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Comment by badloginagain | Hacker News Reader

It absolutely provides the Trump Administration with cassus belli to take punitive measures against the CIA. WikiLeaks appeared to have received the dump quite recently.

This is all conjecture, but this could be seen as a 'civil cyber war'. The Executive branch suffers from leaks, followed by an evisceration of the CIA hacking capabilities? Trumps love of the intelligence community is well known, and the scale of these leaks can be seen as a warning to the other agencies: the Executive branch will accept severe destabilization risks to protect itself.

Will be interesting to see if things escalate.

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Are you positing that Trump or members of his administration have somehow released these CIA resources? Or just that WikiLeaks is bringing attention to these resources and their current "libre" status in the wild?

Im stating the possibility that the Executive Branch made available the means to doxx the CIA.

The timing, the target, and the vector of attack all line up very nicely.

We had such leaks all the time during Obama's presidency (what with Snowden et al).

So, no reason at all to assume anything particular changed, except that people want to assume something -- because Trump.

It is interesting that the dumps were primarily from the NSA. I don't know the issue well enough to state whether the antipathy existed between the CIA and NSA enough for them to make this kind of move under the nose of Obama, but it certainly could have helped move some NSA funds to the CIA.

So Trump is simultaneously a complete incompetent blowhard and pulling off these mastermind plans??

I think it's likely that Trump will make difficult demands of his staff, and they find a way to make it happen. The President doesn't necessary get involved with the details of formulating the strategy to accomplish the demand. What's more important is the President thinks about risk factors, fallout, long-term implications of the strategy their staff proposes.

The 'incompetent' comes from an apparent disregard of thinking about the consequences of his actions. The 'blowhard' is self-documented.

just because the demands are difficult, doesnt mean that the staff will work to make it happen.

The staff can let it fail and place the blame on a rival

The staff can fail, and distract the president

The staff can fail, and blame a convenient political opponent.

The staff can succeed, in a few things, but not the whole remit. They can then spin it as a success

The task could be very complicated and would require multiple steps to achieve it.

But finally, the reason this fails as an argument - is that gutting the security apparatus of the state when you control it, is absurd.

The assumption for this to be non-absurd, is that the CIA is working against the government, and the constitution.

If that was the case, then following the constitution and declassifying their arsenal was not necessary in the least.

Essentially, the theory can be disproved by contradiction/occams razor.

>Essentially, the theory can be disproved by contradiction/occams razor.

You haven't disproved anything. You've stated an opposing viewpoint.

I haven't seen any evidence that leads me to believe that someone in the administration leaked this to harm the CIA, but nothing you said came close to proving that that's not what happened.

>the reason this fails as an argument - is that gutting the security apparatus of the state when you control it, is absurd

Your entire argument rests on the assumption that the hypothetical administration leakers will come to the same cost benefit conclusion you did. I can think of limitless situations in which covertly injuring the CIA may appear to be worth it to people within the administration.

The administration doesn't appear to trust the CIA and it's entirely possible they view them as an enemy to be dealt with rather than an asset to be controlled. Again I don't think this is the likely explanation, but it's not so unlikely that you can just throw out "occams razor I'll accept your concession now."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot

The plans aren't his.

That sounds like such a CIA move. Always attacking indirectly.

It looks more like Wikileaks chose this timing to help Trump. No one is talking about his paranoid surveillance tweets now. Everyone's talking about how suddenly the CIA is in all our phones and TV sets. Trump gets to say "See, I told you!", and the world gets to witness another NSA surveillance style scandal, only this time possibly on an even larger scale.

Interesting coincidence that Wikileaks chose to help Trump during the election as well.

I doubt it was a coincidence. Wikileaks supports Trump.

> Wikileaks supports Trump.

I wonder whose hand is really stuck in that sock puppet.

This is my hypothesis right now. It was recently reported that the CIA was withholding material from Trump - while the FBI helped him get elected.

People assume this needs mastermind-level capability. It just needs motive and capability. All it takes is one CIA defector or a previously existing plant.

I would think securing inside intel on other government institutions would be pretty standard. How else can you check that they're not compromised by Russians ;)

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