Chelsea Manning’s reluctant return to crypto and renewed passion for privacy

It is a sign of the times that secrecy from the authorities is not at the top of the mind of the American activist and whistleblower Chelsea Manning.

“We’re actually so flooded with information now that secrecy is no longer the issue,” she said. “It’s confirmation.”

She talked to Decrypt over a video call in June about her security work at Web3 the privacy project Nym and what brought her – a little reluctantly – back to the world of cryptography.

Manning became synonymous with public openness when she gave classified documents – 250,000 US 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 US history.

In the wake of that, she was sentenced to martial law and served seven years of a 35-year prison sentence before it was overturned by President Barack Obama in 2017. Before the conversion of the verdict, Manning, a transgender woman, was imprisoned in a men’s military. prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

The day she spoke to Decrypt, it had been a week since the British Home Secretary Priti Patel approved the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States. There he would be prosecuted under the Espionage Act for his role in publishing the documents he received from Manning in 2010.

Manning made it clear that her martial law prevented her from commenting directly on Assange’s extradition. But she said the long-standing nature of cases like his has sharpened her focus on building tools to help people preserve their privacy.

“I want to ensure that cases that will last for 12, 15 years do not happen again in the future,” she said. “That’s why I believe very strongly in this type of tool and in this technology. There are pitfalls to not having this type of technology.”

When she talked to Decrypt on June 24, it had been a few hours since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. With it, the court eliminated the constitutional right to abortion and laid the groundwork for a ban in as many as 17 states.

The implication of these prohibitions became a very timely example of how people could use one decentralized mixnet as Nym.

Manning explained that someone outside the state of Texas, where an abortion ban has taken effect, may hypothetically want to advise Texas residents on how or where they can safely complete the procedure.

To be clear, it is now illegal in certain jurisdictions.

The potential helper risks being identified by law enforcement through their internet metadata. Metadata, even if it does not include the contents of emails or other messages, can be used to show where the person lives or when and how often they have been in contact with someone in Texas.

To protect themselves, they can use a VPN, or virtual private network, to route their Internet data through an encrypted server. That person can also use something like Tor, a browser that acts as a supercharged VPN by sending data through three different encrypted servers on the way to the destination.

It is difficult, but not impossible, for encrypted data to be decrypted. That’s where a mixnet, like Nym, comes in, Manning said.

It separates parts of metadata, such as a person’s IP address or the recipient of a message, and mixes it with other metadata. The resulting packets of encrypted data combine the IP addresses, time, date and location of many different people’s metadata.

It only works if enough node operators participate, break apart and remix packets of metadata. Otherwise, it’s like trying to hide in a crowd of just a few people.

It’s there NYM token recording. Like other decentralized public blockchains, a native token is how Nym encourages users to run nodes and participate in the network. Manning has no control over NYM’s tokenomics, but she has worked hard to emphasize the importance of the network being both large and decentralized.

“The decentralized network part is necessary and necessary to have a mixnet,” Manning said. “To have the required number of nodes operating on the network with enough traffic flow to provide privacy protection on the mix network, you need to motivate people to run those nodes and motivate people to validate.”

Manning’s role in the project has been twofold: As a security expert, she has figured out how to overcome hardware problems that have hampered network growth, especially in rural areas with limited Internet access. She has also used her connections in the security community to bring privacy advocates back to crypto.

When crypto became an abbreviation for cryptocurrency instead of cryptography, many of the community’s mainstays – including herself – took a step back. This is a consequence of investors initiating what she calls “nouveau rich yuppie culture”.

“People are laughing, but I’ve lost all of Bitcoins with information I extracted from a MacBook Pro. So I was very early in this process, Manning said. “And I moved away from it – I mean, obviously I was in jail for a significant period of time – but even afterwards I kind of moved away from it because I realized that there are a lot of people who do not necessarily understand the technical aspects of this or security and the privacy implications. ”

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