Whereas Hillary Clinton is still walking on the streets of America, flexing her muscles, and even wants to become president, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is going about harassing innocent citizens for doing something far less than what Clinton did.
Clinton used her private server to conduct official national business, including sending and receiving classified information. Despite the glaring criminality in her case, and the numerous calls by many observers for her arrest, the FBI ignored it.
It has now emerged that the FBI secretly arrested a cyber contractor working for the United States National Security Agency (NSA) back in August 2016, for allegedly taking home classified information from NSA servers.
The contractor was identified as Harold T. Martin. He lives in Glen Burnie, Maryland. According to a criminal complaint filed in late August and unsealed on October 5, Martin at the time of his arrest, was working as a contractor for the Defense Department after leaving the NSA. Matin was hired from the consulting company Booz Allen Hamilton, where the NSA hired Edward Snowden from.
The FBI said Martin has been charged with theft of government property and the unauthorized removal, or retention, of classified documents.
According to investigators, they are now trying to find out whether Martin has disclosed to a third party, a highly classified computer code developed by the NSA to hack into the networks of foreign governments. It is said the code was part of the files Martin took from the NSA.
In 2013, Snowden also took a vast trove of documents from the NSA – that he would later pass on to journalists, exposing the NSA mass surveillance programs. Currently, Snowden is wanted under espionage charges in the United States, however, many privacy activists have hailed Snowden as a hero.
According to The New York Times, the information taken by Martin appears to be different in nature to Snowden’s files. Reports suggest that what Martin took describes the depth and breadth of the NSA’s surveillance.
Also, the code he took is said to have been developed by the NSA. The NSA uses it to break into computer systems of U.S. opponents like Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.
The FBI claimed in court documents filed at the United States District Court in Baltimore, that it discovered thousands of pages of documents and dozens of computers/electronic devices at the home of Martin, and in his car. The court documents revealed the computer data contained many terabytes of information.
However, FBI officials were unable to prove in the court documents that Martin actually leaked the information, passed them on to a third party, or whether he simply downloaded it into his possession only.
Lawyers for Martin released a statement confirming that there is no current evidence against their client suggesting that he has violated the U.S. espionage laws. They wrote in the statement: “We have not seen any evidence. But what we know is that Hal Martin loves his family and his country. There is no evidence that he intended to betray his country.”
Although the case is still pending, observers have said the FBI is making a case out of nothing; Martin is not the first person to have been caught with sensitive information.
It is said countless senior Washington officials have been caught taking classified information home without ever receiving penalty.
- Samuel R. Berger, a former national security adviser, stole classified documents from the National Archives and hid them under a construction trailer.
- Alberto R. Gonzales took home documents about the country’s warrantless wiretapping program while he was serving as the 80th Attorney General of the United States – under the George W. Bush administration.
- The former Central Intelligence Agency director, John M. Deutch, kept classified information on his home computer.
And of course, Clinton also recklessly used her private server to receive and send classified information, which the FBI has deliberately refused to pursue.
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