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A recent National Security Agency memo documents a phone call in whichU.S. President Donald Trump pressures agency chief Admiral Mike Rogers to state publicly that there is no evidence of collusion between his campaign and Russia, say reports.

The memo was written by Rick Ledgett, the former deputy director of the NSA, sources familiar with the memo told The Wall Street Journal. Ledgett stepped down from his job this spring.

The memo said Trump questioned the American intelligence community findings that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. American intelligence agencies issued a report early this year that found Russian intelligence agencies hacked the countrys political parties and worked to sway the election to Trump.

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The Russia investigations special counsel Robert Mueller plans to interview Ledgett as part of his investigation into Russias efforts to manipulate the 2016 vote, a source toldWSJ. Mueller is also probing whether Trump himself obstructed justice when he fired former FBI Director James Comey on May 9, according to TheWashington Post.

A memo drawn up by a National Security Agency deputy reportedly records Trump pressuring NSA Director Mike Rogers to influence Russia investigation. Joshua Roberts/Reuters

They made up a phony collusion with the Russians story, found zero proof, so now they go for obstruction of justice on the phony story. Nice, Trump tweeted Thursday. You are witnessing the single greatest WITCH HUNT in American political historyled by some very bad and conflicted people! he wrote.

Read more: Trump asked intelligence chiefs to intervene in Comeys Russia investigation: report

Comey testified a week ago that Trump had pressured him to let go an investigation into fired National Security Adviser Michael Flynn after Flynn misled Vice President Mike Pence about contacthe had had with Russian officials.

Comey also testified that Trump asked him to deny publicly that the president was being investigated by the FBI. Comey said that at the time Trump was not being investigated, but he demurred from Trumps request because he would have to correct his statement publiclyif the facts changed.

On March 20, Comey testified that his investigation into Russian interference was looking at whether Trumps campaign colluded with the foreign power. British intelligence agencies first picked up contactbetween Trumps campaign members and associates in 2015.

Two current and two former officials told The Washington Post that in March Trump asked Rogers and Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats to publicly deny the existence of any evidence of collusion between his campaign and Russia during the 2016 election.

During testimony to the Senate intelligence committee on June 7, neither Coats nor Rogers would answer many specific questions, but both said they did not feel pressure. Coats testified that he never felt pressure to intervene in the Russia investigation.

In the three-plus years that I have been the director of the National Security Agency, to the best of my recollection, I have never been directed to do anything I believed to be illegal, immoral, unethical or inappropriate, Rogers said. And to the best of my recollection...I do not recall ever feeling pressured to do so.

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Trump Tried to Convince NSA Chief to Absolve Him of Any Russian Collusion: Report - Newsweek

BBC News

NSA links Wannacry worm to North Korea BBC News The Wannacry worm that infected organisations in 150 countries in May has been blamed on North Korea by the US's National Security Agency (NSA). The Washington Post said there was "moderate confidence" in the report's findings, while the spy agency ... The NSA reportedly believes North Korea was responsible for WannaCry ransomware attacksThe Verge NSA uncovers ties between North Korea and WannaCry attacksHealthcare IT News NSA Links WannaCry Ransomware Attack To North KoreaTom's Hardware Newser -Mic -One America News Network (press release) -Washington Post all 25 news articles »

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NSA links Wannacry worm to North Korea - BBC News

New York Times

Company Lost Secret 2014 Fight Over 'Expansion' of NSA Surveillance New York Times 11 program through which the N.S.A. collected international phone calls and emails linked to terrorism suspects from American telecommunications providers without the warrants required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. After ... and more »

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Company Lost Secret 2014 Fight Over 'Expansion' of NSA Surveillance - New York Times

The document, a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruling, was wrested from the government thanks to an ACLU FOIA request. But it's so heavily redacted that we cannot identify the tech company who stood up to the NSA.

Specifically, the mysterious company didn't comply with an NSA order under Section 702. That's the legal structure supporting the PRISM domestic spying program, which forces companies to give the NSA access to Americans' international communications.

The company refused because cooperating to grant said access would implicate its First and Fourth Amendment rights. In short, it took the NSA to Constitutional school over the legality of Section 702 itself (to be precise, the company took issue with an "expansion" of Section 702 surveillance, the details of which were redacted), since opening up its users' international communications would eventually and inevitably expose those of domestic citizens. Ergo, if the NSA wanted access, it needed to get a warrant, the company stated.

Ultimately, the court rejected the tech company's claim and ordered it to comply with the NSA request. Judge Rosemary Collyer, who presided over the case, said "the mere fact that there is some potential for error is not a sufficient reason to invalidate the surveillance" -- in other words, prove misconduct or sit down. The document, only now made available to the public, is from 2014, so whatever surveillance may have happened as a result might already have happened.

Section 702 is set to expire at the end of this year, and debate rages on about whether Congress should renew it. The NSA already claimed back in April that it would stop even incidentally collecting domestic American emails in its sweeps, which its analysts were still accidentally doing in 2016. Regardless, this case is a sadly rare illuminating window into an intentionally shadowy world: Back in 2016, for example, the FBI reassured the public that it would be reforming how it accessed data collected by the NSA...but didn't say how, because that's classified.

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Mystery internet company challenges NSA's mass surveillance order - Engadget

The National Security Agency has linked the North Korean government to the creation of the WannaCry computer worm that affected more than 300,000 people in some 150 countries last month, according to U.S. intelligence officials.

The assessment, which was issued internally last week and has not been made public, is based on an analysis of tactics, techniques and targets that point with moderate confidence to North Koreas spy agency, the Reconnaissance General Bureau, according to an individual familiar with the report.

The assessment states that cyber actors suspected to be sponsored by the RGB were behind two versions of WannaCry, a worm that was built around an NSA hacking tool that had been obtained and posted online last year by an anonymous group calling itself the Shadow Brokers.

[NSA officials worried about the day its potent hacking tool would get loose. Then it did.]

It was the first computer worm to be paired with ransomware, which encrypts data on victims computers and demands a ransom to restore access.

WannaCry was apparently an attempt to raise revenue for the regime, but analysts said the effort was flawed. Though the hackers raised $140,000 in bitcoin, a form of digital currency, so far they have not cashed it in, the analysts said. That is likely because an operational error has made the transactions easy to track, including by law enforcement.

As a result, no online currency exchange will touch it, said Jake Williams, founder of Rendition Infosec, a cybersecurity firm. This is like knowingly taking tainted bills from a bank robbery, he said.

[Clues point to possible North Korean involvement in massive ransomware attack]

Though the assessment is not conclusive, the preponderance of the evidence points to Pyongyang. It includes the range of computer Internet protocol addresses in China historically used by the RGB, and the assessment is consistent with intelligence gathered recently by other Western spy agencies. It states that the hackers behind WannaCry are also called the Lazarus Group, a name used by private-sector researchers.

One of the agencies reported that a prototype of WannaCry ransomware was found this spring in a non-Western bank. That data point was a building block for the North Korea assessment, the individual said.

The linkage shows that despite the Obama and Trump administrations efforts to deter North Korean aggression, the country does not appear to have been discouraged from launching one of the most wide-ranging cyberattacks the world has seen.

What it really confirms is that ... you dont have to be the best in the business to cause a lot of disruption, said Michael Sulmeyer, director of the cybersecurity project at Harvards Kennedy School. And thats what they showed they were willing and able to do.

The NSA declined to comment.

North Korea is one of the worlds most isolated countries, with very little computer infrastructure. Yet it has managed to deploy cyber capabilities to harass and annoy its rival, South Korea, and to generate revenue for the authoritarian regime.

Last year, security researchers identified North Korea as the culprit behind a series of cyber-enabled heists of banks in Asia, including one in Bangladesh that netted more than $81 million by manipulating the banks global payments messaging system.

The fact of a nation-state using cyber tools to rob banks, then-NSA Deputy Director Richard Ledgett said in March, represented a troubling new front in cyberwarfare. He did not name North Korea, but the allusion was clear. This is a big deal, he said.

North Korea in 2014 hacked Sony Pictures Entertainment and demanded that the movie studio pull a film that satirized the countrys leader, Kim Jong Un. The hackers disabled computers and released embarrassing company emails. But what tipped the scale for President Barack Obama was the threat to do more damage if the studio did not yank the movie a move that the administration viewed as an assault on free speech. The administration publicly blamed Pyongyang for the attack and imposed new economic sanctions on the regime.

The NSA cyber tool at the base of WannaCry was an exploit dubbed EternalBlue by the agency. It took advantage of a software flaw in some Microsoft Windows operating systems and enabled an attacker to gain access to those computers.

Although Microsoft, after being notified by the NSA, issued a patch for the software flaw in March, many companies around the world and some in the United States failed to update their machines and fell victim to the virus. Michael Daniel, president of the Cyber Threat Alliance, a nonprofit group devoted to improving cyberdefenses through data sharing, said there were a reasonable number of victims in the United States.

Microsoft declined to comment for this report.

Williams, who has closely studied the code, said he is convinced that the ransomware accidentally got loose in a testing phase. That would explain some of its shortcomings, such as an inability for the attacker to tell who has paid the ransom or not, he said.

Nonetheless, he said, this is a case where youve got a weaponized, government-sponsored exploit [or hacking tool] being used to deliver ransomware. If North Korea goes unchecked with this, I would expect other developing nations to follow suit. I think that would change the cyberthreat landscape quite a bit.

Daniel, who was Obamas cybersecurity coordinator, said there needs to be a broad-based approach to deterring North Korea across the board in the physical world and in cyberspace.

Federal prosecutors have been probing North Koreas role in the Bangladesh bank theft, and indictments could be issued. The Justice Department in recent years has used indictments as a tool to try to hold accountable hackers from other nation states, including China and Iran.

Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, which is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, has said that the Obama administrations response to North Korea after the Sony attack was not bold enough. I ... think the Russians were watching and decided that, well, we didnt respond to that. They could get away with a cyberattack, he said at a recent public discussion with Washington Post columnist David Ignatius.

When the South Koreans want to respond to North Korea, Schiff said, they use a form of information warfare. They do it with loudspeakers, he said. They do it by telling people in the North what a terrible regime they live under thats starving their own people.

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The NSA has linked the WannaCry computer worm to North Korea ... - Washington Post