1780 lines
90 KiB
Plaintext
1780 lines
90 KiB
Plaintext
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"Oh. You know. To check out, uh, to find out what's going on in London. How
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is it there?"
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"Its five o'clock in the morning. It's raining now."
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"Oh. Who are you?"
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The London passerby turns out to be an R.A.F. enlistee on his way back to the
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base in Lincolnshire, with a terrible hangover after a thirty-six-hour pass.
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Page 35
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The Official Phreaker's Manual
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He and Fraser talk about the rain. They agree that it's nicer when it's not
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raining. They say good-bye and Fraser hangs up. His dime returns with a nice
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clink.
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"Isn't that far out," he says grinning at me. "London, like that."
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Fraser squeezes the little blue box affectionately in his palm. "I told ya
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this thing is for real. Listen, if you don't mind I'm gonna try this girl I
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know in Paris. I usually give her a call around this time. It freaks her out.
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This time I'll use the ------ (a different rent-a-car company) 800 number and
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we'll go by overseas cable, 133; 33 is the country code for France, the 1 sends
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you by cable. Okay, here we go.... Oh damn. Busy. Who could she be talking
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to at this time?"
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A state police car cruises slowly by the motel. The car does not stop, but
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Fraser gets nervous. We hop back into his car and drive ten miles in the
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opposite direction until we reach a Texaco station locked up for the night. We
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pull up to a phone booth by the tire pump. Fraser dashes inside and tries the
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Paris number. It is busy again.
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"I don't understand who she could be talking to. The circuits may be busy.
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It's too bad I haven't learned how to tap into lines overseas with this thing
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yet."
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Fraser begins to phreak around, as the phone phreaks say. He dials a leading
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nationwide charge card's 800 number and punches out the tones that bring him
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the time recording in Sydney, Australia. He beeps up the weather recording in
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Rome, in Italian of course. He calls a friend in Boston and talks about a
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certain over-the-counter stock they are into heavily. He finds the Paris
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number busy again. He calls up "Dial a Disc" in London, and we listen to
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Double Barrel by David and Ansil Collins, the number-one hit of the week in
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London. He calls up a dealer of another sort and talks in code. He calls up
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Joe Engressia, the original blind phone-phreak genius, and pays his respects.
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There are other calls. Finally Fraser gets through to his young lady in
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Paris.
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They both agree the circuits must have been busy, and criticize the Paris
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telephone system. At two-thirty in the morning Fraser hangs up, pockets his
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dime, and drives off, steering with one hand, holding what he calls his "lovely
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little blue box" in the other.
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You Can Call Long Distance For Less Than You Think
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"You see, a few years ago the phone company made one big mistake," Gilbertson
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explains two days later in his apartment. "They were careless enough to let
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some technical journal publish the actual frequencies used to create all their
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multi-frequency tones. Just a theoretical article some Bell Telephone
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Laboratories engineer was doing about switching theory, and he listed the tones
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in passing. At ----- (a well-known technical school) I had been fooling around
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with phones for several years before I came across a copy of the journal in the
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engineering library. I ran back to the lab and it took maybe twelve hours from
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the time I saw that article to put together the first working blue box. It was
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bigger and clumsier than this little baby, but it worked."
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It's all there on public record in that technical journal written mainly by
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Bell Lab people for other telephone engineers. Or at least it was public.
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"Just try and get a copy of that issue at some engineering-school library now.
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Bell has had them all red-tagged and withdrawn from circulation," Gilbertson
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Page 36
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The Official Phreaker's Manual
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tells me.
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"But it's too late. It's all public now. And once they became public the
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technology needed to create your own beeper device is within the range of any
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twelve-year-old kid, any twelve-year-old blind kid as a matter of fact. And he
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can do it in less than the twelve hours it took us. Blind kids do it all the
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time. They can't build anything as precise and compact as my beeper box, but
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theirs can do anything mine can do."
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"How?"
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"Okay. About twenty years ago A.T.&T. made a multi-billion-dollar decision to
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operate its entire long-distance switching system on twelve electronically
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generated combinations of twelve master tones. Those are the tones you
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sometimes hear in the background after you've dialed a long-distance number.
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They decided to use some very simple tones -- the tone for each number is just
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two fixed single-frequency tones played simultaneously to create a certain beat
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frequency. Like 1300 cycles per second and 900 cycles per second played
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together give you the tone for digit 5. Now, what some of these phone phreaks
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have done is get themselves access to an electric organ. Any cheap family
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home-entertainment organ. Since the frequencies are public knowledge now --
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one blind phone phreak has even had them recorded in one of the talking books
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for the blind -- they just have to find the musical notes on the organ which
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correspond to the phone tones. Then they tape them. For instance, to get Ma
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Bell's tone for the number 1, you press down organ keys F~5 and A~5 (900 and
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700 cycles per second) at the same time. To produce the tone for 2 it's F~5
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and C~6 (1100 and 700 c.p.s). The phone phreaks circulate the whole list of
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notes so there's no trial and error anymore."
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He shows me a list of the rest of the phone numbers and the two electric organ
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keys that produce them.
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"Actually, you have to record these notes at 3 3/4 inches-per-second tape speed
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and double it to 7 1/2 inches-per-second when you play them back, to get the
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proper tones," he adds.
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"So once you have all the tones recorded, how do you plug them into the phone
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system?"
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"Well, they take their organ and their cassette recorder, and start banging out
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entire phone numbers in tones on the organ, including country codes, routing
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instructions, 'KP' and 'Start' tones. Or, if they don't have an organ, someone
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in the phone-phreak network sends them a cassette with all the tones recorded,
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with a voice saying 'Number one,' then you have the tone, 'Number two,' then
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the tone and so on. So with two cassette recorders they can put together a
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series of phone numbers by switching back and forth from number to number. Any
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idiot in the country with a cheap cassette recorder can make all the free calls
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he wants."
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"You mean you just hold the cassette recorder up the mouthpiece and switch in a
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series of beeps you've recorded? The phone thinks that anything that makes
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these tones must be its own equipment?"
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"Right. As long as you get the frequency within thirty cycles per second of
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the phone company's tones, the phone equipment thinks it hears its own voice
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talking to it. The original granddaddy phone phreak was this blind kid with
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perfect pitch, Joe Engressia, who used to whistle into the phone. An operator
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could tell the difference between his whistle and the phone company's
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Page 37
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The Official Phreaker's Manual
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electronic tone generator, but the phone company's switching circuit can't tell
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them apart. The bigger the phone company gets and the further away from human
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operators it gets, the more vulnerable it becomes to all sorts of phone
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phreaking."
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A Guide for the Perplexed
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"But wait a minute," I stop Gilbertson. "If everything you do sounds like
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phone-company equipment, why doesn't the phone company charge you for the call
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the way it charges its own equipment?"
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"Okay. That's where the 2600-cycle tone comes in. I better start from the
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beginning."
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The beginning he describes for me is a vision of the phone system of the
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continent as thousands of webs, of long-line trunks radiating from each of the
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hundreds of toll switching offices to the other toll switching offices. Each
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toll switching office is a hive compacted of thousands of long-distance tandems
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constantly whistling and beeping to tandems in far-off toll switching offices.
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The tandem is the key to the whole system. Each tandem is a line with some
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relays with the capability of signalling any other tandem in any other toll
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switching office on the continent, either directly one-to-one or by programming
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a roundabout route through several other tandems if all the direct routes are
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busy. For instance, if you want to call from New York to Los Angeles and
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traffic is heavy on all direct trunks between the two cities, your tandem in
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New York is programmed to try the next best route, which may send you down to a
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tandem in New Orleans, then up to San Francisco, or down to a New Orleans
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tandem, back to an Atlanta tandem, over to an Albuquerque tandem and finally up
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to Los Angeles.
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When a tandem is not being used, when it's sitting there waiting for someone to
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make a long-distance call, it whistles. One side of the tandem, the side
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"facing" your home phone, whistles at 2600 cycles per second toward all the
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home phones serviced by the exchange, telling them it is at their service,
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should they be interested in making a long-distance call. The other side of
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the tandem is whistling 2600 c.p.s. into one or more long-distance trunk lines,
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telling the rest of the phone system that it is neither sending nor receiving a
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call through that trunk at the moment, that it has no use for that trunk at the
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moment.
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"When you dial a long-distance number the first thing that happens is that you
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are hooked into a tandem. A register comes up to the side of the tandem facing
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away from you and presents that side with the number you dialed. This sending
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side of the tandem stops whistling 2600 into its trunk line. When a tandem
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stops the 2600 tone it has been sending through a trunk, the trunk is said to
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be "seized," and is now ready to carry the number you have dialed -- converted
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into multi-frequency beep tones -- to a tandem in the area code and central
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office you want.
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Now when a blue-box operator wants to make a call from New Orleans to New York
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he starts by dialing the 800 number of a company which might happen to have its
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headquarters in Los Angeles. The sending side of the New Orleans tandem stops
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sending 2600 out over the trunk to the central office in Los Angeles, thereby
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seizing the trunk. Your New Orleans tandem begins sending beep tones to a
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tandem it has discovered idly whistling 2600 cycles in Los Angeles. The
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receiving end of that L.A. tandem is seized, stops whistling 2600, listens to
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the beep tones which tell it which L.A. phone to ring, and starts ringing the
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Page 38
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The Official Phreaker's Manual
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800 number. Meanwhile a mark made in the New Orleans office accounting tape
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notes that a call from your New Orleans phone to the 800 number in L.A. has
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been initiated and gives the call a code number. Everything is routine so far.
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But then the phone phreak presses his blue box to the mouthpiece and pushes the
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2600-cycle button, sending 2600 out from the New Orleans tandem to the L.A.
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tandem. The L.A. tandem notices 2600 cycles are coming over the line again and
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assumes that New Orleans has hung up because the trunk is whistling as if idle.
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The L.A. tandem immediately ceases ringing the L.A. 800 number. But as soon as
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the phreak takes his finger off the 2600 button, the L.A. tandem assumes the
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trunk is once again being used because the 2600 is gone, so it listens for a
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new series of digit tones - to find out where it must send the call.
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Thus the blue-box operator in New Orleans now is in touch with a tandem in L.A.
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which is waiting like an obedient genie to be told what to do next. The
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blue-box owner then beeps out the ten digits of the New York number which tell
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the L.A. tandem to relay a call to New York City. Which it promptly does. As
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soon as your party picks up the phone in New York, the side of the New Orleans
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tandem facing you stops sending 2600 cycles to you and stars carrying his voice
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to you by way of the L.A. tandem. A notation is made on the accounting tape
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that the connection has been made on the 800 call which had been initiated and
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noted earlier. When you stop talking to New York a notation is made that the
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800 call has ended.
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At three the next morning, when the phone company's accounting computer starts
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reading back over the master accounting tape for the past day, it records that
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a call of a certain length of time was made from your New Orleans home to an
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L.A. 800 number and, of course, the accounting computer has been trained to
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ignore those toll-free 800 calls when compiling your monthly bill.
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"All they can prove is that you made an 800 toll-free call," Gilbertson the
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inventor concludes. "Of course, if you're foolish enough to talk for two hours
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on an 800 call, and they've installed one of their special anti-fraud computer
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programs to watch out for such things, they may spot you and ask why you took
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two hours talking to Army Recruiting's 800 number when you're 4-F.
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But if you do it from a pay phone, they may discover something peculiar the
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next day -- if they've got a blue-box hunting program in their computer -- but
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you'll be a long time gone from the pay phone by then. Using a pay phone is
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almost guaranteed safe."
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"What about the recent series of blue-box arrests all across the country -- New
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York, Cleveland, and so on?" I asked. "How were they caught so easily?"
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"From what I can tell, they made one big mistake: they were seizing trunks
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using an area code plus 555-1212 instead of an 800 number. Using 555 is easy to
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detect because when you send multi-frequency beep tones of 555 you get a charge
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for it on your tape and the accounting computer knows there's something wrong
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when it tries to bill you for a two-hour call to Akron, Ohio, information, and
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it drops a trouble card which goes right into the hands of the security agent
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if they're looking for blue-box user.
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"Whoever sold those guys their blue boxes didn't tell them how to use them
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properly, which is fairly irresponsible. And they were fairly stupid to use
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them at home all the time.
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"But what those arrests really mean is than an awful lot of blue boxes are
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flooding into the country and that people are finding them so easy to make that
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Page 39
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The Official Phreaker's Manual
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they know how to make them before they know how to use them. Ma Bell is in
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trouble."
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And if a blue-box operator or a cassette-recorder phone phreak sticks to pay
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phones and 800 numbers, the phone company can't stop them?
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"Not unless they change their entire nationwide long-lines technology, which
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will take them a few billion dollars and twenty years. Right now they can't do
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a thing. They're screwed."
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+-- End first file of four --+
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Page 40
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The Official Phreaker's Manual
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***** The AAG Proudly Presents The AAG Proudly Presents *****
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* *
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* +----------------------------------------------+ *
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* *
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* Secrets of the Little Blue Box *
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* *
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* by Ron Rosenbaum *
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* Typed by One Farad Cap/AAG *
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* *
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* -A story so incredible it may even make you *
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* feel sorry for the phone company- *
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* *
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* (Second of four files) *
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* *
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* +----------------------------------------------+ *
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* *
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***** The AAG Proudly Presents The AAG Proudly Presents *****
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Captain Crunch Demonstrates His Famous Unit
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There is an underground telephone network in this country. Gilbertson
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discovered it the very day news of his activities hit the papers. That evening
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his phone began ringing. Phone phreaks from Seattle, from Florida, from New
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York, from San Jose, and from Los Angeles began calling him and telling him
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about the phone-phreak network. He'd get a call from a phone phreak who'd say
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nothing but, "Hang up and call this number."
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When he dialed the number he'd find himself tied into a conference of a dozen
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phone phreaks arranged through a quirky switching station in British Columbia.
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They identified themselves as phone phreaks, they demonstrated their homemade
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blue boxes which they called "M-Fers" (for "multi-frequency," among other
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things) for him, they talked shop about phone-phreak devices. They let him in
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on their secrets on the theory that if the phone company was after him he must
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be trustworthy. And, Gilbertson recalls, they stunned him with their technical
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sophistication.
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I ask him how to get in touch with the phone-phreak network. He digs around
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through a file of old schematics and comes up with about a dozen numbers in
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three widely separated area codes.
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"Those are the centers," he tells me. Alongside some of the numbers he writes
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in first names or nicknames: names like Captain Crunch, Dr. No, Frank Carson
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(also a code word for a free call), Marty Freeman (code word for M-F device),
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Peter Perpendicular Pimple, Alefnull, and The Cheshire Cat. He makes checks
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alongside the names of those among these top twelve who are blind. There are
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five checks.
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I ask him who this Captain Crunch person is.
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"Oh. The Captain. He's probably the most legendary phone phreak. He calls
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himself Captain Crunch after the notorious Cap'n Crunch 2600 whistle."
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(Several years ago, Gilbertson explains, the makers of Cap'n Crunch breakfast
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cereal offered a toy-whistle prize in every box as a treat for the Cap'n Crunch
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set. Somehow a phone phreak discovered that the toy whistle just happened to
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produce a perfect 2600-cycle tone. When the man who calls himself Captain
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Crunch was transferred overseas to England with his Air Force unit, he would
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receive scores of calls from his friends and "mute" them -- make them free of
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charge to them -- by blowing his Cap'n Crunch whistle into his end.)
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Page 41
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The Official Phreaker's Manual
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"Captain Crunch is one of the older phone phreaks," Gilbertson tells me. "He's
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an engineer who once got in a little trouble for fooling around with the phone,
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but he can't stop. Well, they guy drives across country in a Volkswagen van
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with an entire switchboard and a computerized super-sophisticated M-F-er in the
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back. He'll pull up to a phone booth on a lonely highway somewhere, snake a
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cable out of his bus, hook it onto the phone and sit for hours, days sometimes,
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sending calls zipping back and forth across the country, all over the
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world...."
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Back at my motel, I dialed the number he gave me for "Captain Crunch" and asked
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for G---- T-----, his real name, or at least the name he uses when he's not
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dashing into a phone booth beeping out M-F tones faster than a speeding bullet
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and zipping phantomlike through the phone company's long-distance lines.
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When G---- T----- answered the phone and I told him I was preparing a story for
|
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Esquire about phone phreaks, he became very indignant.
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"I don't do that. I don't do that anymore at all. And if I do it, I do it for
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one reason and one reason only. I'm learning about a system. The phone
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company is a System. A computer is a System, do you understand? If I do what
|
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I do, it is only to explore a system. Computers, systems, that's my bag. The
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phone company is nothing but a computer."
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A tone of tightly restrained excitement enters the Captain's voice when he
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starts talking about systems. He begins to pronounce each syllable with the
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hushed deliberation of an obscene caller.
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"Ma Bell is a system I want to explore. It's a beautiful system, you know, but
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Ma Bell screwed up. It's terrible because Ma Bell is such a beautiful system,
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but she screwed up. I learned how she screwed up from a couple of blind kids
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who wanted me to build a device. A certain device. They said it could make
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free calls. I wasn't interested in free calls. But when these blind kids told
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me I could make calls into a computer, my eyes lit up. I wanted to learn about
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computers. I wanted to learn about Ma Bell's computers. So I build the little
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device, but I built it wrong and Ma Bell found out. Ma Bell can detect things
|
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like that. Ma Bell knows. So I'm strictly rid of it now. I don't do it.
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Except for learning purposes." He pauses. "So you want to write an article.
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Are you paying for this call? Hang up and call this number." He gives me a
|
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number in a area code a thousand miles away of his own. I dial the number.
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"Hello again. This is Captain Crunch. You are speaking to me on a toll-free
|
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loop-around in Portland, Oregon. Do you know what a toll-free loop around is?
|
||
I'll tell you.
|
||
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||
He explains to me that almost every exchange in the country has open test
|
||
numbers which allow other exchanges to test their connections with it. Most of
|
||
these numbers occur in consecutive pairs, such as 302 956-0041 and 302
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||
956-0042. Well, certain phone phreaks discovered that if two people from
|
||
anywhere in the country dial the two consecutive numbers they can talk together
|
||
just as if one had called the other's number, with no charge to either of them,
|
||
of course.
|
||
|
||
"Now our voice is looping around in a 4A switching machine up there in Canada,
|
||
zipping back down to me," the Captain tells me. "My voice is looping around up
|
||
there and back down to you. And it can't ever cost anyone money. The phone
|
||
phreaks and I have compiled a list of many many of these numbers. You would be
|
||
surprised if you saw the list. I could show it to you. But I won't. I'm out
|
||
|
||
Page 42
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
The Official Phreaker's Manual
|
||
|
||
of that now. I'm not out to screw Ma Bell. I know better. If I do anything
|
||
it's for the pure knowledge of the System. You can learn to do fantastic
|
||
things. Have you ever heard eight tandems stacked up? Do you know the sound
|
||
of tandems stacking and unstacking? Give me your phone number. Okay. Hang up
|
||
now and wait a minute."
|
||
|
||
Slightly less than a minute later the phone rang and the Captain was on the
|
||
line, his voice sounding far more excited, almost aroused.
|
||
|
||
"I wanted to show you what it's like to stack up tandems. To stack up
|
||
tandems." (Whenever the Captain says "stack up" it sounds as if he is licking
|
||
his lips.)
|
||
|
||
"How do you like the connection you're on now?" the Captain asks me. "It's a
|
||
raw tandem. A raw tandem. Ain't nothin' up to it but a tandem. Now I'm going
|
||
to show you what it's like to stack up. Blow off. Land in a far away place.
|
||
To stack that tandem up, whip back and forth across the country a few times,
|
||
then shoot on up to Moscow.
|
||
|
||
"Listen," Captain Crunch continues. "Listen. I've got line tie on my
|
||
switchboard here, and I'm gonna let you hear me stack and unstack tandems.
|
||
Listen to this. It's gonna blow your mind."
|
||
|
||
First I hear a super rapid-fire pulsing of the flutelike phone tones, then a
|
||
pause, then another popping burst of tones, then another, then another. Each
|
||
burst is followed by a beep-kachink sound.
|
||
|
||
"We have now stacked up four tandems," said Captain Crunch, sounding somewhat
|
||
remote. "That's four tandems stacked up. Do you know what that means? That
|
||
means I'm whipping back and forth, back and forth twice, across the country,
|
||
before coming to you. I've been known to stack up twenty tandems at a time.
|
||
Now, just like I said, I'm going to shoot up to Moscow."
|
||
|
||
There is a new, longer series of beeper pulses over the line, a brief silence,
|
||
then a ring.
|
||
|
||
"Hello," answers a far-off voice.
|
||
|
||
"Hello. Is this the American Embassy Moscow?"
|
||
|
||
"Yes, sir. Who is this calling?" says the voice.
|
||
|
||
"Yes. This is test board here in New York. We're calling to check out the
|
||
circuits, see what kind of lines you've got. Everything okay there in
|
||
Moscow?"
|
||
|
||
"Okay?"
|
||
|
||
"Well, yes, how are things there?"
|
||
|
||
"Oh. Well, everything okay, I guess."
|
||
|
||
"Okay. Thank you."
|
||
|
||
They hang up, leaving a confused series of beep-kachink sounds hanging in
|
||
mid-ether in the wake of the call before dissolving away.
|
||
|
||
The Captain is pleased. "You believe me now, don't you? Do you know what I'd
|
||
|
||
Page 43
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
The Official Phreaker's Manual
|
||
|
||
like to do? I'd just like to call up your editor at Esquire and show him just
|
||
what it sounds like to stack and unstack tandems. I'll give him a show that
|
||
will blow his mind. What's his number?
|
||
|
||
I ask the Captain what kind of device he was using to accomplish all his feats.
|
||
The Captain is pleased at the question.
|
||
|
||
"You could tell it was special, couldn't you?" Ten pulses per second. That's
|
||
faster than the phone company's equipment. Believe me, this unit is the most
|
||
famous unit in the country. There is no other unit like it. Believe me."
|
||
|
||
"Yes, I've heard about it. Some other phone phreaks have told me about it."
|
||
|
||
"They have been referring to my, ahem, unit? What is it they said? Just out of
|
||
curiosity, did they tell you it was a highly sophisticated computer-operated
|
||
unit, with acoustical coupling for receiving outputs and a switch-board with
|
||
multiple-line-tie capability? Did they tell you that the frequency tolerance
|
||
is guaranteed to be not more than .05 percent? The amplitude tolerance less
|
||
than .01 decibel? Those pulses you heard were perfect. They just come faster
|
||
than the phone company. Those were high-precision op-amps. Op-amps are
|
||
instrumentation amplifiers designed for ultra-stable amplification, super-low
|
||
distortion and accurate frequency response. Did they tell you it can operate
|
||
in temperatures from -55 degrees C to +125 degrees C?"
|
||
|
||
I admit that they did not tell me all that.
|
||
|
||
"I built it myself," the Captain goes on. "If you were to go out and buy the
|
||
components from an industrial wholesaler it would cost you at least $1500. I
|
||
once worked for a semiconductor company and all this didn't cost me a cent. Do
|
||
you know what I mean? Did they tell you about how I put a call completely
|
||
around the world? I'll tell you how I did it. I M-Fed Tokyo inward, who
|
||
connected me to India, India connected me to Greece, Greece connected me to
|
||
Pretoria, South Africa, South Africa connected me to South America, I went from
|
||
South America to London, I had a London operator connect me to a New York
|
||
operator, I had New York connect me to a California operator who rang the phone
|
||
next to me. Needless to say I had to shout to hear myself. But the echo was
|
||
far out. Fantastic. Delayed. It was delayed twenty seconds, but I could hear
|
||
myself talk to myself."
|
||
|
||
"You mean you were speaking into the mouthpiece of one phone sending your voice
|
||
around the world into your ear through a phone on the other side of your head?"
|
||
I asked the Captain. I had a vision of something vaguely autoerotic going on,
|
||
in a complex electronic way.
|
||
|
||
"That's right," said the Captain. "I've also sent my voice around the world
|
||
one way, going east on one phone, and going west on the other, going through
|
||
cable one way, satellite the other, coming back together at the same time,
|
||
ringing the two phones simultaneously and picking them up and whipping my
|
||
voice both ways around the world back to me. Wow. That was a mind blower."
|
||
|
||
"You mean you sit there with both phones on your ear and talk to yourself
|
||
around the world," I said incredulously.
|
||
|
||
"Yeah. Um hum. That's what I do. I connect the phone together and sit there
|
||
and talk."
|
||
|
||
"What do you say? What do you say to yourself when you're connected?"
|
||
|
||
|
||
Page 44
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
The Official Phreaker's Manual
|
||
|
||
"Oh, you know. Hello test one two three," he says in a low-pitched voice.
|
||
|
||
"Hello test one two three," he replied to himself in a high-pitched voice.
|
||
|
||
"Hello test one two three," he repeats again, low-pitched.
|
||
|
||
"Hello test one two three," he replies, high-pitched.
|
||
|
||
"I sometimes do this: Hello Hello Hello Hello, Hello, hello," he trails off and
|
||
breaks into laughter.
|
||
|
||
Why Captain Crunch Hardly Ever Taps Phones Anymore
|
||
|
||
Using internal phone-company codes, phone phreaks have learned a simple method
|
||
for tapping phones. Phone-company operators have in front of them a board that
|
||
holds verification jacks. It allows them to plug into conversations in case of
|
||
emergency, to listen in to a line to determine if the line is busy or the
|
||
circuits are busy. Phone phreaks have learned to beep out the codes which lead
|
||
them to a verification operator, tell the verification operator they are
|
||
switchmen from some other area code testing out verification trunks. Once the
|
||
operator hooks them into the verification trunk, they disappear into the board
|
||
for all practical purposes, slip unnoticed into any one of the 10,000 to
|
||
100,000 numbers in that central office without the verification operator
|
||
knowing what they're doing, and of course without the two parties to the
|
||
connection knowing there is a phantom listener present on their line.
|
||
|
||
Toward the end of my hour-long first conversation with him, I asked the Captain
|
||
if he ever tapped phones.
|
||
|
||
"Oh no. I don't do that. I don't think it's right," he told me firmly. "I
|
||
have the power to do it but I don't... Well one time, just one time, I have to
|
||
admit that I did. There was this girl, Linda, and I wanted to find out... you
|
||
know. I tried to call her up for a date. I had a date with her the last
|
||
weekend and I thought she liked me. I called her up, man, and her line was
|
||
busy, and I kept calling and it was still busy. Well, I had just learned about
|
||
this system of jumping into lines and I said to myself, 'Hmmm. Why not just
|
||
see if it works. It'll surprise her if all of a sudden I should pop up on her
|
||
line. It'll impress her, if anything.' So I went ahead and did it. I M-Fed
|
||
into the line. My M-F-er is powerful enough when patched directly into the
|
||
mouthpiece to trigger a verification trunk without using an operator the way
|
||
the other phone phreaks have to.
|
||
|
||
"I slipped into the line and there she was talking to another boyfriend.
|
||
Making sweet talk to him. I didn't make a sound because I was so disgusted.
|
||
So I waited there for her to hang up, listening to her making sweet talk to the
|
||
other guy. You know. So as soon as she hung up I instantly M-F-ed her up and
|
||
all I said was, 'Linda, we're through.' And I hung up. And it blew her head
|
||
off. She couldn't figure out what the hell happened.
|
||
|
||
"But that was the only time. I did it thinking I would surprise her, impress
|
||
her. Those were all my intentions were, and well, it really kind of hurt me
|
||
pretty badly, and... and ever since then I don't go into verification trunks."
|
||
|
||
Moments later my first conversation with the Captain comes to a close.
|
||
|
||
"Listen," he says, his spirits somewhat cheered, "listen. What you are going
|
||
to hear when I hang up is the sound of tandems unstacking. Layer after layer of
|
||
tandems unstacking until there's nothing left of the stack, until it melts away
|
||
|
||
Page 45
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
The Official Phreaker's Manual
|
||
|
||
into nothing. Cheep, cheep, cheep, cheep," he concludes, his voice descending
|
||
to a whisper with each cheep.
|
||
|
||
He hangs up. The phone suddenly goes into four spasms: kachink cheep. Kachink
|
||
cheep kachink cheep kachink cheep, and the complex connection has wiped itself
|
||
out like the Cheshire cat's smile.
|
||
|
||
The MF Boogie Blues
|
||
|
||
The next number I choose from the select list of phone-phreak alumni, prepared
|
||
for me by the blue-box inventor, is a Memphis number. It is the number of Joe
|
||
Engressia, the first and still perhaps the most accomplished blind phone
|
||
phreak.
|
||
|
||
Three years ago Engressia was a nine-day wonder in newspapers and magazines all
|
||
over America because he had been discovered whistling free long-distance
|
||
connections for fellow students at the University of South Florida. Engressia
|
||
was born with perfect pitch: he could whistle phone tones better than the
|
||
phone-company's equipment.
|
||
|
||
Engressia might have gone on whistling in the dark for a few friends for the
|
||
rest of his life if the phone company hadn't decided to expose him. He was
|
||
warned, disciplined by the college, and the whole case became public. In the
|
||
months following media reports of his talent, Engressia began receiving strange
|
||
calls. There were calls from a group of kids in Los Angeles who could do some
|
||
very strange things with the quirky General Telephone and Electronics circuitry
|
||
in L.A. suburbs. There were calls from a group of mostly blind kids in ----,
|
||
California, who had been doing some interesting experiments with Cap'n Crunch
|
||
whistles and test loops. There was a group in Seattle, a group in Cambridge,
|
||
Massachusetts, a few from New York, a few scattered across the country. Some
|
||
of them had already equipped themselves with cassette and electronic M-F
|
||
devices. For some of these groups, it was the first time they knew of the
|
||
others.
|
||
|
||
The exposure of Engressia was the catalyst that linked the separate
|
||
phone-phreak centers together. They all called Engressia. They talked to him
|
||
about what he was doing and what they were doing. And then he told them -- the
|
||
scattered regional centers and lonely independent phone phreakers -- about each
|
||
other, gave them each other's numbers to call, and within a year the scattered
|
||
phone-phreak centers had grown into a nationwide underground.
|
||
|
||
Joe Engressia is only twenty-two years old now, but along the phone-phreak
|
||
network he is "the old man," accorded by phone phreaks something of the
|
||
reverence the phone company bestows on Alexander Graham Bell. He seldom needs
|
||
to make calls anymore. The phone phreaks all call him and let him know what
|
||
new tricks, new codes, new techniques they have learned. Every night he sits
|
||
like a sightless spider in his little apartment receiving messages from every
|
||
tendril of his web. It is almost a point of pride with Joe that they call
|
||
him.
|
||
|
||
But when I reached him in his Memphis apartment that night, Joe Engressia was
|
||
lonely, jumpy and upset.
|
||
|
||
"God, I'm glad somebody called. I don't know why tonight of all nights I don't
|
||
get any calls. This guy around here got drunk again tonight and propositioned
|
||
me again. I keep telling him we'll never see eye to eye on this subject, if
|
||
you know what I mean. I try to make light of it, you know, but he doesn't get
|
||
it. I can head him out there getting drunker and I don't know what he'll do
|
||
|
||
Page 46
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
The Official Phreaker's Manual
|
||
|
||
next. It's just that I'm really all alone here, just moved to Memphis, it's
|
||
the first time I'm living on my own, and I'd hate for it to all collapse now.
|
||
But I won't go to bed with him. I'm just not very interested in sex and even
|
||
if I can't see him I know he's ugly.
|
||
|
||
"Did you hear that? That's him banging a bottle against the wall outside.
|
||
He's nice. Well forget about it. You're doing a story on phone phreaks?
|
||
Listen to this. It's the MF Boogie Blues.
|
||
|
||
Sure enough, a jumpy version of Muskrat Ramble boogies its way over the line,
|
||
each note one of those long-distance phone tones. The music stops. A huge
|
||
roaring voice blasts the phone off my ear: "AND THE QUESTION IS..." roars the
|
||
voice, "CAN A BLIND PERSON HOOK UP AN AMPLIFIER ON HIS OWN?"
|
||
|
||
The roar ceases. A high-pitched operator-type voice replaces it. "This is
|
||
Southern Braille Tel. & Tel. Have tone, will phone."
|
||
|
||
This is succeeded by a quick series of M-F tones, a swift "kachink" and a deep
|
||
reassuring voice: "If you need home care, call the visiting-nurses association.
|
||
First National time in Honolulu is 4:32 p.m."
|
||
|
||
Joe back in his Joe voice again: "Are we seeing eye to eye? 'Si, si,' said the
|
||
blind Mexican. Ahem. Yes. Would you like to know the weather in Tokyo?"
|
||
|
||
This swift manic sequence of phone-phreak vaudeville stunts and blind-boy jokes
|
||
manages to keep Joe's mind off his tormentor only as long as it lasts.
|
||
|
||
"The reason I'm in Memphis, the reason I have to depend on that homosexual guy,
|
||
is that this is the first time I've been able to live on my own and make phone
|
||
trips on my own. I've been banned from all central offices around home in
|
||
Florida, they knew me too well, and at the University some of my fellow
|
||
scholars were always harassing me because I was on the dorm pay phone all the
|
||
time and making fun of me because of my fat ass, which of course I do have,
|
||
it's my physical fatness program, but I don't like to hear it every day, and if
|
||
I can't phone trip and I can't phone phreak, I can't imagine what I'd do, I've
|
||
been devoting three quarters of my life to it.
|
||
|
||
"I moved to Memphis because I wanted to be on my own as well as because it has
|
||
a Number 5 crossbar switching system and some interesting little independent
|
||
phone-company districts nearby and so far they don't seem to know who I am so I
|
||
can go on phone tripping, and for me phone tripping is just as important as
|
||
phone phreaking."
|
||
|
||
Phone tripping, Joe explains, begins with calling up a central-office switch
|
||
room. He tells the switchman in a polite earnest voice that he's a blind
|
||
college student interested in telephones, and could he perhaps have a guided
|
||
tour of the switching station? Each step of the tour Joe likes to touch and
|
||
feel relays, caress switching circuits, switchboards, crossbar arrangements.
|
||
|
||
So when Joe Engressia phone phreaks he feels his way through the circuitry of
|
||
the country garden of forking paths, he feels switches shift, relays shunt,
|
||
crossbars swivel, tandems engage and disengage even as he hears -- with perfect
|
||
pitch -- his M-F pulses make the entire Bell system dance to his tune.
|
||
|
||
Just one month ago Joe took all his savings out of his bank and left home, over
|
||
the emotional protests of his mother. "I ran away from home almost," he likes
|
||
to say. Joe found a small apartment house on Union Avenue and began making
|
||
phone trips. He'd take a bus a hundred miles south in Mississippi to see some
|
||
|
||
Page 47
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
The Official Phreaker's Manual
|
||
|
||
old-fashioned Bell equipment still in use in several states, which had been
|
||
puzzling. He'd take a bus three hundred miles to Charlotte, North Carolina, to
|
||
look at some brand-new experimental equipment. He hired a taxi to drive him
|
||
twelve miles to a suburb to tour the office of a small phone company with some
|
||
interesting idiosyncrasies in its routing system. He was having the time of
|
||
his life, he said, the most freedom and pleasure he had known.
|
||
|
||
In that month he had done very little long-distance phone phreaking from his
|
||
own phone. He had begun to apply for a job with the phone company, he told me,
|
||
and he wanted to stay away from anything illegal.
|
||
|
||
"Any kind of job will do, anything as menial as the most lowly operator.
|
||
That's probably all they'd give me because I'm blind. Even though I probably
|
||
know more than most switchmen. But that's okay. I want to work for Ma Bell.
|
||
I don't hate Ma Bell the way Gilbertson and some phone phreaks do. I don't
|
||
want to screw Ma Bell. With me it's the pleasure of pure knowledge. There's
|
||
something beautiful about the system when you know it intimately the way I do.
|
||
But I don't know how much they know about me here. I have a very intuitive
|
||
feel for the condition of the line I'm on, and I think they're monitoring me
|
||
off and on lately, but I haven't been doing much illegal. I have to make a few
|
||
calls to switchmen once in a while which aren't strictly legal, and once I took
|
||
an acid trip and was having these auditory hallucinations as if I were trapped
|
||
and these planes were dive-bombing me, and all of sudden I had to phone phreak
|
||
out of there. For some reason I had to call Kansas City, but that's all."
|
||
|
||
A Warning Is Delivered
|
||
|
||
At this point -- one o'clock in my time zone -- a loud knock on my motel-room
|
||
door interrupts our conversation. Outside the door I find a uniformed security
|
||
guard who informs me that there has been an "emergency phone call" for me while
|
||
I have been on the line and that the front desk has sent him up to let me
|
||
know.
|
||
|
||
Two seconds after I say good-bye to Joe and hang up, the phone rings.
|
||
|
||
"Who were you talking to?" the agitated voice demands. The voice belongs to
|
||
Captain Crunch. "I called because I decided to warn you of something. I
|
||
decided to warn you to be careful. I don't want this information you get to
|
||
get to the radical underground. I don't want it to get into the wrong hands.
|
||
What would you say if I told you it's possible for three phone phreaks to
|
||
saturate the phone system of the nation. Saturate it. Busy it out. All of
|
||
it. I know how to do this. I'm not gonna tell. A friend of mine has already
|
||
saturated the trunks between Seattle and New York. He did it with a
|
||
computerized M-F-er hitched into a special Manitoba exchange. But there are
|
||
other, easier ways to do it."
|
||
|
||
Just three people? I ask. How is that possible?
|
||
|
||
"Have you ever heard of the long-lines guard frequency? Do you know about
|
||
stacking tandems with 17 and 2600? Well, I'd advise you to find out about it.
|
||
I'm not gonna tell you. But whatever you do, don't let this get into the hands
|
||
of the radical underground."
|
||
|
||
(Later Gilbertson, the inventor, confessed that while he had always been
|
||
skeptical about the Captain's claim of the sabotage potential of trunk-tying
|
||
phone phreaks, he had recently heard certain demonstrations which convinced him
|
||
the Captain was not speaking idly. "I think it might take more than three
|
||
people, depending on how many machines like Captain Crunch's were available.
|
||
|
||
Page 48
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
The Official Phreaker's Manual
|
||
|
||
But even though the Captain sounds a little weird, he generally turns out to
|
||
know what he's talking about.")
|
||
|
||
"You know," Captain Crunch continues in his admonitory tone, "you know the
|
||
younger phone phreaks call Moscow all the time. Suppose everybody were to call
|
||
Moscow. I'm no right-winger. But I value my life. I don't want the Commies
|
||
coming over and dropping a bomb on my head. That's why I say you've got to be
|
||
careful about who gets this information."
|
||
|
||
The Captain suddenly shifts into a diatribe against those phone phreaks who
|
||
don't like the phone company.
|
||
|
||
"They don't understand, but Ma Bell knows everything they do. Ma Bell knows.
|
||
Listen, is this line hot? I just heard someone tap in. I'm not paranoid, but
|
||
I can detect things like that. Well, even if it is, they know that I know that
|
||
they know that I have a bulk eraser. I'm very clean." The Captain pauses,
|
||
evidently torn between wanting to prove to the phone-company monitors that he
|
||
does nothing illegal, and the desire to impress Ma Bell with his prowess. "Ma
|
||
Bell knows how good I am. And I am quite good. I can detect reversals, tandem
|
||
switching, everything that goes on on a line. I have relative pitch now. Do
|
||
you know what that means? My ears are a $20,000 piece of equipment. With my
|
||
ears I can detect things they can't hear with their equipment. I've had
|
||
employment problems. I've lost jobs. But I want to show Ma Bell how good I
|
||
am. I don't want to screw her, I want to work for her. I want to do good for
|
||
her. I want to help her get rid of her flaws and become perfect. That's my
|
||
number-one goal in life now." The Captain concludes his warnings and tells me
|
||
he has to be going. "I've got a little action lined up for tonight," he
|
||
explains and hangs up.
|
||
|
||
Before I hang up for the night, I call Joe Engressia back. He reports that his
|
||
tormentor has finally gone to sleep -- "He's not blind drunk, that's the way I
|
||
get, ahem, yes; but you might say he's in a drunken stupor." I make a date to
|
||
visit Joe in Memphis in two days.
|
||
|
||
+-- End second file of four --+
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Page 49
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
The Official Phreaker's Manual
|
||
|
||
***** The AAG Proudly Presents The AAG Proudly Presents *****
|
||
* *
|
||
* +----------------------------------------------+ *
|
||
* *
|
||
* Secrets of the Little Blue Box *
|
||
* *
|
||
* by Ron Rosenbaum *
|
||
* Typed by One Farad Cap/AAG *
|
||
* *
|
||
* -A story so incredible it may even make you *
|
||
* feel sorry for the phone company- *
|
||
* *
|
||
* (Third of four files) *
|
||
* *
|
||
* +----------------------------------------------+ *
|
||
* *
|
||
***** The AAG Proudly Presents The AAG Proudly Presents *****
|
||
|
||
A Phone Phreak Call Takes Care of Business
|
||
|
||
The next morning I attend a gathering of four phone phreaks in ----- (a
|
||
California suburb). The gathering takes place in a comfortable split-level
|
||
home in an upper-middle-class subdivision. Heaped on the kitchen table are the
|
||
portable cassette recorders, M-F cassettes, phone patches, and line ties of the
|
||
four phone phreaks present. On the kitchen counter next to the telephone is a
|
||
shoe-box-size blue box with thirteen large toggle switches for the tones. The
|
||
parents of the host phone phreak, Ralph, who is blind, stay in the living room
|
||
with their sighted children. They are not sure exactly what Ralph and his
|
||
friends do with the phone or if it's strictly legal, but he is blind and they
|
||
are pleased he has a hobby which keeps him busy.
|
||
|
||
The group has been working at reestablishing the historic "2111" conference,
|
||
reopening some toll-free loops, and trying to discover the dimensions of what
|
||
seem to be new initiatives against phone phreaks by phone-company security
|
||
agents.
|
||
|
||
It is not long before I get a chance to see, to hear, Randy at work. Randy is
|
||
known among the phone phreaks as perhaps the finest con man in the game. Randy
|
||
is blind. He is pale, soft and pear-shaped, he wears baggy pants and a wrinkly
|
||
nylon white sport shirt, pushes his head forward from hunched shoulders
|
||
somewhat like a turtle inching out of its shell. His eyes wander, crossing and
|
||
recrossing, and his forehead is somewhat pimply. He is only sixteen years
|
||
old.
|
||
|
||
But when Randy starts speaking into a telephone mouthpiece his voice becomes so
|
||
stunningly authoritative it is necessary to look again to convince yourself it
|
||
comes from a chubby adolescent Randy. Imagine the voice of a crack oil-rig
|
||
foreman, a tough, sharp, weather-beaten Marlboro man of forty. Imagine the
|
||
voice of a brilliant performance-fund gunslinger explaining how he beats the
|
||
Dow Jones by thirty percent. Then imagine a voice that could make those two
|
||
sound like Stepin Fetchit. That is sixteen-year-old Randy's voice.
|
||
|
||
He is speaking to a switchman in Detroit. The phone company in Detroit had
|
||
closed up two toll-free loop pairs for no apparent reason, although heavy use
|
||
by phone phreaks all over the country may have been detected. Randy is telling
|
||
the switchman how to open up the loop and make it free again:
|
||
|
||
"How are you, buddy. Yeah. I'm on the board in here in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and
|
||
|
||
Page 50
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
The Official Phreaker's Manual
|
||
|
||
we've been trying to run some tests on your loop-arounds and we find'em busied
|
||
out on both sides.... Yeah, we've been getting a 'BY' on them, what d'ya say,
|
||
can you drop cards on 'em? Do you have 08 on your number group? Oh that's
|
||
okay, we've had this trouble before, we may have to go after the circuit. Here
|
||
lemme give 'em to you: your frame is 05, vertical group 03, horizontal 5,
|
||
vertical file 3. Yeah, we'll hang on here.... Okay, found it? Good. Right,
|
||
yeah, we'd like to clear that busy out. Right. All you have to do is look for
|
||
your key on the mounting plate, it's in your miscellaneous trunk frame. Okay?
|
||
Right. Now pull your key from NOR over the LCT. Yeah. I don't know why that
|
||
happened, but we've been having trouble with that one. Okay. Thanks a lot
|
||
fella. Be seein' ya."
|
||
|
||
Randy hangs up, reports that the switchman was a little inexperienced with the
|
||
loop-around circuits on the miscellaneous trunk frame, but that the loop has
|
||
been returned to its free-call status.
|
||
|
||
Delighted, phone phreak Ed returns the pair of numbers to the active-status
|
||
column in his directory. Ed is a superb and painstaking researcher. With
|
||
almost Talmudic thoroughness he will trace tendrils of hints through soft-wired
|
||
mazes of intervening phone-company circuitry back through complex linkages of
|
||
switching relays to find the location and identity of just one toll-free loop.
|
||
He spends hours and hours, every day, doing this sort of thing. He has somehow
|
||
compiled a directory of eight hundred "Band-six in-WATS numbers" located in
|
||
over forty states. Band-six in-WATS numbers are the big 800 numbers -- the
|
||
ones that can be dialed into free from anywhere in the country.
|
||
|
||
Ed the researcher, a nineteen-year-old engineering student, is also a superb
|
||
technician. He put together his own working blue box from scratch at age
|
||
seventeen. (He is sighted.) This evening after distributing the latest issue
|
||
of his in-WATS directory (which has been typed into Braille for the blind phone
|
||
phreaks), he announces he has made a major new breakthrough:
|
||
|
||
"I finally tested it and it works, perfectly. I've got this switching matrix
|
||
which converts any touch-tone phone into an M-F-er."
|
||
|
||
The tones you hear in touch-tone phones are not the M-F tones that operate the
|
||
long-distance switching system. Phone phreaks believe A.T.&T. had deliberately
|
||
equipped touch tones with a different set of frequencies to avoid putting the
|
||
six master M-F tones in the hands of every touch-tone owner. Ed's complex
|
||
switching matrix puts the six master tones, in effect put a blue box, in the
|
||
hands of every touch-tone owner.
|
||
|
||
Ed shows me pages of schematics, specifications and parts lists. "It's not easy
|
||
to build, but everything here is in the Heathkit catalog."
|
||
|
||
Ed asks Ralph what progress he has made in his attempts to reestablish a
|
||
long-term open conference line for phone phreaks. The last big conference --
|
||
the historic "2111" conference -- had been arranged through an unused Telex
|
||
test-board trunk somewhere in the innards of a 4A switching machine in
|
||
Vancouver, Canada. For months phone phreaks could M-F their way into
|
||
Vancouver, beep out 604 (the Vancouver area code) and then beep out 2111 (the
|
||
internal phone-company code for Telex testing), and find themselves at any
|
||
time, day or night, on an open wire talking with an array of phone phreaks from
|
||
coast to coast, operators from Bermuda, Tokyo and London who are phone-phreak
|
||
sympathizers, and miscellaneous guests and technical experts. The conference
|
||
was a massive exchange of information. Phone phreaks picked each other's
|
||
brains clean, then developed new ways to pick the phone company's brains clean.
|
||
Ralph gave M F Boogies concerts with his home-entertainment-type electric
|
||
|
||
Page 51
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
The Official Phreaker's Manual
|
||
|
||
organ, Captain Crunch demonstrated his round-the-world prowess with his
|
||
notorious computerized unit and dropped leering hints of the "action" he was
|
||
getting with his girl friends. (The Captain lives out or pretends to live out
|
||
several kinds of fantasies to the gossipy delight of the blind phone phreaks
|
||
who urge him on to further triumphs on behalf of all of them.) The somewhat
|
||
rowdy Northwest phone-phreak crowd let their bitter internal feud spill over
|
||
into the peaceable conference line, escalating shortly into guerrilla warfare;
|
||
Carl the East Coast international tone relations expert demonstrated newly
|
||
opened direct M-F routes to central offices on the island of Bahrein in the
|
||
Persian Gulf, introduced a new phone-phreak friend of his in Pretoria, and
|
||
explained the technical operation of the new Oakland-to Vietnam linkages.
|
||
(Many phone phreaks pick up spending money by M-F-ing calls from relatives to
|
||
Vietnam G.I.'s, charging $5 for a whole hour of trans-Pacific conversation.)
|
||
|
||
Day and night the conference line was never dead. Blind phone phreaks all over
|
||
the country, lonely and isolated in homes filled with active sighted brothers
|
||
and sisters, or trapped with slow and unimaginative blind kids in straitjacket
|
||
schools for the blind, knew that no matter how late it got they could dial up
|
||
the conference and find instant electronic communion with two or three other
|
||
blind kids awake over on the other side of America. Talking together on a
|
||
phone hookup, the blind phone phreaks say, is not much different from being
|
||
there together. Physically, there was nothing more than a two-inch-square wafer
|
||
of titanium inside a vast machine on Vancouver Island. For the blind kids
|
||
>there< meant an exhilarating feeling of being in touch, through a kind of
|
||
skill and magic which was peculiarly their own.
|
||
|
||
Last April 1, however, the long Vancouver Conference was shut off. The phone
|
||
phreaks knew it was coming. Vancouver was in the process of converting from a
|
||
step-by-step system to a 4A machine and the 2111 Telex circuit was to be wiped
|
||
out in the process. The phone phreaks learned the actual day on which the
|
||
conference would be erased about a week ahead of time over the phone company's
|
||
internal-news-and-shop-talk recording.
|
||
|
||
For the next frantic seven days every phone phreak in America was on and off
|
||
the 2111 conference twenty-four hours a day. Phone phreaks who were just
|
||
learning the game or didn't have M-F capability were boosted up to the
|
||
conference by more experienced phreaks so they could get a glimpse of what it
|
||
was like before it disappeared. Top phone phreaks searched distant area codes
|
||
for new conference possibilities without success. Finally in the early morning
|
||
of April 1, the end came.
|
||
|
||
"I could feel it coming a couple hours before midnight," Ralph remembers. "You
|
||
could feel something going on in the lines. Some static began showing up, then
|
||
some whistling wheezing sound. Then there were breaks. Some people got cut
|
||
off and called right back in, but after a while some people were finding they
|
||
were cut off and couldn't get back in at all. It was terrible. I lost it
|
||
about one a.m., but managed to slip in again and stay on until the thing
|
||
died... I think it was about four in the morning. There were four of us still
|
||
hanging on when the conference disappeared into nowhere for good. We all tried
|
||
to M-F up to it again of course, but we got silent termination. There was
|
||
nothing there."
|
||
|
||
The Legendary Mark Bernay Turns Out To Be "The Midnight Skulker"
|
||
|
||
Mark Bernay. I had come across that name before. It was on Gilbertson's
|
||
select list of phone phreaks. The California phone phreaks had spoken of a
|
||
mysterious Mark Bernay as perhaps the first and oldest phone phreak on the West
|
||
Coast. And in fact almost every phone phreak in the West can trace his origins
|
||
|
||
Page 52
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
The Official Phreaker's Manual
|
||
|
||
either directly to Mark Bernay or to a disciple of Mark Bernay.
|
||
|
||
It seems that five years ago this Mark Bernay (a pseudonym he chose for
|
||
himself) began traveling up and down the West Coast pasting tiny stickers in
|
||
phone books all along his way. The stickers read something like "Want to hear
|
||
an interesting tape recording? Call these numbers." The numbers that followed
|
||
were toll-free loop-around pairs. When one of the curious called one of the
|
||
numbers he would hear a tape recording pre-hooked into the loop by Bernay which
|
||
explained the use of loop-around pairs, gave the numbers of several more, and
|
||
ended by telling the caller, "At six o'clock tonight this recording will stop
|
||
and you and your friends can try it out. Have fun."
|
||
|
||
"I was disappointed by the response at first," Bernay told me, when I finally
|
||
reached him at one of his many numbers and he had dispensed with the usual "I
|
||
never do anything illegal" formalities which experienced phone phreaks open
|
||
most conversations.
|
||
|
||
"I went all over the coast with these stickers not only on pay phones, but I'd
|
||
throw them in front of high schools in the middle of the night, I'd leave them
|
||
unobtrusively in candy stores, scatter them on main streets of small towns. At
|
||
first hardly anyone bothered to try it out. I would listen in for hours and
|
||
hours after six o'clock and no one came on. I couldn't figure out why people
|
||
wouldn't be interested. Finally these two girls in Oregon tried it out and
|
||
told all their friends and suddenly it began to spread."
|
||
|
||
Before his Johny Appleseed trip Bernay had already gathered a sizable group of
|
||
early pre-blue-box phone phreaks together on loop-arounds in Los Angeles.
|
||
Bernay does not claim credit for the original discovery of the loop-around
|
||
numbers. He attributes the discovery to an eighteen-year-old reform school kid
|
||
in Long Beach whose name he forgets and who, he says, "just disappeared one
|
||
day." When Bernay himself discovered loop-arounds independently, from clues in
|
||
his readings in old issues of the Automatic Electric Technical Journal, he
|
||
found dozens of the reform-school kid's friends already using them. However, it
|
||
was one of Bernay's disciples in Seattle that introduced phone phreaking to
|
||
blind kids. The Seattle kid who learned about loops through Bernay's recording
|
||
told a blind friend, the blind kid taught the secret to his friends at a winter
|
||
camp for blind kids in Los Angeles. When the camp session was over these kids
|
||
took the secret back to towns all over the West. This is how the original
|
||
blind kids became phone phreaks. For them, for most phone phreaks in general,
|
||
it was the discovery of the possibilities of loop-arounds which led them on to
|
||
far more serious and sophisticated phone-phreak methods, and which gave them a
|
||
medium for sharing their discoveries.
|
||
|
||
A year later a blind kid who moved back east brought the technique to a blind
|
||
kids' summer camp in Vermont, which spread it along the East Coast. All from a
|
||
Mark Bernay sticker.
|
||
|
||
Bernay, who is nearly thirty years old now, got his start when he was fifteen
|
||
and his family moved into an L.A. suburb serviced by General Telephone and
|
||
Electronics equipment. He became fascinated with the differences between Bell
|
||
and G.T.&E. equipment. He learned he could make interesting things happen by
|
||
carefully timed clicks with the disengage button. He learned to interpret
|
||
subtle differences in the array of clicks, whirrs and kachinks he could hear on
|
||
his lines. He learned he could shift himself around the switching relays of
|
||
the L.A. area code in a not-too-predictable fashion by interspersing his own
|
||
hook-switch clicks with the clicks within the line. (Independent phone
|
||
companies -- there are nineteen hundred of them still left, most of them tiny
|
||
island principalities in Ma Bell's vast empire -- have always been favorites
|
||
|
||
Page 53
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
The Official Phreaker's Manual
|
||
|
||
with phone phreaks, first as learning tools, then as Archimedes platforms from
|
||
which to manipulate the huge Bell system. A phone phreak in Bell territory
|
||
will often M-F himself into an independent's switching system, with switching
|
||
idiosyncrasies which can give him marvelous leverage over the Bell System.
|
||
|
||
"I have a real affection for Automatic Electric Equipment," Bernay told me.
|
||
"There are a lot of things you can play with. Things break down in interesting
|
||
ways."
|
||
|
||
Shortly after Bernay graduated from college (with a double major in chemistry
|
||
and philosophy), he graduated from phreaking around with G.T.&E. to the Bell
|
||
System itself, and made his legendary sticker-pasting journey north along the
|
||
coast, settling finally in Northwest Pacific Bell territory. He discovered
|
||
that if Bell does not break down as interestingly as G.T.&E., it nevertheless
|
||
offers a lot of "things to play with."
|
||
|
||
Bernay learned to play with blue boxes. He established his own personal
|
||
switchboard and phone-phreak research laboratory complex. He continued his
|
||
phone-phreak evangelism with ongoing sticker campaigns. He set up two recording
|
||
numbers, one with instructions for beginning phone phreaks, the other with
|
||
latest news and technical developments (along with some advanced instruction)
|
||
gathered from sources all over the country.
|
||
|
||
These days, Bernay told me, he had gone beyond phone-phreaking itself. "Lately
|
||
I've been enjoying playing with computers more than playing with phones. My
|
||
personal thing in computers is just like with phones, I guess -- the kick is in
|
||
finding out how to beat the system, how to get at things I'm not supposed to
|
||
know about, how to do things with the system that I'm not supposed to be able
|
||
to do."
|
||
|
||
As a matter of fact, Bernay told me, he had just been fired from his
|
||
computer-programming job for doing things he was not supposed to be able to do.
|
||
he had been working with a huge time-sharing computer owned by a large
|
||
corporation but shared by many others. Access to the computer was limited to
|
||
those programmers and corporations that had been assigned certain passwords.
|
||
And each password restricted its user to access to only the one section of the
|
||
computer cordoned off from its own information storager. The password system
|
||
prevented companies and individuals from stealing each other's information.
|
||
|
||
"I figured out how to write a program that would let me read everyone else's
|
||
password," Bernay reports. "I began playing around with passwords. I began
|
||
letting the people who used the computer know, in subtle ways, that I knew
|
||
their passwords. I began dropping notes to the computer supervisors with hints
|
||
that I knew what I know. I signed them 'The Midnight Skulker.' I kept getting
|
||
cleverer and cleverer with my messages and devising ways of showing them what I
|
||
could do. I'm sure they couldn't imagine I could do the things I was showing
|
||
them. But they never responded to me. Every once in a while they'd change the
|
||
passwords, but I found out how to discover what the new ones were, and I let
|
||
them know. But they never responded directly to the Midnight Skulker. I even
|
||
finally designed a program which they could use to prevent my program from
|
||
finding out what it did. In effect I told them how to wipe me out, The
|
||
Midnight Skulker. It was a very clever program. I started leaving clues about
|
||
myself. I wanted them to try and use it and then try to come up with something
|
||
to get around that and reappear again. But they wouldn't play. I wanted to
|
||
get caught. I mean I didn't want to get caught personally, but I wanted them
|
||
to notice me and admit that they noticed me. I wanted them to attempt to
|
||
respond, maybe in some interesting way."
|
||
|
||
|
||
Page 54
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
The Official Phreaker's Manual
|
||
|
||
Finally the computer managers became concerned enough about the threat of
|
||
information-stealing to respond. However, instead of using The Midnight
|
||
Skulker's own elegant self-destruct program, they called in their security
|
||
personnel, interrogated everyone, found an informer to identify Bernay as The
|
||
Midnight Skulker, and fired him.
|
||
|
||
"At first the security people advised the company to hire me full-time to
|
||
search out other flaws and discover other computer freaks. I might have liked
|
||
that. But I probably would have turned into a double double agent rather than
|
||
the double agent they wanted. I might have resurrected The Midnight Skulker
|
||
and tried to catch myself. Who knows? Anyway, the higher-ups turned the whole
|
||
idea down."
|
||
|
||
You Can Tap the F.B.I.'s Crime Control Computer in the Comfort of Your Own
|
||
Home, Perhaps
|
||
|
||
Computer freaking may be the wave of the future. It suits the phone-phreak
|
||
sensibility perfectly. Gilbertson, the blue-box inventor and a lifelong phone
|
||
phreak, has also gone on from phone-phreaking to computer-freaking. Before he
|
||
got into the blue-box business Gilbertson, who is a highly skilled programmer,
|
||
devised programs for international currency arbitrage.
|
||
|
||
But he began playing with computers in earnest when he learned he could use his
|
||
blue box in tandem with the computer terminal installed in his apartment by the
|
||
instrumentation firm he worked for. The print-out terminal and keyboard was
|
||
equipped with acoustical coupling, so that by coupling his little ivory
|
||
Princess phone to the terminal and then coupling his blue box on that, he could
|
||
M-F his way into other computers with complete anonymity, and without charge;
|
||
program and re-program them at will; feed them false or misleading information;
|
||
tap and steal from them. He explained to me that he taps computers by busying
|
||
out all the lines, then going into a verification trunk, listening into the
|
||
passwords and instructions one of the time sharers uses, and them M-F-ing in
|
||
and imitating them. He believes it would not be impossible to creep into the
|
||
F.B.I's crime control computer through a local police computer terminal and
|
||
phreak around with the F.B.I.'s memory banks. He claims he has succeeded in
|
||
re-programming a certain huge institutional computer in such a way that it has
|
||
cordoned off an entire section of its circuitry for his personal use, and at
|
||
the same time conceals that arrangement from anyone else's notice. I have been
|
||
unable to verify this claim.
|
||
|
||
Like Captain Crunch, like Alexander Graham Bell (pseudonym of a
|
||
disgruntled-looking East Coast engineer who claims to have invented the black
|
||
box and now sells black and blue boxes to gamblers and radical heavies), like
|
||
most phone phreaks, Gilbertson began his career trying to rip off pay phones as
|
||
a teenager. Figure them out, then rip them off. Getting his dime back from
|
||
the pay phone is the phone phreak's first thrilling rite of passage. After
|
||
learning the usual eighteen different ways of getting his dime back, Gilbertson
|
||
learned how to make master keys to coin-phone cash boxes, and get everyone
|
||
else's dimes back. He stole some phone-company equipment and put together his
|
||
own home switchboard with it. He learned to make a simple "bread-box" device,
|
||
of the kind used by bookies in the Thirties (bookie gives a number to his
|
||
betting clients; the phone with that number is installed in some widow lady's
|
||
apartment, but is rigged to ring in the bookie's shop across town, cops trace
|
||
big betting number and find nothing but the widow).
|
||
|
||
Not long after that afternoon in 1968 when, deep in the stacks of an
|
||
engineering library, he came across a technical journal with the phone tone
|
||
frequencies and rushed off to make his first blue box, not long after that
|
||
|
||
Page 55
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
The Official Phreaker's Manual
|
||
|
||
Gilbertson abandoned a very promising career in physical chemistry and began
|
||
selling blue boxes for $1,500 apiece.
|
||
|
||
"I had to leave physical chemistry. I just ran out of interesting things to
|
||
learn," he told me one evening. We had been talking in the apartment of the
|
||
man who served as the link between Gilbertson and the syndicate in arranging
|
||
the big $300,000 blue-box deal which fell through because of legal trouble.
|
||
There has been some smoking.
|
||
|
||
"No more interesting things to learn," he continues. "Physical chemistry turns
|
||
out to be a sick subject when you take it to its highest level. I don't know.
|
||
I don't think I could explain to you how it's sick. You have to be there. But
|
||
you get, I don't know, a false feeling of omnipotence. I suppose it's like
|
||
phone-phreaking that way. This huge thing is there. This whole system. And
|
||
there are holes in it and you slip into them like Alice and you're pretending
|
||
you're doing something you're actually not, or at least it's no longer you
|
||
that's doing what you thought you were doing. It's all Lewis Carroll.
|
||
Physical chemistry and phone-phreaking. That's why you have these phone-phreak
|
||
pseudonyms like The Cheshire Cat, the Red King, and The Snark. But there's
|
||
something about phone-phreaking that you don't find in physical chemistry." He
|
||
looks up at me:
|
||
|
||
"Did you ever steal anything?"
|
||
|
||
"Well yes, I..."
|
||
|
||
"Then you know! You know the rush you get. It's not just knowledge, like
|
||
physical chemistry. It's forbidden knowledge. You know. You can learn about
|
||
anything under the sun and be bored to death with it. But the idea that it's
|
||
illegal. Look: you can be small and mobile and smart and you're ripping off
|
||
somebody large and powerful and very dangerous."
|
||
|
||
People like Gilbertson and Alexander Graham Bell are always talking about
|
||
ripping off the phone company and screwing Ma Bell. But if they were shown a
|
||
single button and told that by pushing it they could turn the entire circuitry
|
||
of A.T.&T. into molten puddles, they probably wouldn't push it. The
|
||
disgruntled-inventor phone phreak needs the phone system the way the lapsed
|
||
Catholic needs the Church, the way Satan needs a God, the way The Midnight
|
||
Skulker needed, more than anything else, response.
|
||
|
||
Later that evening Gilbertson finished telling me how delighted he was at the
|
||
flood of blue boxes spreading throughout the country, how delighted he was to
|
||
know that "this time they're really screwed." He suddenly shifted gears.
|
||
|
||
"Of course. I do have this love/hate thing about Ma Bell. In a way I almost
|
||
like the phone company. I guess I'd be very sad if they were to disintegrate.
|
||
In a way it's just that after having been so good they turn out to have these
|
||
things wrong with them. It's those flaws that allow me to get in and mess with
|
||
them, but I don't know. There's something about it that gets to you and makes
|
||
you want to get to it, you know."
|
||
|
||
I ask him what happens when he runs out of interesting, forbidden things to
|
||
learn about the phone system.
|
||
|
||
"I don't know, maybe I'd go to work for them for a while."
|
||
|
||
"In security even?"
|
||
|
||
|
||
Page 56
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
The Official Phreaker's Manual
|
||
|
||
"I'd do it, sure. I just as soon play -- I'd just as soon work on either
|
||
side."
|
||
|
||
"Even figuring out how to trap phone phreaks? I said, recalling Mark Bernay's
|
||
game."
|
||
|
||
"Yes, that might be interesting. Yes, I could figure out how to outwit the
|
||
phone phreaks. Of course if I got too good at it, it might become boring
|
||
again. Then I'd have to hope the phone phreaks got much better and outsmarted
|
||
me for a while. That would move the quality of the game up one level. I might
|
||
even have to help them out, you know, 'Well, kids, I wouldn't want this to get
|
||
around but did you ever think of -- ?' I could keep it going at higher and
|
||
higher levels forever."
|
||
|
||
The dealer speaks up for the first time. He has been staring at the soft
|
||
blinking patterns of light and colors on the translucent tiled wall facing him.
|
||
(Actually there are no patterns: the color and illumination of every tile is
|
||
determined by a computerized random-number generator designed by Gilbertson
|
||
which insures that there can be no meaning to any sequence of events in the
|
||
tiles.)
|
||
|
||
"Those are nice games you're talking about," says the dealer to his friend.
|
||
"But I wouldn't mind seeing them screwed. A telephone isn't private anymore.
|
||
You can't say anything you really want to say on a telephone or you have to go
|
||
through that paranoid bullshit. 'Is it cool to talk on the phone?' I mean,
|
||
even if it is cool, if you have to ask 'Is it cool,' then it isn't cool. You
|
||
know. 'Is it cool,' then it isn't cool. You know. Like those blind kids,
|
||
people are going to start putting together their own private telephone
|
||
companies if they want to really talk. And you know what else. You don't hear
|
||
silences on the phone anymore. They've got this time-sharing thing on
|
||
long-distance lines where you make a pause and they snip out that piece of time
|
||
and use it to carry part of somebody else's conversation. Instead of a pause,
|
||
where somebody's maybe breathing or sighing, you get this blank hole and you
|
||
only start hearing again when someone says a word and even the beginning of the
|
||
word is clipped off. Silences don't count -- you're paying for them, but they
|
||
take them away from you. It's not cool to talk and you can't hear someone when
|
||
they don't talk. What the hell good is the phone? I wouldn't mind seeing them
|
||
totally screwed."
|
||
|
||
+-- End third file of four --+
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Page 57
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
The Official Phreaker's Manual
|
||
|
||
***** The AAG Proudly Presents The AAG Proudly Presents *****
|
||
* *
|
||
* +----------------------------------------------+ *
|
||
* *
|
||
* Secrets of the Little Blue Box *
|
||
* *
|
||
* by Ron Rosenbaum *
|
||
* Typed by One Farad Cap/AAG *
|
||
* *
|
||
* -A story so incredible it may even make you *
|
||
* feel sorry for the phone company- *
|
||
* *
|
||
* (Fourth of four files) *
|
||
* *
|
||
* +----------------------------------------------+ *
|
||
* *
|
||
***** The AAG Proudly Presents The AAG Proudly Presents *****
|
||
|
||
The Big Memphis Bust
|
||
|
||
Joe Engressia never wanted to screw Ma Bell. His dream had always been to work
|
||
for her.
|
||
|
||
The day I visited Joe in his small apartment on Union Avenue in Memphis, he was
|
||
upset about another setback in his application for a telephone job.
|
||
|
||
"They're stalling on it. I got a letter today telling me they'd have to
|
||
postpone the interview I requested again. My landlord read it for me. They
|
||
gave me some runaround about wanting papers on my rehabilitation status but I
|
||
think there's something else going on."
|
||
|
||
When I switched on the 40-watt bulb in Joe's room -- he sometimes forgets when
|
||
he has guests -- it looked as if there was enough telephone hardware to start a
|
||
small phone company of his own.
|
||
|
||
There is one phone on top of his desk, one phone sitting in an open drawer
|
||
beneath the desk top. Next to the desk-top phone is a cigar-box-size M-F
|
||
device with big toggle switches, and next to that is some kind of switching and
|
||
coupling device with jacks and alligator plugs hanging loose. Next to that is
|
||
a Braille typewriter. On the floor next to the desk, lying upside down like a
|
||
dead tortoise, is the half-gutted body of an old black standard phone. Across
|
||
the room on a torn and dusty couch are two more phones, one of them a
|
||
touch-tone model; two tape recorders; a heap of phone patches and cassettes,
|
||
and a life-size toy telephone.
|
||
|
||
Our conversation is interrupted every ten minutes by phone phreaks from all
|
||
over the country ringing Joe on just about every piece of equipment but the toy
|
||
phone and the Braille typewriter. One fourteen-year-old blind kid from
|
||
Connecticut calls up and tells Joe he's got a girl friend. He wants to talk to
|
||
Joe about girl friends. Joe says they'll talk later in the evening when they
|
||
can be alone on the line. Joe draws a deep breath, whistles him off the air
|
||
with an earsplitting 2600-cycle whistle. Joe is pleased to get the calls but he
|
||
looked worried and preoccupied that evening, his brow constantly furrowed over
|
||
his dark wandering eyes. In addition to the phone-company stall, he has just
|
||
learned that his apartment house is due to be demolished in sixty days for
|
||
urban renewal. For all its shabbiness, the Union Avenue apartment house has
|
||
been Joe's first home-of-his-own and he's worried that he may not find another
|
||
before this one is demolished.
|
||
|
||
Page 58
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
The Official Phreaker's Manual
|
||
|
||
|
||
But what really bothers Joe is that switchmen haven't been listening to him.
|
||
"I've been doing some checking on 800 numbers lately, and I've discovered that
|
||
certain 800 numbers in New Hampshire couldn't be reached from Missouri and
|
||
Kansas. Now it may sound like a small thing, but I don't like to see sloppy
|
||
work; it makes me feel bad about the lines. So I've been calling up switching
|
||
offices and reporting it, but they haven't corrected it. I called them up for
|
||
the third time today and instead of checking they just got mad. Well, that
|
||
gets me mad. I mean, I do try to help them. There's something about them I
|
||
can't understand -- you want to help them and they just try to say you're
|
||
defrauding them."
|
||
|
||
It is Sunday evening and Joe invites me to join him for dinner at a Holiday
|
||
Inn. Frequently on Sunday evening Joe takes some of his welfare money, calls a
|
||
cab, and treats himself to a steak dinner at one of Memphis' thirteen Holiday
|
||
Inns. (Memphis is the headquarters of Holiday Inn. Holiday Inns have been a
|
||
favorite for Joe ever since he made his first solo phone trip to a Bell
|
||
switching office in Jacksonville, Florida, and stayed in the Holiday Inn there.
|
||
He likes to stay at Holiday Inns, he explains, because they represent freedom
|
||
to him and because the rooms are arranged the same all over the country so he
|
||
knows that any Holiday Inn room is familiar territory to him. Just like any
|
||
telephone.)
|
||
|
||
Over steaks in the Pinnacle Restaurant of the Holiday Inn Medical Center on
|
||
Madison Avenue in Memphis, Joe tells me the highlights of his life as a phone
|
||
phreak.
|
||
|
||
At age seven, Joe learned his first phone trick. A mean baby-sitter, tired of
|
||
listening to little Joe play with the phone as he always did, constantly, put a
|
||
lock on the phone dial. "I got so mad. When there's a phone sitting there and
|
||
I can't use it... so I started getting mad and banging the receiver up and
|
||
down. I noticed I banged it once and it dialed one. Well, then I tried
|
||
banging it twice...." In a few minutes Joe learned how to dial by pressing the
|
||
hook switch at the right time. "I was so excited I remember going 'whoo whoo'
|
||
and beat a box down on the floor."
|
||
|
||
At age eight Joe learned about whistling. "I was listening to some intercept
|
||
non working-number recording in L.A.- I was calling L.A. as far back as that,
|
||
but I'd mainly dial non working numbers because there was no charge, and I'd
|
||
listen to these recordings all day. Well, I was whistling 'cause listening to
|
||
these recordings can be boring after a while even if they are from L.A., and
|
||
all of a sudden, in the middle of whistling, the recording clicked off. I
|
||
fiddled around whistling some more, and the same thing happened. So I called
|
||
up the switch room and said, 'I'm Joe. I'm eight years old and I want to know
|
||
why when I whistle this tune the line clicks off.' He tried to explain it to
|
||
me, but it was a little too technical at the time. I went on learning. That
|
||
was a thing nobody was going to stop me from doing. The phones were my life,
|
||
and I was going to pay any price to keep on learning. I knew I could go to
|
||
jail. But I had to do what I had to do to keep on learning."
|
||
|
||
The phone is ringing when we walk back into Joe's apartment on Union Avenue.
|
||
It is Captain Crunch. The Captain has been following me around by phone,
|
||
calling up everywhere I go with additional bits of advice and explanation for
|
||
me and whatever phone phreak I happen to be visiting. This time the Captain
|
||
reports he is calling from what he describes as "my hideaway high up in the
|
||
Sierra Nevada." He pulses out lusty salvos of M-F and tells Joe he is about to
|
||
"go out and get a little action tonight. Do some phreaking of another kind, if
|
||
you know what I mean." Joe chuckles.
|
||
|
||
Page 59
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
The Official Phreaker's Manual
|
||
|
||
|
||
The Captain then tells me to make sure I understand that what he told me about
|
||
tying up the nation's phone lines was true, but that he and the phone phreaks
|
||
he knew never used the technique for sabotage. They only learned the technique
|
||
to help the phone company.
|
||
|
||
"We do a lot of troubleshooting for them. Like this New Hampshire/Missouri
|
||
WATS-line flaw I've been screaming about. We help them more than they know."
|
||
|
||
After we say good-bye to the Captain and Joe whistles him off the line, Joe
|
||
tells me about a disturbing dream he had the night before: "I had been caught
|
||
and they were taking me to a prison. It was a long trip. They were taking me
|
||
to a prison a long long way away. And we stopped at a Holiday Inn and it was
|
||
my last night ever using the phone and I was crying and crying, and the lady at
|
||
the Holiday Inn said, 'Gosh, honey, you should never be sad at a Holiday Inn.
|
||
You should always be happy here. Especially since it's your last night.' And
|
||
that just made it worse and I was sobbing so much I couldn't stand it."
|
||
|
||
Two weeks after I left Joe Engressia's apartment, phone-company security agents
|
||
and Memphis police broke into it. Armed with a warrant, which they left pinned
|
||
to a wall, they confiscated every piece of equipment in the room, including his
|
||
toy telephone. Joe was placed under arrest and taken to the city jail where he
|
||
was forced to spend the night since he had no money and knew no one in Memphis
|
||
to call.
|
||
|
||
It is not clear who told Joe what that night, but someone told him that the
|
||
phone company had an open-and-shut case against him because of revelations of
|
||
illegal activity he had made to a phone-company undercover agent.
|
||
|
||
By morning Joe had become convinced that the reporter from Esquire, with whom
|
||
he had spoken two weeks ago, was the undercover agent. He probably had ugly
|
||
thoughts about someone he couldn't see gaining his confidence, listening to him
|
||
talk about his personal obsessions and dreams, while planning all the while to
|
||
lock him up.
|
||
|
||
"I really thought he was a reporter," Engressia told the Memphis Press-Seminar.
|
||
"I told him everything...." Feeling betrayed, Joe proceeded to confess
|
||
everything to the press and police.
|
||
|
||
As it turns out, the phone company did use an undercover agent to trap Joe,
|
||
although it was not the Esquire reporter.
|
||
|
||
Ironically, security agents were alerted and began to compile a case against
|
||
Joe because of one of his acts of love for the system: Joe had called an
|
||
internal service department to report that he had located a group of defective
|
||
long-distance trunks, and to complain again about the New Hampshire/Missouri
|
||
WATS problem. Joe always liked Ma Bell's lines to be clean and responsive. A
|
||
suspicious switchman reported Joe to the security agents who discovered that
|
||
Joe had never had a long-distance call charged to his name.
|
||
|
||
Then the security agents learned that Joe was planning one of his phone trips
|
||
to a local switching office. The security people planted one of their agents
|
||
in the switching office. He posed as a student switchman and followed Joe
|
||
around on a tour. He was extremely friendly and helpful to Joe, leading him
|
||
around the office by the arm. When the tour was over he offered Joe a ride back
|
||
to his apartment house. On the way he asked Joe -- one tech man to another --
|
||
about "those blue boxers" he'd heard about. Joe talked about them freely,
|
||
talked about his blue box freely, and about all the other things he could do
|
||
|
||
Page 60
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
The Official Phreaker's Manual
|
||
|
||
with the phones.
|
||
|
||
The next day the phone-company security agents slapped a monitoring tape on
|
||
Joe's line, which eventually picked up an illegal call. Then they applied for
|
||
the search warrant and broke in.
|
||
|
||
In court Joe pleaded not guilty to possession of a blue box and theft of
|
||
service. A sympathetic judge reduced the charges to malicious mischief and
|
||
found him guilty on that count, sentenced him to two thirty-day sentences to be
|
||
served concurrently and then suspended the sentence on condition that Joe
|
||
promise never to play with phones again. Joe promised, but the phone company
|
||
refused to restore his service. For two weeks after the trial Joe could not be
|
||
reached except through the pay phone at his apartment house, and the landlord
|
||
screened all calls for him.
|
||
|
||
Phone-phreak Carl managed to get through to Joe after the trial, and reported
|
||
that Joe sounded crushed by the whole affair.
|
||
|
||
"What I'm worried about," Carl told me, "is that Joe means it this time. The
|
||
promise. That he'll never phone-phreak again. That's what he told me, that
|
||
he's given up phone-phreaking for good. I mean his entire life. He says he
|
||
knows they're going to be watching him so closely for the rest of his life
|
||
he'll never be able to make a move without going straight to jail. He sounded
|
||
very broken up by the whole experience of being in jail. It was awful to hear
|
||
him talk that way. I don't know. I hope maybe he had to sound that way. Over
|
||
the phone, you know."
|
||
|
||
He reports that the entire phone-phreak underground is up in arms over the
|
||
phone company's treatment of Joe. "All the while Joe had his hopes pinned on
|
||
his application for a phone-company job, they were stringing him along getting
|
||
ready to bust him. That gets me mad. Joe spent most of his time helping them
|
||
out. The bastards. They think they can use him as an example. All of sudden
|
||
they're harassing us on the coast. Agents are jumping up on our lines. They
|
||
just busted ------'s mute yesterday and ripped out his lines. But no matter
|
||
what Joe does, I don't think we're going to take this lying down."
|
||
|
||
Two weeks later my phone rings and about eight phone phreaks in succession say
|
||
hello from about eight different places in the country, among them Carl, Ed,
|
||
and Captain Crunch. A nationwide phone-phreak conference line has been
|
||
reestablished through a switching machine in --------, with the cooperation of
|
||
a disgruntled switchman.
|
||
|
||
"We have a special guest with us today," Carl tells me.
|
||
|
||
The next voice I hear is Joe's. He reports happily that he has just moved to a
|
||
place called Millington, Tennessee, fifteen miles outside of Memphis, where he
|
||
has been hired as a telephone-set repairman by a small independent phone
|
||
company. Someday he hopes to be an equipment troubleshooter.
|
||
|
||
"It's the kind of job I dreamed about. They found out about me from the
|
||
publicity surrounding the trial. Maybe Ma Bell did me a favor busting me.
|
||
I'll have telephones in my hands all day long."
|
||
|
||
"You know the expression, 'Don't get mad, get even'?" phone-phreak Carl asked
|
||
me. "Well, I think they're going to be very sorry about what they did to Joe
|
||
and what they're trying to do to us."
|
||
|
||
+-- End fourth file of four --+
|
||
|
||
Page 61
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
The Official Phreaker's Manual
|
||
|
||
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
|
||
$ $
|
||
$ THE HISTORY OF ESS $
|
||
$ --- ------- -- --- $
|
||
$ $
|
||
$ $
|
||
$ Another original phile by: $
|
||
$ $
|
||
$ $
|
||
$$$$$$$$$$$$-=>Lex Luthor<=-$$$$$$$$$$$
|
||
$ $
|
||
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
|
||
|
||
|
||
Of all the new 1960s wonders of telephone technology - satellites, ultra
|
||
modern Traffic Service Positions (TSPS) for operators, the picturephone, and so
|
||
on - the one that gave Bell Labs the most trouble, and unexpectedly became the
|
||
greatest development effort in Bell System's history, was the perfection of an
|
||
electronic switching system, or ESS.
|
||
|
||
It may be recalled that such a system was the specific end in view when the
|
||
project that had culminated in the invention of the transistor had been
|
||
launched back in the 1930s. After successful accomplishment of that planned
|
||
miracle in 1947-48, further delays were brought about by financial stringency
|
||
and the need for further development of the transistor itself. In the early
|
||
1950s, a Labs team began serious work on electronic switching. As early as
|
||
1955, Western Electric became involved when five engineers from the Hawthorne
|
||
works were assigned to collaborate with the Labs on the project. The president
|
||
of AT&T in 1956, wrote confidently, "At Bell Labs, development of the new
|
||
electronic switching system is going full speed ahead. We are sure this will
|
||
lead to many improvements in service and also to greater efficiency. The first
|
||
service trial will start in Morris, Ill., in 1959." Shortly thereafter, Kappel
|
||
said that the cost of the whole project would probably be $45 million.
|
||
|
||
But it gradually became apparent that the development of a commercially
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usable electronic switching system -in effect, a computerized telephone
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||
exchange - presented vastly greater technical problems than had been
|
||
anticipated, and that, accordingly, Bell Labs had vastly underestimated both
|
||
the time and the investment needed to do the job. The year 1959 passed without
|
||
the promised first trial at Morris, Illinois; it was finally made in November
|
||
1960, and quickly showed how much more work remained to be done. As time
|
||
dragged on and costs mounted, there was a concern at AT&T and some-thing
|
||
approaching panic at Bell Labs. But the project had to go forward; by this
|
||
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