NSA Contractor Indicted Over Mammoth Theft of Classified Data (reuters.com)

Dustin Volz, reporting for Reuters: A former National Security Agency contractor was indicted on Wednesday by a federal grand jury on charges he willfully retained national defense information, in what U.S. officials have said may have been the largest heist of classified government information in history. The indictment alleges that Harold Thomas Martin, 52, spent up to 20 years stealing highly sensitive government material from the U.S. intelligence community related to national defense, collecting a trove of secrets he hoarded at his home in Glen Burnie, Maryland. The government has not said what, if anything, Martin did with the stolen data. Martin faces 20 criminal counts, each punishable by up to 10 years in prison, the Justice Department said. "For as long as two decades, Harold Martin flagrantly abused the trust placed in him by the government," said U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein.

Comments

the NSA should put him on the payroll

[turkeydance]

if he's THAT good for THAT long

Re:the NSA should put him on the payroll

[hey!]

This. Fuck, they should give him a nice cushy pension and his own private island for giving them the methods he used to steal said information over those 20 years.

Unless the method he used was to exploit bureaucratic inertia and dysfunction. It's only worth paying people for information you plan to do something about. If you don't plan to do something about it, the next best choice would be to make an example of people who expose your incompetence.

Double standard

[Hylandr]

But Hillary did nothing wrong.

Re:Double standard

[Perl-Pusher]

And using bleach bit to permanently delete emails wasn't destroying evidence? Even though it was a fools errand because it existed on recipient computers is beside the point. There was a clear intent there to conceal. So yes there is a very big double standard. A Navy guy in Portsmouth VA was convicted and all he did was connect his tablet to receive emails in the field. No intent, no destroying evidence, just mishandling. I can recount an airman getting an article 15 for leaving a safe unlocked. The safe was in a secure facility designed to allow and store classified information. Basically a safe inside a vault. Career ruined over a simple lapse.

Abused Trust

[freeze128]

Why is the trust that the government placed in the contractor worth more than the trust that the citizens of the U.S. have placed in the government? It works both ways, guys.

Re:I don't buy it

[smooth wombat]

You can't see how someone, over a 20 year period, was able to gather 50TB of data? 2.5TB of material per year is insignificant to the amount of data people such as him have access to.

Re:Good reason...

[WheezyJoe]

... not to out-source critical shit to contractors.

But you want to be able to hire and fire them easily, on the whims of the budget, right? And to show efficiency with as tiny a staff as possible, right? And to obfuscate responsibility if something goes wrong, right? If your assistant commits treason on your watch, you're to blame because you should have picked up on it, at least. But a contractor? Who takes the fall for contracting the contractor? Fingers point everywhere but nobody's directly responsible for what a contractor does (except when he does something good, you can take credit).

Out-sourcing. Your stepping-stone to success in management.