textfiles/phreak/PHREAKING/phrkhist

A Brief History of Phreaking
____________________________

by

BucWheat

     Like most college students, I have occasionally been
assigned research papers for one class or another. My latest
assignment was for a systems analysis class- the subject chosen
was required to be computer related. Intrigued by the ideas
presented in the movie War Games, I chose hacking as my topic. As
I began my research, the subjects of hacking and phreaking are
somewhat intertwined, and as a result I learned a lot of
fascinating information about the history of phreaking. That
information is summarized below.

     (The following is an excerpt from Out of the Inner Circle by
The Cracker, Microsoft Press. Used without permission, but who
really cares?)
     In the 1970s, before personal computers became as common as
they are now, the telephone system was explored by a group of
hackers who called themselves phone phreaks. The ethical and
technical predecessors of today's hackers, the phone phreaks were
anarchic "musicians" who delighted in using flutes, whistles, and
any other sound generators that worked to enter and explore the
worldwide telephone network.
     The phone phreaks were far less organized and widespread
than today's hackers are, and, in the beginning, none of the even
knew of each other's existence. The cult itself came into being
in the late 1960s, partly because of a brilliant young man in
Tennessee named Joe Engressia.
     Joe was the first phone phreak to achieve media notoriety
when a 1971 Esquire article told about him and his cohorts. Like
many other early phone phreaks, Joe is blind. He was only twenty-
two when the article was published, but he had been tweaking the
phone system since the age of eight. Telephones had always
fascinated him, and Joe happens to be one of those rare
individuals who are born with perfect pitch. One day, by
accident, he discovered how this gift could help him manipulate
some of the most sophisticated and widespread technology in the
world.
     He was dialing recorded messages, partly because it was the
only way he knew to call around the world for free, and partly
because it was a favorite pastime. He was whistling while
listening to a recorded announcement when suddenly the recording
clicked off. Someone with less curiosity might have assumed it
was one of those strange things the phone company does to you,
but Joe had an idea. He fooled around with some other numbers,
and discovered he could switch off any recorded message by
whistling a certain tone.
     He called the local telephone company and asked why tape
recorders stopped working when he whistled into the telephone. He
didn't fully understand the explanation he was given (remember,
he was only eight years old), but it sounded as if he had
stumbled upon a whole new world of things to do and explore. And
to a blind eight-year-old, an easily explored world, no farther
away than his telephone, was, indeed, an intriguing discovery.
     Joe was able to control some of the telephone company's
global switching network - which is what he had stumbled upon
with his whistling - because of a decision American Telephone and
Telegraph (AT&T) made sometime in the 1950s. Their long-term,
irreversible, multi-billion dollar decision was to base their
long distance switching on a series of specific, audible tones
called the multifrequency system. The multifrequency system
(known to phreaks as "MF") is a way for numbers that designate
switching paths to be transmitted as tones similar to those that
touch tone phones make. Certain frequencies are used to find open
lines, to switch from local to long distance trunks, and,
essentially, to do most of the jobs a human operator is able to
do.
     Undoubtedly, the decision makers at AT&T did not give a
moment's thought to the possibility that the system might someday
fall before a blind eight-year-old with perfect pitch, but Joe
found that he could maneuver his way through the system by
whistling that one specific tone at the right time. His
motivation was not to steal free telephone calls, but to find his
way around the network and to learn how to extend his control
over it.
     Joe had explored for years, but he never thought of himself
as an enemy of the telephone system. He loved the system. His
dream was to work for the telephone company someday. But he
finally ran afoul of his intended employer one day when he was
caught whistling up free phone calls for his fellow college
students.
     The publicity surrounding Joe's case had an unfortunate (for
the telephone company) side effect: it led to the creation of the
phone phreak network. Soon after the story hit the papers, Joe
began to get calls from all over the country. Some of the callers
were blind, most were young, and all of them had one thing in
common: an enormous curiosity about the telephone system. Joe put
the callers in touch with one another, and these scattered
experimenters soon found that they had stumbled upon several
different ways to use the MF system as the ticket to a world of
electronic globe-trotting.
     Joe Engressia may have been the "phounding phather" of the
phone phreaks, but just as one discovery often leads to another
and another, it soon happened that someone else discovered a very
large error made by the Bell Telephone System in 1954. The Bell
System's technical journal had published a complete description
of the MF system, including the exact frequencies and
descriptions of how those frequencies were used.
     Once the frequencies became public knowledge, phreaks began
to use pipe organs, flutes, and tape recorders to create the
tones that gave them control over the entire telecommunications
network. Then came the ultimate irony: the news spread that a
simple toy whistle, included as a giveaway inside boxes of Cap'n
Crunch cereal, produced a pure 2600 Hz. tone when one of the
holes was taped shut. Using the whistle at just the right point
in the process of making a connection, phreaks could call each
other whenever and wherever they wanted to without having to pay
the phone company.
     One of the more curious and inventive phreaks using the
Cap'n Crunch whistle was John Draper, a young Air Force
technician stationed overseas. Draper used the whistle for free
calls to his friends in the United States. He was interested in
the way this bizarre tool worked, so he began experimenting with
the system and found that he could use his whistle and his
knowledge of the switching network to route his calls in peculiar
ways.
     He began by calling people who worked inside the telephone
system. They weren't aware that he was an outsider, so he was
able to start gathering "intelligence". Soon, he was calling
Peking and Paris, and routing calls to himself around the world.
He set up massive clandestine conference calls that phreaks
around the world could join or drop out of at will. Soon, he
became known in the phreak underground as Cap'n Crunch.
     Cap'n Crunch soon found out from other electronically minded
phreaks that it was possible to build specially tuned electronic
tone generators that could reproduce the MF frequencies. A few
electronic wizards began to circulate the generators, which were
first known as "MF boxes" because they reproduced the
multifrequency tones, and later came to be called "blue boxes",
as they are today.
     The number of phreaks grew, and as they added their own
discoveries to the collection of phreak knowledge, the cult's
power to manipulate the system steadily increased. Then, in
October, 1971, the whole underground scene, from Joe Engressia to
Cap'n Crunch became well known to the outside world. Esquire
magazine published "Secrets of the Little Blue Box" by Ron
Rosenbaum, a journalist who had encountered the top phreaks of
the time. Cap'n Crunch was characterized somewhat romantically in
Rosenbaum's piece as a roving prankster who drove the author
around in his specially equipped van, pausing frequently at
public telephones to phone locations around the world: the
American embassy in Moscow, a group of blind teenage phreaks in
Canada, a public telephone in Trafalgar square.
     After the article was published (though not as a direct
result) Crunch was arrested twice, convicted, and ended up
spending four months in the federal prison in Lompoc, California
in 1976, and two in Northampton State Prison in Pennsylvania in
1977. While he was in prison, several mob-connected inmates tried
to enlist him in a commercial blue box venture. Draper/Crunch
declined. The convicts broke Draper's back and knocked out his
front teeth.
     After he left prison, Draper quit phreaking and decided to
start programming. An old friend by the name of Steve Wozniak
seemed to be doing pretty well with a piece of hardware he called
the Apple ][, and Draper started writing software for Apple
Computer. He developed a word-processing program known as
EasyWriter and gained another niche in the technological hall of
fame in 1981, when EasyWriter was chosen as the first word
processor to be available for the IBM personal computer. Now,
Cap'n Crunch makes a legitimate living under a new handle, Cap'n
Software.


TAP

     During his trial, John Draper claimed (and still claims)
that his interest in phreaking was strictly devoted to learning
about the workings of the complex, worldwide communication-
switching networks. There were other phreaks, though, of a more
political mind, who saw this method of technological trespassing
as a tool for spreading anarchy, and one radical branch of the
phreak fraternity grew out of the political group of the late 60s
and early 70s known as the Yippies.
     On May Day, 1971, the founding Yippie, Abbie Hoffman, and a
phone phreak who used the handle Al Bell started a subversive
publication called the Youth International Party Line, which
focused on information about cracking the phone network. A few
years later, its name was changed to Technological Assistance
Program (TAP), when the technology phreaks separated from their
more politically motivated counterparts. TAP was purely
anarchist. Through it, phreaks learned how to make plastic
explosives, how to obtain phony birth certificates and illicit
airline tickets, and how to abuse credit cards. It published
circuit diagrams of blue boxes, and its members specialized in
obtaining and trading hard to get telephone numbers, such as that
of the Vatican or the Kremlin. TAP even secured the phone number
of the American Embassy in Teheran after it was seized by
students during the hostage crisis of 1980, posted the number,
and invited phreaks to "tell off" the revolutionary guards.
     In the late 1970s the phreak most closely associated with
TAP also became a well-known hacker with the aliases Richard
Cheshire and Cheshire Catalyst. Often employed as a computer and
communications consultant by large corporations who are unaware
of his secret identity, Cheshire has a widespread, carefully
cultivated network of cohorts inside the telephone company and
other institutions. Avoiding what he calls "dark side hacking"
that results in damage to data, Cheshire claims that there are
some kinds of information which even TAP will not publish. For
example, Cheshire once said: "A few years ago, before the
Progressive magazine actually published the plans for making a
hydrogen bomb, we were approached by someone who had similar
plans. I decided that anything like the hydrogen bomb, which has
the capability of destroying the phone network, is not in our
interests."
     Cheshire also mentioned an incident in which a hacker he
knew stumbled upon the data processing facilities of a top secret
American seismic station in Iceland, a facility responsible for
monitoring Soviet nuclear testing. The hacker got out as soon as
he realized where he was - "We try to stay away from that sort of
stuff," Cheshire said. He also remarked, "I once invited the CIA
to attend a public lecture of mine, and there were a couple of
guys at that talk, seated towards the back, who definitely turned
a couple shades of green when I told about that Icelandic
station."