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I agree with you that NSA security appears to be a total clusterfuck and that this is an instance where Walter Peck is fully justified in coming in and shutting down the Ghost Containment Unit.

A lot of people that know more about this stuff than I do disagree pretty forcefully. Dan Guido on Twitter just reminded me that Martin was specifically read into extremely sensitive programs at NSA; he was one of just a few hundred people with this access.

The court filing is pretty damning. For instance, there's the email he had prepared to send his team in 2007, noting that "they" are "inside the perimeter" and threatening to bring his coworkers "into the light". The emails, the hoarding, the guns, the weird handwritten notes... this looks extremely bad. Keep in mind that he could have been trying to do some terribly stupid things.

> > The filing described Mr. Martin as computer genius who easily outsmarted government efforts to protect secrets and said he possessed an advanced understanding of how to encrypt messages and hide information in cyberspace.

> They are certainly lying in terms of how capable he was with the "genius" implications.

Yes. It's hard to wrap my head around the characterization of him being a genius at cybersecurity, but he's leaving materials obviously marked "top secret" sitting around in his car. It seems a little convenient, almost like a movie plot.

If this guy had decent opsec at all, he would not have been caught with any detectable materials in his house or car; a raid of his house would have uncovered nothing without his cooperation.

Perhaps they had been tracking him for a while and this was a sting that launched at a particular time. Otherwise, I don't understand why he'd have any printed materials in his car, much less with tradecraft instructions on them! Sheesh.

Why would you ever have printed materials with you with secrets on them? Transmit the information digitally protected by encryption. If a skilled operator needed to recover information on printed documents, then I would expect them to expeditiously scan them and destroy them, not keep them sitting around in a car unattended.

The story does make a bit more sense interpreted through the lens of him being a hoarder with not particularly good opsec. Either that or he's a sloppy spy that they've been tracking for some time, and chose to execute a sting at the right time when he was undertaking vulnerable activities like transporting material or preparing for a drop.

But, the idea that this was a sting does not resonate with the fact that they did not arrest him while serving the search warrant on his house. ... unless they deliberately left him free while observing him, in the hopes of discovering how he contacts his handlers. </speculation>

This is another example of attribution error. People who work in TAO aren't super-spies. They're people with access to a lot of weird random exploits and with very peculiar collections of very deep knowledge into things like the operating systems of Chinese Internet gateway routers and the DLL offsets of whatever versions of Windows Russia is still using.

> "Snowden isn't some magical computer genius of exceptional ability either"

Yeah, his main "hack" was social engineering - convincing others to give him their credentials for various made up IT work.

It's a little late now, but I'm truly curious why people downvoted this, because it is literally how he gathered large swaths of the data he stole.

That's still "hacking". NSA apologists have to be careful when scoffing at the exploits of their various rogue employees: if it was so easy, one really must assume that agents of China, Russia, etc. have done it too.