06/06/2026
In May 2017, a 25-year-old NSA contractor in Augusta, Georgia printed a five-page classified intelligence report and mailed it to a news outlet. The document described Russian military intelligence operations targeting U.S. voting software vendors and local election officials in the weeks before the 2016 election.
Reality Winner had been an Air Force linguist before taking the contractor role. She spoke Pashto, Farsi, and Dari. She was the lowest-ranking employee with access to that report, and she was the only person prosecuted for making its contents public.
The Intercept published the document in June 2017. The FBI traced it back to her within days, partly because the printer had embedded near-invisible identifying codes in the document, and partly because The Intercept had shared a copy with the government during verification and those markings survived in the shared file. She was arrested in June 2017 and charged under the Espionage Act of 1917. In August 2018 she accepted a plea agreement and was sentenced to 63 months in federal prison. At the time, that was the longest sentence ever imposed for an unauthorized media disclosure of classified information. She served most of it at a federal facility in Texas and was released to home confinement in June 2021. The report she disclosed appeared in the Mueller Report and in subsequent congressional reviews.
She was 25 years old. No one above her in the chain of access was ever charged.
Now you know her name.
