UNITED STATES AIR FORCE - Leaker Gets Minimal Prison Time

IMO:  Being retired US Navy (22yrs) and a Vietnam Vet, people who help our enemies by revealing information that may help them are committing Treason, regardless of their misguided reason, and 45 months is no where near the sentence he should get.  As for whistleblower laws, our military national security should override the concerns of prison time for whistleblowers, if they break their oath they pay the consequences, especially when they plead guilty.

"Former Airman Who Leaked Details of Drone Program Sentenced, Will Serve Prison Time" by Oriana Pawlyk, Military.com 7/27/2021

A former Air Force intelligence analyst who said he was compelled to speak out against the military’s use of drones after witnessing firsthand their effect on civilian casualties has been sentenced to 45 months in prison for leaking classified information.

U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady convicted Daniel Hale of Nashville, Tennessee, on Tuesday for leaking the top secret information to a reporter.  Hale pleaded guilty to violating the 1917 Espionage Act in April.

Hale, who served in the Air Force between 2009 and 2013 deployed to Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan, in 2012.  There he supported the National Security Agency and used his skills to track down cell-phone signals hunting enemy combatants in the field, according to the Associated Press.  He was honorably discharged in 2013, the same year he reached out to an unidentified reporter, according to the original indictment.

O’Grady confirmed during the sentencing hearing that the leaks were made to the Intercept.

He then leaked more than a dozen documents while working as a contracted analyst at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in 2014 and 2015.  The documents provided a counterpoint to U.S. claims that the drone program prioritized avoiding civilian casualties.

In an impassioned 11-page letter to O’Grady, Hale spoke of his depression and post traumatic stress disorder he has suffered in the wake of his intelligence work.

"Not a day goes by that I don't question the justification for my actions," Hale wrote.  “What possibly could I have done to cope with the undeniable cruelties that I perpetrated?"

The prosecution argued that Hale’s leak, however, made its way into an internet manual used by Islamic State fighters, jeopardizing military tactics and operations.

“You are not being prosecuted for speaking out about the drone program killing innocent people,” O’Grady, the judge, said Tuesday in Alexandria, Virginia.  “You could have been a whistleblower … without taking any of these documents.”

Lisa Ling, a former Air Force technical sergeant who worked with the drone program, told Military.com that unless the U.S. government creates more adequate ways for whistleblowers to come forward, leaks will continue to come from the intelligence and military communities.

“We all believe the public has a right to know what’s done in our name,” said Ling, who was honorably discharged in 2012 and spoke out against drone warfare in the 2016 documentary, "National Bird."

Ling believes the system meant to protect whistleblowers is broken, cheating the individuals who want to do public good.  “And the Espionage Act should be repealed -- it shouldn't be used for whistleblowers,” she said.

The World War I-era act was intended to punish those spying on behalf of any enemy or a foreign actor, but its scope has expanded over the years to include the prosecution of those who leak highly sensitive information that could harm national security.

Hale’s case has been compared to Reality Winner, who until recently was serving a 63-month sentence at a Fort Worth, Texas, federal prison after pleading guilty to leaking classified NSA information on Russia's alleged efforts to undermine the 2016 election -- a topic that has dominated national discourse and brought to light the challenges of safeguarding the voting process.

Prosecutors said at the time it was the longest sentence ever imposed for an unauthorized distribution of government information to a media outlet.  Similar to Hale, Winner was a former Air Force language analyst aiding pilots targeting enemy combatants in the Middle East.  She also was found guilty of violating the Espionage Act in 2018.

“I am so relieved that Daniel Hale did not receive as harsh of a sentence as my daughter,” Billie Winner-Davis, Reality’s mother, said Tuesday.

Winner last month was freed from the detention center and entered a residential reentry process.  She has not been pardoned.

“It breaks me to know he was sentenced to prison though,” Winner-Davis said.  “I don't believe he, nor any whistleblower, belongs in prison.”

More attention should be focused on the U.S. lethal actions abroad, argued Ling.

“It's always ‘a bad thing’ when somebody has a document that the public should have a right to know [about],” Ling said.

“If you look at a lot of the whistleblowers who come in who have come out, a lot of them have been involved or touched the drone program to include Edward Snowden,” she added.  “Why is that?  And why are we not interrogating the drone program?  Why are we interrogating the whistleblowers?”

CYBERATTACK - American Towns

"American towns under cyberattack from an NSA-built software" PBS NewsHour 5/26/2019

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Over the last few weeks, the city of Baltimore essentially went offline after a cyberattack was followed by a ransom demand which the city refused to pay.  According to the New York Times, ‘EternalBlue,’ the software that wreaked havoc in Baltimore and other cities, was actually created by the National Security Agency.  New York Times reporter Scott Shane joins Hari Sreenivasan for more.

NATIONAL SECURITY - Targeting U.S. Systems by China & Iran

"Network hacking traced to China and Iran" by Nicole Perlroth (New York Times), San Diego Union-Tribune 2/18/2019

NOTE: This is from the e-newspaper, so no link to article.

Targeting of U.S. systems is more extensive than was previously reported

Businesses and government agencies in the United States have been targeted in aggressive attacks by Iranian and Chinese hackers who security experts believe have been energized by President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal last year and his trade conflicts with China.

Recent Iranian attacks on U.S. banks, businesses and government agencies have been more extensive than previously reported.  Dozens of corporations and multiple U.S. agencies have been hit, according to seven people briefed on the episodes who were not authorized to discuss them publicly.

The attacks, attributed to Iran by analysts at the National Security Agency and the private security firm FireEye, prompted an emergency order by the Department of Homeland Security during the government shutdown last month.

The Iranian attacks coincide with a renewed Chinese offensive geared toward stealing trade and military secrets from U.S. military contractors and technology companies, according to nine intelligence officials, private security researchers and lawyers familiar with the attacks who discussed them on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements.

A summary of an intelligence briefing read to The New York Times said that Boeing, General Electric Aviation and T-Mobile were among the recent targets of Chinese industrial-espionage efforts.  The companies declined to discuss the threats, and it is not clear if any of the hacks were successful.

Chinese cyberespionage cooled four years ago after President Barack Obama and President Xi Jinping of China reached a landmark deal to stop hacks meant to steal trade secrets.

But the 2015 agreement appears to have been unofficially canceled amid the continuing trade tension between the U.S. and China, the intelligence officials and private security researchers said.  Chinese hacks have returned to earlier levels, although they are now stealthier and more sophisticated.

“Cyber is one of the ways adversaries can attack us and retaliate in effective and nasty ways that are well below the threshold of an armed attack or laws of war,” said Joel Brenner, a former leader of U.S. counterintelligence under the director of national intelligence.

Federal agencies and private companies are back to where they were five years ago; battling increasingly sophisticated, government-affiliated hackers from China and Iran — in addition to fighting constant efforts out of Russia — who hope to steal trade and military secrets and sow mayhem.  And it appears the hackers substantially improved their skills during the lull.

Threats from China and Iran never stopped entirely, but Iranian hackers became much less active after the nuclear deal was signed in 2015.  And for about 18 months, intelligence officials concluded, Beijing backed off its 10-year online effort to steal trade secrets.

But Chinese hackers have resumed carrying out commercially motivated attacks, security researchers and data-protection lawyers said.  A priority for the hackers, researchers said, is supporting Beijing’s five-year economic plan, which is meant to make China a leader in artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge technologies.

“Some of the recent intelligence collection has been for military purposes or preparing for some future cyber conflict, but a lot of the recent theft is driven by the demands of the five-year plan and other technology strategies,” said Adam Segal, director of the cyberspace program at the Council on Foreign Relations.  “They always intended on coming back.”

Officials at the Chinese Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.

Segal and other Chinese security experts said attacks that once would have been conducted by hackers in China’s People’s Liberation Army are now being run by China’s Ministry of State Security.

These hackers are better at covering their tracks.  Rather than going at targets directly, they have used a side door of sorts by breaking into the networks of the targets’ suppliers.  They have also avoided using malware commonly attributed to China, relying instead on encrypting traffic, erasing server logs and other obfuscation tactics.

“The fingerprint of Chinese operations today is much different,” said Priscilla Moriuchi, who once ran the National Security Agency’s East Asia and Pacific cyber threats division.  Her duties there included determining whether Beijing was abiding by the 2015 agreement’s terms.  “These groups care about attribution.  They don’t want to get caught.”

Federal agencies are also trying to fend off new Iranian espionage campaigns.

After the Trump administration pulled out of the nuclear deal, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen testified before Congress that her agency was “anticipating it’s a possibility” that Iran would resort to hacking attacks.

The Iranian attacks, which hit more than a half-dozen federal agencies last month, still caught the department off guard.  Security researchers said the hacks, which exploited underlying weaknesses in the Internet’s backbone, were continuing and were more damaging and widespread than agency officials had acknowledged.

Iranian hackers began their latest wave of attacks in Persian Gulf states last year.  Since then, they have expanded to 80 targets — including internet service providers, telecommunications companies and government agencies — in 12 European countries and the United States, according to researchers at FireEye, which first reported the attacks last month.

The current hacks are harder to catch than previous Iranian attacks.  Instead of hitting victims directly, FireEye researchers said, Iranian hackers have been going after the Internet’s core routing system, intercepting traffic between so-called domain name registrars.  Once they intercepted their target’s customer web traffic, they used stolen login credentials to gain access to their victims’ emails.  (Domain name registrars hold the keys to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of companies’ websites.)

“They’re taking whole mailboxes of data,” said Benjamin Read, a senior manager of cyberespionage analysis at FireEye.  Read said Iranian hackers had targeted police forces, intelligence agencies and foreign ministries, indicating a state-backed espionage campaign rather than a criminal, profit-seeking motive.

There is a long history of Iranian attacks against the U.S., and episodes from five years back or longer are just now being made public.

Representatives for Iran’s Mission to the United Nations did not respond to requests for comment.

The recent Iranian attacks have unnerved U.S. officials.  But after issuing the emergency order about the ones last month, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has largely played them down.

An official with the cybersecurity agency said there was a belief that no information had been stolen and that the attacks had not “materially impacted” operations.  But Read of FireEye and others said there had been a noticeable escalation in Iran’s digital espionage.

“If you tell the Iranians you’re going to walk out on the agreement and do everything you can to undermine their government,” said Brenner, the former counterintelligence official, “you can’t be surprised if they attack our government networks.”