29 May Chris Lamprecht: The First Person In History To Be Legally Banned From The Internet
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This week in cybersecurity from the editors at Cybercrime Magazine
Sausalito, Calif. – May. 28, 2026
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A 1997 WIRED story reported on Chris Lamprecht, the first person to be legally banned from using the Internet.
When U.S. District Court Judge Sam Sparks sent Chris Lamprecht to the Federal Correctional Institution in Bastrop, Texas, in 1995, the 24-year-old hacker sobbed before the bench. A stint in the federal pen was terrifying enough, but the judge had tacked an unusual condition onto his 70-month sentence. Though Lamprecht was being sent to Bastrop for money laundering – not the hacking that earned him the handle “Minor Threat” – Judge Sparks stipulated that Lamprecht was forbidden to access the Internet until 2004.
“I told the judge computers were my life,” Lamprecht recalled.
Back then, any case that involved computers and a boyish, fair-skinned defendant was bound to get press, but things changed after Swing magazine billed Lamprecht as “the first person to be officially exiled from cyberspace.” If Lamprecht was the first to be exiled from the online world by law, he gained plenty of company, following the circulation of an internal memo at the Federal Bureau of Prisons in 1996, which set in stone a federal policy of keeping prisoners – and even many parolees – offline.
Fast forward 30 years to 2026 and listen to Lamprecht sharing his story on the Cybercrime Magazine Podcast.
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