Tag: vault 7

A federal judge sentenced former CIA programmer Joshua Schulte to 40 years in prison on Thursday afternoon on espionage charges for the largest leak in agency history, in addition to child pornography convictions.

Comparing the WikiLeaks “Vault 7” leak of top secret Central Intelligence Agency cyber-espionage tools to a “digital Pearl Harbor,” U.S District Judge Jesse Furman said Thursday he was “blown away by Mr. Schulte’s complete lack of remorse and acceptance of responsibility.”

“The impact on our nation’s intelligence operations was enormous and we will likely never know the extent of the damage caused, but no doubt it was massive and real,” Furman said before imposing the 480-month sentence.

“It did have, as substantiated by the deputy director’s unclassified letter and even more substantiated by a confidential letter, an immediate and catastrophic effect on the CIA, and caused untold damage to national security,” the Obama-appointed judge said at the conclusion of the two-hour sentencing hearing.

Furman sentenced Schulte to 400 months imprisonment on the espionage counts and separately to 80 months for child pornography counts.

Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York asked for the judge to impose a sentence of life prison for Schulte’s convictions of what they called “some of the most heinous, brazen violations of the Espionage Act in American history.”

“Schulte’s theft of an arsenal of extremely sensitive intelligence-gathering cyber-tools from the Central Intelligence Agency and subsequent dissemination of that information to WikiLeaks — which in turn publicized it to America’s adversaries — is ‘one of the largest unauthorized disclosures of classified information in the history of the United States’,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing letter.

Schulte, who has been detained at federal jails in Manhattan and Brooklyn for over six and a half years, requested nine years’ imprisonment followed by five years’ supervised release.

Federal prosecutors argued an additional terrorism enhancement on his sentence was warranted because Schulte’s theft of the arsenal of extremely sensitive, intelligence-gathering cyber-tools from the Central Intelligence Agency — and subsequent dissemination of that information to WikiLeaks — was intended to satisfy a personal vendetta and “clearly calculated to retaliate against the United States as a whole.”

The 35-year-old asked for a sentence of time served, citing the “immoral human rights abuses” he says he endured during his pretrial detention at the Metropolitan Detention Center, a federal jail in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.

In his lengthy 28-minute sentencing statement, Schulte decried the conditions of his “torture cage” at the Bureau of Prison facility, calling it “New York City’s very own Auschwitz,” and “something only the SS could come up with.”

Judge Furman during sentencing called Schulte’s comparison to Nazi concentration camps “offensive”.

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A former CIA software engineer accused of the largest leak of classified data in agency history was convicted on all charges.

Joshua Schulte, 33, was convicted Wednesday of leaking classified CIA information to WikiLeaks in 2017. He was found guilty in federal court on eight espionage charges and one obstruction charge over the so-called Vault 7 leak.

Schulte, who chose to defend himself at the New York City retrial, told jurors in his closing arguments that the CIA and FBI made him a scapegoat for the embarrassing public release the trove of secrets.

The leaked materials concerned software tools the Central Intelligence Agency used to surveil people outside the U.S., through such means as compromising smartphones and internet-connected TVs.

The U.S. Department of Justice said Schulte was motivated to leak the materials out of spite because he was unhappy with how management treated him.

Prior to his arrest, Schulte had helped create the hacking tools as a coder at the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. 

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