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Army will begin initial treatment for Chelsea Manning’s …

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FILE - In this undated file photo provided by the U.S. Army, Pfc. Chelsea Manning poses for a photo wearing a wig and lipstick.AP

WASHINGTON The Bureau of Prisons has rejected the Army's request to accept the transfer of national security leaker Pvt. Chelsea Manning from the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to a civilian facility where she could get better treatment for her gender-identity condition. The military will instead begin the initial treatment for her.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has approved the Army's recommendation to keep Manning in military custody and start a rudimentary level of gender treatment, a defense official said Thursday. The initial gender treatments could include allowing Manning to wear some female undergarments and also possibly provide some hormone treatments.

The decision raises a number of questions about what level of treatment Manning will be able to get and at what point the private would have to be transferred from the all-male prison to a female facility.

Manning has been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, the sense of being a woman in a man's body. Civilian prisons can provide treatment, and the Defense Department has argued repeatedly that it doesn't have the medical expertise needed. As a result, the Army tried to work out a plan to transfer Manning to a federal prison.

Officials said Thursday that federal authorities refused the proposal. Officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly by name.

Manning's lawyer, David Coombs, told The Associated Press on Thursday that he was encouraged that the Army will begin medical treatment.

"It has been almost a year since we first filed our request for adequate medical care," Coombs said. "I am hopeful that when the Army says it will start a 'rudimentary level' of treatment that this means hormone replacement therapy."

If hormone therapy is not provided, he said he will have to take "appropriate legal action to ensure Chelsea finally receives the medical treatment she deserves and is entitled to under the law."

In May Coombs had also contended that civilian prisons were not as safe as military facilities.

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Army will begin initial treatment for Chelsea Manning's ...

Edward Snowden interview: ‘If I end up in chains, I can live with that’ | Channel 4 News – Video

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Edward Snowden interview: #39;If I end up in chains, I can live with that #39; | Channel 4 News
Former American spy Edward Snowden, currently in exile in Moscow, reveals new details of what he claims are US intelligence abuses of personal data collected...

By: Channel 4 News

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Edward Snowden interview: 'If I end up in chains, I can live with that' | Channel 4 News - Video

Snowden: think like ‘worst people on Earth’ to outwit NSA

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Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden who was responsible for blowing the whistle and exposing surveillance programmes run by the US and UK governments has implored hackers to focus more of their efforts on creating anti-surveillance technologies.

Speaking via video link from Moscow to the audience at the Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE) conference in New York this weekend, Snowden said that he intends to devote his time to promoting technologies that allow people to communicate anonymously and encrypt their messages. At the same time, he encouraged others to do the same.

"If you let go of your rights for a moment, you've lost them for a lifetime, and this is why this matters -- we didn't know about it [the surveillance], we weren't told about it." Describing the surveillance programmes set up by the US government as "a fundamentally un-American thing", he then proceeded to explain to the hackers, many of whom consider him to be a hero, how they can help fight back against what we now know to be "the new truth of our world".

"I think we the people, you the people, you in this room right now have both the means and the capability to help build a better future by encoding our rights into the programs and protocols on which we rely every day. And that's what my future work is going to be involved in and I hope you will join me and the Freedom of the Press Foundation and every other organisation in making that happen."

When asked to explain what tools needed to be developed and how people should use them, Snowden said that while the level of protection required varied dramatically from person to person, there were still basic rules that should be abided by. "Generally when I talk about this, I say encryption, encryption, encryption, because it is an important first step that denies the government access to anything typically more than suspicion which is drawn from association."

Snowden, who is now on the board of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, explained that encryption for journalists in particular should only be seen as the first step, as that association is capable of betraying them completely. It's important to remember, he says that when it comes to how governments work out who their adversaries are, "the same techniques they use to discover spies, they use to discover journalists".

He praised some of the tools already out there, including Tor and PGP, but said that the hacking community needed to work together to peer review any systems that are built up by attacking them and "work as adversaries to find holes so we can fix them".

User experience also needs to significantly improve to make tools easier to use, he said. "We need encryption, mixed routing, we need non-attributable communications or un-attributable internet access that's available to people, that's easy, that's transparent, that's reliable -- that we can use not just here in the United States, but around the world, because again this a global problem."

The dangers posed by surveillance and the attacks against anti-surveillance technologies are only going to get worse, he added, before imploring the "grad students of the world to fix this thing". The trick is, he says, "to think like the worst people on Earth" and consider how they will unpick the systems that are built. "The techniques are only limited by our imagination."

Snowden has now been in Russia for over a year and earlier this month made a request to extend his Russian visa, which expires at the end of July. The US has requested that Snowden be extradited to face criminal charges, but given the past and current tensions between the two countries, it is unlikely that Russia will acquiesce to Washington's demands anytime soon.

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Snowden: think like 'worst people on Earth' to outwit NSA


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