Billie Winner-Davis, Reality Winner's mother, told Business Insider on Tuesday that President Donald Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, is attempting legal representation to aid the former Air Force language analyst contractor and Kingsville native Reality Winner with her case.
Winner pleaded guilty in 2018 to leaking classified National Security Agency information on Russia's alleged efforts to interfere with the 2016 election. She was found guilty of violating the U.S. Espionage Act and sentenced to five years in prison at the Federal Medical Center-Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas.
In 2016 following her separation from six years of active duty, Winner was hired by Pluribus International Corporation under an NSA contract to work out of Fort Gordon, Georgia.
According to ABC News, Winner printed a classified report detailing how Russian hackers allegedly “executed cyber espionage operations” on local election systems and mailed the documents to The Intercept.
She was arrested on June 3, 2017.
Amazing! Thank you. My daughter Reality Leigh Winner is yet another victim of this admin. Doing hard time for bringing the truth to light. #FreeRealityWinnerhttps://t.co/wU0sg3LeRs
Michael Cohen, who pleaded guilty to campaign violations and tax fraud in 2018, began serving his sentence in May 2019 at the federal penitentiary in Otisville, New York.
He has been under house arrest since July over coronavirus concerns.
Military.com stated that Reality’s mother sent a Twitter message that said “Cohen has asked another attorney to look at the case and for opportunities to help.”
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Data Encryption with two-level keys
May 02, 2008
Two levels of protection
The researchers' scheme requires two things to be protected:
Actual data and the policy for the data.
The policy is essentially an embedded description of who can have access to encrypted data. While we know how to secure the data, how should the policy be secured?
According to Prof. Sahai, ideally both should have equal levels of security. As he put it, the person "who satisfies the policy should only know that they satisfy the policy," not why. If one can protect both the policy and the data, then a whole new range of applications is possible.
One such application is searching encrypted data. Prof. Sahai and colleagues presented their latest work on a new scheme that allows for expressive searching of encrypted data at Eurocyrpt 2008, a premier international cryptography conference.
A preprint for the mathematically inclined of the paper can be obtained from the Cryptology ePrint Archive. In prior work on searching encrypted data, searchers could use search predicates that consisted only of equality matches and conjunctions. For example, if have have all of my e-mail encrypted on a remote server, I could search for e-mails where (sender=Mom) AND (month=February).
Previous work was unable to handle disjunctions—OR operators. Using the prior example, previously, I would have been unable to search my encrypted archive for (sender=Mom) OR (sender=Dad) AND (month=February).
In the above paper, Sahai and coworkers developed a new mathematical formalism for the creation of keys and encryption that allows full searches of encrypted data in both conjunctive and disjunctive normal forms.
In addition to the ability to search encrypted data, the new encryption scheme allows for the implementation of a "fuzzy" identity encryption scheme. In an identity based encryption scheme, the public key is something tied to your identity—your name, your e-mail, or, in the example Prof. Sahai relayed to me, your fingerprint. In their new system, this public key holds not only your identity but the policies about the data that you can have access to. In the fingerprint example, suppose you encrypt your information under a given impression of your fingerprint. At a later date you attempt to decrypt the information with you fingerprint, but small changes—dust, scratches, growth—will cause the key (your fingerprint) to be slightly different. The new formalism developed here allows for a "fuzzy" check, so the key can be off within a specified threshold.
One concept that was not clear to me after reading the paper was how such a system would be implemented in the real world. Prof. Sahai said that the initial setup would be handled by the organization or person overseeing the data. They would develop the secret keys and publish public parameters. With these in place, it is all up to the end users, as they will set the policies of who can see and decrypt their data—all of which is handled by the underlying mathematics. If a given secret key matches a user's policy, then the person with that key will be granted access to the encrypted data. While the underlying math and theory is very complicated, this new scheme greatly advances the encryption and decryption of data while simultaneously allowing a much higher level of control over who can gain access to protected data.
This work is still in the early stages, but the ideas put forth in this line of research have been incorporated in work on an attribute-based messaging system developed by Prof. Carl Gunter at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champlain. Co-author Dr. Brent Waters is also scheduled to give the keynote address at a NIST workshop that will occur in early June and focus on "Pairing-based cryptography."
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That Rose Garden event — there's been a great deal of speculation about it — my wife Karen and I were there and honored to be there. Many of the people who were at that event, Susan, were actually tested for coronavirus, and it was an outdoor event, which all of our scientists r...
