Wikileaks: former CIA hacker Joshua Schulte sentenced to 40 years in prison
Kyiv • UNN
Former CIA officer Joshua Schulte is sentenced to 40 years in prison for leaking classified CIA hacking tools to Wikileaks and storing images of child abuse.
Former CIA officer Joshua Schulte was sentenced to 40 years in prison for leaking classified hacking tools to the Wikileaks information platform. He was also found guilty of storing images of child abuse. This was reported by the BBC, according to UNN.
Details
Prosecutors accused Joshua Schulte, who has been behind bars since 2018, of leaking CIA Vault 7 tools. These tools allow intelligence officers to hack into smartphones and use them as listening devices. They stated that this leak is one of the most "brazen" in US history.
Schulte handed over about 9,000 documents to Wikileaks in 2016-2017, which is the largest data leak in the history of the CIA, the US Department of Justice said.
He denied the charges but was found guilty on various counts in three separate federal trials in New York in 2020, 2022, and 2023.
He has now been finally convicted on charges of espionage, computer hacking, contempt of court, making false statements to the FBI, and possession of child abuse images.
According to the evidence presented at the trial, Schulte worked as a software developer at the Cyber Intelligence Center, which is engaged in cyber espionage against terrorist organizations and foreign governments. Prosecutors believe that he was probably motivated by anger over a dispute with colleagues who nicknamed him "deadline drifter" for constantly missing deadlines.
Prosecutors said he wanted to punish those who he believed had wronged him. They added that "in carrying out this revenge, he caused tremendous harm to national security" because the publication of the documents on Wikileaks had damaged the CIA's ability to gather foreign intelligence.
The FBI also states that a search of Schulte's apartment revealed "tens of thousands of images of child sexual abuse material.
They added that after his arrest, Schulte tried to pass on more information. He smuggled a phone into the prison, from which he tried to send the journalist information about CIA cyber groups and wrote tweets containing information about CIA cyber tools under the name of Jason Bourne, a fictional intelligence operative.
