Joshua Adam Schulte was sentenced to 40 years in prison for leaking Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) secrets to WikiLeaks in 2017. The leaked information revealed the CIA's ability to access Android devices, OIS and TVs without the owner's knowledge for spying purposes.
He made the mistake while serving as a software engineer at the CIA by also overseeing the Devlan network that the agency used for software development. In addition to revealing the CIA's spying capabilities, Schulte also leaked various software used by the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence. At that time all the information was published by WikiLeaks as Vault 7 documents and was the biggest secret leak ever in CIA history.
He was detained at the airport while trying to flee to Mexico. He was found guilty of espionage, computer hacking, contempt of court, making false statements to the FBI and child pornography.
Schulte became the second individual to be sentenced to prison for disclosing documents to WikiLeaks. Before him, Chelsea Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison for exposing the US Army's war crimes in Iraq, leaking nearly 1 million documents about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables while serving as a military intelligence officer. He was however released when he received a pardon from President Obama after serving seven years in prison.