NSA Secret Report Shows Russia Attempted to Hack State Voting Systems, Leaker Arrested

[mystery-ak]

DOJ charges alleged media leaker under Espionage Act

By Eric Geller and Cory Bennett

06/05/2017 07:49 PM EDT


The Trump administration on Monday brought its first case under the Espionage Act, charging an intelligence agency contractor with leaking a classified document to a news outlet.

The leaked document described in the charges appears to match a top-secret National Security Agency analysis published Monday afternoon by The Intercept, detailing Russian efforts to tamper with U.S. election systems.

more
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/06/05/media-leaks-cybersecurity-espionage-239162

[Wingnut]

Bet she is missing Obama and his look the other way DOJ about now!

[IsailedawayfromFR]

She has some serious problems, but I wonder if her attorneys will claim some witch hunt like McCarthy did on left wingers.

What I found on the Espionage Act is

1917
U.S. Congress passes Espionage Act

On this day in 1917, some two months after America’s formal entrance into World War I against Germany, the United States Congress passes the Espionage Act.

Enforced largely by A. Mitchell Palmer, the United States attorney general under President Woodrow Wilson, the Espionage Act essentially made it a crime for any person to convey information intended to interfere with the U.S. armed forces prosecution of the war effort or to promote the success of the country’s enemies. Anyone found guilty of such acts would be subject to a fine of $10,000 and a prison sentence of 20 years.

The Espionage Act was reinforced by the Sedition Act of the following year, which imposed similarly harsh penalties on anyone found guilty of making false statements that interfered with the prosecution of the war; insulting or abusing the U.S. government, the flag, the Constitution or the military; agitating against the production of necessary war materials; or advocating, teaching or defending any of these acts. Both pieces of legislation were aimed at socialists, pacifists and other anti-war activists during World War I and were used to punishing effect in the years immediately following the war, during a period characterized by the fear of communist influence and communist infiltration into American society that became known as the first Red Scare (a second would occur later, during the 1940s and 1950s, associated largely with Senator Joseph McCarthy). Palmer–a former pacifist whose views on civil rights radically changed once he assumed the attorney general’s office during the Red Scare–and his right-hand man, J. Edgar Hoover, liberally employed the Espionage and Sedition Acts to persecute left-wing political figures.

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/u-s-congress-passes-espionage-act

[mystery-ak]

By Greg Richter   |   Monday, 05 Jun 2017 06:37 PM

A highly classified National Security Agency report details how Russian military intelligence attempted a spear-phishing email attack just days ahead of the 2016 presidential election, The Intercept reported.

The website said it verified the NSA document and redacted certain portions it deemed not vital to the national interest, but declined an NSA request not to write about or publish the document at all.

CBS News also verified the document's veracity.

"Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate actors . . . executed cyber espionage operations against a named U.S. company in August 2016, evidently to obtain information on elections-related software and hardware solutions," the document reads. "The actors likely used data obtained from that operation to . . . launch a voter registration-themed spear-phishing campaign targeting U.S. local government organizations."

more
http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/election-meddling-spear-phishing-Reality-Leigh-Winner/2017/06/05/id/794293/

[Right_in_Virginia]

Report: Russians hacked US voting systems maker just before election
The Hill, Jun 5, 2017

Russian intelligence agents hacked a U.S. voting systems manufacturer in the weeks leading up to the 2016 election, according to a National Security Agency investigation report leaked to The Intercept.

The Intercept reported Monday that the NSA believes hackers used that breach to obtain information used to spearphish its customers.

The report, marked top secret and only to be shared with the "Five Eyes" nations (Canada, Britain, New Zealand and Australia), claims the Russian intelligence agency GRU targeted more than 120 email addresses associated with local government organizations, which it speculates were taken from the earlier hack.

The report does not claim that voting machines were hacked, a once-popular post-election theory from Democrats, nor does it state whether the information pertaining to the voting systems could be used to hack those systems. 

More: http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/336422-russian-intelligence-hacked-voting-systems-maker-spearphished-its

[Right_in_Virginia]

Just to be clear, no claim is being made here that actual voting machines were hacked, or that vote counting was compromised, just that a voting machine manufacturer had its computer system hacked, and some email data stolen. 

Further, is this proof of collusion with Trump?  No.

[Right_in_Virginia]

BTTT

[SirLinksALot]

This from AllahPundit of Hotair:

SOURCE: http://hotair.com/archives/2017/06/05/secret-nsa-report-russian-military-intelligence-tried-hack-u-s-election-infrastructure-weeks-vote/

(EXCERPT)

Why did Russian military intelligence want to access local government officials’ computers? Good question. VR Systems doesn’t sell vote-counting software. They sell voter-registration software, to “verify and catalogue who’s permitted to vote when they show up on Election Day or for early voting.” In theory the hackers could have wreaked havoc with the voting process by mass-deleting voters from the registration database, introducing glitches to slow down the voting process, and so on. As best anyone can tell, they didn’t do that — certainly not on a scale large enough that people would have noticed. (There was a malfunction in the voter-registration system — operated by VR Systems — at some polling locations in Durham, North Carolina, on Election Day but officials there insist there’s no evidence of tampering.) So what did they do, or what could they have done if in fact this was just an experiment by Russia to probe what sort of chaos is technologically possible the next time the U.S. has an election? The Intercept speculates:

[A] more worrying prospect, according to Graff, is that hackers would target a company like VR Systems to get closer to the actual tabulation of the vote. An attempt to directly break into or alter the actual voting machines would be more conspicuous and considerably riskier than compromising an adjacent, less visible part of the voting system, like voter registration databases, in the hope that one is networked to the other. Sure enough, VR Systems advertises the fact that its EViD computer polling station equipment line is connected to the internet, and that on Election Day “a voter’s voting history is transmitted immediately to the county database” on a continuous basis. A computer attack can thus spread quickly and invisibly through networked components of a system like germs through a handshake.

According to Alex Halderman, director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society and an electronic voting expert, one of the main concerns in the scenario described by the NSA document is the likelihood that the officials setting up the electronic poll books are the same people doing the pre-programming of the voting machines. The actual voting machines aren’t going to be networked to something like VR Systems’ EViD, but they do receive manual updates and configuration from people at the local or state level who could be responsible for both. If those were the people targeted by the GRU malware, the implications are troubling.

Use information from VR Systems to get into the local officials’ computers, then use information from the local officials’ computers to get into the all-important voting-machine software. There’s no hard evidence that Russia actually did that, and it’s hard to see why they would have waited until as late as October 27th to try to screw with vote tabulation if that was the big plan, but you can understand why the NSA is concerned about an enemy power being that close to potentially fiddling with vote totals.

[Victoria33]

Each county in the country has their own voter list with backups and printed copies.  If one wants the names, addresses, etcs., one can buy it from the county.  It is not a secret.  I had numerous county voter lists on my computer when I worked for the Republican Party.  I did not have to buy them, but in earlier years before I worked for the state party, I did have to buy our county list which was on a disk.  On election day, a polling place has a print out of that list to check the voter in.  So, each county has their own list they maintain.

The Secretary of State in each state has a voter list of all in the state.  If the Russians got into that list, it would not affect a county list. 

When I first read about this, it sounded like, and still does, the Russians wanted to, or did, send emails to people.  If they had a county voter list, which anyone can buy on a disk, they could send letters or emails, if the email was listed. 

I was still working for the party, when it became possible for the Republican National Committee, to have a voter list of all registered voters in the country.  The Russians could hack into that list, but that would not affect a county voter list.  Remember, every election is held in a county or parish.  They have the control of that election in their county.  Consider where you vote - you vote in your county at your voter precinct.  You vote on a machine that is not connected to the internet.  It is a dumb machine that counts.  Some of you may be in a small county that votes by paper ballots - that is legal. 

When you read about "Oh, my God, the Russians broke into voting machines!", remember your county has their own voter list with backups and their voting machines are locked in a room and not plugged into anything, they just sit there until election day.  Your county runs your election and remember the process you went through at your voting precinct.  At the end of election day, your county has a central counting station where all the votes from each precinct goes.  The votes are counted there by human beings assigned to work there.  The totals are reported to the Secretary of State.

If you live in Texas, I wrote the law that central counting stations in every county in Texas must follow regarding who can be in there and count your vote. 

[DCPatriot]

Just to be clear, no claim is being made here that actual voting machines were hacked, or that vote counting was compromised, just that a voting machine manufacturer had its computer system hacked, and some email data stolen. 

Further, is this proof of collusion with Trump?  No.

We should remind everybody too, that WIKI said the CIA and NSA has been able to make it appear that a document/email, etc.., could be made to look like it originated from Russia, etc..