Birgitta Jónsdóttir: Why I'm suing the US government to protect internet freedom

The NDAA means the US military can put anyone under suspicion of being a terror threat and detain them for ever

Political consultant Naomi Wolf speaks at a news conference in New York last month announcing a lawsuit against indefinite detention provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act.

Freedom for most people is something sacred, and many have been willing to sacrifice their lives for it. It is not just another word, for we measure the health of our democracies by the standard of freedom. We use it to measure our happiness and prosperity. Sadly, freedom of information, expression and speech is being eroded gradually without people paying much attention to it. Freedom of movement is permitted within certain zones, freedom of reading is disappearing, and the right to privacy is dwindling with the increased surveillance of our every move.

When the world wide web came into being, it was an unrestricted, free flowing world of creativity, connectivity and close encounters of the internet kind. It was as if the collective consciousness had taken on material (yet virtual!) form and people soon learned to use it to work, play and gather. Today's social and democratic reform is born and bred online where people can freely exchange views and knowledge. Some of us old-school internet freedom fighters understood this value way before the web became such a part of our daily lives. One of them is John Perry Barlow, who in 1996 wrote a Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace in a response to an attempt to legalise restrictions on this brand new world. In it he declares: "Governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather."

Barlow inspired me and others to create the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI), a parliamentary proposal unanimously approved by the Icelandic parliament in 2010, tasking the government to make Iceland a safe haven for freedom of information and expression, where privacy online would be as sacred and guarded as it is in the real world. The spirit of IMMI is in stark contrast with the serious attacks we are currently faced with. We have legal monsters like Acta, Sopa, Pipa and now Cispa; we have anti-terrorist acts abused to tear these liberties apart; we have armies of corporate lawyers scrutinising every bit of news prior to it getting out to us before we ever get to know the real stories that should remain in the public domain.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. The US government legally hacks into other nations' parliamentary private social media data because it is stored on servers originating in the US, as in my Twitter case. The infamous EU data retention law is making us all into terrorist subjects by default, and now we have the newest addition in a dangerous cocktail of erosion of civil liberties online with the offline reality: meet the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), also known as the Homeland Battlefield Act. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) describes it thus:

"For the first time in American history, we have a law authorising the worldwide and indefinite military detention of people captured far from any battlefield. The NDAA has no temporal or geographic limitations. It is completely at odds with our values, violates the constitution, and corrodes our nation's commitment to the rule of law."

Since the US department of justice is ploughing my private data and WikiLeaks (whom I volunteered for in 2010 by co-producing Collateral Murder) are defined by the US vice-president as cyberterrorists, I felt under direct threat when NDAA was passed. I have not been able to travel to the US for more than a year under advice from the Icelandic state department. The only way for me to go is on a UN visa (the same kind as Gaddafi and Hussein got when going to the UN) when I plan to attend the UN assembly later this year. Basically what NDAA means is that the US military can put anyone, anywhere under the suspicion of being a terror threat or an associate and detain you for ever, without you having access to a lawyer or a court. So I joined Chris Hedges, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg and other activists in suing the United States government to stop the implementation of the NDAA. Naomi Wolf was kind enough to read my testimony at a US court last month, since I could not be there in person.

The good news is that cyberspace is full of hacktivists and our offline world has a growing Occupy movement, inspiring all of us into action, co-creating a different reality in the spirit of a true online and offline freedom.