Boston phreaker sentenced to 11 years for stirring up the police against others

Matthew Weigman, a blind Boston-area teenager known as "Little Hacker", was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison Friday last week for hacking into the telephone network and browbeating the Verizon investigator who was building a case against him. It is known that he was part of a group of telephone hackers that met up on telephone party lines and was associated with more than 60 "swatting" calls to 911 numbers across the country. Weigman pledged to telephone hacking around age 14 and continued to operate until last year.

Swatters make prank 911 calls, but they use spoofing technology to make it look as though the call is being made from a victim's house. The idea is to intimidate their targets, preferably by having police show up at their door, guns drawn. A single SWAT (special weapons and tactics) incident can eat up tens of thousands of dollars in emergency services costs, and it can be dangerous too, when victims suddenly have to deal with armed police officers.

The U.S. Department of Justice said that Weigman and his group used a variety of tricks to target "employers, landlords, families and friends of multiple party line participants," often in the hope that they would be fired or evicted from their homes. Sometimes they would cut phone lines, or listen in on victims` conversations.

According to the statement made by the DoJ on Monday, most of the members in the group have already been sentenced, and Weigman was given the longest sentence. He was arrested in May 2008, shortly after showing up at the home of a Verizon investigator who had been building a case against Weigman and the other swatters.