Her former IT C.I.A was found guilty by a New York court on Wednesday in his trial over the 2017 leak by the WikiLeaks website of cyber-espionage tools belonging to the US intelligence agency, which authorities had strongly condemned.
Joshua Solti, a 33-year-old developer, “was convicted of one of the most shameful and damaging actions espionage in American history,” New York U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a brief press release.
In 2016, while working for an elite group specializing in cyberespionage, Mr. Williams began amassing a collection he dubbed “Vault 7,” of hacking tools, malware, viruses, Trojan Horses…
WikiLeaks began publishing the 8,761 documents in March 2017, putting US intelligence in an extremely difficult position and giving professional and amateur hackers the same tools that US spies had at their disposal.
“The img wishes to start a public debate on the security, creation, use, spread and democratic control of these cyber weapons,” the WikiLeaks editorial team commented at the time.
Prosecutors, on the other hand, argued that Joshua Solti wanted to take revenge on the CIA, in whose directorate he accused him of not taking his side in conflicts he had with his colleagues.
After he began to feel “disgust” with the service, he began “secretly collecting these tools and sent them to WikiLeaks,” Attorney Williams noted, “knowing that the collateral damage of his revenge would pose a significant threat to national security.”
The young man, who immediately began to be suspected, was secretly charged in 2017 because a large collection of child pornography was found on his computers, as reported by Agence France-Presse and relayed by the Athens News Agency. His charges were later upgraded to theft and transfer of classified information under anti-espionage legislation.
In 2020, a jury had found him guilty of perjury, but failed to reach a verdict on the other charges and the proceedings were declared a mistrial.
After a new trial and four days of deliberations, a jury found him guilty Friday of eight counts of espionage and lying to FBI agents.
He will be sentenced later.
Source: News Beast
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