Minor convictions for ex-CIA coder in hacking tools case

A former CIA software engineer accused of stealing a massive trove of the agency's hacking tools and handing it over to WikiLeaks was convicted of only minor charges Monday, after a jury deadlocked on the more serious espionage charges against him.

Joshua Schulte, who worked as a coder at the agency's headquarters in Langley, Virginia, was convicted by a federal jury of contempt of court and making false statements after a four-week trial in Manhattan federal court that offered an unusual window into the CIA's digital sleuthing and the team that designs computer code to spy on foreign adversaries.

After deliberating since last week, the jury was unable to reach a verdict on the more significant charges.

The verdict followed four days of deliberations, during which jurors reached impasse on several counts. One juror was dismissed last week after telling the panel she had come across news about the Schulte case before the trial.

Prosecutors portrayed Schulte as a disgruntled software engineer who exploited a little-known back door in a CIA network to copy the hacking arsenal without raising suspicion, in what was said to be the largest leak in CIA history involving classified information.

It was only after the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks published the so-called Vault 7 leak in 2017 nearly a year after the theft that the agency scrambled to determine how the information had been stolen. It identified Schulte, a 31-year-old originally from Lubbock, Texas, as the prime suspect.

Schulte had left the agency on stormy terms after falling out with colleagues and supervisors, and prosecutors described the leak as an act of revenge.

The data dump revealed CIA efforts to hack Apple and Android smartphones and even described efforts to turn internet-connected televisions into listening devices.

These leaks were devastating to national security, Assistant US Attorney Matthew Laroche told jurors.

The CIA's cyber tools were gone in an instant. Intelligence gathering operations around the world stopped immediately."
Hundreds of people had access to it, she said. Hundreds of people could have stolen it."