
Trial of programmer accused in CIA leak ends in hung jury - jbegley
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/09/nyregion/cia-wikileaks-joshua-schulte-verdict.html
======
undreren
I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist, but it seems awfully convenient that a
guy that knows how to nuke his hard disk to protect himself from the CIA, only
nukes the the hard disk he downloaded the WikiLeaks transfer program on, and
then forgets to nuke the hard disk riddled with child porn.

~~~
meowface
Certainly seems odd, but it's not like the guy's dead or something. First, it
was stored in a VeraCrypt encrypted container; if he believed only he had the
keys, he may have thought it was safe. If he believes he was being framed for
child pornography, I imagine he would shout it from the rooftops. Or at least
try to shout it to the extent he could, to the point that there would probably
be at least a little coverage of the framing allegation. Second, they found
plenty of other things, too, (for example, the keys to various VeraCrypt
volumes on his phone), so he clearly wasn't a total pro at wiping data.

For the record, the original allegation [0]:

>investigators discovered a single classified document as well as over 10,000
images and videos depicting child pornography including "sadistic and
masochistic images and videos of children as young as a few years old who had
been brutally sexually assaulted." The government found that Schulte had
"neatly organized" this material "according to his preferences, and stored it
for a period of years."

More details here, including IRC chat logs:
[https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.480183...](https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.480183/gov.uscourts.nysd.480183.1.0.pdf)

I'd recommend reading the whole criminal complaint. They'd really have to
provide full, unedited chat logs in order to get a more holistic view, but
from what they provided, it does seem somewhat ambiguous. Based on the chat
logs and Google search results they found, it seems clear he did intentionally
seek out and download child pornography. However, from the conversation
snippets they posted, I could see the argument that it was a morbid curiosity
for him rather than out of pedophilic urges. None of those conversations look
anything like conversations between pedophiles or child porn distributors. One
would think they would stick the worst stuff in the complaint, and if those
are the worst logs they found, then it doesn't seem like a total open-and-shut
case. You could definitely interpret those logs as Schulte slyly probing for
where to find things, with some plausible deniability, so he could fulfill his
sexual desires, but you could also possibly interpret it as young guys (he was
around 21 at the time, talking to other young guys) being edgy and stupid.

That interpretation is tough given the fact that he had 54 GB of it, in a
folder named "CP Files", across over 10,000 images and videos, in neatly
organized sub-folders. They also found a few Google searches up until 2012.
[1] Though, if it were perhaps one large archive he had downloaded and
extracted one time, rather than meticulously curating individual files over
years, I could possibly see the argument that it was from when he was just
researching about that horrible fascination. If so, and if it was done around
2009 - 2012, it's possible he could've even forgotten he had it when he got
raided in 2017. And the Google searches look pretty bad, but, again, if those
are the worst they found, I wouldn't say it's open-and-shut.

Of course, I do think people should face consequences for having 10,000+ items
of child pornography, regardless of their motives, but there could be
mitigating factors here. Or there might not be. One would have to look at a
lot more evidence, and we'll presumably get a look at that once he's
separately tried for the child pornography charges.

In an interesting twist, he actually did (briefly?) publicly claim he was
framed, and there's an allegation that he planned to use two false identities
and a document claiming inside knowledge that the child pornography was
planted, written by him under one of these false identities (masquerading as a
supposed internal FBI source), to be released by WikiLeaks. Basically, the
government is accusing him of trying to frame a framing. This appears to not
be denied by him (I think?), but could possibly be thrown out due to potential
attorney client-privilege issues with the documents that contained the
evidence. (Not sure if it was brought up in this trial.) In my opinion, the
evidence is pretty damning that he did plan to spread this disinformation to
cast doubt about the leak and the child pornography; though all of this
doesn't necessarily lend more support to any of the original allegations.
[2][3][4]

I'm not a fan of this trend of HN comments skimming some headline or article
snippet and then giving a hot take without actually looking into any of the
facts or claims. I feel like it's been happening a lot more in the past few
years; even reddit often isn't as bad. It takes about a minute to see the
government's case against him and to consider a few possible defenses he may
have, rather than knee-jerk pattern matching "alleged CIA leaker accused of CP
possession" to "FBI/CIA possibly/likely planted evidence", with nothing to
support that. If you were to sow some seeds of doubt in the veracity of the
logs or any other government claims, it'd be different. Just because it's a
plausible story from a motive perspective doesn't mean the onus still isn't on
you to support the suspicion.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Schulte#Sex_crimes_alle...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Schulte#Sex_crimes_allegations)

[1] (Paraphrased slightly) (i) April 9, 2011, Google Search for "child
pornography" on at least three occasions; (ii) October 15, 2011, Google
Searches for "movie where father videos daughter and friend sex" and "movie
where father videos child porn"; and (iii) May 15, 2012, Google Search for
"female teenage body by year."

[2] [https://www.emptywheel.net/2019/06/19/accused-
vault-7-leaker...](https://www.emptywheel.net/2019/06/19/accused-
vault-7-leaker-planned-to-have-wikileaks-publish-disinformation-to-help-his-
defense/)

[3]
[https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.480183...](https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.480183/gov.uscourts.nysd.480183.96.0_1.pdf)

[4] Excerpts:

>“So who’s responsible for Vault 7? The CIA’s own version of the FBI’s Peter
Strzok and Lisa Page”

>in the Fake FBI Document in the Schulte Cell Documents, a purported FBI
“whistleblower” claimed that the FBI had placed child pornography on Schulte’s
computer after its initial searches of the device were unsuccessful in
recovering evidence.

~~~
staticautomatic
I don't have any comment on the truth of the factual assertions. And I don't
know how common it is for feds to actually plant evidence these days or in
these kinds of cases, but in my experience it is relatively common for federal
prosecutors to over-charge suspects, make shit up outright, lob salacious
accusations that they know perfectly well aren't supported by evidence,
conceal evidence from grand juries which they know would jeopardize their
chances of securing an indictment, knowingly conceal exculpatory evidence, and
deliberately misstate the nature of evidence, among other things. Source:
Myself; I consult on litigation for a living, including criminal cases ranging
from misdemeanor drug possession to white collar to murder one.

~~~
UweSchmidt
What mechanisms lead to this? Do prosecutors have to win cases for promotions
and be tough on crime for later political careers?

~~~
staticautomatic
I suspect there are a number of reasons. They need to be understood in the
context of the criminal justice system's goals. It is not principally
concerned with "doing justice" in any holistic political-philosophical sense.
That is evident from its favoring of certain aspects of justice like
punishment, retribution, and deterrence over things like procedural fairness
and proportionality. That is to say its primary aim is punishing wrongdoers
and making examples of them. Accordingly, any means or outcome which satisfies
these goals is assumed to be "just". Any alternative-- even one in the cannon
of "justice"\-- is understood to be a failing or at best reckless.

One reason this happens is that police and prosecutors alike put a lot of work
into investigating crimes, and they do not like working in vain. They are
especially bothered by the prospect of not apprehending anyone, and much more
so by the prospect of being unable to convict someone they believe is guilty.
It would be fair to say that they have at least some bias toward convicting
someone-- anyone. It's also the case that they are sometimes wrong but very
much don't want to believe they are. People easily find ways of justifying
things they want to believe.

Another reason is that trial lawyers tend to develop a preoccupation with
winning. Consider that, for a prosecutor, the only way to win is to get a
conviction. This can lead them down the path to all sorts of hell and is
probably the biggest contributor to grand juries being shams and evidence
being withheld.

It is true that there are career benefits to winning a lot of cases, but for
your average ADA that's typically just the privilege of being given more
serious cases to prosecute. Plenty of ADA's lose a lot of trials with few ill
consequences. Where this is more of a problem is with elected prosecutors, the
actual District Attorneys. They are the ones who benefit most from high
profile investigations, indictments, and convictions. It's very much in their
political self-interest to get convictions.

Lastly, the courts (judges) generally let prosecutors get away with all sorts
of shenanigans for a variety of reasons. It may be that they themselves are
"tough on crime", or prefer to give prosecutors the benefit of the doubt, or
simply that they're lazy. Any trial lawyer will tell you it happens with
shocking regularity that judges allow evidence into trial that they really
shouldn't under the guise of the questionable rationale that they should just
"let the jury decide." Let us not forget that one of Alexander Hamilton's main
arguments in favor of the jury system was as a safeguard against corrupt
judges.

In short, little stops them from doing these things other than their own
consciences, a handful of weakly observed procedural safeguards, and some
extremely vigilant defense attorneys who fight back hard.

------
ikeboy
My favorite thing about the case is how he sued the government for $50 billion
for violating his 2nd Amendment rights and preventing him from becoming the
next Bill Gates while in prison, and also for missing out on teaching his
little brother the true answer to the tabs v spaces debate.

Every single word of that was true.

[https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/1121882678725357570](https://twitter.com/emptywheel/status/1121882678725357570)

complaint at
[https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.513783...](https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.513783/gov.uscourts.nysd.513783.2.0.pdf)

btw, the One True Answer is apparently:

>I lost time mentoring and teaching my youngest brother programming as he
attends college and most likely learns the wrong way to align braces and
indent (the correct answer of tabs v. spaces is actually to use tabs but have
the tabs insert spaces instead of \t).

~~~
probably_wrong
While I agree that those parts are funny, I would encourage people to read the
entire complaint. In that same paragraph, for instance, you have some other,
not-so-funny parts:

> _I 've lost 40lbs as my health has severely deteriorated as has my parents'
> as the stress, frustration, and depression have affected more than just me.
> I receive no dental and minimal medical treatment for my congenital heart
> defect. I've lost all my hair and what remains is turning gray - and all
> before I turned 30._

(Note that, while he didn't have much hair to begin with, court sketches do
show him with gray hair[1]).

Sure, some of the complaints he presents are not super reasonable, but some of
the other ones definitely are. And I believe that, if someone asked me to
"write every single complaint you have about your three-years arrest", I'm not
sure I would fare a lot better.

[1] [https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2020/03/joshua-
schulte...](https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2020/03/joshua-
schulte.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1200)

~~~
ikeboy
I respect the troll job, and it shows some level of intelligence, competence,
and humor. I've read a decent number of pro se complaints, including some
brought by prisoners, and you could do a lot worse. I don't know if he'll get
anywhere with it, the case is stayed while the criminal case is going on, but
I wish him the best of luck. Nobody deserves torture conditions, even if he's
guilty of everything they accused him of.

And frankly, if he hadn't included those parts, chances are I wouldn't have
seen it, or wouldn't have remembered it and wouldn't post it here. If his goal
was to get more attention to the torture allegations, that probably worked.

------
RachelF
The Register (as usual) has excellent coverage of this:

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/09/cia_hacking_trial_v...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/09/cia_hacking_trial_verdict/)

It seems like the CIA's opsec was bad: "It didn’t help that during the course
of the trial, the CIA was found to have appalling security measures in place:
multiple people used the same admin username and password to access the
critical servers. Not only that, but the passwords used were weak – 123ABCdef
and mysweetsummer being the main two – and on top of that, they were published
on the department’s intranet."

------
Dahoon
The people named in the court documents[1] all have users on HN according to
two minutes of searching on google. Shows how little it takes to dig up info
on people. Kinda scary.

1\.
[https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.480183...](https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.480183/gov.uscourts.nysd.480183.1.0.pdf)

------
neonate
[https://archive.md/MP5s9](https://archive.md/MP5s9)

------
LatteLazy
If a trial I was on a jury for involved the CIA, I'd just find innocent.
Evidence is easy to fabricate with the time and expertise and that's a major
part of what they do. Digital evidence is the flimsest kind generally and the
easiest to fake...

~~~
friendly_fren
Then they would boot you off the jury and replace you with someone else

~~~
windthrown
Prosecutors can't retroactively remove jurors based on the verdict. Jury
selection happens at the beginning of the trial.

~~~
Rebles
The prosecutors would ask this question during jury selection. If you lied and
it came out during the trial, the judge would replace you with an alternate.

------
kelnos
> _He did so, prosecutors said, by reinstating his administrator-level access
> that the C.I.A. had removed after his workplace disputes._

Er... what? How is that even possible? I'm assuming that the NYT got some
details wrong here.

~~~
dlgeek
Read it in a court document I am too lazy to look up - he separately had admin
on the virtualization (VMSphere?) management plane and used it to rollback
whatever server did access management for the system in question to a previous
snapshot where he still had admin access to that system.

------
hacker_newz
I can't read the article because it's behind a paywall, but searching his name
leads to articles that indicate he leaked data from a CIA Confluence instance.
After Snowden, this is just laughable.

