Barrett Brown, the brash journalist and former member of Anonymous who was sentenced in January 2015 to over five years in federal prison, had his e-mail privileges suddenly revoked, seemingly for corresponding with journalists.

On Sunday, Brown’s supporters published his account of the punishment, describing how he suddenly lost access to his prison-supplied e-mail account on March 31. In the ensuing days, Brown attempted to contact various prison officials to get further information, including someone named “Trust Fund Manager Coleman.”

As he wrote:

I did so, and when I asked another group of prison officials if they knew where I could find Mr. Coleman, another individual came up to me and said that he was the person I was looking for. He pulled me aside and told me that he was the one who had cut off my e-mail, as I wasn’t supposed to have access to it in the first place due to my charges. I noted that I had three charges and asked which one precluded me from using the e-mail service. He told me to list my charges and I did so. He then added that he had done a review of my e-mail correspondence and found that I had “been using it for the wrong thing.” I replied that I had simply been using it to communicate with the press. He confirmed that “that was the wrong thing.” I asked him his name, which he gave as “Moore.” Then I walked over to a group of inmates who told me that the individual is with the “SIA,” which they explained is a level above the “SIS” internal security division. BOP Guideline P5265.13 (PDF) spells out the conditions by which inmates can be restricted from use of the e-mail system. I’m going to hold off on going into the specific legal arguments that I’ll be making through the [Bureau of Prisons] Administrative Remedy process, and if need be, through the courts; for now, I don’t think I’m giving too much away in noting that the sudden restriction of my e-mail access about a year after I pleaded guilty to those charges, more than two months after I’ve been sentenced on those charges, and about an hour after I sent a message to a journalist concerning possible BOP misconduct, under circumstances that were not discernible to other staff, and followed by a warning from an internal security officer that by talking to the media I was doing “the wrong thing” is obviously problematic, is not exactly outside the pattern of state retaliation to which I’ve become accustomed, and which at this point has already been explained in further detail in dozens of outlets ranging from the New York Times to the Guardian.

Neither Brown’s attorney, Ahmed Ghappour, nor the Bureau of Prisons immediately responded to Ars’ request for comment.

As Ars reported previously, in April 2014 Brown took a plea deal admitting guilt on three charges: “transmitting a threat in interstate commerce,” interfering with the execution of a search warrant, and being "accessory after the fact in the unauthorized access to a protected computer."

Brown originally was indicted in Texas federal court in December 2012 on several counts, including accusations that he posted a link from one Internet relay chat channel, called #Anonops, to another channel under his control, called #ProjectPM. The link led to private data that had been hijacked from intelligence firm Strategic Forecasting, or Stratfor.