I find interesting that 'they' feel the need to do a character assination on the man (where they being the people who are the source for this and similar articles, I guess his former employer).
The original article says:
"But US prosecutors never presented any forensic evidence to specifically tie Schulte to the publication of the CIA hacking materials on WikiLeaks."
Maybe the issue here is that the case isn't that strong after all.
The New Yorker story suggests there was some digital evidence, not of upload to wikileaks but of unauthorised access and download:
And, on the sixth day of the trial, prosecutors laid out what they regarded as a coup de grâce—the digital equivalent of fingerprints at a crime scene. Even after Schulte was stripped of his administrative privileges, he had secretly retained the ability to access the O.S.B. network through a back door, by using a special key that he had set up. The password was KingJosh3000. The government contended that on April 20, 2016, Schulte had used his key to enter the system. The files were backed up every day, and while he was logged on Schulte accessed one particular backup—not from that day but from six weeks earlier, on March 3rd. The O.S.B. files released by WikiLeaks were identical to the backup from March 3, 2016. As Denton told the jurors, it was the “exact backup, the exact secrets, put out by WikiLeaks.”
That is just the password some professional working in IT-security and cutting edge hacking would pick ... in particular if they were about to commit treason by leaking states secrets.
Sounds like exactly the kind of password an emotionally immature junior employee subject to poor judgment would pick, though.
Whether that's a fair description here, I can't say--but the New Yorker story is certainly internally consistent (and, it must be said, doesn't exactly make the CIA look good, either).
It lines up with his history as a deranged narcissist.
> In a 2009 exchange... one person Schulte interacted with went by “hbp.” Another went by “Sturm.” Josh’s username was “Josh.” At one point, he volunteered to grant his new friends access to the child-porn archive on his server. He had titled it /home/josh/http/porn. Sturm, taken aback, warned Schulte to “rename these things for god’s sake.”
I bet it was a co worker who wanted to leak but also didn't want to be blamed. Or maybe even a coworker who had a grudge against the defendant and didn't care about the leaks at all.
It would be pretty easy to set up. If you work in the same room or building as a coworker how hard is it to set up a camera or a physical key logger to steal their password? Once you have someone's username and password you can make it look like they did anything. You could even do something nefarious on their computer when they went home for the evening.
You may think that as security professionals they would definitely notice a key logger, but do you honestly think _anyone_ checks the back of their computer every time they come back from a lunch break?
Character assassination? He assassinated his own character. Character suicide.
He ran a child porn server:
> At one point, he volunteered to grant his new friends access to the child-porn archive on his server.
Sexually assaulted a passed-out roommate:
> When F.B.I. investigators searched Schulte’s phone, they found something especially alarming: a photograph that looked as though it had been taken inside the house in Sterling, Virginia, where he had lived while working for the C.I.A. The photograph was of a woman who looked like she was passed out on the bathroom floor. Her underwear appeared to have been removed and the hand of an unseen person was touching her genitals. State investigators in Loudoun County subsequently identified the woman and interviewed her. She has not been publicly named, but she told them that she had been Schulte’s roommate and had passed out one night, with no memory of what had happened. The encounter in the photograph was not consensual, she assured them.
In UK we sent over 100 people to jail because software was buggy, said they stole money, a private company knew about the problem but lied under oath and nobody checked.
the chance that anyone would ever discover that someafiles were planted by an arm of the state seems to be zero.
Sure. But pedophilia is probably comorbid with psychological problems which lead people to believe they are in some kind of battle with the CIA, so one might expect it to appear a bit more commonly. No one's ever accused Jeffrey Sterling of being a pedo or rapist.
I don’t know about how strong the case is, but the stories about his character makes sense in the context of someone who would leak that.
Notice who you call as ‘they’ didn’t portray him as a self-proclaimed idealist, but someone with an unstable personality and who weaponizes workplace bureaucracy for petty fights
We do know for a fact that he filed for a restraining order against his coworker, that seems extremely weird to me, and I don’t work for the CIA.
>Maybe the issue here is that the case isn't that strong after all.
It doesn't need to be. It just needs to be someone. Imagine you're the head of a department and everyone up to the president is breathing down your neck about how this data made it out of your supposedly air-gapped system. Do you simply blame it on the Russians or Chinese, essentially admitting that a foreign intelligence service was able to walk past your security with all that confidential data? Or do you pick the weakest link among your own? Someone who will soothe superiors, can't really stand up for himself and will absorb all the blame?
>"But US prosecutors never presented any forensic evidence to specifically tie Schulte to the publication of the CIA hacking materials on WikiLeaks."
I mean, getting into forensic evidence of what he did at the CIA would likely require exposing top secret classified material in a court room. Suffice to say, prosecutors generally can't do this except as a last resort.
When the guy left his phone full of passwords, and his computer full of encrypted child sex assault material, I'm not so sure the prosecutor feels the need to burn CIA secrets in court anymore.
Not really, opsec is a fascinating thing but in my personal experience very very few people, even trained professionals, actually go through the hassle of rigorous opsec for their personal projects and lives. The idea that a CIA hacker didn't follow rigorous opsec is about as believable as the idea that the NSA left their hacking tools publically available https://thehackernews.com/2016/09/nsa-hacking-tool-exploits....
Although, based on the strength of the assumption that it must be planted, I would say that working for the CIA would be a strong cover for a pedophile, since it's apparently impossible in the public eye for someone there to authentically trade in CSAM
> I find interesting that 'they' feel the need to do a character assination on the man
That's par for the course for the mainstream US (and Western, more generally, I would say) media nowadays. It wasn't always like that, but the last few years and especially the current war against Russia have accelerated this trend.
I don't understand this perennial thread of "No one declared it, it's not a war" when armies are trying their hardest to exterminate each other. What makes the magic words "i declare war" by some old buffoon who just wants the children of his nation to die in cruel ways make a magical difference?
Seriously - if you look at pictures of the children dismembering each other in Ukraine during ww2 and the children dismembering each other in Ukraine in 2022, the only major differences are fashion and how effective technology lets them be at cruelty.
The legalistic bullshit of needing magic words sounds like something the monsters that want dead children say to each other to get a little distance from the fact that the dead children are still their fault.
I think that the commenter takes issue with the implications that USA is in war with Russia rather then Russia being in aggressive war against Ukraine.
It is popular framing among pro-russia people - trying to frame it as if Ukraine did not mattered at all. Or as if did not even existed.
USA didn't declare war against DPRK, Vietnam, Iraq, etc. That's not something we do. However, "serious politicians" have "mistakenly" mentioned that we're at war with Russia for months.
Yes, but in all those instances the US sent troops there with weapons and they fired those weapons at the other side, which is how most people visualize "war". That's not what is happening here. We're sending weapons and money, not men. It would be like saying America entered WWII when they signed the Lend-Lease act, not after Pearl Harbor.
USA military and CIA had been present in Korea and Vietnam for years, with little fanfare, before those wars really got going. Their roles in Laos, Indonesia, Iran, Nicaragua, etc. were never acknowledged. They are currently present though unacknowledged in dozens of nations, with the hopes of kicking off future wars for the profit of armaments manufacturers. USA "special forces" have been embedded with various more-or-less-official military units in Donbas for years, during which time UN estimates that 14,000 people died in violent military action including more than 3,000 civilians. Over the same time, various American and western European neo-nazis also found their way to Donbas, forming a convenient cover for the "operators".
Americans have been in Ukraine for a long time, and that's not even to mention e.g. Victoria Nuland. This is a stupid argument anyway. Congress has committed to spending Russia's entire annual military budget to fill Ukraine with deadly weapons. That doesn't count the billions we already spent over the last 15 years. A president was impeached because he proposed (without actually doing) a temporary slowdown of the flow of American weapons to Ukraine. Our masters wanted a war, and now they have what they wanted. Very few mammalian Americans want a war, but after twenty years of stupid wars it's clear that the peace we want doesn't matter.
> Our masters wanted a war, and now they have what they wanted.
How does sending weapons to a country encourage another country to attack it? Wouldn't it decrease the chances they attacked it - since it is fairly clear that the Ukraine could not invade Russia.
> Very few mammalian Americans want a war
As opposed to reptilian Americans? I'm just joking, I assume this is a typo but I can't figure out what it is meant to be.
Do Americans actually want peace between the Ukraine and Russia(if it would just mean acceding to Russia's demands)? Granted I live in a fairly liberal area, but I see blue and yellow flags all over the place right now.
How would we feel about Chinese weapons located in Tijuana? Even if they couldn't threaten a takeover of USA, they could still level Los Angeles with five minutes' notice. Eastern Ukraine similarly threatens Moscow.
Americans where I live couldn't care less what happens in Ukraine. I have never seen a Ukrainian flag in the flesh, although they're on TV incessantly. If I drive around the area, I see USA flags, some state flags, a lot of confederate flags, and even a few "Brandon" flags. My own hope for Ukraine is peace at any cost. This isn't some glorious republic; it has consistently led Europe in the "most corrupt" lists and the history it chooses to emphasize features Nazi collaboration. Split it up into a part that can get along with Russia and a part that will eventually be absorbed by Poland. It will be a win for the West if the latter part contains Odessa.
I'll take the two questions in reverse order. Russia has invaded Ukraine in order to protect Russian interests. You could pick 100 Russian politicians at random, and every one of them would do as Putin is doing, if they were put in his position. The lives of the people of Russia are threatened by NATO armaments in Ukraine. Then-ambassador-to-Russia and current CIA director Burns said as much in 2008. [0] It's even more true since USA orchestrated the removal of the elected leader of Ukraine in 2014. [1] It's more true yet since USA has supported the Nazi brigades who have killed civilians in Donbas ever since, [2][3] while slowly inserting more and more weapons and "advisors". [4] If Ukraine had sought peace with Russia, as the majority of Ukrainians would have chosen to do (this was Zelensky's primary, if Wilsonian, campaign promise when he won election) [5], this invasion probably would not have happened. So, yes, there are people associated with USA who bear a large portion of blame for the invasion.
I'm not sure if I would consider Russia "fascist". Certainly it is no longer communist. If it is fascist for the sake of discussion, we can blame Putin for that. And, indeed, we can certainly blame USA for Putin. We intervened on Yeltsin's behalf when Russia naturally would have gone in a more socialist direction. [6] The inevitable result of that was that his right-hand, Putin, soon took over. [7] I think at one time Putin would have considered a sort of peace with the West, if we had made that more practical than the alternative. Alas, we did not.
> Russia has invaded Ukraine in order to protect Russian interests.
Russia has literally stated that they don’t consider Ukraine a real country they invaded to try and take over the country. I guess given Russias history you could count that as “protecting Russias interests”.
> The lives of the people of Russia are threatened by NATO armaments in Ukraine.
The only thing NATO armaments in Ukraine threatened is Russias ability to invade Ukraine. But once again I can see why given their history Russia might see a country being protected by others that they wish to subjugate and invade as a threat to themselves.
> It's more true yet since USA has supported the Nazi brigades who have killed civilians in Donbas ever since,
Your links literally don’t say this they mention the Azov and children dying separately.
> If Ukraine had sought peace with Russia, as the majority of Ukrainians would have chosen to do (this was Zelensky's primary, if Wilsonian, campaign promise when he won election) [5], this invasion probably would not have happened. So, yes, there are people associated with USA who bear a large portion of blame for the invasion.
Ukraine already had a promise from Russia to not invade or threaten its borders when it gave up its nuclear weapons. Look how much good that did, Russia doesn’t understand peace agreements only weapons. Any “peace agreement” with Russia just means they’ll invade on the future when they aren’t happy.
Let’s be clear, the only people to blame for this war are Russia, they decided to invade and they can leave at any point.
And if you want to talk about Nazis maybe you should think about which side is raping civilians, performing mass executions of civilians and running “filtration camps”.
The Russians are literally committing genocide in Ukraine, there’s only one side that’s the fascists here and that’s Russia.
Just to mention, Russia invaded Ukraine and never declared it war. Russians are also comiting genocide in Ukraine. Russians call it special operation, it is illegal to call it war in Russia.
USA offered to fly Ukrainian president to safety. Ukrainian president refused and Ukrainian army started to fight. USA did very decent thing after - supported Ukrainian army with guns.
jessaustin makes implications rather then clear statements. I dont think Ukraine situation is in any way similar to Vietnam or Iraq. And it is not case of American aggression at all.
No, USA is not in war with Ukraine or Russia. Ukraine is in war with Russia. USA supports Ukraine. Russia does see west in general as ennemies, does actively work to undermine democracy and stability of western countries. Consequently, Ukraine is not just defending itself, but also defending everyone further west.
Is that enough answer?
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Edit: looking at other comments jessaustin is trying to revert aggressor and victim. Or rather, invent new aggressor, ignore victim interests entirely and make actual aggressor look innocent.
You've avoided saying it directly, but the oblique claim in your post is that (1) the CIA is the New Yorker's source for the claims in the article, and (2) the New Yorker acceeded to an intentional character assassination.
These are extraordinary claims, ones that you haven't presented correspondingly extraordinary evidence for.
I don't know anything about this case, but it seems from reading comments like evidence is pretty thin.
You can't just say "he's a traitor" and it makes him guilty. Even if he is, he's also a human being. Labeling people as "traitor" and dismissing their humanity is pretty weak.
While he may not be executed, its a lot more serious than Mannings leak. It is far more damaging from the hacking tools he released. He's also going to become an example so they will make he sentencing more harsh.
My favorite part was how insanely petty the whole thing sounded... How he insisted his nickname should be "Badass" but people called him what you mentioned as well as "Voldemort" more often than his self appointed nickname... What a goof. If this article is accurate it paints a picture of an incredibly socially immature workplace where people who didn't advance past the point of high school in that aspect left the guy feeling bullied enough that he did the leak. This was something like my first and only experience doing government contracting at a large corporation, on my tour of the offices one of the things I pointed out to my boss were these print out clip art stop signs that said "STOP BULLYING" on the walls everywhere and that I hadn't seen something like that since high school. He rolled his eyes pretty hard at that one but these people were responsible for systems that enormous amounts of people's lives depended on. I remember when these systems failed multiple times over multiple incidences and just thought of the stop sign shit.
Hah. I was deeply struck by how immature the whole thing sounds.
Nobody here looks good, of course. But even top flight tech companies have this sort of time-wasting, so it's not exactly a surprise you'd find it at a TLA as well.
I got reprimanded one time at a previous job for pretending to throw a bee at my supervisor. A nest had formed in some concrete overhang in the building, he freaked out and got adrenaline ampules at the pharmacy (epipen shortage year) like "you need to inject me with this if I get stung". So later on, I walked up to him sitting next to a coworker with nothing in my hands and a shit eating grin on my face. "What's that?" "A BEE!" as I opened my hands with nothing in them... He fell over in his chair and everyone in the office stood up and pointed and laughed at him. It was ultra funny though he insisted I was insane for this and demanded I see a psychiatrist if I wanted to keep my job. Just ended up getting xanax pills I really didn't want or need. This was close to a decade ago and I wouldn't pull something like that now, but I mean what do you expect out of hiring people in their early 20s?
Look, I don't want to come off as judgemental, but it really wasn't funny. He was genuinely afraid of bees, perhaps bordering on a phobia. Whether that's a "rational" fear or not isn't important (although the epipen/adrenaline makes it sound like it's quite rational; people can die from bee strings), people have all kinds of fears and they almost never find practical jokes about them "funny". Even worse, you put him in the extremely uncomfortable and embarrassing situation where the entire office was laughing at him over it. It sounds like an absolutely horrible situation for him.
"What do you expect out of hiring people in their early 20s?" is a lame excuse. A 11-year old? Sure. A 21-year old should know better. We all make errors in judgement, but this really was a spectacular error, and some "official" response was entirely warranted.
That's funny, pretty much everyone else thinking him demanding someone see a psychiatrist over a prank thought his response was a bit over-wrought, especially the psychiatrist
I don't think we have those departments where I live except in American or Euro companies that do outsourcing, nor any "STOP BULLYING" signs around the office in this neck of the woods.
