Comments

• Hacker News;
• Reddit;
• X/Twitter.

Relevant legal documents

• United States v. Rockenhaus, 4:19-cr-00181, (E.D. Tex.)

Source: Reddit- Private front-end.

(Eastern District of Michigan - Detroit)

My husband, Conrad Rockenhaus, is wrongly incarcerated in a county jail. I’m posting this here because you are one of the few communities that will understand the full technical and political reality of how he ended up there.

My husband is a former Tor operator, and at one point, he ran some of the fastest relays and exit nodes in the world.

This nightmare began when he refused to help the FBI decrypt traffic from his exit nodes.

Months later, the government arrested him. Their official reason? A minor, non-violent CFAA charge from an old workplace dispute that had nothing to do with Tor.

In fact, the statute of limitations was just a couple of months from expiring. It was a clear pretext to target him.

That minor charge was all they needed to get him into the system. To deny him bail, a U.S. Probation Officer in Texas lied under oath, telling a judge that Conrad had installed a “Linux OS called Spice” to “knock out their monitoring software” and access the “dark web.”

Read the transcript

Here is the technical reality of their lie: The software was a standard SPICE graphics driver needed for his Ph.D. program. As many of you know, this is a basic utility for displaying graphics from a virtual machine. It is not an OS, has no connection to the dark web, and was technically incapable of interfering with their monitoring software.

The claim is a technical absurdity, equivalent to saying a mouse pad can hack a server.

Based on that lie alone, he was held in pre-trial detention for three years.

Now, the retaliation has escalated in Michigan. After I filed a formal complaint against his US probation officers for harassment, they used fraudulent warrants to jail my husband again.

During this violent arrest by US Marshals (who smashed in our windows and nearly shot my dog) he sustained a severe head injury that caused him to have a grand mal seizure in court. The jail’s “medical attention” was to ask him what year it was (he said 2023) and then send him back to his cell. He is being denied real medical care.

See videos:

• Feds threatening to sick dogs on us
• Feds beating by husband in the head
• Feds smashing in our windows
• Feds threaten to shoot my dog
• More threats to shoot my dog

To make matters worse, U.S. District Judge Stephen J. Murphy, III has created a procedural trap that has stripped my husband of his right to a lawyer to fight for his life, health, or innocence. He is trapped in a constitutional and medical crisis.

I am not asking for money. I am asking for your help to amplify this story. You understand the technical truth and why this fight is so important.

We have all the evidence: the court transcript of the false testimony, the fraudulent warrants, the proof of medical neglect. It’s documented on my website:

https://rockenhaus.com/

TL;DR: My husband, a former Tor operator, refused to help the FBI decrypt Tor traffic. They retaliated by using an old, unrelated CFAA offense to arrest him and then lied about him using a "graphics driver to access the dark web” to keep him in pre-trial detention for 3 years. Now he’s been jailed again in Michigan on fraudulent violations, is being denied care for a head injury, and has no lawyer.

I need help getting the word out🙏

Adrienne Rockenhaus

For updates:

• Official Press.
• X/Twitter.

More Context from her comment:

Seeing a lot of questions and some misinformation in the comments, so I wanted to clarify a few key facts with sources:

• On the original case: My husband did not have a trial. He took a coerced guilty plea in Texas after being held for three years based on perjured testimony about a “SPICE graphics driver.” We have the court transcript proving the perjury on our website.
• On the violent arrest: The claim that my husband was “combative” is a complete fabrication, likely being spread to justify the U.S. Marshals’ actions. We have the unedited security camera footage of the entire raid, and it proves the opposite.
• On the relevance of Tor: The government’s retaliation against our family began after my husband, a Tor exit node operator, refused to help the FBI decrypt traffic. They then used an unrelated workplace dispute as the pretext for the initial charge. The entire case stems from his support for online privacy.

Even More Context:

I’m seeing comments about a deeply offensive search term (“NAMBLA”) that the prosecution brought up in my husband’s 2020 hearing in Texas, and I want to address it directly so there is no confusion. The search was for an article my husband was writing for Encyclopedia Dramatica, a well-known (and very controversial) satirical wiki that parodies offensive topics. He was researching the topic to make fun of it, much like the show South Park did in a famous episode. The prosecution knew this search was irrelevant to the case, but they put it in front of the judge anyway . This is a classic “poison the well” tactic, using something shocking and out-of-context to prejudice a judge against a defendant. It’s a hallmark of a malicious prosecution. While they want everyone distracted by this, the real issues are the ones they can’t defend: the fraudulent warrants, the perjured testimony, the ongoing medical neglect, and the judge’s documented conflict of interest.