Former CIA Director Blames Millennials For WikiLeaks Documents
Michael Hayden, the former director of the CIA, has claimed that millennials are more likely to leak information due to “cultural differences.”
Speaking to the BBC following the publishing of WikiLeaks Vault 7 documents, former CIA director Michael Hayden stated that he believes millennials employed by the American security services are likely to leak classified information due to “cultural differences.”
“I don’t mean to judge them at all, but this group of millennials and related groups simply have different understandings of the words loyalty, secrecy, and transparency than certainly my generation did,” said Hayden speaking to the BBC. “So we bring these folks into the agency – good Americans, all, I assume – but culturally they have different instincts than the people who made the decision to hire them.”
Hayden continued, “We may be running into this different cultural approach that we saw with Chelsea Manning, with Edward Snowden and now, perhaps, with a third actor.”
Speaking about the contents of the Vault 7 leaks, which revealed that the CIA had hoarded security exploits and had the ability to turn smart devices into microphones, Hayden said, “This seems to be an incredibly damaging leak in terms of the tactics, techniques, procedures and tools that were used by the Central Intelligence Agency to conduct legitimate foreign intelligence. In other words, it has made my country and my country’s friends less safe.”
The source of WikiLeaks information has yet to be revealed, but the whistleblower service has hinted at where they may have received the leaks from. “The archive appears to have been circulated among former US government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive,” WikiLeaks said in a statement.
