I know this isn't PSP-related, but I found the original Esquire article on the Blue Box and thought those who want to reminisce will enjoy it.
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- *
* *
* *
* +----------------------------------------------+ *
* *
***** The AAG Proudly Presents The AAG Proudly Presents *****
by Ron Rosenbaum. -A story
so incredible it may even make you feel sorry for the phone company- Printed in the
October 1971 issue of Esquire Magazine. If you happen to be in a library and come
across a collection of Esquire magazines, the October 1971 issue is the first issue
printed in the smaller format. The story begins on page 116 with a picture of a blue
box.
--One Farad Cap, Atlantic Anarchist Guild
The Blue Box Is Introduced: Its Qualities
Are Remarked
I am in the expensively furnished living
room of Al Gilbertson (His real name has been changed.), the creator of the "blue
box." Gilbertson is holding one of his shiny black-and-silver "blue boxes"
comfortably in the palm of his hand, pointing out the thirteen little red push buttons
sticking up from the console.
He is dancing his fingers over the buttons, tapping out discordant beeping electronic
jingles. He is trying to explain to me how his little blue box does nothing less
than place the entire telephone system of the world, satellites, cables and all,
at the service of the blue-box operator, free of charge. "That's what it does.
Essentially it gives you the power of a super operator. You seize a tandem with this
top button," he presses the top button with his index finger and the blue box
emits a high-pitched cheep, "and like that" -- cheep goes the blue box
again -- "you control the phone company's long-distance switching systems from
your cute little Princes phone or any old pay phone. And you've got anonymity. An
operator has to operate from a definite location:
the phone company knows where she is and what she's doing. But with your beeper box,
once you hop onto a trunk, say from a Holiday Inn 800 (toll-free) number, they don't
know where you are, or where you're coming from, they don't know how you slipped
into their lines and popped up in that 800 number. They don't even know anything
illegal is going on. And you can obscure your origins through as many levels as you
like. You can call next door by way of White Plains, then over to Liverpool by cable,
and then back here by satellite. You can call yourself from one pay phone all the
way around the world to a pay phone next to you. And you get your dime back too."
"And they can't trace the calls? They can't charge you?"
"Not if you do it the right way. But
you'll find that the free-call thing isn't really as exciting at first as the feeling
of power you get from having one of these babies in your hand. I've watched people
when they first get hold of one of these things and start using it, and discover
they can make connections, set up crisscross and zigzag switching patterns back and
forth across the world. They hardly talk to the people they finally reach. They say
hello and start thinking of what kind of call to make next. They go a little crazy."
He looks down at the neat little package in his palm. His fingers are still dancing,
tapping out beeper patterns. "I think it's something to do with how small my
models are. There are lots of blue boxes around, but mine are the smallest and most
sophisticated electronically. I wish I could show you the prototype we made for our
big syndicate order." He sighs. "We had this order for a thousand beeper
boxes from a syndicate front man in Las Vegas. They use them to place bets coast
to coast, keep lines open for hours, all of which can get expensive if you have to
pay. The deal was a thousand blue boxes for $300 apiece. Before then we retailed
them for $1500 apiece, but $300,000 in one lump was hard to turn down. We had a manufacturing
deal worked out in the Philippines. Everything ready to go. Anyway, the model I had
ready for limited mass production was small enough to fit inside a flip-top Marlboro
box. It had flush touch panels for a keyboard, rather than these unsightly buttons,
sticking out. Looked just like a tiny portable radio. In fact, I had designed it
with a tiny transistor receiver to get one AM channel, so in case the law became
suspicious the owner could switch on the radio part, start snapping his fingers,
and no one could tell anything illegal was going on. I thought of everything for
this model -- I had it lined with a band of thermite which could be ignited by radio
signal from a tiny button transmitter on your belt, so it could be burned to ashes
instantly in case of a bust. It was beautiful. A beautiful little machine. You should
have seen the faces on these syndicate guys when they came back after trying it out.
They'd hold it in their palm like they never wanted to let it go, and they'd say,
'I can't believe it. I can't believe it.' You probably won't believe it until you
try it."
The Blue Box Is Tested: Certain Connections
Are Made
About eleven o'clock two nights later Fraser
Lucey has a blue box in the palm of his left hand and a phone in the palm of his
right. He is standing inside a phone booth next to an isolated shut-down motel off
Highway 1. I am standing outside the phone booth. Fraser likes to show off his blue
box for people. Until a few weeks ago when Pacific Telephone made a few arrests in
his city, Fraser Lucey liked to bring his blue box (This particular blue box, like
most blue boxes, is not blue. Blue boxes have come to be called "blue boxes"
either because 1) The first blue box ever confiscated by phone-company security men
happened to be blue, or 2) To distinguish them from "black boxes." Black
boxes are devices, usually a resistor in series, which, when attached to home phones,
allow all incoming calls to be made without charge to one's caller.) to parties.
It never failed: a few cheeps from his device and Fraser became the center of attention
at the very hippest of gatherings, playing phone tricks and doing request numbers
for hours. He began to take orders for his manufacturer in Mexico. He became a dealer.
Fraser is cautious now about where he shows
off his blue box. But he never gets tired of playing with it. "It's like the
first time every time," he tells me. Fraser puts a dime in the slot. He listens
for a tone and holds the receiver up to my ear. I hear the tone. Fraser begins describing,
with a certain practiced air, what he does while he does it. "I'm dialing an
800 number now. Any 800 number will do. It's toll free. Tonight I think I'll use
the ----- (he names a well-know rent-a-car company) 800 number. Listen, It's ringing.
Here, you hear it? Now watch." He places the blue box over the mouthpiece of
the phone so that the one silver and twelve black push buttons are facing up toward
me. He presses the silver button -- the one at the top -- and I hear that high-pitched
beep. "That's 2600 cycles per second to be exact," says Lucey. "Now,
quick. listen." He shoves the earpiece at me. The ringing has vanished.
The line gives a slight hiccough, there
is a sharp buzz, and then nothing but soft white noise. "We're home free now,"
Lucey tells me, taking back the phone and applying the blue box to its mouthpiece
once again. "We're up on a tandem, into a long-lines trunk. Once you're up on
a tandem, you can send yourself anywhere you want to go." He decides to check
out London first. He chooses a certain pay phone located in Waterloo Station. This
particular pay phone is popular with the phone-phreaks network because there are
usually people walking by at all hours who will pick it up and talk for a while.
of the box. "That's Key Pulse. It tells the tandem we're ready to give it instructions.
First I'll punch out KP 182 START, which will slide us into the overseas sender in
White Plains." I hear a neat clunk-cheep. "I think we'll head over to England
by satellite. Cable is actually faster and the connection is somewhat better, but
I like going by satellite. So I just punch out KP Zero 44. The Zero is supposed to
guarantee a satellite connection and 44 is the country code for England. Okay...
we're there. In Liverpool actually. Now all I have to do is punch out the London
area code which is 1, and dial up the pay phone. Here, listen, I've got a ring now."
I hear the soft quick purr-purr of a London ring. Then someone picks up the phone.
"Hello," says the London voice.
"Hello. Who's this?" Fraser asks.
"Hello. There's actually nobody here. I just picked this up while I was passing
by. This is a public phone. There's no one here to answer actually."
"Hello. Don't hang up. I'm calling from the United States.",
"Oh. What is the purpose of the call? This is a public phone you know."
"Oh. You know. To check out, uh, to find out what's going on in London. How
is it there?"
"Its five o'clock in the morning. It's raining now."
"Oh. Who are you?"
The London passerby turns out to be an
R.A.F. enlistee on his way back to the base in Lincolnshire, with a terrible hangover
after a thirty-six-hour pass.
He and Fraser talk about the rain. They
agree that it's nicer when it's not raining. They say good-bye and Fraser hangs up.
His dime returns with a nice clink.
"Isn't that far out," he says
grinning at me. "London, like that." Fraser squeezes the little blue box
affectionately in his palm. "I told ya this thing is for real. Listen, if you
don't mind I'm gonna try this girl I know in Paris. I usually give her a call around
this time. It freaks her out. This time I'll use the ------ (a different rent-a-car
company) 800 number and we'll go by overseas cable, 133; 33 is the country code for
France, the 1 sends you by cable. Okay, here we go.... Oh damn. Busy. Who could she
be talking to at this time?"
A state police car cruises slowly by the motel. The car does not stop, but Fraser
gets nervous. We hop back into his car and drive ten miles in the opposite direction
until we reach a Texaco station locked up for the night. We pull up to a phone booth
by the tire pump. Fraser dashes inside and tries the Paris number. It is busy again.
"I don't understand who she could
be talking to. The circuits may be busy. It's too bad I haven't learned how to tap
into lines overseas with this thing yet."
Fraser begins to phreak around, as the
phone phreaks say. He dials a leading nationwide charge card's 800 number and punches
out the tones that bring him the time recording in Sydney, Australia. He beeps up
the weather recording in Rome, in Italian of course. He calls a friend in Boston
and talks about a certain over-the-counter stock they are into heavily. He finds
the Paris number busy again. He calls up "Dial a Disc" in London, and we
listen to Double Barrel by David and Ansil Collins, the number-one hit of the week
in London. He calls up a dealer of another sort and talks in code. He calls up Joe
Engressia, the original blind phone-phreak genius, and pays his respects. There are
other calls. Finally Fraser gets through to his young lady in Paris.
They both agree the circuits must have
been busy, and criticize the Paris telephone system. At two-thirty in the morning
Fraser hangs up, pockets his dime, and drives off, steering with one hand, holding
what he calls his "lovely little blue box" in the other.
You Can Call Long Distance For Less Than
You Think
"You see, a few years ago the phone
company made one big mistake," Gilbertson explains two days later in his apartment.
"They were careless enough to let some technical journal publish the actual
frequencies used to create all their multi-frequency tones. Just a theoretical article
some Bell Telephone Laboratories engineer was doing about switching theory, and he
listed the tones in passing. At ----- (a well-known technical school) I had been
fooling around with phones for several years before I came across a copy of the journal
in the engineering library. I ran back to the lab and it took maybe twelve hours
from the time I saw that article to put together the first working blue box. It was
bigger and clumsier than this little baby, but it worked."
It's all there on public record in that
technical journal written mainly by Bell Lab people for other telephone engineers.
Or at least it was public. "Just try and get a copy of that issue at some engineering-school
library now. Bell has had them all red-tagged and withdrawn from circulation,"
Gilbertson tells me.
"But it's too late. It's all public
now. And once they became public the technology needed to create your own beeper
device is within the range of any twelve-year-old kid, any twelve-year-old blind
kid as a matter of fact. And he can do it in less than the twelve hours it took us.
Blind kids do it all the time. They can't build anything as precise and compact as
my beeper box, but theirs can do anything mine can do."
"How?"
"Okay. About twenty years ago A.T.&T.
made a multi-billion-dollar decision to operate its entire long-distance switching
system on twelve electronically generated combinations of twelve master tones. Those
are the tones you sometimes hear in the background after you've dialed a long-distance
number. They decided to use some very simple tones -- the tone for each number is
just two fixed single-frequency tones played simultaneously to create a certain beat
frequency. Like 1300 cycles per second and 900 cycles per second played together
give you the tone for digit 5. Now, what some of these phone phreaks have done is
get themselves access to an electric organ. Any cheap family home-entertainment organ.
Since the frequencies are public knowledge now -- one blind phone phreak has even
had them recorded in one of the talking books for the blind -- they just have to
find the musical notes on the organ which correspond to the phone tones. Then they
tape them. For instance, to get Ma Bell's tone for the number 1, you press down organ
keys FD5 and AD5 (900 and 700 cycles per second) at the same time. To produce the
tone for 2 it's FD5 and CD6 (1100 and 700 c.p.s). The phone phreaks circulate the
whole list of notes so there's no trial and error anymore."
He shows me a list of the rest of the phone
numbers and the two electric organ keys that produce them.
"Actually, you have to record these
notes at 3 3/4 inches-per-second tape speed and double it to 7 1/2 inches-per-second
when you play them back, to get the proper tones," he adds.
"So once you have all the tones recorded,
how do you plug them into the phone system?"
"Well, they take their organ and their
cassette recorder, and start banging out entire phone numbers in tones on the organ,
including country codes, routing instructions, 'KP' and 'Start' tones. Or, if they
don't have an organ, someone in the phone-phreak network sends them a cassette with
all the tones recorded, with a voice saying 'Number one,' then you have the tone,
'Number two,' then the tone and so on. So with two cassette recorders they can put
together a series of phone numbers by switching back and forth from number to number.
Any idiot in the country with a cheap cassette recorder can make all the free calls
he wants."
"You mean you just hold the cassette
recorder up the mouthpiece and switch in a series of beeps you've recorded? The phone
thinks that anything that makes these tones must be its own equipment?"
"Right. As long as you get the frequency
within thirty cycles per second of the phone company's tones, the phone equipment
thinks it hears its own voice talking to it. The original granddaddy phone phreak
was this blind kid with perfect pitch, Joe Engressia, who used to whistle into the
phone. An operator could tell the difference between his whistle and the phone company's
electronic tone generator, but the phone company's switching circuit can't tell them
apart. The bigger the phone company gets and the further away from human operators
it gets, the more vulnerable it becomes to all sorts of phone phreaking."
A Guide for the Perplexed
"But wait a minute," I stop Gilbertson.
"If everything you do sounds like phone-company equipment, why doesn't the phone
company charge you for the call the way it charges its own equipment?"
"Okay. That's where the 2600-cycle
tone comes in. I better start from the beginning."
The beginning he describes for me is a
vision of the phone system of the continent as thousands of webs, of long-line trunks
radiating from each of the hundreds of toll switching offices to the other toll switching
offices. Each toll switching office is a hive compacted of thousands of long-distance
tandems constantly whistling and beeping to tandems in far-off toll switching offices.
The tandem is the key to the whole system. Each tandem is a line with some relays
wih the capability of signalling any other tandem in any other toll switching office
on the continent, either directly one-to-one or by programming a roundabout route
through several other tandems if all the direct routes are busy. For instance, if
you want to call from New York to Los Angeles and traffic is heavy on all direct
trunks between the two cities, your tandem in New York is programmed to try the next
best route, which may send you down to a tandem in New Orleans, then up to San Francisco,
or down to a New Orleans tandem, back to an Atlanta tandem, over to an Albuquerque
tandem and finally up to Los Angeles.
When a tandem is not being used, when it's
sitting there waiting for someone to make a long-distance call, it whistles. One
side of the tandem, the side "facing" your home phone, whistles at 2600
cycles per second toward all the home phones serviced by the exchange, telling them
it is at their service, should they be interested in making a long-distance call.
The other side of the tandem is whistling 2600 c.p.s. into one or more long-distance
trunk lines, telling the rest of the phone system that it is neither sending nor
receiving a call through that trunk at the moment, that it has no use for that trunk
at the moment.
"When you dial a long-distance number
the first thing that happens is that you are hooked into a tandem. A register comes
up to the side of the tandem facing away from you and presents that side with the
number you dialed. This sending side of the tandem stops whistling 2600 into its
trunk line. When a tandem stops the 2600 tone it has been sending through a trunk,
the trunk is said to be "seized," and is now ready to carry the number
you have dialed -- converted into multi-frequency beep tones -- to a tandem in the
area code and central office you want.
Now when a blue-box operator wants to make
a call from New Orleans to New York he starts by dialing the 800 number of a company
which might happen to have its headquarters in Los Angeles. The sending side of the
New Orleans tandem stops sending 2600 out over the trunk to the central office in
Los Angeles, thereby seizing the trunk. Your New Orleans tandem begins sending beep
tones to a tandem it has discovered idly whistling 2600 cycles in Los Angeles. The
receiving end of that L.A. tandem is seized, stops whistling 2600, listens to the
beep tones which tell it which L.A. phone to ring, and starts ringing the 800 number.
Meanwhile a mark made in the New Orleans office accounting tape notes that a call
from your New Orleans phone to the 800 number in L.A. has been initiated and gives
the call a code number. Everything is routine so far. But then the phone phreak presses
his blue box to the mouthpiece and pushes the over the line again and assumes that
New Orleans has hung up because the trunk is whistling as if idle. The L.A. tandem
immediately ceases ringing the L.A. 800 number. But as soon as the phreak takes his
finger off the 2600 button, the L.A. tandem assumes the trunk is once again being
used because the 2600 is gone, so it listens for a new series of digit tones - to
find out where it must send the call.
Thus the blue-box operator in New Orleans
now is in touch with a tandem in L.A. which is waiting like an obedient genie to
be told what to do next. The blue-box owner then beeps out the ten digits of the
New York number which tell the L.A. tandem to relay a call to New York City. Which
it promptly does. As soon as your party picks up the phone in New York, the side
of the New Orleans tandem facing you stops sending 2600 cycles to you and stars carrying
his voice to you by way of the L.A. tandem. A notation is made on the accounting
tape that the connection has been made on the 800 call which had been initiated and
noted earlier. When you stop talking to New York a notation is made that the 800
call has ended.
At three the next morning, when the phone
company's accounting computer starts reading back over the master accounting tape
for the past day, it records that a call of a certain length of time was made from
your New Orleans home to an L.A. 800 number and, of course, the accounting computer
has been trained to ignore those toll-free 800 calls when compiling your monthly
bill.
"All they can prove is that you made
an 800 toll-free call," Gilbertson the inventor concludes. "Of course,
if you're foolish enough to talk for two hours on an 800 call, and they've installed
one of their special anti-fraud computer programs to watch out for such things, they
may spot you and ask why you took two hours talking to Army Recruiting's 800 number
when you're 4-F.
But if you do it from a pay phone, they
may discover something peculiar the next day -- if they've got a blue-box hunting
program in their computer -- but you'll be a long time gone from the pay phone by
then. Using a pay phone is almost guaranteed safe."
"What about the recent series of blue-box
arrests all across the country -- New York, Cleveland, and so on?" I asked.
"How were they caught so easily?" "From what I can tell, they made
one big mistake: they were seizing trunks using an area code plus 555-1212 instead
of an 800 number. Using 555 is easy to detect because when you send multi-frequency
beep tones of 555 you get a charge for it on your tape and the accounting computer
knows there's something wrong when it tries to bill you for a two-hour call to Akron,
Ohio, information, and it drops a trouble card which goes right into the hands of
the security agent if they're looking for blue-box user.
"Whoever sold those guys their blue
boxes didn't tell them how to use them properly, which is fairly irresponsible. And
they were fairly stupid to use them at home all the time.
"But what those arrests really mean
is than an awful lot of blue boxes are flooding into the country and that people
are finding them so easy to make that they know how to make them before they know
how to use them. Ma Bell is in trouble."
And if a blue-box operator or a cassette-recorder
phone phreak sticks to pay phones and 800 numbers, the phone company can't stop them?
"Not unless they change their entire
nationwide long-lines technology, which will take them a few billion dollars and
twenty years. Right now they can't do a thing. They're screwed."
Captain Crunch Demonstrates His Famous
Unit
There is an underground telephone network
in this country. Gilbertson discovered it the very day news of his activities hit
the papers. That evening his phone began ringing. Phone phreaks from Seattle, from
Florida, from New York, from San Jose, and from Los Angeles began calling him and
telling him about the phone-phreak network. He'd get a call from a phone phreak who'd
say nothing but, "Hang up and call this number."
When he dialed the number he'd find himself
tied into a conference of a dozen phone phreaks arranged through a quirky switching
station in British Columbia. They identified themselves as phone phreaks, they demonstrated
their homemade blue boxes which they called "M-Fers" (for "multi-frequency,"
among other things) for him, they talked shop about phone-phreak devices. They let
him in on their secrets on the theory that if the phone company was after him he
must be trustworthy. And, Gilbertson recalls, they stunned him with their technical
sophistication.
I ask him how to get in touch with the
phone-phreak network. He digs around through a file of old schematics and comes up
with about a dozen numbers in three widely separated area codes.
"Those are the centers," he tells
me. Alongside some of the numbers he writes in first names or nicknames: names like
Captain Crunch, Dr. No, Frank Carson (also a code word for a free call), Marty Freeman
(code word for M-F device), Peter Perpendicular Pimple, Alefnull, and The Cheshire
Cat. He makes checks alongside the names of those among these top twelve who are
blind. There are five checks.
I ask him who this Captain Crunch person
is.
"Oh. The Captain. He's probably the
most legendary phone phreak. He calls himself Captain Crunch after the notorious
Cap'n Crunch 2600 whistle."
(Several years ago, Gilbertson explains,
the makers of Cap'n Crunch breakfast cereal offered a toy-whistle prize in every
box as a treat for the Cap'n Crunch set. Somehow a phone phreak discovered that the
toy whistle just happened to produce a perfect 2600-cycle tone. When the man who
calls himself Captain Crunch was transferred overseas to England with his Air Force
unit, he would receive scores of calls from his friends and "mute" them
-- make them free of charge to them -- by blowing his Cap'n Crunch whistle into his
end.)
"Captain Crunch is one of the older
phone phreaks," Gilbertson tells me. "He's an engineer who once got in
a little trouble for fooling around with the phone, but he can't stop. Well, they
guy drives across country in a Volkswagen van with an entire switchboard and a computerized
super-sophisticated M-F-er in the back. He'll pull up to a phone booth on a lonely
highway somewhere, snake a cable out of his bus, hook it onto the phone and sit for
hours, days sometimes, sending calls zipping back and forth across the country, all
over the world...."
Back at my motel, I dialed the number he
gave me for "Captain Crunch" and asked for G---- T-----, his real name,
or at least the name he uses when he's not dashing into a phone booth beeping out
M-F tones faster than a speeding bullet and zipping phantomlike through the phone
company's long-distance lines. When G---- T----- answered the phone and I told him
I was preparing a story for Esquire about phone phreaks, he became very indignant.
"I don't do that. I don't do that
anymore at all. And if I do it, I do it for one reason and one reason only. I'm learning
about a system. The phone company is a System. A computer is a System, do you understand?
If I do what I do, it is only to explore a system. Computers, systems, that's my
bag. The phone company is nothing but a computer."
A tone of tightly restrained excitement
enters the Captain's voice when he starts talking about systems. He begins to pronounce
each syllable with the hushed deliberation of an obscene caller.
"Ma Bell is a system I want to explore.
It's a beautiful system, you know, but Ma Bell screwed up. It's terrible because
Ma Bell is such a beautiful system, but she screwed up. I learned how she screwed
up from a couple of blind kids who wanted me to build a device. A certain device.
They said it could make free calls. I wasn't interested in free calls. But when these
blind kids told me I could make calls into a computer, my eyes lit up. I wanted to
learn about computers. I wanted to learn about Ma Bell's computers. So I build the
little device, but I built it wrong and Ma Bell found out. Ma Bell can detect things
like that. Ma Bell knows. So I'm strictly rid of it now. I don't do it. Except for
learning purposes." He pauses. "So you want to write an article. Are you
paying for this call? Hang up and call this number." He gives me a number in
a area code a thousand miles away of his own. I dial the number. "Hello again.
This is Captain Crunch. You are speaking to me on a toll-free loop-around in Portland,
Oregon. Do you know what a toll-free loop around is? I'll tell you.
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
302 956-0042. 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 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?"
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 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?"
"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 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 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 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. 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.
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 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 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
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 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 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."
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 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?"
"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?"
"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."
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.
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.