Schulte has consistently denied that he was
the source of the information.
Two years ago, he was convicted on two of the
original 11 charges, while the jury hung on the
remaining nine.
The most recent trial, in which Schulte
represented himself, was on those nine counts,
and he now faces as many as 80 years in prison.
Schulte is yet to be tried on state child
pornography charges.
Prosecutors had literally no evidence that
Schulte had taken the data from the CIA and
transferred it to WikiLeaks.
But they contended that he was a computer
genius who is so brilliant that he was able to
cover his tracks.
They alleged that he leaked the information
because he was a disgruntled former CIA employee
who hated his boss, couldn’t get along with his
coworkers, and sought revenge against the
Agency.
That was enough for the jury.
CIA Deputy Director for Digital Innovation
Sean Roche called the Vault 7 leak “a
digital Pearl Harbor.”
Chief prosecutor Damian
Williams said the revelations were “one of the
most brazen and damaging acts of espionage in
American history.” And Vice magazine said it was
“the worst leak of CIA information ever.”
The
CIA leadership apparently thought the leak was
so damaging that then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo
ordered the Agency to come up with a plan to
kidnap or to kill Julian Assange in London.
One former Trump Administration national
security official said that Pompeo and other
senior CIA leaders, “were completely detached
from reality because they were so embarrassed
about Vault 7. They were seeing blood.”
All of
the major media outlets reported on the
finalization of Schulte’s case. What they
haven’t reported on, though, is exactly what
Schulte was accused of leaking in the first
place.
What did we learn from Vault 7?
Vault 7 was a series of
24 collections of documents totaling
hundreds of thousands of pages that included the
most sophisticated computer hacking,
surveillance, and cyberwarfare tools that the
CIA ever developed.
WikiLeaks published the first tranche, called
“Year Zero,” on March 7, 2017.
Just this first installment contained more
information than all of that released by Edward
Snowden and included vulnerabilities known to
the CIA within web browsers, including Google
Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and
Opera and the operating systems of most of the
world’s cellphones, including Apple’s iOS and
Google’s Android.
The fact that the CIA knew about these
vulnerabilities and didn’t inform the companies
was a violation of a
longstanding policy that the Agency claims
to have that it would assist U.S. tech companies
with their security if it learned of security
weaknesses.
Instead, it exploited those problems in its
digital operations. We have no idea if the
Agency used these vulnerabilities to spy on
Americans. Ashley Gorski, an American Civil
Liberties Union staff attorney
said at the time, “Our government should be
working to help the companies patch
vulnerabilities when they are discovered, not
stockpile them.”
A second Vault 7 revelation came on March 23,
2017 and included accounts of CIA efforts to
hack Apple’s iPhones and Mac computers.
Additional tranches were released every week
or two until September 2017.
Their revelations included proof that the CIA
was able to hack into cars’ computer systems and
could take over control of the vehicle.
Was the purpose of this to force the vehicle
off the road? Off a cliff? Into a tree? The CIA
never commented.
Still other documents showed how CIA officers
could take over an unsuspecting person’s smart
TV and turn its speaker into a microphone to
surreptitiously bug a room, even while the
television appears to be turned off.
Yet other documents showed that the CIA was
running digital operations against the National
Security Agency (NSA). It is unclear whether
this was done as an exercise between the two
agencies or if it was something more sinister.
Other revelations were that the CIA had
created a program to track documents transferred
by would-be whistleblowers to media outlets (the
program is called “Scribblers”), malware that
can take over and control computers using the
Microsoft Windows 10 operating system (called
“Athena”), and malware that can be transferred
from one “clean” computer to another through
internal systems that are otherwise protected by
anti-virus software (called “Pandemic”).
Schulte’s revelations were not limited to
software. He also revealed a program called “HammerDrill,”
that injects a trojan horse onto CDs and DVDs
and then documents information on the discs for
later transmission to the CIA.
An operation called “Dark Matter” revealed
security vulnerabilities unique to Apple
operating systems. And Schulte revealed that the
CIA had compromised vulnerabilities in a huge
range of Cisco Systems router models. Apple and
Cisco spent untold millions of dollars to
redesign their products and correct the security
flaws.
Despite the fact that this was supposedly the
worst data breach in the history of the CIA,
Schulte and his revelations did not get much
press play.
There are several likely reasons for this.
First, Schulte claimed innocence. He insisted
that he was not a whistleblower and he has
maintained throughout his ordeal that he did not
provide WikiLeaks with anything.
Second, the state of New York, simultaneously
with the federal charges, charged Schulte with
multiple counts of child pornography, which has
given many of Schulte’s natural supporters
pause.
Prosecutors maintained that they only
discovered the pornography when they seized the
computer hard drives in Schulte’s apartment
while looking for Vault 7 information. Schulte’s
defense to the child pornography charges will be
that he considers himself to be a libertarian
anarchist and that he set up a server to allow
people unfettered “free speech,” something akin
to the 4chan and 8chan servers.
He maintains that he has not “received” or
“disseminated” any child pornography personally.
However, when child pornographers saw that
Schulte’s server supported “unfettered free
speech,” they used it to trade illegal images
and videos. Schulte is adamant that none of the
pornography was his. His protestations likely
won’t matter.
I’m of two minds on Joshua Schulte. On the
one hand, the American people have a right to
know what the government is doing in their name,
especially if what the government is doing is
illegal. On the other hand, Schulte is adamant
that he is not the person who provided WikiLeaks
with the information. Does that mean we walk
away from Schulte and celebrate an anonymous
whistleblower?
Either way, one of the things that I feel
strongly about is the treatment that Schulte has
endured.
He has been held in barbaric conditions over
the past two years, kept in a literal cage in
solitary confinement at the Metropolitan
Correctional Center (MCC) in Brooklyn, New York.
Now that he has been convicted, he’ll likely
be placed in a Special Administrative Unit or a
Communications Management Unit in a
maximum-security or Supermax penitentiary.
The government will seek to cut him off from
the rest of the world for as long as possible.
That alone should be worth our interest and
disgust.
In December 2007, John was the
first U.S. government official to confirm that
waterboarding was used to interrogate al-Qaeda
prisoners, a practice he described as torture.
John Kiriakou was a former senior investigator
for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a
former counter-terrorism consultant. While
employed with the CIA, he was involved in
critical counter-terrorism missions following
the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, but
refused to be trained in so-called “enhanced
interrogation techniques,” nor did he ever
authorize or engage in such crimes.
After leaving the CIA, Kiriakou appeared on ABC
News in an interview with Brian Ross, during
which he became the first former CIA officer to
confirm the existence of the CIA’s torture
program. Kiriakou’s interview revealed that this
practice was not just the result of a few rogue
agents, but was official U.S. policy approved at
the highest levels of the government.
Kiriakou is the sole CIA agent to go to jail
in connection with the U.S. torture program,
despite the fact that he never tortured anyone.
Rather, he blew the whistle on this horrific
wrongdoing.
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reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House. in this article are
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