Posted on 06/10/2017 10:50:07 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
The value of the information she made available is great—but real-world news events may have gotten ahead of her.
Some people have a fixed, principled stance on intelligence leaks—transparency in government is always for the good, for example, or releasing classified intelligence is never appropriate. But for most of us, the difference between a courageous whistle-blower—who risks their career and freedom to expose some dark secret the government doesn’t want us to know—and a leaker—who undermines national security, may put people at risk and gives comfort to our adversaries—is a subjective one. Most people celebrate the release of information they want to see released and condemn leaks that reveal stuff that they don’t want revealed. It usually comes down to partisanship or ideology. You can call that hypocrisy, or you can chalk it up to human nature; it is what it is.
In the days following The Intercept’s report revealing that the NSA had evidence that Russian military intelligence “executed a cyberattack on at least one US voting software supplier and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials just days before last November’s presidential election,” the debate over whether Reality Leigh Winner, the 25-year-old NSA contractor who allegedly sent the document to The Intercept—and was arrested only minutes after the piece was published—is a hero or a traitor seems muted compared to the noisy disagreements that followed Chelsea Manning’s or Edward Snowden’s revelations.
That may be because of her lack of tradecraft, her own failure to protect herself as a source. While The Intercept has come under fire—from people like veteran national-security reporter Barton Gellman—for its role in Winner’s swift apprehension, Winner herself was one of only six people who had access to the document, and she alone had e-mailed The Intercept from her work computer. Gellman tweeted that Winner “would have been lead suspect no matter what.”
But whatever mistakes she made in handling the documents, the public interest value of the material that Winner is accused of revealing seems obvious. Coming just days after Vladimir Putin hinted that Russia had hacked the election but then claimed that it could have been the work of “patriots” unaffiliated with the Russian government, The Intercept reported the first direct link to the GRU, the Russian military intelligence agency.
And legal scholar Claire Finkelstein, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law, explains that “what’s significant about this report is that we have moved from an awareness of Russian covert operations, some of which was the kind of thing that intelligence communities engage with all the time, to something that looks more like a cyber-attack.
“It was designed to provide the Russians with techniques, information and the ability to directly manipulate election registration systems, and could have impacted the outcome of the 2016 presidential election,” says Finkelstein. “Whether they accomplished this or not, is another question. And most experts are not claiming that it changed the vote results. But I think the emphasis on results is overblown because the fact is that if they didn’t impact the results of this election, they might do so the next time.”
The public has a pressing need to understand that threat. During his hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday, former FBI director James Comey was asked whether “the Russian activity in the 2016 election [was] a one-off proposition, or is this part of a long-term strategy? Will they be back?” His reply: “Oh, it is a long-term practice of theirs. It’s stepped up a notch in a significant way in ‘16. They’ll be back.”
So if the value of the information Winner made public were the sole criteria, she should probably be lionized in the same way that many people have lauded Edward Snowden. But there are other important questions that need to be asked when evaluating whether a leak of classified material is justified. First, could the leak put intelligence operatives or others in danger? That doesn’t appear to be the case here. The Intercept was careful to redact portions of the document that might have revealed the NSA’s “sources and methods.”
Then, could the leaker have achieved the same ends going through normal channels? Stanford political scientist Scott Sagan, co-editor of Insider Threats, says that “many cases of insider attack—whether it’s a leaker, a spy or a saboteur—are done by highly disgruntled workers. There’s a lot that organizations can do reduce the effects of disgruntlement. One obvious thing that makes it less likely that insiders will act against an organization is to have the leaders of that organization be squeaky-clean. One possible motive in this case, or in other cases of leaking, is a concern that the people at the top of the administration are not letting justice be served in terms of having fair reviews and an impartial investigation into exactly what Russia has done.”
According to the FBI, Winner, who pleaded not guilty to espionage charges this week, admitted to agents that she copied the document and sent it to The Intercept. She also told investigators that she was “mad about what she had recently seen in the media” and “wanted to set the facts right.” According to The Atlantic’s Aria Bendix, “Winner regularly tweeted about Trump—notably calling him a ‘piece of sh*t’ in February. Winner’s mother, Billie Winner-Davis, told The Guardian that her daughter was ‘not a fan of [President] Trump,’ but added that Winner wasn’t ‘someone who would go and riot or picket.’”
So in her mind, Winner, rocked by the election like so many of us but with documents showing that the Russian government hacked into American elections systems, was battling fake news.
Whether that belief was justified at the time hinges on when she sent the document. According to an FBI affidavit, it was “on or about May 9,” eight days before the appointment of former FBI director Robert Mueller as a special counsel charged with investigating possible collusion between the Russians and the Trump campaign.
On May 9, Winner had every reason to believe that those at the top were uninterested in pursuing the truth. The White House was obfuscating, calling it fake news and dismissing it all as a desperate attempt by Democrats to shift blame away from Hillary Clinton for losing an election she should have won. Two weeks earlier, Tim Mak from The Daily Beast had reported that the Senate’s investigation was underfunded and had no full-time staff and that the part-timers working the probe “do not have significant investigative experience.” He remarked that the investigation was moving much slower than previous ones that had taken “years to accomplish.” The House investigation was an obvious joke after Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) had discredited himself by running cover for Trump. He had recused himself a month before the FBI says Winner leaked the NSA document.
But Mueller’s appointment on May 17 was a game-changer. Even those who have ideological or policy differences with the former FBI director acknowledge that he’s a tireless investigator who isn’t easily swayed by political pressure. During his testimony on Thursday, James Comey called Mueller “a dogged, tough person,” adding that “you can have high confidence that, when it’s done, he’s turned over all the rocks.”
Claire Finkelstein says that the distinction between a leaker and a whistle-blower depends on the circumstances. “Sometimes a person blows the whistle by leaking,” she says. “In this case, I do think that given that we now have a special prosecutor in place, it would be most appropriate for someone who has security clearances to send their information to the investigator” rather than to the media.
Scott Sagan was cautious to weigh in on this question as it relates to Reality Winner because “we don’t have all the facts,” but agreed in a general sense that Mueller should inspire confidence in the integrity of at least one of the ongoing investigations into “Kremlingate.”
This means that Reality Winner acted at a time when a reasonable person could have concluded that the system wasn’t working, but then the appointment of Mueller overtook her actions. If the government’s case is right, that event took place during the three weeks or so that it took for The Intercept to receive the document and report, write and vet their story. So one can look at the question in one of two ways: Either Winner acted as a patriot trying to get the truth out to the American people, or she acted impulsively and ended up facing charges for releasing information that Mueller almost certainly has, and that would likely have come out in the end, had she honored her security clearance.
An irony here is that, according to James Comey, had Donald Trump not tried to influence the FBI director, and then fired him when that failed, Comey would not have leaked an unclassified memo to The New York Times detailing Trump’s efforts and Robert Mueller likely would not have been appointed.
That may be murky, but one thing is clear: Reality Winner is likely to have the book thrown at her by a Justice Department that’s been under heavy pressure from the White House to crack down on leaks. And as CIA whistle-blower John Kiriakou told ThinkProgress, that would “most certainly [have] a chilling effect” on other potential whistle-blowers.
No. She is still holding on to solid stste drive with thoudands of files on it.
She is a complete scumbag who should be forced to live under shariah with a typical shariah compliant husband.
Well, Rosie O’Dumbass says so and there’s a go fund me page set up for her, so she is according to the PC “not sees”.
Commies love dead red ted kennedy’s collaboration with the Soviets to influence the 1984 presidential election.
Meanwhile Comey’s denial under oath that Trump’s team didn’t collude with Russian hackers has been blown over by the treasonous DNC media.
> “She is still holding on to solid stste drive with thoudands of files on it.”
Fabricated files, planted on the thumbdrive, with an arranged ‘arrest’ so that Sessions would have no option but to make it look official.
By the way, NSA files are not transferable to any outside devices unless authorized through a chain of command.
She is a criminal, but on the plus side, she has inadvertently made the case for ending digital voting machines, and the march towards massive on-line voting fraud the Democrats crave. The Reality is that digital voting machines are an invitation to fraud. How to defeat the Russian menace to Democracy? Require paper ballots with a genuine audit trail.
So surprising that there is zero press coverage of the clear policy implications of what she leaked — the NSA’s unverifiable pretense that they caught the GRU hacking the election is all they care about.
So, Snowdon authorized himself?
Thanks for the info. I hadn’t known that. I wonder if she was a plant...
The NATION us a longtime communist rag.
The Nation‘s Sympathy for Communism
by ANNE HOBSON July 23, 2014
https://spectator.org/60049_nations-sympathy-communism/
The communist apologists over at the Nation, the self-described “flagship of the left,” have outdone themselves. The liberal rag, notorious for its long record of useful idiocy in the service of tin-pot dictators and tyrants, has once again fallen in love with Castro’s Cuba. You would think it was the sixties all over again.
A self-congratulatory article about the Nation‘s educational staff trip to Cuba sets a dangerous precedent by commending the Cuban government for its political and economic advancements. But the Castro regime is just as guilty of crimes against humanity as it was four decades ago. Just because the island is showing feints at “progress” does not make the regime worthy of praise.
Last week, Cuba renewed its ties with Russia—Big Brother’s Big Brother. Putin forgave 90 percent of Cuba’s debt, amounting to $32 billion. There are also reports, and denials, that Russia has agreed to fund the Lourdes electronic eavesdropping base in Cuba.
The Nation article points to the following as an example of positive government-induced change: the director of the Cuban National Center for Sex Education “is considering legalizing same-sex marriage, subsidizing sex-change operations, and banning sexual discrimination at the workplace.” Firstly, it is not government’s obligation to subsidize a sex-change operation. Furthermore, the fact that one person—center director Mariela Castro, President Raul Castro’s daughter—is deciding the policies according to her whims, and her whims alone, is itself a frightening fact of communism.
The Nation goes on to claim:
Cuba’s infant-mortality rate is lower than ours, for example, and in indicators like Uneven Economic Development, Poverty, and Economic Decline, the separation between Cuba and the United States is narrower than you might imagine.
There are many things wrong with this statement. First, Cuba’s infant-mortality rate is known to be a government-fabricated lie. The real rate is 34 percent higher than in the U.S. Castro’s regime pays doctors to manipulate the statistics.
Second, economic indicators of third-world countries mirroring economic indicators of first-world countries are not surprising. Normal statistical distributions are exactly that—normal. We may have a similar proportion of people under the poverty line. But our poverty line represents a standard of living notably higher than what’s available to much of the Cuban middle class. And standard of living is what matters. Most Cubans are embarrassed to welcome foreigners into their houses because of how little they have. A desk fan costs a month’s worth of wages. One-room homes contain wooden lofts to create more space for sleeping.
Cubans are not allowed to guide foreigners without permits. Locals are prohibited from visiting Varadero Beach, a primary destination for many foreigners. Visitors use an entirely different currency than native Cubans. Like North Korea, Cuba does its best to portray its country as thriving: look at how great the facades are! And writers at the Nation have once again fallen for the ruse.
For example, the author declares that it is a false assumption that dissent is prohibited and punished in Cuba. On my first trip to Cuba in 2006, I asked a Cuban named David if he was allowed to speak about politics. He took me into a room, closed the windows, and shut the door. “I am afraid,” he told me, “if my neighbor overhears me speaking of this he will turn me in to the police.”
On each block in Cuba there is a building with a symbol of an eye on the door. This houses a member of the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR), who is responsible for tattling on his neighbors and making sure his block is adhering to the current government mandate.
What the Nation calls “an education exchange” was a tour for communist sympathizers. And the primary evidence for the Nation‘s arguments is the word of a government-approved guide. In 2008, I had one such guide tell me that John Lennon was murdered in a CIA plot. Right, and North Korea won the World Cup.
What the article ignores is that the only source of positive change in Cuba lies in the resourcefulness and resilience of the Cuban people themselves. Their social pressure initiated the changes that the government was helpless to prevent save for by a use of overwhelming military force. Cuba had a strong black market for everyday goods, so the Cuban government legalized small businesses and private professions that already existed. Cubans backwards-engineered cell phones, so the government was forced to allow citizens to have cell service. The growing homosexual scene in Havana pressured the government to begin changing its stance.
Therein lies the true story. It’s the people, not the regime, that deserve praise for progress.
In many countries she’d be taken out and shot.
Shame anyone supporting Winner. Those that do, should also be investigated as traitors or enemy combatants.
As post #6 here from freeper Hostage points out- in a manner of speaking vis a vis NSA intercept downstream restrictions-— this was “red meat” thrown out (as is often done in really secure intel systems) to “out” leakers. It is much more sophisticated than that— but the so called “content”, which the Intercept bit on as well— was created assumedly by counterintel (w/in sig-int, signals intelligence circles, possibly “white hat” FBI- which should be their purview, but perhaps in a highly restricted flow), and, in view of the fact that the “russia” investigation could (should) include a false narrative house cleaning element, along with factual proof of clinton machine/obama/rice/brennan/clapper “unmasking” and thus collusion exposing our real intel to the russians,this is intriguing. We shall know them by the fruits of their “resistance”, and they are in positions like this employee of another poorly vetting “contractor” who should lose their contract as well.
At a minimum, this should “encourage others” that they better watch their step, and keep their self-righteous traitorous keyboards silent. Come down, hard- on everyone, and especially WH insiders with no business “lining their nest” as paid informants.
One other observation from this article.
It comments on
“because of her lack of tradecraft, her own failure to protect herself as a source”.... BS. This was a goofball, hired from the Air Force with some kind of language skills- but it was no professional spy (to know any tradecraft). A political moron, who lives in i-phone-landia of pink ponies and sparkling idiocy with a well-infused sense of self righteous social justice warrior and overweening ego (to “direct” national policy). Snowden was more sophisticated but has similar markers and hubris. And most likely is a russian asset for disinformation. The russians wanted hitlery and their old corrupt dem pals who hate this country. Simple as that— this chickie is not a “one-off”— there are lots in the point and click world.
100 phishing emails?
One computer system infected with malware that had no known impact on the vote count?
A bunch of 19 year old Russian college students could have pulled this off while they were drinking vodka shooters and playing video games.
I get phishing emails from Russia every week.
Is it really a national security issue?
I’m hoping she will get together with Anthony.
Winner-Weiner
Snowden worked for NSA contractor Booz-Allen-Hamilton working at an NSA facility in Hawaii at the time he copied NSA files which had been authorized for release to BAH for analysis.
The security breach was on BAH’s part.
Inside the NSA, it is another story. The transfer of files is blocked unless there is authorization through a chain of command.
So Reality Winner’s incident is in a different context and setting than that of Snowden’s.
It is a safe bet that the leaked files of Reality were fabricated and handed to her with a scheme to get arrested and call her a Bernie supporter who hated Trump.
A few facts:
* Reality Winner is not her real name. It’s a fake name used as a dig against President Trump and his former success as a Reality show producer.
* She was a coffee runner for 2 weeks before suddenly becoming an NSA Analyst.
* Many Bernie supporters hate Hillary more than Trump because they know Hillary stole the primary (and money) from Bernie Sanders.
The files handed to the coffee runner are in the same category as the Steele dossier.
Reality Winner will likely never see a Congressional hearing as there will be no audit trail of authorization of her files, therefore the files cannot be confirmed to be NSA files.
The purpose of this scam is the same as the Steele dossier (2 Russian women urinating on Donald Trump), to feed propaganda to the national news media and dominate the news cycle to buy time for McCabe to find a Guccifer 2.0 to arrest and become a star witness against Trump.
McCabe has had since late March a reward of $3 million for the arrest of Guccifer 2.0. Guccifer 2.0 does not exist. It was invented to create a story of ‘hack’ for the DNC leaks. There is an important distinction between ‘leak’ versus ‘hack.’
McCabe has had difficulty finding a stooge to act the part of Guccifer 2.0. The plan is to get a stooge to step forward, agree to act the part of Guccifer 2.0 and to be trained by MWW in NYC to say that Trump people paid him to hack DNC and others, then receive immunity for testifying, pay him $3 million and send him back to Europe.
It’s taking time for McCabe to get the suitable Guccifer 2.0 who can play the part without blowing the cover.
Some very fine actors can be bought easily for $3 million and immunity.
Reality Winner aka Honey Boo-Boo is a character ‘insert’ to keep the Russia lie going.
MWW is a PR firm in NYC (google their website). The Podesta and Wasserman-Shultz’s relatives are there, they work for the Democrats and are part of the Hillary camp. They are busy writing scripts for the impeachment of Donald Trump. It’s safe to say that a janitor could witness their whiteboards and their storyboards covered with script ideas and action items to write the fake news narratives and the coming ‘star witness’ testimony before Congress.
By now, much of the American public has caught on to fake news. They know something is wrong. But the truth does not matter to the Podestas, etc. Their necks are at risk as well as trillions of dollars. They will do anything to keep from being cornered.
I think you have it right. From what little info there is, she went straight from high school into the military where apparently she had an aptitude for language and received training that then allowed her to go to work for this contractor. But she has only a minimal education and probably little political or intellectual sophistication. Add the impulsiveness of youth and the programming from pop culture and this is what you get.
These kids think that the number of views you get on YouTube is more important than truthfulness and that they are entitled to do whatever they wish in the pursuit of righting what they perceive to be wrongs.
These educational defecits will soon be filled for them, however.
Your 'facts' are backed up with what? Linkies?
Her obvious motivation is her hatred of Trump, so she exposes TS information that isn’t connected to Trump. A total non sequitur that does nothing, either legally or morally, to justify her actions. What will drive her conviction and sentencing won’t be Trump’s desire to stop leaks. It will be the unknown disposition of her previous illegal activities in the Air Force.
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