Ex-CIA Accused of Leaking Secret Hacking Tools to WikiLeaks Gets Mistrial

A federal judge in New York on Monday declared^[1] a mistrial in the case
of a former CIA software engineer who was accused of stealing a
massive trove of the agency’s classified hacking and tools and
leaking it to WikiLeaks whistleblower website.

While the jury was unable to reach a verdict on eight counts of
the theft and transmission of CIA’s confidential documents, it did
find ex-CIA Joshua Schulte guilty on two counts of contempt of
court and making false statements to the FBI investigators.
^[2]

Schulte’s lawyers last month asked the court for a mistrial in this
case claiming the prosecutors withheld evidence that could
exonerate his client during the four-week trial in the Manhattan
federal court.

Potentially, as a result of this, jurors failed to reach a
unanimous agreement on the most severe charges against Schulte
after deliberating since last week.

Schulte, who designed hacking tools and malware for both the CIA
and NSA to break into adversaries computers, was arrested in August
2017 and initially charged with possession and transportation of
child pornography.

However, later in 2018, US prosecutors unveiled new charges
against Schulte accusing him of stealing and leaking over 8,000
classified CIA documents to WikiLeaks, who then published the
classified information under the name “Vault 7”
leaks.
^[3][4]

Vault 7 was the biggest leak of classified information in the
intelligence agency’s history, which exposed CIA’s secret
cyber-weapons and spying techniques that the United States
government used to monitor or break into computers^[5], mobile
phones^[6], televisions^[7], webcams^[8], video
streams^[9], and more networks
worldwide.

The court will hold the next hearing later this month to discuss
the next steps in the case. Meanwhile, Schulte will also go through
a separate trial for the child-pornography case, where the charges
have not been fully adjudicated, but carry a 20-year maximum
sentence.

In a separate report published just last week, a Chinese cybersecurity company
accused the CIA^[10] of being behind an
11-year-long hacking campaign that targeted several Chinese
industries and government agencies.

Researchers also accused the CIA based upon the similarities
between the tools and exploits leaked in the Vault 7 archive and
the tools used on the cyberattacks.