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Biography
Kristinn Hrafnsson (born 25 June 1962) is an Icelandic investigative journalist who is editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks. He was the spokesperson for WikiLeaks between 2010 and 2017.
He has worked at various newspapers in Iceland and hosted the television programme Kompás on the Icelandic channel Stöð 2, where he and his team often exposed criminal activity and corruption in high places. In February 2009, while investigating the connection between Iceland's Kaupthing Bank and Robert Tchenguiz and Vincent Tchenguiz, the programme was taken off air and Kristinn and his crew were sacked.
Shortly thereafter, Kristinn was hired by RÚV (The Icelandic National Broadcasting Service). In August 2009, he was working on a story about Kaupthing's loan book which had just been published on the WikiLeaks webpage, when the bank got a gag order issued by the Reykjavik sheriff's office, banning RÚV from reporting on the loan book, which could be publicly accessed online via WikiLeaks. The prohibition order was withdrawn later.
Kristinn was dismissed from RÚV (his contract was not renewed) in July 2010. Beginning in 2010, he collaborated with WikiLeaks, serving as the organisation's spokesman after founder Julian Assange began to have legal problems. He has called the December 2010 attacks on WikiLeaks by MasterCard, Visa, and others a "privatisation of censorship". In 2012, in his capacity as WikiLeaks spokesman, he defended the organisation on the website of Swedish Television against what he described as a smear campaign by the Swedish tabloid Expressen.
Kristinn has been named Icelandic journalist of the year three times, in 2004, 2007 and 2010 by Iceland's National Union of Journalists.
In early 2017, Kristinn stated that he was no longer spokesperson for Wikileaks.
It was announced on 26 September 2018 that Kristinn Hrafnsson had been appointed editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks by Julian Assange following an extended period in which Assange lost access to the internet earlier in the year. WikiLeaks said Assange would remain as publisher.