The Largest CIA Data Breach – Act 2: The Prison Cell Search

Join me to hear the story of Joshua Adam Schulte, the CIA cybersecurity software developer who leaked Vault 7 to WikiLeaks! This is eCrimeBytes.com Season 3, Episode 8 – The Largest CIA Data Breach – Act 2: The Prison Cell Search.

Sources:

• https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/former-cia-officer-joshua-adam-schulte-sentenced-40-years-prison-espionage-and-child
• https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6359562/united-states-v-schulte/
• https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6359557/united-states-v-schulte/
• https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshschulte/
• https://nypost.com/2024/02/01/metro/cia-leaker-josh-schulte-to-serve-40-years-after-offending-judge-by-comparing-nyc-jail-to-nazi-camp/ (Photo)
• https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13037297/Joshua-Schulte-sentenced-40-years-prison-brazen-intelligence-leak-history-Former-CIA-officer-guilty-possessing-child-abuse-images.html (Photo)

Transcript:

00:00:00:00 – 00:00:24:59
Keith
What up, you crazy bastards. Welcome to another week of eCrimeBytes. This is where I research the court documentation and roast the criminal so you don’t have to. All right, so this week I’ve been bringing you this is season three, episode eight. This is the biggest CIA data breach. And now a little plot twist for you. Okay. There was a plot twist.

00:00:25:02 – 00:00:39:06
Keith
It was more than the CIA data breach. And I talked to all about it in Act One. You’re actually jumping in an act two right now. Now, I know there are some people that are like, I need to see the beginning of this, and that’s how I would do this. And I do recommend you do that that way.

00:00:39:06 – 00:00:51:43
Keith
And I’m going to put a link here on YouTube so you can just click on it and go back and watch everything. If you decide to move on. Let me give you the real quick tour of what happened in Act One, just so you can understand what happens here.

00:00:51:43 – 00:00:57:00
Keith
Now we have this individual. His name is Joshua Schulte.

00:00:57:14 – 00:01:10:50
Keith
S c h u l t e. I’m just going to call him Joshua from now on. That’s what I’ve been calling him. Now Joshua. He worked at the CIA specifically. He worked on computerized tools to break into other people’s

00:01:10:50 – 00:01:33:43
Keith
networks. So you can imagine at the CIA he’d make the things that spies would use to break into terrorist organization networks and computers in order to get information from them for intelligence purposes or maybe shut something down for war purposes. Those are the type of tools that Joshua’s group makes.

00:01:33:48 – 00:02:04:28
Keith
Now he’s working there. He’s a software developer, but they’re like, Hey, you need to do this other stuff and help us with this backup server. Here’s some administrative privileges. He’s like, Sweet, Thank you. He gets in an argument with one of his employees or his coworkers. Not, he didn’t have somebody under him, it was just a coworker. Gets in an argument and apparently doesn’t like how management handled it with him, which is they take him and they move him to another group.

00:02:04:33 – 00:02:27:42
Keith
When they do that, they take away some of his access on the network. He decides he doesn’t like that, so he gets his access back. One time specifically, it was by going in when he had access and creating another account that people didn’t know about. So that way, when they took away the original account, he had this other one waiting in the wings over here and he jumped on

00:02:27:42 – 00:02:52:15
Keith
it and was like, Look at me! Nobody sees me now. And he goes to the backup server, grabs all the backup data for all the tools that this group has written. So you can imagine any offensive and probably defensive capabilities of the United States, CIA, cyber security tools are now in Joshua’s hands. Not only the ones he wrote, but all everybody else has written.

00:02:52:20 – 00:03:06:34
Keith
And what do you think he does with it? He goes straight to WikiLeaks and he gives it to them. And then he quits. He quits the CIA because he’s pissed off at how management dealt with that dispute with him and the other employee.

00:03:06:34 – 00:03:15:43
Keith
And WikiLeaks publishes all the vault 7 and vault 8 information out there. So now there’s all this information out there in public.

00:03:15:43 – 00:03:33:26
Keith
And the government goes, shit, we got a leak. Not just a leak. We got the biggest leak of the CIA of all time. And they look at it and they did some correlations and they said, you know what? It looks like this comes from a very specific server, a backup server.

00:03:33:31 – 00:04:01:17
Keith
It’s only a couple of people that have access to that backup server. And they went and they pulled that list and then they took that list and compared it to the actual data that was leaked. And they said, wait a minute. There’s one person missing from the data that’s leaked publicly and that’s Mr. Josh. So Josh took himself out of the data when he leaked it to WikiLeaks.

00:04:01:17 – 00:04:29:31
Keith
So it made it almost obvious, I think obvious that it was him. When the CIA looked at all the people in the data went, there’s only one person missing. It’s Josh. And so now they’re on Josh’s… they’re on to, there on to Josh. They know it’s Josh. So there’s a search warrant that happens at Josh’s apartment and they got a lot of computer evidence and they were looking for this whole classified thing and they go, my God, this guy’s really into child porn.

00:04:29:36 – 00:05:07:35
Keith
Everybody really into child porn. He’s got like 3000 images. Just tons of child porn. Not questionable child porn, like really young child porn, beastiality, and just S&M and just all sorts of stuff you the average person should not have on their computer. Josh had it all and he encrypted it amongst all these layers of encryption, but because he because he reused passwords and wrote them down and put them on his phone in places that the feds got them later on in the search warrant, they they put these passwords in and they got into these encrypted areas and they saw this child porn and they were like, holy shit.

00:05:07:35 – 00:05:25:14
Keith
Okay, okay. Now we got child porn charges coming at this guy. And there’s one other charge, copyright infringement, because this motherfucker had a server of pirated movies and TV shows. And I’m sure he had Dharma and Greg and all this other stuff on there. Well, they charged with that, too.

00:05:25:14 – 00:05:30:40
Keith
So there are a series of indictments that came out and they were like, it was something like 15 counts.

00:05:30:40 – 00:05:45:23
Keith
It was so many counts, I couldn’t even read them all to you. I put them on your screen. They threw everything at them. And a lot of them kind of sounded like I got I got to be honest, It kind of sounded like a lot of charges, but they threw the book at him, so they arrested

00:05:45:23 – 00:05:51:59
Keith
him. And like a normal I use air quotes here, but a normal criminal, they let him out on bail for a little bit.

00:05:52:03 – 00:06:10:47
Keith
He violates his probation or his bail conditions, which was don’t use a computer for anything except your defense. And it sounds like he was out there surfing porn and going on the dark web and doing all sorts of shit he shouldn’t have been doing. And they were like, you, buddy, you’re going to be back in jail until trial now.

00:06:10:52 – 00:06:30:01
Keith
And so now he’s sitting in jail. He’s like, Fuck, now what do I do? Okay. And I left you on the fact that he accidentally maybe on purpose. Who knows? He’s now representing himself. I don’t even want to go down that tangent anymore. He’s representing himself and he filed a motion that has classified data in it to the public.

00:06:30:05 – 00:06:54:48
Keith
And so the government went, my God. See, Judge, this is why we said, don’t let this guy represent himself because he would fuck up like this. And he did. There’s classified data now in the public court record that they had to go out and remove and all that kind of stuff. So they did that. And you can imagine Josh did this while he was still in jail and you would think, God, that’s the worst Josh could do.

00:06:54:48 – 00:07:16:49
Keith
No, no, it is. Because now because of all this shit, they’re like, We got to search what he has access to. If he’s if he’s releasing stuff from jail, we got to. We got to see what he has. So on October 3rd of 2018, they have a search warrant to search his jail. And you would think at jail you could actually just search it because they’re prisoners.

00:07:16:49 – 00:07:46:31
Keith
But there’s actual search warrant. Apparently, this is new to me that they filed and the judge signed off on. And it was it sounds like a cell and or a former cell of Josh. Now, he made physical handwritten notes, apparently a lot of notes, like 300 pages of notes. And in some of these notes, he admitted to using contraband cell phones in jail.

00:07:46:36 – 00:08:13:44
Keith
So, Josh is behind bars using phones. Not supposed to be using cell phones. Okay. But using phones all contraband. So these pages also have these passwords. I know I talked about them earlier. I know it’s a little bit of a repeat, horse and cart thing here. I had to tell you earlier that he had passwords because this is what they used to break into, things like his desktop and all that kind of stuff.

00:08:13:48 – 00:08:53:46
Keith
So they also found some other stuff where he’s making documents purportedly from FBI agents. These are like fake documents, by the way, from these fake FBI agents intended for WikiLeaks that look like they’re whistleblowers from inside the FBI. They’re like, hey, Josh, is not responsible for all this stuff. The FBI has got this wrong. So what Josh is trying to do is make this fake scenario of this FBI whistleblower sending things to WikiLeaks to try to get the public off of his trail, that he was the one that leaked it to WikiLeaks.

00:08:53:51 – 00:09:10:08
Keith
This is only going to hurt him because they’re going to charge him with this shit later. And now they also find the contraband cell phones. Okay. I know you have a lot of questions about that. I do, too. I do, too. Hold on a second. I got a picture for you. No, you know what? I’ll give it to you now.

00:09:10:09 – 00:09:15:45
Keith
I’ll put the picture on the screen for you now, and I’ll. I’ll finish talking about my thought here. You can see this picture.

00:09:15:45 – 00:09:23:47
Keith
I know he has a cell phone in prison because this is a picture of him in prison with a cell phone in his hand. Now, I had a lot of questions about this picture.

00:09:23:52 – 00:09:46:42
Keith
I couldn’t exactly tell you who took it, but I think it’s another inmate. I think it’s another inmate taking a picture of Josh on a cell phone to have this evidence against Josh if it were ever needed, which then begs the question, there’s another inmate out there that has another cell phone that’s using it. Right? Right. I would that’s what I’d be thinking as an investigator.

00:09:46:47 – 00:09:48:28
Keith
Okay. So you can see him on the cell

00:09:48:28 – 00:10:13:22
Keith
phone. While he’s on this phone, he actually accessed Protonmail, which is an encrypted mail service from this phone and other phones that he had access to. And we know this because later on, agents get this these these encrypted emails and then they use the passwords and his notebooks and decrypted them and saw all the contents of the emails.

00:10:13:26 – 00:10:38:50
Keith
This is next level. This is next level. He created covert partitions on these laptops he was given to use for his court research. Now, if you don’t know what that means, if you open up your computer on a Windows computer and you see the C colon and then you see a D colon, those are partitions. What he did is he created one of those, but it doesn’t show up.

00:10:38:54 – 00:11:02:31
Keith
It’s only hidden, only he knows about it and he’s hiding stuff there. I don’t exactly know what he hid there, but they know that he put something there and that it was encrypted. All of that on a court computer. Okay, this is not his computer. He went on a court provided computer and did this shit on there. So this is something he’s not supposed to be doing on a court computer.

00:11:02:31 – 00:11:07:45
Keith
And this is this is going to also be wrapped up in all those many, many charges that I read you.

00:11:07:45 – 00:11:32:52
Keith
Now, Josh, he didn’t stop there. He wanted to make what he called a quote unquote, information war. He himself wanted to make it a whole information war against the United States government. Okay. And he’s going to do that with his contraband cell phones, literally his contraband cell phones in prison that he used to create anonymous encrypted email and social media accounts.

00:11:32:52 – 00:11:43:12
Keith
So basically, he can use these accounts to then make more postings like he did with WikiLeaks and stuff prior. So

00:11:43:12 – 00:12:01:27
Keith
if you take nothing from that, if you take nothing at all from that, just think that Josh is sitting in jail being tried for the very thing he’s doing while he’s in jail and not supposed to be doing while he’s in jail, which is trying to create this information war against the United States government.

00:12:01:32 – 00:12:37:00
Keith
Now, he did he wanted to to publish his, quote unquote, manifesto. No, I’m sorry. I did not find his manifesto. But when I saw the manifesto, two people came to my mind immediately. One was Ted Kaczynski and the other was Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombings. And I’m like, this is the level person I’m thinking about with with this manifesto, because no normal person ever has a manifesto. You’re never like, Hey, I’m going to go hang out with Greg on the boat and go crabbing later.

00:12:37:04 – 00:13:04:09
Keith
Well, what are you guys going to talk about? I brought you my manifesto. I’m sorry. Your what? My manifesto. You have a manifesto? Yes. And that’s the point where you stop being friends with that person. Because anybody who has a manifesto, there’s no good purpose for a manifesto. Okay. So he wanted to, quote unquote, break up diplomatic relationship, close embassies and US occupation across the world.

00:13:04:09 – 00:13:33:06
Keith
This is his information war he wanted to plan against the United States. Now, they did verify that he successfully sent emails containing classified information while in jail about the CCI development network and the number of employees and the CIA Cyber Intelligence Group and all shit that he should not be saying to a reporter he emailed to a reporter.

00:13:33:12 – 00:14:01:29
Keith
So yeah, he did. He didn’t stop while he was in prison and they saw that he didn’t stop. Now there’s a period of a long period of time, you know, in SpongeBob where they’re like two years later and they do dot dot dot? There’s one of these in the court documentation where it’s just motion after motion after motion to try to suppress this and suppress that and expert witness this, an expert witness that there were literally I’m not exaggerating.

00:14:01:29 – 00:14:18:51
Keith
There were thousands of documents in this case. There were over a thousand documents that I had to go through to find the right ones to bring you this case. And I hope you appreciate that by the way. I try to pick out the things that you’re not going to see in the news. And I know what the news reports on and I know the fun things. And I try to pick out of fun things.

00:14:18:51 – 00:14:39:22
Keith
And I hope that’s why you come to these videos. So all these motions that go by. But there’s one very important motion that I touched on. I just touched on it earlier, and I said that he he represented himself, okay. He represented himself. And you can’t just go in and say, I want to represent myself and the court’s

00:14:39:22 – 00:15:00:56
Keith
like, sure, go ahead. There’s a whole motion process that goes on. The government, rightly so, is like we don’t want him representing himself because he’s going to fuck up. And when he fucks up, he’s going to be like, I accidentally fucked up and I somebody should have stopped me. Somebody should stop me from fucking up. And the government’s like, We don’t want him doing that, so let’s make sure he has an attorney.

00:15:01:01 – 00:15:24:28
Keith
And then, then the court listens to Josh and Josh is like, You know what? I’m a fucking genius. I am a genius and I can handle this all myself. And I should be able to represent myself because only I can represent myself. I know the classified stuff, right? I know it. So let me represent myself. And the court went back and they were probably like, We don’t really want to let him represent himself.

00:15:24:28 – 00:15:49:02
Keith
Can it please, can anybody please stop me? Stop, OK you can represent yourself. And Josh was probably like, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The government was like, Fuck, fuck. Okay, So Josh just immediately comes out and starts just acting like a crazy man, with all his motions and stuff. You saw the picture earlier, right? He had the beard, he had the Ted Kaczynski beard in jail.

00:15:49:02 – 00:16:04:53
Keith
So I imagine he did not look presentable. And he just starts going crazy with the motions. And immediately I know I’m reading this in the paper and I can’t see this. I can’t see the court, but I’m trying to envision it so I can give you a picture. And the only picture I could think of that you would agree with me on is Charlie.

00:16:04:58 – 00:16:27:13
Keith
Charlie from It’s Always Sunny when he does his proofs, his lawyer proofs. This is what I imagine Joshua does throughout his case in all these goddamn motions. And most of the motions the court’s like ahhh God damn it. Okay. Well, how long is this going to take? All right. Yep, yep, yep. Keep talking. Yep, yep. Okay. Denied.

00:16:27:13 – 00:16:54:21
Keith
Denied. What’s your next motion? shit. All right. Okay. Keep going. Yup. Denied on that one, too. And they just kept doing it over and over and over. At one point, all those counts that I told you about actually get separated. And he gets separated into two trials and becomes the classified secrets trial. That’s trial number one. And that’s a longer trial because there’s there’s a lot more data involved with it.

00:16:54:25 – 00:17:20:09
Keith
And then there’s trial number two, which is the child porn trial. And that’s pretty much just the images and videos. And I don’t mean to say just as in it’s minimized, but meaning it’s only those files being used in that trial. So they separated the two trials. Now, this is important to lawyers because they had to have certain teams and certain lawyers working on certain things not important to us.

00:17:20:11 – 00:17:26:25
Keith
Okay. So in your mind, just think he’s still getting charged with all the same shit, but it’s being charged across two different trials.

00:17:26:25 – 00:17:34:36
Keith
I have the verdict forms of both. I had explained to you there are two trials because when I showed you two verdict forms from two different trials, you’d be like, What? What? Why is this?

00:17:34:36 – 00:17:52:47
Keith
Okay. So in trial one, we have remember, this is the one that is all the classified documents. This is the theft of classified documents. So he represents himself. And I’m sure that goes about as horribly as all the other motions that I read from him.

00:17:52:52 – 00:18:07:12
Keith
He probably was up there and was like I’m the smartest person in the world. And the government was like, not at all. Here’s some evidence. And then Josh was like, Yeah, but I want to overthrow the government. And then the jury comes back and slides the verdict form that I’m putting on the screen now,

00:18:07:12 – 00:18:22:57
Keith
which is count one, illegally gathering of classified information, guilty, count two transportation of it, guilty, count three, transmission of it, guilty. Count four more transmission of it guilty.

00:18:23:02 – 00:18:35:15
Keith
And Josh, I imagine at this point was probably just like, God damn. Right? Count five, unauthorized access to a computer, obtain

00:18:35:15 – 00:18:54:13
Keith
classified information, guilty. Count six. Another similar charge, guilty. Count seven. Another similar charge guilty. Count 8 another guilty. And here’s where we get to a little bit of a difference. Obstruction of justice. Guilty of that too my friend.

00:18:54:18 – 00:19:03:54
Keith
Gosh. So that’s count nine that they went through. And Josh probably sat down was like, Holy shit, I just got

00:19:03:54 – 00:19:17:13
Keith
my ass handed to me. I was found guilty on every single count. All counts. Counts one through nine. What else could go wrong? Well, you know what? I have a second trial coming up. Maybe I should get my own I’ll get a lawyer on this one.

00:19:17:13 – 00:19:41:04
Keith
And from what I could tell, he did. He got a lawyer and it sounds like the lawyer worked him through it. Now, the first trial went from June to July of 2022. And so that is what it was like just over a month. And in trial terms, that’s that’s a that’s a pretty long trial. Anything where you have multiple weeks,

00:19:41:04 – 00:20:09:09
Keith
that’s a pretty long trial. Normal trials are usually only a few days. And that’s what his child pornography trial ended up being. Ended up being two days. Specifically, it was September 12th through 13th of 2023. Now, I imagine he he was like, I got a lawyer, my lawyer, I got a lawyer on this one. They’re going to get me out of this, they’re definitely going to get me out of this.

00:20:09:13 – 00:20:21:43
Keith
And the government went up. They were like, Hey, here’s thousands and thousands and thousands of videos of child porn. My friends in the jury, you must convict him. And there was probably pretty much

00:20:21:43 – 00:20:28:50
Keith
nothing he could say because he was like, it was an encrypted folder. The government was like, But you needed your password to get into it.

00:20:28:51 – 00:20:47:59
Keith
He was like, Fuck, okay, well, it was in a encrypted whole directory and they’re like, Well, it was your home directory and you needed your password to get into it. He was like, Fuck, okay, but it was in a the encrypted virtual machine and they were like, But it was your virtual machine and you needed your password to get into it.

00:20:47:59 – 00:20:51:10
Keith
He’s like Fuck, right?

00:20:51:10 – 00:20:57:56
Keith
And now he comes out and they slip the verdict form in the child child porn case over and he’s like, Fuck again!

00:20:57:56 – 00:21:06:13
Keith
He’s guilty on all three counts. Count one was received child pornography. Count two is possession of child pornography, and count three was transportation of child

00:21:06:13 – 00:21:06:43
Keith
pornography.

00:21:06:43 – 00:21:17:28
Keith
So very, very stiff counts. And I had a pause because I just used the word stiff accidentally. And I know people will probably point that out in the comments if

00:21:17:28 – 00:21:28:00
Keith
they watched this far. All right. So that was trial number two. And so you can imagine Josh sits down and he’s like, okay, So I was found guilty on everything.

00:21:28:00 – 00:21:51:29
Keith
I gambled. I gambled. I thought maybe maybe I’d be found not guilty on something. But no, I was found guilty. Found guilty on everything, both trials. And so the defense says we don’t have much to stand on here, but we’d really only like 108 months of imprisonment. And I had to grab my calculator quickly. Do the math. Nine years, I was like, That’s really light.

00:21:51:36 – 00:22:13:39
Keith
You really. You think you’re going to get nine years for classified information? Hey, more power to you. And they said, Hey, how about five years of supervised release? And I thought, Mother fucker, you were caught with child porn. You need to be on life supervised release. Okay? You if you ever get out of prison, you need to be on a registry that gets delivered to everybody’s doorstep.

00:22:13:39 – 00:22:40:17
Keith
Okay? All right. And then the defense sits down and the government stands up, and they’re like, We only have one thing to say. We just. We want life. We want life. And I was like, okay, I wonder how this is going to play out. So you imagine this is where the judge has to consider all the evidence and the the fact that he’s found guilty and victim impact statements.

00:22:40:17 – 00:22:59:01
Keith
Now there’s victim impact statements here. There’s one really important victim impact statement I’ll read you in a second, and then there’s a bunch I’m going to skip over. And the ones I want to skip over were the child pornography victims and they all had letters, it sounds like, and they were redacted in the court documentation thank, I think, thankfully.

00:22:59:06 – 00:23:16:01
Keith
But I do want to acknowledge that they have their their points heard and they should in this case. Now, there’s another point that’s heard here. This is probably the highest up victim impact statement I’ve read in any of these cases.

00:23:16:01 – 00:23:23:56
Keith
This is from the deputy director of the CIA to the judge about the sentencing in this case. And I’m just going to read it in its entirety.

00:23:24:01 – 00:23:56:27
Keith
It says, I’m writing to offer the views of the Central Intelligence Agency regarding the impact of Joshua’s crimes on the agency, including the damage to the agency’s work, its workforce, the US national security. I should have put an and in there. I apologize and U.S. national security. Because significant aspects of the harm Joshua caused cannot be, now I gotta say they didn’t call him Joshua, but I’ve we’ve become close enough now that I can call him that.

00:23:56:32 – 00:24:09:17
Keith
So he goes on to say, because the significant aspects of the harm Joshua caused cannot be captured in an unclassified submission, meaning I cannot put it in this letter because

00:24:09:17 – 00:24:23:42
Keith
he stole some bad stuff. He goes on to say, I am appending to this letter a classified statement from this other director of CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence, that I imagine the judge could read and probably weigh in his decision.

00:24:23:46 – 00:24:47:36
Keith
So the letter continues and it says at a unclassified level, I can confirm that the crimes committed by Joshua caused exceptionally grave harm to U.S. national security and the CIA. As a criminal trial established, Joshua is directly responsible for the largest data breach in CIA history and one of the largest unauthorized disclosures of classified information in the history of the United States.

00:24:47:41 – 00:25:23:12
Keith
His actions cost the agency hundreds of millions of dollars, degraded its ability to collect foreign intelligence against America’s adversaries, placed directly at risk CIA personnel programs and assets, and jeopardized U.S. national security by disregarding the CIA’s ability to conduct its mission. In short, Joshua’s actions inflicted heavy costs on the United States. Thank you for considering this information as you determine a just and appropriate sentence for the crimes Joshua committed against the United States.

00:25:23:17 – 00:25:25:41
Keith
And this is from the deputy director,

00:25:25:41 – 00:25:50:26
Keith
CIA. This is just one big fuck you letter to Joshua. So I thought when I read this letter, I thought, there’s no way he’s not getting life. He’s getting life. If the director, the deputy director of CIA is personally writing a letter about you getting fucked over in prison, you know, you know you’re getting a stiff sentence, no pun intended.

00:25:50:26 – 00:26:16:05
Keith
Again, I mentioned prison and stiff, but, you know, you’re getting a stiff sentence if this letter is coming down right? So the judge gets this and there’s still a sentencing hearing and Joshua gets to speak on his behalf. Now, this case is fresh enough that I can’t get to the actual transcript where Joshua said this, so I only can rely on news.

00:26:16:10 – 00:26:40:09
Keith
So I pulled the news take on what happened here. And you know me, if you’ve been around on my episodes, I very, very rarely will quote the news. Usually it’s just when the criminal says something, I will quote them. And in this case, I’m going to quote the news because it paints what happens in the courtroom and you will understand why at the end here.

00:26:40:20 – 00:26:41:34
Keith
So here we go.

00:26:41:34 – 00:27:08:32
Keith
This is from The New York Post. And they said an ex CIA computer whiz convicted of leaking an arsenal of government hacking tools and possessing a trove of child porn was hit with a 40 year sentence. Shocking, by the way. You’re going to find out the 40 year sentence. Thursday after offending a New York judge by comparing conditions at Brooklyn lockup to those at a Nazi concentration camps.

00:27:08:37 – 00:27:54:40
Keith
Yes, this motherfucker actually went in there and compared what happened in World War Two to what he was put through in the United States justice system. I imagine that didn’t go well. And it didn’t according to this news, this news article, it said that Josh described a special unit for dangerous inmates at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center as, quote unquote, New York City’s very own Auschwitz and quote unquote, something that only the SS could come up with in references to the notorious Nazi death camp and Adolf Hitler’s army, which murdered 6 million Jews in during World War Two.

00:27:54:46 – 00:28:15:30
Keith
During the 29 minute speech at a sentencing hearing in Manhattan federal court. I got to pause there. I imagine his attorney the whole time was like, Shut the fuck up. Sit down, sit down. What are you doing? Stop. Shut up stop. And Joshua just kept going on and was like, Yeah, yeah. And you are Nazis. And his attorney is like, my God, you’re going to get a bad sentence.

00:28:15:30 – 00:28:40:52
Keith
You’re going to get a bad sentence. And they probably thought it was life when he was talking and and it didn’t. You heard. It didn’t. Well, we’ll talk about that in a minute. But to continue on with this article, it says Joshua also read a quote aloud from famed South African activist and politician Nelson Mandela about the perils of solitary confinement and claimed that he was forced to live in a, quote unquote, torture cage. Oh man.

00:28:40:52 – 00:28:41:42
Keith
The news article says

00:28:41:42 – 00:29:07:25
Keith
but at no point in this half hour, hour long address did Joshua take responsibility for the crimes he was convicted of, which was brazenly leaking government secrets to the website WikiLeaks to settle a petty office score and storing more than 3000 videos of child porn on his computer. So either one of those. Joshua, you’re you’re a douche buddy.

00:29:07:30 – 00:29:25:19
Keith
You take either one of those crimes and it’s like your life’s over. And so they said the judge was quoted as saying, I am blown away by Joshua’s complete lack of remorse before he announced his sentence.

00:29:25:19 – 00:29:35:24
Keith
And he goes on to say that Joshua, comparing the conditions at Brooklyn lockup and defense attorneys, they say, Yeah, it is poor, it is poor.

00:29:35:29 – 00:29:59:56
Keith
But the judge said to compare that to the third Reich was taking things a bit too far. And yes, yes, I would say a very large portion of the population would say that was that was too large of a comparison for your case, Joshua. The judge says to compare yourself to victims of Nazis is offensive.

00:29:59:56 – 00:30:06:44
Keith
So then the judge goes away, and I’m reading this article, I’m like, okay, all right, he’s going to come back with life, or at least like 80 years.

00:30:06:44 – 00:30:30:14
Keith
All right. Maybe just give him a little sliver of his life. Judge comes back and goes haha… 40 years. And I was like 40 years? 40 years for child. 40 years would have been all right for child porn alone. But it was 40 years for child porn and the classified stuff combined. So he got away with a lot of egregious stuff for, in my opinion, only 40 years.

00:30:30:19 – 00:30:53:27
Keith
And he will be on a term of supervised release of life, which, thank God because when he’s unfortunately let out in 40 years and going back probably to find child porn, at least we can monitor him for the rest of his life and hopefully catch him again. And hopefully he won’t be in for 40 years. He’ll be in for longer next time.

00:30:53:32 – 00:31:19:04
Keith
Now he has all the usual supervised release conditions. I’m just going to summarize for you. Okay. This I’m just paraphrasing, hold on a second here. Joshua, no kids, okay? You’re not allowed around kids. You had child porn. No kids at all. In fact, here’s another condition. No porn, No porn at all. No adult porn. Nothing. No porn at all.

00:31:19:08 – 00:31:34:44
Keith
And I thought right there, you’re going to break this, Joshua, because this is the first one you broke. I know you broke this one earlier. This is what put you back in jail. And the court goes on and says, you can not, you can’t use computers anymore for any type of fun. Okay, We took away your porn. Any other fun?

00:31:34:44 – 00:31:53:09
Keith
Just take that away, too. You only can use computers to maybe do your taxes. You know, fuck that too. You. You’re going to do your taxes. You’re going to do your taxes on paper the hard way. You can only use computers to register for the sexual registry, the sexual offender registry. That’s the only reason why you can use a computer.

00:31:53:09 – 00:32:13:37
Keith
You can go online and register. That’s it. That’s it. I’m sure it went something like that. And then they went on and they they label a ton of counseling that he has to take. Just a ton. And I hope he takes it while incarcerated and well, if he’s let out. That’s it, my folks. That’s the end of the case.

00:32:13:47 – 00:32:33:35
Keith
Okay. So some final thoughts here. Final thoughts? Okay. Child porn. My God. I did not see that coming. I read this. I read this. I was like, classified, classified, classified child porn. Where did that come from? And it ended up being a very large part of this case. And I think the investigators probably felt the same way.

00:32:33:35 – 00:33:01:51
Keith
They were looking for classified stuff then they went, oh god, child porn and kind of like Al Capone who got charged with tax evasion, they were like child porn is important too my friends. Let’s charge him with that. So they added that to all the classification charges and, you know, they just went to town and you saw they went to town because Joshua represented himself in the lion’s share of the court process, which was a bad idea.

00:33:01:56 – 00:33:26:26
Keith
This is generally a bad idea for anybody ever. Okay. Just just don’t. You saw there was one spot where he was like, I want to make a motion on my bail. And then the other people were like you just published classified material accidentally or maybe on purpose in your motion. And Joshua was like heh heh fuck! Right? I mean, that’s what happens when you don’t hire a lawyer.

00:33:26:26 – 00:33:49:08
Keith
That that’s the type of thing that happens. This case had a 1129 court documents when I researched it. Oh by God. So I looked at well over 100 documents, well over 100 documents in here, and I read well over 100 arguments from beginning to end.

00:33:49:08 – 00:33:51:01
Keith
So I hope you appreciate the detail I put in.

00:33:51:06 – 00:34:07:52
Keith
I know if you if you follow this case, it’s a popular case. If you follow this case and you’re like, why didn’t he talk about this other thing or talk about that other thing? Time. Okay. I try not to make these things too long because I try to make them into bites so you can listen them one week and they take me a lot of time to produce.

00:34:07:52 – 00:34:34:25
Keith
So I tried to only give you the important stuff here. And to me it was the the child porn and the classified stuff and the relevant maybe funny or aspects of those of him reusing his password and them being able to break in. You know, I, I find it almost humorous that somebody in cybersecurity wrote down his passwords and investigators could just use that to break in.

00:34:34:30 – 00:35:03:08
Keith
Okay. So the sentence the sentence didn’t sit right with me. I have friends that work in a classified environment. And if they were put in jeopardy because of this dude. And then I heard this dude only got 40 years. I would feel pretty not okay about that. So this felt really light to me. Yeah, I know it might be heavy for maybe not production of child porn, but having child porn 40 years is a lot.

00:35:03:12 – 00:35:32:06
Keith
But 40 years when you add child porn to the classified, that feels really light. I mean, it feels like he should have been well over 60. At least that’s my opinion. This last this last point is also my opinion, which is my impression is this guy is a douche all around. Just a douche from reading what he wrote when he represented himself in the court documents to him thinking he wanted to represent himself.

00:35:32:06 – 00:36:03:05
Keith
Usually that’s a very douchey move to just everything. He just seemed like he was a douche. And maybe that that alone should warrant this guy to have a longer sentence. If you, if you didn’t care about anything else I said, just remember he was a douche. And that should have given him more than 40 years. Right? So with that, please, like, follow, thumbs up, subscribe, whatever it is on your app that you’re watching me on. That positive affirmation, that puts this video in front of other people.

00:36:03:05 – 00:36:22:11
Keith
And I know you might not think it even just one like that one like where you don’t have to spend any money, just clicking it probably will boost this video up 100 viewers easily. Easily. It happened last week when I mentioned this. I saw more likes on it and immediately my videos took off and it amazed me. And I have to thank you for that.

00:36:22:25 – 00:36:43:36
Keith
Thank you so much for doing it. So if there’s anything you want to do, please like, subscribe, and follow. And if there’s anything extra, show a friend that you think might like true crime where the guy’s obviously not that serious. You know, I talk about the real aspects of the case, but the conversations I make funny and stuff like that. If you think they might like this, feel free to

00:36:43:39 – 00:37:04:18
Keith
put this in front of them. Hopefully they’ll like it too. And they could join us every week on one of these episodes that we’ve been doing. So with that, I’m not even going to give you a preview next week. And if you’re like, God, I really like those previews. The reason why is because I did it a couple weeks ago and I couldn’t cover the case and I’ve been still feeling rotten about it and I don’t want to do that again.

00:37:04:23 – 00:37:24:11
Keith
So I’m going to keep it to myself, but I’m going to guarantee you that every case, every week is going to be as cool and as fun, hopefully, as the case that we do this week. Even when it has child porn I try to skirt around the issue of it being child porn and just talk about the fact that it was another crime in the case, and it affected him.

00:37:24:16 – 00:37:30:46
Keith
So I hope you come back next week and we’ll pick up a new case and we’ll see you then. Thanks. Bye.

00:37:30:46 – 00:37:40:46