The FBI hacker Joseph Thomas Colon still awaits sentencing in a case where he stands accused of illegally accessing the bureau's computers in 2004. To do so, Colon who possessed a security clearance made use of a FBI agent's password in order to gain access into a secret network. The defense pleaded that Colon was merely attempting to increase the performance and speed of the network conversion process. The accused did so as a contractor working on the Trilogy project that was meant to upgrade the FBI's obsolete IT infrastructure, as an employee at BAE Systems.

"In this case, the defendant, in a post-September 11 age, abused the trust placed in him by the FBI to gratuitously hack the passwords of every FBI employee, including the director, with access to the FBI's classified secret database," prosecutors said in memo to Judge Leon last month.

Colon pleaded guilty to four misdemeanor counts of premeditated accessing a computer while exceeding his authorization level in order to obtain government information illegally. For this he faces no less than four years of prison. Colon also admitted of cracking the encrypted versions of user passwords for the FBI employees' data he had accessed. According to the U.S. District Court in Washington the four different security breaches that Colon is responsible for, brought to a halt an FBI records system hosting data about witness protection and counterespionage that was classified.