Hacker Andrew Auernheimer Has Been Placed in Solitary Confinement, Possibly for Tweeting

Andrew Auernheimer, also known as weev, is currently serving more than three years in prison for hacking-related charged. Perhaps due to his abrasive personality, and certainly due to the nature of his case, Auernheimer’s prison stint is already very different from that of an average inmate. It appears the correctional facility fears Auernheimer’s skills so much, they’ve placed him in solitary confinement.

Prison officials are calling Auernheimer’s isolation “administrative detention” done for “investigative purposes,” said his lawyer, Tor Ekeland, in a phone interview. Ekeland had just happened to get off the phone with a prison official before our conversation.

Ekeland hasn’t been able to reach his client for almost two weeks now. “I have been cut off from him,” he said, and finds the whole thing “really strange.” Strange enough “that we may litigate,” he added. “It's not clear to me what is going on” and Ekeland won’t know until he drives out there and visits him in person this upcoming weekend.

After managing to tweet and post phone messages on his Soundcloud from prison through the help of his friends in April, the hacker-troller was placed in solitary confinement sometime two weeks ago. He’s also had his corrlinks access revoked at some point in the last month.

“They wouldn’t tell me what he is being investigated for, and I can't conceive what they have to investigate,” said Ekeland. But he said his guess is that it was sparked by Auernheimer’s tweeting and posting files to Soundcloud, which technically isn’t illegal.

Auernheimer is currently serving 41 months in prison for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) by discovering a security flaw in how AT&T was storing user data.  AT&T housed its customers personal information online on a public website, and Auernheimer was able to obtain data on more than 120,000 customers' by guessing URLs, of which he passed onto Gawker.

It was a victimless crime—Gawker censored the personal data when it published the security flaw—and many security experts don’t even view what Auernheimer did as a crime at all. Nevertheless, Auernheimer was caught up under the CFAA’s wide umbrella, and many experts now place the defeat of the controversial and highly publicized act on his shoulders.

Auernheimer’s political importance may very well explain the diligence of the correctional facility; both Ekeland and friends have heard the decision to cut off his Internet access came from “higher-ups.” (We haven't been able to independently corroborate that claim.)

“I think they are making the same mistake” as they made with the trial, said Ekeland. They’re “making him a martyr and a celebrity by doing this,” and “if they left him alone, I don't think we'd be getting all this attention right now.”

Update: A letter from Auernheimer to Shane MacDougall has been transcribed and posted to Pastebin.