Category Archives: NSA

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FBI Used 'Microdots' to Nab Accused NSA Leaker Newser The yellow "microdots" formed a coded design on the paper the 25-year-old NSA contractor allegedly provided to the Intercept that purports to detail Russian interference in the November election. The pattern revealed the serial number of the printer ...

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FBI Used 'Microdots' to Nab Accused NSA Leaker - Newser

The lovely catch 22 of living in the age of mass surveillance is that the NSA isn't even sure when it's illegally spying on you. To determine whether its activities are illegal, the NSA would have to conduct additional, also illegal surveillance. And so Americans are being illegally spied on, but no one knows how often this happens, why it happens, or how it happens.

Under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the US is allowed to conduct surveillance on foreign nationals, but surveillance of "American persons" (citizens and Green Card holders) is illegal. The Snowden revelations showed that communications by Americans were regularly swept up regardless, and a court opinion from earlier this year confirmed that much of this collection was illegal and inappropriate.

For years, groups like the American Civil Liberties Union have demanded that the NSA produce figures about the number of Americans whose communications are inappropriately swept up in the NSA's bulk surveillance programs, and Congress has recently begun asking for similar figures. Don't expect to ever get them.

Wednesday, Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the NSA believes it is impossible to determine how often it is breaking the law.

"The NSA has made herculean, extensive efforts to devise a counting strategy that would be accurate and would respond to the question [about surveillance of US persons]," Coats said. "It remains infeasible to generate an exact, accurate, meaningful, and responsive methodology that can count how often a US person's communications may be collected under 702."

Image: Getty Images

Coats said the reason it is so difficult is that, in order to determine if the NSA illegally spied on you, the NSA would have to illegally spy on you.

"To determine if communicants are US persons, NSA would be required to conduct significant further research trying to determine whether individuals who may be of no foreign intelligence interest are US persons," he said. "I would be asking trained NSA analysts to conduct intense identity verification research on potential US persons who are not targets of an investigation. From a privacy and civil liberties perspective I find this unpalatable."

Because Section 702 surveillance programs deal with vast amounts of data from many people all over the world, Coats is suggesting that identifying who shouldn't have been spied on would require drilling down to more granular data setsan even more invasive spying than the original bulk surveillance.

This all means that the NSA has put itself between a rock and a hard place and is content to stay pinned there forever so long as its toys aren't taken away: Coats was testifying, after all, to urge Congress to reauthorize Section 702 without scaling it back.

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The NSA Says It Has to Spy on You to Find Out If It's Spying On You - Motherboard

by Greg Peters

Our Director of Marketing, Mimi Brown, reviews some of the pearls of wisdom from Corey Perlman's March program at NSA Michigan. https://www.youtube.com/embed/mzx9AYmuB0o

by Greg Peters

Penny Rosema, one of our fantastic Past Presidents at NSA Michigan, had a chance to sit down with our May 2017 seminar speaker, Laurie Guest, to talk a little bit about what we can expect. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hsHlBTfzKs

by Greg Peters

This month, I had the pleasure of speaking with Shawne Duperon, a 10-year member of National Speakers Association and NSA-Michigan. As a former television news broadcaster and producer, she joined NSA to help her with the news speaking business. Last year, she had...

by Greg Peters

Meet some of the new faces youre seeing around the table. In our March seminar, I mentioned finding a Facebook post of mine from March of 2011. "My first NSA meeting. Friendly folks!" I'm pleased to tell you that six years later, our community is still full of...

by Breeda Miller

I wear two hats. I am a professional speaker and I am an event planner. It's always helpful to have an understanding of the people with whom you work - their challenges, goals and pain points. If you are aware you can be prepared and present yourself in the best...

by amy

Corey Perlman is bringing his eBootcamp to Michigan! Click on the image of Corey below to find out why you need tojoin us in Ann Arboron March 11.Register todayat nsamichigan.org and take advantage of early bird prices!...

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NSA-Michigan | The Home of Michigan's Community of ...

Reality Leigh Winner, 25, a contractor with Pluribus International Corporation in Georgia, is accused of "removing classified material from a government facility and mailing it to a news outlet," according to a federal complaint. CNN is told by sources that the document Winner allegedly leaked is the same one used as the basis for the article published Monday by The Intercept, detailing a classified National Security Agency memo. The NSA report, dated May 5, provides details of a 2016 Russian military intelligence cyberattack on a US voting software supplier, though there is no evidence that any votes were affected by the hack.

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

US intelligence officials tell CNN that the information has not changed the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, which found: "Russian intelligence obtained and maintained access to elements of multiple US state or local electoral boards. DHS assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying."

Prosecutors say when confronted with the allegations, Winner admitted to intentionally leaking the classified document -- and she was arrested June 3 in Augusta, Georgia.

An internal audit revealed Winner was one of six people who printed the document, but the only one who had email contact with the news outlet, according to the complaint. It further states that the intelligence agency was subsequently contacted by the news outlet on May 30 regarding an upcoming story, saying it was in possession of what appeared to be a classified document.

The Intercept's director of communications Vivian Siu told CNN the document was provided anonymously.

"As we reported in the story, the NSA document was provided to us anonymously. The Intercept has no knowledge of the identity of the source," Siu said.

"Releasing classified material without authorization threatens our nation's security and undermines public faith in government. People who are trusted with classified information and pledge to protect it must be held accountable when they violate that obligation," Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said in a statement Monday.

Winner faces up to 10 years in prison for leaking classified information. Winner's court-appointed attorney, Titus Nichols, said a detention hearing will take place on Thursday in Augusta, where the judge will determine whether to release her on bond. Winner did not enter a plea in her initial appearance Monday.

Last month Attorney General Jeff Sessions slammed leaks in the wake of the Manchester attacks, saying: "We have already initiated appropriate steps to address these rampant leaks that undermine our national security."

Winner's mother said that her daughter is "touch and go" in an interview with CNN on Monday.

"I think she's trying to be brave for me," Billie Winner said. "I don't think she's seeing a light at the end of the tunnel."

She also said her daughter wasn't especially political and had not ever praised past leakers like Edward Snowden, to her knowledge. "She's never ever given me any kind of indication that she was in favor of that at all," her mother said. "I don't know how to explain it."

Nichols told CNN that Winner spent six years in the military, speaks Farsi and Pashtun, and has been with her current company since 2017. He added that he has not received any evidence from the government about the arrest warrant and case files, and hasn't seen evidence of a relationship between his client and the reporter.

"She's just been caught in the middle of something bigger than her," Nichols said.

Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, the former Democratic vice presidential candidate, said on CNN's "Erin Burnett OutFront" that people who leak classified information should face the full force of the law, but added that Americans need to know much more about alleged Russian attempts to influence the election.

"Somebody who leaks documents against laws has got to suffer the consequences" Kaine said. "But the American public is also entitled to know the degree to which Russia invaded the election to take the election away from American voters."

Kaine noted he knew of no evidence that showed Russia affected machine voting totals and said he was referring to intelligence assessments that Russia had acted to influence the election.

The October information appears to be part of what is contained in the new NSA document, but the document contains additional details.

Most significantly, as CNN reported at the time, and The Intercept also reports Monday based on the this document, that there is still no evidence any votes were affected by Russian hacking.

CNN's David Shortell and Nick Valencia contributed to this report.

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Contractor charged with leaking classified NSA info on ...

The National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, as seen from the air, January 29, 2010. Saul LoebAFP/Getty Images

For more than a year, U.S. intelligence officials reassured lawmakers they were working to calculate and reveal roughly how many Americans have their digital communications vacuumed up under a warrant-less surveillance law intended to target foreigners overseas.

This week, the Trump administration backtracked, catching lawmakers off guard and alarming civil liberties advocates who say it is critical to know as Congress weighs changes to a law expiring at the end of the year that permits some of the National Security Agency's most sweeping espionage.

"The NSA has made Herculean, extensive efforts to devise a counting strategy that would be accurate," Dan Coats, a career Republican politician appointed by Republican President Donald Trump as the top U.S. intelligence official, testified to a Senate panel on Wednesday.

Coats said "it remains infeasible to generate an exact, accurate, meaningful, and responsive methodology that can count how often a U.S. person's communications may be collected" under the law known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

He told the Senate Intelligence Committee that even if he dedicated more resources the NSA would not be able to calculate an estimate, which privacy experts have said could be in the millions.

The statement ran counter to what senior intelligence officials had previously promised both publicly and in private briefings during the previous administration of President Barack Obama, a Democrat, lawmakers and congressional staffers working on drafting reforms to Section 702 said.

Representative John Conyers, the top Democrat in the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, said that for many months intelligence agencies "expressly promised" members of both parties to deliver the estimated number to them.

Senior intelligence officials had also previously said an estimate could be delivered. In March, then NSA deputy director Rick Ledgett, said "yes" when asked by a Reuters reporter if an estimate would be provided this year.

"Were working on that with the Congress and we'll come to a satisfactory resolution, because we have to," said Ledgett, who has since retired from public service.

The law allows U.S. intelligence agencies to eavesdrop on and collect vast amounts of digital communications from foreign suspects living outside of the United States, but often incidentally scoops up communications of Americans.

The decision to scrap the estimate is likely to complicate a debate in Congress over whether to curtail certain aspects of the surveillance law, congressional aides said. Congress must vote to renew Section 702 to avoid its expiration on Dec. 31.

Privacy issues often scramble traditional party lines, but there are signs that Section 702's renewal will be even more politically unpredictable.

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Some Republicans who usually support surveillance programs have expressed concerns about Section 702, in part because they are worried about leaks of intercepts of conversations between Trump associates and Russian officials amid investigations of possible collusion.

U.S. intelligence agencies last year accused Russia of interfering in the 2016 presidential election campaign, allegations Moscow denies. Trump denies there was collusion. Intelligence officials have said Section 702 was not directly connected to surveillance related to those leaks.

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"As big a fan as I am of collection, incidental collection, I'm not going to reauthorize a program that could be politically manipulated," Senator Lindsey Graham, usually a defender of U.S. surveillance activities, told reporters this week.

Graham was among 14 Republican senators, including every Republican member of the intelligence panel, who on Tuesday introduced a bill supported by the White House and top intelligence chiefs, that would renew Section 702 without changes and make it permanent.

Critics have called the process under which the FBI and other agencies can query the pool of data collected for U.S. information a "backdoor search loophole" that evades traditional warrant requirements.

"How can we accept the government's reassurance that our privacy is being protected when the government itself has no idea how many Americans' communications are being swept up and stored?" said Liza Goitein, a privacy expert at the Brennan Center for Justice.

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NSA Backtracks on Sharing Number of Americans Caught In Warrantless Spying - Fortune

Augusta

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has called on his supporters to rally to the side of the 25-year-old suspect in the National Security Agency leak investigation here.

Assange, who has drawn a mixture of praise and scorn for his role in the disclosure of highly classified U.S. intelligence information, tweeted this week: Alleged NSA whistleblower Reality Leigh Winner must be supported. She is a young women [sic] accused of courage in trying to help us know. He also tweeted that Winner, a U.S. Air Force veteran, is against the wall for talking to the press.

It doesn't matter why she did it or the quality (of) the report, said Assange, who jumped his bail and sought asylum in Ecuador to avoid extradition to Sweden on rape accusations. Swedish prosecutors have since announced they were dropping the rape inquiry and no longer seeking to extradite him. Assange has denied the allegations. Acts of non-elite sources communicating knowledge should be strongly encouraged.

Assistant U.S. attorney Jennifer Solari highlighted Assanges support for Winner while pushing Thursday to keep her in jail until her trial. U.S. Magistrate Judge Brian Epps ultimately denied Winners release on bond, citing the nature of the crime, the weight of the evidence, her history and the potential danger to the community.

A federal grand jury has indicted Winner on a single count of "willful retention and transmission of national defense information. Winner faces up to 10 years in prison and $250,000 in fines, plus up to three years of supervised release and a $100 special assessment. Winner pleaded not guilty to the charge Thursday.

Filed this week, the six-page federal indictment says Winner worked as a federal contractor at a U.S. government agency in Georgia between February and June and had a top-secret security clearance. On about May 9, the indictment says, Winner printed and removed a May 5 report on intelligence activities by a foreign government directed at targets within the United States. Two days later, she sent a copy of the report to an online news outlet.

The U.S. Justice Department announced Winners arrest Monday, about an hour after The Intercept reported that it had obtained a top-secret NSA report about Russias interference in the 2016 presidential election. The report says Russian military intelligence officials tried to hack into the U.S. voting system just before last Novembers election.

Reality Leigh Winner is the first person to be charged with leaking confidential information during the Trump administration.

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WikiLeaks founder supporting NSA leak suspect in Georgia - Atlanta Journal Constitution

From left, National Intelligence Director Dan Coats, National Security Agency director Adm. Michael Rogers and acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, arrive for the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, on Capitol Hill, Wednesday, June 7, 2017, in Washington. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Lawmakers went after intelligence community leaders in the Senate Wednesday for again failing to provide Congress with an estimate of the number of Americans incidentally caught up in broad National Security Agency foreign spying powers set to expire later this year.

Senators on the Intelligence Committee were frustrated by NSA, FBI, and ODNI leaders continued inability to estimate how many Americans are incidentally swept up in surveillance conducted under Section 702 of the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, set to expire in December.

Section 702 authorizes NSAto tap the physical infrastructure of internet service providers, like fiber connections, to surveil the content of foreign emails, instant messages, and other communications as they exit and enter the U.S.Privacy advocates say such collection facilitates a loophole for NSA to incidentally collect data belonging to American citizens, and likely amounts to millions of warrantless interceptions.

Lawmakers must decide whether to reauthorize the law by the end of December. Many, including Oregon Democrat Sen. Ron Wyden, dont want to do that until they know how many Americans are affected. The most heated portion of Wednesdays hearing related to 702 came when Wyden blasted Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats for failing to provide that estimate, despite pledging to do so during his confirmation hearing earlier this year.

As recently as April you promised Americans that you would provide what you called a relevant metric for the number of law-abiding Americans who are swept up in the FISA 702 searches, Wyden told Coats. This morning you went back on that promise, and you said that even putting together a sampling a statistical estimate would jeopardize national security.

Wyden said that was a very, very damaging position to stake out, adding he would continue to battle it out with the intelligence community for an answer.

Coats countered that he pledged to make every effort to try to find out why we were not able to come to a specific number on the collection of U.S. persons, and that he personally visited NSA and met with Director Mike Rogers to get the answer.

They went through the technical details, Coats explained. There were extensive efforts on the part of NSA to try to get you an appropriate answer. We were not able to do that.

Coatssaid that in his conversation with Rogers, the NSA director stated if someone out there knows how to get to it, hes welcome to have them come out and tell NSA how to do it.

Coats added the technical complications of coming up with a number would be explained to senators in a closed session later Wednesday.

Rogers, during his testimony, said Section 702s collection and value grows every year, and that it was 702 authority that allowed the signals intelligence agency to intercept intelligence on Russian efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.

The NSA director said about 90 percent of the time incidental collection of data on Americans occurs when two foreign targets of the agency discuss an American in an intercepted communication. Intercepted communications of Americans happens about 10 percent of the time when NSA is surveilling a foreign target and that target communicates with a U.S. citizen.

But Maine Independent Sen. Angus King noted theres a difference between the collection of data and the querying of that data once its stored in an NSA database

Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked the existence of widespread upstream surveillance programs like PRISM, noted the same difference during a March interview, during which he disputed intel chiefs description of how Section 702 is used and subsequently abused to spy on Americans.

The main thing that this boils down to are word games, Snowden said on an Intercept podcast. These intelligence agenciestheyre saying to them, collect doesnt mean that we copied your communications, that we put it in the bucket, that we saved it in case we want to look at it. Those things,he added, are happening to virtually everyone.

To them, collect means that they take it out of the bucket, and actually look at it and read it, Snowden said.

In theory, surveilling an American requires a warrant. But according to the former NSA contractor, the agency can circumvent that.

They cant target you directly, but if they look at the other side of that communication the communication that went overseas or involved a non-U.S. person in any way thats entirely legal, he said.

In the 10 years since Congress enacted the FISA Amendments Act, Coats said there have been no violations of Section 702, but Rogers admitted there have been compliance issues.

Have we had compliance incidents? Yes, Rogers said. Have we reported every one of those to the court? Yes. Have we reported those to our congressional oversight in Congress? Yes. Have we reported those to the Department of Justice and Director of National Intelligence? Yes.

On Tuesday, Republican Sens. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Richard Burr of North Carolina, Marco Rubio of Florida, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and others introduced a bill to make Section 702 permanent and without expiration.

However Graham went on the record Tuesday saying, As big a fan as I am of incidental collection, Im not going to reauthorize a program that could be politically manipulated, noting Section 702 was the authority used to intercept communications between former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and theRussian ambassador during last years presidential transition.

The Obama administration unmasked Flynns name from an intelligence report detailing the interception, which was later leaked to the press.

President Donald Trumps homeland security and counterterrorism advisor Tom Bussert wrote in a New York Times op-ed Wednesday the president supports the Cotton bill without condition.

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Congress Grills Intel Chiefs Over Americans Spied On Under Expiring NSA Powers - InsideSources

Here are 5 questions that were raised by the leaked NSA hacking report and the ongoing threat that national security officials say Russia poses to the integrity of American elections. Patrick Semansky/AP hide caption

Here are 5 questions that were raised by the leaked NSA hacking report and the ongoing threat that national security officials say Russia poses to the integrity of American elections.

America's sprawling elections infrastructure has been called "a hairball" but as people in Silicon Valley might ask, is that a feature or a bug?

Then-FBI Director James Comey touted it as a good thing "the beauty of our system," he told Congress, is that the "hairball" is too vast, unconnected and woolly to be hacked from the outside.

That was before Monday's leak of a top secret National Security Agency report about a Russian election cyberattack. What that document confirms is that if the whole is safe, its many individual parts may not be.

The NSA report, posted by The Intercept, documents a scheme by Russia's military intelligence agency, the GRU, to compromise the systems of a Florida elections services company then use that access to explore local voting registration records.

"It is unknown whether the aforementioned spear-phishing deployment successfully compromised the intended victims, and what potential data could have been accessed by the cyber actor," as one NSA analyst wrote in the report.

Here are 5 other questions that remain unknown about this story and the ongoing threat that national security officials say Russia poses to the integrity of American elections.

1. How widespread are these attacks?

The Department of Homeland Security and U.S. intelligence leaders have said generally that voter registration rolls were a pet target of Russian cyberattackers, but that Russia didn't change any votes. The American leaders also have warned, however, that they expect the Russian mischief to continue in the 2018 and 2020 election cycles. If the GRU continues operations like this elsewhere, how much better of an understanding will it have of local elections officials and their vendors next year or beyond?

Elections systems analysts tell NPR that although electronic voting machines are not connected to the public Internet, the computers that update their firmware are, or the ones that program them at the factory. It isn't clear what's practically possible in this realm in terms of hacking or compromising those systems; Comey told members of Congress that Russia has attempted to tamper with votes "in other countries," but the details aren't clear.

Even with the redactions, The Intercept made at the request of the NSA to protect some of its key secrets, there are tantalizing details about the extent of the GRU mischief. One note makes clear that this so-called "spear-phishing" campaign was separate from another major program known within secret circles though the name of that is blacked out.

Another mention in the NSA report suggests that two-factor authentication the popular system in which Gmail, for example, sends users a text message with a code they must enter along with a password in order to log in is not a failsafe security feature. The GRU hackers were able to use fake websites that used real Google verification codes to gain access to victims' accounts.

2. Can the federal government do more?

Then-DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson said last year that the federal government was offering help across the board to local elections officials to be aware of the Russian cyber-mischief. And Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee last month that the government continued to provide information about the ongoing threat.

"Two things we can do, and that we are doing, both in the United States and with our allies, is telling the people responsible for protecting the election infrastructure in the United States everything we know about how the Russians and others try to attack those systems," Comey said. "How they might come at it, what [Internet protocol] addresses they might use, what phishing techniques they might use."

That may have been one eventual goal for the NSA report posted on Monday it could have been the top secret original from which DHS or other agencies might have created unclassified advisories to send out to states.

But is it enough just to share information about such a sophisticated adversary? Local vendors and state officials don't have vast IT resources or sophisticated counterintelligence to help defend themselves against state-actor adversaries. And states "pushed back" against Johnson when he offered help last year, as former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told Congress they rejected what he called "federal interference."

Clapper said he believed Congress should designate the national election apparatus "critical infrastructure," the way the U.S. has labeled 16 other "sectors," including the American chemical industry, dams, the power grid and others. That could get very complicated, however, and it would take time and cost money.

3. Why do these leaks keep happening?

The Justice Department has charged a U.S. intelligence community contractor, Reality Winner, with allegedly leaking the NSA report to The Intercept. According to court documents, when the news site's correspondents asked the NSA's public affairs office to verify the report, that enabled the FBI to narrow down who had access to it and pinpoint Winner.

From the perspective of NSA leaders, that's a partial success story: they plugged a leak quickly instead of having it turn into a gusher. But at the same time Winner's case is just the latest example of a contractor on the outer periphery of a spy agency hazarding closely held secrets.

Last month, tens of thousands of sensitive files connected to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency were left on a publicly accessible Amazon server by an engineer with contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Last year, an NSA contractor also with Booz Allen was charged with hoarding a "breathtaking" amount of sensitive material. And before that, NSA contractor Edward Snowen took huge amounts of secret information about the U.S. intelligence community and the military.

Agency bosses, now led by Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, say they've focused intensely on what they call the "insider threat" since the Snowden days, and the intelligence community now has a task force dedicated to helping snuff it out.

The question that Winner's case again raises is how secure Coats and agency leaders can make a constellation of 17 separate agencies that each has its own wider network of contractors who support it.

4. Why can't the U.S. stop these cyberattacks?

Then-CIA Director John Brennan called his counterpart in Russia last year to read him the riot act: "I said that all Americans, regardless of political affiliation or whom they might support in the election, cherish their ability to elect their own leaders without outside interference or disruption," Brennan told the Senate last month. "I said American voters would be outraged by any Russian attempt to interfere in the election."

But Alexander Bortnikov, the head of Russia's FSB intelligence agency the successor to the infamous KGB claimed he didn't know anything about any election meddling. In Brennan's telling, he promised he'd relay the details of the phone conversation to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

President Barack Obama also is believed to have warned Putin to knock off the interference with no result. The NSA report posted on Monday describes a cyberattack that lasted until just before Election Day in November, well after the U.S. announced publicly that Russia had been responsible for campaign mischief.

U.S. intelligence officials said at the time that they believed so-called "attribution" was a powerful weapon. The FBI later issued indictments for Russian intelligence officers and others involved with the meddling, making public how much information Americans have about what's taking place behind the scenes.

None of it, however, appears to have made a difference. Coats, Comey, Brennan and other leaders continue to warn that Russian cyber-mischief proceeds, that Moscow considers it successful and that it could ramp up again in the 2018 midterm and 2020 presidential elections. One political scientist told NPR the world of foreign meddling is "the new normal."

Is that so, or can the U.S. government do more launch cyberattacks of its own, impose further restrictions on Russia or take some other step to impose greater costs on the Russians?

5. Will this change Trump's tune?

"As far as hacking, I think it was Russia," then-President-elect Trump said at a news conference before Inauguration Day.

Since then, however, he's dismissed the election-meddling story as an excuse created by Democrats to cover up Hillary Clinton's loss, or opined that cyberspace is so complicated that no one could ever know for certain who might have been behind it. Russian President Vladimir Putin made the same point over the weekend to NBC News' Megyn Kelly.

The NSA report leaked on Monday, however, shows that, in fact, American intelligence officers have a highly detailed technical understanding about how much of Russia's hacking operation works. They attribute the scheme without hesitation to the GRU and talk in detail about the software and other tools used to try to compromise the victims' computers.

It was one thing for the intelligence community to conclude that Russia had interfered and not explain how it knew. Now there are more clues in the open about how it knows. And the report, completed in May, shows that its analysis continues about the ways Russia's intelligence agencies attacked the U.S during the 2016 cycle.

Trump rejects any notion that his campaign aides might have colluded with the Russian operatives who meddled in the election, but does the emergence of this NSA document make it tougher for him to continue to question whether it even happened?

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5 Unanswered Questions Raised By The Leaked NSA Hacking ...

Barely an hour after a news organization published an article about a top-secret National Security Agency document on Russian hacking, the Justice Department announced charges against a 25-year-old government contractor who a senior federal official says was the leaker of the document.

The May 5, 2017, intelligence document published by The Intercept, an online news organization, describes new details about Russian efforts to hack voting systems in the U.S. a week prior to the 2016 presidential election. While the document doesnt say the hacking changed any votes, it "raises the possibility that Russian hacking may have breached at least some elements of the voting system, with disconcertingly uncertain results."

Even as the document was ricocheting around Washington, the Justice Department announced that a criminal complaint was filed in the Southern District of Georgia, charging Reality Leigh Winner, 25, a federal contractor, with removing classified material from a government facility and mailing it to a news outlet.

The complaint did not link the charges with the story, but a senior federal official confirmed to NBC News that Winner is the accused leaker of the document published by the Intercept. The NSA has a large facility in Georgia.

The complaint says she admitted to printing out the document and mailing it to the news outlet.

It adds that the government found evidence that Winner "had email contact" with the news outlet, and that Winner was one of just six individuals who had viewed the intelligence reporting since the U.S. government published it internally.

Related: NSA Leak Mystery Not Solved With Arrest of Hal Martin

She was arrested by the FBI at her home Saturday, according to a senior federal official. She faces a single charge of "gathering, transmitting or losing defense information."

Winner is a contractor with Pluribus International Corporation, authorities said. She had been employed at the facility since on or about February 13, and held a Top Secret clearance.

Her attorney, Titus Thomas Nichols, told NBC News that his client is "looking forward to putting this behind her," and has no prior criminal history.

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Feds Arrest NSA Contractor in Leak of Top Secret Russia ...

Rosie ODonnell donated a $1,000 to Reality Winner, the woman who has been charged with stealing and leaking Top Secret documents from the NSA.

On Thursday, the 55-year-old comedian shared on Twitter that she had made the donation on a crowd sourcing site set up for Winner, who was indicted on Monday after she allegedly stole classified documents from her employer about Russians trying to interfere into the 2016 election and gave them to The Intercept.(RELATED:Rosie ODonnell Calls For Trump To Be Arrested)

Rosie ODonnell speaks at a protest rally organized by activists against U.S. President Donald Trump outside the White House in Washington February 28, 2017. REUTERS/James Lawler Duggan

gofundme.com/2d9rnm64 i support reality winner speak truth to power #resist #womenUNITE https://twitter.com/JohnEdwardsAJC/status/872768212190076929 , ODonnell tweeted Thursday along with a link to the GoFundMe page.(RELATED:Rosie ODonnell Shifts From Calling Trump An Orange Anus To Serious Prayer)

She also confirmed that the large donation on the site that read from Rosie ODonnell was in fact from her.

@JohnEdwardsAJC it is accurate i would love to talk to the mother and offer any help, she added.

In one post she even referred to Winner as a brave young patriot.

According to the information on the page, contributions are to help Winner deal with the loss of employment and counseling she will need due to this traumatic experience.

These funds will be able to assist with loss of wages, counseling from this traumatic experience and tobe able to recover from this as Reality & her family rebuilds theirlives, a statement on the site read. Possible expenses for travel for the family and anything they might need to help them through these troubled times.

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Rosie O'Donnell Gives Large Sum Of Money To NSA Leaker - The Daily Caller