Monthly Archives: April 2017

Bitmon – Bitcoin and cryptocurrency mining monitor service

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Bitmon monitors your mining workers around the clock and notifies you as soon as a worker starts to perform badly or stops completely.

You are able to set an individual hashrate threshold for every mining pool worker you have and are notified as soon as a drop in hashrate is detected.

All the common mining pools like CEX, Slush's Pool, Multipool, Bitminter etc. are supported with more being added continuously, and Bitmon supports all the cryptocurrenies like Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin etc. in addition, fiat currencies like USD, CAD, DKK etc. used by those mining pools.

View the list of supported mining pools, cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies.

Monitoring your mining pools enables Bitmon to generate great reports that include your mining yield, broken down for each mining pool.

In the reports is also a calculated fiat value based on the latest exchange rate.

The report is available in a daily and weekly interval.

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Bitmon - Bitcoin and cryptocurrency mining monitor service

Chelsea Manning files appeal against ‘grossly unfair’ 35-year …

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Chelsea Manning, 28, was convicted in 2013 of multiple crimes for passing an estimated 700,000 documents to WikiLeaks, Photograph: AP

Chelsea Manning has formally appealed against her conviction and 35-year prison sentence for leaking a huge cache of government documents, arguing that her punishment was grossly unfair and unprecedented.

Describing the sentence as perhaps the most unjust sentence in the history of the military justice system, attorneys for Manning complained that she had been portrayed as a traitor to the US when nothing could be further from the truth.

No whistleblower in American history has been sentenced this harshly, states the appeal, which also alleges that Manning was excessively charged and illegally held while awaiting trial in conditions amounting to solitary confinement. It suggests that her sentence be reduced to 10 years.

The appeal sharply contrasts the governments punishment of Manning with the two years probation given to David Petraeus, the retired military commander and CIA director, who admitted giving classified information to his biographer, with whom he was having an extramarital affair. While Manning was a whistleblower, Petraeus apparently disclosed the materials for sex, say Mannings attorneys.

Manning, a 28-year-old former US army private, was convicted in 2013 of multiple crimes for passing an estimated 700,000 documents to WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy group. The cache included diplomatic cables and reports on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Attorneys for Manning filed the appeal documents on Wednesday to the US army court of criminal appeals at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. The documents were made public on Thursday after being reviewed by officials for possible redaction of classified material. Manning, a transgender woman previously known as Bradley, is serving her sentence at the Fort Leavenworth military base in Kansas.

Manning disclosed the materials because under the circumstances she thought it was the right thing to do, said the appeal brief. She believed the public had a right to know about the toll of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the loss of life, and the extent to which the government sought to hide embarrassing information of its wrongdoing.

Mannings appeal said her sentence was unfairly inflated by the military judges misreading of relevant laws and by overzealous prosecutors deciding to charge her with more severe crimes than the mishandling of classified information, to which she admitted.

She was initially charged with stealing or converting databases, despite the original records remaining intact. But stealing or converting photocopies of documents within a filing cabinet is not the same as stealing the filing cabinet itself, Mannings attorneys argued. The government later amended these charges but only after each side had presented its case.

The appeal also claimed the sentence also did not take into account the time she served in deplorable and inhumane conditions of confinement before her trial, which are described as unconstitutional and sufficient grounds for dismissing the charges altogether.

Mannings attorneys requested that she be credited 10 days of time served for every day she spent in these outrageous and completely unjustified pretrial conditions, which would effectively wipe out seven years of the total sentence.

The appeal urged authorities to consider the context of Manning suffering from mental health problems and stress, which it blames on her inability to live openly as a transgender woman in the US military. The governments litigation strategy was to ignore all of this, and to instead make an example of her, it said.

Related: When will the US government stop persecuting whistleblowers? | Chelsea Manning

In a simultaneously filed brief supporting Mannings appeal, the American Civil Liberties Union said the Espionage Act used to convict Manning was unconstitutionally vague because it allows the government to subject speakers and messages it dislikes to discriminatory prosecution.

The ACLU said Mannings prosecution was separately unconstitutional because the military judge overseeing the trial barred Manning from asserting any defense on the basis that the information she disclosed was in the public interest.

A war against whistleblowers is being waged in this country and this case represents how this country treats anyone who reveals even a single page of classified information, Nancy Hollander, one of Mannings attorneys, said in a statement. We need brave individuals to hold the government accountable for its actions at home and abroad and we call upon this court to overturn the dangerous precedent of Chelsea Mannings excessive sentencing.

In another brief backing Manning, the Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI) said her overall motive was to advance the public interest and the public interest value of some of the disclosures justifies mitigation of the sentence.

In support of this argument, the brief quoted the Guardians former investigations editor David Leigh and John Kerry, now the US secretary of state, who as chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee said that disclosures within the Afghan war logs leaked by Manning raise serious questions about the reality of Americas policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The OSJI brief also argued that Mannings sentence was far higher than the penalties that our closest allies would consider proportionate. The brief featured a survey of 30 such countries that pointed to a maximum 14-year sentence in Canada as the next stiffest penalty for a comparable conviction.

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Chelsea Manning files appeal against 'grossly unfair' 35-year ...

Chelsea Manning Appeals "Unprecedented" Conviction

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Lawyers for Chelsea Manning appealed her conviction on Thursday, calling it grossly unfair and unprecedented and arguing that no whistleblower in American history has been sentenced this harshly.

Manning was convicted of six counts of espionage by a military court in 2013 and is currently serving a 35-year sentence in military prison.

In January 2010, while serving as an Army intelligence analyst overseas, Manning then known as Bradley sent hundreds of thousands of documents about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to WikiLeaks. The documents revealed dramatically higher numbers of civilian casualties than were publicly reported and featured a video of Apache attack helicopters in Baghdad gunning down two Reuters journalists.

Manningstreatment in military court came under fire from journalists and free speech advocates. Because she was indicted under the Espionage Act, shewas not allowed to raise the public interest value of her disclosures as a defense.

In the 209-page legal brief made public on Thursday, lawyers for Manning questioned the testimony of military officials at her trial, arguing that their claims of harm were speculative and provided no indication of actual harm, which they said had a highly prejudicial effect on the trial.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed an amicus briefarguing that applying the Espionage Act to whistleblowers is unconstitutional and furnishes the government with a tool for selective prosecution.

The ACLU brief cites the example of Gen. David Petraeus, a former Army general and CIA director, who gave eight notebooks filled with classified information to his biographer, who he was sleeping with. Petraeus was not charged under the Espionage Act,accepted a plea deal for two years probation and a $100,000 fine, and kept his security clearance.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has cited Mannings treatment and trial as a key reason for not returning to the United States.

[Disclosure: First Look MediaWorks, Inc.,publisher of The Intercept, made a $50,000 matching-fund donation to Chelsea Mannings legal defense fund through its Press Freedom Litigation Fund, andGlenn Greenwald, a founding editor of The Intercept, donated $10,000.]

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Chelsea Manning Appeals "Unprecedented" Conviction

Encryption – UCSD Mathematics

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Encryption is a method of hiding data so that it cannot be read by anyone who does not know the key. The key is used to lock and unlock data. To encrypt a data one would perform some mathematical functions on the data and the result of these functions would produce some output that makes the data look like garbage to anyone who doesn't know how to reverse the operations. Encryption can be used to encrypt files that the owner feels are too sensitive for anyone else to read. And now, with the rise of the Internet, encryption is used to encrypt data, like a credit card number, and then send it across the net. This way no one can read intercept and read the data while it is traveling through the web. The recipient of the data does have to know how to decrypt the information or else the data will look like garbage to the recipient too.

There are two categories of encryption, private key and public key. The major difference is who knows the key. Encryption is an entirely mathematical process applied to the world of computers. The only thing an encryption program will do is take in data, perform some predefined mathematical operations on the data, and then output the result. Decryption is the process of taking the encrypted data, that now looks like garbage, and reverse the mathematical functions so that the result is the same data that originally existed before the encryption process. The "key" is the set of mathematical operations and values that are used to encrypt and decrypt the data. Encryption and decryption algorithms describe the mathematical operations while key describes the exact process which includes the algorithms and any other random initial values that are used in the algorithms. Lets first look at private key encryption and how it works.

PRIVATE KEY ENCRYPTION

What private key means is that the same method is used to encrypt and decrypt. If someone knows what method was used to encrypt the message then that person can decrypt the message. Thus, the key must be kept private. Only the person sending the data and the person receiving the data should know the key. Private key cryptography, also known as symmetric cryptography since the encryption and decryption processes are just opposites, is an encryption method where the encryption algorithm is known before hand by the sender and the recipient. Accordingly, the two users must communicate beforehand and agree on the algorithm and the key so that the recipient can decode the message. A very simple example of private key cryptology is to take the text that is to be sent across the Internet and use the next letter in the alphabet in place of the original letter. Then send the scrambled text across the Internet. The person receiving the text would have to know how the message he receives is scrambled so that he can unscramble it. Thus, the "key" being used in this example is, 'use the next letter in the alphabet.'

With this key the text, "hi rob" would become, "ij spc". Since the recipient of the message knows the key, that person will take the message he received and take the previous letter in the alphabet. The person would receive the message, "ij spc," and using the previous letter that person would recover, "hi rob." This example is much simpler than the private key encryption algorithms used today, but it illustrates the fact that in private key encryption the encryption and decryption processes are just the reverse of each other

Private key encryption has the benefits of being very fast in that the computer programs that will perform the encryption and decryption will finish executing in a very short amount of time. The more complex the key the longer the process takes. However, even the most complex private keys algorithms can encrypt and decrypt data faster than that of public key cryptology. A disadvantage to private key cryptography is that the key must be communicated before hand. You would have to tell me exactly how you were going to encrypt the messages that you will send to me so that I could recover the original message later.. You could not encrypt this information as I wouldn't know the key yet. In a large organization or over the Internet it is easy for these keys to become compromised because they have communicated, without using encryption, before the actual encryption takes place.

PUBLIC KEY ENCRYPTION

Public key cryptography (asymmetric) was created to eliminate the shortcomings of private key cryptography. The biggest advantage of public key cryptography is that no prior communication needs to take place between the recipient and the sender.

Public key cryptography works like this, everyone has two keys, a public key, which the entire world has access to, and a private key, which only the owner knows. Note that the private key referred to here is completely different than the private key used in private key cryptography. For lack of a better name the secret key in public key cryptography is called a private key. These two "keys" are much different form the "keys" used in private key cryptography. In fact both keys used in public key cryptography are just very large integers, on the order of 300 digits long. With public key cryptography there is only one algorithm that is in use, that algorithm is know as the RSA algorithm. The RSA algorithm is the only algorithm that will be used to encrypt and decrypt data.

The algorithm works by taking in some data, and then using one of the keys which is a large number, and using the key to perform modulo and exponential functions on the data. The result is a message so scrambled that no amount of statistical analysis could break the code. The beauty of RSA is that a message encrypted with a public key can be decrypted with the corresponding private key and a message encrypted with a private key can be decrypted with the corresponding public key. For this reason RSA is know as asymmetric cryptography, different algorithms are used to decrypt and encrypt data. The algorithm is actually just a very complex mathematical identity. Thus, person X can encrypt a message with person Ys public key and only person Y can decrypt the message using his private key, this is the process used to encrypt e-mail. More importantly, if I had a public and private key, and only I know my public key, I could encrypt a message using my private key and everyone could decrypt the message using my public key. If my public key successfully decrypts the message you can be sure that I sent it because the message could have only been created with my private key. The reason it could have only been created with my private key is that my public key was used to decrypt the message. By decrypting the message with my public key you know only my private key created it. This works as long as only I have access to my private key. The process described here is known as a digital signature because by creating a message that only I could have created I am effectively signing the message.

Like private key cryptography the encryption and decryption process must reverse each others actions, but the difference lies in that there are two different numbers and two different algorithms used. One number is the public key and the other number is the private key. These numbers are used in the two different algorithms one to encrypt a message and one to decrypt a message. The important aspect of RSA and public key cryptography is that no prior communication has to take place before a message is sent. If you receive a message encrypted with RSA and your public key you have all the information you need to decrypt the message. RSA does have some disadvantages however, since the numbers used are so large the amount of time it takes to encrypt or decrypt is a lot longer than private key cryptography.

What you should understand now is that there are two methods of encryption, private key and public key, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. You should also understand the concept of a digital signature as this will be used later to prove identity.

To go back to main page click here or to proceed to the page describing digital certificates, click here

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Encryption - UCSD Mathematics

Chelsea Manning Officially Appeals Her 35-Year Prison …

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Chelsea Manning, the former U.S. Army Private who leaked thousands of classified documents to the website WikiLeaks in 2013, has officially filed an appeal for her 35-year military prison sentence after being convicted of multiple charges including violation of the Espionage Act.

The former intelligence analyst's leak of hundreds of thousands of classified documents, mostly about the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, has sparked a wide debate about government secrecy and First Amendment rights.

Manning, who was born male and known as Bradley, transitioned to being a woman after the government convicted the former soldier of leaking the documents.

The appeal argues that the sentencing was overreaching, stating, "For what PFC Manning did, the punishment is grossly unfair and unprecedented. No whistleblower in American history has been sentenced this harshly. Throughout trial the prosecution portrayed PFC Manning as a traitor and accused her of placing American lives in danger, but nothing could be further from the truth."

The appeal also argues that Manning released the documents for the good of the public, who had the right to know what was going on.

"PFC Manning disclosed the materials because under the circumstances she thought it was the right thing to do. She believed the public had a right to know about the toll of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the loss of life, and the extent to which the government sought to hide embarrassing information of its wrongdoing," the appeal states.

ABC News previously reported that the judge in the Manning case, Col. Denise Lind, called Manning's conduct "both wanton and reckless" in court documents. Lind added that it "was of a heedless nature that made it actually and imminently dangerous to others."

Nancy Hollander, one of Manning's attorneys, told ABC News today that she "really is a very brave courageous young woman to have done what she did and to write about it. She did what she believed was right in a very difficult situation. What happened with her is really an outrageous sentence, especially when you compare it to others."

Manning, who is currently serving out her prison sentence at the militarys detention facility in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, wrote about the appeal in her own words on her blog. "I have asked the judges to dismiss all charges or give me a shorter sentence," Manning wrote, outlining alleged errors in her trial. "All in all, rather than this being the end, this is only beginning."

The American Civil Liberties Union, historically a strong defender of First Amendment rights, wrote an amicus brief to the judges of the U.S. Army Court of Criminal Appeals in support of Manning. The ACLU argues that the conviction and sentence of Manning under the Espionage Act must be overturned for two main reasons.

"First, the Espionage Act is unconstitutionally vague, because it provides the government a tool that the First Amendment forbids: a criminal statute that allows the government to subject speakers and messages it dislikes to discriminatory prosecution. Second, even if the Act were not unconstitutional in all its applications, the military judges application of the Act to PFC Manning violated the First Amendment because the military judge did not permit PFC Manning to assert any defense that would allow the court to evaluate the value to public discourse of any of the information she disclosed," the amicus brief, posted on the ACLU website reads.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation also posted an amicus brief in defense of Manning, calling for U.S. Army Court of Criminal Appeals to reverse her conviction.

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Chelsea Manning Officially Appeals Her 35-Year Prison ...

Political prisoner Chelsea Manning appeals excessive 35yr …

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Whistleblower Chelsea Manning is appealing her conviction under the Espionage Act for releasing more than 700,000 cables to Wikileaks in 2010, which earned her a 35 year sentence in a military prison.

Papers were filed on Wednesday with the Army Court of Criminal Appeals in Fort Belvoir, but they must be reviewed for classified information before they are released to the public.

Manning was sentenced to 35 years in 2013 after being found guilty of 20 charges by court martial, including six under the Espionage Act of 1917, for whistleblowing on war crimes committed by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The New York Times editorial board called her prison term "excessive" at the time of the verdict.

At the age of 22, US army intelligence analyst Manning sent documents, cables, and other digital files to Wikileaks.

She included the haunting Collateral Murder video which depicts a US Apache crew killing civilians including two Reuters cameramen and wounding two children in Iraq.

"I started to question the morality of what we were doing," Manning said through a statement during the trial. "We had forgotten our humanity."

Lawyers Vincent Ward, Nancy Hollander, and Captain James Hammond have been preparing the appeal for months.

The Guardian reports the lawyers reviewed classified evidence at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

The Freedom of the Press Foundation raised money for the appeal with First Look Media and Glenn Greenwald matching donations up to $60,000.

The US Army Court of Appeals has the power to throw out the case, order a retrial, or amended her sentence.

The Obama administration has used the Espionage Act more than any other administration in US history, convicting seven whistleblowers including Manning.

She was awarded the Blueprint Enduring Impact Whistleblowing Prize earlier this month and wrote an acceptance speech from prison.

I keep fighting to survive and thrive. I am fighting my court-martial conviction and sentence before a military appeals court, starting this month. I am fighting to make the full investigation by the FBI public. I am fighting to grow my hair beyond the two-inch male standards by the US military, she wrote. I keep fighting to warn the world of the dangerous trend in which the only information you can access is the kind that someone with money or power wants you to see.

Mannings leak revealed a US policy of ignoring torture reports in Iraq, including the Frago 242 order against investigating allegations of abuse by the Iraqi government in violation of the UN Convention Against Torture.

The Guantanamo Filesrevealed detainees were arrested based on thin evidence.

The complicity of defense company DynCorp in child trafficking was also leaked, showing how the US embassy tried to censor a story about foreign contractors who hired young dancing boys to entertain them in northern Afghanistan.

Mannings inside information exposed the coverup of Obamas drone war in Yemen and evidence that US diplomats were authorized to collect biometric data on UN officials through an order signed by presidential candidate Hillary Clinton while she was Secretary of State.

Wikileaks is still under investigation for its role in whistleblowing and its founder Julian Assange remains in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

Manning submitted an official request for a presidential pardon in 2013 and the hashtag #PardonManning is being used by someone social media to push President Barack Obama.

He technically has the power to release her before the end of his term in January 2017, although he has given no indications he will do so.

As for Obama's potential successor, only Hillary Clinton has commented directly on Manning.

I think that in an age where so much information is flying through cyberspace, we all have to be aware of the fact that some information which is sensitive, which does affect the security of individuals and relationships, deserves to be protected and we will continue to take necessary steps to do so, Clinton said about Manning on December 11, 2015, failing to foresee the irony of her comments in light of her current email server scandal.

There is no record of her primary opponent Bernie Sanders mentioning Manning by name, but when asked about Edward Snowden at an October debate, he said, I think Snowden played a very important role in educating the American public ... he did break the law, and I think there should be a penalty to that.

Republican presumptive nominee Donald Trump has hinted he would kill Snowden using the death penalty, saying, This guys a bad guy. There is still a thing called execution.

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Political prisoner Chelsea Manning appeals excessive 35yr ...

FFIEC IT Examination Handbook InfoBase – Encryption

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Action Summary

Financial institutions should employ encryption to mitigate the risk of disclosure or alteration of sensitive information in storage and transit.Encryption implementations should include

Encryption is used to secure communications and data storage, particularly authentication credentials and the transmission of sensitive information. It can be used throughout a technological environment, including the operating systems, middleware, applications, file systems, and communications protocols.

Encryption can be used as a preventive control, a detective control, or both. As a prevention control, encryption acts to protect data from disclosure to unauthorized parties. As a detective control, encryption is used to allow discovery of unauthorized changes to data and to assign responsibility for data among authorized parties. When prevention and detection are joined, encryption is a key control in ensuring confidentiality, data integrity, and accountability.

Properly used, encryption can strengthen the security of an institution's systems. Encryption also has the potential, however, to weaken other security aspects. For instance, encrypted data drastically lessens the effectiveness of any security mechanism that relies on inspections of the data, such as anti-virus scanning and intrusion detection systems. When encrypted communications are used, networks may have to be reconfigured to allow for adequate detection of malicious code and system intrusions.

Although necessary, encryption carries the risk of making data unavailable should anything go wrong with data handling, key management, or the actual encryption. For example, a loss of encryption keys or other failures in the encryption process can deny the institution access to the encrypted data. The products used and administrative controls should contain robust and effective controls to ensure reliability.

Financial institutions should employ an encryption strength sufficient to protect information from disclosure until such time as the information's disclosure poses no material threat. For instance, authenticators should be encrypted at a strength sufficient to allow the institution time to detect and react to an authenticator theft before the attacker can decrypt the stolen authenticators.

Decisions regarding what data to encrypt and at what points to encrypt the data are typically based on the risk of disclosure and the costs and risks of encryption. The costs include potentially significant overhead costs on hosts and networks. Generally speaking, authenticators are encrypted whether on public networks or on the financial institution's network. Sensitive information is also encrypted when passing over a public network and also may be encrypted within the institution.

Encryption cannot guarantee data security. Even if encryption is properly implemented, for example, a security breach at one of the endpoints of the communication can be used to steal the data or allow an intruder to masquerade as a legitimate system user.

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FFIEC IT Examination Handbook InfoBase - Encryption

PGP Encryption Tool – iGolder

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This tool is simple to use: enter a public PGP key and the message you wish to encrypt, and click on the Encrypt Message button. If you do not have a public PGP key, simply use our PGP Key Generator to generate your own public/private key pair. You are also welcome to use the iGolder public PGP key to contact us or just to test our PGP- encryption tool.

iGolder respects your privacy and does not log nor monitors any activity (encryption) done on this web page.

PGP Public Key (paste the public key of the recipient you are about to send a message)

Message to Encrypt (enter the message text you wish encrypt)

Encrypted Message

Copy & paste this encrypted message and sent it by email to owner of the public PGP key you encrypted the message. Your friend is welcome to use the PGP Decrypt Tool to decrypt the message you sent him.

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PGP Encryption Tool - iGolder

Encryption | Privacy PC

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Why use Encryption software?

The data you store on your personal computer could be an open source of knowledge about your identity. If skillfully processed and analyzed, your files can tell a whole lot more about you than you might have ever thought: financial and banking information, your contacts, SSN, social circle, habits the almost intimate things that people normally do not disclose to strangers. Now, imagine someone breaking into your PC be it a hack or physical burglary and getting hold of it all. You wouldnt be flattered, would you?

As far as privacy and personal information confidentiality are concerned, encryption software can become your solution to safeguard these data from unwanted disclosure, even if your machine gets compromised or you happen to lose it due to unpredictable circumstances. As the concept prompts, the software employs cutting-edge techniques to encode your files so that nobody else can retrieve anything out of them in readable format. With encryption softwares features on your side, you are the only one who knows the secret key for undoing the lock and getting the information back to its original state.

Encryption software is particularly helpful to those dealing with large bulks of high-value sensitive information whose loss may lead to serious consequences for their well-being or reputation.

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Encryption | Privacy PC

Whitleblower Chelsea Manning Appeals ‘Unprecedented’ Sentence

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Lawyers for Chelsea Manning, the former U.S. Army soldier convicted of leaking a massive trove of classified documents related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, formally appealed her lengthy prison term handed down in 2013, calling Mannings punishment grossly unfair and unprecedented.

In their 209-page appeal, Mannings lawyers said the whistleblower was convinced disclosing the cache of classified documents to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks was the right thing to do.

She believed the public had a right to know about the toll of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the loss of life and the extent to which the government sought to hide embarrassing information of its wrongdoing, Mannings lawyers wrote. The documents were published by WikiLeaks in 2010.

The appeal comes more than two years after Manning was convicted under the Espionage Acta World War I-era law intended to prosecute spiesbut was acquitted of the most serious charge of aiding the enemy. Manning, a private first class in the U.S. Army, was subsequently sentenced to 35 years in prison and dishonorably discharged at a military trial at Fort Meade, Md.the home base of the National Security Agency.

Related: Revolutions Family Tree: Franklin and Adams to Manning and Snowden

Her lawyers are now arguing that the judges sentence was overly harsh compared to prosecutions of other leakers, most notably, Gen. David Petraeus. The former CIA director pleaded guilty to disclosing classified documents to his mistress and biographer. For his crimes, Petraeus was sentenced to two years of probation.

Manning is asking military judges to dismiss all charges based on the militarys use of solitary confinement, vague evidence and for the absence of proof that her disclosures harmed the United States.

Mannings leak included more than 700,000 classified military and state department documents. Among the cache of intelligence was cockpit gun-sight footage of a U.S. Apache helicopters killing a dozen unarmed civilians and two Reuters photojournalists in Iraq in 2007. At the time it was the largest leak of U.S. intelligence secrets in history.

The disclosures rocked U.S. intelligence agencies and prompted dubious suggestions that by leaking classified intelligence Manning was putting American lives in dangerbut such claims have gone unfounded, her supporters claim.

Mannings trial also came during a historically aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers under President Obama, whose administration has prosecuted more people under the Espionage Act than all other presidents combined.

Vincent Ward, of the New Mexico-based firm Freedman Boyd Hollander Goldberg Urias & Ward, which is representing Manning, said theyll argue that the Espionage Act violates Mannings due process and First Amendment rights.

The elements are so broad and vague that you dont know what to defend against, Ward told the Press, adding, Its an issue thats been subjected to lots of scrutiny and debate for a long time, even before Chelsea.

Manning, who has gone through a very public sex change, was previously known as Bradley Manning.

No whistleblower in American history has been sentenced this harshly, Mannings lawyers wrote. Throughout trial the prosecution portrayed PFC Manning as a traitor and accused her of placing American lives in danger, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Her lawyers chided the government for its pretrial confinement of Manning, which, they claim, worsened her already serious mental health issues.

Court documents note that Manning was restricted to what amounted to solitary confinement for nine months while awaiting trial despite Manning having informed Army officials about her challenges dealing with obsessive compulsive disorder, attention deficit hyperactive disorder and anxiety.

The American Civil Liberties Union, in an amicus brief filed in support of Mannings appeal, challenged the legality of the Espionage Act because it prohibits suspects from defending themselves on the merits of the disclosures. The civil rights group also regaled at a double standard in which government officials are permitted to disclose information to perpetuate a certain agendawhich critics have dubbed authorized leaks.

Disclosures of government information happen all the time, whether by officials seeking to advance their interests or by whistleblowers exposing misconduct for public benefit, a pair of ACLU attorneys wrote in a blog post announcing the agencys amicus brief. But only one person in our history has ever been sentenced to decades in prison for disclosing truthful information to the press and public: Chelsea Manning.

Ward said Manning is anxious and nervous and has been highly engaged in all aspects of her case.

She also recognizes that she has a voice that transcends even the current situation, Ward told the Press. Shes brought awareness to both the issues associated with being a whistleblower to transgender issues, and I think she understands she occupies that political space.

Manning enlisted in the Army in 2007 and was deployed to Baghdad as an intelligence analyst two years later. It was during the course of her deployment that Manning deteriorated emotionally because of her inability to live openly as a transgender woman, her appeal states.

In February 2015, Manning, who is incarcerated at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, was authorized by the Army to undergo hormone therapy. Just days after she was sentenced, Manning announced via a statement to NBCs Today show that she was transitioning to a woman.

As I transition into this next phase of my life, I want everyone to know the real me, the statement read. I am Chelsea Manning. I am a female. Given the way that I feel, and have felt since childhood, I want to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible. I hope that you will support me in this transition. I also request that, starting today, you refer to me by my new name and use the feminine pronoun (except in official mail to the confinement facility). I look forward to receiving letters from supporters and having the opportunity to write back.

In 2013, the Press visited Fort Meade, Maryland to report on Mannings trial:

(Featured photo: Famed Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Elsberg during a demonstration in support of Chelsea Manning/Courtesy Free whistleblower PVT Chelsea Manning Facebook)

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Whitleblower Chelsea Manning Appeals 'Unprecedented' Sentence