Reality Winner will plead guilty to Espionage Act charges for leaking NSA doc on Russia election hack

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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/06/21/reality-winner-changes-plea-to.html

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They have to prosecute her. Otherwise what becomes of “no collusion! No collusion!” They should prosecute her for leaking secrets that are also fake news. But also secret.

Pity there weren’t some tax returns in there. Remember the tax returns?

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Here’s to hoping they throw the book out the window. Reality Winner is a hero, and should be released immediately with time served. In a just universe, she wouldn’t have been in jail at all.

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Someone should tell Trump that Obama personally locked her up. He wouldn’t be able to sign that pardon quickly enough.

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so she’s going to be punished for doing something that apparently helped our country.

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We have lost the plot.

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Obama’s America was guilty of the same upside-down logic. No wonder we end up with trump as president.

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They broke her spirit with a year on solitary confinement. I’ve donated to her defense several times, she is a national hero.

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REMEMBER THE MAINE

Oh, nevermind

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I’m donating to her defense, right now.

would you call this a good link?

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she is going to be convicted. The punishment started in '16. She has been “innocent” (unproven otherwise) until she agreed to a plea deal after a year in solitary freedom enhancement.

The sentence, that’s irrelevant by now, but I expect it to be another 5 years.

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Logic doesn’t steal kids or elections. Dirty hands do.

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Yup, that’s it Dude.

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So, if you’ll allow a digression for a while. Hopefully this will circle back to being on-point.

Torture is, in certain circles, held up as working and being the only way of avoiding the consequences of a ticking-time-bomb scenario. Now, every part of that belief is wrong^ but let’s allow the premise.

Now, given the premise, there are a couple of options. One is to make torture legal, and the other is to keep torture illegal and let the justice system decide whether an individuals choice to torture in a given set of circumstances was justified. Basically, in the same way that killing people is wrong but that doesn’t automatically make all killings murder.

But with what has happened to Ms. Winner we can maybe see why conservatives aren’t comfortable with leaving torture illegal and letting the justice system sort it out; she did objectively the right thing (like Snowden) and is being hung out to dry for it. They’re baying for her blood, but have just enough self-awareness to realise their arguments are dangerous to themselves.

^ ticking time bomb scenarios don’t really exist, old fashioned police work solves crimes, old fashioned intelligence work prevents crimes, torture doesn’t work, etc.

Edit: fixed legal -> illegal typo

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The leak of this document was absolutely in the public interest, and the Espionage Act, which disallows a public interest defense for leaking, needs to be repealed. The federal government is addicted to secrecy, to the detriment of our nation. If Reality Winner actually perpetrated this leak, then she should be lauded as a hero alongside Ed Snowden.

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Interesting question there from Parker Higgins, and I’ve got a guess why Reality Winner has gotten so much less attention.

The Intercept’s team drove a lot of the Snowden press. But this time, the Intercept fucked up. They’re the reason she got arrested, because they published the scan with the print code. It was a bone-headed, fully preventable, amateur-hour mistake and they got rightfully excoriated for it, though not nearly as much as they deserved. Failing to protect a source, or turning on a source, are shitful journalism.

Therefore, the Intercept forgot. Reality who? What? No. Sorry, we’re busy frying the dishes and winding the cat. Vice, Vox, or (maybe) Slate could have taken over, but they didn’t break the story. Salon is spiraling the drain. And it’s a tough story, because it comes with a set of nauseating suspicions: elections may be as sound as a chocolate teapot, and we may be more fucked than we realize. Those stories are a very hard sell.

I want to be wrong.

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So the Russians really were trying to affect the 2016 Presidential elections. So much for fake news. Know that we know, how long until “The Donald” starts referring to them as “Bad Hombres”. My guess NEVER.

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Reality Winner has gotten less attention than Snowden or Manning because:

  1. A minor piece of inconclusive Russiagate evidence is nowhere near as consequential as the massive crimes exposed by Snowden and Manning;

  2. Centrist liberals know that campaigning on behalf of Reality Winner would draw attention to the point that most of them have called for the prosecution of Manning and/or Snowden;

  3. The radical left think Russiagate is overhyped nonsense, so they’re not particularly invested in the Winner case either.

Jeremy Scahill and the Intercept crew have been basically the only people working to raise awareness of Winner’s plight.

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I’m starting to think our whistleblower protection laws are simply there to fool people into thinking they are safe doing the right thing so that the govt can arrest and jail anyone who tries to make use of them.

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Does her plea bargain at least promise that she won’t face execution? Espionage is still a capital crime.

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