Attkisson: Government agency bugged my computer - "Worse than anything Nixon ever did"
Ex-CBS reporter: Government agency bugged my computer
By Kyle Smith and Bruce Golding October 27, 2014 | 7:36am
A former CBS News reporter who quit the network over
claims it kills stories that put President Obama in a bad light says she was
spied on by a “government-related entity” that planted classified documents on
her computer.
In her new memoir, Sharyl Attkisson says a source who
arranged to have her laptop checked for spyware in 2013 was “shocked” and
“flabbergasted” at what the analysis revealed.
“This is outrageous. Worse than anything Nixon ever did.
I wouldn’t have believed something like this could happen in the United States
of America,” Attkisson quotes the source saying.
She speculates that the motive was to lay the groundwork
for possible charges against her or her sources.
Attkisson says the source, who’s “connected to government
three-letter agencies,” told her the computer was hacked into by “a
sophisticated entity that used commercial, nonattributable spyware that’s
proprietary to a government agency: either the CIA, FBI, the Defense
Intelligence Agency or the National Security Agency.”
The breach was accomplished through an “otherwise
innocuous e-mail” that Attkisson says she got in February 2012, then twice
“redone” and “refreshed” through a satellite hookup and a Wi-Fi connection at a
Ritz-Carlton hotel.
The spyware included programs that Attkisson says
monitored her every keystroke and gave the snoops access to all her e-mails and
the passwords to her financial accounts.
“The intruders discovered my Skype account handle, stole
the password, activated the audio, and made heavy use of it, presumably as a
listening tool,” she wrote in “Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the
Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington.”
Attkisson says her source — identified only as “Number
One” — told her the spying was most likely not court-authorized because it went
on far longer than most legal taps.
But the most shocking finding, she says, was the
discovery of three classified documents that Number One told her were “buried
deep in your operating system. In a place that, unless you’re a some kind of
computer whiz specialist, you wouldn’t even know exists.”
“They probably planted them to be able to accuse you of
having classified documents if they ever needed to do that at some point,”
Number One added.
In her book, Attkisson says CBS lost interest in her
coverage of the deadly attack on the US Embassy in Benghazi, Libya, and killed
her stories of the federal “Fast and Furious” gun-running scandal.
Both CBS and the White House declined to comment.
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