My lawyer then asked the judge to allow him to bring a laptop into the prison visiting area so he could review the electronic evidence with me. Again Judge Pfaelzer denied the request, adding, "We’re never in the world going to do that." She apparently believed that just sitting in front of a computer, even under my attorney’s supervision, I could somehow cause great damage. (There was no wireless Internet in 1998, so it would have been impossible for me to pull an Internet connection out of thin air. But she simply didn’t know enough about how computers worked to have any idea whether I could connect to the outside world.) And besides, the prosecutors kept warning her that I would have access to the victim’s proprietary source code, or that I might write a computer virus that could somehow be released into the wild. As a result, we weren’t permitted to examine any of the electronic evidence against me that was key to the government’s case. When my attorney asked the judge to order the government to print out the files, the prosecutor said that there were far too many of them, so many that they would fill up the entire courtroom, and the judge refused to order the government to comply.