Chelsea Manning: "People think they're free, but they're not".

The Big Whale: In just a few years, you've become one of the leading figures in the fight to protect privacy, which has also earned you a number of threats. How do you deal with this situation?

Chelsea Manning: I deal with it quite well. Obviously it's not easy, I've been under a lot of scrutiny over the last few years, but I know it was inevitable. The publication of my book (Readme.txt) last year also gave me a lot of exposure. I've done a lot of conferences to tell my story, WikiLeaks, prison, and the fight I'm waging.

Now I'm trying to take a step back, to be less present in the media, on social networks, to focus on the fight that drives me every day: protecting privacy.

What has changed most on the Internet since 2010 and your arrest?

Normal people now use it every day. I still remember the time before I went to prison, I was a bit of a geek, even in the army. The one who spends her days on her computer or smartphone.

Today, that's the case for billions of people, which is actually very worrying because behind this frenetic use, it's people's entire private lives that are under threat.

The Internet we know today is much more opaque and fragmented than it was in the 1990s. Access is simpler, but in reality people understand it much less.

Are people not free to do what they want?