CIA Car Hacking
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Kiriakou says the Vault 7 revelations, which he attributes to Joshua Schulte, exposed that the CIA can take control of a car while it is being driven by hacking its computer, sending it off a bridge or into a tree so that the death looks like a suicide or an accident.  He says the same leaks revealed that the agency can turn on a smart TV's speaker in reverse so that it functions as a microphone even while the television appears to be off, allowing it to listen to conversations in the room.  Kiriakou calls these disclosures matters of life or death, distinguishing them from the diplomatic embarrassment of the Chelsea Manning cables. 

He has separately described the same capability in another appearance; see CIA Remote Vehicle Control.

Discussing the capability again in the context of a fatal car crash involving Qatari diplomats, Kiriakou said CIA training included a specific survival instruction for the scenario: if you sense you are losing control of the car, immediately shift into neutral and pull the emergency brake, "it's the only thing that's going to allow you to survive."

What it is for

Kiriakou never states the capability without stating its purpose, and the purpose is always the same. "Why would the CIA want to take over your car? To make you drive off a bridge, maybe? To make you drive into a tree and kill yourself? To make you drive into an abutment and make sure that there's no way you can survive, because they've got the thing going 140 miles an hour and you can't control it." The motive he supplies is equally consistent: "maybe they don't like what you're working on. Maybe you're writing something that's embarrassing to them."

He is specific that this is not a question about electric vehicles. Asked whether the risk was confined to them, his answer was "conventional, really", the way in is the car's computer system, and the computers in petrol cars are advanced enough for the same result.

The smart television, and what else is unknown

The car is always paired with the television. The agency, he says, developed the ability "to reverse your smart TV, to make the speaker into a microphone, with the TV still appearing to be off, so you don't know that it's broadcasting everything that's being said in your house to CIA headquarters." On phones he has given up entirely, when he sat on the board of WikiLeaks, the members would put their phones in a microwave oven before holding a conversation.

The disclosures matter to him less as a catalogue than as a sample. These, he says, "are just random revelations that we've either stumbled upon or that we learned because of whistleblowers. What is it that we don't know? It's incalculable how much is out there that we don't know." He reaches for the old line about the danger being not what you know but what you think you know that just ain't so. The scale of the underlying leak he measures against Chelsea Manning's: thousands upon thousands of pages, making the Manning material look "like scrawl from a sixth grader."

See also

- John Kiriakou
- CIA Remote Vehicle Control
- Vault 7
- Joshua Schulte
- WikiLeaks
