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."

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

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

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

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.

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

By Patrick Grubb / The Northern Light

A Blaine-area Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer says the recent extreme vetting of travelers with Iranian backgrounds occurred under the direction of Blaine port managers. The allegation was revealed by local immigration attorney Len Saunders, a frequent commentator on border issues.

As earlier reported by The Northern Light, more than 60 U.S. citizens and permanent residents of Iranian heritage were subjected to enhanced screenings on Jan. 4 and 5 as they entered the U.S. at the Peace Arch border crossing. Many were returning home from an Iranian pop concert that had taken place in Vancouver.

Following a U.S. airstrike on an Iranian military commander in Iraq, some of the travelers reported being detained for up to 12 hours, while others said they were turned away and refused entry due to CBPs lack of capacity to handle them. Border security was enhanced nationwide during the period of escalating military tensions with Iran.

At the time, it was thought that the detentions were limited to the Peace Arch crossing, but the CBP whistleblower said Iranian-born travelers were detained at other border crossings in the Blaine sector as well. Saunders told The Northern Light that the CBP officer asked not to be identified due to concerns about retribution, with the officer citing the existence of a blacklist of officers blocked from career advancement.

Travelers were selected for counterterrorism inspections based solely upon their national origin, the officer said, adding that there were no immigration or customs reasons to detain them. Once the detentions became national news, Blaine port director Kenneth Williams put out a directive on Jan. 5 at 1 p.m. saying the operation was suspended, the CBP officer said. According to the source, officers have been told not to talk to the press about the matter.

The CBP officer also addressed the issue of expedited removals (ERs), saying assistant port director John Dahm was behind the recent increase in the number of ERs being imposed on Canadians crossing the border. ERs typically mean that individuals are banned from entering the U.S. for a period of time, usually five years. In December, the CBC reported that ERs on the northern border had jumped 97 percent to 616 from October 2018 to September 2019, compared to 312 in the previous 12-month period. According to Saunders, CBPs Seattle Field Office accounted for 309 and 91, respectively, of those numbers, about 50 percent of the total in 2019 versus 29 percent in 2018. There are four field offices on the northern border.

The CBP officer said there was very little support from line officers for the ERs that the Blaine area has been imposing on Canadians since last year, describing the ERs as outrageous and contrary to the Immigration and Nationality Act and past government practice.

CBPs Seattle Office of Field Operations, headquartered in Blaine, is responsible for 54 ports of entry along the northern border from Washington to Minnesota. The Office of Field Operations director overseeing the ports is Adele Fasano, who was named to her position in the spring of 2019. She was previously port director for New York and New Jersey and director of field operations in San Diego.

While in San Diego, Fasano was named in a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security brought by former CBP officer Julia Davis, who claimed that Fasano had engaged in retribution after Davis had made a whistleblowing disclosure to the FBI. While in New Jersey, her office was the subject of complaints by documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras for being repeatedly harassed when returning from overseas. Poitras won the 2015 Academy Award for best documentary feature for Citizenfour about Edward Snowden.

In 2018, Fasano was reported to receive a base salary of $187,000 which puts her in the top 10 percent of the highest paid CBP officials.

There has been significant backlash to the reports that people of Iranian heritage were subjected to harsh vetting. National and international media have picked up the story, while The Seattle Times published an editorial on January 17 calling for answers from CBP. Governor Jay Inslee and other politicians have criticized CBP on the matter, while the Department of Homeland Securitys Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) disclosed that it was opening an investigation into the incidents. A request for comment made to CRCL was unanswered at press time. Saunders said he had yet to be contacted by the office, nearly two weeks after he reported being an eyewitness to the detentions.

Reprinted with permission from The Northern Light.

Continue reading here:
Whistleblower: Border hold on Iranians was a local initiative - The Daily Herald

Intergenerational wars are all the rage on social media, especially after the OK, boomer meme made headlines nationwide. But the apparent conflict between the older and younger American generations is not just a struggle for cultural scores. It is also a reality in the consumer market.

Recent reports from Business Insider have shed some light on this market warfare, These reports show how consumers react to politics and other important issues.explaining that recent polls suggest younger and older consumers are at odds when it comes to brand trust.

While at a glance, this bit of information may seem like just another claim regarding generational preferences, it also provides insights into what brands particular consumers are into. This is golden information for the market and may help to shape how brands interact with their potential audiences. Further, it provides important information on how consumers react to politics and how privacy and other important politically charged issues come to light when consumers are ready and willing to spend their money.

Tech companies often deal with privacy issues. So do government-backed enterprises such as USPS.

Both types of businesses have had their share of scandals thanks in part to the way these companies deal with our private property, whether its located online or in a physical envelope. The difference between these two sectors is how they respond (or dont) to criticism in order to give the consumer peace of mind.

The US Postal Service has long been at the center of serious debate regarding privacy and how far a mail carrier service can go to aid government and law enforcement, even if that means taking part in unconstitutional acts. Unfortunately, Americans have yet to see a real change in how the agency does business.To Generation Z consumers, accountability seems to matter. Younger consumers are also happy to see companies engaging in real-time culture.

The government-backed service doesnt have real competitors, as US law forbids any other company or individual from delivering private correspondence.

Companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, etc. all have reasons to fear that their current leadership positions may no longer be a reality if they anger enough consumers.

Thats why after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden came forward with revelations regarding private tech companies aiding the federal government in unconstitutional spying practices, these firms felt the backlash.

To this day, many of them still struggle and wont go one day without being attacked for their practices, putting them in the unholy position of offering government aid in killing their competitors.

To Generation Z consumers, accountability seems to matter, especially when you consider what Instagram Shopping's product lead, Layla Amjadi, has to say about young consumers and their preferences.

According to Business Insider, Amjadi sees Gen Z shoppers like herself truly valuing authenticity, meaning that Gen Z wants you to give it to them straight. According to the market researcher, younger consumers are also happy to see companies engaging in real-time culture, meaning privacy issues might really be a driving force both personally and culturally.

When a brand repeatedly fails to address scandals, younger shoppers feel they can no longer trust them. But what about older shoppers? Have their feelings regarding services such as USPS changed over the years?

According to Business Insider, the answer is no.

[W]hen it comes to the brands that they trust the most, Gen Z gravitates toward tech, ranking Google, Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, and Playstation as its top picks. Those rankings have no common ground with those of the baby boomers.

For older shoppers, the United States Postal Service delivers the most when it comes to trust. The federal mail service is followed closely by the United Parcel Service, Hershey, the Weather Channel, and Cheerios.

In the years after the Snowden files surfaced, tech companies took a beating in the public arena, which forced them to be loud and proud about their new and creative approaches to privacy in order to gain back consumer trust. The same did not happen with USPS, yet baby boomers have no problem putting their trust in the service.

While Gen Z members put their trust in entertainment-focused brands such as Netflix, Playstation, and YouTube, companies like Amazon and Google are also in the business of making consumption and knowledge respectively more readily accessible to a greater audience.

If anything, younger consumers arent only after amusement, but they do seek more amusement opportunities precisely because now they have the free time for it.

Options such as Amazon Fresh and Prime Pantry help young shoppers stay home while their groceries come to them.

To many, Google has provided enough remote working opportunities that even to those with little schooling, working from home has become a full-time gig. It will be interesting to see whether agencies like USPS will adapt at all or whether the government will continue to pay the price.Younger Americans arent spending hours driving to and from work and are now more available at home, meaning they can consume what firms like Netflix have to offer.

Older Americans, on the other hand, are slowly making the change to more online life, but this shift hasnt happened fast enough, and they still value getting things done the old-fashioned way.

While theres plenty of room for improvement among brands trying to cater to a younger audience, it is clear that there are certain styles that will prevail over the next few years, whereas other, less market-based approaches will continue to lose favor among the younger crowds.

It will be interesting to see whether agencies like USPS will adapt at all or whether the government will continue to pay the price for the growing discontent with the postal service.

Read more:
Gen Z's Top 5 Trusted Brands Are WAY Different Than Boomers' | Chloe Anagnos - Foundation for Economic Education

Read: What Jeff Bezoss reported phone hack says about billionaires

That Bezoss net worth is comparable to the GDP of a state (such as Kuwait or Morocco, two fellow Arab monarchies that Saudi Arabia has almost surely tried to bug) does not reduce the hideousness of the accusation. Yet Bezoss wealth and global influence put the alleged phone hack in a different context, as an act of espionage akin to what developed nations have done for a long time, and without apology.

The fury at the current accusation resembles in some ways the anger at the United States after allegations by Edward Snowden that it had tapped German Chancellor Angela Merkels phone. Merkel told the Americans that spying between friends just isnt on. Yet in fact, a certain amount of espionage is not only on but standard and responsible practice, and when done between friends, it does not entirely unravel the friendship. What is not standard practice is to be caught and exposedas the United States was then, and as Israel was, most dramatically, in the case of Jonathan Pollard.

The key question for MbS is whether he stands in the same category as Israel and Germany, and whether offenses taken and given will sever affections forever. It sometimes appears that MbS is doing everything he can to encourage his own vilification, in the confidence that Saudi Arabia is as close a friend to the United States as Israel and Germany are. His strategy appears to be to wait for America to forget the state-sponsored murder of the Posts Jamal Khashoggi. For him to be personally involved in the sordid targeting of a private citizen, due to his ownership of a critical newspaperand then get caughtwould be an enormous gift to MbSs enemies, and it would further test the U.S.-Saudi relationships capacity for forgiveness.

Read: The U.S. loved the Saudi crown prince. Not anymore.

The current administration in Washington dislikes Bezos and will not alter its policies over his exposure. But MbS is 34 years old, and he is seeking allies for a reign that may last the next half century, long past the second Kushner administration. And the disappearance of trust and goodwill between him and his various American counterparts is a setback from which he will not easily recover, as Israel and Germany have. (Indeed, the Bezos hack is both a symptom and a cause of that disappearance of trust: Many news sources have reported the hack as fact, even though the best technical analysis of the device has failed, as of this writing, to show more than circumstantial evidence that MbS infected his phone.)

MbS should be asking what marks an ally as one capable of receiving the benefit of the doubt and, finally, pardon. What Israel and Germany share with the United States is a commitment (sometimes honored in the breach) to basic liberal democratic values, rule of law, and the unalienable rights of their citizens. This commitment is a salve that Saudi Arabia will have great difficulty whipping up, given that democracy and liberalism are utterly foreign to it. Saudi Arabia has liberalized dramatically since MbSs de facto rule began three years ago, but it is still an absolute monarchy and will probably remain one. Those who wish it would democratize will find that they have to decide between political and social liberalization, at least in the short term, because MbS has promoted the latter at the expense of the former.

Link:
Mohammed bin Salman Tests Americas Ability to Forgive - The Atlantic

A $10 million lab has been created in New York by the district attorney of Manhattan to break into iPhones and iPads. The lab houses technology experts who use state-of-the-art equipment to try and break into smartphones used by criminals.

Fast Company has published a profile of the cyber lab built by the district attorney of Manhattan, Cyrus Vance Jr. The lab was built to compete against the encryption efforts by technology giants like Apple and Google, who implemented stronger security measures on their platforms. The lab has specialized hardware to repair damaged devices and even a supercomputer to generate passcodes to be used for brute force attacks.

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Proprietary software provides prosecutors with real-time information about each smartphone in their possession, which can be removed from the radiofrequency-shielded room using Ramsey boxesminiaturized versions of the isolation chamber that allow technicians to manipulate the devices safely.In other corners of the lab are a supercomputer that can generate 26 million random passcodes per second, a robot that can remove a memory chip without using heat, and specialized tools that can repair even severely damaged devices.

As per Vance, Apple used to happily provide data from iPhones before September 2014. But things changed ever since Edward Snowden exposed the surveillance program operated by the United States National Security Agency, also known as the NSA. Edward had revealed that Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook participate in the surveillance program by providing direct access to their servers to the NSA. This was denied by Apple and it double-downed its encryption efforts next year with iOS 8, and started encrypting iPhones with passcodes. The company also introduced longer passcodes, and limits to how many times a passcode could be entered per second. This time would increase exponentially with every wrong entry, which made it almost impossible to brute force into an iPhone.

Awareness of smartphone security has also increased. As per Moran, director of the High Technology Analysis Unit, the number of locked smartphones that come in for investigation has changed from 52% five years ago, to 82% now.

Although Apple provides iCloud backups for investigation, which are not end-to-end encrypted, it sometimes is not enough. It usually does not include the latest backup from the time of the incident, which causes difficulties in investigation. The latest communications, GPS coordinates and other important information is usually missing from such backups. Automated iCloud backups usually take place at night when the iOS device is connected to WiFi and plugged in for charging.

Not all investigations result in charging criminals. Many wrongly accused suspects have been exonerated because of the data and evidence extracted from their smartphones. These are the kind of examples that are used by Vance to try and convince the CEOs of Apple and Google, as well as the Congress, to legislate a "compromise" against encryption. Vance somehow also believes that Apple has a backdoor for iOS, even though the company refuses to create one.

Despite the security measures put into place by Apple, devices like Jeff Bezos' iPhone X have fallen to hacks. Even the FBI unlocked an iPhone 11 and an iPhone 11 Pro Max, without Apple's help. United States President Donald Trump has been pressurizing Apple to help with iPhone unlocks, especially for the Florida shooting case, where the FBI has been unsuccessful.

This cat and mouse game between law enforcement and tech companies will not end anytime soon. Each time Apple and Google release software updates, they make it even more difficult for law enforcement agencies to crack into iPhones and Android smartphones and conduct investigations. The tech companies rightfully believe that creating backdoors will compromise the security of everyone. Including those who ask for the backdoor.

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$10 Million Lab in New York Exists Just to Break Into iPhones - Wccftech