It was a chilly Friday evening in San Francisco when I settled into my sturdy, mahogany chair at Gracias Madre and watched my companions slip their cell phones into faraday bags. I looked around the table, still not fully able to process who I was about to break vegan bread with.

To my left sat Chelsea Manning — around the table sat her manager and a couple friends who live in the Bay Area. I won’t name them for the sake of privacy, something Chelsea sacrificed almost a decade ago when she leaked hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables and army reports.

Though her leak is old news by now, it’s worth pointing out that among the material Manning leaked was the following video of a US Apache Helicopter killing two Reuters journalists:

Manning was ultimately convicted of 17 charges and sentenced to 35 years in prison for her 2010 leak, almost seven of which she served before President Obama commuted her sentence.

This morning, after she refused to testify before a grand jury investigating Wikileaks, Manning was sent to jail. District Judge Claude Hilton brushed off a request from Manning’s lawyers that she be sent to home confinement due to medical complications, saying U.S. marshals can handle it.

She will remain in jail until she decides to testify (spoiler alert: she won’t), or until the grand jury concludes its investigation.

In a statement released via her Twitter, which is being “run by friends and volunteers until Chelsea is released from jail,” she reiterated her refusal to cooperate with the grand jury. Another Tweet quoted Chelsea as saying, “this ain’t my first rodeo.”

The decision to jail Manning, despite having already been tried, convicted, sentenced, and incarcerated for her crimes, sends a deeply concerning message to leakers. It says, essentially, that you are never safe from being harassed and pressured into forfeiting your fifth amendment right under threat of imprisonment.

Manning isn’t the only leaker convicted recently under the Espionage Act — in fact, the Obama Administration pioneered use of the Act to prosecute leakers, with his former Director of National Intelligence saying, “it is good to hang an admiral once in a while as an example to the others.”

The problem is, the Espionage Act was originally intended to prosecute spies for were sharing secret information with hostile nations. In the past half century, however, it has increasingly been used to prosecute those who leak information in the public interest such as Manning, who, while convicted for other crimes, was acquitted of “aiding the enemy.”

Ultimately, this discussion should come down to a simple question — do citizens have a right to know what their government is doing?

Some might counter that while yes, in general, governments should be transparent, they also must keep some of their more violent functions classified for the sake of national security.

I would argue that after a better part of a century of U.S. military and intelligence dominance, it’s become abundantly clear our government needs to be reigned in, not given more slack.

We’ve committed moral atrocities and crimes against humanity around the world from Vietnam to South America, and overthrown democratically elected leaders of Iran, Guatemala, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Brazil, and countless other nations.

In fact, it wouldn’t be hard to argue that the United States has been the single most destabilizing force in the post WWII world order. Considering that this mess was made in our name, and on our dime, maybe it’s time we demand to know more about what our government is up to.

To be clear, I’m not arguing that we should simply throw open the doors to all of our institutions and allow the FSB to poke around. Rather, I believe we should repeal the Espionage Act and implement clear legal protections for those who leak classified information in the public interest.

Otherwise, the alternative is waiting around to see what creative uses the Trump Justice Department can find for their sweeping powers.