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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
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Friday July 19 2019, @09:46PM (9 children)
Not the best deal, really.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19 2019, @09:54PM
Considering he didn't disappear off the face of the Earth, I'd say he was lucky.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19 2019, @09:54PM (2 children)
It depends upon what he would have been charged with if he didn't take that deal. If he had been removing material for the better part of two decades, I'm thinking he got a great deal out of this because he deserves much worse.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19 2019, @11:56PM
Deserves more?
The guy took a deal that will probably let him still touch his children again before he dies.
Obviously sentencing is not proportional to acts committed. Sentencing, even prosecution, depends on your class. Really big fish like Hillary are immune. High level government employees like Petraeus get prosecuted, but their sentences fall on the scale of months.
Some low level peon contractor listening to your phone calls in Kansas City though gets hit full force: decade if he cooperates, life if he doesn't.
(Score: 2) by legont on Friday July 19 2019, @11:59PM
He might be charged with more serious crimes later so the deal is really not good at all.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday July 19 2019, @10:04PM
What leverage did he have? They probably had mountains of evidence to bury him in.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 19 2019, @11:34PM (2 children)
Specially not when Hillary and Petraeus walk free.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 20 2019, @02:54AM (1 child)
You forgot Trump and his kids.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 20 2019, @04:23AM
That may make you feel better saying that, but Trump as president can personally declassify anything. He has that power because we the people by the millions voted to take a risk with him.
Hillary, Petraeus and this sap did not face that kind of scrutiny.
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Saturday July 20 2019, @01:38AM
Uncle Sam doesn't like to get crossed. People fucking with the government never get off easy.
(Score: 3, Troll) by Snotnose on Friday July 19 2019, @11:06PM
For most of my working life I saved useful docs so I could work at home. Granted, I did not do this to documents classified secret. Nor did I spend more than a year or so working with classified stuff, the risk/reward just wasn't there (anyone else in the 80s get the video of hot Russian chicks picking up socially incompetent nerds in a bar? We laughed our asses off over that one).
If this guy wasn't looking to sell the stuff he used to work better, then why? This all goes back to HRC and her damned email server in the bathroom. Too lazy to look into exactly what this guy did, and I don't really want to bring up the "lock her up" crap again, but, dafuq?
It's just a fact of life that people with brains the size of grapes have mouths the size of watermelons. -- Aunty Acid
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 20 2019, @04:43AM (1 child)
He should've stored it on a locally administered e-mail server instead.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 20 2019, @06:01AM
What he did was safer: he didn't put his stash online.
No, his fatal flaw is that he isn't the wife of a former president, bringing tons of global cash to the democrat party.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 20 2019, @09:35AM
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 ...