US contractor Reality Winner arrested after NSA leak report
A US government contractor has been arrested on suspicion of leaking top-secret information to a news outlet.
Reality Leigh Winner, 25, allegedly removed classified material from a federal site in the state of Georgia.
The
charges were announced shortly after news website The Intercept
published a National Security Agency briefing about alleged Russian
meddling in last year's election.
The Trump administration has been seeking to fight leaks to the media.
Ms Winner was arrested on 3 June, the justice department said.
She
is a contractor with Pluribus International Corporation and had been
employed at an NSA facility in Georgia since February, reports NBC News.
The accused faces a count of "gathering, transmitting or losing defence information", according to the network.
Ms Winner, who graduated from basic military training at Lackland Air
Force Base in San Antonio in 2011, was caught after investigators
noticed that the leaked document appeared to have been folded or
creased.
That suggested it had been "printed and then carried out of a secured space", according to an FBI affidavit in support of the arrest warrant.
Investigators
then determined that Ms Winner was one of only six people to have
printed the document. Examination of her email on her desk computer
further revealed that she had exchanged emails with the news outlet, the
indictment said.
When confronted, Ms Winner admitted printing the
report despite not possessing a "need-to-know" about its content and
said she was aware that the information "could be used to the injury of
the US and to the advantage of a foreign nation", the affidavit says.
alleges that Moscow's military intelligence services attempted
cyber-attacks on at least one US voting software supplier days before
last November's US presidential election.
It also accuses them of sending spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials.
However, there is no suggestion in the document that the hackers were successful.
The NSA file in question was apparently marked for declassification not before May 2042.
American
intelligence agencies have accused the Kremlin of trying to interfere
in the election to ensure Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton.
Several congressional committees and the FBI are investigating the matter.
The
president has repeatedly dismissed the story as "fake news", arguing
that the real scandal is how the allegations are being leaked to the
media.
BBC NEWS
No comments:
Post a Comment