Chelsea Manning: Tech more efficient than laws to ensure privacy
By Catarina Demony
LISBON (Reuters) — Chelsea Manning, a former U.S. army analyst and WikiLeaks source, said on Tuesday that technology tools can be more efficient in protecting people's privacy and information than legal or regulatory mechanisms that risk being tampered with.
«I believe very strongly that there are technical means of protecting information and those are more reliable,» Manning told Reuters in an interview during Europe's largest technology conference, the Web Summit, in Lisbon, Portugal.
Manning was convicted by court-martial in 2013 of espionage and other offences for leaking an enormous trove of military reports, videos, diplomatic cables and battlefield accounts to online media publisher WikiLeaks while she was an intelligence analyst in Iraq.
Former President Barack Obama later reduced Manning's sentence, and she was released in May 2017.
Manning currently works as a security consultant at Nym Technologies, a network that aims to prevent governments and companies from tracking people's online activities.
The 35-year-old said that «technical means», such as cryptography, data obfuscation and end-to-end encrypted messaging platforms such as Signal, are ways to ensure privacy and a level of anonymity online.
Legal or regulatory mechanisms «can change on a whim… legislators can be lobbied… rules can be reinterpreted by courts and burdens of proof are very hard to meet», Manning said.
«Regulation can set the tone of what the standards should be,» she said. "(But) actual math and actual technology… are much easier to control and have much more guarantees."
'SIDESTEPPING ETHICS'
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the big topic at this year's Web Summit, which draws tens of thousands of participants and
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