U.S. identifies suspect in major leak of CIA hacking tools

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: Washington Post

The U.S. government has identified a suspect in the leak last year of a large portion of the CIA’s computer hacking arsenal, the cyber-tools the agency had used to conduct espionage operations overseas, according to interviews and public documents.

But despite months of investigation, prosecutors have been unable to bring charges against the man, who is a former CIA employee being held in a Manhattan jail on unrelated charges.

Joshua Adam Schulte, who worked for a CIA group that designs computer code to spy on foreign adversaries, is believed to have provided the agency’s top-secret information to WikiLeaks, federal prosecutors acknowledged in a hearing in January. The anti-secrecy group published the code under the label “Vault 7” in March 2017. It was one of the most significant and potentially damaging leaks in the CIA’s history, exposing secret cyberweapons and spying techniques that might be used against the United States, according to current and former intelligence officials. Schulte’s connection to the leak investigation has not been previously reported.

Federal authorities searched Schulte’s apartment in New York last year and obtained personal computer equipment, notebooks and handwritten notes, according to a copy of the search warrant reviewed by The Washington Post. But that failed to provide the evidence that prosecutors needed to indict Schulte with illegally giving the information to WikiLeaks.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-identifies-suspect-in-major-leak-of-cia-hacking-tools/2018/05/15/5d5ef3f8-5865-11e8-8836-a4a123c359ab_story.html

[dalton99a]

1. The child porn stuff sounds serious:

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6359557/1/united-states-v-schulte/

[BumRushDaShow]

2. NYT mentions some of what happened in summary

Suspect Identified in Leak of C.I.A. Hacking Documents

By Scott Shane and Adam Goldman
May 15, 2018

<...>

But instead of charging Mr. Schulte in the breach, referred to as the Vault 7 leak, prosecutors charged him last August with possessing child pornography, saying agents had found the material on a server he created as a business in 2009 while he was a student at the University of Texas.

Court papers quote messages from Mr. Schulte that suggest he was aware of the encrypted images of children being molested by adults on his computer, though he advised one user, “Just don’t put anything too illegal on there.”

In September, Mr. Schulte was released on the condition that he not leave New York City, where he lived with a cousin, and keep off computers. He was jailed in December after prosecutors found evidence that he had violated those rules, and he has been held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan since then. He has posted on Facebook under a pseudonym a series of essays critical of the criminal justice system.

It is unclear why, more than a year after he was arrested, he has not been charged or cleared in connection with Vault 7. Leak investigators have had access to electronic audit trails inside the C.I.A. that may indicate who accessed the files that were stolen, and they have had possession of Mr. Schulte’s personal data for many months.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/15/us/cia-hacking-tools-leak.html

[Blue_Tires]

4. Somehow I don't think Greenwald or the ACLU will be sprinting to his defense...

Link to tweet

[BumRushDaShow]

5. Heh

[Fullduplexxx]

3. Planting of child porn is a common practice when framing someone

So who knows