Man Who Took Trove of N.S.A. Data Has Court Date

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/22/us/politics/nsa-hoarder-harold-martin.html

Version 0 of 1.

BALTIMORE — The intelligence contractor accused in the largest-ever breach of classified information was portrayed by his lawyer in court on Friday as a patriot and a dedicated worker who became compulsive about taking work home.

An unlocked garden shed, stuffed with more classified documents than the contractor, Harold T. Martin III, could ever read, might be a symptom of a mental disorder, the lawyer said.

Mr. Martin, a rotund man with glasses whose striped gray jail garb stood out in an ornate federal courtroom here, sat silently during his first public appearance as his lawyer, James Wyda, argued that he should be released while awaiting trial.

The prosecution, opposing the request, described Mr. Martin, 51, in starkly different terms: as a serial lawbreaker of staggering audacity. Over two decades as a contractor for the National Security Agency and other government units, it said, he took home masses of secrets in full knowledge that it was illegal to do so. And, the prosecution added, there is no way to be certain what he has done with the information, or whether he might be hiding more.

At the end of an hourlong detention hearing, Magistrate Judge A. David Copperthite sided with the government and decided that Mr. Martin would remain in jail. He noted that Mr. Martin had a history of binge drinking, and concluded that he posed a flight risk because he saw in him a divided personality.

“You have someone here who presents himself as two different people,” Judge Copperthite said, agreeing with the defense that mental health might be an issue.

“He presents himself as the protector of the N.S.A.,” the judge said, referring to an unsent letter the F.B.I. found in which Mr. Martin scolded his colleagues as “clowns” who were incapable of protecting the nation’s secrets. “Yet he walks out with and keeps in an unlocked shed information that enemies of this country would love to exploit.”

Likewise, the judge said, Mr. Martin’s wife, Deborah Shaw, who sat in the front row, told investigators she had no idea that he owned what prosecutors called an “arsenal” of 10 firearms, including an assault-style rifle and a pistol-grip shotgun.

“For 20 years this has gone on,” the judge said, referring to Mr. Martin’s collecting of classified material. “His family was there, and I’m sure they had no idea what was going on.”

Judge Copperthite said that because Mr. Martin is currently charged with relatively minor criminal offenses — theft of government property and unauthorized retention of classified material — the law permitted him to consider only whether the defendant posed a risk of flight, not whether he might be dangerous. But he suggested that he agreed with the government that Mr. Martin would pose a danger — not necessarily a threat of violence, but a threat that he might further damage national security.

Prosecutors said that in a raid on Mr. Martin’s suburban Maryland home in August, the F.B.I. took boxes of papers and an estimated 50 terabytes of electronic files — equivalent to 500 million pages — from his home office, shed and car. Much of it, they said, is highly classified material that should never have left the secure premises of the N.S.A., the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and Pentagon offices where Mr. Martin worked.

The scale of the data Mr. Martin is accused of taking home is many times greater than either the hundreds of thousands of N.S.A. documents that Edward J. Snowden gave to journalists in 2013 or the military reports and diplomatic cables that Chelsea Manning gave to WikiLeaks in 2010.

But after seven weeks of frantic investigation, F.B.I. and N.S.A. officials have not been able to show that Mr. Martin gave any of his collection to anyone else. Notably, they have not been able to link him to the disclosure of highly classified N.S.A. hacking tools that an anonymous group called the Shadow Brokers offered for sale on the web in August.

Officials, however, say that investigators cannot be certain that he is not the source of the Shadow Brokers material or that he has not transferred other secrets elsewhere, in part because Mr. Martin’s cyberskills would make it possible for him to erase his electronic tracks.

One of the prosecutors, Zachary A. Myers, suggested the continuing frustration of F.B.I. agents who look at Mr. Martin’s record of “betrayal and deceit” and believe he is not being candid about his motives or his actions.

“Suffice it to say that the government does not at this point believe that the defendant has been fully cooperative,” Mr. Myers said.

For example, Mr. Myers said, after many hours of searching Mr. Martin’s property, F.B.I. agents thought, and Mr. Martin assured them, that they had found all his material. Then they discovered that more disks containing stolen data were still in his house, hidden behind a bookshelf.

“There’s no guarantee that he’s not storing other information somewhere else that he has not told us about,” Mr. Myers said, noting that Mr. Martin had software that might make it possible to stash data in the electronic cloud and leave no trace for investigators to find.

Mr. Wyda, a federal public defender and Mr. Martin’s lead lawyer, said his client wanted only the best for the N.S.A. and for his country. Indeed, he suggested, it was Mr. Martin’s very dedication that became his undoing.

“Hal was always driven by his desire to be better,” Mr. Wyda said of his client, whom he called “a voracious learner.” He began to take work home to master it, the lawyer said, and “it became a compulsion.”

“The mental health factor is the only explanation for this that makes sense,” Mr. Wyda added.

The lawyer said Mr. Martin was “no Edward Snowden” — he did not share Mr. Snowden’s political conviction that the government was violating privacy. Nor, Mr. Wyda said, was he Aldrich Ames or Robert Hanssen, employees of the C.I.A. and F.B.I. who sold secrets to the Russians.

“This was the behavior of a compulsive hoarder,” Mr. Wyda said, mentioning that Mr. Martin’s mother had also had hoarding tendencies. Keeping top secret material in plain view in his home and car was not the conduct of a spy or a political activist, he said, just a man carried away with his drive to master his work.

Mr. Wyda said Mr. Martin was in poor financial shape and could not afford to flee even if he wanted to. He insisted that his client was telling agents everything he knew.

After the judge’s decision that Mr. Martin would return to a suburban jail for the many months that are likely to elapse before a plea or a trial, Mr. Wyda said that Mr. Martin and his family were “very disappointed” and that they would seek a review of the decision next week. Ms. Shaw and Mr. Martin’s brother, Michael Martin, a nurse anesthetist who lives in Florida, left the courtroom and walked off into the rain without speaking to journalists.