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Comment by jrcii | Hacker News Reader

I was detained and interrogated for 12 hours in Congo, accused of being a spy for the CIA. The whole thing was very scary.

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C'mon man, you can't just dangle that in front of us and then not tell the story.

I was on a flight to Goma which had in years past experienced some dangerous rebel activity. I studied the region intensely before going there and understood that the situation was currently safe, but sitting next to a local on the plane decided to ask him. He didn't understand my pronunciation of the rebel leader and group names (for example, Ntaganda) so I wrote them in my notebook, upon seeing them in writing he immediately understood and assured me they were not active.

Later in the conversation we were discussing Hawaii, which he didn't know by name. I drew a small map of it in my notebook to see if he understood by the look of the islands since they're pretty distinctive.

After landing I'm checking in and the customs guy asks for some baloney authorization papers that no one at the embassy or capital ever mentioned. When I said I didn't have them he said, "Give me $200." I said no, he said it again. I explained I was on a strict budget and even if I did have the money I wouldn't give it to him. He told his goons to search all my bags.

One of his guys opens my notebook full of the names of all the rebel generals and groups in Congo accompanied by map sketches. Mind you these people have no concept of Wikipedia. I was transferred around after being detained. The first question was, "What is your relationship with General Nkunda?" (an infamous war criminal). Of course the more innocent I made myself appear, the more honed my spycraft appeared to be.

After the initial interrogation I was forced into the back of an SUV with giant people on both sides of me and they refused to say where we were going. I was sure I was going to be shot and put in a ditch or a prison. After asking 100x they said we were going to the airport. We came to a fork in the road, the airport was right, they turned left. That was one of the scariest moments in my life.

Fortunately we were going to the airport, but to my hotel first to get my things, I was deported back to the capital for a second round of interrogation. After that I got a professional translator who was probably one of a dozen people who spoke English well enough in the country to understand what happened. The Minister of the Interior apologized and offered to give me armed escorts to off-limit areas in apology, which I refused and can only imagine was another attempt to see if I was a spy.

TL;DR I'm owed a favor by Democratic Republic of Congo's Minister of the Interior. And now I remember the whole incident was 20 hours, not 12.

Czech game developers face 20 years of prison in Greece... They took photos of public buildings

They were released over 3 years ago, after over 100 days in jail... They were arrested for photographing a military base, wich is not exactly a public building (and illegal in every country I know of).

Case was resumed (it was never closed) a few weeks ago. If they are sentenced in Greece, our country will have to pass them to Greece.

Uhh, I havent heard of that... I thought the thing was over in 2013!? It would be an utter embarresment for greece if they really pushed this any further.

>wich is not exactly a public building (and illegal in every country I know of).

Which is still all kinds of fucked up. If you don't want your government facility to be photographed build it underground.

Yes, it is kind of fucked up. I dont want to excuse silly laws like that, but I think it is more reasonable to expect things like this if you take photos of military installations (at least more reasonable than beeing detained because you said 'someone barked at me').

And up until now I thought the case was closed, because there was no intention of espionage, but appereantly I was wrong (see: jkot in the sister-thread).

> If you don't want your government facility to be photographed build it underground.

You comment gave me a thought: What about the people that operate Google Earth? They must be held accountable for espionage in every counry in the world. Now 'that' is fucked up...

It is legal to photograph a military base (or any other government property, for that matter) in the US, provided that you do it from the public right-of-way (or any other place you would otherwise have a right to be). Unfortunately, MPs, sheriff's deputies, and municipal police officers (if applicable) are very likely to hassle you about it anyway, and possibly also detain you on any convenient pretext, should you attempt it.

This had bred a variety of protester that will stand on the public sidewalk, photographing things, until a cop shows up. The police encounter is recorded in its entirety. Depending on what the cop does, the protester may then sue for rights violations, and typically receives a settlement offer after the judge sees the video, which then gets posted to the Internet to fan your outrage.

I may have misread your tone, but you sound as if you find such protesters distasteful. I for one hope they bravely continue, until such time as one need not fear being detained on convenient pretexts for legal activities.

Yes, you definitely misread. The only thing I find distasteful about such protests is that those cops who enforce laws that do not exist are not generally held personally accountable for their actions in any meaningful way, even when they cost their county/municipality tens of thousands of dollars for just a few minutes worth of unprofessional conduct.

What? Seriously?

Yep true story.

I was detained together with 4 friends and interrogated in the border between Poland and Ukraine for about 2-3h just because we fill out the visa papers wrongly (they didn't agree in our stated reason for entering the country).

It was actually rater amusing since I never thought nothing really bad could happen. But it shows how dangerously arbitrarily are the people taking decisions in countries where there is no real accountability for the government and its public servants and enforcement agencies.

I travel to a lot to countries which require visas to be gotten upfront and I learnt to not fill them in myself. I use a service per country for getting the visas and never had issues since. I spent many hours at the PL/UA (going to Lviv) border before that...

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