Whistleblowers and Chelsea Manning

Chelsea Manning (originally born as Bradley Manning) was assigned in 2009 to an Army unit in Iraq as an intelligence analysts. Having access to classified databases, in early 2010 she leaked three-quarters of a million classified or unclassified, sensitive military/diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks and confided this to her online acquaintance, Adrian Lamo. She was arrested in May of that same year and convicted in July of 2013 on the bases of violations of the Espionage Act and other offenses.

While in prison, Chelsea is still actively publishing documents and tweeting out (her most recent tweet being April 21st) about her life in prison, and her area of journalism. You can find her twitter here. One of her most recent articles When will the US government stop persecuting whistleblowers? posted on March 18, 2016 on a support network for her, goes into depth about the National Insider Threat Task Force, which was formed after her arrest, under the authority of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and several other US government agencies. The broad mission of the program is to deter any threats from anyone who willingly or unwillingly misuses their access to government documents. In her article she states that this program, "works against innovation, creativity and the prevention of institutional corruption. Perhaps this is the real intent of the intelligence community and the Insider Threat Task Force – to instill fear and project dominance throughout the intelligence community, the military, and among government employees and contractors at large."

How Chelsea is still able to actively tweet while in prison, I'm not sure. However, there are many support sites on her behalf advocating for her freedom, and just on Twitter she's accumulated 71.6K followers. Through The Guardian Chelsea has her own column, in which she publishes articles mostly about her life in prison, LGBTQ rights, and basically whatever she knows on national security debates.

Although Chelsea is imprisoned she is still able to contribute and write about what she feels is valuable and important information. She has accumulated more readers/followers while being in prison, and for her reasons sending her to prison, then maybe she had before. She leaked massive amounts of information and was punished, however she will more than likely survive her sentence (35 years) and will be released, and while in prison she is still able to work. This makes me wonder if it will inspire more journalists/analysts who have information they feel should be public, to make the jump and actually leak it based on her situation.