| In CIA Leaks
Retrial Brutal Kangaroo Launches With 16
Jurors and Blogger in the Back, A Tale
By Matthew
Russell Lee, Patreon Maxwell
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LITERARY SDNY,
June 14– "These fine
gentlemen," Josh Schulte
pointed at the US Marshals who
sat in back of him in court,
"You will be seeing a lot of
them."
The CIA Vault 7
leaks re-trial began after
these 16 jurors were picked.
In responding to the jury
summons they'd had no idea it
could be about petabytes of
information, air-gapped split
hard drives and fall-out from
the nerf gun wars. But here
they were.
Kurt
Wheelock the blogger was in
the back bench of the
courtroom gallery when the
last 16 were picked. He heard
their names but didn't publish
them, at least not on his blog
or Twitter feed. He gave in to
the white noise and did not
try to listen through
it.
But when it
came time for sealed
witnesses, he told himself, he
would be opposing it
again.
Schulte
argued to Judge Furman that if
the prosecutors now wouldn't
stipulate that what Wikileaks
had published was in fact
government information, why
was he on trial? Why indeed.
Some was and some wasn't. 1.4
petabytes of data had been
seized.
"The back
door was the front door,"
Schulte said. Some jurors
shook their heads. Drifting
Deadline was one program,
Brutal Kangaroo another. Kurt
thought that would make a good
title for this story, the
serial, the parallel tale told
from the inside.
He had
rushed back to New York when
he heard the opening
statements would be on the
second day. A FlixBus from
Washington, from midnight to
four pm, a bad smell in the
bad of the bus and the roads
being fixed even at this hour.
It was another America.
In Philadelphia
they stopped in front of the
Federal court. Kurt wondered
if they had a Press Room....
Josh
Schulte on 39th Street had
owned, he told the jury, huge
hard drives and played games
on them. He was charged with
child porn but said others had
uploaded it. A libertarian had
provided a venue for all
things maligned elsewhere. But
what were his
politics?
In his
opening statement Schulte
cited Ukraine's Zelenskyy,
perhaps ironically. He name
checked George Orwell and said
he'd played a role in tracking
down Osama Bin Laden.
How did he
compare, say, to Virgil
Griffith who pleaded guilty at
the last minute to charges of
helping North Korea with
crypto? This leaks was treated
more seriously.
FBI Agent
Evanchec called the leak's
impact "devastating." While
the help to North Korea was
all what might have been, or
what still might be. The
prosecutors wouldn't let
Schulte plead that way, and he
probably wouldn't take it. His
notebooks, marked Attorney
Client Privilege, spoke of an
information war. But this
trial would in fact be it.
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