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]
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.”[4]
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.”[5]