Wikileaks makes first steps to find home in Iceland

A true democracy would embrace Wikileaks to prove its commitment to transparency:

Whistleblower WikiLeaks has registered in media-friendly Iceland its first known legal entity — a business that so far has no office or activity, the website’s spokesman said Friday.

Wikileaks is now mulling whether to use the firm to fundraise or for information gathering, Kristinn Hrafnsson told AFP.

“We want WikiLeaks to have a global presence and having a business in Iceland is part of this plan,” said Hrafnsson of the new entity, called Sunshine Press Productions.

“We have registered Sunshine Press Productions as a business in Iceland… but we don’t have an office or activity at the moment,” he added.

The new firm appears to be WikiLeaks’ first known legal presence in a country, though its Internet site functions thanks to servers based in Sweden.

Iceland, which is currently considering far-reaching freedom of information legislation, counts among the countries where WikiLeaks has its most solid base.

In June, the country’s parliament voted unanimously in favour of the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI), a resolution developed with the help of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange — who travels regularly here — and aimed at protecting investigative journalists and their sources.

WikiLeaks, which last month published an unprecedented 400,000 classified US documents on the Iraq war and posted 77,000 secret US files on the Afghan conflict in July, has said its people have come under pressure and been harassed.

Last week, Assange announced he was considering requesting asylum and basing his website in neutral Switzerland.

Text and images ©2024 Antony Loewenstein. All rights reserved.

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