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Government

Ecuador Jails Swedish Programmer Over Alleged Ties To WikiLeaks (theguardian.com) 45

An anonymous reader quotes the Guardian: A judge in Ecuador has jailed a Swedish software developer whom authorities believe is a key member of WikiLeaks and close to Julian Assange, while prosecutors investigate charging him with hacking as part of an alleged plot to "destabilise" the country's government. Ola Bini, 36, was ordered to held in preventive detention on Saturday pending possible cyber-attack charges and his bank accounts were frozen. Prosecutors were examining dozens of hard drives and other material he had in his possession, according to local media reports...

On Thursday, Ecuador's interior minister, Maria Paula Romo, said they had identified a "key member of WikiLeaks" who was "close to Mr Julian Assange". Secret visitors' logs seen by the Guardian show that Bini was one of Assange's many visitors in Ecuador's embassy in Knightsbridge, west London.... Speaking to local media on Thursday, Romo said Ecuador was at risk of cyber attack, hinting Wikileaks could retaliate for the termination of Assange's asylum. She added the government did not want the country "to turn into an international [cyber] piracy centre"...

Last week, the government of president Lenin Moreno, 66, accused WikiLeaks of being involved in a campaign implicating Moreno and his family in corruption. Moreno, who has long expressed his unhappiness over Assange's asylum status, complained that "photos of my bedroom, what I eat and how my wife and daughters and friends dance" had been circulating on social media.

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Ecuador Jails Swedish Programmer Over Alleged Ties To WikiLeaks

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  • by houstonbofh ( 602064 ) on Saturday April 13, 2019 @05:11PM (#58433146)
    Boy, when Ecuador is bought, they sure go all in! The dollar really does go a long way there... And $4.2 of them even longer!
    • by Anonymous Coward

      Next up: Ola Bini smells of Scandinavian fermented fish and tortures cute endangered animals in his basement.

    • It's all one he'll of a coincidence.

    • A commentor on a different blog (that I can't find ATM) stated that he knew from inside knowledge that Julian has a "dead-man's switch" to be triggered if he's ever arrested, with damaging information on Ecuador.

      He also stated that the recent arrest definitely triggered the switch, and we should expect some interesting wikileaks drops in the next week or so.

      (Wikileaks takes care to verify it's information, which usually takes a couple of days. For example, it verifies the encryption signatures of E-mails. A

      • [Wikileaks] scans and removes information that might get someone killed

        since when?! they dumped all quarter million pages of the Iraq stuff completely unredacted.

        • by Anonymous Coward

          Since forever and even after they were deprived of donations by the US illegal pressure on international payment providers and cooperation with the "free journalism". You can only do so much with a few good employees.

          Be that as it may, I still have to see a verifiable story of someone killed because of a wiki leak.

        • No, Guardian's David Leigh did, by foolishly releasing the password to an archive that had been entrusted to him precisely to do "responsible" redactions.

          WikiLeaks then decided that since all the spy agencies, big boys etc. anyone with a budget basically, now had access to it, the rest of us should as well.

      • So what you're saying is that Assange selectively releases information depending on what is personally beneficial and who he is and is not allied with?

      • it's not unreasonable to wait a week and see if Julian cleaned up and with a shave talks reasonable at a press conference

        That seems unlikely. He's not going to be treated well.

      • I can't say I am in any sort of panic right now. And what do you mean "fatally hacked"? You can only fatally hack an android or at least someone with a pacemaker...

    • "The dollar really does go a long way there"

      The US dollar is literally their legal tender.

    • I'm really not convinced Ecuadorian President Moreno was bought. He seems like a pretty traditional upper class, anti-worker Latin American politician. No need to take bribes - he and is family and friends directly benefit from every public policy that kicks the poor or gives a government handout to the super rich. Standard issue banana republic capitalist dog.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        No need to take bribes

        People who take bribes seldom do.

        The whole "it's harder to bribe rich" people is a myth.
        It has nothing to do with your financial situation and only to do with your morals.

        At most rich people will be more expensive to bribe, but when it comes to politics the value you get from bribing someone tends to become astronomical pretty quickly.
        Say that you want to start a mining operation in a natural preservation area. You can possible make billions from it, so a $100 million bribe isn't really something you can't

  • ...Moreno himself. Isn't it obvious?

  • And how did they obtain these secret visitor logs ?

    They must be teh haxors !!! (surely not a leak)

    The guardian used to be a reputable media outlet, now they collaborate with sources hostile to society to disseminate propaganda.

    • by evanh ( 627108 )

      The phrase will mean the logs are secret for the visitation only, as in a hidden camera scenario. Revealed after the recording is made.

      Ecuador will be spilling everything it has and spinning a yarn to go with it.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Next up, women who formerly fucked Ola Bini now regret their decision and claim he retroactively raped them. Also, underage girls claim he raped them too. And the gov will find child porn on every hard drive they inspect... and there's no evidence someone like NSA planted it there.

    Or some such crap. Anything to dehumanize a target of political suppression. The political stage is just a Clown World at this point. We should all just hold a vote of no confidence in all governments, fire everyone and hire

  • by Anonymous Coward

    It's clear that the country most hostile to exposing journalism and press freedom is good old America itself who always tauts its "freedom and democracy". And now the corrupt psychopaths and war criminals are going after anyone they can to send the message: don't talk about our war crimes, or we put you in prison for life.

    What a dishonest piece of shit country America has turned into.

  • Cui bono.

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