The feds secretly busted a National Security Agency contractor who stole and possibly leaked highly classified computer codes developed to launch hack attacks against hostile foreign governments, authorities said Wednesday.
Harold Thomas Martin, 52, of Glen Burnie, Md., was taken into custody by the FBI on Aug. 27 and charged with theft of government property and unauthorized removal and retention of classified materials by a government employee or contractor, authorities said.
If the documents were leaked, the US Justice Department said in a statement, the disclosure could “cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the US.”
The feds executed search warrants at Martin’s home in suburban Maryland, as well as his vehicle and two storage sheds on the property.
They found documents and digital information stored on various devices, many of which were marked “top secret” or otherwise highly classified.
The contractor allegedly took highly classified “source code” developed by the agency to break into computer systems of adversaries like Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.
Martin — who had top secret security clearance and worked for the same contractor as NSA leaker Edward Snowden — also had government property worth “in excess of $1,000” on his property, the feds said.
“Among the classified documents found in the search were six classified documents obtained from sensitive intelligence and produced by a government agency in 2014,” Justice said in the statement.
“Those documents were produced through sensitive government sources, methods and capabilities, which are critical to a wide variety of national security issues.The disclosure of the documents would reveal those sensitive sources, methods and capabilities.”
The theft could mean that for the second time in three years someone with access to secret data was able to swipe damaging secret information from the NSA.
Snowden, also a contractor for the NSA, stole a huge number of documents that were later leaked to the press, revealing US surveillance operations here and abroad.
He quickly took to Twitter to slam the feds for keeping the arrest secret until now.
“This is huge. Did the FBI secretly arrest the person behind the reports NSA sat on huge flaws in US products?” he tweeted.
Snowden, who now lives in Russia, also tweaked the Obama Admnistration.
“Am I correct in reading they didn’t charge him under the Espionage Act? Under this administration, that’s a noteworthy absence,” he tweeted.
The information allegedly taken by Martin — who like Snowden worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, a firm that creates and operates some of the agency’s most secret cyberoperations — differed from Snowden’s theft, and some of it may be dated, according to The New York Times, which first reported the arrest.
Investigators are also trying to determine Martin’s motive and whether he is linked to a group of hackers known as the Shadow Brokers, which is suspected in a series of leaks of NSA intercepts related to Japan, Germany and other countries that WikiLeaks has published.
“We’re struggling to figure him out,” an official told the paper.
Martin appeared in federal court in Baltimore on Aug. 29 and remains in custody. He faces a year behind bars for removing the classified materials and another 10 for theft of government property.
James Wyda, the federal public defender who is representing Martin, said that the charges only represented the first step in the process.
“There’s no evidence that Hal Martin has betrayed his country what we do know is that Hal Martin loves his family and his country he served this nation honorably in the US Navy and he has devoted his entire country to protecting his country,” Wyda told The Baltimore Sun. “We look forward to defending Hal Martin in court.”
Booz Allen Hamilton did not immediately respond to a request for comment.