hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1312.txt

Episode: 1312
Title: HPR1312: Deepgeek interviews Birgitta Jonsdottir (Icelandic Pirate Party parliamentarian)
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1312/hpr1312.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 23:25:44

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Today, on Hacker Public Radio, the pseudonymous Deep Geek of Talk Geek to Me News interviews
Brigida Jonsdott here, Icelandic member of Parliament for the Pirate Party.
But first, the also pseudonymous Epicanus of dogphilosophy.net, that's me, will butt
in for a few minutes so that I can pretend that I did any of the work.
The year is 2013, and it is summer in the Northern Hemisphere, and in accordance
with the prophecy, Hacker Public Radio is running low on shows.
A sacrifice must be offered to appease the internet spirits.
All of you listeners are making that sacrifice right now by listening to my anine and babble
for a few minutes.
You see, back in the old days, Hacker Public Radio used to pad the queue of pending shows
by grabbing Creative Commons license studio from elsewhere and throwing those into the
Hacker Public Radio feed.
This occasionally caused some problems, though, by stalling shows that were made specifically
4HPR during times when many people were contributing.
In the end, it was decided that all Hacker Public Radio shows should be made specifically
for Hacker Public Radio.
There is a perfectly legitimate loophole here, though.
A contributor can take a Creative Commons license show from somewhere else, and by adding
some substantive commentary to introduce it, they can create a new derivative work for
HPR from it.
Today's derivative work comes from an interview Deep Geek got with a member of the Icelandic
Pirate Party who has been elected to Parliament there.
Since the Pirate Party is the only political party that I know of that is explicitly Hacker
friendly, this seems like an obvious fit for HPR.
Between Deep Geek and Brigida Young's Stuteer's interview, and my few minutes here introducing
it, you'll get a sense of what the Pirate Party is focused on right now, at least in
Iceland, discussions of privacy and security in an age of government spying and control
over the internet, and a little bit about neo-froidian psychology and perhaps how many
Freudians it takes to screw in Lightbulb.
Before I go away and turn the audio stream over to Deep Geek and Brigida Young's Stuteer,
there is one part of the interview I can't resist commenting on.
Phil Hillm freakin' Reich?
Seriously?
Here's the context.
At one point, the interview turns to the topic of government overreach in the potential
societal harms of censorship, or at least that's how I heard it, to illustrate how censorship
can rob society of beneficial discoveries, two examples are given, and I really want
to suggest coming up with better examples for next time, at least if your goal is to convince
anyone who is skeptical of your argument.
The first example given was Timothy Leary.
It's not that I don't think we might actually be missing out on useful results that might
build off of his research from before he got fired from UC Berkeley.
After all, there's a whole series of FDA-approved drugs chemically related to LSD that are used
to treat migraine headaches, dementia, Parkinson's disease, symptoms, and a few other things.
I just don't think Timothy Leary is a very persuasive example.
Most people just know Timothy Leary as that turn-on tune-in drop-out hippie guy, and most
of his notoriety seems to have more to do with the spectacle of him fleeing the country
to escape a marijuana possession charges than in a serious research.
Still, since most of the spectacle came from the US government freaking out and trying
to get him extra-dited from other countries, and the president at the time calling Leary
quote, the most dangerous man in America unquote, you can at least make a case that that's
a good example of government overreach.
What the other example?
Ville Hillm Reich?
For those who aren't familiar with the name, he started as a contemporary of Sigmund Freud
and developed what seems to be a rather orgasm-centric theory of psychology.
It's worth noting that, supposedly, even Sigmund freaking Freud himself, a man who in the
modern era has basically been reduced to nothing but a series of jokes about how everything
is a phallic symbol, he reviewed Reich's hypotheses and thought he was seriously oversimplifying
things.
You'll find a lot of lurid hyperventilation about orgasm-powered life energy if you
look up Ville Hillm Reich on the internet, which by itself is enough to keep most people
from taking him seriously, regardless of anything else, and that makes him an unuseful example.
Don't mind the distracting sex stuff, though.
Never mind the fact that his organomy is more or less the Dionetics of the 1940s, and
never mind that what I've seen so far of it sounds awfully similar to the claims for
pyramid power.
The part that's relevant here is what's described as the banning and burning of his books.
The background for this is that at the time, his Institute of Organomy was selling his
life energy gathering boxes, and seemingly promoting them as cures for cancer.
The fact that he seems to have contemptuously dismissed investigators showing up to check
things out, and then refused to show up in court to defend his medical fraud case certainly
didn't help.
The court was obviously seriously annoyed with him and came down with a very heavy-handed
punishment in the end.
Even then, though, this was apparently not the implied hunting down in confiscation of
all of his writings from libraries, private collectors, and so on, but specifically just
requiring Reich to destroy just the copies that he had in stock for sale, along with the
remaining life energy gathering boxes that he hadn't yet sold.
While I still concur that even if one thinks Wilhelm Reich was completely nukking futs,
this is pretty excessive.
I still can't picture too many people managing to develop much outrage over it, though.
Point is, in a time when there are documented cases of ordinary mainstream peer-reviewed
scientists in the last five to ten years who have been told to shut up by their government
employers, because their findings aren't aligned with the political agendas of not just
a U.S. administration, but has a recall also Harper's administration in Canada.
Surely, you can find some more effective examples to work with.
Anyway, there.
I have contributed original content to this episode, and I hereby declare it a derivative
work.
Hooray for me!
Now, here's the interview by DeepGeek, who actually did all of the real work that
I'm pretending I had anything to do with.
You're listening to TGTM News No. 100 Record for Sunday, July the 7th, 2013.
Here are the vials statistics for this program.
Your feedback matters to me.
Please send your comments to DG at deepgeek.us.
The webpage for this program is at www.talkgeektme.us.
You can subscribe to me on Identica as the username DeepGeek, or you could follow me on Twitter.
My username there is DG-T-G-T-M, as in DeepGeek TalkGeek to me.
Hey, it's DeepGeek.
Hello and welcome to a very special episode of TGTM News.
While away in Europe, I have had the opportunity to interview Icelandic member of Parliament,
Brigitte John Steter.
I caught up with Brigitte at a scheduled time on July the 2nd at Parliament for our interview
and literally, she was in panic mode, turns out that United Nations General Secretary
Ban Ki-moon was in the Parliament building also and had just insulted Iceland's sovereignty
to Brigitte John Steter.
She had to rush out to her meeting, asked me to wait for a quarter hour, came back, and
just did not want to deny me the opportunity, so she rescheduled for July the 4th upon
catching up with her for the second time on July the 4th.
Well, I'll let the interview explain it all.
I do want to fully transcribe this interview that will take me quite some time, but I'll
publish when I get the first few questions and answers transcribed.
But to give you a perspective of when this interview took place, it was maybe days after
the Snowden release of documents about the NSA's sweeping surveillance system of the internet.
Snowden was in Russia, was just denied favorable terms for his asylum request in Russia.
Ban Ki-moon was visiting there after Snowden applied to Iceland for asylum, which request
was received by Asylum's Foreign Secretary, and when I got back, caught back up for
the second time with Brigitte, she had an article in the Guardian which she was the prime
source for was published explaining Ban Ki-moon's public faux pas.
Upon arriving back to Editheorio, I discovered that Venezuela had offered asylum to Snowden,
and a bill for citizenship in Iceland for Snowden was deferred in the Icelandic parliament
to which Brigitte Hanshter wrote a personal English blog entry.
So that gives you the perspective of what happened.
I did want to mention to you also the interview went exceedingly well.
Brigitte has a unique response to being interviewed.
I really believe that if I just put a microphone in front of her, it would have been just wonderful
enough, but I didn't manage to steer the conversation, but normally when I interview,
I have to prod and poke a little bit with the interviewer as some of you who've heard
my past interviews.
Now, I really needed to do no antics.
I think that my peculiar focus on the subject of the interview, I really try to hold anything
about myself back and focus razor shop on the person I'm interviewing.
I think that might have thrown her a bit here and there, but overall, this synergy between
my interview's focus and her conversational mode produced, I interview that sounds more
like just a beautiful conversation.
So I do hope you enjoy this conversation with Brigitte Hanshter.
Thank you.
Did you see the news what I did to Bankymoon?
No, I want to ask about that.
I haven't been in touch with news.
I do.
Have you been banking more?
Ah, sure.
You've been following, of course, the Snowton case, haven't you?
Yes, I have.
I want to ask about it, actually.
I was invited because I have been sort of the parliamentarian for the pirates and the
other party I was in, active in the front of affairs, and so I am always invited to these
leadership meetings with Foreign Blahblah, so I was invited to Bankymoon meeting with
the rest of the Parliamentary delegation.
Basically, I asked him, like, I was really concerned and focused on privacy issues when I came
to online privacy, and especially in the light of what's been revealed in the last week.
It wouldn't be a good place to start to sort of go back to fight it.
This invasion, and I would really primarily concerned about the general public, not so
much the leaders, but we would include in the UN Declaration of Human Rights the word
privacy in front of, no online in front of privacy in Article 12.
And instead of addressing that, he decided to say that with all these freedoms we have
online, individuals need to behave with responsibility, and there was a lot of misuse, and people
like Snowton and the Sons were part of the problem by misusing the technology that was
not intended to be used in this way.
So what I did, because I don't like, I was really upset, and I don't think that he knew
who I was, or he would have been maybe a little bit more careful, but it was very serious,
because at the time, it was just hours after Snowton had applied for political asylum in
Iceland, and he is saying this, his personal opinion, in front of the Foreign Affairs Committee
in Iceland.
And Snowton's assignment, asylum seeking had been passed through the foreign affairs ministry,
and so I felt it was mantling with our internal affairs, that it should not be the role and
responsibility of the UN Secretary General.
So I decided to go public with it, it's on a very great song, but I have often said things
about what happens at meetings like this, because I am sort of the public's freedom of
information act, in two power, so I contacted the Guardian and asked them if they were willing
to run this story, and after lots of verification, they were very careful, so I got all the people
that were at the meeting to confirm that I wasn't just making it up, they published it yesterday.
Oh, fantastic.
So basically, I showed that the Emperor was not wearing any clothes, so basically, yeah,
it was one of the most red stories on the World News section, online World News section
of the Guardian yesterday.
The Guardian, Edward Snowton's digital misuse has created problems.
Says Ben Keemun.
Actually, do you know what the Banke means, like Banke, and it means Banke.
Oh.
If that's his chief contributor to a political campaign, that might be a problem.
Yeah.
Yeah, so you see, it's been passed around quite a bit.
Yes.
Already shared thousands of times.
That's why I was sort of running around like crazy after I met you guys, because I was
trying to get this story going.
Well, I do appreciate you sweetly scheduling me and making the time for me.
I know it's I'm in trucking in summer session.
It's a big deal for me.
I appreciate so much.
My pleasure.
I was going to ask a little bit later about Snowton.
I want to know how you felt about the difference between the way Snowton came forth through
the Guardian and the way that Bradley Mann and came forth through WikiLeaks.
There is not a lot of difference between these two cases in the sense that Bradley Mann
did try to go through the New York Times, and I think it was the Washington Post, but
they didn't take it seriously.
So he had tried to go directly to mainstream media to get an assistance with his story,
with the NPS source for them.
So he went through WikiLeaks, but WikiLeaks did want.
They went in collaboration with among other publications, the Guardian.
So and I think that maybe that was an example that Snowton saw that the Guardian were willing
to and have the capacity actually to sift through all the wealth of information and draw
out of it and the message to the general public that Snowton was trying to relay.
I mean, if you would only publish the rock documents, I remember I actually got to see
all the entire leak which has not been clarified was from Bradley Mann and it was just so much
that it was very difficult to understand or get any sort of lid on what was in it.
I mean, and so it was so valuable that actually and that's why it is important that there are
some mainstream media left that are actually have the capacity, the passion and the understanding
of the importance of being the true power that belongs to them, which is to take complex
things and work through them in such a way that the peoples can understand their societies.
So and that is a lot of work.
It's a lot more complicated and it requires a lot more expertise than many people think.
And this is why we have so much crappy media, which is just like you have all the mainstream
media like CNN and Fox and so forth.
It was actually quite shocked when I saw the American version of CNN, for example, it's not news.
It's news infomercials.
Yes.
You know, it is not.
There is not that you can't trust what you see there instead of, for example, covering
what's happening in Egypt, they're covering a local murder trials.
And which is sort of, it's news infomercials, it's or news soap operas.
I remember I was, I don't remember what was the breaking story.
I was in the States.
No, I was in Canada and we only got the American version of CNN there too.
And it was something really remarkable happening in the world at the time, which I could see
through the internet.
But the only thing that was on CNN was that some guy, some high ranking person had tweeted
a picture of his penis and it was like life everywhere interviews with people, experts
on penises.
I don't know.
And now he's going to want the mayor of New York.
Right.
That's amazing.
That's how I made a record.
But I'm very concerned.
I'm very concerned just with the latest incident in relation to Snowden, for example.
And the latest incidents are this.
A presidential airplane is not being granted airspace because of suspicion that he was hiding
Snowden in the bathroom in the airplane or something.
And you haven't heard about this.
They stopped like Erho Morales, the president of Bolivia, was at the conference on energy
or something like that in Moscow.
And he had been asked like every leader in the world, are you willing to, if Snowden
would apply for political asylum, would you grant him asylum or consider it?
And he said something along the lines that he would, of course, look into it.
So he's going back home on his plane.
This is an elected president in a country.
It's like Obama.
And he's flying home from Moscow and he needs to refuel and go through countries in Europe.
And he's rewrote it all over Europe because Portugal and France said that his flight could
not come through because they were afraid Snowden was in their airspace.
And in the end, he got to land in Vienna, which is in Austria.
He had to wait there for 12 hours while his airplane was being searched.
Unbelievable.
So how would the United States people, if the same thing would happen to Obama?
I mean, the United States doesn't exactly have a very good track record when it comes
to honoring human rights.
For example, we only have to look towards Cuba where Quantanamo pays or what's been
happening in Cuba for a long time.
I mean, the cold war is over, isn't it?
Yes, it was.
Some countries in Europe would decide to do this.
They were actually putting the life of this president in danger because he was running out
of you.
And so what I'm concerned, I don't know if you're familiar with the work of Naomi Wolfe,
but she wrote the remarkable book about how the United States is declining into fascism.
And fascism by definition, by Mussolini, for example, and he actually used to call his
form of governing corporacy, and then he changed it into fascism because I guess the sound
is more sexier or something, I don't know.
And it's actually the same definition as our former president, that FDON used the same
definition.
Yes.
So it's the perfect marriage between the corporate and the state, so you have the, it's
not only that the door is revolving between the corporate and the state.
They're literally dancing in it.
And they are the gestures that look us in the face and say, look, you can't do anything
to change this.
We own you.
We own your leaders.
There's a what are you going to do?
You have this two-party system that is fake.
It's nothing real about this.
It doesn't matter who is in leadership, they don't control anything.
It's the corporation that control everything.
And it's the same everywhere, it's just, it's because you have all this military power
and you have all this corruption that you have allowed to thrive because you're waiting
for the gold dust and diamond juice to trickle down, which is never well.
It only trickles down to anybody if they choose to.
You've been just, it's so sad because there is so much greatness within the United States
and is not through Hollywood or, you know, it's, it's through this system of resistance.
So you have incredible people that have, and you find them everywhere, they're very imaginative.
They put so much work on themselves to volunteer to bring forward solutions, but they are being
tracked down like wild animals because of the capacity of the government to monitor everything.
People think like, oh, it's okay, I feel safer that they're going to get the terrorists
because, you know, I feel safer, I don't care if they completely invade my privacy.
It's okay, I haven't done anything wrong.
Now when people say this to me or people in Iceland say to me, I was just having a conversation
with an MP yesterday, I was just sort of like a congressman.
And I was talking about this, and I said, I think with him, and I said, oh, we should
feel privileged that somebody wants to spy on us, little, us powerless us.
And I was like, you don't understand what this means, do you?
You don't understand what this means, this means that now I'm talking to you and now you
are a target.
How does that feel?
Now they're going to spy on you because I'm talking to you.
How does it feel knowing that journalists can't protect their sources?
How does it feel that a doctor can't honor the privacy of his patient?
How does it feel that a lawyer can't honor the privacy and the confidentiality between
him and his client?
How does it feel that a court ration or a private little firm can't keep any contract
under seal while they're negotiating?
How does it feel that nothing is private?
And he's sort of like, it's not prepared for it.
No.
But there's an interesting parallel there between that case and the way the Obama administration
provided to your Twitter record, because again, without regard to your being a parliamentarian,
they just walked right in, they were subpoenas, and you were fired with this legendary.
But I don't think by listeners or I think I should say, I think my listeners would really
benefit from knowing the difference between the government just subpoenaing a regular
rank-and-file citizens' records, and I'm going after a representative's Twitter activity.
The only reason I decided to take this case, and I was fortunate I wouldn't have never
been able to afford it if I wouldn't have been given a pro bono treatment by the electronic
volunteer foundation, the EFF.org, and the ACLU, which they did for medical were a really
great work, and they decided to help me because it was sort of a test on the system and
the justice system for everybody else.
I only took it on because I wanted to try to get your listeners in anybody else that
use any form of digital media to understand that we don't have any rights, to understand
that this invasion is just as invasive as if they go into your own home and actually
worse.
So I say, okay, the EFF actually went into my home, they went into my home and they went
through all my private stuff, all my private letters, they went through all my bills, they
could see exactly where I was with home and for how long, and they could see just everything
about me, and they studied the stuff in my fridge, and the books I read, and everything,
and they actually went into my home through my back door, through my internet back door.
I do think that you have a better perspective on this because I did read that wonderful,
I want to talk to you about this, your English language blog, you made this great post
a while back about you self identifying yourself as a hacker, and as hackers we both
know for a long time that we've lived online quite a bit, and lately it's been said that
if it doesn't happen online, it doesn't happen.
Could you talk about the penetration of the idea to the general public in other transition
to them understanding that it's just a perfect, perfect mirror to the real world?
Exactly, this is a very important question.
I've lived online, it's been my most permanent home since 1995.
That's my permanent home, and that's where my history, my library of my life, isn't there
like a TV show called This Is Your Life, okay, so that's where it's been building up for
that epic show, or whatever, and so everything, the internet doesn't forget, and this is
what people, like you can actually burn your laughter, so you don't want anybody to see
your old diary, you can burn it, but the blogs, when they started, and I actually had one
of the world's first blogs, in 1995 and 1996, they don't go, they're there forever.
And so you can't erase your history, like you can't actually, and sometimes it's good
to be able to just forget and erase stuff, like the diary is that you write when you're
teenager or whatever, but the internet doesn't forget, and this is what the whole generation
is actually experiencing, it's usually younger people that are born into the internet.
And so everything they do, and say, and all the party photos, they're a tag, they might
never be able to get a job because of that, that's one element of it, the other element
is, and this is very critical, is let's say you post the story about that your mom has
cancer, and let's say that later on you want to get insurance, and let's say the insurance
company can actually pour all the passwords that relate to you, and they might find out
that you were doing either a search on cancer, then you might not get as good insurance
as somebody else.
And there's actually been studies, like I'm not only worried about governments, I'm also
worried about the corporations, that the harvest, our history, they go through our trash
all the time, it's like having somebody in your yard, and in your home, and in your
bedroom, you can actually, in your phone, the phones are actually worse than the computers,
because we allow the phone to know exactly where we are, it's always asking you, this
program wants to know if you allow us to know where you are, and not only that, we do
our workouts, we use programs that monitor how we sleep, to help us sleep better, and
then some insurance company, or some company might want to push stuff to us, or medical
companies, or whatever, and they completely, psychologically, profile us.
This is now, since nothing's forgotten, and now we found out the governments, it's
not only the private corporations we have to deal with, and there's one element to all
of this, and this is what many people don't know, like the first court ruling in my Twitter
case, the judge basically said that as an individual, you as an individual, and everybody
listening to this, we don't have the right to look after our own back.
We have to rely on the social media companies to look after our interest, it might not always
be in their interest, they might not have the capacity to fight it, and now there's
a much bigger and wider angle to my story, okay, so I'm a member of parliament, and it's
upsetting that they had this invasion into somebody that had a seat in the Foreign Affairs
Committee, I'm a member of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, and so forth, so I mean some information
might be compromised, that should be state, or even bigger secrecy around, but what I'm
chiefly concerned about, and that is that I can't protect you if you're right to me,
because it's not only me, this is communications that they're sniffing, and their case, I don't
have a criminal case against me in the United States.
They still went after a member of the parliament, a congresswoman's private data, and it was
not my tweets, it was my private messages, it was my IP number, and lots of other host
of other information they wanted to get, people can actually go and look into it and see
the subpoena at the eff.org website if they just searched my last name.
Now that's not all, so there were lawyers figured that there was some paper on me in a grand
jury, they can't have that unsealed, I can understand this is a secret jury system which
is weird, then I don't understand it, I don't know what that is, but every now can guess
which grand jury it was.
Yes, it's based in Virginia, and it's called What the Fuck, or the Witties' Task Force.
But there were four other companies that I cannot get from unsealed that delivered all my
personal stuff to the government.
Now after the NSA, and this is what I'm trying to be so interesting, is that it's obvious
it's Google, it's Skype, or Microsoft, with own Skype, now people might think that it's
safe to talk through Skype, forget it, nothing, nothing, you do in a computer or via phone
is safe, just forget it, we might want to try to encrypt us, but it's too complicated
for the ordinary citizens to use to protect themselves.
So Facebook, Google, you know, and under Google is like you to Gmail everything, but Twitter
will knock on the NSA slide, because Twitter is actually stood up, and it's not because
they have less compromising information about you, it's not because they're not in America,
it's because they have damn good policies and lawyers, you know, they invest, and they
protect their users, or the inhabitants in the Twitter world, and the other companies
might actually do much better.
But not only is this invasion sort of okay, because hey, I haven't done anything wrong,
but you never know, you might just type in, I hate Al Qaeda, and then you are in the
net.
Yeah.
So you certainly couldn't paste a statement that you were fooling with, accidentally
put it into the Google search box, and now it's in Google.
Or if you're a researcher, you're a teacher, you're anybody that's curious about the world
around you.
No, I don't only search stuff that I like, even if Google is trying to make me, because
many people might not know that when I search something, let's say I search for Egypt,
and then some of the listeners, or you search Egypt, we will get entirely different search
results.
So I encourage people to use Google Doc, it's a really good search engine, and it's not
like Google.
I would encourage people to use, go to the tour projects, it's TOR, download protection.
You don't want the government to know wherever you go in your real life.
Do you want somebody to follow you when you go to the shop and look what you're putting
in your basket?
Do you want them to know who you're kissing and who you're not?
Do you want them to know what to say to your kids?
Do they want them to know what you're doing in your bedroom?
I mean, in some states it's actually illegal, which is bizarre, but it's illegal to do certain
things in the bedroom.
But I'm worried, I mean, I really would like my friends in the United States that have
not caved in to fear, to unify themselves more, about one or two issues that can be in
unison about, across groups, you know, all the different groups that are trying to rise
up, because you never going to change anything if you allow them to do the divide and conquer.
We can't change it, and that's the beauty about crisis, is that crisis after not only
misery, it offers an incredibly small window for incredible change, but do you just have
to be ready?
To pass on it.
Exactly.
You were talking before about the corporate invasions of privacy, I'd like to ask you
for your thoughts on two corporations.
First of all, it's Google, because as you've implied that you are your search history
to a certain extent.
Yeah.
Now, quite a while ago, in order to hone their ability to do voice recognition, they became
a telco, and the US are actually blank, like AT&T or Verizon, they're actually licensed
as a telco.
Right.
And a telco has always been notorious in my country for being in bed with the federal government.
Right.
So I want to know about your thoughts about Google's history, making ability in relationship
to their closeness to the federal government of the United States.
Google is too big, and Google, the people that run it, Eric Smith, for example, was very
much against the people being able to be anonymous.
It was a policy to just erase that possibility.
And since Google, like I used to use Google when they just started, and now they own everything.
And so they need to, we won't just simply, it's like it's impossible to break them down.
It's not going to happen.
They're too big.
Just like Microsoft became too big, and now Microsoft is being eaten itself like this.
It's getting smaller, but Apple is becoming too big.
And Apple also is a dangerous development there.
I love Apple products.
I used Apple's since 87, but I don't love Apple anymore.
I don't love it.
I really despise it.
Because of the invasion, they have allowed into our lives.
The Apple phones are one of the worst spy tools.
And we can't protect ourselves as much with Apple products, because it's so close down,
so you don't have this sort of open source community around Apple, as we have around, for
example, the Android.
So the only way we can change this is both, there are two ways.
It's both for the general public to be more knowledgeable.
And how do we acquire knowledge?
We do that through legalizing freedom of information.
Now, after I became a lawmaker, I have to say that I didn't have a lot of respect for
laws before.
I don't have any respect for laws now.
I know how they're written.
It's horrible.
It is just so horrible how laws are written.
Something that actually, like in Iceland, affects thousands and thousands of people, is
processed here through way too much rust.
It's very faulty, it's very badly checked, there might be, we don't know who writes it,
because it's done in the ministries and there you have the lobbyists.
And it's a very similar process in your country.
So I don't like laws, because they're not, they're only protecting a certain elite group.
You can never reach them, you know, because they write the loopholes, you know, for their
lawyers.
And yet you tell me this, and you're the chief proponent, I understand, of the Icelandic
modern media initiative, which is, of course, a body of laws.
Exactly.
So I recognize, because I'm pragmatic, so I recognize that we live in the, by the rule
of law.
So while you're at it, while you have the capacity to influence it, it's very important
to use that.
But I very much, I'm looking at the Icelandic modern media initiative, inspiration to get
a collective, common demand that our rights are being protected, the right to know, the
right to share, the right to share knowledge, the right to have our sovereignty and privacy,
the right to be creative, and to be sustainable, and to do whatever we want as long as we're
not harming others.
I was just thinking about, like, the other day, how insane is it that, why are we having
all these scientists doing studies on, like, what's bad for us and what's good for us?
There is no one, like, okay, it's really bad for me, if I sit on the phone all day, I'm
sure that I'm going to find my brain.
If I, but it doesn't change it, that knowledge doesn't change it that I'm still going to
be using my phone.
If I dream, products that I don't know what's in it, it is bad for me, no matter what.
So, but I don't have the knowledge, no, it's bad for me.
I don't care, like, they're always like giving you these, like, according to scientists,
red wine is bad, good, bad, bad, good, and this much quantity quantity.
Why aren't we using all these incredible knowledge, all these money, to figure out ways so
that we don't have to live in a world where we're sabotaging ourselves and the planet?
Why aren't we doing that?
You know, why are we allowing animal abuse in the name of science?
Why are we allowing people's abuse in third world countries in the name of science?
And why don't we understand we're running out of planet?
And why don't we do something about it?
Why are we sitting and arguing about global warming?
Where it is, like, it is something's happening.
I don't know if it's made by man or not.
I don't really care, but it's happening and how are we going to deal with it?
How are we going to deal with it, like, all these countries are going underwater and you're
going to get, like, lots and lots of more of extreme weather?
What are we going to do about it?
You know, I don't want to, like, live in a world where I'm in a bunker with a rifle.
No, almost that.
Well, there are.
So, like, there are so many people that actually want it.
And then you have these things, like, in the States, I thought it was the country of the
free, where people, you know, go on the woods and they build a little house and they just
want to be self-sustainable and they're driven out.
What happened?
It's shocking, but I'm glad you brought up scientists, because I've been planning
questions a while.
It might be a little hard for me to express.
Right.
With human rights is, you know, of course, world-renowned at this point.
But they've all dealt with political dissidents.
And we have two landmark cases, if I might take a minute to explain this possibly to you
in America, where the rights of scientists were violated.
Right.
And one of them is, in the 50s, we had Dr. Wilhelm Reich, who came over from Germany
where his books were banned and he wasn't jailed by the Nazi party.
And when he came to America, America banned his books and jailed him too.
Yes.
And then later on...
What is it called?
The Food and Drug Administration, prompted by the American Medical Associations.
Later on, about a decade later, we had Dr. Timothy Larry, who did pioneering work in
psychology, began writing double-blown experiments of the use of LSD to make positive changes
in human personality, things like dropping recidivism rate for our felons, things like
whether or not you could induce religious experience using LSD 25.
He was jailed for 30 years for possession of one trying to marijuana, a bizarre, bizarre
occurrence, obviously, a political prisoner, because the normal jail in Texas at that time
was five years for that, for the same time.
Five years for that?
Yeah.
And he got 30.
Wow.
Yeah.
That's crazy.
Oh, my God.
Now, it's illegal to re-perform the experiments of right or a leery.
Really?
Yes.
So I want to know if you thought about the application of your work, not merely to political
dissidents, but to doctors and researchers.
Well, my work doesn't only evolve around dissidents in that sense.
My work evolves around, like, I take the fact, like, if I can apply myself, like, everything
has its timing and so forth, but I apply myself wherever I see violations of human rights.
I don't care if it's, you know, if I go up against the general secretary of the United
Nations or if I go up against the Chinese government or the US government or the Russian government,
I don't have any friends.
Yeah.
Political friends.
Yeah.
Or at least not at least friends.
But so, but I found that to be very interesting that you can't re-do this experiment, which
is very strange to me.
I did read many, many years ago the book by Reich about his, his box.
Yes.
The organ box.
Yeah.
And it was very interesting.
There are so many people like that that have been doing experimentation with free energy
and that have been, you know, killed or imprisoned or, you know, threatened.
We have very strong, weird powers that play, and you can see it's so clearly in this
golden case where you can see leader after leader and nation after nation caving in to
the pressure.
But it's also, we're at this incredible time now in history where things are shifting
and changing, and it is up to us how it's going to shift and how it's going to change.
I do have a lot of respect for many scientists, but I don't share the respect for the big pharmaceuticals
that have incredible influence on the work of scientists.
I don't have respect for Monsanto.
I don't have respect for the aluminum industry or the mining industry or the petroleum
industry.
I don't have any respect for maximizing profit and I don't care where it is.
I do not respect the criminalization of drug use.
I do not respect and I refuse to honor the prison industry.
I refuse to honor that many things that should be a part of our social infrastructure
and it has nothing to do with communism.
It just has something to do with common sense.
That we have health care that's free for everybody.
What are people paying taxes for?
Why is the entire infrastructure in the United States collapsing?
Every time I go there or look at news there, there is a bridge that is collapsed or your
infrastructure is absolutely collapsing.
What are you paying taxes for?
What I'm really keen in doing is to start to work on the new system because this system
that we have now is completely out of date.
It allows the corruption and the plungering of the assets that the joint assets that
everybody should share.
The water systems are being destroyed and it occurs everybody to see a very, very critical
and important film called Flow for the love of water and it occurs everybody to see a
friend's documentary film with subtitles about Monsanto.
I don't remember the name of it.
You have to know what you're dealing with, all of us.
We're all dealing with the consequences of this.
The greed and the short-sightedness is so dangerous.
I believe in the fourth fathers.
I believe in the wisdom of the original people in the United States.
I happen to be one fourth Cherokee and according to my father, I don't know if it's true but
that's what he claims.
There were some people from Native Americans that were here at the base and apparently
some Icelandic women had relationships with people from the base.
I've always looked with interest and been very curious about my heritage with the Ronald
Variments about, I don't know anybody from that family.
The way they governed in the old days, I don't know how they do it today, in the modern
society, was that they would only make decisions for the greater good of the next seven generations.
That was, of course, the support of the previous seven generations.
It was a holistic approach to decision-making which we sorely lack today.
The politicians only think for next term which is usually four or five years.
So I'm so, I just want people so much to start to think what we want instead of this
broken system.
Because as soon as we start to visualize what is the end result, what is, where do I feel
that I have achieved my dream about humanity?
We need to start to think about it because the power of our minds and our words is
so incredible.
Just think about driving a world in 1984 and the power they've had to make our world
really messed up.
And so why don't we have that sort of similar vision where we collectively start to see something
beautiful and hold for our planet and the peoples and everybody that lives on it?
I promise you I wouldn't ask you about a certain person who founded a certain organization.
But I do want to ask you a question, one question about WikiLeaks.
Okay.
And the founder of that body wrote an essay on governments as a conspiracy when he was
posting to a mailing list called Cypher Parks and discussed the idea of liberating the
secrets that the politicians and corporations keep from us onto the outside.
And I want to ask you if you thought that WikiLeaks is living up to its original plan or
if it has somehow vastly deviated from them?
I think, Mike, and I'm glad that somebody else in Jerusalem is riding the Cypher Park.
I say Cypher Parks, but I know it's wrong, but I can't say that word correctly.
And I think in many ways, and I contribute, like, and I honor the knowledge and wisdom
that a science has.
And you know, the best moments we had as friends back in the old days, it feels, was when
we were, you know, having discussions about society and human nature and all these things.
I learned a lot from him in that regard.
I think that WikiLeaks in many ways is, you know, despite what people think, it's a very
tiny organization.
And in many ways, some of the things about the organization are way of track.
And at the same time, it is still on track because it is him.
And I can't judge, like, people change and their values.
So the original idea I was very fascinated about, and I still think that they're doing
a lot in that regard.
They did the spy files, which was actually the preload to the NSA link, and gives you
a lot of context.
I think, you know, as Maxis, I would love to criticize the way he's running it.
It's his project.
So he runs it the way he wants to in the larger picture, what WikiLeaks did is so important.
And I, you know, I could be very critical.
I don't think it's worth it because I think it is time we start trawling each other,
at least in public.
Yeah, it was WikiLeaks.
I did read a interview you did with the Durstandard, they built them online publication, and you
called it Megalix.
Yes.
Was that a reference to Kim.com?
No, it wasn't.
It wasn't.
That's the funny thing, because WikiLeaks used to do a lot of small projects.
Like when I was involved, there were lots of WikiLeaks.
So it was more sort of originally started as a sort of crowdsource sort of Wiki project,
where you're trying to get people involved from many different backgrounds to work on
stories.
And the my dream around this was that we would get, let's say it was a big story, we would
have like the day of the leap, the leap where you would have joint resources of activists
and journalists from all over the world to, let's say, cover BP when the big old spill
was.
And so forth.
So you could actually then get lots of stories that never got any attention into the mainstream
media and into the public knowledge.
So then it became, just like they got these 12 sort of documents.
So it became like a megalisk and it was a very, very big leap.
Well, for me, I cannot thank you enough for granting me this interview, it means so very
much to me.
Yeah, I'm very happy.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Talk Geek to Me.
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a like, he does own license.
So how many Freudians does it take to screw in a light bulb?
I know you think this is some sort of a racy pun here, but the joke is it's sort of an
anti-joke.
Freudian psychologists are just regular people, otherwise.
And so the answer just like with any other kind of regular people is that it just takes
two of them.
Find it to change the light bulb and one to hold the penis ladder.
Hold the ladder.