Former NSA contractor pleads guilty to stealing classified material

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Harold Thomas Martin III, the former National Security Agency contractor charged with hoarding more than 50 terabytes of sensitive data at his Maryland home, has pleaded guilty to one felony count of willful retention of National Defense information. In return, federal prosecutors agreed to drop 19 existing charges and seek a sentence of nine years in prison.

The plea provides an anticlimactic and unsettling end to one chapter in an ongoing saga over how the NSA-the world's foremost spy and hacking agency-protects its vast arsenal of weaponized exploits. When the charges against Martin first became public in late 2016, the NSA was still reeling from the leak of highly classified NSA exploits two months earlier by a mysterious group calling itself the Shadow Brokers. Martin first came to investigators' attention as they searched for the source of the Shadow Brokers leak. The hope at the time was investigators had found the culprit.

As it turned out, the Shadow Brokers published a series of increasingly vexing follow-on leaks that continued into 2017, well after Martin's arrest in August 2016. Speaking in deliberately exaggerated broken English published in Internet dispatches, the Shadow Brokers publicly taunted the NSA and made veiled references to top-secret exploits.

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