Weren't you detained in a similar way when you traveled to the US to attend Defcon (without the arrest part)? Are you able to discuss how that all went down?
Hotel rooms searched before con by the FBI, seized some tech and left me alone. Pretended to arrest a "friend" who was with me.
On my way back, switching planes at JFK there were a bunch of FBI agents waiting in the tube whom served me a subpoena and suggested that I'd be arrested if I tried to continue my trip.
Ended up being dropped off at the courtyard Marriott in Newark by the FBI (after very little arguing they paid for it, rather strange). Stayed there overnight, got interviewed in the morning about things I knew little about.
After the interview I got driven to JFK (maybe EWR, not sure) in a FBI car, with the agent at the wheel demonstrating some impressive skills in the heavy traffic, mostly going around it by driving on the shoulder.
Never going to the US again I guess, not voluntarily nor involuntarily.
So if I'm following right, the FBI tried to keep you away from a hacker conference and -- I'm inferring here -- because you were a foreigner, and possibly a kid ( no offense meant)?
Member/associate of HTP and Lizard Squad, hacked Linode (at least once), Lenovo, the Python wiki, some game companies; called in a bomb threat on a plane a Sony executive was flying (might've just been a friend of his who did that, can't remember), DDoSed video game services and 8chan for ages, possibly involved with the creation of the GayFgt and Mirai botnets, and much more. Got off scot free because he did it all before he turned 18.
I believe his use of ryan / ryanlol is a mocking reference to Ryan Cleary, whom he hated and considered incompetent. (Could be wrong.) It may have an (unintentional?) double meaning, since that's also the name of the aforementioned "friend" who secretly snitched on him and led to his detainment.
Nothing against the guy. He's intelligent and a good HN commenter. By sheer coincidence I sat in many disparate IRC channels under different aliases over the years that he would always seem to find his way into (probably not a coincidence in retrospect; he just loves IRC). He was very open about most things and generally appeared to be driven by e-cred, revenge/competition, and comedy over financial gain. But some people say he was involved with carding, too. No idea if that's true.
Because of a bunch of silly shit I did as a kid. I've got more details in past comments but it was the typical things that happen when you grow up spending too much time on hacker IRCs.
