MANHATTAN (CN) — A federal judge sentenced former CIA programmer Joshua Schulte to 40 years in prison on Thursday afternoon on espionage charges for the largest leak in agency history, in addition to child pornography convictions.
Comparing the WikiLeaks “Vault 7” leak of top secret Central Intelligence Agency cyber-espionage tools to a “digital Pearl Harbor,” U.S District Judge Jesse Furman said Thursday he was “blown away by Mr. Schulte’s complete lack of remorse and acceptance of responsibility.”
“The impact on our nation’s intelligence operations was enormous and we will likely never know the extent of the damage caused, but no doubt it was massive and real,” Furman said before imposing the 480-month sentence.
“It did have, as substantiated by the deputy director’s unclassified letter and even more substantiated by a confidential letter, an immediate and catastrophic effect on the CIA, and caused untold damage to national security," the Obama-appointed judge said at the conclusion of the two-hour sentencing hearing.
Furman sentenced Schulte to 400 months imprisonment on the espionage counts and separately to 80 months for child pornography counts.
Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York asked for the judge to impose a sentence of life prison for Schulte’s convictions of what they called “some of the most heinous, brazen violations of the Espionage Act in American history.”
“Schulte’s theft of an arsenal of extremely sensitive intelligence-gathering cyber-tools from the Central Intelligence Agency and subsequent dissemination of that information to WikiLeaks — which in turn publicized it to America’s adversaries — is ‘one of the largest unauthorized disclosures of classified information in the history of the United States’,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing letter.
Schulte, who has been detained at federal jails in Manhattan and Brooklyn for over six and a half years, requested nine years' imprisonment followed by five years’ supervised release.
Federal prosecutors argued an additional terrorism enhancement on his sentence was warranted because Schulte’s theft of the arsenal of extremely sensitive, intelligence-gathering cyber-tools from the Central Intelligence Agency — and subsequent dissemination of that information to WikiLeaks — was intended to satisfy a personal vendetta and “clearly calculated to retaliate against the United States as a whole."
The 35-year-old asked for a sentence of time served, citing the “immoral human rights abuses” he says he endured during his pretrial detention at the Metropolitan Detention Center, a federal jail in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
In his lengthy 28-minute sentencing statement, Schulte decried the conditions of his "torture cage" at the Bureau of Prison facility, calling it “New York City’s very own Auschwitz," and "something only the SS could come up with."
Judge Furman during sentencing called Schulte’s comparison to Nazi concentration camps “offensive”.
His defense lawyer César de Castro argued in a sentencing letter that Schulte had been “subjected to unconscionably punitive conditions” for the last five years while being detained under “physically and psychologically torturous” special administrative measures. Those included being locked his small windowless cell for 23 hours a day; no ability to turn off the lights in his cell; being subjected to nonstop white noise so he couldn't hear anything outside his cell; and only being permitted one short call or video call with his family per week.
Schulte was just 28 years old when he was arrested in 2018, nearly six months after WikiLeaks published the largest-ever trove of confidential files on the CIA in the agency's history.
With more than 7,000 pages, millions of lines of embedded computer code and several hundred attachments, the document dump that WikiLeaks dubbed Vault 7 included details of how the agency uses malware to hack the iPhones, Android devices and Samsung smart televisions of private consumers.
Throughout the trove of agency materials, a variety of covert techniques, malware and programs used to collect audio and video streams live from their user's devices are given names worthy of a tawdry suspense novel. One such covert program exposed in the Vault 7 leak was Weeping Angel, which offers hackers a window into the private citizen's world by way of their Samsung smart televisions.
The espionage tools revealed how professionally groomed CIA hackers and other officials, including those of foreign governments, engaged in a training system and frequently exchanged information on how to bypass password protections, antivirus software and other forms of encryption methods with relative ease.
As a coder at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, Schulte himself had helped create the hacking tools exposed in the WikiLeaks publication, according to the government's case.
The government initially tried Schulte for the leak in 2020, but those monthlong proceedings came to an anticlimactic end after a week of deliberations: The jury deadlocked on the eight most serious counts, pertaining to the theft and transmission of secret CIA documents. Separate from contempt of court and lying to the FBI, two minor counts on which the jury found Schulte guilty in 2020, U.S. District Judge Paul Crotty declared a mistrial.
Schulte represented himself for his retrial. He was ultimately convicted on nine counts in July 2022 for stealing classified documents from the CIA and feeding national cyberintelligence to WikiLeaks.
At trial, prosecutors said Schulte used a backdoor password to access the CIA’s “most protected technical secrets” on offline servers in 2016, then attempted to cover his tracks by manipulating and deleting digital logs of activity on the sensitive CIA servers.
Schulte’s internet search history showed that for months after he transmitted the files to WikiLeaks, he repeatedly checked the Julian Assange-founded website — so obsessed was he, prosecutors said, to find out if his leaked cache of documents had been published.
They portrayed him as a maladjusted and discontented employee, rather than as a politically motivated whistleblower.
Federal agents also found a trove of child pornography inside Schulte’s digital lockbox while searching for evidence pointing to the Vault 7 leak.
At a separate trial on the child pornography trial, prosecutors said Schulte built a custom desktop computer while living in Virginia in 2016, which he used to download and collect more than 15,000 images of child pornography and child erotica that he stored in various encrypted locations on the computer.
When he relocated to New York City later that year, he transported his child pornography computer with him and continued to stockpile child pornography from the dark web and Russian websites.
At his sentencing hearing, prosecutors told the judge that the Schulte’s child pornography trove “speaks to a particular pathology of the defendant.”
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