Shouldn't he be in front of the firing squad?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/f...-secrets-11563565527

Former NSA Contractor Sentenced to 9 Years for Heist of U.S. Secrets

Harold Martin III’s theft of data is considered one of the largest in nation’s history

By Dustin Volz
July 19, 2019 3:45 pm ET

A former National Security Agency contractor was sentenced Friday to nine years in prison after pleading guilty earlier this year to removing classified information from the spy agency, in what is widely viewed as one of the largest thefts of U.S. government secrets in history.

Harold “Hal” Martin III, who was indicted in 2017 and accused of taking home thousands of pages of documents containing some of the nation’s most sensitive secrets over a span of several years, pleaded guilty in March to a single count of willful retention of national defense information. Prosecutors at the time agreed to recommend dropping 19 other counts of the same charge, and a plea deal recommended a nine-year sentence.

“Harold Martin was entrusted with some of the nation’s most sensitive information,” John Demers, the assistant attorney general for national security, said in a statement. “Instead of respecting the trust given to him by the American people, Martin violated that trust and put our nation’s security at risk.”

Following his prison term, Mr. Martin will be under three years of supervised release, a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Maryland said. A lawyer for Mr. Martin declined to comment.

Mr. Martin, a Navy veteran, spent up to two decades as a contractor stealing sensitive national defense information from multiple government intelligence agencies by simply walking out of buildings with stolen material. He avoided detection for an unusually long time as he stockpiled an enormous trove of files in his suburban Maryland home, shed and car, according to prosecutors.

When authorities raided Mr. Martin’s property, they said they found a stash of about 50 terabytes worth of data, including specific details about classified intelligence operations and plans, the name of undercover intelligence officers and technical computer code. They also found 10 firearms, most of which were unregistered, prosecutors said.

The court proceedings of Mr. Martin’s case didn’t resolve whether any top-secret material ended up, wittingly or otherwise, in the hands of foreign adversaries. The case leaves unanswered whether his actions were at all connected to the leak online of NSA hacking tools from a group that calls itself the Shadow Brokers. Mr. Martin was arrested in 2016 weeks after the group emerged online to advertise the NSA tools—the result of an urgent internal investigation to find the source of what officials viewed as a severe compromise of their systems that held significant national security implications.

But it remains unclear how the Shadow Brokers, which officials and security experts have long suspected of being tied to the Russian government, obtained some of the NSA’s most important cyberweapons, and whether Mr. Martin’s stockpile played any role.

Mr. Martin’s attorneys had argued that Mr. Martin suffered from mental health issues that played a role in his compulsive hoarding of secret material.

His case reflected the continuing struggle U.S. intelligence agencies have had in preventing the theft of government secrets by employees and contractors since Edward Snowden’s high-profile leak in 2013 of classified files about the NSA’s domestic and international surveillance operations. Both the Obama and Trump administrations have sought to prosecute leaks and invest in technology to detect and deter so-called insider threats, but counterintelligence officials say the challenge of protecting secrets has persisted.

The government has found recent success in prosecuting cases, however. Last August, another former NSA contractor, Reality Leigh Winner, received a five-year sentence after pleading guilty to leaking top-secret information about Russian election interference to the Intercept, an online news outlet.

In September, Nghia Pho, a 68-year-old Vietnamese immigrant who worked in NSA’s elite hacking unit, was sentenced to five and a half years after admitting to insecurely storing secret work files on his home computer. And former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent Terry Albury was sentenced in October to four years after pleading guilty to leaking information about the FBI’s informant-recruitment tactics and efforts to identify political extremists.

Mr. Martin was never charged with leaking information, only illegally retaining national defense information. In a court hearing for his guilty plea in March, Mr. Martin told U.S. District Judge Richard Bennett: “It’s time to close the lid on Pandora’s box.”

U.S. intelligence officials consider the theft of secrets by Mr. Martin—who had worked for both the NSA and the Pentagon on developing classified cyberweapons and other programs as an employee of Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. and several other defense contractors—to be potentially the largest heist of classified government secrets in American history, measured by the sheer volume of data stolen.

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The government has found recent success in prosecuting cases, however....

The fact that they haven't been more successful (i.e., said firing squad mentioned above) probably has something to do with how widespread it is.

And yet Clinton walks free ...

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Originally posted by Haveme1or2:
And yet Clinton walks free ...

More evidence of corruption at the highest levels of the United States government.