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Equador, how an authoritarian government
is fooling the entire world.
We have two speakers, Pedro Noel,
who is a coeditor at the Associated
Whistleblowing Press, and Bethany Horn,
who is an activist and a writer.
So the question is, is Ecuador
really interested in free speech?
They don't think so, and they will let
you know why. So please welcome with me
on stage Daphne Horne and Pedro Noel.
So how good night, thanks
for, uh, for the CCC, for bringing
us here, accepting our talk and
supporting us being here.
And Pedro Neul, I'm a Brazilian
journalist. I've been since 2010.
Working with leaks means,
uh, restricted materials of public
relevance, uh, both publishing
leaks and analyzing.
Currently, I work as a coeditor
at the Associated Whistleblowing Press,
which is an NGO,
uh, working and implementing running
and operating whistleblowing platforms,
always in a local way, among
other platforms.
We run in Iceland, in Spain,
in sonand in Peru.
I hope, uh, we
also have a platform in Ecuador,
which is called Ecuador Transparent.
I'll talk more about this platform later
on. So now let Button introduce
herself.
Uh, so I'm Bethany Horn.
I grew up in Ecuador,
but I started working as a journalist in
Canada.
I then moved back to Ecuador
and worked at the state newspaper
there for
for a little bit, very short, little
bit, and then I went to work
for a academic research
group at a university.
The academic research group was run by
hackers, and we were researching
copyright and other policy issues
to advise the Ecuadorian government.
The first thing that I want to say and
that I need to say
is that I recognize
that Ecuador has to
has to be praised and thanked
for the very brave act
of giving asylum to Julian
Assange.
I'm glad that my adopted country
has taken on this role in the world
and stands up to the United States
on this one issue.
Defending WikiLeaks is right to publish
and exist is a human rights
issue.
I think that Julian Assange is in danger
of extradition.
And the Ecuadorian embassy in London
is the only thing keeping him safe,
but it would be a mistake to assume that
this portion of Ecuador's foreign policy
has any effect on their domestic policy.
It doesn't.
Governments are made up of people.
And inside the Ecuadorian government,
like inside many governments, there
is a war between factions,
some good, some bad.
This is a government that has been in
power for eight years now, and they
intend to stay in power for many more.
President Rafael Correa
and the political party that he started
are concerned with power.
They'll change the rules that they
themselves created in order to
keep power.
An example of this.
Is a recent.
Well, this has been going on for a while,
but in 2008, they wrote
a new constitution that said.
Limits term limits.
Recently, they've grown so worried about
whether they can win another election
without Rafael Correa that
there was two years of discussion
about changing the Constitution so that
they could reelect Rafael Correa for
a third or maybe fourth term
indefinitely.
They didn't end up doing that.
They did change the Constitution.
But Rafael Correa decided he didn't want
to run anyway, so they didn't change it
to make it friendly to him.
But this is just an example that I wanted
to give of
of one of the tactics that the Ecuadorian
government has for maintaining
control, and that is
the laws.
And I want to talk about some of the laws
that they've brought in that deal with
communications especially, and how this
affects democratic freedoms, journalism
and free speech.
But there's a second more worrying way
that the current government in Ecuador is
exercising control, and that's through
illegal means.
Pedro has published documents via
his whistleblowing platform that
illustrate this, and he'll talk about
them.
Ecuador's constitution protects citizens'
right to intimacy.
So we consider certain
kinds like the spying that is
revealed in the documents
to be illegal.
There are other illegal tactics popping
up in Ecuador, stuff like
threats of violence, censorship.
Not all of it can be linked directly to
the government, but we'll talk about it
to.
Ecuador's intelligence services are
heavily implicated, especially in the
illegal stuff that we see going on,
the intelligence agency in Ecuador is
called the sending the secretary of
National Intelligence.
It also has another
short form seen.
And it's it's Ecuador's biggest problem,
but the government's
other institutions, the presidency,
the National Assembly and
the super powerful Communications
Secretariat, they all benefit from
the intelligence that's gathered by
by the Senate.
They're benefiting, benefiting from it,
and they're not challenging it.
So laws need to change in Ecuador, but
also its institutions need to be made
to follow the law.
International pressure helps, which is
why we are here.
So after at
the end of our talk, we'll deliver a
message to Korea because
we know that he listens and
we know that he listens because,
well, I found my picture in the Senate
leaks, so I know
I have a certain amount
of.
CachÃ©,
we know he listens because he responds,
he
he's very vocal, he
does his own Twitter feed.
Last time I wrote about Ecuador, he
responded to me on national television
for 14 minutes, which was fun.
His his account will get there.
I want to I want to first give, like,
a picture.
The key to understanding him is,
is understanding that he craves
control.
We had a video that we were going
to play now, but it didn't work.
I.
Believe that I linked to it on
my blog, Bellhorn horn dot com,
if you want to see the video later, I
will I will put it up there.
He creates control.
He had such high approval ratings for
a really long time because to a certain
degree, Ecuadoreans agreed
that keeping stuff under control was
important.
To understand why control is the key
word, I want to give a brief outline
of the ten years in Ecuador before
Correa came to power.
So.
The first character
in this story, oops.
Is this guy he was elected
in 1996, his name is Abdala Bucaram,
he was elected despite the Hitler
mustache.
He was a.
Populist.
Kind of unpredictable.
His nickname was a local
the crazy guy, and he really
was insane.
He would go on TV and sing songs
and he embezzled a whole lot of money.
Congress declared him mentally unfit
to serve as president.
There was a Congress made up of his
political enemies.
They had to go against the Constitution
in order to do this, in order to
name his replacement.
But he was he
was kicked out of office after
two million Ecuadorians took to the
streets for weeks and
shut down the country, basically.
So this is the first of three
soft coups in the 10 years
that came before Korea.
His presidency was very short, it ended
in 1997.
Congress appointed an interim leader
and then the next guy that's elected
is what he's sort
of the opposite of Abdulahi, who's very
smart and.
He was a known political actor.
He'd been the mayor of the capital city.
He was right wing
and
governed pretty predictably.
He during his presidency, Ecuador
was hit with the worst financial
crisis in generations,
70 percent of the banks in the country
closed.
Thousands of families lost their savings.
Families were split up because people had
to migrate to Italy
and Spain and the U.S.
in order to find work.
He doloris the economy because inflation
got so bad that Ecuador lost its currency
during his presidency.
And again, people took to
the streets, shut down Quito, shut
down the highways, protested.
And an army general refused
to stop the protesters from taking over
the presidential palace.
And again, he had to
leave.
His vice president took over, finished
or finished up his presidency.
This is the second soft coup.
And this was in.
When was it?
Um, 2000.
One, yeah,
uh, anyway.
So next is this guy,
he was actually the army general who
didn't stop the protests
from taking over the presidential palace.
This is Lucio Gutierrez.
He's another populist who
was close to
left and indigenous movements at
the beginning when he ran similar to
Abdullah.
But he quickly lost that
support because he governed
like a neoliberal.
And by this point, people just knew,
like, OK, we can get rid of him, so they
took to the streets, protested,
and he was gone.
Uh.
So by the end of this, I
mean, Ecuador has a young democracy, they
had a military dictatorship for
a while.
By the end of this,
people were pretty demoralized about
it was bad for business.
All the coups were bad for business.
Oops, I skipped a slide.
And and
people were ready for something else, so
2006, Rafael Correa
runs a campaign with a totally
new party.
He promises that he's going to disband
Congress and.
Call new elections to
rewrite the constitution after he
wins and he wins.
He got a lot of support by promising
to be different.
And he started out really well and a lot
of us, myself included, were excited
by his first year in office and we liked
his we liked his constitution.
But in 2010, he lost control.
And as you remember,
control is very important to him.
There was a protest by the police
union that shut down
streets and people were getting
flashbacks to
to 1997, 2001 and
and 2003.
The police cornered him, he
needed the military to rescue him from a
hospital, there was a shootout, people
died. He calls it a coup attempt.
And I don't call it a coup
attempt. I think it's debatable.
And that's a debate we can
talk about another time.
But what was true is that it really
scared him.
And after 2010,
the need for control started to clash
with his original promise of democracy.
And it's this clash with democracy that
is my problem and our problem as
people interested in universal human
rights.
So I want to talk about the laws, the
legal stuff that's been going on in
Ecuador, that threatening speech and
publishing and
dissent.
So the first one was the Constitution
of 2008,
which, as I said, had a lot of
progressive and good
innovations in it.
It affected the media because it
it legislated
the separation between.
People owning media and other businesses,
so a lot of bankers got their
newspapers and TV stations
expropriated by the government,
which people supported, they didn't want
bankers having that much power
over the media.
But it led to concentration of a
different sort, the state
never sold those media outlets
and the state went from owning nine
public media outlets to owning 42.
And this concentration trend is
continuing
its papers.
Fold and get one
just recently got bought by the
state newspaper and another
one closed last year, the second law
is the communications law in
2013,
which was really
which was sort of a wish of
Korea to bring in earlier.
But he didn't have support in the
assembly and
in it.
There it creates the crime
of media lynching, which it describes
as a Kornet coordinated dissemination
of information, which sounds
a lot like journalism
with the purpose of discrediting or
harming the reputation of a natural or
legal person.
It doesn't say if that information is
false, if it harms the reputation
of a natural legal person and it's a
coordinated publication, then
you could be in trouble.
This law also makes media outlets
responsible for online comments.
A lot of newspapers shut down their
comment sections after it, and it creates
regulatory agencies to enforce
the murky law.
The biggest one is the super com.
Which forces
corrections and I want to show.
So this is a cartoon
of a police raid on a
journalist's house two years ago.
It was done by a guy who
is one of the country's biggest
cartoonists. The government didn't like
it. They said that he had to issue
a correction on his cartoon
because it showed the police being too
violent, I guess.
So he drew a correction, which shows the
police knocking very politely
and asking
kindly to take the journalist's
computer with them and
will keep it in a closed
envelope to preserve chain of custody
and have a happy
Christmas.
So
cartoonists have a little bit of fun with
it.
This is another one that I
like.
They asked this magazine
to issue a correction of its front page
image because they thought that
the wrecking ball destroying
the logo of the social service
agency was not accurate
and they just.
That was their correction, so
it's a little it's a little boring,
there's a lot of fines that come along
with this communication law.
They've now issued two hundred thousand
dollars in fines, at least in the past
two years, to journalists
and self-censorship because journalists
don't want to get fined.
So there's that kind of way.
How much they can say and not go against
the communications are.
And the third law is just within
the past month, they changed the
Constitution, as I said, and
they made communication, public
service, and nobody really knows what
they mean by this,
whether it means that communication
passes to be a responsibility of the
state like water
and electricity.
But this is what journalists are afraid
of and they don't really see the trend
going in a good way.
So they were opposed
to this.
To this, there are other difficulties
doing journalism in Ecuador, I
experienced some
and others have experienced others,
you can ask me about it later.
And then so
the legal framework for control
that that
that goes hand in hand with this
legal one.
Ecuador sort of was a star of the
hacking team.
Info dump, there was a lot
of evidence in the
documents released by WikiLeaks,
published by WikiLeaks, released by some
friendly hacker
that Ecuador is a client of hacking team.
This was the receipt,
I believe.
With a with the contractor Thiola
in Belize.
Based on Malaysia.
So the government denied
after this information came out, they
denied that they had any relationship
with hacking team. Of course, they don't
have a contractual relationship with
hacking team. They have a contractual
relationship with the intermediaries.
And I'm going to
talk about what
his documents show about the about
sending.
Can you hear me? Yeah, yeah,
OK, yeah.
So, um, I was just make a very
practical example, uh, regarding
to two publications, my organization did
related to illegal surveillance in
Ecuador and the platform
who did that was Ecuador Transparent,
which is, uh, a local
platform, uh, for whistleblowing
use, uh, free software, uh, globally.
And, um, yeah.
First publication.
It's from August, uh,
it's published 31 pieces
of the Ecuador intelligence,
which were stating that they.
Constantly surveyed
journalists.
Um.
Human rights actors, ecology,
ecological groups and politicians,
right? They did it in two ways.
First. Uh, they did in
a physical way. In a digital way.
This, for example, is a
collection of
of records like any records
of the government. It's not public
information, but it's information that
the government can get.
So they were building profiles over
people. So this profile, for example, is
a profile of the cartoonist that Bethany
just mentioned it that were in the
cartoon sorry, the journalist in
the cartoon. Exactly.
The trellising in the cartoon.
Ah, no, it is the cartoonist.
Yeah, it's the cartoonist. But, you know,
so it's a profile made up
of him based on like all his
travels, like which countries the
for which countries he was going and
which dates and time, how much money
he has on his accounts, how many cars you
have, how many
houses he have.
Oh this is, this
is you could say that it's legal
because they are using public like
inor records of the government.
Then you have also digital
surveillance based on
active surveillance, which
is um.
Surveillance based on metadata
collection, we don't know how yet they
got this these things, we
suspect that it was in compliance with
an Internet, Internet service providers
and communication service providers.
So there are between these Gretz
based on far whom people were calling
for whom people were sending e-mails from
whom they were receiving calls from whom
they were receiving mails and then
building this like detailed reports
like this woman, for example, is a
journalist for the one of the biggest
television channels in Ecuador.
Physical surveillance, this is even more
like this is a proof
that they were really following and
infiltrating in advance in
life events of the major of the capital
city, Quito.
So after publishing it, we were really
asking for an answer from the government.
But the answer they did actually was.
They say the embassy sent a letter to our
media partner for this publication in
Germany, and that's politics, for
example, saying that
the documents should be
taken out the website and that
the journalist that that's politic was
performing was not good quality
journalism.
Then they sent a letter to our ISP
saying that,
accusing us of far things, first of it,
first of them, copyright infringement,
because actually in the documents we
publish said there were logos from the
government.
Then they also accused, which is more
serious, that we were infringing
five articles from the penal code,
one of them perceive of
indefinite detention.
So thanks for both greenhouse and
that's politic for sticking with the
materials online and telling us that they
received this material and for publishing
this material, I think actually that's
Politicked publisher, the letter they
received.
Uh, so now
I will make sure I don't
think we have too much time, so make a
very fast publication.
You are the first ones to see this files.
Actually, I'm just we just upload
15 minutes ago.
It's an analysis of the risk factors for
Ecuadorian democracy
made up by the intelligence service.
OK, so you can
see what they consider risk factors
for Democratico stability
and what they consider to be
events of risk for
Democratico stability.
So you can see in the middle of
everything, it's it's media
militarization of factors of critical
factors. So for them, what is most
important and one of the most dangerous
things is that they have media covering
critical points in their society.
Then, for example, they have graphics
like relating events with media coverage.
Then here they have an analysis
of an event of risk,
so they were this event of risks is
concerned to the change of laws that
Bethany said.
So they were preventing that changing the
laws would make that civil society
and citizens would be
enraged and feel that
their basic rights were harmed.
And if media would cover this
like big protests, skewed outcome.
Uh, so I don't have
too much time so you can search this in
data. AWP.
Yes, that's she put it.
Yes, but it's I guess, um.
So you can just check it, I don't have
too much time to develop on this now, so
we have some conclusions, which is, uh,
like complex problems and complex
solutions. So, for example, is
Ecuador helping the cause of free speech
by providing asylum to Julian Assange?
Of course it is, of course.
But is it really interested
in providing freedom of speech
inside the country?
No.
So you can perfectly criticize Ecuadorian
policies regarding surveillance
and also support WikiLeaks,
actually, if you follow in these
arguments that you can't criticize
Ecuador because they are providing asylum
to WikiLeaks.
You're exactly following the argument
that the Ecuadorian government wants.
You will be able to, which is to avoid
external criticism.
Uh, I
want to address actually two
messages, first of all, this one is
for you, like international community.
Which is split self-support
and spread all that information, because
we don't have enough coverage about
it, like most of the coverage which
criticizes Equador, unfortunately,
is biased by an anti
anti WikiLeaks feeling.
But actually, this is like really, truly
something. That's both me and Mazzone.
We saw and experimented as journalists
in Ecuador.
So if you can spread this message,
share this information in your channels
or being in person or in
an institutional way, we are very
welcome.
You can also keep sending us links.
We are we promise they're going to
keep publishing it.
Then to finish, we had just,
um, well, actually, this is we
can start with, uh, the
president, because Bethanie is
blocked because they were after, uh,
a pretty harsh conversation on Twitter so
she can access the president's profile.
But you can tweet him.
It's mashie Rafael.
So so that the second message
is exactly to him, which is
this address said to the Mr. Rafael
Correa, the president of the Republic
of Ecuador.
So we are kindly asking him
to implement oversight mechanisms
in his intelligence service,
which could allow.
Senning to be accountable
for what they do, because so far they've
been acting with total impunity.
They are not even obligated to go
to the National Assembly to ask
questions from the assemblies.
They can just deny or miss the
appointments as they did the last time.
They said they were going there and said,
oh, no, we could not go and nothing
happened. And so so far, CNN is working
in total impunity.
Second thing we are going to ask him is
Rafael Correa, president of the Republic
of Ecuador, is
to refactor the inner mechanisms
of sinning in order to establish
really basic standards
of transparency and accountability inside
Sinem.
Until he does, he doesn't do it.
We will continue leaking and we continue
exposing and we will not be afraid of
harassment. We are not to be afraid
of legal para legal or illegal
surveillance or pressure.
He must know that.
Then there's like the last thing we ask
him is Rafael Correa, president
of the Republic of Ecuador, is
to grant its citizens and all
the foreigners which are working or
living in Ecuador with
one of the most basic rights of the
people, which is the right to communicate
freely without any interference
by any means.
I think.
What do you think?
Do we have.
OK, so thanks very much for the talk.
As you can see, we have a little over
time, so if you want to leave the room,
please do so, but quietly.
So if you have any questions, please line
up at the microphones so that
Pedro and, um.
Can answer them.
Yeah, so we've got the first question
at Mike number two.
All right. Um, so I actually work
for Grinnell's with this.
So we host Bedrolls website, and
we wanted to say that we didn't get a
warrant, so we didn't actually remove any
data. We actually forwarded the request
because it wasn't legal.
So I just wanted to make that clear.
Yeah. Thank you for seeking.
OK, another question from Mike.
Number two, I
wanted to ask
if there has been
a reaction by the
government in all legal means
or, I don't know, with the
blackmailing or something similar.
I mean, us
like it's nothing that we can prove.
Like Batman just told about legal things
they did with other people with us.
We just not said that they were really
pressuring our potential sources.
And yes, in the airports,
it's always, always shit to leave
a or Ecuador.
Yeah, but more than
one that's like nothing.
And then these letters of pressure
and stuff.
But so far, we think that maybe there is
some investigations going on.
But so far.
It's just pure fear and pressure.
OK, next question, Mike, number six,
please.
Hey, thanks for the talk.
I just wanted to know,
I think on the presidents
thing here, it's Nippo, they're my
power. What is that about
people that in our Constitution.
OK, so my power
through the Constitution, which
would change it.
OK, so next question would be Mike number
three, I was just
wondering what other types of digital
tools or technologies
besides global leaks or green
hosted services might be helpful to
journalists and Ecuador?
Well, all the ones that you
would recommend to journalists in
general, you have more experience
than I do trying to train journalists in
Ecuador, how to use secure technologies.
It's an uphill battle.
What do you think?
Well, I mean, there are a lot of tools
that not only in Ecuador but in all over
the globe journalists can use, but I
think I'm not the best person to talk
about it. But you can search for like
any, like, store or things.
I wish I wish the journalists in Ecuador
used to.
I wish that journalists in Ecuador
used Otar.
I wish that journalists in Ecuador used
signal. And I wish that they encrypted
their hard drives because as we see,
there are raids.
There's danger.
It's not just journalists, a
tweeter who tweeted,
what was he tweeting she or he was
tweeting about
nepotism in the ministry and one
of the ministries, and he got sent to
jail for two weeks, not for
publishing any incorrect information
just because
it was considered libelous that
he accused the minister of
of nepotism.
So regular people are vulnerable,
too, and people should
be protecting their
their home drives and their their
communications because there's a lot
that's going on and it's only
getting worse.
OK, next question from Mike, number one,
please.
Uh, so I have actually two questions.
The first is, how has the judicial
system responded to these
new laws that regard
the freedom of expression, as you
put it? And the second question is,
according to your point of view, what is
the state of Internet freedom,
especially of Internet censorship in
Ecuador? Thank you.
Well, I think the first one, Bethany, can
reply maybe because
there was a whole, uh, renewal
of the jurisdictional system.
Second one is that the state of
Internet freedom is actually we
were going to publish another thing
today.
Maybe we can publish tomorrow.
So B, which is this
like they said, they they really we
have evidence that they have
blocked both Twitter and Google.
During some days, because
an anonymous group, anonymous
group had published documents of
the Senate in two years ago, so we have
evidence that they actually blocked
Twitter and YouTube, not
sorry, YouTube and Google.
And so I think the
the state of Internet freedom is very
poor.
Well, I I
think it's actually really interesting
what's going on in Ecuador, because you
see the use of tactics
of softer tactics like DMCA
takedown notices through YouTube and
Twitter and Facebook to
get accounts shut down, to get videos
taken down.
And there's a massive investment
in propaganda.
There has been there have been
publications saying that the government
hires armies of trolls and
puts them in an office and they flood
social media with with messages
to sort of move the conversation
in in the direction that
they're that they want.
And so it's kind of interesting.
I don't see a lot of those shutdowns
or blockages, but but definitely
attempts to influence
what what what is said and what is read.
Did you did you have another question?
No.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
So, Mike, number three, please.
I am so first of all,
I agree completely that there is a bunch
of really problematic stuff going on.
And I really especially appreciate Pedros
list of actions and questions,
I think sunniness extremely problematic.
I have two small questions.
The first one is the use
of your word, the word in a title
authoritarian.
The reason why I'm asking about is
because focusing on Alianza payees, not
not Rafael Correa.
I mean, they still have an approval
rating of between 60 and 80 percent,
depending on how you look. Do they?
When was the last time you read that?
Half a year ago. So but
it doesn't really matter.
I mean, at the end of the day, it's still
a popular like
it's an election system that seems
to work. I haven't heard any allegations
of voter fraud of any kind.
Right. So I guess, like for
democracy, even though there are
these bad things going on, is that
actually authoritarian?
And the second question comes with your
specific history, because you
work with the society.
Right, which was funded by the
government in order to investigate issues
of copyright and intellectual property
and freedom of speech and many of these
things in order to actually make for
better regulation.
So it seems to me I mean,
from my perspective, this is a
complicated issue.
But we have a big government that is
pulling in a lot of different directions.
It's very clear that the A and some parts
of the presidency are pulling in both
directions. But there also seems to be a
lot of areas of the government that
are trying really hard to a lot
in other directions.
I think that there are less and less,
and I think that there were a lot of
people pulling in good directions.
And you sort of you see them leaving
as it becomes
more clear how hard it is to
have a progressive agenda.
Your first question about
the word authoritarian?
Yeah, I can.
Well, let's talk about
well, regarding democracy.
The party actually lost
the last election that happened in
Ecuador. They lost the mayor
elections and prefect elections
and a lot of cities. And that that
was the last election and
it was widely considered to be a rebuke
of their leadership.
And the next elections are in two years
and it's not really looking good
for them. I, I wouldn't
bet on them.
But you're right. It is a democracy and.
So I don't think that early on suffice
loses. Do you think the right
wing opposition is going to be better for
the country?
It depends who the opposition
who is, I think comes
next.
It's it's not a democracy.
It's not just because people vote that
it's a democracy.
Like, if people don't have information
enough to choose for whom they're voting
and who are their leaders and what their
leaders are doing, it's not a democracy.
So that's why I put on the title
authoritarian, because people they don't
have information enough to judge by
themselves what their leaders are doing.
Are there any democracies then?
Well, we all know
the answer.
OK, so another question from Mike number
three.
Hi.
So I really appreciated your talk.
And as Peter, we've never
talked, but I talked with Bethany a lot
before the talk.
And it was really actually glad to see
that there was a separation between the
idea of a uniformed state
and the intelligence service.
And I think the only mistake in your talk
is the idea that there's a uniform state.
So when you say Ecuador is for the world,
I think that there are elements of the
Ecuadorian government who actually
do care about WikiLeaks.
For example, the Ecuadorian government
has offered to protect me from the US
government. And I feel very strongly
that they would actually back that up.
And I've been to Ecuador a number of
times and well, I've been there.
I've had very bad experiences with the
Senate and the presidency
and the vice presidency actually
protected me from the Senate and until I
left the country.
So my experience is this.
I'm sorry to follow in the leftist
tradition of giving a five minute speech
and then asking yourself answering
question. But I'm going to do that
and you're going to love it.
So
they protected me and they let me know
that this is dangerous and that even
if you're a guest of the presidency, if
the Senate doesn't like you, you're going
to end up in a ditch
with a bullet in your head.
So if you can imagine, these are the
political class of Ecuador that are
explaining to me that they don't have the
ability to protect even their guests
who they, in theory, want to protect.
So to call that one country
and to say that the sending in and the
Ecuadorian political class are the same
is a hmm.
I feel like it's a simplification that
betrays your lack of information
about how these power structures actually
exist.
And I feel like this.
And in our extremely dangerous and it
follows a pattern we see all around the
world, which is that the intelligence
services of the world are out of control.
They have total capture of
telecommunication systems and they
actually capture the political class
inside and out.
I mean, the presidency is very worried
about the sun and tapping his phone
calls, for example.
And there's no way that you can protect
against an intelligence service of your
own service.
And so I think all your criticisms here
are actually pretty much centered around
the Senate in and the
fact that there are external forces that
are trying to empower dissent and
to overthrow the Ecuadorian state.
And I mean, I've met the Department of
Defense, the minister of defense,
I've met a former the former minister
of defense, the former.
It's one of those who has left the
government recently.
Absolutely. But listen, when I met her,
one of the things that she was very clear
about was that there are
elements in the Ecuadorian government,
especially this morning, who
are fucking scary and they want to kill
people like Correa and her.
And I think you can't say that that's the
same. There's an internal political
struggle and there are really good people
who put their life on the line, some of
whom have actually been killed, some
people who have died.
And there's also elements of the CIA
in that country. I met the head of
counterintelligence. I had dinner with
him. That was fucking awkward.
Let me tell you.
Do you want to talk about pressing for
end to end encryption and not getting
anywhere? That was a conversation like
that and didn't
give him any drugs.
And I would have
just didn't have the opportunity.
But but the point is
to to say this as one
thing is the mistake.
And so I wonder if you can acknowledge
this is my question.
Can you acknowledge that the Senate is
the big, big problem and that they
actually control the political class and
the political class is afraid of them and
not the other way around?
Yeah. Is that like I think Bettini also
thought that was a problem.
We also like I personally think
that SINNEN is
part of a bigger problem, which is like,
as Bethany told, there are a bunch of
other kind of of legal measures
which are restricting freedom of speech.
I agree with that.
Sending in a certain way is a different
thing from foreign government.
In some some ways they don't respect
actually Korea's intentions.
For example, we have evidence that
they spy, even identify
which is which is the Korean spy,
even though I think
that Korea has power enough.
But to change these policies
and try to change the name from
yes, from the beginning, let's say
Restructure Senning, I
mean, maybe he doesn't want or is not
political worth it for him to try
to do it now, especially because
elections are coming.
But I think that's that's also
actually the purpose of
this dog. We said we are not going to
just criticize the government, but in the
end, we will try to demand some
small two things to Korea,
which is to implement an oversight
mechanism for training and restructure
listening in order for it to have basic
standards of transparency.
And he has the power to do that.
And what he's going to say after this
talk is his career is
going to go on television and say
CNN is accountable.
There are prosecutors
in their office that approve every
intercept.
We Korea founded CNN.
It was his baby in 2009.
And he's going to say we wrote this
new plan for national security.
We got rid of all the old cops and we
formed our new agency.
He defends them in public.
And he's very bad at accepting
criticism and and and
taking making reforms.
And it's one of his biggest his biggest
downfalls.
So I don't know.
I mean, you can at some point
you have to lay some
blame on him for
his handling of them.
If you want to believe
that the Senate is so evil that
the president of the country can't
reform them or challenge them or make
any changes, I will
hold a different view.
But I agree with you that they.
Ah, the biggest
problem.
I have got one more question from
Mike.
Number two, I
was just wondering, in terms of the
discussion about SINNEN, I think
that I was wondering actually
how you view it in an overall context.
I mean, is I guess
who's the bulldog is?
It's CNN who sort of has been raised
and bred by career, who then
says, well, we're even afraid of this
thing or is it the
opposite? Sort of it really is in
control, able to to
do what it wants with Korea, scared
of it and really unable to move.
It's more complex. You cannot simply
find its way.
But I think what denying for example, for
me, it's part of a global problem,
which is a problem of the intelligence
complex as as Jacob said.
But in my my feelings,
that's when I really got out of his
control.
And if he can do anything
now or if he doesn't want
to do anything, he has
to accomplice.
But I think, yeah, it's the two things
like heat, exercise, some control
on it, but on the other hand, there are
some things that CNN does without
his mother asking him
and he cannot really stop it anymore.
There's another question from the mike,
number three again,
so I mean, I'm glad that you said that
because I could have just sat down, but
I'll take this opportunity to just say
one other thing, which is that
the Senate in being the primary problem,
the question that's open to me is how do
we deconstruct the intelligence service?
I mean, I'm of the eliminate the state
crypto world.
You want to get rid of the state.
The state's dangerous, you know.
You know, when you do cryptographic
signatures, for example, or when you
build laptops or something.
And in general, maybe we want to also
take that tactic also for states, real
states. And so maybe Ecuador would be
better off if you had a revolution.
I'm not sure. But maybe but then the
question is, what about a limited
revolution? So what are the actual
practical things that you can do to get
rid of this in a in like for example,
the way that people think about states
with a person in charge of them, for
example, Obama, is he really responsible
for every bad thing that happens in
America? Every time a cop shoots a black
person, which is every single day,
I, I feel like we have to think
about states differently than we think
about people. Right.
And so in this case, the question is,
what does the political class of Ecuador
and what can we as an international
community do to destroy the intelligence
service of Ecuador?
And I feel like that's the question we
should be asking, because that's
a thing we can turn into a political
action plan and a subversive
kind of revolutionary action plan,
frankly. Yeah.
To actually do that. But the question is,
what do we do? How do we do that?
And to all of our friends and say, you
know
what, you got us, but
what do we do to take that down?
How do you get rid of an intelligence
service?
Because if we're going to hold him responsible,
what is the actual thing we need to do,
like go burn the building down?
Probably don't do that. That seems like a
bad idea because, you know, they can just
move. So, you know,
they have a really nice building.
They have a pool.
Yeah.
Probably where they'll find all of our
bodies the next time we're in know, but
but, hey, you know, you got to die
someday. So but but what do we actually
what do we actually do? How do we do
this? Like, for example, we know they do
mass surveillance.
They ask me actually to build a mass
surveillance system to wiretap the entire
country of Ecuador.
And you said that.
I know that.
And I couldn't add it to my talk.
But have you guys confirming that?
And so so check it out.
So I told them to go fuck themselves and
I reported them to the presidency and
explained to the presidency that they
had asked me to do this specifically to
bypass the judicial review
because they wanted to wiretap judges in
the political class.
And I said, well, you want to wiretap the
democratically elected leaders?
And they said, no, no, it's a translation
problem. And I said, you know, I speak
enough Spanish.
And the president's translator actually
translated it. So I don't think it's a
problem. I think you're proposing a coup.
And yeah, like, I have your names,
and so I just you're fucked.
And so the thing is, what do we do
to stop that?
I think the answer is we deploy crypto
and we have political responses
to that. But what do we really ask from
Korea? Because when I went to them, they
said, you know, what do we do?
And I think it's a big open question
because you don't take on a
military or an intelligence service.
Lately, and when you do, you lose, they
kill you and these guys, I mean, these
guys actually told me the CIA followed me
to Ecuador and they ejected a CIA agent,
which was very awkward, by the way.
And so, you know, what a fucking
complex situation.
So what do we actually do about that?
For me, I just don't go back to Ecuador,
but for people in Ecuador, that's not
really an option. So what action plan
do we actually have now?
I can't believe I told you all those
things, but fucking light it
on fire.
So I can't believe you told us
all those things either.
I have a headache now.
Yeah, well, you know you know, the coffee
here is great, but the dexamphetamine is
even better.
I mean, just kidding.
First of all, I think like Korea must be
it must feel responsible.
OK, I'm sorry for your last question, but
we can't do an answer to that, so
I don't think anybody can answer that yet
again.
Thanks a lot for the Talk Back.
All the questions for the conversations
and.