Clouded Vision

“I spent 8 months managing the email inbox of a Presidential campaign, so here’s some advice on actually getting your email read / having the biggest impact:

write your own email. write your own email. write your own email.”

“If you send a form email, and only change the name, all that tells an org is that a petition exists. If the org or office is hostile, they can just set up a filter, based on the subject line or content, and send them all to the trash.”

Her name is “Reality Leigh Winner” and she was a NSA Contractor. She passed a top secret NSA document to a news source (an article from The Intercept) that contains information about a Russian cyber-attack with one voting machine DAYS before the 2016 presidential election. This is considered the most detailed piece of proof regarding Russia’s interference with the elections to date. 

Here’s how the NSA document described how the Russians did the hacking: 

“As described by the classified NSA report, the Russian plan was simple: pose as an e-voting vendor and trick local government employees into opening Microsoft Word documents invisibly tainted with potent malware that could give hackers full control over the infected computers.

But in order to dupe the local officials, the hackers needed access to an election software vendor’s internal systems to put together a convincing disguise. So on August 24, 2016, the Russian hackers sent spoofed emails purporting to be from Google to employees of an unnamed U.S. election software company, according to the NSA report. Although the document does not directly identify the company in question, it contains references to a product made by VR Systems, a Florida-based vendor of electronic voting services and equipment whose products are used in eight states.