As a rule, the NSA wants to hire people who are good at spying. But according to the FBI, a former employee tried to reverse the roles of the agency and was caught red-handed.
By details released by the Ministry of Justice This week, a Colorado resident was arrested on Wednesday and charged with attempting to pass classified information to a foreign government representative.
The press release says Jareh Sebastian Dalke, 30, was employed by the NSA from June 6 to July 1, 2022. Between August and September 2022, the FBI says he used an encrypted email account to send parts of three classified documents to a person. to send. who he thought worked for a foreign government.
In fact, that person was an FBI agent who lured Dalke into a covert operation that eventually led to his arrest.
A declaration of the FBI in support of the case provides further details. After contacting the agent he believed to be working for a foreign government, Dalke is alleged to have offered extracts of three different classified documents: the cover page of a threat assessment of a foreign government’s military capabilities; the plans of an unnamed federal agency to update a cryptographic program; and a threat analysis of sensitive US defense capabilities.
The information in the first of these documents was classified as “secret,” and the last two were classified as “top secret,” an FBI review concluded. Dalke apparently told the undercover officer in an email that the three fragments were just a “small example of what’s possible”.
Dalke apparently told the undercover cop that the three fragments were just a “small example of what’s possible”
In exchange for sending the full documents, the FBI says Dalke has requested a payment of $85,000 in cryptocurrency. The undercover agent sent Dalke a preliminary payment of approximately $4,800 in cryptocurrency, which he then transferred to an account with the Kraken exchange and converted into US dollars for withdrawal.
While the affidavit doesn’t specify the cryptocurrency used, the amount and price listed — roughly 30 units equivalent to $4,800 at the end of August — means it was likely the privacy-focused coin Monero, which has emerged as a top pick for fraudulent online transactions. .
After the first transaction was made, the FBI says Dalke asked his contact to set up a secure connection at a public location from which he could send the documents in their entirety. The undercover cop told him he could find this at Union Station in Denver; but upon arrival, Dalke was arrested by FBI agents and taken into custody.