Whistleblower and former intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning is no stranger to data privacy. She was responsible for the largest leak in U.S. history, passing classified military documents onto WikiLeaks. 

On Thursday, Manning said we need to rethink the underlying infrastructure of the Internet because it wasn’t built to be private. She added that the cryptography element in blockchain-based systems, and zero-knowledge proofs in particular, leave her feeling optimistic. 

“I’ve always found the flaws of the modern Internet come from the fact it was built on top of existing infrastructure that was built in the 1960s and 1970s,” she said in a keynote speech at the Consensus conference in Austin, Texas. “Privacy, security and authentication wasn’t a priority in the initial design. We mustn’t view privacy on the Internet as something that we slap onto it, but instead, something inherent and transparent to the user,” she said. 

In a world where the amount of information available is overwhelming the need for veracity and authentication is vital, she said. “By authenticating the value of information, it becomes all the more important,” she said.  

This is especially pertinent in the age of AI, deep fakes, and online impersonators - where it’s crucial to distinguish between misinformation, disinformation and information that’s unverifiable. 

Now a security consultant for a cryptocurrency startup, NYM Technologies, Manning is bullish on bringing cryptography into crypto. “I’m generally skeptical of speculative assets but from a technical perspective, zero-knowledge proofs and append-only ledgers have always fascinated me,” she said.

When asked if people even care about privacy, Manning said: “I think people do but they don’t have a choice and they’ve sort of been forced in this direction. You essentially have to move to a cottage in Montana or Oregon and not interact with society. That’s not a productive way to go about things.” 

“To me, a better Internet is one in which we no longer feel sick whenever we're interacting with it,” she said. “We no longer feel watched, afraid or completely beholden to another company.” 

In 2013, Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison for leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks in 2010. President Obama commuted her sentence in 2017.