In December of that year, a sixty-seven-year-old former NSA staffer and developer for the agency’s Tailored Access Operations hacking team named Nghia Hoang Pho pleaded guilty to violating his security clearances. He’d taken home enormous troves of classified materials. He’d later tell a Maryland court that after bad performance reviews he’d merely sought to study the materials as a way to get ahead in his work. Pho was sentenced to sixty-six months in prison.
