<story><title>Opensource contributor Bassel Khartabil detained in Syria. Needs help</title><text>Bassel Bassel Khartabil - an open source software contributor to projects such as Creative Commons &amp;#38; Mozilla has been unjustly detained for nearly four months without trial or any legal charges being brought against him.&lt;p&gt;Read more &amp;#38; sign the support letter: 
http://freebassel.org/&lt;p&gt;ps: Help get this on the frontpage of HackerNews</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>calbear81</author><text>I don&apos;t know Bassel but the fact that he&apos;s been detained secretly in Syria suggests that the government thinks he&apos;s involved somehow with he uprising/democracy movement.&lt;p&gt;I don&apos;t think signature campaigns will do any good since not even pressure from the US and Turkey has slowed down the bloodshed so do we really think they will care about a bunch of virtual signatures collected online?&lt;p&gt;There&apos;s a few more viable options that should be considered:&lt;p&gt;1) Leverage someone who has influence with the Syrian government to take up the cause.  Given Bassel has been an open source contributor, maybe look at which tech companies are still contracted by the Syrian government and try to get them to lend a voice of support.  Make sure to play up the positive PR that releasing Bassel will have on improving Syria&apos;s image.&lt;p&gt;2) Stop collecting signatures and start collecting money to work the back channels.  Let&apos;s be honest here, corruption is rife (high corruption index on Transparency International study) and the situation pretty chaotic, if you really want to free Bassel, consider a pragmatic approach.</text></comment>
<story><title>Opensource contributor Bassel Khartabil detained in Syria. Needs help</title><text>Bassel Bassel Khartabil - an open source software contributor to projects such as Creative Commons &amp;#38; Mozilla has been unjustly detained for nearly four months without trial or any legal charges being brought against him.&lt;p&gt;Read more &amp;#38; sign the support letter: 
http://freebassel.org/&lt;p&gt;ps: Help get this on the frontpage of HackerNews</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sandGorgon</author><text>Just a suggestion - why do you not work with Avaaz.org 
A lot of people (like me) would be a little worried at sharing name and email addresses to an unknown site(no offence).&lt;p&gt;In fact, it would have been better if you had linked to &lt;a href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/33119&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/33119&lt;/a&gt; which vouches for &lt;a href=&quot;http://freebassel.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://freebassel.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Creative Commons supports efforts to obtain the release of Bassel Safadi, a valuable contributor to and leader in the technology community. Bassel’s expertise and focus across all aspects of his work has been in support of the development of publicly available, free, open source computer software code and technology. He pursues this not only through his valuable volunteer efforts in support of Creative Commons, but in all of his work in the technology field. Through his efforts, the quality and availability of freely available and open technology is improved and technology is advanced.&lt;/i&gt;</text></comment>