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

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Exploding the Phone : The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell (9780802193759) Page 34

by Lapsley, Phil


  Caming didn’t need a crystal ball to predict what happened next: a phone call from the chair of the House Subcommittee on Courts, Civil Liberties, and the Administration of Justice. “He said, ‘I think we’re going to have to have one of your guys come down and explain all this to us.’” Caming knew, as he had known for ten years now, that he would be the guy.

  Less than three weeks later Caming found himself before the U.S. Congress, swearing to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Seated with Caming were Earl Conners, chief of security for Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company, and John Mack, a Bell Labs engineer who was intimately familiar with the technical details of Greenstar. True to his reputation for loquaciousness (or maybe it was his legal training) Caming made sure his colleagues never got to speak more than two dozen words over the course of the three-hour hearing. Caming explained AT&T’s motivations for launching the surveillance system, how it operated, and, most important, why it was legal—indeed, not just legal, but in fact the only option AT&T had to combat blue box and black box fraud at the time. Never once did he refer to it as “Greenstar,” the name that ten years earlier he said “just sounds illegal.” Perhaps it was Caming’s legal reasoning, perhaps it was his appearance—­competent, prepared, confident, yet self-effacing—or perhaps it was 195 Broadway’s deft handling of the press on the matter, but AT&T managed to weather the Greenstar storm without much damage. Despite some alarming headlines there was little fallout and no criminal investigation. The Greenstar matter quickly faded away.

  The Ashley-Gravitt lawsuit refused to do the same, though. As soon as it got to trial the case erupted in an explosion of headline-grabbing dirty laundry. Multiple Southwestern Bell managers testified under oath that they had made contributions to politicians and then had been reimbursed by filing false expense vouchers; one manager admitted that he had “arranged for a city councilman to purchase some property from Southwestern in order to curry favorable influence in a rate case.” On the witness stand Ashley admitted falsifying expense vouchers but said he did it to “disguise political payoffs.” Firing back, Southwestern Bell’s attorneys produced thirteen female employees who testified to having sex with Ashley or with Gravitt—or who had sex with other men at their direction—in order to be promoted.

  The lawsuit turned into something of a legal roller coaster. James Ashley and Gravitt’s widow initially won a $3 million verdict against Southwestern Bell, plus another $1 million in a separate suit in which Ashley claimed Southwestern Bell had illegally wiretapped him. But a year later the appeals court overturned both verdicts. On October 22, 1980, the Supreme Court of Texas let this ruling stand, and Ashley and Gravitt’s widow would get nothing.

  While AT&T was dealing with its decade of competition, scandal, and antitrust lawsuits, something amazing was happening in Silicon Valley, something that, in its way, would turn the light out on blue boxing and phone phreaking even more effectively than CCIS. Ironically, it was something that AT&T itself had made possible. Bell Labs’ invention of the transistor enabled not just the computer but also the microprocessor—a computer on a chip. By the mid-1970s the microprocessor had made it possible for you to own a computer of your very own. As it would turn out, the kind of people who would have been interested in hacking telephones would be just as interested—for many, much more interested—in hacking computers.

  Back in 1968, Intel was a small start-up focused on making memory chips for computer systems. Its founders, Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, had both worked at Shockley Semiconductor, the company started by one of the three Bell Labs scientists who had invented the transistor. In 1970 an even smaller company called Computer Terminal Corporation approached Intel about having it manufacture a new chip that CTC had designed. The interesting thing about the new chip was that CTC wanted it to hold an entire computer on a single piece of silicon; in other words, it would be a computer on a chip, something that had never been done before. Bob Noyce allegedly responded that his company could do it, but it would be a dumb business move for Intel, which was in the business of selling chips. “If you have a computer chip, you can only sell one chip per computer,” he said, “while with memory you can sell hundreds of chips per computer.” Still, money talked; CTC and Intel signed a $50,000 development contract.

  The project did not go smoothly. Intel was unable to deliver on time and CTC decided it would rather build its own computer out of separate chips than wait any longer for Intel. Instead of paying Intel for something it couldn’t use, CTC kept its money and Intel kept the rights to the chip. The project eventually resulted in something called the Intel 8008, an early eight-bit microprocessor that Intel began selling for $120 each in 1972.

  By 1974 Intel had released a new and greatly improved successor, the Intel 8080, a tiny rectangle of silicon some 3/16 of an inch on a side that contained about six thousand transistors. It was a computer on a chip that executed a few hundred thousand instructions per second. Engineers called it the “first truly useable microprocessor.” Intel didn’t know it yet but that chip would be the thing that started the home computer revolution and would lead to Intel’s eventual domination of the microprocessor market.

  In January 1975 Popular Electronics, a geeky electronic hobbyist magazine, offered its readers an unbelievable chance to own their own slice of high-tech heaven. “Project Breakthrough!” the cover fairly shouted. “World’s First Minicomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models . . . ‘Altair 8800.’” The cover’s photo showed a large metal box—blue, as it happened—about the size of three toasters, its nerd-sexy front panel festooned with dozens of tiny toggle switches and red LEDs. The computer had an Intel 8080 processor and 256 bytes of memory. It had no screen or keyboard, not even a teletype. If you wanted to program it, you would be flipping switches on the front panel for some time. But before you could program it you had to build it. It came as a kit, consisting of empty circuit boards and bags full of electronic components you had to solder together. The price? A mere $397, mail-ordered from a company no one had ever heard of: MITS in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

  MITS’s phone began ringing off the hook. Within weeks thousands of orders were called in for the Altair 8800, more than four hundred in a single day. The Popular Electronics editor Les Solomon said later, “The only word which could come into mind was ‘magic.’ You buy the Altair, you have to build it, then you have to build other things to plug into it to make it work. You are a weird-type person. Because only weird-type people sit in kitchens and basements and places all hours of the night, soldering things to boards to make machines go flickety-flock.”

  Weird-type people who sit in kitchens and basements, soldering things to make machines go flickety-flock. Hmm. Where have we heard of such people before?

  As a hobby, building computers had a huge advantage over building blue boxes: it was legal. Computer hobbyists began to gather in the Silicon Valley—shockingly, without fear of arrest, without the haunting “who’s the informant?” paranoia that accompanied phone phreak gatherings. First there were the Wednesday night potluck dinners at the People’s Computer Company on Menalto Avenue in Menlo Park—the same place the FBI would stake out in the Bureau’s efforts to catch Captain Crunch—and later there were the meetings of the nomadic Homebrew Computer Club. Homebrew hosted its first meeting in March 1975. Its second meeting had some forty attendees; by its fourth meeting more than one hundred people were on its mailing list. The Homebrew Computer Club rapidly attracted the likes of John Draper and Steve Wozniak, who often hung out together in the back of the meetings. Wozniak would show off his latest hardware hacks and Draper—before his 1976 bust and still on probation from his 1972 bust—would happily give tips on blue box construction and tuning to those who asked.

  Hacking on microcomputers had another advantage over hacking phones because you might actually be able to make money at it. The Altair 8800, for example, quickly caught the attention of a couple of
undergraduates from Harvard University. Sensing a business opportunity, the duo proposed to write an interpreter for the BASIC computer language, something that would make the Altair far more useful. Upon seeing demo code from the pair, MITS took them up on the deal. The Harvard students—two kids named Bill Gates and Paul Allen—dropped out and started a company called Micro-Soft to pursue the opportunity.

  Intel’s 8080 found itself at the center of a competitive whirlpool of other companies’ microprocessor chips: the Motorola 6800, the MOS Technology 6502, the Zilog Z80. MITS’s Altair 8800 spawned a cottage industry of competitors as well, mostly kits, mostly clumsily named: the IMSAI 8080, the Processor Technology SOL-20, the MOS KIM-1, the Southwest Technical Products Corporation SWTPC 6800. Other companies formed to supply accessory circuit boards to these new computers, such as Cromemco, Morrow’s MicroStuff, Godbout Electronics, North Star Computers. Every one needed hardware and software hackers to help them. Riches, or promises of riches, or maybe just a fun job that might pay the bills beckoned.

  In 1976 former phone phreaks Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were selling Apple I computers to their fellow hobbyists. “Jobs placed ads in hobbyist publications and they began selling Apples for the price of $666.66,” journalist Steven Levy wrote. “Anyone in Homebrew could take a look at the schematics for the design, Woz’s BASIC was given away free with the purchase of a piece of equipment that connected the computer to a cassette recorder.” The fully assembled and tested Apple II followed later that year. By 1977 microcomputers had begun to enter the mainstream. You could stroll down to your local Radio Shack and buy a TRS-80 microcomputer off the shelf, something absolutely unheard of just a year earlier. The microcomputer revolution was fully under way.

  Twenty-one

  Nightfall

  EVER SINCE 1967, when he called directory assistance operators all over the country to find out where each area code was, Bill Acker had been building a map of the telephone network in his head. By 1976 that map was bursting with information. It had long since expanded beyond the borders of the United States and now included countries overseas. In fact, it was now much more than a map; it was closer to a call routing database. When ordinary long-distance operators got stumped by how to make complicated international phone calls they’d call the expert operators at rate-and-route. Certain phone phreaks knew it was faster, and maybe even more accurate, just to call Bill Acker.

  One of Acker’s close friends had moved to Florida and had a Haitian roommate. Acker’s friend had a blue box and wanted to know how to help his roomie call home, so he boxed himself a call to Acker in New York and asked for routing guidance. Acker was happy to oblige. “Well, let’s see,” Acker said. “Look, the Dominican Republic is on the same island, so why not call Santa Domingo? 171 121 is how you get there and they’ll get you through. It should be pretty straightforward.”

  It was good routing advice but, like so many things in life, it had unintended consequences. In December 1976, the United States of America indicted William F. Acker on the felony charge of conspiracy to commit Fraud by Wire. As it turned out, the telephone company had been investigating Acker’s friend for blue boxing and had placed a recorder on his line. Just like in the Hanna case from the 1960s, the telephone company’s recorder grabbed several minutes of conversation from the telephone line every time it was activated by a 2,600 Hz tone. Those several minutes were enough to get Acker on tape giving his buddies advice on how best to route their fraudulent call. As Acker put it later, “Apparently being a rate-and-route operator for phone phreaks is considered conspiracy.”

  Fortunately for Acker, things had tightened up a little bit since the Hanna case a decade earlier. Back then the phone company turned tapes over to the FBI and the feds prosecuted based on whatever was talked about on those tapes—in Hanna’s case, his conversations were used as evidence of bookmaking. That wasn’t considered kosher anymore. The new legal standard was that tapes resulting from blue box monitoring could be used as evidence of toll fraud, and to identify the people involved, but attempting to prosecute on other charges based on anything else that was said on the tapes was standing on shaky legal ground. Luckily, Acker hadn’t actually committed toll fraud—on that call, anyway—and the result was that the conversation on the tape couldn’t be used as evidence of conspiracy. Charges against him were dropped on March 14, 1977. His buddy and the roommate weren’t so lucky, for they had actually made blue box calls; they were convicted later that month of Fraud by Wire.

  That January, a few months before the charges against Acker were dropped, John Draper walked out of Lompoc prison a free man. He had spent a total of three months on the inside, where he slopped pigs at the prison’s piggery and tended the prison grounds in a landscaping job. While there, Draper claims, he taught the art of phone phreaking to dozens of other inmates.

  Draper soon went to work for his friend Steve Wozniak at Apple Computer, designing an innovative product called the Charley Board. Charley was an add-in circuit board for the Apple II that connected the computer to the telephone line. With Charley and a few simple programs you could make your Apple II do all sorts of telephonic tricks. Not only could it dial telephone numbers and send touch tones down the line, it could even listen to the calls it placed and recognize basic telephone signals as the call progressed, signals such as a dial tone or busy signal or a ringing signal. With the right programming it could be used as a modem.

  An Apple II with a Charley Board, in fact, became the ultimate phone phreaking tool. Just as the phone company thought it was natural to mix computers and phone switches, John Draper thought it was natural to mix computers and phone phreaking. Draper was not the first to have this insight; students at MIT in the mid-1960s had interfaced one of the school’s PDP-6 microcomputers to the telephone line and used it as a computerized blue box. According to hacker historian Steven Levy, “At one point, [the telephone company] burst into the ninth floor at Tech Square, and demanded that the hackers show them the blue box. When the hackers pointed to the PDP-6, the frustrated officials threatened to take the whole machine, until the hackers unhooked the phone interface and handed it over.” Still, the small size and low cost of the Apple II changed the game, and the fact that Charley could listen to a call in progress meant that it could do tricky things like crack codes for WATS extenders. As Wozniak explained it, “A WATS extender is used when a company has incoming and outgoing free 800 lines. Company executives call in on the incoming 800 line and tap out a four-digit code, which gets them on their company’s outgoing 800 line. Then they can dial a free call anywhere they want. The only system protection is the four-digit code.” Thanks to Charley and some software Draper had written, some of phone phreaking’s drudgery was eliminated; what Charlie Pyne and Jake Locke had to do with their index fingers at Harvard in the 1960s—dialing thousands of numbers and listening for dial tones—an Apple II could now do automatically. According to Wozniak, Draper cracked some twenty WATS extenders by Charley’s brute-force dialing of codes while Draper was working at Apple.

  All this did not sit well with Steve Jobs and the other managers at Apple, who thought the Charley Board product was a bit too risky and, besides, they disliked Draper to begin with. Charley was shelved. Draper left Apple and moved from California to rural Pennsylvania to work at a friend’s company designing a product for the emerging cable television industry. He and his like-minded housemates quickly turned their house in the Poconos into a microcomputer laboratory—a Processor Technology SOL-20 microcomputer sat side by side with an Apple II. Wires spilled out from the guts of Draper’s Apple II, where a new and improved Charley Board connected his computer to the telephone line. Charley was immediately set to work scanning for numbers.

  Draper loved to show off for his friends. Charley was a tele­phonic tour de force, an opportunity for adulation not to be missed. Draper penned a handwritten flyer on a piece of graph paper inviting his friends on both coasts
to come to his housewarming party on October 22, 1977: “There will be plenty of music, fun, and information exchanges going on all day and most of the evening [. . .] along with substances in solid, liquid, and perhaps gassious [sic] states for the head. ‘Charley,’ the first phone phreak computer, will be on hand to play with [. . .] So, head for the hills, the beautiful Poconos for the first East Coast Capt Crunch Party.”

  The event attracted more than a dozen of Draper’s friends and acquaintances, some from as far away as California. It was mid­afternoon before the party crashers arrived: the Pennsylvania state police and security agents from Bell of Pennsylvania. Draper soon found himself in an increasingly familiar situation, in handcuffs, sitting in the back of a police car. His Apple II and his housemate’s SOL-20 computer were seized and carted off to Bell Laboratories for analysis.

  Pennsylvania Bell security agents had been watching Draper like a hawk, having attached a dialed number recorder, or DNR, to his telephone line within a few days of getting word of his arrival in the 717 area code. Unlike a wiretap, a DNR doesn’t generally record voice conversations. Rather, it listens for tones and pulses and then decodes and prints out everything it hears—the numbers dialed with a rotary dial, with touch tones, or with the MF tones generated by a blue box. Within a couple of days the dialed number recorder printouts showed Draper making illegal calls. Some were made via a blue box, others by WATS extending.

  For Draper, it was the start of a lengthy nightmare, one that he would, as always, chalk up to Draperism. He spent the next thirty days in the county prison, finally posting bail and getting out around Thanksgiving. Then, the day after Christmas, Draper’s venerable VW van blew a tire while driving through the Lincoln Tunnel. Pulling off in Weehawken, New Jersey, Draper called a tow truck, which dropped him and his van off at a service station. “When I come back to the gas station after getting money for the tire the car’s gone,” Draper recalled. “So I ask the gas station owner what happened to it and they said, ‘Call the Weehawken police.’

 

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