An earlier  report from Euractiv (which styles itself as a “cross-lingual” network of news) claimed that Swedish law protects whistle-blowers who post documents to Wikileaks. This has been repeated like a mantra across the MSM. Now we have a Swedish newspaper report that confirms the opinion of more informed critics that Wikileaks‘ claims of protection under Swedish law are exaggerated and false. Swedish law requires a license before protection can be claimed, and Wikileaks doesn’t have one. So anyone who leaked documents to it would indeed be vulnerable. Just as Wikileaks’ original co-founder John Young of Cryptome pointed out, Wikileaks is guilty, at the very least, of overpromising security. That certainly adds to suspicions about its true nature:

“Whistle-blower website WikiLeaks did not have a licence to publish material in Sweden and its claim that its sources were protected by Swedish constitutional law could therefore be questioned, reports said Saturday.WikiLeaks recently published thousands of pages of classified documents detailing the war in Afghanistan. The move was criticised by the governments of Afghanistan and the United States, among others.The whistle-blower’s website says that material is “routed via Sweden and Belgium which have first rate journalist-source shield laws.”But the Swedish Freedom of the Press Act requires a certificate of publication issued by the Radio and TV Authority that lists a publisher who can, for instance, be prosecuted for publishing information.Both the Sydsvenskan daily and Swedish radio’s media affairs programme Medierna on Saturday carried interviews with media and legal experts who said that since WikiLeaks did not have a licence to publish material in Sweden, authorities could therefore probe sources without violating press freedom and freedom of speech laws.Medierna said it had tried to contact WikiLeaks about the issue, and late Friday received an email from WikiLeaks co-founder and editor in chief Julian Assange saying that the site’s lawyers would look into the matter.”To my mind, it is too simple to claim that all WikiLeaks sources are totally protected in Sweden,” Hakan Rustand, deputy Chancellor of Justice told Sydsvenskan.The Chancellor of Justice is the sole prosecutor in cases concerning offences against freedom of the press and freedom of expression.”If the constitutional laws are non-applicable, ordinary liability laws take effect. This means a source could be brought to court by a common prosecutor,” Rustand added.Journalist Anders R Olsson, a specialist on freedom of speech, observed that “even when the publisher is protected by constitutional law, the ban on investigating sources isn’t watertight.”

“In the case of top secret information that is of great importance to the military, police and prosecutors have a duty to try to find the leak and prosecute the source,” he said.”