15 ms·

Ex-NSA Contractor Stole at Least 500M Pages of Records and Secrets

mtgx 10y ago
And this is just the one the found out about, mainly because of ShadowBrokers' public announcement that they have NSA's tools, which prompted the NSA to investigate the issue. But how many of NSA's employees may be selling NSA data silently to others and have been more careful about it? Same thing with Snowden. They only found out about it when he went public with it. But they want us to trust them to store all of our data.
- thingexplainer 10y ago
  Perhaps the DNI should consider offering some form of clemency for other people who brought "homework" out of their SCIF to turn themselves in.
  - nickff 10y ago
    This may be a good idea, but I think the DNI would be rather embarrassed if the true magnitude of the 'homework' problem were revealed.
    - thingexplainer 10y ago
      It doesn't have to become public. It probably shouldn't.
hackinthebochs 10y ago
What the hell are these people doing over there? The NSA really needs a "security section" that actively monitors the usage of resources of its employees. That someone could be siphoning terabytes of classified information over the span of decades is just beyond comprehension.
- OscarCunningham 10y ago
  They need an NSASA.
- pg_is_a_butt 10y ago
  not trusting themselves creates a legal action whereby those being spied on could argue the congressional actions did not use trusted actors and are thus invalid. you're all idiots.
- x1798DE 10y ago
  > That someone could be siphoning terabytes of classified information over the span of decades is just beyond comprehension. I don't know how ridiculous this is. Security is an ever-evolving field, and a lot of these stringent controls weren't necessarily in place decades ago - for example, what fraction of places were banning USB flash drives even 10 years ago? The NSA isn't superhuman, and security is hard. I have no love for the agency, but it's not like only complete morons are susceptible to deep insiders exfiltrating data over the course of decades.
  - ythl 10y ago
    > and security is hard. Security experts act like it's very trivial and basic to get a fully secure shop up and running if we simply do everything they say. When something fails, the security expert gets fired, and a new one comes on board who will inevitably call the old one "incompetent" and claim that super basic and trivial things were not being followed. Repeat ad infinitum. Some organizations/companies are more vulnerable than others, but I have yet to see one that cannot be compromised by a determined/patient adversary.
    - oldmanjay 10y ago
      When a rebuttal starts with a strawman, what are the odds it's going to improve from that point?
  - L_226 10y ago
    I have firsthand knowledge that a certain Australian three letter agency was filling USB ports for non-cleared staff with silicone gel, more than 10 years ago.
alva 10y ago
Odd to describe this as "500m Pages" "Fifty terabytes is equivalent to 50,000 gigabytes. One gigabyte can contain 10,000 pages of documents, the department estimated. By extrapolation, 50 terabytes can hold 500 million pages." I can't find the court filing at the moment, but I would be amazed if even a small majority of the 50TB were 'pages of documents'. Looks like he got away with databases to me. edit: Found the filing http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/nsa1019.pdf http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/nsa1019.pdf
- molecule 10y ago
  I'd be curious to know if and how he was able to store 50TB @ home while avoiding being a disorganized pack-rat?
  - nickff 10y ago
    All it would take is a few network attached storage devices with high-capacity 3.5" drives. If you have 8 drives per NAS, and each drive is 4 TB, you only need 2 NAS to store data with no redundancy or RAID 5, and 3 or 4 NAS for more redundancy. P.S. 6 TB drives are now very common, and 8TB drives are widely available, but more expensive.
  - v4n4d1s 10y ago
    There's a subreddit dedicated to data hoarding. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/ Storage got cheap and easy to manage for regular consumers over the last few years.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- patrickg_zill 10y ago
  1 page of text with no graphics, is less than 2Kb. So 1MB can hold 500 pages of text; 1GB can hold 50,000 pages. 1TB can hold 50 million. 10TB can thus hold 500 million. Of course, graphics, audio, video files etc. can severely increase the size.
wintom 10y ago
When everyone screams about security and why we shouldn't be snooped on one of the biggest factors to consider is that inevitably someone who has access to this information will abuse their power. It's just human nature. The argument that there can be some process, some security apparatus, or anything in this world to prevent that is just a pipe dream. Someone will abuse their power and ruin someones life that is why no one should have access and that way we are all better off.
- hash-set 10y ago
  Yes. I am caught up in the Chinese hack that stole all the .gov background check information last year. Not only did my pertinent information get stolen, but also everyone who I used as character references. Trust is dead.
  - grandalf 10y ago
    Oh wow, I've been a reference for a few friends. Looks like mine was breached too. Incidentally I got the "looks like a state actor is trying to access your gmail account" several years ago, and I think the only value I'd have is as a friend/reference of some people in fairly sensitive government positions.
  - doubt_me 10y ago
    I actually heard it was 100x worse than reported. Totally not from anyone at homeland security tho
gtrubetskoy 10y ago
According to my simplistic math using standard 10x12x15 inch boxes of pages where each box has 5000 sheets, it's about a 15x15x15 meter cube. 15 meters is approximately a 5 story building. If it's 16lb paper, then about 3,828 metric tonnes. Obviously the weight of the paper is a huge factor here. Another way of looking at it: if there are 260 days in a year (not counting weekends), then over a period of, say, 10 years, it amounts to 1.47 metric ton per day.
grandalf 10y ago
The most fascinating aspect about this sort of thing in my opinion is the realistic size limit of a "circle of trust". Considering the frequency of relationship infidelity, I'd estimate the maximum reliable size of a circle of trust at roughly 1.5 people. Chances are intelligence agencies can use vetting procedures and internal processes to increase that number, but it's still fairly small. Many major scandals get discovered due to a broken circle of trust... via both professional and interpersonal infidelities. Human trust and trustworthiness is an act of loyalty and intimacy. Humans are notoriously easy to offend, challenging loyalties and disrupting intimacy. In the private sector, employees frequently jump ship to leverage trade secrets for their own benefit... not necessarily as blatant corporate espionage, but by having "several years of highly relevant industry experience" and applying for a job with a competitor. Something like Bitcoin requires us to trust any one party very little, but to trust the system's behavior in aggregate. The safeguards put in place after Manning and Snowden's breaches seem to be intended to mitigate harm, as does "need to know" security clearance, but I wonder if there exist (or will exist) more elaborate distributed trust systems: Suppose that instead of "need to know", everyone else in the intelligence agency department knew some information about what secret information you had viewed or saved that day, week, month... both magnitude and frequency, and frequency of repeated visits to document areas... some sort of footprint that offered an easy heuristic for social detection of deceitful behavior by fellow humans, rather than relying simply on harm-mitigation measures. This culprit would have had a very distinct footprint even if none of his coworkers could themselves access the data or see exactly what it contained. Disclaimer: I believe that government classification of information ought to be avoided in 95% of the circumstances it is used today. There are reasons to do it, but all information should be declassified within 50 years of its initial classification no matter what, and classification of information for political or selfish reasons (not directly in the national interest) should be a serious crime akin to treason or espionage.
- dgacmu 10y ago
  I won't argue against the idea that we have too much classified. It's expensive and counterproductive to try to protect things that are no longer important. That said, 50 years ago, we had detailed and effective designs for nuclear weapons - likely well beyond what's known by, e.g., north Korea. There are probably people alive who'd be placed in danger by the release of information from 50 years ago. Not many, but 50 is within the lifetime of someone who was undercover at age 25. I'm not sure that such a blanket 50 year declassification policy is defensible.
alva 10y ago
Unsent letter from the suspect in 2007 "Well, for one thing, I’ve seen pretty much all your tech secrets wrt [sic] regard to compusec [computer security]. Thanks. You made me a much better infosec [information security] practitioner. In exchange, well, I gave you my time, and you failed to allow me to help you . . . You are missing most of the basics in security practice, while hinking you are the best. It’s the bread and butter stuff that will trip you up. Trust me on this one. Seen it. . . . Dudes/Dudettes, I can’t make this any plainer . . . Listen up . . . ‘They’ are inside the perimeter. . . I’ll leave you with this: if you don’t get obnoxious, obvious, and detrimental to my future, then I will not bring you ‘into the light’, as it were. If you do, well, remember that you did it to yourselves"[0] Limiting the damage disgruntled employees can cause must be very difficult. Presumably drastically reducing the amount of information any individual gets exposed to? [0] http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/nsa1019.pdf http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/nsa1019.pdf
grownseed 10y ago
> "[...] he has demonstrated absolutely no interest in protecting it" > "The filing described Mr. Martin as computer genius who easily outsmarted government efforts to protect secrets and said he possessed an advanced understanding of how to encrypt messages and hide information in cyberspace." This doesn't really make sense and the wording also hints at sensationalism. It reads like a classic case of deflection, making the accused appear considerably more powerful than he actually is. This, to me, shows a few things: - the NSA clearly has no clue who accesses "their" data, when, or how - the NSA will throw anybody under the bus to save face - the NSA, to this date, still refuse to put their own inadequacy in the balance and traded their integrity for the power to sustain the organization itself at the cost of everything else (including their original purpose) Why on earth is this organization still allowed to operate at all?
- nickff 10y ago
  The more important question to me is how the other government agencies compare to the NSA. I have no reason to suspect that the NSA is below average; everything I have seen suggests that the are probably better than HHS, HUD, etc. and this is very troubling to me.
  - tptacek 10y ago
    They are much better than the civilian agencies.
- jdubs 10y ago
  The leaders have determined that the value they bring outweighs the liability they are.
- elcct 10y ago
  The purpose of such agencies is to leech on the tax payer. Most important part is to create problems, "solve" them in the most expensive and ineffective way and spread fear.
- tptacek 10y ago
  It's hard to give a concise response to a comment going in so many different directions at once, but I'll take a whack at it: * Should NSA be broken up? I think so. It's a mainstream policy idea. NSA has two conflicting missions --- IAD and SIGINT --- three, if you want to count pure research separately. Splitting up NSA would solve some conflict of interest problems, but would also add the practical benefit of minimizing the number of people who might end up with access to documents like this guy collected. * Does that mean NSA is lying about the Martin case? No. They could be, but I would not put money on that. Prosecutors definitely shade facts to make their cases sound stronger. But it's less likely that in an extremely high profile federal prosecution like this one, they're going to entirely make things up. With Martin, we're talking about a case where someone hoarded extremely classified documents about ongoing operations against "known enemies of the US" (that's a term that probably has pretty specific meaning). He left them laying in his car. On the back of the printouts were handwritten explanations of tradecraft and terms of art. If I had to guess, the most likely outcome here is going to be that we are talking about someone with very serious mental health issues who NSA had no business putting within 1000 miles of the information he managed to hoard in his house.
pinewurst 10y ago
Why is everyone working in IT portrayed in press and courts as a "computer genius"?
- deadbunny 10y ago
  Because 99% of the population have no idea how technology actually works.
- leggomylibro 10y ago
  It's less of a mouthful than, "practitioner of the dark arts and lay member of the Esoteric Order of Data-Gone".
- Nelson69 10y ago
  There are 2 factors here. 1) If he's simply a mediocre IT jockey and then his NSA contractor status resulted in him pulling in $200+k a year, that's a bad look. 2) If he's average and he somehow managed to defeat the NSA at what the NSA does, that's also a bad look. Now it's likely a policy problem, that contractors can access these quantities of data with access to physically removable media and such seems like a policy problem. On the other hand if he's some kind of computer super genius then he was given a little trust and took advantage of it.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
whamlastxmas 10y ago
Full text because stupid paywall and web workaround is lame solution: WASHINGTON—A former National Security Agency contractor amassed at least 500 million pages of government records, including top-secret information about military operations, by stealing documents bit by bit over two decades, the Justice Department alleged in a court filing submitted Thursday. Prosecutors in August arrested and charged Harold “Hal” Martin III, of Glen Burnie, Md., with theft of government property and unauthorized removal or retention of classified documents. The case was kept under seal until earlier this month, when some details became public. The new filing said the Justice Department would likely charge Mr. Martin with additional crimes, including violating the Espionage Act, an offense that carries much stiffer penalties than the current charges. Mr. Martin’s attorney, Jim Wyda, declined to comment on the new filing. In the past, he has said that Mr. Martin is a patriotic American who has served his country. A federal court has scheduled a hearing for Friday to consider whether Mr. Martin should be released while awaiting trial. The Justice Department released its 12-page document ahead of that hearing, detailing new allegations about the scope of Mr. Martin’s alleged theft and suggesting he had become heavily armed, accumulating 10 weapons, and had taken sophisticated steps to cover his tracks. Some former associates had described Mr. Martin as a harmless hoarder who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. The new government filing paints a different picture, raising questions about his motives and suggesting he was capable of sharing U.S. secrets with the nation’s adversaries and potentially putting American lives at risk. The document doesn’t, however, answer one of the big questions in the case: whether Mr. Martin shared any of the stolen classified information with another person or another country. The document offers no evidence that he did but suggested Mr. Martin had the capacity to do so. The Maryland home of Harold Martin III, a former NSA contractor who the Justice Department alleges stole millions of pages of government records. ENLARGE The Maryland home of Harold Martin III, a former NSA contractor who the Justice Department alleges stole millions of pages of government records. Photo: Jose Luis Magana/Associated Press Mr. Martin, a former Naval officer, was most recently a contractor at Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp. , a job that placed him inside some of the government’s most secretive programs inside the NSA and the Pentagon. The Justice Department said that a search of his home and his automobile uncovered “thousands of pages of documents and dozens of computers and other storage devices and media containing, conservatively, fifty terabytes of information.” Fifty terabytes is equivalent to 50,000 gigabytes. One gigabyte can contain 10,000 pages of documents, the department estimated. By extrapolation, 50 terabytes can hold 500 million pages. In seeking Friday’s hearing, Mr. Martin’s legal team wrote that he “is neither a flight risk nor a danger to the community, and to the extent either of these factors is a concern, they can be sufficiently addressed with specific release conditions.” The Justice Department countered Thursday that Mr. Martin “presents a high risk of flight, a risk to the nation, and to the physical safety of others.” Mr. Martin worked on highly sensitive programs, people familiar with the investigation have said, including those involving an arsenal of cybertools the government has amassed to use against other countries as well as cyberweapons that were in development. So far, it is unknown what Mr. Martin intended and what, if any, plans he had for the pilfered information. When the Federal Bureau of Investigation searched Mr. Martin’s home and car in August, it found much of the stolen information in plain sight. Top-secret information was stored in his car, which wasn't parked in a garage. Investigators also found an email chain printed out in that car that was marked “top secret” and contained “highly sensitive information.” They also found handwritten notes that appeared to describe the NSA’s classified computer infrastructure, the Justice Department said in its filing. “Among the many other classified documents found in the Defendant’s possession was a document marked as ‘Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information’ (‘TS/SCI’) regarding specific operational plans against a known enemy of the United States and its allies,” the court document said. Government lawyers argued that releasing Mr. Martin would present an obvious danger. “As a result of the extensive publicity this case has received, it is readily apparent to every foreign counterintelligence professional and nongovernmental actor that the Defendant has access to highly classified information, whether in his head, in still-hidden physical locations, or stored in cyberspace—and he has demonstrated absolutely no interest in protecting it,” the Justice Department said. “This makes the Defendant a prime target, and his release would seriously endanger the safety of the country and potentially even the Defendant himself.” The filing described Mr. Martin as computer genius who easily outsmarted government efforts to protect secrets and said he possessed an advanced understanding of how to encrypt messages and hide information in cyberspace. In July 2016, according to the document, Mr. Martin went to Connecticut and bought a “detective special” police-package Chevrolet Caprice. The FBI found 10 firearms in his possession, including an AR-style tactical rifle and a shotgun with a flash suppressor.
collinmanderson 10y ago
The title on the front page of wsj.com is now "Ex-NSA Contractor Stole Records for Decades, U.S. Says"
wyldfire 10y ago
From the US attorney's response to Mr. Martin's attorney's motion for a detention hearing: > The Defendant also had encrypted communication and cloud storage apps installed on his mobile device. ...like...their browser linked against libopenssl and they had the stock Google Drive or Apple iCloud apps? > The antipathy demonstrated in this letter raises grave concerns about the Defendant’s intentions and potential actions should he be released The letter strikes me as having been written by a person who is fairly odd, but possibly has good motives. It's hard to understand the context but if indeed it was signed by "Hal" and somewhere in/on/near his workplace it's suspicious indeed.
h4nkoslo 10y ago
"The Justice Department released its 12-page document ahead of that hearing, detailing new allegations... suggesting he had become heavily armed, accumulating 10 weapons" 10 weapons! It's always funny seeing what coastal types consider "heavily armed", as opposed to "a starter collection". In my experience, the more guns one owns, the likelier they are to be a hobbyist or collector. It's not like you wield one in each limb and six in your teeth; more != more dangerous.
- sasas 10y ago
  A loaded pistol was found in his car.. the same car which had documents stashed. The majority of weapons were unregistered.
bogomipz 10y ago
I wasn't able to read the WSJ article due to paywall but I read another probably similar piece. At what point would or should Booz Allen Hamilton lose their "preferred contractor status" with the NSA? I mean this is the second one that we at least know about. Perhaps the NSA should rethink hiring contractors?
matheweis 10y ago
I think it wasn't 500M pages, but 50TB of data; for some reason the press (or whoever is feeding them) is really set on demonizing this guy and making him sound as sketchy as possible. See this discussion from a couple weeks ago where HN decided Martin was basically an eccentric guy who liked to take his work home. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12645210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12645210
- rurban 10y ago
  It was never written that he actually stole 50TB if data, only that they found several hard drives, computers, backups they need to investigate. If he was for example a movie or music collector, there wouldn't much room on these drives for actual stolen data. 50TB (a few hard drives worth of data) looks very sensationalistic, but is most likely not. Code is not big.
  - matheweis 10y ago
    I think we are saying the same thing. The court filing specifically noted "investigators seized thousands of pages of documents and dozens of computers and other digital storage devices and media containing, conservatively, fifty terabytes of information". It doesn't say whether that 50TB was all classified govt docs or just that they seized his personal computing equipment to investigate whether it contained any classified data. My point was that nowhere does it say 500M pages of documents; the press seems to have conflated the 50TB to mean approximately 500M pages (which sounds even bigger).
probably_wrong 10y ago
Mirror for those who cannot skip the paywall: http://archive.is/uS6or http://archive.is/uS6or
ommunist 10y ago
He is not that Russian from Prague, right?
ibejoeb 10y ago
>Defendant has access to highly classified information, whether in his head, in still-hidden physical locations, or stored in cyberspace—and he has demonstrated absolutely no interest in protecting it,” the Justice Department said. Go on... >“This makes the Defendant a prime target, and his release would seriously endanger the safety of the country and potentially even the Defendant himself.” That seems reasonable. >Prosecutors in August arrested and charged Harold “Hal” Martin III, of Glen Burnie, Md., with theft of government property and unauthorized removal or retention of classified documents. Hang on: they're indicting him? What Justice Department is this? >The new filing said the Justice Department would likely charge Mr. Martin with additional crimes, including violating the Espionage Act, an offense that carries much stiffer penalties than the current charges. I thought we already decided this was no big deal. What is going on here?

mtgx 10y ago

And this is just the one the found out about, mainly because of ShadowBrokers' public announcement that they have NSA's tools, which prompted the NSA to investigate the issue. But how many of NSA's employees may be selling NSA data silently to others and have been more careful about it? Same thing with Snowden. They only found out about it when he went public with it. But they want us to trust them to store all of our data.

thingexplainer 10y ago
Perhaps the DNI should consider offering some form of clemency for other people who brought "homework" out of their SCIF to turn themselves in.
- nickff 10y ago
  This may be a good idea, but I think the DNI would be rather embarrassed if the true magnitude of the 'homework' problem were revealed.
  - thingexplainer 10y ago
    It doesn't have to become public. It probably shouldn't.

hackinthebochs 10y ago

What the hell are these people doing over there? The NSA really needs a "security section" that actively monitors the usage of resources of its employees. That someone could be siphoning terabytes of classified information over the span of decades is just beyond comprehension.

OscarCunningham 10y ago
They need an NSASA.
pg_is_a_butt 10y ago
not trusting themselves creates a legal action whereby those being spied on could argue the congressional actions did not use trusted actors and are thus invalid. you're all idiots.
x1798DE 10y ago
> That someone could be siphoning terabytes of classified information over the span of decades is just beyond comprehension. I don't know how ridiculous this is. Security is an ever-evolving field, and a lot of these stringent controls weren't necessarily in place decades ago - for example, what fraction of places were banning USB flash drives even 10 years ago? The NSA isn't superhuman, and security is hard. I have no love for the agency, but it's not like only complete morons are susceptible to deep insiders exfiltrating data over the course of decades.
- ythl 10y ago
  > and security is hard. Security experts act like it's very trivial and basic to get a fully secure shop up and running if we simply do everything they say. When something fails, the security expert gets fired, and a new one comes on board who will inevitably call the old one "incompetent" and claim that super basic and trivial things were not being followed. Repeat ad infinitum. Some organizations/companies are more vulnerable than others, but I have yet to see one that cannot be compromised by a determined/patient adversary.
  - oldmanjay 10y ago
    When a rebuttal starts with a strawman, what are the odds it's going to improve from that point?
- L_226 10y ago
  I have firsthand knowledge that a certain Australian three letter agency was filling USB ports for non-cleared staff with silicone gel, more than 10 years ago.

alva 10y ago

Odd to describe this as "500m Pages" "Fifty terabytes is equivalent to 50,000 gigabytes. One gigabyte can contain 10,000 pages of documents, the department estimated. By extrapolation, 50 terabytes can hold 500 million pages." I can't find the court filing at the moment, but I would be amazed if even a small majority of the 50TB were 'pages of documents'. Looks like he got away with databases to me. edit: Found the filing http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/nsa1019.pdf http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/nsa1019.pdf

molecule 10y ago
I'd be curious to know if and how he was able to store 50TB @ home while avoiding being a disorganized pack-rat?
- nickff 10y ago
  All it would take is a few network attached storage devices with high-capacity 3.5" drives. If you have 8 drives per NAS, and each drive is 4 TB, you only need 2 NAS to store data with no redundancy or RAID 5, and 3 or 4 NAS for more redundancy. P.S. 6 TB drives are now very common, and 8TB drives are widely available, but more expensive.
- v4n4d1s 10y ago
  There's a subreddit dedicated to data hoarding. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/ Storage got cheap and easy to manage for regular consumers over the last few years.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
patrickg_zill 10y ago
1 page of text with no graphics, is less than 2Kb. So 1MB can hold 500 pages of text; 1GB can hold 50,000 pages. 1TB can hold 50 million. 10TB can thus hold 500 million. Of course, graphics, audio, video files etc. can severely increase the size.

wintom 10y ago

When everyone screams about security and why we shouldn't be snooped on one of the biggest factors to consider is that inevitably someone who has access to this information will abuse their power. It's just human nature. The argument that there can be some process, some security apparatus, or anything in this world to prevent that is just a pipe dream. Someone will abuse their power and ruin someones life that is why no one should have access and that way we are all better off.

hash-set 10y ago
Yes. I am caught up in the Chinese hack that stole all the .gov background check information last year. Not only did my pertinent information get stolen, but also everyone who I used as character references. Trust is dead.
- grandalf 10y ago
  Oh wow, I've been a reference for a few friends. Looks like mine was breached too. Incidentally I got the "looks like a state actor is trying to access your gmail account" several years ago, and I think the only value I'd have is as a friend/reference of some people in fairly sensitive government positions.
- doubt_me 10y ago
  I actually heard it was 100x worse than reported. Totally not from anyone at homeland security tho

gtrubetskoy 10y ago

According to my simplistic math using standard 10x12x15 inch boxes of pages where each box has 5000 sheets, it's about a 15x15x15 meter cube. 15 meters is approximately a 5 story building. If it's 16lb paper, then about 3,828 metric tonnes. Obviously the weight of the paper is a huge factor here. Another way of looking at it: if there are 260 days in a year (not counting weekends), then over a period of, say, 10 years, it amounts to 1.47 metric ton per day.

grandalf 10y ago

The most fascinating aspect about this sort of thing in my opinion is the realistic size limit of a "circle of trust". Considering the frequency of relationship infidelity, I'd estimate the maximum reliable size of a circle of trust at roughly 1.5 people. Chances are intelligence agencies can use vetting procedures and internal processes to increase that number, but it's still fairly small. Many major scandals get discovered due to a broken circle of trust... via both professional and interpersonal infidelities. Human trust and trustworthiness is an act of loyalty and intimacy. Humans are notoriously easy to offend, challenging loyalties and disrupting intimacy. In the private sector, employees frequently jump ship to leverage trade secrets for their own benefit... not necessarily as blatant corporate espionage, but by having "several years of highly relevant industry experience" and applying for a job with a competitor. Something like Bitcoin requires us to trust any one party very little, but to trust the system's behavior in aggregate. The safeguards put in place after Manning and Snowden's breaches seem to be intended to mitigate harm, as does "need to know" security clearance, but I wonder if there exist (or will exist) more elaborate distributed trust systems: Suppose that instead of "need to know", everyone else in the intelligence agency department knew some information about what secret information you had viewed or saved that day, week, month... both magnitude and frequency, and frequency of repeated visits to document areas... some sort of footprint that offered an easy heuristic for social detection of deceitful behavior by fellow humans, rather than relying simply on harm-mitigation measures. This culprit would have had a very distinct footprint even if none of his coworkers could themselves access the data or see exactly what it contained. Disclaimer: I believe that government classification of information ought to be avoided in 95% of the circumstances it is used today. There are reasons to do it, but all information should be declassified within 50 years of its initial classification no matter what, and classification of information for political or selfish reasons (not directly in the national interest) should be a serious crime akin to treason or espionage.

dgacmu 10y ago
I won't argue against the idea that we have too much classified. It's expensive and counterproductive to try to protect things that are no longer important. That said, 50 years ago, we had detailed and effective designs for nuclear weapons - likely well beyond what's known by, e.g., north Korea. There are probably people alive who'd be placed in danger by the release of information from 50 years ago. Not many, but 50 is within the lifetime of someone who was undercover at age 25. I'm not sure that such a blanket 50 year declassification policy is defensible.

alva 10y ago

Unsent letter from the suspect in 2007 "Well, for one thing, I’ve seen pretty much all your tech secrets wrt [sic] regard to compusec [computer security]. Thanks. You made me a much better infosec [information security] practitioner. In exchange, well, I gave you my time, and you failed to allow me to help you . . . You are missing most of the basics in security practice, while hinking you are the best. It’s the bread and butter stuff that will trip you up. Trust me on this one. Seen it. . . . Dudes/Dudettes, I can’t make this any plainer . . . Listen up . . . ‘They’ are inside the perimeter. . . I’ll leave you with this: if you don’t get obnoxious, obvious, and detrimental to my future, then I will not bring you ‘into the light’, as it were. If you do, well, remember that you did it to yourselves"[0] Limiting the damage disgruntled employees can cause must be very difficult. Presumably drastically reducing the amount of information any individual gets exposed to? [0] http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/nsa1019.pdf http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/nsa1019.pdf

grownseed 10y ago

> "[...] he has demonstrated absolutely no interest in protecting it" > "The filing described Mr. Martin as computer genius who easily outsmarted government efforts to protect secrets and said he possessed an advanced understanding of how to encrypt messages and hide information in cyberspace." This doesn't really make sense and the wording also hints at sensationalism. It reads like a classic case of deflection, making the accused appear considerably more powerful than he actually is. This, to me, shows a few things: - the NSA clearly has no clue who accesses "their" data, when, or how - the NSA will throw anybody under the bus to save face - the NSA, to this date, still refuse to put their own inadequacy in the balance and traded their integrity for the power to sustain the organization itself at the cost of everything else (including their original purpose) Why on earth is this organization still allowed to operate at all?

nickff 10y ago
The more important question to me is how the other government agencies compare to the NSA. I have no reason to suspect that the NSA is below average; everything I have seen suggests that the are probably better than HHS, HUD, etc. and this is very troubling to me.
- tptacek 10y ago
  They are much better than the civilian agencies.
jdubs 10y ago
The leaders have determined that the value they bring outweighs the liability they are.
elcct 10y ago
The purpose of such agencies is to leech on the tax payer. Most important part is to create problems, "solve" them in the most expensive and ineffective way and spread fear.
tptacek 10y ago
It's hard to give a concise response to a comment going in so many different directions at once, but I'll take a whack at it: * Should NSA be broken up? I think so. It's a mainstream policy idea. NSA has two conflicting missions --- IAD and SIGINT --- three, if you want to count pure research separately. Splitting up NSA would solve some conflict of interest problems, but would also add the practical benefit of minimizing the number of people who might end up with access to documents like this guy collected. * Does that mean NSA is lying about the Martin case? No. They could be, but I would not put money on that. Prosecutors definitely shade facts to make their cases sound stronger. But it's less likely that in an extremely high profile federal prosecution like this one, they're going to entirely make things up. With Martin, we're talking about a case where someone hoarded extremely classified documents about ongoing operations against "known enemies of the US" (that's a term that probably has pretty specific meaning). He left them laying in his car. On the back of the printouts were handwritten explanations of tradecraft and terms of art. If I had to guess, the most likely outcome here is going to be that we are talking about someone with very serious mental health issues who NSA had no business putting within 1000 miles of the information he managed to hoard in his house.

pinewurst 10y ago

Why is everyone working in IT portrayed in press and courts as a "computer genius"?

deadbunny 10y ago
Because 99% of the population have no idea how technology actually works.
leggomylibro 10y ago
It's less of a mouthful than, "practitioner of the dark arts and lay member of the Esoteric Order of Data-Gone".
Nelson69 10y ago
There are 2 factors here. 1) If he's simply a mediocre IT jockey and then his NSA contractor status resulted in him pulling in $200+k a year, that's a bad look. 2) If he's average and he somehow managed to defeat the NSA at what the NSA does, that's also a bad look. Now it's likely a policy problem, that contractors can access these quantities of data with access to physically removable media and such seems like a policy problem. On the other hand if he's some kind of computer super genius then he was given a little trust and took advantage of it.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

whamlastxmas 10y ago

Full text because stupid paywall and web workaround is lame solution: WASHINGTON—A former National Security Agency contractor amassed at least 500 million pages of government records, including top-secret information about military operations, by stealing documents bit by bit over two decades, the Justice Department alleged in a court filing submitted Thursday. Prosecutors in August arrested and charged Harold “Hal” Martin III, of Glen Burnie, Md., with theft of government property and unauthorized removal or retention of classified documents. The case was kept under seal until earlier this month, when some details became public. The new filing said the Justice Department would likely charge Mr. Martin with additional crimes, including violating the Espionage Act, an offense that carries much stiffer penalties than the current charges. Mr. Martin’s attorney, Jim Wyda, declined to comment on the new filing. In the past, he has said that Mr. Martin is a patriotic American who has served his country. A federal court has scheduled a hearing for Friday to consider whether Mr. Martin should be released while awaiting trial. The Justice Department released its 12-page document ahead of that hearing, detailing new allegations about the scope of Mr. Martin’s alleged theft and suggesting he had become heavily armed, accumulating 10 weapons, and had taken sophisticated steps to cover his tracks. Some former associates had described Mr. Martin as a harmless hoarder who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. The new government filing paints a different picture, raising questions about his motives and suggesting he was capable of sharing U.S. secrets with the nation’s adversaries and potentially putting American lives at risk. The document doesn’t, however, answer one of the big questions in the case: whether Mr. Martin shared any of the stolen classified information with another person or another country. The document offers no evidence that he did but suggested Mr. Martin had the capacity to do so. The Maryland home of Harold Martin III, a former NSA contractor who the Justice Department alleges stole millions of pages of government records. ENLARGE The Maryland home of Harold Martin III, a former NSA contractor who the Justice Department alleges stole millions of pages of government records. Photo: Jose Luis Magana/Associated Press Mr. Martin, a former Naval officer, was most recently a contractor at Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp. , a job that placed him inside some of the government’s most secretive programs inside the NSA and the Pentagon. The Justice Department said that a search of his home and his automobile uncovered “thousands of pages of documents and dozens of computers and other storage devices and media containing, conservatively, fifty terabytes of information.” Fifty terabytes is equivalent to 50,000 gigabytes. One gigabyte can contain 10,000 pages of documents, the department estimated. By extrapolation, 50 terabytes can hold 500 million pages. In seeking Friday’s hearing, Mr. Martin’s legal team wrote that he “is neither a flight risk nor a danger to the community, and to the extent either of these factors is a concern, they can be sufficiently addressed with specific release conditions.” The Justice Department countered Thursday that Mr. Martin “presents a high risk of flight, a risk to the nation, and to the physical safety of others.” Mr. Martin worked on highly sensitive programs, people familiar with the investigation have said, including those involving an arsenal of cybertools the government has amassed to use against other countries as well as cyberweapons that were in development. So far, it is unknown what Mr. Martin intended and what, if any, plans he had for the pilfered information. When the Federal Bureau of Investigation searched Mr. Martin’s home and car in August, it found much of the stolen information in plain sight. Top-secret information was stored in his car, which wasn't parked in a garage. Investigators also found an email chain printed out in that car that was marked “top secret” and contained “highly sensitive information.” They also found handwritten notes that appeared to describe the NSA’s classified computer infrastructure, the Justice Department said in its filing. “Among the many other classified documents found in the Defendant’s possession was a document marked as ‘Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information’ (‘TS/SCI’) regarding specific operational plans against a known enemy of the United States and its allies,” the court document said. Government lawyers argued that releasing Mr. Martin would present an obvious danger. “As a result of the extensive publicity this case has received, it is readily apparent to every foreign counterintelligence professional and nongovernmental actor that the Defendant has access to highly classified information, whether in his head, in still-hidden physical locations, or stored in cyberspace—and he has demonstrated absolutely no interest in protecting it,” the Justice Department said. “This makes the Defendant a prime target, and his release would seriously endanger the safety of the country and potentially even the Defendant himself.” The filing described Mr. Martin as computer genius who easily outsmarted government efforts to protect secrets and said he possessed an advanced understanding of how to encrypt messages and hide information in cyberspace. In July 2016, according to the document, Mr. Martin went to Connecticut and bought a “detective special” police-package Chevrolet Caprice. The FBI found 10 firearms in his possession, including an AR-style tactical rifle and a shotgun with a flash suppressor.

collinmanderson 10y ago

The title on the front page of wsj.com is now "Ex-NSA Contractor Stole Records for Decades, U.S. Says"

wyldfire 10y ago

From the US attorney's response to Mr. Martin's attorney's motion for a detention hearing: > The Defendant also had encrypted communication and cloud storage apps installed on his mobile device. ...like...their browser linked against libopenssl and they had the stock Google Drive or Apple iCloud apps? > The antipathy demonstrated in this letter raises grave concerns about the Defendant’s intentions and potential actions should he be released The letter strikes me as having been written by a person who is fairly odd, but possibly has good motives. It's hard to understand the context but if indeed it was signed by "Hal" and somewhere in/on/near his workplace it's suspicious indeed.

h4nkoslo 10y ago

"The Justice Department released its 12-page document ahead of that hearing, detailing new allegations... suggesting he had become heavily armed, accumulating 10 weapons" 10 weapons! It's always funny seeing what coastal types consider "heavily armed", as opposed to "a starter collection". In my experience, the more guns one owns, the likelier they are to be a hobbyist or collector. It's not like you wield one in each limb and six in your teeth; more != more dangerous.

sasas 10y ago
A loaded pistol was found in his car.. the same car which had documents stashed. The majority of weapons were unregistered.

bogomipz 10y ago

I wasn't able to read the WSJ article due to paywall but I read another probably similar piece. At what point would or should Booz Allen Hamilton lose their "preferred contractor status" with the NSA? I mean this is the second one that we at least know about. Perhaps the NSA should rethink hiring contractors?

matheweis 10y ago

I think it wasn't 500M pages, but 50TB of data; for some reason the press (or whoever is feeding them) is really set on demonizing this guy and making him sound as sketchy as possible. See this discussion from a couple weeks ago where HN decided Martin was basically an eccentric guy who liked to take his work home. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12645210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12645210

rurban 10y ago
It was never written that he actually stole 50TB if data, only that they found several hard drives, computers, backups they need to investigate. If he was for example a movie or music collector, there wouldn't much room on these drives for actual stolen data. 50TB (a few hard drives worth of data) looks very sensationalistic, but is most likely not. Code is not big.
- matheweis 10y ago
  I think we are saying the same thing. The court filing specifically noted "investigators seized thousands of pages of documents and dozens of computers and other digital storage devices and media containing, conservatively, fifty terabytes of information". It doesn't say whether that 50TB was all classified govt docs or just that they seized his personal computing equipment to investigate whether it contained any classified data. My point was that nowhere does it say 500M pages of documents; the press seems to have conflated the 50TB to mean approximately 500M pages (which sounds even bigger).

probably_wrong 10y ago

Mirror for those who cannot skip the paywall: http://archive.is/uS6or http://archive.is/uS6or

ommunist 10y ago

He is not that Russian from Prague, right?

ibejoeb 10y ago

>Defendant has access to highly classified information, whether in his head, in still-hidden physical locations, or stored in cyberspace—and he has demonstrated absolutely no interest in protecting it,” the Justice Department said. Go on... >“This makes the Defendant a prime target, and his release would seriously endanger the safety of the country and potentially even the Defendant himself.” That seems reasonable. >Prosecutors in August arrested and charged Harold “Hal” Martin III, of Glen Burnie, Md., with theft of government property and unauthorized removal or retention of classified documents. Hang on: they're indicting him? What Justice Department is this? >The new filing said the Justice Department would likely charge Mr. Martin with additional crimes, including violating the Espionage Act, an offense that carries much stiffer penalties than the current charges. I thought we already decided this was no big deal. What is going on here?