I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist, but it seems awfully convenient that a guy that knows how to nuke his hard disk to protect himself from the CIA, only nukes the the hard disk he downloaded the WikiLeaks transfer program on, and then forgets to nuke the hard disk riddled with child porn.
I have to agree, with the usual caveats about anecdotal evidence, that it's awfully strange how often it seems that people accused of exfiltrating sensitive information are later discovered (I'm really tempted to write "discovered") to have child porn on their computers.
This is sorta what all the mass surveillance and tracking is about, or at least enables: To ruin the life of any potential dissident. If they can't dig up any dirt from your history, they'll inject it.
Isn't it a known CIA or FBI technique to imply people are "weird" in some fashion, so that the public doesn't look into cases too much. Like it used to be people accused by them were implied to be homosexual, transexual, furries, weird sex things, etc. Now it's child porn, so that no one would want to look into it too much or want to defend the accused person too much.
But has it ever been any different? Planting illegal items on people has always been a tactic that the law could use to ruin otherwise clean people they don't like. Talking about mass surveillance being the source of the problem kind of distracts from the fact that we need a solution to this form of abuse of power in general.
Part of the answer is probably constant counter-surveillance of law enforcement themselves (body cams, software logging, etc) stored in an immutable or at least tamper evident data store. Of course, you'd still have a "who watches the watchmen" problem.
To speak of conveniences and "cui bono?" instead of disinterested analysis of the evidence is to be a conspiracy theorist. Of course they conspire all day, because any covert action can be called a conspiracy. It doesn't necessarily lead one to think they're conspiracies in the sense of planting child pornography on a US citizen suspect's computer.
One can't rule anything out when you're dealing with intelligence agencies, but in this case, is there a single known instance of the US government ever doing such a thing? Planting child pornography on a defendant's computer? Imagine dealing with the optics from that fallout; not only seeking out and spreading content of children being raped, but also using it to falsely imprison someone. I suspect nearly all CIA agents are far more comfortable with assassinating foreign adversaries than doing that.
Of course it could happen, but such a claim requires evidence, or at least some attempt at refuting the prosecution's claimed evidence, not just "well, you can't trust the CIA, you know".
Is CIA really scared of fallout? This is the same agency that lies to congress, has blown up a plane full civilians (Cubana de Aviación Flight 455) and tortured people that later turned out to be innocent.
Which part of that indicates they respect due process?
Yes, because some fallout is much worse than others, and some breaches of due process are much worse than others. I could list things that I consider just as bad or worse, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they will do literally anything and everything imaginable to achieve their objectives, especially when many decades have passed since many of these things.
Also, is torturing any better if the people are guilty? One of the many problems with torture is you can never know if they're innocent or guilty, in addition to the fact that even torturing guilty people is unethical. Unless you're alleging the CIA tortured people who they knew to be innocent, or who they knew were very likely innocent, which is a much more severe allegation. If you had evidence of them doing that within the past decade, my prior for their planting child pornography would increase by a lot, absolutely.
I don’t understand your reasoning. It seems like either astonishing naivety or arguing in bad faith...
Do you really believe that a huge organisation that has plenty of people that are fine with illegally assassinating people, kidnapping people and torturing them, lying to Congress, etc. would have any moral issue with planting some images on a suspect’s hard drive?
These are very much “ends justify the means” kinds of people.
There is plenty of precedent too. One of the largest child abuse web sites on the dark web was confiscated by Australian police and then they continued to run it for another year [1]. But not only that, they did indeed post additional content (that they had confiscated elsewhere I assume) to keep the site’s users believing it was running as normal!
I guarantee agencies like the CIA would have no qualms doing the same thing, or using some of those images to “help” get somebody they felt was guilty but didn’t have evidence to convict.
That’s not to say that it’s necessarily happening in this case, but I would be surprised if they hadn’t don’t it multiple times before.
>Do you really believe that a huge organisation that has plenty of people that are fine with illegally assassinating people, kidnapping people and torturing them, lying to Congress, etc. would have any moral issue with planting some images on a suspect’s hard drive?
At an organizational level? Yes, absolutely. I could believe a few people there taking such an action independently, but I believe it's a lot less likely the organization itself would approve it. Possible, but unlikely.
Either way, even if I thought they would have absolutely no qualms about doing it, there are still plenty of reasons not to do it (optics, etc.). And even if that weren't an issue, the onus is still on the accuser to produce at least some evidence.
>There is plenty of precedent too. One of the largest child abuse web sites on the dark web was confiscated by Australian police and then they continued to run it for another year [1]. But not only that, they did indeed post additional content (that they had confiscated elsewhere I assume) to keep the site’s users believing it was running as normal!
This is very questionable, but still a different thing.
To be fair, the CIA doesn’t need to seek out such content. There is a giant repository of it at FBI headquarters, used to create the hash database that they scan people’s computers with in order to convict them.
This database is decades old.
The government has people clearly capable of torturing actual living children in Guantanamo Bay, so I doubt they will have trouble finding someone capable of planting a picture taken in the 1960s.
>To be fair, the CIA doesn’t need to seek out such content. There is a giant repository of it at FBI headquarters, used to create the hash database that they scan people’s computers with in order to convict them.
Could you show how you know they're still storing the photos, and not just the hashes?
>The government has people clearly capable of torturing actual living children in Guantanamo Bay, so I doubt they will have trouble finding someone capable of planting a picture taken in the 1960s.
Unless you're talking about cases of formally government-sanctioned raping of children by adults, I don't think this analogy works.
I could also say that any organization fine with assassinating people in cold blood would be fine with planting child pornography on someone's computer, and there may be some superficial logic to that, but I think it's completely false. I think there are millions of people who wouldn't lose a wink of sleep over assassinating someone in cold blood, but wouldn't be able to live with themselves if forced to acquire and plant images and videos of children being raped so that a political prisoner could be falsely convicted.
Of course, with any intelligence agency (and the FBI), one's prior for anything like that happening is much, much higher than average. I definitely believe they could've wanted to do such a thing and could have done it. But even with that prior, it's still a big claim, and it requires at least a little evidence. Ideally big evidence; not no evidence, and especially not nothing to even refute the comprehensive evidence and logs the FBI has laid out over hundreds of publicly released pages, and probably hundreds or thousands of more pages that we're not (yet) privy to.
> I think there are millions of people who wouldn't lose a wink of sleep over assassinating someone in cold blood, but wouldn't be able to live with themselves if forced to acquire and plant images and videos of children being raped so that a political prisoner could be falsely convicted.
Why?
I think if there are millions of people who can justify assassination for their country/ideology, they'll be able to justify planting child pornography too. They'll just look away from the pictures themselves, just like they've looked away from every single other atrocity committed in their name. It's not like they have to pull a trigger: they have to print out some paper, stick it an envelope without looking while repeating to themselves "I wasn't the one who took the pictures" (if they even get that far in their thought process), and go about their business framing someone. It's even easier if they work in tech because they probably don't even have to open the file. Just grab ten thousand binary blobs from the database and thats it. One will be enough! Then they'll go home to their children, look them in the eyes, and forget all about it.
It's certainly possible, but I just disagree that assassinations are as psychologically weighty, personally. Killing someone who's killed other people or contributed to their deaths vs. rigging the justice system and planting child pornography on someone who leaked some of your secrets are really different things.
I fail to see how planting evidence crosses a higher moral barrier than killing someone.
By the way, in both cases, the person who makes the decision genuinely believes, probably on wrong information, that the person they are entrapping is evil and they just lack the right evidence
So I don’t buy the argument that they would lose they sleep over what they did.
Because there are different kinds of "evil". Killing an individual who they believe is responsible for the deaths of many people is different from framing a US citizen and going around the justice system by planting child pornography evidence, because they leaked secrets. These are not apples-to-apples situations.
> I think there are millions of people who wouldn't lose a wink of sleep over assassinating someone in cold blood, but wouldn't be able to live with themselves if forced to acquire and plant images and videos of children being raped so that a political prisoner could be falsely convicted.
Even supposing what you say is true, why does it become unlikely that there's a disjoint set of people (sizeable enough to assume that some work for some law enforcement agency) who wouldn't blink an eye at doing the latter thing, if they truly believed it was for the good and safety of their country? I think there are absolutely people like that, and suggesting that there aren't feels incredibly naive.
I'm sure there are some people who would be doing that. I'm just saying that there are a lot of people who are okay with the former but not the latter, so I disagree with the suggestion that most or all of the CIA or FBIA would be okay with it. That leads me to think the probability of this happening at an organizational level (i.e. the director orders it) is low.
The probability of a few people acting independently is a lot higher, but I think still low. And whether it's low or high, you still need evidence. Any evidence. For example, evidence that they may have doctored chat logs.
From an objective morality standpoint, you're probably right that that is worse. But subjectively and psychologically, I think most of them put them in different boxes.
You know you have the bad guy. He knows he's bad. But the system is going to let him get away. He's not a child pornographer but you and I both know we don't put other people away the way we did Al Capone. He knows he's the bad guy and he laughs in my face just because some lawyer will get him off. I'm the good guy, man. If I let this guy off who knows how many lives he'll ruin.
Society is peaceful because rough men stand ready to do violence in the night in its name. They can judge me, but I did the right thing.
>I think there are millions of people who wouldn't lose a wink of sleep over assassinating someone in cold blood, but wouldn't be able to live with themselves if forced to acquire and plant images and videos of children being raped so that a political prisoner could be falsely convicted.
I think Nazi Germany should have been enough proof that humans are perfectly happy to do anything to support their side. Planting CP to target political prisoners is nothing compared to what the Nazis and various other regimes have done. What makes you think the humans in this place are any different?
> One can't rule anything out when you're dealing with intelligence agencies, but in this case, is there a single known instance of the US government ever doing such a thing? Planting child pornography on a defendant's computer? Imagine dealing with the optics from that fallout; not only seeking out and spreading content of children being raped, but also using it to falsely imprison someone. I suspect nearly all CIA agents are far more comfortable with assassinating foreign adversaries than doing that.
Imagine dealing with the optics of the other major illegal activities, such as Operation Mockingbird, or trafficking drugs for Contra, or more recently, trying to smuggle 1300 lbs. of cocaine across the boarder. There are bad people working in the CIA (there are bad people working in most major organizations; it is logically sound to think the power and rule-bending offered by the CIA attract more of these types than other organizations). They had ample access, they have huge collections of child porn in evidence, and they had strong motive. Is it more believable that this guy circumvented their security, wiped his hard drive, but forgot about the life-sentence inducing child porn on his other hard drives? Or that is was planted by people who didn't like him, needed a scapegoat, needed a conviction, and had an easy way to do it.
> Of course it could happen, but such a claim requires evidence, or at least some attempt at refuting the prosecution's claimed evidence, not just "well, you can't trust the CIA, you know".
The US Intelligence Community has had some really massive screwups and straight up illegal operations become exposed over the last couple of decades (weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, COINTELPRO, PRISM, the list goes on...). They have lost the legitimacy required for blind trust in them.
>Is it more believable that this guy circumvented their security, wiped his hard drive, but forgot about the life-sentence inducing child porn on his other hard drives? Or that is was planted by people who didn't like him, needed a scapegoat, needed a conviction, and had an easy way to do it.
Neither, because they're both contrived strawman scenarios.
>The US Intelligence Community has had some really massive screwups and straight up illegal operations become exposed over the last couple of decades (weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, COINTELPRO, PRISM, the list goes on...).
I mentioned COINTELPRO in another comment, but I don't consider any of the other things you listed as ranking as highly as planting child pornography, and even COINTELPRO never went that far.
>They have lost the legitimacy required for blind trust in them.
Another weakman argument. Obviously I don't trust any government, let alone any government's intelligence agencies. Few people do. Most people, in all countries around the world, are well-aware that they're some of the least trustworthy entities to ever exist.
I still think evidence is required when accusing an intelligence agency of heinous offenses, even when they have been guilty of many offenses in the past. I would even say the same of far more authoritarian and ruthless governments' intelligence agencies, like China's, even in spite of the fact that I think China's system and police state is a serious threat to humanity.
It would not shock me much if the CIA did this. It would shock me if everyone out-of-hand believed it was more likely than not that they did this despite not a shred of evidence, or in the vast majority of cases didn't even look for any evidence, or cared about there being evidence, or even read anything related to the situation beyond a condensed title or a comment from someone who also read nothing but the title. It's intellectual laziness. Not that prosecuting a leaker is a high-stakes social issue, but future issues may arise where such a poor approach to epistemology could pose a great threat to our country or world. This thread so far is only a hair's width better than an InfoWars comment section.
>> Is it more believable that this guy circumvented their security, wiped his hard drive, but forgot about the life-sentence inducing child porn on his other hard drives? Or that is was planted by people who didn't like him, needed a scapegoat, needed a conviction, and had an easy way to do it.
> Neither, because they're both contrived strawman scenarios
Except that the first scenario isn't a strawman, or even contrived: it's exactly what the CIA/FBI/prosecution is telling us to believe.
While the second scenario certainly smacks of "conspiracy theory", it's trivially doable by the agencies in question, who have motive to do so, and incredibly difficult for the defense to even allege, let alone gather evidence to support. I absolutely agree with and am sympathetic to the idea that this is just conspiracy theory nonsense, but... would anyone really be surprised if it were true? I certainly wouldn't be.
There are known cases of the FBI running such sites and sharing such images. In general, people have not been outraged by the FBI's actions and the FBI agents themselves are fine doing so, even though by the very logic that makes the material illegal they are harming the children in doing so. This is part of a trend I've noticed where some portion of the population is far more interested in catching and punishing the bad guy than protecting the innocent and when it comes to having to choose one or the other, willingly sacrifice the innocent to punish the bad guy.
There will be no fallout. Even if it is true the records would be destroyed if they ever existed. If the FBI or location police uncovered said operation there would be no action taken. Why? Because all operations today are joint operations.
If this is true, then how can one dispute any conspiracy theory? If one believes that all of law enforcement and intelligence is in on every conspiracy, will never leak, and that all evidence of every conspiracy is destroyed before it can ever be discovered, then you can justify any belief.
I think if the FBI or police covered up a conspiracy theory of planted child pornography evidence, and this were found out, it would be a massive scandal that would dominate the news for months or years.
Actually, stopping at "cui bono" would be a great thing. The common pathology is that people start with the legitimate idea of who has benefited, get hung up on unsupported specifics, and end up creating straw men that then get used to discourage talking about the obvious incentives.
No, the common pathology is that they stop at cui bono and come to conclusions about facts based only on incentives instead of empirical data and evidence.
> is there a single known instance of the US government ever doing such a thing?
Not that I’m aware of, but they’ve done a lot worse in the past (arming opposition to democratically elected governments, then turning against them later; drugging people without their consent or knowledge; etc) so its not particularly crazy to think that they’re willing or capable to do such things.
I completely agree. I just think the other repliers aren't assigning the probabilities correctly. Also, separately from the incentive and capability issue, there's the fact that people seem comfortable casting suspicion without any evidence or other empirical basis, while lazily including misinformation like "convenient that this happens so often, huh" despite not mentioning a single other case of it happening (leaker charged with possessing child pornography).
I get what you're saying, but there is a difference between discussing conspiracies that we know the CIA participated in, such as the overthrow of various governments, vs. theorizing about things such as framing someone with child porn. Both actions meet the definition of conspiracy, but we can discuss the facts of CIA conspiracies to overthrow governments without theorizing- the historians that wrote books about this aren't conspiracy theorists (well, not all of them). The second is actually being a conspiracy theorist- it's awful convenient to find child porn on someone's hard drive but we don't have any facts to support the idea.
We can also discuss the trustworthiness of the CIA when deciding whether to believe anything they claim to be true.
They have the power to do that sort of thing. They would have a clear motive to do it. It’s not any different from the regular business-as-usual sort of thing they get up to. What reason would I have trust this?
I was addressing GP's assertion that anyone contemplating the actions of the CIA is a "conspiracy theorist," which is not true. Some people are solidly defined as historians, where they use official documents and trustworthy interviews as source material rather than speculation.
You are perfectly normal to be suspicious of the actions of the CIA, and some of the theories are likely to be true, but that was not the point I was making.
I don't think it's a stretch to be honest, the thing is, while he might be completely guilty of leaking and the CIA know just can't prove. He wen't up against the CIA. This is a body who has the ability (allegedly of course) to restructure other governments.
If it is a bogus charge.. Would anyone here really be surprised ? I mean really ?
I don't think the people who would say : 'Nah wouldn't surprise me' are tinfoil hat wearers.
EDIT: That's really not to say that the CIA is not important.. It's just not out of the realm of possibility that someones ego/butt would be hurt about the leaks.
Would I be surprised some people in the CIA would want to do such a thing? No.
Would I be surprised they'd do something so stupid as to plant child pornography on a suspect's computer and ruin their already pretty soiled reputation to such an extent that all future prosecutions of whistleblowers and leakers will come under heavy doubt, in addition to their ethics around abused children, and that this would be signed off by the top leadership and accepted organizationally? Kind of.
Why not? They claim end-to-encryption is protecting pedophiles... And it's their selling point. That trench of absolute human shit is their marketing. - For impact, they need to sell it over the value of e2e for the citizen.
Planting that shit seems a perfect candidate to get a no questions asked lock up. And lets be honest, if its true, we would all burn his balls attached to him and than let him go to prison.
But I agree with other posters, he is capable enough to clean his leaking, but not his kiddie shit ? Also he was never recognised for the kiddie stuff before ? My tinfoil hat is not on, but its in that region.
>But I agree with other posters, he is capable enough to clean his leaking, but not his kiddie shit ?
As I wrote in my post, he wasn't capable enough to clean up a lot of his leaking. They found various kinds of evidence. A lot of it was covered up, but a lot wasn't.
>Also he was never recognised for the kiddie stuff before ?
I would bet the majority of people who download child pornography probably never end up getting on anyone's radar. Or at least a large percentage don't.
>Why not? They claim end-to-encryption is protecting pedophiles... And it's their selling point. That trench of absolute human shit is their marketing. - For impact, they need to sell it over the value of e2e for the citizen.
Sure, I don't like that one bit, but it's a huge leap to go from that to planting child pornography evidence on a suspect's computer. Many people do legitimately believe encryption is a net negative and enables criminals like pedophiles and terrorists. I don't agree with them, but this is a belief people have. On the other hand, there is no belief or rationale that could ever justify planting child pornography on someone's computer.
Are you suggesting that this is a double-layered conspiracy - not only a way to get a leaker convicted, but also a way to make those who use encryption seem like pedophiles? If so, you're going to need to provide even more evidence than if you were just posing the first claim. I could think of like four more layers of conspiracy theories I could pile on top of that, but they're also meaningless without evidence. I could spin your comment as you being part of a conspiracy theory to protect pedophiles; also meaningless.
>Planting that shit seems a perfect candidate to get a no questions asked lock up. And lets be honest, if its true, we would all burn his balls attached to him and than let him go to prison.
Sure, that'd be one of the best ways to secure a conviction if you're trying to think of what sort of evidence to plant, but I don't see how it relates to your other points or to the likelihood of it being true. Conspiring to crash planes into financial and government buildings on 9/11 would be one of the best ways to start a war in the Middle East if you're trying to think of some casus belli, but that doesn't mean that's what actually happened.
I would recommend reading the documents. Yes, some are long, but they're much more informative than completely blind speculation from HN commenters going off of nothing but a thread title.
Where are your facts? You're betting, too. CIA/FBI don't and couldn't possibly monitor what every single employee does when they're not at work, especially when they're taking anonymization precautions. There's probably more than one person working at such a place right now who's in possession of CP and who will live and die without ever being found out by anyone. It's just a numbers game.
>I refer to the above. You don't like it ? Bullshit, you're defending it.
I have no idea what you're trying to say. I'm a huge proponent of end-to-end encryption, and against any attempts by governments to backdoor it. It still has absolutely no relation to this particular topic.
At what point to you revert from "their reputation is already so terrible they wouldn't sully it more" to "we should really just assume the worst 100% of the time"?
I would say the public exposure of a truly shocking and confirmed scandal that took place within the past 10 - 20 years and which goes all the way to the top of the organization. Especially if a lot of people are in the know.
Something along the lines of MKULTRA or COINTELPRO. (I would argue that even in the era where those programs were rampant, planting child pornography would still seem unlikely. Though certainly a lot more likely.)
Have you seen how many times they failed to assassinate Fidel Castro? Stupid is as stupid does and the CIA are the greatest idiots of all times. Not even their foes could dream of creating a quagmire that destroyed public acceptance of the draft and created so many disabled veterans that it lead to the ADA after two world wars with antibiotics boosting survival rates of previously mortal injuries.
> ...then forgets to nuke the hard disk riddled with child porn.
He kept the porn in an encrypted partition with the password on his phone, which the Feds had access to. They also have transcripts of his messages with child porn forum members. It's detailed in this FBI affidavit:
Certainly seems odd, but it's not like the guy's dead or something. First, it was stored in a VeraCrypt encrypted container; if he believed only he had the keys, he may have thought it was safe. If he believes he was being framed for child pornography, I imagine he would shout it from the rooftops. Or at least try to shout it to the extent he could, to the point that there would probably be at least a little coverage of the framing allegation. Second, they found plenty of other things, too, (for example, the keys to various VeraCrypt volumes on his phone), so he clearly wasn't a total pro at wiping data.
For the record, the original allegation [0]:
>investigators discovered a single classified document as well as over 10,000 images and videos depicting child pornography including "sadistic and masochistic images and videos of children as young as a few years old who had been brutally sexually assaulted." The government found that Schulte had "neatly organized" this material "according to his preferences, and stored it for a period of years."
I'd recommend reading the whole criminal complaint. They'd really have to provide full, unedited chat logs in order to get a more holistic view, but from what they provided, it does seem somewhat ambiguous. Based on the chat logs and Google search results they found, it seems clear he did intentionally seek out and download child pornography. However, from the conversation snippets they posted, I could see the argument that it was a morbid curiosity for him rather than out of pedophilic urges. None of those conversations look anything like conversations between pedophiles or child porn distributors. One would think they would stick the worst stuff in the complaint, and if those are the worst logs they found, then it doesn't seem like a total open-and-shut case. You could definitely interpret those logs as Schulte slyly probing for where to find things, with some plausible deniability, so he could fulfill his sexual desires, but you could also possibly interpret it as young guys (he was around 21 at the time, talking to other young guys) being edgy and stupid.
That interpretation is tough given the fact that he had 54 GB of it, in a folder named "CP Files", across over 10,000 images and videos, in neatly organized sub-folders. They also found a few Google searches up until 2012. [1] Though, if it were perhaps one large archive he had downloaded and extracted one time, rather than meticulously curating individual files over years, I could possibly see the argument that it was from when he was just researching about that horrible fascination. If so, and if it was done around 2009 - 2012, it's possible he could've even forgotten he had it when he got raided in 2017. And the Google searches look pretty bad, but, again, if those are the worst they found, I wouldn't say it's open-and-shut.
Of course, I do think people should face consequences for having 10,000+ items of child pornography, regardless of their motives, but there could be mitigating factors here. Or there might not be. One would have to look at a lot more evidence, and we'll presumably get a look at that once he's separately tried for the child pornography charges.
In an interesting twist, he actually did (briefly?) publicly claim he was framed, and there's an allegation that he planned to use two false identities and a document claiming inside knowledge that the child pornography was planted, written by him under one of these false identities (masquerading as a supposed internal FBI source), to be released by WikiLeaks. Basically, the government is accusing him of trying to frame a framing. This appears to not be denied by him (I think?), but could possibly be thrown out due to potential attorney client-privilege issues with the documents that contained the evidence. (Not sure if it was brought up in this trial.) In my opinion, the evidence is pretty damning that he did plan to spread this disinformation to cast doubt about the leak and the child pornography; though all of this doesn't necessarily lend more support to any of the original allegations. [2][3][4]
I'm not a fan of this trend of HN comments skimming some headline or article snippet and then giving a hot take without actually looking into any of the facts or claims. I feel like it's been happening a lot more in the past few years; even reddit often isn't as bad. It takes about a minute to see the government's case against him and to consider a few possible defenses he may have, rather than knee-jerk pattern matching "alleged CIA leaker accused of CP possession" to "FBI/CIA possibly/likely planted evidence", with nothing to support that. If you were to sow some seeds of doubt in the veracity of the logs or any other government claims, it'd be different. Just because it's a plausible story from a motive perspective doesn't mean the onus still isn't on you to support the suspicion.
[1] (Paraphrased slightly) (i) April 9, 2011, Google Search for "child pornography" on at least three occasions; (ii) October 15, 2011, Google Searches for "movie where father videos daughter and friend sex" and "movie where father videos child porn"; and (iii) May 15, 2012, Google Search for "female teenage body by year."
>“So who’s responsible for Vault 7? The CIA’s own version of the FBI’s Peter Strzok and Lisa Page”
>in the Fake FBI Document in the Schulte Cell Documents, a purported FBI “whistleblower” claimed that the FBI had placed child pornography on Schulte’s computer after its initial searches of the device were unsuccessful in recovering evidence.
I don't have any comment on the truth of the factual assertions. And I don't know how common it is for feds to actually plant evidence these days or in these kinds of cases, but in my experience it is relatively common for federal prosecutors to over-charge suspects, make shit up outright, lob salacious accusations that they know perfectly well aren't supported by evidence, conceal evidence from grand juries which they know would jeopardize their chances of securing an indictment, knowingly conceal exculpatory evidence, and deliberately misstate the nature of evidence, among other things. Source: Myself; I consult on litigation for a living, including criminal cases ranging from misdemeanor drug possession to white collar to murder one.
I suspect there are a number of reasons. They need to be understood in the context of the criminal justice system's goals. It is not principally concerned with "doing justice" in any holistic political-philosophical sense. That is evident from its favoring of certain aspects of justice like punishment, retribution, and deterrence over things like procedural fairness and proportionality. That is to say its primary aim is punishing wrongdoers and making examples of them. Accordingly, any means or outcome which satisfies these goals is assumed to be "just". Any alternative-- even one in the cannon of "justice"-- is understood to be a failing or at best reckless.
One reason this happens is that police and prosecutors alike put a lot of work into investigating crimes, and they do not like working in vain. They are especially bothered by the prospect of not apprehending anyone, and much more so by the prospect of being unable to convict someone they believe is guilty. It would be fair to say that they have at least some bias toward convicting someone-- anyone. It's also the case that they are sometimes wrong but very much don't want to believe they are. People easily find ways of justifying things they want to believe.
Another reason is that trial lawyers tend to develop a preoccupation with winning. Consider that, for a prosecutor, the only way to win is to get a conviction. This can lead them down the path to all sorts of hell and is probably the biggest contributor to grand juries being shams and evidence being withheld.
It is true that there are career benefits to winning a lot of cases, but for your average ADA that's typically just the privilege of being given more serious cases to prosecute. Plenty of ADA's lose a lot of trials with few ill consequences. Where this is more of a problem is with elected prosecutors, the actual District Attorneys. They are the ones who benefit most from high profile investigations, indictments, and convictions. It's very much in their political self-interest to get convictions.
Lastly, the courts (judges) generally let prosecutors get away with all sorts of shenanigans for a variety of reasons. It may be that they themselves are "tough on crime", or prefer to give prosecutors the benefit of the doubt, or simply that they're lazy. Any trial lawyer will tell you it happens with shocking regularity that judges allow evidence into trial that they really shouldn't under the guise of the questionable rationale that they should just "let the jury decide." Let us not forget that one of Alexander Hamilton's main arguments in favor of the jury system was as a safeguard against corrupt judges.
In short, little stops them from doing these things other than their own consciences, a handful of weakly observed procedural safeguards, and some extremely vigilant defense attorneys who fight back hard.
If you think you are being framed, but have no evidence then your best court defense is to talk about what you can prove. Judges do not look kindly on desperate gambits.
Once you are free, it’s much easier to gather evidence.
He did attempt to orchestrate an extremely elaborate and desperate gambit to try to claim he was framed. (See citations 2 - 4.) And indeed, it appears it was not looked upon kindly.
I don't agree in general, though. If someone framed you but you couldn't prove the actual framing, you would still insist that you were framed and explain how you couldn't have done it. If that happened to me, I would be livid and professing my innocence and making it very clear to whoever I could that someone somehow planted the evidence. Maybe his lawyers advised him not to talk, but they didn't really present much of an argument for framing/planting at trial, either, it seems.
>Once you are free, it’s much easier to gather evidence.
What if you're convicted and sentenced to many decades, or life, as he likely will be either for a retrial on the leak stuff, or for his child pornography trial?
I added a paragraph about that. Of course it's illegal, and I personally think from an ethical standpoint that he should face criminal consequences either way, but there may be mitigating factors, and it may not be like how the government is portraying him in the complaint (essentially like a prolific predator and distributor). This could play a big role in sentencing, if it's true that there are those mitigating factors.
Agreed. It is without doubt that the CIA has access to large amounts of child pornography, seized from hard drives, and they had both easy opportunity and strong motive to plant them. It really doesn't make sense at all that he would book a flight to Mexico just days before being arrested, wipe his hard drive, then leave other, more incriminating evidence on scene.
Maybe he forgot about it? Maybe he made an opsec mistake? it can happen.
What you have is a conspiracy hypothesis not theory. "It is unlikely" is not enough, you gotta dig a bit deeper and find information that backs up motive ,methods and timeline after which you can try to independently corroborate that information to show it as fact
My favorite thing about the case is how he sued the government for $50 billion for violating his 2nd Amendment rights and preventing him from becoming the next Bill Gates while in prison, and also for missing out on teaching his little brother the true answer to the tabs v spaces debate.
>I lost time mentoring and teaching my youngest brother programming as he attends college and most likely learns the wrong way to align braces and indent (the correct answer of tabs v. spaces is actually to use tabs but have the tabs insert spaces instead of \t).
While I agree that those parts are funny, I would encourage people to read the entire complaint. In that same paragraph, for instance, you have some other, not-so-funny parts:
> I've lost 40lbs as my health has severely deteriorated as has my parents' as the stress, frustration, and depression have affected more than just me. I receive no dental and minimal medical treatment for my congenital heart defect. I've lost all my hair and what remains is turning gray - and all before I turned 30.
(Note that, while he didn't have much hair to begin with, court sketches do show him with gray hair[1]).
Sure, some of the complaints he presents are not super reasonable, but some of the other ones definitely are. And I believe that, if someone asked me to "write every single complaint you have about your three-years arrest", I'm not sure I would fare a lot better.
I respect the troll job, and it shows some level of intelligence, competence, and humor. I've read a decent number of pro se complaints, including some brought by prisoners, and you could do a lot worse. I don't know if he'll get anywhere with it, the case is stayed while the criminal case is going on, but I wish him the best of luck. Nobody deserves torture conditions, even if he's guilty of everything they accused him of.
And frankly, if he hadn't included those parts, chances are I wouldn't have seen it, or wouldn't have remembered it and wouldn't post it here. If his goal was to get more attention to the torture allegations, that probably worked.
Oh man. Page 11, form asks for "Prison Identification #", handwritten answer is "Slave #79471054". Page 12, defendants are Attorney General, DOJ, FBI, etc.: "Collectively, "The Federal Terrorists"". Page 13, says "There is no difference between pretrial detention for the legally innocent and federal incarceration for the legally guilty; pretrial detention is actually federal prison and is used to punish and coerce the innocent into pleading guilty—The government has legislated, through pretrial detention, that those who have not been found guilty beyond reasonable doubt can be sentenced to indefinite incarceration." He may have a point there. Page 15: "Current conditions of confinement are similar to conditions imposed under Nazi Germany by the SS and Gestapo to torture political prisoners with psychological punishment to inflict permanent damage including death." Well, let's not mince words here. Page 16 says "Total loss of income: $50,000,347,000".
Grievances on page 16 include: "Exposure to 24/7 bright lights that cannot be turned off constitute torture and violate the 8th amendment". Page 20 (now it's typed rather than handwritten) says "No heat or A/C in cage" and "There was no heat in the building for a month from Thanksgiving to Christmas; resulted in sub 30s and formation of ice in the cell", and "Cells infested with rodents", and mentions sleep deprivation including the bright lights and "Every few hours at night COs come by with bright flash light to wake up plaintiff". Page 23 says "The United Nations considers 15 days of solitary confinement as torture—the plaintiff has spent 3 months and counting in solitary confinement, with no end date in sight". Page 23 also claims "Plaintiff is subjected to harsher conditions under "pretrial detention" than ALL convicted prisoners serving sentences under the BOP".
Some of his complaints seem trollish, but others seem serious, and if that's being done to someone who hasn't been convicted of a crime, that seems worrying.
> if that's being done to someone who hasn't been convicted of a crime, that seems worrying
If that's being done to someone who has been convicted of a crime, it would still be horrible. The U.S. has a constitutional prohibition against "cruel and unusual punishment" (8th Amendment), and we claim to be a country that upholds basic human rights. This is the kind of abuse our government would complain about if some other country subjected our citizens to it.
It seems like the CIA's opsec was bad:
"It didn’t help that during the course of the trial, the CIA was found to have appalling security measures in place: multiple people used the same admin username and password to access the critical servers. Not only that, but the passwords used were weak – 123ABCdef and mysweetsummer being the main two – and on top of that, they were published on the department’s intranet."
The people named in the court documents[1] all have users on HN according to two minutes of searching on google. Shows how little it takes to dig up info on people. Kinda scary.
If a trial I was on a jury for involved the CIA, I'd just find innocent. Evidence is easy to fabricate with the time and expertise and that's a major part of what they do. Digital evidence is the flimsest kind generally and the easiest to fake...
I'm fairly sure they can't do that after the trial has started.
Basically, yeah, if you admit to the attorneys at the beginning (during "jury selection") that you'd do this, then yes, they'd use this to make sure you don't get on the jury, because you're obviously biased.
But if you lie or keep your mouth shut and get on the jury, and then during deliberations you bring this up only among other jury members that you don't believe anything the CIA says, I don't see how they can boot you from the jury at that point. Most likely, it would result in a mistrial due to hung jury.
The prosecutors would ask this question during jury selection. If you lied and it came out during the trial, the judge would replace you with an alternate.
Read it in a court document I am too lazy to look up - he separately had admin on the virtualization (VMSphere?) management plane and used it to rollback whatever server did access management for the system in question to a previous snapshot where he still had admin access to that system.
I can't read the article because it's behind a paywall, but searching his name leads to articles that indicate he leaked data from a CIA Confluence instance. After Snowden, this is just laughable.
