WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. intelligence contractor has been charged with leaking to a news organization classified National Security Agency material about Russian interference in the 2016 American presidential election, the Justice Department and officials said.

The Justice Department on Monday charged Reality Leigh Winner, 25, with removing classified material from a government facility in Georgia. It said she was arrested on Saturday.

It was one of the first concrete efforts by the administration of President Donald Trump to crack down on leaks to the media.

The charges were announced less than an hour after The Intercept published a top-secret document from the NSA that described Russian efforts to launch cyber attacks on at least one U.S. voting software supplier and send “spear-phishing” emails, or targeted emails, that try to trick a recipient into clicking on a malicious link to steal data, to more than 100 local election officials days before the Nov. 8 U.S. election.

While the charges do not name the publication, a U.S. official with knowledge of the case said Winner was charged with leaking the NSA report to The Intercept. A second official confirmed The Intercept document was authentic and did not dispute that the charges were directly tied to it.

The Justice Department declined to comment on the case beyond its filing. The Federal Bureau of Investigation did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Winner’s mother also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Intercept report carried details it said supported the conclusion of U.S. intelligence agencies that Russian intelligence services were seeking to infiltrate state voter registration systems as part of a broader effort to interfere in the election, discredit Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and help the Republican Trump win the election.

Reality Leigh Winner, 25, a federal contractor charged by the U.S. Department of Justice for sending classified material to a news organization, poses in a picture posted to her Instagram account. Reality Winner/Social Media via REUTERS

The new material does not suggest that actual votes were manipulated.

The Intercept co-founding editor Glenn Greenwald did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

While partially redacted, the NSA document is marked to show it would be up for declassification on May 5, 2042. The indictment against Winner alleges she “printed and improperly removed” classified intelligence reporting that was dated “on or about May 5, 2017.”

Classified documents are typically due to be declassified after 25 years under an executive order signed under former President Bill Clinton.

The NSA opened a facility in Augusta in 2012 at Fort Gordon, a U.S. Army outpost.

The FBI and several congressional committees are investigating how Russia interfered in the election and whether associates of President Donald Trump may have colluded with Russian intelligence operatives during the campaign.

Trump has dismissed the allegations as “fake news” and sought to focus attention on leaks of information to the media.

Slideshow (6 Images)

Winner graduated from basic military training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio in 2011. Investigators determined she was one of only six individuals to print the document in question and that she had exchanged emails with the news outlet, according to the criminal complaint.

The complaint said that on Saturday, Winner told an FBI agent she had intentionally printed classified intelligence and mailed it to a news organization while knowing “the contents of the reporting could be used to the injury of the United States and to the advantage of a foreign nation.”

U.S. intelligence agencies including the NSA and Central Intelligence Agency have fallen victim to several thefts of classified material in recent years, often at the hands of a federal contractor. Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in 2013 disclosed secret documents to journalists, including Greenwald, that revealed broad U.S. surveillance programs.</s>Edward Snowden was a National Security Agency contractor when he leaked a trove of NSA documents in 2013. Similar cases have followed despite attempts by the NSA and other security agencies to address the problem.

Now, Reality Leigh Winner, a 25-year-old contractor and an Air Force veteran, is accused of the latest bombshell leak from the NSA. Winner, who was working in the Georgia office of contractor Pluribus International, allegedly printed out a top secret document last month and mailed it to an online news outlet, which was not named in court documents.

However, The Intercept broke a story Monday with details on Russian attempts to penetrate U.S. election systems.

At roughly the same time, the Justice Department announced that it has charged Winner with mishandling classified information on national defense. She was arrested Saturday at her home in Augusta, Ga., but the case was not announced until Monday.

Winner spent several years in the Air Force before leaving last year, according to her social media accounts. She began working with Pluribus in February and had "top secret" clearance, according an affadavit from the Justice Department. It said she printed and removed the document on or about May 9 and passed it on to the news outlet.

Pluribus says on its website that it works with the Defense, Security, and Intelligence Community sectors and offers a range of services, including translation in languages such as Farsi and Pashto.

Winner's mother, Billie Winner-Davis, told CNN that her daughter was a linguist with the Air Force in Maryland who speaks Pashto, Farsi and Dari — languages widely spoken in Iran and Afghanistan.

Investigations into national security matters can often drag on for months or even longer. But in the affidavit, the FBI said it began investigating just last Thursday — after the news outlet contacted the government saying it had received the document anonymously and was working on a story.

The Intercept has provided a similar account. Ryan Grim, one of reporters who wrote the story, told NPR's Morning Edition that the news site received the document from an unknown sender.

He described the document as "an NSA analysis of Russian efforts to tamper" with the election.

Winner-Davis, told The Daily Beast that she spoke with her daughter on Sunday evening — the day after she was arrested — but they apparently did not discuss details of the case.

"She called us (Sunday) night. She asked if we could help out with relocating her cat and dog," Winner-Davis said.

Winner-Davis said she was not aware of the details of her daughter's work or the charges against her.

"I don't know what they're alleging," she said.

Winner-Davis described her daughter as "passionate" about her beliefs. Reality Winner has been active on social media and has been critical of President Trump's policies.</s>The Intercept has just published an NSA document [PDF] (mailed to it by a government contractor [more on that in a bit]) detailing Russian interference in the US election.

Russian military intelligence executed a cyberattack on at least one U.S. voting software supplier and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials just days before last November’s presidential election, according to a highly classified intelligence report obtained by The Intercept. The top-secret National Security Agency document, which was provided anonymously to The Intercept and independently authenticated, analyzes intelligence very recently acquired by the agency about a months-long Russian intelligence cyber effort against elements of the U.S. election and voting infrastructure. The report, dated May 5, 2017, is the most detailed U.S. government account of Russian interference in the election that has yet come to light.

The document doesn't exactly offer anything that hasn't already been hinted at or suspected, but it does at least confirm a lot of the election hacking speculation. It also contradicts Putin's claim the Russian government was uninvolved in the election hacking.

While there is no evidence the breached voting software supplier resulted in compromised votes, what's suggested by the NSA document is something just as disruptive: an IRL denial-of-service attack that would affect American voters.

Pamela Smith, president of election integrity watchdog Verified Voting, agreed that even if VR Systems doesn’t facilitate the actual casting of votes, it could make an alluring target for anyone hoping to disrupt the vote. “If someone has access to a state voter database, they can take malicious action by modifying or removing information,” she said. “This could affect whether someone has the ability to cast a regular ballot, or be required to cast a ‘provisional’ ballot — which would mean it has to be checked for their eligibility before it is included in the vote, and it may mean the voter has to jump through certain hoops such as proving their information to the election official before their eligibility is affirmed.”

That being said, the US election process is somewhat hack-proof, though certainly not by design or as the result of security enhancements. Election hacking can apparently be somewhat mitigated by operational inefficiencies and this nation's democratic process bottleneck. Voting databases are decentralized, with very little coordination/connection between county, state, and federal systems. To make things even more unpredictable, the Electoral College decides who gets to become president, rather than millions of votes cast through a vast variety of voting machines.

Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of this leak is how quickly the government tracked the leaker down. The Intercept asked the government for comment on May 30th. By June 3rd, the government's investigation had narrowed to one suspect: government contractor Reality Winner [emoji combining WTF/irony].

Although the government's press release and affidavit [PDF] only refer to The Intercept as "News Outlet," the dates of the document cited match up to those in the published document. How did the NSA track down Winner so quickly? Internal printer audits and email records.

The U.S. Government Agency conducted an internal audit to determine who accessed the intelligence reporting since its publication. The U.S. Government Agency determined that six individuals printed this reporting. WINNER was one of these six individuals. A further audit of the six individuals' desk computers revealed that WINNER had e-mail contact with the News Outlet. The audit did not reveal that any of the other individuals had e-mail contact with the News Outlet.

In short, bad opsec and worse opsec. There's more:

These creases can plainly be seen in the document published by The Intercept.

According to the FBI, Winner has already confessed to these actions. And it's tough to see this information as being of the whistleblower variety as it doesn't expose any sort of surveillance overreach, but rather the sort of work we actually expect the NSA to be engaged in. The only possible motive for Winner's decision to hand this document over to journalists is the (somewhat justifiable) fear the Trump Administration would do its best to ensure this information was never made public.

On the other hand, the document is clearly of public interest, seeing as it details apparently ongoing efforts by a foreign country to disrupt the election process. It also highlights just how many security holes remain unaddressed, despite years of warning by security researchers. Even if the Russian government never performs another election hack, it has already planted several seeds of doubt in the legitimacy of the system -- something that will cause every election result going forward to be questioned by those who come out on the losing end.</s>On Monday, the Intercept published a classified internal NSA document noting that Russian military intelligence mounted an operation to hack at least one US voting software supplier—which provided software related to voter registration files—in the months prior to last year's presidential contest. It has previously been reported that Russia attempted to hack into voter registration systems, but this NSA document provides details of how one such operation occurred.

According to the Intercept:

The top-secret National Security Agency document, which was provided anonymously to The Intercept and independently authenticated, analyzes intelligence very recently acquired by the agency about a months-long Russian intelligence cyber effort against elements of the US election and voting infrastructure. The report, dated May 5, 2017, is the most detailed US government account of Russian interference in the election that has yet come to light. While the document provides a rare window into the NSA's understanding of the mechanics of Russian hacking, it does not show the underlying "raw" intelligence on which the analysis is based. A US intelligence officer who declined to be identified cautioned against drawing too big a conclusion from the document because a single analysis is not necessarily definitive. The report indicates that Russian hacking may have penetrated further into US voting systems than was previously understood. It states unequivocally in its summary statement that it was Russian military intelligence, specifically the Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate, or GRU, that conducted the cyber attacks described in the document: Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate actors … executed cyber espionage operations against a named U.S. company in August 2016, evidently to obtain information on elections-related software and hardware solutions. … The actors likely used data obtained from that operation to … launch a voter registration-themed spear-phishing campaign targeting U.S. local government organizations.

Go read the whole thing.</s>WASHINGTON — A federal contractor has been arrested following the leak of a classified intelligence report that suggests Russian hackers attacked at least one U.S. voting software supplier days before last year’s presidential election.

Shortly after the release of the report by The Intercept on Monday, the Justice Department announced it had charged government contractor, Reality Leigh Winner, in Georgia with leaking a classified report containing “Top Secret level” information to an online news organization. The report the contractor allegedly leaked is dated May 5, the same date as the document The Intercept posted online.

The report suggests election-related hacking penetrated further into U.S. voting systems than previously known. A Kremlin spokesman denied the report.

The classified National Security Agency report does not say whether the hacking had any effect on election results. But it says Russian military intelligence attacked a U.S. voting software company and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials at the end of October or beginning of November.

The document said Russian military intelligence “executed cyber espionage operations against a named U.S. company in August 2016 evidently to obtain information on elections-related software and hardware solutions, according to information that became available in April 2017.”

Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for President Vladimir Putin, denied the allegations Tuesday, saying that the Kremlin did not see “any evidence to prove this information is true.” He said Moscow categorically denies “the possibility” of the Russian government being behind it.

The hackers are believed to have then used data from that operation to create a new email account to launch a spear-phishing campaign targeting U.S. local government organizations, the document said. “Lastly, the actors send test emails to two non-existent accounts ostensibly associated with absentee balloting, presumably with the purpose of creating those accounts to mimic legitimate services.”

The document did not name any state.

The information in the leaked document seems to go further than the U.S. intelligence agencies’ January assessment of the hacking that occurred.

“Russian intelligence obtained and maintained access to elements of multiple U.S. state or local electoral boards,” the assessment said. The Department of Homeland Security “assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying.”

The Intercept contacted NSA and the national intelligence director’s office about the document and both agencies asked that it not be published. U.S. intelligence officials then asked The Intercept to redact certain sections.

The Intercept, a digital magazine founded by journalists involved in the release of documents leaked by NSA contractor Edward Snowden, said some material was withheld at U.S. intelligence agencies’ request because it wasn’t “clearly in the public interest.”

The Associated Press could not confirm the authenticity of the May 5 NSA document, which The Intercept said it obtained anonymously.

In its announcement of the arrest, the Justice Department said Winner, 25, of Augusta, Georgia, has been charged in U.S. District Court with copying classified documents and mailing them to a reporter with an unnamed news organization. Prosecutors did not say which federal agency Winner worked for, but FBI agent Justin Garrick said in an affidavit filed with the court that she had previously served in the Air Force and held a top-secret security clearance.

Winner’s attorney, Titus Thomas Nichols, declined to confirm whether she is accused of leaking the NSA report received by The Intercept. He also declined to name the federal agency for which Winner worked.

“My client has no (criminal) history, so it’s not as if she has a pattern of having done anything like this before,” Nichols said in a phone interview Monday. “She is a very good person. All this craziness has happened all of a sudden.”

In affidavits filed with the court, Garrick of the FBI said the government was notified of the leaked report by the news outlet that received it. He said the agency that housed the report determined only six employees had made physical copies. Winner was one of them. Garrick said investigators found Winner had exchanged email with the news outlet using her work computer.

Garrick’s affidavit said he interviewed Winner at her home Saturday and she “admitted intentionally identifying and printing the classified intelligence reporting at issue” and mailing it to the news outlet.

Asked if Winner had confessed, Nichols said, “If there is a confession, the government has not shown it to me.”</s>The U.S. Department of Justice on Monday charged a federal contractor with sending classified material to a news organization that sources identified to Reuters as The Intercept, marking one of the first concrete efforts by the Trump administration to crack down on leaks to the media.

Reality Leigh Winner, 25, was charged with removing classified material from a government facility located in Georgia. She was arrested on June 3, the Justice Department said.

The charges were announced less than an hour after The Intercept published a top-secret document from the U.S. National Security Agency that described Russian efforts to launch cyber attacks on at least one U.S. voting software supplier and send "spear-phishing" emails, or targeted emails that try to trick a recipient into clicking on a malicious link to steal data, to more than 100 local election officials days before the presidential election last November.

The Justice Department declined to comment on the case beyond its filing. Federal Bureau of Investigation did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

While the charges do not name the publication, a U.S. official with knowledge of the case said Winner was charged with leaking the NSA report to The Intercept. A second official confirmed The Intercept document was authentic and did not dispute that the charges against Winner were directly tied to it.

The Intercept's reporting reveals new details behind the conclusion of U.S. intelligence agencies that Russian intelligence services were seeking to infiltrate state voter registration systems as part of a broader effort to interfere in the election, discredit Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and help then Republican candidate Donald Trump win the election.

The new material does not, however, suggest that actual votes were manipulated.

The Intercept co-founding editor Glenn Greenwald did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Winter's mother also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

While partially redacted, the NSA document is marked to show it would be up for declassification on May 5, 2042. The indictment against Winner alleges she "printed and improperly removed" classified intelligence reporting that was dated "on or about May 5, 2017."

Classified documents are typically due to be declassified after 25 years under an executive order signed under former President Bill Clinton.

The NSA opened a facility in Augusta in 2012 at Fort Gordon, a U.S. Army outpost.

The FBI and several congressional committees are investigating how Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election and whether associated of President Donald Trump may have colluded with Russian intelligence operatives during the campaign.

Trump has dismissed the allegations as "fake news," while attempting to refocus attention on leaks of information to the media.

Winner graduated from basic military training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio in 2011. Investigators determined she was one of only six individuals to print the document in question and that she had exchanged emails with the news outlet, according to the indictment.

U.S. intelligence agencies including the NSA and CIA have fallen victim to several thefts of classified material in recent years, often at the hands of a federal contractor. For example, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in 2013 disclosed secret documents to journalists, including The Intercept's Greenwald, that revealed broad U.S. surveillance programs.</s>The Intercept dropped its most significant story in its three-year history on Tuesday. The website published a piece based on leaked NSA documents that detailed what appeared to be a previously unreported Russia-backed cyberattack on the U.S. election that included vendors selling voter registration systems.

Almost immediately afterward, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it had arrested a government contractor for leaking classified information—and claimed it was The Intercept's source.

That led to immediate speculation as to whether The Intercept had accidentally given up the source. The DOJ claimed that when The Intercept had shown the documents to the NSA for verification, it had also provided some of the evidence needed to find the leak.

On Tuesday, The Intercept pushed back. Its message: Don't believe a thing the government tells you.

"While the FBI’s allegations against Winner have been made public through the release of an affidavit and search warrant, which were unsealed at the government’s request, it is important to keep in mind that these documents contain unproven assertions and speculation designed to serve the government’s agenda and as such warrant skepticism," the company said in a statement. "Winner faces allegations that have not been proven. The same is true of the FBI’s claims about how it came to arrest Winner."

The Intercept also said that it had no knowledge of who its source is, and therefore could not confirm or deny that Reality Winner, who the Justice Department had arrested, had leaked the documents.

The website's statement comes as it is taking heat for the arrest. The Intercept has made a name as a destination for people willing to leak classified information to journalists who can safeguard sources and write intelligently on national security issues.

The arrest of a source to have allegedly leaked to the website has led to various people int he cybersecurity community to question if the website had acted responsibly in handling the leaked documents.

Others have noted that Winner allegedly printed out the docs and also emailed the Intercept, actions that would have made her an easily identifiable suspect either way.</s>And much of the resulting media coverage is focused on the leaker instead of the leak itself.

By now you've undoubtedly heard about Reality Winner, the 25-year-old government contractor who is accused of using her top secret security clearance to leak classified information to The Intercept and is now facing up to 10 years in jail. The story bounced around the Internet with most of the coverage and fascination being dedicated to one aspect of the tale over all others... The terrifying nature of the information she leaked? No. Of course not. Ways to protect ourselves from future cyber attacks? Nope. Of course, the answer is, the media focused on her name.

So let's get this out of the way. Yes, the accused's real name is Reality Winner. Okay? Good. But this isn't Ken Bone milking his 15 minutes of fame, this is someone who put her own freedom at risk so that she could tell the American people something important that we weren't supposed to know. And that information is terrifying. According to The Intercept, a top secret NSA report shows new and damning information about Russia's cyberattacks on the United States in the lead-up to the 2016 election. It turns out they were more widespread than we've been led to believe.

Russian Military Intelligence executed a cyberattack on at least one U.S. voting software supplier and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials just days before last November’s presidential election, according to a highly classified intelligence report obtained by The Intercept. The top-secret National Security Agency document, which was provided anonymously to The Intercept and independently authenticated, analyzes intelligence very recently acquired by the agency about a months-long Russian intelligence cyber effort against elements of the U.S. election and voting infrastructure. The report, dated May 5, 2017, is the most detailed U.S. government account of Russian interference in the election that has yet come to light.

If this NSA report proves accurate, then Russia's hacking wasn't limited to Democratic party backbiting. No, the Russians also apparently went after a company that makes voting software. Now is it the voting software that counts the votes? No. VR Systems, which sounds like a fake company in a sci-fi movie, instead makes the software that eight different states use to track voter registration and decide who is allowed to vote and who may have to cast a provisional ballot. On the face of it, this type of attack looks like a high-tech way to disenfranchise voters.

The implications of this are somewhat staggering. For one thing, it raises questions about how successful this attack was. We know they compromised many employees' information, but to what end? Where did it lead? It also raises even more questions about Donald Trump's treatment of Russia during and after the campaign. If our intelligence community is finding out we were electronically attacked by a foreign adversary, why is Donald Trump buddying around with Kislyak and Lavrov? If my brother told me the school bully beat him up on the playground, and then I had concrete evidence that the school bully beat him up on the playground, you know what I'm not going to do? Sleepover at that bully's house.

There's a lot we still don't know about this report, and there's a lot we still don't know about the Russia situation. But much of the media coverage focused on Reality Winner alleged role plays right into the Trump administration's hands. For months Trump and congressional Republicans have been trying to deflect attention from the Russia investigation by insisting that its the fact of the leaks and not the content of the leaks that is most important. We've rightly laughed at this suggestion. It's on its face ridiculous. And yet here we are, talking a ton about the leaker and hardly at all about the leak.

If He Were Doing Any Other Job, Donald Trump Would Be Fired by Now</s>Washington: Russian hackers attacked at least one US voting software supplier days before last year's presidential election, according to a leaked government intelligence report that suggests election-related hacking penetrated further into US voting systems than previously known.

The classified National Security Agency (NSA) report, which was published online by The Intercept on Monday, does not say whether the hacking had any effect on election results. But it says that Russian military intelligence attacked a US voting software company and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials at the end of October or beginning of November.

The document said Russian military intelligence "executed cyber espionage operations against a named US company in August 2016 evidently to obtain information on elections-related software and hardware solutions, according to information that became available in April 2017."

The hackers are believed to have then used data from that operation to create a new email account to launch a spear-phishing campaign targeting US local government organisations, the document said.

"Lastly, the actors send test emails to two non-existent accounts ostensibly associated with absentee balloting, presumably with the purpose of creating those accounts to mimic legitimate services." The document did not name any state.

The information in the leaked document seems to go further than the US intelligence agencies' January assessment of the hacking that occurred.

"Russian intelligence obtained and maintained access to elements of multiple US state or local electoral boards," the assessment said.

The Department of Homeland Security "assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying." The Intercept contacted NSA and the national intelligence director's office about the document. Both agencies asked that it not be published.

US intelligence officials then asked The Intercept to redact certain sections. The Intercept said some material was withheld at US intelligence agencies' request because it wasn't "clearly in the public interest."

The Associated Press could not confirm the authenticity of the 5 May NSA document, which The Intercept said it obtained anonymously.

But on Monday, the Justice Department announced it had charged a government contractor in Georgia with leaking a classified report containing "Top Secret level" information to an online news organisation.

The report the contractor allegedly leaked is dated 5 May, the same date as that of the document posted online by The Intercept.

Reality Leigh Winner, 25, of Augusta, Georgia, was charged in US District Court with copying classified documents and mailing them to a reporter with an unnamed news organisation.

Prosecutors did not say which federal agency Winner worked for, but FBI agent Justin Garrick said in an affidavit filed with the court that she had previously served in the Air Force and held a top-secret security clearance.

Winner's attorney, Titus Thomas Nichols, declined to confirm whether she is accused of leaking the NSA report received by The Intercept. He also declined to name the federal agency for which Winner worked.</s>There are 1 comment on the RedState story from 17 hrs ago, titled The Reality Winner Arrest Shows the NSA Learned Nothing From the Edward Snowden Experience. In it, RedState reports that:

My colleague Andrea Ruth posted on the the arrest of the unfortunately named Reality Winner for stealing a secret assessment of Russian efforts to penetrate various electoral systems and giving it to Glenn Greenwald's online domain, The Intercept . Basically, Ms.

Join the discussion below, or Read more at RedState.
After The Intercept publishes a classified NSA document describing Russian efforts to launch cyberattacks on U.S. voting software suppliers, the United States Department of Justice announces it had brought charges upon Reality Winner, the alleged leaker.