Chelsea Manning said she will not be intimidated by the CIA, even after pressure from current and former intelligence officials caused Harvard to withdraw a fellowship it had offered her, The Daily Beast reported on Tuesday.
Manning, who was convicted by court martial in 2013 of multiple counts of leaking classified information and was released from prison this past May, said she is going to continue speaking up and engaging in political activism.
Manning spoke with the Daily Beast after she gave a speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which invited her after Harvard canceled her appearance.
At her MIT speech before some 130 people, Manning warned engineering students about to enter the job market that "While we might be making a piece of software that does one thing, for medicine or marketing or advertising, it can be used in a military context or to suppress dissent. These technological solutions are kind of universal in that sense that they can be misused."
Since leaving prison, she told the Daily Beast, seeing the prevalence of domestic surveillance and the militarization of policing is "like I'm walking out into the most boring dystopian novel I can imagine. It feels like American cities, certain parts of them, are occupied by an American force, the police department."
Manning stressed that it was a crucial victory to speak at another university after Harvard canceled its invitation.
"What's important here is that the Central Intelligence Agency and associated people in the intelligence community, they think they can stifle dissent, all forms of dissent, all across America and use academic institutions as a battleground," she said.
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