Ex-CIA coder behind WikiLeaks ‘Vault 7’ cache found guilty of espionage | Hacker News Reader

Ex-CIA coder behind WikiLeaks ‘Vault 7’ cache found guilty of espionage

courthousenews.com

102 pointsjaboutboul74 comments

A recent deep dive into this case from The New Yorker:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/13/the-surreal-ca...

We all knew they were doing it, this leaker's only crime is discrediting the agencies convenient brushoff where they'd label everyone a "conspiracy theorist" for even considering they have these capacities.

"Spooks in my wires?! It's more likely than you think!"

If you're going to illegally leak sensitive information, give it to journalists, not WikiLeaks.

Good journalists know how to balance public safety and public interest, and have the resources to redact dangerous information. WikiLeaks is much more anarchic and leans heavily towards total disclosure.

Caveat emptor leaking anything to “journalists”

Caveat narrator. Alternatively, caveat proditor.

It's not like casual secrets are usually leaked.

Trust doesn't mean blindness. If I agree to conceal your secrets and then you tell me you are doing unspeakable acts against me and the rest of the country, why the fuck wouldn't I out you?

All of this trust, honor, integrity humdrum only makes sense when it's reciprocated. These principles are predicated on bidirectionality but for some reason, macho nationalists love to act like these principles are some one-sided blood pact, made in a sacrificial fashion by "real" men.

These agents are able to keep their mouths shut while their soul withers to dust. It's clearly not out of strength, more out of cowardice, ingroup identification, and learned psychopathy.

Lame! Fuck the spooks and the skunks they rode in on!

Then there's the case of Reality Winner and the Intercept's bungling:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Winner

That despite the EFF's technologist Micah Lee being on the Intercept's staff. (Lee was not consulted in managing the documents.)

The ICIJ seem to have robust practices and a proven track record. I'm aware of their handling multiple leaks and not compromising any sources.

https://www.icij.org/

Total disclosure when it happens to favor Russian interests. Not otherwise.

https://www.vox.com/world/2017/1/6/14179240/wikileaks-russia...

Wikileaks was leaking before vox had any readers to shill

Most of their leaks are bipartisan

They were bipartisan until they weren't.

Real journalists defined by the media cartel or government entities?

The leaker!

Ah yes. Journalists who definitely aren't going to be subjects of the illegal domestic surveillance which is exists precisely for the purpose of doing things like stopping journalists from doing their jobs.

Back when the main leaks happened, most real journalists were not able to use encryption, which would be a risk for the leaker. Snowden had to teach Greenwald encryption first. Newspapers only started to publish their public keys afterwards.

> give it to journalists, not WikiLeaks.

This is utter agitprop nonsense. Do you work in the defense industry?

Wikileaks have been a lot more responsible with their reporting than the so-called journalists you revere.

I find True Scotsman to be an unhealthy outlook on the universe.

It's crazy how much power government bureaucrats have. They can instantly ruin someone's life if they want to. They're unelected and leech off of the taxpayer as well. Our government should be run like a public, for-profit corporation, with each taxpayer as shareholder.

The government is not a corporation. It most certainly should not be driven by profit. It exists to deliver value and do things that no private corporation would do, and to be a check on corporate power.

> It most certainly should not be driven by profit.

Stop right there, because it currently is.

Where do we go from here, is the question?

Ah yes, the super profitable US government that still finds itself trillions of dollars in debt

> Ah yes, the super profitable US government that still finds itself trillions of dollars in debt

Can't believe I have to spell this out, but am happy to — it's the individuals making it up who are benefitting...obviously the organization has not been benefiting/improving from good leadership for some time.

Because large private corporations are well known for never ruining an individual's life. This is satire, right?

yes because corporates are pillars of freedom, security and honesty right?

They can go out of business at least and not be a burden to the public anymore. I think the point of the comment was there would be some accountability being for-profit or at least a metric that the bureaucracy is performing correctly. I dont agree with this notion but I wont resort to attacking him like a rabid dog for suggesting such a thing like all the responses seem to do.

Yeah I get this notion too.

Given the relative difference in size and complexity of structure, there is a vast power imbalance between the state and the citizen. There needs to be much more accountability.

agreed, but mega corps aren't really the peak of accountability. i'd argue that a panchayat (local self govt in India) is far more accountable and transparent (tho still far from perfect, and having real problems too) than amazon.

People calling out the poster for presenting an ill thought out, old and long debunked idea is "attacking like a rabid dog"?

not if they are a monopoly. that only leads to crap service. the state-company will be a monopoly. what's the guarantee that a state-company won't instantly ban all competition in every industry? oh they will be elected you say? guess who's making the voting machines.

It's honestly mad that people still believe governments should be run like for-profit corporations. Like, properly insane.

They find divisions between us that won't be reconciled, then tell us they'll deal with the people we don't like. Democracy has pathologies that people don't appreciate, especially at a national level.

Genius! I wonder how that would look....

Perhaps we should model it after insurance companies. Those guys are great at ruining peoples lives on a whim. And no one has ever once complained about insurance paperwork (at least in your fantasy land this is true i bet).

Or maybe we should model it after agricultural giants. Monsanto would be a good model, they've never done anything to hurt millions of people nor have they ever converided up any evidence that they intentionally ignored the issues their products could cause.

Perhaps you're thinking more in the tech space - this is HN after all. Facebook could serve as inspiration - the idea that they would push propaganda and surveil you in ways that the government wouldn't even think of is just nonsense right?

To prevent leeching we could hire the best hedge fund managers like bernie madoff and the best financial architects out there - accenture (formerly arthur anderson).

Point being, structuring things like a corporation does exactly what? Sure accuse me of cherry-picking but I have backups and backup-backup examples for each one I've named.

So anyway - for your amazing idea, please tell me how:

* this company would make money?

* one share per person == one vote per person, so how does that change things?

* do you handle citizenship changes? A buyback?

* do you handle new people being born? Dilute my shares?

* does this reduce absurd policies from idiots at the top?

thats why I often say real democracy and republics stop existing shortly after creation.

They always descend into some sort of plutocracy where you can buy politicians loyalty or a dictatorship.

for example: america - plutocracy, russia - dictatorship

Half way thru the article I feel confused. How can hi-grade IT specialist make so many ridiculous mistakes building up his own safety measures? I mean, when you put your bluetooth pin-pass on a sticker at home is one thing, but when you deal with THIS - ... hardly believable.

Coincidentally had child porn on his machine.

The go to ‘sprinkle some crack on em’ tool in the alphabet toolbox.

He had state secrets on his machine.. why would they need to do this or what would they gain from doing this?

Makes him look really scummy?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32090407

Impeaching the witness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witness_impeachment

IANAL, but I don't think they can introduce child pornography charge in the espionage trial--they severed the two trials, and the ex-CIA coder hasn't yet been convicted of child pornography (it's the later trial), so it doesn't fall under the "Prior Conviction" umbrella.

Fair point. There are other potential prosecutorial benefits.

There's still the court-of-public-opinion element. Such a charge might give allies / witnesses for the defence pause to come forward.

Facing multiple independent counts also increases pressure, costs, and distracts attention for the defendant against any one case. Given the defendant here is representing himself, that may be a major hurdle. (Last sentence here is a stealth edit FYI.)

Whether the CP charges are justified or strategic I really can't say. The practice of digging up additional dirt on defendants in specific instances is a venerable tradition however.

How would they know he had state secrets on his computer? And how could they convince a judge they knew he had those secrets without admitting to illegal activities themselves?

he leaked them. he had to have them for him to leak them. if you're asking how they know he was the leak, idk

>he had to have them for him to leak them

A smart leaker would then delete them and destroy any disk they touched.

Even if they knew he leaked them, there's no guarantee he would have them on his machine. Which would be another reason to ‘sprinkle some crack on em,' that way he would still be punished if he was prepared.

> A smart leaker would then delete them and destroy any disk they touched.

And the prosecutors will put them back. Just like police inserts a small package in your backpocket when they arrest you.

>Which would be another reason to ‘sprinkle some crack on em,'

I would assume they would know by doing a standard legal investigation where they get a warrant from the judge and look. I don't know what evidence they gave in the warrant application in this case but usually they have to be more than a blind shot in the dark request.

Thinking they ran an aboveboard investigation of the person they think leaked their surveillance tools is optimistic. Given what I've read about the CIA at that time plotting the assassination of Assange, I don't share your trust.

It's a tradition at those 3 letter agencies. They know that some people love wistleblowers and they want to discredit them. Just look at wikipedia pages of those wistleblowers or spies.

If there was such a tool, why wasn't it used for others like Chelsea Manning?

Not every leak and leaker is the same. If a tool/procedure like that existed, it would probably be used on people who could generate positive public perception of their actions.

Apparently the "vault 7" leak was centered around how devices were hacked to spy on private citizens and consumers. The public has a soft spot for people who leak things that expose direct invasions of privacy. Chelsea Manning on the other hand leaked documents that I don't believe would influence public opinion of them very easily (diplomatic cables and different military things).

If you were going to break the law (planting evidence) to smear the character of someone, smear the person who has a higher chance of the public siding with.

then why wouldn't they have used it against Edward Snowden? he revealed a whole mass surveillance operation, along with misconduct by NSA agents, and there was a lot of popular support for him.

I still agree they could have smeared him, but I don't think it's improbable that the porn was actually his. Pedophiles are skilled at opsec, keeping secrets and doing unsavory things, so their background suits working in IC if they can conceal their behavior. And if discovered by a foreign intelligence agency, they'd be easy to extort into spying.

Vault 7 released a fair bit of code, didn't it? It would benefit state adversaries to leak that publicly, by burning exploits the CIA's using.

How would it work with Snowden? "Yknow the guy who flew to Hong Kong and stated he deleted all his data? Turns out he still had one computer he forgot that just so happens to be jam packed with illegal porn."

Much easier to trap him in Russia and claim he's a foreign agent.

Because that dirty tricks team was busy with Assange

Her court martialing could already happen without anything else needed, and was enough to get her up to 90 years in prison, of which she got a 35 year sentence.

It was; they got the word "rape" printed next to Assange's name in hundreds of headlines despite the women involved saying that they were railroaded by police and that no rape occurred.

Character assassination is a common tool in the CIA toolbox.

Living by the sword could result in dying thereby.

I think all the comments miss that this comment is said as a joke. I don't think OP is meant that they literally did that - it would be a particularly dumb law enforcement move that would jeopardize the entire case.

Plenty of people believe the government literally does that all the time, as a matter of routine.

What word causes the ultimate form of cognitive dissonance in males?

ASD love doing that too. I think they got it from the Americans.

Have we ever seen proof that any intelligence agency has done something like this in the modern era?.

I have no written proof to offer.

This one is very hard to believe. A guy who worked on advanced hacking tools and was able to get out that much data without trace does not know how to use encrypted hidden volumes nor shred his hard drives?

Maybe he did. Maybe he wasn't able to shred in time.

Easy for me to believe. Highly intelligent and skilled people are often also very arrogant and think they can't get caught. Or, they have blind spots. Or, they just get careless about certain things.

Edward Snowden was the exception, not the rule.

Leakers tend to be optimists and idealists. But it’s cynics and misanthropes who are the best at opsec.

This leaker wasn't motivated by idealism, he was just a dickhead trying to get back at his employer.

I don’t find that extremely surprising. The Catholic Church scandals have shown that child sexual abuse is much more widespread than anyone would like to think, and with all of the teenagers out there taking nude pictures there could easily be underage porn out there that people don’t even know is illicit. Between intentional and unintentional possession there is probably a significant percentage of the population who they could get on this charge.

The article says he felt slighted by the CIA. What was the reason? Did he not get a promotion?

1 guy, 34 terabytes of data?

Why can't these super ninja CIA hackers click on FileVault on their mac book pro?

The jury should have been asking exactly that. Obviously the guy could. And just as obviously, this CIA unit was fully equipped to make it look like he failed to. It was their everyday job. None of their "evidence" passes the smell test.

The child porn thing is an obvious extortion tactic: plead guilty to this or we'll try you for that!

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