this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2024
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Whether or not you think he should be jailed for leaking CIA secrets, the dude had child porn. He deserved a serious sentence because he expressed zero remorse for that. Along those lines he couldn’t even fucking pretend to have leaked the state secrets for any other reason than the CIA was a shitty place to work. You gotta play the fucking game if you’re gonna fuck with the government. You can’t just be a crusty old coder.
"Furman said Schulte continued his crimes from behind bars ... by creating a hidden file on his computer that contained 2,400 images of child sexual abuse that he continued to view from jail."
How do you get 2.4k images on a jail computer? Manifest it out of thin air?
Considering CIA is involved, which is known for torture, human experimentation, poisonings, planted evidence, etc. I'd not be too surprised if that file was straight up planted as an extra "fuck you" to the guy.
That was never part of his defense. Do you think the CIA colluded with him and his lawyer to accept responsibility for the material the CIA planted to sandbag his sentence? I feel like an innocent person would be screaming that. Hell, even possibly innocent/possibly guilty folks do.
Edit: here’s a quote about the material you’re defending:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/06/13/the-surreal-case-of-a-cia-hackers-revenge
The sentence previous to the one you're quoting, the one you've omitted, changes the context quite a lot.
In the US a person pending trial can be either released or kept detained. (18 U.S. Code § 3142 - Release or detention of a defendant pending trial) In cases when the defendant is being charged with non-violent crimes, it's fairly common for them to be released until their trial. Possibly on bond.
The wording of his statement is... questionable. But in this context, it could be re-worded to something like "you're are accusing me of possession of illegal material, which is not a violent crime. I was not involved in creation of said material, therefore there are no victims of mine".
Anyway, even if he did have the material in question, the fact that they report finding some on a jail computer is awful weird. Those aren't, exactly, known for having unrestricted and unmonitored access to the internet. I, also, would be surprised if those computers are less locked down than school or library computers, which tend to restrict users' permissions to the bare minimum, often as far as prohibiting creation of files.
Apologies. I copied the quote from his Wikipedia article. The other sentences I left out included him potentially assaulting a drunk roommate and the decade+ of evidence covering his interest in CSAM. That really changes your context quite a bit, no?
Still waiting for you to produce evidence of his defense about it all being the CIA. You’re really focused on the poor wording of a single news report covering his case and you’re missing the preponderance of evidence.
Edit: you really defended someone who claimed that CSAM was a victimless crime. What the fuck.
I merely pointed out that in the context, his statement was, most likely, not trying to claim that CSAM is a victimless crime, but that his alleged possession of it is.
Substitute CSAM for something like murder, for example: It's one thing to have a video of someone committing murder and a very different thing to commit murder yourself and record it. One is, obviously, a violent crime; the other, not so much. It's a similar argument here.
He might be 100% guilty, he might not be. I don't know for sure. What I do know for sure, is that CIA and other alphabet agencies have a history of being... less than honest and moral. So, I exercise caution and take their statements with a fair bit of skepticism. Pardon me of that doesn't come off as I intend it to.
CIA: "yeah let's put this 2.4k images of child porn at his computer and he will be fucked muahahahaha 😈😈"
Seems like something the CIA definitely would do.
Specially if someone leak their "precious secrets"
CIA can cobble together questionable evidence against an entire country, proving the US administration with more reasons to start a "preventive war". A war which would eventually end with "whoopsie-daisy, there are no WMDs after all".
Yet, planting evidence on a single guy who just leaked a whole bunch of their secrets? No, of course they'd never do anything questionable or immoral to him!
I think one of the things that inflate image counts like that is that if there is a video of child porn, each individual frame of the video is counted as a single image. If he downloaded a 40 second, 60 FPS video, that's 2.4k images right there.
This is why it's more interesting when they mention total size in gigabytes of whatever, because image data has a maximum compression size but "raw number of images" is completely made up and could be a single file even when in the tens ouf thousands (still bad of course but you get my point)
Holy shit, they really buried the lede with that headline. For sure, throw away the key.
I don't know about you guys, but I don't really trust the word of the CIA on those things. Or anything, really.