FBI couldn't get my husband to decrypt his Tor node so he was jailed for 3 years

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).

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.

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.

Yeah, but apart from that …

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...

This needs to be higher up, it is very damning

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:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01L8C4WBG/

The poor wife, “can you stop being a criminal for like, one month, please?”.

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.

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.

That's par for the course in America

> 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 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.

Some are free. Some are not. __Like in good old times__

The guy did bad things and got caught. The ridiculous wife's perspective doesn't include that he e.g. DDOS'd an employer.

And home of the brave.

Guilt by association is much more a social construct, than a legal one.

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.

By this logic, anyone who has had a Google Pixel and or is running GrapheneOS is guilty by association, right?

Just wanted to understand your point.

The part that should really enrage you is the way people will selectively understand this based on whether they agree or disagree with the context.

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.

>> But this should be a cautionary warning of what might also happen 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?

>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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Idk the punishment just doesn't match the crime. Can't they just confiscate the computer? Or pressure the ISP to cancel his account? Tbh I get that the Feds are going route around and through anything that stands in their way.

Instead we're left up to state thuggery.

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 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.

If you read above, he was wanted for IT sabotage, avoiding FBI monitoring and other disgusting acts such as browsing for underage pornography.

Several years prior I had a coworker get arrested on CSAM charges because, you guessed it, he ran an Tor exit node.

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.

That's not the key precedent they are setting. They are working on a much more important case: Making the population understand that disobedience will result in punishment