A government contractor, Reality Winter, was arrested by the FBI for purportedly leaking highly classified information to The Intercept. The leaked document is a highly classified NSA report detailing how the Russians hacked a voting supplier company in Florida.
However, the NSA report does not reveal that Trump was working, colluding, or anything of the sort with the Russians. What the document does depict is that Russian actors used a spear-phishing email scheme to target local government officials and employees.
The document does claim that the attack by the Russians may have been more far-reaching and devious than previously thought.
The twenty-five-year-old leaker apparently shared the material for political motive. Reality appeared in court Monday after being arrested at her home over the weekend. She was charged with removing and mailing classified documents to a news outlet, DOJ officials said. Which under US law is a serious offense;
“Releasing classified material without authorization threatens our nation’s security and undermines public faith in government,” Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein explained in a statement. “People who are trusted with classified information and pledge to protect it must be held accountable when they violate that obligation.”
The question is what will her sentence look like, given the fact that there have been so many leaks from the United States in recent weeks, it would appear as though, Reality Winner will be made an example of.
Winner works as contractor for Pluribus International Corporation and allegedly leaked the report in early May to The Intercept, the full NSA document can be seen below.
[embeddoc url=”https://www.dropbox.com/s/h2cf5e4hk6rdtej/NSA-Report-on-Russia-Spearphishing.pdf?dl=1″ download=”all” viewer=”google”]
While leaking is criminal, historically, leaks have proven to benefit society, the documents released by Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and others all made aware the current situation in regards to government overwatch, and crime within our Nation. What Winner has done, regardless of political motive, has potentially proved that Russia did try a phishing campaign against the United States. Now the question is how will Donald Trump respond?
