
Ex-NSA Contractor Stole at Least 500M Pages of Records and Secrets - collinmanderson
http://www.wsj.com/articles/ex-nsa-contractor-stole-at-least-500-million-pages-of-records-and-secrets-1476991747
======
grownseed
> "[...] 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?

~~~
tptacek
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.

~~~
xenobioticants
One of the biggest beefs I have with how Americans deal with the NSA is that
they're cool with them spying on EU citizens. As long as its not domestic, you
guys are cool with it. Its as if when you are not an American, you have no
right to basic human rights like privacy according to Americans. Add to that
they even did stuff like tap Merkels' phone.. spying on your allies is a
serious faux-pas and wtf all rolled into one.

~~~
tptacek
One of the biggest beefs I have with Europeans who take issue at NSA spying on
the EU is the misconception they have that their own spy agencies aren't doing
the same thing to everyone else: us, Russia, China, and other states in the
EU.

More annoying about this argument though is the fact that the leaders of the
most powerful EU states, regardless of what they may say to their own
citizens, demonstrably benefit from and invite NSA spying. The German NBD, for
instance, spied on Austria in collaboration with the NSA --- got caught doing
so just last year. It's easy for EU SIGINT agencies to get away with this
stuff, because they can launder the unpopular spying they want to do through
NSA in private while "blaming" them in public.

If we want to have a world without spying, we should be honest about it. More
honest than the conversation is today.

But we should also be careful what we wish for. The prevailing sentiment on HN
is that NSA is more or less spying on behalf of Disney's copyright enforcement
corps and the Moral Majority. But a lot of the reason we conduct foreign
surveillance is _to avoid large scale armed conflict_. To allow us to head
conflict off surgically, and to prevent intractable problems (for instance:
unchecked proliferation of nuclear arms to countries that we'd have to invade
to keep them from deploying).

I have real, bigly problems with NSA and think it needs drastic reform and
completely restructured oversight. But I'm not in the (very large) faction
that believes surveillance to be intrinsically evil. I personally feel
fortunate to have made it out of the 1970s without disintegrating in a nuclear
barrage. That threat is not gone; it is far more realistic than evil AI.

~~~
jacquesm
> But I'm not in the (very large) faction that believes surveillance to be
> intrinsically evil.

I don't think anybody on HN had that impression.

> I personally feel fortunate to have made it out of the 1970s without
> disintegrating in a nuclear barrage. That threat is not gone; it is far more
> realistic than evil AI.

So, essentially you're scared and that's why you are ok with surveillance.
What I don't get is why you feel that all this surveillance is helping to keep
you safe from nuclear barrage?

Personally I'm against mass surveillance of any kind, it is against our
collective human rights (which does not stop at the border of the US or any
other country), also I'm by extension against any kind of surveillance of the
private individuals of any other country by intelligence operatives of my
country.

Finally, 'Europeans' and 'Americans' are not entities that you can compare
directly, Europeans are typically the citizens of some country and those
countries have very different capabilities when it comes to surveillance and
usually a very different role on the world stage. You can't compare the
intelligence services of say Greece, Germany, Finland, the UK and Slovenia
with respect to their capability and you _really_ can't compare their role in
Europe as an entity and in the world at large. States are not countries, the
USA is a continent sized country with an extremely large federal budget when
it comes to things like mass surveillance, military (aka 'defense', but it
hasn't been used for that purpose in ages) and so on.

Finally, the reason that you'll find a lot of Europeans taking issue with any
kind of spying on allies (also by their own intelligence services, which are
most likely just as unhinged as the US ones) is that it isn't all that long
ago that there was a large chunk of what is now the EU under the boot of an
army of occupation, and that this was kept that way to a large extent by mass
surveillance of the citizenry.

I sincerely hope you'll never be given a reason to regret your stance on being
'ok' with mass surveillance, but if you do end up regretting it don't be
surprised by any lack of sympathy from my end, of all the people that I know
that support this stance you are probably the only one where I will never
understand why your position is the way it is.

~~~
tptacek
You've moved the goalposts, perhaps without realizing it. I'm OK with signals
intelligence. I'm not OK with "mass surveillance" in the sense that you
probably mean it --- a giant data warehouse in Utah storing and indexing
everybody's email.

The comment to which I replied talked about tapping Angela Merkel's phones. If
monitoring Werner Faymann's phone calls prevents a war, I'm fine with that ---
as, apparently, is Angela Merkel.

Meanwhile, for those of us concerned about dragnet surveillance, the answer is
to replace the janky 80s protocols we use to send and receive electronic
communications with modern encrypted alternatives.

~~~
jacquesm
> I'm OK with signals intelligence. I'm not OK with "mass surveillance" in the
> sense that you probably mean it --- a giant data warehouse in Utah storing
> and indexing everybody's email.

They are to all intents and purposes equivalent, it is pointless to be 'for'
signals intelligence but 'against' a giant datawarehouse in Utah storing and
indexing everybody's email the one results in the other.

Besides email being only a very small part of the picture 'metadata' in the
form of who-calls-who, when and how frequently is gold and there is no amount
of encryption that will protect you from that data being captured and stored.

In many cases the difference between dragnet surveillance and signals
intelligence is as small as whether or not someone (not something) has looked
at the data stored.

And that giant data warehouse with all that email exists, it's just that there
are three of them right now, one run by Google, one run by Microsoft and
another by Yahoo regardless of what intelligence agencies are trying to
accomplish in less direct ways. Other email servers are probably so lightly
protected in comparison to those you may as well consider them compromised.

Finally, I can think of several simple ways in which even encryption isn't
going to make much difference in collecting that data regardless of what is
happening on the wire, and I'm sure you can too.

On the whole, the trend seems to be to store more data for longer times on an
increasingly larger slice of the world population, some call that 'signals
intelligence' when it suits them, others call it dragnet surveillance because
that is what it is.

We're talking about: email, web surfing behavior, mobile text messages,
location information and so on.

Whether Merkel is ok with having someone else's phone tapped while probably
disagreeing with whether or not her own phone is tapped I'm against phone taps
without warrants by the country where people reside, foreign entities should
simply respect the law of the land and go through the proper channels. That
way we don't have to deal with another 'Belgacom' (oh, sorry, Proximus).

It doesn't matter whether you call it signals intelligence or mass
surveillance, the key is that it is _warrantless_ surveillance, and that it is
usually not your own country doing it.

> Meanwhile, for those of us concerned about dragnet surveillance, the answer
> is to replace the janky 80s protocols we use to send and receive electronic
> communications with modern encrypted alternatives.

That's going to make a relatively small impact, it will simply raise the bar
for the various agencies to attack the network infrastructure and servers of
the more interesting choke points as well as the originating endpoints
(consumer computers) a little harder. The only thing that will really stop
that is to make it illegal in some treaty. (Not that that will every happen,
but it would be a nice change.)

I'm not sure why you believe monitoring Werner Faymann's phone would prevent a
war or why it prevented one. Wikipedia has him currently working at the United
Nations, what are you getting at here?.

~~~
tptacek
Respectfully, this is like 7 paragraphs of stuff we already know we don't
disagree about, followed by the incoherent position that foreign spying is
only acceptable when the citizenry of the foreign target agrees with it.

You can have an intellectually coherent position against foreign spying
entirely. I'll point out the downsides of that position, but I won't tell you
your argument is invalid.

But don't pretend. Either be against spying, own the potential downsides,
and/or argue that those downsides don't matter, or accept that spying is
coercive --- coercion is built into the concept, which is why we have the
special word "spying".

 _BTW: Merkel authorized and the German NBD participated in SIGINT
surveillance of Austria, is why I pulled that particular name out of my hat.
Austria is interesting exactly because nobody would expect that particular
spying target inside of Europe._

~~~
jacquesm
> followed by the incoherent position that foreign spying is only acceptable
> when the citizenry of the foreign target agrees with it.

Foreign spying on citizens of another country is not ok, period.

Domestic wiretaps/monitoring and so on are acceptable if and _only_ if a judge
signs off on it.

Governments spying on each other is acceptable as long as it does not devolve
into spying on the rest of the citizens of that country wholesale.

In other words: ordinary citizens should be left alone, if you decide to join
the government you're raising the stakes and you should be aware that you will
become a 'person of interest' for many other parties.

I hope this clear up my position in a way that there is no room for mis-
interpretation.

I'm sure EU governments spy on each other and I'm also sure that EU government
officials are aware of this particular fact if only because they themselves
are _also_ engaging in it, so nothing of value was communicated with that
particular example.

~~~
tptacek
I can't even tell where we disagree anymore. I think we're mostly just
haggling over terminology at this point. So I'ma peace out of this now.

------
alva
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)

~~~
ingsoc79
They're just describing the data in terms that most members of Congress can
understand.

~~~
qq66
The problem is that nobody can understand numbers that big either. Nobody can
really understand what it's like to be 4 billion years old or 100,000 light
years across or 500 million pages of documents.

------
wintom
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
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
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.

------
grandalf
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
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.

~~~
grandalf
Those are good points. Even if the limit was 75 or 100 years for things like
that, it would likely be possible to declassify all but a few "black box"
details of the tech. That's the most defensible use of secrecy, since the
precise way in which it works is not likely to be the basis for a conspiracy
by officials against the public.

------
alva
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)

------
h4nkoslo
"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
A loaded pistol was found in his car.. the same car which had documents
stashed. The majority of weapons were unregistered.

------
mtgx
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
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
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
It doesn't have to become public. It probably shouldn't.

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

~~~
Nelson69
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.

------
matheweis
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
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
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).

------
gtrubetskoy
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.

------
wyldfire
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.

------
probably_wrong
Mirror for those who cannot skip the paywall:
[http://archive.is/uS6or](http://archive.is/uS6or)

------
ibejoeb
>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?

------
bogomipz
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?

------
hackinthebochs
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.

~~~
x1798DE
> 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
> 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
When a rebuttal starts with a strawman, what are the odds it's going to
improve from that point?

------
whamlastxmas
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.

~~~
madengr
"heavily armed, accumulating 10 weapons", and gasp, an AR-15!

Ha ha, here in flyover country, 10 guns is just a start. I have a 1911 on my
hip as I type this.

~~~
cstrat
Out of interest, why do you need a firearm on your hip as you sit at the
computer?

edit: I'm from Australia and the idea of having a single weapon, let alone
more than 10 close by is kind of frightening.

~~~
madengr
I don't need one at this moment, I just want one since I don't know when I'll
need one. It's concealed carry; I just happened to still have it on after
wearing it all day.

~~~
bogomipz
I am curious why you felt the need to mention it at all.

~~~
madengr
Because the media embellishes the ownership of guns for some nefarious
purpose. I could have said more, as they have reported one technical error,
but I did not.

~~~
bogomipz
Can you explain how they embellish the ownership of guns for nefarious
purposes?

The majority of media coverage I see of guns is in relation to actual gun
violence i.e incidents that seem to occur with alarming frequency - whereby
someone opening fire in a mall or a movie theater.

What usually follows these incidents in the news cycle are editorials asking
why there are more stringent background check as many of these incidents are
carried out by unstable people. The evidence seems to suggest that the
overwhelming majority of gun owners support these check because most owners
are responsible law-abiding stable people. But I don't see these editorials as
painting this gun owners in a nefarious light. The NRA lobby yes but
responsible gun owner no, I just don't see it. And I like to consider myself
as someone tries to consume varied news sources.

But I would like to hear your thoughts.

~~~
madengr
The article had nothing to do with guns, yet they mention it in two places,
specifically to associate it with possible criminal activity.

The media only reports the bad use of guns. If you want to read about the
numerous self defense instances, you'll have to read about it from the gun
lobby. The NRA is comprised of 4 million dues paying members, which it
represents just as much as it does it's corporate members. I actually prefer
the GOA myself.

Also, the article mentions a shotgun with a "flash hider". Thus is pure
embellishment. Besides, it's a muzzle break to reduce muzzle lift, not a flash
suppressor, which would be pointless in a shotgun that would be used at most
tens of yards. Though even a muzzle break would be of questionable use on a
shotgun.

~~~
bogomipz
"If you want to read about the numerous self defense instances, you'll have to
read about it from the gun lobby."

You want to complain about "media embellishments" and inaccurate coverage but
then you suggest I should use the most powerful political lobby in the US as a
news source? There's no embellishment there? That's an unbiased news source?

Just a cursory glance at some recent media outlet coverage of self defense
shootings:

[http://www.live5news.com/story/31972984/ncpd-
investigating-o...](http://www.live5news.com/story/31972984/ncpd-
investigating-overnight-shooting-at-bar)

[http://www.ktnv.com/news/rtc-bus-driver-says-shooting-was-
in...](http://www.ktnv.com/news/rtc-bus-driver-says-shooting-was-in-self-
defense)

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/02/naked-man-shot-
chok...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/02/naked-man-shot-choking-dog-
miami_n_2395851.html)

There is no shortage of them. So your assertion that media "only" reports bad
use of guns is simply untrue.

~~~
madengr
Not as a news source, but a news aggregator. The self defense shootings are
buried as a 2nd tier link on a web site, or back of news paper. Crime is on
the front page. Of course the gun lobby does not highlight crime or negligent
shootings, so I'll give you that.

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

------
ommunist
He is not that Russian from Prague, right?

