Then on June 15, 2006, Wawina’s N2 carrier system went the way of all flesh and, indeed, of all telephone equipment—it was, as they say, disconnected and no longer in service. Before it was removed, Shane Young at Northern Telephone set up a voice-mail account and quietly requested telephone enthusiasts across the country to pay their final respects to the system by dialing 218-488-1307 and leaving a message. In the weeks leading up to the cutoff he amassed several hours of good-byes from old phone phreaks and telephone enthusiasts, including Mark and Al Bernay, Captain Crunch, and even the old Whistler himself, Highrise Joe.
The messages were poignant testimony to the power of the spell that the telephone had cast over some people. After all, phone phreaking’s heyday came and went some forty years ago. And that means we have a bit of catching up to do.
Most of the original phone phreaks—the ones mentioned in this book, anyway—went on to live happy, productive, and fairly conventional lives. Jake Locke, the slacker student at Harvard in 1967, never did get a summer job with the phone company. Instead, he went on to get his PhD and became a respected scientist and academic administrator, demonstrating, he says, that “even callow youths can go on to become stodgy bureaucrats.” The students who preceded him at Harvard and MIT back in 1962—Charlie Pyne, Tony Lauck, Ed Ross, and Paul Heckel—all went on to have successful careers in engineering and related fields and are now mostly retired; Pyne even married his high school sweetheart, Betsy, who used to impersonate operators to reach him at his boarding school. Sadly, Heckel passed away in 2005. David Condon, the man who hoodwinked long-distance operators with his Davy Crockett Cat and Canary Bird Call Flute back in 1955, became an accountant and tax preparer. Now eighty and retired, he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and enjoys traveling by railroad. Ralph Barclay, the inventor of the blue box, was an electrical engineer and entrepreneur for forty-four years before he died in 2009.
The blue box bookies (and one of their attorneys) came to less happy ends. The government finally succeeded in convicting Gil “the Brain” Beckley, its most-wanted layoff bookmaker, in 1967. After lengthy legal wrangling, it looked like he would be going to prison for ten years. But then Beckley failed to make a court date. Some speculated that he had fled the country. Others suggested he had been rubbed out to prevent his cooperating with the feds; if he was tempted to squeal, Time magazine wrote, “Gil Beckley would be distinctly more valuable to his friends dead than alive.” Kenneth Hanna, the bookie whose blue box use caused FBI agents to kick in his door in 1966, met a more certain end. He was found shot dead and stuffed into the trunk of a car at the Atlanta airport in 1970. Flamboyant mob attorney Ben Cohen was convicted of income tax evasion in 1966 and sentenced to eighteen months in prison; he died in 1979.
Thankfully, most of the phone phreaks profiled in the Esquire article, and those who fell in with them later, avoided prison, to say nothing of car trunks in airport parking lots. Bill Acker spent twenty-seven years at Mountain Bell (which, after the AT&T breakup, became U.S. West and then later Qwest) as a network troubleshooter and switch technician; ironically, he even spent some time in the Network Element Security Group. Now largely retired, he lives in Denver, Colorado, where he maintains a version of the Linux operating system that is accessible to the blind; he also hacks on Asterisk, an open-source software-based telephone switching system. Al Gilbertson, whose annoyance at being busted by the phone company set the unintended consequences in motion that culminated in the Esquire article, retired after an entrepreneurial career in electronics. He now lives in a house on a vineyard in an idyllic area of northern California where, he says, he tries to do “as little as possible.” For almost twenty years Jim Fettgather has been at Alphapointe Association for the Blind in Kansas City where he teaches computer skills to the blind. Denny Teresi continues to love music and radio; he ran an oldies record store for a number of years and recently celebrated his thirty-fifth anniversary at San Jose State University’s radio station, KSJS. Mark Bernay switched from engineering to law; he is now retired and lives in San Francisco. Ray Oklahoma, the author of the Ramparts article and the discoverer of the 052 conference, went on to become a software developer and computer consultant. Al Diamond, also known as Al Bernay, whose telephone conference lines gave so many Los Angeles phone phreaks their start, was a schoolteacher for many years in southern California. He passed away in 2008.
Joe Engressia traveled a substantially less conventional path. After leaving Mountain Bell’s Network Service Center in 1980 he took some time off, only to return to Bell System in 1981 as an operator for about a year. He moved to Minneapolis on June 12, 1982, a date he says he chose because 612 was the area code for Minneapolis. He found a high-rise apartment building where he lived on Social Security disability payments and the occasional odd job, including working as an olfactory panelist (or, as he put it, “smelling pig poop”) for the University of Minnesota. He also ran a pair of recorded telephone announcement lines, one called Zzzzyzzerrific Funline (the last entry in the phone book) and the other Stories and Stuff.
Around 1986 he began calling himself Joybubbles. “We were on a retreat at Carleton College, a spiritual retreat, and it went around the room, what name would you like to use for the week?” he told a reporter later. “Suddenly it got around to me and I said, ‘Joybubbles.’ It was like a breath. You just felt the rightness of it. . . . I guess because it conjures up in my mind joyful feelings.”
Several years later Joybubbles decided to become a child. He explained it this way: “I’m a survivor of child sexual abuse at a blind school in New Jersey from 1955”; this was something he had “sort of forgot for a number of years.” He continued, “I think that, and going to school when I was four, and other things contributed to me feeling like I never had a childhood . . . I felt that I was too smart to need to play like other kids did.” So, he said, “in 1988 I decided to have a childhood at last.” He declared himself eternally five years old and began surrounding himself with toys. He legally changed his name to Joybubbles in 1991. In 1998 he made a few headlines for his pilgrimage to the University of Pittsburgh’s library in order to listen to several hundred episodes of the television program Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Fred Rogers, Joybubbles suggested in an interview, was on par with Martin Luther King and Gandhi: “Nobody knows how much peace and love he sowed,” he said. He remained interested in telephones and often reported telephone network misconfigurations to the telephone company. Joybubbles died of congestive heart failure in 2007 at age fifty-eight. He left behind a tiny apartment full of toys, a diverse collection of books and magazines on tape, a few telephones, many real-world friends, and several imaginary ones.
For John Draper, things were looking up in 1980. EasyWriter for the Apple II did well enough to be noticed by IBM, which selected it to be the word processor of choice when it introduced the IBM PC in 1981. For the next few years Draper lived high on the hog as president of his own company, Cap’n Software. A 1983 newspaper article described him as a “wealthy executive,” one who drove a new Mercedes sedan and hung out on the beaches of Hawaii and Acapulco. But by 1984 his personal fortunes were crumbling. Cap’n Software’s distributor, Information Unlimited Software, had introduced its own, entirely separate version of EasyWriter called EasyWriter II—one for which Draper received no royalties. By 1985 Cap’n Software had collapsed and Draper took a more conventional software job. Two years later he was back in the papers for forging tickets to BART, the San Francisco Bay Area subway system; he eventually plea-bargained this charge to a misdemeanor. This was the beginning of twenty-five years of spotty employment, raves and dance parties, failed start-ups, and the occasional where-are-they-now newspaper article. Today Draper is sixty-nine and lives in Burbank, California.
Chic Eder, the drug dealer and informant who gave the FBI the recording of Draper wiretapping their San Francisco office, ended up back in the slammer in 1980 on drug charges, where he died eight years later.
Paul Sheridan, the phone phreak spy for Pacific Telephone and the FBI’s Los Angeles field office, went on to have a successful and entrepreneurial career in business after his stint in the air force.
Ron Rosenbaum, the man who made the Esquire phreaks famous, continues his distinguished writing career. He is the author of nine books and now writes for Slate. A reprint of “Secrets of the Little Blue Box” can be found in his collection The Secret Parts of Fortune (2000).
TAP, the phone phreak newsletter formerly known as YIPL, thrived in the early 1980s, especially thanks to a 1982 article in Technology Illustrated magazine. Still, rents being what they are in Manhattan, editor Tom Edison decided to close TAP’s New York City office and move production of the newsletter to his condo in New Jersey. Then, over the July Fourth weekend in 1983, while he and his wife were out of town, Edison’s home was burglarized and set ablaze. “It was an arson job, they had set fire to three different rooms. But before they set fire to everything they took the computers, the TAP information, the mailing lists, everything,” Edison says. “The fire department concluded that it was started by person or persons unknown. They agreed it was arson, there were accelerants used, there was no question.” To this day Edison believes that the telephone company was behind it. “The stuff that was taken had no value except to the phone company. If they stole the stereo, that would be one thing, but when they stole the paper mailing list and the floppy disks, that has no value to anybody else.” Editorship transferred to Robert Osband, aka Cheshire Catalyst. TAP ceased publication soon after, in the spring of 1984, after ninety-one issues. As it happened, in January of that same year a new hacker/phone phreak publication, 2600, appeared on scene.
Alan Fierstein, the original founder of YIPL, was blissfully unaware of all this drama, having long since retired from the newsletter. Today he is an acoustical engineering consultant in New York City. Edison is retired and lives in New Jersey. Cheshire Catalyst moved to Florida, where he was instrumental in getting area code “321”—the last words astronauts hear before “Liftoff!”—for the Space Coast of Florida.
The Bell System employees described here all went on to have lengthy careers with the telephone company. Ken Hopper, the former head of the Telephone Crime Lab, retired from Bellcore (the post–AT&T-breakup successor to Bell Labs) in 1991 after forty-four years. He and his wife, Barbara, moved to Arizona where he established Rancho Radio—several acres of desert land dotted with telephone poles and strung with long-wire antennas where he could enjoy ham radio. He passed away in 2007 at age eighty. Wayne Perrin, the Pacific Telephone security agent who handled the Paul Sheridan affair, retired from the telephone company in 2000 after thirty-five years; he passed away in 2009 at sixty-seven. Bill Caming, the former Nuremberg prosecutor and AT&T’s attorney for Privacy and Fraud, retired in 1984 after thirty-one years with American Telephone and Telegraph. In retirement, he wrote and lectured on international war crimes and freedom of information issues. Today, in his nineties, he lives in New Jersey. As he noted in a letter to Ken Hopper at the time of his retirement, “We fought a great many battles together.”
As to Ma Bell, after being broken up by the U.S. Department of Justice in 1984, AT&T and the Baby Bells (a great name for a rock band) went their own ways for a while, and then, gravitational attraction being what it is in a maturing industry, slowly began to reassemble. One of the planetary masses was SBC, formerly Southwestern Bell, which in 1998 and 1999 gobbled up SNET, Pacific Telesis, and Ameritech. Another heavenly body was Verizon, the new name for Bell Atlantic, which by 2000 had glommed on to NYNEX and GTE (the old General Telephone). These two telephonic gas giants orbited around each other for a few years, with Qwest off on the side. Then, in 2005 and 2006, SBC bought the old AT&T long-distance company, the new AT&T wireless company (Cingular), and BellSouth, and renamed itself “at&t.” Verizon bought MCI. And that brings us to where we stand today, telephone company–wise: lowercase at&t, Verizon, and CenturyTel (formerly Qwest); at&t now trades on the New York Stock Exchange, not the Boston one, but in a nod to history its ticker symbol remains “T.”
Judge Harold Greene, the man who presided over the restructuring of the telephone industry, passed away in 2000.
The telephone network itself, the phone phreaks’ electronic playground, continued its evolution, as it had every year since its birth in 1876. Today its core is digital, with bits flowing over fiber optic cables. Increasingly, it is wireless as well. By 2001 the number of wired telephone lines in the United States had peaked and the number of households with wireless service only was on the rise. There is not an electromechanical switch to be found anywhere on the network today, except in museums and the basements of telephone collectors. The last 4A crossbar switch was too large to fit in either of those places and was removed from service sometime in the mid-1980s. No ceremony or newspaper article mourned its passing.
The blue box slowly became obsolete, a victim of technology: the transistor, the computer, the modem, the electronic telephone switch, common channel interoffice signaling (CCIS), and the digital network. Yet it still could be used in other countries that utilized telephone switching equipment from the United States —reports on the Internet claim that blue box calls could be used to explore the network (and, as always, make free phone calls) as late as the 1990s outside of the United States. CCIS, the computerized telephone signaling network that spelled the end for blue boxes, has shuffled off this mortal network. Its progeny, a system called signaling system number 7, lives on. Ironically, SS7 allows caller ID to be easily faked and was, at some level, what made possible the British telephone hacking scandal involving Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World newspaper in 2011.
As to phone phreaking itself, an old joke comes to mind: “When was the golden age of science fiction?” The answer: “Whenever you were fourteen years old.” Blue boxes may not work anymore, and computer hacking may have stolen the limelight, but some teenagers and young men still seem quite interested in obsessively exploring the telephone network. In 2006, when I was first starting this book, I received an email from a modern-day phone phreak who goes by the handle Lucky225. His email opened with “PHREAKING ISN’T DEAD.” He went on (thankfully in lower case) to list a variety of phone phreaking techniques in use today, ranging from using blue boxes on obscure old trunks in various parts of the world to caller-ID spoofing and voice-over-IP hacking. There was still much to explore in the modern telephone network, he said, and he urged me not to let my readers think that “we live in a world where the phone company has learned from its mistakes.”
Phone phreaking itself, however, differs from the legacy bequeathed to us by the original phone phreaks. To borrow a phrase from Apple, the phone phreaks “thought different”—and taught us to do the same. Where others saw a rotary phone that connected them to the three towns next door, Charlie Pyne saw a portal to another world. Where others saw a dense article in a little-read technical journal, Ralph Barclay saw a gaping hole. Where others saw a utilitarian telephone system, Joe Engressia, Bill Acker, John Draper, and their friends saw an electronic playground. They noticed things that others ignored, and they saw joy and opportunity in the otherwise mundane.
Nothing captures this spirit more than the inspiration Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs found in Ron Rosenbaum’s Alice in Wonderland tale of blind kids hacking the telephone network, the two Steves jumping for joy after discovering the blue box frequencies in an obscure technical document in the library at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Their phone phreak collaboration selling blue boxes door to door in the dorms at Berkeley foreshadowed their later ventures, and phone phreaking was one of the things that formed the basis of their partnership—a collaboration that would give the world the Apple computer and create a company that would go on to produce the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. As Jobs recalled later, “It was the magic of the fact that two teenagers could build this box for $100 worth of parts and control hundreds of billions
of dollars of infrastructure in the entire telephone network of the whole world from Los Altos and Cupertino, California. That was magical!” He concluded: “If we hadn’t made blue boxes, there would have been no Apple.”
The phone phreaks forced us to consider things we hadn’t thought of, sometimes things we’d rather not think about—to ponder questions about who is ultimately responsible for computer and network security, for example, and what to do with people whose curiosity causes them to cross societal lines. The figurative descendants of the phreaks are still forcing us to think about these questions every single day.
In the 1930s and ’40s and ’50s, the telephone company spent billions of dollars designing and building and deploying an automated long-distance network. The result was a technical accomplishment that pushed the limits of what was possible. Bell Laboratories had a lot on its plate; short of the Apollo space program and the atomic bomb, its researchers were tackling one of the biggest engineering problems that mankind had ever attempted. Computers and automated networks didn’t exist then, and there weren’t hackers to hack into them, so the technicians didn’t think much about security. You can hardly blame them for this oversight.
Fast forward sixty years or so. In 2005 the Boston subway introduced a new system, CharlieTicket, that used magnetic stripe cards as subway tickets. You could add value to your CharlieTicket by depositing money in a fare machine that would rewrite the mag stripe on your card with the new amount. It turned out that the CharlieTicket had no security to speak of; less than three years later MIT students proudly displayed a $653 subway card they had created using a mag stripe card reader/writer they had bought for $300 on eBay. The Boston subway system’s response? Sue the students to prevent them from reporting their results at a security conference.
Exploding the Phone : The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell (9780802193759) Page 36