Anybody know Reality Winner’s new mailing address?
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So Reality continues to be the outstanding victim of the Trump regime’s injustice. We need someone in the White House who will give Reality a pardon. It should be the rallying cry of any politician honestly claiming to represent the people. Pardon Reality. Restore Reality.
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#RealityWinner #nationaltreasure
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Agreed!
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Yeah, it sucks but… Reality Winner??? What were her parents thinking?
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This woman should not only be freed from her outrageous conviction, but we should hold her up as a true Patriot and create a new national holiday in her name. Someday, she will go down in history like George Wasington and Abraham Lincoln.
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Very few things are classified just because officials do not want the American people to know about them. In some cases, the greatest harm could be done if our opponents found out the extent of our knowledge, and the methods we have to obtain that knowledge.
A good example is the old statement “sometimes you have to let them bomb Coventry”. That refers to a situation (somewhat based on actual history) where the British had cracked the German methods of communication, but it was decided that vigorously defending against a known planned attack would alert the Germans that their comms were compromised. In the long term, it would be more damaging to the allied war effort if the Germans changed to stronger cryptography. So Coventry was allowed to be bombed.
Winner may not have known how the info she leaked was obtained, and releasing it may well have compromised whole intelligence systems and endangered people who worked within it.
The laws against leaking classified info are draconian, because the risk to the nation should the info be released is very significant.
Admiral Yamamoto is a good illustration of what can happen.
First, don’t you think they already know that we can spy on their hacking? Secondly, if our election is being monkeyed with then who is the NSA protecting by keeping this secret? The American people from which their mandate to exist and function is derived, or the self interests of the agency?
Nice comparison. Considering we aren’t actually at war and no one needs be bombed it may be a bit different but the sentiment is consistent. We must protect the machinery of war in order to maintain our ability to wage war even at the cost of innocent lives (or the soul of our nation it would seem). Protecting your intelligence assets at the cost of your democracy places a greater value on the ability to spy on people than it does the most fundamentally democratic feature of our nation, our elections. No asset or intelligence gathering ability should be given greater priority than our democracy.
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We have an Administration that persists in denying the full extent of the verifiable interference in the 2016 election. The reality of the situation, if you will .This sort of situation is why whistleblower protection exists. And absent those protections working, presidential pardon. Because the stooge who benefited from the compromised election is in office, Reality’s act of patriotism will be punished. I do not buy the argument that secrecy trumps the citizens’ right to know that our democracy failed in 2016.
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A “whistleblower” is someone who informs on their organization then it is engaging in unlawful or immoral activity. Chelsea Manning is a good example of that. RW released national security information about US detection of activity by a foreign power. That release had to have ruined whatever surveillance assets the US was using to detect the Russian activity. It may well have compromised an investigation on the activity.
If our national security is set up so that any junior employee with a security clearance gets to unilaterally decide what stays secret and what information goes to the media, we are going to have some disasters.
Believe it or not, everyone who handles classified material knows about the procedures to follow when they discover illegal or immoral activity during the course of their duties. And people to contact when the first set of contacts are involved with the questionable activity or do not take the charges seriously.
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Oh, because those procedures they are supposed to follow always work so well for the whistleblower, yes? Please.
And yes, she is a whistleblower according to your own definition. She released information about her organization - the federal government, as a veteran and an employee - because the Trump Administration engaged in unlawful, immoral activity by downplaying and denying the existence of Russian interference in the election (and probably colluding with that effort).
What good are those intelligence gathering initiatives if the president is owned by Putin, the executive branch compromised?
Reality made a tough, brave decision which has been validated repeatedly by the Orange Menace’s behavior.
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She changed her name to Reality Winner.
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I think @Erin_Schram’s point is that the decision of whether or not to declassify the information is a policy decision that doesn’t rest in with the NSA analysts. You can perhaps laud any given analyst (eg Winner) as a hero for breaking the chain of command and leaking the information, but you can’t really fault the employees who instead just passed it up to the people whose job it is to make this kind of decision. “The NSA decided” is a funny locution, since it is a massive nonmonolithic organization.
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I don’t think we have any reason to believe that she was in any position to know what the federal government might be doing about the information she leaked, or what the consequences to any current investigations or sources might be from her disclosing the info.
I might say that she does not get to leak classified intelligence info when she feels that the government is not using the intelligence in an appropriate way. But she was not high enough in the chain of command to have access to how the intelligence agencies were dealing with that information. She leaked raw intelligence because she fancied herself a member of the resistance (one who “stands with Iran”).
Certainly there is a lot of sinister stuff going on with the NSA and other intelligence agencies. But they also have a real and necessary function.
RW did something reckless and dangerous, but many here are willing to excuse that because she shares trendy political views with them.
This seems to be a statement that gets repeated, in one form or another, pretty much continuously. If I were to compare the last two president’s actions towards Russia in Ukraine, Syria, Iran and around the world, and was told to pick which administration was in the thrall of Putin, I would probably not pick the Trump administration
“Our goal is to help strengthen Russia.”. If Trump had said that, everyone would go insane.
But it should not matter what part of the political spectrum you are on. National security leaks can and do endanger the citizens of the country where the leaks occur. If you burn a US intelligence asset, you will never know if that asset might have prevented the next 9/11.
She provided the documents to the Intercept in the midst of Trump and Co. repeatedly denying and found to be lying about contact with connected Russians during the campaign. Trump was ignoring reports from our intelligence agencies regarding Russian interference. There was ample evidence for a reasonable person to conclude the the executive branch was not going to carry out it’s duty regarding election interference, and definitely not going to protect a low level whistleblower.
And your Clinton quote is completely out of context. 2010 interview. Before Euromaiden and Crimea annexation. Secretary of State practicing diplomacy. Crazy thought.
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Obama waited until the last possible moment to do so, never acknowledged the justification for Chelsea’s actions, and decided to delay the release until a few months after the election.
As far as I can tell, that last one was just to give the incoming fascist an opportunity to fuck with Chelsea. I suspect that the only reason Trump let the release proceed was because he thought he’d be relying on the pardon power himself eventually.
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Federal agencies often mark documents classified and withhold information for decades simply because they contain embarrassing material.
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I see it a little differently. Evidence that a foreign nation has the capability to take over and control the government at all levels would be a serious and immediate threat to national security and the foundation of the country. How does “let them bomb a city so we don’t lose this intel source that we’ll need for the rest of the war” compare to “let them take over the entire country so we don’t have to reveal that they can”?
It could be that they decided it had not had that much effect and that they could put in place defensive measures and alerts for the future without anyone ever knowing. Maybe they wanted to take time to prepare (the next election was a ways off after all) to prevent panic and disruption of business-as-usual.
But if you assert that revealing the danger was riskier than allowing the country to be silently conquered, that wouldn’t sound right.
I don’t really know that classified documents would be needed to back the claims that people can hack voting machines and send phishing emails though, that’s not really a secret.
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