Birgitta Jónsdóttir talking:
what happened in January 2011, I get an email from Twitter saying that they had taken a subpoena to court and unsealed it. And in it, it said that the Department of Justice wanted all my personal messages and IP numbers and so forth, without my knowledge, within three days. There are apparently four other companies that were requested to hand over my information, which they already have.
And weve taken it again and again to court to try to unseal it, because they say the U.S. government says to the judge that they have investigative interests, or they dont want me to know because theyre investigating. But they wont tell me what theyre investigating. And I have been told by the Department of Justice, through the U.S. embassy in Iceland, that I am not the subject of criminal investigation. But the justice system here is so opaque. Its so impossible to understand how it functions. And like my case is relatively mild compared to the cases Ive heard of people here in the United States, like Jeremy Hammond and Barrett Brown and all these young, really talented peopleand lets never forget Aaron Swartzthat are being persecuted for things that they would never be persecuted for in my country.
I dont see any difference between what the government is doing and then what Jeremy Hammond is accused of doing. So why isnt the U.S. government then held accountable for probing into peoples lives like this? I mean, its very serious that they probed into my life. They actually literally went into my home, through the Internet door, and Im a member of Parliament. And this has been like a worldwide incident, where the International Parliamentary Union actually put forward a very harsh parliamentary proposal, unanimously adopted by the International Parliamentary Union, because parliamentarians, for example, are encouraged all the time to be working across nations. And then, like everybody that writes me is now on the desk of the FBI. Is that OK? So whats the difference from what Jeremy Hammond did than what the U.S. government did? They are notIm not the subject of criminal investigation, so what gives them the right to go into my personal stuff? Or what gives Stratfor the right to go into Julian Assanges personal stuff or anybody thats associated with WikiLeaks?
I think it is really time to stop the witch hunt on people that are involved with journalism and whistleblowing. And it is of deep concern to me that this country, the United States of America, which had one of the most significant trials in the world in relation to freedom of expression and speech, when Lawrence Ferlinghetti went on trial a long time ago to defend just these valuesand many people here
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet and publisher of City Lights.
February by Icelands justice minister that in August of 2011 Icelandic lawmakers expelled several FBI agents who had flown into Iceland in their own plane, landedand then, describe what happened. Were you awere you a lawmaker then, in the Parliament.
we have had a series of committee meetings about this incident with the state prosecutor, with the mysterious Mr. Q and Kristinn Hrafnsson and, you know, various others to try to understand what was going on.
it originally starts with that the FBI contacts the Icelandic state prosecutor and says Iceland is under imminent attack by the hackers group LulzSec.
And they are going to go and, like, steal all the documents from the state. And then they sent off the Icelandic state prosecutor and the chief of police to the United States to see further evidence. Now, anybody that knows anything about the hacker community and Anonymous and so forth knows that LulzSec was created by Sabu, which was an FBI agent.
Sabu was an FBI agent. codename Sabu. So, he was like organizing with the mysterious Siggi, or Mr. Q, which was then later on found outwhich we discovered was also then turned around agent for the FBI, or at least collaborating with them. So there was this staged attack on Iceland to come into Iceland to help the Icelandic government in setting up stronger shields against hackers. And I really hope that they never got their hands on our software, because then we have to like buy new equipment so they havent created back doors into our country. But so then they just carry on the investigation. Like, originally, it was about imminent attack. And then, all of a sudden, it turned into a WikiLeaks investigation. And Siggi, he apparently went to the U.S. embassy. He was then a WikiLeaks volunteer of some sortwent to the U.S. embassy and said, “I want to be an informant.” And he spent about 70 hours with the FBI in Iceland, Washington and Denmark telling pathological lies about some Icelanders.
The FBI agents were turned around by the interior minister. They flew in on a private plane. 10 or 13 or something. they were told to get out of town.
it is so alien to me to look at it, and I’m quite shocked, you know. And many of my colleagues simply don’t get this heavy sentencing on things that, you know, in other countries would actually—we’re trying to move—you know, and I can’t say other countries; some countries are just as bad. You know, Britain, for example, the interconnection between Britain and the U.S. when it comes to figuring out ways to entrap young people and criminalize them for sharing. Like now everybody—and they’re trying to push these laws, like SOPA, CISPA, ACTA—you know, all these legal zombies that come up again and again and again. And we can thank—thank you very much, big media corporations and copyright holders, for what nota bene is not actually the artists that hold the copyright but some big corporations that are trying to destroy the Internet. And they’re building a platform for, you know, government, totalitarian governments, to build on.
Because the corporate media owns a lot of copyright. So, like, let’s say, they own—Disney now owns not only Disney-related stuff, but they have incorporated many great child writer—children writers into their empire. So you can’t—you extend the copyright for yet another 70 years. And like copyright would be fine if it would be—had anything to do with the reality we live in today. Like, how come somebody has a copyright for 140 years on something? And it usually goes all back to the corporations and Hollywood and so forth and the big musical industry. It’s all industry. Art is not industry. You know, I am an artist. I am a poet. I’m an artist. My mother was a famous musician in Iceland. I hold copyright to her stuff. But I share it. There is a CC on everything I do. Anybody can remix or, you know, reuse, as long as they give me credit.
It means that anybody can do and use it, as long as they give me credit, and they don’t start to make, you know, tons of money on it without giving me a little bit of a share of it. And those of us that are looking at copyright reform are worried that the large copyright holders have now created an example where you can actually go and put people into prison for sharing.
And then I’m particularly concerned about young people that are sharing files, like, you know, that go onto Pirate Bay and share games, and then they might actually buy the game because they like it. Like, we want to—there is a culture of people that simply wants to try stuff, and they’re not given permission to do that. Like whenever I have a book—let’s say I buy like a printed version of a book. Nobody can actually track whom I lend it to or whom I choose to give it to or if I take a page out of it, because I want to, and make a papier-mâché out of it. Nobody can control or track that. But with the books from Amazon or the other book publishers in ebooks, they actually have put in a destruction device, so they can actually destroy your library. Like let’s say I built up a library like in this studio. They can, if they think that you are sharing books, and they don’t like it, the copyright holders, they can actually just—poof—all the library is gone, because you are not doing things that we think are right.
And it was ironic with Amazon. So, they were selling 1984, by George Orwell. And I hope your viewers all know what that is, and if not, you have to read it. So, they were selling this book, and many people had bought this book in an ebook format. And then, one day, poof, it vanished. 1984 vanished out of people’s books, because the copyright holder—there had been some infringement between him and Amazon. And it vanished out of their computers. Amazon reached into everyone’s Kindle library, and then went in their home, and they took a book. They went into every people’s person’s home and took a book from it and burned it. isn’t that a wake-up call? Hello?
Could you imagine if Julian Assange or Jeremy Hammond or Bradley Manning did that? Oh, my god. They would like probably be executed with books being poured over them until they would be crushed. No, but it is so insane. And we need to have a reality check. That’s what we need—politicians, in particular. We need to have a reality check. And we need to hurry up to write good laws to protect the people that were elected to protect and serve, with all this online reality, like our privacy, our right to share and our right to have access to freedom of information and like—or to the files that belong to the governments that—because the government is us. John Lennon talked about this like when he did the project, “War Is Over,” or him and Yoko Ono did the project together, “War Is Over! (If You Want It).” And in an interview around it, which I just found like a couple of years ago, it was really shocking to hear that he was saying exactly what I am saying, and nobody has sort of realized the fact that the government is us. We are the government. It’s not sort of an entity that is sort of free-floating, alien, that we can’t get hold of or can’t change. We can change it. Nobody else. And that’s what I’m interested in changing, the laws, so that we can actually have a much more direct influence on the lawmakers.
I want to change one myth. And one myth is that the government at the time had actually decided they were not going to bail out the banks. It wasn’t like that. They were scrambling. We had like a right-wing government with a social democrat, and they were scrambling to get—to borrow money from other countries to bail out the banks. But nobody wanted to lend us money. And I’m very thankful, because we would be in a very different situation. And so, I just don’t want to give credit to people that don’t deserve it.
But then, another incident happened that was very interesting for Iceland, and that is sort of a very clear sign that we actually did something like nobody else did. And that was when the U.S.—no, the U.K. government and the Dutch wanted us to take on—the nation, taxpayers—to take on responsibility on debt that some private people, private Icelanders, had created in their countries. They co—like owned a bank called Icesave. It was an online lending service with very good interest. Mmm, no bells ringing. But they were particularly upset because like many foundations and the police had actually put their savings in these high-interest accounts. No bells ringing. I don’t understand it, why they did it. But, you know, if it’s too good to be true, it’s never true. It’s just basically like that. But so they wanted us to pay this, you know, the taxpayers. And so, we said no. So we not only did say no, and like we don’t do it, the government really wanted to fork it down our throat, because there was so much pressure, from the IMF, from the EU countries, like in particular from—actually, what they did was a really dirty deal. So we are applying for an EU membership—or the government used to be. I don’t think we’re going to end up in it, because there have so many things gone wrong in the process.
So one of the things they did—the U.K. and the Dutch, you know, former colonists, of course—they were like threatening that we would not get an IMF loan if we would not agree to pay Icesave, and if that wouldn’t happen, nobody wanted to allow us to have credit lines again. So we were faced with, you know, food and medicine shortages if we didn’t agree to do this. So the minister that was there, like from little old Iceland with 315,000 people, is standing there in front of two empires. He had no other choice. I mean, it was either, you know, saying yes to this memorandum of understanding or facing food shortages. That’s what he thought. We could have talked to some of our friends in Latin America or something, and I’m sure that they would have helped us out, but that’s another story. So, then they brought like this contract. They sent off like a completely incompetent person to do the contracting, and he had no experience in this sort of contracting. So we got like contracts that was a complete secrecy around.
We—finally, somebody leaked them, so that the parliamentarians and the nation could see them. And around this time—I just heard in Bradley Manning’s statement—he was following this ordeal, and apparently he chose to do the first leak, because he felt it was like a David-and-Goliath situation.
And so he chose the first leak with WikiLeaks would be based on Iceland. And it was very helpful. I had no idea that he had had this train of thought or there was this, you know, interest in Iceland at the time on his behalf.
So, anyway, so we had two national referendums where we used loopholes in our system to make sure that the president would say, “No, I’m not going to sign the law, because there is a breach between the nation and the Parliament,” which it was, and had another precedent to build on. And then, actually, we said no. But there were many that said to us, “OK, you said no. We’re going to end up like the Cuba of the North and isolated, and nobody is going to do trading with Iceland, and so forth.” They tried to put on all the fear mongering that was possible to think of.
However, we ended up like—many of us just wanted to take it to court and figure out, like, is it right that the nation is obliged to actually fork out money and look after the interest and put it on the shoulders of taxpayers to socialize private debt? Is that really so? Is the European law? We want to find out. So we were taken to court, and we won, because Europe would have just gone belly up if that would have been the case that all nations in Europe should privatize—socialize private debt. So, that, for us, was so important, because even if we would have lost in the court, we had recovered a little bit, because around the time, just to give you perspective how intense that that would have been, it would have taken 80 percent of all our income tax only to pay the interest.
usually we never have any unemployment. So, like, the numbers are around 1, 1-and-a-half percent or something. It’s just sort of the runaround of people moving between jobs, or school and jobs.
We have social healthcare system. We are communist. Ooh! Actually, everybody has the same access to health and education. So even I, as an MP, ended up in a hospital in November, and I got exactly the same treatment as the woman working in the factory or in McDonald’s or Domino’s. And I like that. I love that. I think that is so important. And so, we pay just about the same amount of taxes as U.S. taxpayers. We don’t have to live in this insurance jungle. So we just, you know—and that was actually one of the first things they wanted to slash down, the IMF—no surprise. So our healthcare system is actually quite fragile, because it—when the right-wing government was in control, they were—they were in control for 18 years. They really tried to start the privatization, which is a trend everywhere where they go. They are such a menace.
And so, what happened is that we sort of got back on our feet. The credit ratings started to get up, and particularly after we said no to Icesave. Everybody said it would go down, but it actually went up. Unemployment, when we had the collapse, shot up like to two digits. It’s now down below. And I’m really pleased, even if I—I really don’t like to think of politics anymore as right and left, because I sometimes feel that it’s just used to distract us, because if I look at the U.S. politics, I don’t really see much difference. You know, really, if you look at it on a wider scale, you sometimes don’t know what left and what right is. And the names on the parties in Europe, like, “Oh, I thought that was like a left-wing party; I thought it was a Christian party; oh, it’s a fascist party. Oh, ah, interesting.” So, if we would not have had a left-leaning government, we would be in much worse shape. And now they are, of course, getting punished for cleaning up the vomit after the right-wing party, that they are severely punished by their voters. It’s a trend. Like the neocons and so forth, they make all the mess, everything collapses, predictably, and then, you know, the left-wing people come and clean up, and then they get punished, when they are starting to build again. It’s depressing.
&dash source democracynow.org
Birgitta Jonsdottir, member of the Icelandic Parliament.