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Ex-CIA computer engineer gets 40 years in prison for giving spy agency hacking secrets to WikiLeaks (apnews.com)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

The sentence previous to the one you're quoting, the one you've omitted, changes the context quite a lot.

When he heard that the government was pushing to keep him detained pending trial, his stomach dropped. “The crime I am charged with is in fact a non-violent, victimless crime,”

In the US a person pending trial can be either released or kept detained. (18 U.S. Code § 3142 - Release or detention of a defendant pending trial) In cases when the defendant is being charged with non-violent crimes, it's fairly common for them to be released until their trial. Possibly on bond.

The wording of his statement is... questionable. But in this context, it could be re-worded to something like "you're are accusing me of possession of illegal material, which is not a violent crime. I was not involved in creation of said material, therefore there are no victims of mine".

Anyway, even if he did have the material in question, the fact that they report finding some on a jail computer is awful weird. Those aren't, exactly, known for having unrestricted and unmonitored access to the internet. I, also, would be surprised if those computers are less locked down than school or library computers, which tend to restrict users' permissions to the bare minimum, often as far as prohibiting creation of files.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Apologies. I copied the quote from his Wikipedia article. The other sentences I left out included him potentially assaulting a drunk roommate and the decade+ of evidence covering his interest in CSAM. That really changes your context quite a bit, no?

Still waiting for you to produce evidence of his defense about it all being the CIA. You’re really focused on the poor wording of a single news report covering his case and you’re missing the preponderance of evidence.

Edit: you really defended someone who claimed that CSAM was a victimless crime. What the fuck.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago

I merely pointed out that in the context, his statement was, most likely, not trying to claim that CSAM is a victimless crime, but that his alleged possession of it is.

Substitute CSAM for something like murder, for example: It's one thing to have a video of someone committing murder and a very different thing to commit murder yourself and record it. One is, obviously, a violent crime; the other, not so much. It's a similar argument here.

He might be 100% guilty, he might not be. I don't know for sure. What I do know for sure, is that CIA and other alphabet agencies have a history of being... less than honest and moral. So, I exercise caution and take their statements with a fair bit of skepticism. Pardon me of that doesn't come off as I intend it to.