[free-sklyarov] NC Call to Protest

[Rob McGee]

On Tue, Jul 31, 2001 at 02:03:37PM -0500, Rob McGee wrote:
> > (quoted from Adrian Dunston)
> > 4. On his way home after the conference, Dmitry Sklyarov was arrested by
> > the FBI and charged apparantly with working for a foreign company that
> > violated the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.  Sklyarov does not head the

On rereading, I see that this isn't exactly true. The charge is that
Dmitri himself was doing the "trafficking" in a circumvention device.

> > the world from his wife and two young daughters.
> 
> I've read that the older child is a son. But I can't say definitively.
> (I've also seen reports that he is 26 and 27; don't know which is true.)

Thanks for the confirmation, Ed. Do you know how old Dmitri is? Are you
maintaining contact with Oksana, or was that a one-time call? It would
be good for this list to have at least some contact with her.

BTW, where's Vladimir (or is it Alex?) Katalov? Last we heard from him
was the promise of a representation announcement which is now overdue. I
would sure like to hear more real news about what is going on.

Also, I'm firmly convinced that the Russian angle is far more likely to
get Dmitri out of jail than is anything we can do in the USA. Being a
Federal case, this one is more likely to be responsive to foreign
diplomatic pressure (as opposed to a state prosecution, in which the
President and State Dep't can be ignored by the prosecutor. Here, dubya
has full legal authority to drop the charges -- though his performance
in Texas would make that appear unlikely. "The State of Texas has never
executed an innocent man" -- yeah, right.)

Has anyone tried writing to president at gov.ru yet? If so, are these being
read by any humans? Is there a Russian MFA e-mail address which might be
better, or should we perhaps just write to the Russian Ambassador?

I would be glad to write, myself, but I think it would be more effective
to be written in Russian (my Russian training was very limited and took
place more than 20 years ago.) Anyway, I'll get to work on a draft and
toss it out for consideration.

    Rob - /dev/rob0