A former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) hacker has been found guilty of stealing a trove of classified hacking tools from Wikileaks.
Joshua Schulte was convicted for sending the U.S. federal government’s Vault 7 cyber-warfare tools to the whistleblowing platform WikiLeaks. He denied the accusation of ‘brazen’ data leak.
In 2017, the international press publicized the revelation of 8,761 classified documents detailing how government agencies actively use the spyware collection capabilities of smartphones overseas.
Prosecutors said it was one of the most “brazen” in the history of the United States. Former CIA Hacker Convicted Of ‘brazen’ Data Leak.
Damian Williams, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York, said Mr. Joshua Schulte’s actions “had a destructive effect on our intelligence community by offering crucial intel to those who wish to do us harm”.
Mr. Schulte, who represented himself but was convicted in court in Manhattan, now faces decades in prison. In addition, a separate case against Mr. Schulte is accusing him of possessing images and videos of child abuse, to which he has pleaded not guilty. Former CIA Hacker Convicted Of ‘brazen’ Data Leak, but he is denying it.
Mr. Schulte soon proceeded to attain the CIA’s highest security clearance in 2010, and a year later moved to the agency’s headquarters in Langley and took on the leading job of chief architect. He designed and developed a series of computer programs used to hack sophisticated devices and operating systems.
Prosecutors alleged that Morton was charged in 2016 that he sent stolen information to the media company Wikileaks and lied when he contacted the FBI about his involvement in the case of Joshua Schulte: Former CIA Hacker Convicted Of ‘brazen’ Data Leak.
The Assistant United States Attorney spoke of how the man appeared to be motivated by intuition over an issue with his job that had been quickly solved. The product engineer needed to finish up his work in a hurry to satisfy his manager’s deadline and had been given the nickname “Drifting Deadline.”
The prosecutors wished to punish those who were believed to have afflicted him and said in “carrying out that revenge, he caused great harm to this country’s national security.”
Mr. Schulte claimed that the government couldn’t prove that he was attempting to incite revenge, though he called his story “pure fantasy” in his closing argument. Mr. Joshua Schulte said that “hundreds of people had access to” the documents in question and that “hundreds of people could have stolen them.”
“The government’s case is riddled with reasonable doubt,” he added.
Prosecutors used evidence that listed the tasks Mr. Joshua Schulte made that mentioned, “Delete suspicious emails.”
During the course of his arrest, Mr. Schulte tried to get people to pass along additional information. From prison, he transported a phone that he attempted to bring to a reporter and composed tweets containing information about CIA cyber tools under a false name, Jason Bourne, in his capacity as a fictional intelligence operative.
Mr. Joshua Schulte has been held in custody since 2018.
A previous lawsuit was declared a mistrial after judges could not come to a decision on the most vital accusations.
Assange’s extradition over documents that were disclosed between 2010 and 2011 in the past has sparked Ecuador’s plan to extradite him to the US, where officials are insisting he took part in a conspiring circle that endangered lives.