In Massive Breach, Ex-NSA Contractor Pleads Guilty to Hoarding Highly Classified Secrets (usatoday.com) 82
"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."
We need FBI back on clearance duty (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:We need FBI back on clearance duty (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Absolutely! The next thing you know, they'll be letting in idiots that won't even type out entire words! -_-
Re:We need FBI back on clearance duty (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Absolutely! The next thing you know, they'll be letting in idiots that won't even type out entire words! -_-
Far worse, they may even elect a president, who has extreme difficulty typing a coherent sentence, and are proud of their ignorance!
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Re: We need FBI back on clearance duty (Score:2)
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Clearance is basically worthless. Anybody planted will get a clearance, the effort in planting them is just higher. Anybody else, they will just screen out the more competent and enterprising people, and hence decrease the skill on the position targeted with no security advantages whatsoever.
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Clearance is basically worthless. Anybody planted will get a clearance
The basic purpose of a clearance is to ensure the individual is not any easy mark for another country to exploit.
Re: We need FBI back on clearance duty (Score:2)
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Hillary Clinton was a government employee (as she's always been, as a matter of fact), when she did her part. Being a government official is no guarantee — you are just much harder to fire over it...
Not a crime (Score:5, Funny)
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Taking home over 50TB of classified information is not careless. That's criminal.
Re:Not a crime (Score:5, Insightful)
Taking home over 50TB of classified information is not careless. That's criminal.
He was extremely careless but there was no ill intent, no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.
Oh wait, he's not a corrupt and wealthy dynastic politician?
Throw him under the toughest PMITA prison!
After all, some animals are more equal than others.
Strat
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It is actually hilarious. Shows nicely what kind of people work for the TLAs and that they do not deserve any level of trust.
Hillary Clinton begs to differ (Score:1, Troll)
> Taking home over 50TB of classified information is not careless. That's criminal.
Hillary Clinton begs to differ
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Sorry, you're wrong. She had a few emails within terabytes of data that had a few minor nits.
James Comey disagrees [fbi.gov]. Hundreds of classified and top secret e-mails, not "a few" and not "minor nits". Even then, Mr. Comey stated:
To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now.
The ONLY reason Hillary was excused was because she was politically connected. People with the same level
Re:Not a crime (Score:4, Interesting)
However I can well imagine that willfully mishandling classified information (taking it home when you have no authority to do so) constitutes a crime under US law. Merely having classified info in your possession when you shouldn't certainly is a crime in my own country.
Being negligent (not careful) with it is a crime (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Not careless at all but all preplanned, it was employment insurance. With the US rabid dog eat rabid dog (healthy dogs do not eat each other) economy, anything goes. So simply stick piling core proprietary designs and engineering to take to their new company, should they ever be let go from the current company, so inter company espionage and not foreign espionage. It's the sort of thing you would expect in an extremely corrupt system, everyone is hedging their bets, ready to turn on each other, at the drop
What about OUR data? (Score:5, Insightful)
Mental illness vs domestic spying (Score:1)
Why is mental illness an excuse but revealing a wholesale federal domestic spying operation isn't.
Attention Deficit Disorder a Myth (Score:1)
ADHD is an invented disease to excuse the behavior of hyperactive unruly kids, and now thieving NSA contractors
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so it's still not a disease then
ADHD, really? (Score:1)
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.
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Ah, that all-too-common "highly" classified (Score:2)