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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

#351

Post by tptacek »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #350
tptacek wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sobriety is a boilerplate parole term. Everybody gets it. If you don't want to comply, you don't accept parole, and you serve your sentence.

A fair few things are boilerplate and also complete bullshit in their conception, and thus far I haven’t been able to determine why this isn’t one of them. (The only actual argument made in this subthread, as far as I can see, is impaired judgment. Which, maybe ? But I’d want to see something other than vibes to weigh the risks of worse judgment against the additional recidivism, and my current intuition is that alco…

It wouldn't have mattered. There were a bunch of things in the warrant, not just the wax.

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

#352

Post by unethical_ban »

baggachipz wrote: post #37
unethical_ban wrote: post #18

3 years of pretrial detention for anything less than blowing up a building should be enough to enrage anyone. Even then, the legal system would be a failure. How is 3 years pretrial not blatantly unconstitutional and thrown out immediately?

Ah, you must be new here. All kidding aside, the "Global War on Terror" was the impetus for all of the surveillance and associated persecution of innocents without due process. Always disappointed, never surprised.

I thought I knew many of the injustices of our system, but I thought that kind of extreme length is for people like KSM who crafted 9/11.

Some BS CFAA charge for not helping decrypt a Tor session? Fucking evil.

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

#353

Post by mananaysiempre »

tptacek wrote: post #351
mananaysiempre wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fair few things are boilerplate and also complete bullshit in their conception, and thus far I haven’t been able to determine why this isn’t one of them. (The only actual argument made in this subthread, as far as I can see, is impaired judgment. Which, maybe ? But I’d want to see something other than vibes to weigh the risks of worse judgment against the additional recidivism, and my current intuition is that alco…

It wouldn't have mattered. There were a bunch of things in the warrant, not just the wax.

Yes, in this particular case, sure. I even find myself in the unusual position of approving of the original CFAA conviction (assuming of course the list of allegations is true as stated), because it does sound like something you might need a separate law for—as opposed to the extra-hard punishment for X-with-a-computer when plain X is already illegal that’s typical of laws involving computers.

I guess what I’m trying to understand is why that particular part is on the boilerplate to begin with, and more importantly whether it’s doing any good there rather than putting people in prison that otherwise wouldn’t need to be. (I pretty much immediately guessed it’s boilerplate, because that’s the only way it makes sense for it to be among the parole conditions for, essentially, a disgruntled sysadmin that took it out on their ex-employer.) It just trips my righteousness alarm, for things that sound right and proper rather than actually helping. And thus the justification of it being there because it’s how we’ve always done it this way annoyed me especially hard.

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

#354

Post by EasyMark »

yellow_lead wrote: post #36

I've seen this other cases like this. 1. The fbi asks you to be an informant or "cooperate" with an investigation in some way. 2. If you refuse, they investigate you, and basically throw the book at you.

They also do their best to try and force you in a corner and get you to lie, since lying to them is a felony. Then they use that as leverage to scare you further.

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

#355

Post by NoImmatureAdHom »

jansper39 wrote: post #133
NoImmatureAdHom wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the U.S. and much of the rest of the civilized world, you have rights. This includes the right to not self-incriminate (in the U.S. that's the 5th amendment). In general, except for very specific and limited circumstances, U.S. state and federal government actors cannot compel speech (telling your encryption keys is compelled speech). The U.K. is fast sliding down the slope to being a dystopian police state. The i…

I just saw that president Trump is thinking about prescribing 'Antifa' as a terrorist organisation and saying that he's 'not sure' their 1st amendment rights should apply. I'd be a little more concerned about the state of US at this point.

Trump is just one man and he won't last much longer. Also, declaring "Antifa" a terrorist organization might make sense.

The U.K. is waaaaaaay further along in this direction. Wrongthink on a social media post? Jail.

They arrest 30 people a day for this: https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/05/15/britains-police...

( https://archive.is/vaCkJ )

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

#356

Post by EasyMark »

rdtsc wrote: post #111
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…

> 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 One the first comments on reddit was actually: > … in trump's america lmao Someone had to awkwardly point out it was biden’s america. Which makes it easier and saves keystrokes: it’s just “america, lmao”. Then other countries can be even worse so it’s “lmao”…

It was bad under previous adminstrations. Expect it to become an order of magnitude worse under the current fascist regime with him treating FBI, etc as personal brown shirt army and not in their traditional roles

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

#357

Post by klibertp »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #267
klibertp wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think sobriety is a reasonable condition of freedom for someone with psychiatric self-control issues, that have lead them to commit felonies in the past. Were he high on weed, maybe he'd not commit the felony in the first place. Yeah, banning him from alcohol is fine, from stimulants broadly - also OK, but weed? Honestly? How often, statistically speaking, does smoking weed make a person aggressive? While this pe…

Weed for normal people isn't a big deal, but weed for people on the cusp of mental illness or even just mental unwellness can exacerbate whatever issue they are facing. Alcohol on the other hand mostly just knocks you out from doing anything too cerebral after you pass the ballmer peak. I say this as a person who prefers weed to alcohol 100x.

No, the problem here is not being dead drunk and immobile; it's everything before that. Even if you drink strong alcohol, it's going to take a while before you're that intoxicated - in the meantime, you have enough time to vibe-code Windows ME, so to speak (IOW, to drunk drive, throw fists at random people or harass them, get lost and robbed, etc...). People can spend long hours being drunk before collapsing, which is basically begging for trouble, almost no matter what they decide to do during that time.

As for mental health issues worsening due to THC - that's true, but alcohol has a much higher probability of causing or exacerbating such problems. On the other hand, the therapeutic use of THC has seen much better results than alcohol. If both happen to be legal in that jurisdiction, then banning weed but not alcohol really doesn't make sense. Further, even if possession is illegal, smoking itself (without inhaling, or however that went) isn't against the law in many places.

It really just seems arbitrary and strange, unless there was a psychiatric evaluation that we're not aware of, or this happened somewhere where weed is very strictly illegal (think alcohol in Saudi Arabia-level).

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

#358

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

tptacek wrote: post #280
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Booze is legal, and parole can limit your drinking. By law. If you don't like the terms of parole, you are permitted to refuse it and remain incarcerated for your full sentence, at which point you are released and there are no parole restrictions at all. Parole is "you agree to behave and they release you early". And "behaving" is whatever they want it to mean.

I mean, he was also forbidden from opening up lines of credit (he was in the middle of negotiations with DOJ on making restitution to his victims), something that is perfectly legal and benign --- nonetheless, he was not allowed to do so as a condition of parole.

Opening lines of credit is an attempt to avoid paying restitution. You pay it off with the credit, declare bankruptcy, then stick someone else with the bill. Courts traditionally despise any attempt to cheat the punishments they hand down.

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

#359

Post by Melonai »

sersi wrote: post #261
tptacek wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying this only because I'm probably speaking for a lot of people here, but: I have no idea what any of that means.

Kiwifarms is a forum for harassing people. Famously Near (the developer behind BSNES/Higan emulator) committed suicide in part due to the abuse he received from that forum. And people on kiwifarms celebrated his death. Only reason I know of it is from the thread at the time on HN.

I think it's also important to note that Near identified as non-binary. This isn't just a "respect their pronouns!" type of thing, but an important aspect of the KiwiFarms propensity to target trans and queer people.

Notably this also isn't the only suicide attributed to the forum, another trans woman by the name of Chloe Sagal also was harassed by them into suicide in 2018, alongside a Canadian woman named Julie Terryberry in 2016.

The forum takes credit for this (though of course, not officially by the admins), with it being basically an explicit goal. I believe they also had a "kill counter" in a thread to count the people they brought to kill themselves. And the fact that they love targeting trans people, autistic people, and basically everyone who's different is a big part of the whole culture they've build.

Note that I prefer to not expose myself to that, so I invite other people to add info or refute something I said.

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

#360

Post by NaomiLehman »

NoImmatureAdHom wrote: post #355
jansper39 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just saw that president Trump is thinking about prescribing 'Antifa' as a terrorist organisation and saying that he's 'not sure' their 1st amendment rights should apply. I'd be a little more concerned about the state of US at this point.

Trump is just one man and he won't last much longer. Also, declaring "Antifa" a terrorist organization might make sense. The U.K. is waaaaaaay further along in this direction. Wrongthink on a social media post? Jail. They arrest 30 people a day for this: https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/05/15/britains-police... ( https://archive.is/vaCkJ )

Declaring "Antifa" a terrorist organization makes as much sense as declaring "MAGA" a terrorist organization
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