Accused NSA leaker may have worked at secretive listening post – New York Post

The 25-year-old contractor accused of leaking classified NSA documents may have used her linguistics skills to gain access to a government listening post that collects intelligence signals from the Middle East and Europe, according to a report Tuesday.

Reality Winner who allegedly leaked a classified intelligence report containing Top Secret Level defense info likely worked at the Sweet Tea outpost, a 604,000-square-foot NSA post in Fort Gordon, Ga., according to The Daily Beast.

The sprawling facility, which opened 2012, can house up to 4,000 specialists working to translate and analyze intercepted communications from Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, according to The Daily Beast.

Winner speaks at least four languages and served as a linguistics specialist for in the Air Force. She speaks Farsi, Pashto, and Dari, her mother told The Guardian.

What she did is very common among former military personnel, especially people who, like her, were trained in the military with linguistic skill sets, Bradley Moss, an attorney specializing in national security told The Daily Beast. She was already vetted and cleared by the Air Force for at least top secret clearance, if not top secret clearance with sensitive compartmented information access eligibility. It transfers over to her contract wherever she goes, in this case apparently the NSA.

Winners rsum notes she worked at the Georgia Cryptologic Center as a contractor for Pluribus International Corporation, the news site reported. An Army spokesperson for Fort Gordon claimed Winner was contractor who was not in Fort Gordon.

An NSA spokesperson wouldnt confirm whether Winner had worked at Sweet Tea. Winners employer, Pluribus International, did not return a request for comment.

Inside, behind barbed-wire fences, heavily armed guards, and cipher-locked doors, earphone-clad men and women secretly listen in as al-Qaeda members chat on cell phones along the Afghan border, and to insurgents planning attacks in Iraq, journalist James Bamford wrote about the site in 2008.

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Accused NSA leaker may have worked at secretive listening post - New York Post