Former CIA employee Joshua Schulte faces 40 years in prison for leaking a trove of secret hacking tools to WikiLeaks announced Thursday. He was also found guilty of possessing images of child abuse.
Prosecutors accused the former programmer of passing on the CIA’s Vault 7 tools. The tool allows intelligence agents to hack into smartphones and use them as eavesdropping devices in what has been variously described as one of the most “brazen” leaks in US history.
Schulte, 35, shared approximately 8,761 documents with WikiLeaks in 2017, according to an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice. This was the largest data breach in the agency’s history.
Although he denied the charges, he was convicted of various counts of espionage in three separate federal trials in New York in 2020, 2022 and 2023.
File/Exterior view of New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center. Joshua Schulte, a former CIA software engineer charged with leaking government secrets to WikiLeaks, was held in solitary confinement in a vermin-infested cell in a prison where inmates are treated like “caged animals.” He said awaiting trial was a cruel and unusual punishment. In court documents on Tuesday, January 19, 2021, Schulte claimed that conditions were “below the level of poor people living in third world countries.” (AP Photo/Osamu Honda, File)
On Thursday, he was found guilty of espionage, computer hacking, contempt of court, making false statements to the FBI and possessing child abuse images.
Mr. Schulte defended himself at trial. A previous trial ended in a hung jury in 2020.
U.S. Attorney Damien Williams said in a statement that Schulte’s activities have ensured that Schulte was “justly punished not only for his betrayal of our country, but also for his possession of a significant amount of horrific child pornography material,” adding: he added.
Joshua Schulte betrayed his country by committing the most brazen and heinous spy crime in American history. He sought revenge for the CIA’s response to security violations committed during Mr. Schulte’s tenure, causing untold damage to our national security.
Once the FBI captured Schulte, he stepped up and tried to further harm this country by waging what he called an “information war” by releasing top secret information from behind bars…and all the while. , Schulte collected thousands and thousands of pieces of information. Videos and images of sickly abused children for his own personal gratification.
According to court documents, Schulte worked for the CIA’s elite hacking unit from 2012 to 2016, smuggling cyber tools used to break into computers and technology systems.
After quitting his job, he sent them to WikiLeaks, which began releasing classified data in March 2017.
AFP reports that the leaked data includes a collection of malware, viruses, Trojans and “zero-day” exploits that, once leaked, can be used by foreign intelligence agencies, hackers and cyber extortionists around the world. It is said that it looked like this.
