Boing Boing Staging

Joshua Schulte named as suspect in 'Vault 7' leak of CIA tools to Wikileaks, but charged instead over child porn

Xeni Jardin

Federal investigators believe a man who once worked for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency is responsible for last year’s massive leak of Top Secret CIA hacking tools, court documents reveal.

The suspect has been named as Joshua Adam Schulte, 29, who lived in New York, and is now in federal jail in Manhattan–not for the hack, but on child pornography charges.

The government has filed no charges against Schulte in connection with the CIA leak. It’s not clear why.

In court, Schulte’s lawyer Jacob Kaplan said the FBI suspects his client was behind the leak of some 8,000 CIA documents to WikiLeaks in March, 2017.

“The FBI believed that Mr. Schulte was involved in that leak,” said Kaplan, according to a transcript of a Jan. 8, 2018 hearing published by NBC News.

“As part of their investigation, they obtained numerous search warrants for Mr. Schulte’s phone, for his computers, and other items, in order to establish the connection between Mr. Schulte and the WikiLeaks leak.”

Shane Harris at the Washington Post, which where today’s news on this story broke:

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 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. Some argued that the Vault 7 disclosures could cause more damage to American intelligence efforts than those by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. He revealed extraordinary details about the capabilities of the United States to spy on computers and phones around the world, but the Vault 7 leaks showed how such spying is actually done, the current and former officials argued.

Schulte’s connection to the leak investigation has not been previously reported.

A man who identified himself to NBC News as Schulte’s brother Jason told a reporter that “what the government is doing to him is wrong. They are screwing him over.”

From Charlie Savage’s report at the NYT:

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.

And a series of observations on the case from Wired News reporter Kim Zetter:

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