The likely home of Hal Martin, as tracked down by a Baltimore Sun reporter last October. Google blurred it out, much like the NSA has blurred Martin out of existence.
Harold T. Martin III, a former NSA contractor, has been held in detention since his arrest in August 2016 after authorities found thousands of pages of classified information in his car and home.
Martin was also accused of stealing 50 terabytes of highly sensitive data, including files from the Tailored Access Operations (TAO), an elite hacking unit that develops and deploys software to hack the networks of foreign governments.
Comment: ...foreign civilians too.
US officials claim that Martin stole 75 percent of TAO's hacking tools, according to the Washington Post.
Comment: That's from the WaPo, chief purveyor of Fake News, so it is probably a grossly over-inflated stat provided to them by 'the intel community' to ensure Martin gets an unfair trial and no one asks to many questions about what exactly the spooks are up to.
Federal prosecutors called Martin's alleged theft "breathtaking in its scale and longevity," and say that he has "top secret" information from the last 20 years he was working with various federal agencies.
Comment: It's not Martn's theft that is "breathtaking in its scale and longevity" - it's the US government's duplicitous deeds that are "breathtaking in their scale and longevity."
James Wyda, Martin's attorney, has argued that Martin was taking his work home to improve his work, adding that he is "a compulsive hoarder" rather than a "traitor."
"This is the behavior of a compulsive hoarder who could not stop gathering and possessing the documents he treasured," Wyda told the Washington Post.
Martin's charges could amount to a sentence of 30 years to life if they run consecutively, prosecutors say.
Comment: Martin was 'secretly' arrested, and appeared before a 'secret judge' in late August 2016, soon after the NSA was hacked earlier in the month in such a way that its own hacking was revealed. It's unclear to what extent, if any, the two events are connected, but the timing is interesting.
Ed Snowden speculated at the time that this 'reverse hack' of the NSA by hacker group 'Shadow Brokers' was Russian intel publicly exposing the NSA's techniques in such a way as to send them this message: if they push their 'Russia is hacking our elections' claim too far, Russia could publicly expose whatever 'evidence' they cooked up as 'proof that Russia hacked the DNC' as having originated from the NSA...