Josh Wolff, who spent more time in a U.S. jail for not co-operating with a prosecutor than any other U.S. journalist ever, talked to Salon:

An excerpt: (free with a day pass)

What has this whole experience been like for you?

Overwhelming. It's broken down a lot of ideas that I thought were true, and were revealed to be false. It's also reinforced suspicions I had that turned out to be true.

What do you mean by that?

I mean, well, many of those thoughts and suspicions revolve around the federal justice system and whether people are [really guaranteed] fair trials -- which they're not. Even when you have money and spend $100,000, in the federal system an attorney's nothing more than a deal-broker.

And in terms of stuff that transpired that was surprising to me, and shouldn't have been -- when you think of felons, you think of them as all being these rough-and-tough and unkind people. In reality, they're just people that were put in a desperate situation and acted out in a desperate manner to achieve the means that they felt were necessary at that point in time.

What was prison like?

It was very boring. Lots of time spent reading. I read about 50 books. I wrote about 1,000 letters responding to the people who were writing me. And then I spent the rest of the time eating, playing some trivial game like dominoes or Spades, and talking to the prisoners about how they got there and what their thoughts on the American landscape are.

So it wasn't quite "Oz."

No, in fact, in some of the early interviews [I did] I said my only perspective was watching "Oz," and as I came in there I was completely afraid of what I was going to experience, and it was much more like -- the best way I can describe it is, and I never went to a military boarding school, but it's what I picture a military boarding school would be like during summer vacation or Easter break for the kids that don't go home or something.

Why did you decide to resist the subpoena?

Well, for two reasons. One, I feel that it's important for journalists to assert the rights and privileges that we are afforded under the U.S. Constitution. We already lost some, and this is the only way we'll ever gain them back. And so just on the issue of the rights it was worth resisting.

But then on the other side, it's also crucial that journalists act as the fourth estate and not [work] for the state in pursuing investigations for ... prosecutions. If you're an investigator for the government then you should be getting a paycheck from the government.

Why did you decide to release the video?

That decision had not quite been made, but we had stepped foot down that road in November and inquired whether the U.S. attorney would accept this resolution to the whole thing. We put this forward in November when the en banc wasn't going to be successful, the Circuit second-level appeal. And the U.S. attorney said the only thing he'd ever accept would be full compliance with the demands of the subpoena, which would have involved testifying before the secret grand jury.

And so what happened really wasn't so much that I decided to release the tape as the government decided to go along with our proposal we put forward back then. And the reason that I had come to that decision about releasing the tape is that, while I feel that I should have autonomy to decide what I publish and don't publish, at the end of the day there wasn't anything of a sensitive nature on the unpublished material and as it had become newsworthy in and of itself, once I had exhausted all reasonable appeals there was no reason to deny the public's demand for the material.