Swedish coder Ola Bini held in Ecuador was defender of Julian Assange but ‘not a criminal’, friends say

An ace Swedish programmer who was an early, ardent supporter of WikiLeaks has been arrested in Ecuador in an alleged plot to blackmail the country’s president over his abandonment of Julian Assange. But friends of Ola Bini say the soft-spoken encryption expert is being unfairly targeted for his activism on behalf of digital privacy. Bini, 36, was arrested on Thursday at the airport in the Ecuadorean capital Quito as he prepared to board a plane to Japan. The arrest came just hours after Assange was evicted from the Ecuadorean embassy in London. Bini was carrying at least 30 electronic storage devices. His lawyers said they have not been notified whether he has been charged. Authorities said the plot hatched with two unidentified Russian hackers living in Ecuador involved threatening to release compromising documents about President Lenin Moreno as he toughened his stance against the WikiLeaks founder. “It’s up to the justice system to determine if he committed a crime,” Interior Minister Maria Paula Romo said on Friday. “But we cannot allow Ecuador to become a centre for piracy and spying. That period in our history is over.” Romo said Bini travelled at least 12 times to meet Assange at the London embassy. She said he was also in Venezuela earlier this year around the same time a close aide to Moreno’s former mentor turned arch enemy, Rafael Correa. The former president granted Assange asylum in 2012 and has been leading a campaign cheered on by WikiLeaks to expose corruption by Moreno, including the release of damaging personal documents and photos, including several of him eating lobster in bed. While the extent of Bini’s relationship with Assange is unclear, the Swede has defended the WikiLeaks founder’s free speech rights in a blog he has kept over the years. “Any official who has called for Assange to be treated as a terrorist or enemy combatant should be seriously considering stepping down from office,” he wrote in December 2010. In the same blog, Bini condemned Amazon for knocking WikiLeaks off its hosting services and credit card companies and PayPal for refusing to process payments to the secret-spilling site. He also described working on a January 2011 panel about WikiLeaks put on by his employer at the time, global software firm Thoughtworks, and including Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame. An expert on secure communications, Bini arrived in Quito in 2013 after being transferred from Chicago to the Ecuador office of Thoughtworks. Around the same time, he started to rethink his online habits and at one point gave up his Gmail account in favour of self-hosted email. “I am not a huge fan of having all my electronic life hosted under the auspices of US legislation, especially not in light of recent events,” he wrote in a 2013 post. Friends and loved ones describe Bini as a computer geek who felt most at ease solving complex programming problems for days at a time. At the time of his arrest, he was travelling to Japan, his former wife Malin Sandell said, for two weeks of jujitsu training – one of the few hobbies he indulged in outside his work as a coder. Mysteries surround Julian Assange’s cat: where is it and what does it know? His Ecuadorean girlfriend said she did not recall Bini ever expressing strong support for Assange despite the fact the WikiLeaks founder has deep ties in Sweden and would have been an obvious topic of conversation in the small Ecuadorean programming circles. “Ola is not a hacker, if by that you mean a criminal, but he is someone trying to understand how computers work and protect people’s privacy,” Sofia Ramos said in an interview from Brussels. Ramos worked with Bini on a project at the Centre for Digital Autonomy for creating a more secure instant-messaging encryption protocol. In its statement on Friday, the centre said Computerworld had ranked him in 2010 as Sweden’s number six developer. Julian Assange’s seven-year stay in Ecuador’s embassy marked by erratic behaviour that included skateboarding at night The centre is a small charity incorporated in Ecuador and Spain dedicated to private, secure and anonymous communication. Its website says it has contributed to well-known projects including Enigmail and the Tor privacy browser. In the hours before he went to the airport on Thursday, Bini sent a Tweet warning of a “witch hunt” by Ecuadorean authorities mopping up after Assange’s forced departure from the embassy. Now that prophecy appears to have been true, said his friends. “I did not realise that knowing somebody is a crime,” said Vijay Prashad, who runs a Marxist publishing house in India and last saw Bini a few months ago in Sao Paulo, Brazil. “He is the last person who would ever be involved in an attempt overthrow a government.”

Swedish coder Ola Bini held in Ecuador was defender of Julian Assange but ‘not a criminal’, friends say

.css-1mniedq{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;}Bini had at least 30 electronic storage devices when arrested at airport on way to Japan and lawyers said they have not been told if he has been charged

Bini had at least 30 electronic storage devices when arrested at airport on way to Japan and lawyers said they have not been told if he has been charged