Transcription performed by LeahTranscribes[START OF RECORDING]
JACK: Hey, it’s Jack, host of the show. When I was a teenager, I went to university and studied computer science. At one point they gave all the students logins to some central Linux computer. It’s where you were supposed to do your schoolwork. Like, you could use it for file storage or check e-mail there and do programming. Well, when they gave me my username and password, they said my username is my last name and my password is just my first and last name. I instantly realized this means if you know another student’s full name, you know their username and password and can log in as them and read their e-mails and look through their files and stuff. I told that to the teacher; hey, this is a bad password policy. He’s like, why? I’m like, ‘cause I know everyone’s password. He’s like, yeah, well, everyone should be changing their password. I’m like, yeah, but they’re not. None of them are changing their passwords. I tried helping a few students change their password, but I knew it was a lost cause. You could pretty much pick any computer science student in the school and there was a pretty good chance that you could log in as them if you just knew their first and last name. Well, while I was sitting in class one day, the school sysadmin came into the class, and he pointed at me and he motioned for me to follow him to the hall. So, I go into the hall and he starts telling me, someone has broken into our Linux computer and is going around deleting a bunch of student files and data and stuff, and some students lost a ton of work from this. I was like, well, it wasn’t me. I don’t know anything about that.
I’ve never done that. But this guy was giving me a crooked look. He was like, come on, fess up; I know it was you. I was like, no, it wasn’t. Why are you blaming me? What makes you think I did this? He’s like, come on, man, I’ve seen your command history. You’re way more active on that computer than anyone else, and the commands you’re doing show me that you know way more than any other student, too. So, it had to be you. There’s literally no other suspects. I’m like, I promise you I did not do anything bad on your system, but you have really terrible default passwords, and the students are not changing them. He was like, whatever, dude. Look, if it happens again, you’re getting suspended. I started to realize if whoever did that again, I might get kicked out of school for that. This made me super worried. I was being wrongfully accused. But I was lucky; they either found the guy who did it or he never did it again, because I never saw that sysadmin again.
(INTRO): [INTRO MUSIC] These are true stories from the dark side of the internet. I’m Jack Rhysider. This is Darknet Diaries. [INTRO MUSIC ENDS]
JACK: 2019 is when you got arrested, right?
OLA: Yeah, correct, in April 11.
JACK: Right. So, let’s go back before that. First of all, tell me your name, and what were you doing before that?
OLA: Okay, so, my name is Ola Bini. I’m from Sweden originally, but I’ve lived in London and Chicago and here in Ecuador where I’m still located since 2013 when I came to Ecuador.
JACK: When did you leave Sweden?
OLA: So, I left Sweden in 2007 because I was hired by an international software development company called Thoughtworks. I worked for them for ten years, and that’s how I came to Ecuador originally. I came with the company.
JACK: What’s your preferred programming language?
OLA: That’s a hard question since I’ve developed my own programming languages and, of course, I like my own programming languages a lot. But I’m pretty old school when it comes to the history of programming languages, so I’m a huge fan of common lisp. I’m still a proud emacs user, and I have my millions of lines of emacs list code to customize my experience.
JACK: Millions; geez. Are you a big Java fan?
OLA: See, that’s a funny question because when I got my first job, I started working in Java, and I was very frustrated with Java from a productivity perspective. So, I got involved in creating other languages for the JVM. So, I first was involved in a list variant called Jatha, and then I got involved in JRuby, which is basically a project to create a Ruby implementation that runs on top of the JVM. I became one of the core developers for JRuby, and that’s kind of what I did for the next few years. The idea was basically to use all the good stuff that is in the Java platform without actually having to deal with the bad stuff, which is, in my opinion, the Java language.
JACK: Fascinating. Java always marketed itself as usable on any device or operating system, making it so you can program something once and it’ll run anywhere, as opposed to making different apps for different operating systems. However, the language itself is clunky and ugly. So, Ola took the beauty he saw in the Ruby programming language and got it to work in Java somehow. It’s kinda mind bending to me that you could code something in Ruby and it’ll run anywhere Java can. But this is the kind of audacious project that Ola enjoys working on. He likes to work on huge projects that are pretty obscure and strange. He spent decades as a programmer working for various companies in various countries, and besides having a love for programming, he’s also got a burning passion for online privacy.
OLA: If you look back in the key servers for GPG, you will find my first GPG key uploaded in 2001 or 2002 or something like that. So, privacy was something that I was always interested in, and from my first job, I was involved with cryptography and that kind of stuff. In 2010, WikiLeaks started releasing the diplomatic cables, and so, my interest kind of — and my activity kind of started coming back in that time. But then I had my regular day job, and I didn’t really get super engaged until the beginning of 2013, because that was when — actually, it was an event where a friend of mine named Aaron Swartz — I don’t know if you’ve heard of him…
JACK: Yes, of course.
OLA: Yeah, so, he killed himself in the beginning of January of 2013, and that was a huge blow to me and it was a huge blow to many people inside of the company because he worked with us. We started talking about how we wanted to do more from a privacy perspective, from a digital advocacy perspective and all these things. So, in 2013 I kind of started out working on those things, and I started out doing both — I really was doing both privacy and information security at the same time.
JACK: So, what was your involvement with WikiLeaks? Did you actually work with them?
OLA: No, no. That’s the thing; I’ve been accused of working for WikiLeaks for a long time, but that’s not true. I never worked for WikiLeaks in any way. [Music] But I am a friend of Julian Assange, and that’s what came in 2013 because I was doing all this work reaching out to privacy networks and talking to people around the world, and then a friend in common who was the lawyer for Julian recommended to Julian that I should meet Julian. So, it was pretty funny. It was a week before the Snowden disclosures. I went to London and I went to the Ecuadorian embassy and I met Julian, and we became friends. Since then, I was traveling a lot, and every time I was in Europe, I passed by London and I went to the embassy to hang out with him and just talk about technology or privacy or all these things. But we were only friends. We were never collaborators or working together in any way.
JACK: Ah. It’s interesting; Julian was in the Ecuadorian embassy, and Ola had just moved to Ecuador from the United States.
OLA: I was in a very privileged position because my company basically told me I could go wherever I wanted that the company had offices, and I could work from anywhere. So, I could have moved to india, I could have moved to China, to Australia. But at the same time, there was this discussion about opening up an office — because the company at that point had offices in Brazil, but nowhere else in Latin America. I had a wife at the time, and she was interested in learning Spanish. So, we were thinking about — okay, Latin America could be interesting. Then the company decided that Ecuador would be the place, and we went and we liked it, so we went there. Everyone always asks if there was any connection with what Julian went through, but actually, it was complete coincidence that I ended up in the same country as Julian was in the embassy of.
JACK: Julian Assange was in trouble because his website WikiLeaks had published some sensitive articles which exposed things like governments that were doing things that they didn’t want us to know about, and they wanted to arrest him for exposing this stuff. So, he was granted asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, because Ecuador looked favorably upon him. [Music] But he couldn’t leave the embassy because the UK and the US didn’t like him, and they wanted to arrest him. So, Julian Assange was stuck there on a little island that if he stepped off of, the UK police would swoop in on him and arrest him.
OLA: Oh yeah, yeah. No, it was crazy. Of course, he didn’t have so many friends, so — that could come and visit him. So, that was one of the reasons why I kept doing it, to — sitting in that situation that he was in, being alone like that — if I were in that situation, I would like for people to come and hang out and just have friends that you can talk to in different ways. So, yeah, so I met him the first time in the first week of June 2013, and then just a few days later came the first Snowden disclosures, and the whole world blew up and started talking about privacy and all this stuff.
JACK: Yeah, it’s true; once the Snowden papers became news, the world started talking about privacy a lot. See, it’s against the law for the US to do mass surveillance on its own citizens, but the Snowden paper showed that through the Prison Project and others, the US government was doing mass surveillance on its own US citizens. It was awful for them to be doing that without consent, without approval, without the citizens knowing it’s happening. So, tons of people were suddenly talking about privacy then. Of course, all this made Ola realize you can’t trust the infrastructure that our communication is going over. There’s entities in the world trying to suck up all the data they can and look into everyone’s packets.
So, it’s incredibly important to do end-to-end encryption on everything so only you and the person you’re talking to can see what’s being said. See, with e-mail for example, typically the e-mail provider can open and read all the e-mail they want. If the police get a search warrant, they can ask the e-mail provider for full readable e-mails. So, Ola started working on tools which would restrict the e-mail provider from being able to see e-mails. Even if someone put a gun to the e-mail provider’s head, they wouldn’t be able to hand over readable e-mails. It would just be encrypted gibberish. He made it so that the sender and receiver would exchange encryption keys. This means the e-mail gets encrypted upon hitting Send and only decrypted when the receiver opens it. Nobody else will ever get to see what’s in it.
OLA: We were also doing our own development. We created a chat platform, a chat tool called CoyIM.
JACK: This also had end-to-end encryption built in and was very privacy-focused, because most of the popular chat apps then — and surprisingly still today — are not end-to-end encrypted. So, these chat services can read anyone’s messages, and so can the governments of the world or hackers if they can get into the systems. As you can see, privacy is very important to Ola.
OLA: I use the definition of privacy which is based on the idea of control. Privacy is the capacity for you to control the information about yourself. So, privacy is not about hiding, although hiding can be one of the things you do with privacy. Privacy is controlling what information you want to release to whom you want to release it under what circumstances, etc. For me, privacy is important — well, it’s important because it’s a human right, and that should be enough, but it’s also very important because it’s very, very closely linked to other rights. For example, if you’re a person that believes in democracy, then you should believe in privacy, because there’s been a lot of studies that show that people under surveillance vote in a different way than if they’re not under surveillance.
So, if you want to have free and proper elections, then you need privacy for people, for example. So, in my perspective, the important thing about privacy is that it enables all these other rights. The problem is that privacy — in the fiscal world, privacy has always been quite hard to violate in a massive way. It’s not like you can have a person just standing at the window of 100,000 people. I mean, if I remember correctly, the Stasi in East Germany — I think at some point, four percent of everyone was working as an informant for the Stasi, four percent of the population, but they still weren’t able to in any way invade the privacy of most people with that amount of people. But, of course in the technological world, the possibility for violation is extreme, and that’s what we’re seeing. Like, every year the privacy invasions are becoming larger and larger.
JACK: Since 2013 Ola has been vocal about this, blogging about it on WordPress, working with others, building tools to enhance our privacy, and trying to be a privacy activist. His job allowed him to build privacy tools while working there, but that company he was working at got bought out by a private equity company, and he knew he wasn’t going to be able to work on those tools anymore with that new leadership.
OLA: [Music] So, I quit, and a few of the other people quit as well, and we started a nonprofit here in Ecuador. Well, actually, we started it first in Brazil and in Barcelona, but then in 2019 we moved the nonprofit to Ecuador.
JACK: This nonprofit was entirely focused on privacy.
OLA: So, this is a nonprofit called Centro de Autonomia Digital. Yeah, the Digital Autonomy Center you can call it in English. It’s based here in Ecuador. We work to create free software that protects the privacy for people at risk, and specifically we try to work from a context of global south more than global north, because a lot of the tools that exist are done for white people in Europe and the United States, and we know that — being in Ecuador, for example, we have contacts with a lot of nonprofits that work here and a lot of the indigenous groups and all these kind of situations that are quite complicated, and many of the tools are not really made for them; not in the right language, not with the right usability, not for the right circumstances. So, we work on free software.
JACK: They built a chat app and e-mail privacy tools and a teleconferencing tool.
OLA: The software development is a big part, but the other big part is that we do public education about security and privacy, and this is directed against — directed towards the communities of civil society to try to help them to have better practices and so on, because a lot of them — I mean, a lot of the people that work in civil society, they get money to do projects to help people, and they often don’t have time to think about their security practices.
JACK: In May of 2018 when a new president took office in Ecuador, everything changed. We’re gonna take an ad break here, but stay with us because this story is about to go off a waterfall.
OLA: So, the new president — his name is Lenin Moreno — he came in in 2018, and when he came into power, everyone thought that he would be kind of from the same political alignment as the previous government, which was headed by President Rafael Correa. But when Lenin Moreno came into power, he basically cut ties with Rafael Correa and the whole movement of Correastas, as they are called, and he basically started investing for corruption, and he made a lot of moves towards industry and going into a right-wing kind of direction. So, everyone was quite surprised.
JACK: With this sudden change in political alignment, in 2019, the new president, Lenin Moreno, suddenly wasn’t happy with Julian Assange and no longer was willing to give him asylum. [Music]
OLA: I was actually on my way to the airport when all of this happened. So, basically, I’m a martial artist, and at the time I was practicing something called Bujinkan. A few months earlier I had received my black belt and I was planning to go to Japan. The idea was to go to Japan to train with the grand master that still teaches in Japan for this martial art. So, I had publicized the fact. I had the tickets bought months before. Early on the morning of the 11th, on the Thursday, I received a message from a few of my friends telling me about what had happened.
JACK: The foreign minister and the interior minister of Ecuador had given a press conference that morning, and Ola was watching what they said.
OLA: These two people, they were talking about the fact that they had — ‘esposado’ is the word they used, but that they had thrown out Julian because he was collaborating with enemies of the state inside of Ecuador. What they were saying in this press conference was that they also had evidence that there were two Russians living in Ecuador that were key members of WikiLeaks and that they were also part of this attempt to destabilize the government.
JACK: Just like that, Julian was under arrest in the UK. After having asylum for seven years, he lost it, and the UK police swooped in on him and took him to jail. It was shocking for the world to see that Julian Assange was arrested.
OLA: I saw this press conference and I didn’t really think anything about it. So, I continued my preparations for my travels. I was gonna leave at 12:00 midday and get to the airport. So, that’s what I did.
JACK: So, he goes through the airport, through security, and arrives at his gate, sits down, and reads a book. Then he hears an announcement; will Ola Bini please come to the gate? He goes up to the gate, and they wanted to check his luggage for some reason.
OLA: This is pretty common that they ask you to go down to where they manage the luggage and go through it, because they’re looking for drugs. So, that’s something that always happens with these trips. So, I went there, and I had no idea. When I stood there, about ten different people came up to me and they were trying to explain to me that they wanted to apprehend me.
JACK: [Music] Apprehend him? He’s like, me? Why? What did I do?
OLA: These people, they didn’t identify themselves. They didn’t have any markings on them saying that they were police or who they were, and I was quite confused. At that time I didn’t really speak Spanish well, so I was trying in English to understand what was happening. They were saying that they were stopping me from going on the airplane and that I needed to come with them. At this point I had no idea why.
JACK: There was a moment where he was able to sneak his phone out and text a friend; hey, I’m in trouble. I think I’m being arrested. I need a lawyer immediately. I’m at the airport. They took him into a little room, and he looks at the sign on the room. It says Interpol.
OLA: Then they sat me down there. They asked me to put my things away from me, but they still let me keep my phone for some reason. So, I was still in contact, and I managed to get hold of the lawyer. He said he was coming towards the airport to be there. But at that point, after about ten minutes inside of this room, the person there asked me to put my phone away, that I was not allowed to have the phone, and that I needed to put the phone away for my own safety. I have no idea what he meant by that, but basically I had to put the phone on the table.
From that point, I wasn’t allowed to touch the phone anymore. All of this was a little bit confusing because no one tried to talk to me about what was happening, and I kept asking, hey, what’s going on? What’s happening? They basically didn’t say anything. It was also complicated because the people — the person keeping me in this office, he didn’t speak any English. So, when I wanted to ask questions, he had to go out and get someone from the immigration department that was out in the airport to come back and to talk to me in English. So, they didn’t really have a translator or anything like that to talk to me at all. That basically was how I spent the next few hours.
JACK: [Music] Hours spent in the Quito Airport in this little room. He missed his flight at this point, and he has no clue why he’s being detained. They weren’t asking him questions and they weren’t giving him answers. They just kept him in a room with the guy there who didn’t speak any English to watch over him. Eventually someone comes in and tells him they are taking him to the city, and they escort him to a car and they put him in a car, and they start to drive off. But then they change their mind and take him back to the airport and send him into that little Interpol room again. He asked if he can call his lawyer, and they let him, but only for like one minute.
OLA: At that point — and this is the most ridiculous thing. At this point, the guy that was holding me there, he held up a paper in front of me and said that this was the reason I was being held. Now, this paper he held up for five seconds, and I couldn’t see anything except that my name was badly written, and it said ‘Russo’. So, this, whatever thing they had, said ‘Russian’, and they had the wrong name on it or misspelled name on it. He held it up to me when I was talking to my lawyer, and then he hid it again, and I wasn’t allowed to see it again.
JACK: Russian? Are the police saying he’s Russian or are they saying the Russians are out to get him or that he’s working for Russia? He has so many questions, and nobody’s answering them. They hold him there at the airport for another five hours. It’s now 11:00 p.m. at night.
OLA: They forced me to stand up and they put handcuffs behind my back, and then they took away all my things from me. I said that I wanted to talk to a lawyer, and they said no. I said that I wanted to talk to a person from my family, and they said no. These two are basic rights in Ecuador. Then basically what ended up happening was that they put me against the wall, and then I had to stand with the wall, like looking at the wall, for about twenty minutes. I don’t know what they were doing during this time period. But then, finally, they went to the door, and at the door was a person reading from a paper. Later — I’ve been told that this person was trying to read in English, but I had no idea what the person was saying because the English — the pronunciation was so terrible.
I had no idea what they were saying. This happened three times with three different people. Afterwards I found out, oh, they were trying to read my rights, but they didn’t have a translator, so they couldn’t make use of a translator to actually make sure that I understood. Then they tried to force me to sign this paper, which I didn’t do, and then they took me out to a cop car. They put me in the back of this cop car, [music] and we sat on this dark parking space outside of the airport, and there was no one around. These two cops were inside of the car, and we sat there for three hours in the middle of the night.
JACK: Sitting in a parked cop car for hours through the night? Man, all this sounds highly unusual. I can’t imagine that this is how arrests normally happen in Ecuador, where unidentified people come and they keep you in a room for eight hours, then they put you in a car to hold you there all night, and the whole time you never know why you’re being detained, and they don’t even ask you questions to make sure that they’ve got the right person. They didn’t even bring his luggage with him. He didn’t know it, but his lawyer did show up at the airport and he was trying to see Ola, but they were telling his lawyer that he didn’t have a right to a lawyer, which is false.
Ecuador law says you are allowed immediate access to a lawyer when you are arrested. In fact, they’re even supposed to tell you that you have a right to a lawyer while being arrested. They were telling both Ola and his lawyer that he didn’t have a right to a lawyer. It just seems incredibly strange. If he’s arrested, then arrest him and take him to jail and tell him what he did wrong. What’s with all this waiting around and no explanation and violating his rights in so many different ways? I mean, how would you hold up sitting in the back of a cop car in a dark parking garage, waiting quietly in the dark all night?
OLA: I started getting really scared. Before I was more confused, but at this point I was really scared because no one knew where I was. The lawyers had never showed up, and I was sitting here in the darkness and no one was around. I was wondering that — because Ecuador has a history of police disappearing people. There has been some famous cases that I knew about, and at that point I was thinking that, okay, this is the time when I disappear, when I get thrown into a ditch somewhere, and no one knows what — no one will ever find out what happened.
JACK: So, you stayed all night in the back of a car?
OLA: No; only until 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning.
JACK: Okay, but I just don’t understand what the other person in the car was doing the whole time. Were they just staring out the window, waiting?
OLA: No, they were just sitting there, yeah. They were just sitting…
JACK: What a boring job. Whatever they were doing is just so boring.
OLA: I mean, I think at some point they went out and they were talking a little bit, but then they came back and they were sitting there. They didn’t have any radio on, nothing. They weren’t doing anything with their mobile phones, absolutely nothing.
JACK: Wow.
OLA: Yeah, definitely not a very interesting job, I can imagine. But finally in the middle of the night, around 2:30 or 3:00 in the middle of the night, they drove me away from the airport, and we started driving. At this point I wasn’t sure if we were driving to my death or driving to somewhere else. After a while, we ended up at my apartment building. I live on the fourth floor in an apartment building in the city of Quito. We came there, and I could see that there was a bunch of — in Ecuador we have what we called RoboCops, and these are the riot cops. They’re dressed all in black and they have masks and weapons, and they — yeah, they look a little bit like RoboCop. So, there was a bunch of these RoboCops outside of my apartment building and other people going in and out. At some point someone came up to me in the car when I was sitting there, and they showed me a paper which I didn’t understand, and asked me in bad English if I would like to be helpful and allow them into my apartment.
JACK: Helpful? How about some equal respect here? If you can arrange to have ten cops come to the apartment, then you can arrange to have an English translator show up and explain to him what’s going on. If you can’t give him the courtesy to let him know why he’s being arrested, then why should he be helpful to you? Anyway, he refused to let them into his apartment, and he demanded his lawyer again. So, at 3:00 a.m. he was sitting in a cop car in front of his apartment for another thirty minutes while the police are talking about what they’re gonna do. He wasn’t gonna let them in the apartment, so they decided to take him somewhere else. [Music] Little did he know, as soon as they drove him away, they just broke into his apartment and seized a bunch of stuff.
OLA: Then they drove me to another place which was some kind of office environment where several of the cops were working, and basically I sat there for three hours just without any knowledge, no information, no nothing. At some point in the night, around 5:00 in the morning, my luggage had arrived to this office and they were going through the luggage, but they weren’t doing it in front of me. They didn’t ask me to verify anything or anything else that I would expect. Then a few minutes before 6:00 in the morning, one of the people turned on a TV that was sitting on the wall, and at that point I still didn’t understand what was going on.
But on the TV they started showing a news show that was showing images of me, including an image of me from the evening before, and I could see the word ‘hacker’, I could see the word ‘Russo’, which means Russian, and a few other things. They had clearly been taking pictures from my Twitter and from previous speaking engagements where I had been publicly giving talks and stuff like that. So, at that point I understood that this had something to do with computers, but I still didn’t know what they were accusing me of or what was actually happening.
JACK: What? It appeared that Ola Bini was being arrested because they thought he was a Russian hacker? This isn’t right. Ola is Swedish, not Russian, not affiliated with Russia at all, and he’s not a hacker or a criminal. He’s the president of a nonprofit who works on privacy tools. He’s a programmer. This is all very strange, and how could the police tell the media what’s going on before even telling him what’s going on? It must be so frustrating to find out why you’re being arrested by turning on the TV and discovering why. So, now it’s 6:00 a.m. and he hasn’t slept all night.
OLA: No, no, no. No, god no. I mean, the first half of the night I was afraid for my life, and then when I came to this office I was just exhausted, but I was also confused and didn’t know what was going to happen. At this point still, I had not been able to talk to anyone. No one knew where I was.
JACK: They keep him in this office for a total of four hours, then they put him in the back of a cop car and drive him to a jail. It’s more like a temporary holding cell. They take him out of the car and walk him into the building.
OLA: When I came in there, I had the relief of seeing my friend who I also work with, Sada, and one of my lawyers that were there waiting for me. But they were not allowed to speak to me, and the cops took me directly into the holding cells. [Music] In the holding cells once again, they tried to force me into signing papers that I didn’t really understand. They said that this was to acknowledge that I had — know my rights, but since I didn’t know my rights and clearly they weren’t really respecting my rights, they — I didn’t sign it. Then they basically threw me into these holding cells which are basically three big kind of cement holes with a big door and space for maybe twelve or fifteen people. I was sitting there with maybe ten people. This was in the morning, 9:15, Thursday and Friday. So, all of these people that had been caught out on parties or for small drug charges or things like that. Everyone’s speaking Spanish, and I had no idea what they were saying.
JACK: So, he sat in this jail — he called it a dungeon — still not sleeping, and hours passed by there. Eventually, to his surprise, the Swedish consular shows up. See, in Ecuador if a foreigner is arrested, the police have to immediately notify the foreign embassy, which the Ecuadorian police didn’t do right away. It wasn’t until the next day that they notified the Swedish embassy, which I think should have been a pretty big clue to the police that they’re not dealing with a Russian; they’re dealing with a Swedish man. I mean, can you imagine calling the Swedish embassy and say, hello, we’ve arrested a Russian hacker. So, this Swedish consular came to the jail to see what was going on.
OLA: I finally got to talk to him. He didn’t really know what was going on. Then finally a criminal lawyer showed up, and — because the other lawyer I got to see was a corporate lawyer because we didn’t have any criminal lawyers; we didn’t know that we needed criminal lawyers. So, finally at 10:00 or 11:00 I got to speak to a criminal lawyer that was assigned to my case. His name is Carlos, Carlos Soria. He told me that we have no idea what is going on. They haven’t shown him anything. I told him the story of everything that had happened, but he couldn’t really tell me anything.
JACK: How frustrating. How infuriating. Back into the holding cell he goes with no answers to anything. It’s now been twenty-four hours since his initial arrest, and he’s still absolutely clueless as to why he’s arrested. He’s trying to think if there’s something that he did that would have caused all this.
OLA: I was thinking about everything, and I just couldn’t make sense of it.
JACK: He’s now been awake for over thirty hours, tired as hell. But at 11:00 p.m. they take him to see the judge. Yeah, at 11:00 p.m., because there’s a legal requirement that he must see a judge within twenty-four hours of being arrested. So, it had to be the middle of the night, I guess. Anyway, great. This is super. Surely he’ll get some answers here. Surely he can see what evidence they have on him and what crime they’re saying he did.
OLA: In Ecuador all the proof is stored in a physical folder called expediente. That’s all the evidence, and it’s the prosecutors that are in charge of this expediente where all the proof is in. My lawyers had basically gotten to see this expediente five minutes before going in front of the judge. So, it was like, okay, how are we gonna make a defense out of this? [Music] Basically what we found out was that they had received a phone call to an anonymous tip line saying that I was one of the two Russians that the Minister of the Interior had mentioned earlier, and that I was escaping to the airport in order to escape from the country. This is what they claimed was the whole reason why they arrested me. They had no other evidence.
They had absolutely nothing. What they accused me of in this hearing in front of the judge was an attack against the integrity of computer systems. That’s the name of the charge. But they didn’t tell me which computer system, when I had attacked it, how I had attacked it. They basically just said, okay, this is the crime you are accused of, but they didn’t tell me anything else and there was no information of anything else. Basically, my lawyer tried to show that I was a martial artist on the way to Japan in a completely legitimate reason for leaving the country, that I was a software developer, etc, etc. But at the end of this — I didn’t really understand the discussion, but at the end of this the consul turned around to me and said, okay, it looks like you’re going to jail.
JACK: Well, hold on. I do want to ask a question here. The fact that they got you as Russian — couldn’t you simply say, listen…
OLA: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s funny. [Crosstalk]
JACK: I am not Russian. You have the wrong guy. You cannot arrest me for being Russian ‘cause I’m not Russian.
OLA: Okay, that is completely true and that’s a very good point, and I forgot to tell you that we found some documents later that basically said that the first set of documents say that I’m Russian. The next set of documents says that I’m Swiss, because in Spanish, Swedish and Swiss are very similar. So, they must have gotten so confused that they first thought I was Russian, then Swiss, and then finally they got it right and found out that I was Swedish. So, there are documents that show this evolution of understanding through the whole story. But, no, they didn’t care about that at all.
JACK: So, they put him back in the holding cells for the next two days, then they took him to prison. I guess they thought he was a flight risk or he would leave the country or was going to destroy evidence, so they wanted to keep him in jail until the trial could take place.
OLA: Yeah, so, they took me there, and that’s where I stayed for the next sixty-eight days, in prison.
JACK: [Music] Holy cow, what is happening here? I mean, Ola has done no crime whatsoever, but the police have arrested him at the airport and violated so many of his rights and put him in prison with no way out. I mean, this could have been you or me. Ola is an innocent person, but now his life is completely ruined.
OLA: Yeah. So, the prison time is — when I first came there, I had this idea of prison from American television series and movies. I thought that it was gonna be a little bit like that. An Ecuadorian prison is nothing like that at all. It was complete chaos. The prisoners are basically running the place. You get two visitors per week. The water is not drinkable. So, your friends and family has to buy water on the outside and send in to you. It was a crazy situation and I was lucky to get out of it alive because — so, I was there from April 13 until June 20, and during May was a period where Ecuador started having prison riots. The most famous example kicked off in one of the big prisons where prisoners killed other prisoners and then hacked off their heads and played soccer with their heads. This was happening at the same time as I was in prison.
JACK: So, the police raided his apartment and took a lot of his computers, and they physically took them apart to try to analyze the hard drives and do forensics on them, but they were soon met with a huge problem. Ola was a privacy advocate, and he encrypts his hard drives and he uses throwaway operating systems and anonymous accounts and stuff like that. The police were absolutely no match to his privacy practices. They couldn’t get into anything.
OLA: The thing is, of course, I work with security, so I had encrypted hard drives everywhere and everything was encrypted and good passwords. So, they didn’t get anywhere with any of that stuff. At that point the prosecutor, he was like — he was asking if I would be so kind to collaborate with them, because in Ecuador you don’t have to give up the password to your devices if you don’t want to. You have the right to deny that. It’s not like in the UK, for example, where they can force you by putting you in prison if you don’t give up the passwords. Though, I said if they tell me what they think I have done, what I’m accused of, what computer I’m supposed to have broken into…
JACK: Yeah, that was my first reaction, too. They said, could you be so kind to help us?
OLA: Exactly.
JACK: It’s like, well, could you be so kind to tell me why I’m here and talk to me like a person?
OLA: Exactly, exactly. Yeah, no, no, that’s exactly what we did.
JACK: Of course, they didn’t want to share any information with him, so they were at a standstill and they couldn’t get into his devices.
OLA: In the beginning of May, I was able to go in front of another court with three judges at this time to do the appeal. This appeal was specifically not for my — not for the whole case, but it was an appeal for the prision preventiva, for the imprisonment. We had a long hearing, and in this case it was actually quite good because a lot of people came, like a lot of media and a lot of my friends and everything. Everyone came to support me. At this point my family — all my family live in Sweden, but at this point my mother and father had come, and they were at the hearing and everything.
So, I was feeling like, okay, this has been three horrible weeks, but at least now I’m gonna get some justice because — of course at the next level, obviously, I’m gonna get justice, or at least that’s what I thought. So, basically — the prosecution basically said that the case — they began by explaining everything that had happened with Julian, and their explanation is that Julian was interfering in the affairs of other countries, and that’s why they were drawing him out. Then they kind of jumped into this thing that I had visited Julian many times in the embassy, but they never really made the connection between anything else. Then, I kid you not, I had programming books in my home, and they used these as evidence that I was a dangerous hacker.
They were not even using the right kinds of books for that stuff. They were just using the basics of programming Python or super basic books. Also, yes, I had a few books about WikiLeaks, I had a book about Stuxnet, I had a book about the Panama Papers. All of these books were literally evidence against me. They literally thought that I was too dangerous to be outside because of the books. There was still no evidence against me. There was still no clarification about what crime I had committed. At the end of the day, the three judges decided to send me back to prison.
JACK: [Music] Sheesh, this wasn’t even to determine if he was guilty or innocent. It was just to recommend that he come out of prison until he’s found guilty. You know, innocent until proven guilty. But no, the judges made him go back to prison and wait for his trial.
OLA: Then three weeks later we asked for bail, because Ecuador has this law that you have to be able to get out of prison on bail unless your crime has more than five years as punishment, which mine didn’t. My punishment would have been three to five years in total according to what they were accusing me of, this attack against the integrity of computer systems. If you have committed a crime against minors or against family members, then you can’t get bail, and if you tried to do money laundering, you can’t get bail. But everyone else has the right to get bail, and the only question for the judge would be, okay, how big the bail should be. So, we went in front of this judge, and once again I had hope because my lawyer told me, legally speaking, there is no way they can deny this.
At this point they didn’t take me to the courtroom. Instead, I was forced to do it from the prison, and they did it in such a way that there was no media allowed or anything like that. So, at this point they were trying to hide the whole stuff. Basically, what happened was that the judge, she denied the request for bail, but the reason was very interesting. She said because the bail has to be proportionate to the amount of victims. But what she said is because the prosecutor hasn’t defined what the crime is, she can’t know who the victims are, and because she can’t know who the victims are, she has no way of setting the bail amount, and for that reason there was no possibility for me to get bail. So, yeah. So…
JACK: Wow, that is wild that even the judge doesn’t know who you’ve wronged.
OLA: Exactly. I’m in the country of insane troll logic at this point.
JACK: What do you…? Okay, but there — that’s one thing. It’s insane, but there’s another thing that I think is a clue here of like, wait a minute, even the judge doesn’t know what I’ve done.
OLA: Exactly.
JACK: This is a tell. This is a tell of some kind. This tells me that there’s — that they’re not just keeping it secret from me, but they’re keeping it secret from other people, and what’s the reason for that? [Crosstalk] Like, you must have thought of that.
OLA: Well, actually, what I was thinking and what we were all thinking is that they didn’t have a crime. They thought that they would be able to arrest me and that they would be able to find something later, but they didn’t find something, and that’s why they couldn’t actually go forward.
JACK: This is even more frustrating now. He’s been arrested for some strange, unknown reason, maybe only because he knows Julian Assange, and to think about sitting in prison without actually committing a crime — the prosecutors said that he was in trouble for an assault on the integrity of computer systems, but they didn’t list a victim or show any evidence to prove that he’s done such a thing. It’s almost like they made up some crime to try to PIN that on him later. At this point he’s been in prison for months.
OLA: So, anyway, what ended up happening is that we did the final recourse which is a constitutional recourse called habeas corpus.
JACK: Oh, nice. Yeah, habeas corpus is the perfect tool here. It’s the constitutional right that protects people who got arrested to challenge the court by saying if I’ve committed a crime, I demand you show me proof. If they can’t show proof, then you could say your rights have been violated, and they could potentially let you go.
OLA: So, we got in front of three judges once again on the 20th of June, and we presented the information about what had happened when I was arrested.
JACK: His lawyer listed all the violations that took place during his arrest, and there were dozens of them; cops didn’t identify themselves, they didn’t say what he was charged with, they illegally broke into his apartment and seized his luggage, they didn’t tell the Swedish embassy within the twenty-four-hour window, and they wouldn’t let him have access to his lawyer, and dozens more violations of his rights.
OLA: Finally — we actually won that one, but they sent me back to prison because it’s a bureaucracy and you have to follow the bureaucracy, all the rules of the bureaucracy and all that stuff. So, I was sent back to prison. Okay, I won, but I’m still in prison. But then a few hours later, like at 10:00, 11:00 in the evening, my lawyers had managed to convince the judges to issue an order to immediately release me. [Music] At that point I came out, and my friends had organized bodyguards because they were being followed by people. So, we got into a car. I had bodyguards. Suddenly I was out, and I can’t even describe — it was a very weird feeling being outside after seventy days of being stuck in prison.
JACK: Okay, he’s finally let out of prison, but he’s still facing trial. He still has to go to court and plead his side to see if they think he’s guilty or innocent.
OLA: But the case didn’t go away, because even though they violated my rights, habeas corpus is just about fixing the immediate problem. The immediate problem was that I was in prison, so because they violated my rights when they arrested me, they let me go. But it didn’t have an impact on the rest of the process. The process continued.
JACK: So, he’s got some rules he has to follow. One, he can’t leave the country. Which, okay, he’s facing legal issues; I could see that. Two, he’s not allowed to have a bank account, and three, he has to check in with the prosecutor’s office every week to show he’s cooperating with authorities, like physically show up and check in. He’s still baffled at what’s all this about. He hasn’t done anything illegal, so he knows they’re not gonna find any crime that he’s committed. But at the same time, it’s super scary to face charges when the government is dead set on finding some crime that you’ve done. Why are they dead set on sending him to prison? It’s all a mystery to him.
OLA: [Music] While I was still in prison, the US sent an official request to interview me. So, we said, sure; following the Ecuadorian rules, we’re fine. But the US withdrew their request. But over the years I have received notifications from Google, I received notifications from Automattic, the WordPress company, I’ve received notifications from Apple. I don’t think I’ve received notifications from Menta. So, those three companies at least gave information to the FBI and to the DOJ about my accounts. So, somewhere in the background there is a US presence, but we still don’t know exactly why.
JACK: Man, what is happening? Why are there multiple countries investigating him now? Keep in mind, the Ecuadorian authorities never gave him back his phone or computers even after being let out of prison.
OLA: They took all of that from me in the airport. They took everything I had except for the clothes I was wearing, including — I mean, I’m one of those weird people that have — I have USB drives and YubiKeys around my neck, and they took all of that stuff. But since I have good password practices, none of that stuff was enough for them to get into any of my devices.
JACK: In 2018, what were you doing there to keep safe, right? So, you had YubiKey; that’s two-factor authentication. The USB drives around your neck, how are those encrypted?
OLA: Most of them were Tails drives with persistent modules, because I was using Tails a lot for high-sensitive stuff.
JACK: Tails is a version of the Linux operating system, which is a total amnesiac. It’s built so that when you reboot, everything you did gets erased. It’s made for extra-sensitive operations or for those who have very strict privacy practices.
OLA: For the regular computers, I was mostly using Debian versions and I was using just standard LUKS for the hard drives. So, it wasn’t anything advanced. I mean, basically my passwords are composed of stuff from the YubiKey composed of things that I have in my head combined with that to make it stronger, and then I was just using KeePass for everything else.
JACK: So, you say that…
OLA: Strange stuff.
JACK: …you were using Tails a lot for high-sensitive stuff. What was some of the high-sensitive stuff you were working on?
OLA: Well, a lot of that stuff had to do with — like, for example, I was talking to people all around the world like Glenn Greenwald, for example. I was in touch with him on and off because at one point we were in discussions for me to come in and look at the Snowden archives. That never ended up happening, but I was in contact with him, for example, and that’s the kind of contact that I don’t really want to do from a normal machine.
JACK: Well, his privacy practices all paid off big time, because the Ecuadorian authorities couldn’t get into anything, and the clock was ticking on them to find things, too.
OLA: In general, the prosecutor and the defense only had ninety days to find evidence. In my case it was extended to 120 days, and this time in August was the last month. When August was over, they wouldn’t have any possibility of finding new evidence and adding new evidence to the process.
JACK: They were determined to find some evidence on him within the time period, but they were really struggling. They were desperately looking for something they could find on him to charge him with.
OLA: [Music] I have been surveiled by different parts of the government. They are always following me, sometimes on motorcycles. Sometimes they are in cars with polarized windows and without the license plate. They have these very specific cars that are from the intelligence department of the judicial police here, and they keep following me.
JACK: He sent me photos that he’s taken of people following him.
OLA: One of the pictures you can see — it’s a picture of one of those cars with a guy pushing out and holding an antenna outside of the window, and this is one of those, I don’t know, meter-long antennas. This car with this antenna was standing outside of my home, pointing at my window for like thirty minutes. So, they were trying to — I don’t know what they were trying to do. The other thing that also happened was that in my apartment I started seeing Wi-Fi networks with different strange names with my name in them, and I never use my own name in my Wi-Fi names. They were coming and going, and it’s clear that the police were trying to convince me to connect to these open networks, because they were the only networks that didn’t have any password on them.
JACK: They were really determined to find something on him.
OLA: The thing is they managed to get video recordings from the surveillance cameras inside of my building. So, at some point when I was standing in front of an elevator, I put in my code. I didn’t have a strong PIN code; it was just eight digits, and the cameras inside of my building were apparently good enough that they could see the PIN code on my screen.
JACK: Wow, by looking at the security cameras from his apartment building, they figured out his PIN code on his phone. Man, I just got chills listening to that, because now I’m realizing that I’ve unlocked my phone a million times in view of a security camera. Elevators often have cameras in them, and I pull out my phone in elevators often and check what’s going on on my phone. You might say, pssh, I don’t need to worry about protecting my PIN in front of cameras because I don’t break the law. Yeah, well, Ola didn’t break the law, either. What’s your plan when your own government comes after you? The more they can look into your private life, the more likely they’re gonna find something bad that you did.
OLA: In August they managed to get into my phone. Of course, the funny part about this is that it’s clearly not legal for them to get access to the video cameras that were for our protection and use this for this purpose. According to the laws of Ecuador, this is a violation and shouldn’t have been possible. My phone was taken from me under illegal circumstances. The habeas corpus already showed that they were illegal circumstances. So, in theory, the phone shouldn’t have been possible to use as evidence. But the judges — later on, they ignored all of this.
JACK: [Music] So, once they got into his phone, they started looking through it. They used a tool called Cellebrite to analyze his phone, which is a tool used by law enforcement to extract and analyze data from digital devices like phones. So, with this, they were able to grab everything. Ola’s lawyers asked for a court date so they could see what the investigators found on the phone, and the technician brought the forensic computer into the court room to show them what they found.
OLA: I can tell you by the way that the version of Cellebrite they were using was like seven years old. So, it didn’t have support for Signal, which is where I had most of my conversations. But what was interesting was also they basically plugged this phone and Cellebrite into a regular desktop computer that was running a cracked version of Windows, that was running Word that was expired, and that had like — I think that I could see on the desktop about ten different games that was on this machine that they were using to exhibit evidence to us.
JACK: Games on there — the fact they had games is the funniest part.
OLA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it’s like — I don’t — I didn’t even know what to think about it.
JACK: I’ll tell you what I think about it. Having outdated forensics tools, unlicensed version of Windows, expired Microsoft Word, and video games on this computer indicates to me that the forensics team has zero accountability or integrity. They aren’t professionals or serious. You don’t play video games on a computer that’s collecting evidence for crimes. That chain of custody is extremely important, and evidence should be treated carefully and never tampered with. Yet, whoever had this computer did not care what the state of their computer was in, and probably didn’t care too much about their job, either, or following the rules.
OLA: Cellebrite had generated a 40,000-page PDF with all the content of my phone, because that’s apparently what Cellebrite does. That’s not so helpful. So, we started looking at this from page to page to page, and then the prosecutor, he was just like, this is taking too long. Please just add all of this to the expediente. What that means is that he basically asked for all those 40,000 pages to be added as evidence. Obviously, they were nothing sensitive from a security standpoint, but they were private conversations with girlfriends, with my family, information about, I don’t know, health history of my family, stuff like that. So, there were definitely sensitive things inside of that, and he was just — let’s add all of it to the pile of evidence. What’s important to know here is the expediente is public for anyone. Anyone can go into the prosecutor’s office and ask for a copy of any expediente. So, once it’s added there, it’s public forever.
JACK: They were able to argue that, really, all 40,000 pages should not be submitted to public record, and they were able to get it stopped, which is good. But then they requested a copy of this document so that they could look through it and prepare a defense if there is anything in there.
OLA: So, yeah. So, we asked to see the evidence on the phone and see if there was anything we could use. They responded back that, no, in order to preserve the privacy of the defendant, we cannot share the information on this phone with his defense. But it turns out that they had access to it. Basically, we found out that the phone and the USB drive is apparently in the safe of this woman, Diana Salazar, who is the prosecutor general of the whole country. They are apparently in her safe inside of that building, and apparently it’s still there. [Music] Then this is when things take a turn, because a few weeks later we find out from television — we don’t find out from the legal system. We found out from television that the prosecution has found an image on my phone, and this is the image that I shared with you.
JACK: Okay, let me pull it up. It’s a photo of a computer screen taken by a cell phone. It’s poor quality. It looks like a terminal window, like maybe a Linux computer. We’re looking at the command line here. It looks to me like someone’s tried to do a telnet connection to an IP address. It connects and it says, you are connected to an ISP in Ecuador called CNT. But then it says, what’s your username? Nothing is typed in. Then it times out and kicks him back into the home directory which is called Ola Bini.
OLA: So, any person with any kind of technical understanding knows that this is a telnet connection that — where it asks for the username and no one put anything in, and then it times out. That’s exactly what it looks like. But the prosecution starts using this, saying that I hacked into the systems of CNT, and they claim that this picture is actually the proof that I hacked into their systems. In fact, they’re so confused that they start asking if this IP address has a username, Ola Bini, on it, because they think that the prompt at the end of it is not the prompt on the computer making the telnet call. They think it’s the prompt of the computer that is running the IP address.
JACK: You’re making me furious.
OLA: Yeah.
JACK: So, here’s my question, though, okay? So, this photo is a — it looks like maybe taken by a cell phone, especially if it was found on your phone, of a computer screen, ‘cause I see the reflection of the screen and a shadow and such. So, why did you take this photo?
OLA: The funny part is — first of all, you can see on the timestamps this log information includes the year, which shows that this was taken in October 2015. So, first of all, this image has nothing to do with why I was arrested in the first place. Secondly, the funny thing is I don’t even remember taking this photo. It’s likely that I did take the photo, but I don’t even remember it. I do know what happened after, because this photo came from WhatsApp, and I have a friend — his name is Ricardo, and he’s worked with open source and free software in Ecuador for many, many years. In 2015 he had a contract with CNT. He was working with them.
Basically, the WhatsApp message that I sent with the image is basically, hey, what do you think about this, or something in that style. I sent the picture and the response I got says, looks like a router to me. I’ll see what I can find out. So, that was the only conversation that was around this picture. So, the way I interpret this, since I don’t remember taking the picture, is that I must have found an open telnet port to the internet, and this is something that is not great for a big corporation like CNT. So, I must have thought that, okay, I can tell Ricardo about this and he can escalate it to the right person. That’s what I think is what happened.
JACK: Well, this is it. The Ecuadorian prosecutors thought this was the smoking gun. Clearly he’s connected to an ISP in this photo, which clearly he’s not even tried to log into it. I mean, if you’re gonna attempt to log into something, I would at least think that you would put in your username, right? But he doesn’t even put in a username to try to log in. But that didn’t matter. The prosecutor was going to make this his crime. So, Ecuador was now charging him with access without permission to a computer system or telecommunication system. Well, in my opinion, this is going to be a slam-dunk case for Ola. He’s being charged with access.
The photo, the only evidence they have on him, clearly shows he doesn’t access it. I mean, I’m perplexed by what the government even thinks you’ve done wrong at this point, right? They thought you were a Russian hacker, and at this point you’re not Russian. They don’t have any evidence of you hacking. So, haven’t they — don’t they think maybe we just have the wrong guy? Like, let’s really look at this analytically. We’re not seeing any evidence on this guy. Like, why would they have kept you? From their perspective, what do you think was the reason why they were holding you?
OLA: Well, we had one theory. In March of 2019, there was a very big leak of documents in Ecuador called the INA Papers. The INA Papers were basically financial documents showing that the president — his name is Lenin Moreno — his family were hiding a lot of money in tax paradises and all kinds of bad stuff. Lenin Moreno was furious about these papers, and some people say that the reason why Julian was thrown out is because WikiLeaks tweeted a link to the INA Papers. Now, the INA Papers didn’t come from WikiLeaks as far as we know, but Julian posted a link to it. Lenin Moreno was very upset about this.
So, basically what we’ve heard is that he told Romo to get him the person responsible for this. Now, here is where it gets stupid. The secret intelligence organization in Ecuador was called the Senain. So, Senain was basically an internal NSA, an internal CIA, that were spying on everyone inside of Ecuador. Senain had a source, a secret source, called El Russo. So, that was their name for the source. Apparently, the way we’ve heard it told, is that the whole INA Papers thing happened because El Russo published these papers. So, this was an internal scandal inside of the Senain doing an attack against the president with these INA Papers. Now…
JACK: El Russo meaning The Russian.
OLA: The Russian; exactly. So, basically, what seems to have happened is that Romo went to the cops and to everyone saying that, okay, we need El Russo. [Music] Then, the day before I was arrested, there was a meeting where some of the cops, high-up cops, presented a photo of me saying that I was El Russo. But there were other people around the table that knew who the source was and said, no, no, no, he is not El Russo. Romo ignored all of that, and that’s what set in motion all of the stuff that happened afterwards. Basically, I became a scapegoat for the president, for the whole thing with — actually, I served as a scapegoat for two things.
First, I served as a scapegoat for the INA Papers, but they never charged me with that. They never actually accused me of the INA Papers. But they also used it as a way of explaining what happened with Julian, why they threw out Julian. So, basically, they were saying that Julian Assange was thrown out of the embassy because he was working with Ola Bini in order to destabilize the government. So, I was politically useful for the political class in Ecuador to have as an excuse or as a scapegoat for these different events.
JACK: They were accusing you of destabilizing the government.
OLA: Yeah, that’s what Romo said in that press conference. Legally speaking, I was never accused of that.
JACK: What an awful situation to be in, to be a political scapegoat. He’s never gonna win this. I mean, if the president is like, bring whoever leaked this to justice, then the authorities better do something, or they’re gonna face embarrassment. So, it seems like the authorities just grabbed someone who looked like it just to please the higher-ups, that they caught someone. But if he’s found innocent, the higher-ups are gonna get upset all over again, so they absolutely must find something Ola is guilty of in order to appease the corrupt politicians, and there’s just no winning move for anyone.
No wonder judges are confused and cops can’t figure out what they’re supposed to do with him. No wonder nobody is explaining anything to him, because they purposely arrested the wrong man in order to make him a scapegoat. I don’t see how this will ever end for Ola. I think he’s gonna be dealing with this for decades. He was let out of prison in 2019, but he’s required to check in weekly to the prosecutor’s office by going down there in person to show himself. Years go by of him doing that.
OLA: So, it went really slowly, but finally in January of 2022, we went to trial. At that point, my team and me, we had asked some friends around the world to serve as expert witnesses. So, I had four friends of mine from different places serve as expert witnesses. One of them is Roger Dingledine. He’s one of the co-creators of Tor, and another one is DMA — that was one of the kind of original people for cybersecurity; he was the person that ran BUGtrack for a long time — and a few other people. Basically, these people — Roger was there because they were saying in the accusation that using Tor is a sign of me being a criminal. You only use Tor if you’re a criminal. So, Roger was there basically to explain that, no, Tor has many uses. The others were there to explain how telnet works, how a connection works. You have to realize these judges, they’re like fifty, sixty years old, all of them. They have absolutely no technical knowledge. My lawyers…
JACK: It’s not just the judges but the investigators, too, had video games on their computers that they were using to investigate your case with.
OLA: Exactly. No one had any technical understanding. [Music] So, basically, this was a big challenge.
JACK: Guess how long his trial took to complete. Just take a wild guess. Go ahead, say a duration of time.
OLA: We had to pause the trial and then take it up again three times. So, the trial finally ended in 2023. So, the whole trial took a year.
JACK: A whole year. Gah, how excruciating. For a trial to last this long with absolutely no evidence on him is absurd.
OLA: The good thing is that at the end of all this, these three judges, unanimously, they declared that I was innocent. So, they — and they made a written declaration that was quite good. Because the thing that I’ve been worried about in my case is a bad case not just for me, but it’s a very bad case for security, cybersecurity researchers in the country. So, when this result came in, I was actually quite happy, because they wrote a lot of stuff that would serve as protection for future cybersecurity researchers in the country.
JACK: Oh yeah, a lot of people speculated that the reason all this happened is because Ola is a privacy activist creating tools to keep the government from spying on you. So, you could see how this could upset the government. So, he was particularly happy to see that the judges used language which would protect future researchers from getting in trouble.
OLA: [Music] But sadly what ended up happening is that the prosecutors, they appealed the decision.
JACK: Of course they appealed. They are never going to let him go. They have to keep him in legal trouble or else their house of cards is going to fall down. So, a new trial date was set, this time for a whole year later.
OLA: A year ago in — it was in the beginning of April last year; I was in front of three judges that were from the provincial level.
JACK: But this time it didn’t go his way. The judges found him guilty, but they didn’t find him guilty of the charge that he was on trial for. He was on trial for unauthorized access to a computer, but the judges changed his charge and found him guilty of attempted unauthorized access to a computer. They added the attempted part all on their own.
OLA: So, in Ecuador you’re not allowed to change the accusation. If you’re accused, someone will be convicted for that or they will not be convicted. These judges, they did a very bad thing because what they said in their decision is that they said that because I had the knowledge to break in, that’s enough to call this an attempt. So, only the fact that I had the knowledge was enough to say that this was what — they used the word ‘tentativa’, that this was an unauthorized access just because I had the possibility and I knew the tools.
JACK: Ahh, it’s like a circus, this court. It’s a bunch of clowns running the show. How can the prosecutors violate so many of his rights and get away with it? How can the judges change his charge and find him guilty of something else entirely? But even all that aside, simply having the knowledge of how to do a telnet connection is enough to convict someone of attempted hacking in Ecuador? Come on. This is killing me. Of course, now he has to appeal this. So, he said to the court, this is ridiculous. Can we please get this sorted? You’ve arrested an innocent man. I’m appealing this. Let’s take this to the next level.
OLA: We sent in that request for appeal in July of 2024, and the judges have not responded since then. So, they are basically just not responding.
JACK: This is what I mean. He’s never going to escape this legal battle. The authorities, the prosecutors, the judges, they all know he’s innocent, but he’s a political scapegoat, so he’s got to stay tangled up in this legal battle for optics of some sort, and it especially looks good if his last trial found him guilty. So, I’m willing to bet there’s never gonna be a new trial for him. He’s gonna remain in this limbo of being guilty but also not being in prison for a long time to come.
OLA: I’ve been in this situation for six years since I came out of prison. For six years I’ve been living with constant surveillance and because of this, my friends decided that I needed protection, because we don’t know what their goal is. So, I have been living with bodyguards, and I don’t leave my — I’m not allowed to leave my apartment without bodyguards, basically. So, I’ve been living like that for six years now. They are so afraid of losing face, so they don’t want to stop now because they’re afraid that they will look bad. So, that’s why this process continues, because all of these powerful people — the president of the country literally went out on public television saying that I was a criminal. While I was in prison — this was in April of 2019. I was in prison and he was saying that I was hacking in the airport while — when I was arrested.
That’s what he literally said to the whole country. Of course, we have pictures that show that when I was arrested, I was reading a book. So, unless you call it hacking to read a book — yeah. Then he was also saying that I didn’t have any training equipment with me, but actually in the lists that the police made of all my belongings is all of my training equipment. So, when the president of the country goes out and lies to the whole population about you, it’s a position where they can lose a lot of face. It wasn’t just him; it was Romo and many other people that have gone out publicly and put their name on the fact that they think that I am a criminal. So, for this reason I’ve been stuck in this, and I don’t know when it’s gonna end, to be honest, but I believe that honestly they would never have done this now. But since they’re stuck in the situation, they just don’t want to lose face.
JACK: Can you leave the country now?
OLA: No, no, no, and I still have to present myself at the prosecutor’s office every week. I still have no access to my bank accounts. I’m basically living with the help of my friends because I use their bank accounts to be able to pay things.
JACK: What is the public opinion of you?
OLA: That’s a great question, and from the beginning I had a lot of — so, I’m very lucky because I have a lot of international friends. I have friends all around the world. When I was arrested, a lot of the international community immediately came out to support me. The EFF has been particularly supportive, and the Tor Project, because those are the people I worked closely with, and we know each other. So — but Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch — there’s been more than a hundred different international organizations that have come out in my support, and they came out in my support immediately, and it was very heartening to feel that support when I was still in prison and worried about what was gonna happen. Here in Ecuador, it’s changed.
Basically, from the beginning, the government had all the narrative because I wasn’t outside. I couldn’t do any interviews. I wasn’t allowed to talk to the press or anything like that. So, during the first year or so, everyone was like, oh, you’re that hacker. Basically, that’s what was happening in the minds of basically everyone. But I’ve had a team helping me that was helping me with the defense. They were also giving advice on how to change the public opinion, on how to do interviews in a good way. I’m really, really happy to say that basically most of the population in Ecuador are actually on my side at this point. They just think about me as the poor software developer that got thrown in prison by the previous government.
So, right now I’m feeling very supported, and actually, that’s why — so, I told you I have the NGO, but actually I run another organization as well, which is called Seguridad Digital Ecuador, which is basically a cybersecurity company. We do both offensive security work and defensive security work. For the last year or so, I’ve been able to find work doing that kind of stuff to finance the NGO on the side. The fact that I’m able to do that kind of work and people are comfortable allowing me to do penetration testing or security audits without any trouble means that they don’t really believe any of the accusations.
JACK: Are you recognized on the street in Ecuador?
OLA: Oh yeah, all the time, all the time. Yesterday I was at an event and I spent probably thirty minutes with people taking pictures together with me. I get regularly recognized when I go to the supermarket or anything like that.
JACK: Ola lives in fear of the possibility that any day they might suddenly deny his appeal and immediately take him to prison. After all, he was found guilty of attempted hacking. So, it’s possible the police could just come and lock him up at any moment. This kind of stuff gives him panic attacks when he starts thinking about it. It’s really hard to get to the truth of this story. To figure out exactly what it is that you’re being charged of and what they think you’re guilty of is still not even entirely clear, that you’re — they’re accusing you of attempting hacking of — into what? What was my target? Who did I — who are the victims?
Bring the victim forward. So, if that’s not the case — if it is because, well, the president doesn’t like whistleblowers and they’re just gonna blame you for being a whistleblower and now that it’s turned out that you’re not the actual whistleblower, the government doesn’t want to be embarrassed for saying publicly that you’re the one who did it, and so, we’re just going to carry on with it anyway is a whole ‘nother world of — it’s almost conspiracy-theory stuff. Imagine what the government thinks without actually knowing what the government thinks; you’re just making stuff up at that point. I hate to indulge in that, but there’s no other road here that I can go down to be — to make sense of this story.
OLA: Yeah, I completely feel you. I completely understand you, because to be honest, I’m not sure if I buy any of the explanations I’ve given you. Like, these are the explanations that we have any kind of possibility that they might be true, but I don’t know if they’re true, and they don’t explain some other stuff that we’ve heard. For example, we’ve heard that CNT was very close to the US embassy, and that the US embassy instructed CNT to continue with the case against me, for example. We’ve heard other things that keep happening that, to be honest, don’t necessarily explain everything. One example is a journalist actually published photographs, and I can identify that these photographs were taken weeks before I was arrested.
If I was under surveillance long before I was arrested, that means that the whole story about Maria Paula Romo and the INA Papers and all that stuff must be false. There must be something else behind this. Sadly, we’ve done freedom of information requests and we’ve asked all the government entities about what information they have about me, and they all responded that they have no information about me, including the cops that are surveiling me have no information about me. [Music] So, I mean, this is the kind of thing that I lie awake during nights trying to figure out. Like, what — why did they do this? What was the purpose, and what are they thinking? Especially the constant surveillance — now, six years later, why are they still keeping me under surveillance? It must cost them so much money.
JACK: Have you heard of the book The Trial by Franz Kafka? It’s a fictional story and meant to be totally absurd, but it’s almost the identical story of Ola Bini. In the book The Trial, a man named K. is arrested, and they don’t tell him why. In fact, they make him feel bad for even asking questions. The people arresting him say it’s not their job to say why he’s under arrest. They’re just carrying out orders to arrest him. So, they didn’t even know why themselves. They tell him, well, you’ll learn everything at your hearing, but when he goes to his hearing, K. doesn’t learn anything about why he’s been arrested. Instead they tell him, well, you’ll find out at your trial. But then they tell him his trial is super far into the future. In the meantime they let him go home and do his business as usual.
So, he’s stuck in this space that they say he’s done something illegal, but they won’t say what with a looming trial far off into the future. In the book, K. stays locked in this legal battle without ever knowing what he did wrong until he dies. Part of why I’m so frustrated about Ola’s story is because it feels like no one has accountability for his situation. The cops didn’t know why they arrested him, so he can’t get clarity there. The prosecutors weren’t sure, either. They were probably just following orders, too. The judges were also in the dark. When bureaucracy becomes that thick, where you can’t find anyone accountable, then you face big problems like this. Innocent people start losing their freedom.
Because if everyone’s just following orders and no one takes responsibility or is accountable, then where does truth fit into anything? In my opinion, this Ola Bini case is frivolous not because it’s weak but because it was never meant to win. The main objective of a frivolous case is to waste someone’s time, money, or energy through court, and that’s what makes it so dangerous. You and I can’t file a frivolous case to waste someone else’s money, but the government can do it, and here’s an example of them doing it. They use the process as punishment when they want to hurt someone but know they can’t win. They just do this. I’m still wondering if this is a battle over privacy.
If Ola was helping people stay private and secure and harder to surveil, then I could see how governments could be upset about that, and maybe they thought they could arrest him and find something later to charge him with, but were no match for his own privacy practices. A lot of people think that’s the reason why he was arrested, and it’s scary to think that those helping us be more private can face legal troubles like this. It’s also a bit ironic that Julian Assange was confined to the Ecuadorian embassy for seven years until he was forced out, and now Ola Bini, his friend, has been confined to Ecuador for over six years now, unable to leave, forced to stay there by the government. In 2021, there were elections for a new president in Ecuador. By that time, Lenin Moreno, the sitting president, had a disastrously low approval rating of nine percent.
He didn’t even try to run. In 2023, Diana Salazar, Ecuador’s attorney general, brought forth charges against the ex-president, Lenin Moreno. By the way, she’s the same person who supposedly has Ola’s phone in her safe. She’s alleging that Lenin Moreno conducted corruption over the building of some hydroelectric plants. So, now the ex-president has his own legal problems where he has to do what the court says. He even has to appear before a prosecutor every few weeks just like Ola has to, and that’s where we’re at today. Both Ola and the ex-president are waiting for the next steps in their legal battles, and we’ll see where they both end up. But I sure hope that Ola gets out of all this soon. He didn’t break any systems, but the system tried to break him. Maybe it’s still trying to do that. But as Kafka wrote, logic may indeed be unshakable, but it cannot withstand a man who wants to live.
(Outro): [Outro music] Thank you so much to Ola Bini for coming on the show and telling us this crazy story. I hope he gets his charges dropped soon and can travel outside Ecuador again someday and not have to worry about this anymore. This episode was created by me, the Ctrl+Alt delinquent, Jack Rhysider. Our editor is the zero-day Zorro, Tristan Ledger, mixing by Proximity Sound, and our intro music is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Remember, kids, privacy isn’t just something you do once. It’s a lifestyle. It’s like, if you forget to put your pants on one day, people are gonna see your junk. So, cover up. This is Darknet Diaries.
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