A former CIA officer says the agency can break into your phone, your TV and even your car/ Screengrab Ladbible Youtube
It’s not every day a former CIA officer sits down, looks straight into a camera and calmly explains how the agency can turn your phone, car and TV into tools of surveillance. Most of the time, that kind of talk lives in films, conspiracy threads and half-whispered pub arguments. John Kiriakou is one of the few people who can speak about it from the inside, and no longer has much to lose by doing so. Between 1990 and 2004, he worked for the CIA around the world, eventually becoming Chief of Counterterrorist Operations in Pakistan after 9/11. Later, he became the first US official to confirm the agency’s use of torture, and served 30 months in prison for passing classified information to the media. Since then, he’s made a second career out of saying the quiet parts out loud. In LADbible’s Honesty Box segment, he’s handed pre-written questions from a black box and asked to answer on camera. One of those cards carried the question people usually ask in private. “Does the CIA listen through our phones and laptop cameras? Yes. I hate to say it,” he admits almost instantly.
“They can intercept anything from anyone”
From there, he launched into a description that linked modern fears about “smart” devices to something very specific: the CIA’s own leaked technical playbook. “There was a dramatic leak in 2017 that the CIA came to call the Vault 7 disclosures, gigabytes worth of documents leaked by a CIA technology engineer. What he told us was that the CIA can intercept anything from anyone, number one. Number two, they can remotely take control of your car through the car’s embedded computer, to do what? To make you drive off a bridge into a tree, to make you kill yourself and make it look like an accident. They can take over your smart television and turn the speaker into a microphone so that they can listen to what’s being said in the room. Even when the TV is turned off. God knows what else that they can do that that hasn’t been leaked.”For anyone uninitiated in the machinery of intelligence work, the idea of a government slipping into your private devices feels oddly familiar like something lifted from the Hollywood fantasies we’ve been fed for decades and pulled straight from the dystopian shelf of Orwell’s 1984, where the state listens in through the walls and watches through the television. Hearing a former CIA chief of counterterrorism describe similar capabilities in the real world lands with the cold weight of confirmation rather than imagination.Kiriakou’s account is plain and unnerving: the agency, he says, has the ability to “intercept anything from anyone,” to reach into the embedded computers of modern cars and manipulate them at will, and to convert an ordinary smart TV, even one that appears switched off, into a live microphone sitting quietly in your living room.Also read: Can the CIA make someone disappear? Former officer and whistleblower says ‘Yes’ and explains how He’s not saying they are doing this to everyone. He is saying the capability exists. Vault 7, the leak he’s referring to, was the name given to a large collection of CIA documents released by WikiLeaks in 2017. The files, dated from 2013 to 2016, outlined internal tools and methods for cyber operations. They described ways to compromise iPhones and Android phones, exploit security holes in operating systems such as Windows, macOS and Linux, and turn certain Samsung smart TVs into covert listening devices. Some programmes focused on breaking into browsers and messaging apps; others were designed to hide the agency’s own malware so that it would be harder to trace. For the public, Vault 7 was the moment when vague suspicions about “they can probably listen through that thing” suddenly had code names and technical detail attached. For someone like Kiriakou, who spent years inside the system, it read as confirmation on paper of what people in his world already assumed: that intelligence work had long moved beyond wiretaps and safe houses, into the software woven through everyday life.
What the CIA is meant to be – and what it becomes
All of this naturally leads ordinary citizens, the very people who fund these federal agencies, to ask what the CIA actually does, and what the secrecy, euphemisms and bureaucratic fog are really concealing. We have films, theories, Reddit threads and YouTube explainers that claim to decode the shadow world of intelligence, but the next Honesty Box question put it plainly: what does the CIA actually do? Kiriakou started with the official version. “What the CIA is supposed to do? What it is legally tasked with doing is very simply to recruit spies to steal secrets and then to analyse those secrets to give the president and other senior policy makers the best information with which they can make policy.” That is the mission statement: human sources and analysis, providing information rather than taking action. But he immediately contrasted that with how things play out in reality. “Now, in real life, it’s not that simple. The CIA does whatever the president tells it to do. That could be to overthrow foreign governments. It could be to implement covert action programmes to influence the foreign media to even kill people. It just depends on who the president is and what policy he wants to implement.”That gap between its legal mandate and its operational reality is where most public unease lives, the space where secret authorisations, shifting priorities and quiet expansions of power take shape, far from the view of citizens or even many lawmakers.
Taken together, Kiriakou’s answers confirm what many ordinary people have long suspected but rarely hear said aloud: a federal agency with enormous reach, operating behind red tape, coded language and a level of secrecy that makes meaningful oversight feel almost impossible. In practice, what the CIA becomes depends largely on whoever occupies the Oval Office, and that shifting mandate creates a world where powerful tools, including the ones exposed in Vault 7, develop quietly in the background while the public stays in the dark. It’s a reminder of how far modern intelligence has drifted from the everyday lives it shadows, and how little visibility people have into the systems created to keep us safe, or so we’re told. That doesn’t mean the CIA is listening to every living room or hovering over every WhatsApp chat. These operations require resources, prioritisation and justification. But Kiriakou’s point is that the barrier is no longer “can they do it?”. It’s “have they decided you matter enough to do it to?”.
Where Kiriakou is now – and why his answers land differently
Kiriakou’s willingness to speak this plainly is tied to the path his life has already taken. His decision to go public about the CIA’s use of torture pushed him out of the agency, into a courtroom and, eventually, into a federal prison cell. The price was high: his job, his clearance, his freedom for a time, and, as he has said elsewhere, the stability of his family life. Since his release, he has built a career outside government as an author, broadcaster and advocate. He talks about civil liberties, whistleblower protections and intelligence oversight at events, on podcasts and in interviews. He writes and speaks not as an outsider theorising about the CIA, but as someone who spent 14 years inside it and then collided head-on with its secrecy.Those wanting to explore his work further can find his books, interviews and commentary on his website, where he continues to document the parts of the intelligence world he feels citizens deserve to understand. Go to Source
