Former CIA director David Petraeus viewed the recent outburst of WikiLeaks document Vault 7 as a vendor causing the developing relationship between the spy agency and the tech industry again to unstable.
According to Petraeus, the WikiLeaks exposed documents, claiming allegations against CIA’s hacking tools could be as damaging as Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA in 2013.
“This will damage the relationship that was being re-established with IT companies in the wake of the Snowden revelations,” Petraeus told KPCC on Wednesday. “They did enormous damage to those relationships and there was a rebuilding process that was going on. I’m afraid that this could set that back a bit.”
In balancing between privacy and national security, Silicon Valley has been at odds for years with law enforcement and the intelligence community. For instance, Apple, in 2016 fought a case against FBI over an issue to unlock the iPhone of an attacker involved in San Bernardino shooting incident, as demanded by the Bureau.
