Treasury Leaker Arrested

Federal prosecutors say a high-ranking Treasury Department official has been arrested in connection with information leaked to a reporter. The information being passed along to an unnamed reporter contained details of suspicious activity reported by banks about Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, suspected Russian spy Maria Butina and the Russian embassy.

Law enforcement officials say that Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards, 40, a senior advisor at the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has been arrested and charged with leaking confidential banking records. The Washington Post reports that Edwards, who lives near Richmond, was arrested with a flash drive that “appear to contain thousands of SARs (Suspicious Activity Reports), along with other highly sensitive material relating to Russia, Iran and the terrorist group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant,” per the complaint.

The flash drive reportedly contained photos of as many as 24,000 SARs that were arranged into folders. The majority of the reports were in a folder named, “Debacle-Operation-CF.” Subfolders were assigned names such as “Debacle/Emails/Asshat.” The complaint notes drily that “Edwards is not known to be involved in any official FinCEN project or task bearing these file titles or code names.”

Suspicious Activity Reports are filed by banks when they spot transactions that could be illegal. The reports “are not public documents, and it is an independent federal crime to disclose them outside of one’s official duties,” U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman said. Banks filed about 2 million SARs in 2017.

Edwards denied wrongdoing when initially questioned by the FBI and then claimed that the documents were related to a whistleblower case that she had filed. When presented with digital evidence that the FBI had obtained from her phone that included hundreds of text messages with a reporter, she confessed that “on numerous occasions, she accessed SARs on her computer, photographed them, and sent the photographs to Reporter-1” using an encrypted phone app. The reporter was not identified or arrested but has been traced by media outlets to BuzzFeed.

The Post also reports that an associate director of FinCEN who is Edwards’ has also been investigated by the FBI. The boss, identified a co-conspirator in the complaint, has not yet been arrested or charged.

Edwards is being charged with one count of unauthorized disclosures of SARs and one count of conspiracy to make unauthorized disclosures of suspicious activity reports. Each count carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison. A Treasury spokesman said that Edwards has been placed on administrative leave.

FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge William F. Sweeney Jr. called Edwards’ actions a breach of the public trust.  “In her position, Edwards was entrusted with sensitive government information,” he said.   “Edwards violated that trust when she made several unauthorized disclosures to the media.  Today's action demonstrates that those who fail to protect the integrity of government information will be rightfully held accountable for their behavior.”

Originally published on The Resurgent

Reality Winner Just Provided Evidence of Russian Election Hacking

The news of the arrest of Reality Winner, the inappropriately named NSA contractor who allegedly leaked classified information to The Intercept, is overshadowing the real news. In a looking-at-the-forest-versus-the-trees moment, the world seems focused on Ms. Winner herself, a 25-year-old blonde, and the details of her arrest rather than the content of her leak.

The big news is that Ms. Winner has provided what many Russia skeptics have been asking for over the past few months: evidence of Russian meddling in the election. The report contains direct, unfiltered insight into the NSA findings on Russian hacking of election officials and companies.

The Intercept published many details of the report that Ms. Winner purloined from an NSA facility at Ft. Gordon, Georgia. The report, dated May 5, 2017, “indicates that Russian hacking may have penetrated further into U.S. voting systems than was previously understood. It states unequivocally in its summary statement that it was Russian military intelligence, specifically the Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate, or GRU, that conducted the cyberattacks” on US companies that provide election software. The NSA found that the Russians stole data that they then used to conduct “a voter registration-themed spear-phishing campaign targeting U.S. local government organizations.”

The report does not assess the impact of the cyberattacks, but there was previously no indication that Russia had targeted computers connected to actual voting in the election. “It is unknown,” the NSA notes, “whether the aforementioned spear-phishing deployment successfully compromised the intended victims, and what potential data could have been accessed by the cyber actor.”

While electronic voting machines are not connected to the internet, Alex Halderman, director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society and an electronic voting expert, told The Intercept that a major risk would be if the Russian attacks compromised vendors who program voting machines prior to Election Day.

“Usually at the county level there’s going to be some company that does the pre-election programming of the voting machines,” Halderman said. “I would worry about whether an attacker who could compromise the poll book vendor might be able to use software updates that the vendor distributes to also infect the election management system that programs the voting machines themselves. Once you do that, you can cause the voting machine to create fraudulent counts.”

Another possibility would be a denial of service attack. Pamela Smith, president of Verified Voting, an elections watchdog group, said, “If someone has access to a state voter database, they can take malicious action by modifying or removing information. This could affect whether someone has the ability to cast a regular ballot, or be required to cast a ‘provisional’ ballot — which would mean it has to be checked for their eligibility before it is included in the vote, and it may mean the voter has to jump through certain hoops such as proving their information to the election official before their eligibility is affirmed.”

The Intercept article noted that polling station computers that deal with registration and check-in are tied to the internet and connect directly to country voter databases. A virus spread by the polling equipment could quickly infect other government computers. Malware that changed or deleted voter rolls could throw an election into confusion.

At this point, the investigation is still ongoing and most of the results are still secret, like Reality Winner’s report should be, but this glimpse that the report provides into what is already known by the government is disturbing. Even if the attacks were ultimately unsuccessful, the mere fact of the attempt could undermine public faith in the outcome of the elections.

“It’s not just that [an election] has to be fair, it has to be demonstrably fair, so that the loser says, ‘Yep, I lost fair and square.’ If you can’t do that, you’re screwed,” said Bruce Schneier, a cybersecurity expert at Harvard. “They’ll tear themselves apart if they’re convinced it’s not accurate.”

Originally published on The Resurgent

Assange reportedly ready to surrender

There are reports that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is willing to face extradition to the United States. WikiLeaks has published classified information stolen from the US government on numerous occasions, but there is currently no indictment against the group’s Australian founder.

On Jan. 12, WikiLeaks tweeted that “If Obama grants Manning clemency Assange will agree to US extradition despite clear unconstitutionality of DoJ case.” Yesterday, President Obama announced that he would commute the sentence of Bradley “Chelsea” Manning, the US Army soldier convicted of stealing 750,000 pages of army documents and videos and giving them to WikiLeaks.

Among the documents that PFC Manning gave to WikiLeaks were incident reports from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that mentioned the names of civilians working with coalition military forces. WikiLeaks published these documents without redacting the names. The Taliban subsequently announced that it was using the WikiLeaks documents to track down Afghans aiding the US military. “If they are US spies, then we know how to punish them,” said Zabihullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman quoted in The Telegraph.

A second tweet on Jan. 17 said, “Assange lawyer @themtchair on Assange-Manning extradition 'deal': ‘Everything that he has said he's standing by.’” It is not clear if Assange considers Obama’s commutation of Manning’s sentence, which fell short of a full pardon, to be sufficient to trigger his promise to surrender to authorities.

Assange has been protected from extradition by his residence in the Ecuadorean embassy in London since 2012, but it isn’t the US that has been trying to bring him to justice. Sweden has been seeking Assange’s extradition so that he can stand trial on charges of the rape and sexual assault of two women in 2010. Assange could also face charges in Britain for violating bail.

Even though there is no formal indictment of Assange in the US, the WikiLeaks founder has maintained that he was fearful of extradition to the US if he left the Ecuadorean embassy. WikiLeaks tweeted a link that purports to show documents indicating that there are current “pending proceedings” against Assange by the US Department of Justice.

An additional tweet on Jan. 17 said, “Assange is confident of winning any fair trial in the US. Obama's DoJ prevented public interest defense & fair jury.”

Originally published on The Resurgent