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“I’m terrified, I’m terrified that she’s not going to be treated fairly,” the mother of accused leaker Reality Sara Winner told CBS News after her daughter’s arrest under the Espionage Act for stealing Top Secret documents and passing them along to a media outlet. Billie-Jean Davis says her daughter is afraid that law enforcement will “make her disappear,” but then at the same time claims that the US government wants to make an example of Winner. “That’s not fair,” she tells CBS:(VIDEO-AT-LINK) The mother and stepfather of 25-year-old Reality Leigh Winner, the NSA contractor accused of leaking government secrets, are...

Now that Reality Winner's in legal jeopardy for abusing her paid position and illegally distributed classified documents to the media and issued a threat to the White House, maybe being a "pretty, white and cute" female is something that could be exploited because she is just so much smarter than everyone else.

On Monday, a Texas civil rights attorney launched a clemency petition for National Security Agency whistleblower Reality Winner in Dallas. The attorney, Alison Grinter, encountered Winner through Crystal Mason, a Texas mother who served time alongside Winner in a Fort Worth federal prison after receiving a five-year sentence for “illegal voting” in the 2016 presidential election. Mason and Winner became friends in the facility’s newsroom, where they spent long hours watching TV news and debating current events. After hearing about Winner from Mason, Grinter began corresponding with the whistleblower’s mother, Billie Winner-Davis, on Twitter. Last year, the two women drove...

“She called us yesterday night. She asked if we could help out with relocating her cat and dog,” Winner-Davis said. Winner-Davis said her daughter never talked about her work, and her family did not know the specifics of her recently acquired job as a government contractor. She added that her daughter, while quiet about her job, was outspoken about her beliefs. “She’s very passionate. Very passionate about her views and things like that, but she’s never to my knowledge been active in politics or any of that,” said Winner-Davis. On Twitter, she expressed frequent dissatisfaction with Trump administration policies, and...

Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden violated secrecy agreements with the U.S. government that allow it to claim proceeds from a memoir he published earlier this year, a judge ruled Tuesday. U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady in Alexandria, Virginia, ruled that Snowden is liable for breach of contract with the government because he published “Permanent Record,” without submitting it for a pre-publication review, in violation agreements he signed with both the NSA and the Central Intelligence Agency. In the book, Snowden explains how he viewed himself as a whistleblower by revealing details about the government’s mass collection of emails,...

According to a new declassified ruling from the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), FBI personnel systematically abused National Security Agency (NSA) mass surveillance data in both 2017 and 2018. The 138-page ruling, which dates back to October 2018, was only unsealed 12 months later in October 2019. It offers a rare look at how the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has been abusing the constitutional privacy rights of U.S. citizens with alarming regularity. The court ruling is also a stinging rebuke to the FBI’s overreach of its ability to search surveillance intelligence databases. Key elements of the FISA court...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The White House says President Barack Obama has invited House Democratic leaders to dinner Wednesday at a hotel near the White House. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California will attend the private dinner, along with the No. 2 and No. 3 Democrats in the House, congressmen Steny Hoyer of Maryland and James Clyburn of South Carolina. The top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, Maryland's Chris Van Hollen, will be there, plus the chair of the House Democrat's campaign arm, Steve Israel of New York.

The general leading the force to free the captive enemy from the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, and inflict a humiliating defeat on the United States is so-called “civil rights” and “Constitutional” attorney Michael Ratner. It was Ratner who led the way in recruiting elite lawyers to defend the enemy combatants being interrogated at Gitmo. But Ratner is a long-time leader of two pro-Communist and anti-American organizations who have for decades lent aid and comfort to America's enemies in the Cold War and beyond. Michael Ratner began his legal career in the late 1960s at the National Lawyers Guild,...

National security insiders are trying to claim treason for the fact that President Donald Trump’s transition team discussed potentially setting up a phone call with the Russian ambassador to the United States.Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin have met publicly on several occasions, and Russia maintains an active embassy in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C.The Hill reported: Former national security adviser Michael Flynn spoke with a “senior official” in President Trump’s transition team at the Mar-a-Lago resort to discuss what he should communicate to the Russian ambassador in a highly-scrutinized series of phone calls in December of 2016,...

Department of Justice Office of Public Affairs FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Tuesday, September 17, 2019 United States Files Civil Lawsuit against Edward Snowden for Publishing a Book in Violation of CIA and NSA Non-Disclosure Agreements The United States today filed a lawsuit against Edward Snowden, a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA), who published a book entitled Permanent Record in violation of the non-disclosure agreements he signed with both CIA and NSA.The lawsuit alleges that Snowden published his book without submitting it to the agencies for pre-publication review, in violation of his...

American whistle-blower Edward Snowden said Beijing’s use of technology to control its citizens and electronically track US targets prompted him to investigate and then expose Washington’s mass surveillance programme. In his book "Permanent Record," published on Wednesday, the former US spy agency contractor who now lives in exile in Russia, detailed how he fled to Hong Kong and then Moscow after creating one of the most serious security breaches in American history. Snowden, who was a technician subcontracted to the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency for seven years, said he began to have suspicions about secret post-September...

Last Updated Sep 16, 2019 9:24 AM EDT In an exclusive U.S. TV interview, Edward Snowden said he would like to return home but that the U.S. won't agree to a fair trial."I would like to return to the United States. That is the ultimate goal. But if I'm gonna spend the rest of my life in prison, the one bottom line demand that we have to agree to is that at least I get a fair trial. And that is the one thing the government has refused to guarantee because they won't provide access to what's called a public...

The White House is seeking reauthorization of a law that lets the N.S.A. gain access to logs of Americans’ phone and text records — while acknowledging that the program has been indefinitely halted. Breaking a long silence about a high-profile National Security Agency program that sifts records of Americans’ telephone calls and text messages in search of terrorists, the Trump administration on Thursday acknowledged for the first time that the system has been indefinitely shut down — but asked Congress to extend its legal basis anyway. In a letter to Congress delivered on Thursday and obtained by The New York...

Independent journalist Matt Kennard has published a number of documents starkly revealing the degree to which The Guardian has been compromised by British security services, and the impact this relationship has on its reporting of key issues. The newspaper has long sought to present itself - to readers and advertisers alike - as Britain’s foremost ‘anti-establishment’ outlet, and took a leading role in reporting on the mass WikiLeaks cable dump in 2010, and the Edward Snowden leaks in 2013, garnering widespread praise and several prestigious journalism awards in the process. In the latter case, the The Guardian’s dissident credentials were...

A man sets himself on fire Wednesday on the Ellipse in downtown Washington, across from the White House, the Secret Service said. A spokesman for the Washington Fire Department tells CNBC, “I can confirm that we’ve transported one patient with burns from the Ellipse and we’re now on the scene assisting law enforcement,” referring to Park Police and U.S. Secret Service officers. Alina Berzins says she was visiting the National Mall with two of her cousins from Bolivia when “we saw this man” on the Ellipse and “he starts running, and then we saw him covered in flames.”

"Daniel Ellsberg (born April 7, 1931) is a former American military analyst employed by the RAND Corporation who precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Pentagon study of government decision-making about the Vietnam War, to The New York Times and other newspapers."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg _____________________________________________________________ "As a response to the leaks, the Nixon administration began a campaign against further leaks and against Ellsberg personally. Aides Egil Krogh and David Young under John Ehrlichman's supervision created the 'White House Plumbers,' which would later lead to the Watergate burglaries."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg#Fallout _____________________________________________________________ So what is Daniel Ellsberg...

LONDON (AP) — Edward Snowden, the former security contractor who leaked classified information about U.S. surveillance programs, says the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is a blow to media freedom. "Images of Ecuador's ambassador inviting the UK's secret police into the embassy to drag a publisher of--like it or not--award-winning journalism out of the building are going to end up in the history books," Snowden said in a tweet. "Assange's critics may cheer, but this is a dark moment for press freedom." Snowden was charged by the United States in 2013 of violating the country’s espionage act. He was...

A few weeks after leaving office, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton may have breathed a sigh of relief and reassurance when Director of National Intelligence James Clapper denied reports of the National Security Agency eavesdropping on Americans. After all, Clinton had been handling official business at the State Department like many Americans do with their personal business, on an unsecured server. In sworn testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on March 12, 2013, Clapper said the NSA was not collecting, wittingly, “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans,” which presumably would have...

A Filipino woman and her daughter who sheltered U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden in Hong Kong have been granted asylum in Canada. Vanessa Rodel, 42, and her 7-year-old daughter Keana Nihinsa, landed Monday night at Toronto Pearson International Airport after a flight from Hong Kong, The Globe and Mail reported. The Filipino nationals were to arrive in Montreal Tuesday where they plan to make a home with the help of non-profit group For the Refugees that had sponsored them. "I feel like I'm free," Rodel told reporters in Toronto. "I can sleep well." Following their arrival in the Ontario capital, Snowden...

A former Minneapolis FBI agent caught leaking classified documents to The Intercept pleaded guilty in federal court in St. Paul Tuesday afternoon.