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Former NSA Contractor Harold Martin III Sentenced to 9 Years in Prison

posted by Fnord666 on Friday July 19 2019, @09:35PM   Printer-friendly
from the if-you-can't-do-the-time dept.

takyon writes:

Ex-NSA Contractor Who Stole Top Secret Documents Is Sentenced To 9 Years In Prison

A former National Security Agency contractor who pleaded guilty to stealing vast troves of classified material over the course of two decades has been sentenced to nine years in prison.

Harold Martin III, 54, apologized before U.S. District Judge Richard Bennett handed down the sentence on Friday.

"My methods were wrong, illegal and highly questionable," Martin told the court in Baltimore, according to The Associated Press.

Earlier this year, he pleaded guilty to "willful retention of national defense information," a crime that carries a punishment of anywhere from no jail time to a maximum prison sentence of 10 years. His plea agreement called for a sentence of nine years in prison.

Previously: NSA Contractor Harold Martin III Arrested
NSA Contractor Accused of "Stealing" Terabytes of Information, Charged Under Espionage Act
The Shadow Brokers Identify Hundreds of Targets Allegedly Hacked by the NSA
Former NSA Contractor May Have Stolen 75% of TAO's Elite Hacking Tools
Former NSA Contractor Harold Martin Indicted

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 20 2019, @09:35AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 20 2019, @09:35AM (#869335)

    hmmm ... how can you steal something that inheriently has no original and can fundamentally only exist as a copy?
    anything electronic and binary has no original ... it's the way a computer works; it makes copies.
    my grip is thus with the word "stole". it implies that something went missing. which, if digital, is only possible when deleted which is still not categoriced as "stolen" but would rather be "destroyed".
    one could argue that something was "copied" but that can never give you a jail sentence ever, unless (lots and lots of) monerary damage was involved. however one then could argue why the non-existant digital original was digitized and made to be universally copiable in the first place which would place the blame on whoever digitized the ... data.
    also, the "data" not-stolen but copied, might be completly irrelevant even if not released to general public thus still "top secret" in less then 9 years (very likely).
    so this is a good "scare theather" methinks ...