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As for tweeting from prison, I have no idea what he was thinking. Is it illegal to do so? What forms of communication are and are not legal when incarcerated?
by pcl 13y ago
As for tweeting from prison, I have no idea what he was thinking.
Is it illegal to do so? What forms of communication are and are not legal when incarcerated?
(Of course, he certainly could have tweeted via an illegal manner. But it's not clear to me on the face of it whether tweeting while convicted is a crime.)
- gknoy 13y agoAccording the the article, it appears that he tweeted by using the (legal to access) system for sending e-mails, and someone else tweets them for him. Unless he has a restriction on using computers / the internet as part of his sentence, I have a hard time imagining how that is illegal.
- peterwwillis 13y agoAccording to the Federal Bureau of Prisons website, "Email correspondence may not jeopardize the public or the safety, security, or orderly operation of the correctional facility. Additionally, it may not exceed 13,000 characters (i.e., approximately two pages). Correspondence that is not consistent with these restrictions will be rejected." http://www.bop.gov/inmate_programs/trulincs_faq.jsp#10 http://www.bop.gov/inmate_programs/trulincs_faq.jsp#10
- jlgreco 13y agoThat length restriction seems really bizarre to me. Is the purpose of that just to prevent their mentally ill inmates from bombarding the public with massive manifestos? Does that limitation also exist for traditional non-electronic letter? Are inmates allowed to publish books from prison? I'm aware of the Son of Sam Law, which forbids profiting off the story of your crime. That seems to indicate that other stories are okay, but I am not sure.
- whatshisface 13y agoI think they limit the length so that the emails can be examined. You wouldn't want someone DOSing the wardens and sneaking a message out via the whitespace characters.
- rayiner 13y ago> That length restriction seems really bizarre to me. Is the purpose of that just to prevent their mentally ill inmates from bombarding the public with massive manifestos? The purpose is to keep organized crime leaders from continuing to run their networks while incarcerated.
- jlgreco 13y agoIs it effective at doing that? Wouldn't crime bosses just do that through their lawyers?
- enraged_camel 13y agoI'm not sure about that. The more likely reason is that someone has to read those emails and authorities did not want it to become a huge burden on the reviewers.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agoNope, it's because of the limited number of staff available to read the stuff.
- joeyh 13y agoWow, I love that prison has a less restrictive arbitrary length limit than does twitter!
- sukuriant 13y agoTwitter's message length is related to the length of a single SMS