It will take investigators many months to go through Martin’s vast haul of purloined classified documents to assess the damage to our national security. Counterspies will be looking for any indications that foreign intelligence services got their hands on that huge collection of Intelligence Community information. Exactly what Martin eventually gets charged with will depend on what they find, particularly if there are any links between this case and other known compromises of NSA information.

Regardless, this debacle is another public black eye for the Agency when it really didn’t need one. In the aftermath of Snowden’s appearance in Moscow, NSA and the whole Intelligence Community swore to fix mistakes and finally get serious about security. The “insider threat” problem was going to be addressed, at last. “This time it’s different,” Agency higher-ups told Congress, asking for a chance to repair a broken counterintelligence system that keeps giving us traitors, defectors, and uncaught moles.

Except they didn’t mean it. Congress was skeptical of NSA promises, and the Martin disaster shows they were right to be. How anybody stole 500 million documents from the Agency across two decades without getting caught needs to be answered—in detail and, for once, with total honesty.

Then there’s the touchy matter of the Agency’s overuse of contractors.