Reykjavík Grapevine - 04.02.2011, Blaðsíða 10

10
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 2 — 2011
Feature | IMMI
The info-wars have begun, and
Iceland is begging to be the leg-
islative battleground. In the wake
of the international controversy
made mainstream in part thanks to
WikiLeaks’ highly-publicized and
continued release of leaked docu-
ments from around the world, Ice-
land remains curiously relevant to
the debate raging globally about
transparency reform, information
freedom, and the future of journal-
ism. The Icelandic Modern Media
Initiative (IMMI), founded last year
in tandem with a proposition to
drastically overhaul the country’s
freedom of information laws, is re-
sponding to the new info-climate by
proposing a legislative framework
that could effectively make Iceland
into an international transparency
safe-haven.
An amalgamation of legal provisions
from around the world dealing with
source and libel protection, freedom
of information and transparency, the
IMMI proposal has garnered interna-
tional attention as the most compre-
hensive legislative protection package
for investigative journalism and free
speech that the world has seen to date.
Notably, three of the five primary au-
thors of the Parliamentary proposal—
Julian Assange, Rop Gonggrijp, and
Birgitta Jónsdóttir—are among others
being probed by the U.S. Department of
Justice as part of the ongoing criminal
investigation into WikiLeaks' disclosure
of thousands of leaked State Depart-
ment cables beginning in November
2010.
Yet for many freedom of information
activists following the transparency
movement—WikiLeaks is not the point.
“This is a much more complicated
story than just WikiLeaks,” says Smári
McCarthy, co-founder of the Icelandic
Digital Freedom Society, ex-WikiLeaks
volunteer, and one of the authors of the
IMMI proposal who as of yet is not vis-
ibly under investigation by the DOJ.
“To focus on them is like to focus on
one grain of sand on a very big beach.”
THE IMMI REVOLUTION
Smári and others in the core organizing
group of the IMMI describe WikiLeaks
as the “crowbar” of the information
freedom movement—the wedge that
opened the floodgates—propelling the
issue into mainstream discussion.
“I’ve been doing this for a lot of
years,” says Smári, “and I’ve always had
to start off by explaining what the hell
I’m talking about. Now I don’t have to
explain that anymore. Now I just have
to figure out a way to make it seem less
antagonistic.”
But in Iceland that battle may al-
ready be close to being won, especially
since the IMMI proposal was passed
unanimously by Alþingi in June of last
year.
“[We started talking about IMMI]
just after the big National Assembly [in
2009], where ‘integrity’, ‘equality’ and
‘honesty’, were sort of the key words”
says Birgitta Jónsdóttir, the proposal’s
chief sponsor in Parliament.
“I realised that if there was a time
for Iceland to take a specific route or
direction, this could fit into that sensa-
tion that the nation had.”
An Icelandic MP and the founder of
The Movement (formerly of The Citi-
zen’s Movement), a political party de-
voted, as she puts it, to “changing the
way we do business in Parliament,” Bir-
gitta considers the freedom of informa-
tion debate to be central to the ques-
tions Iceland struggles with as it begins
its slow recovery from the economic
collapse.
“I’ve read the Shock Doctrine,” says
Birgitta, “and that implies that when na-
tions are in crisis, very damaging legis-
lation is often pushed through because
people are simply in too much shock to
realise what sort of impact it can have.
But during that state of shock, you can
also do very positive things.”
“If you live in a democracy,” Birgitta
says, “and don’t have freedom of infor-
mation, it’s not a democracy. And peo-
ple have to understand that if you don’t
have freedom of information online, it’s
not going to be offline, either.”
Underlying their emphasis on the
importance of freedom of information
(or foi as some of them really do call
it), in particular with regard to legisla-
tive reform, the philosophy of the IMMI
organisers seems to be based in the
shared belief that information is central
to a functioning democracy.
“When Iceland’s economy col-
lapsed,” says Smári, “what we saw was
that every single failing that caused
that collapse was a lack of information
flow. The regulators, the banks, the au-
ditors, everybody throughout the chain
either had insufficient information, or
whoever was supposed to be regulat-
ing them had insufficient information.
So the entire thing can be to some
degree understood as just a failing in
information flow. And of course if you
don’t have the information you don’t
have accountability, you don’t have any
of the safeguarding structures actually
functioning. So in essence you do not
have anything that is in any way akin to
a democracy, if you don’t have informa-
tion.”
ANTIdOTE TO SECRECY
The idea for Iceland as the “Switzer-
land of bits”—the information-focused
equivalent of a tax-haven—was first
brought up to members of the IMMI
at an Icelandic Digital Freedom Soci-
ety conference in 2008. The sugges-
tion came from John Perry Barlow, an
American cyberlibertarian and one of
the founders of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation. The following year, the DFS
invited WikiLeaks to speak at their an-
nual conference. Reiterating Barlow’s
sentiment of an information Mecca,
WikiLeaks also did him one better,
providing the members of IMMI with a
list of laws regarding press and source
protection that had proven useful to
them, a list that would become the
blueprint for the IMMI proposal.
“We cherry-picked all the best laws
from around the world that are dealing
with the issue of freedom of informa-
tion, speech and expression,” says Bir-
gitta. “And what we did was not only
cherry-pick the best laws, but the laws
that are actually functioning as the best
laws. They don’t only look good on pa-
per. The reason for that is that if our
law would come under attack, because
we’re a relatively small nation, then
it would be an attack also on the law
in Sweden, or Belgium or the United
States, or France.”
Julian Assange—who helped draft
the proposal and also to present it to
members of Parliament prior to the
vote—wrote in a blog entry on the
Guardian website the night before it
was filed, that he hoped that “Iceland
could be the antidote to secrecy ha-
vens.”
“It may become an island” said As-
sange, “where openness is protected –
a journalism haven. Sleet Street 2.0”
NO INFORMATION LEFT BEHINd
The question of how best to facili-
tate information flow, and how to do
it responsibly, is a key and contended
question brought into the public eye by
the actions of WikiLeaks over the past
few years.
Herbert Snorrason is one of the
primary spokespeople for OpenLeaks
(www.openleaks.org), a whistleblow-
ing alternative that launched its site late
last month and that advocates a more
egalitarian approach to the distribution
and release of leaked documents. Her-
bert ended his stint as a WikiLeaks vol-
Words
Valgerður Þóroddsdóttir
Illustration
Hörður Kristbjörnsson
Information
Without
Borders?
THE IMMI PROPOSAL
The IMMI proposal combines stat-
utes from around the world—Swe-
den, Belgium, the United States and
France, among others—dealing with
source and libel protection, freedom
of information, and transparency,
in the hopes of creating compre-
hensive legal protections for media
organizations, newspapers, journal-
ists, and sources alike—globally.
The proposition was passed unani-
mously by Alþingi on June 16th,
2010, and has thus become parlia-
mentary policy, though as of yet it
has no legislative value. All of the
proposed improvements to at least
13 laws in four different ministries
have yet to be passed, and the es-
timated time for the entire IMMI
package to be legislated is about
one year.
The proposal’s primary sponsor in
Parliament was Birgitta Jónsdót-
tir who, along with Julian Assange,
Smári McCarthy, Herbert Snorrason
and Rop Gonggrijp, was also one of
the proposal’s primary authors.
Birgitta says it would be “bizarre” if
the overwhelming support shown
for the proposal by Parliament in
June of last year wouldn’t translate
when the laws have been written
and are ready to go through the Par-
liament.
“The economic benefits to being the safe-haven for
free speech are very well known, because the last
country that did it is still the dominant empire on
the planet.”
Iceland, WikiLeaks and the electronic frontier
What do y'all think? Will the IMMI laws be passed by Alþingi? Will Iceland be the world's haven from libel
laws and gag orders? Will it rescue us from KREPPA? Leak your thoughts to letters@grapevine.is (also, if
you're interested in leaking actual documents to us, we wouldn't mind printing that stuff).