Joshua Schulte, a former CIA official has been sentenced to 40 years in prison for the largest data leak in the agency’s history, US media reported on Thursday.
US Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement:
Joshua Schulte betrayed his country by committing some of the most brazen, heinous crimes of espionage in American history. He caused untold damage to our national security in his quest for revenge against the CIA for its response to Schulte’s security breaches while employed there.
Schulte, who worked as a computer engineer at the CIA’s Cyber Intelligence Centre, was accused of passing classified data to WikiLeaks. Schulte was convicted in 2022 on federal charges after leaks revealed how the CIA hacked Apple and Android smartphones in overseas spying operations and tried to turn Internet-connected televisions into eavesdropping devices, The Associated Press reported.
A former CIA official, who represented himself in court, said the hacking could have been done by anyone. Throughout the trial, prosecutors argued that Schulte was motivated to orchestrate the leak because he believed the agency had disrespected him by ignoring his complaints about the work environment.
Schulte’s problems at the CIA began in the summer of 2015 when he started feuding with management and a colleague, eventually filing a restraining order against him in state court, court documents show.
Investigators say Schulte became enraged when CIA employees wanted to hire a contractor to build a cyber tool similar to one he was creating.
After a “staff disagreement” between Schulte and another developer in March 2016, he was transferred to another branch of the centre, where he abused his admin rights to give himself access to a project he should no longer have had access to.
He stole the files, committing the largest data leak in CIA history, and transferred them to WikiLeaks using his personal computer, the DOJ alleges. Once WikiLeaks published the classified information, it “profoundly damaged the CIA’s ability to gather foreign intelligence against America’s adversaries; put CIA personnel, programmes, and assets at direct risk; and cost the CIA hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Schulte, who also allegedly lied to CIA and FBI investigators to cover his tracks, was arrested in August 2017 on child pornography charges. A few months later, he was indicted on charges related to the data leak. Damian Williams’s statement said:
When the FBI caught him, Schulte doubled down and tried to cause even more harm to this nation by waging what he described as an “information war” of publishing top secret information from behind bars. All the while, Schulte collected thousands upon thousands of videos and images of children being subjected to sickening abuse for his own personal gratification.
