They have found a way even though it is prohibited

Elizabeth Holmes answer in Xfrom prison, to the questions of his followers. Harvey Weinstein give interviews to a podcast without leaving the cell. A prey launches an AI-generated clone of you on his Instagram profile. These are not isolated cases at all: technology is redefining what it means to be “incommunicado” when you serve a sentence.

Cell phones in prison. Wait a minute: how come influencers in prison? Isn’t the use of cell phones prohibited in prison? Yes and no, at least in the United States: the Federal Bureau of Prisons has maintained a system called TRULINCS (Trust Fund Limited Inmate Computer System) since 2009, designed to provide prisoners with limited access to electronic messaging without an internet connection. To be more specific, the system does not allow inmates to access the web, all incoming and outgoing messages are monitored and emails are limited to 13,000 characters with no attachments. Social networks are also completely out of authorization.

Who pays it? The inmate himself: the operation is so restrictive that inmates can only write to a maximum of 30 previously approved external contacts, and the service costs $0.05 per minute, paid directly from the inmate’s own funds. This money comes from the inmate’s work in prison, but no one gets rich there: an inmate receives an income of barely 15 dollars a month working inside the center, so use the mail server It can become a luxury.

Influencers by proximity. How then do figures like the aforementioned Holmes (convicted of fraud and founder of Theranos, a Silicon Valley company that promised to revolutionize blood tests with a single drop, eventually being valued at $10 billion) or Sam Bankman-Fried (former CEO of FTX, one of the largest cryptocurrency platforms, guilty of one of the largest financial frauds in US history)? They transfer the management of their accounts to trusted people outside the premises.

George Santos (former Republican congressman convicted of wire fraud, donor identity theft and embezzlement of campaign funds for personal use and whose sentence was commuted by Trump) acknowledged that nine people managed his profiles while he was inside. The system explicitly prohibits inmates from operating or maintaining social media accounts, and there is an intention to toughen sanctions limiting the ability of third parties to post content on behalf of the prisoner. It is a legal and ethical gray area.

And in Spain? Before we continue, let’s be clear about the differences: we do not have any unified electronic messaging infrastructure comparable to TRULINCS. In Spain, the technology available to prisoners is, in most cases, analog: radio, television, and computers without an internet connection for those who study with the UNED or participate in workshops. From 2022, yes, there are a reform of Royal Decree 268/2022 that modified the Penitentiary Regulations to open the door to teleworking, videoconferences with family members, the presentation of complaints online and internet access in the centers’ libraries. Everything depending, obviously, on the infrastructure of each prison.

Prisoners who speak. The figure of the inmate who tries to speak to the world from his cell is not new. For decades, television was the only channel, and personalities like American journalist Barbara Walters They made it a common format, with long conversations with criminals from prison, such as the Menéndez brothers, the scammer Bernie Madoff or the actor Robert Blake while he was awaiting trial for the murder of his wife.

The next step has been podcasts: famous journalists (significantly, always conservative) like Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens have used the format for interviewing people as prominent as Harvey Weinstein. This appeared on Owens’ podcast in his first interview in almost ten years since Rikers Island.

Prisoners by AI. The most extreme case of this kind of virtual exit from prison walls is in the case of Nicole Daedone. She was convicted in 2025 for conspiracy to commit forced labor within the framework of the OneTaste company. Her team published a video on Instagram in which an AI-generated clone read a message to her followers: a synthetic replica of Daedone herself thus communicated with her audience while she was physically detained. A curious step forward that faces a new legal loophole, since there is no rule that prohibits an external team from publishing AI-generated content on behalf of an inmate, as long as that content was not produced within the prison.

The future. In this way, a multitude of opinions and positions come together. There are lawyers who, significantly and as The Hollywood Reporter specifies, believe that presence on social networks can distort the image of the accused and, ultimately, their public image, and end up harming them. But how it has been saidMartin Luther King wrote his ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ on papers that his lawyers distributed. Today, his wife Coretta would have published it on Twitter.

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