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In the latest phase of her record sentence for whistleblowing, former National Security Agency linguist Reality Winner is a short drive to the blazing hot summertime beaches on Texass Gulf coast. But she cant get near them. She cant even go into the yard of a neighbor who invited her to aid in his beekeeping project.

Convicted under the Espionage Act for having shared a classified document on threats to election security with the media, Winner has been released to home confinement but wears an unwieldy ankle bracelet. It beeps even if she strays too far within her familys yard.

Not wanting her to miss out, a high school friend showed up on a recent day with a kiddie swimming pool and some sand. Mom, Im going to the beach today, Winner said, her mother Billie Winner-Davis recalled. The pair filled the kids toy and Winner waded in.

Winners family and friends are thrilled to have her home after four years behind bars a stint that took miserable turns as her release date neared. Shecontracted Covid-19 as part of a mass infection in her prison, filed a sexual assault complaint against a guard, and went thirsty and cold when her facility lost heat and water in February during Texass deadly winter storm.

I really want the public to know that theyre not seeing Reality Winner, theyre not hearing from Reality Winner, because she is under some serious restrictions.

Despite their elation that she is out of prison, though, Winners family and friends say she is far from free. Every day is still marked by intrusions, like the app carceral authorities require her to put on her phone to monitor her and needing prior approval to go to Walmart with her mother for errands. Winner is projected to be transferred from home confinement to supervised release in November.

Thats why they are continuing their year-and-a-half-long campaign for a presidential pardon or clemency, saying the whistleblower is being gagged from telling her own story.

I really want the public to know that theyre not seeing Reality Winner, theyre not hearing from Reality Winner, because she is under some serious restrictions, Winner-Davis said.

Winner-Davis added that Reality, who is under a gag order, is also banned from using social media, a condition her attorney, Alison Grinter, said is normal and up to the discretion of halfway house authorities.

Grinter, speaking recently on Democracy Now, said a pardon for Winner is both something she and her country deserve.

Reality released a document that gave us information that we needed to know at a time that we absolutely needed to know it, Grinter said. And she was in prison not because the information was a danger or put anyone in danger. She was in prison to salve the insecurities of one man who was concerned about the validity of his election win.

Left/Top: Reality Winner sits on her bed at her mothers home while charging her ankle monitor as she serves a home confinement sentence in Kingsville, Texas, on July 3, 2021. Right/Bottom: A landscape near Reality Winners home in Kingsville, Texas, on July 3, 2021.Credit: Photos: Christopher Lee for The Intercept

Winner is currently serving the longest prison sentence of its kind under the Espionage Act, a World War I-era law used in recent years to send journalists sources to prison, even as comparable defendants have simply gotten probation for charges of mishandling classified information.

The government itself acknowledges that Winners intent was to send the document she leaked to journalists and therefore warn the American public, rather than use it for personal gain. The NSA report detailed phishing attacks by Russian military intelligence against local U.S. election officials and was published in a June 2017 article by The Intercept. (The Press Freedom Defense Fund which is part of The Intercepts parent company, First Look Institute supported Winners legal defense.)

Released from a Fort Worth, Texas, federal prison one day shy of the four-year anniversary of her June 3 arrest, Winners path to her parents remote southern Texas home was a bumpy one. The journey began with a 23-day quarantine with five other women in a hospital patient-sized room. After that, her family picked her up for a long drive down through Texas in which they had a matter of hours to deliver her to a halfway house, where she stayed for a week before being released toher rural childhood home. There, paper labels with Arabic vocabulary words are still taped to household items early remnants from the series of events that would lead her to prison when, as a teenager eager to learn foreign languages, she signed up for the military.

Taking advantage of the window of time they had with her as they drove her to the halfway house, her family and close friends planned a series of surprises. Winner met her infant niece, whom the whistleblower had only seen on video chats and Shutterfly-printed postcards, due to visitation bans at prisonamid the pandemic.

While sitting in her parents car and sorting through her belongings, she saw the blond hair of her sister, Brittany Winner, in the distance in a park and tried to jump out of the moving vehicle. She dropped everything on her lap and just ran, her mother said. She ran to Brittany and the baby.

Her sister said the whistleblower was trembling, still unnerved by a guard who had told her that morning that she would not be released. Just the look in her eyes, she almost looked, like, dead, so traumatized and not really believing that everything was happening, Brittany Winner said. And, at some point, I was talking to her, she just reached up in the middle of my sentence to touch my face, and she said, Youre real, right?'

At the southernmost point in their trip toward home, two other loved ones were waiting for her: Wendy Collins, a family friend from Philadelphia who spearheads a social media campaign calling for her pardon, and Collinss partner.

They ate at a Thai restaurant as they counted down the minutes to her report time to the halfway house. Collins hugged the whistleblower for the first time since their friendship and Collinss tireless advocacy began.

Collins said, I flew for the hug.

Reality Winner gives her dog a kiss as they play outside at her mothers home in Kingsville, Texas, on July 3, 2021.

Photo: Christopher Lee for The Intercept

Reality Winner sits in a tarp full of beach sand, brought to her by a friend, at her mothers home in Kingsville, Texas, on July 3, 2021.

Photo: Christopher Lee for The Intercept

At her familys quiet home, Winner schedules her days in an orderly way, similar to her life before the arrest time slots for online yoga courses, cycling exercise routines, and a new part-time job as a researcher for a documentary filmmaker. She relishes spending time with her family dog, Domino, and cat, Fiona, since Winner lost ownership of her own pets, a dog named Mickey and cat named Mina, in the chaos after her arrest. In her down time, she sorts through books supporters have sent her and boxes of belongings from her Augusta, Georgia, home, which was raided by a fleet of armed federal agents whose interrogation of Winner would later be characterized by the government as a voluntary interview one in which she was never read her Miranda rights.

When the heat breaks in the evenings, her mother says Reality prefers to not watch TV, opting instead to breathe in fresh air on the back patio.

Shes seen people from all walks of life just be completely taken advantage of by the system, especially people of color. And that is something that she just cant tune out.

Looking toward the future, when she can speak publicly and take more control over her life, her sister said she expects the whistleblower to advocate for incarcerated people. Shes seen people from all walks of life just be completely taken advantage of by the system, especially people of color, Brittany Winner said. And that is something that she just cant tune out. She cant just live her quiet life.

When shes free to go to the water the Gulf of Mexico, not the kiddie pool out back the whistleblower hopes to go the Texas shoreline to plant mangroves, something Winner, long an environmental advocate, told her sister she wants to do in order to heal coastal ecosystems.

Grateful for even this incomplete freedom, the sisters send each other a near-constant flurry of updates. Not a day goes by when she and her sister dont exchange50 or more text messages and phone calls, including baby photos and videos of Reality practicing yoga with her ankle bracelet in her parents garage. I feel lucky to have my sister back, Brittany Winner said. And one of the things that I was scared of was that she was going to be changed you know, like damaged, like she wasnt going to be the same person because of four years in prison.

How can that not mess you up? But despite the trauma, I feel like shes the same,she said. At least with me. Shes the same person.

Originally posted here:
Home, but Not Free: NSA Whistleblower Reality Winner Adjusts to Her Release From Prison Taylor Barnes - The Intercept

Urian B., Tech Times 09 July 2021, 03:07 am

(Photo : Screenshot from Tor Browser) Tor Encryption can Allegedly be Accessed by the NSA, Says Security Expert

Tor encryption can allegedly be accessed by the NSA according to a security expert. While the Tor browser is popular amongst people who would prefer to protect their identity and what they are doing online, a security expert suggests that the NSA might still be able to access the encrypted data.

When it actually turned out that the popular Firefox JavaScript Tor vulnerability shenanigans directly came from the NSA and not really the FBI, it became pretty clear that the popular agency was really looking to undermine the access of Tor's vastly used anonymous internet. According to Gizmodo, it's pretty much like a moth to a flame.

A security expert by the name of Robert Graham, however, has outlined his reasons for actually believing that the NSA might not even need tricks and paltry exploits in order for them to gain access to Tor, according to a blog post on Erratasec. Why? The security expert notes that this is because they might already have the keys to the kingdom. If they don't, then they might be able to, according to arsTechnica.

Tor uses 1024 bit keys in order for it to be able to run a lot of its encryption and it is currently pretty much agreed that the actual NSA is capable of cracking these with the use of custom chips that IBM along with other manufacturers make for them. It was noted that this is especially true for anyone that is still using the older versions of Tor like the Tor 2.3 version.

The newer Tor 2.4 version, however, has better security but it was said that only about 10% of Tor's total servers have actually been upgraded. The security researcher, Graham, ran a sort of "hostile" exit node on a massive 22,920 Tor connections in order to look at the encryption that is mediated by algorithms on the incoming connections.

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There were only about 24% that were using the newer Tor 2.4 version software. This means that there are still about 76% of users that were still using the older, NSA-vulnerable version keys.

According to the article by arsTechnica, Graham then called on Tor Project leaders to try and do a better job of getting their end users to finally upgrade to the newer 2.4 version. He then wrote that of course, this is basically just guessing when it comes to finding out the NSA's true capabilities.

He also noted that it turns out that the newer elliptical keys can turn out to be much easier to be cracked than previously thought. This means that the older software might actually be more secure. It was noted however that due to the 1024 bit RSA/DH being used as a popular SSL encryption, Graham assumes that the NSA is best at cracking it.

Related Article:Department of Health Probe by UK Information Commissioner Launched Due to Private Emails Used for Alleged Official Business

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by Urian B.

2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.

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Tor Encryption can Allegedly be Accessed by the NSA, Says Security Expert - Tech Times

Former National Security Agency Deputy Director Chris Inglis was formally sworn in as the first White House national cyber director on Monday.

Ingliss swearing-in, confirmed to The Hill by a spokesperson for the White Houses National Security Council, came almost a month after the Senate unanimously approved his nomination andfollows multiple major cybersecurity incidents such as last weeks ransomware attack on software group Kaseya.

Bloomberg Government first reported Inglis's plannedswearing-in late last week.

Inglis will be the first to serve as the White House cyber czar after the position was created as part of the most recent National Defense Authorization Act. It is an expansion of the previous White House cybersecurity coordinator role that was eliminated in 2018 under the Trump administration.

The position is intended to serve as a coordinating mechanism for cybersecurity policy between federal agencies, Congress and the White House.

Sen. Angus KingAngus KingChris Inglis formally sworn in as national cyber director Democrats hit crunch time in Biden spending fight Joe Manchin's secret MORE (I-Maine), the co-chairman of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission, which pushed for the establishment of the position, on Monday praised Ingliss confirmation. Inglis served as a member of the commission, alongside other members of Congress and federal officials.

The threats of cyberattacks arent just looming they [are] here and harming us every day, King said in a statement provided to The Hill. America is a uniquely connected nation, but that leaves us especially exposed to bad actors, and our cyber vulnerabilities are being exploited to make our nation less safe.

Given that cybersecurity touches every aspect of our government and our lives -- from our laptops to the Internet of Things -- the U.S. desperately needs centralized leadership to coordinate the federal response to improve our defenses, King said. After serving with him for two-plus years on the Cyberspace Solarium Commission, I am confident that Chris Inglis is the right person to take on this vital role.

Inglis, who was confirmed by the Senate in June, wassworn in justmore thana week after a ransomware attack on software company Kaseya impacted up to 1,500 businesses. It was one of the largest ransomware attacks in history.

While the Biden administration has not yet formally concluded who was behind the attack, cybersecurity experts have pointed to Russian-linked cyber criminal group REvil, which was also linked by the FBI to the ransomware attack on meat producer JBS USA in May.

The Biden administration has been forced to make cybersecurity a priority from almostits first day, with President BidenJoe BidenPoll: Biden approval on coronavirus slips 2 percentage points Overnight Defense: Top US commander in Afghanistan departs | US sends delegation to Haiti after request for troops | Senate Dems propose .3B for Pentagon in Capitol security bill Protests escalate US-Cuba tensions MORE taking office a month after the discovery of the SolarWinds hack, which compromised nine federal agencies and around 100 private sector groups for most of 2020.

Following formal attribution of the attack by U.S. intelligence officials to Russian-government linked hackers, Biden levied a sweeping set of sanctions on Russia in April in retaliation and discussed cybersecurity concerns with Russian President Vladimir PutinVladimir Vladimirovich PutinChris Inglis formally sworn in as national cyber director Rand Paul requests probe into allegations NSA spied on Tucker Carlson Ukraine says Russian-linked hackers attacked its navy's website MORE during their summit in Geneva last month.

King on Monday pointed to the mounting threats in underlining the need for federal cybersecurity leadership.

His swearing-in is a major step forward for Americas cyber defense posture; now, its time for us all to get to work, King said.

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Chris Inglis formally sworn in as national cyber director | TheHill - The Hill

Tucker Carlson, host of Tucker Carlson Tonight, on the set of his Fox News program in 2017. Richard Drew/AP hide caption

Tucker Carlson, host of Tucker Carlson Tonight, on the set of his Fox News program in 2017.

On consecutive nights this week, Fox News prime-time host Tucker Carlson has alleged that the National Security Agency charged with monitoring communications abroad to keep the U.S. safe is spying on him in hopes of getting his top-rated show canceled.

"We heard from a whistleblower within the U.S. government who reached out to warn us that the NSA, the National Security Agency, is monitoring our electronic communications and is planning to leak them to take this show off the air," Carlson said Monday night.

Ascribing political motivations to the Biden administration, Carlson said the whistleblower had information about a story he's working on that could only have been derived from his own texts and emails.

On Tuesday, the NSA denied spying on him or wanting his show canceled. That night, Carlson returned to the air, crackling with indignation. He followed up his incendiary charge of possible criminal acts by saying the agency had notably not denied it was reviewing his communications.

He did not, however, offer anything more concrete. And Fox News has notably not reported on Carlson's allegations within its news programs, according to a review of transcripts. Not on Fox News political anchor Bret Baier's show. Not on Fox anchor John Roberts' afternoon news program. Not even on the often conspiracy theory-friendly morning show, Fox & Friends.

Online, Fox News has published two brief posts one without a byline simply rounding up what Carlson said but offering no new reporting. And Fox News public relations executives have not responded to repeated requests for comment from NPR and other outlets asking whether the network stands behind Carlson's claims. They instead pointed to Carlson's own remarks.

Asked by NPR for greater verification or documentation, Carlson wrote, "My word. Why would I make something like that up? Doesn't help me. I've got enough drama."

"But it's true," he said. "They haven't denied it, including tonight. The NSA was reading my email. That's absolutely confirmed."

Carlson did not answer NPR's questions of whether he was in contact with people in Russia or Ukraine over the 2016 elections, the president's son Hunter Biden or any related matter.

The NSA is banned from targeting U.S. citizens for direct eavesdropping unless a secret federal court finds there is reason to believe they are terrorists or agents of a foreign power. Yet the agency often sweeps up the emails or other communications of Americans who are in touch with one of the agency's foreign targets. Because the agency operates on such a massive global scale, the communications that are "incidentally" collected can be extensive.

"Tucker Carlson has never been an intelligence target of the Agency and the NSA has never had any plans to try to take his program off the air," the NSA said in a formal statement Tuesday. "We target foreign powers to generate insights on foreign activities that could harm the United States. With limited exceptions (e.g. an emergency), NSA may not target a U.S. citizen without a court order that explicitly authorizes the targeting."

The NSA's statement saying Carlson was not a "target" of its intercept operations does not conclusively mean the agency did not collect some of his emails or texts. If, hypothetically, Carlson was exchanging messages with someone in Russia or Ukraine as part of his show's coverage of the 2016 election or the Trump administration or Hunter Biden, and the person overseas was being monitored by the NSA, the agency might well have gathered his messages. The agency is supposed to conceal the names of any Americans whose communications are gathered that way.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, announced Wednesday he had asked Rep. Devin Nunes of California to investigate the NSA over Carlson's claims and other episodes. Nunes, a former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee when Republicans controlled the chamber, has pushed conspiracy theories from former President Donald Trump and his allies over numerous matters, including the 2016 elections, Russia and Ukraine.

Carlson is right on one score at least: He has had more than enough drama. Carlson has come under attack for some of his claims surrounding COVID-19 and public health officials and his defense of Trump against critics. Yet Carlson has navigated a delicate dance on those, taking the pandemic more seriously, more quickly, than many of his opinion colleagues at Fox, and also acknowledging, at times, Trump's flaws.

More problematically, Carlson has embraced rhetoric that inspires white supremacists, even as a top writer for his show quit after his online posts were revealed to have been racist and bigoted. Carlson also defended those who laid siege to the U.S. Capitol in January as patriots wrongly singled out for denigration by overbearing law enforcement authorities and liberals.

And most recently, and seemingly paradoxically, Carlson has also argued that the FBI may have been behind the siege.

"His audience is in perpetual state of anger and outrage, where now the target has shifted from 'the radical left' and the [D]emocrats, to the security state," tweeted Joan Donovan, research director of Harvard University's Shorenstein Center and a scholar of online misinformation and hate groups.

"He's making stronger and stronger claims about a conspiracy to overthrow the government without requisite proof," Donovan wrote. "This propaganda feeds into ... his audience's collective desperation that NO ONE is going to bring about justice. To them, the govt is now occupied by illegitimate forces."

Carlson's assertions could prove true or contain grains of truth. But that's not necessary for him to keep broadcasting: Lawyers for Fox News prevailed in a slander suit against Carlson by arguing his words could not literally be believed. A federal judge embraced that reasoning.

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Tucker Carlson Says The NSA Wants Him Off The Air. Fox News Isn't Following His Lead - NPR

WASHINGTON (AP) U.S. and British agencies disclosed on Thursday details of brute force methods they say have been used by Russian intelligence to try to break into the cloud services of hundreds of government agencies, energy companies and other organizations.

An advisory released by the U.S. National Security Agency describes attacks by operatives linked to the GRU, the Russian military intelligence agency, which has been previously tied to major cyberattacks abroad and efforts to disrupt the 2016 and 2020 American elections.

In a statement, NSA Cybersecurity Director Rob Joyce said the campaign was likely ongoing, on a global scale.

Brute force attacks involve the automated spraying of sites with potential passwords until hackers gain access. The advisory urges companies to adopt methods long urged by experts as common-sense cyber hygiene, including the use of multi-factor authentication and mandating strong passwords.

Issued during a devastating wave of ransomware attacks on governments and key infrastructure, the advisory does not disclose specific targets of the campaign or its presumed purpose, saying only that hackers have targeted hundreds of organizations worldwide.

The NSA says GRU-linked operatives have tried to break into networks using Kubernetes, an open-source tool originally developed by Google to manage cloud services, since at least mid-2019 through early this year. While a significant amount of the attempted break-ins targeted organizations using Microsofts Office 365 cloud services, the hackers went after other cloud providers and email servers as well, the NSA said.

The U.S. has long accused Russia of using and tolerating cyberattacks for espionage, spreading disinformation, and the disruption of governments and key infrastructure.

The Russian Embassy in Washington on Thursday strictly denied the involvement of Russian government agencies in cyberattacks on U.S. government agencies or private companies.

In a statement posted on Facebook, the embassy said, We hope that the American side will abandon the practice of unfounded accusations and focus on professional work with Russian experts to strengthen international information security.

Joe Slowik, a threat analyst at the network-monitoring firm Gigamon, said the activity described by NSA on Thursday shows the GRU has further streamlined an already popular technique for breaking into networks. He said it appears to overlap with Department of Energy reporting on brute force intrusion attempts in late 2019 and early 2020 targeting the U.S. energy and government sectors and is something the U.S. government has apparently been aware of for some time.

Slowik said the use of Kubernetes is certainly a bit unique, although on its own it doesnt appear worrying. He said the brute force method and lateral movement inside networks described by NSA are common among state-backed hackers and criminal ransomware gangs, allowing the GRU to blend in with other actors.

John Hultquist, vice president of analysis at the cybersecurity firm Mandiant, characterized the activity described in the advisory as routine collection against policy makers, diplomats, the military, and the defense industry.

This is a good reminder that the GRU remains a looming threat, which is especially important given the upcoming Olympics, an event they may well attempt to disrupt, Hultquist said in a statement.

The FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency joined the advisory, as did the British National Cyber Security Centre.

The GRU has been repeatedly linked by U.S. officials in recent years to a series of hacking incidents. In 2018, special counsel Robert Muellers office charged 12 military intelligence officers with hacking Democratic emails that were then released by WikiLeaks in an effort to harm Hillary Clintons presidential campaign and boost Donald Trumps bid.

More recently, the Justice Department announced charges last fall against GRU officers in cyberattacks that targeted a French presidential election, the Winter Olympics in South Korea and American businesses.

Unlike Russias foreign intelligence agency SVR, which is blamed for the SolarWinds hacking campaign and is careful not to be detected in its cyber ops, the GRU has carried out the most damaging cyberattacks on record, including two on Ukraines power grid and the 2017 NotPetya virus that caused more than $10 billion in damage globally.

GRU operatives have also been involved in the spread of disinformation related to the coronavirus pandemic, U.S. officials have alleged. And an American intelligence assessment in March says the GRU tried to monitor people in U.S. politics in 2019 and 2020 and staged a phishing campaign against subsidiaries of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, likely to gather information damaging to President Joe Biden, whose son had earlier served on the board.

The Biden administration in April sanctioned Russia after linking it to election interference and the SolarWinds breach.

___

Bajak reported from Boston.

Originally posted here:
NSA discloses hacking methods it says are used by Russia - The Associated Press