Would-be seller of US secrets undone by LinkedIn boast

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/08/would-be-seller-us-secrets-linkedin-boast

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If there’s a lesson to the following story, perhaps it’s this: don’t brag that you worked on “Top Secret DOD projects” on your LinkedIn page.

Charles Harvey Eccleston, a fired Department of Energy worker living in the Philippines, tried to sell a list of Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) emails to a foreign government for $18,800 and ended up arrested on 27 March for attempting to send spear-phishing emails to as many as 37 Department of Energy computers, according to a recently unsealed indictment.

Eccleston had married a local woman and wanted money to stay in the Philippines, the arresting agent’s affidavit said, so he walked into the embassy of a country (unnamed in the FBI complaint) and offered the email list, saying he would sell it for about the price of a new Honda Civic.

Eccleston, according to both the complaint and his LinkedIn page, worked at the NRC as a facilities security specialist between 2008 and 2010, where his clearance was “secret”. He had previously worked at the Department of Energy between 1988 and 2001 and had been cleared as “top secret”.

Special Agent Lauren C Gulotta, the undercover FBI agent who swore out the complaint against Ecclestone, wrote that representatives of “Country A”, as it is identified in the DoJ complaint, reported the then unknown Eccleston to the FBI, who matched his flight records from his home in Davao City to Manila with the day of the embassy walk-in.

The complaint states that agents subsequently found his LinkedIn page, where he had bragged about working on “Top Secret DOD projects”. And after 4 October 2013 Eccleston began a lengthy collaboration with people he thought were foreign dignitaries and were actually FBI agents, according to the DoJ. The email list, he told them, was classified, and he could use it to “lure them to download a virus on to the NRC’s computers”, wrote Gulotta.

Eccleston went by “Mr Harv” or “Mr Harvey”, Gulotta said, and he did actually manage to sell a thumb drive of about 1,200 NRC email addresses to the FBI for $5,000, plus $2,000 for his expenses. The complaint states that he told the FBI that he had worked on “two highly classified, unnamed US government programs” and would spill details about them for $100,000.