Reading material: biography of WikiLeaks whistleblower Chelsea Manning

Chelsea Manning was 22 years old when she leaked tens of thousands of documents about the Iraq and Afghanistan war to WikiLeaks in 2010. The data analyst was sentenced to 35 years in prison for this. What and how Manning leaked is now well known. She describes why she did that in her first autobiography, Readme.txt.

Readme.txt is an aptly chosen title for a book about the life of Chelsea Manning. The title refers to the readme file with reading instructions that she sent along during her first leaks. In 2010, Manning leaked more than 750,000 confidential defense documents related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although Manning was only 22 years old at the time, her role as a data analyst gave her access to an unprecedented amount of data. Manning was able to burn it to DVDs and smuggle it out of the country after her deployment to Iraq, an outgrowth of the poor information security in the military at the time.