I imagine this is why the arresting document went to pains to describe it this way–they hope to stop anyone else from leaking, which will certainly work if people think the first step a journalist will take is to tell the government about a leak and provide the documents! I bet what really happened is considerably more complicated.
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She’s 25 and was a new hire, so I’d lean towards inexperience. Either way, her arrest looks like it resulted from a bog standard internal investigation and not a crackdown.
Though, huh,I guess this means the administration will literally be putting Reality on trial.
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We’ll see how she feels about the moniker “reality winner” when she’s serving hard time in a Federal prison. I guess Greenwald is the real winner here, as per usual.
It is standard journalistic ethics to attempt to confirm something like that with the government. They were going to hear about it once the article is published anyway. Where the intercept fucked up, if they fucked up, was in giving them the clue about the creases in the paper which (supposedly) led the NSA to get a list of people who printed it out.
But, as I’m typing that out, and reading it back, it doesn’t really pass the sniff test. Creases or not, it makes sense that they would check the audit trail on the document. Where she screwed up is in communicating with the intercept in a trackable way enabling the NSA to do a relatively easy comparison of the list of everybody who accessed the document and everybody who communicated with the Intercept.
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That’s misleading. The older reporting just talked about hacked websites. The Intercept’s story builds on that and talks about attacks on the developer of software that runs on registration verification systems at the polls. The Chicago Tribune’s story isn’t anywhere near as detailed as the Intercept’s, it doesn’t even mention VR. Its weird they ran it today though, I wonder if the NSA prompted it since they knew the Intercept had the goods or if the Tribune heard through the grape vine about the Intercept and was trying to shake the trees and could only come up with a rehash.
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Too bad the directors of the NSA couldn’t do the moral, if not legal, action and let the public know that indeed the Russians were trying to screw with our election. But I guess they’re too cowardly to pay the consequences. Obviously they don’t particularly care about the integrity of our democratic process, or the Constitution, or the United States.
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They care about the integrity of the NSA. Just like Comey cared about the integrity of the FBI. Sometimes what’s best for an agency, even a non-venal agency, is not what’s best for the country. Its more clear-cut to fall back on protecting the reputation and integrity of the agency because that’s not political. I’m not saying I agree with the choices they’ve made, but I don’t think its cowardly. Figuring out the right thing to do here is hard, its un-charted waters, lots of wildcards and the stakes are really high.
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Dear god can you please start reporting on the CONTENT of the leak. The NY Times also made this mistake, leading with the arrest, and burying the CONTENT of the leak in the story. The really important part of the story: the NSA has evidence that Russian actors attempted to hack election machines. And does not yet know whether the attack was succesful.
120 election officials were sent phising emails disguised as messages from a voting machine manufacturer by Russian state hackers, according to a leaked top secret report. Whether they succeeded: unknown. According to a leaked top secret report.
To what end? Not to exfiltrate information such as voting lists (mentioned in the leaked document). But as a stepping stone to compromising voting machines. And we don’t know if Russian state actors did compromise voting machines. Although we know they were attempting to do so.
That’s a big story. Not the arrest of the person who leaked it. PLEASE reframe this story. PLEASE. The story is: US Election May Have Been Hacked.
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This has been reported thoroughly already, and I saw the reports on it before they mentioned that the source of the leak was arrested. I’ve noticed a lot of Boing Boing articles address topics that are posted on Reddit first (sorry if I leaked the secret sauce formula - though Boing Boing often adds its own flavor and focus also).
What’s amazing is that this is the most leaky administration in the history of the US, and this poor young lady is the only one caught and prosecuted for her (alleged?) misdeeds. I feel sorry for her. She did what she felt was best for her country, but I’m guessing that her naivete and inexperience made it easy to find her.
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Additional info here:
That reporting did not just talk about websites, it also talked about hackers accessing voter registration records. I mean, geez, the ABC headline literally says “Russian Hackers Targeted Nearly Half of States’ Voter Registration Systems, Successfully Infiltrated 4”. And this wasn’t even a comprehensive selection, just what I found with ten seconds of searching. Now The Intercept story absolutely fills in more detail into those broad outlines, and I absolutely am happy to read it, but I’m not sure there’s anything there explosive enough for a whistle-blower defense for Ms. Winner.
As for the Tribune story, another possibility is that since their source is a Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee someone is laying groundwork for when the head of the NSA testifies to the Senate on Wednesday.
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Uh, it sounds like they have a fairly good prima facie case. eg, only 5 people had access to the document. her computer emailed a news source.
And arrest first is infinitely better than intimidate and harass for months first.
So, they’re learning!
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I think that if I’m ever running a super secret intelligence organization and want to keep its secrets secret I’ll, like, actually hire my employees… and not use contractors. Hm?
Privatization, is there anything it can’t do worse?
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Apparently printers include near-invisible microdots that encode data about the print-job. Including the doc The Intercept received and shared with an NSA contractor in order to verify it.
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I know, right? It’s not like all the defense-ey organizations don’t have more money than God thanks to the US blowing literally hundreds of billions of dollars on it every year. Apparently roughly $80 billion between the CIA, NSA, and the various other Big Brother Agencies.
