It’s a sign of the times that government secrecy isn’t top of mind for American activist and whistleblower Chelsea Manning.
“We’re actually so awash in information now that secrecy isn’t the issue anymore,” she said. “It’s verification.”
She spoke to Decrypt over a video call in June about her security work at Web3 privacy project Nym and what brought her—somewhat begrudgingly—back into the world of cryptography.
Manning became synonymous with government transparency when she gave classified documents—250,000 American diplomatic cables and 480,000 Army reports on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars—to WikiLeaks in 2010. It was, and still is, the largest intelligence leak in U.S. history.
In the aftermath, she was court-martialed and served seven years of a 35-year prison sentence before it was commuted by President Barack Obama in 2017. Before the commutation of her sentence, Manning, a transgender woman, was incarcerated at a men’s military prison at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas.
On the day she spoke with Decrypt, it had been a week since British Home Secretary Priti Patel approved the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States. There he would face charges under the Espionage Act for his role in publishing the documents he received from Manning in 2010.
Manning made it clear that her court martial prevents her from...
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