Joshua Schulte, who called himself “Bad Ass,” and who was also called “Voldemort” by colleagues in the C.I.A.’s Operations Support Branch, was convicted by a federal court jury in New York of sending the CIA’s “Vault 7” cyber-warfare tools to WikiLeaks in 2017.
Larry Neumeister and Tom Hays of AP report:
A former CIA software engineer was convicted Wednesday of federal charges accusing him of the biggest theft of classified information in CIA history.
Joshua Schulte, who chose to defend himself at a New York City retrial, had told jurors in closing arguments that the CIA and FBI made him a scapegoat 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. Prior to his arrest, Schulte had helped create the hacking tools as a coder at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
Read more on HuffPost.
Related: Statement Of U.S. Attorney Damian Williams On The Espionage Conviction Of Ex-CIA Programmer Joshua Adam Schulte
July 13, 2022 – Joshua Adam Schulte was a CIA programmer with access to some of the country’s most valuable intelligence-gathering cyber tools used to battle terrorist organizations and other malign influences around the globe. When Schulte began to harbor resentment toward the CIA, he covertly collected those tools and provided them to WikiLeaks, making some of our most critical intelligence tools known to the public – and therefore, our adversaries. Moreover, Schulte was aware that the collateral damage of his retribution could pose an extraordinary threat to this nation if made public, rendering them essentially useless, having a devastating effect on our intelligence community by providing critical intelligence to those who wish to do us harm. Today, Schulte has been convicted for one of the most brazen and damaging acts of espionage in American history.
Related: Superseding Indictment (and press release of June 2018)