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 centre for cyber intelligence. 7918 documents with 915 attachments. Wikileaks say it is only part of what it intends to publish. The rise of connected devices has promised Intelligence Agencies like the cia a new golden age of spycraft, where every home is filled with all sorts of objects that can be enlisted to gather data against their owners. What wikileaks have got details of is how the cia are going about doing this and the very Computer Code they are using. This seems to be an incredibly damaging leak in terms of the tactics, procedures and tools that were used by the cia to conduct legitimate foreign intelligence. In other words, it has made my country and my countrys friends less safe. For example, the wikileaks document suggests that the cia have bypassed the encryption on android mobile phone messaging apps like whatsapp, telegram, and signal, and collect audio and messaging traffic before it is encrypted. These are wraps which many people used to relay Sensitive Information because they believe they are impenetrable. One technique, code named weeping angel, can turn a Samsung Smart tv in a targets living room can turn it into a live microphone. This was apparently developed with the help of the uks gchq. Wikileaks say they have got hold of millions of lines of Computer Code, the cias toolbox of tricks and hacks. But, they say, they wont be releasing what they call these armed Cyber Weapons until a consensus emerges on how they can be dealt with. How they can be a handled and disarmed. It will add to the damage done to western Intelligence Agencies by Chelsea Manning and edward snowden. We dont know how this information got out. One former director believes that one of the big dangers to secrecy is cultural. In order to do this kind of stuff, we have to recruit from a certain demographic, and i dont mean tojudge them, there is a group of millennials and they simply have different understandings of the words loyalty and secrecy and tra nsparency, than certainly my generation did. And so we bring these folks into the agency, good americans i can only assume, but again, culturally, they have different instincts than the people who made the decision to hire them. What has supposedly been leaked suggests no limit to the cias ambition, like hacking Self Driving Cars as a future weapon for assassinations. What is likely to be most damaging is that the Us Intelligence agencies as yet cant be sure how many of their secrets have been breached. David grossman. Well, our diplomatic editor, mark urban, is with me. This leaking is a big issue, mark. And how and why and how many people have access to all of this staff . Well, the agencies are caught in this terrible place where theyve had to create huge surveillance programmes, lets face it, thats what were talking about, in power in awful lot of people to share that information because of the lessons of 9 11 and other systemic failures, stove piping, they want to get across all of that. 800,000 plus people are cleared to top secret and higher level code the us. If even a tiny proportion of those or ideological or opposed, greedy, they want to sell the stuff, all working for another power, damage can be done. It is getting harder for Intelligence Agencies generally to a tribute or track where different malware and tools are coming from. Why take away from my initial read of this, the most interesting stuff was this tom burridge group, a group in the cia that harvest other statess cyber tactics to use by the cia in deniable attacks. Add to that that we now know that many of these cyber attack tools, with if you like, an american forensic signature, are in the hands of wikileaks and who knows who else, and the wilderness of mirrors about attributing cyber attacks, who the hell has done this . We saw this with the democrats in this last summer, it becomes harder and harder to work out. Thanks mark. Bruce schneier is a Security Technologist and harvard fellow. I spoke to him earlier, and i asked him if this was a disaster for the cia. I mean, certainly whenever classified documents are released by an Intelligence Agency, it is a disaster. These are particularly sensitive, they are hacking tools, they are techniques the cia uses. And if i was inside the cia, i would call this a disaster as well. What do you think is going on here . We have this leak, it seems to be one thing after the other at the moment. Whats happened to the culture of secrecy that you would expect in an Intelligence Agency . Its not the culture of secrecy, its the culture of computing. These documents are on computers, they are on networks, which means they are vulnerable. They are vulnerable for outsiders hacking, they are vulnerable for insiders taking them and leaving. And we see this against the cia, the nsa, a panamanian law firm, the Democratic National committee, Climate Change researchers, again and again and again individuals, organisations and nation states are hacking these documents, and in many cases, making these public. Michael hayden, former director of the cia, told the bbc earlier that he thought there may be something about a kind of a culture of the people who you need to recruit to be kind of working the computers and devising all these tools in the first place, that perhaps theyjust have a different view of their life and their career that say the old spooks did say a generation ago. You know, maybe that is generalising from one example, from edward snowden, maybe from two, from Chelsea Manning. This is probably an outsider, not an insider, like the nsa Equation Group documents were hacked by the shadow brokers. You know, its really hard to generalise. There are so few examples. The only thing we know is that these documents are more vulnerable because there are on networks, which means that individuals can do more damage. Now, look, how dangerous is it that a lot of these cia tools are now out in the hands of other people . How much damage can those other people do if those tools leak through . Well, the tools are leaked. And near as we can tell, theyve leaked for a while. Wikileaks said that they have been passed around for a while. So theyve already done damage. Now we can start getting security, now that we know what the attacks are, we can fix these systems and be less vulnerable. And thats really the way to think. I mean, yes, its bad that these attacks are out there, but they were out there anywhere. The cia knew that it was most likely that other countries did as well. So getting them in the hands of the public so they can be fixed is really a measure of making things better. Bruce schneier, thank you for talking to me. And bruce also told me he always puts something over the cameras on his various devices to make sure they are not him. Not because of the russians or the chinese, but because of teenage hackers sometimes having fun filming things. And Glenn Greenwald is the journalist that campaigns on these National Security issues. Hejoins me from rio. Good evening. Have you seen anything in these leaks that make you think the cia was doing anything wrong . One, i think, very significant revelation, is that the cia actively encourages and at times even pays various companies and organisations to preserve vulnerabilities that there are able to exploit in a lot of these software programmes. So that means not only they can go through these back doors that they make sure exist, but so can hackers, or other nations. The cia and nsa making the internet more unsafe for everybody. I think that is very disturbing. More on so maybe they should tell the googles and the apples where the vulnerabilities are rather fun exploit them. Have you seen any evidence that listening in on televisions or making Driverless Cars crash, have you seen any evidence that these have been applied to good people, ordinary people, as opposed to what President Trump would call the bad hombres. Do you think they have been misusing these tools . One of the problems with having a massive surveillance state, intelligence community, that operates almost entirely in the dark is that we know very little about what they actually do. There is very little accountability or oversight, which is why when we did this reporting, even people on the Intelligence Committee said, we didnt even know that these were taking place. So based on the first sort of batch of documents that wikileaks have released, we know the cia have extraordinary abilities that they are exploiting. We dont know against who they are using it, but the history of the cia is one filled with abuse, and we ought to know more about why they are using it. But lets be honest have you really seen any thing that surprises you in terms of a skill or a talent or a tool that they have . In a lot of ways, this is just what you would expect a really top class Spying Agency to be doing, isnt it . I think some of the methods that they use, and the extent of control they are able to obtain over peoples android phones, the progress that they have made into peoples iphones, has actually surprised people who work in the security field. Its not shocking that the cia is trying to do it, although i dont think a lot of people knew that the cia has such a vast surveillance apparatus. They assumed that the nsa was really the agency that uses billions of dollars, so that it is suprising. It is not shocking the cia is trying, but it can do clever stuff to spy on people from abroad, preferably, who are doing or mean us harm, or do we not want Intelligence Agencies to do that . And i i mean we have come back to this, and i have spoken to you about it before. In the end, if you are going to have Intelligence Agencies, you have to let them get on with the job and you cant expect them to stand by telling you what they are doing because it isnt going to work if they do that. Yeah, i mean, ithink, you know, there is an absolutist way to look at things, which is very simplified. Either they get full secrecy or they have none. And then theres a more sophisticated way to look at it, which we as journalists ought to be adopting, which is, yes, you need some degree of secrecy, but in a democracy, secrecy is extremely corrosive and dangerous. And for agencies that we have allowed to operate almost entirely in the dark, as journalists, our objective ought to be to report on what they are doing and cheer for when there is transparency. That the government is trying to protect secrecy. As journalists we ought to be devoted to telling the public what these people are doing. Some people say wikileaks have been strangely related to trump in these kind of ways. Do you think theres anything strange about the timing of this, another difficult week for President Trump, and this whole fuss about president obama, and did he tap him. Is this a distraction . I mean, it is funny because we always like to look at Russian Media and the arab world and mock them for conspiracies and yet we in the west sure do love our conspiracies. There was a weird timing issues with wikileaks, intended to distract. There is always Important News going on. Wikileaks published this material not in a particularly sensitive week. I can assure you it takes some time to process this material and unless we have evidence that wikileaks manipulated the timing i do not think we should be assuming that that took place. I do not know of any evidence that says anything like that happened. Theresa may suffered the embarrassment of defeat today. The lords voted with a Majority Ofjust under 100 to insist parliament has the final Meaningful Vote on the deal she gets on brexit. The pm will whip her mps to try and overturn this defeat when the bill comes back to the commons probably next week. Now theresa may is hailed as the most unassailable Prime Minister weve had for years, a weak opposition, a united party. But, think a little on it, and you remember she has only a small majority in the commons so shes vulnerable on all sorts of thorny issues such as brexit, Grammar Schools and us taking in refugees. Thats why some colleagues including William Hague in his telegraph column today have said she should call a general election to strengthen her position. Nick watt is here. How popular is that opinion amongst conservatives . Downing street gave the William Hague idea short shrift but im told theres something of a debate going on involving members of the cabinet, as to whether an early election would be a good idea. As i said, there are a whole series of issues that the Prime Minister may be vulnerable on with such a small majority. These ministers are saying over the next two years you may be able to mountan next two years you may be able to mount an argument that it is in the National Interest to hold an election before the due date in 2020. The moment they are identified is when the government seeks to introduce the great repeal bill. This is the legislation that would annul the Legislation Underpinning Oui annul the legislation underpinning our membership of the eu and it will put all that Eu Legislation into uk law and then the uk will be able to decide which bits of that legislation it wants to keep. Im told his ministers have identified a couple of danger points with that legislation. Number one is when it is in the House Of Lords, we have seen the House Of Lords this week bearing their teeth and there was a feeling in government circles that if the commons could overturn those amendments bumble laud them from the lords, then the lords would throw in the towel and not want to be accused of thwarting the will of the people on brexit. There will be no such qualms on the great repeal bill, they think, and the second danger identified by ministers is that the Scottish Parliament may say that under the original Devolution Settlement that great repeal bill would need their consent. Asi as i said, perhaps the Prime Minister najib you vulnerable on such a small majority. Heres chris cook. A busy College Green here in westminster is a sign that something is about to happen in parliament. Tomorrow is budget day, which is a day when the government usually looks at its most imperious. The whole structure of the day really favours the people in power. It also comes as the Conservative Partys racking up enormous poll leads, consistently in double digits over the labour party. But might that mean that we are overstating just how strong theresa mays position really is . Critically, take a look at the lords where the government does not have a majority. As of tonight, theresa may has lost 2a votes in the upper house. Well, we look at issues where we can make a difference and perhaps persuade the House Of Commons and the government to think again. Things like the housing bill, weve asked the government to think again on that. On trade union legislation, on education. And indeed some of the aspects of brexit. Indeed, just this evening, the lords have defeated the government again on brexit. Theyve passed an amendment demanding what they call a Meaningful Vote by parliament on the terms of brexit at the end of the negotiation. One of two lords amendments on the brexit bill. Everyone in this house knows that we now face the most momentous peace time decision of our time. And this amendment as the noble lord has so clearly set out, secures in law the governments commitment, already made to another place, to ensure that parliament is the ultimate custodian of our national sovereignty. I am in a minority in this house because i support the views of the majority of people in this country. This house is absolutely full of people who still havent come to terms with the results of the referendum. So what now . Well, the effect of these votes is to reopen the legislation in the commons. And so potentially re empower rebel Tory Backbenchers to negotiate new concessions from