 OK, who is Ola Bini? I'm Ola Bini. I'm a Swedish developer. I've lived in Ecuador since 2013, and I consider Ecuador my home. I've been a developer for close to 30 years. The developer means that I write software programs. For the last 10 years or so, I have been focused primarily on developing software related to security and privacy. The kind of programs that I develop are things that I give away for free for everyone. So I want to protect the privacy and the security of everyone on the planet, not just specific people that pay me. So that's really who I am, or part of who I am, of course, my job, and this is not. It doesn't define everything that I am, of course. Since April 2019, I've been under investigation and then charged in a criminal procedure here in Ecuador. And I'm still not free from that procedure. OK, number two, can you explain the motives of the Ecuadorian for pressing charges against you? I actually have no idea. I really wish I could explain the motives. I have been spending nine months now trying to figure out why they are doing this. Me and my legal team and my friends, we have a lot of guesses about why they're doing this. But to be clear, they have never said their real motivation. When I was first arrested, I was arrested on the charges of impacting the integrity of computer systems. But they never actually said which computer systems I have been attacking in any way. They never actually asked me any questions. They never interviewed me over the whole time when I was in prison. Up until the end of the instance from fiscal, there has never been an official interview of me where they've asked any questions. And of course, in media and in other places, both Maria Palaromo, the minister of the interior, well, previously minister of the interior and now minister of the government, and the president of the Republic, I don't know, have both made a lot of pronouncements about saying that I've done several things in tuning. I have worked together with the former foreign minister. We have the patinium to the state who likes the government. The president also said that I was actually caught in the airport in the process of hacking systems that I've been hacking computer systems, telephone systems, and many other things. They said that I was doing that when I was captured in the airport. Of course, the official statements from the police officers that captured me and also the videotapes from the airport show that I was actually reading a book. So all of these things are very, very weird. The government has also made connections to Julian Assange. And of course, when I was taken at the airport, it was the same day as Julian Assange was actually thrown out of the exploration embassy and given to the British police. I'm only a friend of Julian Assange. I've never worked with him on anything or with Wikileaks on anything, but they claim that I have worked together with him to disable his efforts. However, none of these accusations have ever been presented with any evidence. It's something that the prosecutor of the case, he's been saying it in every hearing we've had, but he only refers to what Daniel Moreno has said in public statements. They've never provided any evidence for any of this. So from my perspective, if I were to guess, the fact that I'm friends with Julian, that I visited him in the embassy, might be one reason. Another reason might be that I work on digital human rights. A lot of governments don't like people working on encryption, working on digital human rights. And you can see this around the world that there's been an harassment of lots of different people doing legitimate security investigation and work and actually facing pretty much all these questions. Nine months have passed since you were arrested in airport in Quito. In legal terms, what are you being accused of? Okay, so in legal terms, my current accusation is different from the one when I was arrested. When I was arrested, they didn't have an accusation and about 30 hours after my arrest, they finally charged me with all the possible crimes, number 232, which is this attack on the integrity of computer systems. But as I mentioned, they never actually specified which computer systems I attacked anyway. Two days before the end of the Instructional Fiscal on the 29th of August, they actually had a hearing where they changed the charges to another judge which has the number 234. 234 is the unauthorized access to a computer system. And what they claimed is that they have an image that shows that I broke into a computer system owned by the C&T in conjunction with Petriak-Oluwara. Of course, the picture in question, first of all, the picture in question is just a picture of text. So you could say whatever, it doesn't actually prove anything. In fact, the technical experts from the prosecution side have already made a conclusion that they can't actually make any informatic, they can't extract any informatic data from it because it's not informatic evidence. However, the government is moving ahead with this and they also have now an accusation from C&T based on this. They still claim that this proves that I actually entered into C&T system even though the image in question, if you assume that the image actually shows something that happened, it actually doesn't show me entering username, it doesn't show me entering a password, it just shows like going to the first page and then doing nothing. So this is what they claim my crime is. So this is of course very, very different from what they arrested me for, which was like attacking the integrity of computer systems and impacting the integrity of the Ecuadorian government and working together with many previous Ecuadorian officials in order to, I don't know, sort of revolution or something like this. They've said a lot of many things but what they're now saying is very small. And interestingly enough, they claim, of course, from the beginning that I was working with Patino, they claim that I worked with Rafael Correa in order to do these things, but the accusation of intrusion is actually for October 2015 against the C&T, which of course was during Correa's time and C&T of course is a public company so if they needed anything from inside of C&T, they would presumably have easier ways of doing it than trying to get someone like me to break into it. Okay, number four. Recently it was announced that there were other surveillance near your house. What irregularities have there been in your case and what rights of yours have been violated? Wow. I'm sorry, but what rights of mine have been violated? That should be more or less all of them repeatedly and in terms of all the violations, I have to admit, I don't remember all of them because we're talking most timely counted, I think we were up in over 120 different specific violations of my rights, violations of due process and so on and so on. When it comes to the audio surveillance, I suspect you refer to the image that my lawyer tweeted out last week of two people sitting in a car outside of my house with the antenna pointing out of it. We don't know if this is audio surveillance. We don't know what kind of surveillance this antenna was used for. There are several different possibilities including surveillance of phone traffic, surveillance of wifi or other biographies. So we don't know if it was audio surveillance or something completely different. We do know that they keep following us both me and my lawyers and my friends have been repeatedly followed. Most days there is car support outside of my building following me when I leave, when I go to work, when I go somewhere else. Sometimes the surveillance is more heavy, sometimes they're not there, but in general since I came out of prison over six months ago, they are still following me almost everywhere. As far as we know, they don't have any legal right to do that. In terms of other violations, of course, my violations started on the same day when I was arrested. I was arrested at the airport between 3 and 3.15 in the afternoon. And at that point as we found out later, the actual orders to detain me were happening less than an hour before, but we also have evidence that I was followed at the airport even before then. I was detained without a translator, without getting access to it all year, without at any point being told why I was detained. I was taken away from the airport and then back to the airport during the eight hour window of the first detention, which is, so this kind of, I don't remember the name of it, but this first eight hour detention is not actually supposed to be a detention. It's like a holding order. But a holding order has to be two different things as far as I understand. The first one is it has to be in the same place. So you can't take me away from there and then take me back, then the holding order is over. So by taking me out of the airport and then back again, they actually broke the holding order. Secondly, the holding order is supposed to hold someone at the place where a crime was committed. And of course, the airport was not where they claim that any of the crimes were committed. So for these and many other reasons, this holding order was not actually a holding order, but it was actually an illegal detention. When I was finally officially detained on an order from my judge at between 11 and 11.10 in the evening, I still did not have a lawyer. I still did not have a translator. They claim that they read me my rights, but actually I didn't understand Spanish enough and they tried to read it in English. Their English was so bad that I couldn't understand what they were saying. They denied me calls to family, they denied me calls to lawyer and they never notified the Swedish embassy that my arrest, which is something that you have to do according to the constitution. They then held me outside of public detention facilities until around 8 a.m. in the morning, the day after when they took me to Freyland. So that was just what happened on the 11th. During the process going on from there, there had been so many violations of my rights that I, yeah, we could spend all day just in your room. We have a nice infographic that details some of them that tell you a little bit of the different things that happened. The latest one or the biggest one that had been happening over the last few months is that my pre-trial was supposed to be on its first schedule for October 10. Of course, this is also legal because the Instruction of Fiscal ended on 31st of August and the pre-trial, according to the administrative rules of Ecuador, a pre-trial can only happen maximum 15 days after the end of the Instruction of Fiscal. But the 10th of October, this was actually canceled with that hearing because of the pattern as it had. And up until Friday, we had not had a day for a pre-trial. So we basically just gone for three months just waiting for them to decide to report a pre-trial. And during this time, there have been several judges assigned to the case and they've spent basically all of their time fighting with each other about who can get out of the case because no judge is interested in having the case. So we've been without judge for most of the case or for most of the last few months, which is also something that is not proper. And in fact, the provincial court at the end of December finally made a decision about who the proper judge should have been and they also sent a kind of a warning to the particular community that saying that this judge was not properly she should be assigned to the investigative court. Okay, number five. Why is the struggle for digital rights and free software important? So digital rights, basically sometimes I feel like this whole idea of digital rights is kind of absurd because your human rights should be the same no matter whether they are in the analog, I would say real world, but of course, we live a lot of our lives in the digital world, so it's as much real as the other world. But our human rights should be the same in both of these places. But the fact is that they are not. The fact is that right now, because digital media, because digital technology makes it so easy to evade privacy and to abuse people's rights in so many different ways, a lot of these kinds of abuses happen. The right to security and privacy are much better protected in the analog world. But because surveillance is so simple to do in the digital world, it's something that happens naturally and a lot of governments claim that the digital place is different. From my perspective, it shouldn't be different and from my perspective, technology should protect us. We should have the same rights everywhere. I don't feel like that's a very radical statement, but a lot of people seem to think that that's a crazy thing to say. So free software is very important because without free software, we can no way of doing what the computers are doing. We don't know what the technology is doing. We can't trust that they're doing the right thing. And we know that there are backdoors. We know that there are bugs. We know that there are errors that are in the system to use. Free software doesn't always fix all those problems, but it makes it possible for us to fix them. That it gives us the possibility of, gives us the chance of fighting back against these kinds of attacks on digital rights. For me, privacy is one of those rights that by itself, privacy might not seem like it's super important. But at the end of the day, privacy is something that we need in order to have all the other things that society depends on. Say for example, elections. Democracy as a concept is based on the idea that people are free to choose who they want to govern them. And without free elections, then the whole idea of democracy kind of goes out the window. But the problem is, if you don't have privacy, if you know that you are going to be surveilled, you don't really have freedom because you know that your choices will be observed. And if the government are the ones that are surveilling you, well, you're probably not going to be doing the same kind of choices as you would make with the government because not surveilling you. So privacy for me is one of those core principles that is necessary for democracy to function. And there's been studies, Facebook did some, and there's been some other studies that show that when people are being surveilled, their political choices changes. They become more conservative. They don't consider alternatives that they would have considered otherwise. So we know from a lot of research that sociologically, privacy is necessary for democracy. Okay. Why do you think that the preliminary hearing of the trial will happen in February? Yeah. First of all, I have to say I'm skeptical that it will happen in February because considering what has happened up until now with multiple delays, with multiple cases where the judges disappear, where things get canceled for no reason, I would not be surprised if they changed the pre-trial date again. It is my feeling that the government is afraid of moving forward in this process because they know that they have no chance of winning unless they proceed with completely illegal means. And they also know that if they proceed illegally, this case has so much international attention that sooner or later, if they do this illegally, this is going to come back to them. Maybe they will win the lower court by pressuring the judges to do the wrong thing, but sooner or later, we're going to get to the higher instances. We will get to the Supreme Court, and if that doesn't work, we will get to the international courts. And sooner or later, we will prove that this case has been, first of all, without any basis, and second has violated every fundamental right of me and of people in Ecuador, because don't forget, if this kind of thing, if they can do this to me, they are going to start doing it towards Ecuadorian and they are already doing it towards Ecuadorian, in fact. To the question of why they finally scheduled it, I do think that maybe they also feel that there is this balance, right? Like they probably don't want to ever do it, but they also know that they can't drag it out forever. They can't come up with excuses all the time. So if it actually happens in February, it's because they realize that they have to, they have to bite the sour apple and move forward at some point. Okay. Final question. From the beginning, Lenin Moreno and Maria Parlar Romo have insisted in making accusations against you in the media. Were said accusations ever formally presented in the legal process? So I touched on this a little bit before. It's not just that they've made accusations. They have made accusations that have been disproved and in the evidence for the case. So for example, Lenin Moreno, his official witness or his official testimony where he simply said that he doesn't know anything about my case except for what Maria Parlar Romo has said publicly. But Maria Parlar Romo never said publicly that I was hacking in the airport. She never said that I didn't have any training equipment with me. So even here we can see that the president is actually contradicting himself. Maria Parlar Romo has said the same thing. In her testimony, she actually claims that they didn't have evidence that I had committed any crime. They only were worried that I might commit a crime. This is of course different from what she said publicly where she has claimed not only that I've committed several crimes, she's also claimed that they have all the evidence needed to convict me of those crimes. She has said this repeatedly and Lenin Moreno has said this repeatedly. None of that evidence has ever shown up. If you look in the expedited, there is no such thing in there. In fact, the only evidence that they are really using, the core evidence they're using to accuse me of a crime is this image that I talked about. All the other stuff is a similar report from the CNT and from technical experts and so on. That's what they're going to try at work. So all this talk about having evidence that I've committed a crime is clearly something that was completely made up from the beginning. The only thing that is in the expedient there is actually Lenin Moreno's public statements because the prosecutor seems to believe that those public statements are equivalent to proof. So those are in the expedient there and sometimes are quite a lot of time during the hearings. The prosecutor spends a lot of time during the hearings actually talking about what Lenin Moreno has said. But no, no evidence at all.