Iceland becomes US enemy - creates safe haven for corporate and government whistle-blowers

[Clancy]

[The biggest story you heard nothing about this week - the founder of Wikileaks is hiding out in Iceland, and is preparing to release a new video showing the U.S. military bombing civilians in Afghanistan. The Iceland parliament just voted unanimously to make Iceland a safe haven for corporate and government whistle-blowers]

The Associated Press: Iceland parliament votes for strong media laws

LONDON — Iceland's parliament voted Thursday to create what supporters hope will be the world's strongest protections for free speech and journalism, passing measures intended to make this Nordic nation a safe haven for investigative reporting.

The legislation — passed unanimously with only a single abstention — requires the government to draft regulations changing Icelandic law to strengthen journalistic source protection and shield reporters from foreign libel judgments. While the measures were mainly aimed at improving the nation's own transparency, Iceland hopes to lure Internet-based media and data centers that would use the country as a base of global free speech.

"This is changing the way the world sees us," said lawmaker Brigitte Jonsdottir, who said that strengthening free speech laws would restore credibility to a nation mired in an economic crisis linked to bad debt and murky deals.

Bolstering the media laws gained traction with Icelanders after the country's devastating economic collapse in 2008, a crisis which many in Iceland said showed that relations between government and the media had become too cozy. Foreign reporters were the ones who uncovered much of the corruption in the small island nation's financial system, prompting calls for improved access to information access and more protection for whistle-blowers.

"It's extremely valuable to us as we are trying to establish trust again," she said, adding that many of the nation's 320,000 residents back greater openness in a bid to put the crisis behind them.

"Protection of whistle-blowers is especially important in a small community like ours. People are afraid to leak things here," she said. "This is what the nation wants, and this legislation will put it into stone."

Supporters said the aggressive media protection laws will entice foreign media and data centers to host their websites in Iceland, and Jonsdottir said there was already substantial interest from foreign news organizations.

The proposed measures aim to counteract challenges to media freedom from other countries such as Britain, which has become known as a center for "libel tourism" because its libel laws heavily favor the plaintiff.

They would also protect journalists against libel judgments issued in other countries — similar to U.S. legislation now being considered to shield American reporters from court judgments abroad.

Benton said the idea that Iceland could somehow shield writers and journalists from libel judgments elsewhere "strikes me as a bit of a harder sell."

Nevertheless, he said he could envisage a situation in which some media organizations move their Internet servers to Iceland to prevent them from being searched or seized. And in general, he said the push was admirable one.

"In so many places these sorts of regulations are driven by powerful players," he said. "It's a good thing that in this case the driving force is something that seems a bit more idealistic. Whether it will be effective or not we'll see."

Iceland safe haven for press freedom: Wikileaks insider
AFP: Iceland safe haven for press freedom: Wikileaks insider

REYKJAVIK — Iceland is becoming an offshore safe haven for information, an insider with whistleblower website WikiLeaks said Friday.

Iceland's parliament, the Altingi, voted Tuesday to task government with finding ways to increase information freedom and to provide stronger protections for media sources and whistleblowers to make Iceland a leader in freedom of expression.

The Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, or IMMI "aims to create an offshore safe haven for information, to add to transparency," said Kristinn Hrafnsson, an investigative journalist with public broadcaster RUV, who has co-operated with Wikileaks.

Even before the passing of the initiative, which was in part drafted by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, work on the project had created a secure environment for revealing sensitive information, he told AFP.

A controversial WikiLeaks video released in April of a US Apache helicopter strike in Baghdad that killed two employees of the Reuters news agency and a number of other people had, for instance, been edited in Reykjavik, he pointed out.

"At the time, Iceland seemed to be the safest place to prepare for the release of the video and do the necessary fact checks," said Hrafnsson, who took part in the process.

WikiLeaks has only said it obtained the video "from a number of military whistleblowers," but the US military last week said it had arrested 22-year-old specialist Bradley Manning for allegedly being the source of the leak.

The release of the video was vital to "showing the gruesome reality behind statistics of what the US army calls 'collateral damage'," Hrafnsson said.

"It is the most important visual evidence coming out of Iraq since the exposure of the photographs from Abu Ghraib," a jail that has become synonymous with abuse in Iraqi prisons.

Manning reportedly also may have leaked other material to WikiLeaks, including separate video of a 2009 air strike in Afghanistan in which many civilians were killed.

Wikileaks has not confirmed that Manning is the source of the Baghdad Apache attack video, but Hrafnsson acknowledged the website was preparing the release of the Afghanistan air strike video.

[LenInSebastopol]

I see that will break open their population of 350K folks.
Smart move, economically speaking....a new Canada!