NSA Contractor Indicted For Largest Heist of Classified Documents in U.S. History

Last year, we told you about a second Snowden, a National Security Agency  who may have been leaking troves of government secrets. Today, former contractor Harold Martin III was indicted on twenty criminal counts for stealing government documents and data or willful retention of national defense information.

Martin was arrested last October and accused of taking classified information.

[RELATED: Another NSA Contractor Arrested Accused Of Taking Classified Information]

Like Snowden, Martin worked as a Booz Allen Hamilton employee, according to Reuters.

Martin may have stolen as much as up to 50TB of classified data, which would make it the largest trove of government secrets ever stolen in history, having stolen more than an half-billion pages of top-secret documents from the U.S. government from 1996 to 2016.

U.S. officials allege that some of the data stolen included at least 75 percent of an elite hacking toolset used by the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations (TAO). The TAO toolset was leaked last year by a group calling itself “the shadow brokers”.

Wikileaks also added that it’s received the Shadow Brokers release of NSA hacking tools earlier and will be releasing them in due time.

“We had already obtained the archive of NSA cyber weapons released earlier today and will release our own pristine copy in due course.”

[RELATED: WikiLeaks to release ‘pristine copy’ of NSA Hacking Tools]

Officials, though, have not yet attributed Martin to any leaking of data and are currently only accusing him of stealing, not espionage.

The indictment says that Martin’s trove of stolen data also included documents from the CIA, the U.S. Cyber Command, and the National Reconnaissance Office.

Some of the documents identified in the indictment included: daily operations briefings from the NSA, a 2016 Cyber Command report detailing military capabilities and gaps for specific operations, a 2008 CIA document detailing methods of intelligence sources and collection, and an NSA anti-terrorism      operation-planning document, the Washington Times reported.

Martin allegedly kept all the data on computers and drives at his Glen Burnie, Maryland home.

Martin was able to accomplish this feat because of the security clearances that were granted him as a contractor with at least seven different government agencies.

He started working back in 1993 after serving in the U.S. Navy for four years, Reuters said Martin is set to appear before a federal judge for a hearing in Baltimore next week on Tuesday, Feb. 14.