Name: The Slow-Motion Tragedy of Ola Bini's Trial
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The Slow-Motion Tragedy of Ola Bini's Trial

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Email updates on news, actions,and events in your area.DEEPLINKS BLOGShare ItEFF has been tracking the arrest, detention, and subsequent investigation of Ola Bini since its . Bini, a Swedish-born open-source developer, was arrested in Ecuador's Quito Airport in a flurry of media attention in April 2019. He was held without trial for ten weeks while prosecutors seized and pored over his technology, his business, and his private communications, looking for evidence attaching him to an alleged conspiracy to destabilize the Ecuadorean government.Now, after months of delay, an Ecuadorean pre-trial judge has failed&nbsp; – despite Bini's defense documenting over hundred procedural and civil liberty violations made in the course of the investigation. EFF was one of the many human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, who were refused permission by the judge to act as observers at Wednesday's hearing.Bini, a Swedish-born open-source developer, was seized by police at Quito Airport shortly after Ecuador's Interior Minister, Maria Paula Romo, held a press conference warning the country of an imminent cyber-attack. Romo spoke hours after the government had ejected Julian Assange from Ecuador's London Embassy, and claimed that a group of Russians and Wikileaks-connected hackers were in the country, planning an attack in retaliation for the eviction. No further details of this sabotage plot were ever revealed, nor has it been explained how the Minister knew of the gangs' plans in advance. Instead, only Bini was detained, imprisoned, and held in detention for 71 days without charge until a provincial court, facing a habeas corpus order, declared his imprisonment unlawful and released him to his friends and family. (Romo was as minister last month for ordering the use of tear gas against anti-government protestors.)EFF to investigate complaints of injustice in the case in August 2019. We that the Bini affair had the sadly familiar hallmark of a politicized "hacker panic" where media depictions of hacking super-criminals and overbroad cyber-crime laws together encourage unjust prosecutions when the political and social atmosphere demands it. (EFF's founding in 1990 was in part due to a notorious, and similar, case pursued in the United States by the Secret Service, documented in Bruce Sterling's .)While the Ecuadorian government continues to portray him to journalists as a Wikileaks-employed malicious cybercriminal, his reputation outside the prosecution is very different. An advocate for a secure and open Internet and computer language expert, Bini is primarily known for his non-profit work on the secure communication protocol, OTP, and contributions to the Java implementation of the Ruby programming language. He has also contributed to EFF's Certbot project, which provides easy-to-use security for millions of websites. He moved to Ecuador during his employment at the global consultancy ThoughtWorks, which has an office in the country's capital.After several months of poring over his devices, prosecutors have been able to provide only one piece of supposedly incriminating data: , taken by Bini himself and sent to a colleague, that shows the telnet login screen of a router. From the context, it's clear that Bini was expressing surprise that the telco router was not firewalled, and was seeking to draw attention to this potential security issue. Bini did not go further than the login prompt in his investigation of the open machine.Defense and prosecution will now make arguments on the admissibility of this and other non-technical evidence, and the judge will determine if and when Bini's case will progress to a full trial in the New Year.We, once again, urge Ecuador's judiciary to impartially consider the shaky grounds for this case, and divorce their deliberations from the politicized framing that has surrounded this prosecution from the start.Share ItIn a new round of talks this week to formulate a , EFF is calling for strictly limiting the scope of the convention’s international cooperation provisions and safeguards to ensure that states respect human rights when responding to legal assistance requests.EFF is among a group of ...Even in the face of strong public protest over a set of proposed revisions to criminal laws that infringe Indonesians’ free expression rights, the Indonesian Ministry of Law and Human Rights last month that threatens to further...The UK government has had to revise its into a proposal that wouldn’t harm users’ basic rights. It has failed to do so, and the bill should be scrapped. The current bill is a threat to free expression, and it undermines...EFF joined the Association of Progressive Communications (APC) and other digital rights organizations from around the world, urging the Indian government to withdraw its new amendment to Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code (2021 IT Rules). EFF ...The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Court that a seven-month ban on Twitter by Nigerian authorities in 2021 was unlawful and infringed freedom of expression and access to media. , which is a political and economic union of fifteen West African countries, has...In a letter to the Indian Government, EFF and partner digital rights organizations from around the world called on the Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology to withdraw the so-called traceability requirement under its Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code (2021 IT Rules). The Rules compel private end-to-end...Panamá’s mobile internet service providers have improved their commitments to transparency and user privacy, according to the of ’s ¿Quien Defiende Tus Datos? (“Who Defends Your Data?”) report. The third edition, published today shows general progress in companies’ data protection policies and their public commitment to...EFF, Article 19, Fundación Karisma, and Privacy International, represented by Berkeley Law’s , urged the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to rule that Colombia’s existing legal framework regulating intelligence activities, and the unlawful and arbitrary surveillance of members of the Jose Alvear Restrepo Lawyers Collective...Peru’s top two telecom operators Movistar (Telefónica) and Claro (América Móvil) continued to earn high marks for being transparent about government requests for user data, while competitors Bitel (Viettel) and Entel slightly improved practices promoting human rights, but in general lagged behind, according to a new ...Download the reportLatin American countries have a choice to make in the coming months—whether to accede to a new set of rules for coordinating and cooperating with each other and nations around the world on criminal...Share It

Email updates on news, actions,and events in your area.DEEPLINKS BLOGShare ItEFF has been tracking the arrest, detention, and subsequent investigation of Ola Bini since its . Bini, a Swedish-born open-source developer, was arrested in Ecuador's Quito Airport in a flurry of media attention in April 2019. He was held without trial for ten weeks while prosecutors seized and pored over his technology, his business, and his private communications, looking for evidence attaching him to an alleged conspiracy to destabilize the Ecuadorean government.Now, after months of delay, an Ecuadorean...

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The Slow-Motion Tragedy of Ola Bini's Trial

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