Thousands of pages of confidential US documents surfaced on WikiLeaks in 2017. They concerned hacker programs for espionage. They were passed on by a former CIA employee. He is now serving a long prison sentence.
A former employee of the US secret service CIA is to spend several decades behind bars for passing on secret documents to the WikiLeaks revelation platform. According to the US authorities, 35-year-old Joshua Schulte is responsible for the biggest theft of secret data in the history of the CIA. The CIA even spoke of a "digital Pearl Harbor" in reference to the major Japanese attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor during the Second World War.
The documents revealed that the CIA had set up its own programming team to spy on suspects through vulnerabilities in smartphones, computers and televisions, among other things. Hackers also gained worldwide access to these tools. Schulte is said to have acted out of anger at former colleagues.
The theft and publication of the programs "immediately and severely damaged" the CIA's ability to gather intelligence on US adversaries, the prosecution said. CIA employees and programs had been exposed to risk, and the data leak had cost the secret service "hundreds of millions of dollars".
During a large-scale manhunt, investigators came across the man who had worked as a software engineer at the CIA developing espionage programs until 2016, according to the Ministry of Justice. He was charged in 2018 with, among other things, illegally obtaining and unlawfully disclosing national defense information. He was found guilty in 2022, and last year he was also convicted of possession of child pornography. The sentence has now been announced.
