You are no longer in control of your life. Every single aspect of your existence can be tapped into, hacked and cataloged by the eyes of Big Brother as you are labeled with an ID number specifying you as a resource rather than a human. The threat of Big Brother spying on its citizenry is no longer just behind the cover of an Orwellian nightmare; it has become absolute and reality.

“Year Zero” is part one of a multi-phase information leak of classified documents from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) called “Vault 7.” This information purge will be released through Wikileaks, the illustrious organization which handled the Hillary Clinton and John Podesta email scandal. Year Zero revealed covert programs run by the CIA that leave the American citizen in peril through their malpractice of manipulating weaknesses in popular software for their advantage.

From Bradley Manning to Edward Snowden, and now to Vault 7, data leak after data leak has shown the entire world how much information the U.S. stockpiles on the global community and its domestic citizenry.

Manning released hundreds upon thousands of documents about the Iraq and Afghanistan War, miscellaneous airstrikes gone rogue with countless citizen casualties and Guantanamo Bay documents illustrating the cruelty brought onto its prisoners.  Snowden released priceless information on the U.S. National Security Agency’s (NSA) countless projects and programs that aim to find vulnerabilities in software and technology like Google Drive, multiple popular social media websites and your smartphone in order to track down criminals and terrorists.

Vault 7 is yet another marker that shows how notorious and deeply un-American the U.S. government runs its agencies. No other country in the world has had three major data leaks in the past decade outlining in vivid detail how three major parts of said government goes against the moral fabric upon which it was built.

The most scandalous part of this new leak is the CIA’s disgusting practice of hoarding vulnerabilities in American software. Hoarding vulnerabilities means the government found ways to break into software and jeopardize the information it’s holding, and chose not to share the liabilities with the software manufacturers in question. Instead, the agency collected them and used them in order to further allow themselves access inside large user databases.

Through hoarding vulnerabilities, the CIA has been able to create permanent backdoors into everything you use daily. Most notably, your smartphone has been utterly compromised. Both Android and Apple have been broken into, and now have backdoors available to the U.S. government for whenever they want to tap into someone’s daily activity.

Whether or not you worry about the government tapping into your phone camera while you smoke weed or take a shower is irrelevant to the fact that every single phone in the world is now compromised. The U.S. has the ability to tap into anyone’s phone across the globe and listen in on their conversations, whether over a call or turning the phone’s microphone on as it sits in a person’s pocket.

The CIA also has the ability to tap into smart TV’s microphones and listen to people when the TV is in a fake off mode while plugged into an outlet. As well, they can control cars remotely through their computer systems. Wired magazine showed how this is possible in a video from 2015, where they hacked into a 2014 Jeep Cherokee and turned off the engine while it was being driven on the highway.

What is most worrying about these documents, however, is how they prove the government is attempting to shift culture through subliminal alterations in everyday media. The CIA proposed a program called the “Meme Warfare Center” (MWC), which aims to create memes in order to shift societal ideas and morals through analyzing the culture of specific populations of people, friendly or foe, and disseminate them organically into the population.

The MWC is just one of many different programs linked in this leak aimed at altering cultural values and shifting them to those which would provide less friction.

Although Year Zero is only about one percent of the entire information mass that will be leaked under the guise of Vault 7, it is enough to show how little the U.S. cares about respecting anyone’s privacy. Through the signing of the Espionage Act and the Patriot Act, slowly but surely the government has taken the voice of its people away and has given it a false sense of free will.

We, as a nation, have given up our freedom for a false sense of security. To quote George Orwell’s 1984, “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”