Former CIA director David Petraeus says WikiLeaks publishing this week what it claims to be a trove of CIA hacking documents could be as damaging to national security as former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s 2013 leak of secret information from the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs.
Speaking to KPCC this week, Petraeus said, “It clearly is on the order of the damage done by Snowden,” referring to disputed reports that terrorist leaders changed how their communication methods after Snowden shed light on NSA surveillance techniques.
Petraeus has his own history of leaking classified information. He pleaded guilty in 2015 for sharing classified information with Paula Broadwell, his biographer. A federal judge gave Petraeus two years probation and a fine of $100,000. His probation ends in April.
After the leak, the CIA wouldn’t say whether the WikiLeaks documents are real, and would not confirm reports that it is investigating any leaks, it warned that any time WikiLeaks publishes something that could hurt the CIA’s ability to do its job is a problem. Snowden, to whom Russia has granted asylum, tweeted Tuesday that the WikiLeaks dump “looks authentic.”
Two other former heads of the CIA, former CIA Director Michael Hayden and former acting CIA Director John McLaughlin, expressed concerns this week about the timing of the WikiLeaks’ “Vault 7” document dump, saying it brought to mind Russian interference allegedly aimed at helping President Trump.
Petraeus also spoke about the potential for the relationship between the community and the government to degrade following the Wikileaks’ “Vault 7” publication, which showed how the CIA’s malware, trojans and weaponized viruses have the capability of bypassing encryption protection in a wide range of devices made in Europe and U.S., including Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows, as well as smart TVs, turning them into covert microphones.
“This will damage the relationship that was being reestablished with IT companies in the wake of the Snowden revelations,” Petraeus said. “They did enormous damage to those relationships and there was a rebuilding process that was going on, and I’m afraid this could set that back a bit.”
The intelligence community’s relationship with tech companies has been put to the test last year. Apple fought a legal battle against the FBI, as it sought the company’s help in breaking into the iPhone 5c used by terrorists in the San Bernardino, Calif., attack in 2015. The FBI ended up paying hackers figure out how to break into an Apple iPhone, but the hack was only applicable to the iPhone 5c and iOS operating system, and not the current lineup of iPhone 7s.
The tech companies whose products were mentioned in the CIA WikiLeaks documents, have commented on the potential security threat to their devices, and some, like Apple and Google, claim that the latest patches and security updates are sufficient to protect consumers’ devices.
During a Thursday press conference, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange that his organization is working with technology companies to protect them against the CIA’s alleged hacking methods.
“WikiLeaks has a lot more information on what has been going on with the cyberweapons program,” Assange said. “And so I want to announce today that after considering what we think is the best way to proceed and hearing these calls from some of the manufacturers, we have decided to work with them to give them some exclusive access to the additional technical details that we have so that fixes can be developed and pushed out so that people can be secured.”
