|  In this week’s issue, the staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe tells the story of Joshua Schulte, a former C.I.A. hacker who has been accused of the largest leak in the agency’s history. I caught up with Keefe to talk about his reporting. In one sentence, how would you describe Joshua Schulte (whom you called King Josh, taking his own cue, on Twitter)? Josh Schulte was a coder in a Top Secret hacking unit of the C.I.A., but he was a difficult employee who got into an escalating series of quarrels with his colleagues, and who now stands accused of the ultimate act of revenge: leaking the agency’s hacking arsenal to WikiLeaks. C.I.A. workers exchanged passwords, shared sensitive details on Post-it notes, and even used weak passwords like “123ABCdef.” Why do you think these experienced coders had such poor operational security? This really blew me away—the extent to which these C.I.A. hackers disregarded the most elemental information-security protocols, the sorts of things that the rest of us are inundated with in mandatory online trainings. Clearly, some of it was just sloppiness, but I suspect that there was an arrogance, too, a sense that these guys (and it was mostly guys) were so good at devising offensive cyber capabilities that defense was for the civilian world, something they didn’t really need to bother with. What was the strangest or most disturbing detail you came across? One of the big questions I had was: How could this person have gotten hired in the first place? Normally, the government performs a background investigation before granting someone a Top Secret clearance, but when I started tracking down people who had known Schulte as a teen-ager, they had stories about him drawing swastikas at school and engaging in highly inappropriate sexual antagonization of female classmates. This pattern of antisocial, abusive behavior started early, and wasn’t much of a secret in Lubbock, Texas, where he grew up; it made me wonder if the agency didn’t know (which would be disturbing), or knew and chose to overlook it (which would be more disturbing). Read the full interview for what to expect at Schulte’s new trial, which is scheduled to begin on June 13th. | 
No comments:
Post a Comment