WEBVTT 00:00:00.297 --> 00:00:05.440 JACK: Hey, it’s Jack, host of the show. When I was a teenager, I went to university and 00:00:05.440 --> 00:00:10.720 studied computer science. At one point they gave all the students logins to some central 00:00:10.720 --> 00:00:16.000 Linux computer. It’s where you were supposed to do your schoolwork. Like, you could use it for file 00:00:16.000 --> 00:00:21.760 storage or check e-mail there and do programming. Well, when they gave me my username and password, 00:00:21.760 --> 00:00:28.480 they said my username is my last name and my password is just my first and last name. I 00:00:28.480 --> 00:00:34.480 instantly realized this means if you know another student’s full name, you know their username and 00:00:34.480 --> 00:00:39.120 password and can log in as them and read their e-mails and look through their files and stuff. 00:00:39.120 --> 00:00:43.280 I told that to the teacher; hey, this is a bad password policy. He’s like, why? I’m like, 00:00:43.280 --> 00:00:45.360 'cause I know everyone’s password. 00:00:45.360 --> 00:00:50.000 He’s like, yeah, well, everyone should be changing their password. I’m like, yeah, but they're not. 00:00:50.000 --> 00:00:54.960 None of them are changing their passwords. I tried helping a few students change their password, 00:00:54.960 --> 00:00:58.960 but I knew it was a lost cause. You could pretty much pick any computer science student in the 00:00:58.960 --> 00:01:03.040 school and there was a pretty good chance that you could log in as them if you just knew their first 00:01:03.040 --> 00:01:10.080 and last name. Well, while I was sitting in class one day, the school sysadmin came into the class, 00:01:10.080 --> 00:01:14.560 and he pointed at me and he motioned for me to follow him to the hall. So, 00:01:14.560 --> 00:01:19.200 I go into the hall and he starts telling me, someone has broken into our Linux computer and 00:01:19.200 --> 00:01:23.600 is going around deleting a bunch of student files and data and stuff, and some students 00:01:23.600 --> 00:01:28.240 lost a ton of work from this. I was like, well, it wasn’t me. I don't know anything about that. 00:01:28.240 --> 00:01:33.200 I’ve never done that. But this guy was giving me a crooked look. He was like, come on, fess up; 00:01:33.200 --> 00:01:38.160 I know it was you. I was like, no, it wasn’t. Why are you blaming me? What makes you think I 00:01:38.160 --> 00:01:42.640 did this? He’s like, come on, man, I’ve seen your command history. You're way more active on that 00:01:42.640 --> 00:01:46.560 computer than anyone else, and the commands you're doing show me that you know way more than any 00:01:46.560 --> 00:01:52.800 other student, too. So, it had to be you. There’s literally no other suspects. I’m like, I promise 00:01:52.800 --> 00:01:59.920 you I did not do anything bad on your system, but you have really terrible default passwords, 00:01:59.920 --> 00:02:07.440 and the students are not changing them. He was like, whatever, dude. Look, if it happens again, 00:02:07.440 --> 00:02:15.200 you're getting suspended. I started to realize if whoever did that again, I might get kicked out of 00:02:15.200 --> 00:02:24.720 school for that. This made me super worried. I was being wrongfully accused. But I was lucky; they 00:02:24.720 --> 00:02:35.417 either found the guy who did it or he never did it again, because I never saw that sysadmin again. 00:02:35.417 --> 00:02:37.840 (INTRO): [INTRO MUSIC] These are true stories from the dark side of 00:02:37.840 --> 00:03:00.714 the internet. I’m Jack Rhysider. This is Darknet Diaries. [INTRO MUSIC ENDS] 00:03:00.714 --> 00:03:02.400 JACK: 2019 is when you got arrested, right? 00:03:02.400 --> 00:03:04.720 OLA: Yeah, correct, in April 11. 00:03:04.720 --> 00:03:07.440 JACK: Right. So, let’s go back before that. First of all, 00:03:07.440 --> 00:03:10.040 tell me your name, and what were you doing before that? 00:03:10.040 --> 00:03:15.840 OLA: Okay, so, my name is Ola Bini. I’m from Sweden originally, but I’ve lived in 00:03:15.840 --> 00:03:22.720 London and Chicago and here in Ecuador where I’m still located since 2013 when I came to Ecuador. 00:03:22.720 --> 00:03:24.120 JACK: When did you leave Sweden? 00:03:24.120 --> 00:03:30.640 OLA: So, I left Sweden in 2007 because I was hired by an international software development 00:03:30.640 --> 00:03:34.480 company called Thoughtworks. I worked for them for ten years, 00:03:34.480 --> 00:03:39.600 and that’s how I came to Ecuador originally. I came with the company. 00:03:39.600 --> 00:03:43.280 JACK: What’s your preferred programming language? 00:03:43.280 --> 00:03:47.600 OLA: That’s a hard question since I’ve developed my own programming languages and, of course, 00:03:47.600 --> 00:03:54.000 I like my own programming languages a lot. But I’m pretty old school when it comes to the history of 00:03:54.000 --> 00:03:59.360 programming languages, so I’m a huge fan of common lisp. I’m still a proud emacs user, 00:03:59.360 --> 00:04:04.720 and I have my millions of lines of emacs list code to customize my experience. 00:04:04.720 --> 00:04:09.760 JACK: Millions; geez. Are you a big Java fan? 00:04:09.760 --> 00:04:15.920 OLA: See, that’s a funny question because when I got my first job, I started working in Java, and I 00:04:15.920 --> 00:04:21.280 was very frustrated with Java from a productivity perspective. So, I got involved in creating other 00:04:21.280 --> 00:04:27.520 languages for the JVM. So, I first was involved in a list variant called Jatha, and then I got 00:04:27.520 --> 00:04:32.720 involved in JRuby, which is basically a project to create a Ruby implementation that runs on top of 00:04:32.720 --> 00:04:38.720 the JVM. I became one of the core developers for JRuby, and that’s kind of what I did for the next 00:04:38.720 --> 00:04:43.520 few years. The idea was basically to use all the good stuff that is in the Java platform without 00:04:43.520 --> 00:04:47.600 actually having to deal with the bad stuff, which is, in my opinion, the Java language. 00:04:47.600 --> 00:04:52.640 JACK: Fascinating. Java always marketed itself as usable on any device or operating system, 00:04:52.640 --> 00:04:56.720 making it so you can program something once and it’ll run anywhere, as opposed to making different 00:04:56.720 --> 00:05:01.760 apps for different operating systems. However, the language itself is clunky and ugly. So, 00:05:01.760 --> 00:05:05.920 Ola took the beauty he saw in the Ruby programming language and got it to work 00:05:05.920 --> 00:05:11.120 in Java somehow. It’s kinda mind bending to me that you could code something in Ruby 00:05:11.120 --> 00:05:16.880 and it’ll run anywhere Java can. But this is the kind of audacious project that Ola 00:05:16.880 --> 00:05:22.080 enjoys working on. He likes to work on huge projects that are pretty obscure and strange. 00:05:22.080 --> 00:05:26.640 He spent decades as a programmer working for various companies in various countries, 00:05:26.640 --> 00:05:32.760 and besides having a love for programming, he’s also got a burning passion for online privacy. 00:05:32.760 --> 00:05:39.280 OLA: If you look back in the key servers for GPG, you will find my first GPG key uploaded in 00:05:39.280 --> 00:05:43.760 2001 or 2002 or something like that. So, privacy was something that I was always interested in, 00:05:43.760 --> 00:05:50.320 and from my first job, I was involved with cryptography and that kind of stuff. In 2010, 00:05:50.320 --> 00:05:56.640 WikiLeaks started releasing the diplomatic cables, and so, my interest kind of — and my activity kind 00:05:56.640 --> 00:06:01.280 of started coming back in that time. But then I had my regular day job, and I didn’t really 00:06:01.280 --> 00:06:06.720 get super engaged until the beginning of 2013, because that was when — actually, 00:06:06.720 --> 00:06:13.400 it was an event where a friend of mine named Aaron Swartz — I don't know if you've heard of him… 00:06:13.400 --> 00:06:14.640 JACK: Yes, of course. 00:06:14.640 --> 00:06:21.440 OLA: Yeah, so, he killed himself in the beginning of January of 2013, and that was a huge blow to 00:06:21.440 --> 00:06:27.440 me and it was a huge blow to many people inside of the company because he worked with us. We started 00:06:27.440 --> 00:06:34.800 talking about how we wanted to do more from a privacy perspective, from a digital advocacy 00:06:34.800 --> 00:06:39.920 perspective and all these things. So, in 2013 I kind of started out working on those things, and 00:06:39.920 --> 00:06:46.640 I started out doing both — I really was doing both privacy and information security at the same time. 00:06:46.640 --> 00:06:51.120 JACK: So, what was your involvement with WikiLeaks? Did you actually work with them? 00:06:51.120 --> 00:06:57.440 OLA: No, no. That’s the thing; I’ve been accused of working for WikiLeaks for a long time, 00:06:57.440 --> 00:07:01.440 but that’s not true. I never worked for WikiLeaks in any way. [Music] But I am 00:07:01.440 --> 00:07:07.360 a friend of Julian Assange, and that’s what came in 2013 because 00:07:07.360 --> 00:07:11.360 I was doing all this work reaching out to privacy networks and talking to people around the world, 00:07:11.360 --> 00:07:18.160 and then a friend in common who was the lawyer for Julian recommended to Julian that I should 00:07:18.160 --> 00:07:23.840 meet Julian. So, it was pretty funny. It was a week before the Snowden disclosures. I went to 00:07:23.840 --> 00:07:30.320 London and I went to the Ecuadorian embassy and I met Julian, and we became friends. Since then, 00:07:30.320 --> 00:07:35.040 I was traveling a lot, and every time I was in Europe, I passed by London and I went to the 00:07:35.040 --> 00:07:39.920 embassy to hang out with him and just talk about technology or privacy or all these 00:07:39.920 --> 00:07:45.360 things. But we were only friends. We were never collaborators or working together in any way. 00:07:45.360 --> 00:07:48.640 JACK: Ah. It’s interesting; Julian was in the Ecuadorian embassy, 00:07:48.640 --> 00:07:51.840 and Ola had just moved to Ecuador from the United States. 00:07:51.840 --> 00:07:57.120 OLA: I was in a very privileged position because my company basically told me I could go wherever 00:07:57.120 --> 00:08:01.760 I wanted that the company had offices, and I could work from anywhere. So, I could have 00:08:01.760 --> 00:08:07.040 moved to india, I could have moved to China, to Australia. But at the same time, there was this 00:08:07.040 --> 00:08:11.920 discussion about opening up an office — because the company at that point had offices in Brazil, 00:08:11.920 --> 00:08:19.040 but nowhere else in Latin America. I had a wife at the time, and she was interested in learning 00:08:19.040 --> 00:08:24.080 Spanish. So, we were thinking about — okay, Latin America could be interesting. Then the 00:08:24.080 --> 00:08:30.800 company decided that Ecuador would be the place, and we went and we liked it, so we went there. 00:08:30.800 --> 00:08:36.640 Everyone always asks if there was any connection with what Julian went through, but actually, 00:08:36.640 --> 00:08:41.440 it was complete coincidence that I ended up in the same country as Julian was in the embassy of. 00:08:41.440 --> 00:08:45.840 JACK: Julian Assange was in trouble because his website WikiLeaks had published some 00:08:45.840 --> 00:08:50.160 sensitive articles which exposed things like governments that were doing things that they 00:08:50.160 --> 00:08:54.640 didn’t want us to know about, and they wanted to arrest him for exposing this stuff. So, 00:08:54.640 --> 00:09:00.720 he was granted asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, because Ecuador looked favorably upon 00:09:00.720 --> 00:09:05.600 him. [Music] But he couldn't leave the embassy because the UK and the US didn’t like him, 00:09:05.600 --> 00:09:10.480 and they wanted to arrest him. So, Julian Assange was stuck there on a little island 00:09:10.480 --> 00:09:15.040 that if he stepped off of, the UK police would swoop in on him and arrest him. 00:09:15.040 --> 00:09:20.240 OLA: Oh yeah, yeah. No, it was crazy. Of course, he didn’t have so many friends, 00:09:20.240 --> 00:09:24.800 so — that could come and visit him. So, that was one of the reasons why I kept doing it, 00:09:24.800 --> 00:09:32.400 to — sitting in that situation that he was in, being alone like that — if I were in that 00:09:32.400 --> 00:09:36.080 situation, I would like for people to come and hang out and just have friends that you 00:09:36.080 --> 00:09:42.240 can talk to in different ways. So, yeah, so I met him the first time in the first 00:09:42.240 --> 00:09:49.040 week of June 2013, and then just a few days later came the first Snowden disclosures, 00:09:49.040 --> 00:09:53.000 and the whole world blew up and started talking about privacy and all this stuff. 00:09:53.000 --> 00:09:57.120 JACK: Yeah, it’s true; once the Snowden papers became news, the world started talking about 00:09:57.120 --> 00:10:02.640 privacy a lot. See, it’s against the law for the US to do mass surveillance on its own citizens, 00:10:02.640 --> 00:10:06.800 but the Snowden paper showed that through the Prison Project and others, 00:10:06.800 --> 00:10:12.720 the US government was doing mass surveillance on its own US citizens. It was awful for them to 00:10:12.720 --> 00:10:17.520 be doing that without consent, without approval, without the citizens knowing it’s happening. So, 00:10:17.520 --> 00:10:22.800 tons of people were suddenly talking about privacy then. Of course, all this made Ola 00:10:22.800 --> 00:10:27.680 realize you can't trust the infrastructure that our communication is going over. There’s 00:10:27.680 --> 00:10:32.160 entities in the world trying to suck up all the data they can and look into everyone’s packets. 00:10:32.160 --> 00:10:37.440 So, it’s incredibly important to do end-to-end encryption on everything so only you and the 00:10:37.440 --> 00:10:42.080 person you're talking to can see what’s being said. See, with e-mail for example, 00:10:42.080 --> 00:10:48.800 typically the e-mail provider can open and read all the e-mail they want. If the police get a 00:10:48.800 --> 00:10:54.640 search warrant, they can ask the e-mail provider for full readable e-mails. So, 00:10:54.640 --> 00:10:58.400 Ola started working on tools which would restrict the e-mail provider from being 00:10:58.400 --> 00:11:03.760 able to see e-mails. Even if someone put a gun to the e-mail provider’s head, they wouldn't be able 00:11:03.760 --> 00:11:10.400 to hand over readable e-mails. It would just be encrypted gibberish. He made it so that the sender 00:11:10.400 --> 00:11:15.840 and receiver would exchange encryption keys. This means the e-mail gets encrypted upon hitting Send 00:11:15.840 --> 00:11:20.960 and only decrypted when the receiver opens it. Nobody else will ever get to see what’s in it. 00:11:20.960 --> 00:11:27.200 OLA: We were also doing our own development. We created a chat platform, a chat tool called CoyIM. 00:11:27.200 --> 00:11:32.480 JACK: This also had end-to-end encryption built in and was very privacy-focused, because most 00:11:32.480 --> 00:11:38.320 of the popular chat apps then — and surprisingly still today — are not end-to-end encrypted. So, 00:11:38.320 --> 00:11:43.600 these chat services can read anyone’s messages, and so can the governments of the world or 00:11:43.600 --> 00:11:50.240 hackers if they can get into the systems. As you can see, privacy is very important to Ola. 00:11:50.240 --> 00:11:56.240 OLA: I use the definition of privacy which is based on the idea of control. Privacy is 00:11:56.240 --> 00:12:02.000 the capacity for you to control the information about yourself. So, privacy is not about hiding, 00:12:02.000 --> 00:12:06.960 although hiding can be one of the things you do with privacy. Privacy is controlling what 00:12:06.960 --> 00:12:11.200 information you want to release to whom you want to release it under what circumstances, 00:12:11.200 --> 00:12:18.000 etc. For me, privacy is important — well, it’s important because it’s a human right, 00:12:18.000 --> 00:12:22.160 and that should be enough, but it’s also very important because it’s very, 00:12:22.160 --> 00:12:28.240 very closely linked to other rights. For example, if you're a person that believes in democracy, 00:12:28.240 --> 00:12:32.400 then you should believe in privacy, because there’s been a lot of studies that show that 00:12:32.400 --> 00:12:36.320 people under surveillance vote in a different way than if they're not under surveillance. 00:12:36.320 --> 00:12:42.800 So, if you want to have free and proper elections, then you need privacy for people, for example. So, 00:12:42.800 --> 00:12:51.520 in my perspective, the important thing about privacy is that it enables all these other rights. 00:12:51.520 --> 00:12:59.680 The problem is that privacy — in the fiscal world, privacy has always been quite hard to violate in a 00:12:59.680 --> 00:13:05.520 massive way. It’s not like you can have a person just standing at the window of 100,000 people. I 00:13:05.520 --> 00:13:12.400 mean, if I remember correctly, the Stasi in East Germany — I think at some point, four percent of 00:13:12.400 --> 00:13:17.440 everyone was working as an informant for the Stasi, four percent of the population, 00:13:17.440 --> 00:13:22.720 but they still weren't able to in any way invade the privacy of most people with that amount 00:13:22.720 --> 00:13:29.360 of people. But, of course in the technological world, the possibility for violation is extreme, 00:13:29.360 --> 00:13:35.120 and that’s what we're seeing. Like, every year the privacy invasions are becoming larger and larger. 00:13:35.120 --> 00:13:40.320 JACK: Since 2013 Ola has been vocal about this, blogging about it on WordPress, 00:13:40.320 --> 00:13:44.560 working with others, building tools to enhance our privacy, and trying to be a 00:13:44.560 --> 00:13:49.280 privacy activist. His job allowed him to build privacy tools while working there, 00:13:49.280 --> 00:13:53.760 but that company he was working at got bought out by a private equity company, 00:13:53.760 --> 00:13:58.000 and he knew he wasn’t going to be able to work on those tools anymore with that new leadership. 00:13:58.000 --> 00:14:01.520 OLA: [Music] So, I quit, and a few of the other people quit as well, 00:14:01.520 --> 00:14:06.240 and we started a nonprofit here in Ecuador. Well, actually, we started it first in Brazil 00:14:06.240 --> 00:14:11.560 and in Barcelona, but then in 2019 we moved the nonprofit to Ecuador. 00:14:11.560 --> 00:14:15.360 JACK: This nonprofit was entirely focused on privacy. 00:14:15.360 --> 00:14:19.680 OLA: So, this is a nonprofit called Centro de Autonomia Digital. Yeah, 00:14:19.680 --> 00:14:26.000 the Digital Autonomy Center you can call it in English. It’s based here in Ecuador. We work 00:14:26.000 --> 00:14:31.120 to create free software that protects the privacy for people at risk, 00:14:31.120 --> 00:14:36.160 and specifically we try to work from a context of global south more than global north, 00:14:36.160 --> 00:14:42.080 because a lot of the tools that exist are done for white people in Europe and the United States, 00:14:42.080 --> 00:14:48.240 and we know that — being in Ecuador, for example, we have contacts with a lot of nonprofits that 00:14:48.240 --> 00:14:52.800 work here and a lot of the indigenous groups and all these kind of situations that are 00:14:52.800 --> 00:14:57.280 quite complicated, and many of the tools are not really made for them; not in the right language, 00:14:57.280 --> 00:15:02.480 not with the right usability, not for the right circumstances. So, we work on free software. 00:15:02.480 --> 00:15:07.120 JACK: They built a chat app and e-mail privacy tools and a teleconferencing tool. 00:15:07.120 --> 00:15:11.600 OLA: The software development is a big part, but the other big part is that we do public education 00:15:11.600 --> 00:15:20.240 about security and privacy, and this is directed against — directed towards the communities of 00:15:20.240 --> 00:15:25.920 civil society to try to help them to have better practices and so on, because a lot 00:15:25.920 --> 00:15:31.840 of them — I mean, a lot of the people that work in civil society, they get money to do projects 00:15:31.840 --> 00:15:37.880 to help people, and they often don’t have time to think about their security practices. 00:15:37.880 --> 00:15:46.160 JACK: In May of 2018 when a new president took office in Ecuador, everything changed. We're 00:15:46.160 --> 00:15:52.760 gonna take an ad break here, but stay with us because this story is about to go off a waterfall. 00:15:52.760 --> 00:16:01.840 OLA: So, the new president — his name is Lenin Moreno — he came in in 2018, and when he came into 00:16:01.840 --> 00:16:07.360 power, everyone thought that he would be kind of from the same political alignment as the previous 00:16:07.360 --> 00:16:14.640 government, which was headed by President Rafael Correa. But when Lenin Moreno came into power, 00:16:14.640 --> 00:16:20.640 he basically cut ties with Rafael Correa and the whole movement of Correastas, as they are called, 00:16:20.640 --> 00:16:25.520 and he basically started investing for corruption, and he made a lot of moves 00:16:25.520 --> 00:16:31.520 towards industry and going into a right-wing kind of direction. So, everyone was quite surprised. 00:16:31.520 --> 00:16:35.040 JACK: With this sudden change in political alignment, in 2019, 00:16:35.040 --> 00:16:38.000 the new president, Lenin Moreno, suddenly wasn’t 00:16:38.000 --> 00:16:43.515 happy with Julian Assange and no longer was willing to give him asylum. [Music] 00:16:43.515 --> 00:16:47.520 OLA: I was actually on my way to the airport when all of this happened. So, basically, 00:16:47.520 --> 00:16:53.600 I’m a martial artist, and at the time I was practicing something called Bujinkan. A few 00:16:53.600 --> 00:16:59.360 months earlier I had received my black belt and I was planning to go to Japan. The idea was to 00:16:59.360 --> 00:17:05.840 go to Japan to train with the grand master that still teaches in Japan for this martial art. So, I 00:17:05.840 --> 00:17:12.240 had publicized the fact. I had the tickets bought months before. Early on the morning of the 11th, 00:17:12.240 --> 00:17:16.920 on the Thursday, I received a message from a few of my friends telling me about what had happened. 00:17:16.920 --> 00:17:20.400 JACK: The foreign minister and the interior minister of Ecuador had 00:17:20.400 --> 00:17:24.160 given a press conference that morning, and Ola was watching what they said. 00:17:24.160 --> 00:17:30.480 OLA: These two people, they were talking about the fact that they had — ‘esposado’ is the word 00:17:30.480 --> 00:17:35.840 they used, but that they had thrown out Julian because he was collaborating with 00:17:35.840 --> 00:17:41.520 enemies of the state inside of Ecuador. What they were saying in this press conference was 00:17:41.520 --> 00:17:47.760 that they also had evidence that there were two Russians living in Ecuador that were key members 00:17:47.760 --> 00:17:53.760 of WikiLeaks and that they were also part of this attempt to destabilize the government. 00:17:53.760 --> 00:18:00.240 JACK: Just like that, Julian was under arrest in the UK. After having asylum for seven years, 00:18:00.240 --> 00:18:04.720 he lost it, and the UK police swooped in on him and took him to jail. 00:18:04.720 --> 00:18:09.080 It was shocking for the world to see that Julian Assange was arrested. 00:18:09.080 --> 00:18:13.840 OLA: I saw this press conference and I didn’t really think anything about it. So, 00:18:13.840 --> 00:18:17.680 I continued my preparations for my travels. I was gonna leave 00:18:17.680 --> 00:18:22.800 at 12:00 midday and get to the airport. So, that’s what I did. 00:18:22.800 --> 00:18:26.800 JACK: So, he goes through the airport, through security, and arrives at his gate, sits down, 00:18:26.800 --> 00:18:32.000 and reads a book. Then he hears an announcement; will Ola Bini please come to the gate? 00:18:32.000 --> 00:18:35.760 He goes up to the gate, and they wanted to check his luggage for some reason. 00:18:35.760 --> 00:18:40.000 OLA: This is pretty common that they ask you to go down to where they manage the luggage and go 00:18:40.000 --> 00:18:43.360 through it, because they're looking for drugs. So, that’s something that always happens with 00:18:43.360 --> 00:18:48.880 these trips. So, I went there, and I had no idea. When I stood there, about ten different 00:18:48.880 --> 00:18:55.106 people came up to me and they were trying to explain to me that they wanted to apprehend me. 00:18:55.106 --> 00:18:58.440 JACK: [Music] Apprehend him? He’s like, me? Why? What did I do? 00:18:58.440 --> 00:19:02.160 OLA: These people, they didn’t identify themselves. They didn’t have any markings 00:19:02.160 --> 00:19:07.440 on them saying that they were police or who they were, and I was quite confused. At that 00:19:07.440 --> 00:19:11.840 time I didn’t really speak Spanish well, so I was trying in English to understand 00:19:11.840 --> 00:19:16.720 what was happening. They were saying that they were stopping me from going on the 00:19:16.720 --> 00:19:21.400 airplane and that I needed to come with them. At this point I had no idea why. 00:19:21.400 --> 00:19:25.040 JACK: There was a moment where he was able to sneak his phone out and text a friend; hey, 00:19:25.040 --> 00:19:29.840 I’m in trouble. I think I’m being arrested. I need a lawyer immediately. I’m at the airport. 00:19:29.840 --> 00:19:34.640 They took him into a little room, and he looks at the sign on the room. It says Interpol. 00:19:34.640 --> 00:19:39.920 OLA: Then they sat me down there. They asked me to put my things away from me, but they still let 00:19:39.920 --> 00:19:45.600 me keep my phone for some reason. So, I was still in contact, and I managed to get hold 00:19:45.600 --> 00:19:51.280 of the lawyer. He said he was coming towards the airport to be there. But at that point, 00:19:51.280 --> 00:19:57.680 after about ten minutes inside of this room, the person there asked me to put my phone away, 00:19:57.680 --> 00:20:03.200 that I was not allowed to have the phone, and that I needed to put the phone away for my own 00:20:03.200 --> 00:20:09.760 safety. I have no idea what he meant by that, but basically I had to put the phone on the table. 00:20:09.760 --> 00:20:14.400 From that point, I wasn’t allowed to touch the phone anymore. All of this was a little bit 00:20:14.400 --> 00:20:19.840 confusing because no one tried to talk to me about what was happening, and I kept asking, hey, what’s 00:20:19.840 --> 00:20:23.840 going on? What’s happening? They basically didn’t say anything. It was also complicated because the 00:20:23.840 --> 00:20:29.040 people — the person keeping me in this office, he didn’t speak any English. So, when I wanted to ask 00:20:29.040 --> 00:20:33.280 questions, he had to go out and get someone from the immigration department that was out 00:20:33.280 --> 00:20:40.960 in the airport to come back and to talk to me in English. So, they didn’t really have a translator 00:20:40.960 --> 00:20:51.506 or anything like that to talk to me at all. That basically was how I spent the next few hours. 00:20:51.506 --> 00:20:57.200 JACK: [Music] Hours spent in the Quito Airport in this little room. He missed his flight at this 00:20:57.200 --> 00:21:02.400 point, and he has no clue why he’s being detained. They weren't asking him questions and they weren't 00:21:02.400 --> 00:21:07.440 giving him answers. They just kept him in a room with the guy there who didn’t speak any English 00:21:07.440 --> 00:21:13.120 to watch over him. Eventually someone comes in and tells him they are taking him to the city, 00:21:13.120 --> 00:21:17.120 and they escort him to a car and they put him in a car, and they start to drive off. But then 00:21:17.120 --> 00:21:20.480 they change their mind and take him back to the airport and send him into that little Interpol 00:21:20.480 --> 00:21:25.440 room again. He asked if he can call his lawyer, and they let him, but only for like one minute. 00:21:25.440 --> 00:21:30.320 OLA: At that point — and this is the most ridiculous thing. At this point, 00:21:30.320 --> 00:21:34.400 the guy that was holding me there, he held up a paper in front of me and said that this was the 00:21:34.400 --> 00:21:40.240 reason I was being held. Now, this paper he held up for five seconds, and I couldn't see anything 00:21:40.240 --> 00:21:47.520 except that my name was badly written, and it said ‘Russo’. So, this, whatever thing they had, 00:21:47.520 --> 00:21:54.240 said ‘Russian’, and they had the wrong name on it or misspelled name on it. He held it up to me 00:21:54.240 --> 00:22:00.000 when I was talking to my lawyer, and then he hid it again, and I wasn’t allowed to see it again. 00:22:00.000 --> 00:22:05.280 JACK: Russian? Are the police saying he’s Russian or are they saying the Russians are out to get him 00:22:05.280 --> 00:22:10.880 or that he’s working for Russia? He has so many questions, and nobody’s answering them. They 00:22:10.880 --> 00:22:15.760 hold him there at the airport for another five hours. It’s now 11:00 p.m. at night. 00:22:15.760 --> 00:22:20.000 OLA: They forced me to stand up and they put handcuffs behind my back, 00:22:20.000 --> 00:22:26.800 and then they took away all my things from me. I said that I wanted to talk to a lawyer, 00:22:26.800 --> 00:22:30.800 and they said no. I said that I wanted to talk to a person from my family, 00:22:30.800 --> 00:22:37.760 and they said no. These two are basic rights in Ecuador. Then basically what ended up happening 00:22:37.760 --> 00:22:40.960 was that they put me against the wall, and then I had to stand with the wall, 00:22:40.960 --> 00:22:44.320 like looking at the wall, for about twenty minutes. I don't know what they were doing 00:22:44.320 --> 00:22:54.640 during this time period. But then, finally, they went to the door, and at the door was a person 00:22:54.640 --> 00:23:02.320 reading from a paper. Later — I’ve been told that this person was trying to read in English, but I 00:23:02.320 --> 00:23:06.160 had no idea what the person was saying because the English — the pronunciation was so terrible. 00:23:06.160 --> 00:23:09.920 I had no idea what they were saying. This happened three times with three different 00:23:09.920 --> 00:23:13.920 people. Afterwards I found out, oh, they were trying to read my rights, 00:23:13.920 --> 00:23:20.880 but they didn’t have a translator, so they couldn't make use of a translator to actually 00:23:20.880 --> 00:23:26.560 make sure that I understood. Then they tried to force me to sign this paper, which I didn’t do, 00:23:26.560 --> 00:23:31.440 and then they took me out to a cop car. They put me in the back of this cop car, [music] and 00:23:31.440 --> 00:23:37.440 we sat on this dark parking space outside of the airport, and there was no one around. These two 00:23:37.440 --> 00:23:42.200 cops were inside of the car, and we sat there for three hours in the middle of the night. 00:23:42.200 --> 00:23:49.280 JACK: Sitting in a parked cop car for hours through the night? Man, all this sounds highly 00:23:49.280 --> 00:23:55.760 unusual. I can't imagine that this is how arrests normally happen in Ecuador, where unidentified 00:23:55.760 --> 00:24:00.960 people come and they keep you in a room for eight hours, then they put you in a car to hold you 00:24:00.960 --> 00:24:05.840 there all night, and the whole time you never know why you're being detained, and they don’t even ask 00:24:05.840 --> 00:24:09.920 you questions to make sure that they’ve got the right person. They didn’t even bring his luggage 00:24:09.920 --> 00:24:14.240 with him. He didn’t know it, but his lawyer did show up at the airport and he was trying to see 00:24:14.240 --> 00:24:18.880 Ola, but they were telling his lawyer that he didn’t have a right to a lawyer, which is false. 00:24:18.880 --> 00:24:23.280 Ecuador law says you are allowed immediate access to a lawyer when you are arrested. In fact, 00:24:23.280 --> 00:24:27.360 they're even supposed to tell you that you have a right to a lawyer while being arrested. They 00:24:27.360 --> 00:24:32.160 were telling both Ola and his lawyer that he didn’t have a right to a lawyer. It just 00:24:32.160 --> 00:24:36.640 seems incredibly strange. If he’s arrested, then arrest him and take him to jail and tell him what 00:24:36.640 --> 00:24:41.120 he did wrong. What’s with all this waiting around and no explanation and violating his 00:24:41.120 --> 00:24:45.520 rights in so many different ways? I mean, how would you hold up sitting in the back 00:24:45.520 --> 00:24:53.200 of a cop car in a dark parking garage, waiting quietly in the dark all night? 00:24:53.200 --> 00:25:00.960 OLA: I started getting really scared. Before I was more confused, but at this point I was 00:25:00.960 --> 00:25:06.080 really scared because no one knew where I was. The lawyers had never showed up, 00:25:06.080 --> 00:25:11.760 and I was sitting here in the darkness and no one was around. I was wondering that — because Ecuador 00:25:11.760 --> 00:25:18.160 has a history of police disappearing people. There has been some famous cases that I knew about, 00:25:18.160 --> 00:25:24.080 and at that point I was thinking that, okay, this is the time when I disappear, when I get 00:25:24.080 --> 00:25:30.480 thrown into a ditch somewhere, and no one knows what — no one will ever find out what happened. 00:25:30.480 --> 00:25:34.240 JACK: So, you stayed all night in the back of a car? 00:25:34.240 --> 00:25:37.200 OLA: No; only until 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning. 00:25:37.200 --> 00:25:40.800 JACK: Okay, but I just don’t understand what the other person in the car was doing 00:25:40.800 --> 00:25:43.351 the whole time. Were they just staring out the window, waiting? 00:25:43.351 --> 00:25:46.200 OLA: No, they were just sitting there, yeah. They were just sitting… 00:25:46.200 --> 00:25:50.720 JACK: What a boring job. Whatever they were doing is just so boring. 00:25:50.720 --> 00:25:53.840 OLA: I mean, I think at some point they went out and they were talking a little bit, 00:25:53.840 --> 00:25:57.280 but then they came back and they were sitting there. They didn’t have any radio on, 00:25:57.280 --> 00:26:01.520 nothing. They weren't doing anything with their mobile phones, absolutely nothing. 00:26:01.520 --> 00:26:01.755 JACK: Wow. 00:26:01.755 --> 00:26:08.480 OLA: Yeah, definitely not a very interesting job, I can imagine. 00:26:08.480 --> 00:26:12.000 But finally in the middle of the night, around 2:30 or 3:00 in the middle of the night, 00:26:12.000 --> 00:26:16.000 they drove me away from the airport, and we started driving. At this point I wasn’t sure 00:26:16.000 --> 00:26:22.640 if we were driving to my death or driving to somewhere else. After a while, we ended up at 00:26:22.640 --> 00:26:29.440 my apartment building. I live on the fourth floor in an apartment building in the city of Quito. We 00:26:29.440 --> 00:26:36.160 came there, and I could see that there was a bunch of — in Ecuador we have what we called RoboCops, 00:26:36.160 --> 00:26:41.520 and these are the riot cops. They're dressed all in black and they have masks and weapons, and 00:26:41.520 --> 00:26:47.600 they — yeah, they look a little bit like RoboCop. So, there was a bunch of these RoboCops outside 00:26:47.600 --> 00:26:52.400 of my apartment building and other people going in and out. At some point someone came up to me 00:26:52.400 --> 00:26:59.040 in the car when I was sitting there, and they showed me a paper which I didn’t understand, 00:26:59.040 --> 00:27:05.120 and asked me in bad English if I would like to be helpful and allow them into my apartment. 00:27:05.120 --> 00:27:11.280 JACK: Helpful? How about some equal respect here? If you can arrange to have ten cops come to the 00:27:11.280 --> 00:27:16.320 apartment, then you can arrange to have an English translator show up and explain to him what’s going 00:27:16.320 --> 00:27:21.200 on. If you can't give him the courtesy to let him know why he’s being arrested, then why should he 00:27:21.200 --> 00:27:26.240 be helpful to you? Anyway, he refused to let them into his apartment, and he demanded his 00:27:26.240 --> 00:27:31.920 lawyer again. So, at 3:00 a.m. he was sitting in a cop car in front of his apartment for another 00:27:31.920 --> 00:27:36.320 thirty minutes while the police are talking about what they're gonna do. He wasn’t gonna let them 00:27:36.320 --> 00:27:41.040 in the apartment, so they decided to take him somewhere else. [Music] Little did he know, 00:27:41.040 --> 00:27:46.640 as soon as they drove him away, they just broke into his apartment and seized a bunch of stuff. 00:27:46.640 --> 00:27:53.920 OLA: Then they drove me to another place which was some kind of office environment where several 00:27:53.920 --> 00:27:59.760 of the cops were working, and basically I sat there for three hours just without any knowledge, 00:27:59.760 --> 00:28:06.160 no information, no nothing. At some point in the night, around 5:00 in the morning, 00:28:06.160 --> 00:28:10.320 my luggage had arrived to this office and they were going through the luggage, 00:28:10.320 --> 00:28:14.720 but they weren't doing it in front of me. They didn’t ask me to verify anything or anything else 00:28:14.720 --> 00:28:20.240 that I would expect. Then a few minutes before 6:00 in the morning, one of the people turned 00:28:20.240 --> 00:28:28.640 on a TV that was sitting on the wall, and at that point I still didn’t understand what was going on. 00:28:28.640 --> 00:28:35.040 But on the TV they started showing a news show that was showing images of me, including an image 00:28:35.040 --> 00:28:40.960 of me from the evening before, and I could see the word ‘hacker’, I could see the word ‘Russo’, 00:28:40.960 --> 00:28:46.640 which means Russian, and a few other things. They had clearly been taking pictures from my Twitter 00:28:46.640 --> 00:28:51.440 and from previous speaking engagements where I had been publicly giving talks and stuff like 00:28:51.440 --> 00:28:55.840 that. So, at that point I understood that this had something to do with computers, 00:28:55.840 --> 00:29:00.320 but I still didn’t know what they were accusing me of or what was actually happening. 00:29:00.320 --> 00:29:04.960 JACK: What? It appeared that Ola Bini was being arrested because they thought 00:29:04.960 --> 00:29:10.000 he was a Russian hacker? This isn't right. Ola is Swedish, not Russian, 00:29:10.000 --> 00:29:14.160 not affiliated with Russia at all, and he’s not a hacker or a criminal. He’s the president 00:29:14.160 --> 00:29:19.920 of a nonprofit who works on privacy tools. He’s a programmer. This is all very strange, 00:29:19.920 --> 00:29:24.800 and how could the police tell the media what’s going on before even telling him what’s going 00:29:24.800 --> 00:29:29.040 on? It must be so frustrating to find out why you're being arrested by turning on 00:29:29.040 --> 00:29:34.400 the TV and discovering why. So, now it’s 6:00 a.m. and he hasn’t slept all night. 00:29:34.400 --> 00:29:39.440 OLA: No, no, no. No, god no. I mean, the first half of the night I was 00:29:39.440 --> 00:29:46.400 afraid for my life, and then when I came to this office I was just exhausted, 00:29:46.400 --> 00:29:51.600 but I was also confused and didn’t know what was going to happen. At this point still, 00:29:51.600 --> 00:29:54.600 I had not been able to talk to anyone. No one knew where I was. 00:29:54.600 --> 00:29:57.680 JACK: They keep him in this office for a total of four hours, 00:29:57.680 --> 00:30:02.320 then they put him in the back of a cop car and drive him to a jail. It’s more like a 00:30:02.320 --> 00:30:06.560 temporary holding cell. They take him out of the car and walk him into the building. 00:30:06.560 --> 00:30:13.760 OLA: When I came in there, I had the relief of seeing my friend who I also work with, Sada, 00:30:13.760 --> 00:30:19.040 and one of my lawyers that were there waiting for me. But they were not allowed to speak to me, 00:30:19.040 --> 00:30:26.320 and the cops took me directly into the holding cells. [Music] In the holding cells once again, 00:30:26.320 --> 00:30:30.080 they tried to force me into signing papers that I didn’t really understand. They said 00:30:30.080 --> 00:30:34.960 that this was to acknowledge that I had — know my rights, but since I didn’t know 00:30:34.960 --> 00:30:42.000 my rights and clearly they weren't really respecting my rights, they — I didn’t sign 00:30:42.000 --> 00:30:47.680 it. Then they basically threw me into these holding cells which are basically three big 00:30:47.680 --> 00:30:57.440 kind of cement holes with a big door and space for maybe twelve or fifteen people. I was 00:30:57.440 --> 00:31:03.520 sitting there with maybe ten people. This was in the morning, 9:15, Thursday and Friday. So, 00:31:03.520 --> 00:31:08.480 all of these people that had been caught out on parties or for small drug charges or things 00:31:08.480 --> 00:31:13.120 like that. Everyone’s speaking Spanish, and I had no idea what they were saying. 00:31:13.120 --> 00:31:18.320 JACK: So, he sat in this jail — he called it a dungeon — still not sleeping, 00:31:18.320 --> 00:31:23.920 and hours passed by there. Eventually, to his surprise, the Swedish consular shows up. See, 00:31:23.920 --> 00:31:29.040 in Ecuador if a foreigner is arrested, the police have to immediately notify the foreign embassy, 00:31:29.040 --> 00:31:33.040 which the Ecuadorian police didn’t do right away. It wasn’t until the next day that they 00:31:33.040 --> 00:31:37.520 notified the Swedish embassy, which I think should have been a pretty big clue to the 00:31:37.520 --> 00:31:41.440 police that they're not dealing with a Russian; they're dealing with a Swedish man. I mean, 00:31:41.440 --> 00:31:46.880 can you imagine calling the Swedish embassy and say, hello, we’ve arrested a Russian hacker. So, 00:31:46.880 --> 00:31:49.640 this Swedish consular came to the jail to see what was going on. 00:31:49.640 --> 00:31:53.200 OLA: I finally got to talk to him. He didn’t really know what was going on. 00:31:53.200 --> 00:31:57.600 Then finally a criminal lawyer showed up, and — because the other lawyer I got to 00:31:57.600 --> 00:32:00.240 see was a corporate lawyer because we didn’t have any criminal lawyers; 00:32:00.240 --> 00:32:05.680 we didn’t know that we needed criminal lawyers. So, finally at 10:00 or 11:00 I got to speak to 00:32:05.680 --> 00:32:13.040 a criminal lawyer that was assigned to my case. His name is Carlos, Carlos Soria. He told me that 00:32:13.040 --> 00:32:18.800 we have no idea what is going on. They haven't shown him anything. I told him 00:32:18.800 --> 00:32:22.720 the story of everything that had happened, but he couldn't really tell me anything. 00:32:22.720 --> 00:32:28.960 JACK: How frustrating. How infuriating. Back into the holding cell he goes with 00:32:28.960 --> 00:32:33.200 no answers to anything. It’s now been twenty-four hours since his initial arrest, 00:32:33.200 --> 00:32:39.200 and he’s still absolutely clueless as to why he’s arrested. He’s trying to think 00:32:39.200 --> 00:32:43.120 if there’s something that he did that would have caused all this. 00:32:43.120 --> 00:32:46.320 OLA: I was thinking about everything, and I just couldn't make sense of it. 00:32:46.320 --> 00:32:52.960 JACK: He’s now been awake for over thirty hours, tired as hell. But at 11:00 p.m. they 00:32:52.960 --> 00:32:57.200 take him to see the judge. Yeah, at 11:00 p.m., because there’s a legal requirement 00:32:57.200 --> 00:33:01.520 that he must see a judge within twenty-four hours of being arrested. So, it had to be the 00:33:01.520 --> 00:33:06.400 middle of the night, I guess. Anyway, great. This is super. Surely he’ll get some answers 00:33:06.400 --> 00:33:10.960 here. Surely he can see what evidence they have on him and what crime they're saying he did. 00:33:10.960 --> 00:33:18.240 OLA: In Ecuador all the proof is stored in a physical folder called expediente. That’s all 00:33:18.240 --> 00:33:24.160 the evidence, and it’s the prosecutors that are in charge of this expediente where all the proof 00:33:24.160 --> 00:33:31.360 is in. My lawyers had basically gotten to see this expediente five minutes before going in front of 00:33:31.360 --> 00:33:37.520 the judge. So, it was like, okay, how are we gonna make a defense out of this? [Music] Basically 00:33:37.520 --> 00:33:44.960 what we found out was that they had received a phone call to an anonymous tip line saying that 00:33:44.960 --> 00:33:50.000 I was one of the two Russians that the Minister of the Interior had mentioned earlier, 00:33:50.000 --> 00:33:55.840 and that I was escaping to the airport in order to escape from the country. This is 00:33:55.840 --> 00:34:00.960 what they claimed was the whole reason why they arrested me. They had no other evidence. 00:34:00.960 --> 00:34:06.640 They had absolutely nothing. What they accused me of in this hearing in front of the judge 00:34:06.640 --> 00:34:12.880 was an attack against the integrity of computer systems. That’s the name of 00:34:12.880 --> 00:34:18.800 the charge. But they didn’t tell me which computer system, when I had attacked it, 00:34:18.800 --> 00:34:23.680 how I had attacked it. They basically just said, okay, this is the crime you are accused of, 00:34:23.680 --> 00:34:28.800 but they didn’t tell me anything else and there was no information of anything else. 00:34:28.800 --> 00:34:33.120 Basically, my lawyer tried to show that I was a martial artist on the way to Japan 00:34:33.120 --> 00:34:39.600 in a completely legitimate reason for leaving the country, that I was a software developer, 00:34:39.600 --> 00:34:45.040 etc, etc. But at the end of this — I didn’t really understand the discussion, but at the end of this 00:34:45.040 --> 00:34:49.440 the consul turned around to me and said, okay, it looks like you're going to jail. 00:34:49.440 --> 00:34:55.920 JACK: Well, hold on. I do want to ask a question here. The 00:34:55.920 --> 00:35:00.020 fact that they got you as Russian — couldn't you simply say, listen… 00:35:00.020 --> 00:35:00.074 OLA: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s funny. [Crosstalk] 00:35:00.074 --> 00:35:03.280 JACK: I am not Russian. You have the wrong guy. 00:35:03.280 --> 00:35:07.760 You cannot arrest me for being Russian 'cause I’m not Russian. 00:35:07.760 --> 00:35:11.680 OLA: Okay, that is completely true and that’s a very good point, and I forgot to tell you that 00:35:11.680 --> 00:35:19.360 we found some documents later that basically said that the first set of documents say that 00:35:19.360 --> 00:35:25.840 I’m Russian. The next set of documents says that I’m Swiss, because in Spanish, 00:35:25.840 --> 00:35:29.760 Swedish and Swiss are very similar. So, they must have gotten so confused that they first 00:35:29.760 --> 00:35:33.680 thought I was Russian, then Swiss, and then finally they got it right and found out that 00:35:33.680 --> 00:35:39.920 I was Swedish. So, there are documents that show this evolution of understanding 00:35:39.920 --> 00:35:43.320 through the whole story. But, no, they didn’t care about that at all. 00:35:43.320 --> 00:35:48.320 JACK: So, they put him back in the holding cells for the next two days, then they took 00:35:48.320 --> 00:35:52.640 him to prison. I guess they thought he was a flight risk or he would leave the country or 00:35:52.640 --> 00:35:57.600 was going to destroy evidence, so they wanted to keep him in jail until the trial could take place. 00:35:57.600 --> 00:35:59.200 OLA: Yeah, so, they took me there, 00:35:59.200 --> 00:36:07.746 and that’s where I stayed for the next sixty-eight days, in prison. 00:36:07.746 --> 00:36:10.880 JACK: [Music] Holy cow, what is happening here? 00:36:10.880 --> 00:36:17.520 I mean, Ola has done no crime whatsoever, but the police have arrested him at the airport and 00:36:17.520 --> 00:36:23.200 violated so many of his rights and put him in prison with no way out. I mean, 00:36:23.200 --> 00:36:33.040 this could have been you or me. Ola is an innocent person, but now his life is completely ruined. 00:36:33.040 --> 00:36:39.520 OLA: Yeah. So, the prison time is — when I first came there, I had this idea of prison from 00:36:39.520 --> 00:36:44.240 American television series and movies. I thought that it was gonna be a little bit like that. An 00:36:44.240 --> 00:36:50.080 Ecuadorian prison is nothing like that at all. It was complete chaos. The prisoners are basically 00:36:50.080 --> 00:36:57.200 running the place. You get two visitors per week. The water is not drinkable. So, your friends and 00:36:57.200 --> 00:37:03.760 family has to buy water on the outside and send in to you. It was a crazy situation and I was 00:37:03.760 --> 00:37:12.080 lucky to get out of it alive because — so, I was there from April 13 until June 20, and during May 00:37:12.080 --> 00:37:17.600 was a period where Ecuador started having prison riots. The most famous example kicked off in 00:37:17.600 --> 00:37:23.760 one of the big prisons where prisoners killed other prisoners and then hacked off their heads 00:37:23.760 --> 00:37:31.000 and played soccer with their heads. This was happening at the same time as I was in prison. 00:37:31.000 --> 00:37:35.920 JACK: So, the police raided his apartment and took a lot of his computers, and they 00:37:35.920 --> 00:37:40.480 physically took them apart to try to analyze the hard drives and do forensics on them, 00:37:40.480 --> 00:37:46.880 but they were soon met with a huge problem. Ola was a privacy advocate, and he encrypts his hard 00:37:46.880 --> 00:37:51.280 drives and he uses throwaway operating systems and anonymous accounts and stuff like that. The 00:37:51.280 --> 00:37:58.480 police were absolutely no match to his privacy practices. They couldn't get into anything. 00:37:58.480 --> 00:38:02.960 OLA: The thing is, of course, I work with security, so I had encrypted hard drives 00:38:02.960 --> 00:38:07.840 everywhere and everything was encrypted and good passwords. So, they didn’t get anywhere 00:38:07.840 --> 00:38:12.160 with any of that stuff. At that point the prosecutor, he was like — he was asking 00:38:12.160 --> 00:38:18.320 if I would be so kind to collaborate with them, because in Ecuador you don’t have to give up the 00:38:18.320 --> 00:38:23.680 password to your devices if you don’t want to. You have the right to deny that. It’s 00:38:23.680 --> 00:38:27.680 not like in the UK, for example, where they can force you by putting you in prison if you 00:38:27.680 --> 00:38:33.840 don’t give up the passwords. Though, I said if they tell me what they think I have done, 00:38:33.840 --> 00:38:36.800 what I’m accused of, what computer I’m supposed to have broken into… 00:38:36.800 --> 00:38:41.280 JACK: Yeah, that was my first reaction, too. They said, could you be so kind to help us? 00:38:41.280 --> 00:38:41.354 OLA: Exactly. 00:38:41.354 --> 00:38:45.986 JACK: It’s like, well, could you be so kind to tell me why I’m here and talk to me like a person? 00:38:45.986 --> 00:38:48.800 OLA: Exactly, exactly. Yeah, no, no, that’s exactly what we did. 00:38:48.800 --> 00:38:52.240 JACK: Of course, they didn’t want to share any information with him, 00:38:52.240 --> 00:38:55.040 so they were at a standstill and they couldn't get into his devices. 00:38:55.040 --> 00:38:59.760 OLA: In the beginning of May, I was able to go in front of another court 00:38:59.760 --> 00:39:05.520 with three judges at this time to do the appeal. This appeal was specifically not for my — not 00:39:05.520 --> 00:39:12.080 for the whole case, but it was an appeal for the prision preventiva, for the imprisonment. 00:39:12.080 --> 00:39:19.360 We had a long hearing, and in this case it was actually quite good because a lot of people came, 00:39:19.360 --> 00:39:22.240 like a lot of media and a lot of my friends and everything. Everyone 00:39:22.240 --> 00:39:26.240 came to support me. At this point my family — all my family live in Sweden, 00:39:26.240 --> 00:39:30.720 but at this point my mother and father had come, and they were at the hearing and everything. 00:39:30.720 --> 00:39:36.400 So, I was feeling like, okay, this has been three horrible weeks, but at least now I’m gonna get 00:39:36.400 --> 00:39:42.160 some justice because — of course at the next level, obviously, I’m gonna get justice, or at 00:39:42.160 --> 00:39:50.560 least that’s what I thought. So, basically — the prosecution basically said that the case — they 00:39:50.560 --> 00:39:56.960 began by explaining everything that had happened with Julian, and their explanation is that Julian 00:39:56.960 --> 00:40:02.800 was interfering in the affairs of other countries, and that’s why they were drawing him out. Then 00:40:02.800 --> 00:40:07.520 they kind of jumped into this thing that I had visited Julian many times in the embassy, 00:40:07.520 --> 00:40:12.640 but they never really made the connection between anything else. Then, I kid you not, 00:40:12.640 --> 00:40:22.000 I had programming books in my home, and they used these as evidence that I was a dangerous hacker. 00:40:22.000 --> 00:40:27.040 They were not even using the right kinds of books for that stuff. They were just using the basics 00:40:27.040 --> 00:40:34.240 of programming Python or super basic books. Also, yes, I had a few books about WikiLeaks, 00:40:34.240 --> 00:40:40.320 I had a book about Stuxnet, I had a book about the Panama Papers. All of these books were literally 00:40:40.320 --> 00:40:46.640 evidence against me. They literally thought that I was too dangerous to be outside because of the 00:40:46.640 --> 00:40:51.200 books. There was still no evidence against me. There was still no clarification about what 00:40:51.200 --> 00:40:59.506 crime I had committed. At the end of the day, the three judges decided to send me back to prison. 00:40:59.506 --> 00:41:02.960 JACK: [Music] Sheesh, this wasn’t even to determine if he was guilty or innocent. It 00:41:02.960 --> 00:41:07.200 was just to recommend that he come out of prison until he’s found guilty. You know, 00:41:07.200 --> 00:41:15.120 innocent until proven guilty. But no, the judges made him go back to prison and wait for his trial. 00:41:15.120 --> 00:41:22.880 OLA: Then three weeks later we asked for bail, because Ecuador has this law that you have to 00:41:22.880 --> 00:41:28.880 be able to get out of prison on bail unless your crime has more than five years as punishment, 00:41:28.880 --> 00:41:32.880 which mine didn’t. My punishment would have been three to five years in total according 00:41:32.880 --> 00:41:37.920 to what they were accusing me of, this attack against the integrity of computer systems. 00:41:37.920 --> 00:41:43.680 If you have committed a crime against minors or against family members, then you can't get bail, 00:41:43.680 --> 00:41:48.080 and if you tried to do money laundering, you can't get bail. But everyone else 00:41:48.080 --> 00:41:53.680 has the right to get bail, and the only question for the judge would be, okay, 00:41:53.680 --> 00:41:57.840 how big the bail should be. So, we went in front of this judge, and once again 00:41:57.840 --> 00:42:05.520 I had hope because my lawyer told me, legally speaking, there is no way they can deny this. 00:42:05.520 --> 00:42:09.040 At this point they didn’t take me to the courtroom. Instead, I was forced 00:42:09.040 --> 00:42:13.680 to do it from the prison, and they did it in such a way that there was no media allowed 00:42:13.680 --> 00:42:17.760 or anything like that. So, at this point they were trying to hide the whole stuff. Basically, 00:42:17.760 --> 00:42:23.680 what happened was that the judge, she denied the request for bail, but the reason was very 00:42:23.680 --> 00:42:30.080 interesting. She said because the bail has to be proportionate to the amount of victims. 00:42:30.080 --> 00:42:37.040 But what she said is because the prosecutor hasn’t defined what the crime is, she can't know who the 00:42:37.040 --> 00:42:41.040 victims are, and because she can't know who the victims are, she has no way of setting 00:42:41.040 --> 00:42:46.234 the bail amount, and for that reason there was no possibility for me to get bail. So, yeah. So… 00:42:46.234 --> 00:42:50.960 JACK: Wow, that is wild that even the judge doesn't know who you've wronged. 00:42:50.960 --> 00:42:56.560 OLA: Exactly. I’m in the country of insane troll logic at this point. 00:42:56.560 --> 00:43:01.120 JACK: What do you…? Okay, but there — that’s one thing. It’s insane, but there’s another thing that 00:43:01.120 --> 00:43:06.360 I think is a clue here of like, wait a minute, even the judge doesn't know what I’ve done. 00:43:06.360 --> 00:43:07.600 OLA: Exactly. 00:43:07.600 --> 00:43:14.160 JACK: This is a tell. This is a tell of some kind. This tells me that there’s — that 00:43:14.160 --> 00:43:19.440 they're not just keeping it secret from me, but they're keeping it secret from other people, 00:43:19.440 --> 00:43:22.400 and what’s the reason for that? [Crosstalk] Like, you must have thought of that. 00:43:22.400 --> 00:43:27.040 OLA: Well, actually, what I was thinking and what we were all thinking is that they didn’t have a 00:43:27.040 --> 00:43:33.600 crime. They thought that they would be able to arrest me and that they would be able to find 00:43:33.600 --> 00:43:39.440 something later, but they didn’t find something, and that’s why they couldn't actually go forward. 00:43:39.440 --> 00:43:44.960 JACK: This is even more frustrating now. He’s been arrested for some strange, unknown reason, 00:43:44.960 --> 00:43:49.280 maybe only because he knows Julian Assange, and to think about sitting in prison without 00:43:49.280 --> 00:43:54.080 actually committing a crime — the prosecutors said that he was in trouble for an assault on 00:43:54.080 --> 00:43:58.720 the integrity of computer systems, but they didn’t list a victim or show any evidence to 00:43:58.720 --> 00:44:02.880 prove that he’s done such a thing. It’s almost like they made up some crime to 00:44:02.880 --> 00:44:06.800 try to PIN that on him later. At this point he’s been in prison for months. 00:44:06.800 --> 00:44:11.520 OLA: So, anyway, what ended up happening is that we did the final recourse which 00:44:11.520 --> 00:44:14.200 is a constitutional recourse called habeas corpus. 00:44:14.200 --> 00:44:19.040 JACK: Oh, nice. Yeah, habeas corpus is the perfect tool here. It’s the constitutional 00:44:19.040 --> 00:44:23.120 right that protects people who got arrested to challenge the court by 00:44:23.120 --> 00:44:28.720 saying if I’ve committed a crime, I demand you show me proof. If they can't show proof, 00:44:28.720 --> 00:44:32.400 then you could say your rights have been violated, and they could potentially let you go. 00:44:32.400 --> 00:44:37.360 OLA: So, we got in front of three judges once again on the 20th of June, 00:44:37.360 --> 00:44:40.960 and we presented the information about what had happened when I was arrested. 00:44:40.960 --> 00:44:44.320 JACK: His lawyer listed all the violations that took place during his arrest, 00:44:44.320 --> 00:44:48.240 and there were dozens of them; cops didn’t identify themselves, they didn’t say what 00:44:48.240 --> 00:44:52.080 he was charged with, they illegally broke into his apartment and seized his luggage, 00:44:52.080 --> 00:44:54.880 they didn’t tell the Swedish embassy within the twenty-four-hour window, 00:44:54.880 --> 00:44:58.960 and they wouldn't let him have access to his lawyer, and dozens more violations of his rights. 00:44:58.960 --> 00:45:06.000 OLA: Finally — we actually won that one, but they sent me back to prison because it’s a bureaucracy 00:45:06.000 --> 00:45:10.080 and you have to follow the bureaucracy, all the rules of the bureaucracy and all that stuff. So, 00:45:10.080 --> 00:45:16.400 I was sent back to prison. Okay, I won, but I’m still in prison. But then a few hours later, 00:45:16.400 --> 00:45:20.160 like at 10:00, 11:00 in the evening, my lawyers had managed to convince the judges 00:45:20.160 --> 00:45:26.160 to issue an order to immediately release me. [Music] At that point I came out, and 00:45:26.160 --> 00:45:33.840 my friends had organized bodyguards because they were being followed by people. So, 00:45:33.840 --> 00:45:39.520 we got into a car. I had bodyguards. Suddenly I was out, and I can't even describe — it was 00:45:39.520 --> 00:45:44.560 a very weird feeling being outside after seventy days of being stuck in prison. 00:45:44.560 --> 00:45:49.600 JACK: Okay, he’s finally let out of prison, but he’s still facing trial. He still has to 00:45:49.600 --> 00:45:52.800 go to court and plead his side to see if they think he’s guilty or innocent. 00:45:52.800 --> 00:45:56.480 OLA: But the case didn’t go away, because even though they violated my rights, 00:45:56.480 --> 00:46:00.720 habeas corpus is just about fixing the immediate problem. The immediate problem 00:46:00.720 --> 00:46:04.880 was that I was in prison, so because they violated my rights when they arrested me, 00:46:04.880 --> 00:46:10.240 they let me go. But it didn’t have an impact on the rest of the process. The process continued. 00:46:10.240 --> 00:46:14.960 JACK: So, he’s got some rules he has to follow. One, he can't leave the country. Which, okay, 00:46:14.960 --> 00:46:20.320 he’s facing legal issues; I could see that. Two, he’s not allowed to have a bank account, and 00:46:20.320 --> 00:46:26.000 three, he has to check in with the prosecutor’s office every week to show he’s cooperating with 00:46:26.000 --> 00:46:32.000 authorities, like physically show up and check in. He’s still baffled at what’s all this about. He 00:46:32.000 --> 00:46:36.880 hasn’t done anything illegal, so he knows they're not gonna find any crime that he’s committed. But 00:46:36.880 --> 00:46:42.480 at the same time, it’s super scary to face charges when the government is dead set on finding some 00:46:42.480 --> 00:46:48.867 crime that you've done. Why are they dead set on sending him to prison? It’s all a mystery to him. 00:46:48.867 --> 00:46:55.680 OLA: [Music] While I was still in prison, the US sent an official request to interview me. So, 00:46:55.680 --> 00:46:59.440 we said, sure; following the Ecuadorian rules, we're fine. 00:46:59.440 --> 00:47:07.360 But the US withdrew their request. But over the years I have received notifications from Google, 00:47:07.360 --> 00:47:11.920 I received notifications from Automattic, the WordPress company, 00:47:11.920 --> 00:47:17.440 I’ve received notifications from Apple. I don't think I’ve received notifications from Menta. So, 00:47:17.440 --> 00:47:26.080 those three companies at least gave information to the FBI and to the DOJ about my accounts. 00:47:26.080 --> 00:47:32.680 So, somewhere in the background there is a US presence, but we still don’t know exactly why. 00:47:32.680 --> 00:47:36.640 JACK: Man, what is happening? Why are there multiple countries investigating 00:47:36.640 --> 00:47:39.760 him now? Keep in mind, the Ecuadorian authorities never 00:47:39.760 --> 00:47:43.480 gave him back his phone or computers even after being let out of prison. 00:47:43.480 --> 00:47:48.080 OLA: They took all of that from me in the airport. They took everything I had except 00:47:48.080 --> 00:47:53.680 for the clothes I was wearing, including — I mean, I’m one of those weird people that have — I have 00:47:53.680 --> 00:48:01.200 USB drives and YubiKeys around my neck, and they took all of that stuff. But since I have 00:48:01.200 --> 00:48:05.480 good password practices, none of that stuff was enough for them to get into any of my devices. 00:48:05.480 --> 00:48:10.960 JACK: In 2018, what were you doing there to keep safe, right? So, you had YubiKey; 00:48:10.960 --> 00:48:16.320 that’s two-factor authentication. The USB drives around your neck, how are those encrypted? 00:48:16.320 --> 00:48:19.440 OLA: Most of them were Tails drives with persistent modules, 00:48:19.440 --> 00:48:21.800 because I was using Tails a lot for high-sensitive stuff. 00:48:21.800 --> 00:48:24.080 JACK: Tails is a version of the Linux operating system, 00:48:24.080 --> 00:48:29.200 which is a total amnesiac. It’s built so that when you reboot, everything you did gets erased. 00:48:29.200 --> 00:48:33.720 It’s made for extra-sensitive operations or for those who have very strict privacy practices. 00:48:33.720 --> 00:48:38.400 OLA: For the regular computers, I was mostly using Debian versions and I was using just 00:48:38.400 --> 00:48:42.960 standard LUKS for the hard drives. So, it wasn’t anything advanced. I mean, 00:48:42.960 --> 00:48:49.200 basically my passwords are composed of stuff from the YubiKey composed of things that I have in my 00:48:49.200 --> 00:48:54.840 head combined with that to make it stronger, and then I was just using KeePass for everything else. 00:48:54.840 --> 00:48:57.175 JACK: So, you say that… 00:48:57.175 --> 00:48:57.194 OLA: Strange stuff. 00:48:57.194 --> 00:49:00.960 JACK: …you were using Tails a lot for high-sensitive stuff. What was 00:49:00.960 --> 00:49:03.120 some of the high-sensitive stuff you were working on? 00:49:03.120 --> 00:49:08.080 OLA: Well, a lot of that stuff had to do with — like, for example, I was talking to people all 00:49:08.080 --> 00:49:12.320 around the world like Glenn Greenwald, for example. I was in touch with him on and off 00:49:12.320 --> 00:49:17.920 because at one point we were in discussions for me to come in and look at the Snowden 00:49:17.920 --> 00:49:22.400 archives. That never ended up happening, but I was in contact with him, for example, 00:49:22.400 --> 00:49:27.080 and that’s the kind of contact that I don’t really want to do from a normal machine. 00:49:27.080 --> 00:49:32.480 JACK: Well, his privacy practices all paid off big time, because the Ecuadorian authorities 00:49:32.480 --> 00:49:36.160 couldn't get into anything, and the clock was ticking on them to find things, too. 00:49:36.160 --> 00:49:42.160 OLA: In general, the prosecutor and the defense only had ninety days to find evidence. In my 00:49:42.160 --> 00:49:49.520 case it was extended to 120 days, and this time in August was the last month. When August was over, 00:49:49.520 --> 00:49:53.480 they wouldn't have any possibility of finding new evidence and adding new evidence to the process. 00:49:53.480 --> 00:49:57.360 JACK: They were determined to find some evidence on him within the time period, 00:49:57.360 --> 00:50:00.720 but they were really struggling. They were desperately looking for 00:50:00.720 --> 00:50:03.427 something they could find on him to charge him with. 00:50:03.427 --> 00:50:08.400 OLA: [Music] I have been surveiled by different parts of the government. They are always following 00:50:08.400 --> 00:50:16.160 me, sometimes on motorcycles. Sometimes they are in cars with polarized windows and without 00:50:16.160 --> 00:50:20.000 the license plate. They have these very specific cars that are from the 00:50:20.000 --> 00:50:24.400 intelligence department of the judicial police here, and they keep following me. 00:50:24.400 --> 00:50:27.000 JACK: He sent me photos that he’s taken of people following him. 00:50:27.000 --> 00:50:32.720 OLA: One of the pictures you can see — it’s a picture of one of those cars with a guy pushing 00:50:32.720 --> 00:50:38.320 out and holding an antenna outside of the window, and this is one of those, I don't know, meter-long 00:50:38.320 --> 00:50:45.600 antennas. This car with this antenna was standing outside of my home, pointing at my window for like 00:50:45.600 --> 00:50:52.560 thirty minutes. So, they were trying to — I don't know what they were trying to do. The other thing 00:50:52.560 --> 00:50:59.280 that also happened was that in my apartment I started seeing Wi-Fi networks with different 00:50:59.280 --> 00:51:06.080 strange names with my name in them, and I never use my own name in my Wi-Fi names. 00:51:06.080 --> 00:51:11.360 They were coming and going, and it’s clear that the police were trying to convince me to connect 00:51:11.360 --> 00:51:15.600 to these open networks, because they were the only networks that didn’t have any password on them. 00:51:15.600 --> 00:51:18.600 JACK: They were really determined to find something on him. 00:51:18.600 --> 00:51:23.520 OLA: The thing is they managed to get video recordings from the surveillance cameras inside 00:51:23.520 --> 00:51:27.840 of my building. So, at some point when I was standing in front of an elevator, 00:51:27.840 --> 00:51:33.120 I put in my code. I didn’t have a strong PIN code; it was just eight digits, and the cameras 00:51:33.120 --> 00:51:37.840 inside of my building were apparently good enough that they could see the PIN code on my screen. 00:51:37.840 --> 00:51:42.800 JACK: Wow, by looking at the security cameras from his apartment building, 00:51:42.800 --> 00:51:49.040 they figured out his PIN code on his phone. Man, I just got chills listening to that, because now 00:51:49.040 --> 00:51:54.960 I’m realizing that I’ve unlocked my phone a million times in view of a security camera. 00:51:54.960 --> 00:52:01.200 Elevators often have cameras in them, and I pull out my phone in elevators often and check what’s 00:52:01.200 --> 00:52:06.000 going on on my phone. You might say, pssh, I don't need to worry about protecting my 00:52:06.000 --> 00:52:11.120 PIN in front of cameras because I don’t break the law. Yeah, well, Ola didn’t break the law, 00:52:11.120 --> 00:52:15.360 either. What’s your plan when your own government comes after you? The more they 00:52:15.360 --> 00:52:20.240 can look into your private life, the more likely they're gonna find something bad that you did. 00:52:20.240 --> 00:52:28.960 OLA: In August they managed to get into my phone. Of course, the funny part about this is that it’s 00:52:28.960 --> 00:52:34.560 clearly not legal for them to get access to the video cameras that were for our protection 00:52:34.560 --> 00:52:38.720 and use this for this purpose. According to the laws of Ecuador, this is a violation and 00:52:38.720 --> 00:52:44.680 shouldn't have been possible. My phone was taken from me under illegal circumstances. The habeas 00:52:44.680 --> 00:52:49.680 corpus already showed that they were illegal circumstances. So, in theory, the phone shouldn't 00:52:49.680 --> 00:52:55.106 have been possible to use as evidence. But the judges — later on, they ignored all of this. 00:52:55.106 --> 00:52:58.400 JACK: [Music] So, once they got into his phone, they started looking through it. They used a tool 00:52:58.400 --> 00:53:03.200 called Cellebrite to analyze his phone, which is a tool used by law enforcement to extract 00:53:03.200 --> 00:53:10.000 and analyze data from digital devices like phones. So, with this, they were able to grab everything. 00:53:10.000 --> 00:53:14.720 Ola’s lawyers asked for a court date so they could see what the investigators found on the phone, 00:53:14.720 --> 00:53:18.720 and the technician brought the forensic computer into the court room to show them what they found. 00:53:18.720 --> 00:53:21.680 OLA: I can tell you by the way that the version of Cellebrite they were using 00:53:21.680 --> 00:53:26.480 was like seven years old. So, it didn’t have support for Signal, which is where I had most 00:53:26.480 --> 00:53:32.240 of my conversations. But what was interesting was also they basically plugged this phone 00:53:32.240 --> 00:53:37.760 and Cellebrite into a regular desktop computer that was running a cracked version of Windows, 00:53:37.760 --> 00:53:43.680 that was running Word that was expired, and that had like — I think that I could see on the desktop 00:53:43.680 --> 00:53:49.674 about ten different games that was on this machine that they were using to exhibit evidence to us. 00:53:49.674 --> 00:53:54.480 JACK: Games on there — the fact they had games is the funniest part. 00:53:54.480 --> 00:53:58.680 OLA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it’s like — I don't — I didn’t even know what to think about it. 00:53:58.680 --> 00:54:02.640 JACK: I’ll tell you what I think about it. Having outdated forensics tools, unlicensed 00:54:02.640 --> 00:54:08.240 version of Windows, expired Microsoft Word, and video games on this computer indicates to me 00:54:08.240 --> 00:54:15.360 that the forensics team has zero accountability or integrity. They aren't professionals or serious. 00:54:15.360 --> 00:54:18.960 You don’t play video games on a computer that’s collecting evidence for crimes. 00:54:18.960 --> 00:54:24.000 That chain of custody is extremely important, and evidence should be treated carefully and never 00:54:24.000 --> 00:54:28.880 tampered with. Yet, whoever had this computer did not care what the state of their computer was in, 00:54:28.880 --> 00:54:32.320 and probably didn’t care too much about their job, either, or following the rules. 00:54:32.320 --> 00:54:39.120 OLA: Cellebrite had generated a 40,000-page PDF with all the content of my phone, because that’s 00:54:39.120 --> 00:54:43.280 apparently what Cellebrite does. That’s not so helpful. So, we started looking at this from page 00:54:43.280 --> 00:54:50.720 to page to page, and then the prosecutor, he was just like, this is taking too long. Please just 00:54:50.720 --> 00:54:56.960 add all of this to the expediente. What that means is that he basically asked for all those 40,000 00:54:56.960 --> 00:55:04.400 pages to be added as evidence. Obviously, they were nothing sensitive from a security standpoint, 00:55:04.400 --> 00:55:11.600 but they were private conversations with girlfriends, with my family, information about, 00:55:11.600 --> 00:55:16.000 I don't know, health history of my family, stuff like that. So, there were definitely sensitive 00:55:16.000 --> 00:55:20.640 things inside of that, and he was just — let’s add all of it to the pile of evidence. What’s 00:55:20.640 --> 00:55:25.680 important to know here is the expediente is public for anyone. Anyone can go into the prosecutor’s 00:55:25.680 --> 00:55:30.760 office and ask for a copy of any expediente. So, once it’s added there, it’s public forever. 00:55:30.760 --> 00:55:35.040 JACK: They were able to argue that, really, all 40,000 pages should not 00:55:35.040 --> 00:55:38.080 be submitted to public record, and they were able to get it stopped, 00:55:38.080 --> 00:55:41.680 which is good. But then they requested a copy of this document so that they 00:55:41.680 --> 00:55:44.600 could look through it and prepare a defense if there is anything in there. 00:55:44.600 --> 00:55:49.680 OLA: So, yeah. So, we asked to see the evidence on the phone and see if there was anything we 00:55:49.680 --> 00:55:56.160 could use. They responded back that, no, in order to preserve the privacy of the defendant, 00:55:56.160 --> 00:56:02.480 we cannot share the information on this phone with his defense. But it turns out that they 00:56:02.480 --> 00:56:10.400 had access to it. Basically, we found out that the phone and the USB drive is apparently in 00:56:10.400 --> 00:56:16.240 the safe of this woman, Diana Salazar, who is the prosecutor general of the whole country. 00:56:16.240 --> 00:56:20.240 They are apparently in her safe inside of that building, and apparently it’s still 00:56:20.240 --> 00:56:27.280 there. [Music] Then this is when things take a turn, because a few weeks later we find out from 00:56:27.280 --> 00:56:34.400 television — we don’t find out from the legal system. We found out from television that the 00:56:34.400 --> 00:56:40.560 prosecution has found an image on my phone, and this is the image that I shared with you. 00:56:40.560 --> 00:56:45.680 JACK: Okay, let me pull it up. It’s a photo of a computer screen taken by 00:56:45.680 --> 00:56:50.000 a cell phone. It’s poor quality. It looks like a terminal window, 00:56:50.000 --> 00:56:54.960 like maybe a Linux computer. We're looking at the command line here. It looks to me like 00:56:54.960 --> 00:56:59.600 someone’s tried to do a telnet connection to an IP address. It connects and it says, 00:56:59.600 --> 00:57:06.240 you are connected to an ISP in Ecuador called CNT. But then it says, what’s your username? Nothing 00:57:06.240 --> 00:57:12.940 is typed in. Then it times out and kicks him back into the home directory which is called Ola Bini. 00:57:12.940 --> 00:57:16.880 OLA: So, any person with any kind of technical understanding knows that this 00:57:16.880 --> 00:57:22.320 is a telnet connection that — where it asks for the username and no one put anything in, 00:57:22.320 --> 00:57:26.800 and then it times out. That’s exactly what it looks like. But the prosecution 00:57:26.800 --> 00:57:30.800 starts using this, saying that I hacked into the systems of CNT, 00:57:30.800 --> 00:57:37.040 and they claim that this picture is actually the proof that I hacked into their systems. In fact, 00:57:37.040 --> 00:57:43.360 they're so confused that they start asking if this IP address has a username, Ola Bini, on it, 00:57:43.360 --> 00:57:47.440 because they think that the prompt at the end of it is not the prompt on the computer making 00:57:47.440 --> 00:57:52.200 the telnet call. They think it’s the prompt of the computer that is running the IP address. 00:57:52.200 --> 00:57:55.600 JACK: You're making me furious. 00:57:55.600 --> 00:57:56.080 OLA: Yeah. 00:57:56.080 --> 00:58:02.240 JACK: So, here’s my question, though, okay? So, this photo is a — it looks like maybe 00:58:02.240 --> 00:58:06.560 taken by a cell phone, especially if it was found on your phone, of a computer screen, 00:58:06.560 --> 00:58:13.200 'cause I see the reflection of the screen and a shadow and such. So, why did you take this photo? 00:58:13.200 --> 00:58:18.000 OLA: The funny part is — first of all, you can see on the timestamps this log 00:58:18.000 --> 00:58:23.920 information includes the year, which shows that this was taken in October 2015. So, first of all, 00:58:23.920 --> 00:58:30.160 this image has nothing to do with why I was arrested in the first place. Secondly, the 00:58:30.160 --> 00:58:36.160 funny thing is I don't even remember taking this photo. It’s likely that I did take the photo, but 00:58:36.160 --> 00:58:42.400 I don't even remember it. I do know what happened after, because this photo came from WhatsApp, 00:58:42.400 --> 00:58:52.400 and I have a friend — his name is Ricardo, and he’s worked with open source and free software 00:58:52.400 --> 00:58:59.600 in Ecuador for many, many years. In 2015 he had a contract with CNT. He was working with them. 00:58:59.600 --> 00:59:03.920 Basically, the WhatsApp message that I sent with the image is basically, hey, what do you 00:59:03.920 --> 00:59:09.760 think about this, or something in that style. I sent the picture and the response I got says, 00:59:09.760 --> 00:59:15.120 looks like a router to me. I’ll see what I can find out. So, that was the only conversation that 00:59:15.120 --> 00:59:20.880 was around this picture. So, the way I interpret this, since I don't remember taking the picture, 00:59:20.880 --> 00:59:26.160 is that I must have found an open telnet port to the internet, and this is something that is 00:59:26.160 --> 00:59:32.320 not great for a big corporation like CNT. So, I must have thought that, okay, I can tell Ricardo 00:59:32.320 --> 00:59:39.800 about this and he can escalate it to the right person. That’s what I think is what happened. 00:59:39.800 --> 00:59:45.280 JACK: Well, this is it. The Ecuadorian prosecutors thought this was the smoking gun. Clearly he’s 00:59:45.280 --> 00:59:49.840 connected to an ISP in this photo, which clearly he’s not even tried to log into it. I mean, 00:59:49.840 --> 00:59:53.360 if you're gonna attempt to log into something, I would at least think that you would put in your 00:59:53.360 --> 00:59:57.920 username, right? But he doesn't even put in a username to try to log in. But that didn’t 00:59:57.920 --> 01:00:03.120 matter. The prosecutor was going to make this his crime. So, Ecuador was now charging him 01:00:03.120 --> 01:00:08.560 with access without permission to a computer system or telecommunication system. Well, 01:00:08.560 --> 01:00:14.000 in my opinion, this is going to be a slam-dunk case for Ola. He’s being charged with access. 01:00:14.000 --> 01:00:21.360 The photo, the only evidence they have on him, clearly shows he doesn't access it. I mean, 01:00:21.360 --> 01:00:26.080 I’m perplexed by what the government even thinks you've done wrong at this point, 01:00:26.080 --> 01:00:29.120 right? They thought you were a Russian hacker, 01:00:29.120 --> 01:00:35.040 and at this point you're not Russian. They don’t have any evidence of you hacking. So, 01:00:35.040 --> 01:00:39.280 haven't they — don’t they think maybe we just have the wrong guy? Like, let’s really look at 01:00:39.280 --> 01:00:45.360 this analytically. We're not seeing any evidence on this guy. Like, why would they have kept you? 01:00:45.360 --> 01:00:48.280 From their perspective, what do you think was the reason why they were holding you? 01:00:48.280 --> 01:00:55.520 OLA: Well, we had one theory. In March of 2019, there was a very big leak of documents 01:00:55.520 --> 01:01:01.280 in Ecuador called the INA Papers. The INA Papers were basically financial documents 01:01:01.280 --> 01:01:06.880 showing that the president — his name is Lenin Moreno — his family were hiding a lot of money 01:01:06.880 --> 01:01:15.440 in tax paradises and all kinds of bad stuff. Lenin Moreno was furious about these papers, 01:01:15.440 --> 01:01:22.480 and some people say that the reason why Julian was thrown out is because WikiLeaks 01:01:22.480 --> 01:01:27.760 tweeted a link to the INA Papers. Now, the INA Papers didn’t come from WikiLeaks as 01:01:27.760 --> 01:01:36.560 far as we know, but Julian posted a link to it. Lenin Moreno was very upset about this. 01:01:36.560 --> 01:01:41.680 So, basically what we’ve heard is that he told Romo to get him the person responsible 01:01:41.680 --> 01:01:49.680 for this. Now, here is where it gets stupid. The secret intelligence organization in Ecuador was 01:01:49.680 --> 01:01:56.880 called the Senain. So, Senain was basically an internal NSA, an internal CIA, that were 01:01:56.880 --> 01:02:04.480 spying on everyone inside of Ecuador. Senain had a source, a secret source, called El Russo. So, 01:02:04.480 --> 01:02:11.840 that was their name for the source. Apparently, the way we’ve heard it told, is that the whole INA 01:02:11.840 --> 01:02:18.800 Papers thing happened because El Russo published these papers. So, this was an internal scandal 01:02:18.800 --> 01:02:25.114 inside of the Senain doing an attack against the president with these INA Papers. Now… 01:02:25.114 --> 01:02:26.800 JACK: El Russo meaning The Russian. 01:02:26.800 --> 01:02:33.840 OLA: The Russian; exactly. So, basically, what seems to have happened is that Romo went to 01:02:33.840 --> 01:02:40.400 the cops and to everyone saying that, okay, we need El Russo. [Music] Then, the day before I 01:02:40.400 --> 01:02:47.040 was arrested, there was a meeting where some of the cops, high-up cops, presented a photo of me 01:02:47.040 --> 01:02:53.360 saying that I was El Russo. But there were other people around the table that knew who the source 01:02:53.360 --> 01:03:00.640 was and said, no, no, no, he is not El Russo. Romo ignored all of that, and that’s what set in 01:03:00.640 --> 01:03:08.000 motion all of the stuff that happened afterwards. Basically, I became a scapegoat for the president, 01:03:08.000 --> 01:03:11.520 for the whole thing with — actually, I served as a scapegoat for two things. 01:03:11.520 --> 01:03:14.880 First, I served as a scapegoat for the INA Papers, but they never charged me 01:03:14.880 --> 01:03:21.040 with that. They never actually accused me of the INA Papers. But they also used it as a way 01:03:21.040 --> 01:03:25.840 of explaining what happened with Julian, why they threw out Julian. So, basically, 01:03:25.840 --> 01:03:31.680 they were saying that Julian Assange was thrown out of the embassy because he was 01:03:31.680 --> 01:03:38.400 working with Ola Bini in order to destabilize the government. So, I was politically useful for the 01:03:38.400 --> 01:03:44.920 political class in Ecuador to have as an excuse or as a scapegoat for these different events. 01:03:44.920 --> 01:03:48.480 JACK: They were accusing you of destabilizing the government. 01:03:48.480 --> 01:03:52.720 OLA: Yeah, that’s what Romo said in that press conference. 01:03:52.720 --> 01:03:55.560 Legally speaking, I was never accused of that. 01:03:55.560 --> 01:04:02.080 JACK: What an awful situation to be in, to be a political scapegoat. He’s never 01:04:02.080 --> 01:04:07.520 gonna win this. I mean, if the president is like, bring whoever leaked this to justice, 01:04:07.520 --> 01:04:11.840 then the authorities better do something, or they're gonna face embarrassment. So, 01:04:11.840 --> 01:04:17.360 it seems like the authorities just grabbed someone who looked like it just to please the higher-ups, 01:04:17.360 --> 01:04:21.520 that they caught someone. But if he’s found innocent, the higher-ups are gonna get upset 01:04:21.520 --> 01:04:27.280 all over again, so they absolutely must find something Ola is guilty of in order 01:04:27.280 --> 01:04:32.560 to appease the corrupt politicians, and there’s just no winning move for anyone. 01:04:32.560 --> 01:04:35.280 No wonder judges are confused and cops can't figure out what they're supposed 01:04:35.280 --> 01:04:39.120 to do with him. No wonder nobody is explaining anything to him, 01:04:39.120 --> 01:04:45.120 because they purposely arrested the wrong man in order to make him a scapegoat. 01:04:45.120 --> 01:04:52.880 I don't see how this will ever end for Ola. I think he’s gonna be dealing with this for 01:04:52.880 --> 01:04:59.200 decades. He was let out of prison in 2019, but he’s required to check in weekly to the 01:04:59.200 --> 01:05:06.480 prosecutor’s office by going down there in person to show himself. Years go by of him doing that. 01:05:06.480 --> 01:05:15.600 OLA: So, it went really slowly, but finally in January of 2022, we went to trial. At that point, 01:05:15.600 --> 01:05:22.880 my team and me, we had asked some friends around the world to serve as expert witnesses. So, 01:05:22.880 --> 01:05:29.040 I had four friends of mine from different places serve as expert witnesses. One of them is Roger 01:05:29.040 --> 01:05:35.840 Dingledine. He’s one of the co-creators of Tor, and another one is DMA — that was one of the kind 01:05:35.840 --> 01:05:42.560 of original people for cybersecurity; he was the person that ran BUGtrack for a long time — and 01:05:42.560 --> 01:05:48.080 a few other people. Basically, these people — Roger was there because they were saying in the 01:05:48.080 --> 01:05:56.320 accusation that using Tor is a sign of me being a criminal. You only use Tor if you're a criminal. 01:05:56.320 --> 01:06:02.480 So, Roger was there basically to explain that, no, Tor has many uses. The others were there to 01:06:02.480 --> 01:06:11.680 explain how telnet works, how a connection works. You have to realize these judges, they're like 01:06:11.680 --> 01:06:16.394 fifty, sixty years old, all of them. They have absolutely no technical knowledge. My lawyers… 01:06:16.394 --> 01:06:19.200 JACK: It’s not just the judges but the investigators, too, 01:06:19.200 --> 01:06:23.920 had video games on their computers that they were using to investigate your case with. 01:06:23.920 --> 01:06:29.680 OLA: Exactly. No one had any technical understanding. [Music] So, basically, 01:06:29.680 --> 01:06:31.560 this was a big challenge. 01:06:31.560 --> 01:06:36.480 JACK: Guess how long his trial took to complete. Just take a 01:06:36.480 --> 01:06:39.720 wild guess. Go ahead, say a duration of time. 01:06:39.720 --> 01:06:44.960 OLA: We had to pause the trial and then take it up again three times. So, 01:06:44.960 --> 01:06:49.200 the trial finally ended in 2023. So, the whole trial took a year. 01:06:49.200 --> 01:06:53.760 JACK: A whole year. Gah, how excruciating. For a trial to 01:06:53.760 --> 01:06:59.040 last this long with absolutely no evidence on him is absurd. 01:06:59.040 --> 01:07:04.240 OLA: The good thing is that at the end of all this, these three judges, unanimously, 01:07:04.240 --> 01:07:09.680 they declared that I was innocent. So, they — and they made a written declaration that was quite 01:07:09.680 --> 01:07:15.680 good. Because the thing that I’ve been worried about in my case is a bad case not just for me, 01:07:15.680 --> 01:07:20.320 but it’s a very bad case for security, cybersecurity researchers in the country. 01:07:20.320 --> 01:07:25.760 So, when this result came in, I was actually quite happy, because they wrote a lot of stuff 01:07:25.760 --> 01:07:30.400 that would serve as protection for future cybersecurity researchers in the country. 01:07:30.400 --> 01:07:34.560 JACK: Oh yeah, a lot of people speculated that the reason all this happened is because 01:07:34.560 --> 01:07:40.480 Ola is a privacy activist creating tools to keep the government from spying on you. So, 01:07:40.480 --> 01:07:44.960 you could see how this could upset the government. So, he was particularly happy to see that the 01:07:44.960 --> 01:07:49.120 judges used language which would protect future researchers from getting in trouble. 01:07:49.120 --> 01:07:55.760 OLA: [Music] But sadly what ended up happening is that the prosecutors, they appealed the decision. 01:07:55.760 --> 01:08:02.400 JACK: Of course they appealed. They are never going to let him go. They have to 01:08:02.400 --> 01:08:08.480 keep him in legal trouble or else their house of cards is going to fall down. So, 01:08:08.480 --> 01:08:12.560 a new trial date was set, this time for a whole year later. 01:08:12.560 --> 01:08:16.400 OLA: A year ago in — it was in the beginning of April last year; 01:08:16.400 --> 01:08:20.320 I was in front of three judges that were from the provincial level. 01:08:20.320 --> 01:08:26.160 JACK: But this time it didn’t go his way. The judges found him guilty, 01:08:26.160 --> 01:08:30.720 but they didn’t find him guilty of the charge that he was on trial for. He was on trial for 01:08:30.720 --> 01:08:36.080 unauthorized access to a computer, but the judges changed his charge and found him guilty 01:08:36.080 --> 01:08:42.200 of attempted unauthorized access to a computer. They added the attempted part all on their own. 01:08:42.200 --> 01:08:47.120 OLA: So, in Ecuador you're not allowed to change the accusation. If you're accused, 01:08:47.120 --> 01:08:51.840 someone will be convicted for that or they will not be convicted. These judges, 01:08:51.840 --> 01:08:57.440 they did a very bad thing because what they said in their decision is that they said that 01:08:57.440 --> 01:09:02.800 because I had the knowledge to break in, that’s enough to call this an attempt. So, only the fact 01:09:02.800 --> 01:09:08.640 that I had the knowledge was enough to say that this was what — they used the word ‘tentativa’, 01:09:08.640 --> 01:09:16.629 that this was an unauthorized access just because I had the possibility and I knew the tools. 01:09:16.629 --> 01:09:20.880 JACK: Ahh, it’s like a circus, this court. It’s a bunch of clowns running the show. How can the 01:09:20.880 --> 01:09:25.920 prosecutors violate so many of his rights and get away with it? How can the judges change his 01:09:25.920 --> 01:09:30.400 charge and find him guilty of something else entirely? But even all that aside, 01:09:30.400 --> 01:09:35.120 simply having the knowledge of how to do a telnet connection is enough to convict 01:09:35.120 --> 01:09:42.000 someone of attempted hacking in Ecuador? Come on. This is killing me. Of course, 01:09:42.000 --> 01:09:46.880 now he has to appeal this. So, he said to the court, this is ridiculous. Can we please get 01:09:46.880 --> 01:09:51.920 this sorted? You've arrested an innocent man. I’m appealing this. Let’s take this to the next level. 01:09:51.920 --> 01:09:56.960 OLA: We sent in that request for appeal in July of 2024, 01:09:56.960 --> 01:10:03.520 and the judges have not responded since then. So, they are basically just not responding. 01:10:03.520 --> 01:10:09.200 JACK: This is what I mean. He’s never going to escape this legal battle. The authorities, 01:10:09.200 --> 01:10:15.840 the prosecutors, the judges, they all know he’s innocent, but he’s a political scapegoat, 01:10:15.840 --> 01:10:21.600 so he’s got to stay tangled up in this legal battle for optics of some sort, 01:10:21.600 --> 01:10:25.520 and it especially looks good if his last trial found him guilty. So, 01:10:25.520 --> 01:10:29.760 I’m willing to bet there’s never gonna be a new trial for him. He’s gonna remain in 01:10:29.760 --> 01:10:35.360 this limbo of being guilty but also not being in prison for a long time to come. 01:10:35.360 --> 01:10:40.080 OLA: I’ve been in this situation for six years since I came out of prison. For six years 01:10:40.080 --> 01:10:44.560 I’ve been living with constant surveillance and because of this, my friends decided that I needed 01:10:44.560 --> 01:10:50.320 protection, because we don’t know what their goal is. So, I have been living with bodyguards, 01:10:50.320 --> 01:10:56.400 and I don't leave my — I’m not allowed to leave my apartment without bodyguards, basically. So, 01:10:56.400 --> 01:11:00.720 I’ve been living like that for six years now. They are so afraid of losing face, 01:11:00.720 --> 01:11:04.080 so they don’t want to stop now because they're afraid that they will look bad. 01:11:04.080 --> 01:11:08.240 So, that’s why this process continues, because all of these powerful people — the 01:11:08.240 --> 01:11:12.400 president of the country literally went out on public television saying that I 01:11:12.400 --> 01:11:19.040 was a criminal. While I was in prison — this was in April of 2019. I was in 01:11:19.040 --> 01:11:26.320 prison and he was saying that I was hacking in the airport while — when I was arrested. 01:11:26.320 --> 01:11:31.200 That’s what he literally said to the whole country. Of course, we have pictures that 01:11:31.200 --> 01:11:36.960 show that when I was arrested, I was reading a book. So, unless you call it hacking to read a 01:11:36.960 --> 01:11:42.400 book — yeah. Then he was also saying that I didn’t have any training equipment with me, 01:11:42.400 --> 01:11:47.840 but actually in the lists that the police made of all my belongings is all of my training equipment. 01:11:47.840 --> 01:11:52.560 So, when the president of the country goes out and lies to the whole population about you, 01:11:52.560 --> 01:11:58.880 it’s a position where they can lose a lot of face. It wasn’t just him; it was Romo and many 01:11:58.880 --> 01:12:04.720 other people that have gone out publicly and put their name on the fact that they think that I am 01:12:04.720 --> 01:12:12.640 a criminal. So, for this reason I’ve been stuck in this, and I don't know when it’s gonna end, 01:12:12.640 --> 01:12:19.120 to be honest, but I believe that honestly they would never have done this now. But 01:12:19.120 --> 01:12:22.720 since they're stuck in the situation, they just don’t want to lose face. 01:12:22.720 --> 01:12:25.320 JACK: Can you leave the country now? 01:12:25.320 --> 01:12:30.400 OLA: No, no, no, and I still have to present myself at the prosecutor’s 01:12:30.400 --> 01:12:36.320 office every week. I still have no access to my bank accounts. I’m basically living with 01:12:36.320 --> 01:12:40.800 the help of my friends because I use their bank accounts to be able to pay things. 01:12:40.800 --> 01:12:43.520 JACK: What is the public opinion of you? 01:12:43.520 --> 01:12:48.560 OLA: That’s a great question, and from the beginning I had a lot of — so, I’m very lucky 01:12:48.560 --> 01:12:53.040 because I have a lot of international friends. I have friends all around the world. When I was 01:12:53.040 --> 01:12:58.960 arrested, a lot of the international community immediately came out to support me. The EFF has 01:12:58.960 --> 01:13:04.640 been particularly supportive, and the Tor Project, because those are the people I worked closely 01:13:04.640 --> 01:13:12.000 with, and we know each other. So — but Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch — there’s 01:13:12.000 --> 01:13:15.920 been more than a hundred different international organizations that have come out in my support, 01:13:15.920 --> 01:13:22.880 and they came out in my support immediately, and it was very heartening to feel that support 01:13:22.880 --> 01:13:29.520 when I was still in prison and worried about what was gonna happen. Here in Ecuador, it’s changed. 01:13:29.520 --> 01:13:37.280 Basically, from the beginning, the government had all the narrative because I wasn’t outside. 01:13:37.280 --> 01:13:41.840 I couldn't do any interviews. I wasn’t allowed to talk to the press or anything like that. So, 01:13:41.840 --> 01:13:46.800 during the first year or so, everyone was like, oh, you're that hacker. Basically, 01:13:46.800 --> 01:13:54.800 that’s what was happening in the minds of basically everyone. But I’ve had a team helping me 01:13:54.800 --> 01:13:59.760 that was helping me with the defense. They were also giving advice on how to change the public 01:13:59.760 --> 01:14:07.040 opinion, on how to do interviews in a good way. I’m really, really happy to say that basically 01:14:07.040 --> 01:14:11.680 most of the population in Ecuador are actually on my side at this point. They just think about 01:14:11.680 --> 01:14:17.760 me as the poor software developer that got thrown in prison by the previous government. 01:14:17.760 --> 01:14:21.520 So, right now I’m feeling very supported, and actually, 01:14:21.520 --> 01:14:27.120 that’s why — so, I told you I have the NGO, but actually I run another organization as well, 01:14:27.120 --> 01:14:34.000 which is called Seguridad Digital Ecuador, which is basically a cybersecurity company. We do both 01:14:34.000 --> 01:14:39.760 offensive security work and defensive security work. For the last year or so, I’ve been able 01:14:39.760 --> 01:14:46.800 to find work doing that kind of stuff to finance the NGO on the side. The fact that I’m able to 01:14:46.800 --> 01:14:52.160 do that kind of work and people are comfortable allowing me to do penetration testing or security 01:14:52.160 --> 01:14:56.800 audits without any trouble means that they don’t really believe any of the accusations. 01:14:56.800 --> 01:14:59.800 JACK: Are you recognized on the street in Ecuador? 01:14:59.800 --> 01:15:04.240 OLA: Oh yeah, all the time, all the time. Yesterday I was at an event and 01:15:04.240 --> 01:15:07.520 I spent probably thirty minutes with people taking pictures together with 01:15:07.520 --> 01:15:13.200 me. I get regularly recognized when I go to the supermarket or anything like that. 01:15:13.200 --> 01:15:18.960 JACK: Ola lives in fear of the possibility that any day they might suddenly deny his appeal and 01:15:18.960 --> 01:15:24.080 immediately take him to prison. After all, he was found guilty of attempted hacking. So, 01:15:24.080 --> 01:15:28.480 it’s possible the police could just come and lock him up at any moment. This kind of stuff 01:15:28.480 --> 01:15:32.560 gives him panic attacks when he starts thinking about it. It’s really hard to get to the truth 01:15:32.560 --> 01:15:39.040 of this story. To figure out exactly what it is that you're being charged of and what they think 01:15:39.040 --> 01:15:45.920 you're guilty of is still not even entirely clear, that you're — they're accusing you of 01:15:45.920 --> 01:15:51.280 attempting hacking of — into what? What was my target? Who did I — who are the victims? 01:15:51.280 --> 01:15:56.240 Bring the victim forward. So, if that’s not the case — if it is because, well, 01:15:56.240 --> 01:16:00.560 the president doesn't like whistleblowers and they're just gonna blame you for being 01:16:00.560 --> 01:16:06.000 a whistleblower and now that it’s turned out that you're not the actual whistleblower, 01:16:06.000 --> 01:16:11.600 the government doesn't want to be embarrassed for saying publicly that you're the one who did it, 01:16:11.600 --> 01:16:17.600 and so, we're just going to carry on with it anyway is a whole ‘nother world of — it’s 01:16:17.600 --> 01:16:22.640 almost conspiracy-theory stuff. Imagine what the government thinks without actually knowing what 01:16:22.640 --> 01:16:26.720 the government thinks; you're just making stuff up at that point. I hate to indulge in that, 01:16:26.720 --> 01:16:31.520 but there’s no other road here that I can go down to be — to make sense of this story. 01:16:31.520 --> 01:16:36.640 OLA: Yeah, I completely feel you. I completely understand you, because to be honest, I’m not 01:16:36.640 --> 01:16:40.560 sure if I buy any of the explanations I’ve given you. Like, these are the explanations 01:16:40.560 --> 01:16:46.400 that we have any kind of possibility that they might be true, but I don't know if they're true, 01:16:46.400 --> 01:16:51.440 and they don’t explain some other stuff that we’ve heard. For example, we’ve heard that CNT 01:16:51.440 --> 01:16:56.960 was very close to the US embassy, and that the US embassy instructed CNT to continue with the 01:16:56.960 --> 01:17:03.040 case against me, for example. We’ve heard other things that keep happening that, to be honest, 01:17:03.040 --> 01:17:12.560 don’t necessarily explain everything. One example is a journalist actually published photographs, 01:17:12.560 --> 01:17:19.360 and I can identify that these photographs were taken weeks before I was arrested. 01:17:19.360 --> 01:17:22.960 If I was under surveillance long before I was arrested, that means that the whole 01:17:22.960 --> 01:17:27.840 story about Maria Paula Romo and the INA Papers and all that stuff must be false. There must be 01:17:27.840 --> 01:17:32.240 something else behind this. Sadly, we’ve done freedom of information requests and 01:17:32.240 --> 01:17:37.760 we’ve asked all the government entities about what information they have about me, and they 01:17:37.760 --> 01:17:42.960 all responded that they have no information about me, including the cops that are surveiling me have 01:17:42.960 --> 01:17:49.280 no information about me. [Music] So, I mean, this is the kind of thing that I lie awake 01:17:49.280 --> 01:17:54.960 during nights trying to figure out. Like, what — why did they do this? What was the purpose, 01:17:54.960 --> 01:18:00.560 and what are they thinking? Especially the constant surveillance — now, six years later, 01:18:00.560 --> 01:18:06.960 why are they still keeping me under surveillance? It must cost them so much money. 01:18:06.960 --> 01:18:14.800 JACK: Have you heard of the book The Trial by Franz Kafka? It’s a fictional story and 01:18:14.800 --> 01:18:21.920 meant to be totally absurd, but it’s almost the identical story of Ola Bini. In the book 01:18:21.920 --> 01:18:26.720 The Trial, a man named K. is arrested, and they don’t tell him why. In fact, 01:18:26.720 --> 01:18:31.760 they make him feel bad for even asking questions. The people arresting him say it’s not their job 01:18:31.760 --> 01:18:35.840 to say why he’s under arrest. They're just carrying out orders to arrest him. So, they 01:18:35.840 --> 01:18:39.840 didn’t even know why themselves. They tell him, well, you'll learn everything at your hearing, 01:18:39.840 --> 01:18:43.840 but when he goes to his hearing, K. doesn't learn anything about why he’s been arrested. 01:18:43.840 --> 01:18:48.160 Instead they tell him, well, you'll find out at your trial. But then they tell him his trial is 01:18:48.160 --> 01:18:53.120 super far into the future. In the meantime they let him go home and do his business as usual. 01:18:53.120 --> 01:18:58.320 So, he’s stuck in this space that they say he’s done something illegal, but they won't say what 01:18:58.320 --> 01:19:05.200 with a looming trial far off into the future. In the book, K. stays locked in this legal battle 01:19:05.200 --> 01:19:10.880 without ever knowing what he did wrong until he dies. Part of why I’m so frustrated about 01:19:10.880 --> 01:19:16.880 Ola’s story is because it feels like no one has accountability for his situation. The cops didn’t 01:19:16.880 --> 01:19:20.720 know why they arrested him, so he can't get clarity there. The prosecutors weren't sure, 01:19:20.720 --> 01:19:24.320 either. They were probably just following orders, too. The judges were also in the 01:19:24.320 --> 01:19:30.240 dark. When bureaucracy becomes that thick, where you can't find anyone accountable, 01:19:30.240 --> 01:19:35.440 then you face big problems like this. Innocent people start losing their freedom. 01:19:35.440 --> 01:19:40.240 Because if everyone’s just following orders and no one takes responsibility or is accountable, 01:19:40.240 --> 01:19:46.880 then where does truth fit into anything? In my opinion, this Ola Bini case is frivolous 01:19:46.880 --> 01:19:51.440 not because it’s weak but because it was never meant to win. The main objective of 01:19:51.440 --> 01:19:57.520 a frivolous case is to waste someone’s time, money, or energy through court, 01:19:57.520 --> 01:20:01.680 and that’s what makes it so dangerous. You and I can't file a frivolous case to waste 01:20:01.680 --> 01:20:06.240 someone else’s money, but the government can do it, and here’s an example of them doing 01:20:06.240 --> 01:20:12.640 it. They use the process as punishment when they want to hurt someone but know 01:20:12.640 --> 01:20:18.960 they can't win. They just do this. I’m still wondering if this is a battle over privacy. 01:20:18.960 --> 01:20:24.320 If Ola was helping people stay private and secure and harder to surveil, then I could 01:20:24.320 --> 01:20:28.640 see how governments could be upset about that, and maybe they thought they could arrest him and 01:20:28.640 --> 01:20:33.600 find something later to charge him with, but were no match for his own privacy practices. 01:20:33.600 --> 01:20:38.560 A lot of people think that’s the reason why he was arrested, and it’s scary to think that those 01:20:38.560 --> 01:20:45.840 helping us be more private can face legal troubles like this. It’s also a bit ironic that Julian 01:20:45.840 --> 01:20:51.120 Assange was confined to the Ecuadorian embassy for seven years until he was forced out, and now 01:20:51.120 --> 01:20:57.520 Ola Bini, his friend, has been confined to Ecuador for over six years now, unable to leave, forced to 01:20:57.520 --> 01:21:05.200 stay there by the government. In 2021, there were elections for a new president in Ecuador. By that 01:21:05.200 --> 01:21:10.560 time, Lenin Moreno, the sitting president, had a disastrously low approval rating of nine percent. 01:21:10.560 --> 01:21:16.800 He didn’t even try to run. In 2023, Diana Salazar, Ecuador’s attorney general, 01:21:16.800 --> 01:21:21.440 brought forth charges against the ex-president, Lenin Moreno. By the way, she’s the same person 01:21:21.440 --> 01:21:26.880 who supposedly has Ola’s phone in her safe. She’s alleging that Lenin Moreno conducted 01:21:26.880 --> 01:21:32.240 corruption over the building of some hydroelectric plants. So, now the ex-president has his own legal 01:21:32.240 --> 01:21:37.360 problems where he has to do what the court says. He even has to appear before a prosecutor every 01:21:37.360 --> 01:21:43.600 few weeks just like Ola has to, and that’s where we're at today. Both Ola and the ex-president 01:21:43.600 --> 01:21:48.800 are waiting for the next steps in their legal battles, and we’ll see where they both end up. 01:21:48.800 --> 01:21:54.720 But I sure hope that Ola gets out of all this soon. He didn’t break any systems, 01:21:54.720 --> 01:22:01.360 but the system tried to break him. Maybe it’s still trying to do that. But as Kafka wrote, 01:22:01.360 --> 01:22:13.120 logic may indeed be unshakable, but it cannot withstand a man who wants to live. 01:22:13.120 --> 01:22:18.240 (Outro): [Outro music] 01:22:18.240 --> 01:22:22.080 Thank you so much to Ola Bini for coming on the show and telling us this crazy story. I 01:22:22.080 --> 01:22:25.600 hope he gets his charges dropped soon and can travel outside Ecuador again 01:22:25.600 --> 01:22:30.160 someday and not have to worry about this anymore. This episode was created by me, 01:22:30.160 --> 01:22:35.600 the Ctrl+Alt delinquent, Jack Rhysider. Our editor is the zero-day Zorro, Tristan Ledger, 01:22:35.600 --> 01:22:40.400 mixing by Proximity Sound, and our intro music is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Remember, 01:22:40.400 --> 01:22:45.920 kids, privacy isn't just something you do once. It’s a lifestyle. It’s like, if you forget to 01:22:45.920 --> 01:22:55.280 put your pants on one day, people are gonna see your junk. So, cover up. This is Darknet Diaries.