BERKELEY, CA—On the final day of a nearly two-week tour of the United States, Icelandic Parliament member Birgitta Jónsdottír said that she wants to help National Security Agency (NSA) leaker Edward Snowden—but nobody knows where he is.

“We haven’t heard anything from him—we’ve tried to contact him via the journalist [Glenn Greenwald,]” she said in an interview with Ars prior to a public panel discussion on Tuesday evening. “[We’ve said:] ‘if you want further help, please be in touch and we’ll do whatever we can to help you.’”

Jónsdottír is a member of the Althing, Iceland's 63-member unicameral parliament, though she wears a number of other professional hats. In addition to being a “poetician” and a spokesperson for WikiLeaks (she is involved in a WikiLeaks-related American court case), she’s also the chairman of the International Modern Media Initiative (IMMI), an effort to turn the North Atlantic nation into a data and free speech haven by packaging together an all-star team of laws, regulations, and policies that would strengthen and enshrine data protection, freedom of speech, and other related values. Earlier this week, IMMI said publicly it was willing to support Snowden’s stated desire to seek asylum in Iceland.

But Snowden has a long road ahead of him if he actually does want to make an official request to seek asylum. According to Jónsdottír, he would either have to fly to Iceland or make a formal request at the nearest Icelandic embassy, which would likely be in Beijing, as his last known location was in Hong Kong. Even then, though, it’s not a sure thing.

“Immigration is not really great in Iceland,” Jónsdottír noted, adding that she would raise it with the parliamentary foreign affairs committee when it convenes on Friday. “We are known for being complete jackasses. We just shipped off 30 people from Croatia that applied for asylum—all these people want to work. In my opinion, I don't see a huge difference for granting political asylum or economic asylum—it's just a slower and more painful death.”

“If I was his legal counsel I would urge him to look at many countries, not just Iceland," she added. “Maybe New Zealand, Ecuador, Cuba—many countries.”

Still, the Icelandic parliament does have the power to bestow citizenship on applicants by a simple majority vote—most famously this happened with chess champion Bobby Fischer in 2005. Fischer, a native-born American, had run afoul of sanctions laws when he played a match in then-Yugoslavia in 1992. Once he became an Icelander, Fischer flew from Japan, where he had been held in prison, directly to Denmark and on to Iceland. (He lived in Iceland until his death in 2008.)

“Reassurances are worthless”

On Tuesday evening, Jónsdottír joined three other local Bay Area activists for a spirited panel discussion held at St. John’s Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, just a half-mile south of the University of California, Berkeley campus. The talk, which was entitled “Our Vanishing Civil Liberties,” was organized by a number of local progressive and liberal political groups, including the Berkeley chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, the Alameda County Against Drones (ACAD), the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, the National Lawyers Guild San Francisco Bay Area Chapter, and others. The event also served as a fundraiser for the Bradley Manning Support Network—attendees were asked to make a $10 donation at the door.

The Icelandic lawmaker was joined on stage by one of the most high-profile leakers, Daniel Ellsberg, who famously leaked the Pentagon Papers and faced a potential sentence of 115 years in prison for doing so. (A federal judge eventually dismissed all the charges against him in 1973.)

Specifically, Ellsberg addressed what he would have told Snowden if the younger leaker had come to the elder for advice.

“I would say that I can't tell him what to do with his life,” Ellsberg noted. “But I will say that this information is worth a life, worth more than one life, worth a life in prison, as I thought the Pentagon Papers were.”

The two headliners were also joined by Norman Solomon, a Bay Area anti-war activist, and Nadia Kayyali, a legal fellow, attorney with Bill of Rights Defense Committee, and executive vice president at the National Lawyers Guild.

The quartet’s moderator was Bob Jaffe, a volunteer attorney in the case Hedges v. Obama, which seeks to halt a portion of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012. In that case, the plaintiffs (including Jónsdottír and Ellsberg) argue that a portion of the law allows activists, journalists, and others to be detained indefinitely by the American military.

The panelists touched on a number of free speech and political issues—peppered with frequent jabs at President Barack Obama and Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA, and head of the Senate Intelligence Committee) along with cheers for Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning, currently on trial for distributing documents to WikiLeaks.

“Reassurances by high officials or by the president himself on the limits of the surveillance of this country—reassurances are worthless,” Ellsberg added. “They carry no information whatever. Just as George W. Bush looked the country in the eye, through the television, and said we do not intercept any Americans without a warrant. That was a flat-out lie. When the president says everything that we're doing is constitutional and refers to interpretations of his own—you cannot repeal the Fourth Amendment by a president or by an act of Congress. The public should understand that the constitutionality has not been addressed.”

The 82-year-old whistleblower also called the current system of NSA surveillance the “United Stasi of America”—referring to the East German secret police—and encouraged Berkeleyans to re-watch the 2006 German film “The Lives of Others.”

“We are a turnkey away from a tyranny in this country,” he added. “This is not a police state or we wouldn't be here in this meeting. But it could become a police state almost overnight. The notion of oversight has become a fraud, a hoax.”

Act local, think global

Several times throughout the meeting, both the moderator and members of the audience wondered how they could make a difference, even locally.

Kayyali had the most salient point of the night, noting that local activists are the best positioned to lobby for changes to local policies and statutes. She said that thanks to the efforts of “five to six people,” the city of Berkeley has become unique in changing how it shares information with so-called “fusion centers”—federally run nexuses of law enforcement data that receive information from local and state agencies.

“The way that this information is gathered right now [in fusion centers], it's a set of behaviors that are indicative of preoperative planning,” she said. “The legal standards that we have are probable cause and reasonable suspicion of criminal behavior. The Coalition for a Safe Berkeley got the Berkeley Police Department to change the policy [of sharing such information with the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center] to reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. This is the only community in the country that has that standard."