Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer John Kiriakou has warned that intelligence agencies are capable of turning smart TVs into covert listening devices, even when they seem to be powered down — a claim that echoes classified material published by WikiLeaks nearly a decade ago.
Kiriakou is a former CIA insider rather than a fringe figure. He served with the agency between 1990 and 2004 and later became the first CIA officer to publicly acknowledge the use of waterboarding during a 2007 interview with ABC News.
A post about the CIA’s surveillance powers went viral on X on 21 May after the account @LeadingReport shared footage of the agency’s former counter terrorism chief stating that the CIA “can access your phone and laptop microphones and cameras.”
MSN reports: Kiriakou’s warnings trace directly to the ‘Vault 7’ leak, a trove of more than 8,000 classified CIA files that WikiLeaks began publishing on 7 March 2017. The documents, which dated from 2013 to 2016, detailed the agency’s cyber warfare toolkit and exposed a programme codenamed ‘Weeping Angel.’
Developed jointly by the CIA and Britain’s MI5, Weeping Angel was designed to target Samsung F Series smart TVs. The tool placed targeted sets into a ‘Fake-Off’ mode, making them appear powered down while the built-in microphone continued to record conversations and transmit audio to a covert CIA server.
The Vault 7 files also exposed CIA tools for hacking Apple and Android smartphones, exploiting security holes in major web browsers, and breaking into Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems.
‘They Can Take Control of Your Car’
Kiriakou, who served as Chief of Counterterrorist Operations in Pakistan, first detailed these claims during an appearance on Steven Bartlett’s ‘The Diary of a CEO’ podcast in January 2026.
‘They can take control of 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,’ he said. ‘It can still hear everything that’s being said in the room and broadcast it back to the CIA.’
He also warned that the agency could remotely seize control of a car’s computer system ‘in order to kill you,’ describing potential scenarios of forced crashes made to look like accidents. The Vault 7 documents confirmed the CIA had been exploring ways to infect vehicle control systems as of October 2014, though no specific operational use was disclosed.
Kiriakou added that these surveillance capabilities were not new. ‘When I first got hired they were able to do that, that’s old technology,’ he said, referring to his recruitment in the late 1980s.
Not Just the CIA
The former officer stressed that the threat extends well beyond American intelligence. ‘It’s not just the NSA, CIA, FBI that you have to worry about,’ he told Bartlett. ‘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.’