A former CIA officer has been sentenced to 40 years in prison for leaking a trove of classified hacking tools to whistle-blowing platform Wikileaks.
Joshua Schulte was also found guilty of possessing child abuse images.
Prosecutors have accused him of leaking the CIA’s “Vault 7” tools, which allow intelligence officers to hack smartphones and use them as listening devices.
They said the leak is one of the most “brazen” in US history.
Schulte, 35, shared some 8,761 documents to Wikileaks in 2017, amounting to the largest data breach in the history of the CIA, the US justice department said.
He denied the allegations, but was convicted on the various counts at three separate federal trials in New York in 2020, 2022, and 2023.
On Thursday, he was sentenced for charges of espionage, computer hacking, contempt of court, making false statements to the FBI and possession of child abuse images.
