Culture

Hacker Andrew Auernheimer Placed In Solitary Confinement For Tweeting From Prison

by admin

As reported on TechCrunch.

by JOHN BIGGS

Weevilicious

Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer has been placed in “administrative segregation,” prison shorthand for solitary confinement for “investigative purposes.” Supporters believe he was locked down and given no Internet access because of his ability to send Tweets to a third party who relayed them on his private account. Auernheimer has not sent electronic messages since April 8.

In a letter acquired by the Daily Dot, Auernheimer writes:

I am disgusted to have to write an actual paper letter but they took away all my electronic comms methods and put me in the special housing unit where I am under 24/7 lockdown. All this for the high crime of blogging, despite nation B.O.P. [Federal Bureau of Prisons] officials having made public statements that what I was doing wasn’t against the rules[…]It has been a week of this and I feel completely alone and abandoned. I don’t even have my loved ones or attorney’s address (they took most of my papers and I happened to have your address on a property slip they didn’t toss). and am unsure when or if anyone will find out about my situation.

His pro bono attorney, Tor Ekeland, has not been able to contact Auernheimer since his lockdown.

Auernheimer was sentenced to 41 months in prison for programmatically scraping user information from a public AT&T website and sharing it with Gawker.com. He entered prison with much fanfare and attempted to blog from behind bars until his lock down.