On April 11, 2014, Andrew Auernheimer, better known by his Internet alias "Weev," was released from Allenwood Federal Correctional Center in Pennsylvania after serving just under 13 months of a 41-month sentence for data and identity theft. He seems intent on being sent back there as soon as possible.

Auernheimer, 28, is notorious in certain circles online—Gawker has called him a "master troll" and "the Internet's best terrible person"—whose exploits the media has documented since at least 2008, when the New York Times Magazine wrote that "Weev … is legendary among trolls." But the legal battle that led to his imprisonment and release began in 2010, when Auernheimer and other members of the IT community discovered that AT&T was storing iPad 3G customer records, including ostensibly protected data, on a public server. After designing a script to retrieve this data, including some belonging to celebrities, journalists, and the White House chief of staff, Auernheimer and his associates handed it to Gawker.

That caught the attention of the FBI. After several false starts and a few shifting charges, Auernheimer was indicted for conspiracy and identity theft under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. In 2011, he was extradited to New Jersey to stand trial. His defense then, as now, is that the data he “stole” was already public. “I never broke into anything,” he told me recently. “Data was aggregated from this public resource and given to a journalist. The supposed victim in this case didn’t even think it was victimized.”

But the government prevailed. In prison, Weev spent a good chunk of time in solitary—retribution, he claims, for continuing to speak out about the case. By 2014, conditions had worsened. “I was not only in solitary,” he said, “but I had just started a hunger strike. To further punish me in solitary they stopped delivering my mail to me, refused to let me mail my attorney about the conditions I was living under, would not let me have my newspaper or magazine subscriptions, or my books.”

The hunger strike ended earlier this month after only four days, when the Third Circuit Court of Appeals vacated Auernheimer’s conviction on a technicality: Since neither Auernheimer nor the AT&T servers he accessed were located in the state of New Jersey, the original trial had run afoul of the Constitution. “Cybercrimes,” Circuit Judge Michael Chagares declared, “do not happen in some metaphysical location that justifies disregarding constitutional limits on venue.”