Gathering Intelligence: Chelsea Manning, the War on Terror, and the Trans Internet

Charlie Markbreiter analyzes Chelsea Manning as era-defining symbol, internet darling, and enemy of the state, in an essay from the LARB Quarterly issue no. 42, “Gossip.”

By Charlie MarkbreiterSeptember 6, 2024

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This essay is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 42: Gossip. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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IN 2009, A US security intelligence operative stationed in Iraq began to notice some gaps in the American government’s “surgical precision” drone strategy. “I was trained to be an all-source analyst,” writes Chelsea Manning in her memoir, README.TXT (2022). “I’m used to collecting the full context and getting—and sharing—as much detail as possible.”

Manning’s childhood and adolescence in many ways exemplified the white millennial trans experience. While transness is culturally synonymized with coastal cities, Manning, like many trans people, grew up elsewhere; she was born to a former Navy intelligence officer and his Welsh wife in Oklahoma City in 1987. Not only did Manning’s father, Brian, instill “rigid cis gender sensibilities”; he also evoked a thoroughly militarized model of masculinity. Little Mermaid dolls were replaced with small fighter jets.

As it was for many isolated, closeted trans people in the aughts—not even out to themselves, let alone to anyone around them—the internet was Manning’s escape. First, it was forums: trolling, lolz, meeting other gay people. Then she became skilled at coding. Back in meatspace, she was aggressively bullied for being gay; her family eventually kicked her out. In Chicago’s Boystown gayborhood, she experienced IRL queer romance and community for the very first time.

But she couldn’t make ends meet. She’d stay with hookups for as long as she could (to shower, get a meal) before going back to living in her car. In a 2016 testimonial used to appeal to then-president Barack Obama for clemency, she wrote, “There were many nights that I was afraid of getting robbed of what little I had, or raped, or even worse.” She moved in with an aunt in Maryland, working at Starbucks full-time to pay for community college tuition. “I tried very hard to get ahead,” she said in the same letter to Obama, “but I soon burned out.”

Manning hoped that enlisting would finally offer financial stability and cure what she would eventually identify as gender dysphoria. But instead of serving on the front lines, “her aptitude for computer-based intelligence work was detected early in training and she was sent to work in Iraq,” as The Guardian reports. Being very online had prepared Manning for war.

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In 2007, as the subprime mortgage market teetered, Apple released its first iPhone to US audiences, popularizing mobile internet access for the very first time. While the iPhone was new, it relied on a preexisting military technology called Geographic Information Systems (GIS), which turned geographically specific datasets—such as the names and locations of enemy targets—into useful schematics like topological maps. As the iPhone became ubiquitous, so did GIS: ride-sharing apps like Uber rely on it, as do digital marketing firms—basically any system that uses geographic data.

The new level of connection usually associated with the advent of the iPhone and Web 2.0 was directly afforded by US military technology like GIS. It is unsurprising that the same decades that saw the rise of the “War on Terror”—characterized by its increasingly impersonal and digitized drone warfare—also saw the rise of social media. And as Caren Kaplan points out in her prescient 2006 essay “Precision Targets: GPS and the Militarization of U.S. Consumer Identity,” GIS is not just military technology; it actually enabled the US’s modern military-industrial complex, which required tools like geo-mapping, photography, and satellite positioning to expand its blossoming drone program. “You could not,” as Kaplan argues, “have targeted marketing without targeted assassinations.”

The rise of US trans populations in the aughts and early 2010s has been correlated with the rise of Web 2.0. “By the time I identified as trans, I located this habit as part of a larger pattern, enabled by the Internet,” writes scholar Avery Dame-Griff, author of The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet (2023). “My first connections with trans folks came online.” This, as Dame-Griff argues, was just the norm for trans people worldwide. “The role of the Internet in my experience was by no means unique. Online, trans youth found and supported each other across a variety of fora, ranging from IRC chat rooms, message boards, home pages, LiveJournal, MySpace, and beyond.” Trans people made up such a geographically dispersed population that it was easier to meet a trans man in Germany online than to run into another trans man in your hometown.

If trans people were very online, they were also thus very reliant on the military-grade GIS technology refined in the War on Terror’s drone program. Web 2.0 not only facilitated content produced by and for trans people—it also increased the odds of them accessing it through “the algorithm.” Through the internet’s tautological logic, the more you clicked on trans content, the more of it you’d see. Cable had never been cunt like that.

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The 1990 Gulf War was the first conflict to make extensive use of GIS. The narrative fed to US audiences was that Iraq, unable to pay its $14 billion debt to Kuwait, instead invaded the oil-rich nation in a grab for resources and territory. The United States swept in as global police officer to counteract this rogue state, all the while securing its geopolitical and economic interests in the region.

In order to justify this proxy war to the American public, the US government needed to limit its casualties and expenses. Precision-targeted warfare, especially drones run on GIS, offered the perfect solution. Despite not even being “fully operational when the war began in 1990,” GPS-based weaponry “quickly took pride of place in the pantheon of satellite-assisted technologies.” Instead of carpet-bombing, commanders could quickly locate, map out, and eliminate enemy combatants.

While “precision targeting” was instrumental to the Gulf War, it also informed how the war was narrativized to US audiences. Mirroring the language of “targeted assassinations” from what Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently described as “the most moral army in the world,” Americans used GIS to paint themselves as ethical technocratic actors. If this was a war, it would be served end-of-history style, knocking out “the bad guys” while leaving civilian infrastructure intact. Of course, as evidenced by the ongoing genocide in Gaza, carrying out individual strikes seldom precludes targeting civilian infrastructure.

Significantly, GIS technology also facilitated coverage of the Gulf conflict, allowing networks to run 24-hour coverage of what became known as “the video game war.” During World War II, “newsreels reached movie theater audiences no less than a month after the occurrence of events depicted,” Kaplan writes. During the Vietnam War, “that time lag had been reduced to approximately twenty-four to forty-eight hours.” But as Iraq invaded Kuwait, satellites allowed news outlets to provide real-time coverage, turning a conflict that most Americans barely understood into a constantly changing Marvel movie screened in their living rooms. While this footage was heavily censored by the Pentagon, the 24-hour feed and gritty visuals allowed anchors to present the news live. Civilians increasingly expected technology to seamlessly merge time and space.

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The United States officially invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, yet drones were already a military staple long before George W. Bush took office. As Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. Hall point out in their 2016 paper “The Drone Paradox: Fighting Terrorism with Mechanized Terror,” drones were used for decades prior to 9/11. “Since 2001,” however, “the use of drones has shifted from an instrument of training and surveillance to a tool for conducting offensive strikes against enemy targets.” “Over this time,” they argue, “the U.S. government’s covert drone program has become institutionalized as a defining aspect of its military strategy and operations.” From 2004 to 2016, US drone strikes are confirmed to have killed 5,909 people in Pakistan alone.

As troop losses mounted and public support waned from its post-9/11 high, then-ascendant president Obama moved away from the Bush administration’s strategy. After killing Osama bin Laden in May 2011, Obama declared the War on Terror over in 2013 and began to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. He did not, however, stop deploying drones. “The use of drones,” wrote the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in a 2017 report, “aligned with Obama’s ambition to keep up the war against al Qaeda while extricating the US military from intractable, costly ground wars.”

Despite this messaging, drones were not the flying scalpels that Obama and his new CIA director John Brennan made them out to be. Even in the imperially ideal case—in which a single “enemy” is killed without any other casualties—the metrics determining who is a target and why were flimsy. In many cases, someone could be classified as a “terrorist” just by virtue of being a military-age man. As the past decade of Black Lives Matter uprisings against police brutality made apparent, violence is often justified based on appearance rather than action. And if there are mistakes, so-called “collateral damage”—well, so be it.

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The top comment on “Chelsea Manning DJ set at sksksks,” a 2022 Reddit post on r/pcmusic, reads, “The military whistleblower to trans DJ pipeline.” Manning, wearing a pair of light-up cat ears, plays a mix of “Immaterial” by Scottish DJ SOPHIE, who had died the year before. Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, SOPHIE’s breakout album, was released in 2018, a year after Manning got out of prison.

“Chelsea Manning Changed the Course of History,” reads a 2017 Vogue headline. “Now She’s Focusing on Herself.” A 2022 profile in the online magazine Them, which includes coverage of her nascent DJ career, argues that “Chelsea Manning is done being a symbol.” Politics is cast as a bad dream from which she had just woken up. Both pieces also repeatedly call Manning a “whistleblower,” which has always been easier than discussing her actual role in the War on Terror.

In a 2017 profile, New York Times staff writer Matthew Shaer hints that Manning’s decision to become a whistleblower was motivated by her gender dysphoria. Manning remembers wondering, while on leave from Iraq, if she should come out to her family as trans, before realizing “she’d never be able to go through with it.” Immediately after, Shaer writes that Manning “downloaded […] almost every SigActs report from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and burned a compressed version of the data onto CD-RW discs, one of which was labeled ‘Lady Gaga.’”

If this were a novel, we might issue the following close reading: unable to reveal her own true identity, Manning revealed the state’s true identity instead. Manning’s transness, military career, and eventual whistleblowing had never been unrelated, either personally or structurally. Fueled by GIS, both the trans internet and military-intelligence analysis were elaborate modes of gossip. Manning had mastered both. With the trans internet, GIS helps trans people observe, interact with, and talk shit about each other in ever more targeted ways. With War on Terror–era surveillance, GIS helps the state “gather intelligence” on “targets” and then ascertain which rumors are verifiable, and thus actionable, facts—just as any good gossip would do.

But while gender dysphoria and the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy increased Manning’s alienation from the military, they were not the main reasons she chose to expose state secrets. The primary reason was that she no longer thought the United States should be in Afghanistan and Iraq. In an anonymous text file accompanying the leak, Manning wrote that her goal was to expose “the true nature of twenty-first century asymmetric warfare.”

Her critiques of asymmetric warfare have not been limited to the War on Terror. On May 7, 2021, Israeli police stormed Gaza’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, deploying tear gas, rubber bullets, and stun grenades. “[T]his is not a complicated issue,” Manning tweeted six days later. “[T]he US gov, through decades of funding and several UN security council votes, is directly complicit in the ethnic cleansing occurring in Palestinian territory.”

Manning doesn’t tweet anymore. If you were a security consultant who used to work for the US military, you probably wouldn’t either. The last thing she tweeted, on December 22, 2022, was, “lol, lmao.”