Once again, the tinfoil hats were wrong: reality is way worse than they claimed

With WikiLeaks’ release of the CIA hacking tools, we can observe that the people described as tinfoil hats were wrong once again – nobody had described the state of affairs as bad enough. If somebody had told you that the CIA can turn on your TV while making it look like it’s still off, the statement would have been thoroughly discarded as a thing of Orwellian Telescreens. What else is our governments doing that is just so audacious we just would never believe it?

The CIA’s hacking arsenal, or a majority of it, has been published by Wikileaks: the world is again stunned with just how much power governments are giving themselves to violate privacy and other civil liberties. It turns out that the CIA has more power than the NSA, which itself was the target of gasps a few years ago as Edward Snowden blew the whistle.

In addition, it would appear that the CIA’s mass surveillance operations have been almost completely devoid of any checks and balances – where such exist for the NSA at least in theory (and are ignored).

A bullet point list with just a short summary of what Wikileaks reveals includes the following:

The CIA has deliberately “inserted”, whatever that means in detail, its own coders into all major US tech manufacturers. (This is not unlike the US accuses China of doing – with Huawei routers being a prime example.)

More to the point, the CIA is alleged to have turned every Windows PC into a potential remote spy tool, with the ability to activate backdoors on demand, including via Windows Update. (This has – or should have – diplomatic implications: any government that doesn’t like a foreign power having remote switches into its administration should have migrated from Windows when this ability was even suspected.)

A lot of people have already mentioned the CIA’s ability to turn a Samsung SmartTV into an Orwellian Telescreen, recording everything said in the room while giving the appearance to be off. To be fair, though, this appears to require physical access to the TV unit – presumably in order to flash the firmware with something hostile – and if you have physical access to the location, you might as well plant a low-tech 1950s-era bug doing the exact same thing.

Notably, the bullet point list includes “… had a huge amount of weaponized malware … and lost control of it”. This is what security experts have said for years, if not decades: everything eventually leaks and you have to design your operations around that fact of life, as if it were a fact of life, for it very much appears to be.

Once again, the world’s most powerful country shows that it can’t even keep its dirtiest laundry under wraps. What makes anybody think that their personal data is better protected? Especially when it’s supposed to be protected by said superpower which can’t even protect its own worst secrets?

More shockingly, this transgression doesn’t stop at violating privacy – it even includes violating the right to life, less academically expressed as “murders and assassinations”: The CIA has access to remote control of medical devices and hospital technology, which it could conceivably use for things like stopping a pacemaker remotely.

Once again, the world’s most powerful country shows that it can’t even keep its dirtiest laundry under wraps. What makes anybody think that their personal data is better protected?

Finally, all these revelations – which will takes weeks to analyze – is said to be the first part of the leak.

Your privacy remains your own responsibility. No superpower is going to protect it for you. In fact, they’re already doing the exact opposite and failing to protect their own privacy about it.