!clinklickers this one is really worth reading in full, but I'm going to clip the best bits for the tiktok-brained zoomers.

TL;DR - Dramatarded failson fumbles his way into a job at the CIA, eventually gets popped for sexual assault and CP but those are only his second or third most especially heinous crimes.

One of the Nerf gunfighters was Joshua Schulte—his real name. A skinny Texan in his twenties, he had a goatee and a shaved head. In what may have been a preëmptive gambit, Schulte gave himself the nickname Bad Butt, going so far as to make a fake nameplate and stick it on his cubicle.

(Side note: nothing could be more badass than clinging to your diereses 100 years after everyone else surrendered)

The group's ultimate manager was a more senior C.I.A. official, named Karen, who acknowledged that the members could get "boisterous," adding, "Folks could get a little loud, a little bit back and forth." Some O.S.B. guys brought Nerf guns to work—not mere pistols but big, colorful machine guns—and they would occasionally shoot darts at one another from their desks. Sometimes people got carried away, and work was paused for some sustained bombardment. But Silicon Valley was known for tricking out offices with foosball tables and climbing walls, and it's likely that the C.I.A. wanted to foster a loose culture on the hacking team, to help engineers remain innovative and, when necessary, blow off steam.

Literal in charge of nerf gun manchildren.

"This extraordinary collection . . . gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the C.I.A.," WikiLeaks announced. The leak dumped out the C.I.A.'s toolbox: the custom-made techniques that it had used to compromise Wi-Fi networks, Skype, antivirus software. It exposed Brutal Kangaroo and AngerQuake. It even exposed McNugget.

Not the tendies!!!

On a blog that he maintained in college, he espoused libertarian views. He was a devotee of Ayn Rand, and came to believe that, as he put it, "there is nothing evil about rational selfishness." He also had a certain intellectual arrogance. "Most Americans, most people in general, are idiots," he wrote in 2008.

"I don't want a 'Big Brother' constantly looking over my shoulder," Schulte once wrote, and his libertarianism might have seemed difficult to square with a career in intelligence. Kavi Patel, who knew Schulte in junior high and became close friends with him in high school, recalled, "He was always a huge Ron Paul guy," adding that Schulte was drawn to "the people who say the government is infringing on our rights." Nevertheless, according to Schulte's parents, his dream was to work for the government.

Most ideologically consistent Paultard.

Schulte proved to be a capable programmer, and in 2015 he was granted a special distinction when he was made a system administrator for the C.I.A.'s developer network, or DevLAN. Now he could control which employees had access to the network that held the source code for the group's many projects. Being a system administrator was regarded, Weber said, as "a privileged position."

It's always the fricking sysadmins. Snowden was a worthless server jannie, too. If the CIA wants to improve their secrecy, they should execute everyone on site with an opinion about cgroups. !codecels the BOFH is a cheeto-stained threat to national security.

Initially, people ribbed Amol because he behaved in a professional manner that was at odds with the prevailing frat-house vibe. Schulte liked to shoot Amol with his Nerf gun. As Amol grew more accustomed to the O.S.B.'s raucous culture, he started fighting back. He would collect Schulte's Nerf darts and stash them behind his desk. He began trolling others in the office, maligning their skills as coders and devising his own cruel nicknames. He referred to Schulte as Bald Butthole. Amol was heavy, and Schulte reciprocated by making fun of his weight. Their bickering intensified.

we have to be professional like bond james bond! We're real spies u guise!

In October, 2015, Amol complained to Sean, the hacking-unit supervisor. "I have had enough of Schulte and his childish behavior," he wrote. "Last night, he shot me in the face with his nerf gun and it could have easily hit me in the eye." Schulte also wrote to Sean, saying that Amol was "very derogatory and abusive to everyone." According to Schulte, Amol had told him, "I wish you were dead," "I want to piss on your grave," and "I wish you'd die in a fiery car crash."

what if a nerf dart poked me in the eye!? I didn't become a CIA agent to take these kinds of risks!

Unlike other prominent digital leakers, Schulte did not seem like an ideological whistle-blower. Ayn Rand fanboys are not exactly famous for their doctrinal consistency, and Schulte's concerns about "Big Brother" don't appear to have occasioned much soul-searching in the years he spent building surveillance weapons for a spy agency.

Jounro editorializing. But also

F.B.I. officials were so nervous about visiting the Web site using Bureau computers or Internet connections (thereby possibly exposing their own networks to a cyber intrusion) that they dispatched an agent to purchase a new laptop and visit the Web site from the safety of a Starbucks. Once the Vault 7 materials had been downloaded from the Internet, the laptop itself became officially classified, and had to be stored in a secure location. But the evidence locker normally used by agents, which held drugs and other seized evidence, wouldn't do, because it was classified only up to the Secret level. Instead, the investigators stored the laptop in a supervisor's office, in a special safe that had been certified to hold Top Secret documents—even though anyone could go to the Internet to see the materials that were on it.

lol @ fedcucks scared to visit a website

The F.B.I. seized his computer hardware, for forensic analysis. When computer scientists at the Bureau examined Schulte's desktop, they discovered a "virtual machine"—an entire operating system nested within the computer's standard operating system. The virtual machine was locked with strong encryption, meaning that, unless they could break the code or get the key from Schulte—both of which seemed unlikely—they couldn't access it. But they also had Schulte's cell phone, and when they checked it they discovered another startling lapse in operational security: he had stored a bunch of passwords on his phone.

this neighbor worked for the CIA...

One of the passwords let the investigators bypass the encryption on the virtual machine. Inside, they found a home directory—also encrypted. They consulted Schulte's phone again, and, sure enough, another stored password unlocked the directory. Next, they found an encrypted digital lockbox—a third line of defense. But, using encryption software and the same password that had unlocked the virtual machine, they managed to access the contents.

Good luck, I'm behind three proxies with the same password.

Inside was a series of folders. When the investigators opened them, they found an enormous trove of child pornography.

But, according to the F.B.I., as agents gathered more evidence they unearthed chat logs in which Schulte conversed about child pornography with fellow-enthusiasts. "Where does one get kiddie porn anyways?" Schulte asked, in a 2009 exchange. This was another instance in which Schulte seemed recklessly disinclined to cover his tracks. His Google search history revealed numerous queries about images of underage s*x. In the chat logs, people seeking or discussing child pornography tended to use pseudonyms. One person Schulte interacted with went by "hbp." Another went by "Sturm." Josh's username was "Josh." At one point, he volunteered to grant his new friends access to the child-porn archive on his server. He had titled it /home/josh/http/porn. Sturm, taken aback, warned Schulte to "rename these things for god's sake."

This neighbor worked for the C. I. A.

"How could you hire Josh Schulte?" she said when I spoke to her recently. "007 he's not." Schulte had always struck Covington as an "oddball," but mostly harmless. On Facebook, however, she started to hear from classmates who shared unpleasant memories of Schulte crossing boundaries and making others uncomfortable. Several former classmates recalled to me that Schulte was infamous for drawing swastikas in school, and that, on at least one occasion, he did so on the yearbook of a Jewish student.

Other classmates recalled sexually inappropriate behavior. One woman told me that he had repeatedly exposed his peepee to students when they were both in the junior-high band. "He would try and touch people, or get people to touch him—that was a daily occurrence," she said.

Schulte's friend Kavi Patel acknowledged that Schulte would "draw swastikas all over the place." He wasn't anti-Semitic, Patel contended; he just relished getting a rise out of people. He recalled Schulte telling him, "I don't really care one way or the other, but it's fun to see the shock on people's faces."

I told you he was a dramatard.

When F.B.I. investigators searched Schulte's phone, they found something especially alarming: a photograph that looked as though it had been taken inside the house in Sterling, Virginia, where he had lived while working for the C.I.A. The photograph was of a woman who looked like she was passed out on the bathroom floor. Her underwear appeared to have been removed and the hand of an unseen person was touching her genitals. State investigators in Loudoun County subsequently identified the woman and interviewed her. She has not been publicly named, but she told them that she had been Schulte's roommate and had passed out one night, with no memory of what had happened. The encounter in the photograph was not consensual, she assured them.

unable to resist the forbidden vagine !moidmoment

He was fascinated by the innovative ways that inmates gamed prison regulations, noticing that many people "claim to be Muslim or Jewish" because doing so entitled them to supposedly better food....

...In prolix memos, many of them handwritten, he has condemned the Justice Department, the C.I.A., the F.B.I., and the Bureau of Prisons. He refers to his cell as a "torture cage," and maintains that his living conditions are "below that of impoverished persons living in third world countries." One of his complaints is that the guards do not give him adequate bathroom breaks during the hours he spends preparing his case in the prison law library. And so, lately, Schulte has taken to urinating in the law library. He has also converted to Islam. When I mentioned this to Kavi Patel, he burst out laughing. "He's manipulative," Patel said. "I don't know how else to say it." One might question whether this conversion is simply a ploy to get better food. But many people discover faith behind bars, and Schulte recently observed a month of daytime fasting during Ramadan.

@MoonMetropolis is this legit? Why didn't you jihad out for that sweet halal grub? What about the library potty hack?

Astonishingly, it appears that Schulte may have even made contact with WikiLeaks during this period. In a Twitter post on June 19, 2018, WikiLeaks released seven installments of Schulte's prison writings, billing them as an account in which the "Alleged CIA #Vault7 whistleblower" would finally speak out in "his own words." Schulte seems to have envisaged these essays, which combined diaristic accounts of prison life with a broader critique of the criminal-justice system, as a sort of "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." He titled them "Presumption of Innocence." Perhaps WikiLeaks simply stumbled on the Facebook page where these essays appeared—or perhaps it was in touch with Schulte. If indeed Schulte managed to contact WikiLeaks from prison, he was adopting a curious strategy: it would be pathologically self-sabotaging to counter allegations that he had shared a set of documents with WikiLeaks by sharing another set of documents with WikiLeaks.

In one of these jailhouse meditations, Schulte wrote that, in prison, it is prudent not to discuss your case with anyone, because "people are vultures and will do anything to help their own situation"—including barter your information for a better deal. "Any scenario that encourages disloyalty, dissention, and 'snitching' is a powerful psychological tool," he warned. But Schulte may not have appreciated quite how true this was, because at a certain point his trusty lookout, Carlos Luna, informed prison authorities that Schulte had a cell phone.

When this news reached the F.B.I., officials panicked: if Schulte could surreptitiously make calls and access the Internet, there was a danger that he was continuing to leak. "There was a great deal of urgency to find the phone," one Bureau official later acknowledged. One day in October, 2018, no fewer than fifty agents descended on the Metropolitan Correctional Center, accompanied by a cell-phone-sniffing dog. After they recovered the device, investigators found that it was encrypted—but also that Schulte, true to form, had written the password down in one of his notebooks.

THIS NEIGHBOR WORKED FOR THE CIA.

The real outrage was that a crucial C.I.A. computer network, DevLAN, had been unprotected. Hundreds of people had access to DevLAN, including not just C.I.A. employees but contractors. The C.I.A.'s hackers appear to have disregarded even the kinds of elementary information-security protocols that any civilian worker bee can recite from mandatory corporate training. Coders exchanged passwords with one another, and sometimes shared sensitive details on Post-it notes. They used passwords that were laughably weak, including 123ABCdef.

On March 9th, they convicted Schulte of two lesser charges—contempt of court and lying to the F.B.I.—but hung on the eight more serious counts, including those accusing him of transmitting national-security secrets to WikiLeaks. Judge Crotty declared a mistrial.

The prosecution had clearly blundered by getting so mired in technical minutiae, and Shroff had ably defended her client.

Schulte currently resides at the Metropolitan Detention Center, in Brooklyn, where he has been preparing for his new trial. Most observers of the case agree that Schulte is fortunate to have a lawyer like Shroff, but he doesn't necessarily share this view; after the government announced that it would retry him, he dismissed her and opted to represent himself.

Archive link for poorcels @snallygaster sorry not sorry for reposting your shit