Software developer, math lecturer at Moscow’s Finance and Law University, free software supporter, Debian and GNU projects contributor Dmitry Bogatov needs our help. Dmitry Bogatov has been jailed since April 10, 2017 for a crime he could not have committed. Dmitry Bogatov ran a program to help those in tyrannical regimes evade censorship and protect their privacy. This program ran on his computer and routed other peoples traffic through his own.
The prosecution wrongly believes that Bogatov posted extremist materials on the internet.
He is accused of part 2 of article 205.2 of Russian Criminal code (incitement of terrorist activities or justifying terrorism via the Internet), part 1 of article 30, part 1 of article 212 (arrangement of preparation of mass riots).
According to the case, somebody posted 2 messages on website sysadmins.ru on 29 March. Airat Bashirov accessed his account from 104 different IP addresses located in different countries, including Dmitry Bogatov's IP address.
To substantiate the need of Bogatov's arrest investigator pointed to video showing "mass riots and police disobedience". The only one video posted by Airat Bashirov is a music clip of hip-hop performers Kanye West and Jay-Z "No Church in The Wild".
Need of arrest also was substantiated by the fact that Dmitry planned to visit Italy on 12 April. At that time Italy hosted International Esperanto Youth Festival, which Dmitry planned to visit beforehand with his wife.
Dmitry Bogatov was a operator of Tor exit relay. Tor is a special piece of software which routes Internet traffic over random circuits built from servers located around the world. Exit relays are the last hop in a users circuit, that's why Dmitry Bogatov's IP address appears in the sysadmins.ru logs. Dmitry's relay was last online at the 5th of April 2017.
After Dmitry's arrest, Airat Bashirov continue to post messages. News outlets "Open Russia" and "Mediazona" even got a chance to speak with him. In a comment to the Mediazona he confirmed that he used Tor.
At the time when Bashirov's messages were posted Dmitry was not at home. He went to a fitness club with his wife, after which he visited a product store. That's confirmed by CCTV footage.
For more information and find out how you can help check out https://freebogatov.org/en/