What It’s Like to Get Online After 25 Years in Prison

Re:What It’s Like to Get Online After 25 Years in Prison by nnq on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @05:03AM (#5594042)

How hard it would be to develop a patched browser (on a secured os, plus a firewall of course) that would only allow "read only web access" (not form submitting, no way to manually go to an url by entering it) to a limited number of domains? I guess the number of dangerous inmates with advanced tech skills or outside resources is very low, so you could separate these high risk guys from the rest of the pack. There's the possibility of high risk guys using the low-risk guys to communicate for them, but really, I don't think there are that many "criminal masterminds" out there... I mean the really dangerous ones are either in high security prisons, or they are too smart to get into prison anyhow.

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Re:What It’s Like to Get Online After 25 Years in Prison by Spooky23 on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @09:49AM (#5595084)

Very hard in a general sense. Many prisons are giving people walled garden access to legal libraries and video conferencing, but nothing else.

I've done some peripheral work for corrections type people -- they don't adopt paranoid thought processes for nothing.

The average drug convict is not a criminal mastermind, but he is a cog in a criminal enterprise that is controlled by smart people. Drug and gang enterprises are real businesses, and they provide support and resources to their employees. They are capable of anything.

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Re:What It’s Like to Get Online After 25 Years in Prison by hackinthebochs on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @11:00AM (#5595505)

This level of paranoia is just insane. Let's not legitimize the war on drugs by elevating any sort of communication with the outside world into some sort of existential threat to civilized society.

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Re:What It’s Like to Get Online After 25 Years in Prison by Spooky23 on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @12:46PM (#5596237)

If you were the guy working in the prison who is going to get stabbed to death by some inmate, you might feel differently.

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Re:What It’s Like to Get Online After 25 Years in Prison by hackinthebochs on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @12:53PM (#5596289)

Kill messages are so easy to get in as it is that I doubt internet access would have a huge impact. Even so, there are ways to mitigate it. Graduated access due to good behavior seems like an obvious one. The point is, we treat all inmates as if they're potential murderous drug kingpins. And this is exactly why the recidivism rate is so high. There are much better ways to rehabilitate than what we are doing today.

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Re:What It’s Like to Get Online After 25 Years in Prison by Spooky23 on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @03:00PM (#5597220)

I agree -- I'm not defending the policy, I'm just trying to point out that these polices don't come out of a vacuum. People who run prisons are concerned about the welfare of their people first.

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Re:What It’s Like to Get Online After 25 Years in Prison by bonaldi on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @06:58AM (#5594331)

Even a GET is a signal. As henchman on the outside I can create a page, linked from my wikipedia personal page or on some otherwise innocuous page, that says something like "Boss, should I off Big Tony? Click here for Yes, Click here for No" and wait to see which link he clicks.

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Re:What It’s Like to Get Online After 25 Years in Prison by nickzoic on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @11:50PM (#5599667)

Using a GET for this is okay, because `kill` is idempotent.

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Re:What It’s Like to Get Online After 25 Years in Prison by dredmorbius on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @07:27AM (#5594419)

Ask North Korea.

Generally: the answer is to provide a web proxy or mirror with restrictions as to available content. And likely highly logged access.

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