The FBI released a statement this afternoon announcing that its agents arrested a National Weather Service employee in Wilmington, Ohio today after she was indicted for "allegedly downloading restricted files" from government servers.

The statement says that Xiafen "Sherry" Chen, a hydrologist, downloaded "sensitive files" from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' National Inventory of Dams—a database that keeps sensitive information on every dam maintained by the United States—in May 2012. Authorities further allege that Chen lied about her actions when pressed by investigators looking into the matter back in 2013.

The Army Corps of Engineers is an agency of the federal government responsible for erecting and maintaining water management and flood prevention structures around the country, including structures like dams and levees.

This wasn't the first time that the security of sensitive information in the National Inventory of Dams was compromised. The International Business Times reported back in May 2013 that an IP address from China hacked into the database in January 2013:

"The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is aware that access to the National Inventory of Dams (NID), to include sensitive fields of information not generally available to the public, was given to an unauthorized individual in January 2013 who was subsequently determined not to have proper level of access for the information," Pierce said in a statement to the Washington Free Beacon.

The IBTimes report further states that the database contains vulnerability information about the country's dams and how many casualties could result from each dam failing.

If found guilty of all four charges leveled against her, Chen could face a maximum of 25 years in prison and a $1,000,000 fine.

[Image: NWS Wilmington, Ohio, via Facebook]

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