Dear TAP,
This is Capn. Crunch, I would like to mention a few things.
First, I’m glad to see you boys back in operation & am curious why you stopped publication for a while. I also want to state my willingness in contacting as many would-be phreaks as possible. In person only & not by mail. Therefore I am offering to anyone who wants to come see me in Mt. View all I know in electronics, computers, & related technologies including freaking of course. However I dislike talking on the phone, nor communication by mail. If you even receive this letter I would consider it a miracle. My current address is: J. T. Draper, 1905 Montecito Ave., Apt. #6, Mt. View, CA 94040 for those who want to set up a meeting by mail. Of course I am not underground. A while back National Review published my phone number in the hopes that people would bug me by calling me at 3 am etc. They didn’t realize that I made hundreds of new friends & taught hundreds the art of freaking. Any people who want to visit me are welcome. They can stay with me up to a week (it usually takes that long to teach them). You might want to publish that fact.
The letter, which continued on in that vein, was a wonderful example of why David Condon’s circle of Berkeley phone phreaks viewed association with Draper as the “kiss of death.” Multiple sources, including General Telephone’s security office in Los Angeles, promptly forwarded the December issue of TAP to the FBI, where it served as a reminder, as if they needed one, that Draper was still out there, busy minting new phone phreaks. Who knew what tricks he was teaching them?
By January 1976 a dark vibe had begun to spread throughout certain groups of phone phreaks in both California and New York. Phreaks who used to talk freely were now being cagey or simply not returning calls. Discussions that used to be about the latest telephone hacks were now concerned with something more malodorous: who’s the rat? Several people believed something unwholesome was happening down in LA, but nobody could prove anything. Paranoia levels were beginning to run at record highs.
In fact, something unwholesome was happening that month down in LA—from a phone phreak perspective, anyway. It was the FBI–AT&T autovon demo, and it took place from Wednesday, January 21, 1976, through Friday, January 23, at the FBI’s Los Angeles field office.
Team fed was made up of thirteen heavy hitters. From the FBI there was Jay Cochran, the assistant director of the FBI Laboratory in Washington, D.C.; R. E. Gebhardt, the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office; Bill Harward, the section chief of radio engineering from FBI headquarters; and Bob Jacobs and Bill Snell, the FBI tech squad special agents who had been Sheridan’s FBI handlers. From the local telephone companies there was Bill Bowren, the security director of Pacific Telephone in Los Angeles; Roger Edfast, the security manager of Pacific Telephone in Pasadena; Walter Schmidt from General Telephone; and, of course, Wayne Perrin. From AT&T, there was Chuck Israel, the autovon network manager; Nelson Saxe, the AT&T Long Lines security supervisor; and Ken Hopper from Bell Laboratories. Finally, there was a gentleman from Washington, D.C., who is notable for how his name and organization are blanked out of every government document describing the meeting: a Mr. B. A. Fonger from the National Security Agency.
The two phone phreaks attending, Paul Sheridan and a clean-cut twenty-something phreak described only as Michael,††† were heavily outnumbered. Michael was a talented, technically sharp Los Angeles–area phone hacker who had served as a sort of technical adviser to the FBI on a wiretap case some years earlier. The two phreaks were brought in separately so as not to have contact with each other. Figuring the phreaks might be somewhat more talkative if they weren’t surrounded by so many feds, the interrogators split into two groups. Harward, Hopper, Israel, Saxe, and the two FBI agents Jacobs and Snell would conduct the interviews in the same room as the subjects. A reel-to-reel tape recorder would record the room conversation as well as any telephone calls that were made. As the reels ran out of tape, every forty-five minutes or so, the tapes would be brought to a second conference room, where they would be listened to by Bowren, Cochran, Edfast, Fonger, Perrin, and Schmidt.
†††A pseudonym.
First up was Sheridan, who would give a guided tour of autovon access techniques.
The big question was: could Sheridan really do what he claimed he could? Could he use a blue box to get into the military autovon network? Did this guard banding technique actually work? Sure, everybody understood that he might be able to get in to autovon by fooling an operator; that was slightly troubling but it wasn’t nearly as big a deal as being able to do it with a blue box. Sheridan had made lots of claims—lots of hair-raising claims. And now a whole lot of high-ranking people had gone out of their way to see these techniques demonstrated. Recall AT&T Long Lines security agent Saxe’s comment a few weeks earlier: “We’re not about to go out to Los Angeles to see Sheridan fail to get a call through on autovon!”
Of course, Sheridan failed to get a call through on autovon.
Well, that’s not entirely fair. In fact, Sheridan was able to get a call through by BSing an autovon operator. And he was able to demonstrate that guard banding worked. He also demonstrated a bunch of other phone phreak techniques. But despite multiple attempts he was unable to get into autovon by the guard banding method described in the paper he had given the FBI earlier in the month. Later that afternoon Michael, the second informant, tried a slightly different guard banding technique for hacking into autovon. It, too, failed.
Yet both phreaks swore their techniques worked.
This situation will be familiar to anyone who has ever had to give or sit through a demo of any new technology. There are entities known in Silicon Valley’s high-tech community as “the demo gods.” It is said that demo gods can smell fear. An important demo? An audience of VIPs? That’s when then demo gods suddenly appear and things mysteriously stop working.
Fortunately for Sheridan and Michael, the more technical members of team fed were familiar with this phenomenon. That evening Fonger, Hopper, Israel, Saxe, and Schmidt adjourned to the General Telephone security laboratory in Santa Monica. Breaking out their (legal) blue boxes and test equipment, they sat down and tried to break into autovon using the techniques they had seen that day. It was a long process; had they been phone phreaks, they might even have enjoyed it. But finally, at 10:30 p.m., they succeeded in accessing autovon using a blue box. Ken Hopper’s notes convey the effort they put into it: “Our success in direct autovon dialing came after many, many fruitless attempts, perhaps as many as 100.” Given how difficult guard banding was until you got the hang of it, this was not entirely surprising. In addition, apparently part of the problem they had making it work was that that other people had been tying up the lines between Los Angeles and Seattle that very evening. Hopper suspected it was Sheridan and Michael, probably trying to prove to themselves that the techniques they had tried to demonstrate to the FBI earlier in the day still worked.
Perrin remembers being woken up by a late-night phone call that evening from the engineers at the security lab: “It works, it works! This stuff really works!” Perrin wasn’t surprised. Despite Sheridan’s failure to hack into autovon earlier in the day, Perrin had developed a certain confidence in Sheridan’s claims ever since getting the White House on the phone. “What the hell are you calling me about? I already knew that,” Perrin recalls telling them. He hung up and went back to sleep.
Just two miles from Stanford University, the 1900 block of Menalto Avenue in Menlo Park was a collection of small storefronts on a tree-lined street in a mostly residential neighborhood. You wouldn’t have thought so from a casual glance but it was a nexus of nerdly activity.
A fixture on the block was the electric vehicle pioneer Roy Kaylor. Kaylor was an inveterate tinkerer, a Stanford electrical engineer, an odd blend of hippie and West Point graduate. He had been building electric vehicles since 1965; his “Kaylor Kits” converted Volkswagen Bugs to run on electric mo
tors and batteries. He had a small store on Menalto where he sold electric motorcycles—in 1975. Kaylor’s house, just across the street and down the block from his electric motorcycle store, doubled as his shop and laboratory. His garage was filled with electronic test equipment and machine tools, everything to make a geeky heart beat faster.
A few storefronts from Kaylor’s electric motorcycle shop was the People’s Computer Company. PCC was a sort of computer commune started in 1972 by personal computing pioneers Bob Albrecht and George Firedrake. “Computers are mostly used against people instead of for people; used to control people instead of to free them,” read PCC’s first newsletter. “Time to change all that—we need a . . . People’s Computer Company.”
PCC became a watering hole for Silicon Valley’s budding personal computer scene. Of course, they weren’t called personal computers back then; that term wouldn’t be popular for years. They were “homebrew” computers, kits assembled from empty circuit boards and bags of electronic components, built one part at a time with solder and sweat and concentration. They were often enclosed in bulky aluminum boxes or homemade wooden enclosures, that is, when anyone bothered to enclose them in anything at all. The computers weren’t powerful; mostly all they could do is blink lights in response to toggle switch inputs. But for those bitten by the bug they were like crack cocaine.
The People’s Computer Company took up two storefronts. It had computers around its periphery, a social space with a couch and rug in the center, and a potluck dinner every Wednesday night. The potlucks were a big draw, not to be missed events for microcomputer hobbyists in the Valley in 1975. Steve Wozniak was a frequent attendee; Bill Gates showed up on one occasion as well. Kaylor recalls a PCC potluck in which he tried to convince Wozniak that Woz should sell preassembled Apple I computers directly to the general public instead of as electronic kits to be assembled by computer geeks. Woz thought this was a hysterically funny idea—so funny, Kaylor says, that Woz actually fell off the couch laughing, rolling around on the rug of the People’s Computer Company, his belly laugh filling the room.
John Draper became a frequent sight at the PCC, programming computers, building electronic gadgets, hanging out, smoking dope. He and Kaylor quickly became friends. “I was impressed with Draper’s diligence, his follow-through, his stick-to-itiveness,” Kaylor recalls. He knew Draper was building various colored phone phreak boxes and even let Draper use the electronics lab in his garage to work on them. But Kaylor made a point of not asking Draper too many questions. Kaylor had a security clearance for some defense work he had done, he says, and, as he later put it, “You learn in that environment that sometimes it’s better not to know things.”
In all, the 1900 block of Menalto was a perfect setup. There were plenty of interesting people to talk to, computers to hack on, soldering irons and multimeters and oscilloscopes to play with. There was a corner market a few doors down where you could buy snacks and soda. The Menalto Market even had a pay phone booth outside where you could call your friends—or test your red and blue boxes to make sure they were in tune. It was everything Draper needed.
“It was decided that the investigation of Draper should be intensified.” Thus spake the passive-voice memo to the special agent in charge of the Los Angeles FBI office, summarizing the autovon demo and the skull session that followed. “As such, Assistant Director in Charge Cochran, Section Chief Harward, and Special Agents [. . .] should travel to San Francisco in order to brief the San Francisco FBI Field Office personally of the developments concerning telephone manipulations. In addition, conscientious efforts should be made to establish and cultivate informants in this area with regard to possible prosecution relating to interception of communications, anti-racketeering-interference of government communications, and interstate transportation of stolen property fraud by wire/computer fraud by wire.”
A few days later, on January 27, FBI agents met with Pacific Telephone investigators in San Francisco to discuss the Draper investigation. Present were Assistant U.S. Attorney Floy Dawson, the FBI special agent in charge of the San Francisco office, his deputy, the assistant agent in charge, and seven other FBI agents. Three representatives from Pacific Telephone attended. The Pacific Telephone people said they would need to talk to their attorneys to figure out how they could help. For its part, the FBI started spot surveillances on Draper’s known haunts to get a handle on his activities. Agents were assigned to check two locations on a random basis. The first was Draper’s apartment in Mountain View. The second was the People’s Computer Company in Menlo Park.
Draperism. That was John Draper’s term for what he viewed as the persistent bad luck that seemed to follow him around like a rain cloud. Draperism was never his fault, never the result of anything he had done. Like the weather, it was a purely external phenomenon, something that just happened.
Whatever it was, the Wall Street Journal did Draper no favors when the newspaper ran a front-page story that same day—January 27, 1976—titled “Blue Boxes Spread from Phone Freaks to the Well-Heeled.” It described the spread of the hobby from “electronics tinkerers who got a charge out of things like reaching the recorded weather report for Tokyo without paying for the call” to the mainstream, to “people who consider themselves basically honest.” It made Draper’s hobby sound like the Next Big Thing, one that was spreading like wildfire.
On January 30 the FBI’s San Francisco office sent a high-priority teletype message to headquarters. As part of their “intensification” of the investigation against Draper, San Francisco agents had procured a tracking device that they were preparing to surreptitiously install on Draper’s car. That same day Pacific Telephone reported that equipment had been deployed that would enable the company to “detect any unusual or illegal telephone usage” at Kaylor’s house across the street from People’s Computer Company, as well as the pay phone down the street outside the Menalto Market. The FBI continued its “fisur”—Bureauspeak for physical surveillance—of Draper’s haunts over the next week.
On February 10 the San Francisco office decided it was time to move the investigation along. “San Francisco has no sources who are phone phreaks,” read the draft of an urgent teletype message. Given this, San Francisco requested that Los Angeles send one of its phone phreak informants up to the Bay Area to visit Draper and “accomplish the following objectives.”
What might those objectives be? We may never know. The FBI’s Freedom of Information Act office suffered an acute attack of shyness and blanked out the entire next page of the draft teletype message. But we can bet the objectives were mundane, certainly nothing exciting, because a few lines later, after the blanked-out material, the draft teletype message noted that Floy Dawson, the assistant U.S. attorney, “advised there would be no entrapment in the above.” What a relief!
Except somebody in the FBI drew a line through that sentence on the draft teletype message—striking it out. A copy of the final teletype message as received at FBI headquarters shows that little exculpatory sentence never made it into the actual teletype message that was sent. Apparently Assistant U.S. Attorney Dawson did not advise that there would be no entrapment in the above or perhaps the FBI thought better of checking with him. Here’s a suggestion, by the way. If you’re ever in a position to document something that might appear to be sketchy—even if it’s perfectly legit—don’t leave drafts of emails or teletypes or memos in your files. And if you do, try to make sure they don’t have sentences that say things like “I checked with our lawyer and he says this is perfectly legal, whoops, actually, no, he didn’t say that, let me just draw a line through that sentence.” It just doesn’t look good.
Whatever the San Francisco office agents were proposing, FBI agents in Los Angeles were not thrilled with it. Still, after some back and forth, Los Angeles finally agreed to send a phone phreak informant up to San Francisco. On Monday, February 23, an urgent teletype message from Los Angeles to San Francis
co advised that the informant would drive up the next day and should arrive in the Bay Area late that afternoon. He was instructed to contact FBI agents in San Francisco upon his arrival.
Perrin and Sheridan were spending a lot of time together. “He wasn’t a bad kid,” Perrin recalls. But, Perrin says, “you couldn’t shut him off. You couldn’t say, ‘Paul, I only talk to you at work,’ because he wanted to talk. He wanted a normal life.” Sheridan’s family situation was a shambles. “It fucked up way back when and it’s been fucked up ever since,” Perrin recalls Sheridan telling him. Sheridan’s parents were divorced and he had attended a reform school in Los Angeles where he had met other teenagers interested in telephone shenanigans.
Perrin says he became a father figure of sorts. Sheridan often dropped by Perrin’s house during the investigation. “He’d come over here and he would be comfortable. He played basketball with my son and daughter and talked to them like he was a long-lost cousin. They were very nice to him, they liked him. But they knew he was somebody I was working a case on, and that he wasn’t normal. Kids can pick things up like that.”
As much as the normalcy that Perrin was providing him, it was clear that Sheridan also liked the attention he was getting from switching sides. Imagine what it must have been like to have telephone company security officers and FBI special agents hanging on your every word, being dazzled by your feats and knowledge, even sending you on spy missions. Then, too, there was the money the FBI was paying him. Finally, Sheridan firmly believed that the phone company had been mere days away from having him arrested. By turning himself in, he must have figured, he was avoiding a much worse outcome.
When Sheridan wasn’t playing basketball with Perrin’s kids, he could often be found on the couch in Perrin’s living room, or in a chair in a conference room at Pacific Telephone, being gently interrogated. “You didn’t have to lean on Paul real hard,” says Perrin. “Paul wanted you to be his friend. You had to imply that the world was coming to an end. If you threatened him—‘listen, you son of a bitch’—it didn’t work. But if you said, ‘Paul, look, I can’t keep these people off you for long, you’ve gotta work with me.’”
Exploding the Phone : The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell (9780802193759) Page 31