Joshua Schulte was charged. The court pleaded not guilty to all nine charges and found that the former Central Intelligence Agency engineer deliberately leaked the cache of intelligence tools he helped create and personally stole classified information and sent it to WikiLeaks. The result was the publication of thousands of documents in a huge archive called “Vault 7”. This happened again in 2017.

Case details

To understand how serious the information leak is, it’s worth noting that the first episode of Vault 7, dubbed Year Zero, contained 8,761 documents from an isolated high-security network located at the CIA’s Cyber ​​Intelligence Center in Langley, Virginia. The files spoke of an arsenal of CIA hacking tools – malware, viruses, trojans, armed zero-day vulnerabilities, remote malware control systems and related documentation. Year Zero contains exploits for products from US and European companies, including Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows, and even Samsung TVs that have turned into hidden microphones.

With that in mind, it’s not hard to understand why US special services were so eager to capture Julian Assange and his resources.

Today’s decision reaffirms that protecting our nation’s cybersecurity is of the utmost importance. This is critical to the security of the American people as well as to our superiority over enemies abroad. As the lawsuit states, unauthorized disclosure not only puts US personnel and operations at risk, but also gives our enemies tools and information to harm us.
CIA Spokesperson Tammy Thorpe told The Verge:

Joshua Schulte engaged in the direct creation of various exploits (a program that exploits a discovered vulnerability to attack a system) is designed to steal information from targets’ devices.

Investigators reportedly obtained evidence against Schulte for his own personal security breaches.