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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

The guy only worked there for three months, and there was an FBI sting operation against him. Is this something they routinely do to new employees, or maybe they found out something right after his hiring? It isn't strange that an employee was doing something wrong, they got wind, and set up a sting, but the timetable is crazy short.

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Let me put it to you another way. New guy turns up, starts printing off a whole bunch of highly classified docs that don’t relate to his actual job and then suddenly has to leave due to a vague “family illness”.

He is basically a walking profile of insider threat behaviour modeling.

I don’t think it was anything other than his stupidity that put him on the radar so quickly. Reading the indictment it’s clear he was a bit of an idiot.

Yeah, but... why does a new guy even have access to a bunch of highly classified docs that don't relate to his actual job? That's an epic fail by the NSA. I mean, good job catching him. Now close the door that he walked through when he found it open.

Probably because far too many docs have a security tag on them just in case.

The affidavit says that he had access to more documents than he was supposed to because of a "misconfiguration". Or at least, that's what he told the undercover agent.

Given that his access of the documents was logged anyway, it wouldn't surprise me if the misconfiguration was itself a honeypot, using documents that are relatively low-value but still classified.

Wonder what the content of the documents is if they indeed are a honeypot? Presumably one wouldn’t put any actual secrets but that presents the problem that one would need to know the real secrets to plant fake ones. Additionally the fake ones would implicate some real person, presumably which is problematic if a sophisticated hacker exfiltrated successfully without detection.

I could never get anything done in espionage. I’m far too paranoid.

this type of material is known as 'chicken feed' and it is curated in order to look valuable while not disclosing anything more damaging than necessary.

The article mentions it contains information on how the US performs cyberattacks. I'm sure it's fairly easy to make that look very convincing if you're new at the organization. I mean if it just mentions there's an SSL tunnel into an energy company somewhere, are you going to test if it works or consider it juicy enough to sell?

The files were in a folder called “NeWgUyHoNeYpOt”. That’s meant as a joke but could very well be true in this case.

That’s available.

https://www.namecheap.com/domains/registration/results/?doma...

Thought the same myself. There was a skunkworks documentary a long time ago with engineers who worked on the program. Their cover was TV technicians or something else bland. He said one time he was approached by a women at a bar who was way out of his league. She was pushy and questioned about his work for a while. The engineer always thought it was a test by the government.

I don't blame him lol

Why not lie to her about everything and bang her anyway?

(Risk of) Blackmail. Oldest trick in the book.

It doesn't even need to be true, just needs to be compelling.

If he’s not married, what’s there to blackmail?

Dickpics?

If you were married, this would likely be blackmail material.

Occasionally, though, it does work like you say. I think there was some Asian(?) politician that they tried to blackmail after something like this, and he basically said: "Hey, could you send me a copy of the sex tape? She was smokin' hot, and I'd love to have the video."

Sukarno (no last name), first president of Indonesia.

https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-cia-and-kgb-tried-to-bl...

Didn't an agency also target Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. this way as well, or am I thinking of someone else?

> King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI–King_suicide_letter

This is despicable behavior, what a painful history.

Thanks. That was the one.

IIRC correctly you can lose your clearance for adultery. The guy was married.

John McAfee (a known liar, so take it with a grain of salt) claimed in one of his interviews he gained and kept a clearance despite adultery and drug use by being brutally honest publicly about it all, so he was utterly unable to be blackmailed.

yeah, lying and trust are much more serious

Yeah, that's plausible. They don't care about drugs and adultery. They care that it's leverage. If the world already knows, it's not leverage.

Sounds like a pretty reasonable test. I've heard from multiple people who worked in the nuclear weapons industry that said that the random, way out of their league women stopped hitting on them once their clearances expired.

It's strange that they would give a security clearance to someone in a bad financial situation. I would think it's quite rare for the FBI to run a sting against an NSA employee... perhaps he wasn't targeted at all, but went out looking for someone to sell information to.

Agencies are well known to not pay competitively, even in IT roles, but when I think about the obvious solution which is to pay more, I immediately think of the uproar and accusations that would come with a government official getting what some might consider a 'lavish' wage even if it is industry standard for the skillset.

I'm looking at this to be possible more like when you have company wide phishing tests going through the emails, and it catches Brenda the new person in accounting who's still on their probationary period.

That's what contractors are for. Snowden was making something like $150k for a fairly basic sysadmin role, and I'd imagine he was nowhere near the top of the contractor pay scale. That is a whole separate issue though, with contracting companies acting as middlemen taking a fat cut, often just for knowing the right people. Not to mention the issue of having a revolving door between the private and government parts of the military industrial complex, like with the SecDef being a former Raytheon board member (and before that, a general).

If the Snowden personal W-2 gross was 150k, booz was almost certainly charging the nsa $285k for him. Pretty standard federal contacting markup for a "body shop" agency.

And just like every other case in US government contracting, the american people overpay for pretty standard functionality because half of the citizens think it's unconscionable for the government to do anything.

Yeah I found this a little confusing as well. They surely knew about the previous bankruptcy mentioned, and the current debt during their security clearance check. That'd surely be a big red flag for high level clearance.

When going through the security clearance background check for NSA, it's the FBI who investigates. It used to be the previous 7 years, neighbors and pretty much all acquaintances. It's extremely tedious figuring all that out when just out of grad school, for example.

If I was going to work in that sector I would kind of assume that any delightful surprises or exciting new people I met outside of work had strings attached for at least the first year or two.

sounds like you would end up like George Clooney's character in Burn After Reading.

Such a funny movie. "THIS... IS... A... CRUCIFIXION. THIS IS POLITICAL." sticks out arms in classic crucifixion style

Or you could just not do crime.

It sounds like the FBI has an website/email account set up like "I_AM_A_RUSSIAN_SPY@gmail.com".

People email that account with offers of providing information to the russian government, and then the FBI goes and sees who had access to the documents which get sent over. In this case, only one person accessed all the documents, so even if he doesn't identify himself to I_AM_A_RUSSIAN_SPY@gmail.com, they still get him.

It doesn't seem like this person was specifically targeted or had an operation against him. He just fell into the honey pot.

He worked there for three WEEKS, not even a month. A weird vibe to this whole saga.

I'm thinking some non-targeted honeypot, given he reached out to the undercover agent directly...

It was the other way around. They reached out to him using a foreign email service provider and mentioning something vague about mutual benefits. He took the bait.

Everyone subject to a background investigation in this sphere has their 4A rights suspended by executive order. They can and will apply all forms of domestic surveillance on such people.

And he also had access to classified (top)secret level documents, unless I misunderstood wrong, how is that possible in that short amount of time?

A friend of mine did an internship for NSA, he needed top secret clearance just to get a foot in the door.

The background investigations take months to complete.

I interned at a NSA contractor in college and applied for a clearance. They called me 3 years later to tell me it was approved after I was working somewhere else, in a totally different industry.

Think for a second,

Say you are the CTO or engineering security staff of say Google.

What is the first 3 months of employment called behind the scenes?

Probation.

It's not just a nickname, as one would track all accesses to anything and higher access rights would obvious follow proven trust. And one might even set up honey pot traps to weed out the bad actors even.

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