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

by Lapsley, Phil

  On the minus side for phone phreaks, the No. 1 ESS rendered black boxes obsolete. Mostly black boxes didn’t work at all with them, and even if you could get them to work a little bit you were limited to about thirty-eight seconds worth of conversation before you were cut off. And although the No. 1 ESS didn’t make blue boxing impossible, it did make it more difficult. After you whistled off a long-distance call on a No. 1 ESS you had about eleven seconds to key the number you wanted to call on your blue box and hope that the network put your call through and the person you were calling answered the phone within that time; if that did not happen, you’d wind up listening to dial tone.

  If the potential impact of the transistor was not lost on the Bell Labs engineers in the 1950s, neither was it lost on some of the phone phreaks in the 1970s. “Bill Acker said something so prophetic,” Joe Engressia recalls. “I think it was in about 1970 or ’71. I didn’t really believe it or understand it at the time. He said, right now, we have more control over the phone system than we ever will have again.”

  Acker was right. As the computer revolution began to proliferate through the network, the network began to change. It didn’t happen all at once. Slowly, over the course of the decade, the network began to homogenize. For example, a “precise tone plan” would make sure that things like ringing and busy signals sounded the same in every city throughout the network. And the various bugs the phreaks had counted on in the telephone switches began to disappear. But it was a slow process, and there was enough older installed equipment throughout the network to provide years more fun for the phreaks. The playground hadn’t been shut down just yet but it was certainly changing.

  One of the new toys that the kids brought to the playground was featured in YIPL’s February 1973 issue: the red box. Keeping up with the Bell System’s new, increasingly computerized network, the red box was a new twist on an old hack. For many years pay phones had had actual physical bells in them that communicated to the operator how much money the customer had deposited: a nickel was one ding, a dime two dings, and a quarter was dong. When you needed to make a long-distance call at a pay phone, the operator would tell you how much money to deposit and then would listen to—and count—the dings and dongs as the coins you deposited struck the appropriate bells; imagine the patience required of an operator when a customer wanted to make a two-dollar long-distance call using forty nickels.

  For as long as pay phones had been making noises like these, people had been figuring out ways to mimic the noises to avoid paying for calls. One low-tech approach required two pay phones right next to each other, a common enough setup back in the day. You’d deposit your money in the next-door neighbor pay phone while holding the handset of your pay phone up to it so the operator could still hear the sounds of the bells; since you weren’t actually making a call on the other pay phone, it would return your money once you were finished. A higher-tech approach that came into vogue in the late 1960s used a portable tape recorder to play a recording of the bells for the operator.

  One of the problems with the dings and dongs, of course, was that they were labor intensive for the phone company; a live operator, after all, had to sit there and count bells. Paving the way for automation, AT&T began introducing pay phones that went beep instead of ding. The beeps were electronically generated tones: one beep for a nickel, two beeps for a dime, and five shorter beeps for a quarter. The new beeps weren’t any more secure than the dings and dongs but they had the advantage that they were easier to generate electronically—no bulky bells required—and, eventually, they could be detected by a computer instead of a human being.

  Of course, the fact that the beeps were easier for AT&T to generate electronically meant that they were easier for phone phreaks to generate electronically, too, and that’s where the red box came in. The red box was simply a tone generator, producing one, two, or five beeps of the appropriate duration. To start with, it was a single tone—2,200 Hz—but later AT&T mixed in a second tone, 1,700 Hz. The phone phreaks quickly modified their red boxes to follow suit.

  The red box, like the black box, really had no use in exploring the telephone network. It was, plain and simple, a way to make free phone calls. “To me, a red box was unethical,” says Seattle phone phreak Bob Gudgel, “because it was actually stealing quarters and dimes and nickels”—in contrast to a blue box, which actually had some intellectual purpose. Indeed, YIPL was not particularly popular among the network explorer–type phone phreaks. Some of this was intellectual snobbery. They felt that YIPL catered to the lower echelons of phone phreaks, kids who didn’t know very much and were only able to follow the instructions of others. But the other problem was both larger and more practical, and had to do with the size of YIPL’s mailing list. If some cool network feature, say a conference bridge or something, made it into the pages of YIPL, the next month it would have thousands of people calling it, and the month after that it would be gone.

  So while the network explorer phone phreaks may not have had much use for YIPL or the red box, the fact was they were rapidly becoming the minority. Indeed, the phrase “phone phreak” was becoming synonymous with someone interested in making free phone calls. There seemed to be a lot more interest in beating the system—whatever the system was—than in exploring it.

  YIPL understood its audience and their love of free things. By August 1973 it had changed its name: it was now TAP, the Technological American Party. As “Al Bell” wrote in the introduction to that issue, “No fancy excuses: we changed our name because we want people to know where we really are and what we hope to become. Technological American Party is rapidly becoming a people’s warehouse of technological information, and a name like Youth International Party Line simply didn’t ring a bell, even if you were trying to find out how to contact the phone phreaks, except of course for the Party Line. We’ve been receiving so much information lately about gas and electric meters, locks, even chemistry, that a name change is definitely in order. We seriously doubt that phones will cease to be our main interest, but it really isn’t fair to ignore the rest of what science has to offer.”

  YIPL—er, TAP—didn’t know it but it had dodged a bullet. At the urging of Pacific Northwest Bell, the FBI had investigated the newsletter in 1974 but found nothing that it could be prosecuted for. Indeed, the FBI learned, “the legal department of [New York Telephone] has gone as high as the N. Y. State Attorney General’s office in Albany but was told that no action could be taken against ‘TAP’ for to do so would constitute a violation of ‘freedom of the press.’”

  Not every group that wanted to publicize phone fraud techniques was located in a state that shared New York’s love of freedom of the press. For example, in 1974 Michigan Bell had a misdemeanor criminal complaint filed against the Detroit underground newspaper Fifth Estate for publishing “Taming the Telephone Beast”; essentially a reprint of the Ramparts article, it also gave the details of the 1974 telephone credit card code.

  Then there was the Telephone Electronics Line newsletter, or TEL. Started in 1974 and run out of Los Angeles, TEL was the creation of Jack Kranyak, whose company, Teletronics of America, also sold electronics plans via mail order. For $6 per year, TEL subscribers could read something like a more technical and less political version of TAP, one focused solely on topics telephonic. “How to Call Long Distance for Free,” “Modern Phone Phreaking,” “Detection: How to Avoid It,” “Overseas Dialing Techniques,” and “Trashing the Phone Company—A Look at Ma Bell’s ‘Garbage’” were some of the articles published over the course of seven months. Considering the provisions of Section 502.7 of the California Penal Code—the law that made it illegal to publish plans or instructions for telephone fraud, which Pacific Telephone had brandished when it had suppressed the Ramparts article—it was a miracle that TEL lasted as long as it did. After its eighth issue, Teletronics, Kranyak, and several others associated with the newsletter were sued by Pacific Telephone in 1975. The
telephone company won, obtaining an injunction against TEL. Under pain of a $100,000 penalty, Kranyak and company were prohibited from publishing any further information about defrauding the telephone system. In addition, Teletronics was required to turn its mailing list over to the telephone company. Soon some eight thousand people—both former subscribers to TEL and people who had just requested a catalog of plans from Teletronics—received an odd note from Pacific Telephone in the mail. “Dear Telephone User,” it began. “Your name appeared on a list (provided under court order) of subscribers, or potential subscribers, to material previously published by Teletronics Company of America.” It went on to remind the Telephone User that it was a violation of state and federal laws to steal telephone service or to “provide information to any person which is useful for such purpose.” It concluded, ”Accordingly, you are urged to destroy any and all written material or device you may have which may violate any of these laws.”

  One recipient of this missive wrote a letter to the editor of Radio Electronics, a hobbyist magazine in which Teletronics had run ads. The Pacific Telephone letter, he wrote, “would appear to me to be saying that dissemination or mere possession of information which could be used for disapproved purposes is a criminal offense.” He concluded, “I am committed to the position that curiosity alone is sufficient ‘need to know’ and that it is a fundamental freedom that criminality must be judged by what an individual does, not upon the knowledge which he has acquired or what he could do with it.”

  Phone shenanigans, it turned out, weren’t confined to the shores of the United States. In January 1973 London’s Sunday Times ran a front-page exposé charging that employees of the British Post Office, which ran the nation’s telephone system, had installed special circuits—so-called fiddles—inside telephone company central offices that allowed those in the know to make free or reduced-rate long-distance or overseas calls. The article claimed that at least seventy-five telephone central offices had been fiddled and the cost of the theft was almost 2 million pounds each year. A post office spokesman described it as “serious national problem” and a “nationwide telephone fraud that has cost a vast but unknown sum in lost revenues.”

  That was all internal fraud, however, even if widespread and headline grabbing. England’s first big, public run-in with real live phone phreaks came later that year, in October 1973, with the trial of nineteen young men at Old Bailey, London’s central criminal court. Arrested at a phone phreak tea party at a flat in London a year earlier, the phreaks included Oxford and Cambridge graduates and the prosecutor in the case allowed that they were all “men of intellectual stature.” The charges went back to 1968 when their fun and games began and covered a variety of offenses, including conspiracy, fraud, and theft of the government’s electricity. Unlike the fiddlers within the British Post Office, these gentlemen were in fact network explorers with little or no interest in fraud. As was revealed at trial, on the day of the tea party the phreaks had made a total of 222 calls using a variety of techniques, including the use of ten different “bleeper boxes.” Of these calls, exactly three went to live human beings, and those three had all been made legally. The trial went on for more than a month. In the end, charges were dismissed against one defendant, ten pleaded guilty partway through the trial, and eight were acquitted. To the acquitted the judge remarked, “Your trial is over and now I can congratulate you. I never did think you were dishonest, and I never said so.” But, he added, “Do exercise some care and judgment in the future because men of your distinction ought never find themselves in the dock at the Central Criminal Court.”

  Back in the United States, phreaking continued its push into mainstream society. If anything, in fact, it overshot and landed among the stars. In 1974, for example, rock star Ike Turner was arrested along with three others for using a blue box from a recording studio in Los Angeles—a blue box that was later said to have come from Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs.

  Then there was the case of Bernard Cornfeld, the flamboyant financier who had built a $2.5 billion hedge fund called International Overseas Investors that eventually ran afoul of securities regulators; he was charged with fraud and spent almost a year in a Swiss prison until he was eventually acquitted. Cornfeld lived a lavish lifestyle, surrounded by women as he jetted between his castle in France and his mansion in Beverly Hills. But in January 1975 his Los Angeles mansion was raided by the FBI and his secretary was charged with blue box fraud. “Unfortunately [for the FBI] they just missed the shooting of a Playboy center spread,” he joked to a reporter. Cornfeld himself, cracking fewer jokes this time, was arrested on the same charges about six months later. In all, FBI agents seized five blue boxes from Cornfeld’s mansion, four of which, according to FBI files, had Wozniak and Jobs’s telltale “He’s got the whole world in his hands” notes inside them.

  Then Lainie Kazan—singer, actress, and a former Playboy model— pleaded guilty to blue box charges in November 1975 and was fined, ordered to make restitution to the phone company, and placed on eighteen months’ probation. The blue box suppliers? Woz and Jobs.

  Finally, in December of that year, police said, Robert ­Cummings —an Emmy Award–winning actor with more than fifty movies to his credit, including Dial M for Murder—was arrested in Seattle with blue box in hand. It was like a little celebrity blue box crime wave, a good chunk of it from the two Steves and their Los Angeles connections.

  Its movement into mainstream society had changed the culture of phreaking once already, shifting it away from curiosity and into the realm of outright thievery. But now, even among the hobbyist network-explorer types, it began changing again. In some ways the NPR announcer had been right—it really was the story of a war and like any war, this one was not without its spies and paranoia. Informants seemed to be everywhere, or so many phone phreaks believed. This notion began to change the way the phone phreaks interacted with one another.

  The first evidence of this was the breakup of the phone phreaks into smaller and more isolated groups made up of people who knew each other personally. Of the many such groups across the country, one of them centered on David Condon—the legendary Davy Crockett, the man who, with the help of his girlfriends and his Cat and Canary Bird Call Flute, had tricked long-distance operators back in the 1950s into making free calls for him from Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Now, almost twenty years later, in 1973, Condon had moved to California and found himself the nucleus of a cell of half a dozen phone phreaks, mostly students and staff from UC Berkeley. Several were gifted electrical engineers and one was also a talented chef. Together they spent many evenings in a house on Colby Street in north Oakland exploring the network with fancy blue boxes after equally fancy meals. “We’d cook dinner and then we’d play until the wee hours of the morning. It was a real circus!” Condon says. They delighted in finding new ways to outfox the network, including an unlikely but successful scheme that involved running high-voltage electricity directly into the telephone line to confuse the switching equipment.

  But the cuisine and calls were served with a healthy side dish of paranoia. Although Condon’s group had occasional interactions with other phreaks—Bill Acker was someone Condon respected and trusted and occasionally talked to—they kept to themselves as much as possible. They avoided conference calls and loop arounds, preferring to do their own research rather than trade information with people who might be informants. And as a rule universally agreed upon within their group, they avoided John Draper and his friends like the plague. “I tell you,” Condon says, “Draper was the kiss of death. He was asking for it, he was looking for trouble.” Well, Condon admits, perhaps Draper wasn’t really looking to get caught, but he was so boastful and careless and public about everything he did that he might as well have been. “He was very flagrant,” says Condon.

  A similar cell formed on the East Coast around the same time. Called Group Bell it included, among several others, New York phreaks Evan Doorbell and Ben Decibel
.§§ Yet there was one New York phone phreak it specifically did not include: Bill Acker. “They explicitly excluded me, because they felt I was not going to keep their secrets,” Acker remembers. “My exclusion from Group Bell was really Ben Decibel saying, ‘This guy Bill is a little too free with who he trusts.’”

  §§The pseudonym he went by at the time.

  Being excluded hurt Acker’s feelings, especially after having believed he’d been alone in the wilderness for so many years. It “was just nasty,” he says. Still, he is not without sympathy for the under­lying problem. The gems that the phone phreaks found in the network tended to be lost as soon as they became widely known —just look at the 2111 and 052 conferences. The more people who knew about a particular vulnerability, the more likely it was that someone from the phone company would find out about it and fix it, and possibly get them all in trouble in the process. “I think if I found something that was really cool but that obviously would go away if word of it got around, I think I’d be a little more selective about who I told,” Acker says. Similarly, he says, he was perfectly willing to keep something confidential if someone asked him to. Not so Joe Engressia. Acker says, “He didn’t want any part of that. His attitude was, nobody’s going to put restrictions on anything I do.” Information wants to be free, the saying goes, but it turns out that certain information also wants to be kept secret. And therein lies the tension. The more people you knew and talked to, the more you were likely to learn interesting things, but it was also more likely that you might get caught or the cool things you knew about would go away. “It was a struggle,” Acker recalls.