Wikileaks 'Vault 7' leak suspect named - but charged with harbouring images of child abuse

Former CIA and NSA staffer Joshua Schulte cited as suspect in Vault 7 leak of US secret services' hacking tools to Wikileaks

A man suspected of being behind the Vault 7 leak of US security services' hacking tools has been named - but the suspect, Joshua Adam Schulte, has been charged instead with harbouring as many as 10,000 images of child abuse on his PC.

The images were found following a raid on the home of the 29-year-old IT specialist in connection with the Vault 7 leaks, according to the Washington Post, based on the transcript of a hearing in January that has only just been unearthed.

Schulte has pleaded not guilty to the charges of possessing, receiving and transporting images of child abuse, according to his indictment in September, and is currently being held in a jail in New York, pending his trial.

Transcripts of the hearing directly reference the FBI investigation into the Vault 7 leaks: "In March of 2017, there was the WikiLeaks leak, where 8,000 CIA documents were leaked on the Internet. The FBI believed that Mr. Schulte was involved in that leak.

"As part of their investigation, they obtained numerous search warrants for Mr. Schulte's phone, for his computers, and other items, in order to establish the connection between Mr. Schulte and the WikiLeaks leak."

The Washington Post reports that while Schulte's home was searched and PCs, notebooks and other materials seized, they failed to make a strong enough connection with Vault 7 - but claim to have found incriminating evidence that he had images of child abuse on his PC.

The investigators claim that Schulte operated a server containing 54 gigabytes of child abuse images. His lawyers claim that he operated a public server and had no knowledge of its content.

However, prosecutors suggested in the hearing that they were unable to present the evidence to the court because, while they had decrypted his hard-disk drives, they were unable to separate the child abuse images from the Vault 7 documents, and therefore required security clearance before the hearing could continue.

In addition, part of the case against Schulte, who has worked for both the CIA and US National Security Agency, according to his LinkedIn profile, is that he used Tor for "transmitting classified information" while on bail.

The hearing transcript continues: "Even more troubling, which wasn't really addressed by defence counsel, is that the defendant or someone in his apartment was using Tor in his apartment during the time when he was on pre-trial release, and this is extremely troubling to the government because Tor is a way to establish anonymous connections to various internet locations to hide the person who is actually accessing those sites.

"It's used to access child pornography. It's also used to access web sites where you don't want to leave a trail. And since the defendant brought it up, I think it's particularly relevant given the other investigation which continues to be ongoing with respect to this defendant."

The implication of the Tor claims is that Schulte would only have used it if he had something to hide.

Tor enables users to communicate anonymously over the internet over a series of encrypted links. Critically, the IP address of the sender and recipient are not both in clear text at any hop between the two so that eavesdroppers cannot identify both ends if packets are intercepted. Tor is also necessary to access hidden services on the internet, many of which are of dubious legality.

However, it can also be used to access websites anonymously, preventing companies like Google, Facebook and other major online advertising companies from identify individuals.