Chelsea Manning was imprisoned in 2010 after leaking 750,000 military documents to the website WikiLeaks. Chelsea’s revelations exposed heinous war crimes by the US military. While the perpetrators of the atrocities she exposed have never faced justice, Chelsea herself spent seven years behind bars, including several months in solitary confinement before her trial. README.txt is Chelsea’s first tell-all memoir about what led her to speak out, and her experiences in prison. Chelsea Manning joins Baltimore-based activist and independent journalist Ryan Harvey for a special discussion on her memoir, hosted at Red Emma’s cooperative bookstore and café.
In README.txt, Manning recounts how her pleas for increased institutional transparency and government accountability took place alongside a fight to defend her rights as a trans woman. Manning details the challenges of her childhood and adolescence as a naive, computer-savvy kid, what drew her to the military, and the fierce pride she has about the work she does.
You can purchase her book here: https://bookshop.org/a/3323/9780374279271
Chelsea Elizabeth Manning is an American transparency activist, politician, and former U.S. Army intelligence analyst. She lives in Brooklyn and works as a security consultant and expert in data science and machine learning.
Ryan Harvey is an activist, independent journalist, and musician based in Baltimore, MD, and the National Field Director for Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. He has worked extensively in support of active-duty military members and veterans organizing against the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and has co-founded several organizations including the Riot-Folk Collective (2004), the anti-war Civilian-Soldier Alliance (2006), Firebrand Records (2015) and Rebel Lens (2017).
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