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

Amazing!

[Stele]

Didn't have time to read the full description... but, wow!

They've already got mammoths cloned from ancient DNA, and they're training them to steal classified data? What CAN'T the NSA do?

Re:Double standard

[Fire_Wraith]

IANAL, but in terms of the law as written, you're correct that intent doesn't matter. In terms of how the law has been applied, it does - and this matters to some degree, because the U.S. is part of the English legal tradition, rather than the French/Napoleonic (with the exception of Louisiana state law).
More specifically, if you look back over the case law for this, people generally get prosecuted if:
A) They get caught lying to the investigators
B) Had the intent to steal, whether for profit or ideology
To date, no one has been prosecuted without one of those two, or without prosecutors alleging one of those two. When I was in the military, I saw several cases where someone screwed up and put classified material on a system that wasn't rated for it, including email. Investigations were conducted, servers were purged, and those responsible got a slap on the wrist and a note in their file for committing a security violation (if you get enough of those, you lose your clearance). This is why Comey said what he did - cases like Clinton's result in administrative punishment at most, and the worst penalty was loss of clearance and thus job (which didn't apply anymore for her because she was no longer Secretary of State).

In the case of this guy, likely the Prosecutors feel they have enough evidence to allege that he was trying to sell the data, probably based on his pattern of conduct, and probably also because those selfsame tools showed up for sale on the internet.

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.