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WASHINGTON Russian hackers attacked at least one U.S. voting software supplier days before last year's presidential election, according to a government intelligence report leaked Monday that suggests election-related hacking penetrated further into U.S. voting systems than previously known.

The classified National Security Agency report, which was published online by The Intercept, 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.

U.S. intelligence agencies declined to comment.

However, the Justice Department announced Monday it had charged a government contractor 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 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."

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contacted NSA and the national intelligence director's office about the document and both agencies asked that it not be published.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 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.

Also on Monday, Reality Leigh Winner, 25, of Augusta, Georgia, was 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."

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Report suggests Russia hackers breached voting software firm - Chattanooga Times Free Press

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Breitbart News reported on March 10 that Florida Republicans were pushing legislation that would put the onus on the state when self-defense was claimed. It forces prosecutors to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a defendants claim to self-defense was not valid before a case could go to trial. In other words, the state law-abiding citizen who used a gun for self-defense would be innocent until proven guilty, and his or her claim of acting in self-defense would be valid unless the state could demonstrate otherwise.

The New York Times went apoplectic over this legislation, claiming the original Stand Your Ground law was bad and the enhancements only make it worse.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has now joined the fray of naysayers with an editorial that claims enhancing Floridas Stand Your Ground law could lead to enhancing Missouris Stand Your Ground Law, which may only lead to more homicides in Missouri.

The outlet writes, In the tumble-down effect that Republican-controlled states have on each other, theres little doubt that similar legislation will surface in Missouri. Critics say a reduced fear of prosecution could prompt an increase in homicides.

The editorial latercites the example of 17-year-old Jordan Davis as an example of the dangers of Stand Your Ground. Davis was a black teen who was shot and killed by a white man, Michael Dunn, over loud music in November 2012. The problem with this example is that Dunn was given life in prison for the shooting, without the possibility of parole. Therefore, it was not a case that fell under the protections of Stand Your Ground.

This effort to flee to examples of white-on-black shootings toundermine Stand Your Ground is itself undermined by Crime Prevention Research Centers John Lott. His latest work on Stand Your Ground shows that the law actually benefits blacks in Florida more than whites. In his book, The War on Guns: Arming Yourself Against Gun Control Lies, Lott explains, From 2005 through October 1, 2014, blacks made up 16.7 percent of Floridas population and 34 percent of the defendants who invoked Stand Your Ground. He adds, Black defendants who invoke this statute are actually acquitted four percentage points more frequently than whites who use this very same defense.

AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host of Bullets with AWR Hawkins, a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.

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St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Enhancing Florida's Stand Your Ground Law Could Increase Missouri's Homicides - Breitbart News

A year ago, Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives staged a sit-in demanding a vote on federal gun-safety bills following the shootings at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. The National Rifle Associations lobbying was largely blamed for no vote happening. But looking deeper, the Second Amendment with the unique American individualism wrapped around it underlies all. It is Americas fundamental gun problem.

As Michael Waldman at the Brennan Center for Justice suggests in Politico Magazine (2014), the NRAs construing of the Second Amendment as an unconditional right to own and carry guns (a right beyond actual constitutional law in Supreme Court rulings) is why it thrives and has clout.

Without clout derived from Second Amendment hyperbole, we might not have, for instance, stand your ground laws in more than 20 states starting with Florida in 2005, laws that professors Cheng Cheng and Mark Hoekstra report in the Journal of Human Resources (2013) do not deter crime and are associated with more killing.

Pockets of America were waiting for the NRAs Second Amendment fertilizer.

For many gun advocates, the gun is an important aspect of ones identity and self-worth, a symbol of power and prowess in their cultural groups. Dan Kahan at Yale University with co-investigators studied gun-safety perceptions and wrote in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (2007) how those most likely to see guns as safest of all were the persons who need guns the most in order to occupy social roles and display individual virtues within their cultural communities.

Or, as the essayist Alec Wilkinson writes more starkly on The New Yorkers website (2012), although the [gun] issue is treated as a right and a matter of democracy underlying all is that a gun is the most powerful device there is to accessorize the ego.

A gun owner carrying his semiautomatic long rifle into a family department store, like Target, in a state permitting such if asked why will likely say because it is his right. He is unlikely to reveal the self-gratification gained from demonstrating the prowess and power of his identity, gained from using the gun to accessorize the ego. The Second Amendment here is convenient clothing to cover deeper unspoken needs, needs that go beyond the understandable pleasures and functions of typical hunting, for instance.

Australia is often mentioned as an example of nationwide gun-safety legislation reducing gun violence. Following the 1996 massacre of 35 people in Port Arthur, Australia, the government swiftly passed substantial gun-safety legislation. And as Professors Simon Chapman, Philip Alpers and Michael Jones wrote in JAMAs June 2016 issue, [F]rom 1979-1996 (before gun law reforms), 13 fatal mass shootings occurred in Australia, whereas from 1997 through May 2016 (after gun-law reforms), no fatal mass shootings occurred.

But Australia also has nothing akin to the Second Amendment.

Anthropologist Abigail Kohn studied gun owners in the U.S. and Australia who were engaged in sport shooting. She describes in the Journal of Firearms and Public Policy (2004) how it is immediately apparent when speaking to American shooters that they find it impossible to separate their gun ownership, even their interest in sport shooting, from a particular moral discourse around self, home, family, and national identity.

And thus, American shooters are hostile to gun control because just as guns represent freedom, independence the best of American core values gun control represents trampling on those core values.

In contrast, the Australians view guns as inseparable from shooting sports. And perhaps most importantly, Australian shooters believe that attending to gun laws, respecting the concept of gun laws, is a crucial part of being a good shooter; this is the essence of civic duty that Australian shooters conflate with being a good Australian. While the Australian shooters thought some gun-safety policies were useless and stupid, they thought that overall gun-safety measures were a legitimate means by which the government can control the potential violence that guns can do.

Unlike Australia (itself an individualist-oriented country), America has the Second Amendment. And that amendment has fostered a unique individualism around the gun, an individualism perpetrating more harm than safety.

Maybe someday the Second Amendment will no longer reign as a prop serving other purposes and, thus, substantive federal gun-safety legislation happens. But as Professor Charles Collier wrote in Dissent Magazine: Unlimited gun violence is, for the foreseeable future, our [Americas] fate and our doom (and, in a sense, our punishment for [Second Amendment] rights-based hubris).

The Second Amendment, today, is a song of many distorted verses. A song of a uniquely American tragedy.

Fred Decker is a sociologist in Bowie, Md., with a background in health and social policy research. He earned his doctorate from Florida State University.

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Second Amendment: An American tragedy - Orlando Sentinel

After her car broke down out of Lewiston, Idaho, a young woman accepted a ride from a man who was driving a marked company van. Later, a fisherman snagged one of her body parts out of the Snake River. She didnt have a concealed pistol permit.

An older lady, again in Lewiston, was brutally murdered, by a sex offender, while taking an evening walk in the park. She didnt have a concealed pistol permit.

While living in the Spokane region, I read about a woman who was stabbed to death while walking on one of the paved trails in the city. She didnt have a concealed pistol permit.

Another woman was kidnapped by two men and thrown, purse and all, into a cars trunk. While in the trunk, the woman retrieved her Smith & Wesson Snub Nose .38 revolver from her purse. When the trunk was opened, the woman shot both of her assailants. She had a concealed pistol permit.

Our graveyards are full of people who died needlessly because they had no way to defend themselves. The latest incident occurred in Portland where two citizens, trying to prevent a hate crime, were stabbed to death by a violent ex-convict who had repeatedly been released from prison after committing serious crimes.

Its ironic that our soft-on-crime liberals/progressives continually release vicious criminals to prey on us, and then suggest that the solution for crime is to take legally owned firearms away from the law-abiding. Thats typical liberal lunacy.

Now that the Republican Party, the party of liberty, is back in control well have at least a four-year respite from the Democratic Partys war on our rights to keep and bear arms. I note, too, that the subversive anti-gun lobby and its network of useful idiots, from Walla Walla to New York, have been deafeningly silent since the election.

Again, we were given the Second Amendment so that we could defend ourselves and our nation.

Now that were finally free, lets take advantage of our Second Amendment rights, which includes the right for law-abiding people to carry concealed arms for self-defense against the monsters.

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Use Second Amendment rights and arm yourself - Walla Walla Union-Bulletin

June 1, 2017 11:31 PM

LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) President Donald Trumps tough stance on illegal immigration has forced many undocumented immigrants to live in the shadows.

A mother of six who agreed to talk to CBS2s Jennifer Kastner only if her identity was not revealed is among them.

For the purpose of this story, she will be referred to as Lisa. It took months before she agreed to be interviewed andshare her daily life, which is filled with fear and anxiety.

Lisa said every time she and her family go anywhere, they always pray in the car first thatthey wont get stopped by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

Kastner rode with Lisa as she went to pick up three of her children from school. On the way back, they went to a 99 Cents Only store to pick up some items. All their stops are usually quick to buy only basic necessities.

Lisa said she has a license, auto registration, insurance and no criminal record. But she still panics when she is on the road and does not take her kids to a park or anywhere else where they can run the risk of being detained and eventually deported.

The 38-year-old mother said her network of undocumented mothers are keenly aware if immigration officers are in the neighborhood as they keep each other informed of ICE activities.

According to ICE, the majority of target fugitives have serious criminal backgrounds. But agents alsoarrest undocumented immigrants who have no criminal records, which has been fueling fears that families are being torn apart solely over illegal status in the United States.

We are good people. We want to do good stuff in this country and have better life, Lisa said.

Lisas husband is also in the country illegally. The couple illegally crossed from Mexico almost 20 years ago. They and their six children, who were born in the U.S., are temporarily living in a motel room.

He works overnights as a cook while she cares for their kids. They said they are practicing Mormons, pay taxes and live modestly.

Kastner first met the couple in March at the Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles, wherethey took weekly immigrants-rights workshop and received a red card, which shows theirconstitutional right to remain silent and not have a home searched unless there is a warrant.

According to the consulate, attendance there drastically soared since Trump became president.

Lisa and her husbands visits to the consulate came soon after theyrevealed to their children about their illegal status.

The couple said they have heard a lot about families being torn apart as a result of deportation and did not want the same to happen to them.

We heard a lot of stories, you know, they took those parents and the kids they left behind. We dont want that for our kids, the husband said.

The couples 8-year-old daughter said she often cries in the schools restroom because she constantly worries about the possibility of her parents being deported.

Im afraid that when school is over, I dont see them again. And I have to go to the orphanage, the girl said as she trembled.

The girl and her five siblings have never met their grandparents, who live in Mexico, because the children do not have the necessary papers needed to cross.

The family says it breaks their hearts. But trying to live the American dream does not come without sacrifice.

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Trump's Tough Talk On Illegal Immigration Forces Many Into ... - CBS Los Angeles