CIA Employee Behind Largest Data Leak in Agency, Sentenced to 40-Year Imprisonment

The US Attorney's Office of the Southern District of New York has reportedly officially sentenced Joshua Schulte to 40 years in prison as well as a lifetime of supervised release. The former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee was found to be guilty in orchestrating the largest data breach in CIA history, possession of child pornographic material, as well as other other charges.

The announcement, stated that Schulte worked as a software developer for the Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI) from 2012 to 2016. A department that carries out offensive cyber operations, or cyber espionage, against foreign governments and terrorist groups.

Back in 2016, Schulte reportedly used his secret server administrator session to carry out a number of cyber-maneuvers on the CIA that would later on become the biggest data breach in CIA history.

Schulte reportedly broke into backups, stole copies of the entire CCI tool development archives, reset the network to its previous state, and erased hundreds of log files. Then, using anonymizing software like the Tails operating system and the Tor browser, Schulte sent the stolen CIA files from his home computer to WikiLeaks.

After a series of investigations, Schulte, in addition to other offenses, was found guilty in 2022 of illegally obtaining and disseminating material for the country's defense and of impeding a grand jury and criminal inquiry. According to the US Attorney's Office, he was also found guilty in 2023 of receiving, owning, and transmitting child pornography.

Wikileaks' 'Vault 7'

After sending WikiLeaks the stolen CIA files, Schulte then formatted and cleaned the internal hard drives of his home computer to erase any of his tracks. The CIA let Schulte go in November of 2016. However, the first of WikiLeaks' Vault 7 releases was released in March 2017 and came from two programs that Schulte was able to access, according to court documents.

Alongside the data, WikiLeaks released a press release stating that the information had been provided anonymously by a source seeking to raise policy concerns, particularly over whether the CIA had overreached its authority and exceeded its hacking capabilities.

Schulte would reportedly later on declare an information war against the US government back in 2018. In order to establish encrypted email and social media accounts, Schulte got cell phones while incarcerated, wherein the former CIA employee tried to utilize these identities to upload a manifesto online and deliver more confidential material to WikiLeaks.

CIA's Stolen Files

Schulte's delivery of the stolen material to WikiLeaks was reportedly described by prosecutors as one of the biggest unauthorized disclosures of secret material in US history.

Prosecutors further claimed that during the CIA leaks probe, they discovered hundreds of photos and films of child sexual assault at Schulte's New York residence, hidden in an encrypted container behind three password-protected layers.

The thousands of documents that were leaked are reported to generally comprised of hacking techniques, but the confidential material also showed how the British and American intelligence services worked together to devise a method of hacking smart televisions to use them as makeshift surveillance devices.