Moments ago, Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer said he would oppose the nomination of Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch and urge fellow Democrats to do the same. Schumer’s opposition comes minutes after Sen. Bob Casey said he would also oppose Gorsuch.

“After careful deliberation, I have concluded that I cannot support Judge Neil Gorsuch’s nomination to the Supreme Court” Schumer said, adding the Supreme Court nominee “was unable to sufficiently convince me that he’d be an independent check” on Trump.

Schumer also said that Gorsuch is “someone who almost instinctively supports the powerful over the weak.”

The Senate Democrat leader also announced that Democrats will filibuster Gorsuch and force Republicans to muster 60 votes to advance him to a final up-or-down vote. “He will have to earn 60 votes for confirmation. My vote will be ‘no’ and I urge my colleagues to do the same,” he said on the Senate floor.

It was unclear as of now if Republicans would use the “nuclear option” as some have suggested in retaliation.

A new WikiLeaks Vault 7 leak titled “Dark Matter” claims that the Central Intelligence Agency has been bugging “factory fresh” iPhones since at least 2008 through suppliers.  The documents are expected to be released after a 10 a.m. EDT “press briefing” that WikiLeaks promoted on its Twitter.

And here is the full press release from WikiLeaks:

Today, March 23rd 2017, WikiLeaks releases Vault 7 “Dark Matter”, which contains documentation for several CIA projects that infect Apple Mac Computer firmware (meaning the infection persists even if the operating system is re-installed) developed by the CIA’s Embedded Development Branch (EDB). These documents explain the techniques used by CIA to gain ‘persistence’ on Apple Mac devices, including Macs and iPhones and demonstrate their use of EFI/UEFI and firmware malware.

Among others, these documents reveal the “Sonic Screwdriver” project which, as explained by the CIA, is a “mechanism for executing code on peripheral devices while a Mac laptop or desktop is booting” allowing an attacker to boot its attack software for example from a USB stick “even when a firmware password is enabled”. The CIA’s “Sonic Screwdriver” infector is stored on the modified firmware of an Apple Thunderbolt-to-Ethernet adapter.

“DarkSeaSkies” is “an implant that persists in the EFI firmware of an Apple MacBook Air computer” and consists of “DarkMatter”, “SeaPea” and “NightSkies”, respectively EFI, kernel-space and user-space implants.

Documents on the “Triton” MacOSX malware, its infector “Dark Mallet” and its EFI-persistent version “DerStake” are also included in this release. While the DerStake1.4 manual released today dates to 2013, other Vault 7 documents show that as of 2016 the CIA continues to rely on and update these systems and is working on the production of DerStarke2.0.

Also included in this release is the manual for the CIA’s “NightSkies 1.2” a “beacon/loader/implant tool” for the Apple iPhone. Noteworthy is that NightSkies had reached 1.2 by 2008, and is expressly designed to be physically installed onto factory fresh iPhones. i.e the CIA has been infecting the iPhone supply chain of its targets since at least 2008.

While CIA assets are sometimes used to physically infect systems in the custody of a target it is likely that many CIA physical access attacks have infected the targeted organization’s supply chain including by interdicting mail orders and other shipments (opening, infecting, and re-sending) leaving the United States or otherwise