THERE IS AN ISLAND OF BLACKNESS IN THE OCEAN

Iceland becomes the world's offshore for compromising evidence. Great Powers Rely on Patriotic Hackers

ELENA CHERNENKO, POLINA EREMENKO

"Oh, just look at those dead bastards," rejoiced the gunner of an American Apache attack helicopter. The camera on its board transmitted a picture to the base: clouds of dust and sand that rose after the shelling, a dozen corpses on the pavement and a wounded guy moving a little further away. "Excellent, good job," congratulated the shooter on the radio. In the meantime, the wounded man got up a little and fell again. "He's trying to crawl away for cover," the shooter reported. "No, we won't shoot anymore," the pilot of the second helicopter, loitering over the suburbs of Baghdad, entered the conversation. “What if he has a weapon in his hands?” The shooter argued. “Come on, dude, just pick up a gun.”

The “dude” didn’t have a gun—what the military took for a grenade launcher turned out to be a camera. The wounded man, 22-year-old Namir Nur-Eldin, was a Reuters employee and was considered one of the best photojournalists in Iraq. While the military was deciding whether to continue shelling or not, a small van drove up to the journalist. There were two adults and two children in the cabin. Nur-Eldin was dragged into the car. “It looks like they are picking up the wounded and weapons. I ask for permission to open fire, ”the shooter handed over to the radio. “Fuck,” commented his colleague from the next side. They got permission to fire. That morning, July 12, 2007, the Americans shot 12 Iraqis. The Pentagon said they were all armed and dangerous.

The truth unexpectedly surfaced in April of this year, when a record of that operation appeared on the infamous Wikileaks portal (“Wikileaks”), which specializes in publishing compromising evidence on government and business structures. A terrible scandal erupted. The military first made excuses, and then began to look for the source of the leak, at the same time trying to get on the trail of the founder of Wikileaks, the famous Australian hacker-journalist Julian Assange, in order to prevent the publication of new revealing materials. The hacker lay low, but first posted on the site a secret document from the Pentagon, judging by which the military has been hatching plans for several years to discredit and destroy its resource.

And at the end of June, Assange showed up in Brussels at a meeting of the European Parliament and made two loud statements. First, he promised, the whole truth about the 2009 air attack on the village of Garani in Iraq, which killed more than a hundred civilians, would soon be made public. Secondly, Wikileaks servers scattered around the world will soon be transferred to one country - Iceland. A few days before Assange's speech, the Icelandic parliament passed a series of bills aimed, according to their drafters, to strengthen media freedom and protect journalists. In fact, they turn the island into an offshore for virtual compromising evidence.

LEAK BY LEAK

The essence of the innovations that are part of the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI) is as follows: the country's authorities guarantee absolute freedom of speech and protection against encroachment by third parties, whether individual companies or even states, registered in Iceland. To get under the protection of Themis, you need to host a site on an Icelandic server. Then neither the Pentagon, nor the Kremlin, nor anyone else will be able to achieve the closure of an inconvenient resource, the transfer of data about its owners or the removal of information.

“Democratic freedoms are extremely highly valued in the Nordic countries, and the media there are generally in heavenly conditions,” explains Andrey Richter, director of the Moscow Institute for Information Law Problems. He believes that with the help of the new law, Icelanders first of all hope to improve the image of their country, which has greatly faded after the banking crisis, which brought the island to the brink of bankruptcy. The developers of the reform do not hide this, however, noting that it is not only a matter of good PR. “Because of the crisis, we have experienced a large-scale brain drain,” says Icelandic MP Brigitta Jonsdottir. “We hope that the project will create favorable conditions for the return of emigrated Icelanders and attract new worthy people to the country.”

By luring media and other organizations persecuted in other countries to Iceland, the Icelanders, according to the deputy, will also receive financial benefits: primarily from the provision of hosting services, as well as from renting out offices. The fact is that the law guarantees the protection of resources registered in Iceland, but not their owners or authors located outside the island. Therefore, the Icelanders hope that not only websites, but also entire editorial offices and even human rights organizations will move to them. “We've had a lot of calls this week and everyone is asking about the possibility of relocating their offices to Iceland,” says IMMI task force member Smary McCarthy. Perhaps such people will be granted work visas, he says.

HEART FOR HILLARY

Julian Assange has already announced that he plans to move to Iceland not only his resource, but also all his employees. How many of them and what kind of people they are is unknown. The hacker only says that it takes €200,000 a year to maintain the resource. Assange himself, according to unconfirmed information, has been sitting in Iceland practically non-stop for two months, avoiding contact with the US authorities. He has reason to fear them. The man who leaked that scandalous Iraqi video to him, 22-year-old American military intelligence analyst Bradley Manning, has been in a military prison in Kuwait for a month now.

A tip on Manning, who served at a military base near Baghdad, was given to the FBI by a character no less famous in the virtual environment, the former hacker Adrian Lamo. A few years ago, he hacked the networks of Microsoft, Yahoo! and the New York Times, for which he was fined and sentenced to six months of house arrest and two years of probation. After serving all the terms, Lamo became a well-known journalist and expert in the field of cybercrime. Manning chatted with him and bragged that he had leaked the Iraq video to Assange, and also sent about 260,000 more files from an online archive containing secret correspondence between US embassies and the State Department.

“Hillary Clinton and several thousand other diplomats around the world will have a heart attack if they wake up one morning and find out that the entire database of secret foreign policy data is available to the general public,” Manning flaunted. In a conversation with Lamo, he justified his act on moral grounds—the desire to betray the secret crimes of the authorities to the public. "What would you do if you had access to secret networks 14 hours a day, seven days a week for more than eight months?" Manning asked. Already after the arrest of the soldier, Lamo made excuses that he had not pawned anyone before, but in this case he understood: this was a threat to US national security.

According to US media reports, employees of the State Department and the Pentagon are very excited about the message about the thousands of documents leaked from the archive. “If he really leaked them, then we will have to deal with a very difficult situation,” they quote a senior American diplomat. According to him, the State Department and law enforcement agencies are trying to develop a strategy that would allow them to put pressure on Wikileaks and prohibit the portal from publishing these files.

Now Wikileaks servers are located in different countries, including those friendly to the USA, for example, in Australia. Danny O'Brian, an expert at the International Committee to Protect Journalists, says that for now the US is trying to put pressure on the resource itself, but in the future it will probably try to use its ties with the authorities of the countries hosting its servers. Icelander McCarthy assures that Assange's brainchild will be safe in his country. "Even if the United States breaks off diplomatic relations with Iceland, it will not achieve anything," he says.

The same, according to McCarthy, applies to Russia. “What are we going to do if we piss off Russia? The worst thing that can happen is that she will take over Iceland. Although it's unlikely," he jokes. Finn Mikael Storsjo, head of the public organization Pro Caucasus, told Newsweek that he is closely following the Icelandic reforms and "two hands for this initiative." Pro Caucasus is the publisher of the resource kavkazcenter.com. The Russian authorities call him the mouthpiece of the Caucasian extremists.

Moscow does not cease to exert diplomatic pressure on the governments of the countries on whose servers this resource is located. At various times, Kavkaz Center broadcast from the USA, Great Britain, Malaysia, Lithuania and Estonia. It is now located in Sweden and Finland, using part of the same servers as Wikileaks. Mikael Storcio says that he would be happy to place a mirror version of the portal in Reykjavik as well.

However, the head of the American consulting firm GreyLogic, Jeffrey Carr, is sure that the Kavkaz Center will not have a cloudless existence in Iceland either. “The country's authorities can promise websites legal protection as much as they like, but for countries like Russia, this has long been no longer the main tool of pressure,” he says. “The main danger today is not the courts, but hackers.” According to Carr, Russian hackers are considered almost the strongest in the world, while among them there are many patriotic young people who willingly cooperate with the special services. “A cool hacker can take down a site and hack a server,” says the expert. And he reminds that devastated Iceland has no money for sophisticated cyber defense systems.