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

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.