[FoxNews] Prosecutors described the leak as the biggest theft of classified information in CIA history.
A former CIA software engineer was sentenced on Wednesday to 40 years in prison for leaking a trove of classified files to Wikileaks in what prosecutors described as the biggest theft of classified information in CIA history.
Joshua Schulte, 35, was also convicted for possession of child sexual abuse images and videos with prosecutors labeling him as a "traitor and predator."
The bulk of the sentence imposed on Schulte in Manhattan federal court came for an embarrassing public release of a trove of CIA secrets by WikiLeaks in 2017.
The so-called Vault 7 leak revealed how the CIA hacked Apple and Android smartphones in overseas spying operations, and efforts to turn internet-connected televisions into listening devices. Prior to his arrest, Schulte had helped create the hacking tools as a coder at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, prosecutors said.
Schulte transmitted the stolen CIA files to WikiLeaks, using anonymizing tools recommended by WikiLeaks to potential leakers, such as the Tails operating system and the Tor browser.
On March 7, 2017, WikiLeaks began publishing classified data from the "Stolen CIA Files." Between March and November 2017, there were a total of 26 disclosures of classified data from the Stolen CIA Files that WikiLeaks denominated as Vault 7 and Vault 8.
The WikiLeaks disclosures were one of the largest unauthorized disclosures of classified information in the history of the U.S. and profoundly damaged the CIA’s ability to collect foreign intelligence against America’s adversaries, the Department of Justice said. The leaks also placed CIA personnel, programs, and assets directly at risk and cost the CIA hundreds of millions of dollars, the department said.
"Joshua Schulte betrayed his country by committing some of the most brazen, heinous crimes of espionage in American history," U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said:
"He caused untold damage to our national security in his quest for revenge against the CIA for its response to Schulte’s security breaches while employed there. When the FBI caught him, Schulte doubled down and tried to cause even more harm to this nation by waging what he described as an ‘information war’ of publishing top secret information from behind bars."
Last fall, he was convicted in the case over the child sexual abuse images, which originated when a computer that Schulte possessed after he left the CIA and moved to New York from Virginia was found to contain the images and videos that he had downloaded from the internet from 2009 to March 2017.
On the desktop computer, FBI agents found layers of encryption hiding tens of thousands of videos and images of child sexual abuse materials, including approximately 3,400 images and videos of disturbing and "horrific child pornography" including the rape and sexual abuse of children as young as two years old, as well as images of bestiality and sadomasochism.
"Schulte collected thousands upon thousands of videos and images of children being subjected to sickening abuse for his own personal gratification," Williams said.
"The outstanding investigative work of the FBI and the career prosecutors in this office unmasked Schulte for the traitor and predator that he is and made sure that he will spend 40 years behind bars – right where he belongs."
Prosecutors alleged Schulte was motivated to orchestrate the leaks because he believed the CIA had disrespected him by ignoring his complaints about the work environment. Therefore, he tried "to burn to the ground" the very work he had helped the agency to create, they said.
While behind bars awaiting trial, prosecutors said he continued his crimes by trying to leak additional classified materials as he carried on an "information war" against the government.
A mistrial was declared at Schulte’s original 2020 trial after jurors were deadlocked on the most serious counts, including illegal gathering and transmission of national defense information.
Schulte has been held behind bars without bail since 2018. In 2021, he complained in court papers that he was a victim of cruel and unusual punishment, awaiting two trials in solitary confinement inside a vermin-infested cell of a jail unit where inmates are treated like "caged animals."
[NY Post] Too bad, they didn't seem like normal MSM biased dreck
Money-bleeding start-up The Messenger
...meant to be a center-right offering in a mainly far-left news landscape...
— the news site that launched to great fanfare last May — shut down after less than a year in "the Titanic of publishing disasters."
The startup was scrubbed of all articles Wednesday evening, hours after an insider at the publication told The Post "The site will go dark."
None of the roughly 300 staffers will get severance, the source added.
The site’s homepage was blank aside from the message info@themessenger.com
A rep for The Messenger did not comment.
Co-founder and CEO Jimmy Finkelstein, who raised $50 million to launch the site, paid top dollar to lure away talent from major publications — including The Post, Politico and NBC News — and paid the site’s editor Dan Wakeford around $900,000, sources said.
"What ultimately killed The Messenger was lack of message — and arrogance," the industry source said. "Hundreds of people left great jobs with the promise of creating something better — which turned out to be a big lie."
Another insider merely added: "It’s shocking how bad Jimmy handled this."
In the last few days, Finkelstein had been trying to lock down a funding deal, telling The Post on Tuesday that staff would learn of their fate in the next 48 hours.
Earlier this month, a group of conservative media and business executives led by Omeed Malik, a financier who backed Tucker Carlson’s new media venture, had reportedly proposed $30 million for a 51% stake in the news site, putting its valuation at $60 million.
#2
There's still a stupid amount of money sloshing around in support of garbage "news outlets" on the internet.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
02/02/2024 7:30 Comments ||
Top||
#3
The main problem with the business of news is that the employees all seem to feel that they deserve 6 figures.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
02/02/2024 8:52 Comments ||
Top||
#4
Given that it was to be a telecommunications and not print operation, why in the hell did they set up in any major city when anyplace with communications broadband would suffice. Just another grift by 'in players'.
[Hot Air] The news coming out of China’s economy continues to be a very mixed bag. Officially the country met its 5% growth target last year, but Evergrande is on the verge of liquidation, the stock market is down, foreign investment is down and the PMI numbers for January also show factory activity is still contracting.
China’s manufacturing activity contracted for the fourth straight month in January, an official factory survey showed on Wednesday, suggesting the sprawling sector was struggling to regain momentum at the start of 2024.
The official purchasing managers’ index (PMI) rose to 49.2 in January from 49.0 in December, below the 50-mark separating growth from contraction and was in line with a median forecast of 49.2 in a Reuters poll.
So what do you do if you’re a one-party state and the news has a negative edge? You censor it of course. That’s precisely what China has been doing.
[Breitbart] The Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Wednesday announced they were able to disrupt a massive Chinese cyber-espionage campaign called Volt Typhoon that penetrated critical American infrastructure systems.
Volt Typhoon was detected and made public by Microsoft’s cybersecurity team in May 2023. Microsoft described the perpetrators as state-sponsored hackers from China who were developing “capabilities that could disrupt critical communications infrastructure between the United States and Asia region during future crises.”
Microsoft’s conclusions were backed by the intelligence agencies of the “Five Eyes” alliance: the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. China denied the allegations and accused the Five Eyes nations of pushing “disinformation.”
Volt Typhoon’s activities were originally thought to be centered on Guam, with the goal of disrupting American network communications across the Pacific in the event of a conflict with China, such as China might cause by invading Taiwan. Further investigation showed the scope of the operation was much greater, with targets including West Coast ports, oil pipelines, and the power grid of Texas.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said in December that China was clearly “pre-positioning” cyber warfare assets to “disrupt or destroy that critical infrastructure in the event of a conflict, to either prevent the United States from being able to project power into Asia or to cause societal chaos inside the United States.”
Volt Typhoon was cited by cybersecurity experts as one of the biggest, most dangerous examples of “living off the land,” a technique in which hackers infiltrate a system without causing any damage or revealing their presence, using tools that mimic normal network activity. As DHS put it, the Chinese operation was all about scouting ahead and preparing for destructive attacks that could be triggered if the U.S. and China came into conflict.
DOJ said on Wednesday that the U.S. and its allies have stepped up their efforts against threats like Volt Typhoon, and that particular threat has been “disrupted” by purging its malicious software from hundreds of routers. U.S. officials remained certain that Chinese state-sponsored hackers were responsible for the intrusions.
Sean Newell, deputy chief of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, explained that Volt Typhoon’s hackers created a “botnet” hidden inside network routers that concealed their other hacking activities. The compromised routers, which were mostly older Cisco and Netgear models nearing the end of their operational lifespans, allowed the hackers to work in secret, without security programs detecting their unusual network traffic.
FBI Director Christopher Wray told the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party that the nearly-obsolete routers were “easy targets” for the hackers, whose activities targeted water, power, oil, and transportation systems.
Wray said the FBI also believes China will try to interfere in the 2024 elections, as it did in Taiwan’s recent presidential race. He pointed to the tremendous amount of information Chinese applications like TikTok collect about their users as potential espionage weapons since the Chinese military apparatus is legally guaranteed at-will access to all data compiled by Chinese corporations.
“Today, and literally every day, they’re actively attacking our economic security, engaging in wholesale theft of our innovation, and our personal and corporate data,” said Wray.
CISA Director Jen Easterly warned that China’s hackers have grown very adept at lurking undetected inside computer systems.
“They’ve elevated their ability to act like a system administrator so you really can’t tell that’s a Chinese actor,” Easterly said.
Security Week reported some concerns in the cybersecurity community that Volt Typhoon might not be completely “disrupted,” because it was able to penetrate “thousands of organizations,” but the FBI’s court orders covered only hundreds of infected routers.
The FBI essentially managed to find a way to order the malware in the infected routers to delete itself, without damaging the routers or the systems that relied upon them. The owners of those routers do not appear to have been warned in advance, but the FBI said it is attempting to notify all of them now and provide some security advice.
Some hardware experts said the routers may not be completely purged of Volt Typhoon’s influence, so it would be safest to replace them all, as quickly as possible.
CISA issued a bulletin to router manufacturers this week that explained how Volt Typhoon was able to hijack their hardware. CISA and the FBI asked manufacturers to eliminate the vulnerabilities that were exploited by the Chinese hacking group and “build security into the design, development, and maintenance” of their products. Among the suggestions included in the bulletin was programming routers to download software updates automatically, and making it harder to disable network security remotely.
[Jpost] The NCMEC has not yet published the total number of child abuse content reports from all sources that it received in 2023, but in 2022 it received reports of about 88.3 million files.
The US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) said it had received 4,700 reports last year about content generated by artificial intelligence that depicted child sexual exploitation.
The NCMEC told Reuters the figure reflected a nascent problem that is expected to grow as AI technology advances.
In recent months, child safety experts and researchers have raised the alarm about the risk that generative AI tech, which can create text and images in response to prompts, could exacerbate online exploitation.
INCREASING CHILD EXPLOITATIVE MATERIAL
The NCMEC has not yet published the total number of child abuse content reports from all sources that it received in 2023, but in 2022 it received reports of about 88.3 million files.
"We are receiving reports from the generative AI companies themselves, (online) platforms and members of the public. It's absolutely happening," said John Shehan, senior vice president at NCMEC, which serves as the national clearinghouse to report child abuse content to law enforcement.
The chief executives of Meta Platforms, X, TikTok, Snap and Discord testified in a Senate hearing on Wednesday about online child safety, where lawmakers questioned the social media and messaging companies about their efforts to protect children from online predators.
Researchers at Stanford Internet Observatory said in a report in June that generative AI could be used by abusers to repeatedly harm real children by creating new images that match a child's likeness.
Not nearly as harmful as repeatedly doing whatever-it-was to the actual child.
Content flagged as AI-generated is becoming "more and more photo-realistic," making it challenging to determine if the victim is a real person, said Fallon McNulty, director of NCMEC's CyberTipline, which receives reports of online child exploitation.
OpenAI, creator of the popular ChatGPT, has set up a process to send reports to NCMEC, and the organization is in conversations with other generative AI companies, McNulty said.
Von der Leyen said a proposal 'to work on reducing these administrative burdens' would be presented at an upcoming meeting of EU ministers A stall, not a cave. Keep protesting, guys.
Announcement follow days of protesting by farmers who are angry over excessive costs, climate policies and EU bureaucracy
Outside, furious farmers threw manure and flaming missiles at riot cops, as shops in Belgium admitted they may soon have empty shelves due to the protests
Convoys with hundreds of angry agricultural workers driving heavy-duty tractors blockaded the HQ, hell-bent on having their complaints heard by the bloc's leaders
[FirearmsNews] The Mountain Outfitters Pyro-15 is a real-deal flamethrower that ships to your front door in 48 of the 50 states. It's portable, easy to use and a lot of fun!
[The Hill] In a shocking reversal, the National Toxicology Program (NTP) of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences has quietly disclosed that it will stop studying the biological or environmental impacts of cell phone radiofrequency radiation.
This decision comes despite results from the program’s carefully engineered and reviewed decade-long $30 million animal studies that found cancer, heart damage and DNA damage associated with exposure to cell phone radiofrequency radiation at levels comparable to those experienced by Americans today.
The sudden end of civilian government efforts to study potential health impacts of wireless radiation constitutes a glaring abdication of responsibility. In contrast, the U.S. Department of Defense continues to study this problem. Those you wish to destroy must first be made crazy have their brains destroyed.
The European Union is providing multi-million dollar grants for multidisciplinary studies. The French government regularly monitors towers and phones and has recalled millions of phones for excessive radiation or other concerns, reflecting public concerns about both psychological and physiological impacts. In 2019, French Minsters passed an order ensuring phones had consumer information that included that teenagers and pregnant women avoid exposing their abdomens to wireless radiating devices.
Just last year, the NTP declared on its 2023 fact sheet that it would perform follow-up studies to better understand the effects found in the long term animal studies. So what happened? At this juncture, it is unclear. Have the follow-up studies been completed already? Working with Swiss national engineering and U.S. government experts, the NTP had devised small-scale systems for exposing animals experimentally to controlled levels of wireless radiation. Yet results from these exposure systems have neither been publicly shared nor published.
[BBC] There is a growing understanding of how microsleeps affect our daily lives, from intruding into mundane everyday tasks to putting lives at risk in certain situations, such as driving a car. More than once I've been found napping over a keyboard with a F-U forehead indention.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[The Hill] In a shocking reversal, the National Toxicology Program (NTP) of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences has quietly disclosed that it will stop studying the biological or environmental impacts of cell phone radiofrequency radiation.
