Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I'm glad you could join us today because we're going to do something really special. The 2017 New Yorker Festival just took place this month. And we're going to be bringing you some of the

highlights throughout the year. First up today is an interview with Chelsea Manning, who was convicted

for sending military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks, 750,000 documents. Manning was recently

released from prison, and she spoke with Larissa McFarker, who's been a staff writer here since 1998.

Yep, that's right.

Larissa, how are you doing?

I'm very well, thank you.

Chelsea Manning's case was front page news all over the world.

So could you take us back a little bit and tell us exactly what was at stake in this?

So Chelsea Manning, she was then known as Bradley Manning.

She was an Army intelligence analyst who, through her work, had access to all kinds of internal government documents, also videos.

And some had to do with the area she was charged with analyzing, which was dangers and significant events on the

ground in Iraq while she was there, which was the late 2000s. But she also had access to hundreds

of thousands of cables from the State Department, some going back many years, and those were

included in her leak. And, you know, at the time in 2010, of course, Rafi Kachadurian published a major

piece about WikiLeaks in that year, but this was earlier in that year. And it was still a very

tiny organization that had published quite a few secret documents. Some were protocols for

the management of Guantanamo, for instance, or the contents of Sarah Palin's private Yahoo account.

But it wasn't a big player on the scene.

It wasn't yet widely known.

And, of course, when it published her documents, all of that changed.

And as if they weren't complicated enough, the day after the sentence was handed down, Manning's lawyers announced that Bradley Manning was transitioning to life as a woman. And she, Chelsea Manning, immediately became one of the most famous trans people in the world, didn't she? She did. She became a hero to many people for being brave enough to announce her identity in that way when she had the world's attention.

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