Joshua Schulte was a CIA software engineer who hoarded child abuse images when he was not sending top-secret material to Wikileaks.

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 give him life behind bars as the prosecutors wanted. Joshua Schulte was found guilty in July 2022 on four counts, each of espionage and computer hacking, and one count of lying to FBI agents after leaking classified materials to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks in the so-called Vault 7 leak.

WikiLeaks, in March 2017, started publishing the materials, which revealed how the CIA spied on foreign governments, alleged terrorists and others by hacking their gadgets and computer networks.

Prosecutors said Schulte's actions were "the largest data breach in the history of the CIA, and his transmission of that stolen information to WikiLeaks is one of the largest unauthorised disclosures of classified information" in US history. 

He did not appear to have been leaking material because he wanted to expose the evil CIA, prosecutors said the leaks were motivated by revenge on the administration and his managers who thought he was a "pain in the ass."

While it might be seen as noble and exposing what US spooks are doing, Schulte’s porn collection was less elevating.

Prosecutors also said Schulte had thousands of images and videos of child sexual abuse and that they found the filth in Schulte's New York flat, in an encrypted box under three layers of password protection, during the CIA leaks probe.

Schulte said the child porn he was nicked for was a "victimless crime" and claimed that the images and videos were not his, but had been dumped by others on a server he ran and let them put whatever they wanted on it. Court papers showed messages by Schulte that proved he knew about the images.

The government found that Schulte had "sorted out" this filth "according to his tastes, and kept it for years." In the government's view, there was "no way to guarantee the Court that he's not going to carry on downloading child porn, egging others to download it and share it and just generally doing very dodgy stuff.

His phone was found to contain a picture of him sexually molesting his old room mate which she told investigators was not consensual.