Suspect in massive CIA leak on trial

Three years ago, WikiLeaks published thousands of pages of secret documents about how the CIA hacks into overseas targets, revealing its ability to compromise smartphones and turn certain televisions into listening devices.

The breach was the largest disclosure of classified CIA information in the spy agency’s history and caused “catastrophic” damage to national security, the government said.

This week, Joshua Schulte, a 31-year-old computer engineer who worked at the CIA, began trial in federal court in Manhattan to defend against charges that he was the leaker.

When the documents went public in March 2017, WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy organization, said in a statement that the source of the information wanted to raise “policy questions that need to be debated in public, including whether the CIA’s hacking capabilities exceeded its mandated powers.”

Prosecutors, however, say Schulte was a disgruntled CIA employee who stole the documents as retaliation because he felt management did not take his workplace complaints seriously. He quit the job in 2016, four months before the WikiLeaks disclosures.

“For the CIA, it was the ultimate act of betrayal from one of their own,” said David Denton Jr., an assistant U.S. attorney, in the government’s opening statement Tuesday.

The trial will delve into the CIA’s shadowy cyberoperations, as prosecutors seek to retrace the steps that they say Schulte took to extract the documents. Schulte worked in the CIA’s Engineering Development Group and designed hacking tools, including malware that targeted the computers of suspected terrorists.