Reality Winner leaks … awful puns into late-night monologues

"Her words to me was that she was scared she was going to be. they were going to make her disappear", mother Billie Davis-Winner said Tuesday.

Reality Leigh Winner, a 25-year-old government contractor, remained locked up Tuesday on federal charges that she mailed a classified report to an online news outlet.

Reality Winner was caught because she was stupid, not because of anything the reporter (s) did or didn't do.

The Intercept published a story on Monday about a leaked NSA report that suggests Russian hackers attacked at least one USA voting software supplier days before last year's presidential election. An internal government audit found that only six individuals printed the report, and victor was the only one in the group to make email contact with the Intercept website which later published the NSA document.

Victor was a six-year Air Force veteran before taking a position at an NSA outpost in Augusta, Georgia while technically employed by a government contractor called Pluribus International Corporation.

According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation affidavit, 25-year-old government contractor Reality Winner, is accused of leaking top secret national security agency intelligence on Russia's alleged election interference.

The Justice Department said victor, who is an Air Force veteran, admitted to printing and leaking the classified information.

What led investigators to victor was an audit that revealed she was one of only six people who had printed the report, and the only one who had had e-mail contact with The Intercept.

In the interview Tuesday with CNN's Anderson Cooper, Winner-Davis said if her daughter committed the alleged crime, "I know that she's ready to pay the price".

She hopes to be released on bond Thursday.

Using a tool created by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and armed with the document Ars Technica was able to determine that the document was printed on 9th May 2017 at 6:20am from a Xerox Docucolor printer.

Court documents allege that victor printed out the NSA report and hand-carried it out of a secure facility. Her mother says she taught herself Arabic before she was even in the air force.

Now, Winner currently lives in Augusta, so that little hint really helped narrow the federal government's scope.

Later on, Cooper asked if they were aware what victor did for a living, had access to classified information and if she had been thinking about doing anything like this.

"If your goal is to disrupt an election, you don't need to pick the victor or actually tamper with tally result", said Matt Blaze, a University of Pennsylvania computer science professor who has written on the security of voting machines. "Well, President Trump promised to crack down and now a government contractor has been charged with leaking about Russian interference with the us election", bemoaned anchor Scott Pelley with the headline "Leak Crackdown" behind him.

That classified material is thought to have been the source for an article that appeared on The Intercept on Monday.

"You don't see very often the deputy attorney general releasing a press release before a case has been prosecuted", Nichols said.

Steve Hall, former Central Intelligence Agency chief of Russia operations, said that while leaks are part of the tensions in an open society, they could tip off the Russians to protect themselves better next time.

Snowden, who is living in Russian Federation and has avoided prosecution in the United States, said in a post online that the Espionage Act leaves no room to consider the public benefit of the information leaked.

To be fair it wasn't that The Intercept had included the name of the leaker but rather that the documents it submitted for review contained secret watermarks that pointed to when the documents had been printed and the printer that was used.

The operation, which potentially threatened the integrity of the U.S. vote, went on for months, until just days before the November 8 election, according to the document.