Wikileaks will face the full force of the law if it turns out that its latest release of thousands of pages of details about CIA hacking tools turns out to be true, said US Vice President Mike Pence late on Thursday 9 March.
“This president and this administration will take that very seriously and use the full force of the law and resources of the United States to hold all of those to account that were involved,” Pence told Fox News’ Special Report host Bret Baier.
“No resource will be spared in holding those accountable who have leaked information,” Pence said, noting that, if authentic, the leak “would represent one of the most significant compromises of national security in recent memory.”
Pence said that President Donald Trump has ordered that the authenticity of the leak be confirmed. On Thursday Donald Trump’s associate, British politician Nigel Farage visited the Ecuadorian embassy where Assange has sought asylum. Farage refused to reveal who he had spoken to there. The FBI and CIA launched an investigation into the Wikileaks release the same day.
On Tuesday 7 March WikiLeaks released 7,818 web pages and 943 attachments claiming to show how the CIA exploits holes in the computer code of devices like cell phones, smart TVs, and automobiles to gain control of them.
Wikileaks has claimed that the initial leak represents just 1% of their entire cache of documents. But much of that is made up of millions of lines of computer code used to create the CIA hacking tools, which Wikileaks’ Julian Assange has said won’t be released to the public.