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Comment by Raphmedia | Hacker News Reader

It is scary to know that as a Canadian, I can get abducted simply for having contributed to open-source projects. It's even worst knowing that my government won't do anything to help if it happens.

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This person isn't a Canadian citizen, he's a permanent resident and a citizen of Iran.

Makes a big difference.

No it doesn't if you are Brown they don't care much like for Mohamed Fahmy[0] or the most egregious one giving a _kid_ to the USA to jail and torture[1].

So, no, if you are not white Canada most likely won't care much unless some huge PR disaster.

[0]: http://www.canadalandshow.com/podcast/canada-failing-mohamed... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omar_Khadr

According to Wikipedia Fahmy has been given a presidential pardon and released (he now lives in Vancouver). While I don't know the specifics of this case, presidential pardons in developing nations are usually the result of international pressure.

Khadr's case is tragic, but it's a bit disingenuous to claim his treatment was entirely on account of him being "brown". I'm pretty sure the fact he was fighting for the Taliban against his own country was part of the reason he wasn't properly advocated for.

There's also the case of two white men being beheaded by terrorists because the Canadian government refused to pay ransom. http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/13/asia/philippines-canada-abu-sa... Their race didn't seem to affect the position of the government, despite much publicity.

Edit:Clarity

They didn't give a kid to the US, he got taken from Afghanistan by the US after his shitty parents sent him away from Canada. I do agree he was a victim of a horrible family and that Canada should have protected him from the worse things done by the US (torture, ridiculous trials, detainment in gitmo), considering he was a 15 year old citizen of Canada at the time.

There is an old, two-year HN discussion [1] on the danger of traveling for hackers (logically, the thread morphed into a heated discussion on the Spanish Inquisition, because... Hacker News!) and it certainly is scary that open source contributors should now entertain the prospects of arrest...I mean, it is open source, people typically do not get paid for that sort of work...and they could get arrested! Kidding aside, scary indeed..

I do not think that Canada is the only such country to find itself in said position. Only recently, Australia was unsuccessful in preventing the execution of some of its citizens, convicted of drug smuggling in Indonesia. Here [2] is a handy tool that visualizes the percentage of foreign prisoners in most countries around the world while [3] reports on the number of non-nationals facing death penalties mainly in Asia. Also came across these news reports on the many (100s) of Canadians that are in foreign prisons [4].

Question is, how exactly did they get to him so quickly after his arrival? Perhaps they de-anonymized his code [5]. Perhaps the State has a huge database of persons of interest [6]. And by the way, how did they figure out that it was his software that was getting used by porn site webmasters?

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8976882

2. http://chartsbin.com/view/8ns

3. https://www.hri.global/files/2011/09/14/IHRA_DeathPenaltyRep...

4. https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2013/10/27/over_1590_can... ; http://globalnews.ca/news/2542128/not-enough-being-done-to-h... ; http://o.canada.com/news/almost-2000-canadians-held-in-forei...

5. https://www.princeton.edu/~aylinc/papers/caliskan-islam_dean... ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMa04HovKfs

6. https://www.iranhumanrights.org/wp-content/uploads/Internet_... ; http://voiceproject.org/post_news/inside-irans-judicial-crac... ; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12488420; https://opennet.net/sites/opennet.net/files/ONI_NameofGod_1_...

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