Larry Downing/Reuters
A former CIA software engineer who committed the largest data breach in the agency’s history and shared the information with WikiLeaks was sentenced to 40 years in prison on Thursday after being convicted on charges of espionage and possessing child pornography, federal prosecutors announced.
The sentence imposed on Joshua Schulte, 35, was predominantly for the theft from the CIA, Judge Jesse M. Furman said. “We will likely never know the full extent of the damage, but I have no doubt it was massive,” Furman said.
Schulte, who has been in jail since 2018, had helped to make hacking tools at the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The so-called Vault 7 leak, which WikiLeaks started publishing in March 2017, disclosed how the CIA surveilled targets overseas by hacking smartphones and had attempted to turn smart TVs into listening devices.