RI Subject - Reality Winner

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Re: RI Subject - Reality Winner

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Jun 06, 2017 5:26 pm

Did the Intercept Betray Its NSA Source?
By Jake Swearingen

Alleged leaker Reality Leigh Winner. Photo: reezlie/Instagram
How, exactly, did the FBI zero in on alleged NSA leaker Reality Leigh Winner? Winner, a contractor for the NSA, was quietly arrested on Sunday and charged with leaking top secret documents. According to the Justice Department, she confessed to printing out classified information while authorities were searching her home and vehicle. Those documents are now confirmed to be the same documents published by the Intercept on Monday afternoon about a Russian cyberattack on U.S. voting machines and officials. About an hour after the Intercept published the story, the Justice Department revealed to the press that it already had Winner in custody, and would be prosecuting her under the Espionage Act. It was an effective bit of showmanship.

The Intercept, for obvious reasons, is saying very little. A statement posted to the site describes the claims made in the government search affidavit and the criminal complaint as “unproven assertions and speculation designed to serve the government’s agenda and as such warrant skepticism.” Naturally, any specific details revealed by the publication could be used to build a case against its sources.

The understandable silence from the Intercept, combined with the fragmented details provided by the court documents, has led to a significant amount of back and forth on Twitter on how much culpability the Intercept has in Winner’s arrest — whether the Intercept’s bad “opsec” led to the government charging Winner, or if Winner’s own missteps led to her arrest. The discussion is more than just a journalistic pissing match: Not only does the site’s reputation as a safe place for anonymous leaks hang in the balance, but journalists and their sources at all publications are nervous about the capabilities of a Trump administration that has declared war on leakers everywhere.


If you go strictly by what’s contained in the FBI’s search affidavit, there were three important pieces of circumstantial evidence that led the Feds to Winner.

The first is that Winner had previous contact with the Intercept. It’s important to note here that — contra the assumptions of many on Twitter — her contact had nothing to do with the story, and occurred months before she even allegedly accessed the report that was leaked. She emailed the site on March 30 from her private Gmail account, asking for a transcript of a podcast. She emailed the site again on March 31, confirming “subscription to the service,” (likely one of the Intercept’s newsletters).

The second is that on May 24, a reporter from the Intercept reached out to an unnamed government contractor, trying to determine the validity of the leak. During the exchange, the Intercept revealed that the leak had been mailed with a postmark of Augusta, Georgia, where Winner lives. (Checking with other sources about the validity of a leak is not necessarily bad opsec; revealing specific information about the leak almost certainly is — though it’s also probably more common than journalists would like to admit.) The contractor told the Intercept that they believed the leak to be fake; when the Intercept returned on June 1, saying that the leak’s authenticity had been confirmed, the original anonymous government contractor turned around and alerted the NSA to the matter — including the key detail that the document had been mailed from Augusta.

The third, and most glaring, is that the Intercept provided a copy of the report itself to the NSA on May 30. It’s unclear if the Intercept gave the NSA a scanned copy of the printed material it had received, or a retyped or otherwise altered version, but the NSA then turned the report over to the FBI for further investigation. According to the FBI’s affidavit, Feds noticed that pages of the intelligence reporting appeared “folded and/or creased,” thus alerting them that the information had been printed. Per the affidavit, the government then found that only six people had printed that report, and Winner had no reason to do so — the report was outside of her job duties.

The “crease” has been bandied about in the press, but there’s good reason to believe that the Feds had a more sophisticated way of figuring out that the document had been printed out. The Intercept’s PDF of the document also contains “tracking dots,” barely visible yellow dots available on printed pages that allow anyone to determine the serial number, model date, and date and time of printed material. You can see these for yourself: Just screenshot the top-left corner of any page of the PDF and invert the colors in an image-editing tool. The dots should become immediately apparent. The tracking dots on the documents from the Intercept show a print date of May 9 at 6:20 from a printer with model number 54, serial number 29535218. (The last page of the PDF has a different set of tracking dots — it’s unclear why.)

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If this is the copy that the Intercept also provided to the NSA, then the government likely knew enough to determine which employee had used that specific printer at that specific time — no need to see “creases” at all. In fact, the crease may be pretext to avoid mentioning tracking dots (or another forensic method) used to determine that the document was printed — a prosecutorial technique known as “parallel construction” that avoids revealing how evidence on a case was actually gathered.

The problem with apportioning blame in this case is that we don’t know if the Intercept handed over to the NSA the original copy of the report that they’d received — which would have been a grave security error — or if it was a photocopy or reprint that nonetheless betrayed some evidence.

And it’s important to note that the FBI and NSA didn’t need to know that the pages had even been printed. All material classified “top secret” (the highest security rating a document can receive) are stored in a massive government intranet known as the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System, or JWICS. As detailed by New York Magazine contributer Yashar Ali on Twitter, this system logs everyone who accesses top secret documents, as well as what they do with them. Even if the Intercept had verified the document without alerting the NSA, and then paraphrased the entire report, after it published its story, the government would have quickly moved to determine who had accessed the document — and Winner would have, eventually, come under the same scrutiny.

Nonetheless, it’s clear that there were serious mistakes made by both the Intercept and its leaker. It’s quite reasonable for the Intercept to seek confirmation that the document in question was real with third-party sources, and eventually the NSA. But revealing the Augusta, Georgia, postmark to the third-party source clearly helped the government build its case. Providing a copy of the report seems to have, in some way, added to the government’s pile of evidence. And the decision to publish the PDF with the tracker dots unobscured — especially considering the Intercept likely had no knowledge that Winner was the leaker, and she was already in custody — is a baffling unforced error from a site that hinges on being a secure place to send documents.

Assuming Winner is the leaker, too, she made a mistake in contacting the Intercept at work — though given that it happened months before she allegedly sent the report, it’s hard to blame her. Still, Winner, as a contractor for the NSA and an Air Force veteran with top secret clearance, would have known as well as anyone that her traffic would be logged, and would also likely have known that accessing top secret documents — even without printing them out — would have thrown up red flags in the aftermath of a leak.

It’s worth reiterating that the FBI has a strong incentive to cast the Intercept as incompetent handlers of sources. There’s a decent chance that the case was built against Winner in a completely different way — one that didn’t rely on mistakes by the journalists at all — and this particular parallel construction of the case is being put forward to cast aspersions on one of the most notorious investigative outfits online. But there’s no escaping that the mistakes made by the Intercept and Winner — small as they may have been — were enough to get a search warrant and indictment signed. If there’s any consolation for leakers and the journalists they rely on, it’s that the affidavit provides an object lesson in protecting sources.
http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/06/inte ... inner.html
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Re: RI Subject - Reality Winner

Postby MacCruiskeen » Tue Jun 06, 2017 5:28 pm

Image

Post-Reality is beginning to look like a surprisingly attractive prospect.
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Re: RI Subject - Reality Winner

Postby MacCruiskeen » Tue Jun 06, 2017 5:33 pm

Reality is part of the reality-based community:

She also tweeted to Nate Silver, the ex-New York Times pollster whose confident predictions that Clinton had as high as an 85 per cent chance of winning made him a laughing stock - but not to Winner.

'I listened to you daily, and your podcast kept me sane,' Winner wrote at the FiveThirtyEight podcast on November 9. 'What the heck #betrayed #disillusioned.'

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z4jGC8hdMP
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Re: RI Subject - Reality Winner

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Jun 06, 2017 5:33 pm

Reality Winner faces 10-year sentence in first Espionage Act charge under Trump
DoJ says in criminal complaint the NSA contractor admitted to leaking document that revealed Russian hacking of US voting systems manufacturer before election
reality winner
An Espionage Act charge would follow the model used aggressively by Barack Obama in his administration’s attempt to clamp down on whistleblowers. Photograph: Reuters

Amanda Holpuch in New York
@holpuch
Tuesday 6 June 2017 15.05 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 6 June 2017 16.35 EDT
Reality Winner, the woman alleged to have leaked classified information about Russian interference in the US election, could face up to 10 years in prison if the Trump administration pursues its complaint that she violated the Espionage Act.

The 25-year-old allegedly shared documents that reveal Russian intelligence agents hacked a US voting systems manufacturer in the weeks immediately before the 2016 presidential election.

The government said in its criminal complaint that Winner admitted to the charge in a conversation with the FBI on 3 June, but lawyers have cautioned that cannot be seen as a definitive admission of guilt, because the information is being relayed by the government.

In the criminal complaint against Winner, the justice department said it was charging her under the Espionage Act, following the model used aggressively by Barack Obama in his administration’s attempts to shut down whistleblowers.

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The complaint says she “improperly removed classified intelligence reporting, which contained classified national defense information”. A single charge under the Espionage Act could attract a 10-year sentence. The government’s formal indictment will show the final charges against her.

Under the Obama administration, the US government expanded its use of the Espionage Act, prosecuting more government sources for leaks than all the previous administrations combined.

“It would be deeply problematic if this prosecution marks the beginning of a Trump administration crackdown on leaks to the press,” Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s national security project, told the Guardian.

Free speech advocates, including the ACLU, said the use of the Espionage Act to prosecute Winner could be a chilling opening salvo in the new administration’s potential war on whistleblowers.

“Leaks to journalists occur every day as they have for decades and are a vital source for information in our democracy,” Shamsi said. “Aggressive prosecution of sources results in a less informed public and less accountable government.”

Asked about the case, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, said he did not know if Trump was aware of the arrest and declined to comment on a continuing investigation. “That being said, I think that you’ve heard the president very clearly talk about the concern that he has about unauthorised disclosures of classified and sensitive information and the threat that they can pose to national security,” he told reporters. “So while I don’t want to comment on any specific case or allegation, I think it is important to note that any disclosure of classified or sensitive information can clearly threaten our national security.”

Kathleen McClellan, who serves as national security and human rights deputy director for the Whistleblower and Source Protection Program, said it was “wildly inappropriate” to use the Espionage Act for cases like this.

“There are plenty of regulations and other laws that you could use to punish someone for leaking,” said McClellan, who has represented the whistleblowers Thomas Drake and John Kiriakou. “It’s clear that the Trump administration wants to punish leakers as severely, if not more severely, than Obama did.”

One of the best known people to have been charged with violating the Espionage Act under Obama is Chelsea Manning, who was found guilty on six counts of violating the act after leaking diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks.

She was sentenced to 35 years in military prison, though Obama commuted her sentence just before leaving office and she is now free.

Though Winner’s leak was small – apparently confined to one document – compared to the trove of more than 250,000 diplomatic cables leaked by Manning or the documents Edward Snowden shared with the Guardian and other news organizations, prosecution is about the quality, not quantity, of the documents shared.

Nancy Hollander, Manning’s attorney, emphasized that the Espionage Act prevented Winner from arguing the disclosures were in the public interest. “When people know something they seriously and genuinely believe the public has a right to know, and the government is keeping from the public, they have no recourse,” she said.

“It’s very difficult for her to defend herself since she can’t ever explain, until such time that she’s sentenced, why she did what she did, what her motive was,” Hollander said.

“I don’t know what her motive was, but assuming it was she believed that the public needed to know this and that it was being kept from them, she won’t have a chance to say that.”

Winner has a string of anti-Trump sentiments on her Facebook page – she called him a “piece of shit” in February – but that information does not prove her intent for leaking the information.

Winner is the first person to be accused of violating the Espionage Act for a leak under the Trump administration. Trump’s White House has been plagued by frequent internal leaks, but the president has also expressed support for leaks.

Trump said “I love WikiLeaks” at a campaign rally in October 2016 after the organization leaked Hillary Clinton’s emails.

“There’s leaking every day,” said Hollander. “Winner’s one that they’ve charged because they don’t like what she leaked.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... an-hacking
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Re: RI Subject - Reality Winner

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Jun 06, 2017 5:35 pm

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Alleged NSA whistleblower Reality Leigh Winner must be supported. She is a young women accused of courage in trying to help us know.
7:39 PM - 5 Jun 2017
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Re: RI Subject - Reality Winner

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Jun 06, 2017 5:40 pm

"She's just been caught in the middle of something bigger than her," he told the outlet.

Contractor Reality Winner Arrested for Leaks: What We Know So Far
A government contractor named Reality Winner has been arrested and charged for removing classified material from a government facility

Saul Loeb/Getty
By Joyce Chen
4 hours ago

A government contractor named Reality Leigh Winner is believed to be behind the recent leak of a top-secret NSA intelligence detailing Russia's alleged interference in last year's presidential election. The bombshell documents were published by The Intercept Monday, and Winner was publicly identified as the suspected source of the leak shortly afterward.

Ten years after the whistleblower enlisted in the army as a closeted trans woman, she's coming out to a much different world – one she helped create
Winner was arrested on Monday, June 5th, and charged shortly afterward for "removing classified material from the government facility where she worked and mailing it to a news outlet," according to a formal announcement by the Justice Department. If found guilty, the 25-year-old Augusta, Georgia, native could face 10 years in prison.

Winner's arrest makes hers the first criminal leak case since President Trump took office in January. Here, what we know so far about the leak, how it led to Winner's arrest, and what comes next.

What are the documents Winner is accused of leaking?
ABC News reports that Winner's arrest is linked to a May 5th intelligence document that The Intercept published Monday, which revealed detailed information about how the Russian military intelligence unit, the G.R.U., perpetrated two cyberattacks that may have impacted the 2016 presidential election. The first of the two attacks involved a Russian hack into a software company that created devices used to maintain and verify voter rolls. The second involved a phishing scheme that targeted employees of government agencies. It is unclear how much success either of the attacks had, though the intelligence document suggests that they were designed to sabotage the elections. (The Intercept is best known for publishing leaked documents provided by former CIA operative Edward Snowden in 2013.)

Why did Winner choose the Intercept?
Though the Intercept did not name its source, ABC News reports that a series of related events that began this past March led authorities straight to Winner once the documents were published.

On March 22nd, The Intercept posted a podcast that discussed the public outcry over Russia's alleged interference with the U.S. presidential elections, with Intercept reporter Glenn Greenwald and podcast host Jeremy Scahill both agreeing that, while it seemed "very possible" that Russia had a hand in Trump's victory, there was very little hard evidence to back up that theory.

A search warrant affidavit filed in federal court in Georgia – which is accessible to the public and was reviewed by the Washington Post – shows that a just over a week later, Winner contacted The Intercept using a Gmail account, asking for a transcript of the podcast. This detail would later be key to authorities' ability to trace the leak to Winner. Then, when the classified NSA documents in question were released more than a month later, on May 5th, Winner allegedly found the document, printed it out and mailed it to The Intercept.

How did authorities track her down?
Investigators later noted that Winner was just one of six individuals who had printed out the intelligence document, according to an internal audit of the agency that housed the report, and the only one who contacted the news outlet. (Creases on the acquired document, as well as an invisible dot pattern that identifies when and where documents are printed, also reportedly helped authorities to name Winner as a possible leaker.)

In an affidavit, FBI agent Justin Garrick said that he interviewed Winner at her home on Saturday, June 3rd, and that she "admitted intentionally identifying and printing the classified intelligence reporting at issue," as well as sending the document to a news outlet.

What has been the response to her arrest?
Deputy Rod J. Rosenstein issued a statement Monday condemning Winner's actions. "Releasing classified material without authorization threatens our nation's security and undermines public faith in government. People who are trusted with classified information and pledge to protect it must be held accountable when they violate that obligation."

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, called for the public to support Winner as a young woman "accused of courage in trying to help us know." Winner's mother, Billie Winner-Davis, told The Daily Beast Monday that her daughter has always been very outspoken about her beliefs.

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"[She's] very passionate about her views and things like that, but she's never to my knowledge been active in politics or any of that," she told the site.

What happens next?
Winner's court-appointed attorney, Titus Nichols, told CNN that a detention hearing will take place on Thursday in Augusta, where a judge will determine whether or not she will be allowed to be released on bond. "She's just been caught in the middle of something bigger than her," he told the outlet.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/ne ... ow-w486040
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Re: RI Subject - Reality Winner

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Jun 06, 2017 5:48 pm

Snowden: Prosecuting NSA Leaker Reality Winner Is a 'Fundamental Threat to the Free Press'
Sarah Jeong
SARAH JEONG
Jun 6 2017, 4:40pm

"To hold a citizen incommunicado and indefinitely while awaiting trial for the alleged crime of serving as a journalistic source should outrage us all."

On the very same day that The Intercept published classified NSA documents describing Russian efforts to hack American voting infrastructure, the Department of Justice announced the arrest of Reality Leigh Winner, a federal contractor from Augusta, Georgia, who is charged with "removing classified material from a government facility and mailing it to a news outlet."

There have been other leaks of classified information to the press in the past few years (for example, the drone papers, also published by The Intercept) but none have had a name and a face tied to them since the Snowden revelations in 2013. Winner can be said to be, in a sense, the newest Edward Snowden.

Snowden himself, who had been proactive in advocating for whistleblower rights in the years since, has now given an official statement through the Freedom of the Press Foundation on Winner's arrest, expressing concern about the charges brought against her. "The prosecution of any journalistic source without due consideration by the jury as to the harm or benefit of the journalistic activity is a fundamental threat to the free press."


Either way, he says, it's also clear that "she is neither a threat to public safety nor a flight risk. To hold a citizen incommunicado and indefinitely while awaiting trial for the alleged crime of serving as a journalistic source should outrage us all."

Full statement follows:

The Justice Department released an indictment of twenty five year-old NSA contractor Reality Winner yesterday, just a few hours after the Intercept posted a story based on a top secret document that described how the NSA believes Russian actors tried to hack into US voting infrastructure. Much is unknown, as the public is made to depend upon the potentially unreliable claims of government prosecutors, while Winner is held in jail without any contact with the public.

What we do know is clear: Winner is accused of serving as a journalistic source for a leading American news outlet about a matter of critical public importance. For this act, she has been charged with violating the Espionage Act—a World War I era law meant for spies—which explicitly forbids the jury from hearing why the defendant acted, and bars them from deciding whether the outcome was to the public's benefit. This often-condemned law provides no space to distinguish the extraordinary disclosure of inappropriately classified information in the public interest—whistleblowing—from the malicious disclosure of secrets to foreign governments by those motivated by a specific intent to harm to their countrymen.

The prosecution of any journalistic source without due consideration by the jury as to the harm or benefit of the journalistic activity is a fundamental threat to the free press. As long as a law like this remains on the books in a country that values fair trials, it must be resisted.

No matter one's opinions on the propriety of the charges against her, we should all agree Winner should be released on bail pending trial. Even if you take all the government allegations as true, it's clear she is neither a threat to public safety nor a flight risk. To hold a citizen incommunicado and indefinitely while awaiting trial for the alleged crime of serving as a journalistic source should outrage us all.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/arti ... free-press
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Re: RI Subject - Reality Winner

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Tue Jun 06, 2017 6:13 pm

Has anyone seen a deep dive on her employer, Pluribus International Corporation?

Name is 100% new to me.

All in all, this is just further proof that NatSec is utterly broken, as a system and a culture, and provides no security whatsoever. Vulnerabilities, on the other hand, proliferate exponentially every week.
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Re: RI Subject - Reality Winner

Postby JackRiddler » Tue Jun 06, 2017 6:46 pm

Document itself adds more non-evidence to the Russian election hacking construct. It's so inconsequential that I am guessing it is authentic (i.e., an actual NSA product that has been leaked and not intentionally planted). Probably a case of staff making themselves important by taking a report about a pedestrian hacking attempt and adding a "likely" GRU attribution, so that some of their masters can later wave at a pile of such reports and say, evidence, mountains of evidence. And this is bureaucracy at work, nothing more, you can find it happening in any large organization with middle management strata.

You would expect fabricated evidence designed to hurt Trump to be a bit more impressive, not some cherry-picked circumstantial case. If we accept that much, it suggests other aspects of the story are plausible. If Reality is like her assorted social media forays imply (and I have met some people that are like this), and if she watched enough Rachel and Anderson shows, she may have believed this was some kind of smoking gun and it was her Destiny (better name for her to have chosen, imho) to reveal it. Which truly would be sad.

If you're still agreeing with this train of thought, the real question becomes why these smart experienced people at The Intercept, four of them no less, would come to the same conclusion. And then build a whole expose around just this one document. Independently of whether they fucked up or even intentionally burned their source. (Remains to be seen.) I mean, they know their shit, presumably, right? Here again, the weakness of the document argues against NSA intent to set up The Intercept, or create some phony New Snowden We Caught. Because that means our theoretical NSA deceivers have to believe in the first place that those smart guys at The Intercept are going to fall for such weak sauce. Unless, of course, one or more of the four authors is one of theirs.

With the Russia-Trump election hacking storyline generally we have reached an interesting point in the culture where something that checks off all the classic complaints about conspiracy theory is treated as though gospel truth, you must believe it if you are a good citizen, and anyone who rejects that is attacked as... of course... a conspiracy theorist! Finally! Now we are conspiracy theorists when we find a conspiracy theory implausible.

Back in the 9/11 days I used to joke the difference between organized crime reporting and conspiracy theory was whether Russians were involved, but I wasn't waiting for such a simple and direct confirmation.
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Re: RI Subject - Reality Winner

Postby JackRiddler » Tue Jun 06, 2017 6:52 pm

Now another semi-plausible scenario occurs to me, which is that this was set up to strengthen Trump.

EDIT: Which is the likely outcome, even if there was no plot and it's just Reality finds a real memo and sends it to the Intercept, then they fuck up, oops. And this scenario is compatible with the weakness of the memo.
Last edited by JackRiddler on Tue Jun 06, 2017 6:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: RI Subject - Reality Winner

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Jun 06, 2017 6:55 pm

Back in the 9/11 days I used to joke the difference between organized crime reporting and conspiracy theory was whether Russians were involved, but I wasn't waiting for such a simple and direct confirmation.


:)

Minstrel Boy/Jeff Wells...for those who haven't been around since 2002

Minstrel Boy Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Oct-24-04 08:12 PM
Response to Original message
5. Vreeland claims that, while in Moscow, he was given the mission
to break into Chalva Tchigirinski's apartment. He told Sander Hicks he thought he was being set up, because he wasn't warned about infrared scanners.


Minstrel Boy Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Oct-24-04 10:49 PM
Response to Reply #26
35. you don't know what you're talking about
It's a matter of record the note was pre-9/11. And I hate repeating myself about this, but I'm a close friend of his Toronto lawyer, and I know he was acting on the warning, trying to interest authorities, over the summer of 2001.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/d ... =125x23537

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http://www.geopolintel.fr/article93.html

The Coincidence Theorist's Guide to 9/11

That in the months prior to September 11, self-described US intelligence operative Delmart Vreeland sought, from a Toronto jail cell, to get US and Canadian authorities to heed his warning of his accidental discovery of impending catastrophic attacks is worthless, since Vreeland was a dubious character, notwithstanding the fact that many of his claims have since been proven true.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0408/S00221.htm
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Re: RI Subject - Reality Winner

Postby The Consul » Tue Jun 06, 2017 8:03 pm

Poor young woman, her life is now in ruins. They're going to crucify the little snowflake in a spectacular fashion.
Don't see how any half brained leaker would even think of contacting The Intercept now. Their wheels are completely covered in shite. They either played her or got played. The smartest investigative journalists? Hardly.

What are they really up to?
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Re: RI Subject - Reality Winner

Postby Spiro C. Thiery » Wed Jun 07, 2017 7:14 am

Luther Blissett » Yesterday, 23:22 wrote:
Wombaticus Rex » Tue Jun 06, 2017 1:36 pm wrote:
Luther Blissett » Tue Jun 06, 2017 12:12 pm wrote:Is there any chance it could have been a mistake / ignorance of the yellow dots on the publisher's part? It really seems like a stretch even though I want to give the Intercept the benefit of the doubt.


A bit of a sticky wicket for Team Omidyar -- simple Aw, Shucks ignorance is their best frame, but then that would rather negate their whole sales pitch & aesthetic as the cutting edge of NatSec/Tech reporting with an all-star team of experts.

The bit about printers having defined IDs for forensic purposes, however, has been a known known for like a decade at least.


I agree. I'm having a bit of an internal dialogue about this. It's not like I ever exalted the Intercept as a perfect paragon of leftist thought, but now I am re-examining Sibel Edmonds take after forgetting it for awhile.


Controlled opposition is as controlled opposition does. This hasn't changed since then. Always weigh the facts presented, but always consider the source (in this case I mean of course Omidyar Whistleblowing Inc. not Reality, though she should be considered as well)

JackRiddler » Today, 00:46 wrote:Here again, the weakness of the document argues against NSA intent to set up The Intercept, or create some phony New Snowden We Caught. Because that means our theoretical NSA deceivers have to believe in the first place that those smart guys at The Intercept are going to fall for such weak sauce. Unless, of course, one or more of the four authors is one of theirs.


Like, either Cole, because he has exposed a source once already, i.e. a prime suspect, or one of the other three who got him to go along because he is a plausible scapegoat.

So far Assange has been the one speaking out on behalf of Reality. To counter the perception that his leaks selectively avoided damaging Trump/Russia? To further contrast Wikileaks with The Intercept's being so silent on their culpability so far that they won't even editorialize in support of their leaker? Because he's a good guy?

seemslikeadream » Yesterday, 22:48 wrote:you're not going to bring that idiot pizzagate asshole into my thread without a response .....biggley


Therefore response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response 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response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response response 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Seeing the world through rose-colored latex.
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Re: RI Subject - Reality Winner

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jun 07, 2017 8:46 am

Mac (and crew) have hounded me for over a year now....he has personally attacked me more times than I can count and been suspended for that at least 4 times ....he has trashed my sources over and over....he started a thread just the other day accusing me of having magical powers and my dog who has been my best friend for over 14 years has been dying in my arms for a week now....yea I am pissed and very angry and very very very sad......

I have just have enough

maybe rose colored glasses would help
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: RI Subject - Reality Winner

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jun 07, 2017 8:55 am

Who Is Accused NSA Leaker Reality Winner?


Reality Winner
By ALICE OLLSTEIN Published JUNE 7, 2017 6:00 AM


Like many 25-year-old women, Reality Leigh Winner’s social media pages are filled with pictures of delicious food, cute animals, tropical vacations, and sweaty, smiling Crossfit selfies, sprinkled with lighthearted observations about life in her sleepy town of Augusta, Georgia, and sporadic gripes about the Trump administration.

What the pages do not show is that Winner is an Air Force veteran and former military linguist, fluent in Pashto, Farsi and Dari, with top secret security clearance. The only indication that she was arrested over the weekend, for allegedly taking a highly classified document and mailing it anonymously to reporters, are the comments streaming down from each of her posts—some calling her a hero and others, a traitor.

Winner is widely believed to be the alleged source of a leaked NSA report published by the Intercept on Monday detailing the Russian military’s attempts to hack into a voter verification software company and into the accounts of more than 100 local election officials. The Intercept in a statement Tuesday refused to confirm that Winner was its source, and the FBI’s affidavit filed in the case only cites an unnamed “News Outlet” as the recipient of her alleged leak. Yet the dates on the leaked NSA document the Intercept published and the date of the stolen material described in the affidavit match, as do the folds and creases visible in the NSA document and described in the affidavit. The DOJ announced the criminal charges against Winner less than an hour after the Intercept’s story was published.

Winner has been incarcerated in Lincolnton, Georgia, since she was arrested at her home on Saturday, and is scheduled to appear before a federal court on Thursday at 4 p.m., according to online records in the case.

According to the FBI affidavit seeking a warrant for Winner’s arrest, the federal government tracked her down as the alleged source of the leak after reporters contacted the NSA on May 30 to notify them that they would be publishing a leaked document.

The affidavit alleged the following: after the reporters showed the NSA a copy of the document in order to verify it, the agency determined it had been printed and hand-carried out of a secure facility. The agency then launched an internal audit and found that six people had printed the document in question. Of those six, they found that Winner had emailed the Intercept from her desk computer. It also raised red flags that the document in question was unrelated to Winner’s job, and that she printed only that intelligence report and no others.

The criminal complaint against Winner alleges she confessed to the crime when FBI agents arrived to search her house on June 3. “Winner admitted intentionally identifying and printing the classified intelligence reporting at issue despite not having a ‘need to know,’ and with knowledge that the intelligence reporting was classified,” it said. “Winner further admitted removing the classified intelligence reporting from her office space, retaining it, and mailing it from Augusta, Georgia, to the news outlet, which she knew was not authorized to receive or possess the documents.”

Winner’s court-appointed attorney, Titus Thomas Nichols, did not respond to TPM’s request for an interview, but told CNN he is troubled by the government’s description of how her arrest played out. “The bigger issue is: Was my client interrogated without her attorney?” he said.

Late on Tuesday, the District Court terminated Nichols’ appointment as Winner’s attorney, noting that she “has sufficient funds to retain counsel of her own choosing and does not qualify for court appointed counsel.”

An unusual life
Reality Winner grew up in the small town of Kingsville, Texas, with her mother, step-father and older sister. It is unclear when her father passed away, but the loss is apparently an ongoing source of pain in her life. She lamented in an Instagram post earlier this year addressed to her late father: “I still don’t know who I am without you here or how to keep moving forward without the one person who believed unconditionally in everything I want to do in life.”

Winner joined the Air Force soon after graduating from high school in 2010. A U.S. Air Force press officer confirmed to TPM that Winner was on active duty from 2010 to 2016, and worked as cryptologic language analyst at the Ft. Meade, Maryland Army base which also houses the NSA’s headquarters. During that time, she received an Air Force commendation medal in recognition of her achievements on the job. She became fluent in Farsi, Dari and Pashto.

In February, according to the government’s criminal complaint, Winner began working with the small Virginia-based federal contractor Pluribus International Corporation and moved to Augusta, Georgia, reportedly to work at the NSA’s Cryptologic Center. She lived, according to the FBI’s search warrant application, in a modest, one-story brick house and drove a Nissan Cube. In her free time, according to her social media pages, she was a fitness fanatic, working out at a Crossfit gym, a yoga studio, and with a personal trainer.

Winner expressed some glib, left-of-center political views on social media, tweeting “people suck” on Election Day, joking that the U.S. would become the “United States of the Russian Federation,” and referring to President Trump as an “orange fascist” and a “piece of shit.”

Her parents have insisted she was not an avowed activist.

“I mean, she has expressed to me that she is not a fan of Trump, but she’s not someone who would go and riot or picket,” her mother Billie Winner-Davis told The Guardian.

“You may not agree with her politics but she is a patriot,” her step-father Gary Davis told the Atlanta Journal Constitution. “She’s just a passionate young woman who probably made some mistakes.”

Her former attorney Nichols took a similar tone, telling CNN: “She’s just been caught in the middle of something bigger than her.”

But Winner was civically engaged, traveling to D.C. this February to talk with the staff of Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) about environmental issues, including concerns about the Dakota Access Pipe Line. After the meeting she posted that she was feeling “optimistic” and that Perdue’s state policy director had promised to keep her posted on her “concerns regarding climate change and what the state of Georgia is doing to reduce dependency on fossil fuels.”

A dark legal landscape
In the leakiest presidential administration in recent memory, Winner is the first person to be criminally prosecuted for passing information to the press. She has been charged under the Espionage Act and could face up to 10 years in prison.

Tom Devine, the legal director of the Government Accountability Project, an organization that counsels and advocates for whistleblowers, told TPM that Winner should be considered a whistleblower even though she did not blow the whistle on wrongdoing in her own workplace.

“Whistleblowing is not limited to misconduct by any specific government. It can be exposing misconduct by a foreign government,” he said.

U.S. law has almost no protection for people who leak classified information, especially private contractors.

“There is no such thing as a public interest defense in the United States,” Devine said, noting that those protections exist in many other countries. “We have a desperate need in our country for a public interest defense against criminal prosecution.”

The government contractor who most famously leaked national security documents to the press—Edward Snowden—took immense precaution, communicating with reporters over fully encrypted channels, and fleeing to Hong Kong where he was unlikely to be extradited. In contrast, Winner seems to have made herself fairly easy to track down, allegedly emailing the Intercept from her work computer and printing and mailing a document that could be traced back to her.

Though Winner has not yet said publicly why she allegedly took this drastic act, Devine says it has the hallmarks of less-than-strategic civil disobedience. “Quite clearly this was an ignorant act of conscience,” he said.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/who-is- ... -intercept


Sen. Mark Warner says Russian election attacks were 'much broader' than NSA document shows
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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