A New York Times article this week recounts some of the major attempts made over the last three years by the US to investigate the activist group Wikileaks and its leader, Julian Assange.
Most notably, Iceland's former minister of the interior, Ogmundur Jonasson, said that he asked “eight or nine” FBI agents to leave Iceland in June 2011 for misrepresenting the purpose of their visit. Jonasson recalled to the paper that the FBI told him they needed entry to the country to stop hackers from executing “an imminent attack on Icelandic government databases.” Upon their arrival, Jonasson found that the agents were there only to gather information on Wikileaks, which has many members in Iceland.
The article notes that although Wikileaks has fallen on and off the public radar since the organization's big leak of US military and diplomatic documents in 2010, the US has kept doggedly at investigating its leader, Julian Assange, and its members. Although Wikileaks and Assange jumped back into the public spotlight this weekend for assisting Edward Snowden out of Hong Kong and “to a safe place,” the organization's members have been under secret scrutiny for years.
Last week, two Icelandic activists—well-known Irish-Icelandic developer Smári McCarthy and former Wikileaks member Herbert Snorrason—received from Google newly-unsealed court orders from 2011, granting US authorities access to data from the activists' respective Gmail accounts.
In addition, “A young online activist, Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson (known as Siggi), told a closed session of Iceland’s Parliament this year that he had been cooperating with United States agents investigating WikiLeaks at the time of the FBI’s visit in 2011,” the New York Times wrote.
According to former Wikileaks member Birgitta Jonsdottir, who is now a member of Iceland's Parliament, Thordarson had been going back and forth visiting Assange in England, where Assange had been under house arrest at the time, and during that time the FBI tried to get Thordarson to wear a wire. Some fellow activists suggested that Thordarson had worked as a double agent for Assange in this capacity, but ultimately, the US investigators' presence left a mark on the Wikileaks members back in Iceland.
“The paranoia is going to kill us all,” Ms. Jonsdottir told the Times.
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