buyers of Microsoft Computers Before 2000 with Bill Gates Permission

BBC Reports On NSA Chips In Microsoft PC Computers Pre-2000

By Dark Politricks

I've saved this old 1999 BBC News report on NSA chips found in a Windows computer, due to the likelihood of it being removed at any time. 

This shows that the NSA was:
  1. Working with Microsoft Windows before 2000
  2. They had a relationship that allowed them to implant their own chips into the PC's.
  3. It is widely suggested that the chip allowed the NSA to bypass any security measures that the user of the machine may have installed.

From the article:
The approval mechanism was introduced to ensure that the weak encryption in non-US versions of Windows could not be replaced with stronger software without it being checked against a "key" embedded in Windows, proving that it had been digitally signed off by Microsoft.


You can read more about the original article and other spying techniques brought in after 9.11 like TRAPWIRE, Prism, XKeyScore, and more here > http://www.darkpolitricks.com/2022/06/bbc-article-from-1999-shows-nsa-were.html


By Dark Piolitricks

© 2022 Dark Politricks

Friday, 19 March 2021

Echelon Spy Network Revealed

The Echelon spy network revealed


By Dark Politricks

This article has been taken from the BBC Website and I am reproducing it here, as it was from my old site and the article was not copied across when I moved here. So I used the Wayback Machine to get a copy. I did this in case the original ever disappears so that there is record of an “official”  news establishment admitting that such an all invasive privacy destroying system exists and has done so for quite a while.

By Andrew Bomford of BBC Radio 4′s PM programme

Imagine a global spying network that can eavesdrop on every single phone call, fax or e-mail, anywhere on the planet.

It sounds like science fiction, but it’s true.

Two of the chief protagonists – Britain and Americaofficially deny its existence. But the BBC has confirmation from the Australian Government that such a network really does exist and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are calling for an inquiry.

On the North Yorkshire moors above Harrogate they can be seen for miles, but still they are shrouded in secrecy. Around 30 giant golf balls, known as radomes, rise from the US military base at Menwith Hill.

Linked to the NSA

Inside is the world’s most sophisticated eavesdropping technology, capable of listening-in to satellites high above the earth.

The base is linked directly to the headquarters of the US National Security Agency (NSA) at Fort Mead in Maryland, and it is also linked to a series of other listening posts scattered across the world, like Britain’s own GCHQ.

The power of the network, codenamed Echelon, is astounding.

Every international telephone call, fax, e-mail, or radio transmission can be listened to by powerful computers capable of voice recognition. They home in on a long list of key words, or patterns of messages. They are looking for evidence of international crime, like terrorism.

Open Oz

The network is so secret that the British and American Governments refuse to admit that Echelon even exists. But another ally, Australia, has decided not to be so coy.

The man who oversees Australia’s security services, Inspector General of Intelligence and Security Bill Blick, has confirmed to the BBC that their Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) does form part of the network.
“As you would expect there are a large amount of radio communications floating around in the atmosphere, and agencies such as DSD collect those communications in the interests of their national security”, he said.
Asked if they are then passed on to countries like Britain and America, he said: “They might be in certain circumstances.”

But the system is so widespread all sorts of private communications, often of a sensitive commercial nature, are hoovered up and analysed.

Journalist Duncan Campbell has spent much of his life investigating Echelon. In a report commissioned by the European Parliament he produced evidence that the NSA snooped on phone calls from a French firm bidding for a contract in Brazil. They passed the information on to an American competitor, which won the contract.
“There’s no safeguards, no remedies, ” he said, “There’s nowhere you can go to say that they’ve been snooping on your international communications. Its a totally lawless world.”
Breaking the silence

Both Britain and America deny allegations like this, though they refuse to comment further. But one former US army intelligence officer has broken the code of silence.

Colonel Dan Smith told the BBC that while this is feasible, it is not official policy: 
Technically they can scoop all this information up, sort through it, and find what it is that might be asked for,” he said. “But there is no policy to do this specifically in response to a particular company’s interests.”
Legislators on both sides of the Atlantic are beginning to sit up and take notice. Republican Congressman Bob Barr has persuaded congress to open hearings into these and other allegations.

In December he is coming to Britain to raise awareness of the issue. In an interview with the BBC he accused the NSA of conducting a broad “dragnet” of communications, and “invading the privacy of American citizens.

He is joined in his concerns by a small number of politicians In Britain. Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker has tabled a series of questions about Menwith Hill, but has been met with a wall of silence.
“There’s no doubt it’s being used as a listening centre,” he said, “There’s no doubt it’s being used for US interests, and I’m not convinced that Britain’s interests are being best served by this.”
The original article on the BBC news site has actually been removed but you can still find a copy on the Wayback Machine Archive. I wouldn't be surprised if that site is removed soon due to "Cancel Culture", when people want all their Internet History "Scrubbed" from the web this is one site that they ask to have archived content remove from.

Here is a direct link to it > news.bbc.co.uk.

By Dark Politricks

© 2012 Dark Politricks









Monday, 1 March 2021

UK Hypocrisy Exposed As MI6 and BBC Exposed For Pushing Pro NATO Propaganda In Russian Areas

TheGrayZone Breaks A Story Which Should Be All Over The MSM


By Dark Politricks

"Reuters, BBC, and Bellingcat participated in covert UK Foreign Office-funded programs to “weaken Russia,” leaked docs reveal"

Max Blumenthal, writes for the thegrayzone.com an explosive piece about the UK/US hypocrisy when it comes to blaming Russia for hacking and interference in elections. All whilst doing the exact same thing to Russia. They are doing this by using major news outlets such as the BBC and Reuters to train up 1000's of YouTuber's, Bloggers and news reporters to push pro NATO propaganda into Russian areas of influence.

"New leaked documents show Reuters’ and the BBC’s involvement in covert UK FCO programs to effect “attitudinal change” and “weaken the Russian state’s influence,” alongside Intel contractors and Bellingcat."

"The UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) have sponsored Reuters and the BBC to conduct a series of covert programs aimed at promoting regime change inside Russia and undermining its government across Eastern Europe and Central Asia, according to a series of leaked documents.

The leaked materials show the Thomson Reuters Foundation and BBC Media Action participating in a covert information warfare campaign aimed at countering Russia. Working through a shadowy department within the UK FCO known as the Counter Disinformation & Media Development (CDMD), the media organizations operated alongside a collection of intelligence contractors in a secret entity known simply as “the Consortium.”

Through training programs of Russian journalists overseen by Reuters, the British Foreign Office sought to produce an “attitudinal change in the participants,” promoting a “positive impact” on their “perception of the UK.”

“These revelations show that when MPs were railing about Russia, British agents were using the BBC and Reuters to deploy precisely the same tactics that politicians and media commentators were accusing Russia of using,” Chris Williamson, a former UK Labour MP who attempted to apply public scrutiny to the CDMD’s covert activities and was stonewalled on national security grounds, told The Grayzone.

The BBC and Reuters portray themselves as an unimpeachable, impartial, and authoritative source of world news,” Williamson continued, “but both are now hugely compromised by these disclosures. Double standards like this just bring establishment politicians and corporate media hacks into further disrepute.”

Thomson Reuters Foundation spokesperson Jenny Vereker implicitly confirmed the authenticity of the leaked documents in an emailed response to questions from The Grayzone

However, she contended, “The inference that the Thomson Reuters Foundation was engaged in ‘secret activities’ is inaccurate and misrepresents our work in the public interest. We have for decades openly supported a free press and have worked to help journalists globally to develop the skills needed to report with independence.”

The tranche of leaked files closely resemble UK FCO-related documented released between 2018 and 2020 by a hacking collective calling itself Anonymous. The same source has claimed credit for obtaining the latest round of documents."

They first tweeted out a link to the article last week but then someone in the UK foreign office must have got worried as they managed to get Twitter to put a new tag on their post that the documents in the article may have been obtained by hacking.


This of course only made the Tweet go viral, with Bellingcat trending at one point, and meme after meme followed it up on Social Media, most half baked gamer irrelevant meme's, but still, it got the article noticed.

Now we must all be wondering who the hundreds of YouTube channels and bloggers are who are being paid by the UK Gov to push pro NATO propaganda into Russian areas are. They obviously don't want to be ousted but it will be interesting to see which #altnews outfits comment on this piece in a pro or negative way or just ignore it all together, which I suspect will be the case as I haven't seen any UK News Station report on this breaking story yet in anyway or form, even negatively e.g "Anonymous Hacks Government Reports", with no actual details of the underlying nature of the information hacked..

As Max said on a YouTube video earlier, if the Grayzone had been caught doing the same thing but in the opposite direction, e.g pushing pro-Russian propaganda in the US or UK, it would be all over the nightly news, they would be jailed, hell storms would be generated and even the possibility of real war

We are already in a proxy war with Russia in the Ukraine, and there is no doubt that the Axis of War is engaged in a new cold war with the remnants of the old Soviet Union, that they bankrupted and stole from when it crumbled in on itself in the 90's, and instead of NATO and Russia facing off and causing a nuclear holocaust, there will be more proxy wars. Just like the one in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, especially now that Biden and the Obama/Clinton neo-lib crew, are back in office.

Biden has already started bombing Syria, a country they are stealing oil from, along with Iraq, and despite being asked by those governments to leave their oil and their countries alone, they have just pushed more NATO troops towards the Middle East.

Biden is more interested in getting to war quickly, bombing Syria, and calling it a defensive measure despite not really knowing who it really was who killed the American contractor in northern Iraq that the response was in retaliation for. 

They blame Iran of course, and want to start a war with them, however Iran have been truly fighting ISIL in Syria and have been invited to do so, along with Russia, who would have finished the job if it wasn't for Western AXIS of WAR meddling powers protecting Idlib, and the remaining ISIL terrorists they have funded, armed and backed in their war against Assad. The civil war in Syria would now be over. 

It seems like whenever the US can make a war that can be ended quickly extend on for years, even decades, they will, all to the benefit of the lobbyists for Raytheon and other DOD revolving door MIC leaders.

I am just hoping to see some mention of this MI6 / Bellingcat / Reuters / BBC intelligence move to destabilise Russia in our own news but then we all know from Jon Snow's autobiography that to work for the BBC you have to become an MI6 snitch, push pro establishment stories, ignore anything to do with Israel massacring Palestinians at the border and in return they collect a double salary tax free.

In his autobiography Shooting History, Channel 4 News anchor-man Jon Snow revealed that, in the 1970s, he was approached to spy on "left-wing people" working in television.

He recalls the experience today: "I was contacted [by letter] in between working for LBC and ITN to spy. They wanted me to work for MI6."

Snow then attended a meeting in Whitehall where he was offered a tax-free salary in return for his services.

He adds: "It was suggested I should read the Denning report into the Profumo affair. I never did and instead I read Kim Philby's My Secret War. It was clear from the book that to be a good spy you would have to be a double-agent."

It really does make listening to our establishment and oh so trust worthy BBC more interesting now, to know they are mostly MI5/6 agents, and involved in a massive scandal that should be world wide news. 

I am not saying Russia does not hack the US or UK, but for us to claim the moral high ground and pretend we are not doing the exact same thing is just ridiculous and makes us hypocrites. 

China, Russia, US, Israel, UK and India are all hacking each other for industrial secrets, an edge on our competitors, some sort of info that will give us a leg up after a massive economic collapse. It happens all the time, but for the BBC to be ousted like this, and then try to get Twitter to deter people from reading the report by putting up a special "These materials may have been obtained by hacking" sign on the Tweet which only made it go viral is really hypocritical.

Listen to Max Blumenthal talk to Aaron Maté about the controversy in this video, I am sure it will be taken down soon, so check on Bitchute.com if it goes down. I just did but couldn't find the video. It said showing 17 from 18 videos, but wouldn't let me see the 18th, so I don't know if they are hiding the relevant video for some reason or not but I just cannot get that 18th video to show up. Maybe someone else knows why it isn't there?

Watch it on YouTube for now.







By Dark Politricks

© 2021 Dark Politricks

Saturday, 28 December 2019

How Google Listens To You All The Time & Why You Should Remove Google Chrome

Remove Google Products From Your PC To Speed It Up And Stop It listening To You All The Time.....



By Dark Politricks

If you read a recent article on speeding up your PC you might be interested in the fact that the other day I removed Google Chrome and now my PC is fast as road runner..

After removing Google Chrome I noticed an increase in page loading and application speed and I have switched to using 3 browsers instead Firefox, Opera and TOR Browser.

Not only has removing Google Chrome from my laptop has sped it up immensely but if anyone has been paying attention, Google is an evil company (they had to remove that it didn't do evil from their motto), that is hooked into nearly every smart phone measuring when you sleep, walk, drive, the current temperature as well as listening to everything you say just in case it wants to be helpful.

I cannot count the number of times that I have been watching a football match streamed from my phone to my TV and then Google pops up to ask "What would you like to know about Man UTD" or some other nonsensical question I didn't want it to help me with in the first place.

This obviously means it is listening to you ALL THE TIME, otherwise it would not know when to offer help.

If you read the Terms and Conditions on your smart phone then you will see under privacy, a mile down the long winded notes, a section about how they are allowed to listen to you and send off the content to "unspecified 3rd parties", content that "may" improve their service as well as helping these unspecified 3rd parties.

These unspecified parties maybe Google AdSense to show more relevant adverts by listening to the surrounding sound around the phone and then translating that to adverts you will see online.  

Or it maybe listening for more illicit speech that it can send local police enforcement or even the numerous 3 letter agencies in the UK and USA.

Will Binney from the NSA who was arrested for going public about the Prism program he had written and Edward Snowden had stolen to expose, told us about how he had designed it for spying on the Soviets in communist USSR. However once the cold war was over they flipped the script and used it to spy on US citizens illegally instead. 

If you read up on the web tech companies that were first involved in the unknowing spying on users, then they were Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook, Google, Apple, PalTalk, YouTube, and Skype.

The UK was used as a test bed due to our lack of a real bill of rights or constitution and therefore we here in UK are rats roaming a maze designed by the NSA all so they can catch the right words and tell the correct authorities if need be.

The main problem is that you cannot remove all Google products from Android phones and trying to do so will probably break your phone. Google is ingrained into most smart phones and almost impossible to remove totally. If you want an app you go to Google Play Store and trying to remove that from your phone would be a huge hassle.

Therefore I have done the logical thing due to the slowness of my PC and removed Google Chrome from it. 

Not only has it sped up my laptop but it means Google searches are no longer logged and kept for years as I now use DuckDuckGo or TOR Browser to surf the net. 

Even the browser Opera has a mini "VPN" built into it which goes through a proxy computer before the site you wanted to visit, hiding your real IP address, and making you look like you are in Germany or Bulgaria.

Just try Opera and then go to this site https://manytools.org/http-html-text/http-request-headers/ and see what headers and IP address you are showing to websites and servers who are looking to log your devices details.



In another tab either type in the search box "Where am I now geo-IP" or just go to this link and you will see information like the results below when I just tested it with a new instance of Opera. My real IP is 86.164.1.XXX by the way.
However viewing my IP address on Opera with that search term or a header search reveals my location to be elsewhere from South East England. In fact they show me to be in the Scandinavian region of Europe with an IP address of 77.111.247.188.


If you want more details on why Google is evil and Youtube is broken then read and watch the video on my recent article.

However if you don't care about Google working with the NSA and GCHQ and listening to you all the time through your phone and just want a faster PC, try removing Google Chrome from your machine and using another browser instead.

Opera's "VPN" may not be a real VPN but rather just a proxy server it passes your data request through before displaying the page you want, but it is better than nothing.

Having a real VPN installed on your PC is a much better idea if you can afford it and you can set your VPN to have the IP address of the country you want. This is helpful if you are in a country that shows a limited selection of Netflix or Amazon Prime videos. With a VPN you can pretend to be in the country you want to be and access more content. If you are interested in this then read this article.

However whatever you want to do with your VPN you should still remove as many Google and Microsoft products from your PC, Phone and tablet as that is a good start to stop being listened and recorded constantly.



By Dark Politricks


© 2019 Dark Politricks

Sunday, 20 January 2019

How our phones are now Spy's in our pockets

How our phones are now Spy's in our pockets

By Dark Politricks


Remember the days when "conspiracy theorists" worried about the "mark of the beast" and people being micro-chipped so that the Government could follow everywhere they went and everything they did?

Well there is no need to worry about microchips anymore, we already have walked into George Orwell's 1984 with our Smart Phones, Smart TV's, Google DOTS, Amazon Echo's and all the rest of the modern day tech that seemingly makes our lives easier but in reality is also constantly monitoring us at the same time.

You may just think that the recording of our position on the planet all the time by either your phones GPS signal or Google's Location tracking, is just a helpful way to show you nearby events or shops that may interest you.

However this information not only is almost impossible to turn off but it's also passed on by the companies to Government agencies to log your behaviour.

If you have read your Smart TV's terms and conditions lately as I have done, you will see that it talks about recording you at all times through the TV's web cam as well as passing this information onto "unspecified 3rd parties".

Why are they unspecified? Who are they and why can't Samsung, Sony or Panasonic tell us what they are doing with this data they have captured of us sitting in front of the box?

Maybe it's because the NSA or GCHQ has a helping hand from the tech companies who now work alongside them.

Google are known to work with the CIA helping them on their PRISM type algorithms that allow agents to type into a CIA search engine an email address or phone number and get results of the person, their close contacts, details of social media posts, emails and website viewing history.

If this is the case why should we think that the CIA is not in a symbiotic relationship in which Google passes them data for their databases?

If they have already admitted building an underground data centre in UTAH the size of a city to hold all the data they collect on people what reason is there to think they are not using this data to spy on us?



How helpful would it be if the live feed of a bunch of terrorists, drug dealers, or even someone having a quite joint with their friends in front of Family Guy, is passed along from your Samsung TV to the local Police Station?

Suddenly you get a knock on the door and find yourself being arrested for supplying a drug and all because you passed a spliff to a friend in front of an all seeing, all listening, modern smart TV.

Oh and they have a recording of it happening to back up their claims, all from your TV set or the Amazon Echo sitting on your table that recorded it all happening! Live video footage and the sound evidence to go with it. A perfect spy in the room system.

If you don't believe how much we have slipped into an Orwellian society and how much our phones record our behaviour, even without SIM Cards, GPS enabled and Flight mode on then watch this recent FOX video.

In it they take two phones on a journey around the city. One with no SIM, no WiFi, and in Flight mode and one with it all enabled. Guess what?

When they got back from their trip round town they monitored all the data that was sent to Googles servers when the phones were attached to the WiFi system. They logged all the data and believe it or not the phone without WiFi in Flight Mode actually sent more data to Google than the one that had a SIM card in.

It sent information such as the number of steps you walked, the height off the ground you were, the temperature, when it thought you were in a car, and despite not having GPS or Location turned on it still logged it from pings to the phone masts.

It seems you cannot get away from Google tracking you and most phones are built around Googles technology, their email, play store, apps and settings and that is not to mention what the phone itself is recording behind your back.




Phones also can record you at all times due to the permissions you give them or the issues you get from removing certain applications like Googles Play Store. It basically states that it can record you at any point in time - why?

What function does this serve apart from spying on what you are saying.

A phone cannot accurately gain information about the potential products you would like from a few words in a long conversation it records to promote certain adverts at you when you next surf the web, so why is it doing it?

Is it because the new Silicon Valley / Intelligence / Government Nexus is all in bed with each other and want a Stasi like state, one in which people willingly engage in?

Watch this video for more information on how phones record you 24/7.



So where is this data going?

The phones, TV's and Google DOTS that don't stop recording you when you stop talking are obviously passing this information onto other places apart from advertising companies they say they are. 

They don't specify that they will be logging you at all times even when you switch your phones GPS and Location setting off, therefore they are being devious in making you believe you can actually stop them logging your position at all times. They can listen in to what you say through the microphone and video you from front and back webcams, not to mention logging your GPS position. 

Helpful apps like Samsung's Health app, monitors your heart rate, stress levels and oxygen levels. It also logs the steps you take each day with the phone on you, when it thinks your asleep (presumably due to you not using the phone), and probably sends all this data off to the Government so they can monitor health levels around the country.

We truly need to get back to dumb phones without GPS, masking tape over your web cams and get rid of constant spy bots like Amazons and Googles DOTS. It maybe tough to let go to your personal computer in your pocket but why not just use Facebook on your PC at home and take a simple phone out with you that can make calls and send texts only. 

They are designed specifically for older people not interested in the bells and whistles and are perfect for a dumb phone that does what you need without logging your constant actions.

This is just something to think about when you go to bed tonight with your phone on charge on the bed stand. Just what is your phone sending off to far away data-centres about your days activities and any nightly fun or lack of it in the sack.

If our generation doesn't do anything about the lack of privacy and civil rights we have noticed diminish before our eyes then the next generation is sure to grow up thinking that it is perfectly normal to live in a world where every moment is posted on Facebook, every photograph sent to Instagram and a phone goes with them wherever they go 24/7 365 days a year sending data to their phone company, advertisers and Government agencies constantly.

By Dark Politricks

© 2019 Dark Politricks



Friday, 21 December 2018

Amerika, A modern day East Germany

Amerika, A modern day East Germany

By Dark Politricks

The definition of a Police State is:
"A state in which the government exercises rigid and repressive controls over the social, economic, and political life of the people, especially by means of a secret police force."
History shows that mankind has been plagued by authoritarian governments since the dawn of collective governance. We have many instances of governments that fit the definition of a Police State from the East German Stasi, Soviet KGB to the current Chinese government who still utilise whole teams of agents to follow westerners of interest around when they visit the country.

However these countries have all been authoritarian one party states and it has always been presumed that within western democracies the idea of a police state only existed in the nightmares of those sections of society who mistrusted the government no matter what it did.


The Washington Post expose looked into the huge expansion of the security services and other intelligence agencies since the attacks of 9/11 and revealed some stunning facts such as:

Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counter terrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.

In case that second point escapes due attention it means that roughly 1 in every 150 adults within the USA has top secret security clearance and if that many people have the top level clearance how many more have one of the many lower levels? 

It does seem from this study alone that the USA is awash with spooks and spies and as we know from the past ten years of abuse they are not all engaged in fighting the war on terror and looking for the supposed architect of 9/11 Usama bin-Laden.

Instead the government has directed this huge intelligence apparatus onto the people they are supposed to protect and one can only wonder whether this was the original aim in the first place. No democratic country would have ever accepted such a huge intrusion of privacy, destruction of civil liberties and total disregard to the rule of law had the threat of terrorism not existed and been used as the excuse of the century to implement such draconian measures.

Like many governments throughout the ages from Roman times with Julius Caesar, to Hitler and the Reichstag fire, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were used by politicians to expand the power of the state at the expense of the citizenry using an outside enemy as the excuse. Whether you believe the attacks of 9/11 were staged or not is not the point as it is clear from succeeding events that they were used by the Bush government, and now the Obama administration to increase the power of the government to intrude into the lives of the public.

The main piece of legislation that started the ball rolling towards a Police State was the Patriot Act. This law was rushed through congress without proper consultation and debate and many senators later admitted that they didn't even read the bill. The very suspiciously timed Anthrax attacks on likely opponents of the bill  ensured that the politicians passed through a truly anti-libertarian bill that had been sitting around for years just waiting for the right "event" to occur.

The law expanded the definition of terrorism to include many domestic activities and it enabled the federal government to increase it's surveillance of the public through a systematic warrant-less wire-tapping campaign that trawled through every conceivable piece of electronic information from phone calls, emails, Internet traffic and credit card transactions whilst it built up a huge database of real time events in which it hoped to find signs of terrorist connections in a huge game of connect the dots.

The loosening of the terms that define what is and not terrorism should be a chilling warning to anyone concerned with the war on terror. We have seen here in the UK how the numerous anti terrorism laws have been misused by Police officers to prevent photographers from recording police assaults on the streets and in preventing legitimate protest. 

We have also seen our government abuse powers that were supposedly only there for exceptional purposes for non exceptional means such as when the UK froze the bank accounts of Iceland during the banking crisis.

The US government has now gone one step further in it's expansion of the war of terror against it's own citizens by enacting presidential powers that allow for the assassination of US born citizens throughout the world. The US government it seems is now perfectly willing to execute it's own citizens if they believe them to be linked to terrorism. No trial is required to contest any evidence that may or may not exist and the defendant is not allowed to answer any charges to a jury of his peers. If the government deems you to be a terrorist with it's newly relaxed definition of what constitutes terrorism then you may be assassinated.

Not only is the US government cranking up the war on terror by attacking those citizens it decides fall into the category of domestic or foreign terrorist it is also trying to crack down on the only forum in which free speech and dissent of government still exists e.g the internet.

In an age in which the dying print media is being deserted en mass and those that control it are scared of losing a major propaganda tool the attacks on the alternative media have increased tenfold. Claims that the old media is in the pocket of government and not doing it's job properly have increased since the 9/11 attacks and the war in Iraq. This was a war which was miss-sold to the public with the help of national newspapers prepared to look the other way as the government used them to drip feed false stories to a public who knew no better.

The only real voices of opposition are to be found in the blogosphere and the powers that be hate that they cannot control the news in the same way as they could buy off newspaper owners, editors and journalists. Instead of only worrying about a dozen or so national newspapers the government has to contend with millions of blogs and alternative news sites and the only tactic that would work is one that limits ownership of such a site or makes the available content illegal in some way or other. This is why there are now calls to regulate Internet bloggers such as the bill being brought forward by Bruce Patterson.

Obama's Information Czar, Cass Sunstein, has already wrote about his desire to crack down on blogs and sites that dare discuss topics that the government deems as conspiracy theory. This would include discussion of alternative theories surrounding the 9/11 attacks, or concluding that the JFK assassination involved more hit-men than Lee Harvey Oswald on his own. In fact it would cover anything that the government might deem beyond the limits of discussion by those who want to look beyond the official story immediately rolled out whenever a high crime is committed.

Then there are bills being introduced such as Senator Joe Lieberman’s 197-page Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act, which aims to mimic China’s firewall and which would give the President powers to control IT networks and the flow of information in times of emergency such as a cyber attack.

Disabling the internet may be an extreme option to consider but deleting content that is deemed unsuitable is already a daily occurrence. With the merger of leading internet companies such as Google and the CIA it has become very easy for media deemed anti government to be pulled from sites such as YouTube or for search results to be tweaked to hide popular anti government search terms.

We already know how Google and the NSA are working together since the attack on Google by China earlier this year and there have also been claims that the CIA helped fund Google when it was starting up.

With all these links to the intelligence agencies it can safely be assumed that Google's massive database of user traffic, search terms, blogs, emails, videos and much more is seen as a prized asset by the intelligence community and who knows at what level they already co-operate when it comes to sharing data.

Whereas old school Police States were very obvious in their surveillance and monitoring techniques the modern day Amerika has no need to put half a dozen handlers onto someone they wish to monitor (not that they don't have the staff) as through their close links with Google and Microsoft and their new plans to access private information without a warrant they can literally let the information come to them.

We live in a semi virtual world where an online persona is just as important as your real one and due to the amount of social time people spend on social networking sites and the dependence of key infrastructure on the Internet means that control of the network literally can mean control over society.

We already know our governments monitor all our phone calls through the ECHELON system and there is no technical or it seems legal limitation preventing them from analysing every single packet of data transferred over the Internet if they so wished.

Therefore due to a political class that seems to be bought and paid for by those wanting to maintain the war on terror and the surveillance society it has sprung up at home there seems little hope of stopping the high tech police state we are now living in. The solutions are available to those with the means to implement them but in the end it comes down to a choice between a public uprising against the state or a change in the political class running it.

With elections in America due very soon it is a great opportunity to show the ruling elite that the public is not prepared to swap liberty and freedom for fear and the police state that enables it. Judge Napolitano always asks his guests the following question:
"which is more threatening to our way of live, terrorism or an ever increasing secretive and authoritarian state?"
The answer is clearly the latter and we need to elect officials that believe so too.

Only when the phony war on terror is seen for what it is can we start to rollback all the police state apparatus that has build up around us over the last decade. A large section of the population has fallen for the tricks played out by power hungry politicians throughout history and willingly handed over liberty in return for perceived security. 

The time has come to realise this was a false trade and that Thomas Jefferson was correct when he said:
“Those who would trade safety for freedom deserve neither.”

Wednesday, 12 April 2017

CIA's Vault 7 Hacking Squad

CIA's Vault 7 Hacking Squad


By Dark Politricks

Vault 7: WikiLeaks reveals CIA's own internal hacking squad

I cannot remember when it was I wrote the article but you can check out some of the ways the authorities are listening to you on this older article I wrote some time ago.

I even warned about WebCams on TVs and phones listening and filming you.

In fact I have warned about that for a long time now. When TRAPWIRE is recording you from every CCTV, NSA is listening in on every phone call and text you send, the CIA is now watching you jerk off to Judge Judy through your TV.

It may sound ridiculous but can you imagine a room full of men, yes even very professional men, who when they get a nice shot of hot babe doing something in front of her TV, do you honestly believe they are not going to get their colleagues to come and have a gander and all have a good laugh?

It is just office mentality full of fools with dangerous tools.

I have a list of things you can try to do to mitigate the issue of living in a global Police State where once again it seems England and GCHQ, got on their knees in front of the CIA, and gobbled up all the work not covered by laws that protect UK citizens - are there even any left?

The article comes from WikiLeaks site if you want to read it there.

 WikiLeaks.org

A few days ago WikiLeaks began its new series of leaks on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Code-named "Vault 7" by WikiLeaks, it is the largest ever publication of confidential documents on the agency.

The first full part of the series, "Year Zero", comprises 8,761 documents and files from an isolated, high-security network situated inside the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virgina. It follows an introductory disclosure last month of CIA targeting French political parties and candidates in the lead up to the 2012 presidential election.

Recently, the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized "zero day" exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation.

This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA. The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.

"Year Zero" introduces the scope and direction of the CIA's global covert hacking program, its malware arsenal and dozens of "zero day" weaponized exploits against a wide range of U.S. and European company products, include Apple's iPhone, Google's Android and Microsoft's Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.

Since 2001 the CIA has gained political and budgetary preeminence over the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). The CIA found itself building not just its now infamous drone fleet, but a very different type of covert, globe-spanning force — its own substantial fleet of hackers. The agency's hacking division freed it from having to disclose its often controversial operations to the NSA (its primary bureaucratic rival) in order to draw on the NSA's hacking capacities.

By the end of 2016, 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 "weaponised" malware. Such is the scale of the CIA's undertaking that by 2016, its hackers had utilized more code than that used to run Facebook. The CIA had created, in effect, its "own NSA" with even less accountability and without publicly answering the question as to whether such a massive budgetary spend on duplicating the capacities of a rival agency could be justified.

In a statement to WikiLeaks the source details policy questions that they say 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. The source wishes to initiate a public debate about the security, creation, use, proliferation and democratic control of cyberweapons.

Once a single cyber 'weapon' is 'loose' it can spread around the world in seconds, to be used by rival states, cyber mafia and teenage hackers alike.

Julian Assange, WikiLeaks editor stated that "There is an extreme proliferation risk in the development of cyber 'weapons'. Comparisons can be drawn between the uncontrolled proliferation of such 'weapons', which results from the inability to contain them combined with their high market value, and the global arms trade. But the significance of "Year Zero" goes well beyond the choice between cyberwar and cyberpeace. The disclosure is also exceptional from a political, legal and forensic perspective."

Wikileaks has carefully reviewed the "Year Zero" disclosure and published substantive CIA documentation while avoiding the distribution of 'armed' cyberweapons until a consensus emerges on the technical and political nature of the CIA's program and how such 'weapons' should analyzed, disarmed and published.

Wikileaks has also decided to redact and anonymise some identifying information in "Year Zero" for in depth analysis. These redactions include ten of thousands of CIA targets and attack machines throughout Latin America, Europe and the United States. While we are aware of the imperfect results of any approach chosen, we remain committed to our publishing model and note that the quantity of published pages in "Vault 7" part one (“Year Zero”) already eclipses the total number of pages published over the first three years of the Edward Snowden NSA leaks.

Analysis

CIA malware targets iPhone, Android, smart TVs.

CIA malware and hacking tools are built by EDG (Engineering Development Group), a software development group within CCI (Center for Cyber Intelligence), a department belonging to the CIA's DDI (Directorate for Digital Innovation). The DDI is one of the five major directorates of the CIA (see this organizational chart of the CIA for more details).

The EDG is responsible for the development, testing and operational support of all backdoors, exploits, malicious payloads, trojans, viruses and any other kind of malware used by the CIA in its covert operations world-wide.

The increasing sophistication of surveillance techniques has drawn comparisons with George Orwell's 1984, but "Weeping Angel", developed by the CIA's Embedded Devices Branch (EDB), which infests smart TVs, transforming them into covert microphones, is surely its most emblematic realization.

The attack against Samsung smart TVs was developed in cooperation with the United Kingdom's MI5/BTSS. After infestation, Weeping Angel places the target TV in a 'Fake-Off' mode, so that the owner falsely believes the TV is off when it is on. In 'Fake-Off' mode the TV operates as a bug, recording conversations in the room and sending them over the Internet to a covert CIA server.

As of October 2014 the CIA was also looking at infecting the vehicle control systems used by modern cars and trucks. The purpose of such control is not specified, but it would permit the CIA to engage in nearly undetectable assassinations.

The CIA's Mobile Devices Branch (MDB) developed numerous attacks to remotely hack and control popular smart phones. Infected phones can be instructed to send the CIA the user's geolocation, audio and text communications as well as covertly activate the phone's camera and microphone.

Despite iPhone's minority share (14.5%) of the global smart phone market in 2016, a specialized unit in the CIA's Mobile Development Branch produces malware to infest, control and exfiltrate data from iPhones and other Apple products running iOS, such as iPads. CIA's arsenal includes numerous local and remote "zero days" developed by CIA or obtained from GCHQ, NSA, FBI or purchased from cyber arms contractors such as Baitshop. The disproportionate focus on iOS may be explained by the popularity of the iPhone among social, political, diplomatic and business elites.

A similar unit targets Google's Android which is used to run the majority of the world's smart phones (~85%) including Samsung, HTC and Sony. 1.15 billion Android powered phones were sold last year. "Year Zero" shows that as of 2016 the CIA had 24 "weaponized" Android "zero days" which it has developed itself and obtained from GCHQ, NSA and cyber arms contractors.

These techniques permit the CIA to bypass the encryption of WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Wiebo, Confide and Cloackman by hacking the "smart" phones that they run on and collecting audio and message traffic before encryption is applied.

CIA malware targets Windows, OSx, Linux, routers

The CIA also runs a very substantial effort to infect and control Microsoft Windows users with its malware. This includes multiple local and remote weaponized "zero days", air gap jumping viruses such as "Hammer Drill" which infects software distributed on CD/DVDs, infectors for removable media such as USBs, systems to hide data in images or in covert disk areas ( "Brutal Kangaroo") and to keep its malware infestations going.

Many of these infection efforts are pulled together by the CIA's Automated Implant Branch (AIB), which has developed several attack systems for automated infestation and control of CIA malware, such as "Assassin" and "Medusa".

Attacks against Internet infrastructure and webservers are developed by the CIA's Network Devices Branch (NDB).

The CIA has developed automated multi-platform malware attack and control systems covering Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, Linux and more, such as EDB's "HIVE" and the related "Cutthroat" and "Swindle" tools, which are described in the examples section below.

CIA 'hoarded' vulnerabilities ("zero days")

In the wake of Edward Snowden's leaks about the NSA, the U.S. technology industry secured a commitment from the Obama administration that the executive would disclose on an ongoing basis — rather than hoard — serious vulnerabilities, exploits, bugs or "zero days" to Apple, Google, Microsoft, and other US-based manufacturers.

Serious vulnerabilities not disclosed to the manufacturers places huge swathes of the population and critical infrastructure at risk to foreign intelligence or cyber criminals who independently discover or hear rumors of the vulnerability. If the CIA can discover such vulnerabilities so can others.

The U.S. government's commitment to the Vulnerabilities Equities Process came after significant lobbying by US technology companies, who risk losing their share of the global market over real and perceived hidden vulnerabilities. The government stated that it would disclose all pervasive vulnerabilities discovered after 2010 on an ongoing basis.

"Year Zero" documents show that the CIA breached the Obama administration's commitments. Many of the vulnerabilities used in the CIA's cyber arsenal are pervasive and some may already have been found by rival intelligence agencies or cyber criminals.

As an example, specific CIA malware revealed in "Year Zero" is able to penetrate, infest and control both the Android phone and iPhone software that runs or has run presidential Twitter accounts. The CIA attacks this software by using undisclosed security vulnerabilities ("zero days") possessed by the CIA but if the CIA can hack these phones then so can everyone else who has obtained or discovered the vulnerability. As long as the CIA keeps these vulnerabilities concealed from Apple and Google (who make the phones) they will not be fixed, and the phones will remain hackable.

The same vulnerabilities exist for the population at large, including the U.S. Cabinet, Congress, top CEOs, system administrators, security officers and engineers. By hiding these security flaws from manufacturers like Apple and Google the CIA ensures that it can hack everyone &mdsh; at the expense of leaving everyone hackable.

'Cyberwar' programs are a serious proliferation risk

Cyber 'weapons' are not possible to keep under effective control.

While nuclear proliferation has been restrained by the enormous costs and visible infrastructure involved in assembling enough fissile material to produce a critical nuclear mass, cyber 'weapons', once developed, are very hard to retain.

Cyber 'weapons' are in fact just computer programs which can be pirated like any other. Since they are entirely comprised of information they can be copied quickly with no marginal cost.

Securing such 'weapons' is particularly difficult since the same people who develop and use them have the skills to exfiltrate copies without leaving traces — sometimes by using the very same 'weapons' against the organizations that contain them. There are substantial price incentives for government hackers and consultants to obtain copies since there is a global "vulnerability market" that will pay hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars for copies of such 'weapons'.

Similarly, contractors and companies who obtain such 'weapons' sometimes use them for their own purposes, obtaining advantage over their competitors in selling 'hacking' services.

Over the last three years the United States intelligence sector, which consists of government agencies such as the CIA and NSA and their contractors, such as Booz Allan Hamilton, has been subject to unprecedented series of data exfiltrations by its own workers.

A number of intelligence community members not yet publicly named have been arrested or subject to federal criminal investigations in separate incidents.

Most visibly, on February 8, 2017 a U.S. federal grand jury indicted Harold T. Martin III with 20 counts of mishandling classified information. The Department of Justice alleged that it seized some 50,000 gigabytes of information from Harold T. Martin III that he had obtained from classified programs at NSA and CIA, including the source code for numerous hacking tools.

Once a single cyber 'weapon' is 'loose' it can spread around the world in seconds, to be used by peer states, cyber mafia and teenage hackers alike.

U.S. Consulate in Frankfurt is a covert CIA hacker base

In addition to its operations in Langley, Virginia the CIA also uses the U.S. consulate in Frankfurt as a covert base for its hackers covering Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

CIA hackers operating out of the Frankfurt consulate ( "Center for Cyber Intelligence Europe" or CCIE) are given diplomatic ("black") passports and State Department cover. The instructions for incoming CIA hackers make Germany's counter-intelligence efforts appear inconsequential: "Breeze through German Customs because you have your cover-for-action story down pat, and all they did was stamp your passport"

Your Cover Story (for this trip) Q: Why are you here? A: Supporting technical consultations at the Consulate.

Two earlier WikiLeaks publications give further detail on CIA approaches to customs and secondary screening procedures.

Once in Frankfurt CIA hackers can travel without further border checks to the 25 European countries that are part of the Shengen open border area — including France, Italy and Switzerland.

A number of the CIA's electronic attack methods are designed for physical proximity. These attack methods are able to penetrate high security networks that are disconnected from the internet, such as police record database. In these cases, a CIA officer, agent or allied intelligence officer acting under instructions, physically infiltrates the targeted workplace. The attacker is provided with a USB containing malware developed for the CIA for this purpose, which is inserted into the targeted computer. The attacker then infects and exfiltrates data to removable media. For example, the CIA attack system Fine Dining, provides 24 decoy applications for CIA spies to use.

To witnesses, the spy appears to be running a program showing videos (e.g VLC), presenting slides (Prezi), playing a computer game (Breakout2, 2048) or even running a fake virus scanner (Kaspersky, McAfee, Sophos). But while the decoy application is on the screen, the underlaying system is automatically infected and ransacked.

How the CIA dramatically increased proliferation risks

In what is surely one of the most astounding intelligence own goals in living memory, the CIA structured its classification regime such that for the most market valuable part of "Vault 7" the CIA's weaponized malware (implants + zero days), Listening Posts (LP), and Command and Control (C2) systems — the agency has little legal recourse.

The CIA made these systems unclassified.

Why the CIA chose to make its cyberarsenal unclassified reveals how concepts developed for military use do not easily crossover to the 'battlefield' of cyber 'war'.

To attack its targets, the CIA usually requires that its implants communicate with their control programs over the internet. If CIA implants, Command & Control and Listening Post software were classified, then CIA officers could be prosecuted or dismissed for violating rules that prohibit placing classified information onto the Internet. Consequently the CIA has secretly made most of its cyber spying/war code unclassified. The U.S. government is not able to assert copyright either, due to restrictions in the U.S. Constitution. This means that cyber 'arms' manufactures and computer hackers can freely "pirate" these 'weapons' if they are obtained. The CIA has primarily had to rely on obfuscation to protect its malware secrets.

Conventional weapons such as missiles may be fired at the enemy (i.e into an unsecured area). Proximity to or impact with the target detonates the ordnance including its classified parts. Hence military personnel do not violate classification rules by firing ordnance with classified parts. Ordnance will likely explode. If it does not, that is not the operator's intent.

Over the last decade U.S. hacking operations have been increasingly dressed up in military jargon to tap into Department of Defense funding streams. For instance, attempted "malware injections" (commercial jargon) or "implant drops" (NSA jargon) are being called "fires" as if a weapon was being fired. However the analogy is questionable.

Unlike bullets, bombs or missiles, most CIA malware is designed to live for days or even years after it has reached its 'target'. CIA malware does not "explode on impact" but rather permanently infests its target. In order to infect target's device, copies of the malware must be placed on the target's devices, giving physical possession of the malware to the target. To exfiltrate data back to the CIA or to await further instructions the malware must communicate with CIA Command & Control (C2) systems placed on internet connected servers. But such servers are typically not approved to hold classified information, so CIA command and control systems are also made unclassified.

A successful 'attack' on a target's computer system is more like a series of complex stock maneuvers in a hostile take-over bid or the careful planting of rumors in order to gain control over an organization's leadership rather than the firing of a weapons system. If there is a military analogy to be made, the infestation of a target is perhaps akin to the execution of a whole series of military maneuvers against the target's territory including observation, infiltration, occupation and exploitation.

Evading forensics and anti-virus

A series of standards lay out CIA malware infestation patterns which are likely to assist forensic crime scene investigators as well as Apple, Microsoft, Google, Samsung, Nokia, Blackberry, Siemens and anti-virus companies attribute and defend against attacks.

"Tradecraft DO's and DON'Ts" contains CIA rules on how its malware should be written to avoid fingerprints implicating the "CIA, US government, or its witting partner companies" in "forensic review". Similar secret standards cover the use of encryption to hide CIA hacker and malware communication (pdf), describing targets & exfiltrated data (pdf) as well as executing payloads (pdf) and persisting (pdf) in the target's machines over time. CIA hackers developed successful attacks against most well known anti-virus programs. These are documented in AV defeats, Personal Security Products, Detecting and defeating PSPs and PSP/Debugger/RE Avoidance. For example, Comodo was defeated by CIA malware placing itself in the Window's "Recycle Bin". While Comodo 6.x has a "Gaping Hole of DOOM".

CIA hackers discussed what the NSA's "Equation Group" hackers did wrong and how the CIA's malware makers could avoid similar exposure.

Examples

The CIA's Engineering Development Group (EDG) management system contains around 500 different projects (only some of which are documented by "Year Zero") each with their own sub-projects, malware and hacker tools.

The majority of these projects relate to tools that are used for penetration, infestation ("implanting"), control, and exfiltration.

Another branch of development focuses on the development and operation of Listening Posts (LP) and Command and Control (C2) systems used to communicate with and control CIA implants; special projects are used to target specific hardware from routers to smart TVs.

Some example projects are described below, but see the table of contents for the full list of projects described by WikiLeaks' "Year Zero".

UMBRAGE

The CIA's hand crafted hacking techniques pose a problem for the agency. Each technique it has created forms a "fingerprint" that can be used by forensic investigators to attribute multiple different attacks to the same entity.

This is analogous to finding the same distinctive knife wound on multiple separate murder victims. The unique wounding style creates suspicion that a single murderer is responsible. As soon one murder in the set is solved then the other murders also find likely attribution.

The CIA's Remote Devices Branch's UMBRAGE group collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques 'stolen' from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation.

With UMBRAGE and related projects the CIA cannot only increase its total number of attack types but also misdirect attribution by leaving behind the "fingerprints" of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from.

UMBRAGE components cover keyloggers, password collection, webcam capture, data destruction, persistence, privilege escalation, stealth, anti-virus (PSP) avoidance and survey techniques.

Fine Dining

Fine Dining comes with a standardized questionnaire i.e menu that CIA case officers fill out. The questionnaire is used by the agency's OSB (Operational Support Branch) to transform the requests of case officers into technical requirements for hacking attacks (typically "exfiltrating" information from computer systems) for specific operations. The questionnaire allows the OSB to identify how to adapt existing tools for the operation, and communicate this to CIA malware configuration staff. The OSB functions as the interface between CIA operational staff and the relevant technical support staff.

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. The 'Case Officer' is also asked to specify the environment of the target like the type of computer, operating system used, Internet connectivity and installed anti-virus utilities (PSPs) as well as a list of file types to be exfiltrated like Office documents, audio, video, images or custom file types. The 'menu' also asks for information if recurring access to the target is possible and how long unobserved access to the computer can be maintained. This information is used by the CIA's 'JQJIMPROVISE' software (see below) to configure a set of CIA malware suited to the specific needs of an operation.

Improvise (JQJIMPROVISE)

'Improvise' is a toolset for configuration, post-processing, payload setup and execution vector selection for survey/exfiltration tools supporting all major operating systems like Windows (Bartender), MacOS (JukeBox) and Linux (DanceFloor). Its configuration utilities like Margarita allows the NOC (Network Operation Center) to customize tools based on requirements from 'Fine Dining' questionnaires.

HIVE

HIVE is a multi-platform CIA malware suite and its associated control software.

The project provides customizable implants for Windows, Solaris, MikroTik (used in internet routers) and Linux platforms and a Listening Post (LP)/Command and Control (C2) infrastructure to communicate with these implants.

The implants are configured to communicate via HTTPS with the webserver of a cover domain; each operation utilizing these implants has a separate cover domain and the infrastructure can handle any number of cover domains.

Each cover domain resolves to an IP address that is located at a commercial VPS (Virtual Private Server) provider. The public-facing server forwards all incoming traffic via a VPN to a 'Blot' server that handles actual connection requests from clients. It is setup for optional SSL client authentication: if a client sends a valid client certificate (only implants can do that), the connection is forwarded to the 'Honeycomb' toolserver that communicates with the implant; if a valid certificate is missing (which is the case if someone tries to open the cover domain website by accident), the traffic is forwarded to a cover server that delivers an unsuspicious looking website.

The Honeycomb toolserver receives exfiltrated information from the implant; an operator can also task the implant to execute jobs on the target computer, so the toolserver acts as a C2 (command and control) server for the implant.

Similar functionality (though limited to Windows) is provided by the RickBobby project.

See the classified user and developer guides for HIVE.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why now? WikiLeaks published as soon as its verification and analysis were ready.

In Febuary the Trump administration has issued an Executive Order calling for a "Cyberwar" review to be prepared within 30 days.

While the review increases the timeliness and relevance of the publication it did not play a role in setting the publication date.

Redactions Names, email addresses and external IP addresses have been redacted in the released pages (70,875 redactions in total) until further analysis is complete.

Over-redaction: Some items may have been redacted that are not employees, contractors, targets or otherwise related to the agency, but are, for example, authors of documentation for otherwise public projects that are used by the agency.

Identity vs. person: the redacted names are replaced by user IDs (numbers) to allow readers to assign multiple pages to a single author. Given the redaction process used a single person may be represented by more than one assigned identifier but no identifier refers to more than one real person.

Archive attachments (zip, tar.gz, ...) are replaced with a PDF listing all the file names in the archive. As the archive content is assessed it may be made available; until then the archive is redacted.

Attachments with other binary content are replaced by a hex dump of the content to prevent accidental invocation of binaries that may have been infected with weaponized CIA malware. As the content is assessed it may be made available; until then the content is redacted. The tens of thousands of routable IP addresses references (including more than 22 thousand within the United States) that correspond to possible targets, CIA covert listening post servers, intermediary and test systems, are redacted for further exclusive investigation. Binary files of non-public origin are only available as dumps to prevent accidental invocation of CIA malware infected binaries.

Organizational Chart

The organizational chart corresponds to the material published by WikiLeaks so far.

Since the organizational structure of the CIA below the level of Directorates is not public, the placement of the EDG and its branches within the org chart of the agency is reconstructed from information contained in the documents released so far. It is intended to be used as a rough outline of the internal organization; please be aware that the reconstructed org chart is incomplete and that internal reorganizations occur frequently.

Wiki pages

"Year Zero" contains 7818 web pages with 943 attachments from the internal development groupware. The software used for this purpose is called Confluence, a proprietary software from Atlassian. Webpages in this system (like in Wikipedia) have a version history that can provide interesting insights on how a document evolved over time; the 7818 documents include these page histories for 1136 latest versions. The order of named pages within each level is determined by date (oldest first). Page content is not present if it was originally dynamically created by the Confluence software (as indicated on the re-constructed page).

What time period is covered?#

The years 2013 to 2016. The sort order of the pages within each level is determined by date (oldest first).

WikiLeaks has obtained the CIA's creation/last modification date for each page but these do not yet appear for technical reasons. Usually the date can be discerned or approximated from the content and the page order. If it is critical to know the exact time/date contact WikiLeaks.

What is "Vault 7"

"Vault 7" is a substantial collection of material about CIA activities obtained by WikiLeaks.

When was each part of "Vault 7" obtained?

Part one was obtained recently and covers through 2016. Details on the other parts will be available at the time of publication.

Is each part of "Vault 7" from a different source?

Details on the other parts will be available at the time of publication.

What is the total size of "Vault 7"?

The series is the largest intelligence publication in history.

How did WikiLeaks obtain each part of "Vault 7"?

Sources trust WikiLeaks to not reveal information that might help identify them.

Isn't WikiLeaks worried that the CIA will act against its staff to stop the series?

No. That would be certainly counter-productive.

Has WikiLeaks already 'mined' all the best stories?

No. WikiLeaks has intentionally not written up hundreds of impactful stories to encourage others to find them and so create expertise in the area for subsequent parts in the series. They're there. Look. Those who demonstrate journalistic excellence may be considered for early access to future parts.

Won't other journalists find all the best stories before me?

Unlikely. There are very considerably more stories than there are journalists or academics who are in a position to write them.

Read the full article and support WikiLeaks here WikiLeaks.org.

How to Protect Yourself

The ways to protect yourself from unwanted spying and trojans in your phone and PC are getting smaller and smaller. Even phone apps for virus checkers are actually spyware pretending to be virus checkers.

I have a list of many of the ways you can be spied upon by hackers or the CIA on this page but you can be in no doubt their technological skills are far greater than ours.

I think the only way is to go backwards to use tools that cannot be hacked.


  • Buy a TV without a webcam or even not a smart TV then buy a Roku to make it smart with catch up channels and Netflix.
  • Train pigeons like Pablo Escobar did in his prison to send messages to other people or actually talk face to face on a bench in a park with no phones on you.
  • You could put masking tape over your web cam when you are not using it and reattach when you want to Skype someone.
  • You could get an old Nokia and take the whole battery and even SIM out so that no GPS tracking can be done and with the battery removed they cannot even triangulate your whereabouts.
  • If you are going somewhere where you don't want anyone to know can you take your battery and SIM card out, if you can, and most smart phones make it very hard to, then do so.
  • Buy a 2nd "dumb phone" meant for OAP's, the battery is easily removable and they don't come with all the Logging Apps, Fake Games and GPS tracking jazz of smart phone. I would guess at least 20% of the games on Facebook that people constantly annoy you with are actually viruses or secret open door apps that send traffic using your own credit to wherever it needed to go.
  • Leave your phone at home if you don't need it.
  • Your TV is turned off and you are about to make love to your girl on the sofa. What you don't know is the TV is in "Fake Off" mode, where the geeks at GCHQ who have trouble meeting women as they were hired for their autistic skills, re-attach the tape and detach any external speakers. Try and stop a crowd getting a PornoTube video at work.
  • Don't use Wickr, WhatsApp or Telegram, who tell you they are encrypted end to end to talk important info. The CIA will have an unencrypted version of the message before you sent it.

Learn to live without technology. Get into the mindset of someone in the 90's where we all knew everyone's phone number in our heads and it was only 10p to use a phone box - not that I see many boxes anymore. No-one carried phones and spend all day and night on them. The worse you could expect was some crackling and beeps on a hacked into house phone.

People we are entering a global world where rich banksters and corrupt politicians bend over to the international corporations and allow them to do what they want. Be careful.

Read the original article at darkpolitricks.com and please help us out by visiting our advertisers.

By Dark Politricks 


© 2017 Dark Politricks