cleared his debts, and kept $10,000 in the bank. @2026-11-02 13:49:18 - Calle 15 de Febrero

Potter is 38 years old, born in Los Angeles, with a high school diploma and an incomplete attempt at a local community college. He has worked construction, mortuary work, forensic assistance, programming, web development, and marketing, never staying more than two years in any position. He has one daughter from his first marriage, now of college age and preparing to leave the state. His second marriage ended in divorce after two years, following a three-day stay in county jail on a charge related to a modified 9 mm firearm. He sold the house he had recently bought, divided the assets by court order, cleared his debts, and kept $10,000 in the bank. He reduced thirty-eight years of life to a single 38-liter Osprey travel backpack weighing 30 pounds, containing a few changes of clothes, a camera, a laptop, and little else. He bought a one-way ticket from LAX to Bangkok, Thailand, and gave his supervisor two weeks' notice. Before that, he worked at Xerox Source, building the company website, billing portal, online store, and intranet. He learned the ConnectKey application platform by trial and error, then connected a Xerox device hard drive to a Linux Kali machine. He found a restricted file, renamed it with a .zip extension, and extracted its contents. Inside were an icon and a script pointing to an external URL. The applications displayed on every Xerox device were web pages hosted on outside servers. He opened a terminal, scraped the site, and duplicated the entire application infrastructure to his own machine. The original developers had left their work publicly accessible. He built new applications from it, placed in every Xerox development contest, and traveled to Rochester, New York in mid-January for a conference on the platform. He has stated that an anonymous FTP URL added to the standard scan, print, and email icons on any networked Xerox device would send a copy of every document processed there to a remote server, with no notification to the owner, installed in under a minute by USB stick or by reaching the device's broadcast IP address. Xerox never contacted him about it. He has stated that he stole a silver Mercedes-AMG C63 S Coupe, 600 horsepower, because he wanted to know what would happen next. What followed was incarceration in Colombia, a holding cell, nine computer hearings, a transfer to Bellavista, and time in Envigado prison, where he wrote from cell #2 in a lime-green hammock suspended above a makeshift kitchen with a double-burner stove set on a sink, surrounded by men making calls on smuggled phones. He describes thirty men, one toilet, one shower, no privacy. He gives a release date of March 18, 2026. In one entry dated January 3, 2023, he states he had been in Envigado for two years. In another, he describes seven years served. The dates he provides do not align. In the same period he wrote about language and borders: the shift in perception when the language around you changes, the meaning carried in the pause between words rather than the words themselves, the point at which translation stops and understanding arrives without effort. He wrote that the brain changes physically with a new language, that gray matter density and the hippocampus grow, and that listening without full understanding carried him through prisons, border crossings, corrupt police, and chicken buses. He also wrote about a three-day camping, fishing, and hiking trip he led with Rich and Jimmy for a group of young adults from the Inland Empire, ages sixteen to twenty-four, most of whom had never left the city. They started at Onion Valley in the Inyo National Forest, roughly fifteen miles west of Independence, California, at about 9,600 feet, and hiked the John Muir Wilderness trail toward the crest. One of the young men was Tim, nineteen, a heroin addict in withdrawal. At ten years old Tim watched his father come home with a shotgun, shoot his mother in the face when she opened the door, and shoot his stepbrother in the stomach when he came through behind her. His father is serving life in prison for murder. On the third day, standing at a lake below the snow line with a fishing pole in his hand, Tim caught his first trout, held it up, and shouted that he was alive. Potter, Rich, and Jimmy cheered. Potter's account moves from a Xerox hard drive opened with a renamed .zip file, to a stolen Mercedes, to a hammock in Envigado, to thirty men and one toilet, to a nineteen-year-old holding a trout above a glacier-fed lake at thirteen thousand feet. In each place the same method applies: find the lock, test the pins, accept the consequence, keep moving. Fiveo1 PO Box 312786 Avalon, California 90704 Evan Winter District 69