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By GERRY SMITH and RYAN J. REILLY
Before he was charged in July 2011 with
aiding the hacker group Anonymous,
Josh Covelli lived what he considered the life of an ordinary 26-year-old. He spent countless hours on the
Internet. He had a girlfriend. He was a student and employee at Devry University in Dayton, Ohio. ¶ But after
federal authorities accused him and 13 other people of
helping launch a cyberattack against the online payment service PayPal, Covelli faced potentially 15 years
in prison, and his life began to unravel.
His girlfriend broke up with him.
He struggled to find an employer
willing to hire an accused computer hacker. His friends “wanted
nothing to do with me,” he said,
and he suffered from bouts of
paranoia — “looking out windows,
not sure who to trust” — before
checking into a behavioral health
center for three days.
“It was as if I got kicked off a
cliff,” Covelli, now 28, told The
Huffington Post in an interview.
Nearly two years after the charges made headlines, the case remains an anxiety-provoking daily
reality for Covelli and his 13 co-defendants. Though they come from
disparate worlds — drawn from
different points on the map and
stages in their lives — the defendants collectively share a sense of
unsettling uncertainty, their plans