As the World Socialist Web Site explained at the time, the failure to convict Schulte of leaking the Vault 7 trove created a stumbling block for the US government in its attempt to extradite WikiLeaks founder and editor Julian Assange, who is currently being held in London’s Belmarsh Prison in violation of his rights. The federal case ended in a hung jury in early March on the most serious eight charges against Schulte and convicted him only on the lesser charges of contempt of court and making false statements to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
#Trove hacks tool trial#
Schulte pled not guilty to eleven charges covered by the US Espionage Act and went to trial in early February. The same limited version of the report had been introduced as evidence in the trial of Joshua Schulte, a former CIA employee who worked at CCI and has been accused of stealing the Vault 7 documents and handing them over to WikiLeaks. The task force report was initially provided to the Washington Post on Tuesday by the office of Democratic Party Senator from Oregon Ron Wyden, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who obtained the incomplete document-pages 15 through 44 have been removed-from the Justice Department.
The CIA report also says that WikiLeaks published primarily “user and training guides” from a collaboration and communication platform called Confluence along with “limited source code” from a repository called DevLan: Stash and that “All of the documents reveal, to varying degrees, CIA’s tradecraft in cyber operations.” Had the data been stolen for the benefit of a state adversary and not published, we might still be unaware of the loss-as would be true for the vast majority of data on Agency mission systems.” Significantly, the heavily redacted and partially released, “WikiLeaks Task Force Final Report” from Octosays, “Because the stolen data resided on a mission system that lacked user activity monitoring and a robust server audit capability, we did not realize the loss had occurred until a year later, when WikiLeaks publicly announced it in March 2017. Julian Assange speaking on the CIA Vault 7 data breach in March 2017 This is roughly equivalent to 11.6 million to 2.2 billion pages in Microsoft Word.” It was the largest unauthorized disclosure of classified information in the history of the CIA. The internal report says that the CIA could not determine the precise scope of the data breach, “We assess that in spring 2016 a CIA employee stole at least 180 gigabytes to as much as 34 terabytes of information. The hack obtained nearly the entire arsenal of espionage tools and the methods by which the CIA was conducting illegal electronic surveillance and cyber warfare around the world. Vault 7 is the name given to a trove of hacked documents from the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI) that were anonymously shared with WikiLeaks, which the online site began publishing information about on March 7, 2017. A newly-released 2017 internal review of security practices at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) confirms that the top secret agency had developed an arsenal of cyber espionage tools and would not have known about the massive “Vault 7” data hack of them had WikiLeaks not made it public.