Silicon Valley Shies Away From Assange's Helping Hand Amid CIA Leaks Scandal

  10 March 2017    Read: 1416
Silicon Valley Shies Away From Assange's Helping Hand Amid CIA Leaks Scandal
US IT-companies based in the so-called Silicon Valley are skeptical about potential cooperation with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on revelations about the alleged CIA hacking activities.
On Wednesday, WikiLeaks published over 8,700 classified files, the first part of Vault 7 release of purportedly CIA secret files, with the revelations so far including the agency hoarding hacking technologies and lists of major operating systems vulnerabilities. On Thursday, Assange proposed assistance to technology manufacturers in sharing information to help them fix the vulnerabilities mentioned in the leak.
The Financial Times reported Thursday that several tech companies questioned by the outlet had not expressed desire to cooperate with the whistleblower on the ground of moral or legal barriers of dealing with classified information.

According to the news outlet, its interlocutors from the Silicon Valley have assumed that Assange tried to improve his own reputation through cooperation with tech giants.

At the same time several companies said that they could change their stance and start cooperation with WikiLeaks if more information would be revealed by the whistleblowers, the newspaper added.

The files, released by WikiLeaks show that CIA seemed to have devised or collected techniques to hack into Mac OS X, Windows, Linux computer operating systems as well as Android and iOS used on mobile phones. The CIA was also said to have developed a technique that could target smart TV sets, making them record audio and send it to CIA servers.

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