Vault 7 is the March 2017 WikiLeaks disclosure of thousands of pages of internal documentation from the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Science and Technology. The documents were leaked by Joshua Schulte, a CIA computer engineer subsequently sentenced to 40 years in federal prison for espionage. The disclosure remains the largest public window into the agency’s offensive technical capabilities and is described by John Kiriakou as having a scope that makes Chelsea Manning’s 2010 disclosures “look like scrawl from a sixth grader.”[1][2][3] Kiriakou has summarized the CIA engineer’s core disclosure in blunt terms: “the CIA can intercept anything from anyone.”[4] He says the leak revealed the CIA to be just as technologically capable as the NSA or FBI when it comes to violating the privacy of the American people[5], and that CIA Director Mike Pompeo called the revelation a “digital Pearl Harbor,” while a former CIA deputy director separately described it as “akin to an intelligence Pearl Harbor” — the single worst thing that had ever happened to the agency, given that the material amounted to its technological crown jewels.[6][7]
Capabilities disclosed
Three categories of capability documented in Vault 7 are routinely cited by Kiriakou as exemplifying the gap between the agency’s mid-twentieth-century mind-control experiments (see MK-Ultra) and its contemporary technical reach:
- Remote vehicle takeover. “The CIA has developed technologies to, for example, remotely take over your car by hacking into the chip. 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?”[3] Asked whether this capability had ever been operationally used, Kiriakou hedges that he does not personally know, but invokes the case of journalist Michael Hastings as the public touchstone: “We did not. But the conventional wisdom among the bloggerosphere is that, you know, we should ask Michael Hastings what happened to him.”[8] He has described the same capability elsewhere as letting the CIA “remotely take control of your car … to make you kill yourself and make it look like an accident,”[4] and, elsewhere still, as taking control of a car’s onboard computer system to force it off the road, off a cliff, or into a tree.[9][10] A colleague of Andy Greenberg’s at Forbes is said to have field-tested the capability and confirmed it worked.[10]
- Smart-television covert microphone. Technology to invert a smart television’s 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.”[11] Kiriakou has also linked the two capabilities directly to the 2017 Vault 7 leak in the same breath, describing a CIA smart-TV surveillance capability that persists even when the television appears off.[4] He has told the same story elsewhere, describing the CIA’s ability to hack Samsung smart TVs and iPhones alike as part of a broader shift of the agency into what he calls a paramilitary organization running assassination squads.[12]
- False-flag attribution. Tools to leave fragments of Russian-language or Persian-language code in foreign systems the CIA had compromised — so that subsequent attribution investigations would conclude the intrusion was Russian, Chinese, or Iranian when in fact it was American.[13]
Reception
Kiriakou’s view, stated repeatedly, is that the disclosure was the most significant public-interest release of CIA material in the post–Cold War period and that its principal lesson is the discontinuity between mid-twentieth-century efforts at coercive influence — such as MK-Ultra — and what the agency is technically able to do today: “Couple what the CIA was trying to do in the ’50s with MK-Ultra and its subcomponents compared to what it is technologically able to do today. And it is terrifying. Terrifying.”[14] Kiriakou has separately said the sheer scale of what Vault 7 disclosed is only a fraction of the whole picture: “it’s incalculable how much is out there that we don’t know” beyond what the public has learned through leaks and whistleblowers.[15]
Kiriakou has also framed the underlying capabilities more approvingly in a different context, saying he wants his country’s intelligence service conducting highly technical surveillance against adversaries such as Russia, China, and North Korea — citing the CIA’s interception of Angela Merkel’s cell phone as legitimate CIA work: “that’s their job, that’s what I want the CIA to be doing.”[16]
CIA spying on the NSA
John Kiriakou says the Vault 7 documents revealed not only car-hacking and smart-TV bugging but that the CIA was electronically spying on the NSA — something he “had to read twice.” The agency’s spokesmen, he says, dismissed it on MSNBC as a “training exercise.”[17][18]
Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern has separately offered his own perspective on the Vault 7 disclosures, emphasizing the significance of the leak and its impact on public awareness of CIA activities.[19]
CIA–NSA functional overlap
The Vault 7 disclosures also exposed, in Kiriakou’s reading, the institutional fact that the CIA is running parallel offensive-cyber programs alongside the National Security Agency and DARPA — programs which should, by statute and by mission, sit within those latter agencies rather than the CIA. “Why is the CIA developing this stuff? This is NSA and DARPA that should be doing it. And NSA and DARPA are doing it, but the CIA is also doing it.” He attributes the overlap to post-9/11 budgetary excess and bureaucratic pissing matches between agency heads:
Often times it’s a bureaucratic pissing match where the Secretary of Defense will say, ‘Well, CIA does its own thing for its own reasons.’ … When you have so much money that you can’t spend it all in a fiscal year, you end up just replicating what the other guys are doing.[20][21]
Smart-television and car-hacking capabilities (additional detail)
Kiriakou has repeated the same smart-TV and car-hacking disclosures in several other interviews, adding detail each time. He says the smart-TV capability existed when he was first hired at the CIA, making it old technology by the time Vault 7 became public in 2017, and that the same disclosures showed the CIA hacking target systems — including the Iranian Ministry of Interior — while leaving traces written in Cyrillic script to make the intrusion look Russian.[22][23][24] He uses the same disclosures to make a broader point: every major country’s intelligence service — British, French, German, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, Russian, Chinese, Israeli, and Iranian, not only American — possesses comparable interception tools, and “nothing is secret. Nothing.”[25]
Officer crackdown after the leak
Kiriakou says the CIA, badly burned by the Vault 7 disclosures, responded by instituting a rewards program under which officers are paid to report colleagues suspected of considering whistleblowing, and has since begun using AI in an attempt to predict which officers might be inclined to leak.[26]
The Assange negotiation rumor
Kiriakou recalls Ray McGovern’s account that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange let the CIA know he possessed the Vault 7 documents before releasing them, offering not to publish if he were freed — and that the CIA was reportedly willing to make that deal before it collapsed.[27] In an earlier interview Kiriakou described hearing the same story only as an unconfirmed rumor: that Assange was negotiating with the CIA to withhold the Vault 7 documents, and that the negotiation was leaked — possibly by his own lawyer — to Senator John Warner, collapsing the deal.[28]