2/12/10

ICELANDERS TRYING TO CREATE PROTECTION FOR REPORTERS, LEAKS, AND THE TRUTH


Iceland's Saucepan Revolution

Iceland is #9 on the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index for 2009, they were #1 in 2008, but some issues of ex-government officials running newspapers have caused controversy. The U.S. is up to #22 from #41 in 2008, which is due to getting rid of the Bush regime.

The people in Iceland have affected a revolution and are demanding freedoms others democracies are loosing. Wikileaks has helped them with the legislation. It isn't just the U.S., many European countries and others such as Israel are loosing their civil rights and freedoms, this is really a world wide problem. Those people in the world who have a conscience have to step forward and find their power. The sociopathic tyrants have taken the reigns of power in this world. The United States is a huge example of this. The poor are being stomped on and the middle class are being slowly eroded. Information and education is the power behind democracy if governments keep secrets from the people that means they have something to hide. There are some current activities for "real" security reasons (for security reasons is the wide ranging cover that is used to hide information from us) which need to be kept. As soon as the event passes we should be given full access to information about it. As it stands we have agencies who are so secret they don't have to tell congress or the president what they are doing and are allowed to lie. Everything is compartmentalized so only a very elite group knows the whole story about almost everything. The ability to leak key information is really the only positive thing I have been able to find about flexians and I hope they keep the leaking up because without the truth we can't change our problems. They make everything they don't want us to know classified. This does not mean it is information the public should not have, it means they for various reasons of control, money, and power want to keep it from us. This is the ethical use of leaks.
 
"We can’t expect everyone to go through the extraordinary efforts [that] we do. Large newspapers are routinely censored by legal costs…It is time this stopped. It is time a country said, enough is enough, justice must be seen, history must be preserved, and we will give shelter from the storm."
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Jonathan Stray for Neiman Journalism Lab:

On Tuesday, the Icelandic parliament is expected to introduce a measure aimed at making the country an international center for investigative journalism publishing, by passing the strongest combination of source protection, freedom of speech, and libel-tourism prevention laws in the world.

Supporters of the proposal say the move would make Iceland an “offshore publishing center” for free speech, analogous to the offshore financial havens that allow corporations to hide capital from authorities. Could global news organizations with a home office in Reykjavík soon be as common as Delaware corporations or Cayman Islands assets?

“This is a legislative package to create a haven for freedom of expression,” Icelandic member of parliament Birgitta Jónsdóttir confirmed to me, saying that a proposal for comprehensive media law reform will be filed in parliament on Tuesday, and that whistle-blowing specialists Wikileaks has been involved in drafting it. There have been persistent hints of an Icelandic media move in recent weeks, including tweets from Wikileaks and a cryptic message from the newly created @icelandmedia Twitter account.

This is part 4 of a conference in which Wikileak's Julian Assange and Daniel Schmitt discussed how this all came about. Go to you tube for all the other segments.

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