But whether such hacking takes place in great numbers is so far merely speculative. If it happens, it is clearly most likely to be domestic interference and not foreign. Greg Palast believes we should ignore the call to get all caught up in the kind of voter fraud Trump has alluded to:
Forget the stuff about [hacking voter machines]. And when Trump brings it up, it's no more credible than when some of my friends on the Left bring it up. It doesn't happen. Never happened, OK? That's not the problem. The problem is that we block people from voting. The biggest way you steal votes in America is before the election, not on Election Day. You steal it mainly by blocking people from voting.
And, as we've seen with Trump trying to steal 12000 votes in Georgia in 2020, it's at the registration level and vote count level that we are most likely to catch culprits who can be convicted.
Reality Winner has made quite a fuss about how her whistleblowing was handled by The Intercept, feeling that they did little to nothing to protect her as a source (let alone a more converted whistleblower). In a 2021 Rolling Stone piece, "'Bitter,' 'Angry,' 'Enraged': Reality Winner Blasts the Intercept After 4 Years in Jail," Tessa Stuart believes it was worse than mere negligence:
While attempting to verify its authenticity with the NSA, an Intercept reporter inadvertently revealed its provenance. According to an FBI affidavit, the document had a telltale crease in it, indicating it had been printed and folded. An FBI agent assigned to the case would later testify that a total of six people had printed the document. The pool of potential leakers was further narrowed to one -- Winner -- when investigators discovered she'd emailed The Intercept from her work computer.
So, as we see in the film, as soon as Reality mentions that she folded the print-out to put down her pantyhose, she's toast. It's the turning point of the film.
Certainly, Glenn Greenwald believed that the staff at Intercept seriously botched the Winnerlude. In his intensely incensed first post at his new Substack site, Greenwald laid into The Intercept for its politically-motivated handling of the Reality Winner document and aftermath:
It was Intercept editors who pressured the story's reporters to quickly send those documents for authentication to the government -- because they were eager to prove to mainstream media outlets and prominent liberals that The Intercept was willing to get on board the Russiagate train. They wanted to counter-act the perception, created by my articles expressing skepticism about the central claims of that scandal, that The Intercept had stepped out of line on a story of high importance to U.S. liberalism and even the left. That craving -- to secure the approval of the very mainstream media outlets we set out to counteract -- was the root cause for the speed and recklessness with which that document from Winner was handled.
This is vintage Greenwald. It's his best scathe since he was bitch-slapped in Brazil in 2020.
The NSA top secret document is so pointless in its scope and revelation that I had to wonder if Reality hadn't been used as a tool for some latter day Turd Blossom who set her up. Why call her a whistleblower? What was she revealing that the government was hiding that we didn't already know from assertions by Obama and Hillary and the whole Russiagate apparatus? That whole retarded narrative is now falling apart, with indications of potential FBI malfeasance and the recent Durham report that says 'mistakes were made' and remembering the Columbia Journalism Review's piece earlier this year that excoriated the MSM for its slack coverage of the Trump-Russia debacle?
The NSA document itself points to some seemingly ridiculous claims -- spear-phishing one's way to electoral manipulation. This seems insane, even on the surface. It reminds me of the 2012 appearance before Congress of Kevin Mandia (Mandiant) where he told legislators that more than 90 % of Fortune 500 companies he contacted first learned from the US government that their network security had been breached. Consider the implications of that statement. And he told Congress that the main varmint of the breaches was "spear-phishing." I had to be propped up and brought out of my whooze with smelling salts.
And Mandiant, shortly after implicating the Chinese in breaching the accounts of the NYT, WaPo and the WSJ, went on to be rewardingly absorbed by FireEye, a company with ties to the CIA, with Kevin Mandia made CEO. Crowdstrike is associated with the FBI, thanks to Chief Security Officer Shawn Henry's former role as executive associate director of the FBI who, as he says in his biog on the site, "oversaw all FBI criminal and cyber investigations worldwide." The tandem have been there for major breaches, most recently the Colonial pipeline farce (the colonial pipeline ransomware server was discovered in NYC!!! by Mandiant!!!) and, back in 2016, they helped sell the DNC Russia intrusion story together.
Furthermore, Kevin Mandia used to work under Crowdstrike's CEO George Kurtz at Foundstone, closed down by a scandal described by Fortune magazine's Richard Behar: "The use of unlicensed software is a global problem -- estimates of lost revenues range up to $13 billion a year -- but it's rare among companies whose business is safeguarding intellectual property." It's easy to see how Reality Winner could have been used and abused by such global players. There's no proof for that, but Winner's gobsmackment at the mild revelations of a document, only titularly top secret, has one speculating. I must stop. Stop it.
The Reality Winner piece was a losing proposition for The Intercept. Not too long afterward, Greewald quit because he felt he'd been censored by editor-in-Chief Betsy Reed. Along the way, Laura Poitras also quit over a salary dispute (she complained that fellow founders Greenwald and Scahill were getting six figure salaries to her five figures. See my review: Snowden's Box). And most recently Reed has jumped to the Guardian.
Winner is correct to be outraged to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act. No doubt more political chicanery is afoot. Reality does not come off as a sympathetic character (though Sweeney does an excellent job enacting her interrogation transcript), as she lies, when she should have had more sense to call for a lawyer. And I find it difficult to believe that anyone who is ga-ga over Anderson Cooper could also be a subscriber to The Intercept. C'mon. Stop f*cking with me. I get edgy, man.
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INTERROGATION TRANSCRIPT FBI - REALITY WINNER
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