A former CIA official has been sentenced to 40 years in prison for leaking confidential files to Wikileaks, the organization founded by Julian Assange. Joshua Schulte, 35, was convicted of the crime “Biggest data leak in CIA history” the US Department of Justice said.
Schulte shared some 8,761 CIA documents with Wikileaks in 2017. The former official has already been convicted on various charges in three separate federal trials held in 2020, 2022, and 2023. On that occasion, he was convicted of espionage, computer hacking, and contempt of court. He was also charged with possession of child pornography.
“Joshua Schulte betrayed his country by committing some of the most audacious and egregious espionage crimes in American history,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement. “In his pursuit of revenge against the CIA for its handling of Schulte’s security breach during his employment, he has inflicted immeasurable damage on our national security.”
Schulte, behind bars since 2018, worked as a computer engineer at the CIA’s Cyber Intelligence Center. He created a tool called Vault 7, made possible by the CIA to hack smartphones and use them as listening devices.
Prosecutors said the former official leaked the information in question to WikiLeaks in 2016. The organization publicly shared the data in 2017 to denounce the spying program based on the Vault 7 system. ways, one of which provided parts of the file to WikiLeaks,” the organization explained at the time of declaration.
The WikiLeaks leak began with a labor dispute at the CIA
All the chaos was the result of a work problem. Schulte, who worked at the CIA from 2012 to 2016, leaked the documents to WikiLeaks because he was angry with his colleagues, prosecutors said. The former official struggled with deadlines on some assignments and fell so far behind that he was nicknamed the “deadline drifter,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Lockard said.
A dispute with co-workers forced him to transfer to another office. But the last straw was when the CIA wanted to pay a contractor to develop a tool similar to the one he created.
From his home computer in April 2016, Schulte transferred the stolen files to WikiLeaks, using tools that the organization recommends to its resources, such as the Tails operating system and the Tor browser. He then tried to clean up all traces by formatting his computer’s internal hard drives, the Justice Department said in a statement communicated.
Schulte did not remain calm. After being detained by authorities in 2018, he tried to leak more information. The former agent managed to smuggle the phone into the prison. In this way, he sent the journalist more data about the CIA’s cyber groups and wanted to send more information to WikiLeaks.
Now condemned, he even, created social media under the fake name Jason Bourne to continue sharing information. In 2018, Schulte claimed to be “waging an information war” against the US government. Later, during a search of his apartment, authorities found “tens of thousands of images of child sexual abuse material,” prosecutors said.