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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.

Originally posted here:
Feds Arrest NSA Contractor in Leak of Top Secret Russia ...

The woman charged by the Department of Justice with stealing Top Secret information from the National Security Agency apparently believes being white is a form of terrorism.

Thats according to a tweet the alleged leaker, Reality Winner, sent in February. Winner, who is herself white, tweeted at rapper Kanye West that he should make a shirt declaring whiteness an act of terror.

@kanyewest you should make a shirt that says, being white is terrorism, she tweeted.

Winners social media history is filled with left-wing messages and support for progressives like Bernie Sanders, as The Daily Callers Chuck Ross has previously documented. (RELATED: NSA Leaker Is A Bernie Supporter Who Resists Trump)

The majority of her recent tweets are angrily directed against President Donald Trump, in particular rehashing the liberal trope about tiny hands. She has also called the president an orange fascist, a cunt and bashed his selection of Confederate General Jeff Sessions amounts to racism. Sessions is head of the agency currently prosecuting Winner.

Winner held a Top Secret security clearance for her job at Pluribus International, an NSA contractor. She reportedly is the source for The Intercepts Monday report about previously unknown Russian interference in the 2016 election. (RELATED: Trump Admin Catches One Of The Leakers)

Read more:
NSA Leaker: 'Being White Is Terrorism' | The Daily Caller

The 25-year-old woman who stole Top Secret documents from the National Security Agency and leaked them to The Intercept appears to be a supporter of Bernie Sanders and other progressive icons, such as Bill Maher and Michael Moore.

Reality Leigh Winners apparent social media footprint also shows that she is a supporter of other liberal causes, including the Womens March and the Islamic Society of North America, the Muslim civil rights group.

She also recently referred to President Trump as a piece of shit because of his position on the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) protests.

Winner was indicted in federal court on Monday after she allegedly stole classified documents from her employer, Pluribus International, a defense contractor that does work for the NSA from its offices in Augusta, Ga.

Winner admitted to FBI agents that she stole the documents and provided them to The Intercept. The news site published an article on Monday that appears to be based on the stolen materials.The Top Secret records show that Russian agents attempted to hack into U.S. voting systems prior to the November election.

The federal complaint filed against Winner reveals that she stole the classified documents on May 9, four days after they were published by the NSA. She printed the report and sent it through ground mail to The Intercept. On May 30, a reporter with the outlet contacted the NSA inquiring about the documents. The agency then contacted the FBI, which dispatched agents to interview and apprehend Winner at her home in Augusta.

Other than her left-leaning Facebook page, Winner has a limited online footprint. One news article from the Kingsville (Tex.) Record shows that she graduated from Air Force basic training in March 2011.

A photo of Winner has not been publicly released, but her Facebook page includes information that matches details contained in a federal indictment filed against her in New York on Monday.

The indictment states that Winner has blonde hair and is five-feet-five.The document also mentions that Winner was planning a vacation to Belize last month and that she drives a light-colored Nissan Cube. Winners social media accounts show that she visited Belize and drives a car matching that description.

Jon Swaine, a reporter with The Guardian, also identified Winner.

Winners posts on Facebook suggest that she is politically active.

OnFeb. 14, a day after Winner took her Top Secret job at Pluribus, Winner posted a photo outside of the Atlanta offices of Georgia Sen. David Perdue.

Winner wrote that she had a 30-minute private meeting with the Republican lawmakers state policy director.

She said they discussed my concerns regarding climate change and what the state of Georgia is doing to reduce dependency on fossil fuels.

Meanwhile, my plea that our senators not be afraid to directly state when our president or his cabinet tell outright lies was well heard. I was able to draw the parallel between the 2011 interview of President Bashar al Assad claiming utter ignorance of the human rights violations his citizens were protesting to Trumps statement last week that the White House hadnt received any calls about the DAPL, nor were there any protests before last week. They got the message, she wrote.

A spokeswoman for Perdue released a statement on Tuesday calling the allegations against Winner very serious.

The allegations against Ms. Winner are very serious, and if true, directly threaten our national security.Wetrust our Justice Department will get to the bottom of this and handle it appropriately, the spokeswoman said.

Winner was heavily critical of Trump just after he took office. She used the hashtag NeverMyPresident and Resist in a Facebook post about his position on DAPL.

Winner posted on Facebook most recently on Friday, the day before she was interviewed by the FBI.

You are what you love, not who loves you, she wrote.

This article has been updated with additional information, including about Winners meeting in February at the offices of Georgia Sen. David Perdue.

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NSA Leaker Is A Bernie Supporter Who 'Resists' Trump | The ...

Security researchers found tracking codes in printed pages from the leaked NSA documents. Enlarge the image and try to spot the faint yellow dots.

Investigators rely on all kinds of prints to find suspects -- fingerprints, footprints and, in Reality Winner's arrest, invisible prints.

On Monday, the National Security Agency contractor was charged in a Georgia court with releasing classified material to a news outlet. The top-secret information was an NSA report from May 5, which was first released to The Intercept, detailing Russian hackers trying to compromise US officials less than two weeks before Election Day in November.

It was yet another twist on the trail of Russian meddling in US politics that stretches back well into last year, from the controversy over leaked emails from Hillary Clinton's campaign to ongoing investigations into meetings involving President Trump's advisers. Trump has disputed reports of Russian interference on his behalf.

The NSA leak came just three days ahead of former FBI director James Comey's expected testimony before a Senate committee looking into the matter.

A trail of printing slipups led the FBI on Saturday to Winner's home, where they arrested the former Air Force linguist. In the Department of Justice's criminal complaint, prosecutors said they saw the leaked documents had been printed, given folds and creases on the page. But it's what wasn't seen that outed Winner as the alleged leaker.

The pages from the NSA's printers came with invisible tracking dots. This is a common feature in modern printers for forensics investigations, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They're nearly invisible to the naked eye, but if you invert the colors, like Rob Graham from Errata Security did, they're a lot more obvious. Take a look now:

This is the document with inverted colors and increased brightness.The dots are a lot more obvious now.

Those dots are part of a DocuColor pattern, a grid of 15 by 8 yellow dots repeated over the edges of printed pages. It's a code packed with tracking information, and can be translated to tell you the time, date and serial number of the printer it came from.

By using the code in the leaked documents, Errata Security saw that the pages were printed on May 9 at 6:20 p.m., on a printer with the serial number 29535218.

"This code the government forces into our printers is a violation of our 3rd Amendment rights," Graham wrote in a blog post.

The NSA also conducted an internal audit to find out that six people had printed out the secret report -- but only Winner had been in touch with The Intercept by email through her work computer.

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Feds charge Reality Winner with leaking NSA report on Russia ...

Reality Leigh Winner, 25, a federal contractor charged by the U.S. Department of Justice for sending classified material to a news organization, poses in a picture posted to her Instagram account. Reality Winner / Instagram via Reuters

"Its a new kind of insider threat that the agency cant defend against," Aid said.

And its getting worse, he added, in part because "Donald Trump and the change in the political scene in America has created an environment for a lot of people who feel that they have to DO something. You become an instant activist."

Winner was vocal in her opposition to Trump on social media, but her motives are unclear. According to federal charging documents, she admitted to mailing a Top Secret document detailing Russian hacking intelligence to the news media. She faces one count of "gathering, transmitting or losing defense information."

The lines are blurry, but Winner and those like her seem in a different class than the Washington insiders who have always leaked to settle internal scores or to make policy points. They are small fries, far from the nations power centers, inside a vast intelligence apparatus who decide the public needs to know what they do. Manning leaked from Baghdad; Snowden was based in Hawaii; Winner was in Georgia.

"These are people who have a greater sense of loyalty to some outside cause than to the organization they are working in, and thats a new thing for the intelligence community," said a former senior NSA official, who asked not to be named so he could speak more candidly about sensitive topics.

There is another dimension, another former NSA official said: Too much information is classified, and everyone working in intelligence knows it.

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Indeed, the document Winner allegedly leaked did not seem, on its face, to be terribly sensitive. The U.S. government, after all, was perfectly willing to acknowledge its authenticity by charging Winner barely an hour after the story broke on The Intercept, as if to send a message. The charging documents dont link the case to The Intercept, but officials quickly did so in background comments to reporters.

Her attorney, Titus Thomas Nichols, said Winner has yet to enter a plea, although a detention hearing is scheduled for Thursday. She remains jailed in Lincoln County.

"A week ago today she was living her life," he said. "Now shes in the middle of a political whirlwind."

See more here:
How Did Accused NSA Leaker Reality Winner Get Security Clearance? - NBCNews.com