Reykjavík Grapevine - 04.02.2011, Qupperneq 11

11
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 2 — 2011
unteer in September 2010, right around
the same time as several other key
names, including Birgitta Jónsdóttir,
Rop Gonggrijp, Smári McCarthy, and
Julian Assange’s ex-right-hand man
and current OpenLeaks spokesman
Daniel Domscheit-Berg.
“There was some drama,” says
Smári. “The split was of course rather
dramatised in the media. But it wasn’t
necessarily bad drama. The divergence
is just healthy, really. It means that you
get this proliferation of different ap-
proaches to the same goal.”
The OpenLeaks approach, says
Herbert, is to “function as a mere con-
duit between a whistleblower and an
organisation of their choice.”
“We will operate in a content-neu-
tral manner,” says Herbert. “Making
editorial choices is not our place. We're
not functioning as a journalistic organ-
isation, and in some sense I think that's
where WikiLeaks started to go wrong."
WikiLeaks’ high-profile approach
and global-impact emphasis, says Her-
bert, leaves a lot of valuable leaked in-
formation untouched or underused.
“With the policy of maximizing im-
pact it seems fairly obvious that the
leaks that are most likely to be chosen
are the ones that are the easiest to use
in order to have an impact,” says Her-
bert.
“Yes, WikiLeaks does make ev-
erything available publicly, which is
a good thing. But at the same time it
does mean that there's this massive ar-
chive of things that hardly anyone has
looked at. And because it's public, no
journalist is interested in looking at it
because they can never be sure that
they won't get scooped by somebody
else. And that means it just sits there.”
OpenLeaks, meanwhile, expects
that the documents flowing through
their system will be related mostly to
local issues, though the organisation
itself will be working globally.
“Local impact is better than global
attention,” says Herbert.
OpenLeaks hopes to be able to
function as a mere middle-man, help-
ing to direct information from leakers
to the organisation of their choice, by
providing a mechanism that ensures
anonymity.
This approach is at its core quite
distinct from that of WikiLeaks, at least
as far as how the organisation sees it-
self; WikiLeaks' slogan, after all, is “we
open governments,” but the OpenLeaks
approach hopes to be much more egal-
itarian.
“Our goal is to help as many people
as possible to provide resources for
whistleblowers,” says Herbert. “So our
goal is not in any sense specifically to
pressure change in governments or
other organisations, it’s simply to make
sure that other people are able to get
their information out there. What the
long-term consequences of that are is
quite debatable. The immediate conse-
quences are quite likely to be that or-
ganisations that need to keep secrets
will try to be even more secretive. But
I don’t think that is sustainable in the
long term. Eventually they will have to
adapt to a more transparent environ-
ment.”
A more transparent environment in
general—this is the same philosophy
emphasised by the IMMI and other
information freedom advocacy groups
such as the Digital Freedom Society
and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The OpenLeaks platform, says Her-
bert, was thus largely sculpted by what
he and others witnessed first-hand as
the shortcomings of working with and
within the WikiLeaks organisation.
“OpenLeaks is going to be hav-
ing a considerably more transparent
structure,” says Herbert. “Both finan-
cially and organizationally. And there
is absolutely no place whatsoever for
any sort of unilateral decision making.
The problem with that is that it’s called
dictatorship. Which is not the most ef-
ficient way to run things, especially if
you have an organisation that needs to
grow quite quickly. That I think is re-
ally the largest failing of WikiLeaks, that
although it has a lot of volunteers, it’s
very difficult to make any efficient use
of those volunteers because you have a
single person who wants to be aware of
everything that’s going on.”
CLIMATE CHANGE
Another of the IMMI’s underlying prin-
ciples is that the benefits of reacting
proactively to the changing informa-
tion climate are systemic—they include
the possibility of true transparency,
responsible politicians and responsible
journalists.
“There is so much need to set laws
that are in line with the fact that infor-
mation doesn’t have any borders any-
more, in our world,” says Birgitta.
But in Iceland, perhaps the biggest
sell for the IMMI legislative framework
is the ways in which the country could
be benefited financially.
“The economic benefits to being
the safe-haven for free speech are very
well known” says Smári, “because the
last country that did it is still the domi-
nant empire on the planet.”
“Well, kind of.”
“If you look at how the U.S. did
things in the early days,” he contin-
ues, “they basically ignored European
copyright and patent laws and just said,
‘well, we want people to innovate here.’
They took a very interesting stance
towards information freedom. Iceland
can do that. And we can do it a lot fast-
er.”
The compelling need for proac-
tive legislative reform, says Birgitta, is
largely apparent in the state of the me-
dia, particularly in Europe and especial-
ly in the U.K., “where it is actually much
worse than most people are aware of.”
According to her, the changing me-
dia landscape threatens not only the
integrity but also the very existence of
investigative journalism.
“Most of the media is moving onto
the Internet and since investigative
journalism is very expensive, it is very
weak, and it needs legislative protec-
tion in order for it to carry on thriving.
The way we could help with investi-
gative journalism for example is if we
could create the legislative environ-
ment so that there are not as many pri-
or restraints and super injunctions on
these stories so that they actually get
published.
“I think the biggest problem we’re
faced with when it comes to freedom
of information is the altering and fal-
sification of our current history. And
I’ve seen that very clearly in the British
media. The reason why I’m concerned
about the British Media is that there
are all these very respected media with
qualified journalists and good reputa-
tions—BBC, Independent, Financial
Times, Guardian—and most other me-
dia outlets go there to recycle stories,
particularly online.”
In the U.K., Birgitta says, libel laws
in particular are so bad that “you can
actually go back to the first days of the
Internet and pull things out of the his-
torical record. And this is what’s hap-
pening, stories are being taken out, be-
cause the media outlets can’t afford the
time or the money to deal with the libel
lawsuits,” particularly by large corpora-
tions trying to protect their image and
interests.
“The same with super injunctions,”
she adds. “That is such an incredible
thing. I couldn’t believe it at first, but
I’ve actually gotten it confirmed by a lot
of journalists who have been victims
of it. Super injunction means that, say
you’re writing a story about BP, and
they find out. BP talks to the head of
the BBC or whatever, and say 'were go-
ing to sue you if you do this.' Then you
reach a settlement and the settlement
includes a gag order, a super injunc-
tion, which means that you can’t tell
anyone that you can’t write the story.
And then if accidentally you find out
that I’m under super injunction, you
are automatically, as a journalist, under
super injunction too. It’s unbelievable.
And this is Britain.”
LOST IN TRANSLATION
But the problem is systemic, and Ice-
land is no exception to the rule. In Au-
gust 2009, state TV station RÚV was
slapped with an injunction minutes
before airing a story about Kaupthing
bank’s ‘large loan book’—a package
of documents leaked by WikiLeaks
revealing hundreds of billions of ISK
that were essentially funnelled from
the bank to its own shareholders in the
form of loans just before its collapse.
In January that same year, prior to the
document leaks, competing TV station
Stöð 2 was hit with a similar gag order
while preparing to air a story about the
relationship between Kaupthing and
Robert Tchenquiz, a property entre-
preneur who was later implicated in
the loan book scandal. The program,
Kompás, was not aired, and its entire
staff promptly fired.
Kristinn Hrafnsson, a current
spokesman for WikiLeaks who worked
on both stories, describes the Icelandic
media as “sheepish” and investiga-
tive journalism in Iceland as “virtually
dead.”
“Very few journalists had the drive
or the means to carry out proper inves-
tigative journalism before the current
economic crisis hit the country,” says
Kristinn. “Since then there have been
massive layoffs and cuts hitting most
media organisations, [resulting] in the
decline of investigative journalism in
Iceland at a time when it is badly need-
ed. ”
“We are in a really big dilemma in
Iceland because RÚV is not doing what
it needs to be doing,” Birgitta says.
“And I don’t see much investigative
journalism. Here we have this financial
mess, and it’s complicated, and the ex-
perts in the field speak a language that
most of us don’t understand. The job of
a good journalist is to translate that into
a language that we understand. For me,
that should be the role of RÚV.”
Indeed for many of those familiar
with the state of the media in Iceland,
the suggestion that the country could
become a lifeline for investigative jour-
nalism, a Mecca for freedom of infor-
mation, seems quite ironic.
“I was speaking at the Association
of European Journalists earlier [last]
year,” says Birgitta, “and there’s nobody
from Iceland in this union. It’s been go-
ing on for 56 years, and never have we
had any Icelandic journalists in that.
We’re very passive when it comes to
journalists understanding that they’re
part of an international community.”
“Journalists have a big responsibil-
ity,” Birgitta says. “It is not only about
having the freedom [of information],
you have to be able to translate it so
that the rest of the people can share or
have access to it in such a way that they
actually care.”
But good journalism cannot exist
in a vacuum. There is a vital interplay
between demand and supply, and a
cultural change in the understanding of
the role of journalism, seemingly must
follow.
“Well, the Icelandic media are rather
pathetic,” says Smári, “but I think that
they’re starting to realise this. Whether
that will drive them to become better, I
don’t know. But I don’t really think this
is so much about Icelandic media, as
Icelandic society as a whole. Because
it isn’t just the media that needs to be
reformed.”
He continues: “The general public
needs to realise that information free-
dom is absolutely worthless if people
are going to be turning a blind eye to all
of the bad things that are going on.”
In the end, much like WikiLeaks
and, tentatively, OpenLeaks, the IMMI
is meeting a global demand, although
the impact may turn out to be local.
“Even if this is a contradiction in
a sense,” says Birgitta, “or a paradox,
that we have a shabby culture of jour-
nalism, and yet want to make Iceland
into a Mecca for freedom of informa-
tion. Since information doesn’t have
borders, it doesn’t really matter where
the Mecca is.”
“There are so many facets to this,”
says Smári. “And some of them are
more hack-ish, more crypto-anarchi-
cal, and some of them have suits and
look nice towards the government,
and you have the entire spectrum in
between. But if you look deep enough
it’s actually all the same people. Some
days I wear suits and some days I break
into things... Well, except for Julian As-
sange. He always wears a suit, espe-
cially when breaking into things.”
A BEACH OF BITS
The backdrop against which the
history of IMMI and of WikiLeaks is
set involves the complicated history
of the Internet, and the up-until-
recently-underground discussion
regarding transparency and infor-
mation freedom on the electronic
frontier.
“The world has been kind of in flux
the last couple of years,” says Smári
McCarthy, “and this is definitely
adding a lot of fuel to that fire. But
this isn’t the revolution, by far.”
In fact, Smári tells us this isn’t even
the first ‘cyber war’. The first war
was waged through the last decade
of the last century, he says, and
ended with a Supreme Court ruling
whereby encryption was taken off
the U.S. Munitions List. ‘Bernstein
v. United States’ decreed written
software code as a form of speech
protected by the First Amendment;
prior to 1999, cryptography had the
same export restrictions as nuclear
warheads, meaning that one had to
be licensed by the State Department
as an arms dealer before one could
“export” software code by posting it
on the internet.
“Basically if you lived outside the
U.S. you didn’t have access to good
crypto,” says Smári. “And if you lived
in the U.S. you didn’t really use good
crypto anyway because you might
accidentally export it and land your-
self in jail for a long time. In 1999
that barrier dropped and suddenly
e-commerce became possible. The
fact that we can buy stuff online is a
direct result of the hackers winning
the first cyber war. So imagine what
good it could do for the world if we
win the second one.”
How winning will be defined in
the current ‘war’, including where
and by whom, is a question that
information freedom activists and
whistleblowing organisations like
WikiLeaks continue to struggle
with. What remains to be seen is
how governments, organisations
and societies as a whole respond to
the changing conditions of the as-
yet-largely-undefined paradigm of
the Internet, wherein information no
longer has any borders.
The most pressing question, at least
to the organizers of IMMI, is what to
do when the war has been won.
“We need to figure out what is go-
ing to happen if victory happens,”
says Smári. “How are we going to
restructure society? This means we
need to look at how infrastructure
works, we need to think about how
government models work. We need
to make sure that if society changes
we have figured out what we want it
to change into.”
“There is absolutely no place whatsoever for any sort
of unilateral decision making. The problem with
that is that it’s called dictatorship.”
Smári McCarthy - Photo: Hörður Sveinsson Birgitta Jónsdóttir - Photo: Julia Staples Herbert Snorrason - Photo: Árný Herbertsdóttir
Learn more about IMMI at www.immi.is