WhatsAppwill stop working on dozens ofolder phone models from 1 February, meaning millions of people will no longer have access to the worlds most popular messaging app.

The Facebook-owned app claims the mass cull is necessary in order to protect the security of its users, as it is no longer actively developing features and updates for certain older handsets.

Affected devices include any iPhonesrunning iOS 8 or earlier, as well as Android phones running versions older than 4.03 also referred to as Ice Cream Sandwich. (The Independenthas put together a list of every device affected.)

Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

Any WhatsAppusers with Windows phones have already lost access, after a similar purge at the end of 2019.

While some users may choose to upgrade toa new smartphone to avoid the purge, this may not be an option for everyone. For those who are unwilling or unable to ditch their old phones, weve put together a list of the best alternatives.

Arguably the most like-for-like messaging app to WhatsApp is Telegram, which supports many of the same features and even some extras.

Telegram founder Pavel Durov has consistently criticised WhatsAppfor perceived security and privacy issues, most recently in a blog post on Thursday.

WhatsApp boasts hundreds of millions more users than Telegram but a series of scandals are pushing people towards the rival messaging app (Composite)

The Russian entrepreneur described WhatsApp as "dangerous", building on previous claims that it would never be secure.

His warning that "there hasn't been a single day in WhatsApp's 10 year journey when the service was secure" appeared to be confirmed earlier this month when it was revealed Jeff Bezos was hacked through a security flaw in the app.

With more than 200 million users, Telegram is therefore already a popular alternative for more privacy-focused users.

With around 260 million users, Viber is even more popular than Telegram. Its users tend to be more concentrated to certain regions, however, meaning it might be difficult to find friends using it unless you are from there.

Its core user base is in eastern Europe, north Africa and the Middle East, though there is a scattering of users elsewhere in the world.

You can unsend a message by tapping and holding it, hitting the Delete symbol and selecting Delete for Everyone. The feature works for all types of messages, but only if they were sent less than seven minutes ago.

WhatsApps blue ticks show when sent messages have been read, but you can disable them buy going to Settings > Account > Privacy > Read Receipts. However, bear in mind that, by doing so, youll lose the ability to see when your own sent messages have been read. Another, more fiddly way of reading your messages without triggering the blue ticks, is enabling Aeroplane Mode before opening your messages - just remember to close the app before switching Aeroplane Mode off again.

Prevent your friends from finding out when you were last online by hiding your last seen time. Go to Settings > Account > Privacy > Last Seen. As is the case with disabling read receipts, hiding your last seen time will also stop you from seeing anybody elses.

You can control how much data you munch through on WhatsApp by limiting the types of media you automatically download on a mobile connection. Go to Settings > Data Usage and choose the best option for you.

If youre expecting an important WhatsApp message from someone, set a custom notification for them by opening the chat, tapping their name at the top and hitting Custom Notifications.

To jazz up any of your messages, simply highlight it by tapping and holding it, hit the More Options key on the pop-up menu and tap the formatting option you want - bold, italic, strikethrough or monospace.

You can get Siri or Google Assistant to type your WhatsApp messages out for you by saying either Hey Siri or Okay Google, followed by the name of the person you want to message and the actual contents of the message.

When youve read a message but cant reply to it straight away, you can set a visual reminder by marking it as unread. On Android, long-press the conversation, and on iOS, swipe from left to right on a chat.

You almost certainly wont do this on a regular basis, but its a handy option to have. You can export entire conversations - complete with emoji and media attachments - by hitting More inside a chat a selecting Email Chat.

You can send the same message to lots of your contacts without lumping them all into one group, much like the BCC option on email, by hitting the New Broadcast option on the apps main menu.

You pin up to three contacts and groups to the top of your WhatsApp conversation list by tapping and holding a chat, then hitting the pin icon.

You can easily mark key messages with a star, allowing you to find them easily when you need to. Just tap and hold a message and hit the star icon to save it, and return to it later by selecting Starred Messages in WhatsApps main menu.

You can unsend a message by tapping and holding it, hitting the Delete symbol and selecting Delete for Everyone. The feature works for all types of messages, but only if they were sent less than seven minutes ago.

WhatsApps blue ticks show when sent messages have been read, but you can disable them buy going to Settings > Account > Privacy > Read Receipts. However, bear in mind that, by doing so, youll lose the ability to see when your own sent messages have been read. Another, more fiddly way of reading your messages without triggering the blue ticks, is enabling Aeroplane Mode before opening your messages - just remember to close the app before switching Aeroplane Mode off again.

Prevent your friends from finding out when you were last online by hiding your last seen time. Go to Settings > Account > Privacy > Last Seen. As is the case with disabling read receipts, hiding your last seen time will also stop you from seeing anybody elses.

You can control how much data you munch through on WhatsApp by limiting the types of media you automatically download on a mobile connection. Go to Settings > Data Usage and choose the best option for you.

If youre expecting an important WhatsApp message from someone, set a custom notification for them by opening the chat, tapping their name at the top and hitting Custom Notifications.

To jazz up any of your messages, simply highlight it by tapping and holding it, hit the More Options key on the pop-up menu and tap the formatting option you want - bold, italic, strikethrough or monospace.

You can get Siri or Google Assistant to type your WhatsApp messages out for you by saying either Hey Siri or Okay Google, followed by the name of the person you want to message and the actual contents of the message.

When youve read a message but cant reply to it straight away, you can set a visual reminder by marking it as unread. On Android, long-press the conversation, and on iOS, swipe from left to right on a chat.

You almost certainly wont do this on a regular basis, but its a handy option to have. You can export entire conversations - complete with emoji and media attachments - by hitting More inside a chat a selecting Email Chat.

You can send the same message to lots of your contacts without lumping them all into one group, much like the BCC option on email, by hitting the New Broadcast option on the apps main menu.

You pin up to three contacts and groups to the top of your WhatsApp conversation list by tapping and holding a chat, then hitting the pin icon.

You can easily mark key messages with a star, allowing you to find them easily when you need to. Just tap and hold a message and hit the star icon to save it, and return to it later by selecting Starred Messages in WhatsApps main menu.

It comes with group chat, instant voice and video messaging, as well as support for audio and video calls.

Similar to both Telegram and WhatsApp, all messages on Viber are end-to-end encrypted, while it also allows users to send timed self-destruct messages.

Endorsed by the world's most famouswhistleblowerEdward Snowden, Signal is the go-to app for people who's number one priority for a messaging service is privacy.

Unlike Telegram, it uses open-source encryption that allows security developers to test it for flaws and find bugs.

Edward Snowden has consistently praised the privacy benefits of the Signal messaging app (Rosdiana Ciaravolo/Getty Images)

It is free and simple to use, however it does not support some of the more popular features of other messaging apps.

Available on all major platforms, it's a great alternative for anyone happy to go without animated emojis.

WeChat is the most popular app you may never have heard of, with nearly a billion people using it every day. Almost all of these users, however, are in China.

The versatile app has achieved such dominance in its native country by covers messaging, social media and mobile payments.

The multi-purpose app is also used by companies as a communication platform, while organisations also use official accounts as a platform to register for servicers.

Its popularity has led to fears that it is used for state surveillance activities, while also being heavily censored.

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WhatsApp is about to stop working for millions what are the best alternatives? - The Independent

LONDON As the 1st Brigade Combat Team of the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division departed for the Middle East amid rising tensions with Iran, their divisional commander gave a simple order. All personnel entering the region were told to leave smartphones and personal devices in the United States.

It was a clear sign of growing official nervousness over the potential vulnerability of items that had become an unquestioned fact of life for soldiers and civilians alike, but which Washington fears potential foes could track, exploit and use for targeting. Such concerns are far from new but were regarded less seriously when Americas primary enemies were seen as nonstate groups such as Islamic State, the Taliban and al-Qaida. Now Washington is worried about other nations not just Iran, but Russia and China which are seen as a much more existential threat.

It also points to a much greater trend. Across the board, the communications revolution and the vast sea of data it produces has made surveillance much easier, a trend likely to be magnified by the growth of artificial intelligence.

It has also facilitated the mass leaking of phenomenal amounts of information, as demonstrated by National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. And simultaneously, it has overturned decades of tradecraft in espionage and associated fields, where despite the rise in fake news and online trickery, spy agencies like the CIA now reportedly find it almost impossible to maintain the multiple false identities on which they once relied.

The foundations of the business of espionage have been shattered, former CIA official Duyane Norman said in a Yahoo News report, which outlined how foreign governments have become much better at tracking real and covert U.S. identities through phone and bank records, facial recognition and even the records of off-the-shelf DNA tests. The debate (within the intelligence community) is like the one surrounding climate change. Anyone who says otherwise just isnt looking at the facts.

For military commanders, the options are also becoming limited. In Russias war with Ukraine, Moscows forces have shown remarkable skill in targeting counterparts on the battlefield as soon as they use their phones or radios. According to the U.S.-based Military Times, the U.S. Marine Corps already bans troops from taking personal devices on Middle East combat deployments. The U.S. Navy says it is reconsidering its rules, while the army says such decisions as with the 82nd Airborne are at the personal discretion of commanders.

Decisions are inevitably compromises. Taking away devices reduces the ability of personnel not just to talk to their families but can complicate communications and organization. However, concerns are growing fast. This month, the Pentagon also demanded personnel stop using the Chinese-owned TikTok application, with other similar platforms including WhatsApp also added to some blacklists.

Reducing careless talk and unnecessary radio and other emissions is hardly new. As far back as World War I, British commanders discovered telephone systems in forward trenches had often been compromised by German signalers and did everything they could to ensure the most sensitive messages were instead carried by hand or word of mouth. Naval vessels, military aircraft and particularly submarines have long done everything possible to mask their signatures, particularly near enemy territory. Recent years, however, have seen growing lapses, including from those who might have been expected to know better.

In early 2018, data released by fitness app Strava identified assorted U.S., Russian and even Iranian secret bases in Syria where military personnel and contractors appeared to have recorded their exercise runs without realizing they would be highlighted and widely shared. The U.S. military has now gone so far as to incorporate such mistakes into training exercises, killing off an entire unit in one drill after a soldier posted a selfie photo whose geo-tagging gave away their position.

Authorities are also nervous about nonaccidental releases of information. This November, White House and military staff removed smartphones from reporters and presidential aides for the duration of U.S. President Donald Trumps unannounced Thanksgiving trip to Afghanistan, which appeared as much about ensuring the news did not leak as worries the phones themselves might be tracked.

In terms of the latter, the greatest threat will come when artificial intelligence and voice recognition software reach the point where phones can be used to monitor nearby conversations without use of a human analyst or translator. That may come sooner rather than later one reason why some security experts are extremely nervous about Chinese firm Huawei being at the heart of 5G phone networks in several European countries, including Britain, which on Tuesday announced it will allow Huwei a limited role despite U.S. objections.

For authoritarian states like China and Iran, both witnessing a major spike in often smartphone-coordinated protest and unrest, being able to access and track electronic devices and the population at large is seen as a priority. Most notably in Xinjiang province but also across the country, Beijing is turning China into the most sophisticated surveillance state in human history. Within its borders, China already has considerable, sometimes almost exhaustive, access to data and devices. Faster and more incisive artificial intelligence and machine learning will dramatically extend that reach.

The question for Western states will be how effectively their potential foes can repurpose that technology to gather information outside their borders. The U.S. and its allies have become used to being able to use whatever devices and communications they wished since the Berlin Wall fell. Those days are ending fast.

Peter Apps is a writer on global affairs.

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In the next war, soldiers will leave their smartphones at home - The Japan Times

The White House sent a threatening letter to former National Security Advisor John Bolton's attorneys declaring that his forthcoming book, The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir, is a threat to national security and cannot be published.

"Based on our preliminary review, the manuscript appears to contain significant amounts of classified information," wrote Ellen Knight, senior director for records at the National Security Council, in the letter to Bolton's attorneys. "The manuscript may not be published or disclosed without the deletion of this classified material."

The full letter was obtained by CNN's Jake Tapper:

Bolton has indicated that he would be willing to testify at the president's impeachment trial in the Senate, though it's currently unclear whether there are enough Republican senators who will vote to allow witnesses at all. Bolton may have information that is damaging to Trump's defense. As Reasonreported previously:

In a book that is soon to be released,Bolton saysthat Trump held up $391 million in congressional authorized security assistance from Ukraine so he could pressure President Volodymyr Zelenskiy into announcing investigations that zeroed in on Trump's political rivals, namely former Vice President Joe Biden. In December,Trump was impeachedby the House on abuse of power and obstruction of Congress in connection with the incident.

The Bolton allegations threw a wrench into the Senate trial as Republicans mull if they want to introduce witnesses and additional evidence after arguments conclude. Lawmakers will need a simple majority to hear new testimony, and Sens. Mitt Romney (RUtah) and Susan Collins (RMaine) have expressed that they will likely vote in favor.Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (RKy.) has emphasized the need for speedy proceedings and expressed his desire thatno witnesses be called.

Senate procedure is one matter. But regardless of whether Bolton is able to present his information at the trial, it's incredibly suspicious for the White House to seek to suppress the book itself. The administration should not be able to invoke the dreaded specter of "national security" every time someone is prepared to say something that might cause the government embarrassment. This is reminiscent of the efforts to stop whistleblower Edward Snowden from publishing his own book about the federal government's vast ability to spy on U.S. citizens. Knowing that it was unlikely the very power apparatus his book was criticizing would give him a fair shake, Snowden opted not to submit his manuscript for government review, which led a court to rule that the authorities could seize the book's profits.

There are, some legitimate secrets the government has an interest in protectingthe names of intelligence assets, for instanceand it's not wrong for the White House to review a former top advisor's book for inadvertent slips. But there's reason to be deeply skeptical that the White House's concerns are related to these actual, sensitive matters. The president himself recently characterized Bolton's potential testimony as a national security issue along the following lines:

"When [Bolton] knows my thoughts on certain people and other governments, and we're talking about massive trade deals and war and peace and all these different things that we talk about, that's really a very important national security problem," Trump told reporters in Davos, Switzerland.

Bolton knowing Trump's "thoughts on certain people and other governments" may be embarrassing for the administration, but it is not a rational basis upon which to censor him. Too often, national security is invoked to quell legitimate questions about government operations.

Readers should not be deprived of access to Bolton's book. They may end up rejecting its relevance, truthfulness, indictment of Trumpindeed, there are many good reasons to be skeptical of Bolton in generalbut that's for the American people to decide, not the national security state.

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Citing National Security, the Trump Administration Says John Bolton Can't Publish His Book - Reason

As Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor, reports in his new memoir, Permanent Record, on the morning of September 11, 2001, the NSAs director Michael Hayden, issued the order to evacuate before most of the country even knew what had happened. Twelve years later, Snowden rocketed from complete obscurity to international headlines and public fame.

Snowden used his access to the NSAs mass surveillance and bulk data collection programs to alert the press and public. Snowdens memoir was published in September of last year and is, for being authored by such a technology inclined individual, surprisingly well written. His prose is full of witticism, his passion for civil liberties is palpable and his explanation of complex technological aspects of the programs that he worked on is elucidating.

According to Snowden, these mass surveillance programs violate the Fourth Amendment, which holds, The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Snowdens position is one the U.S. government clearly disagrees with, which led to Snowden being trapped in Russia on June 23, 2013, when then-Secretary of State John Kerry revoked Snowdens passport while he was in mid-flight from Hong Kong to Moscow. Snowden had planned to connect to another flight that would take him toward his final destination in Ecuador where he planned to seek asylum.

Snowden, still stuck in Russia, now serves as the president of the board of directors of the Freedom of the Press Foundation which is, as he writes, a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting and empowering public-interest journalism in the new millennium. He states that the major goal of the organization is to preserve and strengthen First and Fourth Amendment rights through the development of encryption technologies. In his memoir, Snowden gives two reasons for his stance: the civil service environment of his family and the civil liberties environment of the early internet. His father and maternal grandfather both served as engineers in the United States Coast Guard.

Snowden writes in his preface about how todays internet is unrecognizable from the internet of his youth. He rightly labels the internet of today as surveillance capitalism, the monetization and commercialization of individuals data. We, and by extension the data we generate through our online interactions, are the product for these platforms. This data, generated by our interactions with online platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Google, is collected and often used to individually target advertisements.

Until recently, most people werent aware that their data was being collected or how the methods of collection were being implemented. Even though this knowledge has now become more available to the public, the technologies that operate on these models have become almost indispensable for many people.

For anyone interested in Edward Snowdens journey from public servant to international martyr, Permanent Record is a thoroughly enjoyable and informative read.

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A Blizzard of Information - The Independent

Every week brings a fresh hell in the tech world. As news of the latest scandals pile up over weeks, months and eventually years, narratives switch. Friendly tech companies become Big Tech. The narrative is flattened. The tech giants become monolithic and their employees become caricatures often of villains.

The truth is always messier, more interesting and more human. It is a central tension animating Anna Wieners excellent memoir, Uncanny Valley. The book traces Ms. Wieners navigating the tech world as a start-up employee in the mid 2010s what might be thought of as the last years before Silicon Valleys fall from darling status. Ms. Wiener said she was drawn into the tech world by its propulsive qualities. Graduating into a recession and spending her early 20s in publishing, tech offered opportunities: jobs, the seductive feeling of creating something and, of course, the money was good.

But what makes Uncanny Valley so valuable is the way it humanizes the tech industry without letting it off the hook. The book allows us to see the way that flawed technology is made and marketed: not by villains, but by blind spots, uncritical thinking and armies of ambivalent people coming into work each day trying their best all while, sometimes unwittingly, laying the foundation of the surveillance economy.

From a privacy standpoint, Uncanny Valley is helpful in understanding what its like being on the other end of the torrent of information that streams from our devices each minute. Early on, Ms. Wiener recounts working for a successful data analytics company and the gold rush toward big data, noting that not everyone knew what they needed from big data, but everyone knew that they needed it.

When confronted with the mass of information her company collected, Ms. Wiener describes feeling uncomfortable with the God Mode view that granted employees full access to user data. This was a privileged vantage point from which to observe the tech industry, and we tried not to talk about it, she writes. This, she notes, becomes a pattern. When Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the National Security Agencys Prism program in 2013, employees at her own data company never discussed the news.

What she describes is a familiar dissociation for anyone who spends time interrogating tech companies on their privacy policies. Her company simply didnt consider itself part of the surveillance economy:

We werent thinking about our role in facilitating and normalizing the creation of unregulated, privately held databases on human behavior. We were just allowing product managers to run better A/B tests. We were just helping developers make better apps. It was all so simple: people loved our product and leveraged it to improve their own products, so that people would love them, too. There was nothing nefarious about it. Besides, if we didnt do it, someone else would. We were far from the only third-party analytics tool on the market. The sole moral quandary in our space that we acknowledged outright was the question of whether or not to sell data to advertisers. This was something we did not do, and we were righteous about it. We were just a neutral platform, a conduit. If anyone raised concerns about the information our users were collecting, or the potential for abuse of our product, the solutions manager would try to bring us back to earth by reminding us that we werent data brokers. We did not build cross-platform profiles. We didnt involve third parties. Users might not know they were being tracked, but that was between them and our customer companies.

They were, in other words, just doing their jobs.

Ms. Wiener frequently returns to this reticence to question the product, the end goals of the technology and the Silicon Valley ethos as a whole.

At her next job working on the terms of service team for a large open source code platform, she reveals how the evolution of the internet pushed her and her co-workers into becoming reluctant content moderators. Soon it became her teams job to fashion a balance between preserving free speech on her platform and protecting it from trolls and neo-Nazis:

We wanted to tread lightly: core participants in the open-source software community were sensitive to corporate oversight, and we didnt want to undercut anyones techno-utopianism by becoming an overreaching arm of the company-state. We wanted to be on the side of human rights, free speech and free expression, creativity and equality. At the same time, it was an international platform, and who among us could have articulated a coherent stance on international human rights?

As a journalist who has covered content moderation issues for the better part of a decade, the perspective is somewhat clarifying. Decisions that feel ad hoc or made by one or two people in the belly of a large company often are. What looks from the outside like a conspiracy or nefarious techno-authoritarianism is often just confusion caused by poor management, poor communication and dizzying growth. Most of the company did not seem aware of how common it was for our tools to be abused, Ms. Wiener writes of her group of de facto moderators. They did not even seem to know that our team existed. It wasnt their fault we were easy to miss. There were four of us for the platforms nine million users.

In this instance, Uncanny Valley shows how the internet can thrust ordinary people into extraordinary positions of power usually without qualifications or a how-to guide. This is not to say that the book excuses any of the industrys reckless behavior. Like a good travel writer, Ms. Wiener positions herself as an insider-outsider, participating in something bigger than myself and still feeling apart from it. And she is sufficiently critical of her and her peers participation in the industry. She writes that she would wonder whether the N.S.A. whistle-blower had been the first moral test for my generation of entrepreneurs and tech workers, and we had blown it, she writes at one point near the end of the memoir.

Ms. Wieners memoir comes at a point where the backlash against Silicon Valley is strong enough to have earned its own name. Narratives have hardened and aggrieved tech employees are adopting a bunker mentality. As Ranjan Roy of the newsletter Margins wrote recently of Facebook, the rank and file are seeing that they are the villains, and will increasingly become so. As so much of the reporting shows, the increased scrutiny and criticism of the techlash is important and almost all is warranted. Big Tech has amassed wild, unregulated power that has grown unchecked.

Still, its easy to get conspiratorial and to fall comfortably into black and white notions of good versus evil. Uncanny Valley is a reminder that the reality is far more muddled but no less damning. Our dystopia isnt just the product of mustache-twirling billionaires drunk with power and fueled by greed though it is that, too, sometimes. Its also the result of uncritical thinking, blind spots caused by an overwhelmingly white male work force and a pathological reluctance to ask the bigger question: Where is this all going? What am I building?

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The Flawed Humanity of Silicon Valley - The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO In the age of mass digital surveillance, how private should your data and communications be? That question lies at the heart of the encryption panel that kicked off the Enigma Conference here yesterday (Jan. 27).

Four cryptography experts discussed the origins of the first "Crypto Wars" in the 1990s, the state of the current Crypto Wars between the government and technology companies two weeks ago, the U.S. attorney general called out Apple for not unlocking a terror suspect's iPhones and what's at stake now for consumers, companies and governments.

"It is a basic human right for two people to talk confidentially no matter where they are. This is sacrosanct," said Jon Callas, senior technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and a veteran of the fight between the U.S. government and tech companies over the use of cryptography to protect digital communications in the 1990s.

It may be a human right, but most countries have not enshrined confidential conversations in their legal codes. What started as a resurgent fight against government surveillance in the wake of the documents leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013 has now bloomed into a larger struggle over who gets to encrypt communications and data.

In Snowdens wake, end-to-end encrypted messaging has become far more accessible, while Apple and Google have introduced on-device encrypted data storage by default. But access to those services could soon depend on which country you are in and whose digital services you're using.

The 1990s Crypto Wars centered on the Clipper Chip, a hardware chip designed to protect phone users calls from surveillance unless the government wanted to listen in. It was a "backdoor" that was going to be built into every cellphone.

But in 1994, cryptographer Matt Blaze, one of the panelists at yesterday's Enigma Conference talk, exposed security vulnerabilities in the Clipper Chip. Experts spent the next three years finding even more vulnerabilities in the Clipper Chip and fighting in court to prevent its inclusion in devices.

Since the commercial internet was in its infancy at the time, legal and computer security experts had to take on faith that the World Wide Web would eventually be important, Blaze said. With the publication in 1997 of a report on the risks of key recovery that Blaze co-authored, most U.S. federal agencies stopped fighting against the cryptographers.

"The FBI became the only organization arguing that computer security was too good," Blaze said.

Today, government access to encrypted communications through a mandated backdoor is not the law of the land in any single country. But laws requiring varying degrees of government access to encrypted communications are becoming more common, said panelist Riana Pfefferkorn, associate director of surveillance and cybersecurity at the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society.

Following the panel discussion, Pfefferkorn said she sees a growing trend, especially in the United States and India, to tie serious liability issues, in both criminal and civil law, to the encryption debate.

"In the U.S., it's child pornography. In India, it's the threat of mob violence," Pfefferkorn said. "They seem like two separate issues, but they're a way of encouraging the regulation of encryption without regulating encryption.

"They're going to induce providers to stop deploying end-to-end encryption lest they face ruinous litigation," she added. "It feels like a bait-and-switch."

Daniel Weitzner, the founding director of the Internet Policy Research Initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, noted during the panel that India's proposed changes to its intermediary liability law would make internet communications providers ("intermediaries") legally responsible for the actions and speech of their users.

He said India's proposals are similar to changes demanded by U.S. senators, including the EARN IT Act of 2019 authored by Senators Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut). Weitzner added that there are other countries with even tougher tech-liability laws on the books.

The United Kingdom passed the Investigative Powers Act in 2016, also known as the Snoopers' Charter. It lets the British government issue statutorily vague Technical Capacity Notices that let it mandate encryption backdoors or otherwise force companies to stop using end-to-end encryption. There's no requirement that the British government has to ever reveal the results of the evaluation process guiding the issuance of the notices.

Australia's Assistance and Access Bill from 2018 is similar, except that it specifically bans the introduction of systemic vulnerabilities into the product in question. What's not clear is another question raised by the legal mandate: Whats the difference between a technical vulnerability and a legally-mandated software backdoor?

As technology itself has grown more complicated and nuanced since the 1990s, so has the burden of responsibility facing its advocates. Proposals to change encryption should be tested "multiple times" strategically and technically, argued the Carnegie Encryption Working Group in September 2019.

And Susan Landau and Denis McDonough said in a column for The Hill that it would be wiser for the tech community to find common ground with governments over data at rest, such as data stored on a locked iPhone, instead of the more contentious data in transit embodied by end-to-end encrypted messaging apps.

Ultimately, the future of the consumer use of encryption is likely to depend heavily on the developers and companies that make it available.

They could split their products, offering different levels of encryption for different countries and regions, as Netscape did in the 1990s, said Pfefferkorn. Or they could refuse to offer encrypted products in countries or regions that demand weaker encryption or backdoor access.

"Or," Pfefferkorn said, "it could be broken for everyone."

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The U.S. government's been trying to stop encryption for 25 years. Will it win this time? - Tom's Guide

In an op-ed published Sunday night by the Washington Post, National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden connected Brazilian federal prosecutors' recent decision to file charges against American investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald to the U.S. government's efforts to prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

"The most essential journalism of every era is precisely that which a government attempts to silence. These prosecutions demonstrate that they are ready to stop the pressesif they can."Edward Snowden, NSA whistleblower

Snowden, board of directors president at Freedom of the Press Foundation, is among those who have spoken out since Greenwald was charged with cybercrime on Jan. 21. Reporters and human rights advocates have denounced the prosecution as "a straightforward attempt to intimidate and retaliate against Greenwald and The Intercept for their critical reporting" on officials in Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro's government.

Greenwald, who is also on Freedom of the Press Foundation's board, is one of the journalists to whom Snowden leaked classified materials in 2013.

As Common Dreams reported last week, the NSA whistleblower, who has lived with asylum protection in Russia for the past several years, is also among the political observers who have pointed out that although even some of Greenwald's critics have rallied behind him in recent days, Assange has not experienced such solidarity. Assange is being held in a London prison, under conditions that have raised global alarm, while he fights against extradition to the United States.

In his Post op-ed, "Trump Has Created a Global Playbook to Attack Those Revealing Uncomfortable Truths," Snowden wrote of Greenwald's case that "as ridiculous as these charges are, they are also dangerousand not only to Greenwald: They are a threat to press freedom everywhere. The legal theory used by the Brazilian prosecutorsthat journalists who publish leaked documents are engaged in a criminal 'conspiracy' with the sources who provide those documentsis virtually identical to the one advanced in the Trump administration's indictment of [Assange] in a new application of the historically dubious Espionage Act."

Snowdenwho said in December that he believes that if he returned to the United States, he'd spend his life in prison for exposing global mass surveillance practices of the U.S. governmentexplained:

In each case, the charges came as an about-face from an earlier position. The federal police in Brazil stated as recently as December that they had formally considered whether Greenwald could be said to have participated in a crime, and unequivocally found that he had not. That rather extraordinary admission itself followed an order in August 2019 from a Brazilian Supreme Court judgeprompted by displays of public aggression against Greenwald by Bolsonaro and his alliesexplicitly barring federal police from investigating Greenwald altogether. The Supreme Court judge declared that doing so would "constitute an unambiguous act of censorship."

For Assange, the Espionage Act charges arrived years after the same theory had reportedly been consideredand rejectedby the former president Barack Obama's Justice Department. Though the Obama administration was no fan of WikiLeaks, the former spokesman for Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder later explained. "The problem the department has always had in investigating Julian Assange is there is no way to prosecute him for publishing information without the same theory being applied to journalists," said the former Justice Department spokesman Matthew Miller. "And if you are not going to prosecute journalists for publishing classified information, which the department is not, then there is no way to prosecute Assange."

Although Obama's administration was historically unfriendly to journalists and leakers of classified materials, President Donald Trump's administration has taken things a step further with its indictment of Assange. "The Trump administration," he wrote, "with its disdain for press freedom matched only by its ignorance of the law, has respected no such limitations on its ability to prosecute and persecute, and its unprecedented decision to indict a publisher under the Espionage Act has profoundly dangerous implications for national security journalists around the country."

Highlighting another similarity between the cases of Greenwald and Assangethat "their relentless crusades have rendered them polarizing figures (including, it may be noted, to each other)"Snowden suggested that perhaps "authorities in both countries believed the public's fractured opinions of their perceived ideologies would distract the public from the broader danger these prosecutions pose to a free press." However, he noted, civil liberties groups and publishers have recognized both cases as "efforts to deter the most aggressive investigations by the most fearless journalists, and to open the door to a precedent that could soon still the pens of even the less cantankerous."

"The most essential journalism of every era is precisely that which a government attempts to silence," Snowden concluded. "These prosecutions demonstrate that they are ready to stop the pressesif they can."

Journalists and press freedom advocates have shared Snowden's op-ed on social media since Sunday night.

Trevor Timm, executive director of Freedom of the Press Foundation, tweeted Monday morning that Snowden's piece "should be read in tandem" with an op-ed published Sunday in the New York Times by James Risen, a former reporter for the newspaper who is now at The Intercept. Risen also argued that "the case against Mr. Greenwald is eerily similar to the Trump administration's case against Mr. Assange."

And, according to Risen, Greenwald concurred:

In an interview with me on Thursday, Mr. Greenwald agreed that there are parallels between his case and Mr. Assange's, and added that he doesn't believe that Mr. Bolsonaro would have taken action against an American journalist if he had thought President Trump would oppose it.

"Bolsonaro worships Trump, and the Bolsonaro government is taking the signal from Trump that this kind of behavior is acceptable," he said.

Notably, Risen added, "the State Department has not issued any statement of concern about Brazil's case against Mr. Greenwald, which in past administrations would have been common practice."

Read the original here:
Snowden Warns Targeting of Greenwald and Assange Shows Governments 'Ready to Stop the PressesIf They Can' - Common Dreams

People need to differentiate between legality and morality, and recognize that sometimes doing the right thing means breaking the law, Edward Snowden told Ecuador's former president Rafael Correa in a wide-ranging interview.

The NSA whistleblower, vilified by Washington after he leaked a trove of documents outlining mass surveillance techniques used by American intelligence agencies, argued that everyone has a duty to expose wrongdoing regardless of legality.

"Sometimes the only moral decision that an individual has is to break the law," he told Correa.

Snowden firmly rejected the argument that legitimate whistleblowers pose a security threat, stressing that the real danger facing all nations is unwarranted government secrecy.

One of the core threats to the rule of law in a society... is the government using secrecy as a shield against democratic accountability. Using secrecy to excuse themselves from public awareness of what it is exactly that they've been doing.

The former intelligence contractor revealed the NSA's mass surveillance program in 2013. Snowden, who was granted asylum by Russia, has offered to stand trial in the US on espionage charges, on the condition that he be allowed to tell the court why he blew the whistle a request that he claims has been refused.

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Sometimes breaking the law is the 'only moral' choice: Snowden opens up to Ecuador's ex-president Correa (VIDEO) - RT

Earlier this month, news organizations around the world, including the Times, the BBC, and Le Monde, began publishing stories about corruption involving Isabel dos Santos, Africas richest woman. Dos Santos has always maintained that she is a self-made billionaire, but her father, Jos Eduardo, was the President of Angola between 1979 and 2017, and the bulk of dos Santoss fortune derives from stakes in Angolan banks, diamond companies, a telecom company, and a cement business. From 2016 to 2017, dos Santos was the chair of Sonangol, Angolas state-owned oil company.

The revelations this month, known as Luanda Leaks, stem from a cache of more than seven hundred thousand documents, including e-mails, spreadsheets, bank transfers, and organizational charts. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (I.C.I.J.), which handled the data, described it as a tale of insider dealing on an epic scale. Prosecutors have reacted swiftly. The Angolan authorities have accused dos Santos and her husband of embezzling more than a billion dollars from the state, including thirty-eight million dollars in fees, which she authorized during her final hours in charge of Sonangol. Last week, the countrys Attorney General, Helder Pitta Groz, travelled to Portugal, where dos Santos has conducted much of her business, to explore seizing her assets. A banker in Lisbon who worked closely with dos Santos has committed suicide.

On Monday, lawyers for Rui Pinto, a thirty-one-year-old Portuguese hacker, revealed that he was the source of Luanda Leaks. Until now, Pinto was known only as the man behind Football Leaks, a monumental data setharvested in the course of more than three yearsdescribing the previously unknown financial side of European soccer. I wrote about Pinto and Football Leaks for The New Yorker last year. I spent time with Pinto in Budapest, where he was based for several years. Pinto defies the conventional definition of an activist, a whistle-blower, or a cyber criminal. He worked as an antiques dealer. The soccer clubs, lawyers, and agents that Pinto targeted during Football Leaks portray him as a rogue hacker who used sophisticated phishing techniques to trick his way into their servers and download confidential information. On the other hand, the data that he uncovered has led to dozens of prosecutions for tax evasion and investigations, by UEFA, into some of Europes leading clubs. Only a small proportion of Pintos data hoardfour of twenty-nine terabyteswas ever systematically processed for Football Leaks. He struck me as clever and anarchic, with an absolute moral distaste for wrongdoing in the real world, but not so bothered about infiltrating your Gmail account.

Luanda Leaks appears to have been a side project. During the weekend, I spoke to William Bourdon, Pintos lead lawyer. Bourdon has represented Edward Snowden and campaigns for whistle-blowers and transparency around the world. In 2017, Bourdon helped to found the Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa (PPLAAF), an N.G.O. based in Paris that helped bring down Jacob Zuma, the former South African President. In the summer of 2018, when Pinto asked Bourdon to be his lawyer, Bourdon told him about PPLAAF. He understood what I did with my new N.G.O., and he could see he could be useful for PPLAAF to get this, Bourdon said, of Luanda Leaks.

Bourdon didnt specify how or when Pinto came across the dos Santos documents, only that he found them during his forays into Portuguese soccer. It was not his target; it was not his purpose, Bourdon said. It happened more or less by random, because of the common community between Angolan circles and the Portuguese football industry. The same people, same banks, same lawyers. In either late 2018 or early 2019, Pinto handed Bourdon a hard drive. He didnt know exactly what was in the disk. He knew it was to do with the criminal world, Bourdon said. PPLAAF subsequently shared the data with the I.C.I.J.

Pinto is currently in prison in Lisbon, awaiting trial on ninety-three charges, including cybercrime and extortion, for offenses allegedly committed during the collection of the Football Leaks data. He faces a maximum sentence of twenty-five years. Portugal has some of Europes weakest protections for whistle-blowers, and Pintos supporters believe that he is being prosecuted so severely in part because he exposed potential corruption at Benfica, the countrys biggest soccer club. Bourdon told me that he hoped the Luanda Leaks will help to change the perception of Pinto in his home country, where he is a household name. Its clear that it will be more and more a public-opinion battle, Bourdon said. I hope it will reshuffle the cards. Pintos Portuguese lawyer, Francisco Teixeira da Mota, who will represent him when he goes on trial this spring, said that Luanda Leaks would strengthen Pintos claim to be acting in a wider public interest. It is clear that he is not someone who is seeking profit from his information, da Mota told me. And it is clear that his information has great, great value in a civic way, in exposing illegal and very serious things against the people of Angola and Portugal.

When I was reporting on Football Leaks, Bourdon told me that all citizens should have the right to whistle-blower protections if they obtain evidence of illegal behavior in any field. I understand that it is a source of anxiety, of trouble and interrogation, he said. He predicted that the next generation of whistle-blowers would not necessarily have any ties to the industry or political administration that they sought to exposejust the digital savvy to unlock their secrets. This kind of whistle-blower, these are the ones who are perceived as the worst enemies of the oligarchy, Bourdon said. They are the most dangerous, because they can come from nowhere. During the weekend, he returned to the theme. Pinto is the Snowden of international corruption now, Bourdon said. This young, smart guy, he has this skill. And he is in jail in a democratic country.

Read more:
The Hacker Connecting Luanda Leaks to Corruption in European Soccer - The New Yorker

In the summer of 2017, a 25-year-old government contractor exposed detailed evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Reality Winner printed out classified U.S. Intelligence documents, hid the papers in her pantyhose as she left work and then put them in the mail to The Intercept. The report they published was the first piece of concrete evidence shared with the public proving that the United States possessed tangible evidence that Russians hackers attacked American voting systems.

After The Intercept published the story complete with scans of the original papers authorities immediately traced the leak back to Reality Winner. She was arrested, denied bail and is now serving five years in a federal prison. Kerry Howley wrote an in-depth profile of Reality Winner for New York Magazine and joins to share the compelling story of who Winner is, why she did it and the severe treatment she's received at the hands of the United States government.

KERRY HOWLEY: It's about, in the wake of 9/11, this massive secret state that we build that's outside of democratic processes. It's not accountable to anyone. We don't even know what it costs necessarily. That's massively geographically distributed and involves 100,000 of our fellow Americans who go to work every day and can't tell their families what they do. And it's like, who are those people, right? And we picture 60-year-old white men who are grim in suits. But no, there are people like Reality Winner. There are young people, people who have been pulled into this world that's completely hidden.

CHRIS HAYES: Hello and welcome to Why Is This Happening? with me, your host, Chris Hayes.

So, there's basically three prongs to Russian interference in the 2016 election two of which we basically have comprehensive knowledge about (or a lot of knowledge about), and one of which remains somewhat murky and occluded.

The first is the hacking of emails, right? They hacked the DNC server, they hacked John Podesta's email who's the campaign chair, I think, for the Hillary Clinton campaign. Those emails then were distributed via WikiLeaks and they drove huge amounts of press coverage, were very damaging to the Clinton campaign. We know about that thanks to both forensic reports from private firms, from statements put up by the intelligence agencies, and also most comprehensively the Mueller indictments that walk through the hacking operation.

There's also the kind of bot network, the Internet Research Agency, which was doing all this stuff on social media, trolling and running Facebook ads, and even in some crazy cases organizing groups of demonstrators, like of Americans from their headquarters in St. Petersburg, I believe. So, that's one

And then the third is in some ways like the most ominous but also the one that's been the least transparently discussed and that is Russian hackers probing various U.S. elections systems. We have some information about that. Some has been made public, some has been made sort of half-public. There's this thing that keeps happening in which the government will say that [the Russians] attempted to penetrate certain election systems, and then not tell us which ones or to what extent.facet.

And the first time that we really learned about the attempts by Russian hackers to get into election software which, let's just keep in mind that this is real kind of apocalyptic stuff, right? I mean, a foreign intelligence apparatus penetrating the software upon which U.S. votes are registered is really scary stuff. I mean, you could imagine them deleting and mass voter registrations causing chaos. You could imagine them in the most extreme setting, changing vote tallies.

None of that happened as far as we know, evidence that any of that happened but they were rooting around those systems, and the degree to which they were able to penetrate them remains somewhat unclear. And in the summer of 2017, June 2017, there was an article about this effort. It was sort of the first big published article, and it appeared in a publication called The Intercept.

The Intercept was an interesting place for it to appear. The Intercept was founded in 2014. It was bankrolled by Pierre Omidyar, who is the billionaire who made a bunch of money in eBay, and its of first three big flagship founders were Laura Poitras, who's a filmmaker who documented Edward Snowden's time in that Hong Kong hotel room. If you've ever seen a movie about that, it's incredible. Glenn Greenwald, who was the person who got the Snowden documents. And Jeremy Scahill, longtime reporter and writer who worked for The Nation, among other places.

And the sort of editorial perspective of the publication has always been deeply skeptical of the intelligence apparatus, intelligence officials, the U.S. military industrial complex has championed whistleblowers folks like Edward Snowden. That term is obviously loaded when you're talking about Edward Snowden, but from their perspective, he's a whistleblower.

And there had also been, I think, sort of prominent editorial voices there: Greenwald chief among them, had been very skeptical of stories about Russian election interference and manipulation, that that should be taken with a grain of salt, that perhaps it was being overstated and manipulated. And so when this story appeared in The Intercept, it was both a huge scoop.

The story had actual U.S. intelligence documents that showed that Russian hackers had attempted this spear phishing which is the way they got into Podesta's email against a variety of American election software firms. Again, big deal, and it was the first, if I'm not mistaken, first time that we really had concrete evidence that there was tangible intelligence info that the U.S. government had possession of that showed the scope of the ambitions of what Russian hackers were doing in 2016.

That story was published. It was very notable and interesting. It appeared in The Intercept when what it demonstrated seemed to be in some tension with the kind of posture of some of the most prominent editorial voices there. And then a few days later, the person who leaked this information, a contractor with the NSA, a woman by the name Reality Winner, was arrested by the FBI. She was denied bail and ultimately sentenced to five years in federal prison.

Now, what she did was a violation of law. It was classified information that she leaked. That's illegal, but the treatment of her has been honestly insane. There is no credible evidence that the publishing of this information harm national security in any way. In fact, a lot of it hasn't been made public subsequently. In fact, there's a good case to be made it's information we should know as an informed public.

She is serving a five year sentence in federal prison and she is a really interesting case because she's the kind of person that you could imagine being kind of cause clbre as happens often with whistleblowers. People who come forward to distribute information they feel the government is hiding that the public should know about. But she's a strange case because she doesn't have a kind of natural ideological cohort backing her.

The folks on the left, who are very skeptical of intelligence agencies, and the so-called deep state, fit awkwardly with what she was trying to demonstrate in her leak, which was to convince the folks at The Intercept that the Russia thing is real. It's really happening. They really, really did do some gnarly stuff and you should take this seriously. So, there's not this sort of like built-in kind of base to support Reality Winner on the elements on the left ideological spectrum, that have been the sort of base for support of intelligence, whistleblowers and leakers.

And on the right, she was showing that Russia really was putting it some on the scale on behalf of Donald Trump. And there's no ideological appetite on that side either.

And so her case, I think, has been caught in this kind of shameful limbo. And what's been done to her is just to my mind, insane. I mean, what she did was rash. It was impulsive, it was a violation of both the law and what the oath she had taken in her job. All of that is unquestionably true, but five years in federal prison for what she did is just an unbelievable penalty.

And the government's treatment of her, as you'll hear in this conversation, has been just relentlessly punitive at every single turn. And the human story of who she is and why she did what she did is a super compelling one. I first kind of came upon the full human story in this fantastic profile that was written about her back in 2017 by a phenomenal nonfiction writer named Kerry Howley. It's called Who Is Reality Winner? And subsequently Kerry wrote a screenplay about Reality Winner that has now been acquired, and I think it's going to go into production. It can be an upcoming film called Winner.

And I had been wanting for a while to take a deep dive on Reality Winner's case, because it's stands at the nexus of so many of the issues that kind of run through our discourse right now about who to trust, about the so-called deep state, about the ways in which career government officials are wrestling with the Trump era and the Trump moment and when to go against their bosses and when to make information public and what we know and don't know and what secrets lurk out there. All of which kind of hangs over the entirety of our political discourse in the moment of Trump, particularly in the wake of the manipulation of the 2016 election and the criminal sabotage conducted by a foreign intelligence agency in Russia.

So, Kerry Howley very kindly agreed to come on the podcast and talk about who Reality Winner is, what happened to her, what her story is and I think it is both an incredible story about the moment we're in in this country and also just a really, I think, moving human story about the complex motives that go into a person who decides to take a risk like Reality Winner did.

I want to just start at the most basic level with the story because I think the details of it are not very well known despite the fact they are fascinating and unnerving in many ways. Maybe just tell me: Who is Reality Winner?

KERRY HOWLEY: Right. Reality Winner was a 25-year-old NSA contractor working in Iranian aerospace at NSA, Georgia in Augusta. One day she walked into her job and she had come across a document that detailed Russian election interference at a level of detail that we hadn't yet seen publicly at that point.

She prints it out, that document, folds it up, put it in her pantyhose and walked out, and sometime later mailed it to The Intercept, where it was subsequently published and she's currently serving a sentence of 63 months in a maximum security in Fort Worth for that crime.

CHRIS HAYES: That is a pretty long sentence.

KERRY HOWLEY: It's the longest sentence ever for a leak prosecution...

CHRIS HAYES: The longest ever?

KERRY HOWLEY: Yes.

CHRIS HAYES: Let's go back. I mean, the first thing when I heard about this story, and this is a dumb surface thing, but her name. The first thought was like, "Who is the kind of person who's named Reality and to which household does a baby come that then gets named Reality?"

KERRY HOWLEY: I think that has actually been a problem for raising awareness of Reality's case and the analysis does tend to stop there. Like, really? In this age in which everything seems so absurd we're going to add the name Reality Winner to the pile? But another hilarious aspect of this is that she has a sister named Brittany. Brittany and Reality. Her father gave her that name. Her parents had decided that her mother would get to name the first and her father would name the second.

The larger question of who is Reality Winner is a fascinating character study. I mean, as soon as I started researching this, I was hit with just how hilarious this person is. The legal documents that I was accessing just to begin the story, to begin the process of telling the story, involved her FBI interrogation. She's hilarious in her FBI interrogation. Her Facebook messages, which were brought up in court with her sister are very funny.

She's a vegan, she's a social justice activist. She is a gun rights supporter. She's just one of these millennials who crosses lines, right? She doesn't fit easily into any particular box. That made her really fun to write about.

CHRIS HAYES: How did she end up working as a contractor for the NSA?

KERRY HOWLEY: That's a really good question. And it's really the animating question, I think, of the profile and in some ways the film. How does this person who is so invested in social justice, thinks of herself as someone who raises awareness about all these causes, about what she has great anxiety, like global warming and Syrian War orphans and African elephants? How does this person end up, not just at the NSA, but a contractor for the NSA?

It's a very complicated question to answer. It starts with her joining up with the Air Force, which is something that I think she saw as a humanitarian act. She didn't see the goals of her idealistic humanitarianism and joining up with the military to be intention at all. And I don't think many people in Kingsville, Texas, where she's from necessarily do.

And so she signs up and she ends up actually in the drone program. She's trying to go abroad. She ends up a linguist. So, the Air Force trains her as a linguist. She's fluent in Farsi, Dari, and Pashto...

CHRIS HAYES: Wait, let me just stop you there. I mean, the armed services always need more people who speak languages like those. It's very hard to train people to speak them because those languages are difficult to learn if you're a native English speaker, and the world of people that can train and learn Dari and Pashto is fairly small. It's not like learning Spanish. She must have some considerable aptitude if she's able to acquire some level of mastery or competence in those.

KERRY HOWLEY: Absolutely. I mean, I think she was very good at her job. All of this is classified. It's very hard to get people to talk about their participation in the drone program. But those who would talk to me said things like, "She was excellent and very professional," and she clearly had an aptitude for languages and she had this job where all day long she's listening to communications and she knows she's eavesdropping on people in Pakistan, transcribing. And those translations were used for military actions, right? People, it seems, would have died due to her translations. It's a very serious, troubling job that I think caused her a lot of anxiety and guilt.

CHRIS HAYES: She goes into the air force with this kind of... She's someone who's very animated by social justice, really cares about global causes particularly, she goes into the Air Force with a kind of view that this would be a means to that end. She ends up training as a linguist and then she's surveilling folks in Pakistan and using the product of that surveillance to target people that will then be blown up by airstrikes.

KERRY HOWLEY: Yes, and I think her vision had been, "Okay, I'm going to go in for a little while. I'm going to learn these languages and then I'm not going to use these languages to eavesdrop. I'm going to use them to go over to Pakistan and work in a refugee camp," or some direct kind of helping.

CHRIS HAYES: She saw this as sort of a step on the way and then she has these language skills and she can go help these folks directly.

KERRY HOWLEY: I think so, and she's constantly trying to deploy. She's trying to go abroad, but there just isn't that opportunity. When she finally gets out, she's searching, and this later it comes up in her trial. When the DOJ attempts to characterize her as some nefarious terrorist sympathizer, she's searching for jobs in Afghanistan and Pakistan with nonprofits, but she doesn't have a college degree because she's gone straight into the Air Force.

KERRY HOWLEY: And there is this pipeline from the military into these contractor jobs because these military contractors are always desperate for people who have security clearance. When she cannot find a job that she wants, she ends up at this contractor, which was never, I don't think, the future she envisioned herself.

CHRIS HAYES: Wow. That's fascinating. She gets these language skills. She's on the drone program. She wants to go do nonprofit working. She ends up sort of through this kind of inertia.

KERRY HOWLEY: Right, this conveyor belt, this machine. Yeah.

CHRIS HAYES: Because they need people that are already... have clearance, and she finds herself doing... What is the work that she does for the NSA contractor?

KERRY HOWLEY: What we know is that she was working in the field of Iranian aerospace. I don't know more than that or really what even that means.

CHRIS HAYES: She's there. At this point, do we know what her sort of feelings are about, I don't know, the war on terror, the American state, the American military industrial complex, her role in all of it? Does she have kind of... in the case of, say, Edward Snowden, there's this kind of trajectory of a kind of dawning awareness in which he starts out thinking like, "I'm gung-ho about this," and then being, "There's serious abuses and this is too much." And kind of having this sort of crisis of conscience. Does she have an arc like that here?

KERRY HOWLEY: It's not so clear. I mean, I think it's complicated. I think that she was deeply troubled by atrocities that she was listening to and hearing about that were committed by ISIS. In some way she saw herself as protecting the vulnerable when she was at the NSA... or in the drone program, excuse me. But she also... she was no fan of Donald Trump. She mostly had very progressive politics. She has this compulsion to help. She's one of these people who is constantly trying to improve everywhere she is.

She's not great at compartmentalizing. She, like many 25-year-olds, believes very strongly in her own capacity to see right from wrong. And that is really... it's a great character to write because if you are determined to improve everyone you meet and every situation you find yourself in, that's a recipe for conflict. And it's like a disaster for the NSA, which depends on conformity and compartmentalization.

CHRIS HAYES: Yeah. The whole point is you do what you're told and you do it competently and quietly, but you're not like... no one's looking for Joan of Arc, right?

KERRY HOWLEY: Right.

CHRIS HAYES: ... in those situations, that's not what you're looking for.

KERRY HOWLEY: I think one of the things that attracted me to this story is ... I can remember being 25 and the intellectual rigidity of that time. It's a time, I think, of great intellectual fulfillment and certainty, and to confront a 25-year-old with a question of, "Are you going to respect the oath you made to this federal agency or an obligation you think you have to the American electorate?" I think that's a great burden to put on an intellectually engaged 25-year-old.

CHRIS HAYES: Why is that the question she faces?

KERRY HOWLEY: The document she came across detailed a spear phishing attack on a provider of election software which had been successful. The Russian intelligence had attained login credentials and was then able to email a bunch of state level election officials. And this was a time we forget that this ever happened but this was a time when people on the left and the right were saying things like, "There is no hard evidence that the Russians attempted to interfere in our election." She was hearing that on Fox News, which was played consistently at her job at NSA Augusta, to the point where she actually filed a formal complaint asking them to change the channel.

CHRIS HAYES: Are you serious?

KERRY HOWLEY: Yes. This is her, right? She gets to a place and she's like, "Things need to change."

CHRIS HAYES: Like, for instance, "You need to shut off the Trump TV on my television."

KERRY HOWLEY: Yeah. She's also hearing it at The Intercept, which is a publication that she was following. She asked for a transcript of a podcast that The Intercept had done in which someone states, "Literally there's no hard evidence that the Russians have attempted to interfere in our election." And so you can see one way to tell this story is that she was responding to that statement.

CHRIS HAYES: Around what time is this, that this is happening?

KERRY HOWLEY: This was May 2017.

CHRIS HAYES: Right. What's frustrating about that is that it had been pretty well established by May 2017. You've got the intelligence agencies saying back in 2016 that that's their determination, but I can understand people being skeptical of them. But you also have private security actors who say pretty quickly, "Look, we've done a forensic review and the Russians were in these systems, they were definitely in the DNC." There's a fair amount of evidence by May 2017, but it's an important point I just want to stay on, which is that there are lots of people denying that for a very long period of time, on the left and on the right.

KERRY HOWLEY: Right. And the Obama administration I think was... they were worried about being too loud about this, because they didn't want to be seen as sewing paranoia about the election in a way that looked like they were trying to rig things for Hillary Clinton. And so they would send out these very vague notices to state level election officials, "Be on high alert," the kind of thing where it's like you're getting a notification to change your password, but what really didn't came across was a level of specificity that was new.

And, in fact, after the document appeared, the Election Assistance Commission which is the federal agency whose job it is to communicate with state level election officials sent out an alert saying, Hey, look at this. This is new to us. State level election officials were upset, they said, No one told us about this attack and we would've like to have known about it.

CHRIS HAYES: So her specifically, you're saying she's watching Fox News and she's listening to The Intercept podcast, and The Intercept had some folks who are skeptical about Russian interference. She gets a transcript of a podcast in which someone is saying there is no hard evidence, and then she comes across this not just hard evidence, but truly astoundingly unnerving hard evidence which is like, they didn't just get into the inbox of a dude named John Podesta (which itself was massively destructive to the entire election) but a log in into an election software company. It's pretty scary stuff.

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KERRY HOWLEY: Yeah. The potential to change voter rolls is scary, and I think she felt... What she said during her FBI interrogation was, "I can't believe this wasn't already out there, that someone else hadn't already leaked it."

CHRIS HAYES: And it's funny because subsequently there's been reporting on precisely this, independent of her leak. Right? It has sort of come out through different reporting, that it's been the subject of tremendous controversy. You have a situation in Florida in which Bill Nelson was running for Senate and sort of said... mentioned offhandedly that their state election system had been penetrated, or at least attempted to be penetrated, and people were like, What are you talking about crazy old man? And then it turned out that he was right.

KERRY HOWLEY: Yeah. Yeah. If you talk to election security experts, they'll say, This is precisely the kind of thing we've been worrying about publicly for a long time, but nobody listens because who wants to talk about election... people get bored immediately when you say the words "election security." But this idea of the vulnerability of vendors apparently had been a weakness that people knew about, and now those experts can say, Look, it's actually happened, here's the evidence.

CHRIS HAYES: Is it an impulsive situation where she prints this thing out? Is it a plant? Is it, she's like, I'm going to set these people right ? Because what's so crazy to me about this leak is that she is trying to correct the false sense of media figures that she trusts. She's like, No, you guys, I like you and you're right about so many things, but you're wrong about this and I want to just show you that you're wrong.

KERRY HOWLEY: Yeah. My impression and something that she does say in a jailhouse phone call is that it was impulsive, but I think we can say it was impulsive and came from good intentions.

CHRIS HAYES: Right. I guess my point is that she's a strange sort of figure because this is not whistle blowing, in the sense she's not like, Oh, look at this abuse that's happening in the surveillance agency I live in. Or like, Look at these civilians that we the U.S. government killed. It's, No, actually the attack against the Americans by the Russians is a real thing, you skeptics of Russian interference.

KERRY HOWLEY: Right. And I think it's been really frustrating to her family that not only other leakers like say, Petraeus, or the president has also shared classified information, have not been punished in the same way.

CHRIS HAYES: Yeah. We should say the president is different constitutionally because all classification authority flows from him, so he can declassify anything he wants to.

KERRY HOWLEY: Sure. But take the example of Petraeus. He was charged with a misdemeanor and never did any jail time. Other people, like say, Michael Cohen or Maria Butina people who did not have the best of intentions have done less jail time or been sentenced to less jail time, and I think that's been of great frustration to her and her family.

CHRIS HAYES: I want to get into the chain of events that led to her arrest and sentencing and we'll do that after this break.

So she prints this out, she smuggles it out and what does she do with the printout?

KERRY HOWLEY: She snail mails it to The Intercept.

CHRIS HAYES: And they get it and they write a story based on it?

KERRY HOWLEY: They get it, and this becomes quite murky, we've never gotten a full accounting of what happened and why, but... I'm not an investigative reporter but my understanding is when you get a leaked document, you never share the image of that document with the agency from which it was leaked, because that has traceable information.

CHRIS HAYES: Right.

KERRY HOWLEY: That someone at The Intercept sent an image of the document to a contractor who was then legally obligated to show it to the NSA, which then immediately located Reality. Only a few people had printed this out. Only one of those people had downloaded a transcript from The Intercept. And...

CHRIS HAYES: She did that on her government account, on her contractor account?

KERRY HOWLEY: I believe so.

CHRIS HAYES: Oh, God. There's traceable information because there's actually... My understanding is there's a security system on the printer. That it's built in. That there's traceable signals embedded in the document that say who printed out the thing.

KERRY HOWLEY: Yeah, that's my impression too. So it's not entirely clear why that happened from a publication that prides itself on supporting whistleblowers, and of course was founded with the intention of disseminating information that Snowden had acquired, but she was basically immediately apprehended after that.

CHRIS HAYES: So in the course of reporting, they share the document; the document makes its way back to the NSA. The NSA does not have a very tough detective trail to trace down until they find that this contractor who's working for them in Augusta, Georgia printed this out and apparently leaked it. What's the timing between... from how long The Intercept gets it to her being arrested?

KERRY HOWLEY: I think it's a while before The Intercept publishes it because they think it's probably fake, because it's postmarked Augusta. I think it took them a while to trust that this was legitimate. But once they published it, it was a matter of hours before [the authorities] were at her house.

CHRIS HAYES: Oh wow. So it gets published and they're there in a matter of hours.

KERRY HOWLEY: I think so.

CHRIS HAYES: What is the government... what do they charge her with and what's the case like that they build against her?

KERRY HOWLEY: They charge her with willful retention and transmission of national defense information, which is under the Espionage Act which is, of course, an act intended to punish spies, but which really the Obama administration used very zealously to punish whistleblowers and leakers. And so she has almost no opportunity to mount a defense because, under this act, intention doesn't matter. She's already confessed in her laundry room to the FBI...

CHRIS HAYES: Wait

Kerry Howley and all they have to do is... She confessed.

CHRIS HAYES: Wait. OK, let's step back. She confesses in her laundry room? Take me through that.

KERRY HOWLEY: They show up at her door... It's a riveting transcript, which has actually been turned into a stage play in which she's really charming, and funny and intelligent and vulnerable, but she deflects for a while and then she says basically, I felt helpless. I wanted to know why this information hadn't already been leaked.

And so, when it comes time to mount a defense, there's very little available to her defense team. And every motion they made to kind of broaden the case to questions of the First Amendment was rejected, so she basically had to take a plea deal because they were seeking a full 10 years.

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Explaining why Reality Winner is still in prison with Kerry Howley: podcast and transcript - NBC News