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In Massive Breach, Ex-NSA Contractor Pleads Guilty to Hoarding Highly Classified Secrets (usatoday.com)
"A former National Security Agency contractor on Thursday pleaded guilty to stealing secret defense information over two decades in what legal experts have described as the biggest breach of classified information in U.S. history."
Long-time Slashdot reader mencik quotes USA Today: In his plea deal in U.S. District Court in Baltimore, Harold Thomas Martin III admitted to removing highly classified digital and hard copy documents, then storing them in his home and car from the late 1990s through 2016. Prosecutors say there is no indication Martin ever shared the stolen secrets. His defense attorneys say he simply hoarded the information... One of his lawyers previously described Martin as a "compulsive hoarder" who took home work documents...
Martin, who held multiple security clearances while working at government agencies as a private contractor, said he knew stealing the documents risked the country's security. He pleaded guilty on Thursday to one felony count of willful retention of national defense information. He could be sentenced to nine years in prison.
Martin also told a federal judge that he'd been diagnosed with ADHD. "His actions were the product of mental illness," his federal defenders' statement said. "Not treason."
Long-time Slashdot reader mencik quotes USA Today: In his plea deal in U.S. District Court in Baltimore, Harold Thomas Martin III admitted to removing highly classified digital and hard copy documents, then storing them in his home and car from the late 1990s through 2016. Prosecutors say there is no indication Martin ever shared the stolen secrets. His defense attorneys say he simply hoarded the information... One of his lawyers previously described Martin as a "compulsive hoarder" who took home work documents...
Martin, who held multiple security clearances while working at government agencies as a private contractor, said he knew stealing the documents risked the country's security. He pleaded guilty on Thursday to one felony count of willful retention of national defense information. He could be sentenced to nine years in prison.
Martin also told a federal judge that he'd been diagnosed with ADHD. "His actions were the product of mental illness," his federal defenders' statement said. "Not treason."
Seriously, we need to drop all of these idiotic private companies doing clearance duty. We are getting far too many ppl that do not belong.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
until the next bigger biggest
People who annoy you: baggers
He was just extremely careless. His record should be fully expunged.
'Martin also told a federal judge that he'd been diagnosed with ADHD. "His actions were the product of mental illness," '
How is an 'inability to sit still' in any way the cause of improper handling of classified data? Do we all have a get-out-of-jail-free card that we didn't know about?
Gotta get that info out while it's still possible!
NSA: America's enemy number one.
Isn't this the same thing they tell us they do with our data? they just collect it all, but outside of official work against terrorists and stuff, they are just holding it and doing nothing with it right?
Yup, the government suffers from ADHD.
But if that was downloaded from piratebay, then it would be doing them a favor.
> Taking home over 50TB of classified information is not careless. That's criminal.
Hillary Clinton begs to differ
These documents are for China!
Snowden leaks showed that NSA = NAS for any entity, especially a state actor, that can plant a [sub]contractor.
Its massive reading of classified information (i believe that it is not confidential, it may have black bars) is equivalent to hundreds of months of intense readings ...
It could result an illness as the ADHD for any people that tries to do this massive job.
Gotta over-fulfil Mussolini's dream, and turn the entire state into a network of private for-profit corporations! Aka privatization. Literally aka fascism. (Look up the origins!)
Why is mental illness an excuse but revealing a wholesale federal domestic spying operation isn't.
Clearly, this is a reputable organization that deserves encryption keys to absolutely everyone's private electronic correspondence.
In fact let's give them to every Three Letter Agency. No, we only have to give them out to one. Then that one will leak them to every TLA, then from there to local police departments, then from there to by-law offices, then from there to news organizations. Then from there to the Russians, the Israelis, the Iranians, the North Koreans, the South Africans, then...
Eventually every tag on every dog and cat will have the encryption keys permanently engraved on the back. Just to make sure they don't get lost. Safe and secure!
In the US, it is a crime to negligently allow it to leave the proper secured systems. Negligent means "not being careful". One recent example of someone who was prosecuted is a Navy sailor who sent home a selfie - aboard ship. The interior of US Navy ships are classified.
A manager who carries papers around in a briefcase could be prosecuted for accidentally leaving a classified document in their briefcase and taking it home. With the security clearance comes a legal duty to be careful - to check that all of the classified documents are removed before taking a briefcase home.
Guy was employed there same time Edward Snowden was. I wonder if Snowden discovered his document stash and simply turned copies of that over to Greenwald/Poitras? It make more sense getting from a single source than him being a uber hacker getting into a bunch of different NSA systems undetected. I previously thought that Snowden might have gotten his documents from a Booz Allen director who previously worked as former director or dept. director, I can't remember exactly) of the NSA since lot of the released Snowden document are power point presentations rather than raw intel, which is the kind of the data that executives are more likely to possess. Of course with oligarch Pierre Omidyar putting the kibosh on any further Snowden leaks (less than 2% estimated leaked), we'll never know for sure.
I think document hoarding amongst former intelligence personnel or contractors is more commonplace than previously thought, particularly if familiarity with various intel projects would be of use in their next security job.
Well you can't blame people for being confused when 'negligent' and 'extremely careless' mean different things. Of course then again Comey did basically say anyone else would be prosecuted for the same thing.
ADHD is an invented disease to excuse the behavior of hyperactive unruly kids, and now thieving NSA contractors
If Hillary Clinton was able to get off scot-free then this guy should get the same.
I'm not even an American!
Don't you get tired of all those lies and made up stuff?
We already see how far you go.
God job - hahah you must have said something right to get -1 score - you stepped on someone toes. My bet would be
She's got "blackmail dirt" and
Unbelievable how "shit REALLY works" out there. Disgusting!
Disgusting indeed. Assholes pretending to be 'honest/hardworking/blahblahblah' while in reality its a corrupted nontransparent shithole.
Mother fucker *I* have ADHD too. I've never tried to use it as a goddamn excuse in court though. Wtf people. Grow the hell up.
Your mind is like a parachute. It works best when it's been opened.
Is it because you never bother to read the summaries?
To tell us how we need even more spying on Americans.
I have ADHD too, and it's ridiculous to claim that it's a mental illness. Sure, it makes some things harder to do, and fitting in with what society expects of you isn't quite as easy, but it doesn't lead me to commit crimes! (Although I do have a slight tendency to hoard things, too) :P
I'd like to see what the actual classification level was. It certainly wasn't "highly."
The sailor took a picture of the engine room on a nuclear vessel. AFAIK, the ship's interior is not necessarily classified, but the engine room definitely is.
The National Background Investigations Bureau (NBIB) is a semi-autonomous U.S. Government agency housed within the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM) that is responsible for conducting security clearance investigations into individuals who need to hold security clearances for employment purposes. Creation of the agency was announced in January 2016.[1] NBIB is the primary service provider of background investigations for the U.S. Government and conducts approximately 95 percent of government-wide background investigations for more than 100 federal agencies.[2] The agency's background investigation information technology (IT) systems will be designed, built, secured, and operated by the United States Department of Defense.[3]
Why you always so clueless liar?