A former employee of the National Security Agency (ANS ) of the United States was sentenced to nearly 22 years in prison last night for trying to pass classified information to a person he thought was a Russian agent but turned out to be an undercover FBI agent, the US Justice Department said, as cited by Reuters and BTA.
Thirty-two-year-old Jarre Sebastian Dahlke of Colorado Springs, Colo., pleaded guilty in October to six counts of attempting to transmit classified national defense information. Last night he was sentenced to 21 years and 10 months in prison.
"This sentence should serve as a stark warning to all those entrusted with the protection of national defense information that betraying that trust has consequences," said FBI Director Christopher Wray.
Dahlke admitted that between August and September 2022, in order to demonstrate both that he had "access and a willingness to share," he used an encrypted email account to transmit excerpts of three classified documents to an individual he thought he was a Russian agent, the Justice Department said.
Dahlke, who worked at the NSA as an information systems security designer, demanded $85,000 in exchange for all the information he had, the department added.