In a tense moment at the New Yorker Festival on Sunday, former intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning shut down speculation that information in documents she shared with WikiLeaks in 2010 was sensitive enough to cause harm to other intelligence officers, informants, or ongoing Army operations. When New Yorker staff writer Larissa MacFarquhar asked whether Manning was afraid of what was in the huge cache of more than 700,000 items she uploaded, Manning answered, “Absolutely not.” It was an emotional and candid discussion for Manning, touching on both her past and what it’s like now that she has been released from prison into a very changed world.

“I knew I was different,” Manning said of growing up in Oklahoma. She grew up on a “primordial” version of the Internet, picking up coding from her father and eventually finding friends online that made her feel more normal than those in real life had been able to. She recalled living on the streets of Chicago for several months after leaving her father’s house, and deciding to go into the Army as an effort to repair their relationship. “I can’t be trans, so maybe I won’t be,” she described thinking. “Maybe this will make me not trans.”

She retold in detail how she reacted to the difference between her pre-deployment training (in which she spent hours analyzing information on the actions of troops in Afghanistan from a base in upstate New York) and the real thing. Once she arrived in Iraq, after her deployment location changed, the numbers and statistics had human faces. “It was like drinking from a fire hose. And it’s just a fire hose of, like, death and destruction and mayhem just every single day. And it’s normal.”

Manning became disillusioned with the presence of the United States Army in Iraq and increasingly dubious about her role in the conflict. She described seeing “feedback loops” in the violence in the region, in which data would lead troops into an area and a violent event would occur, only to create more data to support more troops, and more violence in response. The objectivity of the statistics she was responsible for analyzing became less and less trustworthy: “Sometimes there would be, like, an incident in which, you know, 15 people were killed, and they wouldn’t . . . so maybe they were or weren’t armed. Like, it was hard to tell, you know? But they would always get put down as being EKIA, you know, enemy killed in action, even though we didn’t know.” One of the items in her disclosures was a video now known as “Collateral Murder,” in which civilians, including children and journalists, were shot and killed by U.S. soldiers in helicopters shooting at the ground.