Barely an hour after a news organization published an article about a Top Secret National Security Agency document on Russian hacking, the Justice Department announced charges against a 25-year-old government contractor who a senior federal official says was the leaker of the document.
The May 5, 2017 intelligence document published by The Intercept, an online news organization, describes new details about Russian efforts to hack voting systems in the U.S a week prior to the 2016 presidential election. While the document doesn't say the hacking changed any votes, it "raises the possibility that Russian hacking may have breached at least some elements of the voting system, with disconcertingly uncertain results."
Even as the document was ricocheting around Washington, the Justice Department announced that a criminal complaint was filed in the Southern District of Georgia charging Reality Leigh Winner, 25, a federal contractor, with removing classified material from a government facility and mailing it to a news outlet.
Source: NBC News
Once investigative efforts identified Winner as a suspect, the FBI obtained and executed a search warrant at her residence. According to the complaint, Winner agreed to talk with agents during the execution of the warrant. During that conversation, 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. 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.
Source: Department of Justice
While the document provides a rare window into the NSA's understanding of the mechanics of Russian hacking, it does not show the underlying "raw" intelligence on which the analysis is based. A U.S. intelligence officer who declined to be identified cautioned against drawing too big a conclusion from the document because a single analysis is not necessarily definitive.
Source: The Intercept
How The Intercept Outed Reality Winner
Julian Assange: Alleged NSA leaker 'must be supported'
Bad tradecraft: How the Intercept may have outed its own leaker
WikiLeaks tweet #1: "Suspected Intercept reporter gave US government NSA whistleblower Reality Leigh Winner's post code, printout and her report number" and tweet #2: "WikiLeaks issues a US$10,000 reward for information leading to the public exposure & termination of this 'reporter'".
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Following Winner's arrest and subsequent charging, the security researcher has submitted a pull request to the PDF Redact Tools, a project for securely redacting and stripping metadata from documents before publishing.
[...] "The black and white conversion will convert colors like the faded yellow dots to white," Szathmari told Bleeping Computer in an interview.
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Reality Winner, a former NSA contractor accused of leaking a document to The Intercept, has had her interrogation by the FBI detailed in a transcript filed by federal prosecutors:
A National Security Agency contractor accused of leaking a classified report on Russian hacking aimed at the 2016 election told FBI agents she smuggled the document out of a high security intelligence facility in her pantyhose. That and other details appear in a transcript federal prosecutors filed in court Wednesday detailing the interrogation of 25-year-old linguist Reality Winner by the FBI as they carried out a search warrant at her home in June.
[...] Winner appears to say she believed the contents of the report — which described Russian spearfishing cyberattacks aimed at U.S. voter registration databases — should be in the public debate. "I saw the article and was like, I don't understand why this isn't a thing," she said. "It made me very mad ... I guess I just didn't care about myself at that point. ... Yeah, I screwed up royally."
[...] The transcript hints at possible political motivations for the leak. Winner says she objected to her workplace tuning the TV to Fox News. She also had a signed photo of CNN Anchor Anderson Cooper, although she said the signature was fake. "I wasn't trying to be a Snowden or anything," Winner said, referring to NSA leaker Edward Snowden and his massive disclosures of details on U.S. government surveillance. "I guess it's just been hard at work because ... I've filed formal complaint about them having Fox News on, you know? Uh, at least, for God's sake, put Al Jazeera on, or a slideshow with people's pets. I've tried anything to get that changed." Despite Winner's statement to the FBI agents, prosecutors say that in a Facebook chat in March with her sister, Winner said she was on the "side" of both Snowden and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
On pages 4-5 of the transcript, the FBI agents discuss letting Reality Winner (RW) put groceries in her fridge and leash up her dog. Do they teach them that technique at the Academy?
Previously: Feds Arrest NSA Contractor in Leak of Top Secret Russia Document
FBI Whistleblower on Pierre Omidyar and His Campaign to Neuter Wikileaks
FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds asserts Pierre Omidyar decided to create The Intercept to not only take ownership of the Snowden leaks but also to continue his blockade against WikiLeaks and create a "honey trap" for whistleblowers.
WikiLeaks, the transparency organization known for publishing leaked documents that threaten the powerful, finds itself under pressure like never before, as does its editor-in-chief, Julian Assange. Now, the fight to silence Wikileaks is not only being waged by powerful government figures but also by the media, including outlets and organizations that have styled themselves as working to protect whistleblowers.
As this three-part series seeks to show, these outlets and organizations are being stealthily guided by the hands of special interests, not the public interest they claim to serve. Part I focuses on the Freedom of the Press Foundation, The Intercept, and the oligarch who has strongly influenced both organizations in his long-standing fight to silence WikiLeaks.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Wednesday June 07 2017, @05:52AM (2 children)
So: why did she pick this journailst? Did they have a "track record" of treating leaks or whistle-blowers with appropriate care?
OR: who *else* (other than the journalist) had access, once she mailed it?
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday June 07 2017, @01:55PM
Or... (context)
Printers use forensic watermarking [eff.org]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by curunir_wolf on Wednesday June 07 2017, @05:15PM
Probably because that's the one that her handlers told her to send it to...
I am a crackpot
(Score: 3, Informative) by mendax on Wednesday June 07 2017, @06:20AM (2 children)
How can The Intercept have any credibility today because of its incredible blunder? If I were a leaker I would think twice before sending any information to them.
However, I suspect there may be more to this story than meets the eye. First, the leaker sent an e-mail to The Intercept. Bad move. If she had followed The Intercept's instructions she would have contacted them in a more stealthy way, e.g., via Tails. Is she really that stupid? Second, was The Intercept's reporter really that stupid as to give the NSA the ORIGINAL? There's something wrong here.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday June 07 2017, @06:31AM
I read that her employer read the printer queue too. So double "you been had".
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 07 2017, @03:12PM
What blunder? Confirming a document with the agency that produced it? That is journalist ethics 101 - its part of verifying the authenticity of the document.
It isn't like they wouldn't see the document once it was published and then go check the audit log on it.
The real idiot here is Assange. He wants to raise money to get someone fired? How does that even work?
If he actually gave a damn about anything beyond attention-whoring he'd be raising that money for Reality's legal defense. Because whistleblowers get persecuted all the time. Going after the reporter won't stop that. But showing potential whistleblowers that even if they do get caught that wikileaks will have their back would go a long way to reassuring them.
What did Assange ever do for Manning? Raised $850 [thepoliticalinsider.com] in a "me too" fundraiser after Obama commuted her sentence. What a joke.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday June 07 2017, @06:22AM (23 children)
The government found out about the leaker, Reality Leigh Winner [heavy.com] a 25 year old female. By using hidden dots in the document as explained by erratasec [erratasec.com] and arstechnica [arstechnica.com]. EFF has a list of which printers [eff.org] that have this tracking function (Okidata and Samsung seems like good choices for privacy).
The tracking technology [wikipedia.org] uses yellow dots in 0.1 mm size with a raster distance of 1 mm. If your printed document have them. They can be tracked. The data that can be found this way is the time of printing and the serial number.
Of course if the printer would not get the instruction to print these then.. there will be no tracking either.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday June 07 2017, @06:41AM (17 children)
It's not conclusively known that the yellow dots led to the arrest.
Here's another account:
Slam dunk!
Either way, it's more evidence that can be used against the alleged leaker.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Wednesday June 07 2017, @06:51AM (16 children)
She should have feed the documents to a offline OCR process. That should remove most of this stuff. However that the Intercept.. didn't intercept this leak is kind of embarrassing.
Btw, how can folding or creasing indicate a secured space?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday June 07 2017, @07:13AM (12 children)
These kinds of places are not supposed to allow you to say, plug a USB flash drive into the computer, copy the files, and walk out with them. But sending the file to the work printer queue and then smuggling the printed pages out of the building is definitely possible, just ill-advised.
(I think Manning got around anti-USB restrictions by burning files to a CD, but I'll have to double check that.)
The crease/etc. indicated that it was printed at the secure location and probably scanned later at home in order to create a digital file that could be sent to The Intercept. As opposed to the other scenario of the NSA being hacked from the outside or something, e.g. The Shadow Brokers (although I heard it was debatable whether they actually hacked the NSA).
If Reality Winner did want to leak some docs, a better way could have been to transcribe the document by hand without printing anything, and then type that up back at home and find a secure channel (Tor hidden service or whatever) to send it to The Intercept from coffee shop/etc. Wi-Fi. And do it some weeks after having come into contact with the docs, not immediately after having received them in an email or however that happened. Then if she appeared on a short list of potential leakers... practice feigning ignorance and beating the polygraph beforehand.
And even that method would be defeated if the govt. ever gets the bright idea to send unique docs with a few words changed to every recipient. I don't know if that's likely to happen, but if they do it another leaker could get their life fucked up.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday June 07 2017, @07:30AM (8 children)
Photographing the screen using a micro camera might be an idea?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday June 07 2017, @07:50AM
It's still a device, and suspicious if found.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday June 07 2017, @11:23AM (6 children)
She clearly wasn't some kind of female James Bond. Plus if said camera was found passing thru security that would have been suspicious as hell.
Apparently she at least knew how screwed she was when the FBI came a knockin' on her door that she admitted it straight away, which is somewhat refreshing. So one can only assume this will be a simple and fast slam dunk trial followed by a long prison sentence.
That has got to be some kind of name change gag, her parents can't have been that clueless.
Have they ever paid out any money? They seem to be offering rewards for various things all the time but one never hears about them actually paying any rewards.
(Score: 1) by oakgrove on Wednesday June 07 2017, @11:42AM (3 children)
This silliness is indeed self-imposed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 07 2017, @03:32PM (2 children)
> This silliness is indeed self-imposed.
Citation?
Her mother's last name [cnn.com] is "Winner-Davis" - Davis is her stepfather's last name.
So Reality Leigh Winner is likely her given name.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 07 2017, @05:31PM
yes, and i can see her hippy parents discussing/creating the name now...i'm sure a baby is a heavy dose indeed.
(Score: 1) by oakgrove on Saturday June 10 2017, @06:55AM
She changed her first name from Sara to Reality.
>citation
Look it up yourself if you don't believe me.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Wednesday June 07 2017, @08:51PM
Reality Leigh Winner
That has got to be some kind of name change gag, her parents can't have been that clueless.
Wrong. People around that age have all kinds of weird and idiotic names these days. I've heard tons of them. There's absolutely something wrong with a large fraction of Americans in the 45-60yo age range (the age the 20-somethings' parents, the parents of the Millennials, would be now), as these are the people who picked these stupid names.
People keep deriding the Millennials for all kinds of things, but what they fail to realize is that the fault really lies with their parents for doing a lousy job of raising them and providing them a good society to live in.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 07 2017, @11:35PM
... is there is less incentive to moderate if you know you get 25 yrs whether it is one document or a disk drive of them.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday June 07 2017, @12:09PM
Which has been a standard trick in the bag for a long time (at least since the Second World War). If you leak a lot over time to a reporter who quotes from the documents, you will get caught.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @03:33PM (1 child)
AFAIK the anti-USB policies came about because of Manning's use of a flash drive to walk files.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday June 08 2017, @08:16PM
Manning used a CD-RW and only put it on a flash drive later, after the files had already been "walked out":
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/nov/28/how-us-embassy-cables-leaked [theguardian.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelsea_Manning#Release_of_material_to_WikiLeaks [wikipedia.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 07 2017, @01:42PM (2 children)
She was not very smart. I don't need a degree in clinical psychology to diagnose a narcissistic personality disorder in this one either. The fact idiots like this get security clearance is ridiculous. Her online presence is pure retard-level vitriol. The left propaganda has rotted another brain, and ruined what could have been a productive life.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 07 2017, @08:08PM (1 child)
Funny, I thought you were referring to someone with less "Reality" in their name, and personality, like The Donald.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @10:03AM
Await the virtualDonaldTriumph! ;-)
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Wednesday June 07 2017, @05:17PM (4 children)
EFF's list is outdated.
I use an OKI MC562w printer for office work, and it seems to use forensic markers as well. It ruins print jobs where you run a sheet through several times--the color builds up with each successive print until it is visible.
We also have a Kyocera TASKalfa 3550ci multifunction for public use, and it also displays dots, though not as obtrusive as the OKI's.
--
This was an accidental discovery--after a series of fortuitous mistakes while designing some brochures, I found that if you run the same sheet through the printer multiple times, the small variations in sheet feed causes the color in the security markings to be deposited unevenly making it larger and more visible. In the OKI, they show up as a kind of smoky schmutz after 4-5 prints, while on the Kyocera, it takes 6-10 prints and you see distinct yellow dots.
Interestingly, the EFF doesn't seem to have used this method of detection, though, as users don't generally do multiple prints on the same surface, it may not have occurred to them.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday June 07 2017, @06:14PM (3 children)
Just a little counter hint.. The image on a page is built up using a bitstream that is scanned onto the drum inside the laser. Now if that laser on/off controlled by a bitstream were to come from somewhere else then, viola the whole design is circumvented ;)
I think the bitrate is in the 4.6 Mbit/s ballpark.
For A4 with 600 dpi printing 8 pages per minute in B/W:
inch = 0.025400
(0.210*(600/inch) * .297*(600/inch)) / (60/8) = 4.6e6 bit/s
For 1200 dpi:
(0.210*(1200/inch) * .297*(1200/inch)) / (60/8) = 19e6 bit/s
Needs a serious serdes unit however. Way faster than standard I2S ports.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @05:36AM
"then, viola"
Either you mean "voila" [wiktionary.org], or you're 3d-printing violin-like string instruments [wikipedia.org] :)
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Thursday June 08 2017, @11:31PM (1 child)
That makes a lot of sense.
I'm not sure how I would fix it though, given my crap electronics skills. (If it was carpentry, no problem).
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday June 09 2017, @05:58AM
You could write a bit-bang program for say a Raspberry-Pi using two of the GPIO outputs. The first GPIO takes input from the laser scanner module and triggers your code to send. The second GPIO will output a string of bits synchronously until one line is complete. The rest is just setup and repetition. To get rid of jitter all interrupts and multitasking has to be shut of when running the code.
The advantage is that you may get away with just wiring the laser scanner module to some GPIO pins. At worst you will have 36 clock cycles per bit to output. A 900 MHz RPi with 600 dpi would have a margin of 195 clock cycles per bit. Plenty of CPU cycles to go around. There should also be some opto-switch or similar to trigger start of a new page. This could also wack all "driver incompatibility" stuff.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 07 2017, @09:37AM (3 children)
Only six people were given access to this document. It contains no meaningful intelligence. Interestingly enough even in the diagrams it's stated that the "Russian connection" is speculation from analysts - which is already public knowledge. Even the phishing attacks are very public knowledge. You can see an example of one of the attacks being carried out (succesfully) in the Wikileaks emails of Podesta who was fooled by the incredibly clever "This is google. Click on this random .tk site and go enter your password, because you've been hacked... so we need your password." He actually was suspicious of the email and sent it off to their tech security guy who decided it was legit. I'm sure there was no nepotism in his hiring. Rant aside - this article comes with a thrilling title that a partisan driven leaker would find great value in leaking. They get their rat and as a double whammy they're also getting to imply The Intercept, one of the few remaining reputable independent media outlets, was somehow at fault for this leaker's complete lack of any security precautions whatsoever.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday June 07 2017, @11:28AM
https://theintercept.com/2017/06/06/statement-on-justice-department-allegations/ [theintercept.com]
Here's a funny thing. If The Intercept defends itself and details the leaker's "complete lack of any security precautions", they risk adding to the evidence against the leaker. No wonder they have "no further comment". It's a PR lose-lose situation for The Intercept.
You have offered a good defense of The Intercept. WikiLeaks will continue to shit on The Intercept [thedailybeast.com] because it could direct exclusive leaks away from First Look/The Intercept and to WikiLeaks instead. More leaks means more donations and Bitcoins.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Wednesday June 07 2017, @12:32PM (1 child)
I'd disagree. I was a follower from day one, and their initial PR was investigative reporting, and they actually did a little, and that was cool.
Then there was a week in the election cycle when they must have signed an advertising contract with the DNC because in the span of one week my RSS feed went from 100% vaguely obscure yet interesting investigative journalism to about 90% of the lowest form of anti-Trump propaganda. For a couple weeks I watched the drivel roll in then stopped following The Intercept.
Lets take a look at their home page this morning. Top story is still pushing the dead narrative of Russian Election Hackers, which is starting to smell like UFO conspiracy theorists, or more accurately a witch hunt in the Salem sense. Next story is a weird anti-Trump piece where two people said something stupid and Trump's only making fun of one of them for being a moron because he's racist or a nazi or some idiocy not worth reading. Bitching about how the details of the USS Liberty attack remain secret, which is completely Fing useless and aside from agitprop purposes accomplishes nothing because it reports nothing new. A fairly idiotic anti-Trump story about how toll road operators like Trump's proposed infrastructure plan therefore in some "friend of my enemy is my enemy" identity politics sense, that means we should hate toll road operators and/or hate Trump, more likely the latter given this birdcage liner's history. Another anti-Trump story where some crank democrat senator technically did not lie when he said that Russian Hackers have messed with more computers than were in the lame fake report we're talking about, which to IT type people is idiotically obvious because, no not every powned windows box randomly port scanning the internet that happens to be located in Russia was mentioned specifically by IP address in the fake report about the fake attacks, so the senator was lying in a meta sense of what he's implying, but in a strictly literal sense he was telling the truth, there exist Russians who hack a lot of stuff.
Then comically "Support our fearless journalism" Yeah how about you do some first? Either journalism or fearless journalism? Even just a tiny little bit? Merely spreading DNC agitprop propaganda is not journalism no matter how many times "the intercept" or "msnbc" or "cnn" does it. Running a commercial for your political party and calling it "the truth" is not journalism. And there's nothing fearless in parroting the rest of the establishment legacy media which is 95% democratic party members. Whats "brave" about being an establishment stooge? Oh how brave you are to sound like a down-market version of the New York Times, you're just so brave, Rambo, for taking on ... um... nobody like that. The counter-culture from 1960 is in charge today. The "real" brave or counter cultural group today is the alt-right, the natsocs, Trump supporters, anyone against SJWs, anyone for free speech, anyone not anti-white racist, etc.
The Intercept was rolled out with a PR plan to provide investigative journalism. All its providing today is sloganeering, intensely establishment, agitprop. There is no investigation, just whatever is mainstream establishment agit-prop pushed without any research or investigation and absolutely no critical thinking.
I donno if they got bought out, compromised, maybe the initial PR was fake all along. But something happened between the first press releases a long time ago and today when it's basically the "weekly world news" of the democratic national committee.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @05:57AM
lowest form of anti-Trump propaganda
Trump's Twitter feed?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 07 2017, @10:44AM (1 child)
In addition to Reality Winner being a Prison Term Winner, she has a sister called Internet Winner.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 07 2017, @11:29AM
funny name, serious leaker
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 07 2017, @03:25PM (1 child)
For months now we've been hearing all these pronouncements about the nefarious "deep state" conspiracy of obama-embedded, political insider elites that are trying to thwart the democratic will of the people in order to maintain their death grip on power.
And when of these swamp-monsters is revealed... its a yoga-loving, idealistically naive 25-year old who followed Anonymous on twitter and was hired less than 6 months ago as a farsi translator.
Derp state is more like it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday June 07 2017, @04:48PM
Governments, especially law enforcement and spy agencies, are always tight lipped. Too tight lipped. Too worried about "loose lips sink ships", and covering their butts. Often "need to know" isn't enough to move them. Good thing we have the Freedom of Information Act.
I view this latest incident with a lot of skepticism. Is this young woman that stupid or naive, not to have prepared a little better? Maybe. Or is she being made into a scapegoat? We ought to hear more of her side of this story before making a judgment call.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday June 07 2017, @04:12PM (4 children)
1) Scan it in?
2) Run the scan through some kind of destructive color-reducing filter, i.e., reduce to 1-bit black and white?
3) Rotate, scale, transform, and otherwise distort the image some?
4) Knock out the EXIF data?
5) Save it as some kind of obfuscated file format?
6) Password protect it?
I'm just a repair technician and if I were going to try something like this...well, wouldn't do it at my place of work, but if I did the above would be the MINIMUM preparations I'd take.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday June 07 2017, @06:17PM
Your method might still slip through watermarking.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 07 2017, @07:43PM (1 child)
All that presumes the content itself isn't watermarked, like using interchangeable synonyms for unimportant words or punctuation like the use of the oxford comma or abberviations like use "will not" versus "won't."
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday June 08 2017, @03:51AM
Eeeeek. I hadn't even considered that. This is why I generally don't tell lies, not even small white ones: there's always better liars out there. I don't want to get involved with anything this convoluted...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Informative) by Whoever on Thursday June 08 2017, @04:33AM
Scan it as "Lineart". This will either remove the tracking dots or make them visible.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jmorris on Wednesday June 07 2017, @10:19PM (2 children)
The question I'm sure Trump is asking, if we have ANY vetting at all of people getting a classified clearance this obviously disturbed person should have been identified and prevented from being in the same building as classified info so what is wrong? At this point, we must purge the Intel community. Not only are far too many obviously playing for the wrong side, that isn't even their worst problem. Utter incompetence is the far more serious charge to lay at their door and they have no defense remaining after the last six months. The first job of an intelligence agency is keeping secrets and every one of them has failed multiple times in that task, often in very splashy and public ways.
The right often complains that government is too big. It is, but we should be focusing on the far easier case to make that government is incompetent and often outright malevolent and once that fairly obvious case is firmly implanted in the public consciousness we can move on to offering the 'it is incompetent and dangerous because it is too large' argument when we get to solutions to the incompetence problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @02:20AM (1 child)
No, their first job is to respect and protect the US Constitution. And then they have a duty to The People to inform them of any government wrongdoing. If that means whistleblowing, then so be it. At any rate, secrecy should not be their top priority.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Thursday June 08 2017, @03:39AM
The people at the top, not those at the working levels. The reason for this is they are expected to assume they DO NOT KNOW enough to have an opinion. The whole spy game is about compartmentalization, need to know, lots of disinformation, double agents, dirty tricks and spending a lot of time in legally gray areas. This is why spies are absolutely essential to any nation state but are terrifyingly dangerous, especially if not kept in constant check by those few at the top who can see the whole picture and the leaders who direct the spymasters.
If some low level minion like this space cadet accidentally sees 'juicy' intel their first assumption should be it is another loyalty test and thus obey the chain of command and the rules as issued to them. Absolutely any other default behavior in your low level minions is toxic. And from an opsec standpoint, either failing to know this crazy bitch was part of "The Resistance" or knowing and allowing her to continue working should get those responsible purged for incompetence.