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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...
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.
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.
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.
Talk about rich irony deposits..
http://dilbert.com/strip/2013-...
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.
NSA should be charged for allowing it to continue for 2 decades
Go well
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?
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! --
Just concerned that she wasn't getting enough data from the NSA, as she always complains in her emails....
You need at least 5TB of data to get one A4 page of any interest to anyone - and that probably means a little league supporter.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
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.
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