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 cooperate with the financial investigation that sets restitution payment amounts.
3. Falling out of contact with his probation officer, who attempted home visits to find him.
4. Opening several new lines of credit.
5. Using an unauthorized iPhone (all his Internet devices apparently have keyloggers as a condition of his release).
These read like kind of standard parole terms? I don't know what the hell happened to get him into this situation in the first place, though.
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 figured out he caused the crash, and terminated him again. He then somehow gained access to their disaster recovery facility and physically fucked up a bunch of servers. They were down a total of about 30 days and incurred $500k in losses.
(He plead this case out, so these are I guess uncontested claims).
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.
>He plead this case out, so these are I guess uncontested claims
In a technical sense, this may be true as part of the plea agreement.
In reality, a lot of plea deals are made because of various factors, which unfortunately is often not that the person accused is guilty, rather the risk of going to trial or especially the cost of going to trial is too large.
I feel the need to point this out as too many folks look at “accepted plea deal” to mean that the person accepting is the guilty party when it can be more complicated than that in reality even if technically by judicial process they are by accepting that considered guilty.
That said, in this particular case, the hard evidence suggests that indeed, the person accused committed the crimes they pleaded out for
Thanks. The overly aggressive arrest was not warranted, obviously.
However, I suspected there was a lot more to this story when the original post buried the actual reason for the arrest several paragraphs down and tried to dismiss it as “minor”. Intentionally damaging a company’s infrastructure with an intent to disrupt their operations is a very serious charge. Not a “minor” disagreement with a former employer.
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.
Here's what the wife says about that[1], for the record:
> The Origins of a Retaliatory Prosecution (Texas, 2019-2022)
> Early 2019: Conrad Rockenhaus, a supporter of free speech, runs Tor exit nodes used by journalists and activists. Federal agents demand he assist them in decrypting traffic; he repeatedly refuses, asserting his constitutional rights.
> The Coerced Confession: The case against him began when he was forced to confess to a non-violent CFAA (computer crime) offense while under the influence of prescribed painkillers and not lucid following a major surgery.
> The Pretextual Arrest: Just months before the 5-year statute of limitations was set to expire, the federal government arrests Conrad on the CFAA charge. The family alleges this was a pretext for his refusal to cooperate on the Tor matter.
He was also placed under electronic monitoring program and immediately went about installing a VM to allegedly circumvent the monitoring software along with searching for a very controversial website relating to pedophilia...
He also lied about using his computer, his wife told on him to his parole officer, according to the court documents.
He was on parole for DDOSing* a former employer...
*Ah, I see your update, guess it was less distributed and more direct denial of service with the physical destruction and all.
“very controversial website related to pedophilia” -> you are referring to NAMBLA? if so, i think that is not uncommon search for people interested in history/wikipedia deep dives, i don’t think you would search this if you were actually a pedophile as it is a historical thing.
Yeah, I read that transcript supplied in the Reddit thread and I was thinking to myself “why would you include this as evidence to support your case”?
The wife makes a big deal about how one of the agents testified that Spice was an operating system, then she went on to falsely claim that it was merely a “graphic driver”. However, later in the in the transcript another agent corrected the error of the first agent and explained to the court that Spice was a means of accessing remote VMs, which could be used to circumvent monitoring software.
This combined with the fact that there was no internet activity subsequent to the software being downloaded is pretty damning evidence.
8 Q. Due to the nature of the offense charged being a
9 computer-related crime, did he have specific
10 restrictions on his pretrial release as it relates to
11 his computer usage?
12 A. Yes. One of the conditions was that he must
13 participate in the Computer Restriction and Monitoring
14 Program.
15 Q. How is that program enforced?
16 A. That program is enforced -- the defendant has to
17 download a software program onto his computer or iPhone
18 or whatever, any type of device that has access to the
19 Internet. That information is -- the monitoring
20 company, they monitor -- they are able to monitor what
21 he is accessing on the Internet. And the Probation
22 Officer has been allowed to review weekly reports about
23 what sites he's accessing, things like that.
24 Q. And is the defendant notified and made aware and
25 provided with a document that states the terms of that
1 agreement?
2 A. Yes.
The use of an encrypted Tor node would likely be a violation of that restriction regardless of what is being accessed.
The chain would then appear to be: convicted of computer crime -> required computer monitoring software during supervision -> installed and used Tor -> supervision violation and revoked to prison.
As I understand it --- I haven't read deeply enough to confirm this, it's what I've pieced together from the Reddit thing --- the Tor stuff came long before any of this. What I gather is:
1. Back in 2014 this person committed a pretty grave computer offense, which was not at the time prosecuted.
2. Some time after that, he became a high-profile Tor relay operator.
3. Some time after that, he was asked to subvert those Tor relays by the DOJ.
4. In 2019 he was prosecuted for the computer offenses, and convicted.
5. In 2021, he was released on parole.
(I think there's a long string of parole issues after that, and then)
6. In 2025 he was accused by the probation office of violating his parole in a bunch of ways and taken into custody.
The funny thing about rights is that you have them even if you've done other bad things. The thinking on display here ("the guy was a criminal anyway") is the primary slippery slope to tyranny that we have seen in the past 100 years.
Seems like he was legally eligible to be arrested for a variety of reasons. The FBI is still not allowed to use fraudulent warrants to that end. The rule of law is no such thing unless it applies to everyone equally.
I'm on the civil rights and free speech maxxing side, but this was clearly a criminal in the act of actively criminaling.
The danger here is in crying wolf when this isn't a case of rights being violated for a non-perpetrator. This guy was willfully breaking laws left and right.
While the abuse by the system needs to be dealt with, if you are going to be a TOR exit node operator (or a thorn in the FBI's side in general), don't do the above. I sympathise with him in spirit, but this is a severe tactical blunder.
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.
People with severe mental illnesses still have Constitutional rights, including one not to get their head bashed in.
Running a Tor exit node is also not a crime, and he ran it long before there was any conviction. And asking to decrypt incoming traffic (from other nodes) is really sus; it has nothing at all do with the accused’s parole or alleged crimes.
We have to consider that crime on the internet is as real as crime in real life. Funny to say it out loud. Criminals move a certain way and just because you are a nerdy tech dude doesn’t also mean you’re not a gangster.
Edit:
Reminds me a lot of the lives of people in this saga:
> We have to consider that crime on the internet is as real as crime in real life. Funny to say it out loud.
According to the court documents his crimes extended into “real life” as well, with intentional damage to his former employer to shut down their operations.
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 Castile and others (he had pot, or pot in his system, thus a criminal undeserving of rights or due process).
Once the federal government is onto you with a case like this, all your money is gone. Either to lawyers or your bank accounts are frozen and things like that. Failing to make payments is a feature, not a bug, in this system. I'm not going to tell everyone here how to live, but its ideal to have money that's squirreled away in a place hard to be frozen because tomorrow this can be any of us. You host a vpn on a vpn somewhere? Use tor? Said the wrong opinion online? Heaven knows, but the hammer falls on a lot of people and there's no mercy to it.
Lines of credit, again, fits in with the above. People need to feed themselves, pay rent, pay lawyers, etc. I've never been accused of a crime but I've done a lot of legal stuff in my life with lawyers and such, and everything about this system is unbelievably slow and expensive. It isn't like Hollywood portrays it at all. The money needed here is more than more people can muster just to remotely get a fair trial or deal. Especially when a lot of charges against you are 'stacked' if not entirely dishonest on the assumption of 'well, we're going to court anyway or making a deal so better add some nonsense on top for negotiation.' I can't find the cite, but I've read that if you get a federal arrest, you're looking at $1m starting to begin. How many of us here have $1m they can access, and even if you do, is it accessible if the feds freeze your accounts on 'suspicion?'
Probation stuff, who knows, but he was already being sieged by LE, so who knows what is happening here. There's no shortage of probation horror stories like one's officer cancelling at the last minute or changing location, and other things to guarantee missing meetings. And eventually you can break a man entirely and he'll stop being functional, and he'll fail at a lot of basic things. The stress here can trigger extreme mental illness. I'm a fairly delicate person and if this happened to me, the stress would entirely break me. I'd fall into deep depression. So there's complexity with "he missed x appointment" and "he missed x payment," that's worth exploring.
The government telling you that you can't use a computer of any kind without a keylogger is insane and should be fought entirely. Computers are like paper nowadays. "Everything you write and do should be sent to LE" is unacceptable. Computers arent optional anymore. Everything we do is computer or app based. Also we dont know his motivation for making a private vm or using an iphone. Keeping valuable information about himself from LE for example or hiding a medical condition or heaven knows what else. This is why privacy and speech and rights between you and your counsel are so protected but "We get all your computers" sidesteps many of those protections.
Yes, he's a criminal but he doesn't deserve to be treated like this. These, and his past, are simple white-collar crimes, but he got the bully treatment.
Yes these are 'standard' because they maximally oppress working class people (note very wealthy people just buy themselves out of the above) with the thin veneer of legitimacy. The wealthy, capital owning class, etc if arrested like this just shrug this stuff off usually, and uses its connections and wealth to get ideal terms, but nobodies like this have no chance. The federal government conviction rate is over 90% not because of merit, but because of this kind of bullying and dishonesty and oppression. Imagine if we were discussing near any other nation with a 90+ percent conviction rate, you'd balk and know its corrupt, but we're the same in this regard.
I wish digital culture was more liberal-libertarian like it used to be, than the hard-right turn its made in the past 15+ years. LE does not need a 'devil's advocate.' The accused do. I dont care if liberalizing the above makes more criminals get away with. I'd rather this guy go free, even if he's super guilty, than accept the above as acceptable in our justice system. All this for what's essentially mostly-harmless white collar crime.
Not to mention the incredible violence here for a non-violent crime. Armed LE more or less besieged his home. I'm not sure why people knee-jerk to defending any of this. I hope a new liberal-libertarian movement emerges in tech because I feel like we've lost our way.
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.
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.
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”).
This always happens though. Every time someone is thrown in a cage unjustly, the state tries to redirect us (yes, us, here in this forum and others like it) to look at other details of the situation, whether it's details of the person's political or personality or, in this case, details of this (also seemingly unjust) probation violation.
Who cares if he smoked weed or installed a VM or evaded a government keylogger? Those are all really shitty reasons to put someone in a cage, whether it's couched as "probation terms" or not.
I'll steelman the unpopular position: 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.
Vandalizing your employer's infrastructure over a grudge is, I suggest, strong evidence of a major impulse control issue. It think it makes sense and is in the public interest, draconian as it is, that this person shouldn't be allowed to get high and have unmonitored internet access. The same place they've committed felonies before, on impulse.
Further context: his own defense lawyer filed a motion asking a court to find this guy mentally incompetent to stand trial,
> the state tries to redirect us (yes, us, here in this forum and others like it) to look at other details of the situation
Isn't the reddit post doing the same thing by trying to imply he was jailed for running a TOR node when he was officially jailed for breaking parole terms? Even if they think those were just excuse to jail him, the refusal to acknowledge those details makes the account at least deceptive.
I'm reasonably anti-carcerial, but he did actually commit a crime, and one of the conditions of release from that crime was agreeing not to do those things - that's what probation means - an agreement he promptly broke.
There has to be some penalty for noncompliance or you get more of it.
He used encrypted services to commit a bunch of crimes. He was then released on the condition that he would no longer use the encrypted services that he used to commit the crimes with. He then lied and used those encrypted services anyway. It's really that simple.
I am absolutely NOT a fan of "tough on crime" type stuff. By and large I feel the US criminal justice system is an inhumane cruel monstrosity. But the conditions were not all that unreasonable (except the weed stuff) and all of this smells of bad faith on the part of this couple.
It'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.
Yeah, that is a significantly more damning then what was given by his wife on Reddit. While SPICE is a normal means to interact with VMs, the defense couldn't offer any legitimate reason for him to be using one. They didn't even make an attempt to. They only established that the monitoring company couldn't say for certain that it was used explicitly to bypass the monitoring.
Also that it occurred right after the search mentioned on Page 28. It's a really bad look.
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.
Monitoring software installed at the OS level can monitor both traffic and what applications generate it. But if the traffic is coming from a VM, it can only do the former.
The article provides a good foundation for opposing arguments.
Excerpting:
> The researchers wanted to find a way to do the seemingly impossible — to give the military the benefits of a global, high-speed communications network without exposing them to the vulnerabilities of the metadata that the network relied on to operate.
> ...
> There are other implications, as well. For a CIA agent to use Tor without suspicion in non-U.S. nations, for example, there would need to be plenty of citizens in these nations using Tor for everyday internet browsing. Similarly, if the only users in a particular country are whistleblowers, civil rights activists and protesters, the government may well simply arrest anyone connecting to your anonymity network. As a result, an onion routing system had to be open to as wide a range of users and maintainers as possible, so that the mere fact that someone was using the system wouldn’t reveal anything about their identity or their affiliations.
> ...
> Anonymity loves company — so Tor needed to be sold to the general public. That necessity led to an unlikely alliance between cypherpunks and the U.S. Navy.
> The NRL researchers behind Onion routing knew it wouldn’t work unless everyday people used it, so they reached out to the cypherpunks and invited them into conversations about design and strategy to reach the masses.
To those who say TOR, VPN, Signal, GrapheneOS or <replace with any privacy tool> is dead, we should use more of them not less. Today privacy became crime because the tech crowd (including many in HN community) ignored slow eradication of our fundamental freedom by evil companies like Apple (Yes, Apple. Don't forget they worked with NSA.) and Google. If crowd like HN is seduced by new AI enhanced, costly and locked phones, then how can a regular citizen understand freedom or privacy?
Freedom is being taken away by govt, because we are making choices that surrender it.
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 you literally have 98% chance of losing in court against the FBI. They are corrupt and incompetent.
> 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”. And soon enough they are just laughing their asses off while the person is stuck in jail.
> "clear hacking tools" I had installed in my computer, e.g CCleaner
I have always wondered if they are primarily that stupid or just evil and pretending to be stupid. I am leaning towards evil.
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
The FBI generally already has enough evidence against you when it comes to raiding and then charging you. You most certainly were not innocent, especially if all you got was probation.
You have no obligation to provide it, and every reason not to so as to remain anonymous online, but I don’t think that anyone should consider your testimony without supporting evidence (i.e. court documents.) The original post is part and parcel of the disconnect between the reality of our judicial system and the subjective experiences of those who naively interact with it.
Every government agency works this way to the extent that they are able to.
Your local building commissioner or whatever just has a lot less money and muscle on tap and much more circuitous access to court judgements in their favor than the FBI does. Differences in their strategic and tactical approach is a reflection of this.
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.
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.
The problem with the CFAA is that it is so (IMO unconstitutionally) broad it is feasible that _every American_ has arguably violated it in some way, completely accidentally.
Thus, every time we see a CFAA charge we have to ask ourselves: "Is this an abuse of power?".
There are a lot of bogus CFAA cases but it seems like this one is within the boundaries of reasonable law enforcement if the description posted above [0] is accurate.
The quick summary is (reddit) OP's husband was fired from a job and used old unrevoked access to crash their servers, was briefly contracted to fix it before the company found out they were the source of the crash and terminated them again, then after all that he then gained access to their DR facilities and physically damaged a number of servers.
If that's true it seems like a pretty cut and dry CFAA case (with some extra normal crime on top to boot) and the main issue to take with it is the FBI using it as leverage to get him to compromise his TOR node.
Readit News
1. Admitting to using cannabis during supervised release
2. Failing to make scheduled restitution payments and to cooperate with the financial investigation that sets restitution payment amounts.
3. Falling out of contact with his probation officer, who attempted home visits to find him.
4. Opening several new lines of credit.
5. Using an unauthorized iPhone (all his Internet devices apparently have keyloggers as a condition of his release).
These read like kind of standard parole terms? I don't know what the hell happened to get him into this situation in the first place, though.
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 figured out he caused the crash, and terminated him again. He then somehow gained access to their disaster recovery facility and physically fucked up a bunch of servers. They were down a total of about 30 days and incurred $500k in losses.
(He plead this case out, so these are I guess uncontested claims).
In a technical sense, this may be true as part of the plea agreement.
In reality, a lot of plea deals are made because of various factors, which unfortunately is often not that the person accused is guilty, rather the risk of going to trial or especially the cost of going to trial is too large.
I feel the need to point this out as too many folks look at “accepted plea deal” to mean that the person accepting is the guilty party when it can be more complicated than that in reality even if technically by judicial process they are by accepting that considered guilty.
That said, in this particular case, the hard evidence suggests that indeed, the person accused committed the crimes they pleaded out for
However, I suspected there was a lot more to this story when the original post buried the actual reason for the arrest several paragraphs down and tried to dismiss it as “minor”. Intentionally damaging a company’s infrastructure with an intent to disrupt their operations is a very serious charge. Not a “minor” disagreement with a former employer.
> The Origins of a Retaliatory Prosecution (Texas, 2019-2022)
> Early 2019: Conrad Rockenhaus, a supporter of free speech, runs Tor exit nodes used by journalists and activists. Federal agents demand he assist them in decrypting traffic; he repeatedly refuses, asserting his constitutional rights.
> The Coerced Confession: The case against him began when he was forced to confess to a non-violent CFAA (computer crime) offense while under the influence of prescribed painkillers and not lucid following a major surgery.
> The Pretextual Arrest: Just months before the 5-year statute of limitations was set to expire, the federal government arrests Conrad on the CFAA charge. The family alleges this was a pretext for his refusal to cooperate on the Tor matter.
[1] https://rockenhaus.com/press-kit/
Deleted Comment
I knew people like that, that where unnable to put their lifes togheter until they where fully medicated.
He also lied about using his computer, his wife told on him to his parole officer, according to the court documents.
He was on parole for DDOSing* a former employer...
*Ah, I see your update, guess it was less distributed and more direct denial of service with the physical destruction and all.
The wife makes a big deal about how one of the agents testified that Spice was an operating system, then she went on to falsely claim that it was merely a “graphic driver”. However, later in the in the transcript another agent corrected the error of the first agent and explained to the court that Spice was a means of accessing remote VMs, which could be used to circumvent monitoring software.
This combined with the fact that there was no internet activity subsequent to the software being downloaded is pretty damning evidence.
The chain would then appear to be: convicted of computer crime -> required computer monitoring software during supervision -> installed and used Tor -> supervision violation and revoked to prison.
1. Back in 2014 this person committed a pretty grave computer offense, which was not at the time prosecuted.
2. Some time after that, he became a high-profile Tor relay operator.
3. Some time after that, he was asked to subvert those Tor relays by the DOJ.
4. In 2019 he was prosecuted for the computer offenses, and convicted.
5. In 2021, he was released on parole.
(I think there's a long string of parole issues after that, and then)
6. In 2025 he was accused by the probation office of violating his parole in a bunch of ways and taken into custody.
Seems like he was legally eligible to be arrested for a variety of reasons. The FBI is still not allowed to use fraudulent warrants to that end. The rule of law is no such thing unless it applies to everyone equally.
He violated 6 or 7 criminal things.
I'm on the civil rights and free speech maxxing side, but this was clearly a criminal in the act of actively criminaling.
The danger here is in crying wolf when this isn't a case of rights being violated for a non-perpetrator. This guy was willfully breaking laws left and right.
Don't cry wolf. We need that energy elsewhere.
https://0x0.st/KcyY.jpg
Running a Tor exit node is also not a crime, and he ran it long before there was any conviction. And asking to decrypt incoming traffic (from other nodes) is really sus; it has nothing at all do with the accused’s parole or alleged crimes.
Edit:
Reminds me a lot of the lives of people in this saga:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01L8C4WBG/
The poor wife, “can you stop being a criminal for like, one month, please?”.
According to the court documents his crimes extended into “real life” as well, with intentional damage to his former employer to shut down their operations.
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 Castile and others (he had pot, or pot in his system, thus a criminal undeserving of rights or due process).
Once the federal government is onto you with a case like this, all your money is gone. Either to lawyers or your bank accounts are frozen and things like that. Failing to make payments is a feature, not a bug, in this system. I'm not going to tell everyone here how to live, but its ideal to have money that's squirreled away in a place hard to be frozen because tomorrow this can be any of us. You host a vpn on a vpn somewhere? Use tor? Said the wrong opinion online? Heaven knows, but the hammer falls on a lot of people and there's no mercy to it.
Lines of credit, again, fits in with the above. People need to feed themselves, pay rent, pay lawyers, etc. I've never been accused of a crime but I've done a lot of legal stuff in my life with lawyers and such, and everything about this system is unbelievably slow and expensive. It isn't like Hollywood portrays it at all. The money needed here is more than more people can muster just to remotely get a fair trial or deal. Especially when a lot of charges against you are 'stacked' if not entirely dishonest on the assumption of 'well, we're going to court anyway or making a deal so better add some nonsense on top for negotiation.' I can't find the cite, but I've read that if you get a federal arrest, you're looking at $1m starting to begin. How many of us here have $1m they can access, and even if you do, is it accessible if the feds freeze your accounts on 'suspicion?'
Probation stuff, who knows, but he was already being sieged by LE, so who knows what is happening here. There's no shortage of probation horror stories like one's officer cancelling at the last minute or changing location, and other things to guarantee missing meetings. And eventually you can break a man entirely and he'll stop being functional, and he'll fail at a lot of basic things. The stress here can trigger extreme mental illness. I'm a fairly delicate person and if this happened to me, the stress would entirely break me. I'd fall into deep depression. So there's complexity with "he missed x appointment" and "he missed x payment," that's worth exploring.
The government telling you that you can't use a computer of any kind without a keylogger is insane and should be fought entirely. Computers are like paper nowadays. "Everything you write and do should be sent to LE" is unacceptable. Computers arent optional anymore. Everything we do is computer or app based. Also we dont know his motivation for making a private vm or using an iphone. Keeping valuable information about himself from LE for example or hiding a medical condition or heaven knows what else. This is why privacy and speech and rights between you and your counsel are so protected but "We get all your computers" sidesteps many of those protections.
Yes, he's a criminal but he doesn't deserve to be treated like this. These, and his past, are simple white-collar crimes, but he got the bully treatment.
Yes these are 'standard' because they maximally oppress working class people (note very wealthy people just buy themselves out of the above) with the thin veneer of legitimacy. The wealthy, capital owning class, etc if arrested like this just shrug this stuff off usually, and uses its connections and wealth to get ideal terms, but nobodies like this have no chance. The federal government conviction rate is over 90% not because of merit, but because of this kind of bullying and dishonesty and oppression. Imagine if we were discussing near any other nation with a 90+ percent conviction rate, you'd balk and know its corrupt, but we're the same in this regard.
I wish digital culture was more liberal-libertarian like it used to be, than the hard-right turn its made in the past 15+ years. LE does not need a 'devil's advocate.' The accused do. I dont care if liberalizing the above makes more criminals get away with. I'd rather this guy go free, even if he's super guilty, than accept the above as acceptable in our justice system. All this for what's essentially mostly-harmless white collar crime.
Not to mention the incredible violence here for a non-violent crime. Armed LE more or less besieged his home. I'm not sure why people knee-jerk to defending any of this. I hope a new liberal-libertarian movement emerges in tech because I feel like we've lost our way.
Yes he does deserve to be treated like this. He violated his parole terms. That is what happens when you do that.
Page 28, lines 3 to 8 on https://rockenhaus.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/U.S.-v.-Ro...
e: really? why am i downvoted for this
Who cares if he smoked weed or installed a VM or evaded a government keylogger? Those are all really shitty reasons to put someone in a cage, whether it's couched as "probation terms" or not.
Vandalizing your employer's infrastructure over a grudge is, I suggest, strong evidence of a major impulse control issue. It think it makes sense and is in the public interest, draconian as it is, that this person shouldn't be allowed to get high and have unmonitored internet access. The same place they've committed felonies before, on impulse.
Further context: his own defense lawyer filed a motion asking a court to find this guy mentally incompetent to stand trial,
https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/USCOURTS-txed-4_19-cr-00...
Isn't the reddit post doing the same thing by trying to imply he was jailed for running a TOR node when he was officially jailed for breaking parole terms? Even if they think those were just excuse to jail him, the refusal to acknowledge those details makes the account at least deceptive.
If someone who did some serious stuff, couldn't follow easy terms, it is cause for concern.
There has to be some penalty for noncompliance or you get more of it.
I am absolutely NOT a fan of "tough on crime" type stuff. By and large I feel the US criminal justice system is an inhumane cruel monstrosity. But the conditions were not all that unreasonable (except the weed stuff) and all of this smells of bad faith on the part of this couple.
Go check page 28, lines 3 to 8 on https://rockenhaus.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/U.S.-v.-Ro...
https://rockenhaus.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/U.S.-v.-Ro...
Also that it occurred right after the search mentioned on Page 28. It's a really bad look.
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 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.
The article provides a good foundation for opposing arguments.
Excerpting:
> The researchers wanted to find a way to do the seemingly impossible — to give the military the benefits of a global, high-speed communications network without exposing them to the vulnerabilities of the metadata that the network relied on to operate.
> ...
> There are other implications, as well. For a CIA agent to use Tor without suspicion in non-U.S. nations, for example, there would need to be plenty of citizens in these nations using Tor for everyday internet browsing. Similarly, if the only users in a particular country are whistleblowers, civil rights activists and protesters, the government may well simply arrest anyone connecting to your anonymity network. As a result, an onion routing system had to be open to as wide a range of users and maintainers as possible, so that the mere fact that someone was using the system wouldn’t reveal anything about their identity or their affiliations.
> ...
> Anonymity loves company — so Tor needed to be sold to the general public. That necessity led to an unlikely alliance between cypherpunks and the U.S. Navy.
> The NRL researchers behind Onion routing knew it wouldn’t work unless everyday people used it, so they reached out to the cypherpunks and invited them into conversations about design and strategy to reach the masses.
Freedom is being taken away by govt, because we are making choices that surrender it.
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”. And soon enough they are just laughing their asses off while the person is stuck in jail.
> "clear hacking tools" I had installed in my computer, e.g CCleaner
I have always wondered if they are primarily that stupid or just evil and pretending to be stupid. I am leaning towards evil.
The Reddit post is an attempt to garner sympathy by leaving out all of the actual crimes committed.
I hope you’re doing well.
Dead Comment
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.
Your local building commissioner or whatever just has a lot less money and muscle on tap and much more circuitous access to court judgements in their favor than the FBI does. Differences in their strategic and tactical approach is a reflection of this.
Thus, every time we see a CFAA charge we have to ask ourselves: "Is this an abuse of power?".
We should have better, clearer laws.
The quick summary is (reddit) OP's husband was fired from a job and used old unrevoked access to crash their servers, was briefly contracted to fix it before the company found out they were the source of the crash and terminated them again, then after all that he then gained access to their DR facilities and physically damaged a number of servers.
If that's true it seems like a pretty cut and dry CFAA case (with some extra normal crime on top to boot) and the main issue to take with it is the FBI using it as leverage to get him to compromise his TOR node.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45262053