This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Should've done what Snowden did. If you know what you're going to do, will lead to these consequences? Get the hell out of the country.
Because this is EXACTLY the kind of thing the American Government would've done to Snowden if he stayed. Snowden was right that he knew they wouldn't give him a fair trial.
Eh, even if he did get a fair trial, what he did was clearly illegal and was definitely going to land him in prison. It was the right thing to do, but unless you have full faith that you're going to get a presidential pardon, you're right that you should be prepared to leave the country and never come back.
Whistleblower laws need strengthening. Snowden's leaks, for example, were clearly in the public interest and needed to be leaked. It's an unjust country that can't see that and spare him.
When you're going against the permanent state, there's no such thing as a fair trial.
If you know what you're going to do, will lead to these consequences? Get the hell out of the country.
Pfft, I say this about every article about someone getting arrested for committing a major crime.
"Oh no I've murdered someone, let me just hide the body reallllly good and call it a day" LMAO
Whether or not you think he should be jailed for leaking CIA secrets, the dude had child porn. He deserved a serious sentence because he expressed zero remorse for that. Along those lines he couldn’t even fucking pretend to have leaked the state secrets for any other reason than the CIA was a shitty place to work. You gotta play the fucking game if you’re gonna fuck with the government. You can’t just be a crusty old coder.
"Furman said Schulte continued his crimes from behind bars ... by creating a hidden file on his computer that contained 2,400 images of child sexual abuse that he continued to view from jail."
How do you get 2.4k images on a jail computer? Manifest it out of thin air?
Considering CIA is involved, which is known for torture, human experimentation, poisonings, planted evidence, etc. I'd not be too surprised if that file was straight up planted as an extra "fuck you" to the guy.
That was never part of his defense. Do you think the CIA colluded with him and his lawyer to accept responsibility for the material the CIA planted to sandbag his sentence? I feel like an innocent person would be screaming that. Hell, even possibly innocent/possibly guilty folks do.
Edit: here’s a quote about the material you’re defending:
Schulte called the child pornography he was accused of possessing a "victimless crime"
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/13/the-surreal-case-of-a-cia-hackers-revenge
The sentence previous to the one you're quoting, the one you've omitted, changes the context quite a lot.
When he heard that the government was pushing to keep him detained pending trial, his stomach dropped. “The crime I am charged with is in fact a non-violent, victimless crime,”
In the US a person pending trial can be either released or kept detained. (18 U.S. Code § 3142 - Release or detention of a defendant pending trial) In cases when the defendant is being charged with non-violent crimes, it's fairly common for them to be released until their trial. Possibly on bond.
The wording of his statement is... questionable. But in this context, it could be re-worded to something like "you're are accusing me of possession of illegal material, which is not a violent crime. I was not involved in creation of said material, therefore there are no victims of mine".
Anyway, even if he did have the material in question, the fact that they report finding some on a jail computer is awful weird. Those aren't, exactly, known for having unrestricted and unmonitored access to the internet. I, also, would be surprised if those computers are less locked down than school or library computers, which tend to restrict users' permissions to the bare minimum, often as far as prohibiting creation of files.
CIA: "yeah let's put this 2.4k images of child porn at his computer and he will be fucked muahahahaha 😈😈"
Seems like something the CIA definitely would do.
Specially if someone leak their "precious secrets"
CIA can cobble together questionable evidence against an entire country, proving the US administration with more reasons to start a "preventive war". A war which would eventually end with "whoopsie-daisy, there are no WMDs after all".
Yet, planting evidence on a single guy who just leaked a whole bunch of their secrets? No, of course they'd never do anything questionable or immoral to him!
I think one of the things that inflate image counts like that is that if there is a video of child porn, each individual frame of the video is counted as a single image. If he downloaded a 40 second, 60 FPS video, that's 2.4k images right there.
This is why it's more interesting when they mention total size in gigabytes of whatever, because image data has a maximum compression size but "raw number of images" is completely made up and could be a single file even when in the tens ouf thousands (still bad of course but you get my point)
Holy shit, they really buried the lede with that headline. For sure, throw away the key.
I don't know about you guys, but I don't really trust the word of the CIA on those things. Or anything, really.
What happened to the guy who staged a coup to overthrow the government? Remember where all those psychos with guns wailed on cops with flagpoles and shit on the walls and stuff, and that lady planted bombs by the RNC office? Remember that? What happened to that guy?
Oh nothing?
Oh.
Huh.
I wouldn’t say nothing, as he might become the next US president
(if the world is unlucky)
I wonder how many of the gaping security holes in softwares and systems he reported have since been patched that otherwise would have left to doors wide open for hackers?
As long as governments hoard security vulnerabilities, they are endangering security, safety, life and property of millions of people.
NSA accidentally leaking eternal blue lol
They take the man's entire life away because he revealed us terrible things our non-elected leaders are doing to us. Who was hurt by his actions?
They take the man’s entire life away because he revealed us terrible things our non-elected leaders are doing to us.
And for possessing child porn...
Furman said Schulte continued his crimes from behind bars by trying to leak more classified materials and by creating a hidden file on his computer that contained 2,400 images of child sexual abuse that he continued to view from jail.
Holy crap, dude was even watching child porn in prison. Clearly the CIA is hiring the cream of the crop.
It wouldn't be far fetched that they put that themselves.
Except the part where he was quoted saying that it was a victimless crime. Ick
Yeah, it's fairly insane. You'd think he would have denied it, got everyone in an uproar, maybe made a bid for appeal.
NOPE
Giving away methods for hacking/spying ensures your country is at a disadvantage.
Disclosing found exploits allows developers to patch them out and improve security of everyone, which includes all the other alphabet boys and regular citizens.
There's no way to know that you're the only one who found any given exploit. Letting an exploit stay unpatched opens up an attack vector for everyone, not just you.
It also enables innocent people to be protected from foreign governments.
Everyone acting like the CIA couldn't have had leverage over that guy and made him admit to the cp charge . Unless i have some kind of proof i ain't believing shit . And also if that is true indeed i think 40 years is fair enough for that charge alone . Or am i missing something ?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The bulk of the sentence imposed on Joshua Schulte, 35, in Manhattan federal court came for an embarrassing public release of a trove of CIA secrets by WikiLeaks in 2017.
The so-called Vault 7 leak revealed how the CIA hacked Apple and Android smartphones in overseas spying operations, and efforts to turn internet-connected televisions into listening devices.
In requesting a life sentence, Assistant U.S. Attorney David William Denton Jr. said Schulte was responsible for “the most damaging disclosures of classified information in American history.”
The judge said Schulte was “not driven by any sense of altruism,” but instead was “motivated by anger, spite and perceived grievance” against others at the agency who he believed had ignored his complaints about the work environment.
A mistrial was declared at Schulte’s original 2020 trial after jurors deadlocked on the most serious counts, including illegal gathering and transmission of national defense information.
In a statement afterward, U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said Schulte “betrayed his country by committing some of the most brazen, heinous crimes of espionage in American history.”
The original article contains 694 words, the summary contains 175 words. Saved 75%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
So, was he really just angry? Or is that a convenient lie?
We haven't heard his side. So definitely a lie
