Weve had the Chelsea Manning leaks, then came edward snowdon, and today another huge wikileaks data dump theyre calling it vault 7, and they say its from a division at the heart of the cia. Thousands of documents, millions of lines of code and, if it is all genuine, it shows the extraordinary array of hacking and spying tools available to the cia. Some of that wont be a surprise. Some of its colourful the ability to infect a samsung tv and turn it into a microphone that records conversations, for example. The british apparently helped with that one, by the way. The cia wont confirm the authenticity of any of it, but there are two big questions. Is it reasonable for the cia to have these abilities . Wikileaks suggests its overreach. But the second is, cant the cia guard any of its own secrets . If it is incapable of doing so, should it harbour software that could allow massive abuse by those with Malign Intent . Well heres david grossman. The documents are purportedly from the cias cent
the issues with the fisa courts and with how those applications were put together, and specifically, frankly, the, what i look at as the stovepiping that may still have been happening among cia and the fbi in the matter of carter page in particular. how much of a concern is that for you that it s one thing to maybe mission the carter page as cia informant the first time you go to the fisa court. why did it happen multiple times? this is the thing that chris wray is remedying, and he said he s already put in place 40 changes to how the fbi does the fisa process. so, i feel assured that here s a guy who is a straight shooter. that s chris wray. speaking of the fbi, his boss, apparently, disagrees with you on that. let me play a piece of sound from him last night and get you to react on the other side. the fbi also sent multiple
briefing that would need to take place. it s your understanding that the fbi did brief, was supposed to tell the trump campaign, hey, the russians are trying to infiltrate your campaign. yes, that was the fbi s responsibility. i know there were conversations that the fbi had. one of the challenging aspects was that some individuals in the trump campaign had some interactions of concern with the russians. and so how do you then ensure that they are informed about the threat but as a counterintelligence investigation that s ongoing, it was at that time, what do you do to protect those investigative processes that you have under way? let s go to the probably the most critical aspect of the i.g. report has to do with the handling of the fisa applications, in particular carter page. and it looks to me, and, look, i don t know how much you re not allowed to talk about, because of the rules on informants, but it looks like as if the cia and the fbi were not speaking with there was s
intelligence. the boss of all intelligence. i was on the committee when he created it. it was created to, if you will, stop the stove piping. encourage communication. create a situation it s a management situation of letting the cia and the nsa, all of them, do their job and making sure that there aren t gaps. so, who better for that than a former u.s. attorney and someone who served on the intel committee doesn t pretend that he is going to be the chief spy? but rather, just like a u.s. attorney, figure out how to do case management? is he the right choice? is a very good choice. should they look at that rather than go back to, well, we ve got to have somebody disagrees with the president. i want someone that disagrees with this kind of group thought where there is either no problem or they all agree on a problem. we had this leading up to the iraq war, where they all agreed
dan coats has been someone who came in as a former senator, former ambassador. did not have a whole lot of experience in intelligence per se and exceeded expectations in the way he managed the intelligence community and in the honesty of his direction and testimony and the advice he gave to the senate which is a big part of his job. he seemed to get along very well with gina haspel. he s in charge of 17 intelligence agencies as reconstructed 9/11 when the re-organization of intelligence is done to try to provide better communication and fewer breakdowns of stove piping as they said after 9/11 so every bit of information would be shared across lines, across agencies. most notably as you pointed out year ago, almost exactly a year ago, he gave a very honest answer to the surprising announcement by the white house on twitter that putin would be