Wroclaw / Poland 5/07/2022
Information and quotations in this article are from Wikileaks.org and were written in March 2017.
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, Virginia. It follows an introductory disclosure last month of CIA targeting French political parties and candidates in the lead up to the 2012 presidential election.
“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.
Do you have a Samsung TV at home? You will be interested in the unknown additional abilities of this truth breaker.
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.
I reassure owners of other brands of televisions – five years have passed since the release of these documents – long enough for the CIA to deal with other television manufacturers’ products, the preachers of “real” and only true propaganda.
The question arises: Why should we be concerned about such wiretapping? Aside from the uncomfortable awareness of having witnesses in intimate situations, most of us don’t mind a stranger behind the wall hearing what we think about our government or our neighbor. The topic of rocket launchers is of the least interest to the CIA, since its employees have had a say in the location and supply of such facilities. Such wiretapping of the inhabitants of the planet has been going on for many years, and the CIA is certainly the most important, but not the only organization, and the US is the most important, but not the only country dealing with it.
Also, due to the nature of the phone, modern cell phones have at least one microphone…
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.
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.
Author of the article: Marek Wojcik