This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
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.
When you're going against the permanent state, there's no such thing as a fair trial.
Bro, Snowden literally got people killed. That guy isn't the hero people like to pretend he is.
What people did he get killed?
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.
You can't get more responsible than that.
You remember the government claiming it, but as far as I know they never released any actual statements that his leaks killed anyone.
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL2N1BR287/
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.
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 removedht 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.
People no like to think nuanced, simpler to think black or white.
Maybe, just maybe, if the government hadn’t been doing something worth whistleblowing about, those people would still be alive.
Evidence? I couldn't find anything that would indicate anyone died.
On the otherhand he did expose the government (NSA) spying program
Patriot Act was the worst thing to happen to America
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.
Being a spy is dangerous.
If you know what you're going to do, will lead to these consequences? Get the hell out of the country.
Pfft, I say this about every article about someone getting arrested for committing a major crime.
"Oh no I've murdered someone, let me just hide the body reallllly good and call it a day" LMAO
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.
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"
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/13/the-surreal-case-of-a-cia-hackers-revenge
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.
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)
CIA: "yeah let's put this 2.4k images of child porn at his computer and he will be fucked muahahahaha 😈😈"
Seems like something the CIA definitely would do.
Specially if someone leak their "precious secrets"
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!
Holy shit, they really buried the lede with that headline. For sure, throw away the key.
I don't know about you guys, but I don't really trust the word of the CIA on those things. Or anything, really.
Why does the CIA have a trove of child porn?
Leverage.
...
Drugs -> Money
Sex -> Control the Powerful
Plumbers protect the CIA.
They take the man's entire life away because he revealed us terrible things our non-elected leaders are doing to us. Who was hurt by his actions?
They take the man’s entire life away because he revealed us terrible things our non-elected leaders are doing to us.
And for possessing child porn...
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.
It wouldn't be far fetched that they put that themselves.
must be nice not having to understand things
“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.”
he got people killed, and you don't care
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.
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?
Oh nothing?
Oh.
Huh.
I wouldn’t say nothing, as he might become the next US president
(if the world is unlucky)
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.
NSA accidentally leaking eternal blue lol
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 ?
