'It is obvious that it doesn’t matter if we have the best source protection laws in the world,' says Icelandic MP

Iceland’s attempts to become a free-speech haven risk floundering in the wake of revelations regarding the extent of internet monitoring by the US and UK intelligence agencies.

The Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI) has spent the last three years working protections for whistleblowers and investigative journalists into the country’s constitution. But the knowledge that monitoring of digital communications is far more widespread than previously thought makes it difficult to promise safety to sources who might have hoped otherwise.

“When we were making IMMI, even if we were aware that there had been spying going on, on all our devices, I don’t think any of us at the time – late 2009, early 2010 – anticipated that it was so invasive,” says Icelandic MP Birgitta Jónsdóttir, one of the driving forces behind the initiative.

“I mean, not even the most paranoid of my hacktivist tribe, except maybe Richard Stallman, could fathom how extensive this is. And so we didn’t write anything into IMMI about privacy.”

Before she was an MP – originally for the Citizens' Movement, a grassroots campaign born out of the Icelandic economic crash – Jónsdóttir was a volunteer for WikiLeaks, and in 2010 she worked with the organisation on the launch of the “Collateral Murder” video. She says the aim of IMMI was to “legalise WikiLeaks”.

“What I loved about WikiLeaks in its original days was that the whole idea behind it was that it was a digital dropbox, and anybody could drop the ‘brown envelope’ there, and we would never know who it was. That was the entire beauty of it.”

“And the aim with IMMI is to legalise that. That it is up to an editor if he processes information from a source, he doesn’t have to know the source.”

After the release of the NSA files, however, it has become clear that IMMI’s goals cannot be met through the legislative arena alone.

“With the revelations from the NSA, it is obvious that it doesn’t matter if we have the best source protection laws in the world. It just doesn’t matter.” With surveillance so much more widespread than was previously assumed, it no longer seems possible for a source to stay anonymous purely through legislative protection.

Jónsdóttir emphasises that the primary goal of the law was never to protect sources, but to protect their right to publish, and their publisher’s right to keep them anonymous.

“I was very surprised when Edward Snowden, for example, said when he appeared for the whistleblower behind the NSA [leaks] that he believed that he would have an automatic refuge in Iceland because of IMMI, because what I have always said is that the intent with IMMI would be to legalise the functions of WikiLeaks, or to make sure the Tibetan blogger who risks his life to tell us what’s going on will remain up, no matter what. Unaltered.

“But we could never save that person.”

The best model for IMMI is one not particularly enamoured of transparency campaigners: that of the tax haven. “My aim is to prevent these international law firms, that specialise in going after stories even years back in time,” from coming to Iceland, she says. “You can register the company with one person accountable in that country, and that person is going to be the front for more than one media organisation.

“That is an option that people can take, and it’s already happened – there are Icelandic citizens that front hosting companies. If it’s OK for tax havens to do it, why isn’t it OK for people that want to protect sources?”

For all that massive international surveillance eats away at IMMI’s successes, however, there’s a bigger threat on the horizon. Some nations have responded to the news that the US and UK monitor the net by splitting themselves from the anglophonic web, a move that concerns Jónsdóttir.

She has spoken against Brazilian attempts to wall the country’s internet off from foreign interference. “They have some great ideas, and I’m hoping to go to Icann and encourage them to do the other stuff they were going to do. But of course, we need to come up with ideas that exclude that specific one.

“The reason I’m worried about this balkanisation of the internet is that it is already in some countries. Iran and China have their own versions [of the web], and Iran wants to go completely off the net. That is very dangerous, and that idea … we do have to decentralise, but that’s not only about the idea of dealing with the extensive capacities of the NSA.”

• The court order that allowed the NSA surveillance has been revealed for the first time.