Hacks, Leaks, and Revelations

2 ACQUIRING DATASETS

In early January 2010, 22-year-old Chelsea Manning sat at a Windows computer in a temporary Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF)—an enclosed area or room suitable for working with secret documents—in eastern Baghdad. She was downloading half a million secret “significant activity” reports from the military network SIPRNet, a Department of Defense computer network used for transmitting classified information.

As an intelligence analyst working for the US Army, Manning needed regular access to these databases, so she downloaded them for work purposes. Having a local copy would be useful in a war zone where network access can be unreliable. It wasn’t until later that month that she decided to leak them to ...