About Steven Haller
Steven Haller is an independent technical advisor in San Diego working at the seam of OSINT, decentralised AI, and urban literature for the incarcerated.
Long bio
Steven Haller is an independent technical advisor working from San Diego, California. His practice sits at an unusual seam: open-source investigation, decentralised AI, and a print-publishing program that mails books into U.S. prisons. He runs a validator on Bittensor subnet 21 with its weighting rubric published in plain text and code open for audit, operates an edge-AI cluster of Rock 5B boards that does the work a workstation GPU used to do at a fraction of the power budget, and authors a pipeline of intel reports staked on a corroboration floor of three independent sources and a confidence scalar above 0.60.
Alongside the technical work, Haller writes novellas, essays, and the indie comic Cat & Basset. His novella Outside Light is forthcoming in 2026; for every paperback pre-ordered, a second copy ships free into the Michigan, California, or Texas state corrections systems. He edits an inside/outside pen-pal anthology and operates a workshop program serving eleven facilities across the country.
He is the principal of the Closed Ladder network — a federation of twenty-three owned web properties spanning corrections-data journalism (People Not Numbers, Inside Michigan, Counted Press), independent capital and policy (Closed Ladder Capital, Closed Ladder Foundation), reentry technology (the Linkage app, built in service of the Michigan Justice Fund), and an in-house creative studio. He is also a student pilot working toward his private check-ride in a PA-28-181 based at Montgomery-Gibbs and Gillespie Field.
Haller corresponds by mail, by PGP, and by Signal. He answers letters from inside facilities first. He does not take pitches from recruiters or unsolicited cold calls. His method, across every track, is the same: corroboration before publication; numbers, not vibes; subject right-of-reply, always.
The 23-site Steven Haller network
This page lives at https://closedladder.com/about-steven-haller.html — one of twenty-three sites operated by Steven Haller. The list below is the full network. Each site is a different face of the same operator.
Reach out
Email: [email protected]
PGP fingerprint: AB3F·9D04·17EE·4C29
Postal: PO Box 7741, La Jolla CA 92038, USA
No recruiters. No cold decks. The door is open by letter.
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