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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday June 20 2018, @05:04AM   Printer-friendly
from the hacking-for-freedom-fries dept.

Ex-CIA Employee Charged In Leak Of Classified Hacking Tools

A former CIA employee was charged Monday with leaking information on CIA hacking tools to Wikileaks.

Joshua Adam Schulte, 29, was charged with the theft of classified national defense information in a 13-count indictment handed down by a grand jury, the Justice Department said Monday. According to the indictment, Schulte stole the classified information from a CIA network in 2016 and then transmitted it to an organization that was unidentified in the indictment.

Schulte is also accused of intentionally damaging a CIA computer system, deleting records of his activities and blocking others from accessing the system. Schulte is currently in custody on child pornography charges. He's pleaded not guilty to those charges.

The leaks, which Wikileaks called "Vault 7," revealed tools used by the CIA to hack phones, TVs and computers as part of its investigations. The disclosures showed the lengths to which government investigators go to access electronic evidence, tailoring hacks for specific smart TVs, for example.

[...] "Schulte utterly betrayed this nation and downright violated his victims. As an employee of the CIA, Schulte took an oath to protect this country, but he blatantly endangered it by the transmission of classified Information," William F. Sweeney Jr., head of the New York FBI office, said in a statement Monday.

Man who allegedly gave Vault 7 cache to WikiLeaks busted by poor opsec

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

FBI used passwords used on suspect's cellphone to also get into his computer.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/ex-cia-engineer-indicted-on-several-new-charges-connected-to-vault-7-leak/


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 20 2018, @06:27AM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 20 2018, @06:27AM (#695471)

    This is why making it illegal to merely possess something (child porn, drugs, etc.) is so dangerous; it is all too easy to plant the thing that is illegal. Police do that all too often with drugs, and it's even easier with child porn, which is just data.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 20 2018, @07:12AM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 20 2018, @07:12AM (#695493)

    I wish to possess slaves and plutonium.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 20 2018, @07:43AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 20 2018, @07:43AM (#695503)

      That's totally fine with me ... provided that:

      1. You handle the plutonium safely (fire-protected storage, radiation shielded, keep away from kids, do not pollute the air or groundwater with dust, adequate protection against theft). Since these things tend to be handled loosely even by professionals, expect frequent controls. Your facilities will have to be certified beforehand. No, you do not get to decide upon the safety criteria, these have already been established and are the same for everyone. You cannot pay for the required security level, including roind-the-clock armed guards and hardened facilities? Tough luck.

      2. Any slave of yours is free to cease being a slave at any time, at which point you may not possess them anymore. The decision to possess a slave is yours, the decision to *be* a slave is theirs! You want a slave against their will? Well, in that case I want *you* as slave against *your* will, and my gun is bigger than yours :-P

    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 20 2018, @08:00AM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 20 2018, @08:00AM (#695509)

      the argument against random people playing with plutonium is different from the argument against drug/child porn possession.
      with the latter, they say "well the producers of these objects are bad people, and they do bad things, so by owning their output, you are supporting them".
      with plutonium, I would say "you have something small but very dangerous, that can get a lot of people horribly sick, and I don't trust any one person with that object".
      it's true that you can plant plutonium if you want to.

      as for slaves, you are being a bad person by owning slaves (because you are denying them their freedom).
      but a law against owning slaves is not easily circumvented by planting evidence, since the availability of slaves for planting requires a whole different level of resources than drugs/kiddie porn or ... basically any other forbidden object that doesn't require sustenance and doesn't think for itself.

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by sgleysti on Wednesday June 20 2018, @02:58PM

        by sgleysti (56) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday June 20 2018, @02:58PM (#695604)

        or ... basically any other forbidden object that doesn't require sustenance and doesn't think for itself

        With the possible exceptions of bacterial biological warfare agents and insects, if there are forbidden insects.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 21 2018, @06:50PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 21 2018, @06:50PM (#696352)

        So could we say the real reason drug and child porn laws have stuck around is to plant evidence and frame people?

        That makes a lot of sense actually, given that there isn't really a logical justification to these laws.

  • (Score: 2) by edIII on Wednesday June 20 2018, @07:41PM

    by edIII (791) on Wednesday June 20 2018, @07:41PM (#695726)

    It's worse. A "computer" is just an object. Pass it around to a bunch of people in an office, show it to the people on the street, and not one of them could differentiate between a file server, mail server, or workstation.

    Yet, a man paid for by the state says it contains the worst possible things we can imagine. I don't believe they show them to the jury, so in the end, it's not even data that convicts you. Just the trust were supposed to have with an IT worker that says it was on the machine, and perhaps one other person reviewing the content (maybe just the poor IT guy).

    In these cases it is fantastically easy for the state to manufacture data on your computer, and almost no oversight as to whether it was true or not.

    If we remember our history correctly, the Geek Squad is famous for looking for child porn and then being rewarded for finding it.

    --
    Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.