Former NSA Operative Arrested for Stealing Classified Documents

Harold Thomas Martin III was arrested yesterday by the FBI in connection with the leaked NSA hacking tools.

Martin was arrested at his Maryland home for theft of government property and unauthorized removal and retention of classified materials.

The Department of Justice press release stated that warrants to search Martin’s home were issued in August, and that most of the information taken from the home, plus Martin’s vehicle, were marked as classified information of the United states. Among the information were documents containing Top Secret and Sensitive Compartmentalized Information.

Also included among these files were six documents created in 2014,  said to be produced in part by sensitive government sources, methods, and capabilities of great importance to national security.  Just earlier, The Shadow Brokers released what they claimed to be leaked NSA tools.  Several experts in the field verified the authenticity of these files.

A report stated:

In August The Shadow Brokers dumped a slew of NSA exploits and hacking tools including those for gaining access to Cisco and Huawei firewalls. The hackers said that they would release more code to the highest bidder of an online auction, or in exchange for 1 million bitcoins (around $568 million).

Last week a member of the Shadow Brokers posted that he was upset due to the fact that no one was taking the auction seriously.

Former NSA staff released a statement that an insider was behind the leaked hacking tools. An investigation was launched to see whether the tools were left on a remote server and then found by the Russians. Coincidentally, Martin worked for the same NSA contractor that Snowden worked for. It has yet to be known if the Shadow Brokers are directly linked to the leak.

“This is huge. Did the FBI secretly arrest the person behind the reports NSA sat on huge flaws in US products?” Snowden tweeted.

When questioned, Martin admitted that he had taken the documents home with him.

“Martin stated that he knew what he had done was wrong and that he should not have done it because he knew it was unauthorized,” the report states.

Martin is facing eleven years behind bars for the unauthorized removal and retention of classified materials and theft of government property.

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