CIA leak 'absolutely' an 'inside job'
Former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell has said that the WikiLeaks' dump of documents it claims are from the top-secret CIA hacking program is "absolutely" an "inside job."
Speaking with "CBS This Morning," Morell said the spy agency should be asking itself whether the leaker was a staff employee or a contractor, and whether there were any "red flags" that were missed.
When asked whether it’s clear to him that this could have been an inside job, Morell answered, "Absolutely."
"This data is not shared outside CIA. It's only inside CIA," Morell said. "It's on CIA's top secret network, which is not connected to any other network. So, this has to be an inside job."
WikiLeaks has said it will not reveal its source.
Morell warned against WikiLeaks' plan to share the technical details on the CIA's surveillance operation with tech companies, whose products were mentioned in the documents as being vulnerable to the spy program.
Morell said this information is "valuable" to US adversaries, because if obtained, they can search their own networks for any CIA bugs.
In the first wave of what it dubbed the "Vault 7" publications, WikiLeaks dumped more than 8,700 documents that it claims reveal the inner workings of the CIA's secret hacking program from 2013 to 2016. The CIA's malware, Trojans and weaponised viruses have the capability of bypassing encryption protection in a wide range of devices made in Europe and US, including Apple's iPhone, Google's Android and Microsoft's Windows, as well as smart TVs, turning them into covert microphones.
While 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.
"The American public should be deeply troubled by any WikiLeaks disclosure designed to damage the intelligence community's ability to protect America against terrorists and other adversaries," a CIA spokesperson said in a statement. "Such disclosures not only jeopardise US personnel and operations, but also equip our adversaries with tools and information that do us harm."
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 "Vault 7" document dump, saying it brought to mind Russian interference allegedly aimed at helping President Trump.
Former CIA director David Petraeus said the leak 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.
