Biography
U.S. Air Force veteran, longtime Tor relay and exit-node operator, and federal prisoner currently held at FCI Milan (Michigan). Rockenhaus was first federally charged in 2019 in the Eastern District of Texas (Sherman Division, case 4:19-cr-00181) under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(5)(A) — "intentional damage to a protected computer" — for a November 11, 2014 incident in which prosecutors alleged he used residual VPN access to disconnect storage from servers at a former employer (an online travel-booking company headquartered in Plano, Texas), causing roughly $564,000 in claimed damages. He was held approximately three years in pretrial detention in Texas before resolving the case by plea.
The Tor operation is central to how the case has been understood by movement digital-rights organizers. Rockenhaus had run Tor relays and exit nodes for years, and his wife, Adrienne Rockenhaus, has publicly documented that federal interest in his case intensified after he refused to assist the FBI with decryption / monitoring requests directed at traffic transiting his exit nodes. (Tor exit-node operators have no ability to decrypt end-to-end TLS traffic, but the demand and the refusal are part of his and his wife's public record.)
In 2025 the federal government moved against Rockenhaus a second time, this time through the U.S. Probation Office in the Eastern District of Michigan, where his supervised release had transferred. On September 4, 2025, a U.S. Marshals "tactical breach" raided the Rockenhaus home, and the government moved for supervised-release revocation on a stacked set of alleged technical violations (cannabis use, missed restitution, lost contact with probation, unauthorized credit lines, unauthorized phone, and use of SPICE remote-desktop software). His defense team has contested every allegation — Marinol is prescribed for service-connected PTSD; restitution receipts exist; phone and SPICE were authorized work / doctoral-studies tools; credit lines are alleged identity theft. He is currently detained at FCI Milan and his case is on appeal at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
While at FCI Milan, Rockenhaus has been placed in the Special Housing Unit (SHU). In a January 4, 2026 call from the SHU his family released publicly, he identified Officers Crenshaw and Zielinski — previously reported to Magistrate Judge Jonathan J.C. Grey for allegedly displaying white-supremacist tattoos — as the staff physically abusing him, stated that BOP is denying his prescribed seizure medication and instead administering 10 mg of Zyprexa (an antipsychotic contraindicated with his trauma medication), and reported that he is now having seizures roughly weekly after being seizure-free for a year prior to incarceration. He is a documented traumatic-brain-injury veteran. His defense counsel of record is Kaycee Berente; Marc R. Lakin previously represented him. The Eastern District of Michigan district judge handling the revocation matter is Stephen J. Murphy III; the SAUSA prosecuting the revocation is Corinne Lambert; the U.S. Attorney for E.D. Mich. as of December 18, 2025 is Jerome F. Gorgon Jr.
NPPC lists Rockenhaus on the U.S. political-prisoner roster on the documented record that federal interest in his case escalated through his operation of Tor exit nodes and his refusal of FBI decryption demands, and on the documented record of ongoing medical and physical mistreatment in BOP custody. Support and updates at rockenhaus.com.
The Bureau of Prisons records his release from custody on March 2, 2026.
