Approaching Zero, Paul Mungo [good summer reads TXT] 📗
- Author: Paul Mungo
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the phone company was liberating technology, and not really criminal.
Phreakers had been carrying on their activities for almost a decade, forming an
underground community of electronic pirates long before the American public had
heard about them. In October 1971 Esquire magazine heralded the phreaker craze
in an article by Ron Rosenbaum entitled “The Secrets of the Little Blue Box,”
the first account of phreaking in a mass-circulation publication, and still the
only article to trace its beginnings. It was also undoubtedly the principal
popularizer of the movement. But of course Rosenbaum was only the messenger;
the subculture existed before he wrote about it and would have continued to
grow even if the article had never been published. Nonetheless, his piece had
an extraordinary impact: until then most Americans had thought of the phone, if
they thought of it at all, as an unattractive lump of metal and plastic that
sat on a desk and could be used to make and receive calls. That it was also the
gateway to an Alice-in-Wonderland world where the user controlled the phone
company and not vice versa was a revelation. Rosenbaum himself acknowledges
that the revelations contained in his story had far more impact than he had
expected at the time.
The inspiration for the first generation of phreakers was said to be a man
known as Mark Bernay (though that wasn’t his real name). Bernay was identified
in Rosenbaum’s article as a sort of electronic Pied Piper who traveled up and
down the West Coast of the United States, pasting stickers in phone booths,
inviting everyone to share his discovery of the mysteries of “loop-around-pairs,” a mechanism that allowed users to make toll-free calls.
Bernay himself found out about loop-around-pairs from a friendly telephone
company engineer, who explained that within the millions of connections and
interlinked local exchanges of what in those days made up the Bell network
there were test numbers used by engineers to check connections between the
exchanges. These numbers often occurred in consecutive pairs, say (213)-9001
and (213)- 9002, and were wired together so that a caller to one number was
automatically looped around to the other. Hence the name, loop-around-pairs.
Bernay publicized the fact that if two people anywhere in the country dialed
any set of consecutive test numbers, they could talk together for free. He
introduced a whole generation of people to the idea that the phone company
wasn’t an impregnable fortress: Ma Bell had a very exploitable gap in its
derenses that anyone could use, just by knowing the secret. Bernay, steeped in
the ethos of the sixties, was a visionary motivated by altruism—as well as by
the commonly held belief that the phone system had been magically created to be
used by anyone who needed it. The seeds he planted grew, over the next years,
into a full-blown social phenomenon.
Legend has it that one of the early users of Bernay’s system was a young man in
Seattle, who told a blind friend about it, who in turn brought the idea to a
winter camp for blind kids in Los Angeles. They dispersed back to their own
hometowns and told their friends, who spread the secret so rapidly that within
a year blind children throughout the country were linked together by the
electronic strands of the Bell system. They had created a sort of community, an
electronic clubhouse, and the web they spun across the country had a single
purpose: communication. The early phreakers simply wanted to talk to each other
without running up huge long-distance bills.
It wasn’t long, though, before the means displaced the end, and some of the
early phreakers found that the technology of the phone system could provide a
lot more fun than could be had by merely calling someone. In a few years
phreakers would learn other skills and begin to look deeper. They found a
labyrinth of electronic passages and hidden sections within the Bell network
and began charting it. Then they realized they were really looking at the
inside of a computer, that the Bell system was simply a giant network of
terminals—known as telephones—with a vast series of switches, wires, and
loops stretching all across the country. It was actual place, though it only
existed at the end of a phone
receiver, a nearly limitless electronic universe accessible by dialing numbers
on a phone. And what made this space open to phreakers was the spread of
electronic gadgets that would completely overwhelm the Bell system.
According to Bell Telephone, the first known instance of theft of long-distance
telephone service by an electronic device was discovered in 1961, after a local
office manager in the company’s Pacific Northwest division noticed some
inordinately lengthy calls to an out-of-area directory-information number. The
calls were from a studio at Washington State College, and when Bell’s engineers
went to investigate, they found what they described as “a strange-looking
device on a blue metal chassis” attached to the phone, which they immediately
nicknamed a “blue box.”
The color of the device was incidental, but the name stuck. Its purpose was to
enable users to make free long-distance calls, and it was a huge advancement on
simple loop-around-pairs: not only could the blue box set up calls to any
number anywhere, it would also allow the user to roam through areas of the Bell
system that were offlimits to ordinary subscribers.
The blue box was a direct result of Bell’s decision in the mid 1950’S to build
its new directdial system around multifrequency tones—musical notes generated
by dialing that instruct the local exchange to route the call to a specific
number. The tones weren’t the same as the notes heard when pressing the numbers
on a push-button phone: they were based on twelve electronically generated
combinations of six master tones. These tones controlled the whole system:
hence they were secret.
Or almost. In 1954 an article entitled “In-band Signal Frequency Signaling,”
appeared in the Bell System Technical System Journal, which described the
electronic signals used for routing long-distance calls around the country, for
“call completion” (hanging up), and for billing. The phone company then
released the rest of its secrets when the November 1960 issue of the same
journal described the frequencies of the tones used to dial the numbers.
The journal was intended only for Bell’s own technical staff, but the company
had apparently forgotten that most engineering colleges subscribed to it as
well. The articles proved to be the combination to Bell’s safe. Belatedly
realizing its error, Bell tried to recall the two issues. But they had already
become collectors’ items, endlessly photocopied and passed around among
engineering students all over the country.
Once Bell’s tone system was known, it was relatively simple for engineering
students to reproduce the tones, and then—by knowing the signaling methods—to
employ them to get around the billing system. The early blue boxes used vacuum
tubes (the forerunners of transistors) and were just slightly larger than the
telephones they were connected to. They were really nothing more than a device
that reproduced Bell’s multifrequency tones, and for that reason hard-core
phreakers called them MF-ers—for multifrequency transmitters. (The acronym was
also understood to stand for “motherfuckers,” because they were used to fuck
around with Ma Bell.)
Engineering students have always been notorious for attempting to rip off the
phone company. In the late 1950S Bell was making strenuous efforts to stamp out
a device that much later was nicknamed the red box—presumably to distinguish
it from the blue box. The red box was a primitive gizmo, often no more than an
army-surplus field telephone or a modified standard phone linked to an
operating Bell set. Legend has it that engineering students would wire up a red
box for Mom and Dad before they left for college so that they could call home
for free. Technically very simple, red boxes employed a switch that would send
a signal to the local telephone office to indicate that the phone had been
picked up. But the signal was momentary, just long enough to alert the local
office and cause the ringing to stop, but not long enough to send the signal to
the telephone office in the city where the call was originated. That was the
trick: the billing was set up in the originating office, and to the originating
office it would seem as though the phone was still ringing. When Pop took his
finger off the switch on the box, he and Junior could talk free of charge.
The red boxes had one serious drawback: the phone company could become
suspicious if it found that Junior had ostensibly spent a half an hour
listening to the phone ring back at the family homestead. A more obvious
problem was that Mom and Pop—if one believes the legend that red boxes were
used by college kids to call home—would quickly tire of their role in ripping
off the phone company only to make it easier for Junior to call and ask for
more money.
Inevitably there were other boxes, too, all exploiting other holes in the Bell
system. A later variation of the red box, sometimes called a black box, was
popular with bookies. It caused the ringing to cease prior to the phone being
picked up, thereby preventing the originating offlce from billing the call.
There was also another sort of red box that imitated the sound of coins being
dropped into the slot on pay phones. It was used to convince operators that a
call was being paid for.
The blue box, however, was the most sophisticated of all. It put users directly
in control of long-distance switching equipment. To avoid toll-call charges,
users of blue boxes would dial free numbers—out-of-area directory enquiries or
commercial 1-800 numbers—then reroute the call by using the tones in the
MF-er.
This is how it worked: long-distance calls are first routed through a
subscriber’s own local telephone office. The first digits tell the office that
the call is long-distance, and it is switched to an idle long-distance line. An
idle line emits a constant 2600cycle whistling tone, the signal that it is
ready to receive a call. As the caller finishes dialing the desired
number—called the address digits—the call is completed—all of which takes
place in the time it takes to punch in the number.
At the local office, billing begins when the long-distance call is answered and
ends when the caller puts his receiver down. The act of hanging up is the
signal to the local office that the call is completed. The local office then
tells the line that it can process any other call by sending it the same
2600cycle tone, and the line begins emitting the tone again.
A phreaker made his free call by first accessing, say, the 1-800 number for
Holiday Inn. His local office noted that it was processing a long-distance
call, found an idly whistling line, and marked the call down as routed to a
free number. At that point, before Holiday Inn answered, the phreaker pressed a
button on his MF-er, which reproduced Bell’s 2600cycle whistle. This signified
that the Holiday Inn call had been completed—or that the caller had hung up
prior to getting an answer—and it stood by to accept another call.
But at the local office no hanging-up signal had been received; hence the local
office presumed the Holiday Inn call was still going through. The phreaker,
still connected to a patiently whistling long-distance line, then punched in
the address digits of any number he wanted to be connected to, while his local
office assumed that he was really making a free call.
Blue boxes could also link into forbidden areas in the Bell system. Users of
MF-ers soon discovered that having a merrily whistling trunk line at their
disposal could open many more possibilities than just
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