Editor’s Note: Today’s Guest writer is Alexander Hotz, a multimedia journalist based in New York City. You can follow him on Twitter at @NYCtechnology.

By Alexander Hotz

Blame it on the holiday season or the industry’s own shortcomings, but last week the American press missed a major announcement concerning what could become the future of investigative journalism.

WikiLeaks.org, a Web site that specializes in the publication of classified or restricted information, announced that it’s pursuing an unprecedented avenue to sustain itself. Late last year the whistleblower organization began lobbying the Icelandic parliament to consider a series of bills, which if passed would transform that nation of 300,000 into a beacon of global free expression.

According to WikiLeaks’ reps, the new laws would be modeled on offshore financial centers or tax havens. The British Virgin Islands, for example, attracts the rich with a set of lenient/shady tax laws unavailable in most countries. Iceland, under the WikiLeaks’ proposal, would offer sources and journalists a strong package of legal protections thereby establishing itself as a sanctuary for free speech.

“So we could just say we’re taking the source protection laws from Sweden … we could take the First Amendment from the United States, (and) we could take Belgium protection laws for journalists,” said WikiLeaks’ spokesman Daniel Schmitt at last week’s Chaos Communication Congress (26C3) in Berlin.

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