While society has yet to reach the dystopian world depicted in Black Mirror, the technology we carry with us is indeed engaging in secretive activities.
This week, on the podcast The Diary of a CEO hosted by Steven Bartlett, former CIA operative John Kiriakou shared some unsettling revelations about the devices we depend on.
In 2012, Kiriakou, aged 61, became the only CIA employee to be criminally charged for exposing the agency’s secretive enhanced interrogation program, which notably included waterboarding. He leaked classified information to a journalist. Kiriakou served as an intelligence analyst and operations officer for the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, and later as a senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
From February 2013 to February 2015, Kiriakou was incarcerated at the Federal Correctional Institution in Pennsylvania before being placed under house arrest for three months.
During the podcast, Bartlett questioned, “What about digital security?” referring to the potential for various international agencies to hack into personal devices. “I think we all go around assuming that our devices are secure…”
Kiriakou, who experienced life-threatening situations during his career, responded: “They’re not secure, at all. It’s not just the NSA/CIA/FBI that you have to worry about, it’s the British, the French, the Germans, the Canadians, the Australians, the New Zealanders, the Russians, the Chinese, the Israelis, the Iranians. Everybody has these capabilities, everybody, so you’ve gotta be very, very careful.”
He elaborated on these capabilities, highlighting not just the interception of communications, but also the sophisticated methods used by the CIA, such as taking control of vehicle systems.
“There was something in 2017 called the ‘Vault 7 Revelations,'” Kiriakou elaborated. “There was a CIA software engineer who was disgruntled and instead of going to the Russians or the Chinese, he went to WikiLeaks and he downloaded tens of thousands of pages of documents classified above top secret. They became what WikiLeaks called the ‘Vault 7 Documents.'”
The former agent claimed the CIA can utilize a smart TV’s speaker to listen in on conversations even when the TV is off.
“It can still hear everything that’s being said in the room and broadcast [it] back to the CIA,” he explained.
“When I first got hired [in the 1980s] they were able to do that, that’s old technology. And then the thing about the car, this was revelatory. They can take control, again remotely, of a car’s computer system in order to kill you. Crash the car, take it off a bridge, take it into a tree, sure.”
The devices that keep us connected today are more than capable of monitoring every interaction. Rest easy tonight.