Monthly Archives: June 2017

Barely an hour after a news organization published an article about a top-secret National Security Agency document on Russian hacking, the Justice Department announced charges against a 25-year-old government contractor who a senior federal official says was the leaker of the document.

The May 5, 2017, intelligence document published by The Intercept, an online news organization, describes new details about Russian efforts to hack voting systems in the U.S. a week prior to the 2016 presidential election. While the document doesnt say the hacking changed any votes, it "raises the possibility that Russian hacking may have breached at least some elements of the voting system, with disconcertingly uncertain results."

Even as the document was ricocheting around Washington, the Justice Department announced that a criminal complaint was filed in the Southern District of Georgia, charging Reality Leigh Winner, 25, a federal contractor, with removing classified material from a government facility and mailing it to a news outlet.

The complaint did not link the charges with the story, but a senior federal official confirmed to NBC News that Winner is the accused leaker of the document published by the Intercept. The NSA has a large facility in Georgia.

The complaint says she admitted to printing out the document and mailing it to the news outlet.

It adds that the government found evidence that Winner "had email contact" with the news outlet, and that Winner was one of just six individuals who had viewed the intelligence reporting since the U.S. government published it internally.

Related: NSA Leak Mystery Not Solved With Arrest of Hal Martin

She was arrested by the FBI at her home Saturday, according to a senior federal official. She faces a single charge of "gathering, transmitting or losing defense information."

Winner is a contractor with Pluribus International Corporation, authorities said. She had been employed at the facility since on or about February 13, and held a Top Secret clearance.

Her attorney, Titus Thomas Nichols, told NBC News that his client is "looking forward to putting this behind her," and has no prior criminal history.

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Feds Arrest NSA Contractor in Leak of Top Secret Russia ...

Here are 5 questions that were raised by the leaked NSA hacking report and the ongoing threat that national security officials say Russia poses to the integrity of American elections. Patrick Semansky/AP hide caption

Here are 5 questions that were raised by the leaked NSA hacking report and the ongoing threat that national security officials say Russia poses to the integrity of American elections.

America's sprawling elections infrastructure has been called "a hairball" but as people in Silicon Valley might ask, is that a feature or a bug?

Then-FBI Director James Comey touted it as a good thing "the beauty of our system," he told Congress, is that the "hairball" is too vast, unconnected and woolly to be hacked from the outside.

That was before Monday's leak of a top secret National Security Agency report about a Russian election cyberattack. What that document confirms is that if the whole is safe, its many individual parts may not be.

The NSA report, posted by The Intercept, documents a scheme by Russia's military intelligence agency, the GRU, to compromise the systems of a Florida elections services company then use that access to explore local voting registration records.

"It is unknown whether the aforementioned spear-phishing deployment successfully compromised the intended victims, and what potential data could have been accessed by the cyber actor," as one NSA analyst wrote in the report.

Here are 5 other questions that remain unknown about this story and the ongoing threat that national security officials say Russia poses to the integrity of American elections.

1. How widespread are these attacks?

The Department of Homeland Security and U.S. intelligence leaders have said generally that voter registration rolls were a pet target of Russian cyberattackers, but that Russia didn't change any votes. The American leaders also have warned, however, that they expect the Russian mischief to continue in the 2018 and 2020 election cycles. If the GRU continues operations like this elsewhere, how much better of an understanding will it have of local elections officials and their vendors next year or beyond?

Elections systems analysts tell NPR that although electronic voting machines are not connected to the public Internet, the computers that update their firmware are, or the ones that program them at the factory. It isn't clear what's practically possible in this realm in terms of hacking or compromising those systems; Comey told members of Congress that Russia has attempted to tamper with votes "in other countries," but the details aren't clear.

Even with the redactions, The Intercept made at the request of the NSA to protect some of its key secrets, there are tantalizing details about the extent of the GRU mischief. One note makes clear that this so-called "spear-phishing" campaign was separate from another major program known within secret circles though the name of that is blacked out.

Another mention in the NSA report suggests that two-factor authentication the popular system in which Gmail, for example, sends users a text message with a code they must enter along with a password in order to log in is not a failsafe security feature. The GRU hackers were able to use fake websites that used real Google verification codes to gain access to victims' accounts.

2. Can the federal government do more?

Then-DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson said last year that the federal government was offering help across the board to local elections officials to be aware of the Russian cyber-mischief. And Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee last month that the government continued to provide information about the ongoing threat.

"Two things we can do, and that we are doing, both in the United States and with our allies, is telling the people responsible for protecting the election infrastructure in the United States everything we know about how the Russians and others try to attack those systems," Comey said. "How they might come at it, what [Internet protocol] addresses they might use, what phishing techniques they might use."

That may have been one eventual goal for the NSA report posted on Monday it could have been the top secret original from which DHS or other agencies might have created unclassified advisories to send out to states.

But is it enough just to share information about such a sophisticated adversary? Local vendors and state officials don't have vast IT resources or sophisticated counterintelligence to help defend themselves against state-actor adversaries. And states "pushed back" against Johnson when he offered help last year, as former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told Congress they rejected what he called "federal interference."

Clapper said he believed Congress should designate the national election apparatus "critical infrastructure," the way the U.S. has labeled 16 other "sectors," including the American chemical industry, dams, the power grid and others. That could get very complicated, however, and it would take time and cost money.

3. Why do these leaks keep happening?

The Justice Department has charged a U.S. intelligence community contractor, Reality Winner, with allegedly leaking the NSA report to The Intercept. According to court documents, when the news site's correspondents asked the NSA's public affairs office to verify the report, that enabled the FBI to narrow down who had access to it and pinpoint Winner.

From the perspective of NSA leaders, that's a partial success story: they plugged a leak quickly instead of having it turn into a gusher. But at the same time Winner's case is just the latest example of a contractor on the outer periphery of a spy agency hazarding closely held secrets.

Last month, tens of thousands of sensitive files connected to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency were left on a publicly accessible Amazon server by an engineer with contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Last year, an NSA contractor also with Booz Allen was charged with hoarding a "breathtaking" amount of sensitive material. And before that, NSA contractor Edward Snowen took huge amounts of secret information about the U.S. intelligence community and the military.

Agency bosses, now led by Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, say they've focused intensely on what they call the "insider threat" since the Snowden days, and the intelligence community now has a task force dedicated to helping snuff it out.

The question that Winner's case again raises is how secure Coats and agency leaders can make a constellation of 17 separate agencies that each has its own wider network of contractors who support it.

4. Why can't the U.S. stop these cyberattacks?

Then-CIA Director John Brennan called his counterpart in Russia last year to read him the riot act: "I said that all Americans, regardless of political affiliation or whom they might support in the election, cherish their ability to elect their own leaders without outside interference or disruption," Brennan told the Senate last month. "I said American voters would be outraged by any Russian attempt to interfere in the election."

But Alexander Bortnikov, the head of Russia's FSB intelligence agency the successor to the infamous KGB claimed he didn't know anything about any election meddling. In Brennan's telling, he promised he'd relay the details of the phone conversation to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

President Barack Obama also is believed to have warned Putin to knock off the interference with no result. The NSA report posted on Monday describes a cyberattack that lasted until just before Election Day in November, well after the U.S. announced publicly that Russia had been responsible for campaign mischief.

U.S. intelligence officials said at the time that they believed so-called "attribution" was a powerful weapon. The FBI later issued indictments for Russian intelligence officers and others involved with the meddling, making public how much information Americans have about what's taking place behind the scenes.

None of it, however, appears to have made a difference. Coats, Comey, Brennan and other leaders continue to warn that Russian cyber-mischief proceeds, that Moscow considers it successful and that it could ramp up again in the 2018 midterm and 2020 presidential elections. One political scientist told NPR the world of foreign meddling is "the new normal."

Is that so, or can the U.S. government do more launch cyberattacks of its own, impose further restrictions on Russia or take some other step to impose greater costs on the Russians?

5. Will this change Trump's tune?

"As far as hacking, I think it was Russia," then-President-elect Trump said at a news conference before Inauguration Day.

Since then, however, he's dismissed the election-meddling story as an excuse created by Democrats to cover up Hillary Clinton's loss, or opined that cyberspace is so complicated that no one could ever know for certain who might have been behind it. Russian President Vladimir Putin made the same point over the weekend to NBC News' Megyn Kelly.

The NSA report leaked on Monday, however, shows that, in fact, American intelligence officers have a highly detailed technical understanding about how much of Russia's hacking operation works. They attribute the scheme without hesitation to the GRU and talk in detail about the software and other tools used to try to compromise the victims' computers.

It was one thing for the intelligence community to conclude that Russia had interfered and not explain how it knew. Now there are more clues in the open about how it knows. And the report, completed in May, shows that its analysis continues about the ways Russia's intelligence agencies attacked the U.S during the 2016 cycle.

Trump rejects any notion that his campaign aides might have colluded with the Russian operatives who meddled in the election, but does the emergence of this NSA document make it tougher for him to continue to question whether it even happened?

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5 Unanswered Questions Raised By The Leaked NSA Hacking ...

Rosie ODonnell donated a $1,000 to Reality Winner, the woman who has been charged with stealing and leaking Top Secret documents from the NSA.

On Thursday, the 55-year-old comedian shared on Twitter that she had made the donation on a crowd sourcing site set up for Winner, who was indicted on Monday after she allegedly stole classified documents from her employer about Russians trying to interfere into the 2016 election and gave them to The Intercept.(RELATED:Rosie ODonnell Calls For Trump To Be Arrested)

Rosie ODonnell speaks at a protest rally organized by activists against U.S. President Donald Trump outside the White House in Washington February 28, 2017. REUTERS/James Lawler Duggan

gofundme.com/2d9rnm64 i support reality winner speak truth to power #resist #womenUNITE https://twitter.com/JohnEdwardsAJC/status/872768212190076929 , ODonnell tweeted Thursday along with a link to the GoFundMe page.(RELATED:Rosie ODonnell Shifts From Calling Trump An Orange Anus To Serious Prayer)

She also confirmed that the large donation on the site that read from Rosie ODonnell was in fact from her.

@JohnEdwardsAJC it is accurate i would love to talk to the mother and offer any help, she added.

In one post she even referred to Winner as a brave young patriot.

According to the information on the page, contributions are to help Winner deal with the loss of employment and counseling she will need due to this traumatic experience.

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, a statement on the site read. Possible expenses for travel for the family and anything they might need to help them through these troubled times.

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Rosie O'Donnell Gives Large Sum Of Money To NSA Leaker - The Daily Caller