Major stored secret information on the memory drive and lost it, received conditional imprisonment

Helsinki The Court of Appeal sentenced 60 days of conditional imprisonment for a service offense to the Major, who recorded large amounts of secret information against years in the USB memory stick and later lost it.

An outside person found a memory stick in the garrison in Mikkeli in 2021 and returned it to the Defense Forces.

The Major was charged with a serious service offense, but the Court of Appeal considered that it was a milder form, a service offense.

The events of the prosecution were from 2014-2021. At that time, Major worked, for example, as the Sector Director of the Maasotala School and as the System Manager for the Information System at the Army headquarters.

The Major had recorded hundreds of documents on an unencrypted memory stick and as a whole formed a security class II as a whole. This security class means secret, for example III means confidential.

The Army Headquarters considered that the end of the material on the outside party could have caused significant harm to national defense and safety.

Major He himself felt that the material had been the material himself and at work. For example, it was not a functional plans but related ground and background information. According to him, almost all documents were also obsolete.

He was at most a negligent act, he did not seek any advantage.

The Court of Appeal stated that the Major was not allowed to transfer the safety classified material with an unprotected memory stick with it to a new place of service from Lappeenranta to Mikkeli and would not continue to store it with the same stick.

He should have taken care of emptying the memory stick, what he had not done.

The court did not believe the argument that preserving a memory stick in a shared safe would have been a reason to get it into the garrison yard.

Court of Appeal According to the act, the act was deliberate, but the Major was not in a particularly responsible position, but only in the responsible person, so he was not convicted of a gross form.

The procedure was lawlessly indifferent, unrelated and against key information security standards. In addition, he himself had trained these norms.

Instead, the reproach was reduced by the fact that the motive for retention was to perform official duties. Most of the material was rapidly obsolete, so it would not have actually caused much damage to national defense, the court said.

The negligence of the standards, the long duration of the act and the abundant amount of information led to the judgment, not a fine, not mere fine. At the same time, he was ordered to pay the state more than EUR 8,000 for the costs of the legal costs.

The matter was first dealt with in the Helsinki Court of Appeal because the accused was a military value.