 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Swedish Software Developer and Privacy Activist Ola Binni remains in prison in Ecuador where he is on pretrial detention. His parents have come to Ecuador and have asked the Swedish government to intervene strongly in the case declaring that they are there to bring their son back home. Ola Binni was arrested on April 11th without any charges and the case is still going on. To talk more about this we have with us Kiran Chandra, the general secretary of the Free Software Movement of India. FSMI is one of the organizations in the forefront of the free Ola Binni campaign that is going on globally. Hello Kiran. Kiran to start with could you talk a bit about why various tech organizations across the world have joined together in this campaign to free Ola Binni. See the arrest of Ola Binni has been very sensitive to all the privacy lovers of the world and also the technologists. The way that he has been portrayed in certain sections of the European media is something that is really worrisome and it is unprecedented for him. He has been portrayed as someone with some criminal motives and it is very unfortunate if you look at who Ola Binni has been is an important question that the society beyond the tech community needs to really look at. Ola Binni has been a developer for more than one and a half decades and he has been contributing significantly to the society. In the last one year itself he were to really quantify and look at the magnitude of the work that he has done for the global common good. In the last one year itself he has committed close to 1200 times to the different free software repositories that are publicly available. It comes down if you assume that Ola was working for 10 hours a day and he was contributing in one year for every three hours he has been contributing code to the society. You have just blocked him, put him behind the bars and the way in which he has been portrayed is see really worrisome. What did Ola Binni do is the question that is pondering us. His contribution was very significant in the dimensions of privacy enhancement technologies in the area of free software development and also in the lines of multidisciplinary subjects that include drug discovery. And I think the way in which he has been criminalized, the way in which a techie programmer who is a Swedish national living in Ecuador with valid work permits and he has made Ecuador his home for the last few years. All the developers of the world were having a different perception about Ecuador and now Ecuador illegally detains him in violation of all international laws did not allow him to speak to his lawyers, detains him for 30 hours and then produces him in front of the judge. That too very late in the night and even in the absence of any interpreter he is forced to speak with the judge. And all these are serious issues of concern and he has been taken to preventive custody, he has been put into detainment as a cause of prevention. I think with all valid permits who have been doing it and the way in which he has been criminalized, he has been picked up from the flight as if that he was fleeing the country. If you look at Ola Binis blogs or if you look at Ola Binis tweets, we all very well understand that he is a martial arts passionate person and he announced much in advance that he was leaving for Japan to pursue his martial arts events. And I think the way in which he has been pursued, he has been called as a Russian while he is a Swedish national. The Swedish embassy has not been communicated until his parents have been approaching this Swedish government and the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs needs to protect its state-owned citizens. The way in which they are attributing Ola Binis makes us feel that being a good programmer and working for the society is a crime. And I think this is precisely the reason why the whole global tech communities are organizing ourselves for the release of Joe Ola Binis. He is one amongst us, we are one amongst him and this is going to be one for all, all for one among the developer fraternity. And it is also part of a larger tendency to look at secure communications and privacy as something very, say something not part of common life so to speak. So could you talk a bit more also about why secure communications and privacy is basically not just restricted to a small group but is essential for everyone? See there is a difference between secrecy and privacy. There is a difference between state secrets and there is a difference between private communication. Private communication between individuals has been, you could say, I would not say is a fundamental right, but de facto well accepted right since the dawn of the civilization. They have got possibilities of talking to each other in mutual trust without nobody watching them. And the privacy technologies, what are they doing? They are just ensuring that these rights, these rights, which exist with people and the communications in the form of computers, I would even call the smartphones that exist today are many more times more sophisticated than the computers that existed a half a decade back. So when people are communicating over more mobile phones or with computers, it is elementary that such rights are guaranteed. Olavini has been one of the important developers in the world, I would say, that you would stand in the front lines of the very few developers who are doing it and releasing it back to the society so that community at large and society at large would be benefited. So that nobody stooped down into every finite discussion or communication between their dear ones. So ensuring that people could communicate in privacy is something that Olavini has been doing. If you were to look at in the recent, what did he contribute to? The of the record communication system as a technology has been brought forward precisely for this purpose. So he was the person who developed it and released in the recent globally acknowledged pets symposium in Barcelona in the last summer that he has contributed, his work has released it for the society, the entire source code is available for public consumption and review. So if you call this that this primary work of making something that is possible, if that is being taken away from the people's rights, if he comes forward to protect it and you make it tail construct a story around it and criminalize him, I think that is something which is of very serious concern. So this is criminalization of humanity. This is criminalization of human instincts, the way people communicate with each other and people talk to each other on any of these things are not something to do or something for the state to really bother about. And people being allowed to have such a communication is a basic right, which is a very great right. And technologists who are developing such technologies are doing it and they are, I would say that the social workers who are ensuring the safety of the mankind and Ola Bini falls into that category and he is being criminalized precisely for developing such technologies. And I understand that Ola Bini is also attended a couple of events of the Free Software Movement of India and he's interacted with some of the activists. So could you also talk a bit about your experiences in terms of interacting and working with him and the inspiration he had on the volunteers of the movement? I would say that Ola Bini in person, having known him for quite some time, is a very inspiring person to work with, humble, humble to the extent. If you go and ask him about the technology, if he knows something, if he doesn't, he's not confident about it or if he's not 100% sure about it, he doesn't say with any authority. He says that with authority, he says that I have no clue about this. He's a very humble person and a very nice human being as far as anyone who has interacted with him knows. Most importantly, he has been a source of inspiration. You see, when you look at one of the important specializations of Ola Bini, he has been the optimal utilization of different hardware. He basically allows us to use, he doesn't go with any of the other patterns of just buying the new tech stuff, new hardware stuff and just using it. He's not against any of those things, but he helps people, nurture, use them for various purposes where even an old computer can be used for. We have had certain workshops of those kind on optimization of some of those stuff. How do we do it? How do we use it? Because we wanted it in a context of school education where we are a developing nation where infrastructure is a matter of concern. Access is a matter of concern. He has extreme capabilities in any of these things. He being an extremely knowledgeable programmer who works on the technologies that people will be consuming in the next half decade, he also is a person who can find right solutions to the school kids. He can inculcate passionate programming and make people make passionate programmers and that is all he has been motivating and asking people to do. Along with this, some of the important works that he has got, he's an extremely great intellectual whom I have met who does a lot of stuff in interdisciplinary sciences. All this in the interest of the humankind and he has motivated on a multiple number of times wherever he has gone from. He is a person who can speak to the top most developers of the world and at the same time he can go to schools and also to any of the people who are completely non-techies and explain stuff and we are proud to say that we have associated with him and we have seen him work them on multiple dimensions. But when you look at some of the ways in which Ecuadorian government is trying to criminalize him, I looked at the photograph where the police department of Ecuador has said that these are certain things that he possesses. If you have a closer look at it, what do you have? You have different variants, generations of laptops. If I am a programmer for the last two decades, I would be holding, keeping the laptops with me and I would not be contributing to the environmental pollution of just discarding them out just because they are old or not fashionable anymore. For the necessity, you hold all of those laptops with you and as the hardware advances, you need interoperable port converters, possession of port converters, possession of laptops, possession of hard disks, possession of network cables, possession of adapters, possession of storage devices. What nonsense is that? Is it criminal to hold any of those things? I would challenge the Ecuadorian government. If you visit the presidential office, you will be finding more hardware than what was found in Olavine's house and Ecuador should be proud on multiple counts and not harass the intellect of Olavine for doing or taking up all these kinds of activities. Thank you so much Kiran. Thank you very much. Newscleek also spoke to noted lawyer Renata Avila on the arrest of Olavine. Here is what she had to say. Again, I am familiar with the work of Olavine because he is an expert of offering the European Union at a different fora. He is very prestigious and very capable and it was such an honor that he was based in a Latin American country and trying to transfer his knowledge and share his knowledge with the Latin American community. And the gaslighting effect of Lenin Moreno arrest, he is trying to save face basically and he is trying to picture this as a big conspiracy. He is trying to do the show, the trial show that the US administration did with the Russian hackers. He wants to recreate the circus in Ecuador to his benefit. And I am really ashamed of the Ecuadorian authorities. They cannot ignore completely basic civil rights and human rights. I hope that the Ecuadorian community as well opens the eyes and realizes that they have really a bad deal of the people that they have elected. That is all we have time for today. Keep watching NewsConnect.