Chelsea Manning

Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Story of Anonymous
by Gabriella Coleman
Published 4 Nov 2014

More than anything, though, it was the pilots’ banal tone of voice during their discussions with command about whether to attack—they were calm to the point of psychosis—that really sent waves of horror over you. One member of the crew laughs upon discovering that one of the many victims is a young girl. “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids to a battle,” he remarks nonchalantly. As we all now know, Bradley Manning (who has since changed names—and genders—to become Chelsea Manning) made the choice to leak the video, along with other vital documents, and a hacker named Adrian Lamo ratted him out. On May 22, 2010, Manning confessed to Lamo during a chat conversation that he’d gifted WikiLeaks the footage that was used to create “Collateral Murder.”

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Evan Hansen, “Manning-Lamo Chat Logs Revealed,” wired.com, July 13, 2011. 4. Lamo has claimed that, since he has published some articles, he is a journalist. He has also said that he is a minister for the Universal Life Church. See Luis Martinez, “Bradley Manning Accuser Adrian Lamo Takes the Stand,” Dec. 20, 2011, abcnews.go.com. 5. Ed Pilkington, “Bradley Manning’s treatment was cruel and inhuman, UN torture chief rules,” theguardian.com, March 12, 2012. 6. Raffi Khatchadourian, “No Secrets,” newyorker.com, June 7, 2010. 7. Actually, the connection can be drawn further, as the young Julian Assange had his own foray into fighting Scientology as well.

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It’s on the hands of the Tunisian government to stop this situation. Free the net, and attacks will cease, keep on that attitude and this will just be the beginning. The Tiger Consumes Four Chickens a Day But let’s back up to the onset of revolution itself. Mohammed Bouazizi, WikiLeaks and Nawaat, and Chelsea Manning all deserve thanks for its inception. In 2010, living under the Ben Ali regime since 1989, scores of Tunisians were downtrodden, living in deplorable conditions, and fearful as human rights abuses—torture, censorship, and detentions—intensified in the country. The country had not been party to any large-scale protests for decades, and its many Western allies, including the United States, singled Tunisia out as a model of political and economic stability in an Arab region otherwise known for strife and instability.

The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to US Empire
by Wikileaks
Published 24 Aug 2015

In August 2013 Manning was found guilty on seventeen counts and sentenced to thirty-five years in prison. See Tom McCarthy, “Bradley Manning Tells Lawyer After Sentencing: ‘I’m Going to Be OK’—as it happened,” Guardian, August 21, 2013. At the time of publication, she is appealing her case to the United States Army Court of Criminal Appeals, and a hearing is expected in mid 2015. See “Chelsea Manning’s 35-Year Prison Sentence Upheld by US Army General,” Guardian, April 14, 2014. 11Josh Gerstein, “Blocking WikiLeaks Emails Trips Up Bradley Manning Prosecution,” Politico, March 15, 2012, at www.politico.com. 12Simon DeDeo, Robert X.

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Kevin Gosztola, “US National Archives Has Blocked Searches for ‘WikiLeaks,’” The Dissenter, November 3, 2012, at dissenter.firedoglake.com. 10Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning was detained without trial for 1,103 days, an infringement of her right to speedy justice. The United Nations special rapporteur for torture, Juan Méndez, formally found that Manning had been treated in a manner that was cruel and inhuman, and that possibly amounted to torture. See Ed Pilkington, “Bradley Manning’s Treatment Was Cruel and Inhuman, UN Torture Chief Rules,” Guardian, March 12, 2012. The government charged Manning—accused of being a journalistic source for WikiLeaks—with thirty-four individual counts of violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, including parts of the Espionage Act, the combined maximum sentence for which was over one hundred years in prison.

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The government charged Manning—accused of being a journalistic source for WikiLeaks—with thirty-four individual counts of violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, including parts of the Espionage Act, the combined maximum sentence for which was over one hundred years in prison. See Kim Zetter, “Bradley Manning Charged with 22 New Counts, Including Capital Offense,” Wired, February 3, 2011, at wired.com. Manning was prohibited by the court from making defense arguments as to public interest, motive, or the lack of actual harm resulting from her alleged actions (see Ed Pilkington, “Bradley Manning Denied Chance to Make Whistleblower Defence,” Guardian, January 17, 2013), and she offered a limited guilty plea (see Alexa O’Brien, “Pfc. Manning’s Statement for the Providence Inquiry,” Alexaobrien.com, February 28, 2013).

The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man
by Luke Harding
Published 7 Feb 2014

No one person knew all the passwords to access a file. The US freelance journalists approached by Snowden now had in their possession a large treasure trove of classified material. The WikiLeaks disclosures, published by the Guardian in London in 2010, were of US diplomatic cables and war-logs from Afghanistan and Iraq leaked by the US private Chelsea Manning. A few – just 6 per cent – were classified at the relatively modest level of ‘secret’. The Snowden files were in a different league. They were ‘top secret’ and above. There had once been a melodramatic defection of Cambridge-educated spies to Soviet Moscow – Burgess, Maclean and Philby. But there had never been a mass documentary leak at this vertiginous altitude before.

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He said he didn’t want to put his colleagues through such an ordeal. Second, he was aware of the NSA’s ferocious technical capacities; it was only a matter of time before they tracked him down. His plan all along had been that after the first few stories, he would make himself known. This didn’t mean, however, that Snowden wished to emulate Chelsea Manning, whose arrest in 2010 and harsh jail treatment he had followed closely. Snowden said: ‘Manning was a classic whistleblower. He was inspired by the public good.’ As a result, Manning was due to face a court martial in Fort Meade, next door to the NSA’s headquarters – one that was shortly to sentence the young soldier to 35 years in prison.

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These pre-dated Snowden’s video confession, and they grew more intense after it. From Assange’s perspective the approach was logical. Snowden was another anti-US whistleblower in trouble, apparently just like him. In 2010, Assange had leaked the thousands of classified documents obtained from the US private Chelsea Manning. Their publication, in collaboration with the Guardian and other newspapers, had caused a global furore. Manning was jailed and a grand jury reportedly investigated Assange over the leaks. Assange’s woes with Swedish women were a separate matter, though the former hacker would frequently – and some would say cynically – confuse the two.

Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs
by Kerry Howley
Published 21 Mar 2023

Where purpose had been muddy, it was now clean. The purpose of the state was to stop another attack. For years afterward servicemen and -women would give 9/11 as the reason for risking their lives, and whether this was catalyst or rationalization would remain mysterious perhaps even to them. Edward Snowden signed up in 2005, Chelsea Manning in 2009, Reality Winner in 2010. In any story, there is a last moment in which the protagonist might have walked away, unbothered by consequence, but we are past that now. Had John Lindh left for his adventure a few months previous and come back home to enroll in a reasonably priced public university in California, it is entirely possible that no one would have known about his wanderings, and had anyone known, it’s unclear anyone would have cared.

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“There are billions and billions of documents, and there are like sixteen people declassifying everything,” says Kiriakou. “So the email about meeting my wife for lunch will never be declassified, never.” On a base in New York in 2009, the army gave a twenty-one-year-old soldier raw war footage from which she was supposed to write reports for the higher-ups. All day long Chelsea Manning watched acts of war take place on a screen and tried to process them. She had access to all sorts of footage taken from above, alongside the recorded voices of soldiers watching it, all in Iraq, where the mission to stop another attack had metastasized. There was a grainy black-and-white video of a Baghdad suburb, seen from a helicopter above, palm trees and low square buildings and hauntingly empty sidewalks.

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The soldiers were under surveillance as they killed a man who held not a gun but a camera. Her workplace was called a SCIF, a sensitive compartmented information facility, but was really a bunch of plywood thrown up on top of a basketball court. She sat at the free throw line, and in all the accounts I have ever read of Chelsea Manning spilling America’s most shameful secrets, I have never seen it noted that it was here where it would occur to her to blow the whistle. Security was such that analysts kept passwords on sticky notes stuck to their laptops. Days on the job were long and boring and left plenty of time to dig deep, scanning the system for anything of interest, in a way not dissimilar to other twenty-two-year-olds digging into the internet that happened to be available to them.

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State
by Glenn Greenwald
Published 12 May 2014

—Ellsberg understood it clearly: people do not want to be associated with someone who has been discredited or publicly humiliated. The same tactic was used to damage Julian Assange’s reputation well before he was accused of sex crimes by two women in Sweden. Notably, the attacks on Assange were carried out by the same newspapers that had worked with him and had benefited from Chelsea Manning’s disclosures, which Assange and WikiLeaks had enabled. When the New York Times published what it called “The Iraq War Logs,” thousands of classified documents detailing atrocities and other abuses during the war by the US military and its Iraqi allies, the paper featured a front-page article—as prominently as the disclosures themselves—by pro-war reporter John Burns that had no purpose other than to depict Assange as bizarre and paranoid, with little grip on reality.

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That the Times would advance so willing a servant of government interests should come as no surprise. Its public editor, Margaret Sullivan, noted that the Times might want to take a look in the mirror if its editors wanted to understand why sources revealing major national security stories, like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, did not feel safe or motivated to bring them their information. It is true that the New York Times published large troves of documents in partnership with WikiLeaks, but soon after, former executive editor Bill Keller took pains to distance the paper from its partner: he publicly contrasted the Obama administration’s anger toward WikiLeaks with its appreciation of the Times and its “responsible” reporting.

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The long line of predecessors who inspired Edward Snowden begins with Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, one of my long-time personal heroes and now my friend and colleague, whose example I try to follow in all of the work I do. Other courageous whistle-blowers who have endured persecution to bring vital truths to the world include Chelsea Manning, Jesselyn Radack, and Thomas Tamm, as well as former NSA officials Thomas Drake and Bill Binney. They played a critical role in inspiring Snowden as well. Bringing to light the ubiquitous system of suspicionless surveillance being secretly constructed by the United States and its allies was Snowden’s own self-sacrificing act of conscience.

Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence
by Amy B. Zegart
Published 6 Nov 2021

Thom Shanker, “Loophole May Have Aided Theft of Classified Data,” New York Times, July 8, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/09/world/09breach.html (accessed March 26, 2020); Matthew Shaer, “The Long, Lonely Road of Chelsea Manning,” New York Times, June 12, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/12/magazine/the-long-lonely-road-of-chelsea-manning.html?searchResultPosition=3 (accessed August 20, 2020). 97. Stephanie Gaskell, “How badly did Manning hurt the United States,” Defense One, August 22, 2013, https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2013/08/how-badly-did-manning-hurt-united-states/69218/. 98. Julie Tate, “Bradley Manning Sentenced to 35 Years in WikiLeaks Case,” Washington Post, August 21, 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/judge-to-sentence-bradley-manning-today/2013/08/20/85bee184-09d0-11e3-b87c-476db8ac34cd_story.html (accessed August 20, 2020); Reuters, “Leaked U.S.

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Just the phrase itself.92 In September 2011, when President Obama announced the killing of an American terrorist in Yemen named Anwar al-Awlaki, the president could not say the words drone or CIA in his speech.93 That information was classified94 even though the CIA’s drone program had already been widely covered in the press.95 In early 2010, Army PFC Chelsea Manning illegally downloaded hundreds of thousands of classified documents about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan onto a fake Lady Gaga CD while lip syncing to the song “Telephone” and handed them over to WikiLeaks.96 The trove included sensitive diplomatic cables with foreign partners; the names of Iraqi and Afghan civilians who had been working with U.S. troops, putting their lives at risk;97 and video of a U.S. helicopter attack in Baghdad that mistakenly killed civilians, including two journalists.98 U.S. government personnel with security clearances were told not to click on the WikiLeaks files, even though they were plastered all over the news.99 Diplomats, soldiers, and others weren’t supposed to read the documents on their home computers or on their personal time, either; at one point, the Air Force even tried to ban the children of Air Force personnel from accessing the Manning WikiLeaks files at home and blocked the New York Times and twenty-five other sites that were running news stories about the documents from unclassified office computers.100 Why all the fuss?

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“I was worried about disloyal people only walking out the door with documents. Now they walk out the door with disks.”93 It took Robert Hanssen more than twenty years to ferret out six thousand documents and hand them to the Russians, one small garbage bag at a time. By contrast, in 2010, Army Private First Class Chelsea Manning downloaded the contents of 250,000 classified State Department cables on a fake Lady Gaga CD while lip syncing to the song “Telephone.” Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden stole an estimated 1.5 million documents containing some of the most highly classified programs in the U.S. government in just ten months before hightailing it to Hong Kong and then Moscow in 2013.94 The trove was so huge, if the documents were printed and physically stacked, the pile would be three miles high.95 Snowden claims he was a whistleblower who acted out of conscience, not a traitor who acted in cahoots with a foreign power.

Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News
by Clint Watts
Published 28 May 2018

This is where WikiLeaks’ methods are oddly misaligned with the declared intentions of those who provide them with secrets. The couriers of WikiLeaks secrets, at least for their big public disclosures, arise not from the most corrupt, oppressive regimes in the world, but the most open, for the consequences of these data thefts in the former is death, and in the latter fame. Two Americans, Chelsea Manning (the former Bradley Manning) and Edward Snowden, remain the most famous couriers connected to WikiLeaks. The former fed the outlet; the latter was assisted by it. Their disclosures surfaced in different places, but in spirit they sought the same goal: the transparency and accountability of the U.S. government.

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They’ve not helped Americans or the West understand complex issues, but they have helped authoritarians rise as free societies decline. October 27, 2010, proved a tipping point for transparency, when Assange went from a pioneer to a puppet. Others have traveled in his footsteps, couriers have supported him, and for them the consequences have been far higher. Chelsea Manning went to prison, and Assange called for her release, going so far as to say he’d accept extradition to the United States if Manning were granted clemency. President Obama commuted Manning’s thirty-five-year sentence before leaving office in January 2017. More than a year and a half later, Assange remains in the Ecuadorian embassy, not honoring his pledge.

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WikiLeaks’ hit list from 2006 to 2009 included China, Kenya’s police force, Scientology, Sarah Palin, Bank Julius Baer, the Bilderberg Group, and Iran. But gradually, Western governments and businesses began to outnumber oppressive regimes by a sizable margin, and Assange’s top target increasingly became the U.S. government. In early 2010, an Army private first class then named Bradley Manning provided WikiLeaks with hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables and classified reports, along with a 2007 video showing a highly contentious Baghdad airstrike by American Apache helicopters that had killed twelve people, including two Iraqi journalists working for Reuters. WikiLeaks and Assange released their “Collateral Murder” video, using footage delivered by Manning, creating a worldwide debate about not only the contents and context of the video but the need for justice and accountability and the legality of the attack.

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex
by Yasha Levine
Published 6 Feb 2018

“Vault 7: CIA Hacking Tools Revealed,” WikiLeaks, March 7, 2017, https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/. 151. It later emerged during the trial of Chelsea Manning that the army private used Tor during his work in Iraq. “Tor is a system intended to provide anonymity online. The software routes internet traffic through a network of servers and other Tor clients in order to conceal the users location and identity. I was familiar with Tor and had it previously installed on a computer to anonymously monitor the social media website of militia groups operating within central Iraq,” he said during trial. Micah Lee, “Bradley Manning’s Statement Shows that US Intelligence Analysts Are Trained in Using Tor,” Micah Lee’s Blog, March 12, 2013, https://micahflee.com/2013/03/bradley-mannings-statement-shows-that-us-intelligence-analysts-are-trained-in-using-tor/. 152.

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Disclosure of these hacking tools showed that, in the end, Signal’s encryption didn’t really matter, not when the CIA and NSA owned the underlying operating system and could grab whatever they wanted before encryption or obfuscation algorithms were applied. This flaw went beyond Signal and applied to every type of encryption technology on every type of consumer computer system. Sure, encryption apps might work against low-level opponents when used by a trained army intelligence analyst like Pvt. Chelsea Manning, who had used Tor while stationed in Iraq to monitor forums used by Sunni insurgents without giving away his identity.151 They also might work for someone with a high degree of technical savvy—say, a wily hacker like Julian Assange or a spy like Edward Snowden—who can use Signal and Tor combined with other techniques to effectively cover their tracks from the NSA.

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From then on, the WikiLeaks site proudly advertised Tor: “secure, anonymous, distributed network for maximum security.” Appelbaum’s timing couldn’t have been better. Late that summer WikiLeaks caused an international sensation by publishing a huge cache of classified government documents stolen and leaked by Chelsea (née Bradley) Manning, a young US Army private who was stationed in Iraq. First came the war logs from Afghanistan, showing how the United States had systematically underreported civilian casualties and operated an elite assassination unit. Next came the Iraq War logs, providing irrefutable evidence that America had armed and trained death squads in a brutal counterinsurgency campaign against Iraq’s Sunni minority, which helped fuel the Shia-Sunni sectarian war that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and ethnic cleansing in parts of Baghdad.79 Then came the US diplomatic cables, offering an unprecedented window into the inner workings of American diplomacy: regime change, backroom deals with dictators, corruption of foreign leaders brushed under the table in the name of stability.80 Assange was suddenly one of the most famous people in the world—a fearless radical taking on the awesome power of the United States.

Snowden's Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance
by Jessica Bruder and Dale Maharidge
Published 29 Mar 2020

We’re describing them now because we want to preserve these small moments for the sake of posterity. Above all, we hope that this story will help empower others — anyone who cares about an open society — to speak and act during a precarious moment in American history. Meanwhile, the presidency of Donald Trump has brought new threats to democracy and transparency in government. Chelsea Manning, whose role in leaking US diplomatic cables made her an inspirational figure to Snowden, has been thrown back in jail, despite having received a pardon by President Barack Obama. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been charged under the Espionage Act and now faces up to 175 years in jail. Meanwhile, Trump is pushing to restore the NSA’s access to Americans’ phone and text records, a practice that was exposed — and then derailed — by the Snowden revelations.

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Otherwise it gave up no secrets. Then I noticed the return address: What the fuck? I thought. Is this a joke? There was no way this package had come from the Army intelligence specialist turned whistleblower who’d used WikiLeaks to disseminate more than 250,000 classified diplomatic cables. At the time, Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning had languished for more than three years in military prison, awaiting a court-martial for the biggest security breach in American history. Meanwhile, it was an unsettling moment to receive a mystery box from someone who might fancy himself a latterday Manning. The Obama administration was zealously pursuing reporters who received classified information.

Because We Say So
by Noam Chomsky

Snowden said that his “breaking point” was “seeing Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress” by denying the existence of a domestic spying program conducted by the National Security Agency. Snowden elaborated that “the public had a right to know about these programs. The public had a right to know that which the government is doing in its name, and that which the government is doing against the public.” The same could be justly said by Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning and other courageous figures who acted on the same democratic principle. The government stance is quite different: The public doesn’t have the right to know because security thus is undermined—severely so, as officials assert. There are several good reasons to be skeptical about such a response.

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Washington has made clear that any country that refuses to extradite Snowden will face harsh punishment. The United States will “chase him to the ends of the earth,” Senator Lindsey Graham warned. But U.S. government spokespersons assured the world that Snowden will be granted the full protection of American law—referring to those same laws that have kept U.S. Army soldier Bradley Manning (who released a vast archive of U.S. military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks) in prison for three years, much of it in solitary confinement under humiliating conditions. Long gone is the archaic notion of a speedy trial before a jury of peers. On July 30 a military judge found Manning guilty of charges that could lead to a maximum sentence of 136 years.

The Tyranny of Metrics
by Jerry Z. Muller
Published 23 Jan 2018

See on this Jonathan Rauch, “How American Politics Went Insane,” The Atlantic, July–August, 2016; Jonathan Rauch, “Why Hillary Clinton Needs to be Two-Faced,” New York Times, October 22, 2016; and Matthew Yglesias, “Against Transparency,” Vox, September 6, 2016. 4. Cass R. Sunstein, “Output Transparency vs. Input Transparency,” August 18, 2016, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2826009. 5. Wikipedia, “Chelsea Manning.” 6. Christian Stöcker, “Leak at WikiLeaks: A Dispatch Disaster in Six Acts,” Spiegel Online, September 1, 2011. 7. Halbertal, Concealment and Revelation, p. 164. 8. Joel Brenner, Glass Houses: Privacy, Secrecy, and Cyber Insecurity in a Transparent World (New York, 2013), p. 210. CHAPTER 15.

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But that decreases the opportunity to carefully lay out positions.4 All policies have costs: if internal deliberations are subject to transparency, it makes it impossible to deflate policy prescriptions that may be popular but are ill advised, or desirable but likely to offend one or another constituency. Thus transparency of inputs becomes the enemy of good government. DIPLOMACY AND INTELLIGENCE Transparency is also a hazard in diplomacy, and is fatal to the gathering of intelligence. In 2010, Bradley Manning, an intelligence analyst in the American Army, took it upon himself to disclose hundreds of thousands of sensitive military and State Department documents through WikiLeaks.5 One result was the publication of the names of confidential informants, including political dissidents, who had spoken with American diplomats in Iran, China, Afghanistan, the Arab world, and elsewhere.6 As a consequence, some of these individuals had to be relocated to protect their lives.

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World
by Joseph Menn
Published 3 Jun 2019

Assange and Mudge treated each other with respect, however, and met for dinner at the Chaos Computer Club’s 2009 gathering in Germany before they aligned with opposite world powers. cDc admired much about the early WikiLeaks, with good reason. The site published a wide variety of documents and seemed most focused on government wrongdoing. When it obtained tens of thousands of US State Department cables from then Private Bradley Manning (now Chelsea Manning) in 2010, it worked with media partners that sifted through for important stories while not printing information that could lead to the deaths of those cooperating with American officials abroad. “I have quite a few issues with the organization, but I like it more than I dislike it, at least for the time being,” Laird wrote to the cDc list that year.

The Targeter: My Life in the CIA, Hunting Terrorists and Challenging the White House
by Nada Bakos
Published 3 Jun 2019

The Agency has for years felt that SIPRNet, the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, has unacceptable vulnerabilities and has instead used its own network for distributing classified material among CIA branches and personnel. The value of that separation was underscored by the WikiLeaks fiasco in 2010, when Private First Class Chelsea Manning illegally pulled 250,000 State Department cables—but not CIA documents—off the network and shared them with media outlets. Having government teams working off different computer networks was a factor in intelligence-sharing failures prior to the 9/11 attacks—and still, a few years later, the sheer clumsiness of the CIA workaround inhibited necessary communication between my team and SOF in Iraq.

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It is not a secret now: Matthew Rosenberg, “Michael Flynn Is Harsh Judge of C.I.A.’s Role,” New York Times, December 12, 2016. 12. ten times that: McChrystal, My Share of the Task. 13. his teams needed to be more agile: Ibid. 14. and has instead used its own network… classified material: Bruce Berkowitz, “Failing to Keep Up with the Information Revolution,” Studies in Intelligence 47, no. 1 (June 27, 2008), https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol47no1/article07.html. 15. illegally pulled 250,000 State Department cables… off the network: Paul Lewis, “Bradley Manning Given 35-Year Prison Term for Passing Files to WikiLeaks,” The Guardian, August 21, 2013. 16. raiding the right homes only around 50 percent of the time: Dana Priest and William Arkin, Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State (New York: Little, Brown, 2011). 17. “left to clean up the mess”: Ibid. 18.

This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers
by Andy Greenberg
Published 12 Sep 2012

vodka in her morning tea Ellen Nakashima. “Bradley Manning is at the center of the WikiLeaks controversy. But who is he?” Washington Post Magazine, May 4, 2011. basics of Web servers and Internet routing Hansen. “quirky as hell” David Leigh and Luke Harding. WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy (New York: Public Affairs), p. 25. “I have been telling him he needs to get a job and he won’t get a job!” PBS Frontline, “Frontline Exclusive: The Bradley Manning 911 Call.” Available at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/wikileaks/bradley-manning/bradley-manning-911-call/ hiding in the bedroom from Davis’s father until he could find a bare-bones apartment in town Denver Nicks.

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feature=player_embedded&v=Gq0CpWhVag4 Outside the base there, he staged another sit-in and was arrested again Ibid. “I was Bradley Manning” Ashley Fantz. “Pentagon Papers leaker: ‘I was Bradley Manning.’” CNN.com, March 19, 2011. The president turns away, and the conversation is over Video available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Ifmt Upd4id0 The materials that Ellsberg leaked were actually of a higher top-secret classification Glenn Greenwald. “The intellectual cowardice of Bradley Manning’s critics.” Salon.com, December 24, 2011. “I can’t tell you how much that affected me.” Fantz.

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He said that the military’s don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy was forcing him to live “a double life.” His Facebook statuses referred to a Boston boyfriend, Tyler Watkins, whom he had met while on leave there prior to shipping out to Iraq. “Bradley Manning is glad he is working and active again, yet heartbroken being so far away from hubby,” read one status update. And another: “Bradley Manning is in the barracks, alone. I miss you, Tyler!” Manning would write later of his decision to “transition” to becoming a female named Breanna Manning. On one of his leaves, he spent days dressed as a female in public, and had begun planning for electrolysis and other sex change procedures after his discharge.

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World
by Timothy Garton Ash
Published 23 May 2016

Many Americans will think of the publication of the Pentagon Papers by the New York Times and Washington Post in the early 1970s: leaked copies of internal US government reports showing just how unsuccessfully and mendaciously the United States was prosecuting the Vietnam War. More recently, we think of the publication by the Guardian and other leading newspapers and magazines—including Der Spiegel, Le Monde and The Hindu—of carefully redacted versions of secret US State Department communications leaked by Private Bradley (subsequently Chelsea) Manning via Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks, and then a selection of the NSA and GCHQ documents passed to them by Snowden. When he first met the journalists involved, in a hotel in Hong Kong, Snowden specifically explained that he wanted experienced news media to decide what it would be in the public interest to publish.56 One can always argue about this or that specific editorial decision, but in general, these newspapers exercised an important controlling function in the public interest; one which government, parliament and the courts had failed to perform.

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So, taken on its own, the journalist’s ‘trust me’ is as inadequate as the spy’s. The responsible use of anonymous sources will remain essential to good journalism. A public interest was served by the publication in leading newspapers of carefully selected and redacted documents from among those that Bradley (subsequently Chelsea) Manning passed to WikiLeaks. To give just one instance, I will never forget the emotional impact of a routine military report from Afghanistan reproduced in the New York Times. Summarising a raid targeting an Al Qaeda commander, it included this sentence: ‘GFC passed initial assessment of 7 × NC KIA (children)’.78 NC KIA stands for noncombatants killed in action.

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US District Court for the Eastern District of Columbia, sworn affidavit dated 21 June 2011 in the case of US v Jeffrey Alexander Sterling (with some passages redacted), http://perma.cc/3VHS-H7UZ 78. see photograph and text in New York Times, ‘The War Logs’, 26 July 2010, A8 79. but see Matt Sledge, ‘Bradley Manning Sentencing Testimony Suggests WikiLeaks Not Responsible for Any Deaths’, Huffington Post, 8 March 2013, http://perma.cc/3SCZ-73DC 80. see Timothy Garton Ash, ‘WikiLeaks Has Altered the Leaking Game for Good. Secrets Must Be Fewer, But Better Kept’, The Guardian, 30 March 2011, http://perma.cc/6V73-QMSR 81. see the editorial ‘The Times and Iraq’, New York Times, 26 May 2004.

The End of Secrecy: The Rise and Fall of WikiLeaks
by The "Guardian" , David Leigh and Luke Harding
Published 1 Feb 2011

First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Guardian Books Kings Place 90 York Way London N1 9GU www.guardianbooks.co.uk A CIP catalogue for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-0-85265-239-8 CONTENTS Cast of characters Introduction Chapter 1: The Hunt Chapter 2: Bradley Manning Chapter 3: Julian Assange Chapter 4: The rise of WikiLeaks Chapter 5: The Apache video Chapter 6: The Lamo dialogues Chapter 7: The deal Chapter 8: In the bunker Chapter 9: The Afghanistan war logs Chapter 10: The Iraq war logs Chapter 11: The cables Chapter 12: The world’s most famous man Chapter 13: Uneasy partners Chapter 14: Before the deluge Chapter 15: Publication day Chapter 16: The biggest leak in history Chapter 17: The ballad of Wandsworth jail Chapter 18: The future of WikiLeaks Appendix: US Embassy Cables Acknowledgements CAST OF CHARACTERS WikiLeaks MELBOURNE, NAIROBI, REYKJAVIK, BERLIN, LONDON, NORFOLK, STOCKHOLM Julian Assange – WikiLeaks founder/editor Sarah Harrison – aide to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange Kristinn Hrafnsson – Icelandic journalist and WikiLeaks supporter James Ball – WikiLeaks data expert Vaughan Smith – former Grenadier Guards captain, founder of the Frontline Club and Assange’s host at Ellingham Hall Jacob Appelbaum – WikiLeaks’ representative in the US Daniel Ellsberg – Vietnam war whistleblower, WikiLeaks supporter Daniel Domscheit-Berg – German programmer and WikiLeaks technical architect (aka Daniel Schmitt) Mikael Viborg – owner of WikiLeaks’ Swedish internet service provider PRQ Ben Laurie – British encryption expert, adviser to Assange on encryption Mwalimu Mati – head of anti-corruption group Mars Group Kenya, source of first major WikiLeaks report Rudolf Elmer – former head of the Cayman Islands branch of the Julius Baer bank, source of second major WikiLeaks report Smári McCarthy – Iceland-based WikiLeaks enthusiast, programmer, Modern Media Initiative (MMI) campaigner Birgitta Jónsdóttir – Icelandic MP and WikiLeaks supporter Rop Gonggrijp – Dutch hacker-businessman, friend of Assange and MMI campaigner Herbert Snorrason – Icelandic MMI campaigner Israel Shamir – WikiLeaks associate Donald Böstrom – Swedish journalist and WikiLeaks’ Stockholm connection The Guardian LONDON Alan Rusbridger – editor-in-chief Nick Davies – investigative reporter David Leigh – investigations editor Ian Katz – deputy editor (news) Ian Traynor – Europe correspondent Harold Frayman – systems editor Declan Walsh – Pakistan/Afghanistan correspondent Alastair Dant – data visualiser Simon Rogers – data editor Jonathan Steele – former Iraq correspondent James Meek – former Iraq correspondent Rob Evans – investigative journalist Luke Harding – Moscow correspondent Robert Booth – reporter Stuart Millar – news editor, guardian.co.uk Janine Gibson – editor, guardian.co.uk Jonathan Casson – head of production Gill Phillips – in-house head of legal Jan Thompson – managing editor New York Times NEW YORK, LONDON Max Frankel – former executive editor Bill Keller – editor Eric Schmitt – war correspondent John F Burns – London correspondent Ian Fisher – deputy foreign editor Der Spiegel HAMBURG, LONDON Georg Mascolo – editor-in-chief Holger Stark – head of German desk Marcel Rosenbach – journalist John Goetz – journalist El País MADRID, LONDON Javier Moreno – editor-in-chief Vicente Jiménez – deputy editor Other Media Raffi Khatchadourian – New Yorker staffer and author of a major profile of Assange Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen – Reuters news agency employees accidentally killed by US army pilots in 2007 David Schlesinger – Reuters’ editor-in-chief Kevin Poulsen – former hacker, senior editor at Wired Gavin MacFadyen – City University professor and journalist, London host to Assange Stephen Grey – freelance reporter Iain Overton – former TV journalist, head of Bureau of Investigative Journalism Heather Brooke – London-based American journalist and freedom of information activist Bradley Manning Bradley Manning – 23-year-old US army private and alleged WikiLeaks source Rick McCombs – former principal at Crescent high school, Crescent, Oklahoma Brian, Susan, Casey Manning – parents and sister Tom Dyer – school friend Kord Campbell – former manager at Zoto software company Jeff Paterson – steering committee member of the Bradley Manning support network Adrian Lamo – hacker and online confidant Timothy Webster – former US army counter-intelligence special agent Tyler Watkins – former boyfriend David House – former hacker and supporter David Coombs – lawyer Julian Assange Christine Hawkins – mother John Shipton – father Brett Assange – stepfather Keith Hamilton – former partner of Christine Daniel Assange – Julian’s son Paul Galbally – Assange’s lawyer during his 1996 hacking trial Stockholm allegations / extradition “Sonja Braun” – plaintiff; member of Brotherhood movement “Katrin Weiss” – plaintiff; museum worker Claes Borgström – lawyer for both women, former Swedish equal opportunities ombudsman and prominent Social Democrat politician Marianne Ny – Swedish chief prosecutor and sex crimes specialist Mark Stephens – Assange lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, QC – Assange lawyer Jennifer Robinson – lawyer in Mark Stephens’ office Gemma Lindfield – lawyer acting for the Swedish authorities Howard Riddle – district judge, Westminster magistrates court Mr Justice Ouseley – high court judge, London Government Hillary Clinton – US Secretary of State Louis B Susman – US ambassador in London PJ Crowley – US assistant secretary of state for public affairs Harold Koh – US state department’s legal adviser Robert Gates – US defence secretary Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles – former UK government special representative to Afghanistan and former ambassador to Kabul INTRODUCTION Alan Rusbridger Back in the days when almost no one had heard about WikiLeaks, regular emails started arriving in my inbox from someone called Julian Assange.

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Was he, too, the hunted animal, with prosecutors and US intelligence agents the red-coated huntsmen, riding to the sound of a blowing bugle, surging closer and closer? CHAPTER 2 Bradley Manning Contingency Operating Station Hammer, 40 miles east of Baghdad, Iraq November 2009 “I should have left my phone at home” LADY GAGA After the punishing heat of summer, Iraq in November is pleasantly warm. But for the men and women stationed at Camp Hammer, in the middle of the Mada’in Qada desert, the air was forever thick with dust and dirt kicked up by convoys of lorries that supplied the capital – a constant reminder that they were very far from home. One of those was Specialist Bradley Manning, who’d been sent to Iraq with the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division a few weeks earlier.

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After discovering that Bradley was homosexual, Brian Manning threw his son out of the house. Homeless, jobless, Bradley rambled around for a few months, moving from place to place, odd job to odd job. As Jeff Paterson, a member of the steering committee of the Bradley Manning support network, puts it: “He needed a way of proving himself, to go out on his own, to establish himself.” After a few months of aimlessness the solution came to him: Bradley Manning would follow in his father’s footsteps and volunteer for the US military. He enlisted in October 2007, and was put through specialist training for military intelligence work at Fort Huachuca in Arizona.

WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency
by Micah L. Sifry
Published 19 Feb 2011

. –– WikiLeaks Central (WLCentral.org). A hub for news, analysis and action run by volunteers supportive of WikiLeaks that covers censorship and freedom of information topics in all forms. –– The Bradley Manning Support Network (BradleyManning.org). An ad hoc, international grassroots effort to help accused whistle blower Pfc. Bradley Manning. See also the blog FireDogLake’s ongoing coverage (FireDogLake.com/bradley-manning-coverage). 211 WIKILEAKS AND THE AGE OF TRANSPARENCY

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We’re talking about five prosecutions in a country of three hundred million. Almost everyone who leaks material is successful. . . . It’s much safer than walking across the street.” And yet, Assange would not travel to America. It is 31 WIKILEAKS AND THE AGE OF TRANSPARENCY probably not a coincidence that right around this time, at the end of May, Private Bradley Manning was arrested at his U.S. Army base east of Baghdad, on suspicion of having given classified military documents and videos, along with hundreds of thousands of secret State Department cables, to WikiLeaks. According to Wired.com, which broke the news, the authorities learned of Manning’s alleged activities from a former computer hacker named Adrian Lamo, who Manning spoke to online.

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In the days after the State Department cables starting leaking, not only did Senator Joe Lieberman intimidate major Internet companies into kicking WikiLeaks off their services without any serious review, the government told its own employees that they shouldn’t look at references to WikiLeaks from government computers or their home computers, and even public resources like the Library of Congress started filtering searches on its computers and Wi-Fi to prevent people from reading news articles about the cables.7 The Office of Management and Budget circulated a fourteen-page memo to all government agencies requiring them to tighten their security procedures, which included suggestions that they employ psychiatrists and sociologists to measure employee “despondence and grumpiness as a means to gauge waning trustworthiness,” “capture evidence of pre-employment and/ or post-employment activities or participation in on-line media data mining sites like WikiLeaks or Open Leaks,” and require all employees to report their contacts with the media.8 It was quite an about-face from the OMB’s Open Government Directive of a year earlier, which called on agencies to “create an unprecedented and sustained level of openness and accountability.”9 And the Justice Department began pursuing a criminal investigation against WikiLeaks, demanding that Twitter turn 139 WIKILEAKS AND THE AGE OF TRANSPARENCY over the subscriber account information—including personal addresses, connections made to and from the account, IP addresses used, means of payment (though Twitter is free)— for Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, and three other people who had been involved with the group around the time that the Collateral Murder video came out: Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir, Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp, and American anticensorship hacker Jacob Appelbaum. This is an extremely worrisome development. For there is nothing that WikiLeaks has done that is different from any other newspaper or media outlet that has received leaked government documents, verified their authenticity, and then published their contents and analysis.

Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance
by Julia Angwin
Published 25 Feb 2014

At his military court proceedings: Bradley Manning, “Bradley Manning’s Statement Taking Responsibility for Releasing Documents to WikiLeaks,” February 28, 2013, http://www.bradleymanning.org/news/bradley-mannings-statement-taking-responsibility-for-releasing-documents-to-wikileaks. He was betrayed by a friend: Kevin Poulsen and Kim Zetter, “U.S. Intelligence Analyst Arrested in Wikileaks Video Probe,” Wired, Threat Level (blog), June 6, 2010, http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/leak/. Government investigators later found traces: Eva Blum-Dumontet, “Bradley Manning Legal Proceedings: Fact Sheet,” WikiLeaks Press, March 31, 2012, http://wikileaks-press.org/bradley-manning-legal-procedures-fact-sheet/.

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Device Searches,” New York Times, September 9, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/10/business/the-border-is-a-back-door-for-us-device-searches.html. House sued the Department of Homeland Security: “U.S. Settles Lawsuit with Bradley Manning Supporter Who Had Laptop Seized at Airport,” ACLU.org (press release), https://www.aclu.org/free-speech/us-settles-lawsuit-bradley-manning-supporter-who-had-laptop-seized-airport. Consider the story of Husain Abdulla: Vernon Silver, “Cyber Attacks on Activists Traced to FinFisher Spyware of Gamma,” Bloomberg.com, July 25, 2012, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-25/cyber-attacks-on-activists-traced-to-finfisher-spyware-of-gamma.html.

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and Afghanistan wars: David Leigh, “Afghanistan War Logs: Secret CIA Paramilitaries’ Role in Civilian Deaths,” Guardian, July 25, 2010, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jul/25/afghanistan-civilian-deaths-rules-engagement. In 2013, Manning was sentenced to: Paul Lewis, “Bradley Manning Given 35-Year Prison Term for Passing Files to WikiLeaks,” Guardian, August 21, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/21/bradley-manning-35-years-prison-wikileaks-sentence. Snowden obtained temporary political asylum: Alec Luhn, Luke Harding, and Paul Lewis, “Edward Snowden Asylum: US ‘Disappointed’ by Russian Decision,” Guardian, August 1, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/01/edward-snowden-asylum-us-disappointed.

Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up
by Philip N. Howard
Published 27 Apr 2015

On the whole, democratically elected governments are comparatively open technical systems, and authoritarian regimes are relatively closed technical systems. Indeed, a spectrum of regimes from “open” to “closed” may capture more of the important nuances in what makes a contemporary government than a spectrum that gauges levels of “democracy” and “authoritarianism.” The surveillance scandals triggered by Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning and the censorship tactics exposed by the OpenNet Initiative complicate many governments’ claims to being democratic. Thinking in terms of democracy and authoritarianism does not make sense in a world where authoritarian governments use digital media to measure and respond to public opinion in positive ways.

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Filling our lives with such devices should not be just about making better consumer products but about giving us the ability to improve our quality of life. The Hope and Instability of Hackers and Whistle Blowers We’ve come to depend on hacktivists and whistle blowers to teach us about how this internet of things is evolving. It’s easy to despise Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning for the perceived breach of trust with their national security colleagues and the armed forces. And industry lobbyists work hard to paint activists like Aaron Swartz as miscreants.10 But it is difficult to ignore the debates these hackers and whistle blowers set in motion. Refusing to address their questions is foolish.

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Srđa Popović, the Serb who in 2000 mobilized the resistance to end Slobodan Milošević’s rule, went on in 2003 to train protesters for Georgia’s “Rose Revolution,” Ukraine’s 2005 “Orange Revolution,” and the Maldives’ revolution in 2007, before training activists in Egypt’s April 6 Movement in 2008. Popović’s book Nonviolent Struggle: 50 Crucial Points has been downloaded thousands of times.19 For the presidents of countries and companies, people like Aaron Swartz, Chelsea Manning, and Julian Assange are threats to national security and the corporate bottom line. But in many networks they are heroes. Every few years, hacktivists and whistle blowers turn national security and diplomacy upside down by putting large amounts of previously secret content online. Conservative security analysts and industry pundits often react hostilely to people who play with information technologies and exploit consumer electronics beyond designers’ intent.

Lurking: How a Person Became a User
by Joanne McNeil
Published 25 Feb 2020

What might have been an uncomfortable conversation delivered by other means came through with stunning poignance and dignity. I learned from it. A lot of people did. It was a summer of portents. Edward Snowden had just appeared on camera from a hotel room in Hong Kong, and a few months later, Chelsea Manning was convicted, after a court-martial predicated on a judge’s failure to understand how the internet actually worked. #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen was groundbreaking and whistle-blowing, too, but due to the nature of its distribution—over Twitter, using hashtags—its significance is often undermined.

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Rather, the voice is flattened by the type of individuals most active on the website: users who are white and male and, presumably, straight and cis. Bias is an ongoing problem, and one that can develop myriad neighboring complications as Wikipedia becomes common element in machine-learning data sets. But, in some cases, Wikipedia has changed for the better. In 2013, when Chelsea Manning came out as transgender, editors battled over how to address this on her page before decisively editing it under the heading of her new name and proper pronouns. A new rule or procedure becomes a new drainpipe for a deluge. The following year, an anonymous user, identified in the edit history with an IP address that traced back to Congress, was banned from Wikipedia for more than a week, after deadnaming Manning and making other transphobic updates.

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Anyone else working in the Capitol Building that day, with that IP address, was blocked from editing Wikipedia. I asked Kyra Gaunt if she’d seen similar progress on Wikipedia over the years. Could it be that Wikipedia editors are growing more diverse? She thinks that progressive changes, such as how the Chelsea Manning page emerged, could also be the work of a number of white-guy Wikipedia regulars. Maybe some of them have developed a more enlightened “neutral point of view,” but there is a sport to it. Issues of racial justice and trans rights are in the news, and “if it’s in the news, they want to be the first person to get it on Wikipedia,” Gaunt said.

Cybersecurity: What Everyone Needs to Know
by P. W. Singer and Allan Friedman
Published 3 Jan 2014

The Pentagon’s prescience was remarkable, as the website was poised to publish a massive cache of documents that ranged from diplomatic cables to memos and videos directly related to the US military’s war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. This story’s beginning goes back to “bradass87,” the online handle of Bradley Manning, born in 1987. Bradley Manning was a private first class in the US Army, and not a terribly happy one. As he described in instant messages sent to another hacker turned journalist, “im an army intelligence analyst, deployed to eastern baghdad, pending discharge for ‘adjustment disorder’ in lieu of ‘gender identity disorder.’”

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Is the individual authorized to buy something, like an account on an online gambling site? And even if so, is the individual old enough to participate? Or, at a slightly larger world stage, just because someone has access to a military’s classified networks, should the person be authorized to read and copy every file in them (a practice that would haunt the US military in the Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden leaks)? The entire problem was perhaps best illustrated by one of the most cited cartoons in history. In 1993, New Yorker magazine published a drawing by Peter Steiner of two dogs sitting near a computer. One dog tells the other, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

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In the attack on RSA, the attackers wanted key business secrets in order to spy on other companies. For Stuxnet (a case we’ll explore further in Part II), the attackers wanted to disrupt industrial control processes involved in uranium enrichment, so as to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program. Finally, it is useful to acknowledge when the danger comes from one of your own. As cases like Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks or Edward Snowden and the NSA scandal illustrate, the “insider threat” is particularly tough because the actor can search for vulnerabilities from within systems designed only to be used by trusted actors. Insiders can have much better perspectives on what is valuable and how best to leverage that value, whether they are trying to steal secrets or sabotage an operation.

Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire
by Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian
Published 1 Nov 2012

I doubt that Tunisians cared very much about French and U.S. hypocrisy, which is all that WikiLeaks revealed—nothing that they didn’t know themselves. Talk about the connection between Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning. Dan is an old friend. I was involved with him in helping release the Pentagon Papers, which I thought was a quite proper thing to do. I testified at his trial. In the case of Bradley Manning, he’s charged with having released material to Julian Assange, who distributed it on WikiLeaks.18 He’s been in prison now since May 2010, a large part of that in solitary confinement—which is torture.

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They’re treating it as a court-martial inside the military system.19 I think Manning should be applauded and the government should be harshly condemned for throwing out the basic principles of law and human rights. Didn’t Obama, a constitutional law professor, make a prejudicial comment about Bradley Manning? Yes, he immediately said he’s guilty.20 That’s unconscionable. Even if Obama wasn’t a constitutional lawyer, he’s the president. He should know that the president shouldn’t say that about a person who is facing criminal charges. There are worse things—say, assassinating Osama bin Laden. He wasn’t tried in a court.

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Steven Erlanger, “French Foreign Minister Urged to Resign,” New York Times, 3 February 2011. 18. Charlie Savage, “Soldier Faces 22 New WikiLeaks Charges,” New York Times, 2 March 2011. 19. Scott Shane, “Court Martial Recommended in WikiLeaks Case,” New York Times, 12 January 2012. 20. Stephanie Condon, “Obama Says Bradley Manning ‘Broke the Law,’” CBSNews.com, 22 April 2011. 21. Mark Mazzetti, Eric Schmitt, and Robert F. Worth, “Two-Year Manhunt Led to Killing of Awlaki in Yemen,” New York Times, 30 September 2011. 22. President Barack Obama, “President Obama’s Statement on the Memos,” New York Times, 16 April 2009.

Barefoot Into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia
by Becky Hogge , Damien Morris and Christopher Scally
Published 26 Jul 2011

Still, although the message behind the video only needed a light breeze to be carried out of the media echo chamber and disappear into the ether, WikiLeaks themselves remained in the headlines throughout the spring and into summer. In early June, Wired magazine’s Threat Level blog was the first to report the arrest of a junior US Army analyst in Baghdad. Private Bradley Manning, 22, was being held in Kuwait under suspicion of leaking the video and other classified documents to WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks had been on the US government’s radar long before the Collateral Murder video. In 2008, the US Army Counterintelligence Center produced an internal memo entitled Wikileaks.org—An Online Reference to Foreign Intelligence Services, Insurgents, or Terrorist Groups?

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Chief among these was the suggestion that: Successful identification, prosecution, termination of employment and exposure of persons leaking the information by the governments and businesses affected by information posted to Wikileaks.org would damage and potentially destroy this center of gravity and deter others from taking similar actions. The counterintelligence document had been leaked to and published by WikiLeaks in March 2010. As the Bradley Manning story hit the headlines, several commentators observed that prosecution of the young Private would appear to present the US government with exactly the opportunity they had been seeking. Manning is now awaiting trial in the US. If found guilty of leaking classified documents, he could face up to 52 years in prison.

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Clearly both still like making “interesting trouble”. Rumours that Lamo is now working on asymmetrical information warfare tactics on behalf of the United States National Security Agency remain unconfirmed. Most probably they always will. * * * After Collateral Murder, Julian Assange went into hiding. But just over a month after Bradley Manning’s story hit the headlines, at noon on 25 July, he appeared again, fronting a press conference at London’s Frontline Club for WikiLeaks’ second high-profile leak of the year: the Afghan War Logs, around 75,000 classified internal US field reports sent from the war in Afghanistan. This time, Julian was only appearing to answer questions.

Permanent Record
by Edward Snowden
Published 16 Sep 2019

The work that these partner news organizations accomplished over the course of 2010 and 2011 suggested to me that WikiLeaks was most valuable as a go-between that connected sources with journalists, and as a firewall that preserved sources’ anonymity. WikiLeaks’ practices changed following its publication of disclosures by US Army private Chelsea Manning—huge caches of US military field logs pertaining to the Iraq and Afghan wars, information about detainees at Guantanamo Bay, along with US diplomatic cables. Due to the governmental backlash and media controversy surrounding the site’s redaction of the Manning materials, WikiLeaks decided to change course and publish future leaks as they received them: pristine and unredacted.

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There were also Drake, Binney, Wiebe, and Loomis, the digital-age successors to Perry Fellwock, who back in 1971 had revealed the existence of the then-unacknowledged NSA in the press, which caused the Senate’s Church Committee (the forerunner of today’s Senate Select Committee on Intelligence) to try to ensure that the agency’s brief was limited to the gathering of foreign rather than domestic signals intelligence. And then there was US Army Private Chelsea Manning, who for the crime of exposing America’s war crimes was court-martialed and sentenced to thirty-five years in prison, of which she served seven, her sentence commuted only after an international outcry arose over the treatment she received during solitary confinement. All of these people, whether they faced prison or not, encountered some sort of backlash, most often severe and derived from the very abuse that I’d just helped expose: surveillance.

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It’s true that Assange can be self-interested and vain, moody, and even bullying—after a sharp disagreement just a month after our first, text-based conversation, I never communicated with him again—but he also sincerely conceives of himself as a fighter in a historic battle for the public’s right to know, a battle he will do anything to win. It’s for this reason that I regard it as too reductive to interpret his assistance as merely an instance of scheming or self-promotion. More important to him, I believe, was the opportunity to establish a counterexample to the case of the organization’s most famous source, US Army Private Chelsea Manning, whose thirty-five-year prison sentence was historically unprecedented and a monstrous deterrent to whistleblowers everywhere. Though I never was, and never would be, a source for Assange, my situation gave him a chance to right a wrong. There was nothing he could have done to save Manning, but he seemed, through Sarah, determined to do everything he could to save me.

Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution
by Pieter Hintjens
Published 11 Mar 2013

Leaking sensitive information about malpractice in a business usually leads to firing, blacklisting, and poverty. It's still better than the life of a person who leaks state secrets. Such individuals tend to get suicidal in the most creative ways. Even darknets can't always survive determined leaks, as Chelsea née Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden showed. No security is perfect because it depends on people, and people make mistakes. Someone plugs an off-the-shelf laptop into a darknet, and suddenly it's trivial to copy gigabytes of documents to a USB drive. A maintenance engineer calls the head of operations warning that there's a problem with a router and they have to reset a password.

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When there is a leak, the American press (when the leak concerns American secrets) focuses on the messenger and his motives, rather than the message. This isn't necessarily a conspiracy as much as how US media, and indeed much of US society, prefers style over substance. The most significant trove of documents that WikiLeaks published came from Chelsea née Bradley Manning, who has been described in the media as mentally unstable, reckless, and naive. Manning was placed into extreme solitary confinement on arrest, prosecuted in secret, and largely forgotten about until his conviction and sentencing for treason. When someone leaks state secrets, as Manning and Snowden did, it is relatively easy to call out "traitor" and "national security" to trigger the tribalistic herd reflexes.

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There is no lack of people who are willing to talk, and often provide very specific, detailed knowledge of crimes committed behind the curtains. The common factor with the whistle blowers is that the mainstream media ignores them unless their stories are pushed through alternative platforms so dramatically that they cannot be ignored. Chelsea née Bradley Manning disclosing crimes through WikiLeaks provides a well-known instance of this. One of the first significant NSA whistle blowers was Russ Tice. He told us in December 2005 that the NSA and DIA (another three-letter agency I'll come back to in the last chapter were spying on US citizens, something that was, and still is, illegal.

The Great Firewall of China
by James Griffiths;
Published 15 Jan 2018

Things got so bad that HBGary Federal’s parent company, also called HBGary, sent its president Penny Leavy into a public chat room to beg with the hackers to leave her company alone. “We are kind of pissed at him right now,” Leavy told the exuberant hackers, according to a chat log posted online.4 They told her to fire Barr and transfer HBGary’s stake in his company to a defence fund for WikiLeaks source Chelsea Manning, along with Barr’s salary. Barr resigned as CEO of HBGary Federal, and within a year both companies were bought by another cybersecurity firm, their reputations destroyed.5 According to the leaked emails, Barr’s intention in going after Anonymous was to get the attention of the FBI and drum up more government business.

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Hundreds of people had access to these documents, but no one wanted to publish them for the public to see, because they were either government officials who didn’t wish to risk diplomatic fallout, or industry members not willing to anger an organisation that could soon be regulating them. What was missing, Dourado and his colleague Jerry Brito realised, was a service through which the documents could be made public anonymously. Its name was obvious: the year before WCIT, Chelsea Manning had leaked a classified US military video showing an Apache helicopter firing on civilians and journalists in Iraq, sparking international outrage and making the service to which she gave the video famous around the world. Thus WCITLeaks was born. The pair came up with the idea on a Tuesday morning, and spent all afternoon coding a basic website that could accept anonymous uploads and convert documents to PDFs to conceal their origin.

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I am also grateful, in no particular order, to: My parents, Catherine and Paul, my sister, Emma, and the rest of my family My friend Erik Crouch, who not only served as my best man but also offered detailed feedback throughout the writing process and suggested a new structure that opened the book up and made it far better than it would have been without his input Current and former colleagues at CNN, especially Hilary Whiteman, Marc Lourdes, Steve George, Rick Davis, Paul Armstrong and Andrew Demaria, for their support of this book Kenneth Tan, for taking a chance on me and changing my life by moving me to Shanghai Joyce Murdoch, Sarah Graham and other former colleagues at the South China Morning Post My agent, Marysia Juszczakiewicz My editor, Kim Walker Dominic Fagan, Rik Ubhi and others at Zed Books; Judith Forshaw for her expert copyediting, and production manager Linda Auld Mike Jones, Patrick Lozada, Catherine Griffiths, Paul Griffiths, Joyce Murdoch and Steve George for reading early versions of this book and offering feedback Caroline Malone, Jeff Wasserstrom, Lydia Namiburu, Nick Marro, Lily Kuo, Lokman Tsui, Sarah Cook, Andrei Soldatov, Alec Ash, Antony Dapiran, Charlie Smith and Tom Phillips for advice and guidance at key moments Ryan Kilpatrick for researching Lu Wei’s background and reading far too many paeans to cyber-sovereignty Shen Lu, Serenitie Wang and Nanlin Fang for their assistance with my CNN reporting, which I also drew on in writing this book Ben Westcott, Josh Berlinger, Kati Bornholdt, Erik Crouch, Bridget O’Donnell, Patrick Lozada, Joshua Newlan, Juliet Perry, Adam White, Andrea Lo, Lindsey Ford, Sofia Mitra Thakur, Jerome Taylor, Huw Lloyd, Eric Shapiro, Pamela Boykoff, Alan Yu, Bryan Harris, Sarah Karacs, Zahra Jamshed, Elaine Yu, Steve George, Nash Jenkins, Isabella Steger, Ravi Hiranand, Wilfred Chan, Sam Green, Rohan Pinto, Sam Pickard, Thaddeus Cheung, and many more I have forgotten to mention, for their continued friendship, instant messages, sofas and spare bedrooms Chelsea Manning and Wikileaks The makers of the Ulysses and Simplenote apps The Hong Kong public library system and the staff at the Tiu Keng Leng branch Finally, thank you to Ella Wong, for everything. Notes In writing this book, I have endeavoured as much as possible to rely on first-hand sources, in both Chinese and English, and interviews with the principals or their own writings.

This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain
by William Davies
Published 28 Sep 2020

With the assistance of newspapers including the New York Times, Der Spiegel, the Guardian and Le Monde, these ‘war logs’ disclosed horrifying details about the conduct of US forces and revealed the Pentagon had falsely denied knowledge of various abuses. While some politicians expressed moral revulsion at what had been exposed, the US and British governments blamed Wiki-Leaks for endangering their troops, and the leaker, Chelsea Manning, was jailed for espionage. In 2011, the phone-hacking scandal put the press itself under the spotlight. It was revealed that senior figures in News International and the Metropolitan Police had long been aware of the extent of phone-hacking practices – and they had lied about how much they knew.

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This is the individual who appears brave enough to call bullshit on the rest of the establishment – whether that be government agencies, newspapers, business, political parties or anything else. Some are whistleblowers, others are political leaders, and others are more like conspiracy theorists or trolls. The problem is that everyone has a different heroic truth-teller, because we’re all preoccupied by different bullshit. There is no political alignment between figures such as Chelsea Manning and Nigel Farage; what they share is only a willingness to defy the establishment and break consensus. If a world where everyone has their own truth-tellers sounds dangerously like relativism, that’s because it is. But the roots of this new and often unsettling ‘regime of truth’ don’t only lie with the rise of populism or the age of big data.

We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous, and the Global Cyber Insurgency
by Parmy Olson
Published 5 Jun 2012

He had no idea that, even though the anticopyright battle was dying, Operation Payback was about to explode with support for a little organization called WikiLeaks. Jake, now as Topiary, explored the AnonOps chat rooms while a former, widely-revered hacker from Australia named Julian Assange was getting ready to drop a bombshell on the American government. Earlier in 2010, a U.S. army private named Bradley Manning had allegedly reached out to Assange and given his whistleblower site, WikiLeaks, 250,000 internal messages, known as cables, that had been sent between American embassies. These diplomatic cables revealed American political maneuverings and confidential diplomatic reports. In exposing the documents, Assange would hugely embarrass American foreign policy makers.

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Green Party to Harvard University to the CERN laboratory in Switzerland. Sabu even pasted a list of exploits—a series of commands that took advantage of a security glitch—to several iPhones that anyone could snoop on. They threw around ideas for future targets: Adrian Lamo, the hacker that had turned in WikiLeaks’s military mole Bradley Manning, or defected botmaster Switch. “If someone has his dox,” said Kayla, “I can pull his social security number and we can make his life hell.” To those who didn’t know her, Kayla came across as someone who was especially keen to dish out vigilante justice. As the InternetFeds participants got to know each other more, they also saw that Sabu was the one with the loudest voice, the biggest opinions, and the strongest desire to coordinate others into action.

…

The reason many of these organizations died out, Sabu believed, was that they had a structured hierarchy. Anonymous was different. If someone arrested Monsegur, there would be ten more like him to take his place. By leaking e-mails or helping Internet users around the world bypass government filtering, Anonymous could assist people like Julian Assange and his alleged whistle-blower Bradley Manning once they were arrested. When he had first heard about Assange’s arrest, Monsegur had gone online as Sabu and looked for vulnerabilities in the networks of organizations related to Assange’s case, from the court that allowed Assange’s warrant to those who ended up taking him to jail. Sabu claimed his research led to a wealth of information for future operations, though he never released it to the public.

Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now
by Alan Rusbridger
Published 14 Oct 2018

He became the bitterest of critics, protesting (in the third person) on Twitter that he had suffered ‘five years being detained [as ‘editor’] without charge after you invited him to the UK to be your source’7 – a very Assangeist mingling of causes and effects. Assange was either an editor or a source: he couldn’t be both. In fact, Chelsea Manning was our (and Assange’s) source. Nor had Assange been detained: he had sent himself into exile, for something that had nothing to do with his, or our, editorial activities. Everything about working with Assange was difficult. The writer Andrew O’Hagan, who was supposed to ghost Assange’s autobiography but ended up writing a short, brilliant account of his months failing to do so, recorded ‘how deeply adversarial WikiLeaks was in its relationship with its friends.

…

‘If it’s true information, we don’t care where it comes from,’ was Assange’s riposte to what he saw as liberal hand-wringing. ‘Let people fight with the truth, and when the bodies are cleared there will be bullets of truth everywhere.’ To Raffi Khatchadourian of the New Yorker, there was a difference between someone like Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden and the exploitation of hacking by foreign powers: ‘State-sponsored information warfare is nothing like what activist hackers and whistleblowers do,’ he wrote in an August 2017 article. ‘The latter take personal risks – with their freedom, and their reputation – to release information that matters to them.

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One article, almost certainly approved by the editor, accused the paper of ‘glorying in betraying Britain . . . Treachery is too strong a word, but it is impossible to find any decent motive for what the Guardian has done.’43 Snowden, two weeks later, was denounced by the paper as ‘a hypocrite and moral coward’.44 We were Chelsea Manning’s ‘leftie puppet masters’, according to another headline a fortnight later.45 In the space of a few months the paper returned repeatedly – almost obsessively – to denunciations of our coverage and questions about our patriotism. The paper explicitly mentioned our ‘single-handed responsibility’ for the Leveson Inquiry and wondered why we shed no tears for tabloid journalists arrested for alleged criminality after being ‘shopped’ by their own news organisation.

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath
by Nicco Mele
Published 14 Apr 2013

Soghoian has suggested that Flame exposes the average citizen to a significant level of security risk on their personal computer by undermining automatic security updates, not to mention the growing consumer privacy concerns.27 As the preceding discussion suggests, the term “nonstate actor” has its limitations; it’s conceivable that every technically literate person with a laptop and an Internet connection might be able to influence global geopolitics as a nonstate actor. In fact, it’s already happening. Consider Bradley Manning and Julian Assange; together they changed diplomacy and, arguably, the governments of several countries—without any exceptional technical knowledge or expertise. Bradley Manning is a computer programmer, but not a technical genius. He was a low-ranking U.S. Army soldier, a private first class, who made use of a fundamental attribute of digital files: They are easily copied and, once copied, easily shared.

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Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, has been out in front defending Assange: “If I released the Pentagon Papers today, the same rhetoric and the same calls would be made about me … I would be called not only a traitor—which I was [called] then, which was false and slanderous—but I would be called a terrorist. … Assange and Bradley Manning are no more terrorists than I am.”33 Micah Sifry, a noted commentator and journalist on technology and politics, regards WikiLeaks as a symptom of a much broader global trend. In his book WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency, he writes, “What is new is our ability to connect, individually and together, with greater ease than at any time in human history.

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World
by Alan Rusbridger
Published 26 Nov 2020

Fisk alleged in his article on 23 May 2019, however, that the OPCW had deliberately concealed a dissenting fifteen-page assessment which claimed that the damning evidence was more probably placed manually. To Fisk, this was a dangerous act of censorship and a piece of outrageous deceit. ‘It can lead to only one conclusion: that we must resort once more to the Assanges and the Chelsea Mannings – “traitors” who harm Western security in the eyes of their enemies – and the revelations of groups like Wikileaks, if we want to know the truth of what happens in our world and the real story behind the official reports.’ This is a remarkable statement by a man who had been working for a national newspaper for the best part of fifty years.

…

But what happens if the intermediary is Julian Assange – not quite a source and also a publisher, editor, information anarchist, activist and hacker? In 2010 he arrived at the Guardian’s offices in London with a thumb drive containing more secret documents than had ever been supplied by any unofficial player in history. The original source for that story, it became apparent, was Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, a twenty-three-year old US Army intelligence analyst. How much should editors have considered the purity of her motives? Or (as with the Pentagon Papers) was it enough just to look at the documentary evidence she had obtained? The same questions arose with Edward Snowden, who became the next most celebrated whistleblower to leak vast quantities of top secret documents, this time from the National Security Agency (NSA).

The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age
by David E. Sanger
Published 18 Jun 2018

But if officials collected evidence that the world’s two other superpowers had placed Snowden in the midst of NSA Hawaii, they have never offered it—perhaps because they hope to prosecute him someday, or perhaps because it would be so supremely embarrassing. Most important, the NSA has never had to account for the fact that it ignored so many warnings about its well-documented vulnerabilities to a new era of insider threats. The warnings had been quite public. Only three years before the Snowden breach, an army private now known as Chelsea Manning had gotten away with essentially the same thing in Iraq—downloading hundreds of thousands of military videos and State Department cables and handing them off to WikiLeaks. Shortly after the Snowden fiasco, the agency announced new safeguards: No longer would systems administrators with access to vast databases be able to download documents by themselves.

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* * * — As it turned out, an uncensored Google made the leadership of the country very nervous. As American intelligence agencies later learned, the leadership were Googling themselves, and the results were not always complimentary. A secret State Department cable, written on May 18, 2009, and made public the next year in the WikiLeaks trove that Chelsea Manning had taken, reported that Li Changchun, who headed the propaganda department for the Chinese Communist Party and was a top member of the leadership, was astounded to discover that when he typed his name into a Google search bar he found “results critical of him.” Since he was the government’s leading censor, the fact that any Chinese citizen with an Internet connection could read something unpleasant about how he performed his duties was a rude awakening.

Bitcoin: The Future of Money?
by Dominic Frisby
Published 1 Nov 2014

Milton Friedman, economist The US Department of Defense called it the ‘largest leak of classified documents in its history’. It’s difficult to overstate how big a threat to the existing world order WikiLeaks was perceived to be in late 2010. There has been revelation after revelation – the Bradley Manning leaks, the video of US soldiers shooting at Reuters cameramen, the ‘friendly fire’ and civilian casualties, then the leak of another 400,000 documents relating to the Iraq war. WikiLeaks had caught the imagination of those opposed to the US and other governments. Many wanted to help. PayPal was the main means by which WikiLeaks was able to receive funds for its activities and, in 2010, its donors gave around one million dollars.

…

In September 2011 he said, ‘I haven’t had email from Satoshi in a couple months actually. The last email I sent him I actually told him I was going to talk at the CIA. So it’s possible that…that may have had something to with his deciding.’42 It’s easy to assume that Satoshi was fearful of government authorities. He saw what was happening to Assange and to Bradley Manning, and what had befallen the founders of other forms of ecash. It’s unlikely he wanted accusations of terrorism levelled against him. Even if they were unfounded, they could have ruined his life and the lives of those close to him. Whether it was WikiLeaks, the CIA or both that caused it, Satoshi had vanished.

Come and Take It: The Gun Printer's Guide to Thinking Free
by Cody Wilson
Published 10 Oct 2016

A handful of buses came and went, each making boiling noises and taking a huddled group in from the freeze. By the time I began to shiver, I found a ride for Bratislava. I didn’t know a thing about Mike personally. I had seen him on Amir’s mailing list, the “system undo crew,” assumed he was young like me, and I read about his work organizing the Free Bradley Manning campaign in the early days after the leaks. I read he had given up his American citizenship voluntarily, forgoing picking up any other. He was known then for being one of the world’s few intentionally “stateless” persons. On the bus ride I looked out over the winter fields and the stretching snowbanks.

…

Amir was asleep on the couch, covered in an old American Airlines blanket. “It’s just how I’ve been doing it, man. What about you?” Mike blew smoke and squinted past it. I spoke again, “What makes a man throw off his state like you did? Become a refugee?” “Well, renouncing my citizenship came first. The Bradley Manning thing was later on,” he told me, referring to the campaign he began to aid the troubled private charged with espionage for sending those thousands of Afghan war documents to WikiLeaks. Mike settled back against his headboard. “Once upon a time in the late nineties I decided I wanted to leave the US and become a PT—you know, many citizenships.

Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again
by Brittany Kaiser
Published 21 Oct 2019

I had now spent almost two years surrounded by anti-Hillary messaging (at every conference I went to, jokingly pasted on the inside of people’s cubicles, on the buttons I was handed at Trump speeches), and I was starting to be persuaded. I was becoming numb to the targeted content on my phone, at conferences, and on the screens of my colleagues’ computers. As for Assange, I saw him the way I saw Chelsea Manning, another whistleblower, and someone who had suffered for her beliefs in the name of government transparency. The invitation to see Assange came through a friend of a friend—he told me during a birthday party that Julian was mourning John, as I was, and perhaps it would be good, emotionally, for the two of us to meet.

…

Some whistleblowers, I knew, were revered for their heroism, and went on after their revelations to live happy, safe lives with their families—Daniel Ellsberg, for example. After reading the Pentagon Papers he’d leaked, the world rejected the war in Vietnam and replaced Richard Nixon with a leader who deserved to be called president of the United States. Others, such as Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, ended up losing large parts of their lives to vilification and incarceration. They were celebrated for their attempts to let the world see the truth. But unlike in the case of Ellsberg, those in power at the time of their leaks were not replaced, and the whistleblowers paid a price, rewarded only with the knowledge that when government crimes were committed, they had stopped at nothing to expose the perpetrators.

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire
by Jeff Berwick and Charlie Robinson
Published 14 Apr 2020

Empty crates of dynamite and crumpled boxes of fuses might give her plan away, but if someone was an actual terrorist would they really be dragging their bomb- making garbage to the curb twice a week? This is silly, insulting to the intelligence of the American people, and a colossal waste of time and money. Why doesn’t Janet Napolitano explain to the American people why any of them should trust her? Edward Snowden came forward and “said something”, how is that working out for him? Chelsea Manning “saw something” and they gave her 30 years in prison. Thanks to Wikileaks, the world knows how dirty the war in Iraq was, and how criminal the people running the show actually are. Where are his great thanks from the Department of Homeland Security? Hillary Clinton’s only question was “can’t we just drone this guy?”

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A person does not need to actually share the information with the public either, as the act of retaining the documents is enough to get a person put away in prison for a decade or more. Obama’s Department of Justice brought charges against eight people accused of leaking to the media — Thomas Drake, Ed Snowden, Jeffrey Sterling, Shamai Leibowitz, Stephen Kim, Chelsea Manning, Donald Sachtleben, and John Kiriakou. These people either went to prison or will be arrested if they set foot in the United States again. Kiriakou did time in a federal prison where he had to sit at the Aryan Brotherhood’s table during meals so that he would not get shanked or worse. This is serious business.

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It)
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 4 Apr 2018

It’s the same story with the punishments handed down to ‘Anonymous’ hacktivists by US courts, who routinely receive jail time for vandalising websites. In the UK, the Home Secretary has proposed increasing the maximum sentence of viewing extremist material online to 15 years in prison, a suggestion worthy of an authoritarian regime. Consider too the sorts of punishment meted out to whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning. (My suspicion is that bitcoin is next.) Such absurd penalties for online crime can only be understood as a sign that governments are beginning to recognise how serious this is, and that deterrence might be their only remaining weapon. This is not a sign of their strength, of course, but of their weakness.

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World
by Bruce Schneier
Published 2 Mar 2015

Daniel Ellsberg, the first person prosecuted under the law, in 1971, was barred from explaining his actions in court. Former NSA senior executive Thomas Drake, an NSA whistleblower who was prosecuted in 2011, was forbidden to say the words “whistleblowing” and “overclassification” in his trial. Chelsea Manning was prohibited from using a similar defense. Edward Snowden claims he’s a whistleblower. Many people, including me, agree; others don’t. Secretary of State John Kerry insisted that Snowden should “come back here and stand in our system of justice and make his case,” and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton proclaimed, “If he wishes to return knowing he would be held accountable and also able to present a defense, that is his decision to make.”

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David Pozen (20 Dec 2013), “The leaky leviathan: Why the government condemns and condones unlawful disclosures of information,” Harvard Law Review 127, http://harvardlawreview.org/2013/12/the-leaky-leviathan-why-the-government-condemns-and-condones-unlawful-disclosures-of-information. Thomas Drake, an NSA whistleblower: Daniel Ellsberg (30 May 2014), “Snowden would not get a fair trial—and Kerry is wrong,” Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/30/daniel-ellsberg-snowden-fair-trial-kerry-espionage-act. Chelsea Manning was prohibited: David Dishneau (20 Jul 2012), “Manning largely barred from discussing WikiLeaks harm,” Associated Press, http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2018724246_apusmanningwikileaks.html. Edward Snowden claims: The country is fairly evenly divided on this point. Seth Motel (15 Apr 2014), “NSA coverage wins Pulitzer, but Americans remain divided on Snowden leaks,” Pew Research Center, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/04/15/nsa-coverage-wins-pulitzer-but-americans-remain-divided-on-snowden-leaks.

Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare
by Thomas Rid

And yet, at the fringes, this emerging subculture embraced a combination of radical transparency and radical anonymity, along with hacking-and-leaking, stealing-and-publishing—and thus created what had existed only temporarily before: the perfect cover for active measures, and not only thanks to the white noise of anonymous publication activity, from torrents to Twitter. What made the cover perfect was the veritable celebrity culture that surrounded first Julian Assange, then Chelsea Manning, and finally Edward Snowden. These self-described whistle-blowers were widely idolized as heroes, seen by their supporters as unflinching and principled in the face of oppression. The situation was a dream come true for old-school disinformation professionals. The internet first disempowered journalism and then empowered activism.

…

In 2006, Assange asked Young to become the public face of WikiLeaks in the United States, and suggested that Young could register WikiLeaks.org in his name.7 The cooperation failed; two eccentric personalities clashed, and the radical-libertarian partnership came to an end. Yet WikiLeaks would soon eclipse Cryptome. In 2010, Chelsea Manning, then a twenty-two-year-old Army private known as Bradley,8 leaked more than a quarter million State Department and Department of Defense documents to WikiLeaks. The leaked diplomatic cables spanned about a decade, and turned Assange and his website into household names. By 2013, Cryptome had collected and published just 70,000 files, many random and hand-curated.

Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy
by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel
Published 4 Sep 2013

But with each chapter we found new privacy issues, and some are too serious to brush aside. While we were busy searching the world for mobile, social media, sensor, data and location technologies, the issues of government surveillance became a prominent national issue in the United States. As the names Bradley (Chelsea) Manning, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and Edward Snowden emerged from the headlines into the national consciousness, public attention came to focus on the role of the secret FISA court, the electronic surveillance of millions of Americans under a National Security Agency data-mining operation called PRISM and so much more.

The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us
by James Ball
Published 19 Aug 2020

On WikiLeaks, David Leigh and Luke Harding were a pleasure to work with and their book is a valuable reminder of the time. LSE’s Charlie Beckett was a joy to co-write an academic book with on the era. As to those within WikiLeaks itself, the good ones know who they are, even if the world doesn’t – and Chelsea Manning deserves to be a free woman. I discovered the surprisingly strange world of ICANN thanks to a story idea from Merope Mills, and worked with Laurence Mathieu-Léger reporting the feature and the video, which was a joy. Thanks are of course due to the extensive Guardian team reporting the Snowden documents, notably Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, Spencer Ackerman, Julian Borger, Nick Hopkins and numerous others.

The Twittering Machine
by Richard Seymour
Published 20 Aug 2019

It was the net as Assange or Pirate Party activists fantasized it could be: a stateless anarchy, without intellectual property rights. The fact that they made leaking ‘sexy’, as security experts put it, and that the enormously modish trolling group Anonymous had joined the war on secrecy, raised the stakes and demanded examples be set. Private Chelsea Manning, blamed for the leaks, was held in solitary confinement at a supermax prison and subject to what the UN special rapporteur on torture called cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. The Justice Department demanded access to the Twitter accounts of WikiLeaks volunteers, dismissing privacy and free speech concerns as ‘absurd’.26 It appeared, for a moment, as though the White House had misunderstood the real potential of the social industry, skewered by its own hype about ‘Twitter revolutions’ and the advantages of tech.

Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control
by Medea Benjamin
Published 8 Apr 2013

Later that same day, Panetta noted US troops had helped affect regime change in Libya using the Global Hawk surveillance drone and the Predator—a hunter/ killer aircraft that, he said, “I was very familiar with in my last job.” Panetta was not reprimanded for disclosing top-secret classified information and joking about what many legal experts consider war crimes. In the warped imperial culture of Washington, DC, when a low-level soldier like Bradley Manning leaks classified information with the express intent of revealing to the world the existence of war crimes, he faces life in prison. Panetta’s joking disclosure, like President Obama’s own quip about murdering the Jonas Brothers band with Predator drones, draws a hearty laugh from the establishment, not an indictment.

The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey
by Michael Huemer
Published 29 Oct 2012

Vice President Biden called Wikileaks founder Julian Assange a terrorist and promised that the Justice Department would be looking for ways to prosecute him. Former Arkansas governor and sometime presidential candidate Mike Huckabee called Wikileaks’ source a traitor and called for his execution. As of this writing (mid-2012), Wikileaks’ source for the Iraq documents, U.S. military intelligence analyst Bradley Manning, is being prosecuted by the military under numerous charges, including ‘aiding the enemy’, a capital offence (though the government will not seek the death penalty).32 These cases show that not everyone is easily intimidated. But they also show that journalists and their sources have rational cause for fear should they publish information embarrassing to the government.

…

What Causes War? An Introduction to Theories of International Conflict. New York: Lexington Books. Cashman, Greg, and Leonard C. Robinson. 2007. An Introduction to the Causes of War: Patterns of Interstate Conflict from World War I to Iraq. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. CBS News. 2011. ‘WikiLeaks: Bradley Manning Faces 22 New Charges’, CBS News, 2 March, www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/03/02/national/main20038464.shtml. Accessed March 10, 2011. Center for Responsive Politics. 2011. Reelection Rates over the Years, www.opensecrets.org/bigpicture/reelect.php?cycle=2006. Accessed March 15, 2011. Center for Systemic Peace. 2011.

All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work
by Joanna Biggs
Published 8 Apr 2015

He didn’t romanticise what he did: ‘I don’t mind what kind of work it is as long as you’re going to get paid, for me that is what is matter at the end of the day, for me.’ He’d never seen a ballet. When he finished work at 4.30 p.m., he might watch Liverpool play: ‘We’re still a long way behind Chelsea, Man United, Arsenal, City, even Tottenham now. I always see football as you never know, still, Liverpool need a couple of good players.’ He had been to see England play at Wembley once, the football equivalent of Covent Garden. Daniel makes twenty-six pairs a day, and is working up to the standard of thirty pairs a day.

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America
by Sarah Kendzior
Published 6 Apr 2020

Among the few who saw the threat clearly was computer scientist Jaron Lanier, who, in 2010, warned the public of a new danger: WikiLeaks. At the time, free speech advocates were hailing WikiLeaks, and its founder, Julian Assange, as defenders of government transparency. Their lionization of the leaker organization was largely due to frustration with the criminal impunity of the Bush administration. In February 2010, soldier Chelsea Manning exposed war crimes by sending classified documents to WikiLeaks, which WikiLeaks then published online. The emphasis on civilian victims led human rights advocates to believe that WikiLeaks would prove a formidable opponent for autocratic regimes. But after WikiLeaks dropped hacked documents from the US State Department in November, Lanier predicted the opposite—that WikiLeaks would ultimately ally with dictators and that social media networks would abet them: The WikiLeaks method punishes a nation—or any human undertaking—that falls short of absolute, total transparency, which is all human undertakings, but perversely rewards an absolute lack of transparency.

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America
by Christopher Wylie
Published 8 Oct 2019

I was exhausted, I had been burned over and over, and I wished that I could just put the Cambridge Analytica ordeal in the past. On top of that, Cambridge Analytica was no longer just a company. My old boss Steve Bannon was now sitting in the White House and on the National Security Council of the most powerful nation on earth. I had seen what happened to whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning when they were at the mercy of the full force of the U.S. government. It was too late to change the outcome of the Brexit vote or the U.S. presidential election. I had tried to warn people, and no one seemed to care. Why would they care now? But Cadwalladr cared. When I read what she had already published, I could see that she was on the trail of Cambridge Analytica and AIQ but had not yet cracked how deep their misdeeds actually went.

Data and the City
by Rob Kitchin,Tracey P. Lauriault,Gavin McArdle
Published 2 Aug 2017

However, making claims was not one of the five classes of speech acts (judgments, decisions, commitments, acknowledgements and clarifications) that he identified as having performative force. Claims are thus a sixth speech act and key to the becoming of a citizen. To be sure subjects make rights claims through what they say as many individual and collective declarations attest. Chelsea Manning says, ‘We’re citizens, not subjects. We have the right to criticize government without fear’ (Manning 2015). While these words may not have legal, if not performative force, their imaginary force can be powerful. There are many other examples of how subjects make claims such as those who call upon authorities to inscribe digital rights through regulations and legislation and give them legal force.

Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another
by Matt Taibbi
Published 7 Oct 2019

Now, it’s a laugh track, and the joke is on us. 1Regarding the unnamed Ferguson sources: perhaps they’d have risked a penalty to offer their names. But others had taken that same risk in other cases—like the Garner case—because they felt strongly enough about what they felt was the truth that they were willing to incur consequences to tell their stories. The same is very rarely true for unnamed sources. In some cases, as in the Chelsea Manning case, an anonymous source is taking a big risk. But most of the anonymous sources in the above examples were probably bosses, not underlings. Why would the head of the CIA need to be nameless? A general? A chief of police or D.A.? Always take that into consideration. What is the purpose of the anonymity?

The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date
by Samuel Arbesman
Published 31 Aug 2012

Bradley’s father was even more cosmopolitan and traveled throughout the continent of Europe, leading his lifetime movements to be spread throughout a space that is about 2,500 miles on each side. Bradley himself, a world-famous scientist, traveled across the globe. While the Earth is not a square grid, he traveled in a range that is around 25,000 miles on a side, about the circumference of the Earth. A Bradley man could move ten times farther throughout the course of his life with each successive generation, traveling in a space an order of magnitude more extensive in each direction than his father. This increase in travel is an exponential increase in distance from one generation to the next. If we look at the areas and not just the distance of the geographic footprint of each man, these also increase exponentially, at a rate double that of the increase in distance (because they are squares).

Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web
by Cole Stryker
Published 14 Jun 2011

Anonymouse thinks that the press is asking the wrong questions, claiming that they tend to focus on the illegal hacks rather than the illegal acts that the hackers are able to expose. He says that most of the media coverage belies a “sick” acceptance of HBGary’s activities, using government power to spy on its citizens. He draws parallels to the freedom-fighting actions of Anonymous and those of Bradley Manning and Julian Assange, who have also experienced a fair amount of negative press. How about prosecuting the soldiers named in one of the Afghan war diaries as having shot a bunch of unarmed teenagers? The number one response I’ve noticed when I argue about this is “Well this is the real world, corruption happens, deal with it.”

Them and Us: How Immigrants and Locals Can Thrive Together
by Philippe Legrain
Published 14 Oct 2020

Indeed, civics should be taught in schools to all pupils, not just to immigrants. Remember that then Prime Minister Gordon Brown couldn’t answer his own citizenship test questions. Beyond that, requiring immigrants to ‘behave like us’ begs the question: behave like whom? Should they model themselves on Barack Obama or Donald Trump? Is their role model trans woman Chelsea Manning – a whistle-blower for some, a traitor who betrayed official secrets to others – or Jerry Falwell Jr. – a conservative evangelical icon for some, a hypocrite accused of an improper relationship with a male pool attendant (a relationship he denies), to others? In the UK, should they emulate environmentalist David Attenborough or petrol-head Jeremy Clarkson?

The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide
by Steven W. Thrasher
Published 1 Aug 2022

The criminal justice system and the immigration system overlap for them when the work they do in the informal economy might get them arrested. It was an Obama administration policy embodying this dynamic that made life even more precarious for Lorena’s “girls” and that first brought her into Chase Strangio’s life. Long before he was known as an attorney who helped free transgender whistleblower army lieutenant Chelsea Manning from prison and worked on the landmark trans Supreme Court case R. G. and G. R. Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. EEOC and Aimee Stephens, Chase was a “baby lawyer” working at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP). After finishing law school in 2010, Chase worked there on a fellowship focused on “carceral systems and disability.”

Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, From the Ancients to Fake News
by Eric Berkowitz
Published 3 May 2021

In 2014, Greenwald and others won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on a cache of confidential documents showing massive global cybersurveillance by the US, while Edward Snowden—the whistleblower who stole the materials and leaked them to Greenwald—was charged with espionage. Another publisher of stolen government documents, Julian Assange, is in serious legal jeopardy for publishing confidential US government materials on his WikiLeaks website in 2010. The materials were stolen by Chelsea Manning, an army intelligence analyst, who was given a lengthy sentence in a military prison for the theft. Should Assange be celebrated along with Greenwald as a journalist who brought important matters to the public, or is he a criminal along with Snowden and Manning? The answer, according to the US prosecutors who unsealed an indictment against Assange in 2019, is obvious: “Julian Assange is no journalist.”

Pegasus: How a Spy in Your Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity, and Democracy
by Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud
Published 17 Jan 2023

Two weeks in Berlin and Donncha knew thirty different cybergeeks locked in battle against the rising tide of cybersurveillance. Donncha ended up back in Berlin after graduation, in the summer of 2015, a few weeks after the unveiling in Alexanderplatz of the life-size bronze statues of Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning, the US whistleblower who had released hundreds of thousands of documents to Wikileaks, a number of them classified or sensitive, and a lot more of them simply embarrassing. Donncha was in Berlin for a Summer of Privacy internship at Tor, a nonprofit cybersecurity venture. “We believe everyone should be able to explore the internet with privacy,” read the Tor mission statement.

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It
by Marc Goodman
Published 24 Feb 2015

Besides transnational organized crime syndicates, hacktivists—politically motivated cyber attackers—represent one of the most influential and powerful groups in cyberspace. Anonymous, LulzSec, AntiSec, WikiLeaks, and the Syrian Electronic Army fall into this group and launch their attacks in retaliation for perceived injustices. Personalities such as Julian Assange, Chelsea (Bradley) Manning, and Edward Snowden have become household names for challenging some of the world’s most powerful institutions and for releasing data that others would most certainly have preferred remain hidden. While Assange, Manning, and Snowden have been propelled onto the covers of newspapers around the world, other hacktivist groups prefer that their individual members remain discreetly hidden in subordination to the organization itself and its broader agenda.

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While big data may be the new oil, our personal data are more like weapons-grade plutonium—dangerous, long lasting, and once they are leaked, there’s no getting them back. Even the federal government is realizing it too can fall victim to this problem. Just look at the 2010 WikiLeaks debacle and the hundreds of thousands of classified diplomatic cables Private Chelsea (Bradley) Manning was able to steal while working as an army intelligence analyst in Iraq. Of course just a few years later, the world would meet Edward Snowden, who used his skills and access as an NSA system administrator to steal millions of highly classified files from America and its allies and share them with journalists for publication online.

DarkMarket: Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You
by Misha Glenny
Published 3 Oct 2011

What he means by that is that he sent infected emails to company email addresses, and it was but a matter of minutes before one of its many thousands of employees had fallen for the trap. So even if you have an unbreachable digital fortress, you have only overcome one of several major security challenges. Similarly, these days it is much easier to perpetrate an inside job in a company because of the ease with which data can be collected and stored. We know that Bradley Manning, the man accused of having removed the US diplomatic cables that were subsequently published on WikiLeaks’ website, managed to download all the material onto a CD marked as a Lady Gaga album. We also know that Stuxnet – to date the world’s most sophisticated virus – must have been planted on its apparent target in Iran’s nuclear facilities by somebody (wittingly or otherwise) infecting the computer systems with a memory stick or CD.

Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe
by Antony Loewenstein
Published 1 Sep 2015

Louise Adler, Elisa Berg, Sally Heath, Paul Smitz, and Penelope White have all contributed hugely to the vision in your hands. I continue to be inspired by a range of journalists and groups whose work informs my own: Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, Pratap Chatterjee, Glenn Greenwald, Amy Goodman, the late and great Michael Hastings, Naomi Klein, Dahr Jamail, Chelsea Manning, George Monbiot, Greg Palast, John Pilger, Jeremy Scahill, Edward Snowden, and Matt Taibbi. Alison Martin is a truly unique woman who constantly challenges, provokes, and loves me. Her intelligence, insights, and warmth run through this book. Our life journey together is one of the best damn things to ever happen to me.

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information
by Frank Pasquale
Published 17 Nov 2014

The Snowden leaks make the shared infrastructure of state and private data collection incontrovertible. Never again can data deregulationists claim that corporate data collection is entirely distinct and far less threatening than government surveillance. They are irreversibly intertwined. Enduring Opacity Despite the leaks of Snowden (and Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange), the national surveillance apparatus is still opaque on many levels.193 It enjoys both real and legal secrecy, hidden as it is in secure networks and protected by the heavy hand of the law. There’s plenty of complexity, too, should secrecy fail. Intelligence agencies commission private defense contractors like SAIC, Northrop Grumman, Booz Allen, and Palantir to devise specialized software to monitor their data sources—which include social networks.194 Their algorithms are complex enough by themselves, but the contractors are also bound to protect company trade secrets.

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist
by Michael Shermer
Published 8 Apr 2020

He is deprived of all freedom of conscience in being forced to kill against his will.3 For this treasonous act of voicing their opposition to the draft (and US involvement in a largely European war), Schenck and Baer were convicted of violating Section 3 of the Espionage Act of 1917, passed shortly after US entry into the Great War in order to prohibit interference with government recruitment into the armed services, and to prevent insubordination in the military and/or support for enemies of the United States during wartime.4 It sounds like an antiquated law applicable to a darker time in American history, employed as it was to silence such socialists as the newspaper editor Victor Berger, the labor leader and Socialist Party of America Presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, communists Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and Pentagon Papers revealer Daniel Ellsberg. But, in fact, the Act is still used today as a cudgel against such whistleblowers as diplomatic cable leaker Chelsea Manning and National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, still on the lam in Moscow for his Wikileaks revelations about spying (and other questionable activities) on both American citizens and foreign actors (including German Chancellor Angela Merkel) by the United States government. Tellingly, as mission creep set in and “clear and present danger” expanded to include speech unrelated to military operations or combating foreign enemies, Holmes dissented in other cases, reverting to a position of absolute protection for nearly all speech short of that intended to cause criminal harm, concluding that the “marketplace of ideas” of open discussion, debate, and disputation was the best test of their verisimilitude.

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 14 May 2014

The balance between liberty and security has shifted dramatically in a way that may not have advanced security but has certainly diminished liberty. Until recently it was assumed that the evils of the security state were confined to “over there,” to Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and extraordinary rendition. But the disclosures from two whistle-blowers, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, have revealed a veritable secret Leviathan, capable of classifying more than ninety-two million documents in one year and giving 1.8 million people “top security” clearance, including Manning, a lowly private in his early twenties with a record of emotional instability.2 And who was in charge of all this?

Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks (Cambridge Studies in the Emergence of Global Enterprise)
by Andrew L. Russell
Published 27 Apr 2014

Google’s high-minded defense of the freedom of expression was, the Global Times declared, a ruse – a “disguised attempt to impose its values on other cultures in the name of democracy.”6 The inherent contradictions and tensions bundled within terms such as “openness” and “transparency” have been further exposed by activists such as Chelsea Manning, Aaron Swartz, and Edward Snowden who put powerful institutions in uncomfortable positions by publicizing data that were intended to be secret. In other words, openness (and its ally, transparency) is easy to promote in rhetoric but more complicated to adhere to in practice. One comes away from the popular accounts of high-tech globalization with an oversimplified, linear, and somewhat deterministic view of the relationship between technology and society: for better and for worse, the Internet and digital technologies have thrust an unprecedented era of openness on us.

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers
by Stephen Graham
Published 8 Nov 2016

Of unacknowledged moons and ‘black’ space craft moving through the pre-dawn and early evening darkness, where the rising and setting sun lights up the stainless steel bodies, and they blink in and out of sight as they glide though the backdrop of a darkened sky hundred of miles below. In most cases, the reflection is all we get.20 Fittingly for this book, Paglen’s work, like the whistle-blowing leaks of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, is an example of what has been called sous-surveillance – literally ‘under surveillance’ or ‘surveillance from below’. In challenging the cloak of invisibility and secrecy that obscures top-down surveillance by national security states, Paglen and the satellite-tracking community fleetingly expose one crucial material embodiment of the increasingly secretive and authoritarian nature of security politics.21 Predictably, further exposures come from the strategic competitors of the United States.

Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom
by Rebecca MacKinnon
Published 31 Jan 2012

But without clear transparency and accountability about how, when, and under what specific circumstances personal information is being collected and used, citizens have good reason to worry about the growth of the state’s “panoptic” power. WIKILEAKS AND THE FATE OF CONTROVERSIAL SPEECH WikiLeaks and several news organizations that the whistle-blowing organization had chosen as partners published the first batch of classified US diplomatic cables, leaked by disgruntled US Army Private Bradley Manning, in November 2010. Vice President Joseph Biden declared WikiLeaks’ leader, Julian Assange, to be a “digital terrorist.” Senator Joe Lieberman declared that “WikiLeaks’ illegal, outrageous, and reckless acts have compromised our national security and put lives at risk around the world.” Meanwhile, the WikiLeaks “Cablegate” website, dedicated to showcasing the leaked diplomatic cables, came under distributed denial of service attacks of unknown origin.

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World
by Clive Thompson
Published 26 Mar 2019

“I don’t think I look hacker enough,” Austin says with mock concern, scanning the room, then flipping his hoodie up. “There you go,” the woman hacking at her laptop across from him says, and laughs. Wandering around behind Austin is Jason Leopold, a BuzzFeed investigative reporter who’s giving a talk on freedom-of-information requests. Lingering near the front door, on her mobile phone, is Chelsea Manning, the army intelligence analyst who was famously jailed for leaking records of military activity and diplomatic cables that helped kick off the Arab Spring, and who’s here to give a rally-the-troops speech to the hackers. The political spectrum of hackerdom is surprisingly broad. As Coleman notes, the common threads of the culture—a love of the craft and sharing of knowledge, support of free software, a distaste for government limits on coding—create groups working together on projects who might otherwise see eye to eye on little else.

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World
by General Stanley McChrystal , Tantum Collins , David Silverman and Chris Fussell
Published 11 May 2015

Never before in U.S. history had so much classified material been compromised in one blow. Since then, several similar incidents have unfolded, most notably the even bigger leak perpetrated by contractor Edward Snowden. An investigation identified the soldier, who by then had been demoted to private first class, as Bradley Manning.* A Fox News op-ed asked with outrage how “all this leaked information was the work of a single 22-year-old enlisted man in the Army.” The author was incredulous: “How could one individual gain such access to all that classified material? Clearly we have grossly under-prioritized information security.”

The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities
by John J. Mearsheimer
Published 24 Sep 2018

The deep affection for secrecy shown by both the Bush and Obama administrations is not surprising in light of their illegal or at least questionable surveillance of American citizens, which they tried to hide from the public, Congress, and the courts.74 This is one reason President Obama was so determined to punish Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, and more generally why he went to war with unprecedented fervor against reporters and whistleblowers.75 He also went to great lengths to disguise how deeply involved the United States was in the Syrian civil war, and to divulge as little information as possible about drone strikes.

The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives
by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen
Published 22 Apr 2013

To some extent, leaking selectively reflects purpose while releasing material in bulk is effectively thumbing one’s nose at the entire system of secure information. But context matters, too. How different would the reaction have been, from Western governments in particular, if WikiLeaks had published stolen classified documents from the regimes in Venezuela, North Korea and Iran? If Bradley Manning, the alleged source of WikiLeaks’ materials about the United States government and military, had been a North Korean border guard or a defector from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, how differently would politicians and pundits in the United States have viewed him? Were a string of whistle-blowing websites dedicated to exposing abuses within those countries to appear, surely the tone of the Western political class would shift.

Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnivores
by Greg Palast
Published 14 Nov 2011

But the club clearly thought it prudent to keep silent. That silence is complicity. The cable came from the U.S. Embassy in Baku. Who had the steel, the courage, the noblesse and fearlessness to bust this open to make this cold cable public? No, not one of Baba’s prisoners. He’s one of President Obama’s prisoners: Private Bradley Manning. While I’ve been hunting the globe for evidence of oil industry killings, I’ve also been hunting for a much more difficult set of clues: to the source of human courage. Manning’s is immeasurable. Soldier Manning, in prison inside the Quantico Marine Base near Washington, DC, sleeps in nothing but his underpants.

The Way of the Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of Firearms
by Iain Overton
Published 15 Apr 2015

Nervous and a little self-conscious, he was unused to the media spotlight and here he was being asked about a set of documents his whistleblowing organisation, Wikileaks, had just released: a cache of military reports that exposed the truth about America’s war in Afghanistan. Julian had some of the most controversial secret documents ever to find their way to the light of day. Millions of files from the US diplomatic and military operations overseas that had been leaked by US soldier Bradley Manning. And I was there, as the editor of the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, to see if my outfit could have a peek. Julian, interested in the Bureau’s ability to make documentary films, was keen to see if the contents of another set of files, this time the Iraq War military reports, could end up on TV channels the world over.

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together
by Bruce Schneier
Published 14 Feb 2012

Moral: Moral teaching not to harm others. Reputational: Society ostracizes those who turn against their own people. Institutional: Laws against war crimes. Security: None. In 2005, Captain Ian Fishback exposed the U.S.'s use of torture in Iraq because of his religious convictions. Similarly, Bradley Manning had to deal with two competing societal dilemmas in 2010 when he allegedly became a whistle-blower and sent 250,000 secret State Department cables to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, which made them public.5 Like the Libyan pilots, he chose to defect from the government and cooperate with what he perceived as the country as a whole.

Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet
by David Moon , Patrick Ruffini , David Segal , Aaron Swartz , Lawrence Lessig , Cory Doctorow , Zoe Lofgren , Jamie Laurie , Ron Paul , Mike Masnick , Kim Dotcom , Tiffiniy Cheng , Alexis Ohanian , Nicole Powers and Josh Levy
Published 30 Apr 2013

The SOPA/PIPA win was the first great American political hack of the Internet age, but it won’t be the last. OR Books PUBLISHING THE POLITICS OF THE INTERNET Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet JULIAN ASSANGE Tweets From Tahrir: Egypt’s Revolution as It Unfolded, in the Words of the People Who Made It NADIA IDLE AND ALEX NUNNS, EDITORS The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story of the Suspect Behind the Largest Security Breach in U.S. History CHASE MADAR Freeloading: How Our Insatiable Appetite for Free Content Starves Creativity CHRIS RUEN Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency MICAH L.

The Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-Up in Oakland
by Ali Winston and Darwin Bondgraham
Published 10 Jan 2023

Olsen was relatively new to activism, having taken part in the state capitol occupation in his native Wisconsin the previous year when labor unions tried to save workers’ collective bargaining rights. He hooked up with Iraq Veterans Against the War in Northern California and took part in Anonymous-led protests in support of WikiLeaks source Chelsea Manning.44 When the Occupy San Francisco encampment appeared, Olsen joined and became a fixture outside the Federal Reserve, sleeping overnight and returning to his apartment only to shower. “It was easier than commuting in from Daly City,” Olsen recalled ten years later. At Fourteenth and Broadway, Olsen spotted a familiar face: navy veteran Joshua Shephard, another IVAW and Veterans for Peace activist.

The Secret World: A History of Intelligence
by Christopher Andrew
Published 27 Jun 2018

.* That intelligence continues to generate headline news has been due not merely to the prolonged official enquiries into 9/11 and the Iraq War but also to unprecedented amounts of classified material leaked by ‘whistle-blowers’. In 2010 the WikiLeaks website, founded by Julian Assange, began publishing online documents downloaded from State Department and military databases by US Army Private Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning.† The 251,287 confidential documents passed by Manning to WikiLeaks were by far the largest number ever leaked by a whistleblower.67 When Mike Pompeo became the CIA’s director early in 2017, he denounced WikiLeaks as ‘a non-state hostile intelligence service’.68 Like much other reporting on twenty-first-century intelligence, the enormous global publicity given to WikiLeaks has been mostly devoid of historical perspective.

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Unlike Mark Felt, Ellsberg’s identity quickly became public knowledge. Charged on twelve felony counts which carried a total maximum sentence of 115 years, he was found not guilty at a trial in 1973 on the grounds of governmental misconduct and illegal evidence gathering against him.§ Ellsberg later became a supporter of WikiLeaks, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. Ellsberg’s example inspired NSA’s first whistleblower, Perry Fellwock, a 25-year-old former analyst opposed to the Vietnam War, to give an interview in 1972 to the radical Ramparts magazine. So little had been made public about NSA that Fellwock was the first insider to reveal that it had a budget larger than the CIA’s and to give some details of the global UKUSA network, but damaged his credibility by claiming total success in SIGINT operations against the Soviet Union: ‘The fact is that we’re able to break every code they’ve got, understand every type of communications equipment and enciphering device they’ve got.’* The New York Times reported that its own ‘intelligence sources both in and out of the Government had corroborated much of Mr.

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities
by Eric Kaufmann
Published 24 Oct 2018

As a result, in October 2017 the universities minister, Jo Johnson, mooted the idea that a new Office for Students be empowered to fine universities engaging in no-platforming.12 Speakers have also been no-platformed from the right, albeit at a lower rate. Those who support abortion have been disinvited from universities with a Catholic ethos, like Boston College, and speakers critical of Israel’s policies in Palestine, such as Robert Trivers, or who have blown the whistle on the military, like Chelsea Manning, have been barred from universities such as Harvard. Islamist speakers have also been targeted – and British academics have been told to report students expressing ‘extreme’ Islamist views. Academics have rightly pushed back against the latter, but should also be decrying the no-platforming of right-wing speakers.

Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts
by Jill Abramson
Published 5 Feb 2019

There were not clear guidelines. But in 2014, when internal Sony emails were hacked, Baquet and the Times decided not to use the stolen material in coverage. Earlier, though, I had opened the door by publishing front-page stories based on stolen documents, relying on contraband first from U.S. Army Private Chelsea Manning and later from NSA contractor Edward Snowden. These documents revealed major stories about failures of the Iraq War and government snooping, which made their publication worth it, I thought. Newsworthiness and the Times’s responsibility to inform the public were the right standards to use, but these were all hard calls.

Austerity Britain: 1945-51
by David Kynaston
Published 12 May 2008

‘The war’s got us down, what with the bombing and the blackout, and the worrying about coupons and queues, women like me haven’t the mind to take to politics,’ a Fulham resident told Mass-Observation early in the campaign. ‘We want to be left alone for a bit – not worrying about speeches.’ A woman from Bayswater agreed: ‘I don’t take any interest in it. Not a scrap. To me it’s an awful lot of tommy rot, what with each party running the other down, and when they get in, they’ll be bosom pals.’ A Chelsea man was the most succinct: ‘Dunno who I’ll vote for. I don’t like politicians anyway – they’re all crooks.’ In mid-June an M-O survey of Londoners as a whole found that only one in seven was ‘happy or elated’, that a third ‘felt no different from during the war’, that a quarter ‘felt worried’, that 15 per cent ‘felt depressed’, and that several ‘simply said that there ought not to be an election yet’.

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist
by Alex Zevin
Published 12 Nov 2019

Obama’s unprecedented use of drones to assassinate suspected terrorists on his ‘kill lists’ – in Yemen, Somalia or Pakistan, where America was not at war, and without judicial oversight even when the targets were its own citizens – ‘do not undermine the rules of war’, though more could be done to ‘adapt’ a ‘potent new weapon’ to the constitution.123 When the US Army private then named Bradley Manning leaked hundreds of thousands of secret government documents related partly to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2010, exposing war crimes committed by US mercenaries, the Economist insisted that both he and the ‘digital Jacobins’ at Wikileaks to whom Manning confided this cache be punished.