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.[1] 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.[2]
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.”[3]