According to a New York Times article published this week, US agencies have made some pretty serious attempts to monitor Julian Assange and his group Wikileaks. In case you don’t know, Wikileaks is the group responsible for a lot of sensitive data and information leaks, and recently they were thrown back into the spotlight for helping Edward Snowden get out of Hong Kong “to a safe place.”

Apparently, Iceland’s former minister of the interior, Ogmundur Jonasson said that he requested a group of “eight or nine” FBI agents to leave the country in June, 2011. The FBI fed him a line that they wanted to come to Iceland to try to stop hackers from enacting “an imminent attack on Icelandic government databases.” As it would turn out, the agents were merely gathering intel on Wikileaks, of which many members currently reside in Iceland. Jonasson found out their plan upon arrival, and asked them to leave the country.

Supposedly, the FBI made plenty of other attempts to monitor the activist group. The New York Times reports:

“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.”

According to Iceland Parliament member Birgitta Jonsdottir, who was formerly from Wikileaks, Thordarson had been visiting Wikileaks leader Assange in England. At that particular point in time Assange was on house arrest, and the FBI tried to convince Thordarson to wear a wire for his visits. Because of this fact, many of the activists believe that Thorsdarson served as a double agent for Assange.

Essentially, it’s all one big web of espionage and paranoia. One thing is certainly obvious, the two organizations are enemies and they won’t be shaking hands anytime soon, that’s for sure.

Ms. Jonsdottir says that the events have left many worried.

“The paranoia is going to kill us all.”

For more information or more in-depth coverage be sure to check out the source link below.

[via The New York Times]