Newser | FBI Used 'Microdots' to Nab Accused NSA Leaker Newser The yellow "microdots" formed a coded design on the paper the 25-year-old NSA contractor allegedly provided to the Intercept that purports to detail Russian interference in the November election. The pattern revealed the serial number of the printer ... |
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FBI Used 'Microdots' to Nab Accused NSA Leaker - Newser
Her family calls Reality Leigh Winner a patriot who may have made some mistakes but acted with conviction for the good of her country. The federal government portrays her as something more sinister a threat to national security.
Those contrasting portraits, first unveiled last week in a bond hearing in an Augusta federal court, will likely emerge in the months ahead as the central themes in the first leak prosecution under the Trump administration.
Each side has much at stake.
Legal experts say prosecutors will want to make an example of someone who allegedly shared secrets in an era where rampant leaks have angered President Donald Trump and damaged his presidency. Winner, meanwhile, will be fighting for her freedom.
Winner, an intelligence contractor who worked at Fort Gordon near Augusta, pleaded not guilty to a single count of willful retention and transmission of national defense information. She is charged under the Espionage Act with leaking a top secret NSA document on Russian attempts to hack U.S. election systems to the news media.
Prosecutors won the first sortie on Thursday, convincing U.S. Magistrate Judge Brian Epps that Winner is too great a risk to be released on bond. Assistant U.S. Attorney Jennifer Solari said the government is concerned Winner might have compromised other secrets, and that she had a persistent desire to travel to Afghanistan and researched technology that could be used to cover her digital tracks.
Winner allegedly wrote that she wanted to burn the White House down and in notes appeared sympathetic to the Taliban.
Winners lawyer, Titus Nichols, said his client isnt a flight risk nor a threat.
Friends and her family have described her as an animal lover, a fitness buff and a decorated Air Force veteran. Her stepfather, Gary Davis, said her youth, her liberal views and her high security clearance make her a perfect patsy.
Thats what our biggest fear is political persecution to drive home a political point, Davis said. Thats the unwritten message. If you go against the government, then were going to shut you down. And were going to throw you into prison and throw away the key.
Record might engender sympathy
President Barack Obama prosecuted more leakers than all other presidents before him combined, and though the Winner case is the first under Trump, the new president has demanded the Department of Justice find and prosecute more.
Under Trump, even the definition of leaker has expanded. On Friday, the president called James Comey, the FBI director he fired amid probes into Russia election meddling, a leaker, although the contents of the memo Comey told Congress he had distributed to the press do not appear to qualify as classified information.
Joshua Lowther, a criminal defense attorney in Atlanta, said Winner could make a sympathetic defendant. Shes a six-year veteran of the Air Force awarded a commendation for her intelligence work, which helped kill and capture hundreds of enemy combatants.
One of Winners potential defenses is to highlight that history of service to her country, including in the decision whether misguided or principled to leak material about Russian influence on the 2016 presidential election that she believed the public needed to know, Lowther said.
In court Thursday, prosecutors sought to shoot down that line of defense with explosive allegations she expressed sympathies to American enemies and wanted to burn the White House, Lowther said.
The government thinks this is someone who deserves to be prosecuted severely, Lowther said.
So far, though, the prosecutions picture of Winner as a danger to the nation doesnt fully square with the material she is alleged to have leaked, said Kenneth Geers, a senior fellow at international affairs think tank Atlantic Council.
Geers, a former NSA and Defense Department analyst, said what Winner allegedly leaked and where she sent the information to the whistleblower website, The Intercept makes it appear she acted out of conscience.
When I read the (original Intercept) article I thought this is a person who might be a Bernie supporter, said Geers, referring to Bernie Sanders, the U.S. senator from Vermont and former Democratic presidential candidate.
Unless prosecutors uncover that Winner compromised more sensitive information, something that would aide an adversary or wound U.S. interests abroad, the case doesnt seem to support the argument that shes a jihadist, Geers said.
I dont know her state of mind or logic, but it seems like if she were a jihadist, only releasing information about the election doesnt make a lot of sense, Geers said.
Prosecutors do not have to prove harm
Not all leak cases are treated equally.
Former CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus and Marine Gen. James Cartwright avoided lengthy prison sentences by pleading to lesser charges. Winner fits into the pattern of the Justice Department throwing the book at lower level employees, said Edward MacMahon, a veteran criminal defense lawyer versed in national security cases.
MacMahon was part of the defense team for Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA operative who was convicted of espionage and sent to prison for leaking details of a secret U.S. operation to sabotage Irans nuclear program to a New York Times reporter.
Though the Winner case is slated to be tried in federal court in Augusta, it will be directed from Washington by the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section of the Justice Departments National Security Division.
The government will put enormous resources into trying this case, MacMahon said.
Prosecutors will attempt to prove that Winner had access to the classified material, gave it to persons without that access and that they can exclude other possible suspects.
The salacious allegations of sympathizing with enemies only ups the ante.
Prosecutors also have a significant advantage: they do not have to prove the leak caused harm to the nation.
They dont have to prove actual harm, they only have to prove the possibility of harm, he said. Its been challenged in court as vague but no court has ever overturned a conviction from it.
Staff writers Johnny Edwards and Jeremy Redmon contributed to this report.
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Accused NSA leaker may be treated harshly as an example, experts say - MyAJC
Liberal television personality Rosie ODonnell confirmed that she donated $1,000 to a GoFundMecampaign set up for the family of Reality Winner, the25-year-old NSA contractor accused of illegally leaking classified intelligence documents.
Winner, who was arrested Tuesday for giving classified documents to the website The Intercept,has pleaded not guilty to one count of willful retention and transmission of national defense information. If convicted, she faces up to 10 years in prison.
This is part of the description from the GoFundMe page:
LETS STAND UP WITH REALITY LEIGH WINNER AND HER FAMILY!
It is a Difficult time for Reality Winner and her family. Please show your love and support with kind messages and a monetary donation if you feel led to do so.
This is a time to come together and unite in peace and hope and show the world LOVE ALWAYS WINS over hate! Good resists even when evil persists!
These funds will be able to assist with loss of wages, counseling from this traumatic experience and tobe able to recover from this as Reality & her family rebuilds theirlives. Possible expenses for travel for the family and anything they might need to help them through these troubled times.
ODonnell praised Winner as a brave young patriot in a tweet.
The page may violate GoFundMes terms of service, which prohibits establishing a campaign for the defense or support of anyone alleged to be involved in criminal activity. But that doesnt bother liberals like ODonnell, who sees Winner as a victim rather than as a traitor to her country.
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Rosie O'Donnell Donates $1000 to NSA Leaker's GoFundMe Page - Accuracy In Media (blog)
The National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, as seen from the air, January 29, 2010. Saul LoebAFP/Getty Images
For more than a year, U.S. intelligence officials reassured lawmakers they were working to calculate and reveal roughly how many Americans have their digital communications vacuumed up under a warrant-less surveillance law intended to target foreigners overseas.
This week, the Trump administration backtracked, catching lawmakers off guard and alarming civil liberties advocates who say it is critical to know as Congress weighs changes to a law expiring at the end of the year that permits some of the National Security Agency's most sweeping espionage.
"The NSA has made Herculean, extensive efforts to devise a counting strategy that would be accurate," Dan Coats, a career Republican politician appointed by Republican President Donald Trump as the top U.S. intelligence official, testified to a Senate panel on Wednesday.
Coats said "it remains infeasible to generate an exact, accurate, meaningful, and responsive methodology that can count how often a U.S. person's communications may be collected" under the law known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
He told the Senate Intelligence Committee that even if he dedicated more resources the NSA would not be able to calculate an estimate, which privacy experts have said could be in the millions.
The statement ran counter to what senior intelligence officials had previously promised both publicly and in private briefings during the previous administration of President Barack Obama, a Democrat, lawmakers and congressional staffers working on drafting reforms to Section 702 said.
Representative John Conyers, the top Democrat in the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, said that for many months intelligence agencies "expressly promised" members of both parties to deliver the estimated number to them.
Senior intelligence officials had also previously said an estimate could be delivered. In March, then NSA deputy director Rick Ledgett, said "yes" when asked by a Reuters reporter if an estimate would be provided this year.
"Were working on that with the Congress and we'll come to a satisfactory resolution, because we have to," said Ledgett, who has since retired from public service.
The law allows U.S. intelligence agencies to eavesdrop on and collect vast amounts of digital communications from foreign suspects living outside of the United States, but often incidentally scoops up communications of Americans.
The decision to scrap the estimate is likely to complicate a debate in Congress over whether to curtail certain aspects of the surveillance law, congressional aides said. Congress must vote to renew Section 702 to avoid its expiration on Dec. 31.
Privacy issues often scramble traditional party lines, but there are signs that Section 702's renewal will be even more politically unpredictable.
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Some Republicans who usually support surveillance programs have expressed concerns about Section 702, in part because they are worried about leaks of intercepts of conversations between Trump associates and Russian officials amid investigations of possible collusion.
U.S. intelligence agencies last year accused Russia of interfering in the 2016 presidential election campaign, allegations Moscow denies. Trump denies there was collusion. Intelligence officials have said Section 702 was not directly connected to surveillance related to those leaks.
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"As big a fan as I am of collection, incidental collection, I'm not going to reauthorize a program that could be politically manipulated," Senator Lindsey Graham, usually a defender of U.S. surveillance activities, told reporters this week.
Graham was among 14 Republican senators, including every Republican member of the intelligence panel, who on Tuesday introduced a bill supported by the White House and top intelligence chiefs, that would renew Section 702 without changes and make it permanent.
Critics have called the process under which the FBI and other agencies can query the pool of data collected for U.S. information a "backdoor search loophole" that evades traditional warrant requirements.
"How can we accept the government's reassurance that our privacy is being protected when the government itself has no idea how many Americans' communications are being swept up and stored?" said Liza Goitein, a privacy expert at the Brennan Center for Justice.
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NSA Backtracks on Sharing Number of Americans Caught In Warrantless Spying - Fortune
Augusta
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has called on his supporters to rally to the side of the 25-year-old suspect in the National Security Agency leak investigation here.
Assange, who has drawn a mixture of praise and scorn for his role in the disclosure of highly classified U.S. intelligence information, tweeted this week: Alleged NSA whistleblower Reality Leigh Winner must be supported. She is a young women [sic] accused of courage in trying to help us know. He also tweeted that Winner, a U.S. Air Force veteran, is against the wall for talking to the press.
It doesn't matter why she did it or the quality (of) the report, said Assange, who jumped his bail and sought asylum in Ecuador to avoid extradition to Sweden on rape accusations. Swedish prosecutors have since announced they were dropping the rape inquiry and no longer seeking to extradite him. Assange has denied the allegations. Acts of non-elite sources communicating knowledge should be strongly encouraged.
Assistant U.S. attorney Jennifer Solari highlighted Assanges support for Winner while pushing Thursday to keep her in jail until her trial. U.S. Magistrate Judge Brian Epps ultimately denied Winners release on bond, citing the nature of the crime, the weight of the evidence, her history and the potential danger to the community.
A federal grand jury has indicted Winner on a single count of "willful retention and transmission of national defense information. Winner faces up to 10 years in prison and $250,000 in fines, plus up to three years of supervised release and a $100 special assessment. Winner pleaded not guilty to the charge Thursday.
Filed this week, the six-page federal indictment says Winner worked as a federal contractor at a U.S. government agency in Georgia between February and June and had a top-secret security clearance. On about May 9, the indictment says, Winner printed and removed a May 5 report on intelligence activities by a foreign government directed at targets within the United States. Two days later, she sent a copy of the report to an online news outlet.
The U.S. Justice Department announced Winners arrest Monday, about an hour after The Intercept reported that it had obtained a top-secret NSA report about Russias interference in the 2016 presidential election. The report says Russian military intelligence officials tried to hack into the U.S. voting system just before last Novembers election.
Reality Leigh Winner is the first person to be charged with leaking confidential information during the Trump administration.
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WikiLeaks founder supporting NSA leak suspect in Georgia - Atlanta Journal Constitution