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“A Digital Pearl Harbor:” The Ways in Which the Vault 7 Leak Could Have Compromised US and British Assets’ Identities

The Julian Assange extradition defense yesterday started presenting evidence that Assange suffers from conditions — Aspergers, depression, and suicidal tendencies — that would make US prisons particularly lethal. It’s the defense that Lauri Love used to avoid extradition, and is Assange’s most likely chance of success. And given our inhumane prisons, it’s a perfectly fair defense against his extradition.

Before that, though, the most interesting evidence submitted by Assange’s team pertained to the three charges that he identified the identities of US and Coalition (and so, British) informants in the Afghan, Iraq, and Cablegate releases. For each of those releases, Assange’s team presented evidence that someone else — Cryptome, in one case, some Guardian journalists in another — released the informants’ identities first. At one point, the lawyer for the US seemed to suggest that Assange had made such disclosures more readily available after the identities had already been published. But Assange can only be extradited for charges that are illegal in the UK as well, and while the UK’s Official Secrets Act explicitly prohibits the publication of covert identities, it does not prohibit republication of names.

In other words, it’s the one evidentiary question where I think WikiLeaks might have the better case (the government has yet to present its own counter-evidence, and Assange has to prove that the charges are baseless to prevent the extradition, so it’s a high hurdle).

The question is particularly interesting for several reasons. Publishing the names of informants is the one charge specifically tied to publication, rather than conspiring to get Chelsea Manning to leak, making it dangerous for journalism in a different way than most of the other charges (save the CFAA charge).

But also because — in a Mike Pompeo screed that many WikiLeaks witnesses have cited completely out of context, in which the then-CIA Director named WikiLeaks a non-state hostile intelligence agency — he accused WikiLeaks of being like Philip Agee, a disillusioned CIA officer who went on to leak the identities of numerous CIA officers who was credibly accused of working with Cuban and Russian intelligence services.

So I thought I’d start today by telling you a story about a bright, well-educated young man. He was described as industrious, intelligent, and likeable, if inclined towards a little impulsiveness and impatience. At some point, he became disillusioned with intelligence work, and angry at his government. He left the government and decided to devote himself to what he regarded as public advocacy: exposing the intelligence officers and operations that he had sworn to keep secret. He appealed to agency employees to send him leads, tips, suggestions. He wrote in a widely-circulated bulletin quote “We are particularly anxious to receive – and anonymously, if you desire – copies of U.S. diplomatic lists and U.S. embassy staff,” end of quote.

That man was Philip Agee, one of the founding members of the magazine CounterSpy, which in its first issue, in 1973, called for the exposure of the CIA undercover operatives overseas. In its September 1974 issue, CounterSpy publicly identified Richard Welch as the CIA station chief in Athens. Later, Richard’s home address and phone number were outed in the press, in Greece. In December 1975, Richard and his wife were returning home from a Christmas party in Athens. When he got out of his car to open the gate in front of his house, Richard Welch was assassinated by a Greek terrorist cell.

At the time of his death, Richard was the highest-ranking CIA officer killed in the line of duty. He had led a rich and honorable life – one that is celebrated with a star on the agency’s memorial wall. He’s buried at Arlington National Cemetery, and has remained dearly remembered by his family and colleagues.

Meanwhile, Philip Agee propped up his dwindling celebrity with an occasional stunt, including a Playboy interview. He eventually settled down as the privileged guest of an authoritarian regime – one that would have put him in front of a firing squad without a second thought had he betrayed its secrets instead of ours.

Today, there are still plenty of Philip Agees in the world, and the harm they inflict on U.S. institutions and personnel is just as serious today as it was back then. They don’t come from the intelligence community, they don’t all share the same background, or use precisely the same tactics as Agee, but they are soulmates. Like him, they choose to see themselves under a romantic light as heroes above the law, saviors of our free and open society. They cling to this fiction even though their disclosures often inflict irreparable harm on both individuals and democratic governments, pleasing despots along the way.

The one thing they don’t share with Agee is the need for a publisher. All they require now is a smartphone and internet access. In today’s digital environment, they can disseminate stolen U.S. secrets instantly around the globe to terrorists, dictators, hackers and anyone else seeking to do us harm.

The reference to Richard Welch is inaccurate (in the same way the claim that WikiLeaks is responsible for release of these informants’ identities could be too). Much of the rest of what Pompeo said was tone-deaf, at best. And that Pompeo — who months earlier had been celebrating WikiLeaks’ cooperation with Russia in interfering in the 2016 election — said this is the kind of breathtaking hypocrisy he specializes in.

Still, I want to revisit Pompeo’s insinuation, made weeks after the release of the Vault 7 files, that Julian Assange is like Philip Agee. The comment struck me at the time, particularly given that the only thing he mentioned to back the claim — also floated during the Chelsea Manning trial — was that WikiLeaks’ releases had helped al-Qaeda.

And as for Assange, his actions have attracted a devoted following among some of our most determined enemies. Following the recent WikiLeaks disclosure, an al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula member posted a comment online thanking WikiLeaks for providing a means to fight America in a way that AQAP had not previously envisioned. AQAP represents one of the most serious threats to our country and around the world today. It’s a group that is devoted not only to bringing down civil passenger planes but our way of life as well. That Assange is the darling of these terrorists is nothing short of reprehensible. Have no doubt that the disclosures in recent years caused harm, great harm, to our nation’s national security, and they will continue to do so for the long term.

They also threaten the trust we’ve developed with our foreign partners when that trust is crucial currency among allies. They risk damaging morale for the good officers at the intelligence community and who take the high road every day. And I can’t stress enough how these disclosures have severely hindered our ability to keep you all safe.

But given what we’ve learned about the Vault 7 release since, I’d like to consider the multiple ways via which the Vault 7 identities could have — and did, in some cases — identify sensitive identities. Pompeo’s a flaming douchebag, and the CIA’s complaint about being targeted like it targets others is unsympathetic, but understanding Pompeo’s analogy to Agee provides some insight into why DOJ charged WikiLeaks in 2017 when it hadn’t in 2013.

Vault 7, justifiably or not, may have changed how the government treated WikiLeaks’ facilitation of the exposure of US intelligence assets.

Before I start, let me emphasize the Vault 7 leak is not charged in the superseding indictment against Assange, and Assange’s treatment of Vault 7 may be radically different than his earlier genuine attempts to at least forestall or delegate the publication of US informant identities. Even if DOJ’s understanding of WikiLeaks’ facilitation of the exposure of US intelligence assets may have changed with the Vault 7 release, DOJ understanding may not be correct. Nor do I think this changes the risk to journalism of the current charges, as charged.

But it may provide insight into why the government did charge those counts, and what a superseding indictment integrating the Vault 7 leak might look like.

First, although WikiLeaks made a big show of redacting the identities of the coders who developed the CIA’s hacking tools (as they did with the 2010 and 2011 releases), some were left unredacted in the content of the release. That may be unintentional. But the first FBI affidavit against accused Vault 7 leaker Joshua Schulte noted that the pseudonyms of the two other SysAdmins who had access to the files were left unredacted in the first release, something that suggests more intentional disclosure, one that would presumably require the involvement of Schulte or someone else who knew these identities.

i. Names used by the other two CIA Group Systems Administrators were, in fact, published in the publicly released Classified Information.

ii. SCHULTE’s name, on the other hand, was not apparently published in the Classified Inforamtion.

iii. Thus, SCHULTE was the only one of the three Systems Administrators with access to the Classified Information on the Back-Up Server who was not publicly identified via WikiLeaks’s publication of the Classified Information.

A subsequent WikiLeaks release (after the FBI had already made it clear he was a, if not the, suspect) would include Schulte’s username, but I believe that is distinguishable from the release of the other men’s cover names.

Schulte would later threaten to leak more details (including, presumably, either his cover or his real name) on one of those same guys, someone he was particularly angry at, from jail, including the intriguing hint that he had been exposed in the Ashley Madison hack.

 

At trial, Schulte’s lawyer explained that the leaking he attempted or threatened from jail reflected the anger built up over almost a year of incarceration, but there’s at least some reason to believe that the initial Vault 7 release intentionally exposed the identities of CIA employees whom Schulte had personal gripes with, or at the very least he hoped would be blamed other than him.

Then there’s the damage done to ongoing operations. At trial, one after another CIA witness described the damage the Vault 7 leak had done. While the testimony was typically vague, it was also more stark in terms of scale than what you generally find in CIA trials.

After describing the leak the “equivalent of a digital Pearl Harbor,” for example, Sean Roche, who was the Deputy Director for Digital Innovation at the time of the leak, testified how on the day of the first release, the CIA had to shut down “the vast, vast majority” of operations that used the CIA tools (at a time, of course, when the CIA was actively trying to understand how Russia had attacked the US the prior year), and then CIA had to reach out to those affected.

It was the equivalent of a digital Pearl Harbor.

Q. What do you mean by that?

A. Our capabilities were revealed, and hence, we were not able to operate and our — the capabilities we had been developing for years that were now described in public were decimated. Our operations were immediately at risk, and we began terminating operations; that is, operations that were enabled with tools that were now described and out there and capabilities that were described, information about operations where we’re providing streams of information. It immediately undermined the relationships we had with other parts of the government as well as with vital foreign partners, who had often put themselves at risk to assist the agency. And it put our officers and our facilities, both domestically and overseas, at risk.

Q. Just staying at a very general level, what steps did you take in the immediate aftermath of those disclosures to address those concerns?

A. A task force was formed. Because operations were involved we had to get a team together that did nothing but focus on three things, in this priority order. In an emergency, and that’s what we had, it was operate, navigate, communicate, in that order. So the first job was to assess the risk posture for all of these operations across the world and figure out how to mitigate that risk, and most often, the vast, vast majority we had to back out of those operations, shut them down and create a situation where the agency’s activities would not be revealed, because we are a clandestine agency.

The next part of that was to navigate across all the people affected. It was not just the CIA. There were equities for other government agencies. There were, of course, equities at places and bases across the world, where we had relationships with foreign partners. People heeded immediately, were calling and asking what do I do, what do I say?

And the third part of that was to communicate, which was — in the course of looking at this as a what systemic issues led to the ability to have our information out there — was to document that and write a report that would serve as a lessons learned with the idea of preventing it from ever happening again. [my emphasis]

Notably, given that Assange could be vulnerable to Official Secrets Act charges in the UK if this leak affected any British intelligence officers or assets, Roche mentioned “foreign partners” twice in just this short passage. You don’t get very far down the list of CIA’s foreign partners before you’ve damaged MI6 assets.

Of course, shutting down ongoing operations would not have been enough to protect CIA’s assets. It took just 40 days for Symantec and Kaspersky to publicly identify the tools described in the Vault 7 releases as those found targeting their clients. If the CIA (or its foreign partners) had used human assets to introduce malware into target computers, as a number of these tools required, then those assets might be easily identifiable to the organizations affected.

Part of that same leak Schulte attempted from jail explains how this might work. He described how a tool from a particular vendor (which he would have named) was actually “Bartender,” by name presumably a watering hole attack, which had been released in Vault 7.

Had he succeeded in tweeting this out, Schulte would have identified either a cover organization or one in which CIA had recruited assets which was loading malware onto target computers while also loading some kind of vendor software.

I’m not defending CIA’s use of such assets to provide a side-helping of malware when targeted organizations install real software, though all major state-actors do this. But what Schulte (without any known active involvement of WikiLeaks, though he did continue to communicate with WikiLeaks, at least indirectly, while in jail) was allegedly attempting to do was burn either a cover organization or CIA assets, who would have been immediate targets if not exfiltrated. And it provides a good example of what could have happened over and over again on March 7, 2017, when these files were first released.

But there’s one other, possibly even more significant risk.

WikiLeaks has, in the past, preferentially withheld or shared files with Russia and other countries. Most obviously, at least one file hacked as part of the Syria Files which was damning to Russia never got published, and Emma Best claimed recently there were far more. The risk that something like that would have happened in this case is quite real. That’s because the files were leaked at a time when WikiLeaks was actively involved in another Russian operation. There was a ten month delay between the time the files were allegedly shared (in early May 2016) and the time WikiLeaks published them on March 7, 2017. The government has never made any public claim about how they got shared with WikiLeaks. Details of contacts between Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks demonstrate that it would have been impossible to send the volume of data involved in this hack directly to WikiLeaks’ public facing submission system in the time which Schulte did so, and several people familiar with the submission system at the time of that hack have suggested it served more as cover than a functional system. That suggests that Schulte either would have had to have prior contact with WikiLeaks to arrange an alternate upload process, or shared them with WikiLeaks via some third party (notably, Schulte bragged in jail that compressing data to do this efficiently was one of his specialties at CIA).

At trial, even though the government in no way focused on this evidence themselves, there was (inconsistent) evidence that Schulte planned to involve Russia in his efforts to take revenge on the CIA. I’ve heard a related allegation independently.

Remember, too, that WikiLeaks has never published the vast majority of the code for these tools, even though Schulte did leak it, which would make it still easier to identify anyone who had used these tools.

So imagine what might have happened had Russia gotten advance notice (either via WikiLeaks, a WikiLeaks associate, or Schulte himself) of these tools? Russia would have had months — starting well before US intelligence had begun to understand the full extent of the election year operation — to identify any of the CIA tools used against it. To be clear, what follows is speculative (though I’m providing it, in part, because I’m trying to summarize the Vault 7 information so people who are experts on other parts of the Russian treason case can test the theory). But if it had, the aftermath might have looked something like Russia’s prosecution of several FSB officers for treason starting in December 2016. And the response — if CIA recognized that its assets had already been compromised by the Vault 7 release — might look something like the Yahoo indictment charging one of the same FSB officers rolled out, with great fanfare, on March 15, just over a week after the Vault 7 release (DOJ obtained the indictment on February 28, after the CIA knew that WikiLeaks had the release coming and months after the treason arrest, but a week before the actual release). That is, Russia might move to prosecute months before the CIA got specific notice, using the years-old complaints of Pavel Vrublevsky to hide the real reason for the prosecution, and the US might move to disclaim any tie to the FSB officers by criminally prosecuting them and identifying many of the foreign targets they had used Yahoo infrastructure to spy on. Speaking just hypothetically, then, that’s the kind of damage we’d expect if any country — and Russia has been raised here explicitly — got advance access to the CIA tools before the CIA did its damage mitigation starting on March 7, 2017.

This scenario (again, it is speculative at this point) is Spy versus Spy stuff, the kind of thing that state intelligence agencies pull off against each other all the time. But it’s not journalism.

And even the stuff that would have happened after the public release of the CIA files would not just have exposed CIA collection points, but also, probably, some of the human beings who activated those collection points.

WikiLeaks would have you believe that nothing that happened after 2013 could change DOJ’s understanding of those earlier exposures of US (and British) assets.

But the very same Mike Pompeo speech that they’ve all been citing explained precisely what changed.

The Other Things the Press Missed by Ignoring the Details Revealed in the Joshua Schulte Prosecution

The WaPo got a copy of the WikiLeaks Task Force report introduced as evidence in the Joshua Schulte from Ron Wyden’s office and so, four months after it was first made public, is declaring the scathing report “news”. (Note, WaPo does not reveal that InnerCity Press made this report public months ago after fighting for its release.)

If the report is news it’s a testament to all the news from the trial that didn’t get reported

The report is scathing. But it describes what any news outlet that covered the trial closely would have reported in real time (as well as the evidence that one after another Schulte denial had been contradicted by evidence submitted at trial), and as such is a confession that besides some passing coverage, few national security journalists did cover this trial and all its alarming disclosures.

The trial showed that Schulte tried to make sure 1TB of data got transferred properly in early May 2017 and then wiped two TB disk drives; this report from early in the investigation assesses that Schulte stole “at least 180 gigabytes to as much as 34 terabytes of information,” something CIA later got more certainty about. The government provided evidence that Schulte inserted outside CDs and thumb drives into his CIA workstation, made a copy of a months-old backup file, and set an Admin password for the files he is accused of stealing, which is why the report focuses so closely on the findings that, “users shared systems administrator-level passwords, there were no effective removable media controls, and historical data was available to users indefinitely.”

The report was published on October 17, 2017, weeks before WikiLeaks published the source code for Hive on November 9, 2017, making this claim (though not necessarily the assessment that Schulte didn’t get the “Gold File”) out of date:

To date, WikiLeaks has released user and training guides and limited source code from two parts of DevLAN: Stash, a source code repository, and Confluence, a collaboration and communication platform. All of the documents reveal, to varying degrees, CIA’s tradecraft in cyber operations.

The trial showed that everyone from Schulte’s colleagues to then-CIA Executive Director Meroe Park had concerns about Schulte’s reliability, but none put him on leave or successfully cut off his access to the vulnerable systems, which makes this passage seem like a breathtaking understatement.

We failed to recognize or act in a coordinated fashion on warning signs that a person or persons with access to CIA classified information posed an unacceptable risk to national security.

The trial also showed that the CIA waited almost two years after this report to put “Michael,” Schulte’s CIA buddy who testified to seeing him stealing files in real time, on paid leave, making it clear they didn’t address this issue even though it appeared in the report.

The report also doesn’t include unredacted descriptions of how the leak led all of CIA’s hack-based spying to grind to a halt, such as that offered by Sean Roche, who had been Deputy Director of the Directorate for Digital Innovation.

Our capabilities were revealed, and hence, we were not able to operate and our — the capabilities we had been developing for years that were now described in public were decimated. Our operations were immediately at risk, and we began terminating operations; that is, operations that were enabled with tools that were now described and out there and capabilities that were described, information about operations where we’re providing streams of information. It immediately undermined the relationships we had with other parts of the government as well as with vital foreign partners, who had often put themselves at risk to assist the agency. And it put our officers and our facilities, both domestically and overseas, at risk.

[snip]

Because operations were involved we had to get a team together that did nothing but focus on three things, in this priority order. In an emergency, and that’s what we had, it was operate, navigate, communicate, in that order. So the first job was to assess the risk posture for all of these operations across the world and figure out how to mitigate that risk, and most often, the vast, vast majority we had to back out of those operations, shut them down and create a situation where the agency’s activities would not be revealed, because we are a clandestine agency.

Nor does the October 2017 report include details about the exploits — such as that these tools were USB drives that NOCs and/or assets would stick into target computer systems, making it likely the leak endangered people who had used the tools — that provide some idea of the kinds of damage the leak did.

Schulte claims the “classified” information on his server consisted of Snowden documents

Meanwhile, there have been several updates in the government’s attempt to retry Schulte.

First, on May 21, the court docketed a hand-written letter from Schulte to Judge Paul Crotty, dated April 12. In it, he claimed He had no counsel,” which is confusing because he has appeared in court subsequent to the letter and its posting with the same trial team (though in a recent filing, his lawyers said Steve Bellovin may not be available to serve as expert in his retrial). Based on his claim to have no lawyers, he asked for access to a bunch of things withheld in discovery, a number of which are things his lawyers had tried but failed to obtain already. That includes his own server, which (according to Schulte, who has proven utterly unreliable) the government withheld because it held “classified” information consisting of the publicly released Snowden files.

The claim is interesting in any case. If Schulte viewed the files while still at CIA, it would be a violation of the government’s ridiculous claims that clearance holders could not view those files without violating their clearance. It’s also interesting given Schulte’s claims, to colleagues, that Snowden should be executed, even while saying elsewhere that Snowden didn’t harm anyone.

The government floated — and then did not fully develop (possibly as part of an agreement to avoid a subpoena to Mike Pompeo) a theory about Schulte’s ties to other leaks, including Snowden’s. That makes the fact they’re still sitting on these files far more interesting. (Schulte used the reports about the hacking of Angela Merkel in his defense.)

DOJ’s superseding indictment tries to make the retrial easier to win

Then there are the circumstances surrounding a third superseding indictment obtained against Schulte on June 8 (which the WaPo notes but doesn’t explain). As the government had explained, they got the indictment to make the specific allegations more clear for the jury than the second indictment, which was released before CIA had declassified the things used at trial.

These counts are based on the same conduct that was at issue during the February trial, namely, the defendant’s theft and transmission of the Backup Files, his destruction of log files and other forensic data on DEVLAN in the course of committing that theft, his obstruction of the investigation into the leak of the Backup Files, and his transmission and attempted transmission of national defense information while detained at the MCC. The modifications in the Proposed Indictment, however, are intended to make clear what conduct is covered in the specific counts. Thus, the Proposed Indictment (i) contains two separate § 793(e) counts related to (1) the defendant’s transmission of writings containing national defense information from the MCC and (2) the defendant’s attempted transmission of writings containing national defense information from the MCC, whereas the S2 Indictment grouped that conduct together in a single count; (ii) clarifies that all the § 793(e) counts, pertaining both to the transmission of the Backup Files and the defendant’s conduct in the MCC, charge the transmission of documents and writings, which does not require proof that the defendant had reason to believe the information therein could be used to harm the United States; (iii) contains two separate § 1030(a)(5)(A) counts specifying that the charged harmful computer commands at issue are (1) the defendant’s manipulation of the Confluence virtual server and (2) the defendant’s log deletions, whereas the S2 Indictment grouped that conduct together in a single count; and (iv) lists the false statements underlying the obstruction charge, which had previously been identified for the defendant in a bill of particulars, whereas the S2 Indictment did not do so.

Here’s a table that shows the difference between the second superseding indictment and the new one.

The government had dropped Count Two during the trial to make it clear that Schulte was exceeding his access when he stole the files he allegedly sent to WikiLeaks. And Schulte had challenged the 641 charge on legal grounds, which explains the dropped charges (marked in black). Jury questions had made it clear that jurors were fighting over what Schulte leaked and tried to leak from jail, and couldn’t agree upon whether Schulte’s various manipulations of the backup servers amounted to a crime. By turning each into two charges, the government not only tells the jury precisely what to look for, but might even get prosecutors to focus on describing why the forensics prove the crime rather than describing the CIA’s personnel disputes. In other words, this superseding indictment is an effort to make it more likely Schulte will be found guilty for the actions described at trial.

Meanwhile, whereas elsewhere the new indictment aims to make things more explicit for the jury, the new one does not mention two things that were laid out in the bill of particulars laying out his false statements and obstruction in the second indictment: any reference to the Brutal Kangaroo tool that Schulte was working on at home and then may have brought back into work, and a discussion of a proffer session that took place on November 16, 2017 where Schulte falsely claimed to have been approached by an unknown male on the way to a court appearance. The government dropped the latter before Schulte’s trial. As to the former, it’s unclear whether the government has decided Brutal Kangaroo (which might have been used to help steal the files or unknown follow-up ones) is too sensitive to explain, or whether they want to make the obstruction charges more generalized.

Now that a bunch of journalists have effectively confessed they missed all this in real time, maybe they’ll finally get around to explaining why the government is having to revamp their charges to try they guy the CIA claims burned their hacking ability to the ground, which seems as newsworthy as this out-of-date, already published report.

Schulte doesn’t want a suburban jury

Nothing the government has done, however, will prevent jury nullification, which appears to have been a key factor in the first trial. Given the notes from the jury, at least two jurors seemed to be unwilling consider fairly clear evidence, and one of them hid that she had outside knowledge (comments she made publicly after she was dismissed suggested she believed Schulte’s claims that the government was using child porn to frame him for this leak).

Ultimately, prosecutors are going to have to explain to a NY jury why they should care that the CIA department in charge of hacking everyone else got hacked itself, all while Schulte’s lawyers make claims about what CIA does when it hacks that the CIA is not about to rebut publicly.

Which may explain why Schulte is preparing to challenge the circumstances of the most recent indictment. The grand jury on the most recent indictment is a White Plains one, not a Manhattan one.

The unusual circumstances of the S3 indictment—the grand jury was sitting in White Plains as opposed to Manhattan, and most members of the public in the Southern District of New York were still under a stay-at-home order—may have compromised the defendant’s right to a grand jury selected from a fair cross-section of the community. Accordingly, through this letter-motion and the accompanying declaration of statistician Jeffrey Martin, Mr. Schulte respectfully requests access to the records and papers used in connection with the constitution of the Master and Qualified Jury Wheels in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, pursuant to the Fifth and Sixth Amendments to the United States Constitution and the Jury Selection and Service Act (“JSSA”), 28 U.S.C. § 1867(a) and (f).

While this motion to get records of how this jury was chosen may not lead to a challenge, ultimately, he seems prepared to argue that the pandemic prevented him from being tried by a jury of his peers. And that’s happening all while he’s refusing (as is his right) to toll Speedy Trial rights during the pandemic. (Plus, I’m not sure prosecutors are being very attentive to excluding the time that the defense itself has asked for.)

The press is only now waking up to what the trial (and the prior court filings) has shown. Perhaps now that they’ve tuned in they’ll bother to explain why the guy who allegedly burned the CIA to the ground may well get off on all his Espionage and hacking related charges?