Former NSA contractor accused of stealing top secret documents says he was just a hoarder
Harold Martin, 52, a private contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA) and a former U.S. Navy lieutenant, was indicted Wednesday on 20 counts of stealing classified materials.
The indictment accuses Martin of stealing 20 years of data from multiple intelligence agencies, dating back to 1996 when he started working as a government contractor.
He was arrested in August at his home in Glen Burnie, Maryland but information about the arrest only came out in October.
Martin's lawyers have argued that their client was just a "compulsive hoarder" and not tied up in anything shady when he was found with a "breathtaking" amount of top secret and classified documents in his home and car.
Just what documents Martin had taken is unclear, but The Washington Post reported it may have been up to 50 terabytes of data. The stolen data, some taken while he was working at one point for Booz Allen Hamilton, may have included an NSA hacking toolset and a 2014 report about cyber intrusion techniques.
Booz Allen Hamilton is the same company that Edward Snowden worked for when he stole documents he leaked to journalists.
Also in the trove of documents, both physical and digital, are allegedly a CIA document, National Reconnaissance Office information and an NSA document with details on suspected terrorists.
Martin, who went by Hal, has worked as a contractor for two decades and was deep in a Ph.D. program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, until his arrest last summer, according to his LinkedIn page. He describes himself as a programmer and scientist "trying to finish that dissertation...." He had submitted a paper to a 2014 conference titled, "Virtual Interfaces for Exploration of Heterogeneous & Cloud Computing Architectures."
Martin will be back in court on Valentine's Day. For each of those 20 counts he faces 10 years in prison.
The Associated Press contributed reporting.
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
