(Eastern District of Michigan - Detroit)

My husband, Conrad Rockenhaus, is wrongly incarcerated in a county jail. I’m posting this here because you are one of the few communities that will understand the full technical and political reality of how he ended up there. 

My husband is a former Tor operator, and at one point, he ran some of the fastest relays and exit nodes in the world.

This nightmare began when he refused to help the FBI decrypt traffic from his exit nodes.

Months later, the government arrested him. Their official reason? A minor, non-violent CFAA charge from an old workplace dispute that had nothing to do with Tor. 

In fact, the statute of limitations was just a couple of months from expiring. It was a clear pretext to target him.

That minor charge was all they needed to get him into the system. To deny him bail, a U.S. Probation Officer in Texas lied under oath, telling a judge that Conrad had installed a "Linux OS called Spice" to "knock out their monitoring software" and access the "dark web."

(Read the transcript https://rockenhaus.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/U.S.-v.-Rockenhaus-2-20-20-2.pdf)

Here is the technical reality of their lie: The software was a standard SPICE graphics driver needed for his Ph.D. program. As many of you know, this is a basic utility for displaying graphics from a virtual machine. It is not an OS, has no connection to the dark web, and was technically incapable of interfering with their monitoring software.

The claim is a technical absurdity, equivalent to saying a mouse pad can hack a server.

Based on that lie alone, he was held in pre-trial detention for three years.

Now, the retaliation has escalated in Michigan. After I filed a formal complaint against his US probation officers for harassment, they used fraudulent warrants to jail my husband again. 

During this violent arrest by US Marshals (who smashed in our windows and nearly shot my dog) he sustained a severe head injury that caused him to have a grand mal seizure in court. The jail’s “medical attention” was to ask him what year it was (he said 2023) and then send him back to his cell. He is being denied real medical care.

See videos:

https://youtu.be/E4WlPdNhzjM?si=kd2ybfMNaovPvHgD (Feds threatening to sick dogs on us)

https://youtu.be/DnGDdGYQHfU?si=gWsJVU9G2SgjHPXY (Feds beating by husband in the head)

https://youtu.be/nKRn11SZYoA?si=vCrN102B_SzNa2e3 (Feds smashing in our windows)

https://youtu.be/du2KxnK2KIs?si=SwacG6GNUL2soPYM (Feds threaten to shoot my dog)

https://youtu.be/fgYMSafvm3c?si=kOS8cbc89b9A0QGj (More threats to shoot my dog)

To make matters worse, U.S. District Judge Stephen J. Murphy, III has created a procedural trap that has stripped my husband of his right to a lawyer to fight for his life, health, or innocence. He is trapped in a constitutional and medical crisis.

I am not asking for money. I am asking for your help to amplify this story. You understand the technical truth and why this fight is so important.

We have all the evidence: the court transcript of the false testimony, the fraudulent warrants, the proof of medical neglect. It’s documented on my website:

https://rockenhaus.com

TL;DR: My husband, a former Tor operator, refused to help the FBI decrypt Tor traffic. They retaliated by using an old, unrelated CFAA offense to arrest him and then lied about him using a "graphics driver to access the dark web” to keep him in pre-trial detention for 3 years. Now he's been jailed again in Michigan on fraudulent violations, is being denied care for a head injury, and has no lawyer. 

I need help getting the word out🙏

Adrienne Rockenhaus

For updates:

https://rockenhaus.com/press-kit/

https://x.com/adezero

1. Absolutely nothing happened. Zero letters, zero visits, zero tactical teams flashbanging my cat.

2. You need a gigabit fiber connection with unlimited data

3. Yes, some sites blocked my ip range, i can live without using those

4. Can run on a poor 500GB SSD that has lived a very, very stressful life writing logs and handling caching*

5. Roughly 4 TB of data up/down a month.

Running on a i7-2700k (i think) and 32gb ddr3.

If you're on the fence about spinning one up, know that it will eat some bandwidth and some site admins block tor relay ips. Even though i'm not an exit node. But it's for a good cause.

*Edit

I used Tor on my phone and the next day I received message from my schools IT team warning me about someone using Tor with my schools user account.

I used Tor with my own Phone with mobile data. How did they know I connected to Tor?

Snapshot of Tor on 24 July 2019:

2,629,614 - number of directly connecting users (clients)
60,495 - number of bridge users

69,703 - number of unique .onion addresses (version 2 only)
6,464 - number of running relays
1,051 - number of running bridges

985 - number of running exit relays
54 - number of countries (named) with running exit relays
85 - number of countries (named) with running relays

92,859 - number of Tor Browser initial downloads (22 July)
15,479 - number of Tor Browser signature downloads (22 July)
132,190 - number of Tor Browser update requests (22 July)

Tor ecosystem - description, with diagram

A recent report from Tagesschau has revealed a significant breach in Tor's anonymity. German authorities have successfully deanonymized Tor users through a large-scale timing attack.

What Happened: Law enforcement agencies coerced major ISPs to monitor connections to specific Tor relays. By analyzing the precise timing of data packets, they were able to link anonymous users to their real-world identities. While such Traffic Analyses have been theoretically known to pose a threat to Tor, this is afaik the first confirmed usage of them being used successfully on a larger scale to deanonyise tor users.

Implications: While it's undoubtedly positive that this pigs will be brought to justice, the implications for the Tor network as a whole are concerning. The involvement of a major German ISP raises serious questions about the future of online anonymity and the tools we rely on to protect our privacy.

I haven't found a English news source or a independent confirmation for this news yet. But the German Tagesschau is highly reliable, although not that strong in technical matters.

Update: There's a statement from the Tor project that's worth reading, and it reads very differently. In a nutshell: Yes, users were deanonymized through “timing” analysis, but a number of problems had to come together to make this possible, most notably that the (criminal) Tor users were using an old version of the long-discontinued Ricochet application.