A United States federal contractor, who remains in detention following his arrest last summer for stealing classified documents, may have worked for an elite cyber espionage unit of the National Security Agency. The man was identified by The New York Times last week as Harold Thomas Martin III, a 51-year-old employee of Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the largest federal contractors in the US. The paper said that, prior to joining Booz Allen Hamilton, Martin served as a US Navy officer for over a decade, where he specialized in cyber security and acquired a top secret clearance. But last August, agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided Martin’s house in Maryland and arrested him on charges of stealing government property and illegally removing classified material.
Media reports suggest that the FBI
discovered significant quantities of classified information, some of it
dating back to 2006, on a variety of electronic devices that Martin had
stored —though apparently not hidden— in his house and car. Another
interesting aspect of the case is that there is no proof at this point
that Martin actually shared the classified information with a third
party. There is some speculation that he may be behind a disclosure
of a collection of NSA hacking tools, which were leaked in August of
this year by a previously unknown group calling itself “the Shadow
Brokers”. But some speculate that Martin may have taken the classified
material home so he could write his dissertation for the PhD he is
currently undertaking at the University of Maryland’s Information
Systems program.
A few days ago, The Daily Beast quoted
an unnamed former colleague of Martin who said that the NSA contractor
was a member of one of the agency’s elite cyber spy units. The existence
of the secretive unit, which is known as the NSA’s Office of Tailored
Access Operations, was revealed in June 2013 by veteran NSA watcher Matthew M. Aid. Writing in Foreign Policy,
Aid cited “a number of highly confidential sources” in alleging that
the NSA maintained a substantial “hacker army” tasked with conducting
offensive cyber espionage against foreign targets. More information on
NSA’s TAO was provided in January 2014 by German newsmagazine Der Spiegel. If The Daily Beast’s allegations about Martin are accurate, they would explain why anonymous government sources told The Washington Post
last week that some of the documents Martin took home “could be
expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security of
the United States”. The case also highlights the constant tension
between security and the privatization of intelligence, which was also a
major parameter in the case of Edward Snowden, another Booz Allen
Hamilton contractor who defected to Russia in 2013.
Meanwhile, Martin remains in detention. If he is convicted, he will face up to 11 years behind bars.
No comments:
Post a Comment