Wikileaks Reports FBI Banned from Iceland

On January 30, 2013, WikiLeaks spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson reported that FBI agents who entered Iceland in August 2011 to investigate Iceland’s WikiLeaks operations had been ejected from the country by Home Secretary Ögmundur Jónasson. Janasson considered it unbelievably presumptuous for a foreign power to assume they could conduct private investigations of Icelandic citizens in their own country. On learning of their presence, he immediately ordered them to pack and leave.

There is already considerable sensitivity in Iceland that the FBI obtained account information from Twitter – presumably to assist in Obama’s efforts to indict Julian Assange on “terrorism” charges – on Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jónsdóttir. Jónsdóttir refuses to travel to the US out of fear of being arrested for her connections with WikiLeaks. She is one of the sponsors of Icelandic media legislation which would make the country a bastion for freedom of speech and source protection.

Jónsdóttir has also been a prominent member of the peaceful revolution Iceland has undergone over the past five years, following a popular uprising resulting from the global economic crisis. Widespread popular unrest forced Iceland ‘s prime minister and parliament to resign, resulting in new elections and ultimately a referendum opposing the government decision to assume a 3,500 million Euro debt their private banks owed to Great Britain and Holland.

Two other outcomes of this nonviolent revolution were the arrest and prosecution of key bankers responsible for Iceland’s banking crisis and the creation of an assembly to rewrite Iceland’s constitution.

Read more here

photo credit: New Media Days via photopin cc