Just a couple of weeks after Orth’s article appeared, Bob Gudgel (aka Bob Bernay), a seventeen-year-old Seattle-area phreak and a frequent 2111 conference attendee, had some unusual trick-or-treaters. Knocking on his door was J. C. VanInwegen, Pacific Northwest Bell security agent, and two other men. Wiggy, as he would come to be known to Seattle-area phreaks, was accompanied by an FBI agent and a United States marshal with a search warrant. They hauled away several radios, assorted electronic items, and a box of what Gudgel recalls as “telephone crap.” The trio presented Gudgel with a subpoena commanding him to testify at a federal grand jury in Seattle a few days later. Gudgel wasn’t the only one. In all, roughly half a dozen Seattle-area phone phreaks were called before the grand jury. “The phone phreaks are a public menace—not just a rip-off of Ma Bell,” a telephone company attorney said, describing them as “mildly mentally unbalanced.”
According to an internal AT&T memo, there were six electronic toll fraud prosecutions in 1970. In 1971 that number jumped to forty-five. The empire was beginning to strike back.
Draper wasn’t the only one who studied the Esquire issue when it came out. The magazine’s target audience was cool young men, guys who today would be called hipsters. But two middle-aged engineers who weren’t in the magazine’s usual demographic also found themselves carefully reading the October issue. They were Charlie Schulz and Ken Hopper, members of the technical staff of the Telephone Crime Lab at Bell Laboratories.
Hopper’s path to the Telephone Crime Lab was a circuitous one. In 1971 he was a distinguished-looking forty-five-year-old electrical engineer, a bit on the heavy side, with blue eyes, short brown hair, and glasses. Hopper had joined the Bell System some twenty-five years earlier, shortly after the end of World War II. Within a few years he had found himself at Bell Laboratories’ Special Systems Group working on government electronics projects. The stereotype of government work is that it’s boring, but Hopper was a lightning rod for geek adventure: wherever he went to do technical things physical danger never seemed far behind. There was the time he had to shoot a polar bear that had broken into his cabin while he was stationed up in the Arctic working on the then secret Distant Early Warning Line, the 1950s-era radar system that would provide advance warning of a Soviet bomber attack. Or the time he almost died in a cornfield in Iowa while building a giant radio antenna for a 55-kilowatt transmitter to “heat up the ionosphere” for another secret project. Then there’s the stuff he still can’t really talk about in detail, involving submarines and special tape recorders and undersea wiretaps of Soviet communications cables.
The Special Systems Group was a natural to help AT&T with the Greenstar toll-fraud surveillance network in the 1960s, Hopper says, and that work led to involvement with other telephone security matters. But the Telephone Crime Lab also owes its existence to the FBI. Hopper recalls, “In the mid-1960s the FBI laboratory came to our upper management and said they were getting electronic-involved crimes. They had no people in their laboratory that could examine evidence in these cases, especially related to communication systems, and they asked for Bell Labs’ assistance. Upper management of Bell Labs agreed that this was in the public interest and that we would do that. The work was assigned to my organization, Charlie Schulz being the supervisor. We had just a few people, never more than two or three, working on this stuff. Initially it was to be a five percent job . . . but within five years it was darn near a hundred percent job.”
So it fell to Schulz and Hopper to study that month’s Esquire magazine in detail. Their report to their bosses—and to Joe Doherty, AT&T’s director of security—opened with a glum assessment. “The article entitled ‘Secrets of the Little Blue Box’ by Ron Rosenbaum in the October 1971 issue of Esquire Magazine is essentially factual,” their memo began. “Some of his material is very recent and indicates an active inside source.” It then went through the article, page by page, dissecting the phone phreak claims, some acknowledged, many disputed.
Hopper constructed a two-page appendix to Schulz’s memo, a detailed table listing twenty-one names mentioned in the article, setting forth all the information Bell Labs had about each miscreant: age, whether blind or sighted, whether or not each knew Joe Engressia, physical description, and any other information they could glean from the article. “Fat, has been on LSD, experimenting with 2600 since age 8,” read part of the entry for Engressia, for example.
The memo demonstrated that Bell Labs took the Esquire article seriously, that the phone company was not about to take this sitting down. But it also demonstrated just how poor a grasp the Bell Labs engineers had of the phone phreaks—in terms of both who the phreaks were and what they were capable of doing. Hopper’s analysis of the names used in the article provided no useful information about any of the phreaks other than Engressia, and he was already well known to the telephone company. Worse, much of Bell Labs’ technical analysis of the phone phreaking techniques revealed by the Rosenbaum article was simply wrong. For example, the Bell Labs memo discounted the phone phreak parlor trick of tandem stacking, claiming it just wasn’t possible. “He talks about ‘tandem stacking’ as if he had the ability to deliberately select multilink routes and to keep adding on links,” Schulz wrote. This was an “exaggeration”; the network simply did not work that way, the memo concluded.
In fact it was no exaggeration at all. The phone phreaks did have this ability and they used it to amuse themselves on a regular basis. It was a great example of how engineering insiders are often the last to know what is actually possible with the systems they design. Part of the problem was probably pride. Bell Labs had created the telephone switching network and, consciously or unconsciously, didn’t want to admit how vulnerable it was; its engineers were, in some sense, spring-loaded to disbelieve reports to the contrary. The other part of the problem was both larger and more subtle. Compared to the phone phreaks, the Bell Labs engineers were laboring under a great disadvantage, for they understood how the system was supposed to work and that blinded them to how the system actually did work—and therefore how it could be made to do things it was never designed to do.
The result was that they could not see the holes in their network that sixteen-year-old blind kids could, even when Rosenbaum and the blind kids explained it to them.
Thirteen
Counterculture
“FUCK THE BELL SYSTEM!”
THOSE FOUR WORDS, all in caps, formed the headline of a flyer handed out at the 1971 May Day demonstrations in Washington, D.C. More than thirty thousand hippies, Yippies, students, and radicals had camped out on the banks of the Potomac. They smoked dope, they listened to rock music, they marched, they protested—against the Vietnam War, against the military-industrial complex, against racism, sexism, the government, and Tricky Dick Nixon. It was, in some ways, the ultimate realization of Marlon Brando’s reply in The Wild One when asked what he was rebelling against: “Whadya got?”
The flyer heralded the birth of a new newsletter: YIPL, the Youth International Party Line. Its name was a play on words that reflected both its roots and its focus. The “YIP” part made it known that it was an offshoot of the Youth International Party, the sometimes radical, sometimes comedic, but always theatrical countercultural movement and quasi-political party. Founded in 1967, the Yippies sought to radicalize the hippie movement and called for revolution in America—or, as they spelled it, Amerika: “We are a people. We are a new nation. [. . .] We want everyone to control their own life and care for one another. [. . .] We will provide free health services: birth control and abortions, drug information, medical care, that this society is not providing us with. [. . .] We cannot tolerate attitudes, institutions, and machines whose purpose is the destruction of life, the accumulation of ‘profit.’” Despite the serious rhetoric, the Yippies approached their revolution with humor. Their flag was a marijuana leaf on a red star and, in 1968, at the Democratic National Convention, they announce
d the nomination of a pig—Pigasus the Immortal—for president of the United States. They were later referred to, aptly, as Groucho Marxists.
The “party line” part of YIPL’s name emphasized its focus on the telephone. Party lines were a form of telephone service used in rural areas in which multiple houses would share the same telephone line. Want to make a call? Better hope that your neighbor down the street isn’t already using the phone. Want the call to be private? Better hope that neighbor isn’t listening.
The connection between the Yippies and the telephone was this: YIPL was devoted to teaching Yippies and hippies and rebellious youth how to use the telephone as a tool of civil disobedience, specifically, how to make free phone calls to fuck the Bell System and, with it, the United States government.
YIPL was the brainchild of Alan Fierstein and Yippie founder Abbie Hoffman. Fierstein was an engineering major at Cornell University during the late 1960s who had long been interested in the telephone system. Based on his own investigations and through conversations with his fellow engineering students he had learned several ways to make free telephone calls. But Fierstein differed from many phone phreaks in one important way: he was strongly political. As a young liberal student at the end of a tumultuous decade he recalls feeling that his mission was to “end the Vietnam War and oppose Nixon in any possible way.”
In his travels through the antiwar demonstrations at Cornell, Fierstein made the acquaintance of the famous and flamboyant Abbie Hoffman, who was then in the process of writing Steal This Book, the Yippie manifesto that taught its readers how to get free food, free postage, free weapons, even a free buffalo from the U.S. Department of the Interior. Fierstein told Hoffman of the ways he knew to make free phone calls and Hoffman was quick to incorporate them into his stealable book. Hoffman, Fierstein recalls, “felt that the technology that I had would be useful in fighting the enemy, which in his case was the United States government. And while I had no love for the government, of course I also had a hatred for the phone company.”
Understanding Fierstein’s hatred of the phone company requires understanding a few things about the phone company itself—and the public’s perception of it—in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Back then, AT&T wasn’t simply the largest company on earth; it was the world’s largest regulated private monopoly. People generally have little love for monopolies, associating them with high prices and poor service, and the telephone company was no exception to this general rule. “In a country indissolubly wed to free enterprise, AT&T stands as a corporate enigma, being a regulated monopoly and the only major phone company in the world not owned and run by a national government,” New York Times business reporter Sonny Kleinfield wrote. “It is like some culture in a Petri dish about which scientists cannot agree whether it is harmful or beneficial.”
As a regulated entity, the telephone company couldn’t increase its rates without permission from its regulatory masters, the FCC and various state public utility commissions. But that didn’t stop the company from asking, and AT&T became notorious for its rate hike requests. At first glance, this reputation seemed undeserved: AT&T’s 1970 request for a 6 percent increase in telephone long-distance rates was its first in thirteen years. But AT&T’s vast size meant that just about every year some part of its far-flung empire was asking some regulatory body somewhere for permission to charge its customers more money. In addition to a long-distance rate hike, the AT&T corporation wanted to increase rates for private telephone lines for things like teletype newswires in 1961 and, in 1968, for specialized high-quality leased lines for audio feeds used by radio and television broadcasters. Bell System local operating companies had their hands out too. Southern New England Telephone and Southern Bell both asked regulators for rate hikes in 1961, Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone in 1964, Pacific Telephone in 1966 (and then again in 1967), Pacific Northwest Bell and Southern Bell in 1968, New York Telephone and—once again—Southern New England Telephone in 1969.
Being frequently in the news asking for more money from rate payers does not endear you to the public. Nor did AT&T’s insistence that all telephones were rented to customers, never owned by them outright. This policy, in place since the inception of the Bell System, wasn’t just for telephone lines but extended to the telephones themselves. Want a single telephone line with two or three extension telephones in your house? Expect to pay the phone company every month for each telephone; prices varied across the United States, but figure about $1 per month per extension in 1970. Local telephone companies ran “ringer tests” at night using automated equipment to count the number of telephones on each line in an effort to spot unauthorized extensions; indeed, in the mid-seventies the Bell System went so far as to deploy a specialized telephone testing computer system called DUE—“detect unauthorized equipment”—to catch subscribers with unauthorized extensions. (A common technique to get around this was to install telephone extensions with their ringers disconnected so they couldn’t be electronically spotted by the phone company.) Installers—or, more accurately, deinstallers—would be dispatched to remove offending instruments; repeat offenders could have telephone service terminated entirely. Needless to say, these were not the sorts of interactions that promoted warm gooey feelings toward the telephone company.
AT&T’s reputation wasn’t helped by the great service failures of 1969 and 1970. As a 1969 New York Times article put it, “Cries of frustration over erratic telephone service are being heard from more and more of the United States’ major metropolitan areas. Although most of the attention has focused on New York, where Federal Communication Commission officials say the situation is the most severe, telephone customers in such cities as Miami, Boston, Denver, Atlanta, and Los Angeles are finding themselves inconvenienced and angered by a variety of troubles.” Customer frustrations included the “inability to get dial tone for minutes or even hours; the rapid ‘buzz buzz’ that means all circuits are busy; the recorded voice that informs the customer the number he is calling no longer is ‘in service,’ when he knows it is; the line that unaccountably goes dead; the busy signal that intrudes before the caller finishes dialing; delays in getting telephones installed, and assorted misconnections, disconnections, and malconnections.” As one writer described it, “A kind of surrealistic telephone chaos reigned, all too suggestive of a world gone mad.”
The madness peaked in July 1969 when an entire telephone exchange—PLaza 8 on East 56th Street in New York City—failed completely due to overload; more than 10,400 telephones in that exchange became unreachable for large chunks of the day for several weeks. AT&T acknowledged that customer complaints had reached record numbers; a New York Telephone executive vice president publicly described service as “lousy.” For its part, the telephone company blamed the problems on “unforeseeable expansion in demand for telephone use”—in other words, AT&T was the victim of its own success, for too many people were demanding telephone service and the company was unable to add capacity quickly enough to serve them. This caused some at the Federal Communications Commission to wonder, as the New York Times put it, “whether the telephone companies’ management techniques are equal to the job of maintaining the United States’ communication network in good order.” An FCC investigation of telephone service complaints was launched.
Then there was the Bell System’s reputation for discriminatory hiring and promotion practices. “For a long time,” wrote one historian, “AT&T was the corporate personification of male chauvinism and racism. It had acquired a well-known tradition of hiring relatively few members of racial minorities, and while it was the biggest employer of women, it traditionally relegated them to low-level slots as secretaries or operators.” Although the telephone company was able to offer some evidence that it was working to correct these problems, in 1970 the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission took an unprecedented step: it asked the Federal Communications Commission to deny a $385 million AT&T rate hike request until the tel
ephone company ended its “callous indifference” to equal employment laws and stopped its employment discrimination against “blacks, women, and Spanish-surnamed Americans.” The FCC responded by launching another sweeping investigation into AT&T, covering not only its request for a “major rate increase” but also its cost structure and “charges of discriminatory hiring practices.” The feds weren’t the only ones who were unhappy. Within a year, half a million telephone workers—members of the AFL-CIO Communications Workers of America and related unions—would be on strike for grievances including wages, pensions, health benefits, and the telephone company’s “anti-feminist job policies.”
Finally, there was AT&T’s reputation as the world’s most controlling and straitjacketed company, a company that prized conformance and discouraged creativity. “In this office,” said an AT&T junior executive in 1967, “we call it ‘The System,’ and the use of the word ‘the’ means dogmatic finality. The wall comes up pretty fast when you start tampering with the way things are done within The System, and you either slow down and do things Bell’s way or you knock your brains out.” Another AT&T executive agreed: “We prefer to have our men use their own initiative, but we leave as little as possible to the imagination.”
As part of its program to leave as little as possible to the imagination, AT&T created an exhaustive collection of manuals and how-to guides covering every conceivable situation. Called Bell System Practices or BSPs, they were the very embodiment of “The System,” codifying precisely how AT&T equipment was to be assembled, disassembled, configured, and serviced and the exact way virtually any task was to be performed by Bell System employees. By 1952 there were more than nine thousand individual BSPs; millions of copies were printed and distributed to the operating companies. A particularly illustrative example was Bell System Practice number 770-130-301 (revised), dated August 1952. Titled “Sweeping, General,” this three-page document set forth the authoritative procedure for sweeping floors within the Bell System. It differentiated among light sweeping, heavy sweeping, stairway sweeping, and “pickup” sweeping, offered instructions for each, and provided a helpful list of tools required (including, not surprisingly, a broom, which it properly referred to as a “floor brush”). Finally, lest there be any confusion, it noted that smooth floors within Bell System buildings should be swept by alternative sweeping methods—methods described in detail in its two sister BSPs 770-130-302 and 770-130-303.
Exploding the Phone : The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell (9780802193759) Page 21