Ex-NSA contractor sentenced to nine years behind bars for stealing classified documents
Harold Martin, a formerNSA contractor, has been sentenced to nine years behind bars for stealing classified information from US intelligence agencies over two decades.
Harold T. Martin III, 54, was also found guilty of stealing national defence secrets. He was also handed an additional three years of supervised release after pleading guilty to wilful retention of national defence information.
Martin was arrested by the FBI in 2016 for stealing up to 50TB of classified data from government agencies, including the National Security Agency (NSA), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), US Cyber Command, and National Reconnaissance Office.
According to prosecutors, Martin stole secret files containing information related to foreign cyber issues, foreign cyber attack techniques, an intelligence-gathering tool, and so on.
In March, he pleaded guilty to retention of defence information, an offence that carries a punishment of maximum 10 years in prison. "Instead of respecting the trust given to him by the American people, Martin violated that trust and put our nation's security at risk," said Assistant Attorney General John Demers, according to Reuters.
"This sentence will hold Mr. Martin accountable for his dangerous and unlawful actions."
Martin worked with at least seven companies from 1993 to 2016. During that period, he was assigned as a contractor to work in multiple government agencies and collected huge volume of material from those agencies over the years.
When he was arrested in 2016, the FBI seized dozens of computers and other storage devices from his residence containing classified information.
"The Defendant was in possession of an astonishing quantity of marked classified documents which he was not entitled to possess," prosecutors said in court documents in 2016.
"Many of the marked documents were lying openly in his home office or stored in the backseat and trunk of his vehicle."
Initially, investigators feared that Martin might have sold secrets to a foreign intelligence agency or to the Shadow Brokers group, which leaked NSA hacking tools in 2016 and 2017. But, they could not find any evidence of Martin sharing the information with any foreign agency or group.
Martin's lawyers argued that he never intended to share any of the NSA's documents with any other group, and was seeking to create a personal archive as he desperately tried "to fill the voids in his life."
Martin's prosecution is not the first case of a NSA employee being sentenced for stealing secret documents from American agencies.
In September last year, ex-contractor Nghia Pho was sentenced to five and a half years for taking classified documents to her home. NSA whistle-blower Reality Winner also got five years and three months in last August for leaking a secret document to the Intercept.
Authorities in the US have taken a closer interest in the activities of its NSA staffers and contractors since the Edward Snowden leaks of 2013.
Gloss