A former CIA software engineer was convicted and sentenced to 40 years in prison for carrying out the largest data breach in CIA history, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Thursday. The Justice Department said in a statement that Joshua Adam Schulte "transmitted stolen information to WikiLeaks in one of the largest unauthorized disclosures of classified information in U.S. history."
The 35-year-old New Yorker was sentenced to 480 months in prison for espionage, computer hacking, contempt of court, making false statements to the FBI and child pornography.
Previously, he was tried and convicted in March 2020, July 2022 and September last year.
Prosecutors said in court documents that Schulte stole a copy of the entire CCI tool development archive, deleted hundreds of files in an attempt to cover his tracks, and then sent the stolen files to WikiLeaks.
In 2016, Schulte was found to have abused his management authority and was subsequently transferred from the Cyber Intelligence Center to another department. WikiLeaks began releasing classified data from stolen CIA files in 2017. Confidential data in the files, known as "Vault 7" and "Vault 8," was disclosed a total of 26 times.
After the leaks, Schulte repeatedly lied in interviews and denied any involvement in the leaks. Prosecutors said he also made up lies about what might have happened in an attempt to deflect suspicion. Schulte's thefts and leaks immediately and severely compromised the CIA's ability to collect foreign intelligence against U.S. adversaries, put CIA personnel, programs, and assets at direct risk, and cost the CIA hundreds of millions of dollars. The Justice Department added that "the disclosure of the information would pose an unusually serious risk to U.S. national security." The CIA's former deputy director for digital innovation described the leaks during Schulte's trial as a "digital Pearl Harbor."
The leaks were mostly innocuous, mostly manuals for old hacking tools, but were so large that some officials compared them to those of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.
Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement that Schulte "betrayed his country and committed the most shameless and heinous espionage crime in American history."
Williams said he "retaliated for the CIA's response to Schulte's security violations while employed by the CIA, causing untold damage to our national security. When the FBI caught him, Schulte redoubled his efforts to do even more harm to the country by launching an 'information war' by releasing top-secret information from prison, which he called an 'information war.' At the same time, Schulte collected thousands of videos and images of children being subjected to sickening abuse to satisfy his own selfish desires."