Yes, the government can use your phone, your computer and even potentially your television to spy on what you are doing inside your own home.

On Tuesday, Wikileaks released thousands of documents that prove what virtually every "conspiracy theorist" in America has been saying for years about government spying. And I don't even like to use the term "conspiracy theorist" much, because the truth is that most "conspiracy theorists" are simply citizen journalists that are attempting to expose things that the mainstream media doesn't want to talk about. And one of the things that the mainstream media has always been hesitant to address is the unconstitutional surveillance that U.S. intelligence agencies systematically conduct on their own citizens.

But now the mainstream media is being forced to talk about government surveillance because Wikileaks has just exposed it for all the world to see. According to Wikileaks, the CIA has been secretly running "its 'own NSA' with even less accountability and without publicly answering the question as to whether such a massive budgetary spend on duplicating the capacities of a rival agency could be justified". It is known as the Central Intelligence Agency's Center for Cyber Intelligence, and it has produced "more than a thousand hacking systems, trojans, viruses, and other 'weaponized' malware". In fact, the computer or phone that you are reading this article on may be infected with one of their programs right now.

The documents that were released by Wikileaks show that government spooks can remotely take control of Apple iPhones, Google Android phones, Microsoft Windows operating systems and Samsung smart televisions, and once in control of those devices they can use them to spy on their owners.

The ironic thing is that while Barack Obama and members of Congress have been accusing Russia of conducting cyberattacks, the truth is that U.S. intelligence agencies have been perhaps the biggest offenders of all.

This is an absolutely massive scandal, and I truly hope that it gets the attention that it deserves in the days ahead. The following is a portion of the press release that Wikileaks issued on Tuesday…

Recently, the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized "zero day" exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation. This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA. The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.

"Year Zero" introduces the scope and direction of the CIA's global covert hacking program, its malware arsenal and dozens of "zero day" weaponized exploits against a wide range of U.S. and European company products, include Apple's iPhone, Google's Android and Microsoft's Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.

Since 2001 the CIA has gained political and budgetary preeminence over the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). The CIA found itself building not just its now infamous drone fleet, but a very different type of covert, globe-spanning force — its own substantial fleet of hackers. The agency's hacking division freed it from having to disclose its often controversial operations to the NSA (its primary bureaucratic rival) in order to draw on the NSA's hacking capacities.

By the end of 2016, the CIA's hacking division, which formally falls under the agency's Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), had over 5000 registered users and had produced more than a thousand hacking systems, trojans, viruses, and other "weaponized" malware. Such is the scale of the CIA's undertaking that by 2016, its hackers had utilized more code than that used to run Facebook.

After learning about this, you may never look at your smart TV the same way again.

In fact, according to the documents that Wikileaks has given us the CIA can even use your smart TV to spy on you when it appears to be turned off…

A program dubbed "Weeping Angel" after an episode of the popular British TV science fiction series "Dr. Who," can set a Samsung smart TV into a fake "off" mode to fool the consumer into thinking the TV isn't recording room sounds when it still is. The conversations are then sent out via the user's server. The program was developed in conjunction with MI5, the British FBI equivalent of a domestic counterintelligence and security agency, according to the WikiLeaks documents.