Former CIA hacker receives 40-year prison sentence

A former CIA employee received a 40-year prison sentence for passing on confidential hacking tools to Wikileaks.

Joshua Schulte was also declared guilty of having pictures of children being hurt.

The prosecutors said he gave out secret spy tools that let agents hack into smartphones and listen in on people.

They said the leak is one of the most “bold” in US history.

Schulte, who is 35 years old, gave Wikileaks about 8,761 documents in 2017. This was the biggest data breach in the history of the CIA, according to the US justice department.

He said he didn’t do it, but he was found guilty at three different trials in New York in 2020, 2022, and 2023.

On Thursday, he was punished for spying, hacking into computers, disobeying the court, lying to the FBI and having inappropriate pictures of children.

US Attorney Damian Williams said that Joshua Schulte betrayed the country by doing very bad spying crimes.

During the trial, it was shown that Schulte worked as a computer programmer for the Center for Cyber Intelligence. This center spies on terrorist groups and other countries using the internet.

In 2016, prosecutors said he gave the stolen information to Wikileaks and then lied to FBI agents about it.

They said he was angry because of a problem at work.

Schulte was having a hard time finishing his work on time. Assistant US Attorney Michael Lockard said one of his projects was behind schedule and people were calling him “Drifting Deadline”.

The lawyers said he wanted to harm those who he believed did something bad to him and in doing that, he caused a lot of harm to the country’s safety.

Wikileaks started sharing secret information from the files in 2017.

The information that was leaked caused a lot of harm to the CIA. It made it harder for them to spy on other countries and put their people and important work in danger. It also cost the CIA a lot of money.

The FBI talked to Schulte many times after WikiLeaks released the information, and he said he didn’t do it.

Prosecutors said they found a lot of inappropriate pictures of children in his apartment.

They also said that after he was arrested, Schulte tried to send more information. He brought a phone into jail and tried to send a reporter secret information about CIA cyber groups. He also wrote tweets about CIA cyber tools under the name Jason Bourne, a made-up spy character.

He has been in jail since 2018.