Politics TOP-SECRET NSA REPORT DETAILS RUSSIAN HACKING EFFORT DAYS BEFORE 2016 ELECTION

Did anyone follow this drama yesterday? What a bizarre fucking story.

Here is the quick and easy summary:

1. A stolen top secret NSA report was released yesterday saying that the Russian Military tried to hack the software of voting machines and election officials days before the Nov election. Very interesting article, you should read it.

2. The woman who leaked this was arrested, she's a subcontractor for the NSA. He name, and you can't make this up, is Reality Winner.

3. Now this is where it gets fun. The website who published this story was in contact with Miss Winner and asked for proof on what she was telling them. So she brought up the report on her computer, printed it and sent it to them.

4. The Intercept scanned the report and printed a PDF of it with their article.

5. All newer printers use micro dot codes when they print that disclose in the printed page when it was printed and the serial number of the printer used.

6. The Intercept accidentally publicly outed their own source. Oops!

7. Wikileaks comes out in support of the woman who leaked the document.

 

RUSSIAN MILITARY INTELLIGENCE executed a cyberattack on at least one U.S. voting software supplier and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials just days before last November’s presidential election, according to a highly classified intelligence report obtained by The Intercept.

The top-secret National Security Agency document, which was provided anonymously to The Intercept and independently authenticated, analyzes intelligence very recently acquired by the agency about a months-long Russian intelligence cyber effort against elements of the U.S. election and voting infrastructure. The report, dated May 5, 2017, is the most detailed U.S. government account of Russian interference in the election that has yet come to light.

While the document provides a rare window into the NSA’s understanding of the mechanics of Russian hacking, it does not show the underlying “raw” intelligence on which the analysis is based. A U.S. intelligence officer who declined to be identified cautioned against drawing too big a conclusion from the document because a single analysis is not necessarily definitive.

The report indicates that Russian hacking may have penetrated further into U.S. voting systems than was previously understood. It states unequivocally in its summary statement that it was Russian military intelligence, specifically the Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate, or GRU, that conducted the cyber attacks described in the document:

Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate actors … executed cyber espionage operations against a named U.S. company in August 2016, evidently to obtain information on elections-related software and hardware solutions. … The actors likely used data obtained from that operation to … launch a voter registration-themed spear-phishing campaign targeting U.S. local government organizations.

This NSA summary judgment is sharply at odds with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s denial last week that Russia had interfered in foreign elections: “We never engaged in that on a state level, and have no intention of doing so.” Putin, who had previously issued blanket denials that any such Russian meddling occurred, for the first time floated the possibility that freelance Russian hackers with “patriotic leanings” may have been responsible. The NSA report, on the contrary, displays no doubt that the cyber assault was carried out by the GRU.

The NSA analysis does not draw conclusions about whether the interference had any effect on the election’s outcome and concedes that much remains unknown about the extent of the hackers’ accomplishments. However, the report raises the possibility that Russian hacking may have breached at least some elements of the voting system, with disconcertingly uncertain results.

https://theintercept.com/2017/06/05...ian-hacking-effort-days-before-2016-election/

 

(CNN)The Justice Department announced charges Monday against a federal contractor with Top Secret security clearance, after she allegedly leaked classified information to an online media outlet.

Reality Leigh Winner, 25, a contractor with Pluribus International Corporation in Georgia, is accused of "removing classified material from a government facility and mailing it to a news outlet," according to a federal complaint.

CNN is told by sources that the document Winner allegedly leaked is the same one used as the basis for the article published Monday by The Intercept, detailing a classified National Security Agency memo. The NSA report, dated May 5, provides details of a 2016 Russian military intelligence cyberattack on a US voting software supplier, though there is no evidence that any votes were affected by the hack.

A US official confirmed to CNN that The Intercept's document is a genuine, classified NSA document.

US intelligence officials tell CNN that the information has not changed the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, which found: "Russian intelligence obtained and maintained access to elements of multiple US state or local electoral boards.

DHS assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying."

http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/05/politics/federal-contractor-leak-prosecution/index.html

 

Awwww....

Funny you should ask that. More from you can't make this shit up files....

Glenn Greenwald was one of the first reporters that Snowden reached out to. He was a reporter for The Guardian. The Guardian mishandled some of the documents Snowden gave them which resulted in Snowden being outed very quickly over this. So Greenwald left The Guardian because of that and started The Intercept.

 

How The Intercept Outed Reality Winner

Today, The Intercept released documents on election tampering from an NSA leaker. Later, the arrest warrant request for an NSA contractor named "Reality Winner" was published, showing how they tracked her down because she had printed out the documents and sent them to The Intercept. The document posted by the Intercept isn't the original PDF file, but a PDF containing the pictures of the printed version that was then later scanned in.

The problem is that most new printers print nearly invisibly yellow dots that track down exactly when and where documents, any document, is printed. Because the NSA logs all printing jobs on its printers, it can use this to match up precisely who printed the document.

In this post, I show how.
the original article here. You can then open it in a PDF viewer, such as the normal "Preview" app on macOS. Zoom into some whitespace on the document, and take a screenshot of this. On macOS, hit [Command-Shift-3] to take a screenshot of a window. There are yellow dots in this image, but you can barely see them, especially if your screen is dirty.


We need to highlight the yellow dots. Open the screenshot in an image editor, such as the "Paintbrush" program built into macOS. Now use the option to "Invert Colors" in the image, to get something like this. You should see a roughly rectangular pattern checkerboard in the whitespace.


It's upside down, so we need to rotate it 180 degrees, or flip-horizontal and flip-vertical:


Now we go to the EFF page and manually click on the pattern so that their tool can decode the meaning:


This produces the following result:

The document leaked by the Intercept was from a printer with model number 54, serial number 29535218. The document was printed on May 9, 2017 at 6:20. The NSA almost certainly has a record of who used the printer at that time.

The situation is similar to how Vice outed the location of John McAfee, by publishing JPEG photographs of him with the EXIF GPS coordinates still hidden in the file. Or it's how PDFs are often redacted by adding a black bar on top of image, leaving the underlying contents still in the file for people to read. Or how opening a Microsoft Office document, then accidentally saving it, leaves fingerprints identifying you behind, as repeatedly happened with the Wikileaks election leaks. These sorts of failures are common with leaks. To fix this yellow-dot problem, use a black-and-white printer, black-and-white scanner, or convert to black-and-white with an image editor.

Printers have two features put in there by the government to be evil to you. The first is that they recognize a barely visible pattern on currency, so that they can't be used to counterfeit money, as shown on this $20 below:



The second is that when they print things out, they includes these invisible dots, so documents can be tracked.

Yes, this code the government forces into our printers is a violation of our 3rd Amendment rights.
http://blog.erratasec.com/2017/06/how-intercept-outed-reality-winner.html#.WTa-VWjyuUl

 

8. Wikileaks also leaked the arrest warrant for Reality Winner before her arrest was announced.

 

It's even more insane when you believe easily debunked lies like the Hillary/Uranium/Russia story.

barfo

 

To get Trump elected. Trump is an idiot. Russia wants to destabilize the world. How better a way to do it, then have egomenaical erratic bumbling Trump get elected. Ties between the United States and our allies are falling apart because of Trump. Putin is getting exactly what he wanted. Plus Rex Tillerson and others in the Trump administration have ties with russian oil companies. Its a win win for Russia snd Putin.

Hillary Clinton would have kept alliances stable, was staunchly against Putin, and would have caused trouble for them in the way of continued and harsher sanctions.