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[Ed note] Background taken from: The Intercept :
Barrett Brown, whose column received the 2016 National Magazine Award for columns and commentary, is an imprisoned U.S. journalist and the founder of Project PM, a crowd-sourced investigation into the cyber-industrial complex. In 2012, the FBI raided his house, and later that year Barrett was indicted on 12 federal charges relating to the 2011 Stratfor hack. The most controversial charge, linking to the hacked data, was dropped, but in 2015 Brown was sentenced to 63 months in prison.
[/Ed note]
I never really got a chance to play any pen-and-paper role-playing games growing up, so being thrown into a prison system in which such things as Dungeons and Dragons are relatively common constituted one of the silver linings of my 2012 arrest, along with not having to deal with an infestation of those little German roaches that had colonized my kitchen or having to see "World War Z."
As it happens, I'd actually learned about the prevalence of tabletop games among inmates a few months before my own incarceration, in the days after the FBI first raided both my apartment and my mother's home in March 2012 and seized laptops and papers without yet making an arrest. As they themselves noted in the search warrant, which the late Michael Hastings published at BuzzFeed, the focus of the investigation was my collaborative journalism outfit Project PM as well as echelon2.org, the online repository where we posted our ongoing findings on the still-mysterious "intelligence contracting" sector (which has since been moved here). The warrant listed HBGary Federal and Endgame Systems — two firms on which we'd focused particular attention — as topics for the FBI's search. This was revealing. A year prior, a raid by Anonymous on the servers of HBGary had revealed, among other things, the firm's leading role in a conspiracy by a consortium calling itself Team Themis to conduct an array of covert operations against WikiLeaks and even journalists like Glenn Greenwald, prompting a congressional inquiry that would ultimately be squashed by a Republican committee chairman.
Is playing an immersive fantasy game with people who have poor impulse control wise?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ledow on Tuesday October 18 2016, @11:28AM
A mind that cannot occupy itself in an empty room is, in itself, empty.
Seriously, gimme a crayon and paper, leave me alone and I'll be happy for days, if not weeks. There have been periods in my life where I've done that to myself deliberately to solve a problem!
Stick me in solitary for any length of time, even without that kind of equipment, so long as I'm able to make some kind of inscription (even a fingermark in the dust) and I'll be designing CPUs, writing programs and playing games. Against myself? Hell, no, against my algorithm.
The beauty of the intellectual is that they need no equipment to perform miracles. Just a lack of disturbance. In any modern first-world country, solitary is pretty rare anyway but I'd actually RATHER solitary than dealing with a bunch of people keep disturbing me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 18 2016, @11:46AM
At this point I would pay for a cell with a blanket, total dark and 2 meals a day. Even if only for a couple of years.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday October 18 2016, @02:13PM
Sounds like west-coast living in a tech area.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 18 2016, @01:15PM
FTFY
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 18 2016, @05:30PM
"In any modern first-world country, solitary is pretty rare anyway"
so, you're excluding the US in your first world group? cuz the feds put that 70+ year old national park occupier in solitary and he may still be in there.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Tuesday October 18 2016, @06:29PM
Exactly correct.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday October 18 2016, @05:50PM
It's a question of how long... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Royal_Game [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Wednesday October 19 2016, @07:52AM
>lack of disturbance
Like the "bunch of rocks" guy in xkcd? https://www.xkcd.com/505/ [xkcd.com]
The environment is noisy and you would be interrupted by random prisoner counts. The noise comes from frequently insane people. Not the conditions I would choose for exercising my mind. Don't imagine you'll get your ADD medication, if you take any.
Designing a CPU without Internet access for reference? OK, maybe. But remember you're limited to a small number of books in the cell. Michael Santos had a prison refuse to deliver books for his PhD courses, because they could. The library will have Westerns, though.
Assuming they don't throw away your notes. Sometimes that happens even with constitutionally protected legal papers. http://images1.laweekly.com/imager/when-a-cartoonist-landed-in-la-county-ja/u/745xauto/5315359/10206890.0.jpeg [laweekly.com] is from a true story.
https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2014/jul/3/two-corrections-chiefs-serve-time-segregation/ [prisonlegalnews.org]
I need to go out for walks when I have a tough problem.
(Score: 2) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Wednesday October 19 2016, @08:08AM
>I'll be happy for days, if not weeks.
It's different for the people who have to do it for years under the stress of knowing that the door won't open and without free access to coffee. Even if they have those rare minds that can concentrate for days or weeks.