Manning warns of mass surveillance
Activist spoke at event in Montreal about power and risks of technology
MONTREAL— American whistleblower Chelsea Manning had her freedom forcibly taken from her during the seven years she spent in a military prison.
Released one year and one week ago, after former president Barack Obama commuted her 35-year sentence, she was homeless, and unable to get credit, a bank account or access services that most people take for granted. Last September, she was turned away at the CanadaUnited States border, refused entry due to her criminal record for violations of the Espionage Act, charges stemming from her decision as an army intelligence analyst to release classified military records about the Iraq and Afghan wars to WikiLeaks.
Finally granted a Canadian visa to attend and speak at a business and technology conference in Montreal on Thursday, the 30-year-old carried with her a message one might not expect to hear from someone who has been through the wringer and is still trying to rebuild their life.
“You’re not helpless,” Manning told her audience. “You have power.” In January, Manning launched what many see as a long-shot bid to win a U.S. Senate seat in Maryland on a campaign platform that includes abolishing prisons and dismantling the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. But for the moment, Manning’s power is limited to that of her voice, which is heavily amplified via her Twitter account and the international media attention she has garnered since obtaining her freedom.
She is also said to be working on a book and documentary about her life.
During this brief Canadian visit, along with similar public appearances that have taken place in Berlin and Texas, Manning has been focused on warning about the risks of technology and the mass-surveillance infrastructure that she had a hand in making and applying as a member of “an occupying force” while deployed to Iraq.
She cast herself as a sort of modern-day version of Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist and so-called “father of the atomic bomb” who spent much of his later life campaigning for arms control.
She said that in the mid-2000s, she was working on algorithms using data for marketing purposes — find customers and identify repeat customers for companies.
“Those same algorithms were the ones I employed in Iraq in 2009 and 2010. Now we were using these algorithms to target people not as customers, but as people to catch and kill,” she said.
Less lethal comparisons can be easily drawn with the recent woes of Facebook, which was used by the Russian firm Internet Research Agency in an alleged attempt to influence the results of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. That and the harvesting of the personal information of 87 million Facebook users by the political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica have served as a concrete example for common folks of the risks inherent in technology and data collection.
For those reasons, Manning said technological developers need to consider both the uses and potential misuses of the tools they create. “One technology company works on video, another works on collection of big data, another one works on self-flying drones and another one is a defence contractor that works on weapons. It’s not the individual technologies, but it’s how they are packaged and built, and you can end up with self-flying death planes,” she said.