A former employee of the US secret service CIA is said to have been behind bars for several decades for passing on secret documents to the disclosure platform Wikileaks. US media reported on Thursday (local time), citing the US Department of Defense, that the 35-year-old programmer had been sentenced to 40 years in prison for espionage and possession of child pornography.
In March 2017, Wikileaks published thousands of pages of confidential documents. This revealed that the CIA had set up its own programming team to specifically spy on suspects through vulnerabilities in smartphones, computers and televisions, among other things. According to the Justice Department, during a large-scale manhunt, investigators came across the man who had worked as a software engineer at the CIA developing espionage programs until 2016.
He was charged in 2018 with, among other things, illegally obtaining national defense information and unlawfully disclosing it.