📸 Photo

Sentencing

Max towered over the marshals as they brought him into the Pittsburgh courtroom to face sentencing. He wore an ill-fitting orange jail uniform, his hair trimmed short and neat.

His escorts uncuffed his hands, and he took a seat next to his public defender at the defense table. A half-dozen reporters talked among themselves on one side of the gallery, an equal number of feds on the other. Behind them, the long wooden pews were mostly empty: no friends, no family, no Charity; she’d already told Max she wasn’t going to wait for him.

It was February 12, 2010, two and a half years after his arrest at the safe house. Max had spent the first month locked up at the Santa Clara county jail, speaking daily with Charity in long phone calls more intimate
than any conversations they’d had while he was immersed in his crimes. The marshals finally put him on a plane and checked him into a detention facility in Ohio, where Max made peace with his confinement, largely drained now of the self-righteous anger that carried him through his previous imprisonments. He made new friends in the joint: geeks like him. They started a Dungeons and Dragons campaign.

By year’s end, Max had no more secrets. It had taken the CERT investigators only two weeks to find the encryption key in the image of his computer’s RAM. At one of his court appearances, prosecutor Luke Dem-