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

his surprise it worked perfectly. “Stay low,”

he told the youngsters. “This thing’s illegal.”

 

But the blind kids were already into phreaking in a big way. They had already

discovered the potential of the Cap’n Crunch plastic whistle, and had even

found that to make it hit the 2600cycle tone every time, all it needed was a

drop of glue on the outlet hole.

 

Draper began to supply blue boxes to clients—generally unsighted youngsters—

in the Bay Area and beyond. He was also fascinated by the little whistle, and

early the next year, when he took a month’s vacation in England, he took one

with him. When a friend rang him from the States, Draper blew the little toy

into the phone, sending the 2600cycle “on-hook” (hanging-up) signal to the

caller’s local office in America. The “on-hook” tone signified that the call

had been terminated, and the U.S. office—where billing was originated—stopped

racking up toll charges. But because the British phone system didn’t respond to

the 2600cycle whistle, the connection was maintained, and Draper could continue the conversation for free. He only used the whistle once in England, but

the incident became part of phreaker legend and gave Draper his alias.

 

While in Britain, Draper received a stream of transatlantic calls from his

blind friends. One of them, who lived in New York, had

discovered that Bell engineers had a special code to dial England to check the

new international directdial system, which was just coming on-line. The access

code was 182, followed by a number in Britain. All of the calls placed in this

way were free. The discovery spread rapidly among the phreaker community;

everyone wanted to try directdialing to England, but since no one knew anyone

there, Draper was the recipient of most of the calls.

 

This was, of course, long before the days when people would routinely make

international calls. Even in America, where the phone culture was at its most

developed, no one would casually pick up a telephone and call a friend halfway

across the world. An international call, particularly a transatlantic call, was

an event, and if families had relatives abroad, they would probably phone them

only once a year, usually at Christmas. The call could easily take half a day

to get through, the whole family would take turns talking, and everyone would

shout—in those days, perhaps in awe of the great distance their voices were

being carried, international callers always shouted. It would take another two

decades before transatlantic calls became as commonplace as ringing across the

country.

 

Naturally the British GPO (General Post Office), who ran the U.K. telephone

system in those days, became somewhat suspicious of a vacationer who routinely

received five or six calls a day from the United States. They began monitoring

Draper’s line; then investigators were sent to interview him. They wanted to

know why he had been receiving so many calls from across the Atlantic. He

replied that he was on holiday and that he supposed he was popular, but the

investigators were unimpressed. Draper immediately contacted his friends in

America and said, “No more.”

 

At about this time, Draper had become the king of phreakers. He had rigged up a

VW van with a switchboard and a high-tech MF-er and roamed the highways in

California looking for isolated telephone booths. He would often spend hours at

these telephones, sending calls around the world, bouncing them off

communications satellites, leapfrogging them from the West Coast to London to

Moscow to Sydney and then back again.

 

The Captain also liked to stack up tandems, which are the instruments that send

the whistling tone from one switching office to another. What the Captain would

do is shoot from one tandem right across the country to another, then back

again to a third tandem, stacking them up as he went back and forth, once

reportedly shooting across America twenty times. Then he might bounce the call

over to a more exotic place, such as a phone box in London’s Victoria Station,

or to the American embassy in Moscow. He didn’t have anything to say to the

startled commuter who happened to pick up the phone at Victoria, or to the

receptionist at the embassy in Moscow—that wasn’t the point. Sometimes he

simply asked about the weather.

 

The unit he carried in the back of the van was computer operated, and Draper was

proud of the fact that it was more powerful and faster than the phone company’s

own equipment. It could, he claimed, “do extraordinary things,” and the

vagueness of the statement only added to the mystique.

 

Once, making a call around the world, he sent a call to Tokyo, which connected

him to India, then Greece, then South Africa, South America, and London, which

put him through to New York, which connected him to an L.A. operator—who

dialed the number of the phone booth next to the one he was using. He had to

shout to hear himself but, he claimed, the echo was “far out.” Another time,

using two phone booths located side by side, Draper sent his voice one way

around the world from one of the telephones to the other, and simultaneously

from the second phone booth he placed a call via satellite in the other

direction back to the first phone. The trick had absolutely no practical value,

but the Captain was much more interested in the mechanics of telecommunications

than in actually calling anyone. “I’m learning about a system,” he once said.

“The phone company is a system, a computer is a system. Computers and systems—

that’s my bag.”

 

But by this time the Captain was only stating the obvious. To advanced

phreakers the system linking the millions of phones around the world—that

spider’s web of lines, loops, and tandems—was infinitely more interesting than

anything they would ever hope to see. Most of the phreakers were technology

junkies anyway, the sort of kids who took apart radios to see how they worked,

who played with electronics when they were older, and who naturally progressed

to exploring the phone system, if only because it was the biggest and best

piece of technology they could lay their hands on. And the growing awareness

that they were liberating computer technology from Ma Bell made their hobby

even more exciting.

 

In time even Mark Bernay, who had helped spread phone phreaking across America,

found that his interests were changing. By 1969, he had settled in the Pacific

Northwest and was working as a computer programmer in a company with access to

a large time-share mainframe—a central computer accessed by telephone that was

shared among hundreds of smaller companies. Following normal practice, each

user had his own log-in—identification code, or ID—and password, which he

would need to type in before being allowed access to the computer’s files. Even

then, to prevent companies from seeing each other’s data, users were confined

to their own sectors of the computer.

 

But Bernay quickly tired of this arrangement. He wrote a program that allowed

him to read everyone else’s ID and password, which he then used to enter the

other sectors, and he began leaving messages for users in their files, signing

them “The Midnight Skulker.” He didn’t particularly want to get caught, but he

did want to impress others with what he could do; he wanted some sort of

reaction. When the computer operators changed the passwords, Bernay quickly

found another way to access them. He left clues about his identity in certain

files, and even wrote a program that, if activated, would destroy his own

passwordcatching program. He wanted to play, to have his original program

destroyed so that he could write another one to undo what he had, in effect,

done to himself, and then reappear. But the management refused to play. So he

left more clues, all signed by “The Midnight Skulker.”

 

Eventually the management reacted: they interrogated everyone who had access to

the mainframe, and inevitably, one of Bernay’s colleagues fingered him. Bernay

was fired.

 

When Rosenbaum wrote his article in 1971 the practice of breaking into

computers was so new and so bizarre, it didn’t even have a name. Rosenbaum

called it computer freaking—thef used to distinguish it from ordinary phone

phreaking. But what was being described was the birth of hacking.

 

It was Draper, alias Captain Crunch, who, while serving a jail sentence,

unintentionally spread the techniques of phreaking and hacking to the

underworld—the real underworld of criminals and drug dealers. Part of the

reason Draper went to jail, he now says, was because of the Esquire article: “I

knew I was in trouble as soon as I read it.” As a direct result of the article,

five states set up grand juries to investigate phone phreaking and,

incidentally, Captain Crunch’s part in it. The authorities also began to

monitor Draper’s movements and the phones he used. He was first arrested in

1972, about a year after the article appeared, while phreaking a call to

Sydney, Australia. Typically, he wasn’t actually speaking to anyone; he had

called up a number that played a recording of the Australian Top Ten.

 

Four years later he was convicted and sent to Lompoc Federal Prison in

California for two months, which was where the criminal classes first learned

the details of his techniques. It was, he says, a matter of life or death. As

soon as he was inside, he was asked to cooperate and was badly beaten up when

he refused. He realized that in order to survive, he would have to share his

knowledge. In jail, he figured, it was too easy to get killed. “It happens all

the time. There are just too many members of the ‘Five Hundred Club,’ guys who

spend most of their time pumping iron and lifting five-hundred-pound weights,”

 

he says.

 

So he picked out the top dog, the biggest, meanest, and strongest inmate, as

his protector. But in return Draper had to tell what he knew. Every day he gave

his protector a tutorial about phreaking: how to set up secure loops, or

eavesdrop on other telephone conversations. Every day the information was

passed on to people who could put it to use on the outside. Draper remains

convinced that the techniques that are still used by drug runners for computer

surveillance of federal agents can be traced back to his tutorials.

 

But criminals were far from the only group to whom Draper’s skills appealed.

Rosenbaum’s 1971 article introduced Americans for the first time to a new

high-tech counterculture that had grown up in their midst, a group of

technology junkies that epitomized the ethos of the new decade. As the sixties

ended, and the seventies began, youth culture—that odd mix of music, fashion,

and adolescent posturing—had become hardened and more radical. Woodstock had

succumbed to Altamont; Haight-Ashbury to political activism; the Berkeley Free

Speech Movement to the Weathermen and the Students for a Democratic Society.

 

Playing with Ma Bell’s phone system was too intriguing to be dismissed as just

a simple technological game. It was seen as an attack on corporate America—or

“Amerika,” as it was often spelt then to suggest an incipient Nazism within the

state—and phreaking, a mostly apolitical pastime, was adopted by the radical

movement. It was an odd mix, the high-tech junkies alongside the theatrical

revolutionaries of the far left, but they were all part of the counterculture.

 

Draper himself was adopted by the guru of the whole revolutionary movement.

Shortly after his arrest, he was contacted by Abbie Hoffman, the cofounder of

the Youth International Party Line (YIPL). Hoffman invited Draper to attend the

group’s 1972 national convention in Miami and offered to organize a campaign

fund for his defense.

 

At the time Hoffman was the best-known political activist in America. An

anti-Vietnam war campai~ner, a defendant in the Chicago Seven trial,