- wording
- BBC News World
15 July 2022, 01:09 GMT
image source, AFP
A New York court found one of its former agents, hacker Joshua Shulte, guilty of one of the CIA’s biggest leaks.
The leak of 8,761 documents to the Wikileaks platform in 2017 revealed how US intelligence agents hacked smartphones abroad and turned them into listening devices.
“Schulte was convicted of one of the most brazen and damaging acts of espionage in US history“said prosecutor Damian Williams.
During the trial, the defendant negfrom the accusations.
But who is Joshua Schulte?
Computer engineer
He was born on September 25, 1988 in Lubbock, a small city of 250,000 inhabitants in Texas, halfway between Dallas and Albuquerque.
He grew up with his parents and his three brothers -he is the oldest-, and in 2007 he moved to Austin, where he studied computer engineering at the University of Texas.
image source, Linkedin
Joshua Schulte was born in Texas, United States.
Between 2008 and 2009 he interned at IBM, the following year he briefly spent time with the US National Security Agency and in May (2010), At just 21 years old, he started working for the CIAaccording to his Linkedin profile.
According to one of his high school classmates, most of those who knew him in Lubbock mightn’t believe he was employed by the intelligence service.
“Not that he wasn’t smart, but he wasn’t someone who stood out as a super brain or anything,” wrote Chrissy Covington, who now hosts a rock show on local radio.
malware writer
Schulte worked on the ninth floor of an office building that looked like any other in Langley, Virginia, regarding 15 miles northwest of the White House in Washington, DC.
He was employed in a dependency called Operations Support Branch (in Spanish, operations support branch), the secret unit where the CIA has its hackers.
From that office, he created malware (software designed to do harm) that was then inserted into the devices of those whom the CIA wanted to spy on. Computers, iPhones and Android phones and even smart TVs were used to listen in on his enemies.
There, everyone had their nickname. Schulte liked to be called Bad Ass (genius, champion), although in general they used to call him Voldemort, in reference to the bald villain of the “Harry Potter” saga, according to a report published in The New Yorker at the beginning of June.
For his good performance, Schulte earned the access as system administrator of the CIA development networkknown as Devlan.
But the bad relationship with one of his colleagues -and the indifference he felt from his superiors towards it- made him decide to resign in November 2016; he moved to New York and started working at the news agency Bloomberg as a software engineer.
Until at the beginning of 2018 he was imprisoned and his trial began.
Schulte was found guilty of sending the CIA’s Vault 7 (“Vault 7”) cyber warfare tools to Wikileaks.
The hacker, who represented himself at trial in Manhattan federal court, now faces decades in prison.
Prosecutors alleged that in 2016 he passed on the stolen information to Wikileaks and then lied to FBI agents regarding his role in the leak.
They added that he was apparently motivated by anger over a workplace dispute in which his employer ignored his complaints.
Prosecutors had also urged jurors to consider evidence of an attempted cover-up, including a to-do list Schulte did that contained an entry that read, “Delete suspicious emails.”
But Schulte said the government had no evidence he was motivated by revenge, calling the argument “sheer fantasy.”
In his closing argument, he claimed that “hundreds of people had access” to the leaked files and that “hundreds of people might have stolen them.”
Schulte also faces a separate trial on charges of possession of child abuse images and videos, to which he has pleaded not guilty.
Remember that you can receive notifications from BBC World. Download the new version of our app and activate it so you don’t miss out on our best content.
