Should've done what Snowden did. If you know what you're going to do, will lead to these consequences? Get the hell out of the country.
Because this is EXACTLY the kind of thing the American Government would've done to Snowden if he stayed. Snowden was right that he knew they wouldn't give him a fair trial.
It's been a minute since I've refreshed myself on the Snowden story, and I don't have time to go deep into that rabbit hole again, but if memory serves I believe he released non-redacted documents that exposed the positions/identities of deployed US assets, and some who were operating undercover had their identities blown.
He gave it to specific journalists with proven track records who concluded that the published info was in the public interest while running it by the government and redacting confidential identifying data.
Both of these are pretty typical of all the articles I have seen, which is the government claiming he did great harm, but no actual examples of getting anyone killed.
Yeah, that sound about right. I don't remember it ever being confirmed what, if anything, was actually compromised by the leaks. But I doubt that we'd ever get specific details on something like that from the government, anyway.
Though I imagine that a lot of ongoing operations at the time probably had to be cancelled prematurely, the consequences of which might never really be known.
Though I imagine that a lot of ongoing operations at the time probably had to be cancelled prematurely, the consequences of which might never really be known.
This is the fear that is always instilled in people whenever the government takes an L. I’m not saying it’s a false statement, but it’s also unsubstantiated.
That’s because they were spies. Spies aren’t typically talked about. SOME of the programs he detailed in those releases were within the scope of what he was trying to expose, but many were not. He dumped THOUSANDS of documents related to humint sources that absolutely got people killed, burned other active contacts / projects and cost years worth of work. There was a huge shuffle of personnel after those leaks as intelligence agencies TRIED to get their people out, but there were a great number who couldn’t get out. Andrew Bustamante speaks about this, at some length, to just name the most well known talking head.
The majority of what he exposed had nothing to do with domestic surveillance programs, and the way he exposed that information was WILDLY irresponsible.
Yes, the illegal surveillance he exposed was a big deal, but again, was done in a really shitty way that compromised active investigations. He neglected to do anything through proper channels, and instead betrayed his country rather than try to fix the problems through whistle blower channels where he would have actually had legal and tangible protections. Dude was an actual shit bag and a Russian asset.
He neglected to do anything through proper channels, and instead betrayed his country rather than try to fix the problems through whistle blower channels where he would have actually had legal and tangible protections.
He neglected to do anything through proper channels, and instead betrayed his country rather than try to fix the problems through whistle blower channels where he would have actually had legal and tangible protections.
I'm not going to pretend he wasn't reckless as fuck but don't pretend for even a moment that "going through the proper channels" would have gotten him anything that even halfway resembled a fair trial.
Bro, by definition you’re not gonna get “evidence” of top secret programs and sources that were compromised. It just doesn’t even make sense to think you would.
If you look at the things that were happening overseas in the immediate aftermath of those releases, You’ll see what I’m talking about. As much as I’d love to spend a bunch of time digging up all that information again, as you can tell by the voting patterns here, people are clearly not interested in the facts or intelligent discourse so I’m not going to waste my time. You can easily look up the articles about how we and our allies were scrambling to recall people, and how people didn’t come home. You can dig up plenty of information from a whole host of analysts and security related personnel who aren’t affiliated with the government who can verify the carelessness of his disclosures and how they did more harm than good.
Yes, Patriot act was an absolute travesty and shouldn’t exist. Yes, the domestic programs Snowden exposed were illegal and needed to be stopped, but they also were widely misunderstood in their scope and danger to US citizens… In fact, they still exist to this day in more or less the same capacity for that reason.
No, he didn’t do it the right way, and I wish he had because he could have actually done good things instead of just serving his country’s enemies. The things he exposed in the US were pretty trivial, in the grand scheme of things, and were widely misunderstood. He could have shut those domestic programs down without compromising the foreign intelligence sources, but he chose not to. He was irresponsible, and flat out was not a good guy.
Bruh, stop pretending you care about something as people dying. There's no evidence to the contrary or anything. You're happily talking out of your ass to sound important. Kindly go fuck yourself.
If the gov didn’t want its secrets out in the open, they shouldn’t have been spying on their citizens. Maybe there would be less sympathy if the leaks didn’t bring to light the bombing of Bagdad full of civilians in the middle of the night and how the military hid it.
Maybe it was all for the money and Snowden is just a dick, but I’m glad he did it.
Several things can be true at once. We don’t have to be all-in on one side or the other of the Snowden affair. I’ve never understood why people seem so eager to pick a team on this issue.
I guess I see the leaks as a direct consequence to the action of various agencies and military, and I’m conflicting villainizing Snowden and villainizing the leaks themselves.
The government got caught red handed and I can’t really see myself being on any side other than the one directly opposite to them on the issue.
When he first leaked the information out, I really felt bad for the guy and I followed him pretty closely. He knowingly threw * his life away to let people know that X,Y and z were happening. But *as he started getting passed around slowly from journalist to journalist, They started asking him questions. It became more and more obvious that he was just some kind of average dude, that saw something wanted to say something and needed to make sure that he could cover his ass.
I honestly think that the US handled it poorly. *He was a whistleblower, guy cared, guy was in the public eye It had at least a decent trove of data.
They should have brought him back in, giving him some conditional amnesty and had him help them dismantle the leak as much as possible. Then they could have give him a cushy job gag ordered him and had him come out of the public eye immediately.
Once he was seeking asylum the only way he’s going to be able to pay for that asylum is with the information he pilfered. Once he is out in no man’s land and stuck, the decisions that he made are not all going to be his own. *There will even the ones that he will make in resentment.
I truly believe his initial act was absolutely made with good intentions, but he got trapped and was drawn down into things that were bigger than he was capable of sorting out.
In the end the US government allowed him to owe a debt to the Russian government. And that was never going to play out well.
Eh, even if he did get a fair trial, what he did was clearly illegal and was definitely going to land him in prison. It was the right thing to do, but unless you have full faith that you’re going to get a presidential pardon, you’re right that you should be prepared to leave the country and never come back.
Whistleblower laws need strengthening. Snowden’s leaks, for example, were clearly in the public interest and needed to be leaked. It’s an unjust country that can’t see that and spare him.
Whenever I see news like this it always hits me with a sense of a revenge story...
U.S. Gov institution: "You put egg on our face, we're gonna bury you." Then ad-hominem character take downs... "Well this guy is into kiddy porn, so anything he does is contemptible."
It works... "Hey did you hear the government was hacking our phones <again> and trying to spy on United States citizens using their flipping flat-screens?" .. "Oh, what is that the stuff the kiddy-porn guy supposed to have released? Let's talk about that instead."
So clicked around and was interested in some court transcripts of how it got to this point. What is now summarized as (from the AP article):
... convicted in the case over the child sexual abuse images... (on) a computer that Schulte possessed ... found to contain the images and videos that he had downloaded from the internet from 2009 to March 2017.
Where in this court transcript (page 17, line 13) his defense makes the point (that the prosecuting state attorney agrees with - page 29, line 7) that the questionable material was on a server in Schulte's possession. Not on his personal computer. Access was gained to the files from his computer but not residing on it, which sharply (for me) throws into question the assertion that he himself "has downloaded from the internet".
The govt prosecutor in that case ties the ability for an admin to access his client's hosted content as first-person possession and responsible creation. The judge and the defending attorney kind of make that observation but they don't know the lingo or how to frame it properly, and of course the prosecution isn't going to point out the tenuous ownership between a server admin and a possible user file.
In this document, the prosecutor also:
Points to some IRC chats where Sculte claims to having sex with high school girls.
*when he was 19 year old. (pg 28, ln 17)
Then the matter of Schulte having pics on his phone depicting hands taking advantage of a passed out ex-roommate (digitally, I believe - gross) in 2015 where the victim "believed that it could in fact be the bathroom" (pg 34 ln 11) that they shared with Schulte as being a roommate. Prosecution didn't apparently (at that time at least, maybe since - unsure) know if it was the actual bathroom of that residence - they didn't go to the residence and take pictures or anything and the victim doesn't remember that evening. Personally I think he is most likely responsible of this one, seems like a very specific thing to have picture of on your phone, but again unsure.
AP article says 6yrs 8mos of the verdict was for CSAM - the rest for the leak. Poor sod shoulda taking the 10yr plea deal they offered...
I would like to see what evidence of just the Vault 7 material was presented by prosecutors linking him to the leak that led to conviction, divorced of this other CSAM / assault noise - not that it is not important and doesn't require focus and justice rendered but I feel like it overshadows the case of "CIA theft".
Everyone acting like the CIA couldn’t have had leverage over that guy and made him admit to the cp charge . Unless i have some kind of proof i ain’t believing shit . And also if that is true indeed i think 40 years is fair enough for that charge alone . Or am i missing something ?
I wonder how many of the gaping security holes in softwares and systems he reported have since been patched that otherwise would have left to doors wide open for hackers?
As long as governments hoard security vulnerabilities, they are endangering security, safety, life and property of millions of people.
To prove the charges. There have been enough cases of “she looks too young to be 18” where they were, in fact, 18. This database (which I thought was actually run by the FBI, but whatever) let’s them show that the images were of Jane Roe, born May 5 1996, and the images/material were produced between 2008-2010.
IOW, to provide proof beyond a reasonable doubt that they were underage.
Whether or not you think he should be jailed for leaking CIA secrets, the dude had child porn. He deserved a serious sentence because he expressed zero remorse for that. Along those lines he couldn’t even fucking pretend to have leaked the state secrets for any other reason than the CIA was a shitty place to work. You gotta play the fucking game if you’re gonna fuck with the government. You can’t just be a crusty old coder.
"Furman said Schulte continued his crimes from behind bars ... by creating a hidden file on his computer that contained 2,400 images of child sexual abuse that he continued to view from jail."
How do you get 2.4k images on a jail computer? Manifest it out of thin air?
Considering CIA is involved, which is known for torture, human experimentation, poisonings, planted evidence, etc. I'd not be too surprised if that file was straight up planted as an extra "fuck you" to the guy.
I think one of the things that inflate image counts like that is that if there is a video of child porn, each individual frame of the video is counted as a single image. If he downloaded a 40 second, 60 FPS video, that’s 2.4k images right there.
This is why it’s more interesting when they mention total size in gigabytes of whatever, because image data has a maximum compression size but “raw number of images” is completely made up and could be a single file even when in the tens ouf thousands (still bad of course but you get my point)
That was never part of his defense. Do you think the CIA colluded with him and his lawyer to accept responsibility for the material the CIA planted to sandbag his sentence? I feel like an innocent person would be screaming that. Hell, even possibly innocent/possibly guilty folks do.
Edit: here’s a quote about the material you’re defending:
Schulte called the child pornography he was accused of possessing a “victimless crime”
The sentence previous to the one you're quoting, the one you've omitted, changes the context quite a lot.
When he heard that the government was pushing to keep him detained pending trial, his stomach dropped. “The crime I am charged with is in fact a non-violent, victimless crime,”
In the US a person pending trial can be either released or kept detained. (18 U.S. Code § 3142 - Release or detention of a defendant pending trial) In cases when the defendant is being charged with non-violent crimes, it's fairly common for them to be released until their trial. Possibly on bond.
The wording of his statement is... questionable. But in this context, it could be re-worded to something like "you're are accusing me of possession of illegal material, which is not a violent crime. I was not involved in creation of said material, therefore there are no victims of mine".
Anyway, even if he did have the material in question, the fact that they report finding some on a jail computer is awful weird. Those aren't, exactly, known for having unrestricted and unmonitored access to the internet. I, also, would be surprised if those computers are less locked down than school or library computers, which tend to restrict users' permissions to the bare minimum, often as far as prohibiting creation of files.
Apologies. I copied the quote from his Wikipedia article. The other sentences I left out included him potentially assaulting a drunk roommate and the decade+ of evidence covering his interest in CSAM. That really changes your context quite a bit, no?
Still waiting for you to produce evidence of his defense about it all being the CIA. You’re really focused on the poor wording of a single news report covering his case and you’re missing the preponderance of evidence.
Edit: you really defended someone who claimed that CSAM was a victimless crime. What the fuck.
I merely pointed out that in the context, his statement was, most likely, not trying to claim that CSAM is a victimless crime, but that his alleged possession of it is.
Substitute CSAM for something like murder, for example: It's one thing to have a video of someone committing murder and a very different thing to commit murder yourself and record it. One is, obviously, a violent crime; the other, not so much. It's a similar argument here.
He might be 100% guilty, he might not be. I don't know for sure. What I do know for sure, is that CIA and other alphabet agencies have a history of being... less than honest and moral. So, I exercise caution and take their statements with a fair bit of skepticism. Pardon me of that doesn't come off as I intend it to.
After thinking about it for a while, I think they actually have a reason to plant something like that, and it's not "muahahahaha 😈😈".
It's to turn general public against the guy. From the point of view of CIA, it wouldn't be a good thing if general public were to sympathize with someone, who just disclosed their methods of hacking and spying on people. Or for general public to think about who it is, exactly, CIA is hacking and spying on. So... They create a distraction. A reason for the public to hate guy and something to take the attention off the fact that they still keep hacking and spying on people.
For the record: I'm not claiming that this is what is going on here. This is pure speculation, so there is a really good chance that I am completely wrong.
CIA can cobble together questionable evidence against an entire country, proving the US administration with more reasons to start a "preventive war". A war which would eventually end with "whoopsie-daisy, there are no WMDs after all".
Yet, planting evidence on a single guy who just leaked a whole bunch of their secrets? No, of course they'd never do anything questionable or immoral to him!
What happened to the guy who staged a coup to overthrow the government? Remember where all those psychos with guns wailed on cops with flagpoles and shit on the walls and stuff, and that lady planted bombs by the RNC office? Remember that? What happened to that guy?
You were all in your fun circle pretending it was only Donald Trump doing Pedo activities.
Then you had to face the reality that both Democrats and Republicans are plenty on Epstein’s list that he made before he accidentally slipped on a banana peel in prison
Tune extent yes, but it also makes us all more secure. Even if you think our own government is doing a good job all the other governments have these holes too.
Disclosing found exploits allows developers to patch them out and improve security of everyone, which includes all the other alphabet boys and regular citizens.
There's no way to know that you're the only one who found any given exploit. Letting an exploit stay unpatched opens up an attack vector for everyone, not just you.
Disclosing found exploits to the development team is far different than exposing those exploits to unfriendly countries or in this case those that would expose state secrets.
Furman said Schulte continued his crimes from behind bars by trying to leak more classified materials and by creating a hidden file on his computer that contained 2,400 images of child sexual abuse that he continued to view from jail.
Holy crap, dude was even watching child porn in prison. Clearly the CIA is hiring the cream of the crop.
“We will likely never know the full extent of the damage, but I have no doubt it was massive,” Judge Jesse M. Furman said as he announced the sentence.
Schulte was responsible for “the most damaging disclosures of classified information in American history.”
Realistically, it’s doubtful anybody died directly because of that particular leak.
Probably the shutting down of the phone reading methods could eventually compromise operations. It probably cost them money and a great deal of time which could totally have an impact on somebody’s life. But that’s how espionage works.
I kind of get that you have to keep your secrets secret. And there need to be repercussions for leaking secrets. Especially trade secrets like this. If not for the CP stuff I would think 5 or 10 years would have been a more reasonable number.
But with the hole unapologetic CP thing. I’m not even sure 40 is enough.
Why should he go to trial? It’s not going to be a fair trial, and the people have a right to know that the US government is illegally surveilling them. If he truly did directly kill people as a result of his leak, there would already be preliminary evidence.
If they publicly released that his leak got someone in particular killed, they would be admitting publicly that the person killed was an agent. In most cases they would not want to tip their hand on that for fear of exposing other agents.
When people claim that leaks “get people killed,” they’re referring to when undercover agents are identified while they’re in the field. The only secrets exposed in these leaks are the computer hacking techniques used by the US to spy remotely through compromised devices.
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.
You could maybe say that closing off those surveillance channels prevented the CIA from learning about some attack, but that’s really tenuous. It also assumes that the CIA isn’t constantly developing new zero-day exploits so that they can continue to spy on just about everyone on the planet.
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