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Comment by enraged_camel | Hacker News Reader

Auernheimer is a tremendous cretin. The fact that he has the gall to compare himself to Aaron Swartz makes me want to vomit.

As for tweeting from prison, I have no idea what he was thinking. Then again it is hardly the first time he exercised extremely poor judgment.

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1. Does being a cretin or a jerk or whatever mean it is OK to be imprisoned for non-crimes?

2. He wasn't the one who started the comparisons with Aaron Swartz, from weev's tweet: "CNN is also sitting around calling me a meanie. I'm a bad troll, and no Aaron Swartz, the outraged masses cry!" Then he goes on to continue differentiate himself from Aaron, he never created or invited a positive comparison.

3. The article said he was sending messages to another person who was tweeting on his behalf. Why would he lose his right to free speech just because he has been convicted of a crime? Why wouldn't he be able to tweet (by proxy)?

EDIT s/charged/convicted/

>Why would he lose his right to free speech just because he has been convicted of a crime?

Inmates have restricted free speech. See here for some info om that: http://civilrights.findlaw.com/other-constitutional-rights/r...

> Inmates have restricted free speech.

In other words, they don't have free speech?

We all have restricted free speech. Some more than others.

Why would he lose his right to free speech just because he has been convicted of a crime?

It's only one of many rights lost. Due process and all.

In the USA the moment you're convicted of a federal crime your rights go right out the window, some of them permanently. In some states you lose the right to vote. You lose all 2nd amendment rights (the right to bare arms) for life unless pardoned by the president no matter what the crime was.

As for tweeting from prison, I have no idea what he was thinking.

Is it illegal to do so? What forms of communication are and are not legal when incarcerated?

(Of course, he certainly could have tweeted via an illegal manner. But it's not clear to me on the face of it whether tweeting while convicted is a crime.)

According the the article, it appears that he tweeted by using the (legal to access) system for sending e-mails, and someone else tweets them for him. Unless he has a restriction on using computers / the internet as part of his sentence, I have a hard time imagining how that is illegal.

According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons website, "Email correspondence may not jeopardize the public or the safety, security, or orderly operation of the correctional facility. Additionally, it may not exceed 13,000 characters (i.e., approximately two pages). Correspondence that is not consistent with these restrictions will be rejected."

http://www.bop.gov/inmate_programs/trulincs_faq.jsp#10

That length restriction seems really bizarre to me. Is the purpose of that just to prevent their mentally ill inmates from bombarding the public with massive manifestos?

Does that limitation also exist for traditional non-electronic letter? Are inmates allowed to publish books from prison? I'm aware of the Son of Sam Law, which forbids profiting off the story of your crime. That seems to indicate that other stories are okay, but I am not sure.

> That length restriction seems really bizarre to me. Is the purpose of that just to prevent their mentally ill inmates from bombarding the public with massive manifestos?

The purpose is to keep organized crime leaders from continuing to run their networks while incarcerated.

I'm not sure about that. The more likely reason is that someone has to read those emails and authorities did not want it to become a huge burden on the reviewers.

Is it effective at doing that? Wouldn't crime bosses just do that through their lawyers?

Nope, it's because of the limited number of staff available to read the stuff.

I think they limit the length so that the emails can be examined. You wouldn't want someone DOSing the wardens and sneaking a message out via the whitespace characters.

Wow, I love that prison has a less restrictive arbitrary length limit than does twitter!

Twitter's message length is related to the length of a single SMS

Yeah, I'm with the other reply, you and too many other people here are saying "Weev was a jerk".

Yeah? Well I think you're a low-life for making decent treatment conditional on your LIKING of someone, especially since I highly doubt you've met him or seriously interacted with him and like everyone else on here are just talking out your ass.

Unless you have something to add - you're the noise, not the signal - mister "tremendous cretin".

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