Approaching Zero, Paul Mungo [good summer reads TXT] 📗

ripping off

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