by ddtaylor | 2025-07-26 14:20:52+00:00
CFAA. Grand jury indicted because of the claims I created Bitcoin and BitTorrent, which are sort of presented as the same thing! Also maybe something something Comcast because he works there?

Firstly, BitTorrent and Bitcoin are two completely different technologies, neither of which I created or have committed code to. Nothing related to Comcast was involved and I never have worked there or any other company like that.

I had a great legal team. Very dedicated. Some areas offer great public defenders because the case load is much lighter than others.

Also it's kind of fun to see MD5 hashes used as evidence! I didn't know that was still a thing and I was curious of the legal grounds for the fact that any forensics expert could walk in and provide an equivalent of md5.gif proving it could be fabricated. I explained to my legal team that I could go home and create a version of my hard drive that is filled with repeating copies of the bible that matches all of those MD5 hashes. In legal battles you have to pick things best with your overall strategy.

I can say it was an interesting ride. I watched people overdose daily during COVID in Federal Prison among all kinds of other insanity. I never had any kind of security issues as I was in a lower security facility and many of them, even the "gang banger" ones, were relatively business minded and interested in how the darknet was changing the global drug trade and genuinely happy to have someone they viewed as talented willing to drop knowledge on it. They also loved the fact I could look "street check" other claimed hackers and fraudsters. If they couldn't answer a few basic questions from me they likely were never in any kind of "game" more complex than physically stealing peoples cards. Combine that with the infinite amount of Android rooting related work that needs done to keep the behind-the-bars mobile network functioning LMAO and I was doing fine.

My first cell-mate type person thing was a doctor. His name was Kumar. His friend came over, who also was a doctor, and someone said "Oh hey Kumar" to him as well. At this point I was starting to assume they just call all Indian people Kumar, because I had witnessed similar things. However, they both happened to be named Kumar. Also, they delivered his mail to me wrongly one time on accident. No envelope, etc. just a piece of paper. It was a bill for tens of millions of dollars and most of it had been paid. At this point I had became conditioned to strange paperwork that attempted to tell me I was screwed, so at first I was like "Oh, yeah? The computers I hacked were $20+ million?" before realizing it was his mail. IIRC he was there because he was scamming Medicare for cosmetic surgery like boob jobs and stuff.

Normally in Federal Prison even if you are a terrible baby murdering criminal, you get a little time outside, etc. During COVID things were fucked and it was 24-0 in the same 4 rooms for 6 months for me. Thankfully I had a good DnD campaign to run and worked up to being able to do some physical challenges like 100 push-ups in a single set, which when starting at 30 is impressive.

Ah yes, and I had you guys! I forgot, as I have mentioned this a few times in passing, but I setup a Puppeteer script that would scrape a few sites like HN that I enjoy and would put them into a PDF. It ran the same thing that would happen if you clicked reader mode so that the page was easy to read and it put 4 on a single page and sent it to a friend who would print it and mail it for me weekly. I could have used an API to do this, but the mailing rules are specific and I didn't want to risk it. My friend helped out and mailed that stuff for me and I received the front page of HN along with the articles in a weekly digest format. Originally I didn't know what the mail rules were so it had all kinds of weird search/replace regexes to avoid OCR or something weird, so articles about "HACKER FINDS BLAH" would turn into "WACKER FINDS BLAH" to avoid my mail getting turned away. (This would not have mattered AFAIK)

About those TRULINCS computers. I had decided not to fuck with them much in terms of hacking them. I did get curious a few times and navigate through their boot menus and check a few things out and there were some demons there. Some of the boot was locked down, but PXE boot attacks would work. And before you think "how the fuck would you...", just know you can pay two fine-running Hispanic gentlemen to bring anything inside at 2X cost and mostly it's by weight because they run outside and grab it and run back inside! It can be done with a Raspberry Pi to simply spoof the PXE. Why would someone hack the TRULINCS computer if they have an Rpi? Well, you can basically sit at those computers and use them without concern from a staff member, whereas using a contraband device requires stashing it, hiding, etc.

The guards didn't go inside the building during COVID. Those guys came in a few times dressed head to toe in bullshit-ass-made Amazon hazmat suits for a few days, then stopped coming all together, then eventually would come through with gas masks on a bit here and there. My time was very short as my case took a long time to reach a plea as there were very low damages and various statutes need damages to trigger IIRC.

One time when they came to check my living quarters while waiting for trial they found a bin of old parts. One of them was a power supply unit (PSU). They spent a considerable amount of time trying to determine "how much data it had" and asked me many questions about it. I was not allowed to have a phone at the time, so I could not simply take the product code on the side of it and show them the online retailer specs, etc. Those guys were genuinely trying to decipher the fucking mystery of how many gigabytes were inside that power supply. I will never forget that, and neither should you!

The FBI got tired of talking to me pretty quickly. Most of my answers created more questions that were of no value to anyone. "Do you remember any passwords used?" - "No" - "You don't remember one of them?" - "I'm not sure I remember which passwords I remember, do you remember which ones you've forgotten?" - "Try to think of one" - Closes eyes "I have thought of passwords" - "Can you remember one now?" - "Remember which ones I forgot?"

I remember when the FBI started taking me to the wrong building accidentally because they missed their turn I specifically said I didn't mind because we can stop at McDonalds before we get back on the highway to the US Marshals.

Happy Saturday!