Published by Global Banking & Finance Review®
Posted on June 13, 2025
2 min readLast updated: January 23, 2026
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A former UK intelligence officer was jailed for taking top secret data home, risking national security. Hasaan Arshad pleaded guilty and received a seven and a half year sentence.
LONDON (Reuters) -A former British intelligence worker who endangered national security by taking top secret data home was on Friday jailed for seven and a half years.
Hasaan Arshad, 25, pleaded guilty in March to one charge under the Computer Misuse Act, committed between August and September 2022 while working at British signals intelligence agency GCHQ.
Prosecutor Duncan Atkinson said the top secret material Arshad had downloaded contained the names of 17 GCHQ employees and that removing it from a secure environment brought the risk of it "falling into the wrong hands".
"His actions damaged confidence in the UK's security," Atkinson told London's Old Bailey court.
Judge Maura McGowan sentenced Arshad to six years in prison for the Computer Misuse Act offence and a further 18 months for two offences of making indecent images of children, to which he had pleaded guilty in 2023.
His lawyer Nina Grahame said Arshad had taken the data due to his "perfectionism" at the end of a year-long placement with GCHQ because he had not completed his work on a particular project.
She said Arshad accepted he had caused a risk to national security but added: "He did not intend to cause such a risk."
(Reporting by Sam TobinEditing by Gareth Jones)
Hasaan Arshad was sentenced for taking top secret data home, which endangered national security, and for making indecent images of children.
Arshad pleaded guilty to one charge under the Computer Misuse Act for downloading top secret material while working at GCHQ.
The top secret data included the names of 17 GCHQ employees, which posed a risk of falling into the wrong hands.
Arshad was sentenced to a total of seven and a half years in prison.
His lawyer argued that Arshad's actions were driven by his perfectionism and that he did not intend to cause a risk to national security.
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