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BALTIMORE – As a Vietnamese immigrant with imperfect English, Nghia H. Pho felt that he was losing ground compared to his fellow software developers of the National Security Agency in promotions and salaries . So in 2010, after four years of work, he began taking highly classified papers to his Maryland home to get extra work at night and over the weekend to improve his performance appraisals.
But in the five years that 68-year-old Pho has stored equipment on his unsecured home computer, officials say he was stolen by Russian hackers using the antivirus software installed on the machine. Mr. Pho was working for the N.S.A. piracy unit, then known as Custom Access Operations, and his cache was thought to include both hacking tools and documentation.
On Tuesday, while family members were crying in the courtroom, Mr. Pho was sentenced to five and a half years in prison after pleading guilty to a charge of voluntary detention. information on national defense.
Mr. Pho, a slender man with a white-haired stubble, chose to address the court in English despite the presence of an interpreter. "I did not betray the United States," he said. "I did not send anyone to anyone. I did not make a profit.
Mr. Pho's lawyer, Robert C. Bonsib, has repeatedly noted that David H. Petraeus, retired army general and former ex-C.I.A. director, did not serve any time in prison after that he pleaded guilty in 2015 to the mishandling of classified information, a misdemeanor. He shared the materials with the woman who was his lover and his biographer.
District Judge George L. Russell III of the United States expressed his sympathy for Mr. Pho's situation and his admiration for his family. But he said the sentence was needed to create "a real deterrent" for others who might consider manipulating sensitive information.
The prosecutors, who had asked for an eight-year sentence, pointed out that Mr. Pho had been trained several times with other NAs employed in the rules governing secrets. Thomas P. Windom, assistant US Attorney, challenged Mr. Bonsib's claim that Mr. Pho had "made a mistake" in an otherwise exemplary career.
"It was not a mistake," said Mr. Windom. "It was five years of bad choices – criminal choices – that were devastating to the intelligence community."
Prosecutors did not explain in open court the evidence that Russia had targeted Mr. Pho's computer, a subject that would have been discussed at a separate closed session. Mr. Windom spoke of the thousands of hours spent by N.S.A. workers to gauge what Mr. Pho took home and what harm the loss of secrets could cause.
Adm. Michael S. Rogers, then the NS Director, wrote in an unusual letter to Judge Russell last March that Mr. Pho's breach of security rules had resulted in "obvious prejudice to the collection of information". Security officials said Pho had installed Kaspersky Lab's popular anti-virus software on his computer, and Russian government hackers had mostly used the software to steal his equipment.
The case of Mr. Pho is only one of the many N.A.A violations in recent years. In 2013, Edward Snowden, an entrepreneurial N.S.A., fled to Hong Kong with a huge archive of documents that he shared with reporters. In 2016, another entrepreneur, Harold T. Martin III, was arrested after years of collecting confidential agency data in his home in Maryland, where he stored it in his car and in a shed in his yard. At about the same time, an unidentified group called Shadow Brokers started publishing some of the agency's most secure software on the Web; the source of the leak was not found.
Last month, an NSA translator, Reality Winner, was sentenced to five years and three months in prison for sharing classified Russian piracy documents with The Intercept, an online publication.
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