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Man jailed for parole violations after refusing to decrypt his Tor node

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Re: Man jailed for parole violations after refusing to decrypt his Tor node

#161

Post by tptacek »

zoeysmithe wrote: post #152
tptacek wrote: post #89

For 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…

I mean this is how the law enforcement part of the federal government uses its weight, Aaron Swartz's prosecutor-style to bully people. Cannabis is harmless and a lot of people use it as medicine, even if they think of it as recreational. "Oh I need it to relax." Then its an anti-anxiety drug, not a 'party' drug. Limiting this is just cruelty and an easy 'win' for LE. Same with justifying the slaying of Philando Cast…

No. He wasn't convicted of a cannabis offense. He was convicted of a fairly grave computer fraud/abuse claim, and part of the contract of his early release from federal custody was a set of terms that included monitoring and sobriety. He allegedly violated those terms, and you stipulate those violations here. Like any parolee, he's being put back into custody.

Re: Man jailed for parole violations after refusing to decrypt his Tor node

#162

Post by mothballed »

ambicapter wrote: post #157
mothballed wrote: post #155

Earlier 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…

What does "incrementing a GET request" mean?

He incremented a number in the query string of a get request

https://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_httpmethods.asp

Re: Man jailed for parole violations after refusing to decrypt his Tor node

#163

Post by skeezyjefferson »

thrownawayfbi wrote: post #68

I can attest as a personal experience in the past that this kind of behavior is not uncommon with feds, and has happened even before the current administration. I've had a five years probation in the past for what the FBI argued that I "hacked" some company from changing the URL in specific ways, not to mention the "clear hacking tools" I had installed in my computer, e.g CCleaner. You know something is wrong when yo…

[dead]

Re: Man jailed for parole violations after refusing to decrypt his Tor node

#164

Post by [deleted] »

cestith wrote: post #156
righthand wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mobile tech didn’t lead to Black Lives Matter. What even are you saying? People were recording the police way back during the Fergusson Mo protests.

Do you think Michael Brown and the Ferguson protests didn’t contribute to the BLM movement?

[deleted]

Re: Man jailed for parole violations after refusing to decrypt his Tor node

#165

Post by righthand »

cestith wrote: post #156
righthand wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mobile tech didn’t lead to Black Lives Matter. What even are you saying? People were recording the police way back during the Fergusson Mo protests.

Do you think Michael Brown and the Ferguson protests didn’t contribute to the BLM movement?

No.

Re: Man jailed for parole violations after refusing to decrypt his Tor node

#166

Post by Aurornis »

mothballed wrote: post #155
petcat wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If all of that is true, then that is a very serious CFAA charge. It makes sense that they would want to downplay it as "minor" and "not relevant". It sounds like the parole violations came later? In any case, thank you for researching. There is always more to the story.

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…

This case has far more than the CFAA violation, though. There were multiple parole violations after the first incident, multiple attempts to evade the parole restrictions on Internet use, discovery of a pedophilia relate search query on his computer, a history of intentional damage to a company’s infrastructure to disrupt their operations, and more.

Being angry at the CFAA is one thing, but this case has no relation to modifying a simple GET request.

Re: Man jailed for parole violations after refusing to decrypt his Tor node

#167

Post by akerl_ »

mothballed wrote: post #155
petcat wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If all of that is true, then that is a very serious CFAA charge. It makes sense that they would want to downplay it as "minor" and "not relevant". It sounds like the parole violations came later? In any case, thank you for researching. There is always more to the story.

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…

In this case you have the evidence of what he did and it does in fact look pretty serious.

Re: Man jailed for parole violations after refusing to decrypt his Tor node

#168

Post by yellowapple »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #101
tptacek wrote: post #89

For 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…

You forgot to mention that in the hearing linked on the Reddit post it is shown that he made a search about a pedophile association as well right before downloading Spice. Page 28, lines 3 to 8 on https://rockenhaus.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/U.S.-v.-Ro...

Okay, and? That ain't illegal, and in fact has many benign explanations (like “I just watched South Park and was curious about whether there really is a North American Man/Boy Love Association like in that one episode”).

Re: Man jailed for parole violations after refusing to decrypt his Tor node

#169

Post by bigfishrunning »

encrux wrote: post #78
blurbleblurble wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unsettling how quickly things are escalating.

Nothing about this was quick. 2015 was the first time we had an increase in authoritarianism in the public debate. Project 2025 was announced in 2023.

The patriot act was a pretty major increase in authoritarianism in 2001. We've been on this particular slippery slope since the start of the cold war.

Re: Man jailed for parole violations after refusing to decrypt his Tor node

#170

Post by tptacek »

mothballed wrote: post #155
petcat wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If all of that is true, then that is a very serious CFAA charge. It makes sense that they would want to downplay it as "minor" and "not relevant". It sounds like the parole violations came later? In any case, thank you for researching. There is always more to the story.

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…

As you probably know, it's everything that happened after they incremented that HTTP request that formed the basis for his charges. Message board discussions tend to want to distill "hacking" CFAA cases down to the specific shell script that ran, but these cases are almost always heavily situational and fact dependent.

Interestingly, Rockenhaus's isn't --- it's more or less exactly the circumstance foreseen by the authors of CFAA, who believed that even though existing law covered most hacking-type scenarios, they didn't form a clear basis for felony charges for purely destructive computer abuse.

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