> Mr. Schulte wasn't charged immediately, and in conversations with authorities he denied leaking classified information. But by early April he faced a different legal peril: while searching Mr. Schulte's devices, agents found evidence of child pornography, opening up a new line of investigation. Mr. Schulte was arrested in August 2017 on federal child-pornography charges.
Abusing children is evil, fullstop. That said the current laws around CP are horrifically ripe for abuse by the sate.
FBI agents got a "covert search warrant", entered his house without him knowing, then magically find unencrypted CP on his drives. This is the same agency that can interview you, not record it, write up their version of your "interview" as a "form 302", then later charge you for lying to them if anything in their written version of your testimony is later shown to be false (no intent required on your part, if you said it rained last tuesday and it didn't you are guilty of lying to federal agents). No one should trust anyone with that kind of power, and you'd be naive to suggest such power has never been abused.
You hear a loud bang and see a car speeding away. Later on, from your window, you see that police have arrived and are investigating. Would you go and offer the info, what car, maybe number, at what hour.
Or lawyer up first, because where I live, finding a lawyer is not a common thing to do.
This is why if forced to speak to federal agents, it is often recommended qualify every response to any question you are asked with, "to the best of my knowledge" or similar qualifiers.
From a prominent legal blog:
'"A statement made to the “best knowledge” of a person does not mean that the person asserts the truth or accuracy of the statement or that the statement is based on that individual’s personal knowledge.'
Similar to undergoing an investigation for SF-86 process all questions are asked "To the best of your knowledge..." leaving you room to make accidental mistakes without incriminating yourself.
>no intent required on your part, if you said it rained last tuesday and it didn't you are guilty of lying to federal agents)
While I completely agree that "lying to a federal agent" is a charge that is open to abuse, it's worth noting that the lie needs to be material in order for a crime to have been committed.
While that's a great point and a likely defense, the play is more often than not to charge you with lying (and scare you with the max jail time threat) to then coerce you to be an informant or work with them in some other way.
> here was no chance whatsoever that your denial — whether it was a panic-induced brain fart, or a failure of memory, or a lie — could have misled or deterred the FBI in its investigation for even a moment. But that doesn't matter. Though materiality is an element of Section 1001, it's a weak, diluted type of materiality. Statements to the government are deemed material if they are the sort of statements that have the capacity to influence it. Courts have come very close to creating a presumption of materiality by reasoning that if the information were not material the government would not have asked for it and you wouldn't have offered it.
Would you not still have the right to a lawyer who would probably record the same conversation?
Don't talk to any law enforcement without a lawyer. No matter how innocent you think you are. You may be the only suspect and any answer could be misconstrued against you. Sometimes it's not even personal or intentional.
No lawyer is going to encourage you to talk to the FBI without, at a minimum, very thorough review of the facts and coaching on how to speak in the arcane legal style that avoids accidental lies. And even that is risky, so it's much better to just not talk to the FBI.
Indeed, I would say let the lawyer do all the talking and only say whatever they say is fine to say, nothing more, nothing less. Become a puppet to your lawyer. At least this seems to be the case of what I've learned from that one law professor who says don't talk to cops.
The point of the parent's comment was to sarcastically note that agents can plant CP and people like you will simply assume that the accusation is correct. It very well may not be. We simply don't know.
That may be true, but how many lay people selected for jury duty know that? Also how many are going to believe a defendant where a lawyer says it's not illegal? They don't care if it's legal or not. They think it's abhorrent and will sentence you to a fate you now how to spend YEARS to get through the supreme court...again!
You can be charged for possession of child porn for pictures of yourself, and be charged as an adult for it (even though you're a minor as far as the images are concerned). The rules are overly broad to give the courts/cops the ability to stop the bad guys. The problem comes in when, in many cases, they're using those powers in a way that makes _them_ the bad guys; but then it's too late.
It means if the arresting officer or prosecutor thinks you have CP, you will be charged with CP possession and perpwalked into the courtroom as a likely child molester in the eyes of the public. It will take an expensive trial to exonerate you if all you have is a Japanese erotic manga involving 100-year-old vampires who look six. But in the eyes of the public, accusation is guilt when it comes to serious sex crimes. So, good luck finding a job.
But, in this case, you have to remember that the FBI is perhaps one of the world's largest possessors and distributors of CP. For purposes of law enforcement, of course. And they have a way of "discovering" CP on the hard drives of espionage suspects at risk of exposing how the national-security sausage gets made...
They could certainly bring the charges. It'd probably get tossed by a court. Whether it's the first court or the supreme court is the million dollar question.
It would get tossed immediately. That's like saying that because someone developed the internet, they're responsible for making it easier to distribute CP. Also it's like saying because you are a gun manufacturer, you're responsible for murder deaths with firearms. Or a rope manufacturer is responsible for suicides.
Why? How is an ML model different from an encrypted or encoded or phitoshoppes CP image? It comes down to whether the jurists decide that your data was built from CP content.
While personally I do find it a tad creepy, I'd 100% rather pervs draw it than actually exploit children. It's a solution that too many right wing morons would never be satisfied with.
For example: There was one guy that the jury was going to convict him for possession of CP, because he had videos of an adult actress that was asian and had small breasts, and so people believed her to be a child...
The only reason he was not convicted, is that when internet found out about it, they got in touch with the actress, that then personally went to the guy trial, and personally handed to the judge her ID and her studio documents, to prove she was adult when she made the movies.
EDIT: if someone remembers the name of the actress in question, please post it, I can't remember it and for some reason I am not finding it either... Juts so people know I am not inventing things.
> Maybe it’s whatever archive.to and similar sites do that Cloudflare hates?
What do you mean? archive.is blocks DNS requests from Cloudflare servers because they don't include the end user's IP range in the request using an optional DNS extension. They do answer such DNS requests coming from others.
We are always surprised by unbelievably convenient coincidences favoring whoever has the ability to cause them.
It's astonishing that, during the vetting process and over the course of his employment, his alleged sexual preferences were never a cause for concern. These people can't keep secrets from their employers because any secret they keep is a possible liability.
The thing that makes me believe that the evidence was planted is because is such an easy thing to do and it does a lot more damage, if there were some financial transcation then there would be some more evidence to corroborate it, if it was some objects or property again there would be a lot more things to corroborate, with porn you just plant a file or a stick and then the you show the jury some disturbing image and you are done, you destroyed the person, lazy and efficient.
The article does not mention it and I would like to know if it is know if this was some files on his laptop, or was in his browser cache or browser history or an USB stick
Ironically, it's the sort of tampering that more "privacy violation" by third-parties could help protect people against. Storing your behavior in the clutches of multiple competing firms with multiple conflicting interests can make it easier to protect one against an attack on reputation that involves modifying one data store.
"Your honor, the prosecution claims my client had CP on his hard drive, yet it does not appear in either his Apple backups nor his Google Drive synchronization images..."
It does not have to be like that, you should be able to find traces in recent played videos opened files, what is ironic is that you have a high visibility person like Epstein that FBI is incompetent to catch for years but for some reasons the people they have reasons to find something the evidence just appears... it just feels this laws are not used to protect children/teens but to punish the ones the government doesn't like.
Possible alternate explanation: Epstein had the resources to pay people to obfuscate the trail of any investigators trying to dig up dirt on him, and $J_RANDOM_CIA_STAFFER does not.
Given the national security aspect of this case you might be right, but in general a lot of dirty details about the hows and wheres of CP cases comes out eventually in court filings.
You don't think it defies logic that a SOFTWARE ENGINEER who works for the CIA, would leave such an obvious trail to a horrific crime on his home computer?
This person has intelligence, technical acumen, and is immersed in secrecy and privacy at an extreme level on a daily basis.
Maybe people are just dumber than we want to credit them for. But I don't think its "conspiracy theory" to find this indecent strange.
> You don't think it defies logic that a SOFTWARE ENGINEER who works for the CIA, would leave such an obvious trail to a horrific crime on his home computer?
The history of people being arrested for crime suggests no. People who are incredibly savvy in one field have been incredibly stupid in what should have been a very-closely-related field.
Entirely too many politicians who know how much people talk have had their careers tarnished by unpopular sexual trysts, for example.
It just feels like from reading the news, that to be an illegal hacker it's almost a requirement to have tons of child porn on your personal computers.
You're assuming CIA software engineers are good at their jobs, and that engineers have opsec skills
Those are two big assumptions.
HN is usually pretty logical, so I find it odd that people are jumping to conclusions here.
Jumping from "the CIA is all elite software engineers" to "CIA engineers must have extraordinary opsec" to "if unencrypted evidence was found, the most likely explanation is it was planted" requires several wild leaps.
Maybe the same sort of person who blows up their life by leaking classified information and does it in a manner sloppy enough to at least be accused of the crime is also careless to not properly cover up other crimes?
Also, clandestine service and analyst roles are two very different roles housed under the same agency. Not everyone in the CIA is in clandestine service. (In fact it's my understanding the vast majority are not)
I have no idea if this person is guilty, that's what a trial is for. But I'm not going to say the presence of evidence is evidence of innocence - that seems like extremely flimsy, circular logic.
Then again, I've never held a clearance or worked a government job - this is all just my own analysis based on open source information, so take what I say with a grain of salt :)
This person went through one of the most demanding interviewing process on the planet and has passed probably more than one interrogation without anyone suspecting he was a paedophile.
I'm really not sure which possible assertions is more disturbing: that the FBI would frame him or that the CIA may be full of paedophiles.
> I feel like that by default would just mean everything involving anyone with any power
Precisely. We give them the power to search our houses and take away our freedom because we trust them to do The Right Thing. When this trust is broken, we are in a very bad place.
See my child comment for a more in depth response, but to your point I believe it is naive to assume intelligence agencies would not weaponize something as powerful as a CP accusation.
Why would they need to do such a thing. The defendant broke his agreement with the CIA and the Federal Government by leaking classified information. It honestly seems incredibly stupid to falsify evidence that could torpedo an entire case....
In general or this case? In general: Because it's incredibly powerful. In this case? See below.
>The defendant broke his agreement with the CIA and the Federal Government by leaking classified information.
This has yet to be proven, and the defendant claims he is innocent. An alleged leaker claiming his innocence possessing unencrypted CP is incredibly convenient for the CIA. Almost too convenient.
>falsify evidence that could torpedo an entire case
Why when the risk to the gov is basically 0%. You run a kit to plant the files and metadata. The files are then "extracted" by a forensic tool, the "evidence" is now bulletproof. The only person who could conceivably challenge such a move would be a very wealthy person who knew they were innocent and chose to hire expert witnesses to analyze the planted data to prove it was faked. Even then... good luck.
I think it is illogical to assume that it happened in any / every given case with no evidence.
I would think that just given time someone has falsified such a thing before, I don't by into the idea that it makes sense to make that assumption for any or every given case.
Not every case. Nobody assumes a conspiracy when your neighbor down the road gets brought up on possession of such material. Despite easily having the power to, there's no motive for the federal government to go around framing random individuals of sex crimes.
But a whistleblower? A thorn in the intelligence agencies' side who has exposed them and attracted their ire? You'd be a credulous fool to take that story at face value. The IC has a long and documented history of flouting norms like honesty and integrity. These are institutions whose entire purpose is to use deceptive, extra-legal methods to focus the power of government against anybody who poses a threat to it.
It would obviously be better if the original article had itself examined the glaring motives. But since we can not rely on mass media to actually do critical reporting, it's good for someone else to say it. When convenient narratives are repeated without questioning, it warps people's perspectives.
It's pretty well established that people federal law enforcement wants gone are allegedly pedophiles or otherwise abusing children at an exceptionally high rate compared to the general population. In the absence of other information some skepticism is warranted.
HN is passing the Eternal September threshold; this is a standard pattern with any open-subscription message board as T approaches infinity.
I'm old enough to remember transitioning my interaction from /. to HN to get more professional discussion of industry topics. That was a long time ago, and there's no reason to assume most of /. hasn't followed me here by now.
Edit: for those downvoting me, I'd appreciate a clarification on whether I was "off-topic," "troll," "flamebait," or something else; this is not the granularity of feedback to which I am accustom. ;)
Interestingly, now that most of the chaff has abandoned /. it has somewhat returned to its original flavor, albeit a bit tainted. I'll not likely return simply because the conversation is a bit more grown-up here and I prefer the uncluttered presentation. But it's better now than it was at its worst.
Way back in the day I always felt the /. community was a bit shrill... to the point of absurdity when it came to the topic of Open Source and such. Hopefully they've mellowed a bit.
I never felt like Slashdot, Dig, or Reddit expected the same amount of depth / thoughtfulness.
Like when I ask a question here I'm not inundated by "I just read wikipedia and i'm here to splain it to you!" folks (I did too man .. that's not my question) and the expected depth on HN was / sometimes is fairly comprehensive. Also a lot less meme level type blogsmap nad links to folks who have blogs that actually know something.
For me that was fairly unique to HN, at least as far as programming type stuff goes. Slasdhot, dig, reddit, always kinda spammy / shallow.
The guy had multiple layers of plausible deniability encryption for a creepily categorized collection of CP. Investigators were able to see it when he unlocked his cellphone which held relevant stored passwords.
As to why this happens more often than you might expect, it's because people that share classified info are all around bad. It's surprisingly uncommon that they are being blackmailed cause of the CP for example.
Also this was very young children being abused, horrible indefensible stuff.
> it's because people that share classified info are all around bad
Now this statement requires some serious proof. Most of the high profile whistle-blowers have been heroes standing up against the odds to at least let everyone of us know what the state is doing.
Camping people like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden 'all around bad' is shameful.
I just ran the first page of results for Obama site:tass.com OR site:rt.com OR site:sputnik.com through NLTK and the propaganda (your word) is both 20% less neutral and 20% more polarizing than the same for Trump (Trump result is the same as Manning OR Snowden too).
The fact that people can be used for propaganda says nothing about them. I'd also mention that Russia Today has some serious journalism interspersed with more problematic content, but I'm sure you'd decide I'm a Russian spy or something if I say that.
Monday, June 18, 2018 > SCHULTE was previously arrested on August 24, 2017, on charges relating to his receipt, possession, and transportation of approximately ten thousand images and videos of child pornography. In March 2017, members of the FBI had searched SCHULTE’s residence in New York, New York, pursuant to a search warrant and recovered, among other things, multiple computers, servers, and other portable electronic storage devices, including Schulte’s personal desktop computer (the “Personal Computer”). On the Personal Computer, FBI agents found an encrypted container (the “Encrypted Container”), which held over 10,000 images and videos of child pornography. The Encrypted Container with the child pornography files was identified by FBI computer scientists beneath three layers of password protection on the Personal Computer. Each layer, including the Encrypted Container, was unlocked using passwords previously used by SCHULTE on one of his cellphones. Moreover, FBI agents identified Internet chat logs in which SCHULTE and others discussed their receipt and distribution of child pornography. FBI agents also identified a series of Google searches conducted by SCHULTE in which he searched the Internet for child pornography.
So a CIA software engineer who was smart enough to use multiple layers of Vera/Truecrypt was dumb enough to google CP on clearnet and keep the passwords to a 10,000+ pic CP archive on his phone? What's more likely, that this guy is a colossal moron or the government is looking for a scapegoat?
Also LOL they charged him with copyright infringement (probably for some torrented movies on his hard drives), they really want to throw the book at this guy.
Isn’t it wryly hilarious that lots of CP clauses in laws, terms and agreements are used like some sort of one harmless OS bundled app, that every vuln PoC take advantages of in demos, completely irrelevant to the intended benefits of the ‘app’?
Like, hey, this type of content is less compatible with ads. Means sudo mark it CP. We don’t like this person have publicity here. Means hey mister CP.
Everyone’s only interested in CP and it’s disgusting and we gets to decide what’s CP, so what’s CP stands for? CP means CP of course!
Seems like this is a good time to ask the question: Why the heck would any (good) engineer work for the CIA?
EDIT: I realize now after re-reading this comment that it could definitely come off as very abrasive. I won't alter it so everyone can see the original. Sorry if I offended anyone, I purely meant it from the standpoint of an engineer who has control of their own career (and likely desires more money/status) and understands the kind of precedent this creates and what it means for preservation of self if one were to work in the CIA.
And what exactly is the “mission” here? Overthrowing democratically elected governments in other countries? Assassinating foreign agents? Starting coups in other parts of the world? Running global drug trafficking operations?
"Preempt threats and further US national security objectives by collecting intelligence that matters, producing objective all-source analysis, conducting effective covert action as directed by the President, and safeguarding the secrets that help keep our Nation safe."
I'm trying to be as non-judgemental as possible and could see that some people might find this mission compelling.
If you have to ask, then it is probably not your cup of tea.
Think of it like the guy in Firefly hunting down the Tam's. He is convinced he's doing work to create a paradise for everyone else, ostensibly in the hope said paradise will never have a need for someone like him.
People who engage with the apparatus do so because at some fundamental level, they have reason to believe the work has to be done, and many take on the responsibility of doing it to spare others of the burden of having to do so.
If you haven't lived or experienced something that's lit that spark, it generally means that someone else is hard at work trying to keep it that way. Some people never experience it, and most of the ones who have had that spark lit that I know tend to hope those around them never do. It changes you. Most I've talked to are non-committal as to whether the change was good or bad, but almost all felt it was their duty to step up.
Preempt threats and further US national security objectives by collecting intelligence that matters, producing objective all-source analysis, conducting effective covert action as directed by the President, and safeguarding the secrets that help keep our Nation safe.
Just curious, if these things were necessary to protect your freedom, your children’s freedom, and the future of world order, (hypothetically) would you be opposed to your government doing those things?
The only one of the four the GP listed that I could see as meeting your criteria is 'assassinating foreign agents'. And I would see the requirement to do that (to meet your criteria) as very, very rare.
Don't you know that all threats to individual freedom have been eradicated forevermore? Now the IC just runs around terrorizing innocent people for the fun of it. (Sarcasm, in case it isn't obvious).
To figure out why he did it is part of the Trial, isn't it? Maybe it's what you've just said, or maybe he did it for fame, maybe a 3rd party forced him, maybe he just had enough of it, etc..
Seriously? Being a cleared engineer, especially in the Washington DC area is a pretty decent career. Demand is pretty good these days with the current move from on prem facilities to the cloud as well...
Actually, I looked out of curiosity once, a while back and they have some moderately interesting work available which is more than I could say for a large swath of the jobs out there.
That being said, the pay was insulting for the skills desired and location (DC metro supposedly isn't cheap). I personally wouldnt work for the out of principle and probably wouldnt ever qualify (no degree, plus I have expressed views that would probably disqualify me anyway)
