Wikileaks' CIA dump contained WAY more bad memes than you would think
Wikileaks dumped a huge cache of CIA documents and files this morning in the first of a series of Vault 7 leaks, and in doing so, showed the world the agency's horrible taste in memes.
The whole leak, codenamed "Year Zero," can be viewed via torrent download. When you check out all the files on your PC, you'll find more than just zipped documents and PDFs. There's a whole array of .gifs and .jpgs too -- and most of them are memes. Old, lame memes, for the most part.
Here's a quick look at some of the memes that came along with the dump. You'll see they include everything from Boromir's "One does not simply..." warning to a pipe-smoking baby.
The leak sadly does not contain a reason why the CIA would want an enormous database of memes, but it can be assumed that the agency might have used them to translate all the civilian internetspeak that flew over their heads or even for interagency use. Many of the memes deal with cybersecurity and technological surveillance.
The memes probably hit about a two on the dankness scale, if we're being generous. The Philoceraptor seen below is an old classic, sure -- but we'd expect some more profound philosophical struggles from the intelligence agency looking to hack our cars and TVs.
There were some .gifs included too, most notably the one below of former President Obama. Let's hope his vacations are at least as fun as this looks.
One of the sections of the leak contained what was purported to be an entire directory of the "Faces of the Internet," a guide of "ALL THE FACES" (the wording itself an old meme). Whichever operative took that task came up a bit short, though -- the cache only included a list of "Japanese style faces," aka kaomoji.
That said, everything in the leak wasn't completely terrible. There was one Very Good meme in the bunch, seen below.
While the revelations from Year Zero are sure to cause some major questions to be raised about our privacy and cyber security, there might be some good to come out of it: the CIA might be shamed into using better memes.
Topics Memes
Brett Williams is a Tech Reporter at Mashable. He writes about tech news, trends and other tangentially related topics with a particular interest in wearables and exercise tech. Prior to Mashable, he wrote for Inked Magazine and Thrillist. Brett's work has also appeared on Fusion and AskMen, to name a few. You can follow Brett on Twitter @bdwilliams910.
