A former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) software engineer who was convicted for carrying out the largest theft of classified information in the agency’s history and of charges related to child abuse imagery was sentenced to 40 years in prison on Thursday.
The 40-year sentence by US district judge Jesse Furman was for “crimes of espionage, computer hacking, contempt of court, making false statements to the FBI, and child pornography”, federal prosecutors said in a statement. The judge did not impose a life sentence as sought by prosecutors.
Joshua Schulte was convicted in July 2022 on four counts each of espionage and computer hacking and one count of lying to FBI agents, after giving classified materials to the whistleblowing agency WikiLeaks in the so-called Vault 7 leak. Last August, a judge mostly upheld the conviction.
Yeah, sure, by all means – let’s do it. But only under the pretext that we can go further back in Russian history from the Circassian Genocide to the Red Terror to Ivan the Terrible and his Massacre of Novgorod, slavery in Russia, etc… There’s a lot more history to Russia than the United States, so I’m going to go out on a limb and say good luck with going down that rabbit hole as though it will benefit your position.
What I will say is that everything you mentioned I find reprehensible, too; but while I do believe the US has made clear progress since then and into the modern day, it seems quite evident that Russia is going the complete opposite direction and backpedaling as quickly as it can back to the USSR days.
I’d further bet money that if we polled a large swath of people, they would rather face a courtroom or imprisonment in the US than Russia. I know I would.