Reykjavík Grapevine - 19.07.2013, Qupperneq 24

By Páll Hilmarsson
With additional reporting from Adrienne Blaine,
Shea Sweeney, Tómas Gabríel Benjamin
and Kaisu Nevasalmi
In early 2010, a young man was arrested in Reykjavík on charges
of stealing sensitive documents from local financial company,
Milestone, which had made their way into news stories in the
Icelandic media. The man, seventeen at the time, had worked for
the company doing computer related work for a few years. His
name is Sigurður Ingi Þórðarson and for the next year and a half
he became a part of the whistleblowing association WikiLeaks,
operating under the alias ‘Q’. In a stunning move, he became an
FBI informant in August 2011, mostly providing the United States
law enforcement agency with information on WikiLeaks, among
them eight data-filled hard drives.
When news came out that Sigurður was an informant,
WikiLeaks representatives swore off any connections to him,
while the media reported that he was in an unstable men-
tal state and had been admitted to a mental institution. In the
past two years, Sigurður Þórðarson has been widely discred-
ited, repeatedly called a pathological liar and/or a psychopath,
and sued for embezzlement while remaining entangled in a
far-reaching and complicated saga that has had astonishing
consequences for the Western worldview in the 21st century.
This is his side of the story.
Photo by Hörður Sveinsson
Continues over
24The Reykjavík Grapevine Issue 10 — 2013