{"id":233786,"date":"2021-07-10T11:00:06","date_gmt":"2021-07-10T11:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theintercept.com\/?p=362176"},"modified":"2021-07-10T11:00:06","modified_gmt":"2021-07-10T11:00:06","slug":"home-but-not-free-nsa-whistleblower-reality-winner-adjusts-to-her-release-from-prison","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/07\/10\/home-but-not-free-nsa-whistleblower-reality-winner-adjusts-to-her-release-from-prison\/","title":{"rendered":"Home, but Not Free: NSA Whistleblower Reality Winner Adjusts to Her Release From Prison"},"content":{"rendered":"
In the latest<\/u> phase of her record sentence for whistleblowing, former National Security Agency linguist Reality Winner is a short drive to the blazing hot summertime beaches on Texas’s Gulf coast. But she can’t get near them. She can’t even go into the yard of a neighbor who invited her to aid in his beekeeping project.<\/p>\n
Convicted under the Espionage Act for having shared a classified document on threats to election security with the media, Winner has been released to home confinement but wears an unwieldy ankle bracelet. It beeps even if she strays too far within her family’s yard.<\/p>\n
Not wanting her to miss out, a high school friend showed up on a recent day with a kiddie swimming pool and some sand. “Mom, I’m going to the beach today,” Winner said, her mother Billie Winner-Davis recalled. The pair filled the kid’s toy and Winner waded in.<\/p>\n
Winner’s family and friends are thrilled to have her home after four years behind bars \u2014 a stint that took miserable turns as her release date neared. She\u00a0contracted Covid-19<\/a> as part of a mass infection in her prison, filed a sexual assault complaint<\/a> against a guard, and went thirsty and cold<\/a> when her facility lost heat and water in February during Texas’s deadly winter storm.<\/p>\n Despite their elation that she is out of prison, though, Winner’s family and friends say she is far from free. Every day is still marked by intrusions, like the app carceral authorities require her to put on her phone to monitor her and needing prior approval to go to Walmart with her mother for errands. Winner is projected to be transferred from home confinement to supervised release in November.<\/p>\n That’s why they are continuing their year-and-a-half-long campaign<\/a> for a presidential pardon or clemency<\/a>, saying the whistleblower is being gagged from telling her own story.<\/p>\n “I really want the public to know that they’re not seeing Reality Winner, they’re not hearing from Reality Winner, because she is under some serious restrictions,” Winner-Davis said.<\/p>\n Winner-Davis added that Reality, who is under a gag order, is also banned from using social media, a condition her attorney, Alison Grinter, said is normal and up to the discretion of halfway house authorities.<\/p>\n Grinter, speaking<\/a> recently on “Democracy Now,” said a pardon for Winner is both something she and her country deserve.<\/p>\n “Reality released a document that gave us information that we needed to know at a time that we absolutely needed to know it,” Grinter said. “And she was in prison not because the information was a danger or put anyone in danger. She was in prison to salve the insecurities of one man who was concerned about the validity of his election win.”<\/p>\n Winner is currently<\/u> serving the longest<\/a> prison sentence of its kind under the Espionage Act, a World War I-era law used in recent years to send journalists\u2019 sources to prison, even as comparable defendants have simply gotten probation for charges of mishandling classified information.<\/p>\n The government itself acknowledges that Winner\u2019s intent was to send the document she leaked to journalists and therefore warn the American public, rather than use it for personal gain. The NSA report detailed phishing attacks by Russian military intelligence against local U.S. election officials and was published in a June 2017 article<\/a> by The Intercept. (The Press Freedom Defense Fund \u2014 which is part of The Intercept\u2019s parent company, First Look Institute \u2014 supported<\/a> Winner\u2019s legal defense.)<\/p>\n\n Released from a Fort Worth, Texas, federal prison one day shy of the four-year anniversary of her June 3 arrest, Winner\u2019s path to her parents’ remote southern Texas home was a bumpy one. The journey began with a 23-day quarantine with five other women in a hospital patient-sized room. After that, her family picked her up for a long drive down through Texas in which they had a matter of hours to deliver her to a halfway house, where she stayed for a week before being released to\u00a0her rural childhood home. There, paper labels with Arabic vocabulary words are still taped to household items \u2014 early remnants from the series of events that would lead her to prison when, as a teenager eager to learn foreign languages, she signed up for the military.<\/p>\n Taking advantage of the window of time they had with her as they drove her to the halfway house, her family and close friends planned a series of surprises. Winner met her infant niece, whom the whistleblower had only seen on video chats and Shutterfly-printed postcards, due to visitation bans at prison\u00a0amid the pandemic.<\/p>\n While sitting in her parents’ car and sorting through her belongings, she saw the blond hair of her sister, Brittany Winner, in the distance in a park and tried to jump out of the moving vehicle. “She dropped everything on her lap and just ran,” her mother said. \u201cShe ran to Brittany and the baby.\u201d<\/p>\n“I really want the public to know that they’re not seeing Reality Winner, they’re not hearing from Reality Winner, because she is under some serious restrictions.”<\/blockquote>\n