NSA guy who tried and failed to spy for Russia gets 262 months in the slammer A former NSA employee has been sentenced to 262 months in prison for attempting to freelance as a Russian spy. In his trial yesterday, Jareh Sebastian Dalke pleaded guilty to six counts of attempted transmission of top-secret info to a foreign agent as announced by the US Department of Justice. He had worked at the NSA as an …
>(...) the former NSA worker took his laptop to Union Station in Denver and sent the documents to the FBI agent over the internet
"Hey let's convene at this heavily monitored public transit location where there's cameras everywhere to do crimes!"
- "That sounds great and not unreasonable in the least"
"And despite you sending me these stolen documents electronically, which doesn't necessitate us meeting in person at all, bring your laptop along too"
- "Got it"
Thinking more about it, if he was expecting it in used notes he’s even more of an idiot than I first thought. Obviously if it’s not a legitimate member of the Russian Intelligence (Oxymoron anyone?) then they’d just nab him when he goes to collect the cash. Even using a dead letterboxn doesn’t help you in that scenario.
"Dalke and Teixeira were seemingly completely incompetent in leaking info. Maybe the US government should review who gets access to classified materials"
On the whole it seems preferable that it's better to allow the incompetent to access the materials. OTOH neither we nor the US govt know about the competent ones.
Hey, if someone is at least a good spy, that's (IMO anyway) not on the FBI or NSA. However, when someone this sloppy at tradecraft manages to get a top secret clearance... that's just a huge professional embarrassment. Hopefully both the NSA and FBI have conducted a post mortem on this and made changes to their processes to at least try to prevent it from happening again. I mean, just for starters, shouldn't there be some kind of internal flag if someone's trying to access documents that aren't part of any of their assigned duties? Or if someone seems to be accessing large numbers of documents in a relatively short period of time? There may be perfectly valid reasons for both scenarios, but it seems like it should trigger someone to at least come along and find out what they are.
There was a student maybe 10 years ago that the FBI arrested for terrorist activity, that the FBI had pressured for over a year to ship materials for a drone or something out of the US that was illegal to do so. They scared him into it, arrested him, then it went public -was interesting, no idea if they kept him for torture fun. I wonder if this is a regular practice, for job security. Because this guy sounds to stupid to do it on his own.
Even if someone has the highest clearance, the material to which they could have access, should be completely restricted to only that needed by their assigned role(s), one would have thought.
A very basic security fail.
Even the US President should be not be entitled to automatic access to classified material.
Given the failings over recent years Maxwell Smart (86) and Control appear rather professional and the Men from Uncle quite aspirational. :)
Perhaps the Brits can lend them Johnny English to give them a few tips.
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