“I go down to the Weehawken police station,” Draper said, “and this detective down there has a bunch of stuff that was found in the car in his office. [. . .] He says, ‘Do you know what this is?’ I says, “It looks to me like a black box with buttons on it.’ He says, ‘Yeah. That’s a blue box. It’s used to defraud the phone company. We found this in your car.’ [. . .] How that thing got there is beyond me.” Draper was ultimately charged with possession of a red box, although this charge was later dismissed; simply possessing a red box, it turned out, was not a crime in New Jersey.
At Bell Labs, Ken Hopper and his colleagues in the Telephone Crime Lab reverse engineered the Charley card and dissected the Apple programs that made it work, eventually preparing a 180-page evidence report for the prosecution. Hopper had no love for Draper. He was also aware of Draper’s legendary paranoia, his fear that the phone company was watching his every move and listening to his phone calls. At one point during the trial, Hopper remembers, he noticed that Pennsylvania Bell had a particularly spooky-looking van, one decorated with the telephone company’s unmistakable logo and color scheme and covered in antennas, complete with a futuristic-looking satellite dish on top. Hopper asked his friends at the Pennsylvania telephone company if they wouldn’t mind parking that van in the courthouse parking lot whenever Draper was there, just to freak him out a bit. Hopper’s friends were only too happy to oblige.
After a lengthy trial filled with failed motions to suppress evidence, Draper agreed to a plea bargain, pleading guilty on June 19, 1978, to one count of possessing a device (an Apple computer!) to steal telecommunication services. He was sentenced to three to six months in jail in Pennsylvania, with credit for the one month he had already served. Once he got out, he would then have to deal with the feds because the Pennsylvania conviction was a violation of his federal probation.
Meanwhile, Joe Engressia had moved from Memphis to Denver a few years earlier. Asked by a reporter why he was making the move, Engressia responded, “I just have a feeling about different areas of the country.” Plus, he said, Denver’s telephone switching system was “more fully computerized” than the one in Memphis and he looked forward to exploring it. His feeling paid off. In Denver he found a high-rise apartment building with an indoor swimming pool, a living arrangement he had dreamed about since he was a kid. He quickly adopted a new handle: “Highrise Joe.”
In Denver Engressia began attending public utility commission hearings, just to keep up to date on what the telephone company was doing. “I was there every hearing, just perfectly quiet all day, listening,” he says. On several occasions Engressia heard a Mountain Bell vice president named Lloyd Leger testifying. Leger made an impression on Engressia with his clarity and no-nonsense style. “He sounded like a ship’s captain,” Engressia remembers. One day after one of the hearings Engressia approached him.
“I got a problem,” said Engressia. “Maybe you could help me out.”
“What’s that?” asked Leger.
“New York. I called them and told them that every line into this particular exchange just gives me free calls. And they just hung up on me. Bunches of lines, it’s like thousands of dollars of revenue being lost every day. I was wondering, who would be the right man to talk to about this?”
“I’m the right man,” Leger responded. Engressia gave him the details on the defective circuits and Leger got the problem squared away; technicians in New York confirmed that there were twenty-four lines giving free calls and that the phone company was indeed losing thousands of dollars of long-distance revenue. Leger was impressed.
After that, Engressia would periodically tell Leger about network problems he found while wandering the network. In 1977, Leger offered Engressia a job. “You wouldn’t believe the pressure AT&T and Southwestern Bell put on me not to hire him,” Leger says. The result was that, just about the time John Draper was being arrested in Pennsylvania, Joe Engressia was starting his new job in Denver with Mountain Bell as a network troubleshooter. He worked in the Network Service Center, where he would receive trouble reports from the field, try to figure out what was causing the problems, and then call the people in the central offices to tell them how to fix it. It was the perfect job for a phone phreak, one that fused arcane knowledge with the problem solving that Engressia had always loved. Engressia would finally get paid to do the things he used to do for free—exploring the network, ferreting out trouble, figuring things out. “I feel the Bell insignia on my jacket and I think I’m the luckiest person on earth,” he said.
Buoyed by Engressia’s success, Acker moved to Denver in March 1979 and began working for Mountain Bell as a telephone operator. What he really wanted, of course, was a job like Engressia’s at the Denver Network Service Center, but Mountain Bell didn’t need any more people there. “They tried to sell other Mountain Bell places on hiring him,” Engressia recalls. “I’d tell them, ‘Yeah, he’s good, he’s my equal, he’ll do real good.’” But it was a tough sell and, despite a few promising opportunities, nothing happened.
Operator services was interesting for a while, Acker says, but the job wore on him. As it happened, Engressia’s dream job was beginning to wear on him too. At heart, Engressia was a free spirit who didn’t like to be told what to do, and the Bell System with its bureaucratic rules and detailed procedural manuals for how to sweep floors was not notable as a place where free spirits thrived. Some things particularly incensed him, such as having been flagged as “being tardy even though you worked seven days a week,” he remembers. “They’d call you tardy if you’re not sitting at your desk [at the right time], all these little schoolish sort of things that I just wanted to avoid.” By 1980, he says, “I was ready to leave and have a different adventure.” It was also not lost on Engressia that with two little words—“I quit”—he might well be able to get Acker hired. “I thought, this may be the one time in my life where I can actually do something to change somebody’s life for the better for long term,” he recalls. Engressia resigned from Mountain Bell in 1980. A few months later, on August 11, Bill Acker joined the Network Service Center.
Ever since his 1976 court case Acker had become much more careful. Now that he was on the inside, however, he knew he had to be scrupulously clean. But, Acker says, he comes from the school of “once a phone phreak, always a phone phreak”; it was just a question of making sure that what he thought of as phreaking was strictly legal. Acker now went to extra lengths to make sure that any network exploring he did, and any conversations he might have with phone phreaks, were above reproach. Besides, it was a good time to get out of blue boxing. AT&T had started to deploy its electronic switching replacement for the venerable 4A crossbar toll switch, the 4ESS, just a few years earlier, and common channel interoffice signaling had continued to expand throughout the network. It was becoming tough to find a “boxable” trunk within the United States, and it grew more difficult with each passing year.
For John Draper, it was also a good time to put phreaking behind him. Draper had completed his prison sentence in Pennsylvania from his 1978 conviction and returned to California to face the music for violating the terms of his parole. Psychiatric evaluations by two different psychiatrists observed that Draper “tend[s] to pass himself off as the victim claiming that he has almost no control over all of the troubles that now beset him” and that he had “numerous paranoid delusions of being especially picked out for persecution because of his power and knowledge”—although, one of the psychiatrists allowed, his paranoia might in fact have some basis in reality given his recent run-ins with the telephone company. Both psychiatrists agreed that a conventional jail would not be a healthy place for John Draper.
In March 1979 Judge Peckham—the very same judge who had presided over Draper’s 1972 and 1976 convictions—once again found himself peering down from the bench at Captain Crunch. “Is this not simple? You have to pay for your telephone calls,” he told Draper. Given the
psychiatric evaluations, Peckham sentenced Draper to a work furlough program for one year, with credit for time already served in prison in Pennsylvania. Oddly enough, this structure seemed to work well for Draper, focusing his energy and attention. He spent his nights in the Alameda County jail writing computer code on paper and his days keying it in to an Apple II computer in Berkeley. The result was EasyWriter, the first word processor for the Apple II.
That April Draper sent an open letter to TAP to be read at the newsletter’s 1979 Technological Hobbyist Conference (the new, more inclusive title for what would have been the “Third Annual Phone Phreak Convention”), explaining his absence. “For several reasons, I have permanently retired from phreaking,” his letter read. “It’s time to move on to new areas of legitimate interest, such as professional computer programming.” He added: “I wish to have no further contact with phreaks or other individuals who may have similar interests.”
TAP had expanded its focus and regularized its printing schedule somewhat since 1977 or so when its founder, Alan Fierstein, turned the reigns over to Tom Edison.§§§ Edison had learned of TAP through a column in the Village Voice in 1975 and quickly sent in some money for a complete set of back issues. “I was totally blown away,” he says, as he remembers reading through those issues. “I had become so fascinated with the whole electronics of the phone system, and at that time there just wasn’t too much being published even in the straight world about telephones and how they worked . . . I don’t think I even slept, I just went through it issue by issue, page by page. It was just fantastic.” Before long Edison was sending TAP corrections to black box schematics. Not long after, he was volunteering at the recently opened TAP office between 28th and 29th Streets on Broadway in Manhattan. Shortly thereafter he found himself running the place. “Al gave me a key and said, ‘Here, this is going to be your new home.’”
§§§The pseudonym he went by at the time.
TAP still covered telephones, of course, but by 1978 it was running computer hacking articles as well. In fact, Cheshire Catalyst¶¶¶ perfectly captured the shift from phreaking to hacking when he introduced his readers to what he called the beige box. “While intrepidly trekking around the recent West Coast Computer Faire in San Jose, CA,” he wrote, “I learned of a new colored box to do wonderful things. The Beige Box is any computer terminal that looks like a Model 33 Teletype to a remote computer.” So named for the sandy brown color of teletypes, Cheshire pointed out that with a teletype (or its equivalent) and a modem you could do all sorts of things, including hack remote computers. It was time for the blue box to move over and make room.
¶¶¶One of the pseudonyms he went by at the time.
It was true that beige boxes (or, as they were more commonly known, home computers with modems) could be used to hack into distant computers, but they were also destined to allow phone phreaks and hackers to communicate with each other rapidly and efficiently. Just a few months earlier two microcomputer hobbyists in Chicago, Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, had developed a program called CBBS, the computerized bulletin board system. CBBS allowed hobbyists with computers and modems to dial into a computer where they could read and post messages and share files. It was a perfect anonymous exchange medium for phreaks and hackers. The first phone phreak/hacker BBSes began appearing within a few years.
Unbeknownst to Tom Edison or Cheshire Catalyst, TAP received some additional scrutiny from the FBI as a result of the THC-79 convention. Someone, it seemed, had been handing out atomic bomb plans at that conference. Via an informant these plans rapidly made their way to the FBI. The New York FBI office forwarded them on to FBI headquarters with a cover note that said, calmly and primly, “Enclosed for Bureau are two packages of Xerox pages which, when assembled, comprise the front and back of a chart entitled ‘Fission Fever.’ Also enclosed is one eight-page Xerox document entitled ‘Thermonuclear Explosives Design.’ It is requested that the Bureau forward this material to the Department of Energy for its analysis as to whether the information contained therein constitutes a violation of Federal law.” The DOE weighed in on the designs and rendered its verdict: “There is a possibility that such a device could give a nuclear yield.” The New York office was asked to investigate the source of the documents, but that source had long since vanished.
Nobody knew it at the time, but Acker’s tenure with the telephone company would outlast the Bell System itself—and by no small margin. In 1981, less than a year after he had started work at Mountain Bell, the United States government’s antitrust suit against AT&T finally went to trial. Judge Harold Greene drew the case his first day on the bench and went on to preside over the largest antitrust case in history and the restructuring of the telephone industry in the United States. The statistics are mind numbing. Over the seven years leading up to and during the trial, AT&T had more than three thousand people assigned to it and spent some $375 million on it; the Department of Justice had 125 people on the case and spent $18 million. The trial saw more than a billion pages of evidence and called hundreds of witnesses. Then, on January 8, 1982, shortly before the trial was supposed to conclude, the government and AT&T reached a settlement. AT&T would be broken up into eight different companies. AT&T itself would retain several parts of its former empire: long-distance services (formerly AT&T Long Lines), Western Electric, and Bell Labs. It could no longer provide local telephone service but would be permitted to enter the computer market. AT&T’s twenty-two regional phone companies would be remolded into seven regional Bell operating companies, or RBOCs: Ameritech, Bell Atlantic, BellSouth, NYNEX, Pacific Telesis, Southwestern Bell, and U.S. West. The RBOCs, each covering a different area of the country, would be allowed to provide only local telephone service, not long-distance calls, and were barred from manufacturing equipment or providing computer and information services.
The new world order went into effect on January 1, 1984. On that date, after 108 years, the Bell System ceased to exist.
The divestiture decision was not universally popular with the public, and especially not with the rank and file of the former Bell System, where Judge Greene and the breakup were widely resented. Life in the post-breakup era took some getting used to for longtime telephone company employees. As part of the settlement, for example, AT&T employees were now supposed to be careful about having contact with their former colleagues at the Bell operating companies. After all, those colleagues now worked for entirely separate companies—not quite competitors, perhaps, but now no longer family. Ken Hopper, the Bell Labs network security engineer, recalls a certain impact this had on his personal life. His wife, Barbara, worked for Bell of Pennsylvania, a Bell operating company. As a joke one evening after Judge Greene’s decision, Barbara took a length of green ribbon and ran it down the center of their bed, dividing it in half.
The breakup of the Bell System symbolized just how much the phone phreaks’ world had changed. The giant cyber-mechanical-human system that was the telephone network, the largest machine in the world, was now almost entirely computers talking to one another via modems. Old analog trunks were rapidly being replaced by digital carrier systems and fiber optics, great news for consumers, for the clarity of digital audio meant that (as the Sprint ads claimed in the late 1980s) you could now hear a pin drop over the telephone. But for phone phreaks, gone was the comforting hiss of analog long-distance trunk lines, gone were the interesting quirks of electromechanical switches, gone were the clicks and clunks and beeps and boops that had so captivated them. The obsolescence of the blue box deprived telephonic explorers of the tool they used most to explore the network, and the network’s homogenization meant there was less and less of interest to explore.
Phone phreaking would continue in various forms in the decades to come; there is something about the telephone network that still entices certain people, even today. But it would never be quite the same. Sort of like the echoes of the final kerchink of a stacked tandem, the g
olden age of analog phreaking had passed and its memory was fading into history.
EPILOGUE
THE TOWN OF Wawina, Minnesota, lies some sixty miles west of the westernmost tip of Lake Superior. Green and forested, with a giant swamp nearby, it is home to about seventy people spread out over some thirty-six square miles. Wawina doesn’t have much of a downtown. It’s mostly just a county road, a town hall, a few buildings, and a church. If you want the bright lights of the big city you need to drive a few miles up the road to Swan River, population 775.
One thing Wawina does have is its own telephone company. With about forty subscribers, the Northern Telephone Company was bought by Bob Riddell in 1972 when he was just twenty-five years old. Riddell, a bit of a phone phreak himself (he prefers “phone nut”), grew up in the area and became interested in telephones when he was three. By the seventh grade he had built his own switchboard and by 1976 had amassed a collection of 108 historical telephones. Riddell injected his quirky sense of humor into the town’s telephone exchange. If you dialed a nonworking number in Wawina in the late 1990s you might have found yourself listening to his voice making the following recorded announcement: “We’re sorry, your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number and dial again, or ask your mother to help you.”
Another thing that Wawina had, for a while at least, was something that no other place in the continental United States could claim: the last operational telephone carrier system that used 2,600 Hz and MF signaling. For many years the carrier circuit, called N2, provided trunk lines for Northern Telephone’s subscribers. It was the last place in the lower forty-eight where you could whistle off your call with a Cap’n Crunch whistle or dial a number with your blue box. Not to worry, though, you couldn’t actually make free long-distance calls that way; the only numbers you could dial with a blue box on the Northern Telephone system were within town.
Exploding the Phone : The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell (9780802193759) Page 35