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]
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]
- 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.”[4]
- 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.[5]
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.”[6]