A former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) software engineer who was convicted for carrying out the largest theft of classified information in the agency’s history and of charges related to child abuse imagery was sentenced to 40 years in prison on Thursday.
The 40-year sentence by US district judge Jesse Furman was for “crimes of espionage, computer hacking, contempt of court, making false statements to the FBI, and child pornography”, federal prosecutors said in a statement. The judge did not impose a life sentence as sought by prosecutors.
Joshua Schulte was convicted in July 2022 on four counts each of espionage and computer hacking and one count of lying to FBI agents, after giving classified materials to the whistleblowing agency WikiLeaks in the so-called Vault 7 leak. Last August, a judge mostly upheld the conviction.
I’ll first open by noting that you had no problem referring back to Stalin when you thought it benefitted your argument
You brought up gulags first. I was just responding to that.
Second, true the Russian Federation isn’t the same as the USSR, but that would be like deciding to remove the Civil War from the domain of US History because the Confederacy no longer exists. Simply absurd.
Oh, then do you want to talk about how this country genocided the Native population from coast to coast? Do you want to talk about the reservation system, which inspired the Nazi concentration camps? Do you want to talk about the Trail of Tears and the Indian Wars and the French-American wars? Do you want to talk about the mountain of corpses from settler-colonialism which absolutely dwarfs anything the USSR ever did? Millions and millions dead, and though small pox killed the majority the United States is directly responsible for unimaginable horror. Do you want to talk about the scalp trade? Do you want to talk about the US Army eradicating the buffalo to starve the Natives? Do you want to talk about all the Native women that were kidnapped and raped and the reason so many white people in America have 1/8th Native ancestry? Holy fucking shit, talking about this country’s history makes me want to fucking kill myself. You want to talk about why I have Native ancestry on both sides of my family and have lily white skin despite that? How my ancestors were kidnapped and raped by settlers to breed the savagery out of them? Had their religion, their language, their entire way of life stolen from them.
I can’t continue this conversation. Just revisiting the history for the argument- I’m done. Leave me alone.
Yeah, sure, by all means – let’s do it. But only under the pretext that we can go further back in Russian history from the Circassian Genocide to the Red Terror to Ivan the Terrible and his Massacre of Novgorod, slavery in Russia, etc… There’s a lot more history to Russia than the United States, so I’m going to go out on a limb and say good luck with going down that rabbit hole as though it will benefit your position.
What I will say is that everything you mentioned I find reprehensible, too; but while I do believe the US has made clear progress since then and into the modern day, it seems quite evident that Russia is going the complete opposite direction and backpedaling as quickly as it can back to the USSR days.
I’d further bet money that if we polled a large swath of people, they would rather face a courtroom or imprisonment in the US than Russia. I know I would.
