When she had had enough of hawking payment plans to poor suburbanites who couldn’t afford them, they returned to Iceland. But back in their homeland, another problem was coming to a head. Before the birth of their son, Jónsdóttir’s husband had begun to suffer from grand mal seizures. Doctors diagnosed him with epilepsy and prescribed drugs that left him vacant, deeply depressed, and sapped of creativity.
Early one morning, he told Jónsdóttir he was leaving for work, and disappeared. She found a note from him when she woke up an hour later: “Can you forgive a desperate soul?”
Despite a manhunt that covered much of western Iceland, it would be another half decade before his weathered and smooth bones were found in a field of moss on Snaefellsnes Peninsula to the north of Reykjavík in a suicide that mirrored her stepfather’s.
Fifteen years later, when Iceland found itself in one of the deepest financial crises in the world’s history, Jónsdóttir would write that the long-smoldering tragedies of her early life had served as preparation for the country’s hour of reckoning. “This morning I realized why I had been given these lessons of living in suspense without going quite mad or losing my integrated sense of optimism,” she would write in her blog. “I was being prepared for the times we are facing on my nearly bankrupted island.”
After her husband’s death, Jónsdóttir buried herself in her usual creative outlets for her grief: words, images, and ideas. But she also discovered a new one that tied them all together: the Internet. While working a temporary job at Iceland’s first Internet ad agency, she was amused to see that the company’s designers had left a typo on its website—in the word “proofreading,” no less. When she couldn’t get anyone at the firm to fix it, she learned HTML and corrected it herself, then began making her own sites, mixing poetry, paintings, and video.
Soon she and two other early Web obsessives named Gunnar Grímsson and Guðmundur Guðmundsson formed a group called InterOrgan or IO, a kind of Web art collective. “Io is the most volcanically active moon in the solar system. The friction from the forces pulling on it creates all this heat inside. It was a very appropriate name,” says Guðmundsson. He, Grímsson, and Jónsdóttir pushed the boundaries of the Internet with some of the Web’s first live audio and video. “If it was new, we did it,” he says. “If it already worked, we weren’t interested.” One of Jónsdóttir’s sites, at its peak, received enough traffic to account for 60 percent of the country’s bandwidth.
When Jónsdóttir wasn’t programming, she was protesting. She organized demonstrations against the construction of the Kárahnjúkar Dam in the east of the country, which threatened to swallow up some of the country’s most beautiful waterfalls to power aluminum smelters. She found the phone numbers of the handful of Icelandic-Tibetans in Reykjavík and organized a series of Free Tibet protests in front of the Chinese embassy. And in 2003, she led protests against the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, writing poems that vented her frustration at political lies and the mass media’s blindness as it stumbled toward a seemingly preordained war.
One was titled “The Horror of War.”
mountains of starved children
shiny bones
burning flesh
these are images we should
put in a frame
mount them in our homes
so we never forget
the true horror of war
For Jónsdóttir, protest became practically a way of life, even when her fellow demonstrators could be counted on a single hand.
Then, in October 2008, the whole of Iceland was suddenly protesting beside her.
Iceland’s banks had been deregulated in 2001, and privatized in 2003 under the Milton Friedman–influenced leadership of Prime Minister Davið Oddsson. With Viking zeal, the country had adopted some of the most highly leveraged, riskiest banking practices in the world. In a few years, the assets of the country’s financial industry grew from 100 percent of the country’s gross domestic product to 1,000 percent. And then, at the height of those bankers’ hubris, the international credit crisis hit.
As the banks failed to repay their mountains of short-term debt, they collapsed and were nationalized in a panic. The stock market value of Icelandic companies fell 90 percent. Luxury properties being built in Reykjavík with make-believe money were halted midconstruction. Consumers defaulted on the expensive car loans they had taken as their savings winked out of existence. Iceland’s obligations to international depositors in one bank alone, Landsbanki, were roughly as damaging to its economy as the reparations Germany had been forced to pay in its crippling Treaty of Versailles after World War I.
Icelanders revolted. The protests began every Saturday outside the Althingi, and grew from hundreds to thousands. They banged on pots and pans, replaced the parliament’s flag with that of a corporate grocery store chain, and at one point nearly managed to storm the building. Word of the demonstrations and organizational details spread through Facebook, where almost half of all Icelanders had accounts, more per capita than any other country. “The first Facebook revolution didn’t happen in Tunisia or Egypt,” says Róbert Marshall, a former journalist who now serves as a member of the Icelandic parliament. “It happened here.”
Three months later, when it became clear that the crowds would paralyze the country before they gave up, the government resigned. An election was scheduled.
In the chaos of that interregnum, Icelanders began meeting in small groups to discuss what they wanted from the new government. Jónsdóttir was a regular at one of those makeshift assemblies at the Reykjavík Academy, and it quickly grew into a political party: the Citizens’ Movement. It had a handful of goals such as keeping the International Monetary Fund out of Iceland and increasing direct democracy. But it vowed to use a hit-and-run strategy: Whether or not it could achieve those goals, it planned to dissolve after eight years, a short enough time that it couldn’t be corrupted.
When Jónsdóttir volunteered to run for parliament as part of that subversive political party, its poll numbers showed that it would receive half of one percent of the vote. “It seemed like a suicide mission,” says Margrét Tryggvadóttir, another of the candidates.
The Citizens’ Movement was largely ignored by the mainstream media. But through its visibility on Facebook, in blogs and Twitter—and by virtue of the electorate’s vast anger toward Iceland’s existing parties—it steadily rose in popularity. They finagled their way into the candidate debates, where Jónsdóttir cut a fiery figure. “We used a kind of hacker mentality,” she says. “We found the cracks in the system where we could get our voices heard.”
In the election that April, more than a third of the country’s representatives were replaced with candidates who had never held office before. Seven percent of the vote went to the Citizens’ Movement, enough to give the party four seats in the legislature.
One of those seats belonged to Birgitta Jónsdóttir.
Long before Atanas Tchobanov ever thought he could take an active part in the leaking movement, he pioneered another method of hacktivism: text message terrorism.
Tchobanov had known since his teen years that Sofia was simply not a place where his brand of free thinking could exist: He refused to join the local Communist Party and was fired from the low-level industrial job he had been forced into by the Bulgarian government. When the Iron Curtain parted in 1989, he got a fellowship at Paris Ouest University and moved to Paris’s Latin Quarter without hesitation.
Tchobanov went on to get a Ph.D. in linguistics and became a skilled computer scientist, analyzing large databases of spoken and written word to find the fundamental underpinnings of human language. But as Bulgarian news began to trickle across the border via the growing online news media, he found his native country’s political problems harder to ignore—and also saw his opportunity to help. In 2004, he created an NGO for Bulgarians living abroad and b
ecame the editor of the Bulgaria-focused Parizhi Vesti, or Paris News, attacking what he calls the country’s “slow and stupid” administration and highlighting issues like a wasteful, no-bid, thirty-five-year highway contract proposed in 2006. “It was my small way of fighting for normality,” he says.
One of the issues that infuriated Tchobanov most was a health care tax that was applied to all Bulgarians: both the seven million that lived in the country and the one million or so that had emigrated since the fall of the Soviet Union. Even those who paid for health care abroad still had to fork out the equivalent of thousands of dollars or risk paying an accumulated fine if they ever set foot in the country again. The law made less sense than ever after Bulgaria’s 2007 accession to the European Union. But despite immense anger from expats, the unresponsive parliament had no incentive to dial down or delete a tax that affected those who couldn’t vote against them.
Just before Christmas in 2008, one Bulgarian newspaper made the mistake of publishing the cell phone numbers of every member of the country’s parliament in a feel-good invitation to the country’s citizens to send them Happy New Year text messages. Tchobanov seized the opportunity, forwarding the list to thousands of Bulgarians around the world, calling on them to send SMS messages demanding the tax be lifted.
Soon more than ten thousand petitioners flooded the parliamentarians’ in-boxes with as many as ninety texts each in a day, paralyzing their phones in a legal version of the same attacks Anonymous would use to take down Visa’s and MasterCard’s websites. Newspapers and lawmakers denounced the tactic and called it “SMS terrorism.” One member of parliament, who was pushing a bill to repeal the tax, issued a public apology to the parliament. But Tchobanov won: The anti-tax bill passed. Today he laughs off the use of the word terrorism to describe his cell phone subterfuge. “People paying lawmakers’ salaries have the right to contact them,” he says with a shrug.
Back in Bulgaria, Yordanov was fighting other battles—without the thousand miles of buffer between Paris and Sofia to protect him.
In 2007, he and fellow reporter Maria Nikolayeva at the newspaper Politika dug into a political decision that would allow a swath of ecologically protected coastal land twelve miles north of Burgas to have its protections stripped, be bought on the cheap, and turned into a lucrative holiday resort. Other patches of the former nature reserve were distributed to public officials, their families, and even the police officer responsible for investigating possible ethics violations by the mayor who had removed the land’s protected status.
The two reporters prepared a series of front-page stories for Politika, exposing the allegedly corrupt deals, titling the series the “Crusade Against Strandzha.” When the first article appeared, Nikolayeva received a visit from two men in the paper’s Sofia office. They dropped the day’s paper on her desk and made some offhand remarks about the building’s security. “You know full well that you shouldn’t write things like this,” they said. “And you know what happens to curious journalists. They get acid thrown at them.”
The two were referring to Anna Zarkova, a reporter for the Dneven Trud who had sulphuric acid splashed on her face and body at a Sofia bus stop in 1998 after publishing a story on Bulgarian human trafficking. Her left eye was so badly damaged that it had to be surgically removed.
The paper’s surveillance camera caught the license plate of the men’s car who had threatened Nikolayeva and the footage was submitted to the police. No arrests were made.
She and Yordanov refused to back down. Instead, Nikolayeva made as many television appearances and gave as many newspaper interviews as possible to try and publicize the threat against her.
After that first installment in the series, Yordanov learned that someone in Burgas was trying a different censorship tactic, purchasing every issue of the paper from the distributor before it could be delivered to newsstands. When the next issue came out, he drove to the distributor early in the morning, filled his car with papers, and handed them out himself to local retailers.
Yordanov’s brazenness didn’t go unnoticed. It would nearly cost him his life.
If John Perry Barlow ever wrote a résumé—and he’s probably not the type who ever has—it would list seventeen years of cattle ranching in Wyoming, a few decades of writing lyrics for the Grateful Dead, experimenting with LSD alongside Timothy Leary, and cofounding the Electronic Frontier Foundation. But science fiction author Bruce Sterling once named Barlow’s primary profession as that of a poet, in the sense that Percy Shelley once described poets: “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
When Barlow stood behind the podium at the Icelandic Digital Freedom Society’s conference at Reykjavík University the summer before the country’s banking collapse, the stubble-jowled rancher looked more like a western priest, wearing a black leather jacket over a black shirt, a black kerchief tied into his collar with a white cross emblem above it. The sermon he offered the assembled Icelandic technophiles was a people’s history of communication, from the invention of language to the first printing press, a device he argued had launched a “renegotiation of power” that led to everything from the Thirty Years’ War to the Spanish Inquisition.
A half-millennium or so farther down his timeline, Barlow came to his own discovery of the Internet. “And lo, I typed in ‘telnet,’” he said, “and I could make a hard disk spin anywhere in the world.”
“I had a real holy vision at that point,” he continued. “If you’re going to take all of humanity and put them in the same social space where they don’t have clothes and buildings, or anything to show who they are, they don’t have property, they don’t have jurisdictional boundaries, they don’t have law maybe . . . it could be the biggest thing since the capture of fire.”
The Internet represented another “renegotiation of power,” he argued, one just as dangerous to the status quo as Gutenberg’s invention had been. For the next twenty-five years, he and fellow cyberlibertarians like John Gilmore and Lotus founder Mitch Kapor would spend much of their lives and enormous sums of money fighting the governments and corporations that would seek to neuter or restrain that new “social space.”
Birgitta Jónsdóttir was in the audience. And it was one tossed-off idea near the end of Barlow’s speech that lodged in her mind. “My dream for this country,” he said, “is that it could become like the Switzerland of Bits.”
He didn’t elaborate.
(When I visited Barlow in his Chinatown apartment in New York a few years later, he was more explicit. “I had thought about the Pirate Bay a lot, and I wanted something more robust than that,” he said between drags of a Marlboro cigarette and sips of Red Bull. He had even discussed the transparency haven idea with a government minister in Monaco before thinking of Iceland. “I felt like the answer to sovereignty was sovereignty. To fight them on their own terms.”)
A few months later, Jónsdóttir was elected. And then the final ingredient in Barlow’s idea appeared: WikiLeaks came to Iceland.
It began when Bogi Ágústsson, a Walter Cronkite-ish anchor for Icelandic national broadcaster RUV, appeared on the evening news and calmly explained that a legal injunction had prevented the station from airing a prepared exposé on Kaupthing Bank, the biggest bank in Iceland. Instead, he said, viewers should visit a site called WikiLeaks, where they could see the source material for the TV segment themselves.
Icelanders who took Ágústsson’s advice found a newly leaked summary of Kaupthing’s loan book posted on the site, detailing an ugly web of more than five billion dollars in loans from Kaupthing’s coffers to its own proprietors and companies they owned, with little or no collateral. Two billion dollars, for instance, went to the bank’s main owners, brothers Ágúst and Lýður Guðmundsson. Another billion went to Ólafur Ólafsson, a major investor in Kaupthing who had on his own birthday flown in Elton John from England, along with a grand piano, for a one-hour concert
. “The banks had been eaten from the inside out,” says Kristinn Hrafnsson, a former investigative reporter in Reykjavík who had worked on RUV’s blocked report and later joined WikiLeaks as a spokesperson.
A government inquest began pulling apart the documents to determine if Iceland’s anger could be channeled into criminal charges against Kaupthing executives and others. Eleven men, including billionaire brothers Robert and Vincent Tchenguiz, who both took loans from Kaupthing and also held an investment stake in the bank, would eventually be arrested in London and Reykjavík. Neither the Guðmundsson brothers nor the Tchenguiz brothers were indicted, but Ólafsson, the Elton John fan, faces charges of money laundering, and his prosecution is ongoing.
WikiLeaks immediately became a household name in Iceland. And just three months later, Julian Assange and Daniel Domscheit-Berg arrived in Reykjavík, conquering heroes from abroad. They were invited to appear on the talk show of Egill Helgason to discuss their bombshell bank leak, two idealistic young men unable to suppress goofy grins on camera as they basked in some of the first mainstream attention to their work. Afterward, strangers on the street offered them hugs and bought them drinks in bars.
It was on the set of Helgason’s talk show that Assange reintroduced a long-smoldering idea, a blend of his love of Neal Stephenson’s data haven novel Cryptonomicon, his recent work digging into the internals of the Cayman Islands holdings of the Swiss bank Julius Baer, and Barlow’s seed of an idea from his talk a year before.
“You mentioned to me this idea that in Iceland we should become a vanguard of publishing freedom,” Helgason, a cheery round man with blond curls said to the pair of WikiLeakers in their on-camera interview.
“Absolutely, absolutely,” Assange responded. “We see in the Caribbean Islands and the Cayman Islands that politicians create laws to enable offshore financial institutions to hide the assets of the developing and the developed world,” he said. Iceland could pull off the opposite trick, he argued: transforming itself into an island where nothing is hidden. He went on to list the world’s most liberal freedom-of-information and media laws from Sweden to Georgia. “Why not pull all this together, and become the center for publishing in the world?”
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