Former CIA spy explains terrifying truth about what our phones and other devices can hear

Society may not have caught up with Black Mirror just yet, but the technology in our pockets is indeed doing clandestine deeds.

Joining the Steven Bartlett-hosted podcast The Diary of a CEO this week, former CIA operative John Kiriakou delivered some pretty terrifying truths about the gadgets we hold most dear.

Back in 2012, the 61-year-old became the only CIA member of staff to be convicted for exposing the secretive agency's enhanced interrogation program - waterboarding being the most problematic element - after handing over classified documents to a journalist. He was an intelligence analyst and operations officer for the Counterterrorism Center, as well as a senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Between February 2013 and February 2015, Kiriakou served a prison sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution in Pennsylvania, before being given three month's worth of house arrest.

John Kiraukou spoke to Steven Bartlett on The Diary of a CEO podcast (YouTube/TheDiaryOfACEO)

"What about digital security?" asked Bartlett during their extensive conversation. "You talked about the fact that it's possible for these forces in not just the US, but other countries, to be able to hack and crack your devices. I think we all go around assuming that our devices are secure..."

Kiriakou, who faced death several times while working in the field, replied: "They're not secure, at all. It's not just the NSA/CIA/FBI that you have to worry about, it's the British, the French, the Germans, the Canadians, the Australians, the New Zealanders, the Russians, the Chinese, the Israelis, the Iranians. Everybody has these capabilities, everybody, so you've gotta be very, very careful."

As for what those capabilities are exactly, the podcast guest mentioned not just a blanket interception of communications, but also the CIA's mind-boggling strategy of commandeering car systems.

"There was something in 2017 called the 'Vault 7 Revelations,'" Kiriakou continued. "There was a CIA software engineer who was disgruntled and instead of going to the Russians or the Chinese, he went to WikiLeaks and he downloaded tens of thousands of pages of documents classified above top secret. They became what WikiLeaks called the 'Vault 7 Documents.'"

Mobile phone speakers can be harnessed remotely by the CIA (Getty Stock Images)

According to the ex-spy, the CIA can remotely turn a smart TV's speaker into a microphone, even when it's switched off.

"It can still hear everything that's being said in the room and broadcast [it] back to the CIA," he said.

"When I first got hired [in the 1980s] they were able to do that, that's old technology. And then the thing about the car, this was revelatory. They can take control, again remotely, of a car's computer system in order to kill you. Crash the car, take it off a bridge, take it into a tree, sure."

So there you have it, the techno bits that keep us connected in the modern world are most definitely listening to every interaction we have. Sleep well.

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