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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."
I love a good prank as much as the next guy, but sending the SWAT team to an innocent persons house? That's not that cool...
Why is he a challenge? If he broke the law, he broke the law, blind or not.
The justice system should be blind, so who cares if he broke the law.
For this he will (rightfully) be tried as an adult because this kind of behavior can cost real lives. (I'll get modded down for being a troll)
--sig fault--
if phreakers or hackers target the feds
but please don't target the local law enforcement guys. you're actively denying some poor shlub 911 resources who might need them in a real emergency
that makes you worse than anything you say you are opposing
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Instead of calling him a "prankster", a "hacker", etc. and then complaining that he is giving "the rest of us a bad name", why not call him what he really is?
A sociopath, a criminal.
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!!!
Wired is so kind not to identify the juvenile...
Thanks to this reporting, anyone who knows him now knows what he did. This will follow him around forever.
Wired could have at least left the first name out and kept the story intact.
What ever happened to the good ole days where phreaking used to mean getting free long distance, free sex chat line and messing with the phone company?
Sending a SWAT team to someone's random house is not a juvenile prank, someone could easily get shot.
Now having a gay 1-900 line call a buddy back and thank him for his business, now that is a prank.
Stick to free 1-900 calls and messing with phone switches. Think before sending heavily armed, trigger happy police into a perceived hostile environment.
Though he may seem like just an ordinary blind 17 year old, he is considered by many to be the most dangerous man alive. If you help us apprehend a known felon, we'll just clear away your record... give you a fresh start.
It's not that the cops are busy with the prank, it's that the cops think they are walking into a violently dangerous situation and conduct themselves accordingly, placing the innocent victims in real danger. It sucks about him being blind but not as much as it would suck to wake up at 2 AM because a bunch of goons have smashed your windows and invaded your home, grab your gun and attempt to defend yourself, and get shot by the cops for your trouble. I have zero sympathy and hope his stay in the pen is as much fun as his pranks are.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
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.
This isn't phreaking, it's thuggery. The Coast Guard has a BIG problem with phony emergencies on marine radio, like at it's peak 2 or 3 pranks per week in the SF Bay Area.
When you get caught you are not released to the custody of your parents, they make sure you go to ass-pounding school.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
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.
Years ago a friend's stepdad was killed in Kansas City. The cops followed his stepdaughter (my friend) home from a party where drugs were present. An hour after she went home the cops busted into her house with flashlights and guns. Their uniforms were black. Well, the step-dad hears the ruckus and comes out with his handgun that he kept near to his bed. Without warning the police shot and killed him. AND, there were no drugs in the house and my friend had LEFT the party because drugs had been present. The cops busted into their house for NO legitimate reason. The family won a large lawsuit against the city and the police department for a wrongful death.
What if something similar to this happened after the blind kid called the SWAT in on somebody? I'd sue the crap out of this kid's family, their cousins, their cousin's cousins and anyone else whose name I had. I'd sue the folks that make the technology that allow 'spoofing' of the calls origin. I've read about phreaking and it could be stopped instantly if telecos went all digital.
This kid should have the privilege of prison cell for a few years.
"No one will really be free until nerd persecution ends."
You would think so - if your source of information is Hollywood or tinfoil hat websites. In reality, they don't.
You know what happens when they do that? People die. Either the cop, or people involved in the struggle, or innocent bystanders.
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.
Thank god no one else is allowed to yell police during a home invasion.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Oh, seriously. Just fuck off with the glorification bullshit already.
Just because there are holes in a system that he's inadvertently exposing through his exploits doesn't make him a hero any more than the Russian mafia are heroes for exposing flaws in the credit card system.
Morally, this tosser is no better than the scum who make phoney calls to the fire brigade and throw stones and objects at them. The consequences have the potential to be just as- and possibly more- serious.
Of course, this guy's a hacker- one of us, right. He's not some antisocial ned or chav from a council estate (who'd probably attack you and film it on their mobile phones). So that makes his actions alright, doesn't it? Way to go with the double standards.
Is he clever and talented? Probably, yeah, but since he's using his "skills" to fuck about with mostly decent people for his own amusement, fuck the prick and let him rot in prison.
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