README.txt by Chelsea Manning

Author:Chelsea Manning
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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On New Year’s Eve, I was alone again. I sat outside at a smoking pit, near the IT center, where all of our internet was piped in. You can see the stars in Iraq, clear and bright, the way you can in Oklahoma. I lit one cigarette after another and decided that this was going to be my decade. It was 2010, I was twenty-two, and I was ready to do some shit. I didn’t want to be stuck any longer. I didn’t want to be dysphoric for the rest of my life. I wanted to figure out if I was ready to transition. I wanted to start making the things happen that I believed in. Cheesy as it sounds, I looked up at the stars and decided that I wanted to see if I could change the world, instead of feeling overwhelmed by the things I found awful about it.

Within the week, I decided I was going to act. I was going to show the world what I was seeing. I had already downloaded onto a DVD-RW the four hundred thousand SIGACT records, as well as HUMINT and CIED reports, that would become known as the Iraq War logs, as a backup for my work. (I always tried to have backup for relevant data in case there was slow connectivity or a computer crashed.) I never needed to hide what I was doing—the discs were labeled and stored out in the open.

But now I was ready to share these databases. I added the files from Afghanistan. On January 8, I began the process of moving the DVD-RWs that I stored at work to my personal laptop. I transferred them to my MacBook Pro, and then to the SD card that I intended to take home with me on leave. We all burned so many things onto DVD-RWs daily—and took them out of the SCIF, whether for personal use or training—that no one even gave me a second glance.

My leave was coming up soon, and I was steady in my decision to release this information. But there was no way I was going to be able to do this on paper—picture being behind me in line at Kinko’s!—so, imagining a journalist opening a file, I wrote a text file with the tagline “Readme.” I wanted to be clear about the file’s technical and historical utility. I’d been well trained in the art of writing a précis, of directing action and encouraging caution. This was exactly the kind of assessment, analysis, and report that the army had built me to write.

Items of the historical significance of two wars Iraq and Afghanistan Significant Activity, SigActs, between 0001 January 2004 and 2359 31 Dec 2009 extracts from CSV documents from Department of Defense and CDNE database. It’s already been sanitized of any source identifying information. You might need to sit on this information, perhaps 90–180 days, to figure out how to best release such a large amount of data, and to protect source.

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