Joseph Konopka

Chaos by the media), is an American citizen who served 16 years of a 20-year prison sentence for arson, vandalism, and possessing chemical weapons.

[1] In 2003 in Illinois, he pleaded guilty to chemical weapons possession for storing cyanide in a disused Chicago subway storage room and was sentenced to 13 years.

[9] In 2002, Konopka, then 25, was arrested by the University of Illinois at Chicago police while trespassing in the steam tunnel system beneath the UIC east campus.

Konopka had briefly associated with a Chicago-area urban exploration group in order to obtain information on how to access the large network of unused tunnels and abandoned rooms in Chicago's transit system as well as to lure juveniles to help him.

"[15] In 2004, Judge Lynn Adelman sentenced Konopka to 21 years in prison for conspiring to knock out power lines, burn buildings, and damage computers in Wisconsin.

[7] On June 1, 2005, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in Chicago, overturned the earlier arson and vandalism convictions, saying a federal judge should have let him withdraw his guilty plea before he was sentenced to 21 years in prison.

In November of that year, Konopka was interviewed by WGN Investigates reporters, stated he would not resume his prior activities and expressed interest in pursuing white hat hacking as a career.