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WikiLeaks delivers again for Donald Trump with dump of CIA secrets

Paul McGeough
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Donald Trump has a new stick with which to beat the US intelligence agencies – not only can they not keep his secrets, they can't keep their own.

Lobbing amidst the worst stand-off ever between a new president and the agencies, Tuesday's sensational WikiLeaks dump of thousands of documents on the CIA's highly secretive, high-tech cyber arsenal reveals how the agency steals data from foreign targets by taking control of their mobile phones, computers and televisions.

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WikiLeaks releases 'vault 7'

Leaked top secret documents from the CIA reveal it has been hacking phones and smart TVs.

Seemingly legitimate, the release of almost 9000 documents will be viewed through political as much as national security prisms.

WikiLeaks, increasingly denounced as a tool of Moscow, is a key player in the months-long dispute in which Trump has mocked and ridiculed the agencies.

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But as commander-in-chief Trump is required to address the document dump as the most embarrassing breach of national security since Edward Snowden leaked a mountain of classified documents in 2013 and, before that, Chelsea Manning leaked about three-quarters of a million classified and other sensitive documents in 2010 .

The White House, the Pentagon and the CIA were caught off guard by a WikiLeaks statement that it was about to upload the documents, which it has codenamed Vault 7.

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Acutely embarrassed, the only response from the CIA was a terse: "We do not comment on the authenticity or content of purported intelligence documents."

Apparently the first in a series, WikiLeaks said that the 8761 documents, which were dated from 2013 to 2016, came from an isolated, high-security network situated inside the CIA's Centre for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virginia.

Describing their contents as "malware, viruses, Trojans and weaponised 'zero day' exploits", WikiLeaks said the files developed by a CIA unit known as the Engineering Development Group, were designed to harness vulnerabilities in Apple's iPhone, Google's Android software and Samsung TV sets. WikiLeaks said the exploits were capable of bypassing popular encryption-enabled applications like WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram. 

"At first glance [the files are] probably legitimate or contains a lot of legitimate stuff, which means somebody managed to extract a lot of data from a classified CIA system and is willing to let the world know that," Nicholas Weaver, a computer security researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, told The Washington Post.

Trump has been infuriated by a torrent of leaks from across government, but especially from within the intelligence agencies on investigations into links between himself and his election campaign team with Russia.

In July 2016 WikiLeaks became a controversial player in the US presidential election when it released 20,000 embarrassing emails that had been hacked from Democratic Party computers, creating uproar on the campaign trail.

Speaking at the time from Ecuador's embassy in London, where he has taken refuge for years, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange denied early suspicion that the Russian government or its agents were responsible for the DNC (Democratic National Committee) hacking – but the combined US intelligence agencies concluded that the hacking was part of a multi-pronged Kremlin plot to help Trump win the election and to discredit US democracy.

Trump celebrated the leaks, declaring "I love WikiLeaks" as he read from a sheaf of the Democratic emails at a rally in the last weeks of the campaign. For months he refused to accept that Russia was involved – even as he jokingly urged Moscow to mount a search for thousands of Hillary Clinton emails that had been processed through her controversial private email server when she was US secretary of state.

On the campaign trail and in office Trump has been repeatedly wrong-footed by leaks on his Russian connections and those of his associates. 

He was forced to sack campaign manager Paul Manafort after allegations that he had received millions of dollars from pro-Moscow politicians in Ukraine. 

In February he sacked his national security adviser Michael Flynn after he was revealed to have lied about his dealings with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. And last week Attorney-General Jeff Sessions was forced to recuse himself from any Justice Department deliberations on intelligence agency and congressional investigations of the Russian links because Sessions had failed to disclose that he too had met the ambassador.

During a candidates' debate in October, just days after the intelligence agencies' declaration that the Democratic hack was the work of Moscow, Trump pushed back: "They like to say the Russians did it. They think they're trying to tarnish me with Russia. I know nothing about Russia."

As the scope of a multi-agency investigation into aspects of Trump's Russia connections became known, president-elect Trump became sharply critical of the agencies – mocking their failures in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and dismissing the need for himself to have a daily intelligence briefing on the grounds that he was "a smart person".

The leaks have continued, including indications that the FBI is increasingly confident about the veracity of aspects of a dossier, compiled by a former British intelligence agent, which alleges that Russia had been "assisting Trump for at least five years" and that the Kremlin had recorded a so-called sex tape during Trump's 2013 visit to Moscow which it would use to compromise him as president of the US. 

Within days of Trump's inauguration there were reports that the agencies were withholding sensitive information because Trump was not to be trusted and might disclose it to Moscow – and in what read as a Trump threat to all the agencies, The New York Times reported that he had enlisted a billionaire buddy with no intelligence experience to conduct a top-to-bottom review of the agencies.

Trump's war with the agencies became more fraught on the weekend when senior former and current officials rejected his tweeted claim that former president Barack Obama had ordered wiretaps on Trump Tower during the election campaign – which apparently was based on reports from Trump-loyal conservative media outlets. 

And on Tuesday, after days of blanket denials, the White House seemed to be walking back the President's unequivocal assertion that Obama had issued such an order.

When he was asked for the proof that Trump claimed he had of Obama's "order", presidential spokesman Sean Spicer said it wasn't a question of proof as a need for a congressional investigation.

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