Selling border security map nets man prison time

 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."