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Teen Phone Phreak Targeted by the FBI
Wired has an interesting editorial on the latest resurgence of the old days of phone phreaking and the latest phreak that is rising into the FBI crosshairs. The most recent hoax, "swatting", involves malicious pranksters calling police with reports of fake murders, hostage crises, or the like and spoofing the call to appear as though it was from another location. "Now the FBI thinks it has identified the culprit in the Colorado swatting as a 17-year-old East Boston phone phreak known as "Li'l Hacker." Because he's underage, Wired.com is not reporting Li'l Hacker's last name. His first name is Matthew, and he poses a unique challenge to the federal justice system, because he is blind from birth. If he's guilty, the attack is at once the least sophisticated and most malicious of a string of capers linked to Matt, who stumbled into the lingering remains of the decades-old subculture of phone phreaking when he was 14, and quickly rose to become one of the most skilled active phreakers alive."
Calling up and making prank calls isn't phreaking.
Even spoofing Caller ID, while a possible phreaking tool, is now common enough today that it's trivial for almost anyone to do.
This is just some stupid punk kid making an ass out of himself and cost the police time and taxpayers money.
This is equal to screaming fire in a crowded theater.
Again, making prank calls to the police and emergency services is stupid, not phreaking.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
If you're talking about the event in Atlanta, you've missed a few details.
They had a warrant, it was just obtained with false information from information provided by an informant who was know to be not credible.
The grandmother? She shot at the cops after they broke into her house. The cops were returning fire.
Yeah, the people that falsified information to get the warrant should be put under the jail. But don't lump all cops in with a few genuine baddies. Generally, they have a shitty job that pays poorly, and are doing their best to protect you and me.
E911 doesn't use Caller ID. It uses the same set of signals that the phone company uses for billing, which are much harder to spoof.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.