One point seems to be about trust. She's noting how society depends upon digital, not analog, trust.
She thinks of that as dystopian because of the foreignness and inconvenience.
We, as technologists, can improve upon this by talking empathetically more with our users about how they interact with our technology, to help steer the product towards incorporating more human-focused designs. This could help avoid this Stranger in a Strange Land phenomenon becoming more prevalent, and avoid the negative psychological behaviors which disconnected individuals typically exhibit.
We can do some of it but most of the 'do no evil' goes away in favor of what the money wants to do. Even well intentioned designers, developers/engineers, entrepreneurs, etc get pushed/pulled in directions of the money and usually understandably. The money machine always gets what it wants.
A big problem with our society today is, the people with all the power (lever on the money) are the same ones selling us out to dystopian lack of control of privacy, rights etc. We are a system setup where the only good that can really come is if wealth, or someone wealthy, wants to see it happen. We are basing all our opportunities, hopes, rights on very few people that are actively getting paid to cut them down.
Inequality does us in more than we realize because it is easy to throw the people under the bus for the money, once you are in the money you aren't in the people by design. We live in a 'free' country, but combine that with the feudal/sharecropper setup at our dictator-like controlled companies we work for where corporate rights overpower individual rights on the regular, and well you end up with a recipe for dystopia.
talking empathetically more with our users about how they interact with our technology
I've been hearing this a lot lately but I don't really know what it means.
I think most (all?) developers/designers try to imagine the experience of an average or "canonical" user while developing features. This is a natural way to try creating a product with decent usability. You can take this a step further with UX studies, focus groups, etc.
However, since "UX design" has existed in one form or another since before PC's were a thing, I take it that's not what's meant by "having more empathy for our users".
I suspect this means somehow tailoring/adapting our products to the wide variety of cultural, geographic, socio-economic backgrounds of users, or even their states-of-mind/existential experience. In that case, I think a UX designer would face a combinatorial explosion of constraints and/or features requests, which is not practical.
However, we do have a free'ish market, which seems well positioned to address this wide variety of needs. Moreover, the long tail of users is getting fatter as our population scales, so it is increasingly rewarding to target niche groups.
But what if there isn't any big incentive to do that? It's profitable to take away people's privacy and there's not that much money in letting them keep it.
It sounds like you just want to talk until they accept the data collection, as opposed to listen to them on why they might think it is a bad thing and be given an opportunity to opt-out of it.
Don't worry about, it's not a problem for technologists, but ultimately for legislatures. It will take a lot of time, but it will happen as with telephones. Europe will keep throwing up roadblocks, and eventually the US will hopefully follow suit in assigning ownership of things like privacy to the individual.
What she describes doesn't sound like a dystopia at all. Some systems that she interacted with weren't able to handle her name change. Ok... having some trouble handling edge cases is not dystopian, that's just poorly designed software.
It's not like she was permanantly shut out of society. She was temporarily inconvenienced.
A world where poorly designed software denies you access to your property because you are an "edge case," and humans who could help just shrug and defer to the computer? I don't know, it sounds to me like a dystopia that somebody might have written about a few decades ago.
Also, I don't think that's the full extent of her point here. She's just offering an example of how our pervasive reliance on computers (which often have poorly designed software) has caused trouble for her personally.
Name changes aren't an edge case. What's dystopian to me is the unwillingness of people to actually work out and solve issues for their clients, customers, and citizens. "Computer Says No" is used to avoid having to work and avoid having to escalate.
having some trouble handling edge cases is not dystopian
Uh.. Okay. What do you think a dystopia is?
In most literature it's a society that has a myopic view of people (ie, not dealing with edge cases) resulting in an oppressive society. One where fairness and free agency have been greatly curtailed by a stubborn insistence on a very simplistic view of the world.
1) The "edge cases" typically change slowly over time. If you are an edge case, it's not your turn this year and someone else's turn next year. Your circumstances define you, and are potentially reinforced by your "edge case" status. It's your turn every year, and your entire life becomes a living hell.
2) It takes only a small proportion of edge cases to get a lot of disenfranchised people. For example, 1% of people being edge cases would draw in over 3 million people in the US alone.
I experienced this recently in the scariest of circumstances -- a hospital.
I have hemophilia, a bleeding disorder. Normally, its a nuisance that just requires I take medication on semi-daily basis. If I don't take the medication, I'll usually be fine, except if I have an active bleed, which will just continue to bleed, causing damage to my body, and can be life threatening depending on the location of the bleed.
I was recently traveling back home and I ran out of my medication. It's a specialty medication that you can't find in pharmacies. It normally has to be shipped to me. I had ordered some but it wouldn't arrive for another day.
I was having an active bleed in my torso, of all places, which is an odd place and distressing because its close to so many important body systems (the spine, major arteries). The thing about my condition is that normally bleeds are innocuous, but you never know. I always be on the safe side, because when I haven't its often meant months-long recovery.
Anyway, I figured no problem, I'll just go to the hospital ER and get some medication, which is what I'm supposed to do and I've done before -- but not in a long time. Most all major metro hospitals carry my medication.
I went to the hospital and told them about my condition and what I needed. They wanted me to take a CT scan, which I declined (I already knew what I was dealing with and just needed my medication). Then, they wanted to test me for hemophilia (I've had the condition since birth), a very expensive and lengthy test that takes hours.
After finally speaking with a doctor, he declined to give me my medication until I both consented to the CT scan and the test for hemophilia (despite me having official medical identification that explains my condition). I didn't want the CT scan because its ungodly expensive and exposes your body to a lot of radiation (100x an x-ray). You could clearly tell it was a bleed due to swelling, bruising, heat, and my prior medical history. And I've lived with the condition for awhile so I am very attuned to these problems.
I experienced what I can only describe as a similar type of hostility as someone coming in seeking drugs to get high (my medication neither makes you high nor is dangerous, except when I don't get it).
Curious as to why I was being treated this way, I pressed further. The doctor came back with a print-out from some medical "AI" software. It had not only determined what the proper course of action was to be (the tests before my medication), I was also informed that if the staff deviated from the "process" at all, they would risk being fired.
There you have it. All decision-making ability had been revoked from even the doctors. They were prepared to let me bleed for hours, while waiting on a test to confirm a condition I've had since birth rather than risk deviating from some computer-generated "AI" policy. Even more sinister, since it was a screenshot (done with print screen) of the windows-based software, I spotted something else: something called a "risk score". It was a gauge-like visualization that had rated me in the "riskier" category. No doubt this was also the case with patients who are drug seeking, and I hypothesize this was the reason for the apathy and apprehension I detected.
It kind of reminds me of the Critical Care episode of Star Trek: Voyager, where patients have been reduced to a "TC" -- treatment coefficient that determines who gets good care and who doesn't and is based on the person's accomplishments and value to society. Honestly, we're not far off from that.
What would happen if I came into the ER with a serious problem that required immediate treatment? Would they defer to this software and watch me die while waiting on tests? I know my condition is rare, I'm used to educating doctors about it, but the fact that the doctors seemed unwilling to even compromise and do the right thing was alarming to me, and also sad. Its like they have become customer service representatives of a large corporation and they know it, and so they have divorced themselves of any care or humanity at all.
I decided to leave and take my chances on waiting the day, rather than sit there for hours. At that point, I was in extreme pain and I honestly didn't know if the bleed would resolve itself or not. Worse case, I could always come back to the hospital. I guess.
The bleed ended up resolving itself, and I eventually got my medication and was able to treat myself. Ironically, a nurse called later the next day to "check up on me". My tests had finally come back over a day later and confirmed my condition, and also that my factor level was low. After I told her the story I've just shared with you, all she could offer was to "make a note in your chart". That no-one will be looking at, and likely not influence the medical software at all. I looked on the hospital web site for contact information to try and lodge a complaint -- there was none. I also tried calling the hospital's 800 number, which was entirely automated and offered no ability to talk to anyone. In case anyone is wondering, the name of the hospital is Riverside in Columbus, Ohio (part of Ohio Health). It's a huge hospital.
Anyway, this is my story about AI. Something to think about because as engineers we are the ones making these kinds of software and have an ethical and moral responsibility. We need to be aware of how people are going to use technology and actively work to prevent abuses, and hopefully build this into the software itself.
What kind of science fiction novel are we living in?
Unless Chelsea Manning is trying to convince us to trust her with our private data, I don't see where the irony is.
It's similar to a reformed/retired safe cracker is telling us which safes are hard to crack. The safe cracker would be in a position to know about how difficult it would be to crack safes.
The major difference being that the safe cracker possibly stands to benefit from lying to us in an effort to make their job easier (convince us to get safes that are in reality easy to crack). In the situation with Chelsea Manning, I'm not sure where you think that she stands to benefit from us following any advice that she's giving.
About trust and confidentiality... of citizens' private data. By contrast, she leaked military/diplomatic documents and footage. Not exactly a 1-to-1 parallel.
She saw something wrong going on and blew a whistle; she was sentenced and it was commuted in the name of transparency and respect for the government's obligations to its citizens and transparency.
So basically, she saw the government's breach of trust and called it out, and is doing so again now.
It seems like either you don't understand what Chelsea did in the first place, or your argument is simply with Chelsea herself for any number of possible reasons.
I'd argue it's a very good thing we're not an inter-planetary or even inter-solar-system civilization yet. Imagine carrying all of the injustice that is done on this planet out there and making it even more widespread.
Even worse, imagine if we stumbled upon something like a galactic council of sorts. They'd nuke us to oblivion for being the savages we are. (Actually, if they are more civilized and technologically advanced than us, it's more likely for them to only forbid us from expanding any further, but you get the general idea.)
> Always amazed at the sympathy people have for criminals who needlessly endangered dozens of lives.
People who receive downvotes can sometimes believe that anyone who is downvoting is doing so because they must support the opposite of what the poster believes. This, in my experience on HN, isn't necessarily (or even often) the case.
Yes, there may be those who sympathize with Manning. However, there are plenty of other reasons one might find a comment worthy of a downvote: Is it substantive? Civil? Productive? Factually correct? On-topic? Charitable? Thoughtful? More likely to promote good, quality discussion rather than adversarial arguments? You may feel strongly about your position and feel that the subject of your comment is not worthy of charitable discourse (and it may very well not be), but the HN community is worthy of charitable discourse, or at least that's goal. Please help make it so, which includes following the guidelines.
> It's impossible for me to believe she wrote this article on her own based on her public Twitter timeline
It's quite easy for me to believe it based on her Guardian columns (she's started as a contributing writer for Guardian US in 2015, and wrote some op-eds before that.) I'm not sure why you'd expect to be able to judge someone's newspaper column writing style from their Twitter style; while some writers might show similar styles between the two, I'd expect most would radically differ.
I know this may be a shock, but the writing style people practice on a highly constrained platform like Twitter may have ever so slight differences from the one they use in forums that actually allow for more than one and a half complete sentences.
It's a stretch to argue that someone with an unprofessional personal Twitter is incapable of writing professionally, especially as this isn't the first thing she's written professionally.
> Ahhhh yes. Thanks for the downvotes. Always amazed at the sympathy people have for criminals who needlessly endangered dozens of lives. Great job HN.
It's not sympathy: it's just that most people only have the mental space for a couple bits per issue, so they need to immediately sort everyone into black and white sides. If you don't like some of the sleazier things the govt does, then you consider the leaks a good thing, and saying anything even slightly negative about someone on the "side" of the leaks _must_ be wrong.
For my part, I think the issue is complex enough and I'm not well informed enough on it that I don't really know what to make of Manning personally.
I agree. The writing style is just completely textbook NYT commentator style. Either she spent her 7 years in jail studying and practicing NYT writing style, or she wrote the bones of this article which was heavily edited by a NYT editor, or she didn't write this at all and just put her name on it.
It's largely irrelevant though, because this article has nothing to do with the reason behind her popularity. This article could have just as easily been written by Joe Blow from Minnetonka without materially changing the article(cf. Edward Snowden articles, where he writes specifically about the system which he became famous for defying)
Is there any evidence that Manning was able to express herself at such a high level before becoming a public figure? I can't help but suspect that someone is just using her name for their own political ends.
> Is there any evidence that Manning was able to express herself at such a high level before becoming a public figure?
Maybe not before becoming a public figure, but she's done a lot of public writing since, including the last couple of years as an official contributing writer for Guardian US, having written a couple op-eds for them before that.
Prison does often give one time for studying, reading, and writing if one chooses to use it for that purpose.
I've no idea, to be honest, but as I was reading the article I was thinking that this could potentially be a nice way to provide for herself financially: writing articles for the media, making appearances/speeches at events/conferences, etc.
With a criminal record and fresh out of prison, she's not going to have many (decent) opportunities available to her so perhaps this is one way to make the most of her situation and/or experiences. I'm sure there are plenty of organizations that would pay for this.
This episode[1] of the fantastic Intercepted podcast includes recordings of Manning's testimony during her trial and discussion with someone who was in extensive contact with her throughout.
I was frankly floored by Manning's calm thoughtfulness.
We have had thought crime and precrime punitive actions and enforcement already through the invention of hate crimes. we already have guilt by association, including both involuntary and voluntary association. how that is going to be any different in a computerized world is beyond me, other than it might become less influenced by people which removes power from those exploiting it.
It's not less influenced by people it's just inflexible now. People are still writing the software. You get preconceived notions baked into something that no longer even has the option to compensate. For example cameras with facial recognition that thinks east Asians are blinking all the time[1]. This wasn't malicious, it wasn't even intentional, but no one can go "Oh the system is making a mistake" and fix it. Yes software can be updated, but how often do small minorities get software updated for them unless they are paying more than everyone else?
[+] [-] ncr100|8 years ago|reply
She thinks of that as dystopian because of the foreignness and inconvenience.
We, as technologists, can improve upon this by talking empathetically more with our users about how they interact with our technology, to help steer the product towards incorporating more human-focused designs. This could help avoid this Stranger in a Strange Land phenomenon becoming more prevalent, and avoid the negative psychological behaviors which disconnected individuals typically exhibit.
[+] [-] drawkbox|8 years ago|reply
We can do some of it but most of the 'do no evil' goes away in favor of what the money wants to do. Even well intentioned designers, developers/engineers, entrepreneurs, etc get pushed/pulled in directions of the money and usually understandably. The money machine always gets what it wants.
A big problem with our society today is, the people with all the power (lever on the money) are the same ones selling us out to dystopian lack of control of privacy, rights etc. We are a system setup where the only good that can really come is if wealth, or someone wealthy, wants to see it happen. We are basing all our opportunities, hopes, rights on very few people that are actively getting paid to cut them down.
Inequality does us in more than we realize because it is easy to throw the people under the bus for the money, once you are in the money you aren't in the people by design. We live in a 'free' country, but combine that with the feudal/sharecropper setup at our dictator-like controlled companies we work for where corporate rights overpower individual rights on the regular, and well you end up with a recipe for dystopia.
[+] [-] dqpb|8 years ago|reply
I've been hearing this a lot lately but I don't really know what it means.
I think most (all?) developers/designers try to imagine the experience of an average or "canonical" user while developing features. This is a natural way to try creating a product with decent usability. You can take this a step further with UX studies, focus groups, etc.
However, since "UX design" has existed in one form or another since before PC's were a thing, I take it that's not what's meant by "having more empathy for our users".
I suspect this means somehow tailoring/adapting our products to the wide variety of cultural, geographic, socio-economic backgrounds of users, or even their states-of-mind/existential experience. In that case, I think a UX designer would face a combinatorial explosion of constraints and/or features requests, which is not practical.
However, we do have a free'ish market, which seems well positioned to address this wide variety of needs. Moreover, the long tail of users is getting fatter as our population scales, so it is increasingly rewarding to target niche groups.
[+] [-] sp332|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bahjoite|8 years ago|reply
Please explain what you mean by "disconnected individuals" and what are the behaviours. Genuinely interested.
[+] [-] ionised|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] QAPereo|8 years ago|reply
This limbo lets you make a mint, but it will end.
[+] [-] meri_dian|8 years ago|reply
It's not like she was permanantly shut out of society. She was temporarily inconvenienced.
[+] [-] chc|8 years ago|reply
Also, I don't think that's the full extent of her point here. She's just offering an example of how our pervasive reliance on computers (which often have poorly designed software) has caused trouble for her personally.
[+] [-] jimktrains2|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hinkley|8 years ago|reply
In most literature it's a society that has a myopic view of people (ie, not dealing with edge cases) resulting in an oppressive society. One where fairness and free agency have been greatly curtailed by a stubborn insistence on a very simplistic view of the world.
[+] [-] femto|8 years ago|reply
1) The "edge cases" typically change slowly over time. If you are an edge case, it's not your turn this year and someone else's turn next year. Your circumstances define you, and are potentially reinforced by your "edge case" status. It's your turn every year, and your entire life becomes a living hell.
2) It takes only a small proportion of edge cases to get a lot of disenfranchised people. For example, 1% of people being edge cases would draw in over 3 million people in the US alone.
[+] [-] XR0CSWV3h3kZWg|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmjaa|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kerno|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antoinevg|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wyatte|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhizome|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Danihan|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] artorias|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] jorgeleo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamleppert|8 years ago|reply
I have hemophilia, a bleeding disorder. Normally, its a nuisance that just requires I take medication on semi-daily basis. If I don't take the medication, I'll usually be fine, except if I have an active bleed, which will just continue to bleed, causing damage to my body, and can be life threatening depending on the location of the bleed.
I was recently traveling back home and I ran out of my medication. It's a specialty medication that you can't find in pharmacies. It normally has to be shipped to me. I had ordered some but it wouldn't arrive for another day.
I was having an active bleed in my torso, of all places, which is an odd place and distressing because its close to so many important body systems (the spine, major arteries). The thing about my condition is that normally bleeds are innocuous, but you never know. I always be on the safe side, because when I haven't its often meant months-long recovery.
Anyway, I figured no problem, I'll just go to the hospital ER and get some medication, which is what I'm supposed to do and I've done before -- but not in a long time. Most all major metro hospitals carry my medication.
I went to the hospital and told them about my condition and what I needed. They wanted me to take a CT scan, which I declined (I already knew what I was dealing with and just needed my medication). Then, they wanted to test me for hemophilia (I've had the condition since birth), a very expensive and lengthy test that takes hours.
After finally speaking with a doctor, he declined to give me my medication until I both consented to the CT scan and the test for hemophilia (despite me having official medical identification that explains my condition). I didn't want the CT scan because its ungodly expensive and exposes your body to a lot of radiation (100x an x-ray). You could clearly tell it was a bleed due to swelling, bruising, heat, and my prior medical history. And I've lived with the condition for awhile so I am very attuned to these problems.
I experienced what I can only describe as a similar type of hostility as someone coming in seeking drugs to get high (my medication neither makes you high nor is dangerous, except when I don't get it).
Curious as to why I was being treated this way, I pressed further. The doctor came back with a print-out from some medical "AI" software. It had not only determined what the proper course of action was to be (the tests before my medication), I was also informed that if the staff deviated from the "process" at all, they would risk being fired.
There you have it. All decision-making ability had been revoked from even the doctors. They were prepared to let me bleed for hours, while waiting on a test to confirm a condition I've had since birth rather than risk deviating from some computer-generated "AI" policy. Even more sinister, since it was a screenshot (done with print screen) of the windows-based software, I spotted something else: something called a "risk score". It was a gauge-like visualization that had rated me in the "riskier" category. No doubt this was also the case with patients who are drug seeking, and I hypothesize this was the reason for the apathy and apprehension I detected.
It kind of reminds me of the Critical Care episode of Star Trek: Voyager, where patients have been reduced to a "TC" -- treatment coefficient that determines who gets good care and who doesn't and is based on the person's accomplishments and value to society. Honestly, we're not far off from that.
What would happen if I came into the ER with a serious problem that required immediate treatment? Would they defer to this software and watch me die while waiting on tests? I know my condition is rare, I'm used to educating doctors about it, but the fact that the doctors seemed unwilling to even compromise and do the right thing was alarming to me, and also sad. Its like they have become customer service representatives of a large corporation and they know it, and so they have divorced themselves of any care or humanity at all.
I decided to leave and take my chances on waiting the day, rather than sit there for hours. At that point, I was in extreme pain and I honestly didn't know if the bleed would resolve itself or not. Worse case, I could always come back to the hospital. I guess.
The bleed ended up resolving itself, and I eventually got my medication and was able to treat myself. Ironically, a nurse called later the next day to "check up on me". My tests had finally come back over a day later and confirmed my condition, and also that my factor level was low. After I told her the story I've just shared with you, all she could offer was to "make a note in your chart". That no-one will be looking at, and likely not influence the medical software at all. I looked on the hospital web site for contact information to try and lodge a complaint -- there was none. I also tried calling the hospital's 800 number, which was entirely automated and offered no ability to talk to anyone. In case anyone is wondering, the name of the hospital is Riverside in Columbus, Ohio (part of Ohio Health). It's a huge hospital.
Anyway, this is my story about AI. Something to think about because as engineers we are the ones making these kinds of software and have an ethical and moral responsibility. We need to be aware of how people are going to use technology and actively work to prevent abuses, and hopefully build this into the software itself.
What kind of science fiction novel are we living in?
[+] [-] turc1656|8 years ago|reply
The miniseries on the Unabomber that just ended this week could not be more timely, even after 20 years.
[+] [-] caiob|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sctb|8 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[+] [-] pyre|8 years ago|reply
It's similar to a reformed/retired safe cracker is telling us which safes are hard to crack. The safe cracker would be in a position to know about how difficult it would be to crack safes.
The major difference being that the safe cracker possibly stands to benefit from lying to us in an effort to make their job easier (convince us to get safes that are in reality easy to crack). In the situation with Chelsea Manning, I'm not sure where you think that she stands to benefit from us following any advice that she's giving.
[+] [-] shallot_router|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] castis|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] allworknoplay|8 years ago|reply
So basically, she saw the government's breach of trust and called it out, and is doing so again now.
It seems like either you don't understand what Chelsea did in the first place, or your argument is simply with Chelsea herself for any number of possible reasons.
Yes, this is where we are now. Fucking good.
[+] [-] jackmott|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nether|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kelnos|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pdimitar|8 years ago|reply
Even worse, imagine if we stumbled upon something like a galactic council of sorts. They'd nuke us to oblivion for being the savages we are. (Actually, if they are more civilized and technologically advanced than us, it's more likely for them to only forbid us from expanding any further, but you get the general idea.)
[+] [-] eric_b|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] grzm|8 years ago|reply
People who receive downvotes can sometimes believe that anyone who is downvoting is doing so because they must support the opposite of what the poster believes. This, in my experience on HN, isn't necessarily (or even often) the case.
Yes, there may be those who sympathize with Manning. However, there are plenty of other reasons one might find a comment worthy of a downvote: Is it substantive? Civil? Productive? Factually correct? On-topic? Charitable? Thoughtful? More likely to promote good, quality discussion rather than adversarial arguments? You may feel strongly about your position and feel that the subject of your comment is not worthy of charitable discourse (and it may very well not be), but the HN community is worthy of charitable discourse, or at least that's goal. Please help make it so, which includes following the guidelines.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|8 years ago|reply
It's quite easy for me to believe it based on her Guardian columns (she's started as a contributing writer for Guardian US in 2015, and wrote some op-eds before that.) I'm not sure why you'd expect to be able to judge someone's newspaper column writing style from their Twitter style; while some writers might show similar styles between the two, I'd expect most would radically differ.
[+] [-] egypturnash|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] delecti|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eugeniub|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ivanhoe|8 years ago|reply
Me too, just I'm pretty sure we don't think about the same group of people...
[+] [-] wutbrodo|8 years ago|reply
It's not sympathy: it's just that most people only have the mental space for a couple bits per issue, so they need to immediately sort everyone into black and white sides. If you don't like some of the sleazier things the govt does, then you consider the leaks a good thing, and saying anything even slightly negative about someone on the "side" of the leaks _must_ be wrong.
For my part, I think the issue is complex enough and I'm not well informed enough on it that I don't really know what to make of Manning personally.
[+] [-] astronautjones|8 years ago|reply
https://www.buzzfeed.com/jasonleopold/secret-government-repo...
[+] [-] oh_sigh|8 years ago|reply
It's largely irrelevant though, because this article has nothing to do with the reason behind her popularity. This article could have just as easily been written by Joe Blow from Minnetonka without materially changing the article(cf. Edward Snowden articles, where he writes specifically about the system which he became famous for defying)
[+] [-] wildmusings|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dragonwriter|8 years ago|reply
Maybe not before becoming a public figure, but she's done a lot of public writing since, including the last couple of years as an official contributing writer for Guardian US, having written a couple op-eds for them before that.
Prison does often give one time for studying, reading, and writing if one chooses to use it for that purpose.
[+] [-] jlgaddis|8 years ago|reply
With a criminal record and fresh out of prison, she's not going to have many (decent) opportunities available to her so perhaps this is one way to make the most of her situation and/or experiences. I'm sure there are plenty of organizations that would pay for this.
[+] [-] sp332|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dcre|8 years ago|reply
I was frankly floored by Manning's calm thoughtfulness.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2017/05/10/intercepted-podcast-jame...
[+] [-] Shivetya|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lovich|8 years ago|reply
[1]http://content.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1954643...