Cybersecurity

10 THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT THE CIA BEFORE YESTERDAY

WikiLeaks’ Vault 7 release of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) documents yesterday opened eyes worldwide about an agency President John F. Kennedy once vowed to “splinter…into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.”

Here’s a comprehensive list of ten things we didn’t know about the CIA before yesterday’s leak.

1. The CIA has an illegal domestic spying apparatus similar to the NSA

Perhaps one of the most revealing things that we learned yesterday is that the CIA’s domestic surveillance capabilities rival and may well surpass those of the National Security Agency (NSA).

While both agencies were required under the Obama administration to report vulnerabilities found in hardware and software to manufacturers, each failed to do so – endangering national security and personal privacy by weakening encryption and in the NSA’s case installing backdoors in consumer electronic devices. Obama’s loophole of the disclosure was that the agencies didn’t have to disclose exploits found if it helped them...