YIPL marked the beginning of the cultural hijacking of phone phreaking. Before this newsletter—and before the Esquire article, which would be published a few months after YIPL’s first issue—phone phreaking had been the domain of the Bill Ackers and Joe Engressias and Charlie Pynes and Ralph Barclays of the world: people who were obsessively interested in exploring the telephone network and understanding how it all worked. To be sure, these early phreaks weren’t immune to the allure of making free phone calls, but that wasn’t their primary interest. In contrast, Hoffman and Fierstein took the hobby in a new direction, one simultaneously more political and more utilitarian. If the old game was to understand, appreciate, and play with the telephone network, the new game was to make free calls and screw Ma Bell and the government.
The game was changing. Old Mother Bell couldn’t afford to ignore this for much longer.
Fourteen
Busted
THE WOMAN WAS a busybody. The man was rude.
It was December 1971. They were at a discount gas station at the corner of Saratoga Avenue and Stevens Creek Boulevard in Sunnyvale, California, the very heart of the Silicon Valley. The woman had been waiting patiently to use the gas station’s lone pay phone when the man cut in front of her and popped into the telephone booth.
The woman watched as he took out a small rectangular box. It had wires coming out of it, wires that went into something that looked like a mound of clay. The box had a label on its side. speech scrambler. Strange sounds came from inside the booth as the man fiddled with the box. It all seemed very odd.
Curiosity piqued—and unable to make her phone call—the woman wandered over to the man’s vehicle, a green Volkswagen van. She peered in the back, through the striped curtains, where she saw what looked like two large car batteries. She wrote down the van’s license plate number, WB6EWU, and went to speak to the gas station attendant.
When she returned the phone booth was empty. The man was gone, along with his Volkswagen van. Nearby, a telephone company employee toiled, doing whatever it is that telephone company employees do. She walked over and told him about the rude man and his odd little box.
Months earlier, in April 1971, British Columbia Telephone took a wrecking ball to the phone phreaks’ home on the network. In a bit of telephonic urban renewal, the old mechanical Vancouver step tandem—home to the 2111 conference—was replaced with a shiny new 4A crossbar toll switching machine. The old step tandem still existed but it was relegated to other, lesser duties. Unfortunately for the phreaks, the telephone company thoughtlessly failed to provide a phone phreak conference call setup in the new switching machine.
The 2111 conference really was something special. It was not the only conference circuit the phreaks had at their disposal but it was one of the best. It was easy to dial—you could use just a Cap’n Crunch whistle from many places—and it supported all the people they could pile on to it. In contrast, loop arounds were okay for meeting other phreaks but you could fit only two people on them, not much of a conference. Another conference bridge technique, pioneered by Joe Engressia, was something called an open sleeve-lead conference. This required either finding a miswired connection in a central office someplace or, more likely, fast-talking a telephone company switchman into miswiring such a connection for you. The former required luck; the latter, balls and skill. If you were particularly clever, you could engineer such a setup to be reached via an 800 number, creating a toll-free conference bridge that any phreak could dial into, whether or not he had a blue box. Bill Acker recalls setting up two of these, one in Charleston and one in Benton Harbor; the Charleston circuit supported up to seven people at once.
The phreaks searched the nooks and crannies of the network for a conference that would be as good as 2111. They did this via the time-honored technique of scanning. Using a blue box, they would connect to a tandem somewhere and start exhaustively dialing all the three-digit codes between 000 and 199—that is, the sequences that couldn’t be the start of normal telephone numbers—to see what they did. The network was a varied thing in those days, so codes that worked on a switching machine in San Francisco, say, might be quite different from those in Peoria. It was tedious work, but it was the kind of tedious work that phone phreaks loved.
One of the tandems they scanned was White Plains Tandem 2 in the 914 area code of New York. In that tandem the code 052 was a bit of an enigma; if you used your blue box to dial KP + 914 + 052 + ST you’d be connected to something that gave you a short little beep—and nothing else. You knew you had reached something but nobody knew what. Pressing more keys on your blue box to feed it more MF digits didn’t get you anything. Multiple phreaks had played with it and couldn’t figure it out. It was the Sphinx of dial codes.
Then in January 1972 a phone phreak named Ray Oklahoma†† cracked the 052 code. Oklahoma, an engineering student from Long Island who was studying at Oklahoma State, had been a phone phreak for about a year. He had been fascinated by the musical notes he heard on long-distance calls and, like others before him, soon found himself headed down the phone phreak rabbit hole. For some reason, Oklahoma tried something that the others hadn’t thought of: what if you connected to 052 and then sent it touch-tones instead of blue box tones? Bingo. Through a process of trial and error, Oklahoma figured out that 052 was actually an incredibly sophisticated conference bridge. Unlike 2111, this conference system allowed you to dial out. That is, you could dial in to 052 with your blue box and then, using touch tones, add other people to the conference by having the 052 conference system call them for you—for free! In fact, through an unintentional quirk, you could even use it to conference in people from overseas.
††The pseudonym he went by at the time.
The 2111 conference was back in business; its new name was 052. It quickly became popular, hosting more than a dozen phreaks at a time, including some from the United Kingdom.
That very same week in January, Bill Acker—then a senior in high school—received an unwelcome visitor, a man the New York phone phreaks would come to know well: Thomas J. Duffy, a security agent for New York Telephone. Duffy was one of roughly 650 Bell System security agents nationwide, some 10 percent of whom were former FBI special agents. Blue and black boxes—what the phone company called electronic toll fraud—took up only a tiny fraction of the average security agent’s time. Mostly they focused on more common problems such as robberies and burglaries (a lot of people paid their phone bills in cash back in those days at telephone company customer service offices), coin telephone thefts, stolen vehicles, company car accidents, and even employee embezzlement. Where toll fraud was concerned, the vast majority were credit card and third number billing fraud. Still, Duffy seemed to be the security agent in the New York area assigned to electronic toll fraud cases, and, in particular, to dealing with the area’s pesky teenage phone hackers—a group that had expanded since the days when Bill Acker felt so alone.
Acker wasn’t entirely surprised to hear from Duffy, since Duffy had already had a few interactions with Evan Doorbell,‡‡ another Long Island phone phreak Acker knew. What did surprise Acker —and annoyed him too—was that Duffy actually showed up at his school to talk with him, instead of visiting him in the privacy of his home. As a result of Duffy’s visit, the officials and other kids at Acker’s school now knew he was in trouble. “That was very uncomfortable,” Acker recalls. “Which maybe was part of it, part of a ‘shock-and-awe’ approach”—an attempt to intimidate Acker and keep him off balance during their conversation.
‡‡The pseudonym he went by at the time.
The shock-and-awe approach didn’t work out well for Duffy. “When Tom Duffy said, ‘We want to talk with you,’ I said the following thing: ‘I have the right to remain silent, and I wish to do so,’” Acker remembers. Acker flat-out refused to talk to Duffy.
“He wasn’t expecting that,” Acker says. After all, Duf
fy wasn’t law enforcement, and he wasn’t there to arrest Acker but just to get him to knock off his telephonic shenanigans. While he was at it, Duffy maybe figured he might be able to get some information on phone phreaking activities in the area. So why the silent treatment? “There was an element of ‘screw you,’” Acker says. “‘Hey, you’re the telephone company, you’re the enemy, you don’t understand us phreaks.’” But there were two other things that made him keep his mouth shut. First, Acker says, “I knew I could talk to him as nicely as I wanted to, we could spend a couple of hours talking, but at the end of the day, ‘Cut it out, kid, or you’re gonna get arrested’ was going to be the message. I knew that that was where the conversation was going to end up.”
More important, Acker says, was this: “He was a trained interrogator. He wasn’t law enforcement, but he was a security guy, that’s what he did for a living. I was a kid. I couldn’t guarantee that if we started talking I wouldn’t let slip something about somebody else inadvertently. I didn’t expect to be a match for him if he really was a good interrogator.” Given his strong feelings about never squealing on another phreak, Acker says, “I just figured, ‘Don’t talk to him at all.’”
The right-to-remain-silent approach didn’t work out well for Acker. “That really pissed him off badly,” Acker remembers. The very next day, while Acker was still in school, Duffy drove to Acker’s house, met with his mother, and drove off with Acker’s most cherished possession: his blue box.
The busybody woman at the gas station in Sunnyvale was just the break the General Telephone security department had been hoping for.
“On several occasions during the year 1971,” read an April 1972 memorandum from a senior special agent with General Telephone security, “information was received from the Security Department of British Columbia Telephone Company, Vancouver, Canada, that their long-lines department was observing illegal entry by parties dialing and multi-frequencing [sic] from points in the United States into their toll switching system and returning back to points in the United States.” This was, of course, exactly what the Esquire phreaks had been using 2111 for back before it was a conference call, back when it still had a dial tone on it; they’d whistle into British Columbia via 2111, get a dial tone, and dial out again.
“Line traces were made,” continued the memo, “and a number of them showed that some of the parties came through switching machines in the San Jose, California area. On 4/17/71, a new 4-A Type toll switcher was placed into service in Vancouver. During this cutover it was observed that a conference call of several hours duration was set up illegally, and a recording of a portion of this conference call was made.” BC Tel sent a copy of this tape to General Telephone security. It was apparent that “one or more parties on the call were located in Los Gatos, California, served by Western California Telephone Company, a part of the General system.”
When General Telephone security received the report from the busybody woman about the rude man with the box that made strange noises, agents ran the license plate number she’d given them through the Department of Motor Vehicles—something anyone could do back in those more innocent days. The registrant turned out to live at 16382 Robie Lane, Los Gatos. His name? John Thomas Draper. “In exchanging information between security departments throughout the United States and Canada,” the memo noted, “the names John Draper and Captain Crunch were associated on a number of occasions in matters pertaining to fraudulent use of multi-frequency signaling.”
“A night time line observation was made”—GT’s euphemism for a tap-and-tape recording setup. One night’s worth of recordings of Draper’s home telephone line on March 27, 1972, netted “evidence of numerous attempts and completions of calls using multi-frequency signaling to points in California and to Sidney, Australia.”
Draper had just finished up a nice long conference call with the other phreaks on 052 when his telephone rang.
The caller was an anonymous telephone company employee, a switchman at White Plains Tandem 2. He was calling to deliver an urgent message. They’re monitoring this thing really, really closely, the switchman told Draper. They’re recording everything. They’re watching what you dial. You guys need to be careful about this. Bill Acker observed later that the switchman “stuck his neck out about a hundred and fifty miles” to deliver that warning.
While the call proved that not everyone in the phone company had it in for the phone phreaks, Acker and New York Telephone security agent Tom Duffy continued their cat-and-mouse games. Acker’s ability to play with the network had been curtailed when Duffy took away his blue box; in particular, Acker needed it to call into the 052 conference. But Acker soon discovered a workaround. Due to a bug in his phone company’s central office, Acker found he was able to dial a telephone number like 914 052 1211 and the switch would connect him—sometimes—to the 052 system. He could then use his touch-tone phone to control the conference, no blue box needed. It would have been better to have a blue box, to be sure, but this wasn’t bad.
That April, Tom Duffy made another trip to Acker’s house. This time he ripped out Acker’s touch-tone phone, replacing it with a rotary dial one. Acker was aghast. “Rotary dial!” he wailed, but Acker’s mom was actually kind of pleased. “She could never understand why anyone would want to push buttons when God intended us to spin a dial,” he says.
It was May 4, 1972. Draper was in his VW van in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven in Los Gatos when the alarm bells began ringing in his reptilian hindbrain: the cars pulling up around him were predators. He wrestled with his fight-or-flight instinct for a moment, but neither option seemed like a smart move. He had no way to fight and a high-speed car chase pitting his Volkswagen bus against police cruisers seemed like a losing proposition.
Plan C, then. Draper got out of his van, walked around behind it, and—unobserved, he hoped—started dumping the contents of his pockets on the ground, ridding himself of incriminating electronics. The last item was a small magnet, which he stuck on the rear of his van. The magnet was a clever security precaution, used to activate a tiny magnetic relay inside his blue box. Draper’s box would not emit even the slightest peep unless he held the magnet up against it in just the right place. The idea was that if a cop ever stopped him and started messing with his blue box, the box simply wouldn’t work.
Plan C’s execution did not go unobserved. The arresting FBI agents recovered every single item Draper had dumped, magnet and all. Their haul included Draper’s blue box and a cassette tape containing “numerous multi-frequency signals representing telephone numbers in California and other states within the continental United States; inward operator route codes for all area codes within the United States; route codes to overseas sender points, foreign country codes, and foreign operator route codes.” Between each series of numbers on the tape was a Morse code sequence identifying the person or place the tones were used for. The FBI also searched his van and, later that day, his apartment.
Draper was arrested for seven counts of violating 18 USC 1343, the Fraud by Wire statute, for making blue box calls to Australia, New York, and Oklahoma. The feds knew they were on solid legal ground using Fraud by Wire now, thanks to the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the bookies’ blue box appeal under this law back in 1969. Draper was arraigned and released on his own recognizance the same day. On June 12, he appeared before U.S. District Court judge Robert F. Peckham and entered a plea of “not guilty.” Not long afterward his attorney filed a motion to suppress the evidence. Captain Crunch was apparently not going to give up the ship without a fight.
The newspaper coverage of Draper’s bust increased his fame from both the Esquire article and the Maureen Orth article, boosting his ego and status as a counterculture icon. The San Francisco Chronicle described him as a “contemporary folk hero,” an “overgrown, misunderstood kid with the mind of a genius”—though they also noted that he was “shy, shifty eyed, and slightly myopic.
” Both of the big newswires of the day, Associated Press and United Press International, covered the story and their copy appeared in smaller newspapers across the country. UPI described him as an “electronics whiz” and played up the Cap’n Crunch whistle angle.
The same month that Draper entered his not guilty plea, a magazine article appeared with an intriguing title: “Regulating the Phone Company in Your Own Home.” According to its editorial lead, the article showed how “practically anyone who can change the plug on an electric toaster—using only a screwdriver, a kitchen knife, and four dollars’ worth of readily available electric parts—can build in two or three hours a simple device capable of evading charges on long distance telephone calls.” It explained to its readers how to build a black box, also known as a “mute,” and its author was Ray Oklahoma, the discoverer of the 052 conference.
Now, it would be one thing if this article was to appear in YIPL or some obscure underground newspaper. But this was slated for publication in the June issue of Ramparts, the darling magazine of the New Left, circulation 100,000. Ramparts was unique among lefty publications for bridging the gap to the non–hippie-Yippie set. “It expressed radical left values in a way mainstream people could understand,” said a former editor. It even did do it with style. It was printed on “heavy, shiny stock with classy graphics that looked good on a Danish Modern coffee table.” In a few short years the magazine developed a scrappy reputation for railing against the Vietnam War and clashing with the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the U.S. military. Its writers were talented and its reporting newsworthy; follow-on coverage of Ramparts articles by mainstream newspapers, even the august New York Times, was common.
Exploding the Phone : The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell (9780802193759) Page 23