Could Tails saved him?
Man jailed for parole violations after refusing to decrypt his Tor node
221–230 of 397 posts
Re: Man jailed for parole violations after refusing to decrypt his Tor node
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
The CFAA isn't super complicated. It basically boils down to: Don't fuck with other people's shit if they don't want you to.
Are you a lawyer by chance? I seem to remember cases or interpretations of the CFAA in which even guessing the username password combo of "admin:admin" would violate the act, resulting in teenagers or children being caught up in cYbEr FrAuD
Breaking in in a system, whether or not the password was easy to guess, sounds like a crime to me.
Re: Man jailed for parole violations after refusing to decrypt his Tor node
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
OK, I think I found the original thing Rockenhaus was convicted of. Back in 2014, Rockenhaus worked for a travel booking company. He was fired. He used stale VPN access to connect back to the company's infrastructure, and then detached a SCSI LUN from the server cluster, crashing it. The company, not knowing he was involved, retained him to help diagnose and fix the problem. During the investigation, the company figu…
Good grief. This is also part of the reason why I have a pact with my coworkers: if I’m terminated, kill my access immediately and universally, and I’ll do the same for them. I don’t even want to have the ability to look at stuff anymore. Remove any shred of possibility that I could get into shenanigans later.
This is exactly what all big corporations (rightly) do, and when layoffs come around you see waves of people making sob stories about how nobody told them and suddenly their work laptop stopped working from one minute to the next, or they didn't even let them inside the office because they were terminated during their morning commute.
Re: Man jailed for parole violations after refusing to decrypt his Tor node
#224For whatever it's worth, the Reddit story here says that the federal courts used "fraudulent warrants to jail my husband again". Maybe! The other side of that story, via PACER, is a detailed parole violation warrant (you can hear the marshal refer to it in the video); the violations in that warrant: 1. Admitting to using cannabis during supervised release 2. Failing to make scheduled restitution payments and to coope…
It gets worse... both the wife and (either their husband or a previous partner) have their own threads on kiwi farms and are closely tied to both Encyclopedia Dramatica and Ethan Ralph. There's videos posted of them showing signs of severe mental illness.
Re: Man jailed for parole violations after refusing to decrypt his Tor node
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
Weev 'violated' the CFAA for incrementing a GET request, with his overturned conviction only for wrong jurisdiction. So the government has put us in a position where it's hard to take the CFAA seriously. We also know from prosecutions in other statutes that the government will often prosecute a a broad crime with many separate sub-definitions of the various way you can break it, then refuse to tell you under which su…
> his overturned conviction only for wrong jurisdiction What are you getting at? If an appeals court says “wrong jurisdiction”, that’s an “rm -rf” on the whole entire case. There’s nothing left to argue about.
> > his overturned conviction only for wrong jurisdiction
> What are you getting at?
> If an appeals court says “wrong jurisdiction”, that’s an “rm -rf” on the whole entire case. There’s nothing left to argue about.
I think your parent comment meant something like "the case wasn't overturned on the basis of deficiencies in the legal theory of the crime."
Re: Man jailed for parole violations after refusing to decrypt his Tor node
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's par for the course in America
Law enforcement is the US is trained to use (often rapidly) increasing force to compel compliance. They are trained that this is the only way to keep themselves and partners safe.
Look up "killology" for more on this.
Re: Man jailed for parole violations after refusing to decrypt his Tor node
#227It's very important to get the official source on this one. Husband was legally restricted and being monitored by the FBI, so he decided to go install a VM to bypass the monitoring. It's not so much bravery against authority as it is hubris that got him 3 years. https://rockenhaus.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/U.S.-v.-Ro...
Since it seems to have been glossed over in the court transcript, can anyone explain how exactly a VM or client for remote VM could be used to bypass the monitoring? Wouldn't the monitoring software capture any application's network activities, including a client for a Remote VM? I'm imagining something like Wireshark?
A VM would bypass monitoring software installed on devices the person uses. A VPN would obscure their traffic such that it is encrypted and not easily monitored. Even something like SSH is encrypted and not straight-forward to monitor, so a VPN isn't required to do this anyway.
A remote VM would combine both of these things, where the device/computer is in a location that isn't monitored and accessed by means aimed at bypassing controls in place. Activities carried out from the remote VM are then not monitored.
User + Devices -> VPN/other -> Remote VM -> Unmonitored Activities / Network Access
^ Monitoring is here, but may not capture the rest of the chain
Law enforcement would need to monitor the VM itself to monitor those activities, or I guess request logs from the provider if at all possible.
There's a limit to how much you can monitor someone and I assume there's a degree of good faith in cooperation with these controls. Failure to comply, seemingly, has severe consequences.
Re: Man jailed for parole violations after refusing to decrypt his Tor node
#228For whatever it's worth, the Reddit story here says that the federal courts used "fraudulent warrants to jail my husband again". Maybe! The other side of that story, via PACER, is a detailed parole violation warrant (you can hear the marshal refer to it in the video); the violations in that warrant: 1. Admitting to using cannabis during supervised release 2. Failing to make scheduled restitution payments and to coope…
It gets worse... both the wife and (either their husband or a previous partner) have their own threads on kiwi farms and are closely tied to both Encyclopedia Dramatica and Ethan Ralph. There's videos posted of them showing signs of severe mental illness. https://0x0.st/KcyY.jpg
Saying this only because I'm probably speaking for a lot of people here, but: I have no idea what any of that means.
Re: Man jailed for parole violations after refusing to decrypt his Tor node
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
Weev 'violated' the CFAA for incrementing a GET request, with his overturned conviction only for wrong jurisdiction. So the government has put us in a position where it's hard to take the CFAA seriously. We also know from prosecutions in other statutes that the government will often prosecute a a broad crime with many separate sub-definitions of the various way you can break it, then refuse to tell you under which su…
> his overturned conviction only for wrong jurisdiction What are you getting at? If an appeals court says “wrong jurisdiction”, that’s an “rm -rf” on the whole entire case. There’s nothing left to argue about.
Yes there is, they can reargue the whole thing in another jurisdiction since he was never 'in jeopardy.'
Considering he was convicted in another jurisdiction, and they can retry him in the 'right' one, why wouldn't a reasonable person anticipate that might happen?
I don't think Weev is living in Ukraine/Transnistria to practice his Slavic languages.
And the reason why I brought up it was overturned, was because I knew someone would mention his case was vacated, and I wanted to make clear it wasn't vacated because there was something improper found about the legal question of the CFAA.
Re: Man jailed for parole violations after refusing to decrypt his Tor node
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
> his overturned conviction only for wrong jurisdiction What are you getting at? If an appeals court says “wrong jurisdiction”, that’s an “rm -rf” on the whole entire case. There’s nothing left to argue about.
> > his overturned conviction only for wrong jurisdiction > What are you getting at? > If an appeals court says “wrong jurisdiction”, that’s an “rm -rf” on the whole entire case. There’s nothing left to argue about. I think your parent comment meant something like "the case wasn't overturned on the basis of deficiencies in the legal theory of the crime."
If it’s in the wrong jurisdiction, the court doesn’t get to the point where they look at the legal theory.