Reykjavík Grapevine - 13.11.2015, Blaðsíða 17

FRI
17The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 17 — 2015
was the blocking of porn sites in Iceland,
which set alarm bells ringing for Ásta.
“According to Icelandic law, pornogra-
phy is illegal,” she says. “It’s a law from
the 19th century, and it hasn’t been en-
forced for fifteen years now. Then the
idea of building a ‘pornography shield’
around Iceland came up. And I thought,
‘No, you can’t do that! It’s censorship!’
And they were like, ‘No, it’s not censor-
ship, we’re thinking about the children!’”
“The Pirate Party is trying to in-
filtrate the system and change these
'heritage laws,’” she continues, “because
when you read a law, you have to under-
stand the root of that law—when was it
written, what was the context, and the
culture. And now we’re in the 21st cen-
tury, with the internet, which changes
everything."
Ásta is a keen study of Icelandic politi-
cal history, talking in broad strokes about
the country’s traditional social conserva-
tism and market liberalism, the histori-
cal legacy of the powerful farming and
fishing lobbies, and ongoing debates in
everything from censorship to industrial
reform.
“Iceland is an unusual place, politi-
cally speaking,” she says. “There’s a void
in Icelandic politics when it comes to
liberal parties. In Denmark and Sweden,
there are many liberal parties, so there is
less space for a Pirate Party. They have
parties that are consistently liberal, and
have been since the ‘60s. There’s a reason
Denmark was the first country to legal-
ise porn in 1969. In Iceland there’s a lot of
social conservatism, even though people
want to be libertarians as far as the mar-
ket, etcetera. What the Pirates are trying
to do is more of social liberalism.”
She pauses, stressing her next point
word by word. “We don’t want to mi-
cro-manage the market, but my way of
thinking is: first we want to protect the
individual; then the society; and then the
market. If a policy protects the market,
but is not good for the society or the indi-
vidual, then in my view it’s a bad policy."
And this is one area where the touch-
stone Pirate issue of transparency comes
to the fore. "As a party, our platform has
been evolving, and is still evolving,” says
Ásta. “Our core policies are moral and
ethical guidelines about how we want to
function as a party. Explaining for exam-
ple, what transparency is—it’s something
we can apply to governments or institu-
tions. Individuals are not transparent—
me for example, you cannot apply trans-
parency to me. But you can apply it to my
work as a legislator. Public figures are
also individuals, and therefore have a
right to privacy.”
We know where you live
In practice, protecting individual rights
is a thornier, more difficult task than
it might seem. The joins between Ice-
land’s traditional, sometimes antique
civil infrastructure and new information
technologies give rise to some worrying
questions.
Helgi Hrafn Gunnarsson, the third
Pirate Party MP, has been consider-
ing such questions for years. A former
programmer and hacker, he’s become
something of a popular public figure of
late for his studious approach to politics,
whether speaking in Alþingi, or respond-
ing at length in the comments section
of a fellow politician’s blog. Sporting a
plain t-shirt, a tidy ponytail and small
spectacles, he combines a confident, flu-
ent speaking style with a self-admittedly
nerdy sense of logic and precision.
“Iceland has a number of things that
have always been considered normal,
okay and not dangerous,” he says, in an
American-English drawl. “For example,
the national registry. In Iceland, you’re
bound by law to tell people where you
live. But if you’re a controversial figure,
let’s say, you’re arguing with Muslims, or
you’re a Muslim arguing with atheists, or
you're a homosexual Jehovah’s Witness…
you might want a little anonymity. It
turns out that’s not legal here. You have to
have a national ID number, and be in the
register. You also have to register your
religious beliefs, because the state sort of
assumes it depending on the religious be-
liefs of your parents. The government has
a central database of individual religious
beliefs, which is used to apportion money
to the different religious organisations.
They don’t allow that in Germany any
more. And you know why?”
He pauses for effect, before continu-
ing: “Yeah, you do! Of course you know
why. But the thing is, here, people don’t
realise the threat this creates. Our entire
national database has leaked a billion
times—any hacker in the world has free
access to it. A plethora of quite hackable
systems have a copy of it. And we think
it’s okay because we don’t have anything
to hide. But here’s the thing—innocent
information can be abused. If someone
has your name, address, phone number
and bank or ID number, they can do bad
things even if you have nothing to hide. I
think people are slowly—and, slowest of
all, in Parliament—recognising this. And
they don’t know what to do about it.”
3D print-
ed, drone
delivered
handguns
This high level of
engagement with
contemporary is-
sues is what at-
tracted Helgi to the
Pirate Party in the
first place. “The big
problem is that in-
formation technol-
ogy evolves quite a lot faster than society
and politics,” he says. “So policy tends to
be outdated as soon as it’s born. The Pi-
rate Party is the first political movement,
that I’m aware of, which recognises this.”
“It’s a problem even for us,” he con-
tinues. “For example—drones. What are
we gonna do about them? Then there’s
3D printing—we now have people ex-
changing instructions on how to make
homemade guns with a 3D printer. That
immediately changes a bunch of things.
It requires us to acknowledge a certain
powerlessness, and to rethink prior so-
lutions to particular problems—and to
know what we can and can’t do in re-
sponse.”
The policy of staying on-point with
breaking topics and emerging technolo-
gies has slowly made more traditionally-
minded MPs in Alþingi realise the Pirate
MPs are a valuable resource. “At first, we
were perceived as somewhat childish,”
says Helgi, “and maybe some of that is
fair. But as we run into more and more
'told you so!' situations… like when we’re
the first to see something coming, and
then we have to remind people. Or when
we have a point of view that nobody
else realises beforehand, until they start
thinking about it... people do respect us
now on certain areas. If you have a new
problem—3D printing and drones are
just two examples—people might want
to see what the Pirates have to say about
it. They’re happy to have us as a resource,
and pride themselves in being able to ask.
Just as we should pride ourselves in being
able to listen to them.”
A big megaphone
Listening to the Pirate Party is some-
thing Iceland’s political establishment
might have to get used to. The Pirates
have topped the Gallup opinion polls for
six consecutive months, and currently
sit at 34.5%—more than the combined
numbers for the ruling coalition of In-
dependence and Progressive parties. But
the three MPs are at a bit of a loss when it
comes to explaining their impressive rise
in prominence.
“First we went to 14.2%, and I was
like: ‘Woah, that’s a record!’,” recalls
Helgi. “We’d usually been polling around
10%. When it’s at 8% we’d start to worry,
when it was at 12%, it’s a good day. Then
it spiked to 14.2%. When it went to 21%,
I thought: ‘Okay, surely it’ll go down af-
ter this.’ The same day, I learned that the
Foreign Minister had just unilaterally
withdrawn Iceland from the EU nego-
tiations. A lot of people put these events
together as the cause of our poll numbers,
but we’d started spiking before those
were public knowledge.”
“I preferred the slow growth, I
think,” he continues. “We knew where
it was coming from. And so many things
will happen between now and the elec-
tions—other parties will adjust.”
In fact, there are signs they’re adjust-
ing already. Prime Minister Sigmunður
Davíð slammed the Pirate Party’s grow-
ing influence as “cause for concern for
society as a whole” (see sidebar). “In their
defence,” laughs Helgi, “whenever some-
one in government speaks about the Pi-
rates, we go up in the polls. It’s actually
surprising how weak their attacks are.
They’re kind of shallow and borderline
childish. We wonder whether to answer
them or not. It says
more about them
than us, and that’s a
mistake. These old
forces are used to a
discourse confined
to newspapers,
television and lin-
ear schedules. It’s
manageable, polite,
contained and slow.
But now, when the
Prime Minister
says something, it’s
immediately talked
about publicly, via social media. The pub-
lic is part of the conversation about news.
It’s not just friends and family members
talking—there’s a conversation and ex-
change going on that wasn’t there before.
They cannot control that. Smirky, clever
one-liners about the opponents don’t
work any more. People are used to it. It
doesn’t appear clever. To be clever now,
you have to say something with content
and information. Those kind of quips and
sound-bites just seem throwaway—like
a Facebook comment. People are past
this.”
Ásta is also circumspect when it
comes to interpreting the polls. “In hon-
esty, we don’t exactly know why we’re
getting so much support,” she says. “But
we’re very thankful, and we’ll continue
doing our work. The next issue becomes
scalability—we’re now asking, ‘Can we
become so big, so fast, without failing?’
It’s a big question—how we’ll scale the
policy work, and the grassroots work.
Like asking: ‘If we had fifteen people in
Parliament, how would we work togeth-
er, and what could we do?’ We will figure
it out as we go. It’s worked for us so far—
we have clearly been doing something
right, and we’ll keep doing it.”
Veteran campaigner Birgitta takes a
pragmatic view of the numbers. “I know
from a life full of experience that the tide
can completely turn,” she smiles. “You
can’t take the popular winds of the mo-
ment as hard fact. But as activists, we
now have a very big megaphone to put
forward our vision—and people are lis-
tening to what we are saying.”
Do, make, fix, break
“However, people should not allow
themselves to believe that we are going to
save them,” continues Birgitta. “They are
going to save themselves, and we’ll give
them the tools to do it. We want to look
for the wisdom of the masses. No one
person is going to get us out of this mess
we’re in… both as Icelanders and as a hu-
man species. It’ll happen through collec-
tive effort.”
In keeping with this thinking, The Pi-
rate Party holds meetings that are open
to the public, where people with some
opinion or insight on certain subjects can
attend and have their say. Their policy-
making process is also a democratic sys-
tem, with Pirate Party members able to
vote, comment, and present policies for
consideration.
“Anyone who cares can walk into a
Pirate Party meeting,” says Ásta. “And
they do—we’ve seen a vast growth in
the number of people engaging. People
come in and say ‘hey, I have expertise
in this, do you want to know about it?’
And of course, we welcome that. I think
it has something to do with the hacker
'do, make, fix, break' culture—the idea
that, to know or feel the ethical or moral
guidelines of how we want our society to
be, you don’t have to be an expert. You
just need to be able to debate, to learn, to
process and understand information and
arrive at a good conclusion.”
One example of this M.O. in action is
the Pirate Party’s policy on fishing quo-
tas. While it’s an issue that lies far out-
side of the international Pirate Party’s
CORE POLICY
Below you can find the core policy of The Pirate Party of Iceland. The policy is
written as a series of statements so it is easy to quote them, but sometimes it can
be a bit tricky to understand what is being referred to. Here are some definitions:
» Civil rights are the legally protected rights that an individual has to
participation in a democratic society. Civil rights include but are not limited
to the right to vote, religious freedom, freedom of expression, freedom of the
press and the right to engage in peaceful protest.
» Information is that which informs, i.e., that from which data can be derived.
Information is conveyed either as the contents of a message or through
direct or indirect observation of some thing. That which is perceived can
be construed as a message in its own right, and in that sense, information is
always conveyed as the contents of a message. Information can be encoded
into various forms for transmission and interpretation. For example,
information may be encoded into signs, and transmitted via signals.
1. Critical thinking and well-informed policy
1.1 Pirates emphasize critical thinking and well-informed decisions.
1.2 This entails that Pirates shape their policy on the basis of data and knowledge
which is gathered irrespective of whether or not the policy seems desirable
or not at first. The position of Pirates on ideas is not based on who promotes
them.
1.3 Former decisions made by Pirates always need be open for revisions.
1.4 The right of individuals to be informed shall never be impaired.

2. Civil rights
2.1 Pirates exert themselves for the enhancement and protection of civil rights.
2.2 The expansion of civil rights shall aim to enhance other rights.
2.3 Current rights must be guarded so that they will not be impaired.
2.4 Pirates believe that civil rights belong to individuals and that the rights of
every person are equally strong.

3. A right to privacy
3.1 A right to privacy is about protecting the powerless from the abuse and
mistreatment of the powerful.
3.2 Pirates believe that all individuals should have a right to privacy in their own
personal lives.
3.3 Privacy includes the rights to discretion, the right to be anonymous and the
right to self-determination.
3.4 Secrecy should never go further than to protect the individual and never go
so far as to affect other individuals.
3.5 Anonymity does not relieve any person of responsibility for their actions.

4. Transparency and responsibility
4.1 Transparency gives the powerless the power to monitor the powerful.
4.2 Pirates believe that transparency is an important part of making the public
informed and thereby capable of making democratic decisions.
4.3 Information should be accessible to the public.
4.4 Information should be accessible in open data formats, in a form that is most
convenient for the usability of the information.
4.5 In order for an individual to be able to take responsibility, she needs to have
the ability to make decisions.
4.6 Pirates believe that everyone has an unlimited right to be involved in
decisions that relate to their own affairs, and a right to knowledge about how
such decisions are made.

5. Freedom of information and expression
5.1 Limits to people’s freedom to collect and share information are unacceptable,
except for the purpose of protecting the rights of individuals.
5.2 Any limits to people’s freedom to express themselves are unacceptable,
except for the purpose of protecting the rights of individuals.

6. Direct democracy and the right to self-determination
6.1 Pirates believe that everyone has an unlimited right to be involved in
decisions that relate to their own affairs.
6.2 That right is guaranteed with the empowerment of direct democracy and
the promotion of transparent governance.
6.3 Pirates believe that centralization needs to be reduced in all areas and
democracy needs to be promoted in all the forms that are available.
Retrieved from www.piratar.is
"Technology evolves
faster than politics,
so policy tends to
be outdated as soon
as it’s born. The Pi-
rate Party is the
first political move-
ment, that I’m aware
of, that recognises
this.” - Helgi Hrafn