Alias Fortezza: A Hacker's Odyssey

A harrowing odyssey of cybercrime and punishment in the United States.

In 2012, 21-year-old Dutch hacker David Schrooten was living at his parents' house in the Netherlands and spending most of his time online. When he wasn't squabbling with fellow hackers, he was making plans to visit his Romanian girlfriend. His life turned upside-down when Interpol agents arrested him at an airport in Romania on international hacking charges involving $63 million in damages. Soon Schrooten found himself extradited to the United States, a country where he had never been before. He was imprisoned in Seattle, WA, where he awaited trial, some 5,000 miles from home. 

While his future hung in the air, Schrooten kept a journal chronicling his every experience - from the inept public defenders on whom his life depended, to the unimaginable horrors of solitary confinement. And it was during this time that Schrooten struck up a correspondence with a Dutch-American journalist who vowed to help him tell his story. 

Alias Fortezza: A Hacker's Odyssey is the astounding journey, told in Schrooten's own words, of a young foreigner's incarceration, as well as a stunning examination of the US justice system at work.

DAVID BENJAMIN SCHROOTEN, 22, also known in the hacking world as ‘Fortezza’

Freke Vuijst is a correspondent from Vrij Nederland in America. Since 1976 she has worked as a correspondent for, among others, the IKON, VPRO and Netwerk. She wrote the non-fiction books The Half Jewish Book , with Daniel Klein (2000), XTC smuggling (2002) and Dood Spoor (2006), the last two with UN colleague Marian Husken. In addition, she directed and produced numerous award-winning documentaries about American youth culture and religion for her own production company, Green Room Productions. Her most recent documentary Poet of Poverty is based on letters from a Catholic priest in Camden, New Jersey, the poorest city in America.