Ex-NSA employee charged with major data theft from secret services

The U.S. Attorney’s Office has officially charged the former NSA operative suspected of stealing secrets from intelligence agencies. He is suspected of twenty criminal offenses, each of which can result in a prison sentence of ten years.

According to the indictment, 52-year-old Harold T. Martin has stolen documents and data from secret services for 20 years. It would be a total of fifty terabytes of data. Reuters reports that the indictment contains a long list of documents Martin allegedly stole from various intelligence agencies since 1996. The list includes reports from the NSA, as well as US Cyber ​​Command, the CIA and the NRO. The indictment does not state what Martin would have done with the documents.

Earlier this week, The Washington Times reported that the ex-NSA employee may have ditched a large portion of Tailored Access Operations’ advanced tools. TAO is the NSA division that develops tools to penetrate systems. Martin is said to have looted more than 75 percent of all the tools. Some of it was offered in October last year by a group called Shadowbrokers. After that publication, the American authorities tracked down Martin.

Martin had worked as a private contractor for various US government agencies through seven different companies since 1993. Before that he was a Marine. When the suspect was arrested on August 29 last year, he was working for the United States Department of Defense. Before that, he was a contractor in the NSA’s TAO division through the Booz Allen Hamilton company. Whistleblower Edward Snowden also worked as a contractor for the same intelligence agency.