Joshua Schulte courtroom sketch.Photo:Elizabeth Williams via AP
Elizabeth Williams via AP
A former CIA software engineer has been sentenced to 40 years in prison for the largest data breach in the agency’s history.
Joshua Schulte, 35, was sentenced in a Manhattan federal court on Thursday, according to apress releasefrom the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
His crimes included espionage, computer hacking, contempt of court, making false statements to the FBI and child pornography.
Schulte leaked huge amounts of stolen information toWikiLeaksin what federal prosecutors called “one of the largest unauthorized disclosures of classified information in the history of the U.S.”
WikiLeaks began publishing the classified data from the stolen CIA files in March 2017, which Schulte transmitted from his home computer in 2016, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York states. Prosecutors said Schulte “wiped and reformatted his home computer’s internal hard drives” after the transmission.
Schulte has been jailed at the Metropolitan Correction Center in New York City.AP Photo/Osamu Honda
AP Photo/Osamu Honda
“We will likely never know the full extent of the damage, but I have no doubt it was massive,” Judge Jesse M. Furman said as he announced Schulte’s sentence, according to theAssociated Press.
Per the outlet, the leak revealed that the CIA hacked smartphones in overseas spying operations, along with their efforts to turn internet-connected televisions into listening devices.
Schulte’s sentencing came after convictions at trials that concluded in 2020, 2022, and 2023. He was convicted of possessing child pornography in the trial that ended last September.
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U.S. Attorney Williams said Schulte had “collected thousands upon thousands of videos and images of children being subjected to sickening abuse for his own personal gratification.”
The former CIA employee, who has been jailed since 2018, downloaded the images and videos from 2009 to March 2017, per AP. The media was found on a computer that Schulte owned after he left the CIA and moved to New York from Virginia.
During his sentencing on Thursday, Schulte said that the government was seeking “vengeance” against him, “not justice,” according to the outlet.
source: people.com
