Former NSA Contractor Pleads Guilty To Taking His National Defense Work Home With Him

Not sure how leaky our nation is, but it would appear those guarding it from outside attacks seldom gaze inward to see how their internal security is holding up. Harold Martin III, a government contractor, spent 20 years exfiltrating top secret documents before the NSA caught on. Given that some of this happened after the NSA's "oh shit" moment -- Snowden walking away from the NSA and towards journalists with an untold number of documents -- one has to wonder how seriously the NSA takes its own security.

Martin has now pled guilty to one charge of "willful retention of national defense documents." He's still facing twenty charges in total, including the belated addition of an espionage count. Fifty terabytes of documents were lifted by Martin -- not just from the NSA, but from the CIA, US Cyber Command, National Reconnaissance Office, and the Defense Department.

That one count could net Martin 10 years in prison. But he could be facing more time than that, thanks to this being only a plea, rather than a plea deal.

Martin pleaded guilty to one count of willful retention of national defense information, which carries a maximum of 10 years in prison, followed by three years of supervised release and fines up to $250,000.

However, since the guilty plea did not include a deal of any kind and there are other extenuating circumstances-such as the abuse of a position of public trust and another 19 counts charged in the original indictment-the judge will have additional leeway during sentencing.

The other 19 charges are still in play, Martin's plea notwithstanding. The DOJ may try to make an example of Martin as a deterrent for future contractors who can't seem to stop taking their work home with them. Unfortunately, the internal controls on contractor access don't appear to be receiving the same amount of attention. As the White House continues to loosen restrictions on federal agency access to NSA collections and tools, the likelihood of sensitive information that can be accessed or taken by contractors increases. The expanded surveillance apparatus is too big to be handled in-house and will likely never be scaled back to the point where controlled access is anything more than a theory.

This is the end of one contractor's twenty-year run on supposedly ultra-secure systems. Martin cannot possibly be the only contractor whose work has made its way out of the office. The Intelligence Community's oversight has pointed out the half-assed job being done to secure things post-Snowden. Martin is just an embodiment of the IC's ideals: more focused on collecting data than making sure the collected info remains secure.