The National Security Agency hired someone named Reality?

A friend sent me “Who is Reality Winner? Accused leaker wanted to ‘resist’ Trump” (Fox News, so should I de-friend this guy for being Deplorable?). The substance of the case doesn’t interest me too much. I have to assume that “a [U.S. government] classified intelligence document” is mostly speculation and misunderstandings. What I am curious to know is whether the National Security Agency hired an employee (even through a contractor) named “Reality” and expected things to work out.

Readers: Was this spirited gal actually working in an NSA facility?

Related:

  • Code Warriors (book about the NSA): “On an Army sergeant’s salary of $100 a week, [the NSA employee who turned out to be selling secrets to the Soviets] owned two Cadillacs, a baby-blue Jaguar sports car, a thirty-foot cabin cruiser, and a world-class racing hydroplane; he told coworkers a series of contradictory and patently fantastic stories to account for his sudden wealth, including that his father owned a large plantation in Louisiana, that he had made a successful investment in filling stations, that he owned land containing a valuable mineral used to make cosmetics, and that he had won the money as prizes in boat races.”
  • article about tracing source of this document via laser printer dots

15 thoughts on “The National Security Agency hired someone named Reality?

  1. Are you really that lazy to not read the linked stories before you publish stuff? Yes the lady was probably at a NSA shop doing classified stuff. Yes she has a funny name and was given a Top Secret clearance even though she has a funny name. So do tons of people. What does her name have to do with the fact that she openly broke the law by leaking classified data to a news site. The stories say she leaked data about how Russians hacked some US voting poll workers. The story implies Russians tried to interfere with our elections and this is the hard data to prove it. The information was published Monday by the paper. The details are pretty sensitive as you well know about hacking protocols and how easy some are to track and verify.

  2. Fox says she was “assigned to a federal facility in Georgia,” but doesn’t say which agency. Does the NSA have offices in Georgia?

    Maybe the NSA could learn from the Kansas schoolteachers that Mom and I met in Paris last year: “Hello my name is: Crispy Nuts” (“the weirder the name the more difficult the kid. When a child comes in named Diamond or Precious I know that it isn’t going to work out well.”)

    [Maybe I will change my name to “Crispy Nuts” and apply for a job at the NSA!]

  3. “Winner attained the rank of senior airmen, E4, and was last stationed at Ft. Mead in Maryland. ” She is retired Air Force and spend time at NSA which is Ft Mead.

  4. Reality was working for an NSA contractor like most leakers. Like most contractor employees she was ex-military because she already had the necessary security clearance. Reality was not the sharpest pencil in the drawer because the NSA logs whoever prints out a copy . Usually kids who go into the enlisted military after high school are not quite college material. Supposedly Reality was a trained as a linguist with expertise in Persian, Pashto and Dari but I have my doubts as to whether she could order kebabs without machine translation software.

    You have to get used to the ideal of current millennials – the little tics – funny name, tattoos, etc. don’t mean anything because they are as common to her generation as long hair and blue jeans were to ours. Another tic is the feeling that as long as you have the “right” (anti-Trump) beliefs, you are a good person and no ill can befall you. You can disrupt speeches, bash heads as an antifa, etc. and nothing will happen to you. The goodness of your motives will outweigh any technical violations of the law. Maybe a couple of years in the Federal pen will bring some reality to Reality.

  5. If I were on the jury I would vote to acquit her on the grounds that the government could have easily understood the risks involved in hiring someone named “Reality”.

  6. If Harvard used FB posting as a “clue” that students are not Harvard “grade” and thus retracted their admission [1], why didn’t our government use “Reality Winner” as a “clue” that this is trouble and should not have hired her to work on sensitive data?

    To be fair to Reality, I don’t know if her name was a given name by her parents or if she changed it. After all, many famous celebrity have changed their names or named their children some odd crazy names [2].

    [1] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/jun/05/harvard-rescinds-admissions-offers-offensive-memes
    [2] http://www.kidspot.com.au/birth/baby-names/naming-your-baby/celebrity-baby-names-top-20-the-crazy-list

  7. That’s like that Bond girl name: Pussy Galore.

    I guess with NSA/FBI leaking like a sieve there’s no need for Russians to hack them !

    Life is certainly funnier than fiction. The latest British Airways was funnier than fiction too, not to the passengers surely, but rather to a casual observer :

    “Have You Tried Turning It Off And On Again? ” (The IT Crowd):

  8. Is the NSA operating on the belief that we don’t want to know about state-sponsored attempts to hack into our voting system? Because we want to know about state-sponsored attempts to hack into our voting system.

  9. If every low level 25 year old contractor unilaterally gets to decide what “we” should see and what remains secret, then “we” can forget about having a country. There is a lot of stuff I “want” to know (including the contents of Hillary’s 30,000 deleted emails) but I know that I can’t know because it would endanger national security, pending investigations, etc.

  10. Well, a lot of people of varying nationalities have probably seen Hillary’s emails. So the national security part is likely to be blown already.

  11. For instance, if I was someone important and was getting email from the US Secretary of State at her home server, I would basically have to tell my security people to hack that server. It would be dereliction of duty not to.

  12. In the old days, I believe these agencies recruited the questionables only for field duty. It has to be more difficult now.

  13. I would have thought the Arabic tattoo on her back would have been enough to disqualify her but I guess we’re no longer allowed to judge.

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