Michael Hastings was a U.S. investigative journalist whose 2013 death in a single-vehicle Los Angeles car crash is invoked by John Kiriakou — with a deliberate hedge that he is reporting “the conventional wisdom among the bloggerosphere” rather than asserting a fact — as the canonical real-world referent for the Central Intelligence Agency car-remote-takeover capability disclosed in the 2017 Vault 7 WikiLeaks documents.[1]
The Vault 7 connection
Asked in a November 2025 Julian Dorey appearance whether the agency’s documented technical capability to remotely take over an internet-connected vehicle had ever been used operationally, Kiriakou’s full response:
We did not. But the conventional wisdom among the bloggerosphere is that, you know, we should ask Michael Hastings what happened to him.[1]
The framing is characteristic — Kiriakou does not directly attribute Hastings’s death to the CIA, but he is the source of the most widely circulated public mapping of the published technical capability to a specific real-world case.