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The current Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Mike Pompeo, has described WikiLeaks as a "non-state hostile intelligence service":
Russian military intelligence used Wikileaks to distribute hacked material during the US election, he added. Earlier this month Wikileaks published details of what it said were CIA hacking tools. The FBI and CIA have launched a criminal investigation into the leak.
"WikiLeaks walks like a hostile intelligence service and talks like a hostile intelligence service," Mr Pompeo said, speaking at a Washington think tank. "It overwhelmingly focuses on the US, while seeking support from anti-democratic countries and organisations," he added.
Wikileaks responded by posting a screenshot of a tweet sent by Mr Pompeo last July, in which the then member of the House of Representatives referred to material contained in the Wikileaks release of Democratic party emails. The tweet has since been deleted.
Does that make the CIA a "state hostile intelligence service"?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @06:56PM (3 children)
Does that make the CIA a "state hostile intelligence service"?
Yes, as hostile as NSA is.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Saturday April 15 2017, @07:58PM (2 children)
CIA does the torture, sabotage, assassination, and smuggling. NSA are all desk jockies.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday April 15 2017, @08:15PM (1 child)
NSA are cyberhostiles.
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(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 16 2017, @04:57AM
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 "weaponized" 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.
-- https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/ [wikileaks.org]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by aristarchus on Saturday April 15 2017, @07:12PM (8 children)
Do you know what we call an intelligence agency that releases all the intelligence it finds to the public? Journalists.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Saturday April 15 2017, @07:47PM (1 child)
Ideally that is so. Most however, see their job as being a publisher of press releases and body extras for cocktail parties hosted by those providing press releases.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday April 15 2017, @08:16PM
So that would make a typical news agency a "non-state semi-hostile intelligence service".
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by NotSanguine on Saturday April 15 2017, @11:59PM (5 children)
While I generally applaud Wikileaks for releasing information about how the US government (Full disclosure: it's my government) is using its resources to spy on its own people as well as others, as well as the ethically challenged environment inside those TLAs, I find it interesting that they haven't really done similar stuff with other countries' information.
Why is that? A few options come to mind:
The first, second and fifth items seem the most plausible to me, with the fifth item making me wonder what sort of agenda Mr. Assange and his associates have.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 16 2017, @03:13AM
Yeah, wikileaks has some hate for the USA. It was really obvious from the "Collateral Murder" title and the really unfair editing on the short version of the video. But also...
6. The consequences are minor. If you tried this with Russia, you'd drink polonium tea. If you tried this with North Korea, you'd get the nerve agent face massage. The US might, possibly, put you in prison.
7. The US is really incompetent at background checks, largely due to political correctness. We give clearances to people who were not born in the USA. We give clearances to Muslims and Jews, despite numerous spy issues with both. (we don't even ask about religion -- you can be a cult member) We don't ask about politics either. Basically, we have taken obvious criteria out of consideration.
(Score: 5, Informative) by takyon on Sunday April 16 2017, @03:19AM (3 children)
I'm sensing a sixth option.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_material_published_by_WikiLeaks [wikipedia.org]
They have released a lot of non-U.S. material with a non-U.S. origin, but you haven't noticed or acknowledged it. They might get more from the U.S. because WikiLeaks is primarily English language, the U.S. is the evil empire/world's policeman and has fingers in all kinds of pies, leaving more of itself exposed, and the U.S. agencies are more prone to lying about their mission which causes employees to question what they signed up for (such as the NSA's dual security/surveillance mission).
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(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Sunday April 16 2017, @03:36AM (2 children)
A fair point. At the same time, you'd think that there are people of conscience in Russia or China, yet we haven't seen much from those governments. It may well be that an English language bias is at work. Then again, there's hasn't been much out of the UK either.
At the same time, just calling a partisan prick like Pompeo out on his hypocrisy isn't enough IMHO. We should always ask the question "who benefits the most" from such activity.
I don't claim to be right, nor do I think that the options I presented are the only possibilities. I was hoping to stir discussion. Thanks for putting in your $0.02.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by lx on Sunday April 16 2017, @07:05AM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 16 2017, @07:35AM
It doesn't help that the "secrets" are more like "List of People We Killed For More or Less No Reason" rather than "List of Places We Keep Our Emergency Cash".
(Score: 0, Troll) by Bot on Saturday April 15 2017, @07:53PM
There are two kind of Italians, those that cannot keep their mouth shut, and those few that know how to do that, which get enrolled in the mafia. Neither of which seems a good choice for the head of the CIA.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Funny) by snufu on Saturday April 15 2017, @07:58PM (3 children)
Is this white house genuinely as paranoid as they act, or is it some kind of incompetent chaotic performance art parody of Nixonian administration?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Saturday April 15 2017, @08:17PM
Probably any CIA Director could be made to say this if you rubbed the right neurons together. The military and intelligence community love to talk about "non-state actors".
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(Score: 1) by Pax on Saturday April 15 2017, @08:31PM
FTFY
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 15 2017, @09:24PM
It's not paranoia when somebody actually is out to get you, for real. That is the case here.
In other news, "hate" and "fear" are sometimes the proper and correct emotions, fully justified. An inability to experience these emotions is mental illness.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 16 2017, @02:49AM (1 child)
An organization run by an alleged rapist that willingly helped sway an election to a racist, sexist, capitalist megalomaniac which prides itself on "Never getting anything wrong!" yet actively trying to destabilize the US by irresponsibly releasing HIGHLY classified and sensitive information leading directly to possible cyber attacks worldwide IS AN ENEMY OF THE MODERN WORLD.
I don't care if Russia is funding them. They are trying to fucking ruin everything. I get so mad about this I can't even see straight sometimes. Why does anyone give them any credit at all? This is the fakest possible news of fake news, my god.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Sunday April 16 2017, @03:36AM
As much as I'm floored by your crap sandwich of a comment, I'll give you points for using "alleged".
The Democratic Party had their work cut out for them. Clinton ruined it, and she owns that, not WikiLeaks or the Russians. Voters gonna vote.
Gee, maybe the CIA/NSA should have thought of that and fixed vulns instead of exploit them. Oh, right, securing computer systems is antithetical to their true mission.
Identifying vulnerabilities is the first step to getting them fixed. And "responsible disclosure" is just a way for corporations to cover their asses. But you did forget that Assange has at least offered to give tech companies exclusive access to vulnerabilities [nytimes.com].
Correction: You are getting so mad about WikiLeaks (or more likely, God Emperor Trump) that you can't even think straight.
Lol, get noided kid. If your post isn't humor/trolling, you might be the most naïve anon in history.
WikiLeaks should keep doing what it does, but ultimately, the brand name is not what matters. What matters is that people are going to leak information, whether it is to WikiLeaks, some other organization, or on Pastebin/BitTorrent/Tor/etc. You might be able to stop the "ENEMY OF THE MODERN WORLD", but good luck stopping the trend.
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