The American suspected of having stolen more than 50 terabytes of state secrets over more than 20 years has pleaded guilty. The admission of guilt was part of a settlement with the Public Prosecution Service. That will now require a nine-year prison sentence.
According to the criminal order, 54-year-old Harold Thomas Martin III stole top secret documents from the late 1990s until August 2016. This concerns both digital files and documents on paper. He kept these in his house in Maryland and in his car. According to the OM, he knew that the stolen documents had to do with the national defense of the United States. The prosecution further alleges that Martin knew that stealing these documents entailed the risk that they could be made public. That could have been detrimental to the country’s national security.
Martin had worked for various government agencies since December 1993 and had security clearances as a result. That way, he was able to access the necessary computer systems and locations to steal the documents.
According to a previously published court document, police found thousands of pages of documents and seized dozens of computers and storage media. Martin would have collected at least fifty terabytes of digital information. ‘Many’ documents would have been classified with Secret or Top Secret, personal information of government employees would also have been stolen.
To indicate what kind of documents were found, the court gives the example of a printed email conversation. It was marked Top Secret and “contained a lot of sensitive information.” According to the court, it seems that the suspect printed this from an official government mail account. On the back of the document were handwritten notes describing the NSA’s secret computing infrastructure, including detailed descriptions of covert “technical operations.” The notes describe the simplest parts of the covert operations. The prosecutor writes that it seems that the documents were intended for readers outside the security services.
Martin has now officially confessed that he “deliberately withheld national security information.” In return, the prosecutor dropped all of the other 19 charges and is now asking for a nine-year prison sentence. The judge will rule on the case on July 17.
The criminal order of the Public Prosecution Service is striking, since Martin was previously suspected of being involved with Shadow Brokers. That was reported by The Washington Post at the time. The Shadow Brokers is an as yet anonymous party that claimed to control exploits of the NSA. The group shared files in 2016 and early 2017, which included the development of the Wannacry virus. In 2017, this infected computer systems of hospitals all over the world.
There have been doubts about Martin’s involvement with Shadow Brokers for some time, especially since Motherboard claimed to have interviewed Shadow Brokers while Martin was incarcerated. If Martin actually had anything to do with the publication of the exploits, he probably would have also received a much longer prison sentence. A former NSA employee tells Ars Technica that the jail sentence suggests the OM does not suspect Martin of working with the Shadow Brokers. Martin’s lawyer tells Cyberscoop that Martin never intended to harm his country, but that collecting the documents was the result of a mental illness.
Politico writes that Martin was arrested in 2016 after sending cryptic messages to Russia’s Kaspersky Lab. Those messages were sent just before the release of the first Shadow Brokers files. As a result, the antivirus company did not trust it and tipped off the NSA. He launched an investigation and eventually got him arrested.