Joshua Schulte, an ex-CIA engineer, was arrested for disclosing secret hacking tools used by the CIA in Wikileaks. He revealed the aforementioned technologies in 2017, becoming one of the most significant leaks in CIA history.
Ex-CIA Engineer Convicted
A jury in New York on Wednesday has acquitted ex-Central Intelligence Agency engineer Joshua Schulte on all nine counts of offense he faced due to the agency's greatest leak in history. Wikileaks'' Vault 7' data and documents, released in 2017, showed a plethora of CIA strategies and exploits used to infiltrate targets' PCs, iPhones/Android phones, and even Samsung smart televisions.
The Verge reports that Schulte worked at Operations Support Branch (OSB), where he allegedly produced hacking tools by fast converting prototypes into genuine vulnerabilities that could monitor or take information from the targeted person's devices. Investigators collected evidence against Schulte through his own security breaches, such as saving passwords on his phone that could be used to reach his encrypted storage.
"Today's verdict affirms that maintaining the security of our nation's cyber capabilities is of the utmost importance. It's critical to the security of the American people, and it's critical to our advantage against adversaries abroad," Thorp said in a statement.
According to Thorp, illegal disclosures not only threaten US soldiers and activities but also provide enemies with tools and knowledge to attack them. Per the Associated Press, prosecutors contended that after being disregarded and insulted about his complaints about the workplace environment, Schulte retaliated against the CIA by stealing and exposing the same vulnerabilities he'd helped create.
Schulte claimed unsuccessfully in his plea case that he was being exploited as a scapegoat for the government's inability to secure harmful hacking tools.
After the verdict had been released, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Damian Williams said, "Schulte began to harbor resentment toward the CIA, he covertly collected those tools and provided them to Wikileaks, making some of our most critical intelligence tools known to the public."
Schulte's History of Illegal Crimes
Despite being made publicly available on the internet, the Vault 7 documents remained classified. This prompts FBI officials to instead download the cache over Wi-Fi at a Starbucks to a newly purchased laptop, which immediately became formally classified and is now stored in a supervisor's office, and only accessible with Top Secret clearance.
But it's not just Vault 7 that helped the jury convict Schulte. More charges were brought, charging Schulte with taking confidential national security material and transferring it to Wikileaks. In 2020, the government's first effort to prosecute Schulte resulted in a mistrial when a jury found him guilty of contempt of court and lying to FBI investigators but couldn't settle on the rest of his cases.
Today, Schulte is the subject of an extensive feature in the New Yorker in which he is described as hostile and then goes into even worse detail. He was apprehended in 2018, first accused of possessing explicit images of children, and has been imprisoned since.
Read also: WikiLeaks Exposes CIA Spying Tools: Smartphones, Computers, Even Internet-Connected TVs Compromised
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Written by Thea Felicity
