Early last week, before the suspects were identified in the Boston Marathon bombings, a U.S. probation officer and his supervisor visited the Manhattan apartment of programmer Stephen Watt with a question: Did Watt happen to know anything about the attack?

“He said, ‘We want to ask you about this Boston thing. I think you know what we’re talking about. I’m talking about the attacks,'” Watt recalls. “Then he said, ‘If you know any rumors that you heard about beforehand or even afterwards, please [tell us] through your lawyer.'”

They told Watt they weren’t accusing him of anything, just that he should come forward if he had any information. Watt and his wife were shocked by the random inquiry. But in some ways, it’s part and parcel of Watt’s new life as a hacker ex-con.

Watt, a striking 7-foot-tall software engineer, once had a bright future coding software for a maker of real-time stock trading systems. Then a small packet-sniffing program he wrote for a friend got him embroiled in a multi-million-dollar bank card heist that netted him a two-year prison sentence and a hefty restitution judgment. Watt went from having a promising career on Wall Street to living in a grim cell in a high-rise prison in Seattle, where blacked-out windows blocked the natural light, and the absence of outdoor exercise facilities meant he didn’t breathe much fresh air for two years.

Now out of prison after serving his sentence, his former career in shambles, he’s trying to put the pieces of his life back together, while suffering the indignities that linger with newly-released prisoners.

He’s barred from working in the securities industry for life and, for the length of his three-year probation, can’t use any computer unless it’s monitored by the government — though he received special dispensation to use a computer at work for his current job as a web developer. Ten percent of his gross salary goes to pay off restitution, and with his earning ability greatly reduced, he has trouble meeting the basic living expenses for him and his wife.

Obtaining work following a felony conviction has naturally proven to be difficult. He got the web job through a friend of a friend.

“Definitely no one wants to hire me. I didn’t have a list of offers to choose from. I tried to contact some recruiters, and they had no interest in taking me on,” he tells Wired.

In the wake of the recent harsh prosecutions of Aaron Swartz and Andrew Auernheimer under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, Watt’s experience provides a look at life after a felony hacking conviction and what he calls the “near-impossibility of thriving in a post-conviction life.” It was these post-conviction prospects that friends of Swartz say drove him to commit suicide in January before his trial for downloading academic documents.

Watt pleaded guilty to creating a program dubbed “blabla” that helped his friend Albert Gonzalez and others siphon off millions of credit and debit card numbers in what prosecutors called “the largest identity theft in our nation’s history.”

The heists, which Gonzalez dubbed “Operation Get Rich or Die Tryin,” targeted TJX, Hannaford Brothers, Heartland Payment Systems and others, and resulted in the theft of more than 200 million bank card numbers. Gonzalez received three concurrent sentences amounting to 20 years in prison. His co-conspirators received less: Christopher Scott got 7 years for breaching the wireless access points of several retailers to siphon card data; his take was $400,000. Humza Zaman received 46 months in prison for laundering between $600,000 and $800,000 of the ill-gotten funds. Damon Patrick Toey helped breach networks and sold some of the stolen card data afterward, earning about $80,000, according to prosecutors. He was sentenced to 5 years in prison and fined $100,000.

Jeremy Jethro received 3 years probation and a $10,000 fine for selling an Internet Explorer exploit to Gonzalez for $60,000.

Watt, by contrast, evidently earned no money from the scheme and didn’t participate directly in the breaches or possess stolen card data. His primary overt act was to code the sniffer tool for Gonzalez, for which he received no payment.

But Watt refused to cooperate with authorities to help make their case against Gonzalez — aside from the fact that he was resolved not to snitch, he also maintained that he had no specific knowledge of his friend’s hacking scheme. His defiance may have been what did him in.

Watt, like Swartz, was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Heymann in Boston. Heymann has made a career of wielding the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to seek harsh sentences under the law; he argued that Watt’s sniffer program was the “key computer hacking program” used in the scheme and sought five years in prison for Watt.

Though U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner acknowledged that Watt’s role in the “mightily, mightily malicious and irresponsible” scheme was minor, she gave him two years in prison and ordered him to pay restitution in the amount of $171.5 million. Part of that he has to pay in conjunction with Gonzalez and Scott, but $100 million of it is owed by Watt alone — due to the lack of coordination between different judges who meted out the unbalanced restitution rulings.

Gertner said in sentencing Watt to prison that she wanted to send a message to him and others that “you cannot be a cog in this wheel knowing that someone else is stealing … even if you didn’t get a dime for it.”

A probation sentence alone, which Watt’s attorney sought and which defendant Jethro got, would not have been sufficient to deter others, she said.

Notably, Gertner, now retired, is a vocal critic of the harsh prosecution of coder Aaron Swartz. She recently told the local NPR affiliate in Boston that “Just because you can charge someone with a crime, just because a technical crime has been committed, doesn’t mean you should.”

Gertner blamed zealous prosecutors and mandatory sentencing guidelines for harsh sentences, saying that both decreased the power of judges to exercise discretion in sentencing.

“So the prosecutor determines the charges and the punishment,” Gertner told WBUR. “[O]nce they start the process, once the indictment is brought, the potential for enormous punishment is there and although a judge has some discretion in sentencing, often what the prosecutor wants is what the person gets.”

In the case of Swartz, she suggested the government should have opted for two years in a diversion program that would have suspended, and then dropped, the charges if Swartz committed no crimes during that period.

“We don’t wreck your life with a criminal prosecution if we think this kind of attention drawn to what you did is all we need to do,” Gertner said.

Watt was not associated with a scheme to liberate academic documents, however, as Swartz was, but was tied to a criminal enterprise. Even so, he might have gone free for time served on the day of his sentencing if he had remained in jail after his December 2008 arrest, but he had chosen bail because he was convinced the judge would never sentence him to prison time.

He surrendered himself to custody on May 7, 2010, and was released from prison last spring.

His attorney requested he be sent to a facility near his wife and mother in New York City, but he was remanded instead to the SeaTac Federal Detention Center in Seattle, a low-security facility where many of his fellow prisoners were child pornographers or migrant workers waiting to be deported after having served sentences for various crimes. He was housed on the facility’s fourth floor with about 120 other prisoners, who shared an exercise space about a quarter the size of a basketball court.

While in prison he earned about $10 a month for various jobs, and received money from his wife and others to buy food and supplies at the prison commissary. The spending limit at the commissary was about $300 a month but because he only used about $200 of that each month, the prison began deducting $100 from the account for his restitution payments.

He was denied access to a computer room at the prison and says the prison had no education programs. A cart of books got wheeled around to prisoners every few weeks, but the selection was limited. Watt survived on magazines and books sent to him by family and friends.

“That was the only way I stayed sane,” he says. “I read all day because there was literally nothing to do.”

Watt met Gonzalez online in an IRC channel in 1999 when he was around 15 and both were living in Florida. Watt went by the name “Jim Jones,” after the People’s Temple leader who led 900 cult members to their deaths with a poisoned off-brand Kool-Aid in 1978. Gonzalez was known as “Soup Nazi,” after the Seinfeld character.

Gonzalez was three years older, but Watt was highly intelligent, and the two shared a fascination with network security and vulnerabilities. Watt graduated early from high school at 16 with a 4.37 grade point average and from college at 19.

Both men remained active in hacker circles, but only Gonzalez turned it into a criminal profession. In July 2003, Gonzalez was busted in Manhattan making fraudulent withdrawals from ATMs, and he began to work undercover for the Secret Service on the underground crime forum Shadowcrew. The operation ended in a coordinated bust in October 2004 that nabbed more than two dozen suspects.

After the takedown, Gonzalez moved back to Miami where he continued to work as a paid informant for the Secret Service, earning $75,000 a year, while simultaneously plotting a new criminal enterprise to hack TJX and other retailers.

Watt took a divergent path. He worked for a Florida software firm while still in high school and then as a summer intern for Qualys, a computer security firm. He later moved to New York where he was hired by Morgan Stanley in 2004 and was earning $90,000 as a software engineer, while doing club and party promotions on the side. In 2007 he moved to a higher paying job at Imagine Software, developing real-time trading programs for financial firms, earning about $130,000.

It was while he was at Morgan Stanley that Gonzalez asked him to create the packet sniffer. It took Watt just ten hours to code and test the tool before handing it off to Gonzalez.

Watt says he didn’t know the code would be used to intercept credit card data. “I assumed it would have something to do with web traffic or instant messaging conversations or logins of some other protocol not related to the credit card information,” he told Wired in 2010.

Prosecutors disputed this and maintained that chat logs recovered from Gonzalez’s computer described illegal carding activity that Gonzalez conducted and showed that Watt at least had broad knowledge of what Gonzalez was doing, if not the details. As Gonzalez and his gang hacked target after target, he sent Watt links to news stories describing the breaches, though he didn’t acknowledge in the correspondence that he was behind the attacks.

Watt’s attorney told Wired in 2010 that his client accepted “responsibility for aiding people that he knew would commit wrongdoing. However, he is very disturbed by the government’s aggressive attempt to make him into more than what he is.”

Married for about five years to a woman from Croatia, Watt and his wife live in a Manhattan apartment his mother paid off after his arrest to keep them from losing it. The apartment now has a lien on it, as a result of his restitution.

His personal computer is monitored by the government, a service for which he pays $29 a month, and he’s prohibited from using an iPhone or Android device, though he can use a BlackBerry — authorities told him the iPhone had too many capabilities.

Until he obtained his web development job in November last year he managed a sports supplement store — a job he got because he had a prior relationship with the owner of the store, who knew about his background. Initially he wasn’t allowed to use the cash register at the store, since it consisted of a touchscreen connected to a Windows PC, but his lawyer negotiated an agreement that allowed him to use the register and a work computer unmonitored.

“It’s been a slow process,” he says nearly a year after his release.

He only has to check in with probation if he’s called for a random urinalysis – which happens about once every three weeks. Probationers are assigned a color and a hotline number to ring each night. If his color is called, he has to go in for a test the next day. “I wouldn’t say that’s the most major inconvenience I’ve suffered so far,” he says.

The real burdens are the extended depression he feels and his inability to meet his expenses. Last year he says he didn’t earn enough to cover basic healthcare costs for him and his wife.

In addition to the ten percent deducted from his salary to pay off restitution, he’s amassed thousands of dollars in credit card debt, which he charged to cover basic living expenses. “I don’t do anything. I stay home as much as possible. I turned thrift and couponing into a self-serving game that helps me survive,” he says.

Last week in Florida Watt spoke at the Infiltrate security conference about his journey through the legal system in a talk titled, “Turning Down an Offer You Can’t Refuse.” He billed it as a talk about “what to expect if you don’t snitch on your friends.”

Despite the financial setbacks, Watt says he has refused bids from a movie studio to option his life story for a film about Gonzalez and the TJX hacking gang.