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.
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A former CIA programmer was sentenced to 40 years in prison on Thursday for leaking the US spy agency's most valuable hacking tools to WikiLeaks:
Joshua Schulte, 35, was found guilty in 2022 of espionage and other charges in what the CIA called a "digital Pearl Harbor" -- the largest data breach in the history of the intelligence agency.
[...] US District Judge Jesse Furman sentenced Schulte to 40 years in prison for espionage, computer hacking, contempt of court, making false statements to the FBI and child pornography.
Schulte worked for the CIA's elite hacking unit from 2012 to 2016 when he quietly took cyber tools used to break into computer and technology systems, according to court documents.
After quitting his job, he sent them to WikiLeaks, which began publishing the classified data in March 2017.
[...] The leaked data included a collection of malware, viruses, trojans, and "zero day" exploits that, once leaked out, were available for use by foreign intelligence groups, hackers and cyber extortionists around the world, they said.
Previously:
- Ex-CIA Employee Convicted of Leaking 'Vault 7' Secrets to Wikileaks
- Former CIA Software Engineer Joshua Schulte Convicted of Minor Charges, Not Espionage
- Ex-CIA Employee Charged In Leak Of Classified Hacking Tools
- Suspect Identified in C.I.A. Leak was Charged, but Not for the Breach
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 20 2018, @05:42AM (13 children)
So ... seeing how it all turned out, how likely is it that the initial child porn accusations were completely manufactured? Keep that in mind, anytime you see it happening again.
The US is not governed by the rule of law anymore. It is governed by the rule of might, and the law is just a fig leaf to hide it from the gullibles. So do not anger the mighty, or they will ruin your life, if only to strike fear into the hearts of other opponents (not enemies!).
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 20 2018, @06:27AM (6 children)
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 20 2018, @07:12AM (4 children)
I wish to possess slaves and plutonium.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 20 2018, @07:43AM
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)
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
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
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
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 20 2018, @06:49AM
Gee, you just noticed? Laws are merely an apparatus of the state, selectively enforced to ensure compliance. I keep trying to explain that laws are like tools, you control the tools, not the other way around.
Now throw in some PR and everyone and their dogs will cheer for it, those opposing it will be mocked as uneducated or unpatriotic.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday June 20 2018, @08:08AM
The tl;dr point: "how likely is it that the initial child porn and the subsequent leaking accusations were completely manufactured?".
With the consequence of:
Don't have dealings with the mighty.
But if you do, don't be shy to anger it, only be vary careful to plausibly frame someone else.
Because you have no warranty that, without plausibly misdirecting them, you won't be the one to be framed by the mighty.
If they need a scape goat, it may end very well in you being the "chosen one". Or, for the current context, Joshua Adam Schulte.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 20 2018, @03:29PM (2 children)
Not likely. The guy was talking about it on irc in 2009 and then googled for it in 2010 in 2012.
He's also got an assault charge in for raping someone who is unconscious and taking pictures of the act in 2015.
So it isn't like this stuff is out of the blue.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 20 2018, @08:40PM (1 child)
Turning it around then, this is the kind of person the government hires for sensitive positions after an exhaustive background check? Similarly with the armed FBI agent who ends up shooting somebody in a club after doing a backflip while drinking.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 20 2018, @11:14PM
As someone who has had a TS-SCI clearance I can tell you that its an imperfect process. They interview friends, neighbors, co-workers, etc. But if you don't have a criminal record at the time its easy for stuff to slip through. They do check your social media, but its not the same as a criminal investigation that would take warrants to track down things like google search histories. Also the assault charge seems to have been filed after they searched his laptop and found the photos of him raping.
(Score: 1) by exaeta on Thursday June 21 2018, @06:47PM
Of course they made it up. Digital evidence is completely fungible. It can't be trusted, ever.
The Government is a Bird