Information security

NSA engineer gets 5+ years for security breach

A federal judge on Tuesday imposed a stiff sentence on a rank-and-file engineer who caused a major security breach for the National Security Agency, but the judge also sounded an alarm in the process about a double-standard for high-ranking officials who violate laws governing the nation's secrets.

Nghia Pho, 68, was sentenced to five years and six months in prison for taking home what prosecutors called a "massive trove" of top secret information between 2010 and 2015 as he worked on sensitive NSA programs aimed at hacking into computers used by terrorists, foreign governments and U.S. adversaries.

Some of those hacking tools are believed to have made their way to the Shadow Brokers, a murky entity that attempted to auction the tools and then exposed many of them on the internet.

The prison sentence imposed by U.S. District Court Judge George Russell was a far cry from the sentence of home detention and probation Pho's lawyer asked for, but came in two-and-a-half years short of the eight years that prosecutors sought.

However, one of the most striking aspects of Tuesday's sentencing was Russell's lament that top government officials seem to have escaped with little more than a slap on the wrist for engaging in similar behavior.