My speech from Kapittel Stavanger International Festival for Literature and Freedom of Speech
Norway 22nd of September 2011
First of all I want to express my
gratitude to the USA Department of Justice for
their attempts to have my personal backend information handed over
to them from my Twitter account because of my volunteer work for
WikiLeaks. It has raised my awareness about the lack of civic rights
social media users have and thus given me reasons to fight for these
rights.
Before my Twitter case I
didn't think much about what rights I would be signing off when
accepting user agreement with online companies. The text is usually
lengthy in a legal language most people don't understand. I think it
is save to say that very few people read the user agreements, and
very few understand its legal implications if someone in the real
world would try to use it against them. It is simply virtual until
case is made in the real world.
Many of us who use the
Internet, be it to write emails, work, browse its growing landscape,
mining for information, connecting with others or use it to organize
ourselves in various groups of likeminded, are not aware of that our
behavior online is being monitored. Profiling has become a default
with companies such as Google and Facebook. These companies have
huge databases recording our every move within their landscape in
order to groom advertisement to our interests. For them we are only
consumers to push goods at, in order for them to sell ads in a clever
business model. For them we are not regarded as citizens with civic
rights in their world. This notion needs to change. To be fair, I
guess no one really knew where we were heading when these companies
were start ups. Neither us the users, nor the companies hogging and
gathering our personal information for profit. Very few of us had the
imagination that governments that claim to be democratic would invade
our online privacy with no regard to rights we are supposed to have
in the real world. We might look to China and other stereo type
totalitarian states and expect them to violate the free flow of
information and our digital privacy, but not our very own
democratically elected governments.
What I have learned about
my lack of rights in the last few months is of concern for everyone
that uses the Internet and calls for actions to raise peoples
awareness about their legal rights and ways to improve legal
guidelines and framework online be it locally or globally.
I guess the problem and
the dilemma we are facing is that there are no proper standards, no
basic laws in place that deal with the fundamental question: are we
to be treated as consumers or citizens online? There is no
international charter that says we should have the same civic rights
as in the offline world.
Our legal systems are slow
compared to the speed of online development. With the social media
explosion many people have put into databases very sensitive
information about themselves and others without knowing that they
have no rights to defend themselves against attempts by governments
to obtain their personal data – be in locally or like in my case
globally. According to the ruling of the judge in my Twitter case, we
have fortified those rights when we agree to the terms and conditions
by the company hosting our data even if it is not kept on servers in
the USA, the company would only need to have a branch in the USA for
authorities to be able to demand the information to be given to them.
We have to rely on, for example, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Twitter
to look out for our interests. It might not always be in their
interest to look out for us.
I want to stress that
Twitter did fight for the interests of their users in my case by
going to court to unseal a document demanding them to hand over
personal backend information about me and four other users connected
to WikiLeaks. The document Twitter managed to unseal stated that they
were to hand over our personal information without our knowledge
within three days. If Twitter had not managed to unseal the document
we would not know how far the DoJ is reaching to get their hands on
our data and how difficult it is to guard our privacy in the
borderless legal jungle. I am for example not a USA citizen and
because of that I am not protected by the 1st and 4th amendment in
the USA constitution. Users from the USA are protected in the same
case by these fundamental rights.
The reason we humans make
international treaties and declarations about human rights is because
somewhere along the line we agreed that certain rights are sacred and
universal. We need to make the same principles applicable to our
human rights online as they are offline. These two worlds have fused
together and there no way to define them separated anymore.
If is too easy to
obtain the information stored online and thus it is too easy to
abuse. If someone wants to go through all my regular mail they would
have to obtain a search warrant in advance. No such thing happened in
my case. I am according to the DoJ not under a criminal investigation
yet they demanded Twitter to hand over my personal messages and IP
numbers without my knowledge. If authorities want to tap your phone
they need warrants, but not in order to get your IP number. If
authorities want to search anything of personal nature or spy on
someone in the real world they would have to get warrants. It has
never been as easy for big brother to pry into all our most sacred
information without us ever knowing.
I find it important to
shed light on the fact that USA authorities have reached so far in
their attempts to criminalize WikiLeaks that they are demanding
backend information from a Member of Parliament from sovereign
nation. This is a whole can of worms that I am not sure that the USA
wants to open. What about the USA senators that want to apply
themselves in the international field of human rights issues. Abuse
of human rights in for example China, Tibet or North Korea. Can USA
authorities protect their own Senators from demands of probing into
the personal data from China? I don't think so.
Members of parliaments all
over the world are encouraged to use social media to be in touch with
their voters. Many people don't understand that sending a message on
Facebook or via Twitter or gmail is not an official pathway. The
voters might send sensitive information about themselves to their
MP's online. With court ruling in favor of exposing this information
to a foreign government – the line of privacy and sovereignty of
individuals in cyberspace has taken a new dangerous direction.
Merging the Online with
the Offline world
The reason why I felt so at home online
when I discovered it 16 years ago was the fact that I am born on a
small island at the edge of the world with only 315,000 people
sharing it with me. My island has natural borders, with roaring
Atlantic Ocean making a shield against the rest of the world.
That shield can cause an intense sense of cultural and personal
claustrophobia. Being a poet with such a small language zone writing
political poetry when that was not so cool in Iceland, I felt prior
to the times of internet isolated and alone at times. The internet
allowed me to break out of that limitation. I was the first poet in
Iceland to create a website and to publish my work and the poetry and
art of others through various adventures online. Later I learned I
was among the first in the world.
One of the prime influences in shaping
a profound understanding that I don’t belong to one nation, that I
belong to all of this planet was my participation in co-creating the
landscape of the new online world. In 1995, I started working
with the shapers and pioneers in the internet landscape in Iceland
and beyond. One of my passions was to merge creative spaces.
Music, poetry, and art all bleed well together in the multi-creative
space of the internet. But that was not enough. After
all, this was a new world, without borders and without limitations,
other than the limitations of our imagination. Likeminded
people found each other, no matter where they happened to be located
in the real world. We could work together — trans-border,
trans-culture, transgender, trans-party, trans-race. It was a
world of transparency, almost beyond duality. Borders, just an
optical illusion. It was as close to paradise as I could get in
this human vessel. It was almost spiritual; it was as if the
collective consciousness had taken on tangible shape in a virtual
world that was influencing the real world at an increased speed every
day. My dream was that this world we created with the free flow
of ideas, information, and understanding could manifest itself
outside the virtual.
The internet has given us the tools to
empower ourselves in the real world, with knowledge beyond the
cultural conditioning we acquire within our own culture. The
internet has given us the tools to work together beyond traditional
borders, and it has allowed us to create real windows into the real
world that reach far beyond our cultural beliefs about other
countries. However, this world beyond borders is now under
serious threat, a threat that is growing at an alarming rate. I
have seen the development of the internet since its early visual
stage. I have seen how it can improve and enrich the quality of
life. I have also seen how those who hold the reigns of power
in our world have discovered that the internet needs to be tamed,
like the rest of the world, and brought under their control — to be
industrialized in the same manner that other media have been brought
under control by industry and the state. My last hope of
gathering momentum in stopping this development is through the free
spirit within the wilderness of the internet — where the
conditioning and the reigns of control have not been able to tame the
free spirits who roam with the hackers’ manifesto singing in their
hearts.
I have seen new stories and new myths
emerge out of the language of the internet, where people speak
together through Google and translate new languages; and I have seen
the library of Alexandria materialize with free knowledge and
torrents of information wash upon shores otherwise impossible to
reach. I have seen the alchemy of stories take on real shape in
a collective online effort; and the truth seeped into the real
world. As the untouchables try to hide their secrets for the
chosen few, those secrets keep spilling out in a whirlwind of letters
in every digital corner of the world. They sweep through the
streets of Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Tunisia, Greece, China, Iceland,
Spain, Iran, and the United States — confirming that the rumors are
true: “corpocracy” is the new global empire, and it thrives in
local corruption.
The internet has given people access to
information that should remain in the public domain; yet it is a
trending policy within the belly of the all embracing system to make
everything secret by default. It is time to reverse this tendency a
create a consensus about the process of keeping secrets.
Transparency and open access to information are the only real
pressures on governments to remain true democracies. If you
don’t have freedom of information and expression, you are not
living in a democracy; rather it is ruled by dictatorship with many
heads.
Many people don’t realize that if we
won’t have freedom of information online, we won’t have it
offline.
Media Morphing into
Cyberspace
The media is in transition
– morphing from the traditional format into the online media
format. Most people want to be able to access news online and usage
of traditional media is shrinking day by day. The mainstream media
has not figured out how to make profit or how to survive online
without cutting off many of the services we have learned to depend on
and regarded as their main responsibility, such as investigative
journalism and in depth analyzing of complex matters in simple easy
to grasp terms for the general public.
In this fragile morphing
stage the media is faced with increased challenges from international
legal firms that specialize in gagging the media. More out of court
settlements are occurring every day. Super injunctions, prior
restraints, and attempts to alter our historical records online is on
the rise. Criminalization of whistle blowing and filtering of online
content is also of great concern.
People feel that mainstream media has
failed them and thus they turn to alternative media online and the
culture of cracking secrets is on the rise. I want to stress that i
am shocked by the lack of courage by the USA media in relation to
WikiLeaks. Shocked because WikiLeaks simply
acted as the middle man. The save box in cyberspace that received
the brown envelope from the source and handed it over to the media.
Shocked by the ignorance from the media, for it's obvious to me that
if WikiLeaks will be taken down or the people behind it, it will be
harder for other media to stay on a firm ground when under attack for
publishing leaked material from whistle-blowers and secret sources.
I feel there has been too much focus on
the people behind WikiLeaks, not the content they have provided. This
has taken the focus off the historical significance of the leaks and
created something of a frenzy around sensationalism around cults of
personalities. If we allow ourselves to step away from the persons
and look into the achievements of WikiLeaks it is obvious that
because of them we have the state of freedom of information on the
agenda, all over the world, and of course the issue of
whistle-blowing as a option when witnessing criminal behavior in the
public, military and private sectors.
I left WikiLeaks about a year ago for
various reasons. I might not agree with how it has developed but its
significance remains the same. We need many more leak sites until we
have real laws in place that protect content, whistle-blowers,
sources and journalists.
The culture of free flow of information
is still strong online, and every attempt to block, hinder, or erase
information is met with increased creativity. Yet those of us
who care for freedom of information have to step-up our quest to
remove the gags, tear down the firewalls, and dissolve the invisible
filters.
The telecom companies have gained incredible power and tend
to cave-in under government pressure, as we saw happen in Egypt in
early 2011. We also saw Amazon cave-in under political pressure and
kick WikiLeaks off its cloud. Corporation and specialized law-firms
have figured out the best countries to use as a medium to attack and
gag journalists, writers, publishers, and the rest of the media
because of weak laws to protect the media. They have become so good
at it that important stories have vanished from the public domain.
Modern book-burnings occur every day in every library in the
world by a click of a button. Libel tourism, prior restraints, gag
orders, out-of-court settlements, and tampering with our online
historical records are altering our current history in real time and
robbing us of the possibility to be informed about the activities of
the most influential corporations and politicians in our world. We
have to do everything in our power to stop this development —
through lawmaking and creative resistance.
The “Icelandic
Modern Media Initiative” (IMMI) is an attempt to raise the standard
and upgrade the current legal framework in order to strengthen
freedom of information, speech, and expression in our modern world.
The creation of a save haven for freedom of information has to start
somewhere – Iceland is a good place because we learned the hard
way, the destructive nature of lack of transparency and where culture
of secrecy can lead us. People yearn for
change and thus this crises can be used for something that will be
beneficial for us and hopefully for the
rest of the world. You can learn more about the project that is
currently being written into law in Iceland at http://immi.is
I gave a speech at Nordic Tech Politics
in Oslo earlier this month, I met many inspirational people from
Norway and from speaking to them the idea of creating a Scandinavian
shield inspired by IMMI was not only born, but a determination to
making that vision into reality. We have been blessed in this part of
the world for having strong foundation for freedom of information.
Sweden has set the standard for the rest of us in many ways.
It is interesting to note that
societies of transparency have more equality.
I have learned to embrace times of
crises and make good use of it because times of crises are the only
times we can push for real change in our societies.
The crisis in Iceland has helped us
transform from secrecy to transparency and encouraged people to take
on more responsibility when it comes to co-creating our society.
Never before has it been easier for people in power to hand over the
power of information to the rest of us and for us to reclaim our
power.
This process of transformation takes
work and dedication. By giving over our powers to religious or
political leaders we can never expect to live in our dream world –
only by applying our time and vision can we hope to co-create our
dream into reality.
Constitutional dreaming together
One of the most positive results from
our Iceland crisis is the re-writing of our constitution. The main
reason i helped create a political movement in the wake of the
meltdown was to create the tools for the general public to be able to
influence law making, and also to inspire people to be part of
decision making. Chief aim was to have our old copy paste Danish
constitution re-written by the people of Iceland. That process has
taken place and the parliament of Iceland has been handed over a bill
by the people we elected to write it with us.
The constitutional committee encouraged
the general public in various ways to be part of the process, such as
encouraging people to comment on each new segment via the facebook
comment system. More on that here: Icelands crowdsourced constitution
The new constitution includes some
pretty awesome freedom of information laws plus net neutrality. The
big task is to get the bill into national referendum before my
co-workers at the parliament attempt to thin it out.
The parliament needs a strong mandate
from the nation on what it wants to keep of the new bill and what
not. I hope by 2013 we will have a constitution that is what the
nation dreamed together into reality. An agreement on what sort of
society we want to live in together. I think perhaps all nations
should allow each generation to have a go at the constitution – for
it is a brilliant platform for a healthy debate on what we envision
as societies together. It is important to note that it has been
foreseen that the 21st century will be the century of the common
people.
Finally I want to leave you with the
wisdom of Alan Moore who claims that writes are the modern day
shamans, I agree with him. One word, one sentence can mean live or
death, joy or grief. Lets treat the world of words with that
knowledge of power.
Many thanks to the EFF and ACLU for offering me strong legal support in my Kafka nightmare through the USA legal system.
