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DOJ Charges Federal Contractor With Leaking Classified Info To Media (thehill.com)
schwit1 quotes a report from The Hill: The Department of Justice charged 25-year-old government contractor Reality Leigh Winner with sharing top secret material with a media outlet, prosecutors announced in a press release Monday. Court documents filed by the government don't specify which media outlet received the materials allegedly leaked by Winner, but NBC News reported that the material went to the Intercept online news outlet. The Intercept published a top secret NSA report Monday that alleged Russian military intelligence launched a 2016 cyberattack on a voting software company. Details on the report published by The Intercept suggest that it was created on May 5, 2017 -- the same day prosecutors say the materials Winner is charged with sharing were created. A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment on whether Winner is accused of sharing the report published by the Intercept. Last month, Winner allegedly "printed and improperly removed classified intelligence reporting, which contained classified national defense information" before mailing the materials to an unnamed online news outlet a few days later, according to prosecutors.
When Reality finally struck, no-one went home a Winner :(
Small government applies to the breadth of what the government does. Small government does not mean inept, in times of war (say WWII) it does not mean keeping taxes low or not paying soldiers. It means that government is limited - that does not have a role in say wage and price freezes (rent control); that it's function is not to redistribute wealth; etc...
You may agree or disagree with the positions - but you are simply making a straw man and digging yourself into an intellectual hole when you convince yourself of this bullsh!t.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
When the leak came out the usual suspects trotted out the usual nonsense:
1. The NSA were clearly lying and these were bogus because Russia is our friend
2. This is obviously "the deep state" (ie management of the NSA, CIA, etc) trying to undermine Cheeto Mussolini with fake news. Sad!
What did the campaign against Winners prove? The docs are the real deal. The NSA does, actually, genuinely believe that the Russian state was actively trying to interfere with the election. They're not making that up. They have evidence - they're not sharing it with you but they have it. They're not trying to undermine anyone, no matter how awful they are. Hell, they're still trying to keep this stuff secret. They're actually trying to protect Trump from negative publicity.
As for Winners, the jokes - based upon her name - write themselves. But yes, she's the real deal. Sessions is confirming she leaked real NSA documents. The rightosphere is confirming she's not some high level intelligence official trying to orchestrate a coup. The NSA documents are legit: Russia interfered with the election.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
God, I have to scroll to the bottom to get to the one comment actually analyzing the situation.
Reality is a slackware box running on a 386 tucked away in god's sock drawer.
Information (generally) isn't classified because the information is good - it's almost always because of the method used to collect it. The goal isn't necessarily to protect the information, so much as the means by which they got that information. I can't speak to the current situation, but that's usually the case with classification. It doesn't then matter if that's information about the next terrorist attack, or about what kind of toilet paper Abu Bad Guy prefers because it doesn't chafe his backside.
Having the Japanese Navy know that we're aware they plan to attack Midway is bad, but having them realize that means we're reading their coded transmissions is far, far worse. It means they'll change their codes, and we can't read them any more. If it was a human agent, it means that guy is probably going to get shot, or at the very least will have to run and won't be able to send any more reports.
Most agencies have offices all over the country, but which one is based in Georgia, other than the CDC? If this contractor was working for the CDC why would he have access to cyberhacking information? Cover?
It's a poorly worded sentence. The agency in question is the NSA and the company, Pluribus International, is based out of Georgia. Or at least the leaker was. The article I read this morning made it clear that it was an NSA document that was leaked, the NSA that tracked the leak down, and an NSA system was used to find the document to begin with.
While the means might be old news to some, it appears that neither Reality Winner nor The Intercept was sufficiently aware of hardcoded printer tracking techology, or just didn't think to check for it and take preventative steps. I can kind of understand that from Winner who might have just acted on the spur of an opportunistic moment, but The Intercept really ought to have known better and cleaned up the PDFs before publishing, and that may well deter people from leaking to The Intercept in future if they're not confident in their own ability to properly sanitise the data.
Going to be interesting to see how The Intercept tries to make up for their part in her now almost certainly ruined life...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
I guess we can thank her for confirming the NSA discovered Russian interference but most reasonable people would have known that already even if they weren't privy to the details. She'll probably end up in prison for 5-10 years over this.
The only facts are
- for some stupid reason, we have electronic voting machines
- they may be vulnerable to hacking
- some hackers tried to hack them, including Russians
So what? If your government uses electronic voting machines, expect stories about them getting hacked from time to time.
the government will put into adding credibility into a story is amazing.
Like I said in a different thread:
After what happened with Snowden, what do you think the odds are that a contractor can both obtain and distribute a NSA document at all without anyone from the NSA noticing ?
I have serious doubts about it and my initial thoughts are this is just the Government pushing the Evil Russians narrative vs the home grown ( DNC ) efforts to skew the election.
Because the former is expected and the latter undermines the trust in the overall US election process. Can't have that now can we ? Bad things happen in armed countries when the populace loses faith in the election systems.
Russia just happens to be a convenient scapegoat for anything that's wrong these days.
Even IF the NSA verifies the document and shows you the evidence they have, after the bullshit they have pulled recently with their surveillance programs, would you trust any of it ?
Dear NSA: That's the problem when you erode / destroy the public trust. When you have a real situation where you need folks to believe you, very few will.
If any at all.
It means that government is limited - that does not have a role in say wage and price freezes (rent control); that it's function is not to redistribute wealth; etc...
I think the problem is we all agree on "small government" and then assume everyone else is with us on the specifics. For me, "small government" means "Not restricting freedoms and rights." Like no laws against abortion.
I'd also argue that having your rights abridged by the government and having your rights abridged by a corporation are different only in that you got to vote for the government. To me, a government that is too small to regulate, say, comcast or health insurance agencies, that's really pretty similar to "big government."
Finally, with wealth inequality reaching the robber barron age, I can't fathom how people would still be saying "government shouldn't redistribute wealth." FFS the fastest way to a situation we'd all consider to be "big government" is through an oligarchy.
From personal experience, I know that link is incomplete. Even mere Secret level clearance takes weeks, Top Secret takes much longer. So her security clearance evaluations started sometime in 2016, guess who was in the White House that year.
At least, the GP is offering a coherent accusation .
Which means, he is one step ahead of the folks demanding "Trump investigation" and "Russian connection". Those not only have no proof, but can't even state the charge...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The report does not claim that voting machines were hacked, a once-popular post-election theory from Democrats, nor does it state whether the information pertaining to the voting systems could be used to hack those systems.
As opined by Matt Vespa> , "still, 55 percent of Democrats think that Russia messed with the vote totals to get Trump elected. The Left has gone insane. Like the rest of the Russian collusion drama, there is no evidence that vote tallies were tampered with by a foreign intelligence service."
Infowars, really? You do realize that Alex Jones has admitted in court proceedings that he's just playing a character and doesn't actually believe the stuff he says, don't you?
The actual tweet is a reply to Kanye West: "@kanyewest you should make a shirt that says, "being white is terrorism"". Kanye West - the "George Bush doesn't care about black people" guy. The Obama hasn't accomplished as much as Bush because "...he ain't got those connections. Black people don't have the same level of connections as Jewish people...We ain't Jewish. We don't got family that got money like that." guy. The reason-he-lost-an-awards-show being "maybe my skin's not right" guy. A guy who's a living parody of himself.
And a guy who runs a fashion line. Hence the joke about the T-shirt.
Of course, to you people the problem isn't the fact that Russia not only launched an aggressive campaign against the public to shift the election, but also tried to compromise voting software and spearfish local election officials. No no, that's not the problem at all. The problem is that someone dared leak the fact that they did this. And that it's someone who doesn't like Trump - like most Americans. And oh my god, she also supports BLM, like the majority of people her age group - including white people in her age group. Clearly the problem isn't a major effort by a hostile power to compromise an election - it's that a person who agrees with the stances of the majority dared tell people about it! Damn her!
We gotta go to a crappy town where I'm a hero.