26C3: WikiLeaks to Conquer Iceland

The WikiLeaks project has assembled the secret toll collect contracts, the so-called field reports from Kunduz covering the controversial bombardment of the tanker convey in Afghanistan, the volatile plan of the European Union Institute for Security Studies (EUISS) and the comprehensive collection of pager messages before and after the tragic events of September 11, 2001. It wants to publicize documents and events that would normally not get much attention because it might make it legally or politically difficult to publicize them. WikiLeaks provides technical and legal assistance for just these purposes. The project is working on a handbook "to peruse" and plans to send it to parliamentarians, for example.

Julian Assange and Daniel Schmitt, who represented WikiLeaks at the 26th Chaos Communication Congress (26C3) in Berlin, announced a series of new offerings. Says Assange, "Many of the public documents are too long or complicated to be picked up by the media. That's why we're providing journalists with a few documents exclusively for a limited time to give them more value."

However, the project wants to go one step further. "After many Iceland banks went bankrupt, we can present a document that lists insiders that could have brought their sheep to the fold in time," explains Schmitt. "Suddenly many Icelanders began to listen." As a result, the WikiLeaks team developed the plan to introduce a few bills into the Iceland parliament to make Iceland into a model technical data state, "a kind of Swiss for bits." This would best occur before Iceland joined the European Union, which it plans to do sometime in the future. In this way the activists want to gather "the best data protection, journalistic rights and freedom guarantees into law."