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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWikileaks was twisting the truth about its dumped CIA cache. Of course.
The writer is Zeynep Tufekci, an associate professor at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/09/opinion/the-truth-about-the-wikileaks-cia-cache.html
In their haste to post articles about the release, almost all the leading news organizations took the WikiLeaks tweets at face value. Their initial accounts mentioned Signal, WhatsApp and other encrypted apps by name, and described them as bypassed or otherwise compromised by the C.I.A.s cyberspying tools.
Yet on closer inspection, this turned out to be misleading. Neither Signal nor WhatsApp, for example, appears by name in any of the alleged C.I.A. files in the cache. (Using automated tools to search the whole database, as security researchers subsequently did, turned up no hits.) More important, the hacking methods described in the documents do not, in fact, include the ability to bypass such encrypted apps at least not in the sense of bypass that had seemed so alarming. Indeed, if anything, the C.I.A. documents in the cache confirm the strength of encryption technologies.
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If anything in the WikiLeaks revelations is a bombshell, it is just how strong these encrypted apps appear to be. Since it doesnt have a means of easy mass surveillance of such apps, the C.I.A. seems to have had to turn its attention to the harder and often high-risk task of breaking into individual devices one by one.
Which brings us to WikiLeaks misinformation campaign. An accurate tweet accompanying the cache would have said something like, If the C.I.A. goes after your specific phone and hacks it, the agency can look at its content. But that, of course, wouldnt have caused alarm and defeatism about the prospects of secure conversations.
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Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)hopefully this will be the last time the media breathlessly rushes to publish his agitprop and his official narrative word-for-word...
FSogol
(45,529 posts)is now being used to prop up the Trump administration. It is nothing more than Russian Propaganda.
Cracklin Charlie
(12,904 posts)He looked like a crazy Caspar the Ghost standing on his balcony for his big interview.
Blue_true
(31,261 posts)murielm99
(30,765 posts)the story broke. Anything to discredit the IC!
I can't believe I am rooting for the IC right now, but they may be one of the few hopes we have left if we want to keep our democracy.
I keep wondering about the Bush family. They are getting to be quite elderly, but they have strong ties and knowledge of how the IC works. They are not fond of Trump. I will keep on wondering.