What were the files Chelsea Manning released to Wikileaks and what did it do?
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This is sort of a controversial topic. She copied a complete set of documents she was given access to with diplomatic cables that had been sent between various American diplomatic and intelligence communities around the world. There was everything from complaints of toilet paper quality to messages of enemy troop movements to analysis of foreign leaders mental state to the identity of secret informants. Everything was included no matter how sensitive or how important it was. It did include proof of war crimes committed by Americans, for example one of the first documents released was gun camera footage and internal communications from an AC-130 as they shot up a town square full of civilians going about their business, and then proceed to fire upon the first responders. However the rest of the documents did not hold up to these standards. There were certainly some embarrassing internal documents and a good insight into how the American diplomats and military worked. But it did not contain any evidence of larger conspiracy within the US government. And because Julian Assange refused to redact any of the information and refused to give the US insight into what was to be released a lot of the information released cause damage to the security of the US and to individuals deployed in various hostile territories. So although people agree that we need more transparency within the US government and that leaks like this is useful to help discover who coverup illegal activity it could have been done much better.
Compare this to Edward Snowden who managed to show evidence of a large scale conspiracy working within the US government conducing illegal surveillance on everyone without actually releasing that many documents and nothing which risks the operational security of the state or any individuals.
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