You can catch one of these by logging into your moms netflix account.
> [Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney] Barrett ruled that for the CFAA, a person violates the "exceeds authorized access" language when they access files or other information that is off-limits to them on a computer system that they otherwise have authorized access to. The majority opinion distinguished this from Van Buren's case, in that the information that he obtained was within the limits of what he could access with his authorization, but was done for improper reasons, and thus he could not be charged under CFAA for this crime.
This still does criminalize logging into your mom’s Netflix account, probably (?), but at least browsing HN on your work computer not covered anymore.
However the quote on its own is not necessarily true without further qualifications as mentioned above.
It's absolutely true, you're accessing an unauthorized account. All law enforcement need to do is ask you, did you access an electronic account that was not yours ?
Nuance will be ignored when it suits them.
Project 2025 was announced in 2023.
I don't normally agree with this man, but he is dead right. There are too many fucking laws.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/08/america-ha...
Of course there was no reporting on the Tor aspect, just “local man arrested for CSAM” in the local papers. He eventually had the charges dropped after years of court battles, but his name is forever tarnished as a result.
This particular job we had a lot of idealist folks, two of whom ran relays - they immediately ceased to do so in the aftermath of the coworker’s arrest.
Even from the early days of Tor I remember all of the warnings to not run an exit node in a country where internet activity was likely to lead to prosecution.
Running any sort of proxy (including Tor exit nodes) allows other people’s traffic to appear as your traffic. That’s the entire purpose of the software. You’d have to be willing and able to handle the consequences of any traffic any other person decides to send through the system.
Your local zoning code is probably chock full of them. And if not there then your local stormwater/runoff rules probably have a bunch of examples too.
Federal stuff is much more highly litigated so you don't see as much of it there. State is a middle ground.
This is exactly the argument for privacy to people who say "I have nothing to hide". Authoritative governments will always find a reason to dig something up and the less privacy you have the easier it will be.
As a side note it sickening to see USA government doing this arrest straight out of gestapo/kgb playbook.
The state does what it wants and in the end it doesn't even need an excuse.
An excuse is a nice to have, but that's it.
It doesn't need an excuse because people let it not need an excuse.
Every idiot, even on HN, heck, particularly on HN and other places where demographic factors result most never having been the target of government or think that they would be, is perfectly fine with it when the government behaves this way in pursuit of things they agree with. And so the only people complaining about any one government abuse are the small minority that care all the time plus whatever group care about the specific issue.
If people would stop being two faced snakes and have some principals and stand by them the problem would decrease on its own. But that's like saying "just go as fast as light", it's not a tractable problem.
Anything other than that is just wishful thinking.
People who say this will not be swayed by any argument. What they are really saying is "I don't want to think about this".
There's a truth I've come to accept in recent times: The vast majority of people are not able to extrapolate from their immediate personal situation. If they are not effected by something right now in a way they personally feel, they do not and will never care.
Once you accept that fact, so many things make so much more sense in this world. The whole MAGA movement explains itself, the complete disregard of climate change or even local environmental issues make sense and the complete ignorance of privacy issues. The only way to sway these people is when they are personally affected. So consider this Truth the next time you find out a service has been collecting private information in an unsecured S3 Bucket.
This is also why mobile phone camera tech led to BLM as more and more people became aware of how police act when they think nobody is watching.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isYZoFrIeo0
However, the poor guy only defeated criminal charges on appeal!
How is 3 years pretrial not blatantly unconstitutional and thrown out immediately?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._Beatty_Chadwick
And this in a civil matter!
New Yorkers spend an average of 10 months in pretrial detention. This kind of abuse is routine in the American system, and by and large Americans want it that way for their usual reasons about "crime".
Well, I hear that if you make being gay a crime again, you cut off the head of palantir.
I remember when I used to think Thiel had libertarian values!
Money can do a lot more things, including inducing hypocrisy, double standardism and blindness.
Unfortunately, Tor carries a negative connotation tied to criminal activity.
And if you're operating (like this individual) something that is perceived to be criminal in nature, you're bound to be a target by law enforcement.
Note: I'm not stating whether or not what happened to this individual is right/wrong. But this should be a cautionary warning of what might also happen to anyone if you associate with things that are perceived as criminal in nature.
Opioid painkillers are associated with “things that are criminal in nature” because a certain segment of every society does and will suck, nearly no matter what. Does this mean that everybody in pain should just suffer and let their education, career, and family be taken from them before their time?
If some electronics repair guy repairing vehicle ECUs in bulk who doesn't ask questions but has an inkling that they're gonna get used for emissions laws violations got rolled up on by the feds for refusing to go out of his way to help them out HN would find all sorts of ways to cheer and justify it.
But when they do it to a tor node it's bad.
I say this because this cultural vibe of government agencies kicking in your door for doing innocuous shit needs to die already, that is simply not how this happens. We get letters, we get calls, VERY occasionally we get visits and said visits are scheduled weeks, sometimes months in advance. We always cooperate and the relationship, therefore, is not adversarial.
Honestly we have way more fucking problems with huckster vendors trying to fuck us out of a few extra dollars on parts than anything to do with the big scary government.
While we're at it, fuck coal rollers with a cactus.
For any given issue, subject, industry or niche there is always a you. And you are the enablers. Multiply by every equivalent idiot and niche and that's how you get the world in which some guy gets whacked for running a tor node.
If not that it would be some other niche, maybe some guy importing gray market power equipment to the chagrin of the branded dealers would be getting whacked. If not that then it's the amish farmers getting whacked over one of their many "in letter but not spirit" compliance measures.
Yeah, in every case the letters of the law are broad enough to nail these sorts of people but that's not an outcome the general public wants except for the occasional zealot on any given subject. And the equivalent enablers would be endorsing it just as you are now.
And at the end of the day your behavior (you plural) undermines the legitimacy of these institutions and the government they serve because these are outcomes that nobody wants, but single industry enforcement enough of a back burner issue that elections mostly don't get won and lost over them so the fire just keeps smoldering year after year (fed by our tax dollars, of course).
>As someone who works in this industry
Perfect illustrative example for one of HN's favorite quotes:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it"
>Our products all align with all required emissions regulation...the relationship, therefore, is not adversarial.
You might as well compare a medium company with an encrypted file share service to some 1-man package maintainer for software that does the same. Who is law enforcement gonna try and abuse?
>While we're at it, fuck coal rollers with a cactus.
A bunch of reactionary yokels are a symptom of the degree to which your ilk has undermined the legitimacy of the laws they violate and enforcement agencies they thumb their nose at, not the root cause. If society solves people like you the yokels will mostly go away on their own. That is what I seek.
Just wanted to understand your point.
Yup. https://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-organized-crim...
The bar for legal consequences is expected to be much higher than mere association.
It has never been perfect, nor uniformly applied in all circumstances, but it is and should remain a nominal goal of the justice system. For that to no longer be considered the case, even in a casual conversation like this, is a devastating shift of the Overton window towards authoritarianism as the norm.
It may not literally be guilt by association, but they’re two parts of the same whole in this case, right or wrong.
This would come off lot more legit if the current elected US president wasn't a convicted rapist and constantly promoting crypto along with his acolytes like Elon Musk.
Wow did this just happen today? I can't find anything about it online
/s
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.
We voted for this, the time to fix the problem was last November, and now we have to live with the results. It's also why I, and anyone else who values their freedom, their career, their family, needs to post such sentiment anonymously. It is NOT safe to criticize this administration.
This will become practically impossible very soon if it isn't already.
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.
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.
This sounds awful lot like Middle Eastern mafia stuff, where it's technically illegal to do some things but you can do a lot of things if you are aligned with the people in power.
I have no idea what this person was up to but this selective treatment smells very bad. IIRC behind the release of Ross there was some libertarian NGO or something, maybe contact them?
Didn't Ulbricht get pardoned for being a hero of the cryptocurrency-bros, as kind of a deal to get support from the Libertarians in the election? I think he was a one-off, or at least part of a small category that doesn't extend to cryptography and privacy idealists.
That was the National Libertarian Party and the party chair was forced to resign in disgrace shortly after, due to accusations of kickbacks and embezzlement.
This didn't work out for SBF, but you can clearly see this process being set up for other people.
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.
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?”.
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.
Page 28, lines 3 to 8 on https://rockenhaus.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/U.S.-v.-Ro...
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).
People take this to the extreme and think that their country is somehow a lawless hellscape where police are openly shooting innocent people, dragging them from cars for seemingly no reason etc... but those stories make the news precisely because it's not the norm.
Ssutting down the server (you solely maintained) before leaving would be "minor" to me... intentionally causing damage, earning money from that, getting caught, and again causing physical damage.. that's pretty "major" to me.
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.
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.
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.
Go check page 28, lines 3 to 8 on https://rockenhaus.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/U.S.-v.-Ro...
There has to be some penalty for noncompliance or you get more of it.
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 unsupervised internet access.
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...
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.
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.
Lines of credit, again, fits in with the above.
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 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 should be sent to LE" is unacceptable. 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 a criminal but 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.
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.
Tor is totally used for criminal activity. That doesn't mean it is inherently a bad thing, or that it is this guy's fault, but he can't completely wash his hands off it. If bad guys use the postal service, it's not the postman's fault, but he has to cooperate with law enforcement if they demand that.
I don't know about the US, but contempt of court is a thing in the UK at least. You can't refuse to submit evidence to court, including things like encryption keys or things only stored in your head - or face penalties including unlimited jail time.
Now, I get that this is the US so the arrest was dialled up to 11 and it seems all of this is extra-judicial - no court warrant etc. This is all very disappointing. But, to my non-expert eye running a Tor exit node is in the legal grey zone, and I guess you can't be too surprised when things like this happen.
Instead we're left up to state thuggery.
3 years sounds about right to me.
The U.K. is fast sliding down the slope to being a dystopian police state. The idea that you can be jailed for refusing to provide encryption keys (except for really specific, narrowly-defined circumstances) is something that should induce nausea. I feel for you and your country, you accomplished such great things.
I'd be a little more concerned about the state of US at this point.
This is a bit more complex in the US. We have the fifth amendment to our Constitution which says "nor shall [a person] be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself."
So, we can't be made to testify against ourselves. This has sometimes been interpreted to mean that they can't compel cryptography keys that are stored in our brains, and sometimes has been interpreted the other way.
I'm unaware of any definitive decision that applies universally. I've heard some suggest that passphrases that are themselves an admission of crime are a workaround that ensures you can't be compelled to provide them.
https://rockenhaus.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/U.S.-v.-Ro...
The FBI said he downloaded a client, here Spice, which can be used to access a VM and visited the tor project website to look into how he could download a Tor client. That happened in the 24h which followed him agreeing to electronic monitoring and voluntarily installing a spyware. They argue that he has the knowledge and mean to circumvent the monitoring he agreed to and his pattern of actions indicate he is likely to do so if left free. A huge part of the argument lies on him having agreed to voluntarily participate in his own monitoring. The CFAA charge seems to be sealed but I'm far from convinced it's a minor work related issue.
If you read the website, they keep firing their attorneys and pretending they are colluding with the government to keep him in jail. Parts of the description are frankly bizarre. It seems they are actually suffering for paranoia.
I would read the post with a huge grain of salt.
Freedom is being taken away by govt, because we are making choices that surrender it.
gryfft•1h ago