FORMER Central Intelligence Agency software engineer Joshua Schulte has been convicted of leaking classified information to the WikiLeaks website in the so-called Vault 7 case. 

Jurors in a Manhattan federal court found him guilty on eight charges of espionage and one of obstruction over what has been described as the biggest theft of classified material in the spy agency’s history. 

Mr Schulte, who represented himself in court, faces decades behind bars for leaking 8,761 documents, an action which prosecutors said was a deliberate attempt to harm the CIA by a disgruntled employee. 

“Schulte was a CIA programmer with access to some of the country’s most valuable intelligence-gathering cyber tools used to battle terrorist organisations and other malign influences around the globe,” US attorney Damian Williams said. 

“When Schulte began to harbour resentment toward the CIA, he covertly collected those tools and provided them to WikiLeaks, making some of our most critical intelligence tools known to the public — and, therefore, our adversaries.

“Today, Schulte has been convicted for one of the most brazen and damaging acts of espionage in American history,” undermining US efforts to counter “terrorist organisations and other malign influences” worldwide, he added. 

The Vault 7 trial focused on a set of documents that WikiLeaks began publishing in March 2017, exposing the activities of the CIA in electronic surveillance and its ability to hack into cars, smart televisions, web browsers and most smartphones.

Prosecutors alleged that the data leak was part of a well-planned theft by Mr Schulte.

But in a previous trial, they were able to provide only circumstantial evidence that he had been behind the security breach.

In the course of that trial, the CIA’s lax security measures were exposed, with weak passwords on the US spooks’ intranet revealed, including 123ABCdef and mysweetsummer.

The proceedings ended in a hung verdict and a mistrial after federal prosecutors failed to convince the jury to convict Mr Schulte of spying-related charges. 

He denies that the leaks were preplanned and insists he has been framed because of his conflicts with CIA management. He was detained in August 2017 and has been in prison since bail was revoked four months later.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange faces extradition to the United States, where he could be sentenced to 175 years behind bars under the draconian Espionage Act for exposing war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.