Lift off for the protected leaks industry?
Jinfo Blog

7th July 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

Item

Back in business following an alarming wobble earlier this year, the whistleblowing website Wikileaks has successfully survived several corporate attempts to gag it over the years. But now the whole leaking business may be about to enter a different league following a vote by the Icelandic parliament to make the country a haven for free speech. It was last February that Wikileaks announced it was having to suspend operations because it didn’t have the computing or people power to cope with its success, and was going to have to devote all its immediate efforts to fundraising (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27868). When it did manage to come back online, several of the new documents it featured related to the very banking crisis that has forced Iceland to find ways of reinventing itself (http://www.wikileaks.org/ and follow links). At about the same time as Wikileaks was facing its problems, an organisation called the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI – http://www.immi.is) filed a resolution with the country’s parliament suggesting that Iceland position itself legally as a guardian of freedom of information. Wikileaks’ editor Julian Assange told the BBC at the time that such legislation could encourage investigative media firms to set up there, and that he believed the political mood was receptive to the change (http://digbig.com/5bbxgg). He was right. Last month, Iceland’s parliament voted unanimously to demand that the government find ways to provide strong protection for whistleblowers (widely reported – see for example European Digital Rights’ coverage at http://digbig.com/5bbxgh). But it may not all be plain sailing nevertheless; Struan Robertson, a technology lawyer with law firm Pinsent Masons, suggests that if Iceland does grant immunity to websites that host leaked documents, and is prepared to reject take-down orders from foreign courts, that could give overseas content owners real problems if threats of domestic sanctions against leakers don't work. However he also points out that the proposal doesn’t affect copyright law – so take-down demands based on copyright infringement could be more effective than those based on breach of confidence (http://digbig.com/5bbxgj). Wikileaks already enjoys good relations with IMMI, so if the Icelandic legislation goes through, it could presumably shift its servers from Sweden – which itself already strongly protects free speech – to Iceland. As it happens, Sweden currently bears the crown as the top digital economy according to the latest Economist Intelligence Unit survey (summary and download details at http://digbig.com/5bbxgk) – whereas Iceland isn't ranked at all because, as the survey's editor Denis McCauley confirms, its economy isn’t large enough to qualify. But that doesn’t really matter so long as there’s a jurisdiction, somewhere in the world, willing to provide legal protection to whistleblowers. Fragmented and fragile up to now, the protected leaks industry could just possibly become a due diligence force to be reckoned with.

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