Interview: Birgitta Jónsdóttir (Part Two)

This is the second part of my interview with Birgitta Jónsdóttir. We got to talking in a bit more detail about her views on freedom of information, transparency, WikiLeaks, and the evolution of media and the internet. She was in town last week to speak to Samara, and shortly before she arrived she received word that she was the target of a US government subpoena, which was trying to get Twitter to provide information about her account.

Q: What is the connection between your general sense that the “system” is broken, and your more specific interest in freedom of information, transparency, and so on? Is the “transparency agenda” that you are interested in a way of fixing government, or is it just something that you think needs to be done because it is in the broader public interest?

A: The latter.

I don’t think that you can “fix government,” you need to fix the entire system. On the bigger scale, when it comes to transparency issues, what I am calling for more than anything is for a dialogue on what should be transparent, what should not be transparent, why should it not, be transparent, or why should it be transparent.

Q: So you don’t consider yourself a transparency absolutist?

A: No. Because it is not my role. But I really feel, and one area where I am an absolutist, is that government should never, ever, decide what to filter out for me, or for you.

Q: So you are an absolutist to the extent that a government should not have secrets?

A: No, that’s not what I am saying. I am talking about lists that governments make of websites that should not be accessible. I am asolutely against that. When it comes to government and secrets, this is interesting because I have participated in sensitive projects like negotiations over IMMI. And if we leaked or published online the drafts, it would have defied the purpose of transparency, because the unfinished draft might have created a lot of fear or misunderstanding and undercut the process.

But once the file is complete, it should be public. And if the question is why it should not be public, there should be a debate over why we need this type of document to be secret.  I want to be able to go to a KKK website and know what they think. It’s not going to go away if we take it away from the Internet.

As a lawmaker, I find it crazy to think “I don’t like this thing, it’s really disturbing, I’m going to make a law so no one can see it.” I try to analyze what is it, in Iceland, that should be absolutely secret. And I’m thinking, and thinking, and thinking… and I can’t think of anything! Because all of it is already available somewhere, and the way we have used the Internet since the early days, the earliest webpages, there has been this culture of cultivating fear of information.

Q: What is your general view, with WikiLeaks and now IMMI, of the function of media in a democratic society? Is it part of holding the government to account? Is WikiLeaks a new media outlet? Traditional investigative journalism has had, ideally, some sense of responsibility to the broader nation that it serves. But in the WikiLeaks era, you have information about all governments put out to everyone, so the connection between responsible government and responsible journalism has been severed. Do you see this as a problem?


Q: I see WikiLeaks as originally a sort of add-on, like a plugin that makes your web browser work better. What has confused people is that WikiLeaks has morphed. It began as a sort of button that would lead you to leaks or raw material to work with. And now it is more of an editor, deciding what cables will go out at what times. So it is less of an add-on to journalism and now it is like a cheap editor for a lot of media in a lot of countries.

So it has morphed, and I haven’t been a part of that process. Being a big fan of horizontalism and spread-out responsibilities, I want to turn the information pyramid on its head. I want to support the sites that are popping up that are more like the original WikiLeaks.

I’m not trying to downplay what WikiLeaks is doing with the big leaks, and there could be speculation for a hundred years as to what is the right way to do it. But I would like to see much, much more media with access to the cables, to put it into perspective. Because you have, say, a diplomat in China talking about, say Burma, and someone in the West writing on the same story. And if you only get the story about the cables from one place, you don’t get the three-dimensional picture.  I think the countries that can’t afford to be part of the WikiLeaks process right now should be given more access, the more poor countries the better. But I don’t know how they [WikiLeaks] are going to do it, I’ve been trying to encourage them…

I think we are in the middle of a massive change when it comes to journalism. The consumption of traditional media is getting less and less everyday, and they haven’t figured out how to make money off the internet. So I see the media as in a really fragile state.

In the early days of the internet, it felt like the wild west. You were sort of finding new territory, shaping it, and now it is the second big wave, with the internet getting industrialized and corporatized. At the same time, there are a lot of fantastic qualities about globalization, and one of these is the internet. I would not be who I am if I had not stumbled on the internet in 1995, and it has shaped my life in incredible ways, especially as a poet.

When I started my adventures on the internet, I was giving up on being a poet. I was a political “peoples poet,” and that was very uncool at the time. I was being ignored everywhere and it felt very lonely. But I got online, started my website, and suddenly I was part of an international community of like-minded people, who were doing experiments with teleparties, where poets would have events in many different place.

What I want to emphasize is that we have to do everything we can to preserve the freedom of information online. We have to have a dialogue about this, and that is why I am happy the US government is going after my information, because it allows us to have a chance to talk about it.

Interview: Birgitta Jonsdottir (Part One)

Last week I had the chance to interview Birgitta Jónsdóttir. She is an Icelandic parliamentarian, a member of the political anti-party called The Movement, and a former spokesperson for Wikileaks. She came to Toronto at the invitation of Samara and talked about her work for the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI), a push to make Iceland  a haven for freedom of information.

I intended to ask Birgitta about Wikileaks and other such topical issues, but we got to talking about more abstract questions. Here's part one:

Q:  I was struck by your remark, at the beginning of your talk, when you mentioned that you were inspired to enter politics after reading Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine. Was that because of her general thesis, or was it because you had specific worries that Iceland was going to get “shock-doctrined” in the wake of the economic crisis?

A.  I had been on the forefront of fighting against the aluminum business in Iceland -- Alcoa and these other companies. Alcoa got to build a massive facility and was getting energy from the Iceland government four times cheaper than it was in Brazil. So I was concerned where Iceland was heading long before the economic collapse; I was concerned, and it was so annoying to be in the role of Cassandra.

I’d been reading books, including The Shock Doctrine, and I was very concerned when I heard the IMF was coming to Iceland. And I was concerned how the regulations were being chipped away when the banks were privatized…in 2007 we were ranked the most developed nation in the world. Where are we now? Third largest collapse in the world. 

It draws this incredible parallel, even if not as extreme, with what happened in Argentina. We have a complicated situation in Iceland with political extremism: the neo-conism from before the collapse, and the new extremism saying the only solution is to join the EU.  I am a member of the foreign affairs committee that has oversight over the application to the EU. I say we should tighten up our garden before trying to join another garden. 

Because we are such a young democracy, and so few in number, when I look at former colonies in Africa, the parallels between their independence and ours is striking. There was a guy who contacted me many years ago: I git this email in 1997 or so, and at the time I had one of the only personal web pages from Iceland.

There’s a strong belief in Iceland about the “hidden people” – these mythical creatures who live in the hills amongst the rocks. I talked about them on my website, and this guy contacts me and asks if I believe in them, and I say yes, and he sends me this remarkable letter. And he says he has been appointed to be the “spear” to lobby for American corporations to enter Iceland.

I couldn’t tell if this guy was real, but it turns out he had a high ranking authority in the California government, and he says that he had been visited by hidden persons, and they gave him a message saying he should stop doing what he was doing, and he was worried we would be exploited if American corporations discovered how vulnerable we are.

We are very vulnerable, we need help from the international community. Members of the environmental activist community were the first to see this in 2005, when we organized the first protests against the aluminum industry. That’s the first time I was classified as an environmental terrorist; the worst thing we did was to padlock some machinery, and someone climbed up a crane.

But we pushed the barriers a bit. Which is basically what WikiLeaks does; they are an activist organization that pushes the barriers of the norm, and others feel empowered to go further, in sort of an evolutionary process.

Q: As a parliamentarian, you clearly feel you can make a difference by working within the system. Is that because you think Iceland is small enough and has a flexible enough political culture that working within the system can make a difference?

A: Well, I wanted do an experiment which is why we founded this party that was defined as neither left nor right. We made a checklist of things we needed to achieve. If it is foreseeable that we can’t achieve these goals, we have to dissolve the party. We have max eight years. One of the things on the checklist is to sever the ties between then corporate and the political.

Q: Meaning, no corporate donations to political parties?

A: To have a severe limit to it, no large corporate donations. Some of them obviously try to go around it...

We, for example, would never accept large corporate donations. We are actually having difficulties raising money because we don’t want to have any members – nobody could be a member of The Movement. It makes it hard though, to organize volunteers. People wanted to pay to become members of the Movement, so we are looking into ways to solve that. So our idea is that if you want to be a member, you can also be a member of any other party as well. Because we don’t want to define ourselves as a party.

I wasn’t sure if it would make a difference, but the reason why we haven’t become like the others, and it has been successful, is that we have two fundamentally different aspects. First, you cannot run for us if you have been a politician, because we want to build a bridge between power and the people.

Second: We are very horizontal (inspired by Horizontalism, a book from Argentina). So we rotate leadership roles, only because you have to have an appointed party group chairman. If we have to do leadership stuff we throw dice… the key is, we don’t take it seriously, so we don’t become like them. We take the pledge to be the annoying fly in the tent, and don’t let anyone feel comfortable around us. We have a jar we have to pay money into if we sound like a politician.

The same with the media. The media hates us, because they love to have the leader of the party for interviews, and they are used to the same structure of power. … It is so critical to understand that there is nothing worthy to sacrifice for power.  So as long as we can keep those things integrated…

I was trying to figure out, everything’s still fucked up, what can the people ask for? They don’t want another government because it’s just the same parties. We have got little attention so people haven’t understood what we are about yet. Many voted for us as part of a protest, because they don’t trust the system.

What I realized is the system is the problem. We have this whole breed of people, most countries have been taken over by this breed called bureaucratic lawyers. They control everything; they work directly with lobbyists. Some of the law that has come up since the financial collapse was written by people from the banking sector. The ministries are filled with people who have got their job not because they are qualified, but because they have the right connections. Meanwhile you have qualified bureaucrats that never get any authority within the civil service.

I used to think I lived in a democracy, and I never thought that it would be so blatantly obvious to me that the system is basically controlled by lawyers. (laughs). And I thought, that’s no good.

The problem is that systems tend to defend their mistakes – as the US is doing right now with WikiLeaks. They look to every possible way to say they didn’t make a mistake. And so we need to do like the Argentinians did, and protest the model of the system. I’ve talked to people from all over the world and there is the same level of distrust in the system, and that we don’t have the tools to change it.

That’s why I think it is important in Iceland, the development of national referendums. If people can call for a referendum, with passion, that they should have the right to have a referendum on issues that are important to the entire nation, then being an active citizen becomes more of the norm, and people will have to educate themselves about the issues.

Borges, Journalism, Wikileaks

Nick Rowe and I were both thinking about Borges’ Library of Babel the other day, though for different reasons (I think). For Nick it was part of another of his fun posts that start from way beyond leftfield and end up nice and close to home. I was trying to figure out something helpful and original to say about Wikileaks and what it means for journalism. This is where I’m at:

Imagine two libraries. The first library contains every important book that has ever been written. It’s a big library, but not that big.  There is only one problem: it is very hard to get into. Access to the stacks is strictly controlled, and when it comes to the best and most important books, it is almost impossible for civilians to even see them. And so while the public knows where all the useful information is to be found, that doesn’t do them much good since they can’t get at it. It’s basically a useless library, so let’s call this the Library of Robarts.

The second library is much, much bigger than the first. It contains every possible book that could ever be written, from a book that is entirely blank except for a single “A” on the first page, to a book that is nothing but “zzzzzz” on every page. It also contains books of any arbitrary length, since individual volumes can be concatenated to form much longer books. Unlike the first library, this one is open to the public. Anyone can go in and wander the stacks to their hearts content, and is free to spend days, months, or even years in the reading rooms.

But this library, too, is totally useless. It's useless not despite its size, but because of its size. Imagine you are looking for a copy of Moby Dick. You find one that you think is the right one, except it is very hard to know for sure. That is because in addition to the true copy of Moby Dick, the library also contains every possible version of Moby Dick that varies from the true one by a single letter or punctuation mark. And one that varies by only two letters or punctuation marks. Here’s the key point: the only way you could ever know that you had the correct version of Moby Dick is if you already had a true version of Moby Dick! In order to find what you want in this library (called the Library of Babel) is if you already know what you are looking for. As Nick puts it,  "What makes a library useful, indeed what makes a library a library, is not just what it contains, but what it does not contain. The optimal size of a library, even if we ignore the cost of books, librarians, and bricks and mortar, is finite."

From the public’s point of view, the ideal library would be mixture of the two regimes. We want the limited size (only the important books!) of the first library, but the open-access of the second.

So what does this mean for journalism? For most of its existence, journalism has taken place in a Library of Robarts world. Officials have secret information that the public wants. The job of the journalist has been to learn about, and hopefully obtain, information that is being kept secret. The journalist in this case is, literally, the medium through which important secret information becomes useful public information.

In the aftermath of the Wikileaks affair, some have argued that this is a sign that we are moving from a world where useful information is secret, and therefore scarce, to an era where useful information is public, and therefore plentiful. That in fact is Julian Assange’s stated goal: a world of absolute transparency, where there are no official secrets.

At first blush, this seems like the ideal mixed-library regime: All and only important official secrets will be made public. The truth will be out there, governments will be more accountable. And journalists will become obsolete, as we will have evolved, say some commentators, into a “post-journalism” world.

Is this plausible? I’m not sure. After all, the two libraries I talked about above are just examples of two ways of hiding a very important piece of information. You can secret it away in a place where no one can get it – put the papers in a safe, or secure it behind very hard encryption, for example. Or you can hide it in plain sight as it were, by embedding the one useful bit of information in a sea of irrelevant information.

Governments typically adopt the first tactic when trying to keep secrets. They put a classified stamp on it, limit its promulgation, lock it up, encrypt it, and so on. But sometimes, when faced with a pesky access to information request, they go the other way. They release the requested document along with a huge pile of other related documents, hoping to bury the needle of useful information in a big useless haystack. “You want information?” they say. “We’ll give you information!” That is, they switch from the Library of Robarts tactic to the Library of Babel tactic.

A big deal has been made about the sheer size of the Wikileaks document dump, with over 90 000 files made public and another 15 000 or so in the queue. Less frequently, it has been observed that the volume of information is not a feature of the leak, but a bug. In his post on the Wikileak, Jay Rosen wondered if the sheer scale of the revelations would have a counterproductive effect. Here is what he wrote:

We tend to think: big revelations mean big reactions. But if the story is too big and crashes too many illusions, the exact opposite occurs. My fear is that this will happen with the Afghanistan logs. Reaction will be unbearably lighter than we have a right to expect— not because the story isn’t sensational or troubling enough, but because it’s too troubling, a mess we cannot fix and therefore prefer to forget.

I think he gets the effect right (reaction has been pretty muted) but not the rationale. I don’t think people kinda shrugged at the Afghanistan logs because the scale of the problems they reveal seems intractable. Rather, I think it is because the scale of the information that was revealed is journalistically intractable. Wikileaks didn’t give us the happy medium library, with its combination of useful and public information, it gave us the Library of Babel, where every good story was hidden in a sea of otherwise useless data.

The lesson for Wikileaks is that information is better when it comes not in a torrent but in useful drips. That is something the Telegraph understood last year, when it tormented the British political class with daily Chinese-water torture revelations about MPs spending habits.

The lesson for journalism, I think, is that it doesn’t really matter which library system we’re operating in. Whether it’s all hidden in Robarts, or in plain view in Babel,  the information still needs to be mediated. Except instead of making useful secrets public, the task of the journalist will be to show the public what is needle, and what is haystack. If anything, journalists in the Libary of Babel world will have to be be more knowledgeable, more specialized in the fields they cover, because in order to find the good stories, they'll already have to know what they are looking for.



Wikileaks and the Paradox of Transparency

What is the impact of the War Logs leak? I think this is best split into at least four questions.

1.  What is the impact on journalism?
2. What is the impact on operational security?
3. What will the impact be on public support for the mission?
4. What is the impact on the military?

1.  Following Jeff Jarvis, we can frame this as the question of “what if there is no more secrecy”? Journalists are, more than anything, information brokers, gatekeepers, and editors.  The big career score is “breaking a story” – that is, being the first person to report on something that becomes a cultural touchstone.

But what happens when there are no more secrets? When, for all intents and purposes, everything is made public, when there is no more use for “access journalism”? I make some tentative explorations of this in chapter five of The Authenticity Hoax, where I’m quite skeptical of the positive claims that are made in favour of maximal transparency and openness.  It’s part of a broader debate being played out between publicity-maximalists like Jarvis and privacy advocates like Andrew Keen, and it is one of the relatively few areas where I’m closer to Keen than to Jarvis.

There’s no magic way of figuring out where the line ought to be between transparency and secrecy. In every case you have to ask who benefits from more transparency, and who benefits from secrecy. Jarvis has a good posting on this where he questions his own commitments:

I make the mistake of thinking that we’ll navigate toward openness via rational and critical discussion. But we’ll more likely move the line because of purposeful subversion of the line like Wikileaks’. The line will be move by force.

This is the nub of the problem. Jay Rosen’s post on this is excellent, and his key point is to note that Wikileaks is the first “stateless” news organization. Why does this matter? Partly because it means it is harder for governments to control it, which can be a good thing. But it also means that Wikileaks has less reason to be responsible and accountable. When newspapers and other “state-based” organizations break news, it is because they perceive themselves as serving the broader public good, and they have a natural constituency that keeps them accountable. Where’s the accountability here, with Wikileaks? I don’t see it, and it bothers me.

2. That said, what is the material effect on the release of these documents on operational security in Afghanistan? From what I’ve read in the documents so far, I don’t see much to be too worried about. I suppose one way of getting at it is to ask whether, if you were working over there, how you would feel about this release. Safer? Less safe? The same? I  don’t have the knowledge or the expertise to answer this adequately.

But perhaps this isn’t a good standard to use anyway. If the military had its way, virtually nothing would be released to the public, in the name of “OPSEC”. OPSEC is just the military version of the “national security” line that the government uses to keep information from the public. But OPSEC and National Security can’t be a get-out-of-jail free card, used to trump all requests for access or information. There is a lot in these documents that I think the public has a right to know about, and that the military could very well have chosen to share with the public years ago, on their own terms.

3.  A lot of people who support the mission are very upset about this leak. For example, my friend Brian Platt got “up on his high horse” (as he put it), arguing that unlike a targeted leak designed to unveil a scandal, this document dump is “a senseless leak, an act of pure treason,” whose only purpose was to screw over the military.

That’s no doubt true, and I share Brian’s suspicion of the motivations behind these leaks.  But just because someone has an agenda, it doesn’t mean the documents aren’t genuine, or valuable, or useful. But more to the point, I’m not convinced that this leak will have the knock-on effect of undermining support for the mission.

Most of the opposition to the mission is  fact-free ideological leanings by people who are against the war not because of what is happening on the ground, but simply because the war exists in the first place -- they are opposed to the mission in principle. In which case, new information -- however positive -- is not going to change their minds. At the same time, a lot of the pro-war faction is pretty much immune to bad news of any sort, and will always be willing to double down on the military commitment no matter how poorly things are going.

The real action is in the fuzzy middle; people (like me) who are unsure of what the goals of the mission should be, and how best they might be achieved, and to what extent realism has to be balanced against idealism. These are people for whom facts on the ground matter, and there is nothing in the documents, on balance, that I can see that would lead the fence-sitters to become devoted anti-war lobbyists.

If anything, I think the opposite is true. The picture that emerges from the documents is of a professional military working in an intense and difficult situation, and performing its job as humanely as possibly under the circumstances.  Canadians have had no indication as to the pace and tempo and intensity of the conflict since the insurgency started in 2006, and that is by design. The military brass has acted under the assumption that if we knew what was going on – how much contact there was, how many IEDs were being found, how many friendly fire or civilian casualties there were – that the public would pull its support. I think that does the public and the military a disservice.

It does no one any good if the public is kept in the dark about what the war is really like. If there is material in these documents that will undermine the effort in the mind of a reasonable public, then that is an argument for making them public. A war that relies for its support on keeping important truths from the public is not a legitimate war.

4. Ultimately, I think that the effect of this leak will be counterproductive for all concerned, in the same way that access-to-information laws have been  counterproductive. In Canada, ATI legislation has helped construct what has been called “the neurotic state” – a government and bureaucracy that is paranoid, highly media-averse, and reluctant to put anything of any consequence in writing.

This is probably what will happen with the military. This leak of very sensitive material is going to convince the government bureaucracy and the military brass that they simply can't put any points of dispute or debate down in writing. There will be an increasing trend towards pseudo-transparency – the release of lots of communiqués and reports that say nothing at all. It doesn’t mean that there won’t be points of contention or matters of urgency; it just means there won’t be a record of it anywhere.

For journalists, coming on the heels of the Rolling Stone piece on McChrystal, it means access will be more difficult to come by. Sources will dry up, interviews will be cancelled, strict and useless talking points will be the order of the day.