\u0397 \u03b9\u03c3\u03c4\u03bf\u03c1\u03af\u03b1 \u03b5\u03bd\u03cc\u03c2 phreaker \u03c3\u03b5 \u03ad\u03bd\u03b1 \u03b1\u03c1\u03ba\u03b5\u03c4\u03ac \u03ba\u03b1\u03bb\u03bf\u03b3\u03c1\u03b1\u03bc\u03bc\u03ad\u03bd\u03bf \u03ba\u03b5\u03af\u03bc\u03b5\u03bd\u03bf. \u0391\u03be\u03af\u03b6\u03b5\u03b9 \u03bd\u03b1 \u03c4\u03bf\u03c5 \u03b4\u03ce\u03c3\u03b5\u03c4\u03b5 \u03bb\u03af\u03b3\u03b7 \u03c0\u03c1\u03bf\u03c3\u03bf\u03c7\u03ae.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
He was a 14-year-old blind kid, angry and alone. Then he discovered that he possessed a strange and fearsome superpower\u2014one that put him in the cross hairs of the FBI. <\/p>\n It began, as it always did, with a phone call to 911. \u00abNow listen here,\u00bb the caller demanded, his voice frantic. \u00abI\u2019ve got two people here held hostage, all right? Now, you know what happens to people that are held hostage? It\u2019s not like on the movies or nothing, you understand that?\u00bb<\/p>\n \u00abOK,\u00bb the 911 operator said.<\/p>\n \u00abOne of them here\u2019s name is Danielle, and her father,\u00bb the caller continued. \u00abAnd the reason why I\u2019m doing this is because her father raped my sister.\u00bb<\/p>\n The caller, who identified himself as John Defanno, said that he had the 18-year-old Danielle and her dad tied up in their home in Security, a suburb of Colorado Springs. He\u2019d beaten the father with his gun. \u00abHe\u2019s bleeding profusely,\u00bb Defanno warned. \u00abI am armed, I do have a pistol. If any cops come in this house with any guns, I will fucking shoot them. I better get some help here, because I\u2019m going fucking psycho right now.\u00bb<\/p>\n The 911 operator tried to keep him on the line, but Defanno cut the call short. \u00abI\u2019m not talking anymore,\u00bb he snapped. \u00abYou have the address. If I don\u2019t have help here now, in the next five minutes, I swear to fucking God, I will shoot these people.\u00bb Then the line went dead.<\/p>\n Officers raced to the house, ready for an armed standoff with a homicidal suspect. But when they arrived, they found no gunman, no hostages, no blood. Danielle and her father were safe and sound at home \u2014 alone. They had never heard of John Defanno, for good reason: He didn\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n \u00abJohn Defanno\u00bb was actually a 15-year-old boy named Matthew Weigman \u2014 a fat, lonely blind kid who lived with his mom in a working-class neighborhood of East Boston. In person, Weigman was a shy and awkward teenager with a shaved head who spent his days holed up in his room, often talking for up to 20 hours a day on free telephone chat lines. On the phone, he became \u00abLil\u2019 Hacker,\u00bb the most skilled member of a small band of telephone pranksters known as \u00abphreaks.\u00bb To punish Danielle, who had pissed him off on a chat line, Weigman had phoned 911 and posed as a psycho, rigging his caller ID to make it look like the emergency call was coming from inside Danielle\u2019s home. It\u2019s a trick known as \u00abswatting\u00bb \u2014 mobilizing SWAT teams to exact revenge on your enemies \u2014 and phreakers like Weigman have used it to trigger some 200 false raids in dozens of cities nationwide.<\/p>\n \u00abWhen I was a kid, a prank was calling in a pizza to a neighbor\u2019s house,\u00bb says Kevin Kolbye, an FBI assistant special agent in charge who has investigated the phreaks. \u00abToday it\u2019s this.\u00bb<\/p>\n Like a comic-book villain transformed by a tragic accident, Weigman discovered at an early age that his acute hearing gave him superpowers on the telephone. He could impersonate any voice, memorize phone numbers by the sound of the buttons and decipher the inner workings of a phone system by the frequencies and clicks on a call, which he refers to as \u00absongs.\u00bb The knowledge enabled him to hack into cellphones, order phone lines disconnected and even tap home phones. \u00abMan, it felt pretty powerful for a little kid,\u00bb he says. \u00abAnyone said something bad about me, and I\u2019d press a button, and I\u2019d get them.\u00bb<\/p>\n But in the end, those close to Weigman feared that his gift would prove to be his downfall. \u00abMatt never intended on becoming the person he became,\u00bb says Jeff Daniels, a former phreaker who befriended Weigman on a chat line. \u00abWhen you\u2019re a blind little tubby bald kid in a broke-ass family, and you have that one ability to make yourself feel good, what do you expect to happen?\u00bb<\/p>\n \u2022\u2022\u2022<\/p>\n Matthew Weigman was born blind, but that was hardly the only strike against him. His family was a mess. His father, an alcoholic who did drugs, would drag the terrified Matt across the floor by his hair and call him a \u00abblind bastard.\u00bb His dad left the family when Weigman was five, leaving Matt and his older brother and sister to scrape by on his disability pension and what their mother earned as a nurse\u2019s aide. For Weigman, every day was a struggle. \u00abThere were times I hated being blind,\u00bb he recalls. At school, as he caned his way through the halls, other kids teased him about how his eyes rolled out of control. \u00abKids can be cruel, because they don\u2019t understand what they\u2019re doing,\u00bb he says. \u00abThey can\u2019t even begin to fathom what they\u2019re causing, and that stuff eats at your mind.\u00bb<\/p>\n At age four, Matt surprised his mother by making out flashing bulbs on the Christmas tree. After that, he could perceive faint lights \u2014 and he exploited the ability for all it was worth. He cooked for himself by feeling his way around the kitchen \u2014 eggs here, frying pan there, toaster over there \u2014 and refused to stop, even after he burned himself. He shocked his brother by climbing on a bicycle and tearing down the road, using the blurry shadows for guidance. He taught himself to skateboard, too. To build his confidence, his mom\u2019s new husband let the eight-year-old Matt drive his car around the empty parking lot at Suffolk Downs, a nearby racetrack. \u00abIt made me feel a lot better,\u00bb Weigman recalls. \u00abI thought, \u2018I\u2019m doing something that people who see can do.\u2019\u00bb<\/p>\n And he could do one thing even better than sighted people: hear. Weigman became obsessed with voices, music and sounds of all sorts. He could perfectly mimic characters he heard on the Cartoon Network, and he played his favorite songs on a small keyboard by ear. He would also dial random numbers on the phone, just to hear who picked up \u2014 and what kind of response he could elicit from them. He fondly recalls the first time he called 911, at age five, and duped them into sending a cop to his door.<\/p>\n \u00abYou need the police?\u00bb the officer asked.<\/p>\n \u00abNo,\u00bb Weigman replied. \u00abI\u2019m just curious. I wanted to see what the operator would do.\u00bb<\/p>\n The cop reprimanded the boy sharply. \u00abI wouldn\u2019t do that no more,\u00bb he said.<\/p>\n But Weigman was hooked. In real life, he was gaining weight and dodging bullies, struggling to find a place to fit in. By age 10, however, he had found the perfect escape: a telephone party line. The service \u2014 a precursor to Internet chat rooms \u2014 allows multiple callers to talk with each other over the phone. Despite the rise of online video streaming, there are still scores of telephone party lines scattered across the country, an odd and forgotten throwback to a pre-digital world. Compared to texting or video chat, the phone lines have a unique appeal: They offer callers a cloak of anonymity coupled with the visceral immediacy of live human voices. Some call to socialize, others for phone sex.<\/p>\n Hoping to give Weigman a social network beyond the confines of his tiny bedroom, a friend had slipped him the number of a free party line known as Studio 55. The second Weigman called, a new world opened up to him. He heard voices. Some were talking to each other. Others piped in only occasionally, listening in as they watched TV or played video games. Weigman found he could decipher each and every ambient sound, no matter how soft or garbled. Many of the callers were social misfits and outcasts: ex-cons and bawdy chicks and unemployed guys with nothing better to do all day than talk shit to a bunch of complete strangers. People without a life. And that\u2019s when it hit Weigman:\u00a0No one here could see each other. They were all just disembodied voices.<\/em>\u00abWe\u2019re all blind right now,\u00bb he announced to the group.<\/p>\n Weigman wasn\u2019t a freak anymore. But he was about to become a phreak.<\/p>\n \u2022\u2022\u2022<\/p>\n Telephone phreaking isn\u2019t new: The practice, which dates back half a century, was the forerunner of computer hacking. In 1957, a blind eight-year-old named Joe Engressia accidentally discovered that he could whistle at the precise frequency \u2014 2,600 hertz \u2014 used to control phone networks. A pioneering phreak named John Draper later realized that the free whistles given out in Cap\u2019n Crunch cereal boxes also replicated the exact same tone. Kids with a mischievous streak and too much free time were soon competing to see who could achieve the most elaborate phone hack. A tech-savvy student named Steve Wozniak, who would soon invent something called Apple with his friend Steve Jobs, once used a series of high-pitched whistles to make a free international call to the Vatican to prank the pope.<\/p>\n As he listened in on the party lines, Weigman began pressing random numbers on his phone, just to see what would happen. Once he held down the star button and was surprised to hear a computerized voice say, \u00abModerator on.\u00bb He had no idea what it meant. But when he hit the pound key, the voice suddenly began ticking off the private phone number of every person in the chat room. Weigman had discovered a secret tool through which a party-line administrator could monitor the system. Now, whenever someone on the line trash-talked him, he could quietly access their number and harass them by calling them at home.<\/p>\n By 14, Weigman was conning his way through AT&T and Verizon, tricking them into divulging insider information \u2014 like supervisor identification numbers and passwords \u2014 that gave him full run of the system. If he heard a supervisor\u2019s voice once, he could imitate it with eerie precision when calling one of the man\u2019s underlings. If he heard someone dialing a number, he could memorize the digits purely by tone. A favorite ploy was to get the name of a telephone technician visiting his house, then impersonate the man on the phone to extract codes and other data from unsuspecting co-workers. Once he called a phone company posing as a girl, saying he needed to verify the identity of a technician who was at \u00abher\u00bb door. Convinced, the operator coughed up the technician\u2019s company ID number, direct phone line and supervisor \u2014 key information that Weigman could later put to nefarious use, like cutting off a rival\u2019s phone line.<\/p>\n There seemed to be no limit to what he could do: shut off your phone service, dig up your unlisted cellphone number, even listen in on your home phone \u2014 something only a handful of veteran phreaks can pull off. Celebrities were a favorite target. Weigman claims to have hacked and called the cellphones of Lindsay Lohan (\u00abShe was drunk, and my friend tried to have phone sex with her\u00bb) and Eminem (\u00abHe told me to fuck off\u00bb). Last year, during the presidential campaign, Weigman heard a YouTube video of Mitt Romney\u2019s son Matt dialing his dad. Weigman listened closely to the touch tones, deciphered the candidate\u2019s cellphone number \u2014 and then made a call of his own. \u00abMitt Romney!\u00bb he said. \u00abWhat\u2019s going on, dude? Running for president?\u00bb Weigman says Romney told him to shove the phone up his ass, and hung up.<\/p>\n In addition to relying on his heightened sense of hearing, Weigman picked up valuable tips on phone hacking from other phreaks on the party lines. One of the most valuable tricks he learned was \u00abspoofing\u00bb \u2014 using home-brewed or commercial services, such as SpoofCard, to display any number he chose on the caller- ID screen of the person he phoned. Intended for commercial use \u2014 allowing, say, a doctor to mask his home phone number while calling a patient \u2014 SpoofCard is perfectly legal and available online for as little as $10. Some services let callers alter their voices \u2014 male to female \u2014 as well as their numbers.<\/p>\n Weigman performed his first \u00abswat\u00bb at age 14, when he faked an emergency call from a convenience store down the street from his home. \u00abListen,\u00bb he told the 911 operator, \u00abthere\u2019s a robbery here! I need you to show up right now!\u00bb Then he hung up and called his brother, who was standing watch outside the store. \u00abOh, God, dude!\u00bb his brother told him. \u00abThere\u2019s police everywhere!\u00bb<\/p>\n \u00abReally?\u00bb Weigman replied in awe. Over the phone, he heard sirens wail in the darkness>.<\/p>\n \u2022\u2022\u2022<\/p>\n Weigman began spending several hours a day talking shit on assorted party lines. When someone on the line would challenge him or piss him off, he would respond by faking a 911 call and sending an armed SWAT team to their door. \u00abI probably did it 50 or 60 times,\u00bb he says.<\/p>\n He spent most of his time on party lines like Jackie Donut and Boston Loach, which teemed with lowlifes, phreakers and raunchy girls whom Weigman calls \u00abhacker groupies.\u00bb Men on the party lines competed to see who could score the most. \u00abA lot of guys on there were looking for free phone sex,\u00bb says Angela Roberson, a tongue-pierced blonde from Chicago who got to know Weigman on Boston Loach. The 34-year-old Roberson, who stumbled on the line one night when she was bored and drunk, found its rough-and-tumble community oddly appealing. \u00abYou can sit and talk smack to whoever you want to,\u00bb she says. \u00abYou get to live in a whole different world.\u00bb Weigman might be overweight and blind and stuck in his room, but the party line provided him with plenty of opportunities the real world didn\u2019t offer. When asked how much phone sex he had, he says, \u00abOh, Jesus, man \u2014 too much.\u00bb<\/p>\n Weigman soon realized that one caller on the party line got his way with the hacker groupies more than anyone else. Stuart Rosoff, a middle-aged party-liner from Cleveland, had started out as a teenager making obscene phone calls and ended up serving three years in prison. Overweight and unemployed, with a hairy chest and thick mustache, Rosoff cruised the party lines for girls, introducing himself as Michael Knight, after David Hasselhoff\u2019s character on\u00a0Knight Rider<\/em>. He was also a member of a gang of phreaks nicknamed the Wrecking Crew.<\/p>\n When Rosoff didn\u2019t get what he wanted on the party line, he turned ugly. \u00abStuart was a malicious phreaker,\u00bb says Jeff Daniels, the former phreak who hung out on the party line. \u00abHe was limited in knowledge, but good at things he knew how to do.\u00bb One time, showing off to Weigman, Rosoff singled out a woman who had refused him phone sex and called the police in her hometown, scrambling the caller ID to conceal his identity. The woman, he told the cops, was abusing her kids \u2014 causing the 911 operator to dispatch police officers to her door. Having proven his power, Rosoff called the woman back and demanded phone sex again. If she didn\u2019t want to do it, he added generously, he would gladly accept it from her daughter.<\/p>\n \u00abStuart was like a mentor to Matt,\u00bb says Roberson. \u00abThey would joke around and threaten to shut each other\u2019s phones off just because they were bored.\u00bb It wasn\u2019t long, however, before Weigman surpassed Rosoff as a phreaker. He began to harass the older man, disconnecting his phone and digging up his personal data to use for leverage and revenge. Phreakers call this \u00abthe information game,\u00bb and Weigman was the undisputed master. Rosoff was soon reduced to groveling on the chat lines, begging Weigman to leave him alone.<\/p>\n Roberson felt threatened by Weigman and by Rosoff, who kept pestering her for phone sex. Once, after a confrontation with Weigman, she picked up her phone only to hear the high-pitched squeal of a fax machine in place of the dial tone. It had been rigged to last all night. Despite Weigman\u2019s denials, Roberson claims he also hacked into her voicemail. To protect herself from attacks, she became close to another member of Rosoff\u2019s gang, eventually moving in with him and taking part in one of the Wrecking Crew\u2019s pranks.<\/p>\n Roberson was surprised when she learned that Weigman was just a teenager. \u00abI would have never thought that he was a 16-year-old,\u00bb Roberson says. \u00abHe was smart, and he was feared.\u00bb When Weigman called up a party line, he would brashly announce his presence in the chat room with a little smack talk: \u00abHow you doing, you motherfuckers?\u00bb He might be an overweight blind kid, but on the party lines, he could be whoever he wanted. \u00abThat\u2019s why he did what he did,\u00bb says Roberson. \u00abHe was insecure, but he could be powerful here.\u00bb<\/p>\n As Weigman\u2019s reputation as a phreaker surpassed even Rosoff\u2019s, his hobby became an obsession. In a single month, he would place as many as 40,000 calls \u2014 ranging from a few seconds in length to several hours. He dropped out of 10th grade, spending all day on the phone. His mother was proud that he had found something he was good at and glad he had finally made some friends, if only on the phone. \u00abShe left it alone because it was my social outlet,\u00bb Weigman says. Matt was also using his newfound skills to bill purchases to bogus credit cards, snagging everything from free phone service to Dunkin\u2019 Donuts gift cards. (\u00abI love Dunkin\u2019 Donuts!\u00bb he says.)<\/p>\n Weigman became a master of what phreakers call \u00absocial engineering\u00bb \u2014 learning phone-industry jargon and using it to manipulate telecommunications workers. One day, Weigman picked up the phone and dialed AT&T. Two rings, then a voice: \u00abThanks for calling, this is Byron. How can I help you?\u00bb<\/p>\n \u00abHow you doing, Byron?\u00bb Weigman asked, adopting the tone of an older man, one at ease with his own authority.<\/p>\n \u00abGood,\u00bb Byron said. \u00abAnd you?\u00bb<\/p>\n \u00abI\u2019m doing all right. My name is William Jones. I\u2019m calling you with AT&T asset protection. I\u2019m actually working on a customer-fraud issue. We need to write out a D order.\u00bb In a few short sentences, Weigman had appropriated the name, voice and lingo of a real AT&T agent, ordering a rival\u2019s phone to be disconnected.<\/p>\n \u00abWhat\u2019s the telephone number?\u00bb Byron asked. Weigman rattled off the name and number on his rival\u2019s account. Then, to authorize access, he gave Byron the AT&T security-ID code belonging to Jones.<\/p>\n For a moment, the phone filled with the sound of rattling computer keys being struck by expert fingers.<\/p>\n \u00abLooks like it\u2019s paid in full,\u00bb Byron said, puzzled.<\/p>\n \u00abYeah,\u00bb Weigman said, \u00abwe\u2019re looking at a fraud account, sir. We\u2019re just going to have to take that out of there.\u00bb<\/p>\n As Byron filed a disconnection order, Weigman made idle chitchat in his \u00abJones\u00bb persona, speculating on the twisted minds of phone phreaks. \u00abDeep down, I know that they know someday they\u2019re going to get caught up, you know?\u00bb he told Byron. \u00abThey just really don\u2019t think about it. It\u2019s crazy.\u00bb<\/p>\n The words applied to Weigman himself. By now, he had \u00abstoolies\u00bb on the party lines eager to do his bidding. As his power on the phones grew, he began to change. Unable to take the teasing and the pity he got for being blind, he grew sneering and mean, lowering his voice, adopting a manly bluster. Using the phone to lash out at others, he directed all the rage he felt at the world against his fellow phreaks. To prove his prowess, he targeted Daniels, a 37-year-old from Alabama who had been arrested for phone hacking as a teenager. \u00abHe was calling my landlord and telling him I was a child molester and that I killed people,\u00bb Daniels claims.<\/p>\n Still, there was something sympathetic about the kid. \u00abTo me, he was still a boy,\u00bb Daniels says. Having been to jail himself, he didn\u2019t want Weigman to make the same mistakes he had. So he got Weigman\u2019s attention the only way he could: by beating him at his own game. When Weigman refused to stop the phone attacks, Daniels tracked down the teenager\u2019s detailed personal information, including his Social Security number. That earned him Weigman\u2019s respect, and the two became friends. They would talk for hours on the phone at night, Weigman\u2019s put-on baritone suddenly replaced by a more childish tone. \u00abHe was not the big shot he made himself out to be,\u00bb Daniels realized.<\/p>\n Weigman opened up about his miserable and impoverished life, crying as he told Daniels how much he longed to see the world with his own eyes. His weight fluctuated from boyishly pudgy to extremely obese, and he was spending more and more time locked in his room upstairs, listening to Nirvana and Muddy Waters. One time, a teacher took his class to a blues club in Boston, and the music seemed to capture what he was feeling: the poverty, the despair, the sense of being trapped. \u00abHe lived in a jail at home,\u00bb says Daniels. \u00abHe lived in a box.\u00bb<\/p>\n Daniels urged him to drop the macho bullshit on the party lines and stop drawing attention to himself. Weigman agreed to keep his mouth shut and even christened his new self-image with a more stoic nickname. From now, on he would no longer be Lil\u2019 Hacker. He called himself \u00abSilence.\u00bb<\/p>\n \u2022\u2022\u2022<\/p>\n On a June night in 2006, James Proulx was watching television at 1 a.m. when a SWAT team suddenly surrounded his home in Alvarado, Texas. A stocky, gray-haired trucker who had recently undergone open-heart surgery, Proulx went to the door, where he was confronted by two armed policemen \u2014 their guns pointed directly at him. The officers threw Proulx to the ground, snapped handcuffs on him and put him in the back of a squad car.<\/p>\n They had reason to be suspicious. A call to 911 had come in from Proulx\u2019s house; a man identifying himself as Proulx said he was tripping on drugs and holding hostages. He demanded $50,000 so he could flee to Mexico. He also claimed to have killed his wife. If any cops got in his way, he warned, he\u2019d kill them, too.<\/p>\n As the police soon discovered, however, Proulx was just another swatting victim. It turned out that Proulx\u2019s 28-year-old daughter, Stephanie, spent time on Jackie Donut. When she clashed with Weigman and others, they decided to strike back. \u00abIf a female wouldn\u2019t give Matt phone sex,\u00bb she recalls, \u00abhe would call them a fucking bitch and send a SWAT team to their house.\u00bb Weigman considered Proulx a \u00abcrazy chick who would threaten hackers,\u00bb and he was very direct with her. \u00abYou\u2019re annoying,\u00bb he told her. \u00abI might come after you.\u00bb Four months after Stephanie\u2019s father was swatted, police showed up at her home in Fort Worth, Texas, drawn by a fake call to 911.<\/p>\n One afternoon, not long after Proulx was swatted, Weigman came home to find his mother talking to what sounded like a middle-aged male. The man introduced himself as Special Agent Allyn Lynd of the FBI\u2019s cyber squad in Dallas, which investigates hacking and other computer crimes. A West Point grad, Lynd had spent 10 years combating phreaks and hackers. Now, with Proulx\u2019s cooperation, he was aiming to take down Stuart Rosoff and the Wrecking Crew \u2014 and he wanted Weigman\u2019s help.<\/p>\n Lynd explained that Rosoff, Roberson and other party-liners were being investigated in a swatting conspiracy. Because Weigman was a minor, however, he would not be charged \u2014 as long as he cooperated with the authorities. Realizing that this was a chance to turn his life around, Weigman confessed his role in the phone assaults.<\/p>\n Weigman\u2019s auditory skills had always been central to his exploits, the means by which he manipulated the phone system. Now he gave Lynd a first-hand display of his powers. At one point during the visit, Lynd\u2019s cellphone rang. \u00abI can\u2019t talk to you right now,\u00bb the agent told the caller. \u00abI\u2019m out doing something.\u00bb When he hung up, Weigman turned to him from across the room. \u00abOh,\u00bb the kid asked, \u00abis that Billy Smith from Verizon?\u00bb<\/p>\n Lynd was stunned. William Smith was a fraud investigator with Verizon who had been working with him on the swatting case. Weigman not only knew all about the man and his role in the investigation, but he had identified Smith simply by hearing his Southern-accented voice on the cellphone \u2014 a sound which would have been inaudible to anyone else in the room. Weigman then shocked Lynd again, rattling off the names of a host of investigators working for other phone companies. Matt, it turned out, had spent weeks identifying phone-company employees, gaining their trust and obtaining confidential information about the FBI investigation against him. Even the phone account in his house, he revealed to Lynd, had been opened under the name of a telephone-company investigator. Lynd had rarely seen anything like it \u2014 even from cyber gangs who tried to hack into systems at the White House and the FBI. \u00abWeigman flabbergasted me,\u00bb he later testified.<\/p>\n But Weigman\u2019s decision to straighten out didn\u2019t last long. \u00abWithin days of agreeing to cooperate, he was back on the party line, committing his crimes again,\u00bb Lynd said. Weigman didn\u2019t like being cut off from the only community he had. \u00abI was a hardheaded little kid, and I wanted to do what I wanted to do,\u00bb he recalls. \u00abI didn\u2019t think this could be serious.\u00bb He was also obsessed. \u00abHe\u2019s not a criminal \u2014 he\u2019s an addict,\u00bb says his friend Daniels. \u00abHe\u2019s addicted to Silence, to Lil\u2019 Hacker, to being the person who is big and bad and bold. He\u2019s addicted to being the person who can get every girl to do what he asks over the phone.\u00bb<\/p>\n Daniels, who owns a party line called the Legend System After Dark, tried to channel Weigman\u2019s energy in a more positive direction by giving him a position as a moderator, making him responsible for managing the phone chats and reining in jerks like Rosoff. As Weigman ran the calls, he began softening up. He even had a girlfriend in her 30s, Chastity, whom he had met on a party line. He seemed calmer since he met her, more the kid he really was. When they had relationship troubles, he confided in Daniels rather than swatting her.<\/p>\n Before long, though, Weigman returned to his old ways. Daniels began hearing from party-liners who said they were being harassed by the kid. \u00abKnowledge is power,\u00bb Daniels told Weigman, \u00abbut you\u2019re using it for the wrong reasons. They\u2019re going to put you in jail, and you being blind isn\u2019t going to save you.\u00bb But Weigman wouldn\u2019t listen. \u00abHe saw himself as this underage blind kid in a poor family,\u00bb Daniels recalls. \u00abSo how were they going to put him in prison with big guys who might want to whup his ass?\u00bb Unable to reform his friend, Daniels had to let Weigman go.<\/p>\n When the FBI finally busted the Wrecking Crew, Weigman\u2019s reputation grew. Recordings and details of his fake 911 calls, including the swatting in Colorado, leaked and spread online. The attention only made Weigman grow more paranoid and vengeful. He stepped up his campaign of intimidation, warning his victims that any cooperation with investigators would warrant new attacks. He told one woman he\u2019d make her life a \u00abliving hell\u00bb and put her husband out of business. He threatened a woman in Virginia with a swatting attack \u2014 and ended up calling in a bomb threat to a nursing home where her mother worked in retaliation for her talking to the FBI. He phoned a mother in Florida and said that if she gave his name to investigators, he\u2019d kill her baby by flushing it down the toilet.<\/p>\n In 2007, Rosoff and other party-liners pleaded guilty to swatting. \u00abI\u2019m kind of like a nobody in real life,\u00bb he told the judge. \u00abI was actually somebody on the phone, somebody important.\u00bb In a plea agreement that limited his prison sentence to five years, Rosoff ratted out his rival, saying that Weigman had participated in \u00abtargeting, executing and obtaining information to facilitate swatting calls.\u00bb<\/p>\n But Weigman was still a minor, and the FBI didn\u2019t want to go after him. In a sense, he was being offered a break. As long as he cleaned up his act, he wouldn\u2019t be prosecuted. All he had to do was walk away before April 20th, 2008 \u2014 the day he would turn 18. After that, any crime he committed would get him tried as an adult.<\/p>\n \u2022\u2022\u2022<\/p>\n Late one night that April, the telephone rang at the New Hampshire home of William Smith, the Verizon fraud investigator who was working with the FBI. When Smith picked up, however, there was no one on the other end of the line. In the nights that followed, it happened again and again. At first, Smith didn\u2019t make much of it. Then one night, his wife looked at the caller ID and noticed something strange: It was Smith\u2019s work number, even though he was there at home. \u00abSomething\u2019s not right,\u00bb she told him.<\/p>\n Smith changed his home number, but it made no difference. The phone would ring again at all hours \u2014 this time with Smith\u2019s own cellphone as the point of origin. Weigman, he soon learned, was using his skills and his network of stoolies to ferret out Smith\u2019s private phone numbers and harass him. And he knew Weigman\u2019s history well enough to know exactly where the calls were leading: a swatting attack. \u00abHe was fully aware that he might be subject to violence by proxy if Weigman chose to make a false emergency call,\u00bb Lynd testified.<\/p>\n In the midst of the harassment, Smith called a travel agent and booked a flight for his wife to visit their son in Georgia. Then he called his son to inform him of the travel plans. Minutes later, the phone rang. This time, the caller ID showed his son\u2019s phone. But when Smith picked up, it wasn\u2019t his son after all. It was Weigman. Matt was using his phone-company connections to track every call that Smith made and received \u2014 and the veteran fraud investigator for Verizon could do nothing to stop him.<\/p>\n Then, one Sunday in May of last year \u2014 on a weekend after his wife had flown to Georgia \u2014 Smith was working in his yard when a car pulled up. Out stepped three young men, including one with strange, broken eyes. \u00abI\u2019m Matt,\u00bb the boy told Smith.<\/p>\n Weigman had driven up from Boston with his brother and a fellow party-liner. Standing in the yard, he could make out Smith\u2019s dark, shadowy figure against a blotch of white light, and he heard the investigator\u2019s familiar Southern accent \u2014 the one he had so easily identified on agent Lynd\u2019s cellphone. Weigman told Smith he wasn\u2019t there to threaten or hurt him \u2014 he just wanted to persuade him to call off the investigation. After years of intimidating others, Weigman was now the one who felt intimidated. He wanted it all to stop.<\/p>\n But Smith wasn\u2019t having any of it. He went inside and called the police, who quickly showed up. Weigman didn\u2019t run. He told the cops he had done things that were \u00abnot so nice.\u00bb When the officers asked what he meant, he said, \u00abswatting.\u00bb But after a lifetime of being teased and abused, Weigman was unable to see himself as anything but a victim. He was just a young blind kid, and here he was getting bullied again. Smith, he told the officers, had a \u00abvendetta\u00bb against him.<\/p>\n Less than two weeks after he showed up at Smith\u2019s house, the police knocked on Weigman\u2019s door outside Boston and arrested him. Weigman soon found himself being interrogated by an FBI agent. He listened in darkness as the agent dialed a number on his phone. Thirty minutes later, he spouted back the number by heart \u2014 and even knew what it was. \u00abThat\u2019s the main number of the FBI office here in Boston,\u00bb Weigman told the astonished agent.<\/p>\n But now that Weigman was 18, his powers couldn\u2019t save him anymore. Last January, he pleaded guilty to two felony counts of conspiracy to commit fraud and intimidate a federal witness. In June, he was sentenced to 11 years in prison.<\/p>\n These days, sitting in a small holding cell in a Dallas prison, Weigman bears no resemblance to the hulking psycho he portrayed on the party lines. Dressed in an orange jumpsuit, he\u2019s slim and soft-spoken, his head shifting as he talks. \u00abI\u2019m not a monster or a terrorist,\u00bb he says. \u00abI\u2019m just a guy who likes computers and telephones. I used my ability to do certain things in the wrong way. That\u2019s it.\u00bb As Weigman recounts his story, he slips effortlessly into the voices of the people he met along the way. Every ambient noise \u2014 a guard\u2019s chatter, a bag unzipping, a computer disc whirring \u2014 draws a tic of his attention.<\/p>\n \u00abLet me tell you something, man,\u00bb he says, his voice a bit like that of a young Elvis. \u00abIf I would have been just a little more mature, if I could just rationalize better, I think I would have been all set. If, when I was young, I had a full-time male father figure in my life\u2026.\u00bb He stammers a bit, then recovers. \u00abNot having my dad didn\u2019t really bother me,\u00bb he says, \u00abbut inside, it kind of messed me up a bit.\u00bb<\/p>\n Above all, though, Weigman is still a teenager. While he expresses remorse over his swatting attacks, he takes giddy pleasure in recounting his other exploits \u2014 whether punking celebrities or playing the phone companies like an Xbox. \u00abThe phone system and infrastructure is just weak,\u00bb he says. \u00abI had access to the entire AT&T and Verizon networks at times. I could have shut down an entire area.\u00bb Then he segues into an earnest pitch for a future job. \u00abI\u2019d love to work for a phone company, just doing what I do legally,\u00bb he says. \u00abIt\u2019s not about power. I know the phone and telecommunication systems and can be a crucial part of any company.\u00bb<\/p>\n In the meantime, he\u2019s free to brush up on his skills. Though he\u2019s restricted from calling party lines, he has phone access in prison. For a self-described telephone addict, it seems almost cruel, like imprisoning a crackhead with a pipe and a rock. Could he use the prison phone the same way he used his home phone? Could he hack his way, from his prison cell, beyond the guard towers and the razor wire, into the world outside?<\/p>\n Weigman bobs his head and kneads his hands. \u00abI\u2019m sure I could,\u00bb he says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u0397 \u03b9\u03c3\u03c4\u03bf\u03c1\u03af\u03b1 \u03b5\u03bd\u03cc\u03c2 phreaker \u03c3\u03b5 \u03ad\u03bd\u03b1 \u03b1\u03c1\u03ba\u03b5\u03c4\u03ac \u03ba\u03b1\u03bb\u03bf\u03b3\u03c1\u03b1\u03bc\u03bc\u03ad\u03bd\u03bf \u03ba\u03b5\u03af\u03bc\u03b5\u03bd\u03bf. \u0391\u03be\u03af\u03b6\u03b5\u03b9 \u03bd\u03b1 \u03c4\u03bf\u03c5 \u03b4\u03ce\u03c3\u03b5\u03c4\u03b5 \u03bb\u03af\u03b3\u03b7 \u03c0\u03c1\u03bf\u03c3\u03bf\u03c7\u03ae. He was a 14-year-old blind kid, angry and alone. Then he discovered that he possessed a strange and fearsome superpower\u2014one that put him in … Continue reading
\nDavid Kushner | Rolling Stone | Sep 2009<\/strong><\/p>\n