Last week Birgitta Jónsdóttir kicked off the second series of the Samara/Massey journalism seminars. Many thanks to Samara volunteer Alex Derry, who summarized her remarks below. CPAC recorded the event, which can be watched in full here.
***
Like many of Canada’s MPs, Birgitta Jónsdóttir never aspired to be a politician. As a single mother, a writer and a poet with activist roots, she was passionate enough about a number of causes to create a grassroots coalition of advocacy groups, called Citizens’ Movement (now known simply as The Movement) in her native Iceland, but she only saw herself working outside of the system.
But Jónsdóttir, who was interviewed on The Agenda with Steve Paikin and spoke at the Samara/Massey journalism seminar on January 11, 2011, decided that in order to realize her dream of “living in a society that is co-created” by individuals cooperating together, she would have to start working within a system that she described as “a rotten potato.” That, and there simply weren’t enough women serving in Althingi, Iceland’s parliamentary body. She was one of four Citizens’ Movement members to be elected to Althingi as a member of parliament in April 2009. Jónsdóttir currently serves on the Foreign Affairs, Environmental, EU Application, Truth Commission and NATO parliamentary committees. She was also one of the first people to work with WikiLeaks.
IMMI – The “Impossible Project”?
As an activist, Jónsdóttir observed the web as an “open space that had become corporatized,” which she saw as a disturbingly fascistic trend. She decided to make freedom of information a top policy priority as an MP, and sponsored the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI). This was a proposal that would make Iceland a haven for freedom of information, speech and expression the way that Switzerland was a haven for tax avoidance. As Jónsdóttir put it, “Tax havens aim to make everything opaque, our aim is to make everything transparent.”
The initiative would take the best legislation from all over the world to create a “shield” for freedom of information. This would include source and whistleblower protection laws, making it harder to charge journalists with libel and prior restraint, creating an award for whistleblowers, and making information more public and accessible. It was a seemingly “impossible project,” according to Jónsdóttir, that was eventually adopted by Althingi in June 2010.
WikiLeaks
Jónsdóttir first began her involvement with WikiLeaks after speaking on a panel at the University of Reykjavik in December 2009 with the now (in)famous Julian Assange. She joined the organization as a volunteer soon afterwards, and began working with Assange and other volunteers on “Collateral Murder,” the video of the July 12, 2007 airstrike on innocent Iraqi civilians that killed nine people, including two Reuters journalists and two children.
The video had a tremendous emotional impact on Jónsdóttir, whose job it was to painstakingly go through the video frame by frame to capture stills to send to their media partners. She was determined that the video had to be seen, that people should want to see it and would compel them to act. By leaking the video to the National Press Club, Jónsdóttir says WikiLeaks was “conducting an experiment with traditional media,” and she wonders why the U.S is not also targeting these traditional media partners who published and profited off the information provided by WikiLeaks.
While she believes in the core mission of WikiLeaks, to bring the concept of the whistle blower to the “forefront of the public’s consciousness,” Jónsdóttir is not without her criticisms of the organization or Assange himself. “It’s more than Assange,” she says, “it is people all over the world” who are dedicated to calling out government abuses through transparency. She hopes for a more robust debate on the role that WikiLeaks can play in global democracy, and what information should be withheld in order to protect those whose safety could be compromised. Pfc. Bradley Manning, for example, who was the key source in providing much of the documentation, from “Collatoral Murder” to Cablegate, is currently languishing in isolation in a Kuwaiti prison, waiting to be prosecuted by a U.S. military tribunal. Jónsdóttir says he may never go to trial.
The U.S. attorney general’s office has filed a subpoena to access Jónsdóttir’s Twitter account. This doesn’t phase her – it’s public information after all, and she’s not afraid to be associated with releasing information into the public domain.
Ultimately, Jónsdóttir is motivated by the desire for information, which is a borderless, living entity that feeds democratic freedom. Without freedom of information, says Birgitta Jónsdóttir, “we are only seeing a portion of our real history.”
Alex Derry is the associate web editor for Macleans.ca and a volunteer with Samara. He also covered the Pew Center's Tom Rosenstiel's seminar. His latest article for Maclean's was on the shooting in Arizona.