Federal prosecutors have charged a former CIA software engineer with stealing secret material from the agency and passing it along to "an organization that purports to publicly disseminate classified, sensitive, and confidential information."
The superseding indictment announced Monday details charges against Joshua Adam Schulte, 29, pertaining to the theft and transmission of national defense information to "Organization-1" — which, though it's never named in the indictment, is widely believed to refer to WikiLeaks.
Last year, WikiLeaks published thousands of documents outlining the CIA's methods of hacking into computers, phones and other devices that connect to the Internet, in the agency's efforts to spy overseas.
All told, Schulte faces 13 counts in the indictment announced Monday — including not only the theft and transmission of government information, but also separate counts relating to alleged child pornography, copyright infringement, lying to investigators and obstruction of justice.
If convicted of all of them, he faces the possibility of up to 135 years in prison.
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