[liberationtech] Is Ecuador the Safe Haven We Want to Believe In?

[hellekin]

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Ecuador won a huge credibility bump in hackerdom when it offered
political asylum to Julian Assange.  That is confirmed with Edward
Snowden jumping from HK to Ecuador via the Red Block to evade the
Angry Murder of U.S. crows. There is a pattern here: if you leak U.S.
secrets, you can go to Ecuador. How cool is that?

Unfortunately, the flip side of the Ecuadorian coin might not be as
bright as it seems. This BuzzFeed article [1] states that it received
exclusive leaks from Ecuador, and backs the documents with some
interesting records: first country to implement nationwide
facial+voice recognition, buyer of "GSM Interceptor" Israeli
surveillance gear, a series of press-controlling laws, etc.

Info? Intox? How relevant is "nationwide" for such a small country?
How much cocaine money went into building this up? [2] Should hackers
and whistleblowers praise Ecuador, or stay away from it? [3]

Note the update on June 26th, quoted from the article [1]:

	The people who provided BuzzFeed with these documents say that they
attempted to leak them to WikiLeaks three days ago, but were
unsuccessful. WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson called this claim
?false? and said ?No one in our team recognises having been approached
with such material as you describe.?

==
hk

[1]
http://www.buzzfeed.com/rosiegray/exclusive-documents-illuminate-ecuadors-spying-practices
[2] http://wlcentral.org/node/2811
[3] http://wlcentral.org/node/2829
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