{"id":13121,"date":"2016-10-06T04:46:06","date_gmt":"2016-10-06T04:46:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/?p=13121"},"modified":"2016-10-06T04:46:06","modified_gmt":"2016-10-06T04:46:06","slug":"nsa-contractor-charged-with-stealing-top-secret-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/news\/nsa-contractor-charged-with-stealing-top-secret-data.html","title":{"rendered":"NSA contractor charged with stealing top secret data"},"content":{"rendered":"

NSA contractor charged with stealing top secret data<\/span><\/strong><\/h2>\n

NSA contractor charged with stealing top secret data<\/strong> : BOSTON \u2014 A federal contractor suspected in the leak of powerful National Security Agency hacking tools has been arrested and charged with stealing classified information from the U.S. government, according to court records and U.S. officials familiar with the case.<\/span><\/p>\n

Harold Thomas Martin III, 51, who did technology work for Booz Allen Hamilton, was charged with theft of government property and unauthorized removal and retention of classified materials, authorities said. According to two U.S. officials familiar with the case, he is suspected of \u201choarding\u201d classified materials going back as far as a decade in his house and car, and the recent leak of the hacking tools tipped investigators to what he was doing.<\/span><\/p>\n

Martin was arrested in August after investigators raided his home in Glen Burnie, Md., and found documents and digital information stored on various devices that contained highly classified information, authorities said.<\/span><\/p>\n

The breadth of the harm Martin is alleged to have caused \u2014 and what might have motivated it, if proven \u2014 was not immediately clear, although officials said some of the documents he took home \u201ccould be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the United States.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Investigators are probing whether Martin, who had top secret clearance, was responsible for an apparent leak that led to a cache of NSA hacking tools appearing online in August, according to the officials familiar with the case, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.<\/span><\/p>\n

The FBI and NSA are trying to figure out what drove Martin. The FBI\u2019s Behavioral Analysis Unit is working on a psychological assessment, officials said. \u201cThis definitely is different\u201d from other leak cases, one U.S. official said. \u201cThat\u2019s why it\u2019s taking us awhile to figure it out.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The leaked NSA tools included \u201cexploits\u201d that take advantage of unknown flaws in firewalls, for instance, allowing the government to control a network. They were posted by a group calling itself the Shadow Brokers. Current and former federal officials said their disclosure could allow targets of NSA spying to determine they were hacked by the United States, and some foreign spy agencies might be able to repurpose the tools.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThis will embolden many to retaliate, likely leading to an escalation of an already costly exchange of cyberattacks between the U.S. and some of its adversaries,\u201d said Leo Taddeo, a former FBI agent and chief security officer at Cryptzone, a cybersecurity firm.<\/span><\/p>\n

Martin\u2019s arrest, first reported by the New York Times, marks another humiliating lapse for both Booz Allen and the NSA. In 2013, contractor Edward Snowden, who also worked for Booz Allen, passed a massive trove of documents to journalists, shedding light on massive government surveillance programs that have drawn criticism since they were revealed.<\/span><\/p>\n

Even before that, the federal government had made detecting and deterring leaks a high priority. In 2011, President Obama created the National Insider Threat Task Force to assist in that effort, and the Justice Department under his administration has prosecuted more leakers than all of its predecessors combined. And after the Snowden disclosures, the NSA doubled down, adopting new technical measures to control information.<\/span><\/p>\n

For example, officials instituted new rules on downloading sensitive data and implemented audit trails and more frequent screenings of network access by system administrators.<\/span><\/p>\n