Exploding the Phone : The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell (9780802193759)

by Lapsley, Phil

  The telephone call from the security agent scared him into going straight for a bit, he says. But it wore off. “That’s the problem with ‘scared straight,’ it doesn’t hold,” Acker says. “It lasted for maybe a few months.”

  And then?

  “And then I couldn’t resist doing it again.”

  Eleven

  The Phone Freaks of America

  JOE ENGRESSIA AND Bill Acker weren’t the only kids playing with the telephone in 1968. As early as 1964 teenagers had begun to discover an interesting quirk of the telephone system.Certain telephone exchanges in some areas of the country, notably Los Angeles and San Jose in California, had busy signals that were shared among all callers. An example was San Jose’s 291 exchange in the 408 area code. If you and I both happened to call busy numbers in 408-291 we would be connected, faintly, over the busy signal—along with anyone else who happened to have called a busy number at that moment. If we shouted we could hear each other. Of course, we’d be constantly annoyed by the baaa . . . baaa . . . baaa of the busy signal. And that busy signal was loud; our voices would be the background to the busy signal in the foreground. “It was an insane way to try to communicate,” recalls Jim Fettgather, a teenager at the time in San Jose. But talkable busy signals were free and they became surprisingly popular. Lots of people could be on one at once and that made them a hangout, a great way for bored kids to meet each other and trade phone numbers. They also served as a sort of subtle introduction. “I didn’t even realize that was the beginning of phone phreaking for me . . . I didn’t realize it then,” recalls Denny Teresi, another San Jose teenager.

  Busy signals weren’t the only type of low-tech conference call service the phone company inadvertently provided. Nonworking number recordings—you know, “You have reached a number that is disconnected or no longer in service, please check the number and dial again or call your operator to help you”—on certain types of telephone company switching equipment also could be used in the same way: everyone calling in to nonworking numbers in such an exchange would be connected. As with the busy signal, you had to talk over the repeating announcement, but the voice announcements were less annoying than the busy signals, and the long silence between the announcements provided more opportunity for people to talk. Best of all, sometimes the announcement recordings broke down and didn’t play at all. Highly prized, these so-called party line broken recording numbers were popular in the New York area in the early 1970s and remained so into the 1980s.

  It turned out there was something even better than busy signal and broken recording conferences, something exciting and magical: loop arounds. These were pairs of telephone numbers that the phone company used for testing its circuits. Loop telephone numbers varied from one city to another, but let’s use a pair from Los Angeles as an example: 213-286-0209 and 213-286-0210. The idea was that a phone company technician could call one number of the pair, say 286-0209, from one telephone line. This number would answer automatically and respond with a loud tone. The technician would then call the other side of the loop, the 0210 number, from a different telephone line. The tone on 0209 would go away and the equipment in the telephone company central office would connect the two lines, looping them around. The technician could now send a test signal down one line and hear it come back on the other line, allowing remote line measurements and troubleshooting.

  Admittedly, this doesn’t sound exciting and magical, but it was.Here’s why. First, you could talk over a loop around. If you called one side of a loop and I called the other, we were both connected and could talk to each other. Second, because they were telephone company test numbers, many loop arounds didn’t supe, that is, they didn’t return answering supervision. To telephone company billing equipment, calls to loop arounds looked like any other unanswered call. And that meant calls to such numbers were free, and they were so from anywhere in the country.

  Also, you could hang out on a loop around. You could call into one side of a loop and set the phone down on your desk and do your homework or whatever. Eventually somebody else would call the other side of the loop and you’d hear a ring-clunk sound followed by a voice saying “Hello?” Pick up the phone, stop doing your homework, and bingo: instant conversation.

  Best of all, though, it was all anonymous. If we both called a loop around, you and I could chat and you never needed to give out your telephone number—heck, you didn’t even need to give out your name. If you met somebody and wanted to stay in contact, but maybe didn’t quite trust him entirely, you could always give them one side of a loop around. That way you could communicate but he wouldn’t have your actual phone number—less chance of getting you in trouble that way. Loop arounds served the same function as the cheese box circuits that bookies had been using for years, a perfect electronic meeting place for clandestine activities. The difference was that these cheese boxes were part of the telephone network and came courtesy of the telephone company.

  Rick Plath, a blind phone phreak from Los Angeles, recalls the spread of loop arounds among teenagers in the mid- to late 1960s. “Al Diamond hired Saul, a friend of mine,” he says. Diamond, a phone phreak himself, ran a business in Los Angeles selling maps to stars’ homes. His workers, all LA teenagers, hung out on likely street corners flagging down tourists, trading maps for cash. Rick had told Saul all about loop arounds. Saul quickly spread the word to the other map workers. “Saul was a friend of Dave. Dave got Aaron involved,” Plath continues. “Aaron had a way of spreading the loops all over Fairfax high school. Through word of mouth it went through Fairfax and then into Beverly Hills.” Before long loop arounds had taken off in LA. “That’s what got loops really started in the LA area. Between a bunch of us we got loops publicized in the LA area without knowing what we were doing,” says Plath.

  Mark Bernay,‡ a Los Angeles–area telephone enthusiast and friend of Al Diamond, took the loop-around bug with him when graduated from college and moved to Seattle in 1967. The phone company certainly had loop-around telephone numbers up north, but Bernay was sad to find they were deserted and that nobody in Seattle knew about them. To help spread the word he printed up pieces of paper with loop numbers and put them on pay telephones throughout the area. Soon the loops in Seattle—they called them “hot lines” up thataway—were “constantly busy,” recalls Seattle phreak Dennis Heinz. “Mark Bernay really brought phreaking to the Seattle area,” he says. Loops were, in his words, the “social networking of the time,” the “Twitter and Facebook of the day.”

  ‡The pseudonym he went by at the time.

  All that, taken together, was exciting and magical. As Plath recalls, “It was like CB radio over the phone. It’s kind of cool that these circuits work the way they do. We didn’t care why, we just knew that they did.” Kind of cool. And incredibly unlikely. Consider that the phone company builds some obscure, mundane test feature into its network to allow technicians to do remote troubleshooting. Ma Bell turns her back for a second and the next thing you know a bunch of high school kids have remade it in to a free, anonymous communication system that the CIA would be proud of. It was almost as if loop arounds and broken recordings and talkable busy signals had been put there by the telephonic fates, a divine power that seemed to want kids to communicate—just not in ways that the designers of the telephone network had ever intended.

  If such fates exist, John Draper believes they have not been kind to him. Actually, that’s an understatement. It’s more that he believes they are out to screw him over, repeatedly and without lube. The fates arranged for a phone call that would change Draper’s life. The phone call would set events in motion that would first make him a countercultural legend and then lead him to prison. But the worst thing about the call, and the reason the fates were so clearly behind it, was this: it was a wrong number.

  A year earlier, in 1968, he was Airman First Class Draper, five-foot-eleven and 170 pounds, with blue eyes, thick black GI
-issue glasses, and a short military haircut. Draper was just finishing four years of active duty as a technician in the United States Air Force. He had grown up in rural towns in northern California, where he bristled under his father’s strict control and got beat up a lot in school. As a kid he loved electronics, so it was natural that he wound up maintaining radar systems on airbases in Maine and Alaska for Uncle Sam’s flyboys.

  Now it was 1969 and he was John Thomas Draper, a twenty-six-year-old civilian. He could wear his hair long, dress a little more casually (some would say sloppily), and smoke some pot. He had an honorable discharge, some GI technical training, and was taking classes part-time at the local college. He had a job as an electronics technician and work was plentiful in the heart of what would come to be known as Silicon Valley. And it was much, much warmer in San Jose than it was at some stupid radar station up near the Arctic Circle. Things were looking good for John Draper.

  Then the phone rang.

  Draper had been expecting a call from an old friend who had just returned from Vietnam, but a few words into the conversation he realized that it wasn’t his buddy on the line. It was a deep-voiced stranger, a guy named Denny, who had reached him by mistake. Despite the wrong number, Draper says, they struck up a conversation. Denny was “really interesting, especially when he mentioned he was into radio. For me, I was always interested in all aspects of radio, from the DJ end to the technical end,” Draper recalls. In fact, Draper was a volunteer DJ at a local radio station. When he was in the air force he had built a low-power FM radio transmitter to entertain the bored servicemen stationed with him up in Alaska. He had even built a pirate radio station in high school.

  Back in the day radio stations used to have listening lines, telephone numbers you could call to hear what was being broadcast by the radio station. They were used mostly by advertising agencies to check that radio stations were broadcasting the ads that their clients had purchased, but they were also sometimes used by radio fans to listen to faraway stations. Of course, they were long-distance calls, so they were expensive. Denny mentioned to Draper that he would call and listen to radio stations all over the country. He’d even call up the radio DJs and spend time talking to them too.

  Draper commented that Denny must have a big phone bill. Nah, Denny said, I never pay for my phone calls. Really? How does that work? I know a million ways to make free phone calls, Denny replied. Draper wanted to know more, but Denny said he had to go. Before they hung up Draper got Denny’s number.

  Sometime later Draper called Denny. Or, rather, he tried to. Instead of “Hello?” he got an earful of tone—a loud, constant, high-pitched tone. Puzzled, he asked the operator to dial Denny’s number for him. Same thing. She told him that the number he was calling was a telephone company test number. Had he written down the telephone number wrong? Whatever the reason, it looked like Draper’s freak connection to Denny was a onetime thing.

  The fates do not give up that easily, however. A few months later Draper and a friend were hanging out, listening to the radio, and they stumbled upon a pirate radio station. Intrigued, they decided to try to find the pirate broadcaster, not to complain, mind you, but to compliment him on his ingenuity and taste in music. They went for a spin around the neighborhood in Draper’s trusty green VW van, trying to locate the transmitter. The fates guided them and soon they found themselves chatting with the bootleg radio operator. During their conversation they discovered that the radio pirate just happened to know Denny. Far out! Before heading home Draper made sure to get Denny’s phone number from the pirate broadcaster.

  Once again, Draper gave Denny a call. No earful of tone this time, they picked up their conversation where it had left off. Soon they arranged to meet in person. Draper got in his van and drove over to Denny’s house in the suburbs of San Jose. A middle-aged man answered the door. Is Denny here? Sure, end of the hall and to the left. Draper walked down the hall and found a room with the lights out.

  “Denny?”

  “Yeah, buddy.”

  “Can I turn the lights on?”

  “Sure, buddy.”

  Turning on the lights Draper set eyes on the mysterious Denny Teresi for the first time: “a chubby kid that looks like a miniature cowboy and sounds like Paul Bunyan and talks eighty miles per hour,” Draper recalled. The sixteen-year-old didn’t have much use for lights. Denny was blind.

  The two continued their discussion from months back. What was up with that weird tone I got when I tried calling you? Oh, said Teresi, that was a loop around. Teresi explained how loop arounds worked, how you could call one side of a loop and somebody else could call the other side and the two of you could talk without ever having to know each other’s telephone numbers. But one side often had a tone on it, and that was what Draper had heard.

  Teresi had a wealth of seemingly incredible knowledge about the telephone system—how you could have conference calls by talking over broken busy signals and recordings, how you could use an electronic organ to make free phone calls, heck, how you could even just whistle free calls! Draper says he found it all unbelievable. It couldn’t be that easy. It just couldn’t.

  But it was, Teresi told him. To prove it, they drove over to Teresi’s friend Jimmy’s house. Jim Fettgather, also sixteen and also blind, was a talented musician who had a Farfisa electronic organ, the same type of organ that the Doors used on “Light My Fire” two years earlier. Fettgather was a virtuoso when it came to using his Farfisa to play those special notes that so charmed Mother Bell.

  Wires spilled out the back of Fettgather’s electronic organ and, through a pair of alligator clips, connected to the telephone line. Fettgather picked up the phone and dialed an 800 number. Just as it started ringing he whistled it off. Kerchink! He turned to his organ and, as Draper put it, “hammered out a call”: two keys at a time, twelve times in a row. Jangly pairs of tones—not quite music —filled the room. Seconds later Draper heard the ringing signal of the rerouted call going through: an expensive long-distance call made free, thanks to a pair of blind kids with an electronic organ.

  Draper was blown away. “He was really fast,” Draper recalls of Fettgather’s dialing. “I was just so flabbergasted that it was so simple. The whole network was controlled by tones! The whole long-distance network.”

  Teresi and Fettgather wanted to know if Draper could build them a multifrequency generator—an MFer, a blue box, a portable electronic gadget that would produce the same pairs of tones they were making with Fettgather’s electronic organ. Draper said he could.

  He returned home in a state of shock. “I had to build a blue box,” Draper recalls. And that night he did. It was a crude first effort that was difficult to use. It had seven switches: one for 2,600 Hz and six to generate the tones that made up multifrequency digits. Just like Fettgather’s electronic organ, you had to press two of the six buttons simultaneously to generate the right pairs of tones; it required practice to get the hang of it. But it worked. And Draper already had ideas for building more sophisticated boxes.

  Teresi, Fettgather, and some of their friends were in the habit of taking “whistle trips”—trips to places with pay phones where they could explore the network just by whistling. Just as Acker had discovered, not all trunk lines were created equal: some were vulnerable to whistling, some weren’t. San Francisco International Airport, thirty-five miles north of San Jose, happened to be wide open, and there was always somebody willing to give the kids a ride up to the airport in exchange for a few free long-distance calls. Several years earlier a Los Angeles phone phreak named Sid Bernay§ had discovered you could generate a nice, clean 2,600 Hz tone simply by covering one of the holes in the plastic toy bosun whistle that was given away as a prize in boxes of Cap’n Crunch cereal. Armed with their Cap’n Crunch whistles Fettgather and Teresi and friends would cluster around pay phones at the airport and go nuts. “We used to have a ball going up to San Francisco
,” Fettgather remembers. “I imagine we must have gotten quite a few looks . . . six or eight of us at these pay phones, whistling into these telephones, dialing long-distance numbers.”

  §The pseudonym he went by at the time. As a pseudonym, the surname “Bernay” among phone phreaks indicated membership in the Mark Bernay Society—an inside joke stemming from a prank phone call placed in Los Angeles during the late 1960s.

  With Draper in the club the whistle trips expanded. The original trips were just to find and use whistleable pay phones, but the whistle trips soon morphed into what they came to call “phone trips”—the idea of going to some oddball location simply for the joy of playing with whatever telephone system they had there. Where could you call from there? What did the calls sound like? What techniques could you use to make free calls? What if you did this? Or this? Let’s try it! It wasn’t just Draper, Fettgather, and Teresi; other phone phreaks in other areas of the country made similar excursions. Mark Bernay in Seattle, for example, made a special trip to the northernmost town in Washington, right near the Canadian border, just to see how its telephones worked.

  By late 1969 a network of phone phreaks had begun to develop. Like snowflakes forming out of moisture in cold winter air, it took just the right set of conditions for it to happen. Instead of humidity and temperature it was the presence of loop arounds and broken recordings and talkable busy signals—and, of course, people to talk on them. And, like snowflakes magically appearing, it was more accidental than planned.

  Fettgather had been talking to other kids on talkable busy signals in San Jose since about 1964. He learned about loop arounds in 1968 when he was at Camp Bloomfield, a summer camp for blind kids down in southern California. Because many of the loop arounds didn’t supe—that is, they were free calls—Fettgather says they “put all of us in San Jose in communication with folks all around the country.” It wasn’t long before Bill Acker in New York ran into Fettgather on the phone. Fettgather introduced Acker to Teresi. Teresi introduced Acker to Draper. The network expanded from there via word of mouth and chance telephonic encounters. The first time Bill Acker called a loop around and got another phreak on the other end of the loop, he recalls thinking it was the “coolest thing in the whole wide world!” You can still hear the amazement in his voice. “I was willing to work in isolation but to think that there were people out there that I could talk to . . .” Acker’s mind boggled.