Regardless, the upshot was that if you were putting together a cast of characters for a hacker movie, you’d have a hard time doing better than the original 2111 gang. They began calling themselves phone freaks—back in those days, they spelled it with an “f”—and even went so far as to create an informal organization called the PFA: the Phone Freaks of America. Joe Engressia quickly found himself elected president and recalls his inaugural speech: “I said, ‘Well, my pledge to you as president is that any knowledge I have I’ll share with you and do my best to help people learn about phones, because knowledge shared is knowledge expanded, and that’s enough of a presidential speech.’ We were on a conference call and people clapped, probably because the speech wasn’t so long that they would get bored.”
It was a golden era, and it was the community that made it so. “The 2111 conference was just a blast,” says Seattle phone phreak Bob Gudgel. “It was a huge part of my life. I met a lot of great people on it. I have really, really good memories of those days.” One of the keys was that it was big enough to be fun but not so large that people had to be overly paranoid. Of course, this didn’t stop some people from trying. Bill Acker recalls getting a phone call one day from a mysterious person who identified himself only as a representative of the International Society of Telephone Enthusiasts, or ISTE. Acker remembers this person’s opening words: “We are concerned.” Specifically, his mystery caller was concerned that Acker was talking to too many people and doing too many things and was somehow going to mess the whole hobby up for everybody. Acker later asked Joe Engressia if he knew anything about this. “Oh, that’s just B. David,” said Engressia. Engressia explained that he was an old phone phreak who seemed to love paranoia and spy stuff. Don’t worry about him, said Engressia. Acker and Engressia went back to their conference calls.
It was on one of those conference calls that John Draper discovered a new identity for himself. For reasons of anonymity—and, honestly, just for the fun of it—it was common for phone phreaks to go by nicknames or handles. Bill Acker was “Bill from New York,” Jim Fettgather was “Mr. Westin,” the members of the Mark Bernay Society all had their Bernay handles—Al Bernay, Bob Bernay, Mark Bernay, Sid Bernay, etc. One day Draper and Engressia were talking about using a Cap’n Crunch whistle to make their beloved 2,600 Hz tone, Engressia recalls, when Draper suddenly said, “You know, I think I’ll just call myself Captain Crunch. That’d be a good name.” Engressia immediately liked it. “It just fit him somehow,” he remembers. “It was just a good name for him. We called him ‘Captain’ a lot.”
Captain Crunch was born.
Photo Insert
A Chappe optical telegraph station at Louvre, Paris. Image courtesy Wikipedia
Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor of the electric telegraph, circa 1860. Photo courtesy Library of Congress
A telegraph key and sounder, circa 1890. The electrical telegraph made the optical telegraph obsolete, sending messages across wires in an instant. Photo courtesy Douglas Palmer
Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, circa 1920. Photo courtesy Harris & Ewing, Library of Congress
A re-creation of Bell’s original telephone. Photo courtesy Detroit Publishing Co., Library of Congress
The original Strowger switch from Automatic Electric Company, 1890. Photo courtesy AT&T Archives and History Center
Long-distance operators at “cord boards” circa 1945. Well until mid-century the operators’ hands, arms, and brains were the workhorses of long-distance telephone switching. Photo courtesy National Archives
The inner workings of a bank of Strowger switches showing the ratchets and pawls and assorted mechanical clockwork required to automate telephone switching in the early 1900s.
Photo courtesy Túrelio/Wikimedia Commons
A portion of the magnificent 4A toll crossbar switch, 1957. The brains of the long-distance network, the 4A would enable truly automated long-distance telephone calls that customers could dial themselves. Photo courtesy AT&T Archives and History Center
A 1950 magazine ad describing the multifrequency signaling system; the ad even went so far as to give the musical equivalents of the MF digits.
A Woolworth’s ad for the Davy Crockett Cat and Canary Bird Call Flute, circa 1955, and the genuine article itself—the toy that would be the basis for David Condon’s whistled exploration of the telephone network. Photos courtesy Hakes.com
Charlie Pyne (seated), Tony Lauck (standing), and Paul Heckel (on the phone) as featured in Fortune magazine, 1966. Photo courtesy Fortune
Pyne’s Freshman Adviser Report at Harvard University, 1963. Image courtesy Charlie Pyne
Joe Engressia, 1968. Photo courtesy AP Images
Bill Acker, 1973. Photo courtesy Bob Gudgel
Bob Gudgel, Jay Dee Pritchard, and John “Captain Crunch” Draper on a phone trip in Duvall, Washington, 1971. Photo courtesy Bob Gudgel
A Cap’n Crunch Bo’sun Whistle. Photo courtesy Richard Kashdan
The Fine Arts 13 classified ad from the Harvard Crimson, 1967.
Front page of the first issue of the Youth International Party Line.
Assorted blue boxes, 1961 through the late 1970s. Photos courtesy Ed Turnley or author unless otherwise indicated
Steve Wozniak with blue box in the dorms at Berkeley, 1970s.
Wozniak’s blue box. Photo courtesy of the Computer History Museum
Bernard Cornfeld and friends, 1974. The millionaire financier would eventually be convicted of Fraud by Wire for using one of Wozniak’s blue boxes. Photo courtesy AP Images
Chic Eder, the one-man crime wave and FBI informant who provided the feds with a tape recording of John Draper wiretapping their San Francisco office. Photo courtesy FBI
A 16-button AUTOVON telephone, whose red-colored fourth column of precedence buttons made the military telephone network a sensitive and seemingly irresistible target for certain phone phreaks. Photo courtesy Wayne Merit, JKL Museum of Telephony
Security Agent Earl Conners and AT&T Attorney Bill Caming testifying before the U.S. House of Representatives after news of the Greenstar toll fraud surveillance system broke, February, 1975. Photo courtesy George Tames/The New York Times/Redux
Ken Hopper and Walter Heinze in the Telephone Crime Lab. Photo courtesy Ken Hopper
As this joke ad illustrates, the security department at Bell of Pennsylvania apparently had a sense of humor about the phone phreaks at Carnegie Mellon University. Image courtesy Ken Hopper
Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey, 1960s. Photo courtesy AT&T Archives and History Center
Replica of the first transistor, invented at Bell Labs in 1947. Photo courtesy AT&T Archives and History Center
MCI magazine ad, 1980, showing their long-distance rates to be about ½ of AT&T’s.
Twelve
The Law of Unintended Consequences
II’S A FUNNY thing, isn’t it, how you never can tell where things are going to go. You set out to do some thing, some simple, straightforward thing. Let’s say you even succeed at it. But because of some niggling detail you didn’t think of, some connection you didn’t quite anticipate, a freak chance that you didn’t factor in, in the bigger picture things go totally off the rails.
It’s called the Law of Unintended Consequences and it has sharp, pointy teeth.
It happened in the 1930s when Bell Labs was busy inventing the multifrequency signaling system. There they were, telephone company scientists and engineers just trying to figure out a way to put through long-distance calls quickly and efficiently and automatically. But they overlooked the fact that there were clever people out there and that their system was wide open to anyone who could generate a pair of tones. You can forgive them for this. Who knew from hackers in the 1930s or ’40s? But the next thing you know, it’s the 1960s and—bleeeeep kerchink—you
r network has blind kids and mobsters and college students making free phone calls with blue boxes.
It happened again in October 1970 when the phone company busted a guy in San Francisco for selling blue boxes. Al Gilbertson¶ had learned about blue boxes in the late ’60s while he was a grad student at a prestigious East Coast engineering school. “I had heard a rumor about a blue box, that phone company people had these things,” he says. “And apparently some bookies used them, this is what I understood. I heard a whiff of this. The next thing I heard was in the newspaper: a guy named Joe Engressia, a blind kid down in Florida, got busted for whistling 2,600 cycles per second down the phone line. Well, with those two pieces of information I went to the engineering library and looked it up in the Bell System Technical Journal and there were the goddamn codes.” Gilbertson shakes his head in disbelief as he recalls his discovery.
¶The pseudonym he went by at the time.
About three days later he had built his first blue box. “It was amazing how much fun you could have with it,” he says. Despite this distraction, Gilbertson somehow managed to complete his dissertation and finish graduate school. PhD in hand, he moved out to San Francisco. After a brief career as a physics postdoc, he decided to try something more entrepreneurial. Maybe he’d start a company, he thought. Maybe he’d make a product, perhaps an electronics product. Say, blue boxes.
“That was a mistake,” he recalls with a laugh. “I wasn’t a real sophisticated business guy at the time and I didn’t understand the law.” The venture ended predictably. “I got arrested by the phone company.”**
**Of course, the telephone company did not have power of arrest, but getting “busted” or “arrested” by the phone company was a common phrase among phone phreaks in those days. It speaks to the telephone company’s immense size and perceived power. Today nobody would say they “got arrested by Google,” for example, but being arrested by the phone company made sense back then.
From the phone company’s perspective, it was about as straightforward as it gets. Some guy is using and making and, worst of all, selling blue boxes. Bust him. Check. What’s next? Is it lunchtime yet? But it’s on occasions such as this—the execution of simple, straightforward projects—that the Law of Unintended Consequences likes to kick in. It played out in slow motion over the next few months and it had two triggers.
First there were the phone calls from the phone phreaks. For obvious reasons, news of a blue box bust was of great interest to the phreaks. Even though they didn’t know Gilbertson, several of the phreaks, including Bill Acker, took it upon themselves to look him up in the phone book and whistle up a call to him. Their motivations were mixed. Partially it was to reach out to someone who might be a fellow telephone aficionado and get the details of what happened. As Acker puts it, “If the phone company’s mad at him, he must be somebody we want to know!”
But their call was also to chide Gilbertson for selling blue boxes, something that the phone phreaks frowned upon almost as much as the phone company. By this time the phreaks had developed a sort of informal code of conduct. It was not universally agreed upon or followed within the phreaking community but, as Tom Politeo remembers it, it had three basic parts. First, don’t seek publicity—the more people who know about phone phreaking, the more likely it was that the phone company would clamp down on it. Second, don’t call during peak hours—this was to avoid busying out circuits, inconveniencing people, and drawing unwanted attention. And third, don’t profit from phreaking. Anyone selling blue boxes was obviously violating this third commandment, and their customers would probably end up causing other problems too. “It sounds funny to say it about something that was already an illegal hobby,” Acker says, “but those people gave phreaking a bad name.”
Gilbertson was a bit older than the mostly teenage phreaks and his motivations were somewhat different. Acker remembers, “He didn’t seem to love the phone the way we did.” Regardless, the phone calls introduced Gilbertson to the cross-country network of phone phreaks and their reindeer games. “They were young and foolish and so was I,” Gilbertson says. “We had tons of fun.”
The second trigger to the Law of Unintended Consequences was Gilbertson’s pride. He wasn’t about to take his bust sitting down. Although he denies revenge was a motivation, he says that “I thought it made a great story, and I was interested in not just being snuffed out by the phone company.” Moreover, his inner engineer was offended that the phone company had designed such a vulnerable system and then got huffy when people took advantage of it. “It was that they were so sloppy! What the Christ did they think, that there’s not any bad guys in this world?”
Gilbertson complained to his attorney about this. “Well, I know these guys at Esquire magazine,” Gilbertson recalls his attorney saying. “And I said, ‘Well, call ’em up!’”
The phone company didn’t know it yet, but that was the moment when things started to go off the rails.
Ron Rosenbaum read the story memo from an editor at Esquire. Some guy out in California had been busted for manufacturing something called a blue box, some sort of telephone fraud device. More interesting was the community it described—a “world of electronics whizzes, teenage blind kids, a whole network of people,” Rosenbaum recalls. “You know, it sounded completely fascinating. These people had managed to create a sort of network, a parallel communications network, of their own.”
Rosenbaum was just twenty-four, a few years out of Yale and in the early days of what would turn out to be a legendary writing career. For several years he had written for the Village Voice, New York City’s hip alternative weekly newspaper. Esquire—“the magazine for men,” as it billed itself, half a million readers strong—wanted to know if Rosenbaum would be interested in covering the phone phreak story.
“It immediately seemed to me to be a story I’d want to do,” Rosenbaum says.
In the spring of 1971 Rosenbaum flew out to San Francisco to meet with Gilbertson and his attorney. “He showed me a blue box, told me the basics of how it was manufactured, how the tones worked, how you produce the phone company tones by merging two different cycles,” Rosenbaum remembers.
Gilbertson passed on contact information for the kids in the network: Engressia, Acker, Teresi, Fettgather—the usual suspects. Soon, says Rosenbaum, “I started having running conversations with a bunch of phone phreaks.” Rosenbaum recalls attending a meeting of phone phreaks in a suburb of San Francisco. “It was like entering this Alice in Wonderland electronic outlaw underground,” he said.
He recalls being surprised by the breadth and depth of the network. “This network of people doing this was so extensive, and yet I hadn’t seen anything about it in the media, I hadn’t seen any reports about it, it was all new to me. It seemed to be fairly highly evolved and fairly . . . not well-organized, necessarily, but it just seemed to be a lot of people with a lot of interchange.” In fact, it reminded him of fiction, he says. “I think I was also influenced in my vision of the phone phreaks by the Thomas Pynchon novel The Crying of Lot 49, which also describes this kind of underground communication network. They seemed to be living it out, in a way.” Far from feeling that they were scary or weird, Rosenbaum says he felt “they were outside the mainstream of conventional America, but that was a reason for me to admire them, more than anything else. I admired their independent spirit and their sort of pioneering exploration and then their willingness to take risks.”
“Then Captain Crunch injected himself into the publication,” Rosenbaum recalls. “All throughout it, during the reporting of the story, he was injecting himself into the story. It was fairly clear that, with some justice, he considered himself if not the star, certainly a star in the phone phreak firmament. And he was always managing to interrupt calls I was having with other phone phreaks to check up on me, demonstrate his talents, stuff like that.”
Rosenbaum’s experience with Captain
Crunch echoed that of many of the other phreaks in the 2111 gang. Indeed, John Draper had developed a second nickname among some of them: Mr. Intense. It was bestowed on him for his lack of manners, his rapid-fire speech, his supersize ego, and his impatience for anything that got in his way. Draper would often go nuts if he was trying to reach someone on the phone and encountered a busy signal, Bill Acker recalls. Draper would call the operator in such situations and, saying it was an emergency, demand to be cut into the line of whoever it was he was trying to reach. “Bell Labs invented call waiting for people like John Draper,” Acker says. If Draper tried to call you and you weren’t immediately available, he would often berate whoever answered the phone and insist that they go find you immediately, a behavior that did not endear him to the parents of his teenage phone phreak friends. In person encounters could be even more intense. Draper had a hatred of cigarette smoke, for example, and was famous for throwing tantrums when he encountered it at a restaurant. “He was pretty strange,” says Jim Fettgather.
Exploding the Phone : The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell (9780802193759) Page 19