Posted on 06/08/2017 5:25:11 AM PDT by Kaslin
Last weekend, the FBI arrested an employee of a corporation in Augusta, Georgia, that had a contract with the National Security Agency and charged her with espionage. Espionage occurs when someone who has been entrusted to safeguard state secrets fails to do so. In this case, the government alleges that the person to whom state secrets had been entrusted is 25-year-old Reality Leigh Winner, who had a top-secret national security clearance.
The government claims that Winner downloaded and printed a top-secret NSA report, removed the printed version of the report from her employer's premises, and then mailed it to The Intercept, a highly regarded international media outlet that exposes government wrongdoing.
The government says it learned of this when folks from The Intercept called the NSA and told agents what they had received and what they planned to publish. After hearing agents describe the potential harm to their work if the full report were to be released, The Intercept agreed to redact certain portions, though it published the bulk of the report.
The report is startling, as it reveals that the NSA discovered that Russian hackers in late October and early November 2016 planted cookies (attractive, uniquely tailored links) into the websites of 122 American city and county clerks responsible for counting ballots in the presidential election. This means that if any employee of those clerks' offices clicked onto any cookie, the hackers had access to -- and thus the ability to interfere with -- the tabulation of votes. This NSA report is at sharp odds with the denials of Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential election made last year by President Barack Obama and made last week by Russian President Vladimir Putin, and it is profoundly more detailed and alarming than anything the federal government has thus far revealed.
Doesn't the American public have the right to know what the Russians did in the election? Is it necessarily criminal to make such things public? Isn't the NSA supposed to protect us from foreign hackers who are attempting to interfere with the core American electoral process -- the election of the president -- and not keep us in the dark if it fails to do so?
Here is the back story.
I have argued since 2013, when we first learned from the Edward Snowden revelations that the NSA has gathered too much data about too many innocent people since 2005, that it does so in violation of the Constitution and federal law and that it suffers from information overload -- meaning it has more raw data than it has resources to examine in a timely and effective manner.
The result of all this is liberty lost -- as innocents have their privacy invaded and, as we know, sometimes even revealed to the public for political purposes -- and our safety compromised, since the NSA repeatedly discovers that it had all relevant communications of killers before the killings but does not connect the dots until too late, as in Boston, San Bernardino and Orlando; and the same can be said for our British partners in Manchester and London during the past two weeks.
The stated purpose of all this suspicionless bulk spying on all of us all the time is to keep us safe. Yet we know that the NSA has failed at that, and we know from a recent judicial condemnation of the NSA that it has failed to protect our liberties. Now we know that it has failed to protect our presidential election.
Is it a crime to reveal what the FBI says Winner revealed? In a word, yes. Yet I argue for understanding the full picture here. If she did as the FBI alleges, she committed a violation of federal law. However, it appears she did not do so for petty, political, financial or venal reasons; rather, she may have done so for the American people to know that the spies who have failed us would keep us ignorant and vulnerable.
Can The Intercept be prosecuted for revealing top-secret material to the public? In a word, no. The Supreme Court made clear in the Pentagon Papers case in 1971 that a media entity may freely publish matters that are material to the public interest, notwithstanding the source of the matters or the behavior of the source that delivered the matters to it. This is grounded in the essence of personal liberty in a free society. In matters of material interest to the public, the public's right to know what the government is doing or has failed to do constitutionally trumps the government's right to secrecy.
Where does all this leave us? Reality Winner may very well be a patriot who risked her career and freedom to warn the American public of what the government was afraid to acknowledge -- that mass spying keeps us neither safe nor free. No doubt the government doesn't see it that way. This case has embarrassed the government, and she will most likely be prosecuted. I hope the judge in her case lets her lawyers argue that because we live in perilous times, the people are entitled to know what the government does and fails to do in our names to address the peril so we can change the government when it fails.
The remedy for the revelation of truth should consist in the truth's ability to flourish in the marketplace of ideas rather than in the punishment of person revealing information. The core principle of democracy is that the people have consented to the government. When the government keeps vital secrets from us -- particularly secrets that embarrass it, secrets that cause us to view it differently, secrets of failure -- we end up with a government that we do not know or trust. And one that ultimately lacks our consent.
> “Defending Reality Winner is incorrect, however, because this radical took it upon herself to decide to release Top Secret material.”
Be careful. It appears you are believing this fiction to be factual. The ‘Top Secret’ material is a fiction.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3559073/posts?page=17#17
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3559073/posts?page=19#19
guess she is what Rush called radicalized.
The clerks have their own websites? The hackers broke into county websites? The hackers left links on forums in websites? The hackers sent phishing emails? The hackers forged cookies to hack email accounts (like Yahoo)?
Here's Yahoo: Yahoo first mentioned ‘forged cookies’ when it announced the massive hack back in December: ‘Based on the ongoing investigation, we believe an unauthorized third party accessed our proprietary code to learn how to forge cookies.’
Uh huh. The only thing worse than the "Russian hacking" stories is them leaving out how we leave the door wide open. What security?
But the people who are authorized to make the decisions are appointed for political reasons and are totally unaccountable - which our Founding Fathers said GUARANTEES absolute corruption. This is how we end up with a “deep state” that is at war with the Constitution and the American public. The only way that deep state can be exposed and excised is if peons expose it. That’s what whistleblowers are and why they are protected. That’s also why Obama has systematically attacked both whistleblowers and inspectors general.
And I do believe Napolitano is right in bringing that issue to our attention. We’s GOT to do something to hold the deep state accountable, and to make sure they never gain this total power again.
If Comey had knowledge about Russian phishing attacks (or even CIA attacks disguised as the Russians, as we know is fully possible) and didn’t alert the victims of those attacks then he is derelict in his duty. When did the FBI know of these phishing attacks, and when did they notify the victims?
And if our election system’s vote-counting process is this vulnerable to alteration, then none of the elections we’ve had could ever be trusted, because the deep state itself had the ability to alter elections all along.
But I doubt the counting is that vulnerable, or Brennan and Clapper would not have had to hire Dennis Montgomery to invisibly (and undetectably) download the FL voter database and upload an altered database for the 2012 election. If what Montgomery says is true, then Clapper and Brennan are caught trying to hack the 2012 election in which Obama was re-elected. But it also affirms that the vote tabulation couldn’t be altered massively enough (in that election, at least) just by bribing/threatening some peon election officials. They had to first move enough voters into the right (manipulable) precincts.
Agreed. This girl visited the White House in April 2016, according to her Facebook check-ins. White House visitor logs should be checked because maybe she was a tourist. She has a Luciferian tattoo on her back. She looks perhaps also transgender??? There is way more to this story — and her name seems like a code word for the operation she was attempting to pull off. Some of her social media identifies her as “Sara.”
Judge Nap has a couple of fundamental items incorrect in his analysis. First, what he described as a ‘cookie’ is not. Cookies are text files that are not executable and contain elemental bits of data about the person who is logged onto the computer. They can be maintained locally (on the users computer) or at the host site. They in no way can interfere with other applications on the users PC. What he is describing is a Trojan Horse. They are executable and can interfere (if not completely hijack) a users PC.
Next, Ms. Winner did not release classified information for the greater good. She did so to support her pet cause, that being Iran. Nothing more treacherous could be done in light of global terrorism. The harm she may have inflicted on these United States is yet to be realized and may cause the life on someone working in the field due to how the intel was collected. The ramifications may ripple through the next several years.
What she did is Treason.
Dimwits can be patriots.
And she was in her position because she knows four languages.
But I disagree with the judge here.
He is wrong. She did it for political reasons.
Precisely WHAT do you base this assertion on?
bump
Napolitano has been compromised. Is now a swamp-dweller.
Napolitano is not a Republican, nor a democrat. He’s a libertarian.
He’s carrying water for the swamp-dwellers. He’s now part of the problem.
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