Joshua Schulte, a former CIA officer, has been sentenced to 40 years in prison for releasing a significant amount of classified hacking tools to Wikileaks, along with other serious charges.
Schulte, 35, faced accusations of leaking the CIA’s “Vault 7” tools, enabling intelligence officers to hack smartphones for surveillance.
The leak, deemed one of the most audacious in US history, involved the transmission of 8,761 documents to Wikileaks in 2017, marking the largest data breach in CIA history.
Despite Schulte’s denial, he was convicted on multiple counts across three separate federal trials in New York during 2020, 2022, and 2023.
His charges included espionage, computer hacking, contempt of court, making false statements to the FBI, and possession of child abuse images.
US Attorney Damian Williams stated, “Joshua Schulte betrayed his country by committing some of the most brazen, heinous crimes of espionage in American history.”
During the trial, evidence revealed Schulte’s role as a software developer in the Center for Cyber Intelligence, specializing in cyber espionage against terrorist organizations and foreign governments.
Prosecutors argued that he transmitted stolen information to Wikileaks in 2016 and lied to FBI agents about his involvement, potentially motivated by workplace disputes.
Assistant US Attorney Michael Lockard noted that Schulte, nicknamed “Drifting Deadline,” sought revenge against perceived wrongs, causing significant harm to national security in the process.
The leak severely damaged the CIA’s ability to collect foreign intelligence, jeopardized personnel, programs, and assets, and incurred hundreds of millions of dollars in losses, according to prosecutors.
Following Wikileaks’ publication of the data, the FBI interviewed Schulte multiple times, during which he consistently denied responsibility.
A subsequent search of his apartment uncovered tens of thousands of images of child sexual abuse materials.
After his arrest in 2018, Schulte attempted to transmit more information from jail, smuggling in a phone to contact a reporter about CIA cyber groups and drafting tweets under the name Jason Bourne, a fictional intelligence operative, revealing information about CIA cyber tools.
Schulte has been in custody since 2018, and his sentencing marks the culmination of a prolonged legal battle surrounding one of the most significant breaches in US intelligence history.
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