A former software program engineer with the U.S. Central Intelligence Company (CIA) has been sentenced to 40 years in jail by the Southern District of New York (SDNY) for transmitting labeled paperwork to WikiLeaks and for possessing youngster pornographic materials.
Joshua Adam Schulte, 35, was initially charged in June 2018. He was discovered responsible in July 2022. On September 13, 2023, he was convicted on fees of receiving, possessing, and transporting youngster pornography. Along with the jail time period, Schulte has been sentenced to a lifetime of supervised launch.
“Schulte’s theft is the most important data breach within the historical past of the CIA, and his transmission of that stolen info to WikiLeaks is among the largest unauthorized disclosures of labeled info within the historical past of the U.S.,” the U.S. Division of Justice (DoJ) mentioned.
The delicate info shared by Schulte included a tranche of hacking instruments and exploits that had been denominated as Vault 7 and Vault 8. It was printed by WikiLeaks beginning March 7, 2017, over a interval of eight months.
Schulte was employed as a software program developer within the Middle for Cyber Intelligence (CCI) from 2012 to 2016, the place he labored on instruments pertaining to offensive cyber operations carried out by the CIA, subsequently abusing his administrator privileges to plunder “copies of your complete CCI software growth archives” in 2016.
This info included strategies to “acquire overseas intelligence towards America’s adversaries,” together with an arsenal of cyber weapons and zero-day exploits that made it attainable to compromise automobiles, sensible TVs, net browsers, and widely-used desktop and cell working techniques.
The leak, described as a “digital Pearl Harbor,” value the company “lots of of hundreds of thousands of {dollars}” and “severely harmed U.S. nationwide security and straight risked the lives of CIA personnel,” prosecutors mentioned.
Schulte was additionally accused of repeatedly mendacity to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) about his involvement in addition to “spinning faux narratives” about how the knowledge may have been obtained from CIA computer systems in an try and deflect suspicion.
A subsequent search of his New York condo in March 2017 unearthed a stockpile of kid sexual abuse materials (CSAM) encompassing roughly 3,400 photographs and movies, a few of which had been collected throughout his employment with the CIA from the darkish net and Russian web sites.
Throughout detention pending trial, he was discovered to have used contraband cell telephones in jail to create nameless, encrypted e mail, and social media accounts, and tried to transmit protected discovery supplies to WikiLeaks and publish labeled details about CIA cyber methods and instruments.
Schulte’s aim, the DoJ mentioned, quoting a journal maintained by him, was to “break up diplomatic relationships, shut embassies, [and] finish U.S. occupation the world over.”
“Joshua Schulte was rightly punished not just for his betrayal of our nation, however for his substantial possession of horrific youngster pornographic materials,” FBI Assistant Director in Cost James Smith mentioned. “The severity of his actions is obvious, and the sentence imposed displays the magnitude of the disturbing and dangerous risk posed by his legal conduct.”
