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Reality Winner pleads guilty to leaking NSA election hacking data
Reality Winner was expected to plead guilty to leaking NSA data, and she's done just that. The whistleblower has officially pleaded guilty to a charge of unlawful retention and dissemination of national defense information. Sentencing will have to wait, but the felony carries a maximum penalty of 63 months (5.25 years) with up to three years of supervised release.
Winner faced the charge after giving The Intercept NSA documents that showed Russia's military intelligence wing, the GRU, attempting to hijack the computers of 122 local election officials ahead of the 2016 American vote. The NSA had determined that Russia wanted to collect information about election-related hardware and software in what could have been a precursor to manipulating the vote itself.
Previously: Feds Arrest NSA Contractor in Leak of Top Secret Russia Document
Reality Winner NSA Leak Details Revealed by Court Transcript
(Score: 5, Informative) by canopic jug on Thursday June 28 2018, @04:50AM (5 children)
Part of the 'opsec fail' you go on about was her relying on The Intercept. She was neither the first nor the last that publication has hung out to dry. Omidyar bought Greenwald and with him the cache of Snowden documents and put them on ice. He used that for unearned credibility to attract and entrap other whistleblowers and act on his long standing his grudge against Wikileaks [soylentnews.org].
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday June 28 2018, @08:48AM (3 children)
I've seen more than one online rag that had a hidden service to which one may submit anonymous tips
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by canopic jug on Thursday June 28 2018, @01:08PM (2 children)
This wasn't enough in her case. They published the more or less raw documents which allowed the investigators to figure out who had printed them. If The Intercept wanted to protect her, one of the things they would have done would have been to re-key the documents prior to publishing and even then only publishing excerpts. This was all common knowledge even before Snowden so there's no excuse they can claim for doing it like they did except that they wanted to make sure she was identified quickly.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday June 29 2018, @12:56AM
Whistleblowers need to:
1. Manage their own OPSEC effectively. Scramble contents, remove metadata, secret printer dots, etc.
2. Trust some random media organization (with far less technical capability than a spy agency) to do the job for them.
Great choice.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday June 29 2018, @01:36AM
That's precisely why intelligence agencies never pass verbatim text to the policy makers.
Also they do:
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Friday June 29 2018, @01:00AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_Winner#Intelligence_report_leak_and_arrest [wikipedia.org]
Even if The Intercept hadn't sent NSA the copies or published the full docs, her OPSEC was absolutely terrible and she would have been caught anyway.
The tech illiterate shouldn't be leaking, but maybe no NSA employee who hasn't also broken the internal security system should be leaking. She was on a very short list of suspects just for accessing the document.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]