As Ekeland began building his case, one of his first steps was to look into the AT&T subsidiary that house the servers that prosecutors claimed his client had hacked. The company listed in the original complaint didn’t seem to exist. Government lawyers took a few days to get back to him with an AT&T entity incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in Texas. Yet the case was being tried in New Jersey.

Why Jersey, Ekeland wondered. Newbie that he was, he began pulling at threads, to see what might unravel.

In many bank wire fraud cases, if electronic money starts in the Caymans, touches a bank in New York, then ends up in Geneva, Switzerland, prosecutors could choose New York City as the trial venue. Ekeland figured prosecutors must have electronic traffic data of some sort that involved New Jersey. They didn’t. Instead, they had based their choice of venue on the fact that 4,000 of the 114,000 email addresses that weev and Spitler scraped — about 3.5 percent of the total — belonged to New Jersey residents.

That was ridiculous, Ekeland thought. As with Goldstein and his misadventures with Kansan authorities, federal prosecutors were trying to grab home field advantage. Ekeland suspected the government had gone “forum shopping,” which is what lawyers do to try and find the place for a trial that offers the best chance to win or, for prosecutors, extract the harshest penalty. They picked New Jersey because the CFAA included a provision that, in certain states, could transform a misdemeanor violation into a felony if the act had been committed in furtherance of another crime or violation in that state. Prosecutors alleged that because weev had violated New Jersey’s unauthorized access statute, the government could charge him with a felony. Another reason was likely one of convenience: the feds had a major crime lab there.

Government lawyers were treating venue as a mere technicality, but Ekeland took it dead seriously. In law school he had learned that the nation’s founders viewed venue as a vital procedural right and had inserted it in the Constitution twice: in Article III and in the 6th Amendment. That was a time when the British were arresting revolutionaries in Philadelphia and transporting them to London to stand trial. “If you don’t think there’s a difference between a jury in Philadelphia and London, think again,” Ekeland says.

Ekeland attacked on two constitutional fronts: The first was venue. The second focused on the vague wording of the CFAA. As computers have become ubiquitous the law has been so broadly interpreted that “unauthorized access” could mean just about anything. As such, the CFAA failed to both adequately describe what is prohibited and provide clear guidelines for law enforcement, in violation of the constitutional requirement of due process of law. Harkening back to the philosophy training he had received at Berkeley under John Searle, Ekeland also argued that AT&T’s servers weren’t “deceived,” so there couldn’t have been unauthorized access and therefore no crime had occurred. The servers had done what AT&T had programmed them to do when a correct URL was entered, and that was to publish email addresses.

Fielding a flurry of aggressive motions and counter-motions, government lawyers and law enforcement officials didn’t know what to make of their untried, untested, hyper-aggressive legal foe. Even the name Tor seemed to throw them for a loop. When an FBI agent found out the name was real, he told him, “No way. I thought you changed your name to fuck with us at trial.”

“‘Tor’ is my real goddamn fucking name given to me by my fucking parents, okay?” says Ekeland, whose family roots trace back to Norway. “I didn’t adopt it because I wanted to be a fucking hacker lawyer or anything like that. I didn’t even know what The Onion Router was before I got into the scene.” Actually, his father was part of the Norwegian Resistance, tortured by Nazis in World War II and sent to a concentration camp. Ekeland says he keeps a Gestapo torture device used for breaking bones on his desk to remind him of the power of the state.

As the case dragged on through the summer and fall of 2012 Ekeland started running out of money. His bank was about to foreclose on his house in Brooklyn when Hurricane Sandy hit, delaying the proceedings. Because the roof sustained damage he was able to line up a mortgage modification and could hold off paying his mortgage for a while, staving off financial ruin.

When the judge denied his motions to dismiss the case, Ekeland knew he would lose. So did Auernheimer, and on November 20, 2012, after the jury found him guilty of one count of identity fraud and one count of conspiracy to access a computer without authorization, he tweeted:

In January 2013, while Auernheimer was awaiting sentencing and out on supervised release, Ekeland noticed that donations were flooding into weev’s legal defense fund, which up to then had scarcely attracted any money. Then he heard that 26-year-old Aaron Swartz, who had also been prosecuted under the CFAA, had hanged himself. People were starting to pay attention. The fund only raised $17,000 — but it was enough to keep the lights on.

In the lead up to his sentencing hearing in March 2013, weev started a campaign to troll the court.

He announced on Reddit, in an Ask Me Anything, “My regret is being nice enough to give AT&T a chance to patch before dropping the dataset to Gawker. I won’t nearly be as nice next time.” On the courthouse steps, before a crowd of supporters and members of the press, he held a wide-ranging press conference. He complained that America is a country in decline, and the feds can take your freedom and never give it back. “I added one to a number on a URL on a public server, and I aggregated that data, and gave it to a fucking journalist at that man’s publication. And this is why I’m going to prison! If they understood what they were doing to the rule of law, to the fucking Bill of Rights and to the free and open Internet, they would die in their own goddamn shame.”

Auernheimer didn’t temper his behavior inside the courtroom either. He had packed the visitor’s gallery with supporters while outside protesters were chanting about Internet freedom.

Ekeland was taking in all the weirdness when Auernheimer told him, “Tor, listen. We don’t want to get a small sentence here. Because if we get a big sentence, it’s going to be better for the press, for the cause, for everything.” He wanted the maximum publicity and that meant he must martyr himself.

“Okay, dude,” Ekeland replied. “You’re hardcore. All right.”

“And I want to go to jail immediately.”

Ekeland was sure that could be arranged.

It was time for Auernheimer to address the court. “I don’t come here today to ask for forgiveness,” he said. “The Internet is bigger than any law can contain. Many, many governments that have attempted to restrict the freedoms of the Internet have ended up toppled. I’m here to tell this court, if it has any foresight at all, that it should be thinking about what it can do to make amends to me for the harm and the violence that has been inflicted upon my life.” Weev heaped scorn on the CFAA, ending with “Hail, Eris,” the Greek god of chaos, strife and discord.

When it was prosecutor Michael Martinez’s turn to address the court he chided Auernheimer for blaming AT&T and not accepting responsibility for his actions. “He says that the reason we’re here is because we don’t like his ideas,” Martinez said. “The reason that we’re here is that he wrote a code and engaged in a clear trespass.”

While the prosecution spoke, weev had his Android tablet out. A linebacker-sized marshal approached from behind and demanded he hand it over.

“No,” Weev replied.

“You want to fuck with me, motherfucker?” the marshal said.

He slammed Auernheimer headfirst into the table, prompting gasps from onlookers as a posse of other marshals surrounded him.

Ekeland sat impassively, eyeing his client with his nose and face smooshed into the table.

“Mr. Ekeland,” U.S. District Judge Susan Wigenton said, “would you please take his phone?”

Now wasn’t the time to correct her. He grabbed weev’s tablet out of his hand and tried to act as if people slam his clients into courtroom tables every day. During a brief recess marshals brought Auernheimer to a side room. A few minutes later they returned with weev in shackles. He grinned at supporters in the visitors’ gallery and some responded with raised fists.

The judge said, “While you consider yourself to be a hero of sorts, without question the evidence that came out at trial reflected criminal conduct. You’ve shown absolutely no remorse. You’ve taken no responsibility for these criminal acts whatsoever. You’ve shown no contrition whatsoever.”

To almost nobody’s surprise, she sentenced Auernheimer, now 27 years old, to 41 months, the maximum under federal guidelines, and ordered him to pay AT&T restitution of $73,167.

Even before sentencing, Ekeland had begun working on the appeal, lining up the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr, a leading legal expert on computer crime. Kerr didn’t believe that Auernheimer (and Spitler, who pleaded guilty and received three years probation and the same 73 grand in restitution as weev) had committed unlawful access. He also questioned why the case warranted a felony conviction. They didn’t pilfer passwords or hack into any servers. They found a gaping security flaw in AT&T’s network. He disagreed with the restitution, which by law was supposed to cover AT&T’s losses, yet the company had never claimed any. Also joining Ekeland’s team were Hanni Fakhoury from Electronic Frontier Foundation; Marcia Hofmann, a former EFF staff attorney who had gone into private practice; and penning a brief in support was Jennifer Granick, Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. Without them, Ekeland says he could never have marshalled the resources and knowhow he needed to launch the appeal.

But it was Kerr who would argue the case before the court, which was fine by Ekeland. “When you have Mariano Rivera to come in and close your game, you don’t go out and fucking pitch yourself,” he says. They faced an uphill battle: only 8.7% of cases on the Third Circuit are reversed on appeal.

In addition to his objections with the CFAA, Kerr was disturbed by the government’s choice of venue — transporting Auernheimer from his Arkansas home to stand trial more than a thousand miles away from his family, friends and resources, adding tens of thousands of dollars to his trial expenses at a whim. A mere fraction of the email addresses he had scraped from the servers belonged to Jersey residents; the harm to the state was, at most, circumstantial.

During this time Ekeland’s drinking had become an even bigger problem. His allegiance with EFF and Kerr got him invited to conferences and attracted media attention. Weev’s case had become front-page news. But none of his newfound fame had translated into income. Until the EFF stepped he couldn’t even scrounge up enough money to cover photocopying all the briefs. Ekeland appeared on Al Jazeera hung over.

He says this period, when he was leading a “rock-n-roll, hacker lawyer lifestyle,” is a blur. His marriage, already tenuous, was in tatters. He didn’t blame his wife “for being pissed,” he says. “It was rough. I bet everything on this case.”

I asked if he and his wife were arguing a lot.

“What do you think? We’re about to get divorced.”

Then he said he’d rather talk about his work.

Over the summer he caught a game at Yankee Stadium with a friend. Drinking heavily, he was standing on line to buy more beer when on the TV monitor he watched Alfonso Soriano hit a homerun for his 2,000th Major League hit. The ball landed right next to his empty seat. The person who grabbed it received a signed bat and season tickets in exchange for the ball. And Ekeland realized how much of life he was missing. The next day, he says, he quit drinking.

As Ekeland continued to advocate for his client, Auernheimer found ways to troll (or exercise his right to free speech, as he saw it) inside prison. While at Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center, where he was waiting to be taken to the Lewisburg penitentiary in Pennsylvania, he managed to tweet from jail by using the prison’s internal email service to contact a friend, who accessed his Twitter account and posted his messages — until his privileges were suspended. Then he posted to Soundcloud voicemail messages (Titled: “Weev — Live from Prison”) with the help of another friend. In Lewisburg he antagonized guards and was placed in solitary confinement and cut off from any books and letters because, as he said, “I do not take any shit from anybody, and told all the corrections workers what I think of them.”

On March 19, 2014, Ekeland was in Philadelphia to appear with Kerr and lawyers from EFF before the Third Circuit, which covers New Jersey and other Eastern states. The courtroom was packed, and a crowd watched on a monitor in the hallway. Security was tight. U.S. marshals brought a box of plastic handcuffs and some explosive-sniffing dogs. Kerr had just begun his remarks when one of the justices cut him off, telling him he wanted to discuss the issue of venue. The three justices wanted to know why the trial was held in New Jersey.

Ekeland couldn’t believe it. They were parroting lines from his own briefs from the trial, as well as Kerr’s. As the proceedings dragged on, it was clear they were hostile to the government’s arguments. One even reminded the government lawyer that venue is mentioned in two places in the United States Constitution.

It sure is, baby! Ekeland thought.

Afterward, as the room cleared of weev’s supporters, one of the judges joked, “We have other interesting cases today, you know.”

A colleague called and Ekeland learned that FBI agents had visited his office in Brooklyn.

“Classic 1950’s shit,” he says. “No call, no advance warning. They just show up to intimidate you.” To get under their skin, Ekeland tweeted a message:

When he returned to New York, Ekeland contacted the agents to arrange a meeting at a nearby café and learned that weev had trolled the FBI. To confirm they had been opening his mail with Ekeland, which should be protected by attorney-client confidentiality, Auernheimer had inserted fake terrorist threats, signing off one by telling Ekeland to set off bombs at the Federal Building at dawn. The agents told Ekeland that they didn’t really believe he was terrorist, because if they had, his life would already be hell.

Three weeks later, Ekeland was walking down the cobblestones streets near his office on his way to pick up a morning latte, when he got the news: Auernheimer’s appeal had been reversed and vacated. The judges in their decision didn’t touch the constitutionality of the CFAA. It was the issue of venue that carried the day.

Ekeland bristles if anyone claims he got weev off on a technicality. “That’s what the government said, ‘This is a technicality and a joke,’ and the Third Circuit said, ‘No, it’s not. It’s a substantial constitutional right.’”

Now Ekeland had to figure out how to get a guy out of prison. It doesn’t happen very often. He called the Department of Justice and convinced an attorney to cut the paperwork, obtained a court order from the same judge who had presided over the trial, and jumped in a Zipcar and drove to the prison, which was located between Scranton and Pittsburgh.

And weev, who says he lost 17 pounds while in prison, was a free man. On the ride home, he asked for bacon, cream cheese and alfalfa sprouts.

Not long after his release, Auernheimer fled to Lebanon, which does not have an extradition treaty with the U.S. He has been noodling around with starting a hedge fund he calls TRO LLC (get it?). The idea is to short stocks of companies with crappy computer security. When he or someone he works with finds a hole, his firm would take a short position then blab about it to the media. If he can push a company’s share price down, he stands to reap a windfall. At least, that’s what he has sketched out in his head.

Who does he hold responsible for his three-year ordeal?

Why, Jews, naturally, claiming they persecuted him, namely the prosecutor, Zach Intrater. Weev sent him an invoice to compensate him for the time he spent in prison, but Intrater has ignored him. Just thinking about it, his rage bubbles over. “If [Jews] will not compensate me for the harm and violence that they have done to me in reducing me to poverty and destitution and homelessness, one day I will take up arms to kill as many Jews as possible. Death to the Jews, down to the last woman and child.”

Once a troll, always a troll. I emailed weev back to ask if his personal jihad would include Orin Kerr, whose father was a Holocaust survivor.

Weev backed off a bit. “No, lol. Orin is an asset to his people and managed to mitigate a large additional swath of the blood debt that would be owed to me. He has done his people a great service.”

As for Tor Ekeland, Auernheimer offers his highest praise. Tor, he says, “is a very competent legal scholar and theorist [and] also a relentless motherfucker that takes no bullshit and can hold his own in a street fight.”

Ekeland is reaping the benefits of his pro bono gambit, which has turned him into the go-to guy for computer crime defense. His firm is growing. He’s added two partners, two associates, an office manager and interns while his client list has ballooned to 248. Ekeland’s offices are on the fifth floor of an old brick building on a cobblestone street in Vinegar Hill, on the East River in Brooklyn. A trendy theater sits at one end of the street, an electric generating station on the other. Cars and subway trains thunder along the nearby Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridge overpasses. After giving up booze for a stretch Ekeland lost 35 pounds and hits the gym. He looks a lot better than the first time I met him, when over lunch he downed four pints of microbrew ale in an hour. (Now, he says, he sticks to wine.)