Thomas was a Peace Corps volunteer in Lesotho (pronounced leh-SOO-too), a country entirely surrounded by South Africa. He was shot to death in what appears to be a robbery. My thoughts are with his friends and family.
So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actual...
I just read about this and am so sad to hear about Thomas's death. I have a newborn of my own and only hope that she shares the interests and compassion that guided Thomas.
ReplyDeleteMy thoughts and deepest sympathies for his family...