She eyes him, dubiously. “Yeah,” she says, “we’re not going to tell them that.” Them, in this case, is the Feds. And they’ve got history. Though weev says he trolls “for the lulz,” his chief targets are governments and corporations that threaten personal freedom. “I’ve never targeted an individual,” he says. Four years ago, he and 26-year-old hacker Daniel Spitler discovered a flaw in AT&T’s website, which exposed over 114,000 email addresses of iPad users. The most shocking thing about it: There was no real hacking required. AT&T had screwed up by making each user’s email address publicly available online; all one had to do was to type the right URL on the AT&T site. Spitler and weev used a script that plugged in random numbers to spit out the associated email addresses—but, essentially, anyone could guess a right answer. To draw attention to the egregious fuckup, weev sent the email list to several media outlets, including Gawker, which published a redacted version of the list on its site. Though geeks lauded Spitler and weev for publicly shaming AT&T into fixing the hole, the Feds didn’t appreciate the hack, and charged the pair with identity theft and conspiracy to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).

Written during the Reagan administration, the CFAA was originally meant to protect government and financial institutions from unlawful and unauthorized access to their computers. But the law has become outdated and vague. The CFAA fails to specify what “unauthorized access” means, so anyone who violates a website’s terms of service in even the most mundane ways—say, creating a fake profile on a dating site—could be considered a criminal. The law came to wide attention after hacktivist Aaron Swartz, who was facing decades in prison for downloading troves of academic journal articles, committed suicide.

Faced with the CFAA charges, Spitler copped a plea, but weev insisted upon going to trial in his own weevy way — reciting John Keats’ The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream to reporters and fans, and live-tweeting from the proceedings. “I’m going to prison for doing arithmetic!” he shouted. As the case gained attention, a strange thing happened: weev, previously a shadowy fringe player online, became a cause célèbre. “These issues go beyond his specific case,” wrote Hanni Fakhoury, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights advocacy group that came to his defense. The EFF cautioned that going after weev set a precedent that “only discourages security researchers from sharing their discoveries.” Orin Kerr, professor of law at George Washington University and a noted expert on computer law, agreed, saying, “What Auernheimer and Spitler did was lawful authorized access.” Supporters from Mozilla to Anonymous made weev a poster child for the misuse of the CFAA. There were “Free weev” T-shirts, websites, dance remixes of his screeds, quotes with thousands of retweets.

But while weev saw himself as a martyr, not everyone was a fan. “You consider yourself a hero of sorts,” federal judge Susan Wigenton admonished weev last March, as a crowd of weev’s fiery (h)acolytes watched. “Without question, the evidence that came out at trial reflected criminal conduct,” she went on. “You’ve shown no contrition whatsoever.” Weev was found guilty of one count of identity fraud and one count of conspiracy to access a computer without authorization, and sentenced to 41 months in prison. He was also ordered to pay $73,167 in restitution to AT&T.

And yet when I meet him in April, weev has reason to celebrate. Two weeks earlier, he was suddenly released from prison after a federal appeals court overturned his conviction. It’s a victory, he says, for his cause: pushing the bounds of free speech in the digital age. And as soon as he was out, weev was back at it, relishing the fact that he couldn’t be ignored and challenging even his supporters to come along for the ride. “I don’t want the support of people who don’t believe in universal liberty,” he tells me. “I don’t want to win because my facade is marketable to a public that hates liberty. Fuck them.”

When I ask weev’s mother, Alyse Auernheimer, what she thinks about her son’s antics, this is what she tells me: “Free speech is the cornerstone of democracy, but I think if you love free speech you don’t take a shit on it.”

Weev and his mother, already distant, grew estranged after the FBI’s raid of weev’s home in Fayetteville, Arkansas for the AT&T hack. The Feds found—weev says planted—an assortment of drugs, and arrested him on felony and misdemeanor possession charges. Weev accused his parents of cooperating with the authorities, which his mother insists isn’t the full story. “Did we speak to law enforcement? Yeah,” she tells me. “But it was about trying to make sure they didn’t lock him up in the worst possible facility if he should be convicted.”

Growing up poor in Arkansas and on a 100-acre farm in Virginia, weev was never one to conform. Weev, whose mother works in real estate and whose father is an industrial engineer for the poultry industry, discovered an early fondness for literature, devouring Keats and Byron and becoming, as he says, “enchanted by the magic of language.” Though short, he flexed his etymological powers on the schoolyard — site of his earliest forays into trolling, which he defines as “using rhetoric offensively.” His preferred technique was seeding playground kids with misinformation (like saying one was insulting the other) and gleefully watching their fights ensue.

After dumpster diving for his first computer, he discovered that writing code was just another form of speech to master. “It’s all about manipulating linguistic systems that would achieve things that are dazzling in effect,” he says. While other kids were watching The Simpsons and playing football, weev was hacking ATMs and exploring the nascent Internet. Convinced the education system was failing their gifted boy, the Auernheimers got him into James Madison University at the age of 14.

It didn’t take. A year later, weev had dropped out to live on his own and support himself writing code. Taking his nickname from his favorite animal — weevils are swarming beetles best known for destroying crops — weev soon found another obsession: drugs. His favorite was LSD, which he claims was uniquely conducive to programming. “I’m already a pretty relentless person, but it makes me far more relentless,” he says. “You can hack better while you’re tripping.”