DO: That's a really good question. I can talk a little bit about the significance of the case, both kind of EFF as an organization and also for its wider implications. So EFF started -- and I think this is why we always seem to be a bit hard to place on the political channel -- as a combination of people from all over the political spectrum who all knew one thing, which was that the rise of digital technology, what we used to call the digital revolution, was going to transform people's rights, whether for good or for ill. So our founders had John Perry Barlow, who was one of the lyricists of the Grateful Dead. We have Mitch Kapor, who was, still is, a businessman; he started Lotus 1-2-3, [which] the ancients among us will remember as the first real popular spreadsheet. [And John] Gilmore, who had a strong place both in programming and kind of the libertarian space. So our politics are all over.
But one of the areas that we spent a lot of time in the early years was just trying to explain to people that -- this was in the very end of the eighties -- that these technologists who were coming along, especially teenage technologists with strangely colored hair, were not necessarily the horsemen of the apocalypse, right. That they had these skills, and there was a real potential here for them to create things that would be useful and powerful and good for open societies. So we spent a bunch of time in the courts explaining it to judges, sometimes actually defending hackers and technologists. So we have a long tradition of doing that.
I think what's interesting in the sort of era -- the post-WikiLeaks era, you might describe it -- is that that sort of model or fiction of what technologists of that kind are like has gone from being these are sort of scary teenagers, to these are people who could, are really going to disrupt society. Whether they're the head of Facebook -- you know, Mark Zuckerberg -- certainly describes himself as a hacker. The address, if you need to send snail mail to Facebook, is 1 Hacker Way. You have folks like Assange that definitely came from that hacker technologist community. And then you have people like Ola who are like thousands of people around the world, who really are keeping the privacy protective parts of the internet, and the stuff that keeps you safe from governments, corporations, and cyber-criminals -- they're like another camp entirely. But they're all from this community of people who understand the technology. And their politics are very varied, their impact is very varied, and their motivations are very varied. One of the challenges we've always had is that people look at the worst in that community, and kind of apply it to everyone else. And that's sort of understandable if you're trying to deal with a scary, new entrant into the power dynamics of modern society. But it can mean that you can throw out not only the good with the bad, but the people who might be solutions to the problems that the other actors are creating.
RS: And that's one of the things that Ola Bini was a leader in. You call him a world leader in trying to build safe places where people can communicate without being subject to government surveillances. And even though people, some people, have a kinder view of the U.S. government, after all, we're talking about a wide world that has to survive in even more overtly controlling environments, and explicitly totalitarian and authoritarian societies. And he has been one of the people -- I gather he's been a consultant to the European Union; he's worked on your very successful sites to keep people [in] this kind of protection. So why don't you just tell us about, you know, who this guy is, and how he connected somehow with Julian Assange. And then let me just give the punchline. You know, I only learned about this case because three of you from the EFF bothered to go down to Ecuador and find out what was going on. I know the justice minister there didn't meet with you; you met with other people, and his defense team. And then you wrote a report when you came back. And for people who don't get the EFF report, I would highly recommend it; we'll cite it at the end. But you were really doing yeoman work here. And again, I beg the question: Why isn't this of greater concern?
DO: So I think there's two parts to this. One is sort of unpacking who Ola is, and maybe we can get to that in a moment. I think that the more pertinent question, certainly for me right now, is you know, why is there not more attention on cases like this. And I think that -- I don't think it's new. I think that there's a model for what we see here, which is -- I used to work for the Committee to Protect Journalists, which is a great organization
RS: I was once on the board, very early in the day, I myself, yeah. When I worked at the L.A. Times, yes.
DO: Right, right. And, well, you'll know that they do really good and similar work for journalists around the world. Because I feel like journalists, lawyers, human rights lawyers, human rights defenders, sort of viewed broadly, are often the canaries in the coal mines in authoritarian or veering-authoritarian regimes. And that if you -- I think many governments recognize that if you can either tug it, or silence, or just intimidate and chill, the key journalists or the prominent public defenders, then you have a huge sort of multiplier leverage effect on opposition groups, or groups fighting for justice in those countries.
What's happened in the last few years is I think that governments around the world have recognized that technologists also fall into this category, or particular kinds of technologists. Actually, I'm sort of dealing with this right now in China; China has been building up to intimidate and scare its own community of technologists who have been primarily involved in creating tools to bypass the Great Firewall of China. Now, of course, it's coming a little bit more to a head, to the technologists who are protecting the privacy of the Hong Kong protesters. So we see this sort of move, but I think right now we're sort of in an era where the world -- and I think this is, I've already talked about the post-WikiLeaks world; I think this is the post- or mid-Facebook era -- where people have gone from being, you know, actually quite engaged and excited by the promises of digital technology, to really quite cautious and intimidated by them. And so when somebody comes along who has these skills, I think it's pretty easy for a government to whip up a moral panic about them.
And that's what happened with Ola in Ecuador. He was arrested shortly after a press conference that the current minister of the interior held -- hours, I think, after the U.K. police were allowed into the Ecuadorian embassy, and Julian Assange was taken out pretty forcefully. So hours after that, the interior minister in Ecuador held a press conference and said, look, we know that there are members of WikiLeaks within Ecuador, and Russian hackers who are planning to attack and bring down the country's systems. We're going to arrest them. And then within hours, Ola -- who is Swedish, but lives in Ecuador -- was picked up and thrown in jail.
RS: And what is the connection between Ola and Julian Assange?
DO: So Ola Bini has -- or the government has accused him of meeting with Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy, I believe 12 to 13 times. They will know [Laughs], because they'll see, they have the visitor's book in the Ecuadorian embassy. Of course, apart from the fact that who you associate with isn't actually, or shouldn't be a crime that you can be arrested and thrown in jail for, it's also the case -- and this is after I spent some time trying to understand better who Ola Bini actually was, partly in talking to him, but mostly in talking to other technologists around the world -- ah, Ola talks to a lot of people. And also, during that period of Julian Assange's sort of exile in the embassy, a lot of people went and saw that man. From, again, all across the political spectrum, and with many different interests. So that's the evidence that the Ecuadorian government has so far to claim --
RS: Including Google's Eric Schmidt, right?
DO: That's right. I'd forgotten about that, but yeah, ah --
RS: Yeah, he was in there, meeting with him and so forth, yeah.
DO: Right, and of course you've got to remember that, like, the arc of Julian Assange's sort of rise and, you know, potentially fall, at least among the U.S. left, has meant that he has definitely ended up meeting with or associating with a huge range of different people. You know, I think he went from a point where he was a cause ce'là ¨bre to now, where I think a lot of people accuse him, or certainly feel that he is implicated in the election of President Trump.
RS: Yeah, and we're -- we're going to get to that. I already did an interview with the UN rapporteur on torture, and you're familiar with his statement about how Assange was treated. I think it's critical to observe here -- and it is a real failure of a part of the left, or liberals, or people who care about individual freedom, whether they're left or right -- that somehow the whistleblower has gone from being an admired figure to being a scorned person. And there's some irony in this. I've done some of these podcasts with Daniel Ellsberg, who I actually, you know, covered as a journalist during the Pentagon Papers trial. And now Ellsberg is remembered nostalgically as a heroic whistleblower, and somehow Julian Assange is a retrograde. And Ellsberg is very quick to point out that actually Julian Assange, in the case of the Pentagon Papers, would be in the position of the New York Times and the Washington Post as publishers. And that he, Daniel Ellsberg, was actually the person who had worked for the U.S. government, had been given these documents as an employee of the RAND Corporation, which then had a contract with the U.S. government. And so he was actually in a much more vulnerable position as a whistleblower.
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