A 68-year-old NSA employee has been sentences to 66 months in prison after taking home highly sensitive hacking tools between 2010 and 2015 in order to have more time to study them, win better performance reviews, and secure higher pay. Because the materials were removed from the NSA’s secure internal systems, the former NSA director wrote that the agency has been “left with no choice but to abandon certain important initiatives, at great economic and operational costs…some of the NSA’s most sophisticated, hard-to-achieve, and important techniques of collecting [SIGINT] from sophisticated targets of the NSA, including collection that is crucial to decision makers when answering some of the Nation’s highest-priority questions…techniques of the kind Mr. Pho was entrusted to protect, yet removed from secure space, are force multipliers, allowing for intelligence collection in a multitude of environments around the globe and spanning a wide range of security topics. Compromise of one technique can place many opportunities for intelligence collection and national security insight at risk.”
Source: NSA employee who brought hacking tools home sentenced to 66 months in prison | Ars Technica