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A former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) software engineer who was convicted for carrying out the largest theft of classified information in the agency’s history and of charges related to child abuse imagery was sentenced to 40 years in prison on Thursday.
The 40-year sentence by US district judge Jesse Furman was for “crimes of espionage, computer hacking, contempt of court, making false statements to the FBI, and child pornography”, federal prosecutors said in a statement. The judge did not impose a life sentence as sought by prosecutors.
Joshua Schulte was convicted in July 2022 on four counts each of espionage and computer hacking and one count of lying to FBI agents, after giving classified materials to the whistleblowing agency WikiLeaks in the so-called Vault 7 leak. Last August, a judge mostly upheld the conviction.
Where would you rather he have run to? As it is, Russia nearly extradited him back. Russia. The list of even unfriendlier places is short and all of them are truly bad places to be, like North Korea or Iran.
A fair point, though I do wonder if someone is willing to live in exile in Russia of all places, I wonder why they might not take the Ellsberg approach. Just a strange notion to protest an act of your own government, then flee to an objectively more corrupt police state and attain citizenship no less. Either way I won’t die on the hill to claim he sold out for Russia versus just being their useful pawn. And of course it doesn’t change the fact that what was exposed needed to be.