Scott Shane

Investigators originally feared that the contractor, Harold T. Martin III, might have passed or sold secrets to a foreign power or to a still-mysterious group calling itself the Shadow Brokers, which released dangerous NSA hacking tools online in 2016 and 2017. But they appear to have concluded that his amassing of secrets was a symptom of a quirky, disturbed mind, not evidence that Martin, a 54-year-old Navy veteran, wanted to betray his country.

In March, Martin pleaded guilty to a single count of willful retention of national defense information. Prosecutors and defense lawyers agreed on the sentence, which was approved by U.S. District Judge Richard D. Bennett.

Martin’s lawyer, James Wyda, said his client had an “autism spectrum disorder” and had experienced difficulty forming and keeping relationships since childhood. As a result, the lawyer said, he had sought meaning and validation in his work as a contractor at the NSA and other agencies, bringing home documents to work on at night.

But as the documents piled up, the lawyer said, they became “a tangible representation of Martin’s worth,” as he was “desperately trying to fill the voids in his life.” His hoarding of both papers and electronic media went out of control, Wyda said.

One of the prosecutors, Zachary Myers, an assistant U.S. attorney, cast doubt on the notion that Martin was a mere victim of his mental disorders. He noted that Martin collected only government documents and kept them in a “logical” order.

“The defendant knew what he was doing was wrong, illegal and highly dangerous,” Myers said.

When FBI agents arrived at Martin’s modest house in Glen Burnie, Maryland, in 2016, they recovered an estimated 50 terabytes of material, much of it stamped top secret, including the closely guarded software he had taken from his job at NSA’s hacking unit, then called Tailored Access Operations. That made it among the largest thefts of classified documents in history.

His arrest came shortly after the Shadow Brokers had begun trying to auction stolen NSA hacking tools online, and investigators were initially convinced that Martin must have somehow supplied the tools. But the Shadow Brokers continued to operate after Martin’s arrest, and prosecutors on Friday gave no indication that they thought he was connected to their wholesale release of NSA cyberweapons, an unprecedented loss for the agency.

According to court records and interviews, Martin contacted employees at a Russian-owned cybersecurity company, Kaspersky Lab, via Twitter in 2016, sending cryptic messages that appeared to indicate he had information to share. “Shelf life, three weeks,” he wrote, in one message first reported by Politico.

But he quickly cut off contact and never delivered anything. Bennett made reference to the episode Friday but noted that the government had not accused Martin of “transmission” of classified secrets.

Martin, who was obese at the time of his arrest three years ago, has lost more than 100 pounds in jail, his lawyer said. He stood in a striped jersey labeled “Inmate” and read for nearly 30 minutes a rambling statement apologizing to family, friends and his former colleagues at the NSA.

“I have been called a walking encyclopedia,” he said, describing himself at another point as “an intellectually curious adventurer.” His words were often cryptic, at one point addressed to “that cool dude in a loose mood” and at another citing the NSA motto, “They serve in silence.”

Bennett repeatedly said he found Martin’s actions disturbing. “This case is very troubling,” he said. “Very sensitive material was taken home. I’ve grappled with the fact that people’s lives were potentially in danger,” he said, referring to intelligence sources overseas.

The judge said he agreed to the nine-year sentence, which will be counted from Martin’s arrest in August 2016, only after deciding it would be enough of a deterrent to other government employees with security clearances who might consider mishandling secrets.

The case is only one of several recent prosecutions of NSA employees, including Nghia Pho, who was sentenced to 5 1/2 years in September for taking home classified documents, and Reality Winner, who got five years and three months in August for sending a secret document about Russian hacking to the online publication The Intercept.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/us/politics/hal-martin-nsa-sentence.html" id="c90686f6-2086-33a4-a230-c48587b57fce">The New York Times</a>.

BALTIMORE — A troubled former National Security Agency contractor who spent two decades stuffing his home, car and garden shed with highly classified documents was sentenced Friday to nine years in prison in a case that exposed a shocking laxity in security at the NSA and other secret government facilities.

NSA Contractor Who Hoarded Secrets at Home Is Sentenced to Nine Years in Prison

WASHINGTON — The intelligence craft in American history and culture is a decidedly mixed bag. It has served up intrigue, genius and heroism, clever undercover operations and brain-boggling gadgetry, making it a linchpin of popular entertainment. Yet the spy trade also has a darker strain: Prone to epic failures and frequently in ethical trouble, the agencies have been embroiled in recent years in scandals involving brutal torture and secret surveillance.

Think Bond and Bourne vs. waterboarding and warrantless eavesdropping.

The challenge taken on by the new, vastly expanded International Spy Museum, opening Sunday in a striking glass-and-steel building not far from the National Mall, was to capture all of these disparate threads. The curators had to appeal to rambunctious 8-year-olds along with somber retirees, tourists whose notion of intelligence comes from “The Spy Who Loved Me” and (given its location) hypercritical visitors from the ranks of the CIA, the National Security Agency and all the secret crannies of the security state.

Overall, the new museum, built for $162 million from private donations and a municipal bond, does a remarkable job. It is more serious and realistic than the original Spy Museum, located 1 mile away and founded by the same man who financed most of the new museum, Milton Maltz, a television and radio entrepreneur. During its run from 2002 to 2018, the old museum became a popular gathering place for authors and speakers on spying, but some of the displays came across as slick and superficial.

The new exhibits use every technological trick in the modern-museum book to engage visitors. But they also are designed to present complex subjects in ways that encourage thoughtful consideration and debate. The museum is rich with historical artifacts, interactive quizzes and original short films.

Most impressively, the new Spy Museum faces squarely the most painful and divisive episodes in the recent history of American spying. A room devoted to interrogation and torture features some history (George Washington took a stand against the mistreatment of British prisoners) and an actual waterboard — the notorious torture device used in the Inquisition, by the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia and by the CIA against al-Qaida suspects in 2002 and 2003. In accompanying video clips, two architects of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” defend them as necessary and effective; a military lawyer, a Navy trainer and others denounce them as useless and starkly at odds with American and civilized values.

In another room, devoted to secrecy and openness, among those who speak in extensive footage are Thomas Drake, a former NSA official prosecuted for leaking to the press about a wasteful, failed program; and Ben Wizner, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who advises Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor who gave journalists hundreds of thousands of secret documents. Senior intelligence officials also get their say, but they do not monopolize the discussion.

The museum takes a forthright look, too, at intelligence failures, dissecting the catastrophically mistaken estimates about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and pairing the attacks on Pearl Harbor and on Sept. 11, 2001, in illuminating ways. A creepy set of rooms depicts East Berlin as a surveillance society gone out of control.

“Here, we cover the dark side,” said Anna Slafer, the museum’s vice president of exhibitions and programs. In the old museum, she said, “We didn’t really address controversy. It was spy-lite.” Given the fierce debates and moral quandaries in the news since 9/11, such an approach was no longer defensible, she said.

Of course, if the old museum was “lite,” this one is not by any means all heavy. There are hundreds of items from the unrivaled spy-artifact collection of H. Keith Melton, who has advised the CIA on historical matters and donated his finds to the museum. There’s a Soviet camera hidden in a glasses case, an East German microdot message in a hollow tooth, a fake-pregnancy suit for female CIA spies and a fake scrotum concealing a transmitter for the men. There are excursions into the huge place of spying in popular culture, but fictional stories are not allowed to predominate.

Alexis Albion, the lead curator, who worked on the 9/11 Commission staff and at the State Department, said that after consulting a panel of historians beginning about five years ago, designers decided “to tell fewer stories but in more depth.”

“You don’t want to be pedantic, but you do want people to understand what this work is really like,” Albion said. “People think spying is sexy and fun. But sometimes it ends badly. We always thought it would be wonderful if some people came out of the exhibits and said, ‘I couldn’t do that. ’”

In keeping with the “international” in its name, the new museum seeks to expand beyond the American and British experience. Among the spies whose stories are told in detail are ones from China, Russia and Israel. A Danish former jihadi, Morten Storm, recounts his terrifying adventures infiltrating al-Qaida in Yemen.

Few movies are built around the work of intelligence analysis. But the museum manages to bring the subject vividly to life with an elaborate presentation of the puzzle CIA analysts faced at the end of the hunt for Osama bin Laden: Was the man living behind the walls of the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, the al-Qaida founder? Or was it the home of a crime boss, a drug kingpin or a reclusive businessman?

Visitors watch Michael Morell, a former deputy director of the CIA, present the known facts on video. A model of the compound lights up to indicate clues: A balcony is surrounded by a high wall; trash is burned rather than put out for collection; a tall man paces the grounds.

At another station, amateurs can assess the social media posts of a suspected terrorist, trying their hand at a daily challenge for the FBI and CIA: Is the person a mere blowhard and fantasist? Or does he really pose a threat of violence?

At some two dozen interactive displays, each visitor, identified by an electronic identification card worn on a lanyard, can test their skills at spycraft. At the end of their tour — about 2 1/2 hours on average, curators predict — visitors get a sort of report card on their aptitude for various intelligence specialties. They can follow up on a website for a more detailed “debrief.”

That will strike some people as hokey — and others as cool. The museum, about halfway between the mall and Washington’s waterfront, seeks to serve all comers, staking its claim to become a must-stop attraction for the hordes of tourists who land in the capital every year. Though the museum is a nonprofit, it’s pricey, in the way of new museums — $24.95 per adult ($2 off for online purchases), with discounts for seniors, military members and children.

“Intelligence is probably the least understood and most misrepresented of the professions,” Allen W. Dulles, the CIA’s longest-serving director, wrote after his retirement in a 1963 book. Indeed, only when Dulles had been dead for several years, in the mid-1970s, did the Senate’s Church Committee help the public understand some of what the agency had been up to during his tenure — a stew of assassination schemes, drug experiments and domestic spying.

With the shock of 9/11 still vivid, the United States is unlikely to pare back its sprawling, powerful intelligence complex anytime soon. No part of the government is more in need of informed, democratic oversight. The Spy Museum will give tourists a fascinating few hours, but it will also help Americans understand what the secret agencies do in their name and with their money.

Opens Sunday in Washington; 202-393-7798, spymuseum.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/06/arts/design/spy-museum-washington-review.html" id="a0eee46d-c4c7-3422-a784-c34caec5eea2">The New York Times</a>.

At a New Museum, Cloaks and Daggers Galore

(Exhibition Review)

Harold T. Martin III, who worked in the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations hacking unit, admitted his guilt more than two years after his arrest in what may be the biggest breach of classified information in history. FBI agents who swarmed his modest home south of Baltimore in 2016 found stacks of documents and electronic storage devices stashed in his car, home and even a garden shed.

But investigators never found evidence that Martin, who was working on a doctorate at the time of his arrest, had shared the stolen secrets with anyone else. His lawyers, James Wyda and Deborah Boardman, have argued that he was simply a hoarder who started taking work home and could not stop. Acquaintances described him as an eccentric with an active fantasy life who may have gotten carried away.

Martin pleaded guilty to one count of willful retention of defense information. Judge Richard D. Bennett said he would approve and impose the prescribed sentence, which was negotiated between prosecutors and defense lawyers. Sentencing was set for July.

Poring over the piles of material they found in their searches, investigators were astonished to discover that for 20 years, Martin, known as Hal, had been carrying classified material out of the NSA and other security agencies where he had worked. At the time of his arrest, he was working for Booz Allen Hamilton — the same intelligence contractor that had employed Edward Snowden, who flew to Hong Kong in 2013 and gave journalists a large trove of NSA documents.

Along with the Snowden and Martin cases, another NSA worker, Nghia Pho, was sentenced in September to 5 1/2 years in prison after taking home secret material describing the agency’s hacking tools. Intelligence officials believe the tools and related documents were then stolen from Pho’s home computer by Russian hackers. A young NSA linguist named Reality Winner was sentenced in August to five years and three months for leaking a classified document on Russian election hacking to The Intercept, an online publication.

But perhaps the most damaging breach of all was discovered around the time of Martin’s arrest in August 2016, when a mysterious group calling itself the Shadow Brokers announced an online auction of a long list of software exploits the NSA used to break into foreign computer networks. The Shadow Brokers eventually made the stolen cyberweapons public, and other countries and criminal groups began using them for hacking and theft around the world.

FBI investigators focused on Martin after getting a tip from Kaspersky Lab, a Russian cybersecurity company. Two Kaspersky employees had gotten cryptic messages from Martin — calling himself “HAL999999999” — via Twitter that seemed to be offering secrets, as Politico first reported in January. The assistance was a bit ironic, because U.S. intelligence officials sometimes accused Kaspersky of being too close to Russian intelligence, charges the company denied.

“Shelf life, three weeks,” Martin wrote in one of his cryptic texts, seeming to suggest that he was offering material on a time-limited basis.

But shortly after sending the messages, he blocked on Twitter the two Kaspersky employees he had just contacted, so they could not respond.

The FBI quickly linked the HAL999999999 Twitter account to Martin, and agents were soon swarming his modest house in Glen Burnie, a Baltimore suburb. The search turned up a staggering total of 50 terabytes of government data, a virtual library’s worth, much of it classified at a high level.

Investigators at first believed Martin might be the Shadow Brokers, who had posted their first announcement of their auction of NSA hacking tools a half-hour after Martin blocked the two Kaspersky workers on Twitter. They found the same NSA exploits in Martin’s vast collection of stolen material.

But the Shadow Brokers continued to post taunting manifestoes and stolen software for months after Martin was jailed. It appears the investigators eventually concluded that Martin was not the source of the Shadow Brokers’ material, at least not wittingly.

Government officials have never charged anyone in the Shadow Brokers breach, and speculation has centered on two possible perpetrators: Russian intelligence or disgruntled NSA insiders. If FBI and NSA security officers have made progress in solving the case, they have not said anything about it in public.

According to court filings, Martin first agreed to plead guilty in January 2018. But negotiations subsequently fell apart, and the plea came more than a year after it was first expected. Martin has been incarcerated since his arrest.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/28/us/politics/hal-martin-nsa-guilty-plea.html" id="0524cc14-e9e7-38d4-af4b-0c9c06042d2e">The New York Times</a>.

BALTIMORE — In a case that exposed the government’s embarrassing failure to secure its secrets, a 54-year-old former National Security Agency contractor pleaded guilty Thursday to taking secret documents home in a deal likely to put him in prison for nine years.

NSA Contractor Arrested in Biggest Breach of U.S. Secrets Pleads Guilty

On the day Roger Stone was charged with lying about a momentous set of leaks that originated with Russian hackers, a feisty band of transparency activists led by a Boston woman posted a voluminous collection of leaks from inside Russia.

It was less a coincidence than a trend, a consequence of technology and a defining feature of our time. We live in an age of leaks, for better or worse.

The better part is easy: We get access to information powerful people and institutions want to keep secret. The worse part is more complicated, and requires more thoughtful consideration than it gets: Leaks often violate laws against hacking or theft and invade people’s privacy, not always with any higher purpose. They can be powerful, unpredictable, unfair weapons. They can allow one country to meddle, from a safe distance, in the affairs of another.

To wit: The Democratic Party emails and documents, hacked by Russian intelligence and broadcast by WikiLeaks with veteran political trickster Stone as cheerleader, may have allowed a foreign power to help elect an American president in 2016. Yet the new, sprawling archive of Russian leaks, ranging from government ties to the Russian Orthodox Church to the Kremlin’s management of its invasion of Ukraine, showed that the Russian state is a target of leaks these days as often as it is a leaker.

Mass leaks, on a scale inconceivable back in the paper-only era, have become so routine globally that only the most extraordinary get extended attention. In South Africa, a Commission of Inquiry Into State Capture is fueled by “Gupta Leaks,” leaked emails detailing corrupt ties between government officials and the Gupta family’s business empire. In Hungary, a Portuguese man was just arrested and admitted to playing a central role in “Football Leaks,” which exposed unsavory financial dealings in international soccer. In Singapore, an American and his Singaporean physician boyfriend were accused of leaking the names of more than 14,000 people with an HIV diagnosis.

Leaks, an ancient metaphor, are a venerable human institution. “A talebearer revealeth secrets,” says Proverbs in an early complaint, “but he that is of a faithful spirit concealeth the matter.” Thomas Paine, the revolutionary pamphleteer, has been described as the first American to be fired for leaking classified information — in 1779.

But only in recent years have leaks attained industrial scale. A terabyte of data — 100 million pages or 1,000 hours of video — can now be slipped into your pocket on a thumb drive and carried off with your keys and chewing gum. If information is power, that is a lot of power in a small package. It is being wielded daily for many purposes.

The same technological change has made information vulnerable to hacking, which means that insiders are no longer the only people capable of leaking it. On a regular basis, companies announce cyberthefts of customer data, causing bureaucratic hassles for millions of people. At the other end of the scale, leaks occasionally target individuals for embarrassment or extortion.

But the most consequential leaks — many of them more like floods — are those that wield political power. The diplomatic cables Chelsea Manning gave to WikiLeaks in 2010 shed light on the hidden world of diplomacy. Edward Snowden’s National Security Agency documents, shared with journalists in 2013, prompted the White House, and then Congress, to set new limits on the surveillance of Americans. The Panama Papers, leaked to a German newspaper in 2015, prompted investigations of tax evasion and money laundering around the world.

On balance, those gargantuan disclosures seem largely beneficial — even if not all diplomats, intelligence officers and tax lawyers would join the applause. But the big leaks of the current era are not all about war and peace, government oversight or financial equity. For journalists, the catnip appeal of scoops can overwhelm careful judgment about the value of the disclosures and problematic questions about sources.

What about the Sony Pictures leaks — an act of vengeance by the North Korean leader for an insulting movie — which exposed mostly gossip, business secrets and employee Social Security numbers? What of the leaks of personal information from AshleyMadison.com, which helps facilitate extramarital affairs?

What, for that matter, about the 20,000 Democratic National Committee emails and 20,000 more pages of emails to and from John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, that Stone is accused of lying about? That breach, weaponized by Russia in the midst of a presidential contest, illustrates well the ambiguous nature of such intrusions.

The leaks were, after all, not disinformation, even if they were obtained by criminal means. The emails were real, which was why they drew so much media attention. “Four of the Juiciest Leaked Podesta Emails,” USA Today trumpeted a month before the 2016 election. The New York Times was only a little more demure: “Highlights From the Clinton Campaign Emails.”

The leaks gave Clinton cause to regret that she had not released the speeches she had delivered to private companies, which were now made public under the worst possible circumstances. It was agony for top Democrats whose private, sometimes snarky comments were aired.

For Donald Trump and his supporters, including his old friend Stone, the emails were a campaign boon, a justified public airing of hidden Clinton truths. For future political historians, they may offer a few meaningful tidbits of insight into the Clinton campaign.

Yet the leaks cannot be separated from those who made them happen: A foreign intelligence service intervened with significant impact on behalf of one side in an American election. Imagine that Russian officials had ignored Clinton and instead hacked and published documents exposing Trump’s epic tax dodges and secret payments to paramours. Even die-hard Trump partisans might recognize that the race could have come out the other way.

A different thought experiment, however, may be more timely. How would the leaks of Democratic emails be viewed had the data been hacked or leaked by a disgruntled American — a false story that Russia and Trump supporters pushed in 2016 — with no taint of foreign meddling? More Americans might accept the leaks as regrettable but inevitable political roughhousing.

Such a scenario may be worth pondering. American political operatives, we recently learned, have begun to imitate Russia’s 2016 operations on social media, with two experiments in the 2017 Alabama Senate election.

So it is almost certainly only a matter of time before Americans try out the hack-and-leak technique as well, as any student of old-school campaign dirty tricks can tell you. Just ask Roger Stone, who wrote in his book “Stone’s Rules”: “To win you must do everything.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/02/sunday-review/data-leaks-journalism.html" id="04cfc750-b9bb-35e0-a688-1156bb7e37a5">The New York Times</a>.

(Sunday Review) ; (News analysis)

Living in the Age of Big Leaks

Hoffman said he had no idea that political operatives whose work he had financed had used fakery on Facebook and Twitter in the special Senate election a year ago in Alabama. But he had an obligation to track how his money was spent, he said, and he promised to exercise more care in the future.

“I categorically disavow the use of misinformation to sway an election,” said Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn and a prominent figure at the intersection of Silicon Valley and Democratic politics. He said he had financed “organizations trying to re-establish civic, truth-focused discourse” and was “embarrassed” to learn his money had been spent on disinformation.

The New York Times and The Washington Post reported last week that $100,000 from Hoffman was spent on a deceptive social media campaign to aid Doug Jones, the Democratic candidate, who barely defeated the Republican, Roy Moore.

The money went to a small group of social media experts that included Jonathon Morgan, chief executive of New Knowledge, a cybersecurity firm.

They created a Facebook page intended to look like the work of conservative Alabamians, and used it to try to split Republicans and promote a conservative write-in candidate to take votes from Moore.

They also used thousands of Twitter accounts to make it appear as if automated Russian bot accounts were following and supporting Moore, according to an internal report on the project. The apparent Russian support for Moore drew broad news media coverage.

Democratic political strategists say the small Alabama operation — which accounts for a minuscule share of the $51 million spent in the contest — was carried out as a debate about tactics intensified within the party.

Democrats had been shocked to learn of Russia’s stealth influence campaign to damage Hillary Clinton and promote Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential race. But at least a few Democrats thought their party could not shun such tactics entirely if others were going to continue to use them.

The Alabama operation is among the first examples to come to light of such underhanded methods on social media in U.S. politics. But because such efforts are generally very easy to hide and very difficult to trace, it is possible that other instances have gone undetected.

In 2017, through a fund called Investing in Us, Hoffman gave money to a small company, American Engagement Technologies. The company’s leader, Mikey Dickerson, is a former Google employee who founded the U.S. Digital Service during the Obama administration to try to upgrade the federal government’s use of technology. An associate of Hoffman’s said that his total grant to American Engagement was $750,000, which also went toward other political races and social media research. Dickerson has declined to comment.

American Engagement then passed $100,000 to Morgan and other researchers. Hoffman’s statement says the money went to Morgan’s company, New Knowledge, but Morgan said the Alabama project was carried out separately from the company.

The revelations of and fallout from the operation are being closely watched. Some U.S. political experts fear that the Russian influence campaign of 2016 could become a dangerous model for stateside politics, with dirty tricks on social media becoming common. Laws and regulations have not been updated to cope with such a threat.

On Saturday, Facebook shut down five accounts, belonging to Morgan and other unnamed individuals, in response to their use of “inauthentic” operations on the platform. Twitter declined to say whether it had taken any action in the Alabama case.

Jones and Democratic Party officials have said they were unaware of the social media tactics and denounced them. Jones has called for investigations by the Justice Department and the Federal Election Commission — a call Hoffman joined Wednesday.

“We cannot permit dishonest campaign tactics to go unchecked in our democracy — no matter which side they purportedly help,” Hoffman said in his statement.

Hoffman, whose net worth is estimated by Forbes at $1.7 billion, has long been involved in politics. In 2017 he co-founded an organization called Win the Future that billed itself as a “nonpartisan project lab” intended to encourage every American to become an informed voter. He has also supported Vote.org, which has a similar goal, and Higher Ground Labs, a startup to help progressive candidates.

He has made no secret of his opposition to Trump, and in 2016 he offered to donate $5 million to veterans’ groups if Trump released his tax returns.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/26/us/reid-hoffman-alabama-election-disinformation.html" id="e39202a9-ec9a-3d0a-a93f-0345b92e9ba6">The New York Times</a>.

LinkedIn Co-Founder Apologizes for Deception in Alabama Senate Race

Reid Hoffman, the tech billionaire whose money was spent on Russian-style social media deception in a Senate race last year, apologized Wednesday, saying in a statement that he had not approved the operation and did not support such tactics in U.S. politics.

Among those whose accounts were removed was a prominent social media researcher who worked on the Alabama operation, Jonathon Morgan, according to a person briefed on the company’s action. Facebook did not name those whose accounts were closed, and it was not immediately possible to identify the others.

The company acted in response to reports in The New York Times, The Washington Post and other news outlets that a small group of social media experts had secretly used deceptive tactics in the Alabama race that were explicitly modeled on Russia’s meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The group sought to split the conservative vote to undermine the Republican candidate, Roy Moore, and to boost support for the Democrat, Doug Jones, who won by a small margin.

Morgan has said the operation was an experiment to learn more about the kinds of methods Russia had used, and not to influence the outcome of the race. But the episode has sparked fears that the fraudulent Russian operations on social media could be imitated widely by American political operatives and further undermine voters’ ability to sort truth from fakery as they choose candidates.

The group that carried out the Alabama operation, composed of tech specialists who leaned Democratic, created a Facebook page on which they posed as conservative Alabamians. That page was shut down in 2017. They also used Twitter accounts that looked Russian — described as a “false flag” scheme in an internal report on the project — to create the impression that Russian accounts were following Moore.

Elections experts have said there was little chance that the $100,000 project could have had a significant impact on a race in which more than $50 million was spent.

Morgan has been a leading voice against the kind of abuse carried out by Russia in 2016, when Russians posing as Americans on Facebook and other platforms attacked Hillary Clinton and promoted Donald Trump in the presidential race. In November, he was one of the authors of an op-ed article in The Times about continued Russian interference in the midterm elections.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/22/us/politics/facebook-suspends-alabama-elections.html" id="d90d6cd5-638e-35b3-aa7c-2de03512f663">The New York Times</a>.

In an unusual move against Russian-style election deception inside the United States, Facebook said on Saturday it had removed five accounts of Americans who used its platform improperly in the hard-fought Alabama Senate election last year.

Facebook Closes 5 Accounts That Used Russia-like Tactics in Alabama Senate Race

The company acted in response to reports in The New York Times, The Washington Post and other news outlets in recent days that a small group of social media experts had secretly used deceptive tactics in the Alabama race that were explicitly modeled on Russia’s meddling in the 2016 U.S.presidential election. The group sought to split the conservative vote to undermine the Republican candidate, Roy Moore, and to boost support for the Democrat, Doug Jones, who won by a small margin.

Elections experts have said there was little chance that the $100,000 project could have had a significant impact on a race in which more than $50 million was spent, including in the primaries.

Nevertheless, Jones said on Friday he was “outraged” to learn of the project and called for an investigation by both the Justice Department and the Federal Election Commission. There is no evidence that Jones, his campaign or Democratic Party officials knew about or encouraged the operation.

In a statement on Saturday, Facebook said it had shut down “five accounts run by multiple individuals for engaging in coordinated inauthentic behavior on Facebook around the Alabama special election, and our investigation is ongoing. We take a strong stand against people or organizations that create networks of accounts to mislead others about who they are or what they’re doing.”

The Washington Post first reported on the accounts’ removal on Saturday.

Facebook said it shuts down more than 1 million accounts each month worldwide for violating its rules. But for a researcher like Morgan, chief executive of a cybersecurity firm based in Austin, Texas, called New Knowledge, the move is bound to be a stinging embarrassment. He did not reply to a request for comment Saturday.

In interviews with The Times this week, Morgan acknowledged his role in the secret Alabama operation on Facebook and Twitter, but described it as a small experiment designed to understand such techniques.

The internal report on the project’s results, evidently prepared for those who financed it, stated in strong language that it was in fact intended to help Jones and hurt Moore and that its operators believed it had succeeded in doing so. The project was funded by Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn and a supporter of Democratic candidates, though a colleague of his said he did not approve of the use of deception on social media.

A Twitter spokeswoman citing users’ privacy, declined to say whether it had taken any action in response to the reports on the Alabama project.

Together, they essentially burnish the résumé of Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, a loyal associate of President Vladimir Putin’s, who owns the Internet Research Agency and its multiple corporate siblings.

Americans might be infuriated by what Prigozhin’s companies are doing, but they are doing it well.

Here are major takeaways from the reports.

— To a degree not fully appreciated, the Russian operation relentlessly targeted African-Americans.

The New Knowledge report finds that while “other distinct ethnic and religious groups were the focus of one or two Facebook pages or Instagram accounts, the black community was targeted extensively with dozens.”

Facebook ads were targeted at users who had shown interest in black history, the Black Panther Party and Malcolm X. The most popular of the Russian Instagram accounts was @blackstagram, with 303,663 followers.

On YouTube, the Russians played on police shootings of unarmed black men with channels with names like “Don’t Shoot” and “BlackToLive.”

While most media attention has focused on Facebook pages appealing to the political right, the Russian effort aimed at black Americans was actually larger, reaching almost as many people. Of 81 Facebook pages created by the Internet Research Agency, 30 targeted African-American audiences, amassing 1.2 million followers, the report finds. By comparison, 25 pages targeted the political right and drew 1.4 million followers.

On Monday, both the NAACP and the Congressional Black Caucus expressed concern about the targeting.

The NAACP, a civil rights group, said it would begin a weeklong protest starting Tuesday called #LogOutFaceook. The group said it would stay off Facebook and Instagram and asked its social media followers and the organizations with which it works to do the same.

The NAACP said that the protest was “a way to signify to Facebook that the data and privacy of its users of color matter more than its corporate interests” and that its users should be protected from “propaganda and misinformation.”

The group said it also had returned a recent donation from Facebook.

— One clear Russian goal, pursued on multiple fronts, was to suppress Democratic turnout in 2016.

One strand focused, once again, on African-American voters. “These campaigns pushed a message that the best way to advance the cause of the African-American community was to boycott the election,” the Oxford report says. One bogus post declared: “HILLARY RECEIVED $20,000 DONATION FROM KKK TOWARDS HER CAMPAIGN.”

The Russian accounts urged people who had backed Bernie Sanders against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination to stay home or to vote for Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, in the general election. The New Knowledge report also describes what it calls “malicious misdirection” and “tweets designed to create confusion about voting rules.”

— All the emphasis on Facebook has obscured the huge role of Instagram, as well as the Russian activity on many smaller platforms.

Most of the early media coverage of the Russian campaign focused on Facebook. The New Knowledge report argues that the Internet Research Agency’s presence on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, has been underestimated and may have been as effective or even more effective than its Facebook effort. The report says there were 187 million engagements on Instagram — users “liking” or sharing the content created in Russia — compared with 76.5 million engagements on Facebook.

“Our assessment is that Instagram is likely to be a key battleground on an ongoing basis,” the report concludes.

Both reports note that there was hardly a social platform, however obscure, that the Internet Research Agency did not invade: Reddit, Google+, Vine, Gab, Meetup, Pinterest, Tumblr and more. The Russian trolls even created a podcast on SoundCloud.

— Why are we still talking about this more than two years after the election?

Russia had used similar online influence tactics inside Russian borders and in neighboring countries, including Estonia, Georgia and Ukraine. But the campaign against the United States in 2016 was historic on several counts: It was the first major foreign influence campaign aimed at affecting a presidential election; it was the biggest influence operation ever to be aimed at Americans from another country; and it was the biggest attack ever — using virtual, not physical weapons — on the United States by its old Cold War adversary, albeit slimmed down from the Soviet Union to Russia alone. It will be studied for years.

It is impossible to measure what effect the Russian campaign — along with the hacking and leaking of Democratic emails — had on the outcome of the very close 2016 election. But some political scientists believe it may have won the presidency for Donald Trump — a remarkable conclusion, even if it cannot be proved or disproved.

Inevitably, some American political operatives are learning from Russia’s example, testing the tools of chicanery in their online operations. So the Internet Research Agency may have taught a new generation of tricksters how to swing an election in the cyberage.

— After the U.S. government and the social media companies exposed their operations, did the Russians stop doing this?

Remarkably, no. The Russian trolls shift their tactics, swap corporate names and move to new buildings, but they don’t stop. The Oxford group reports: “The highest peak of IRA ad volume on Facebook is in April 2017 — the month of the Syrian missile strike, the use of the Mother of All Bombs on ISIS tunnels in eastern Afghanistan, and the release of the tax reform plan.”

The pace was stepped up for Instagram posts in particular: 5,956 in 2017, more than double the 2,611 posts in 2016, according to the Oxford report. While they reacted slowly and reluctantly to the evidence of Russian manipulation, social media platforms have stepped up their efforts to block fraudulent activity. But the Russians often seem to be able to outmaneuver the watchdogs and stay online.

“Over the past five years, disinformation has evolved from a nuisance into high-stakes information war,” the New Knowledge report concludes. American concerns about protecting free speech have made both the government and the platforms uneasy about acting decisively, it says.

“Our deeply felt national scruples about misidentifying a fake account or inadvertently silencing someone, however briefly,” the report says, “create a welcoming environment for malign groups who masquerade as Americans or who game algorithms.”

Both reports suggest that the effort to understand everything that happened in 2016 — let alone figuring how to prevent a repeat — is far from finished.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/us/politics/takeaways-russia-social-media-operations.html" id="29bbfe3e-51f1-3268-ac76-91c04e3ef6cc">The New York Times</a>.

Five Takeaways From New Reports on Russia's Social Media Operations

The Senate Intelligence Committee on Monday released two new reports it commissioned about the Russian campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media platforms during the 2016 election and beyond. The reports, by teams led by experts at the cybersecurity company New Knowledge and Oxford University, fill out a portrait of the impressive operations by the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, Russia.

This article originally appeared in <a id="52922acc-ecb8-403b-91c7-6be962652558" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/06/arts/design/spy-museum-washington-review.html">The New York Times</a>.

(Exhibition Review): WASHINGTON — The intelligence craft in American history and culture is a decidedly mixed bag. It has served up intrigue, genius and heroism, clever undercover operations and brain-boggling gadgetry, making it a linchpin of popular entertainment. Yet the spy trade also has a darker strain: Prone to epic failures and frequently in ethical trouble, the agencies have been embroiled in recent years in scandals involving brutal torture and secret surveillance.

At a new museum, cloaks and daggers galore

But investigators never found proof that Martin, who was working on a doctorate in information systems at the time of his arrest, had shared the stolen secrets with anyone else, though there is evidence he may have considered doing so.

Wearing a gray jail jersey with white stripes and a neatly trimmed beard, Martin stood and answered the judge’s questions in a clear, calm voice. “It’s time we closed this Pandora’s box,” the defendant said at one point, his most extensive statement in court.

His lawyers, James Wyda and Deborah Boardman, have argued that he was simply an eccentric hoarder who started taking work home and could not stop. “His actions were the product of mental illness. Not treason,” his lawyers said in a statement. They called him a “patriot” and said he was “deeply remorseful.”

Robert K. Hur, the U.S. attorney for Maryland, called the scale of the information taken by Martin “breathtaking in its scope” and said the nine-year sentence would be the longest ever imposed for illegal retention of secrets.

But perhaps the most damaging leak of all was discovered around the time of Martin’s arrest in August 2016, when a mysterious group calling itself the Shadow Brokers announced an online auction of a long list of software exploits the NSA used to break into foreign computer networks. The Shadow Brokers eventually made the stolen cyberweapons public, and other countries and criminal groups began using them for hacking and theft around the world.

FBI investigators focused on Martin after getting a tip from Kaspersky Lab, a Russian cybersecurity company. Two Kaspersky employees had gotten cryptic messages from Martin — calling himself “HAL999999999” — via Twitter that seemed to be offering secrets, as Politico first reported in January. The assistance was a bit ironic, because U.S. intelligence officials have sometimes accused Kaspersky of being too close to Russian intelligence, charges the company denies.

The FBI quickly linked the HAL999999999 Twitter account to Martin, and agents were soon searching his modest house in Glen Burnie, a Baltimore suburb. They discovered a staggering total of 50 terabytes of government data, a virtual library’s worth, much of it classified at a high level.

According to court filings, Martin first agreed to plead guilty in January 2018. But negotiations subsequently fell apart, and the plea came more than a year after it was first expected. Martin has been incarcerated since his arrest, and the 2 1/2 years he has served will be counted toward his sentence.

This article originally appeared in <a id="db98181d-3e50-423b-b3f0-a2f7f39137aa" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/28/us/politics/hal-martin-nsa-guilty-plea.html">The New York Times</a>.

NSA contractor arrested in biggest breach of U.S. secrets pleads guilty

BALTIMORE — In a case that exposed the government’s embarrassing failure to secure its secrets, a 54-year-old former National Security Agency contractor pleaded guilty Thursday to taking classified documents home in a deal likely to put him in prison for nine years.

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Scott Shane

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Five Takeaways From New Reports on Russia's Social Media Operations

Five Takeaways From New Reports on Russia's Social Media Operations

Five Takeaways From New Reports on Russia's Social Media Operations

Five Takeaways From New Reports on Russia's Social Media Operations

At a new museum, cloaks and daggers galore

NSA contractor arrested in biggest breach of U.S. secrets pleads guilty