‘Former employee who stole NSA hacking tools pleads guilty’

The American who stole 50TB worth of documents and hacking tools while working on behalf of a subcontractor in a branch of the US intelligence agency NSA is likely to plead guilty at an upcoming hearing.

At the January 22 hearing, Harold T. Martin III will confess to stealing NSA hacking tools and documents for 20 years, Reuters concludes from court documents. He will plead guilty to the charge of stealing classified information. He could get ten years in prison for that. He also faces trial on nineteen remaining charges of criminal offences.

Martin worked at the NSA through Booz Allen, a company through which whistleblower Edward Snowden also found employment at the NSA. The American was arrested in August 2016. He has worked for the NSA since 1993. The man was working for the United States Department of Defense at the time of his arrest.

Among the tools he stole would be a lot of software from Tailored Access Operations, the NSA division that develops the sophisticated tools used by intelligence agencies to bombard and invade systems. According to sources, this concerns more than 75 percent of all TAO tools, which would make the theft larger than previously thought. Some of those tools came into the public eye through a group called Shadowbrokers. The American authorities tracked down Martin after that publication of Shadowbrokers.