Wikileaks' CIA Revelations Look Like a Dud for Now

Wikileaks' latest data dump, the "Vault 7," purporting to reveal the Central Intelligence Agency's hacking tools, appears to be something of a dud. If you didn't know before that spy agencies could apply these tools and techniques, you're naive, and if you think it undermines the attribution of hacker attacks on the Democratic National Committee and other targets, you'll be disappointed.

On the surface, the dump -- touted by Wikileaks as the biggest ever publication of confidential CIA documents -- offers some explosive revelations. They're all over the news pages: The CIA is able to use your Samsung smart TV to eavesdrop on you! The CIA can get into your iPhone or Android device, as well as your Windows, Mac or Linux PC, and harvest your communications before they are encrypted! No encryption app -- not even the Edward Snowden favorite, Signal, or WhatsApp, which uses the same encryption -- is safe! The CIA hoards "zero day" vulnerabilities -- weaknesses not known to the software's vendors -- instead of revealing them to the likes of Google, Apple and Microsoft! CIA hackers use obfuscation tools to pretend its malware was made by someone else, including Russian intelligence! There's even a Buzzfeed story quoting current and former U.S. intelligence officers that the dump is "worse than Snowden's."