A Bellingham man has been sentenced to prison for trying to sell a map showing the location of surveillance cameras along the U.S./Canada border.
According to federal court records, Leif Rankin planned to sell the map to drug smugglers.
He told someone he thought was a smuggler, but was actually an informant for the U. S. Department of Homeland Security, that he stole the map from a garage sale at a border agent's house. Rankin said the map was tucked inside a book. Rankin promised that the 2007 map of sensors and cameras revealed the best places to cross the border undetected in the Blaine area.
Rankin made a deal to sell the map to the informant for $6,000.six thousand dollars. He was arrested in September and pleaded guilty in November 2011.
Now, he’s been sentenced to a year in prison and three years of supervised release.
In sentencing Rankin, U-S District Judge Richard A. Jones told him,
“Once you sold those documents, you had no idea how they would be used…They could have been used by terrorists."
