Staff reporter Daily Dawn + Dawn TV report
London: Hassan Arshad, 25, who interned at the UK intelligence agency GCHQ, has been sentenced to 7 years and 6 months in prison for transferring sensitive and top-secret data to his home.
Hassan Arshad has pleaded guilty under the Computer Misuse Act.
Hassan Arshad was accused of extracting highly classified information from GCHQ’s secure system on August 24, 2022, through a mobile phone and transferring it to a personal computer. This information included not only data related to his project but also the code names of other teams and the real names of employees.
During the trial at the Old Bailey court in London, Justice Maura McGowan said in her remarks that Arshad had put national security at risk.
The court said in its remarks that Hassan Arshad had put the lives of intelligence officers at risk and wasted thousands of hours of hard work and national resources.
The court described it as an “extremely serious and dangerous” act. According to the prosecution, Arshad had transferred the data to his home without permission, posing a “significant threat” to national security.
The judge said that if the information had fallen into the wrong hands, it could have had disastrous consequences.
Hassan Arshad was allowed to work on intelligence tools and techniques during his annual internship at GCHQ and had also signed the Official Secrets Act under the office’s regulations. Despite this, he took the sensitive information home, ignoring security rules.
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