The FBI secretly arrested a former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor in August and, according to law enforcement officials, is investigating whether he stole and disclosed highly classified computer code developed by the agency to hack into the networks of foreign governments.
The arrest raises the embarrassing prospect that for the second time in three years, a contractor for the consulting company Booz Allen Hamilton stole highly damaging secret information while working for the NSA.
In 2013, Edward Snowden, who was also a Booz Allen contractor, took a vast trove of documents from the agency, which were later passed to journalists, exposing surveillance programs in the US and abroad.
The contractor was identified as Harold Martin III of Glen Burnie, Maryland, according to a criminal complaint filed in late August and unsealed on Wednesday.
Martin, who at the time of his arrest was working as a contractor for the US Department of Defense after leaving the NSA, was charged with theft of US government property and the unauthorized removal or retention of classified documents.
FBI RAID
Martin, 51, was arrested during an FBI raid on his home on Aug. 27.
A neighbor, Murray Bennett, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday that two dozen FBI agents wearing military-style uniforms and armed with long guns stormed the house and later escorted Martin out in handcuffs.
According to court documents, the FBI discovered thousands of pages of documents and dozens of computers or other electronic devices at his home and in his car, a large amount of it classified.
The digital media contained “many terabytes of information,” according to the documents.
They also discovered classified documents that had been posted online, including computer code, officials said.
More than a month later, the authorities cannot say with certainty whether Martin leaked the information, passed it on to a third party or simply downloaded it.
When FBI agents interviewed Martin after the raid, he initially denied having taken the documents and digital files, according to the complaint.
He later told the authorities that he knew he was not authorized to have the materials, it said.
He told the agents that “he knew what he had done was wrong and that he should not have done it because he knew it was unauthorized.”
The US Department of Justice unsealed the complaint — which was filed in the District Court in Baltimore — after the New York Times notified the government it intended to publish a story about Martin.
In a brief statement issued on Wednesday, lawyers for Martin said: “We have not seen any evidence, but what we know is that Hal Martin loves his family and his country. There is no evidence that he intended to betray his country.”
If true, the allegations against Martin are a setback for US President Barack Obama’s administration, which has sustained a series of disclosures of classified information.
Along with Snowden’s revelations, the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks in 2010 disclosed hundreds of thousands of documents from the US departments of state and defense.
DISCLOSURE
In the aftermath of the Snowden disclosures, the administration took steps to put measures in place to prevent the unauthorized disclosures of classified information.
White House press secretary Josh Earnest defended the Obama administration’s procedures for protecting national security information, saying since Snowden’s disclosures, agencies have tightened their security measures.
Another administration official said investigators suspected that Martin began taking the material before Snowden’s actions became public, adding that reforms put into place after Snowden’s theft would not have stopped Martin.
“This is something that has its origins certainly before Snowden came on the scene, so many of the forms that have been in place since 2013 wouldn’t be relevant to stopping what happened,” the official said.
The information believed to have been stolen by Martin appears to be different in nature from Snowden’s theft, which included documents that described the depth and breadth of the NSA’s surveillance.
Martin is suspected of taking the highly classified computer code developed by the agency to break into computer systems of adversaries like Russia, China, Iran and North Korea, some of it outdated.
Several officials said that at the moment it did not look like a traditional espionage case, but the FBI has not ruled anything out.
Martin does not fit any of the usual profiles of an “insider threat,” and one administration official said that investigators thought that he was not politically motivated — “not like a Snowden or someone who believes that what we were doing was illegal and wanted to publicize that.”
Martin, a US Navy veteran, has degrees in economics and information systems, and has been working for a decade on a doctorate in computer science.
Neighbors described him as cordial and helpful, but knew little about his work.
Law enforcement officials said that the FBI was investigating the possibility that he had collected the files with no intention of passing them along.
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