Ex-CIA computer engineer gets 40 years in prison for giving spy agency hacking secrets to WikiLeaks
Ex-CIA computer engineer gets 40 years in prison for giving spy agency hacking secrets to WikiLeaks
A former CIA software engineer has been sentenced to 40 years in prison for what the government called the biggest theft of classified information in CIA history and for possession of child sexual abuse images and videos.
Should've done what Snowden did. If you know what you're going to do, will lead to these consequences? Get the hell out of the country.
Because this is EXACTLY the kind of thing the American Government would've done to Snowden if he stayed. Snowden was right that he knew they wouldn't give him a fair trial.
Eh, even if he did get a fair trial, what he did was clearly illegal and was definitely going to land him in prison. It was the right thing to do, but unless you have full faith that you're going to get a presidential pardon, you're right that you should be prepared to leave the country and never come back.
Whistleblower laws need strengthening. Snowden's leaks, for example, were clearly in the public interest and needed to be leaked. It's an unjust country that can't see that and spare him.
When you're going against the permanent state, there's no such thing as a fair trial.
If you know what you're going to do, will lead to these consequences? Get the hell out of the country.
Pfft, I say this about every article about someone getting arrested for committing a major crime.
"Oh no I've murdered someone, let me just hide the body reallllly good and call it a day" LMAO
Bro, Snowden literally got people killed. That guy isn't the hero people like to pretend he is.
If the gov didn't want its secrets out in the open, they shouldn't have been spying on their citizens. Maybe there would be less sympathy if the leaks didn't bring to light the bombing of Bagdad full of civilians in the middle of the night and how the military hid it.
Maybe it was all for the money and Snowden is just a dick, but I'm glad he did it.
Maybe, just maybe, if the government hadn’t been doing something worth whistleblowing about, those people would still be alive.
Bruh, stop pretending you care about something as people dying. There's no evidence to the contrary or anything. You're happily talking out of your ass to sound important. Kindly go fuck yourself.
When he first leaked the information out, I really felt bad for the guy and I followed him pretty closely. He knowingly threw * his life away to let people know that X,Y and z were happening. But *as he started getting passed around slowly from journalist to journalist, They started asking him questions. It became more and more obvious that he was just some kind of average dude, that saw something wanted to say something and needed to make sure that he could cover his ass.
I honestly think that the US handled it poorly. *He was a whistleblower, guy cared, guy was in the public eye It had at least a decent trove of data.
They should have brought him back in, giving him some conditional amnesty and had him help them dismantle the leak as much as possible. Then they could have give him a cushy job gag ordered him and had him come out of the public eye immediately.
Once he was seeking asylum the only way he's going to be able to pay for that asylum is with the information he pilfered. Once he is out in no man's land and stuck, the decisions that he made are not all going to be his own. *There will even the ones that he will make in resentment.
I truly believe his initial act was absolutely made with good intentions, but he got trapped and was drawn down into things that were bigger than he was capable of sorting out.
In the end the US government allowed him to owe a debt to the Russian government. And that was never going to play out well.
*God, Google dictation sucks
Being a spy is dangerous.
Whether or not you think he should be jailed for leaking CIA secrets, the dude had child porn. He deserved a serious sentence because he expressed zero remorse for that. Along those lines he couldn’t even fucking pretend to have leaked the state secrets for any other reason than the CIA was a shitty place to work. You gotta play the fucking game if you’re gonna fuck with the government. You can’t just be a crusty old coder.
"Furman said Schulte continued his crimes from behind bars ... by creating a hidden file on his computer that contained 2,400 images of child sexual abuse that he continued to view from jail."
How do you get 2.4k images on a jail computer? Manifest it out of thin air?
Considering CIA is involved, which is known for torture, human experimentation, poisonings, planted evidence, etc. I'd not be too surprised if that file was straight up planted as an extra "fuck you" to the guy.
That was never part of his defense. Do you think the CIA colluded with him and his lawyer to accept responsibility for the material the CIA planted to sandbag his sentence? I feel like an innocent person would be screaming that. Hell, even possibly innocent/possibly guilty folks do.
Edit: here’s a quote about the material you’re defending:
Schulte called the child pornography he was accused of possessing a "victimless crime"
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/13/the-surreal-case-of-a-cia-hackers-revenge
I think one of the things that inflate image counts like that is that if there is a video of child porn, each individual frame of the video is counted as a single image. If he downloaded a 40 second, 60 FPS video, that's 2.4k images right there.
This is why it's more interesting when they mention total size in gigabytes of whatever, because image data has a maximum compression size but "raw number of images" is completely made up and could be a single file even when in the tens ouf thousands (still bad of course but you get my point)
Holy shit, they really buried the lede with that headline. For sure, throw away the key.
I don't know about you guys, but I don't really trust the word of the CIA on those things. Or anything, really.
Why does the CIA have a trove of child porn?
To prove the charges. There have been enough cases of "she looks too young to be 18" where they were, in fact, 18. This database (which I thought was actually run by the FBI, but whatever) let's them show that the images were of Jane Roe, born May 5 1996, and the images/material were produced between 2008-2010.
IOW, to provide proof beyond a reasonable doubt that they were underage.
What happened to the guy who staged a coup to overthrow the government? Remember where all those psychos with guns wailed on cops with flagpoles and shit on the walls and stuff, and that lady planted bombs by the RNC office? Remember that? What happened to that guy?
Oh nothing?
Oh.
Huh.
I wonder how many of the gaping security holes in softwares and systems he reported have since been patched that otherwise would have left to doors wide open for hackers?
As long as governments hoard security vulnerabilities, they are endangering security, safety, life and property of millions of people.
NSA accidentally leaking eternal blue lol
They take the man's entire life away because he revealed us terrible things our non-elected leaders are doing to us. Who was hurt by his actions?
They take the man’s entire life away because he revealed us terrible things our non-elected leaders are doing to us.
And for possessing child porn...
Furman said Schulte continued his crimes from behind bars by trying to leak more classified materials and by creating a hidden file on his computer that contained 2,400 images of child sexual abuse that he continued to view from jail.
Holy crap, dude was even watching child porn in prison. Clearly the CIA is hiring the cream of the crop.
Giving away methods for hacking/spying ensures your country is at a disadvantage.
Disclosing found exploits allows developers to patch them out and improve security of everyone, which includes all the other alphabet boys and regular citizens.
There's no way to know that you're the only one who found any given exploit. Letting an exploit stay unpatched opens up an attack vector for everyone, not just you.It also enables innocent people to be protected from foreign governments.
Tune extent yes, but it also makes us all more secure. Even if you think our own government is doing a good job all the other governments have these holes too.
must be nice not having to understand things
“We will likely never know the full extent of the damage, but I have no doubt it was massive,” Judge Jesse M. Furman said as he announced the sentence.
Schulte was responsible for “the most damaging disclosures of classified information in American history.”
he got people killed, and you don't care
When people claim that leaks "get people killed," they're referring to when undercover agents are identified while they're in the field. The only secrets exposed in these leaks are the computer hacking techniques used by the US to spy remotely through compromised devices.
The so-called Vault 7 leak revealed how the CIA hacked Apple and Android smartphones in overseas spying operations, and efforts to turn internet-connected televisions into listening devices.
You could maybe say that closing off those surveillance channels prevented the CIA from learning about some attack, but that's really tenuous. It also assumes that the CIA isn't constantly developing new zero-day exploits so that they can continue to spy on just about everyone on the planet.
Everyone acting like the CIA couldn't have had leverage over that guy and made him admit to the cp charge . Unless i have some kind of proof i ain't believing shit . And also if that is true indeed i think 40 years is fair enough for that charge alone . Or am i missing something ?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The bulk of the sentence imposed on Joshua Schulte, 35, in Manhattan federal court came for an embarrassing public release of a trove of CIA secrets by WikiLeaks in 2017.
The so-called Vault 7 leak revealed how the CIA hacked Apple and Android smartphones in overseas spying operations, and efforts to turn internet-connected televisions into listening devices.
In requesting a life sentence, Assistant U.S. Attorney David William Denton Jr. said Schulte was responsible for “the most damaging disclosures of classified information in American history.”
The judge said Schulte was “not driven by any sense of altruism,” but instead was “motivated by anger, spite and perceived grievance” against others at the agency who he believed had ignored his complaints about the work environment.
A mistrial was declared at Schulte’s original 2020 trial after jurors deadlocked on the most serious counts, including illegal gathering and transmission of national defense information.
In a statement afterward, U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said Schulte “betrayed his country by committing some of the most brazen, heinous crimes of espionage in American history.”
The original article contains 694 words, the summary contains 175 words. Saved 75%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
So, was he really just angry? Or is that a convenient lie?
We haven't heard his side. So definitely a lie