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

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989 points heavyset_go | 3 comments | 16 Sep 25 12:10 UTC | HN request time: 0.741s | source
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tptacek ◴[16 Sep 25 13:26 UTC] No.45261951[source]▶
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.

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tptacek ◴[16 Sep 25 13:33 UTC] No.45262053[source]▶
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).

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petcat ◴[16 Sep 25 13:42 UTC] No.45262161[source]▶
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.
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1. nerdponx ◴[16 Sep 25 14:05 UTC] No.45262432[source]▶
And yet fraudulent warrants, if they are indeed fraudulent, are still illegal and immoral and a violation of this criminal's rights.
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2. DannyBee ◴[16 Sep 25 14:24 UTC] No.45262666[source]▶
As far as i can discern, the warrants aren't fraudulent.

Warrants (in the US anyway) require reasonable belief that the crimes listed were committed.

They don't have to be right, mind you (after all, that's what trial is for), they just need reasonable belief.

They also can't recklessly disregard the truth (IE deliberately write lies they know are wrong).

Again, it's okay for them to be wrong about their belief. It's just not okay to know they are wrong and write it anyway.

Here, reading the warrant, etc, there is nothing obviously fraudulent here.

Perhaps it is, of course, but i read everything i could find and it's completely non-obvious which part of the warrant is supposed to be fraudulent.

Even the sort of retaliation claim made here is strange - Arresting you when you appear to actually hvae broken the law is generally only considered retaliation if (among other things) the enforcement of the law is uneven - IE targeted at you and nobody else.

Given the arrest was for a parole violation and they arrest parole violations like this all the time, ....

Like if you are at a traffic stop becuase you ran a red light, call a cop an asshole, and they arrest you because you have 50kg of cocaine bricks in your back seat, it's not retaliation.

Retaliation would be if you call a cop an asshole on facebook, and they come arrest you for violation of an 1825 law that hasn't been used against anyone in 200 years.

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3. nerdponx ◴[16 Sep 25 19:08 UTC] No.45266505[source]▶
Totally valid. And I also didn't check into the warrants themselves.

I was responding to the implication I keep seeing here that it's OK that he got arrested because he did bad things, regardless of how the arrest came about.