The New York Times – The Truth About the WikiLeaks C.I.A. Cache – “On Tuesday morning [March 7, 2017] WikiLeaks released an enormous cache of documents that it claimed detailed “C.I.A. hacking tools.” Immediately afterward, it posted two startling tweets asserting that “C.I.A. hacker malware” posed a threat to journalists and others who require secure communication by infecting iPhone and Android devices and “bypassing” encrypted message apps such as Signal and WhatsApp. This appeared to be a bombshell. Signal is considered the gold standard for secure communication. WhatsApp has a billion users. The C.I.A., it seemed, had the capacity to conduct sweeping surveillance on what we had previously assumed were our safest and most private digital conversations. In their haste to post articles about the release, almost all the leading news organizations took the WikiLeaks tweets at face value. Their initial accounts mentioned Signal, WhatsApp and other encrypted apps by name, and described them as “bypassed” or otherwise compromised by the C.I.A.’s cyberspying tools. Yet on closer inspection, this turned out to be misleading. Neither Signal nor WhatsApp, for example, appears by name in any of the alleged C.I.A. files in the cache. (Using automated tools to search the whole database, as security researchers subsequently did, turned up no hits.) More important, the hacking methods described in the documents do not, in fact, include the ability to bypass such encrypted apps — at least not in the sense of “bypass” that had seemed so alarming. Indeed, if anything, the C.I.A. documents in the cache confirm the strength of encryption technologies. What had gone wrong? There were two culprits: an honest (if careless) misunderstanding about technology on the part of the press; and yet another shrewd misinformation campaign orchestrated by WikiLeaks.” [This article is by Zeynep Tufekci, an associate professor at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, is the author of the forthcoming Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest and a contributing opinion writer.]

• See also via The Intercept – WikiLeaks Files Show the CIA Repurposing Hacking Code To Save Time, Not To Frame Russia and CIA’s New “Digital Innovation” Division Can’t Seem to Keep Its Own Secret
• The Government’s Secret Wiki for Intelligence – Analysts reportedly tucked classified information about Russian hacking inside Intellipedia for safekeeping.