A U.S. contractor has been arrested by the FBI for allegedly stealing classified government documents that could cause "exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the United States" if disseminated, according to a criminal complaint unsealed Wednesday by the Justice Department.
The contractor, Harold Martin of Glen Burnie, Maryland, admitted to investigators that he knowingly took home documents and digital files that contained highly classified information from the agency he worked for, according to the complaint. Martin was arrested on Aug. 27 and faces a maximum sentence of one year in prison for the unauthorized removal and retention of classified materials and ten years in prison for theft of government property.
Citing sources,The New York Times reported that Martin was a contractor for the National Security Agency, who it didn’t identify, was secretly arrested as the FBI investigates whether he took classified computer source code developed to break into the systems of adversaries such as Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.
The contractor worked for the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp., which also employed Edward Snowden, who took and released thousands of classified files from the NSA, the Times said.
"The complaint alleges that among the classified documents found in the search were six classified documents obtained from sensitive intelligence and produced by a government agency in 2014," according to a Justice Department statement. "These 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."
This report contains material from Bloomberg News and Reuters.
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