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

free phone calls: they

could dial into phonecompany test switches, to long-distance route operators,

and into conference lines—which meant they could set up their own phreaker

conference calls. Quite simply, possession of a blue box gave the user the same

control and access as a Bell operator. When operator-controlled dialing to

Europe was introduced in 1963, phreakers with MF-ers found they could

directdial across the Atlantic, something ordinary subscribers couldn’t do

until 1970.

 

The only real flaw with blue boxes was that Bell Telephone’s accounts

department might become suspicious of subscribers who seemed to spend a lot of

time connected to the 1-800 numbers of, say, Holiday Inn or the army recruiting

office and might begin monitoring the line. Phreaking, after all, was

technically theft of

service, and phreakers could be prosecuted under various state and federal

laws.

 

To get around this, canny phreakers began to use public phone booths,

preferably isolated ones. The phone company could hardly monitor every public

telephone in the United States, and even when the accounts department realized

that a particular pay phone had been used suspiciously, the phreaker would have

long since disappeared.

 

By the late 1960s blue boxes had become smaller and more portable. The bulky

vacuum tubes mounted on a metal chassis had been replaced by transistors in

slim boxes only as large as their keypads. Some were built to look like

cigarette packs or transistor radios. Cleverer ones—probably used by drug

dealers or bookies—were actually working transistor radios that concealed the

components of an operational blue box within their wiring.

 

What made Bell’s technology particularly vulnerable was that almost anything

musical could be used to reproduce the tone frequencies. Musical instruments

such as flutes, horns, or organs could be made to re-create Bell’s notes, which

could then be taped, and a simple cassette player could serve as a primitive MF

device. One of the easiest ways to make a free call was to record the tones for

a desired number in the correct sequence onto a cassette tape, go to a phone,

and play the tape back into the mouthpiece. To Bell’s exasperation, some people

could even make free phone calls just by whistling.

 

Joe Engressia, the original whistling phreaker, was blind, and was said to have

been born with perfect pitch. As a child he became fascinated by phones: he

liked to dial nonworking numbers around the country just to listen to the

recording say, “This number is not in service.” When he was eight, he was

accidentally introduced to the theory of multifrequency tones, though he didn’t

realize it at the time. While listening to an out-of-service tape in Los

Angeles, he began whistling and the phone went dead. He tried it again, and the

same thing happened. Then he phoned his local office and reportedly said, “I’m

Joe. I’m eight years old and I want to know why when I whistle this tune, the

line clicks off.”

 

The engineer told Joe about what was sometimes known as talk-off, a phenomenon

that happened occasionally when one party to a conversation began whistling and

accidentally hit a 2600cycle tone. That could make the line think that the

caller had hung up, and cause it to go dead. Joe didn’t understand the

explanation then, but within a few years he would probably know more about it

than the engineer.

 

Joe became famous in 1971 when Ron Rosenbaum catalogued his phreaking skills in

the Esquire article. But he had first come to public attention two years

earlier, when he was discovered whistling into a pay phone at the University of

South Florida. Joe, by this time a twenty-year-old university student, had

mastered the science of multifrequency tones and, with perfect pitch, could

simply whistle the 2600cycle note down the line, and then whistle up any phone

number he wanted to call. The local telephone company, determined to stamp out

phreaking, had publicized the case, and Joe’s college had disciplined him.

Later, realizing that he was too well known to the authorities to continue

phreaking in Florida, he moved on to Memphis, which was where Rosenbaum found

him.

 

In 1970 Joe was living in a small room surrounded by the paraphernalia of

phreaking. Even more than phreaking, however, Joe’s real obsession was the

phone system itself. His ambition, he told Rosenbaum, was to work for Ma Bell.

He was in love with the phone system, and his hobby, he claimed, was something

he called phone tripping: he liked to visit telephone switching stations and

quiz the company engineers about the workings of the system. Often he knew more

than they did. Being blind, he couldn’t see anything, but he would run his

hands down the masses of wiring coiled around the banks of circuitry. He could

learn how the links were made just by feeling his way through the

connections in the wiring, and in this way, probably gained more knowledge than

most sighted visitors.

 

Joe had moved to Tennessee because that state had some interesting independent

phone districts. Like many phreakers, Joe was fascinated by the independents—

small, private phone companies not controlled by Bell—because of their

idiosyncrasies. Though all of the independents were linked to Bell as part of

the larger North American phone network, they often used different equipment

(some of it older), or had oddities within the system that phreakers liked to

explore.

 

By that time the really topflight phreakers were more interested in exploring

than making free calls. They had discovered that the system, with all of its

links, connections, and switches, was like a giant electronic playground, with

tunnels from one section to another, pathways that could take calls from North

America to Europe and back again, and links that could reach satellites capable

of beaming calls anywhere in the world.

 

One of the early celebrated figures was a New York-based phreaker who used his

blue box to call his girlfriend in Boston on weekends—but never directly.

First he would call a 1-800 number somewhere in the country, skip out of it

onto the international operator’s circuit, and surface in Rome, where he would

redirect the call to an operator in Hamburg. The Hamburg operator would assume

the call originated in Rome and accept the instructions to patch it to Boston.

Then the phreaker would speak to his girlfriend, his voice bouncing across the

Atlantic to a switch in Rome, up to Hamburg, and then back to Boston via

satellite. The delay would have made conversation difficult, but, of course,

conversation was never the point.

 

Few phreakers ever reached that level of expertise. The community was never

huge—there were probably never more than a few hundred real, diehard phone

phreaks—but it suddenly began to grow in the late 1960s as the techniques

became more widely known. Part of the impetus for this growth was the increased

access to conference lines, which allowed skills and lore to be more widelv

disseminated.

 

Conference lines—or conference bridges—are simply special switches that allow

several callers to participate in a conversation at the same time. The service,

in those days, was generally promoted to businesses, but bridges were also used

by the telephone company for testing and training. For instance, the 1121

conference lines were used to train Bell operators: they could dial the number

to hear a recording of calls being made from a pay phone, including the pings

of the coins as they dropped, so that they could become familiar with the

system. If two phreakers rang any one of the 1121 training numbers, they could

converse, though the constant pinging as the coins dropped on the recording was

distracting.

 

Far better were lines like 2111, the internal company code for Telex testing.

For six months in the late 1960s phreakers congregated on a disused 2111 test

line located somewhere in a telephone office in Vancouver. It became an

enormous clubhouse, attracting both neophyte and experienced MF-ers in a

continuing conference call. To participate, phreakers needed only to MF their

way through a 1-800 number onto the Vancouver exchange and then punch out 2111.

 

The clubhouse may have existed only in the electronic ether around a test

number in a switching office somewhere in Canada, but it was a meeting place

nonetheless.

 

Joe Engressia’s life in Memphis revolved around phreaker conference lines, but

when Rosenbaum talked to him, he was getting worried about being discovered.

 

“I want to work for Ma Bell. I don’t hate Ma Bell the way 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…. Once

I took an acid trip and was havin these auditory hallucinations … and all

of a sudden I had to phone phreak out of there. For some reason I had to call

Kansas City, but that’s all.”

 

Joe’s intuition was correct: he was indeed being monitored. Shortly after that

interview, agents from the phone company’s security department, accompanied by

local police, broke into his room and confiscated every bit of

telecommunications equipment. Joe was arrested and spent the night in jail.

 

The charges against him were eventually reduced from possession of a blue box

and theft of service to malicious mischief. His jail sentence was suspended.

But in return he had to promise never to phreak again—and to make sure he kept

his promise, the local phone company refused to restore his telephone line.2

 

One of Joe’s friends at that time was a man called John Draper, better known as

Captain Crunch. Like Joe, Draper was interested in the system: he liked to play

on it, to chart out the links and connections between phone switching offices,

overseas lines, and satellites. His alias came from the Quaker Oats breakfast

cereal Cap’n Crunch, which once, in the late 1960s, had included a tiny plastic

whistle in each box as a children’s toy. Unknown to the company, it could be

used to phreak calls.

 

The potential of the little whistle was said to have been discovered by

accident. The toy was tuned to a high-A note that closely reproduced the

2600cycle tone used by Bell in its long-distance lines. Kids demonstrating

their new toy over the phone to Granny in another city would sometimes find

that the phone went dead, which caused Bell to spend a perplexing few weeks

looking for the source of the problem.

 

Draper first became involved with phreaking in 1969, when he was twenty-six and

living in San Jose. One day he received what he later described as a “very

strange call” from a man who introduced himself as Denny and said he wanted to

show him something to do with musical notes and phones. Intrigued, Draper

visited Denny, who demonstrated how tones played on a Hammond organ could be

recorded and sent down the line to produce free long-distance calls. The

problem was that a recording had to be made for each number required, unless

Draper, who was an electronics engineer, could build a device that could com-bine the abilities of the organ and the recorder. The man explained that such a

device would be very useful to a certain group of blind kids, and he wanted to

know if Draper could help.

 

After the meeting Draper went home and immediately wired up a primitive

multifrequency transmitter—a blue box. The device was about the size of a

telephone. Ironically it wouldn’t work in San Jose (where long-distance calls

were still routed through an operator), so Draper had to drive back to San

Francisco to demonstrate it. To