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Prosecutors Say Contractor Stole 50 Terabytes of NSA Data (zdnet.com)
An NSA contractor siphoned off dozens of hard drives' worth of data from government computers over two decades, prosecutors will allege on Friday. From a ZDNet report: The contractor, Harold T. Martin III, is also accused of stealing thousands of highly classified documents, computers, and other storage devices during his tenure at the agency. It's not known exactly what Martin allegedly stole, but a report from The New York Times on Wednesday suggests that the recently-leaked hacking tools used by the agency to conduct surveillance were among the stolen cache of files. Prosecutors will on Friday charge Martin with violating the Espionage Act. If convicted, he could face ten years in prison on each count. The charges, news of which was first reported by The Washington Post, outline a far deeper case than first thought, compared to the felony theft and a lesser misdemeanor charge of removal and retention of classified information revealed in an unsealed indictment last month.
Are you sure it's not the Russian spies who did it? They seem to be responsible for just about everything lately...
Why do they obfuscate the essential measures of information to fool the sheeple?
It's 3.33 Libraries of Congress.
Is it so darn EASY to get this so called secret data?
It seems everybody who works for the NSA these days is stealing data illicitly.
First there was Snowden, now this.
50TB of data stolen? OK, so they caught the guy, but, if he had been a bit less greedy, perhaps he would have gotten away with it.
Seriously, how can anyone trust the NSA to do the right thing (respect human rights, rule of law, due process, yadda yadda yadda) after these two... ahem... "incidents" is beyond me. Is everyone asleep at the wheel at Fort Meade?
And here is something even more disturbing: if a contractor can do this, what makes you think other people at NSA can't do this, for, you know... "fun" and profit?
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
The NSA... the agency responsible for keeping government secrets actually secret... can't keep its own systems secured. This same government wants unfettered access to all encrypted systems, and already has the ability to tap any phone anywhere in the US from the comfort of their living room sofa. Not scary at all. Nope.
Apparently tons of people, if the last years is any indication.
This is the problem with weaponizing information, its not like nukes where you actually have to remove an object from one persons possession and give it to another, you can just replicate them at will.
The NSA and all its stupid bullshit just needs to end
More like vote trump and face death by firing squad
That's around 700 kbs. He probably just left a telnet session open on an older, slower machine, "collecting" (NOT searching or tapping) the internet in case of terrorism.
Right?
NSA: Well, we can't get Snowden, but it would sure be swell if we could get SOMEONE.
Martin: *Waves* Hi! I'm still living in the States!
NSA: Yes, you'll do nicely.
Consistency is only a virtue if you're not a screw-up.
I sometimes attend IT-related conferences, a few in the infosec space. And inevitably a few people from government contractors and agencies show up (on the taxpayers' dime) and rail against encryption, Apple, Snowden, or anything that makes operating the surveillance state difficult for them.
But between Snowden, the Russians, this guy, and OPM, what's left to steal? Why are we paying these assholes -- especially the ones working for contractors who've sucked on the federal tit for decades -- six-figure salaries to sit around Northern Virginia and shit on the Bill of Rights all day long?
This entire thing's a joke. They spy on us, and then can't secure the shit they uncover. Read Congress's recent report on the OPM debacle to see how fucked we are.
The name Harold T. Martin III sounds like a good author name for that next blockbuster of a book. He must have almost gotten his research for the book ready and now this happened. Slammer bummer!
Talk about rich irony deposits..
More like vote for Hillary and prepare for WW3.
http://dilbert.com/strip/2013-...
Why did NSA even have so much data? Oh, wait is it all the data they collected through their dragnet? Well in that case it's MY data not theirs! I want it back!!!
That's probably your data being "siphoned".
Oh sure, when it's in your hands it's free for the taking. Once they have it they own it though, and taking it is stealing. Now for the first time, taking data is suddenly seen as a problem.
It wasn't 50 Terabytes of data, it was drives that were capable of storing 50 Terabytes of data or 500 million pages of documents. By extrapolation, 50 terabytes can hold 500 million pages. SO they are charging him with the max. It doesn't mean there was that much info, there could be 1 document on the drive. He had like a dozen drives. But he had stuff sitting in plain site in his car, so didn't look like he cared to protect it. Not sure why it took so long to catch him.
Or ~2013 for AMD (Although the old AMD hardware is still 'fresh' on the market until next year.)
AM3/C32/G34 are all pre-SEE but anything LGA11xx or LGA2011+ on the Intel side has had signed management engine firmware since Sandy Bridge. Given the list of countries involved in R&D for it, you should assume Israel, the US, and potentially many of their allies have known exploits if not custom tools to gain remote access to any x86 computer hardware newer than that point. Basically all modern motherboards have integrated ethernet, and if the bios/me firmware has the support necessary to initialize it, they can infiltrate/exfiltrate data below the operating system level. While there haven't been any documented cases of it, there is no way to be sure that is because the software is and will remain secure, rather than that they haven't had a reason yet, or the people targetted have not been paranoid enough to record all traffic entering/leaving their network to discover and document this form of attack.
Keep that in mind the next time you are buying new x86 hardware (and many/most of the modern ARM boards/phones/etc as well!) Our entire hardware ecosystem has been backdoored in under 10 years after all the work done during the 90s (white and blackhat) to try to discredit and/or block it.
Oh I see you work for the Russian MAAFIA. We have ways to make you work. LOL
Browsing without an adblocker is like fucking without a condom - Mal-2
TLzy;DR but What are they doing?? Do they do real/invasive bag searches, wanding, and metal detection when entering and exiting secure areas...Was he in the IT dept just vacuuming up files and drives to be destroyed/or a trusted insider, you can only have some many watchers watching each other but(only recently) were scrapped computers gutted for their drives so they could be destroyed and there are several people overseeing it but can imagine one person palming a drive surreptiously though the destruction process may catch a drive slated for destruction but was never handled(wonder if it just gets filed away in the xfiles)....if anything like my organization...thumb drives outlawed, unauth USB devices in corporate system bad, BYOC bad but no real ability to enforce it outside of policy and penalty if caught; so it continues, wifi bad, but smartphone tethering happens, inserting "unauthorized" drives gets 'flagged' but seems no one looks at those logs, its just a scary popup that says you've been logged...scary booga booga. But no one has ever come to me and asked for the drive, I can burn dozens of dvds without anyone batting an eye, an improvement in other ways though..a decade ago one could browse network neighborhood for open shares the user admin'd their own system, on paper frowned upon, but no real preventive measures...only when audits come through is there any concern but its more get the stacks of paper lined up and pretty not acutally, look too deep into things. Only once have I seen someone come through with a RF tool to seek out a node but they left before looking into desk spaces...not sure what they expected to find in a hallway.
NSA should be charged for allowing it to continue for 2 decades
Go well
so what, who cares?
50 TBytes is a non-credible claim. Period. I've got something like 4-6 TB storage here at Home. 50TB Is an E-Nor-Moose amount of home storage.
Anyone have the release URL? no?
Think this is not real
Does the NSA still have those files? Then they weren't stolen, they were copied.
Who at the NSA will also face prosecution for such poor access controls that a *contractor* (not even a full employee) could steal 50TB of "highly classified documents" unnoticed?
I have full admin rights to every system at my employer, and even with those admin rights, I could not steal data unnoticed. A few times a month I trip an alarm in my normal work and have to justify my actions to our compliance group.
And we don't even store classified documents, just run of the mill business documents for our customers.
No.
FIRST was this (and who knows what else). THEN there was Snowdon. This is important.
One of the arguments in favour of Snowdon being an honourable whistleblower was this:
If he was malicious, he would have quietly stilen the data and sold it to the highest bidder. Like this guy did. And Snowdon didn't.
One of the (many) arguments in favour of Snowdon is that if he could *so easily* collect that information undetected, then other, malicious people could be doing so. And so it turns out. Snowdon alerted us to the weaknesses of the NSA security practices (amongst many other nobler services).
Vindication. Again. It tastes sweet. But not as sweet as a pardon.
Recycle PCs and build a wireless community network www.hillsborough.org.nz
> It seems everybody who works for the NSA these days is stealing data illicitly.
To be fair, isn't that their job?
Found guilty? Firing squad. The only thing traitors deserve
1. We shouldn't rely on the government for security. We should instead support projects (and a standard in this case) like EOMA68 that's enabling people to design devices we might actually be able to secure and won't ship with backdoors.
2. Those who think government is incompetent and violating of our rights, liberties, and freedoms should move to New Hampshire to join in the Free State Project. An effort to limit government. An effort to maximise freedom and liberty. We should end boarders, we should end social security, we should end the police state, we should end government indoctrination programs (government or 'public' schools), we should end taxes, we should end copy"right" (it's an artificial construct reliant on violence to enforce where the are no actual victims, as no violence, coercion, or deprivation of property occur), we should have the freedom to travel and not need permission from the state to drive (the courts ruling are wrong, and people should be free to travel utilizing whatever the means of the day are), there should be no vehicular registration laws (it's just a tax really), there should be no or severely minimal taxes until better solutions can be conceived to replace government functions with private ones (roads, issues here include freedom of travel and privacy, but then again government already destroyed both in most states, NH being an exception mostly), etc.
It would be illegal to spy on Americans in their own country, therefore such data can't exist.
Qui custode custodi?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
But what did he do with all that data?
Just concerned that she wasn't getting enough data from the NSA, as she always complains in her emails....
or maybe it was the roses in the ribbons in her long blonde hair, all I know is he couldn't leave the data lying there
The bigger question is: what did he do with all this data?
Stash it in his basement? As insurance for something?
Use it for blackmail?
Sell it to foreign spies?
Leak select items to the press?
He certainly did not publish it wholesale or we would have heard about it.
Do the original caretakers still have it too? Then no, it wasn't stolen. It was duplicated.
So no theft went on here.
According to reports he stole NSA Hacking Tools, so does that mean the NSA has sent details on the exploits their tools use to the various Software Developers so that they can fix their code?
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
The new penalty is that you get to run for President, as Obama's chosen successor.
Of course, given the huge Wall St bubble and the current economic down-turn (been watching the growth, GDP, productivity numbers?) the next president is probably going to hit an economic mess that makes 2008 look tame, so it just might be a form of punishment to get the job. Keep an eye on the number of physicians bailing out of normal practice and going into concierge care as Obamacare gets increasingly financially toxic too - few things can cause a president more grief in peacetime than a bunch of elderly voters with trouble getting healthcare.