government Contractor Indicted in robbery of pinnacle-mystery files

WASHINGTON — A former safety contractor changed into indicted on Wednesday on charges of stealing a trove of quite categorized data that federal prosecutors,
for the first time, stated covered documents on sensitive counterterrorism operations, a foreign intelligence goal the C.I.A. changed into monitoring and the launch of a satellite.

The 20-rely indictment that turned into unsealed in Maryland federal court offered only a glimpse of what prosecutors claim Harold T. Martin III, 52, stole undetected for years.

Mr. Martin, of Glen Burnie, Md., become arrested in past due August after the F.B.I. raided his house and determined an estimated 50 terabytes of electronic documents in his home office, vehicle and shed. it's far nonetheless not clean why Mr. Martin become hoarding the documents, and prosecutors have no longer recommended, at the least publicly, that he might have passed the facts to everyone or bought it to a foreign intelligence organization.

Join up For the Morning Briefing publication


The indictment says Mr. Martin become employed as a personal contractor for the yank government from December 1993 to August 2016. In that time, he worked for at the least seven non-public groups, which includes Booz Allen Hamilton. He held safety clearances that allowed him get admission to to some of the government’s maximum sensitive intelligence packages.

“The indictment alleges that for so long as two a long time, Harold Martin flagrantly abused the consider located in him by using the government via stealing files containing extraordinarily categorized information,” Rod J. Rosenstein, the usa attorney for Maryland, said in a declaration.

Mr. Martin’s lawyer, James Wyda of the federal public defender’s office, stated he had no comment. If convicted on all the counts, Mr. Martin may want to face a 2 hundred-year prison sentence. he is being held with out bail.


according to the indictment, he's accused of taking materials from the C.I.A., the country wide security organization, the usa Cyber Command, the defense branch and the country wide Reconnaissance workplace, which is in price of the united states’s intelligence satellites.

A majority of the documents indexed in the indictment towards Mr. Martin have been taken from the N.S.A., consistent with prosecutors. there may be a 1996 N.S.A. weekly status summary of country wide protection worries around the sector; an define of an workout regarding N.S.A. and American navy “resources to illustrate present cyberintelligence and operational talents”; and an N.S.A. “antiterrorism operational record concerning extraordinarily touchy U.S. making plans and operations concerning international terrorists.”


It appears that Mr. Martin took domestic categorized statistics just days earlier than his arrest, at the same time as he turned into operating on the Cyber Command. One report became dated Aug. 17, 2016, and turned into described as discussing gaps in army capabilities and info of specific operations.

according to court documents, Mr. Martin served in the united states of america military for 4 years until 1992 and then was within the navy Reserve for eight greater years.