9 ms·

The arrest warrant says nothing about printer dots, actually. It says that once they saw it was printed (per the Intercept showing them a copy to confirm its le

by NamTaf 9y ago

The arrest warrant says nothing about printer dots, actually. It says that once they saw it was printed (per the Intercept showing them a copy to confirm its legitimacy) they simply looked at who'd printed the original document. Upon looking into the desk computers of those 6 people, she was the only person who'd had email contact with the Intercept. They didn't even need the yellow dots. She literally emailed the Intercept from her work email and was one of a trivial number of people who'd printed it in the first place.

retox 9y ago
Does this strike anyone else as suspicious? To my mind she's either incompetent or she intended to become a martyr.
- throwaway32144 9y ago
  As an aside, how else would one sneak top-secret stuff out of the NSA ? I assume all IO ports have been cut, and the input devices soldered onto the motherboard ? Send some xor-ed file out using a non-secure connection and sneak the key out somehow ? Take photographs/video using the phone, cold-war style ?
  - toyg 9y ago
    Taking photographs on an (offline) phone is probably the safest and easiest way to go about it. Obviously no flash, if you can't do it in non-monitored environments make it look like you're just looking at your phone. Go home, take pics out of device, delete them and destroy the phone. This said, it's been reported some contractors and employees routinely took home loads of external drives, so your expectation that IO ports are completely disabled might be unrealistic; the NSA is good but it's just another large org, just a bit more paranoid than average.
    - matthewbadeau 9y ago
      Phones aren't allowed in SCIFs (the facility she worked in). Hard drives labeled unclassified can be removed from those facilities with special permission but I think hard drives are under more scrutiny nowadays.
      - totallynotcool 9y ago
        There are much easier ways to exfil data from a scif than photos. Esp. If you are a contractor.
        AnimalMuppet 9y ago
        Do tell.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    - creepydata 9y ago
      You can't just "look at your phone" while processing classified information. Its highly forbidden to even have a phone in your possession while processing classified information.
  - tbihl 9y ago
    Without having visited the site in question, the underlying theme is that you, as the security people, have to choose your battles because employees start to get very upset when you make their jobs difficult in order to show them how little you trust them.
  - taneq 9y ago
    > Send some xor-ed file out using a non-secure connection and sneak the key out somehow ? Stray thought: You don't have to sneak a OTP out, you only need to sneak it in. Then you do your XORing, transmit the mangled data, and erase that copy of the key.
- danso 9y ago
  Her background, according to the Guardian, is former Air Force and being fluent in Middle Eastern languages. None of that indicates that she would be especially knowledgeable of how access logs are implemented. I mean, she should have gave the NSA the benefit of the doubt given the massive clusterfuck caused by Snowden 3+ years ago. But even today, we see reports of massive data incompetence by Booz Hamilton (Snowden's employer) top secret contractors: http://gizmodo.com/top-defense-contractor-left-sensitive-pentagon-files-on-1795669632 http://gizmodo.com/top-defense-contractor-left-sensitive-pen...
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    The whole idea of 'top secret contractors' is wrong to begin with. You can't have people access information at that level without making them part of your culture. If you take that risk then there is a fair chance your 'top secret' is in fact 'public domain'.
    - GVIrish 9y ago
      It's not about whether someone is a contractor or a full time government employee. Contractors work on the government site just as much as FTE's, receive the same security training, and are indoctrinated into the same culture. The problem is inadequate access control to classified materials. There tends to be a lot of information that people can access without a need to know, that is not rigorously tracked and locked down. This means that someone looking to steal or leak can get their hands on a lot of stuff they shouldn't without raising suspicions if they're not stupid about it. The reason we may be seeing a number of spillage incidents with contractors is simply because there a lot of contractors working at government agencies. In IT a lot of the time contractors outnumber government people by a significant margin.
    - danso 9y ago
      Yeah, America has not only had an over-classification problem, but it's been inundated with contractors with unnecessary top clearances. The Washington Post had a great investigation back in 2010 cataloguing the sheer size and complexity of America's security and intelligence system: http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/ http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/ Some findings: > Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States. > An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances. > Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.
- kibwen 9y ago
  Third possibility: that she suspected she'd be caught regardless, and decided that releasing this specific information publicly was more important than her personal freedom. Fourth possibility: that the NSA did use the forensic marks in question to identify her, and fabricated a parallel construction in order to avoid acknowledging the existence of said marks. (But still, most likely this is Hanlon's Razor. What's there to be suspicious about?)
  - brador 9y ago
    Five: someone wanted her out and framed her. Six: she was a weak security link and someone used her access details without permission.
    - manicdee 9y ago
      Seven: someone with sysadmin privileges sent mail from her account, having printed the document from six accounts and only managing to get to "her" printer before loose documents were destroyed.
      - optimiz3 9y ago
        Eighth: It's a counter-intel operation and her identity isn't even real.
        dawnerd 9y ago
        Or this whole thing is all completely fabricated... The way politics are now I'd believe anything at this point.
        syngrog66 9y ago
        we are asked to believe a HS grad is a triple linguist, named Reality Winner, and within first few months on job ever with NSA was allowed to print and email a TS doc. and that she was arrested on same day within hours so yes, there is at least circumstantial evidence this was not a "real" thing that happened. either a plant or make believe
- JohnStrange 9y ago
  She's 25 years old and worked in that job for a few months, not a security specialist or some super-spy.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    Well, that's one way to look at it. The other is that NSA's internal security is so botched that a fresh-out-of-school 3 months on the job external contractor managed to outfox the NSA's security measures. What she did should not have been possible in the first place.
    - coldtea 9y ago
      Or that she was a convenient, not long-term career person, to make a cool deal to appear as somebody leaking the document against NSA's will.
      - jacquesm 9y ago
        Not a chance. She will spend a long time in jail if convicted and during the court case such stuff will surely come out if her defense is any good. (Assuming you are aware that she admitted to being the leaker.)
        taneq 9y ago
        Does she have any close family with health issues that will now get magically taken care of? Sometimes taking a jail sentence is part of the deal.
        coldtea 9y ago
        Or, they had her on something else -- and getting a jail sentence for this is less time, more heroic and/or compensated.
- nl 9y ago
  Does this strike anyone else as suspicious? What is suspicious about it? This isn't 4chan. Present some evidence but don't just make up random speculation that "could have happened". I mean it's possible to come up with elaborate theories, but the most likely explanation is that she was just spectacularly stupid. or she intended to become a martyr I'm not sure being this dumb is going to get much sympathy from anyone.
  - EthanHeilman 9y ago
    Not stupid, it is just hard to not get caught. Once you see how someone is caught you can say "oh of course I'd never do that", but you'd probably make some other mistake. Could she and should she have taken better precautions, without a doubt. Would the average intelligence analyst who is not being coached by a foreign power do a better job, I doubt it. In fact many foreign spies have done a far worst job and not been caught immediately. This is because the intelligence they stole was not published. Being a source of a journalist is much harder than being a source for a foreign power.
    - nl 9y ago
      I agree it's hard not to get caught. But this was just giving it away.
- dsplittgerber 9y ago
  From what's publically known, the email to The Intercept related to their podcast, of which we supposedly was a listener and not to the matter at hand.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- yoaviram 9y ago
  I don't get it. So she printed the document, then scanned in order to email it?
  - spuz 9y ago
    It sounds more like she contacted the Intercept just to tell them she had some documents and where should she (physically) mail them.
  - eternalban 9y ago
    Details, details. /s
- eternalban 9y ago
  Are we only permitted to consider 2 choices here or is it permissible to consider the other obvious possibilities?
- m-j-fox 9y ago
  Agreed. Whenever I leak, I make sure to pin it on some derp. Throws them off my trail so I don't end up like Manning. As for the derp, she'll get a book deal which is more than she ever had going for her. (Kind of annoyed that the derp became the story while the actual leak never made the front page.)
throwaway32144 9y ago
> She literally emailed the Intercept from her work email and was one of a trivial number of people who'd printed it in the first place. Surely, NSA contractors aren't this stupid ? Something smells.
- thehardsphere 9y ago
  Why not? She's some 25 year old kid. There's no real indication (aside from having linguistic talent) that she's especially smart.
  - ForRealsies 9y ago
    And a hardcore Bernie supporter. At least this one didn't pull a Portland Metro.
- bradknowles 9y ago
  Why not? I did something only somewhat less stupid when I was about that age: http://www.shub-internet.org/brad/cacm92nov.html http://www.shub-internet.org/brad/cacm92nov.html
ckastner 9y ago
> It says that once they saw it was printed This was a significant clue that The Intercept did not have to give up. The warrant says they looked at all people who had accessed the report, and because the document appeared to have been printed, then at those 6 who printed it. The yellow dots might have not been a factor, but it's nevertheless the same type of carelessness which might have exposed a whistleblower otherwise. (But yes, this whistleblower would have been discovered by other means as well).
- qb45 9y ago
  1. The actual reason she was arrested is because she admitted leaking it. 2. The story about only six printouts and e-mail correspondence is the official cover to draw public attention away from the yellow dots. 3. The yellow dots is how they actually found her and why she had no reasonable choice but to admit leaking, which allowed 1 to happen without drawing attention to the yellow dots.
  - us0r 9y ago
    > why she had no reasonable choice but to admit leaking While I didn't make my first year of law school I feel like nearly every criminal defense attorney in this country would disagree with this statement.
  - banku_brougham 9y ago
    this is an interesting angle, i assume because there are no references this is merely speculation? actually, since the dots are not at all a secret, #3 cant be right. #2 is a bold claim, obviously pure speculation. So #1, is this true? please link source.
    - mi100hael 9y ago
      > The complaint says she admitted to printing out the document and mailing it to the news outlet. http://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/05/feds-arrest-nsa-contractor-in-leak-of-top-secret-russia-document.html http://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/05/feds-arrest-nsa-contractor-in... I read another article that stated her admission came while the feds were raiding her home.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Shivetya 9y ago
the real issue is not how she was caught, the real issue is how someone like her got to this position in the first place. with a social media existence that is littered with dislike/to hate for the current administration, high activity on social media, a name change, and more? these should all be red flags that either block such positions or remove you from then. back in the last world war they managed to pull off creating an atom bomb with even the vast majority of people in office knowing about it, today every damn snowflake is looking for their five minutes of fame.
novaleaf 9y ago
beware Parallel Construction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction Basically you can't believe any narrative, as the gov can legally put forth anything they can contrive after-the-fact as long as it's plausible.
- Nadya 9y ago
  Nevermind that. Go down the rabbit hole that is COINTEL and realize that thinking that you can really know or trust anything you think you know is futile. The tactics have been used in the past and there is no reason they wouldn't still be in use: they work. Bonus points? Any mention of possible COINTEL tactic gets you labeled a conspiracy theorist. A lovely term invented by the CIA that readily dismisses anyone who points out that a COINTEL tactic might be in use. Lucky for them most the general public bought it hook, line, and sinker.
rndgermandude 9y ago
She did not email TheIntercept from her work address, she subscribed to their podcast mailing list via her personal email. Still an opsec failure of sorts, true, but far less so than you try to make it sound https://d3vv6lp55qjaqc.cloudfront.net/items/1k2I053M3J2z0f473l3r/show_temp%20%2866%29.pdf https://d3vv6lp55qjaqc.cloudfront.net/items/1k2I053M3J2z0f47... PDF Page 11, Paragraphs 15 and 16

by NamTaf 9y ago

retox 9y ago

Does this strike anyone else as suspicious? To my mind she's either incompetent or she intended to become a martyr.

throwaway32144 9y ago
As an aside, how else would one sneak top-secret stuff out of the NSA ? I assume all IO ports have been cut, and the input devices soldered onto the motherboard ? Send some xor-ed file out using a non-secure connection and sneak the key out somehow ? Take photographs/video using the phone, cold-war style ?
- toyg 9y ago
  Taking photographs on an (offline) phone is probably the safest and easiest way to go about it. Obviously no flash, if you can't do it in non-monitored environments make it look like you're just looking at your phone. Go home, take pics out of device, delete them and destroy the phone. This said, it's been reported some contractors and employees routinely took home loads of external drives, so your expectation that IO ports are completely disabled might be unrealistic; the NSA is good but it's just another large org, just a bit more paranoid than average.
  - matthewbadeau 9y ago
    Phones aren't allowed in SCIFs (the facility she worked in). Hard drives labeled unclassified can be removed from those facilities with special permission but I think hard drives are under more scrutiny nowadays.
    - totallynotcool 9y ago
      There are much easier ways to exfil data from a scif than photos. Esp. If you are a contractor.
      - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
        Do tell.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - creepydata 9y ago
    You can't just "look at your phone" while processing classified information. Its highly forbidden to even have a phone in your possession while processing classified information.
- tbihl 9y ago
  Without having visited the site in question, the underlying theme is that you, as the security people, have to choose your battles because employees start to get very upset when you make their jobs difficult in order to show them how little you trust them.
- taneq 9y ago
  > Send some xor-ed file out using a non-secure connection and sneak the key out somehow ? Stray thought: You don't have to sneak a OTP out, you only need to sneak it in. Then you do your XORing, transmit the mangled data, and erase that copy of the key.
danso 9y ago
Her background, according to the Guardian, is former Air Force and being fluent in Middle Eastern languages. None of that indicates that she would be especially knowledgeable of how access logs are implemented. I mean, she should have gave the NSA the benefit of the doubt given the massive clusterfuck caused by Snowden 3+ years ago. But even today, we see reports of massive data incompetence by Booz Hamilton (Snowden's employer) top secret contractors: http://gizmodo.com/top-defense-contractor-left-sensitive-pentagon-files-on-1795669632 http://gizmodo.com/top-defense-contractor-left-sensitive-pen...
- jacquesm 9y ago
  The whole idea of 'top secret contractors' is wrong to begin with. You can't have people access information at that level without making them part of your culture. If you take that risk then there is a fair chance your 'top secret' is in fact 'public domain'.
  - GVIrish 9y ago
    It's not about whether someone is a contractor or a full time government employee. Contractors work on the government site just as much as FTE's, receive the same security training, and are indoctrinated into the same culture. The problem is inadequate access control to classified materials. There tends to be a lot of information that people can access without a need to know, that is not rigorously tracked and locked down. This means that someone looking to steal or leak can get their hands on a lot of stuff they shouldn't without raising suspicions if they're not stupid about it. The reason we may be seeing a number of spillage incidents with contractors is simply because there a lot of contractors working at government agencies. In IT a lot of the time contractors outnumber government people by a significant margin.
  - danso 9y ago
    Yeah, America has not only had an over-classification problem, but it's been inundated with contractors with unnecessary top clearances. The Washington Post had a great investigation back in 2010 cataloguing the sheer size and complexity of America's security and intelligence system: http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/ http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/ Some findings: > Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States. > An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances. > Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.
kibwen 9y ago
Third possibility: that she suspected she'd be caught regardless, and decided that releasing this specific information publicly was more important than her personal freedom. Fourth possibility: that the NSA did use the forensic marks in question to identify her, and fabricated a parallel construction in order to avoid acknowledging the existence of said marks. (But still, most likely this is Hanlon's Razor. What's there to be suspicious about?)
- brador 9y ago
  Five: someone wanted her out and framed her. Six: she was a weak security link and someone used her access details without permission.
  - manicdee 9y ago
    Seven: someone with sysadmin privileges sent mail from her account, having printed the document from six accounts and only managing to get to "her" printer before loose documents were destroyed.
    - optimiz3 9y ago
      Eighth: It's a counter-intel operation and her identity isn't even real.
      - dawnerd 9y ago
        Or this whole thing is all completely fabricated... The way politics are now I'd believe anything at this point.
      - syngrog66 9y ago
        we are asked to believe a HS grad is a triple linguist, named Reality Winner, and within first few months on job ever with NSA was allowed to print and email a TS doc. and that she was arrested on same day within hours so yes, there is at least circumstantial evidence this was not a "real" thing that happened. either a plant or make believe
JohnStrange 9y ago
She's 25 years old and worked in that job for a few months, not a security specialist or some super-spy.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  Well, that's one way to look at it. The other is that NSA's internal security is so botched that a fresh-out-of-school 3 months on the job external contractor managed to outfox the NSA's security measures. What she did should not have been possible in the first place.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    Or that she was a convenient, not long-term career person, to make a cool deal to appear as somebody leaking the document against NSA's will.
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      Not a chance. She will spend a long time in jail if convicted and during the court case such stuff will surely come out if her defense is any good. (Assuming you are aware that she admitted to being the leaker.)
      - taneq 9y ago
        Does she have any close family with health issues that will now get magically taken care of? Sometimes taking a jail sentence is part of the deal.
        coldtea 9y ago
        Or, they had her on something else -- and getting a jail sentence for this is less time, more heroic and/or compensated.
nl 9y ago
Does this strike anyone else as suspicious? What is suspicious about it? This isn't 4chan. Present some evidence but don't just make up random speculation that "could have happened". I mean it's possible to come up with elaborate theories, but the most likely explanation is that she was just spectacularly stupid. or she intended to become a martyr I'm not sure being this dumb is going to get much sympathy from anyone.
- EthanHeilman 9y ago
  Not stupid, it is just hard to not get caught. Once you see how someone is caught you can say "oh of course I'd never do that", but you'd probably make some other mistake. Could she and should she have taken better precautions, without a doubt. Would the average intelligence analyst who is not being coached by a foreign power do a better job, I doubt it. In fact many foreign spies have done a far worst job and not been caught immediately. This is because the intelligence they stole was not published. Being a source of a journalist is much harder than being a source for a foreign power.
  - nl 9y ago
    I agree it's hard not to get caught. But this was just giving it away.
dsplittgerber 9y ago
From what's publically known, the email to The Intercept related to their podcast, of which we supposedly was a listener and not to the matter at hand.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
yoaviram 9y ago
I don't get it. So she printed the document, then scanned in order to email it?
- spuz 9y ago
  It sounds more like she contacted the Intercept just to tell them she had some documents and where should she (physically) mail them.
- eternalban 9y ago
  Details, details. /s
eternalban 9y ago
Are we only permitted to consider 2 choices here or is it permissible to consider the other obvious possibilities?
m-j-fox 9y ago
Agreed. Whenever I leak, I make sure to pin it on some derp. Throws them off my trail so I don't end up like Manning. As for the derp, she'll get a book deal which is more than she ever had going for her. (Kind of annoyed that the derp became the story while the actual leak never made the front page.)

throwaway32144 9y ago

> She literally emailed the Intercept from her work email and was one of a trivial number of people who'd printed it in the first place. Surely, NSA contractors aren't this stupid ? Something smells.

thehardsphere 9y ago
Why not? She's some 25 year old kid. There's no real indication (aside from having linguistic talent) that she's especially smart.
- ForRealsies 9y ago
  And a hardcore Bernie supporter. At least this one didn't pull a Portland Metro.
bradknowles 9y ago
Why not? I did something only somewhat less stupid when I was about that age: http://www.shub-internet.org/brad/cacm92nov.html http://www.shub-internet.org/brad/cacm92nov.html

ckastner 9y ago

> It says that once they saw it was printed This was a significant clue that The Intercept did not have to give up. The warrant says they looked at all people who had accessed the report, and because the document appeared to have been printed, then at those 6 who printed it. The yellow dots might have not been a factor, but it's nevertheless the same type of carelessness which might have exposed a whistleblower otherwise. (But yes, this whistleblower would have been discovered by other means as well).

qb45 9y ago
1. The actual reason she was arrested is because she admitted leaking it. 2. The story about only six printouts and e-mail correspondence is the official cover to draw public attention away from the yellow dots. 3. The yellow dots is how they actually found her and why she had no reasonable choice but to admit leaking, which allowed 1 to happen without drawing attention to the yellow dots.
- us0r 9y ago
  > why she had no reasonable choice but to admit leaking While I didn't make my first year of law school I feel like nearly every criminal defense attorney in this country would disagree with this statement.
- banku_brougham 9y ago
  this is an interesting angle, i assume because there are no references this is merely speculation? actually, since the dots are not at all a secret, #3 cant be right. #2 is a bold claim, obviously pure speculation. So #1, is this true? please link source.
  - mi100hael 9y ago
    > The complaint says she admitted to printing out the document and mailing it to the news outlet. http://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/05/feds-arrest-nsa-contractor-in-leak-of-top-secret-russia-document.html http://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/05/feds-arrest-nsa-contractor-in... I read another article that stated her admission came while the feds were raiding her home.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Shivetya 9y ago

the real issue is not how she was caught, the real issue is how someone like her got to this position in the first place. with a social media existence that is littered with dislike/to hate for the current administration, high activity on social media, a name change, and more? these should all be red flags that either block such positions or remove you from then. back in the last world war they managed to pull off creating an atom bomb with even the vast majority of people in office knowing about it, today every damn snowflake is looking for their five minutes of fame.

novaleaf 9y ago

beware Parallel Construction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction Basically you can't believe any narrative, as the gov can legally put forth anything they can contrive after-the-fact as long as it's plausible.

Nadya 9y ago
Nevermind that. Go down the rabbit hole that is COINTEL and realize that thinking that you can really know or trust anything you think you know is futile. The tactics have been used in the past and there is no reason they wouldn't still be in use: they work. Bonus points? Any mention of possible COINTEL tactic gets you labeled a conspiracy theorist. A lovely term invented by the CIA that readily dismisses anyone who points out that a COINTEL tactic might be in use. Lucky for them most the general public bought it hook, line, and sinker.

rndgermandude 9y ago

She did not email TheIntercept from her work address, she subscribed to their podcast mailing list via her personal email. Still an opsec failure of sorts, true, but far less so than you try to make it sound https://d3vv6lp55qjaqc.cloudfront.net/items/1k2I053M3J2z0f473l3r/show_temp%20%2866%29.pdf https://d3vv6lp55qjaqc.cloudfront.net/items/1k2I053M3J2z0f47... PDF Page 11, Paragraphs 15 and 16