Leaking of military secrets has the potential to benefit Britain’s enemies and to place services personnel and the general public in harm’s way. Such offences under the Official Secrets Acts are thankfully rare but, as a Court of Appeal ruling made plain, perpetrators can expect exemplary punishment.
The case concerned a highly trained software engineer who, through his employment by private defence contractors, performed highly sensitive work for the Ministry of Defence. He harboured numerous grievances against the authorities and, following his resignation, he set about recording as much detail as he could remember of the secret missiles programme on which he had been working.
He did so by using cloud-based computing services that were not secure and carried out much of the work in a public library. He enclosed an unencrypted document containing the fruits of his illicit labour in eight emails sent to third parties. After his arrest, he hindered containment measures by refusing to reveal the passwords for his laptop computers and mass data storage device.
Following an investigation, he pleaded guilty to offences under the Official Secrets Act 1911 and 1989 and under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. In sentencing him to four and half years’ imprisonment, a judge noted that he had some features of autistic spectrum disorder which reduced his culpability.
At the behest of the Solicitor General, the Court ruled that sentence unduly lenient and increased it to eight years. Although it was not a case of conventional spying, and he had no links to terrorist organisations or foreign powers, the Court noted that his crimes were long premeditated and carefully planned and executed.
The information concerned was highly classified and he had, by his activities, stripped it of the vital cloak of secrecy. Such conduct was highly damaging to the interests of the UK and had inevitable financial and reputational consequences. It also exposed services personnel and civilians to the possibility of harm.
Whatever his grievances, there was no justification, moral or legal, for what he had done. Autism also provided no sufficient explanation for his crimes, and his efforts to thwart the investigation by his continuing refusal to reveal the passwords indicated a lack of remorse. Other than his late guilty pleas and the effect of autism on his thought processes, there was no mitigation available to him.