CIA Smart TV Surveillance
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According to John Kiriakou, the CIA can repurpose a smart television's speaker system as a covert microphone, enabling audio surveillance even when the TV is turned off. He has described the same capability elsewhere in stronger terms: the CIA can convert smart TVs and speakers into microphones to listen to conversations without a warrant, using technology he estimates is roughly 20 years ahead of general public understanding.

Kiriakou frames this and comparable disclosures as only a small sample of what is actually known, drawn from leaks and whistleblowers rather than any systematic accounting: "it's incalculable how much is out there that we don't know."

The clip's second life

By December 2025 the capability was circulating again as a viral clip, and Kiriakou was being asked whether it was real. His answer was flat, "Oh, no. They very much can do that", followed by the observation that the material was not new: "it's funny to me that this clip that you're talking about has taken on a second life, because that information was released in 2017 by Josh Schulte."

He traces the chain of publication explicitly, Joshua Schulte sent it to WikiLeaks and WikiLeaks released it, as part of Vault 7, and restates the mechanism: "the CIA can turn on your smart TV without it looking like it's on. They can turn the speaker into a microphone and they can listen to everything that goes on in that room. All the while you are thinking that the TV is off."

See also

- Vault 7
- John Kiriakou
- Central Intelligence Agency
