THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

At the turn of the century, the FBI finally arrested Robert Hanssen who had been spying for the Russians for 20 years. He lasted that long despite waving numerous red flags, not the least his living beyond his salary. In the current breach of NSA security it appears that Harold T. Martin III who walked out of the building with a garage full of top secret documents, did the same.

Year after year, both in his messy personal life and his brazen theft of classified documents from the National Security Agency, Harold T. Martin III put to the test the government’s costly system for protecting secrets.

And year after year, the system failed.

Mr. Martin got and kept a top-secret security clearance despite a record that included drinking problems, a drunken-driving arrest, two divorces, unpaid tax bills, a charge of computer harassment and a bizarre episode in which he posed as a police officer in a traffic dispute. Under clearance rules, such events should have triggered closer scrutiny by the security agencies where he worked as a contractor.

Yet even after extensive leaks by Pfc. Bradley Manning in 2010 and Edward Snowden in 2013 prompted new layers of safeguards, Mr. Martin was able to walk out of the N.S.A. with highly classified material, adding it to the jumbled piles in his house, shed and car.

A federal judge in Baltimore ruled on Friday that Mr. Martin, 51, must remain jailed on charges of stealing government documents and mishandling classified information over two decades. Prosecutors say they will add new charges under the Espionage Act. Mr. Martin, whose arrest in August was disclosed by The New York Times this month, has admitted to taking the material but denies giving secrets to anyone else.

His actions, which prosecutors described in court as “breathtaking,” have already cast a harsh light on the government’s ability to police the 3.1 million employees and 900,000 contractors who hold clearances — or even the much smaller number who work inside the most closely guarded programs, as Mr. Martin did. His case appears to show serious breakdowns in personnel evaluation, technology designed to detect leaks and the basic job of inspecting people leaving secure buildings.

Dennis C. Blair, a former director of national intelligence, said he was “shocked” that Mr. Martin managed to remove classified material in bulk as recently as this year, in part because the government has spent tens of millions of dollars since 2010 on measures to prevent unauthorized activity or downloads.

“If there are breakdowns in your security system, as there clearly were with Snowden and this guy, you have to look at whatever went wrong and fix it,” Mr. Blair said.

Yep, they got to fix it. But it appears that the breaks were at the very basic levels of security. If they can not even check what an employee may be removing from a secured facility, maybe some people need to find a new line of work.