Ex-NSA contractor Harold Martin indicted: He spent 'up to 20 years stealing top-secret files' Former Booz Allen Hamilton contractor Harold Thomas Martin III allegedly stole secret and top-secret software and documents from American intelligence agencies for up to 20 years. That's according to a federal grand jury indictment revealed today. The legal paperwork [PDF] lays out the US Department of Justice's case against …
"... allegedly stole secret and top-secret software and documents from American intelligence agencies for up to 20 years ..."
Twenty years, you say? Just a suggestion folks, but you might wish to review your security procedures a little.
I wonder how many contractors have taken classified documents during that period, and not been caught.
If I was working with classified material, and had been helping myself to some of it, I'm pretty sure that after Manning and Snowden I'd get nervous that they were going to start cracking down on that sort of thing and stop.
I guess they were cracking down - it only took a bit over three years after Snowden to catch this guy!
Except for the fact that this guy is a "white American gent" just like Timothy McVeigh. Terrorists come in vanilla, Christian flavor too, you know. So far, I've yet to hear of any Mexicans causing more terrorism than some ill-conceived tamales. That wall should be to keep the idiots inside of the US from spreading to nearby nations that are not run by a random orange fruitcake.
The guy is a hero. Martin was using his own time and resources to create backups for the organisation he worked for. That's after he learned that these organisation have a terrible backup success rate and that important documents frequently get lost or accidentally erased, when required by courts.
The real news here is that it took 20 years to find out about this guys outstanding efforts. He should get a lifetime achievement award.
Aye, and beginning in 1996, too. There were few CD-R drives, memory sticks or unobtrusive portable mass storage boxes, back then. Floppy disks carried no more than 1.38 MiB, which I suppose is big enough for a few documents, but Top Secret networks typically didn't have floppy disk drives. The earliest stuff was probably carried out through a security checkpoint in good old paper files.
[1] Certainly no office-based ones in NSA establishments, I expect. See Wikipedia entry
We did have Exabyte 8mm tapes that held many giga bytes. They were physically identical to camcorder tapes. The easiest way of getting a lot of data out the door would be to switch a backup tape. Walking out the door with a tape relabeled "Holiday in Spain" would have been low risk. They were fairly unreliable too so if a backup tape was later found to be blank no one bat an eyelid.
AC due to having had very high clearance and using such tapes.
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