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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."
The challenge is that he's a disabled juvenile, for which there are likely very few facilities available for the internment thereof.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
I mean I don't disagree that we should shoot for better security, but the idea that the problem is that they don't have perfect security is stupid. Not that long ago, within my lifetime, E911 didn't know where you called from, you had to tell them. So phreaking them was as simple as giving a false address. What's more, it had been this ways for DECADES.
So while the telcos should work towards a better identification system, it isn't necessarily the easiest thing in the world to develop and deploy, especially since the phone switches aren't the world's most extensible architecture (new features often mean adding hardware, not just changing code). We have to accept that virtual security is just like physical security: It cannot be perfect and impenetrable. We can have better and worse, but just because a failure is found doesn't mean the security is necessarily bad.
Besides, I see a bigger problem in kids who think this sort of thing is ok to do.
I watched a summer of love special when they talked about flower power and drugs and the california scene.
Anyways, a common recurring theme I took from that and found it to be true with a lot of stuff is that the first generation doing something, whether that is separated by a few years of age or a real generation, the second seems to take it to an extreme and never gets the point of the fist right in practice. I mention this because the "plain assholes" are typically people who don't get it but want to participate in some way. It is usually what results in insane laws being made about things.
Exactly. The police, on the other hand, get little to no punishment at all for breaking into the wrong house and shooting someone. However, if you were, say, in a bad part of town and are woken up to people breaking down your door and kill one of them, then you get life in prison.
It's funny that the posts saying that the police are frequently not comporting themselves professionally get modded down, while the obvious "donkey porn" troll does not. I really wish I had mod points today. Fact is, police teams rely on career criminal informants, and thanks to Tricky Dick and the Drug War, no-knock warrants are increasingly common. Police are happy to take shortcuts, since they're people just like everyone else. Problem is, that ends up with a greater number of innocent people being shafted.
"-1, Troll" is not a substitute for "I don't agree with you." Get over yourself.