Supervised release travel restrictions
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Asked what he meant by saying that even after release you are not really free, John Kiriakou answered with the mechanics of federal supervision. You have three years, five years, ten years of probation, he said, and people convicted of sex offences have a lifetime of it. You are not free to travel; you are not free, really, to do anything without asking a court, multiple times, to allow you to go out and make a living.  

The Berlin speech

His worked example is a speaking invitation. He was trying to make a living after getting out, he said, and was invited to give a speech in Berlin for five or ten thousand dollars, and the judge said no travel. Kiriakou's objection was that the court was telling him he had to go and take a job at Safeway stacking shelves for eight dollars an hour rather than earn ten thousand dollars for one speech in Berlin, and that the only reason offered was that he was a bad guy and needed to be punished. Either you want me to make a living, he said he told them, or you don't want me to make a living, and by the way, I have five children.  

The court relented, he says, but attached a condition: he had to turn his passport in as soon as he got back. He asked why, and calls it a constant fight. Constant. Told that he had done his time, his reply was that they do not care. They don't care. 

Where it sits in his account

Kiriakou treats supervised release as part of a single continuous punishment rather than an aftermath, and it is the counterweight to the more benign story he tells about Virginia's restoration of his voting rights and state pardon. It also underlies his standing objection to the phrase Club Fed, discussed in the Club Fed myth: prison is prison, and what follows it is not liberty. 

See also

- The Virginia pardon and voting rights
- Club Fed Myth
- The halfway house
- Home confinement
- Kiriakou pardon request
- Bureau of Prisons
