High-level discussions included proposals for the CIA to dump embarrassing hacked information about Russian officials online, as well as to destroy Russian servers, according to former officials.īut just days away from launching operations in the late summer of 2016, intelligence operatives were told to stand down, according to former officials. While the CIA has been pushing for years to expand its cyber authorities, Russia’s interference in the 2016 election led Obama officials to grasp for new ways to retaliate against the Kremlin. The National Security Council did not respond to multiple written requests for comment. The CIA declined to comment or respond to an extensive list of questions from Yahoo News. “Our government is basically turning into f****ing WikiLeaks, secure communications on the dark web with dissidents, hacking and dumping,” said one such former official. intelligence agencies in hack-and-dump activities also raises uncomfortable comparisons for some former officials. officials, see a potentially dangerous attenuation of intelligence oversight, which could have unintended consequences and even put people’s lives at risk, according to former officials. official.īut critics, including some former U.S. “People were doing backflips in the hallways ,” said another former U.S. Some CIA officials greeted the new finding as a needed reform that allows the agency to act more nimbly. “This has been a combination of destructive things - stuff is on fire and exploding - and also public dissemination of data: leaking or things that look like leaking.” Since the finding was signed two years ago, the agency has carried out at least a dozen operations that were on its wish list, according to this former official. The CIA has wasted no time in exercising the new freedoms won under Trump. Now, “as long as you can show that it vaguely looks like the charity is working on behalf of that government, then you’re good.” “Before, you would need years of signals and dozens of pages of intelligence to show that this thing is a de facto arm of the government,” a former official told Yahoo News. It has also freed the agency to conduct disruptive operations against organizations that were largely off limits previously, such as banks and other financial institutions.Īnother key change with the finding is it lessened the evidentiary requirements that limited the CIA’s ability to conduct covert cyber operations against entities like media organizations, charities, religious institutions or businesses believed to be working on behalf of adversaries’ foreign intelligence services, as well as individuals affiliated with these organizations, according to former officials. The finding has made it easier for the CIA to damage adversaries’ critical infrastructure, such as petrochemical plants, and to engage in the kind of hack-and-dump operations that Russian hackers and WikiLeaks popularized, in which tranches of stolen documents or data are leaked to journalists or posted on the internet.
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