Exploding the Phone : The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell (9780802193759)
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The exasperated cry of Al Gilbertson, the phone phreak whose 1970 bust resulted in the Esquire article, seems applicable here: “What the Christ did they think, that there’s not any bad guys in this world?”
Whose fault is it when things like this happen? Do you blame the MIT students for being clever? Or do you blame the Boston subway authorities for fielding a system like that in the first place? Is it the fault of the phone phreaks for playing with the telephone system or the fault of Bell Labs for designing a vulnerable system to begin with?
The phone phreaks compelled us to deal with a new class of criminal: the curious. When Charlie Pyne started dialing thousands of telephone numbers out of curiosity, just to find out what would happen, did he do anything wrong? When Bill Acker called the directory assistance operators in every area code, did he cross a line? What about when the 2111 phreaks dialed in to a broken TWX converter and used it as a giant conference call, making it into their home on the network? How about when Joe Engressia whistled telephone calls for his college buddies for a dollar each? At some point a threshold is crossed. But the precise location of that threshold—as well as where it should be—very much remains subject to debate.
Then, too, there’s the question of what society should do when one of its virtual lines is crossed. Should Engressia be kicked out of school for whistling calls? Should John Draper be fined $1,000 for making a three-minute phone call to Australia? Should he be sentenced to prison for four months for doing it again? And should he get more jail time for programming a computer to dial numbers to break into a WATS extender? How about for remotely wiretapping the FBI, even if he did it just as a lark?
This is not to say that phone phreaks and hackers should get a free pass. There is a difference between mere curiosity and true crime, even if we cannot always clearly articulate what the difference is or what we should do about it when we recognize it. At some level, we as a society understand that there is a benefit to having curious people, people who continually push the limits, who try new things. But we’d prefer they not go too far; that makes us uncomfortable.
In the end the phone phreaks taught us that there is a societal benefit to tolerating, perhaps even nurturing (in the words of Apple) the crazy ones—the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes. Say Wozniak and Jobs hadn’t been so lucky when they wound up in the back of the police car that evening back in 1972, when they convinced the cops that their blue box was actually a music synthesizer. Say they had been arrested, possibly gone to jail. We might never have had Apple computer or any of the other things that Apple went on to make. Would we be the better for it?
SOURCES AND NOTES
ON A SUNNY afternoon in November 2005 I found myself giving a sweaty, half-naked man a piggyback ride around the front room of a dingy little apartment in Burbank, California. The man was heavy and my knees strained to hold us up as he shouted directions in my ear, telling me where to turn or how better to support him as I lurched across the room. The man was John Draper and the piggyback ride, which Draper referred to as “energy work,” was my introduction to what one author described twenty years earlier as a “Draper initiation ritual that all interviewers must survive before they get anything out of him.”****
**** Douglas G. Carlston, Software People: An Insider Look at the Personal Computer Software Industry (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), pp. 102–103.
I survived, knees only slightly the worse for wear. I got little out of Draper that day; actual substantive interviews would come later, he assured me. It was an uncomfortable and slightly inauspicious start to collecting the stories that would eventually turn into this book, and perhaps it should have served as a warning of sorts as to what lay ahead. Had I more sense, I might have stopped there. But over the next five years I would go on to interview more than one hundred people in person or by telephone, and I would correspond with many, many more via email. Phone phreaks, telephone company employees, FBI agents, and their friends and families all shared stories with me. Sometimes they gave me not just reminiscences but stacks of old documents, often documents I couldn’t believe they had kept all these years; in one or two instances, I was handed thirty-five- or forty-year-old tape recordings. It had never before dawned on me just how useful packrats are to historians.
Much of my research time was spent tracking people down, sometimes people who had little interest in being found. My first telephone conversation with Ralph Barclay, the inventor of the blue box, went as follows:
Me: “Hi, is this Ralph Barclay?”
Barclay: “Yes?”
Me: “Ralph, you don’t know me, but I’m writing a book on phone phreaking. Back in college, were you involved with something called a blue box?”
After a very long pause, and with a distinct lack of enthusiasm in his voice, Barclay replied, “That was a long time ago.” It took me more than a year to earn Barclay’s trust to the point that I was able to interview him in person.
One connection often led to another, but I learned that these connections happened at their own pace, often the result of a combination of frustratingly skimpy leads and pure dumb luck. A great example was when a phone phreak told me early on, “You need to talk to John.” “John? You mean John Draper?” I asked. “No, this is another John, a phreak at Berkeley in 1972. Or maybe ’73 or ’74. He built a specialized blue box,” was the reply. “Got anything else to go on?” “No.” But then a year or so later my phone rang and, out of the blue, the caller introduced himself as John Gilbert, “an old phone phreak from Berkeley, just checking in.” Sure enough, same John.
Then there were the Freedom of Information Act requests. I filed more than four hundred FOIA requests with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Department of Justice, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Federal Communications Commission, the National Archives and Records Administration . . . some days it felt as if the only agency I wasn’t spamming with FOIA requests was the Federal Interagency Committee for the Management of Noxious and Exotic Weeds. After reviewing thousands upon thousands of pages of redacted documents, I built up an unenviable level of expertise in filing FOIA appeals and decoding FBI “Bureauspeak.” I eventually got to the point where I was sending holiday cards to the FOIA staff at various federal agencies.
All of that leads to this: the chapter notes that follow provide references for quotations and facts mentioned in the text, and, just as important, they expand on various points that were too technical or otherwise esoteric to include in the main body of the book. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed researching them.
General Sources
All present-tense quotations in this book from the following people are taken from in-person or telephone interviews I conducted at the following times: Bill Acker, 2007 and 2008; Ralph Barclay, 2009; Al Bell, 2006; Mark Bernay, 2005; Bill Caming, 2007 and 2008; David Condon, 2009; Al Diamond, 2008; John Draper, 2008; Tom Edison, 2008; Jim Fettgather, 2008; Al Gilbertson, 2008; Bob Gudgel, 2012; Dennis Heinz, 2010; Ken Hopper, 2006; Joybubbles (Joe Engressia), 2006; Tony Lauck, 2007; Jake Locke, 2006; Ray Oklahoma, 2008; Wayne Perrin, 2008; Charlie Pyne, 2007 and 2011; Ron Rosenbaum, 2008; Ed Ross, 2007 and 2008; and Denny Teresi, 2007.
For newspaper articles, AP indicates Associated Press, and UPI indicates United Press International. FBI files are cited by file number and serial number (essentially a document number within a given file).
Scans of some of the documents mentioned below are available on my website. These documents have a “db number” in angle brackets after the citation, e.g.,
Chapter 1: Fine Arts 13
Much of the material in this cha
pter comes from author interviews conducted with Jake Locke.
2“WANTED HARVARD MIT”: Harvard Crimson, March 7, 1967, p. 6
3transcribed the reversed lettering: Locke does not recall whether the letter was actually in Russian or merely in English transcribed into Cyrillic characters.
5“you’d have to dial something like 212-049-121”: Locke’s recollection of Suzy’s dial code for the New York inward may have been somewhat off; the New York City inward was 212-121, since it was a big city. 212-049-121 would likely have gotten you to an outlying city in the New York area.
7“Five Students Psych Bell System”: Charles W. Bevard, “Five Students Psych Bell System, Place Free Long Distance Calls,” Harvard Crimson, May 31, 1966
8Locke dug up the Herald article: Ron Kessler, “Student Dialers Play Their Way to Global Phone Calls, Non-Pay,” Boston Herald, May 27, 1966, p. 1
10“Signaling Systems for Control of Telephone Switching”: C. Breen and C. A. Dahlbom, “Signaling Systems for Control of Telephone Switching,” Bell System Technical Journal, vol. 39, no. 6, November 1960, p. 1381
11used a telephone dial to select the train to be controlled: Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, 25th Anniversary Edition (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media), p. 8.
Chapter 2: Birth of a Playground
14the best known was created by Claude Chappe: J-M Dilhac, “The Telegraph of Claude Chappe—An Optical Telecommunications Network for the XVIIth Century,” IEEE Global History Network, at http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/images/1/17/Dilhac.pdf.
15In America the inventor was Samuel Morse: The Supreme Court of the United States declared Morse to be the sole inventor of the telegraph; see Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-line Pioneers (New York: Walker Publishing Company, 2007), p. 183. But debate continues as to the extent of Morse’s inventorship of the telegraph and the code that bears his name; see Gavin Weightman, The Industrial Revolutionaries: The Making of the Modern World, 1776–1914 (New York: Grove Press, 2007), p. 197.
16Victorian Internet: Standage, Victorian Internet.
16“net-work like a spider’s web”: David Bogue, The London Anecdotes: Anecdotes of the Electric Telegraph, 1849, as quoted in Standage, Victorian Internet, p. 58.
16conveyed news, facilitated commerce, and whispered gossip: Standage, Victorian Internet, p. 105ff, p. 127ff.
1690% of all telegraph traffic: IEEE Global History Network, “Western Union,” at http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php /Western_Union.
16$6.6 million: Annual Report of the President of the Western Union Telegraph Company, 1869. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator goes back only to 1911, but assuming a 3.2 percent inflation rate gives 2011 equivalent revenues of $676 million.
1620 million: Tomas Nonnenmacher, “History of the U.S. Telegraph Industry,” Economic History Association, at http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/nonnenmacher.industry.telegraphic.us. Astonishingly, the number of telegraph messages didn’t stop growing until the end of World War II, peaking in 1945 at 236 million messages.
17“Nothing, save the hangman’s noose”: Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), p. 22.
17“harmonic telegraph”: “The Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers at the Library of Congress, 1862–1939,” at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/bellhtml/belltelph.html.
17He became obsessed with this new idea: Thomas Farley, Thomas Farley’s Telephone History Series, 1998 to 2006, “page 3” at http://www.privateline.com/TelephoneHistoryA/TeleHistoryA.htm.
17“could never be more than a scientific toy”: Herbert N. Casson, The History of the Telephone (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1910), pp. 24–25.
17“For him the thrill of the new”: Wu, Master Switch, p. 22.
17“I now realize I should never”: Floyd Darrow, Masters of Science and Invention (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1923), p. 293.
18he finally succeeded: Bell started work on the harmonic telegraph in 1873. Many have claimed inventorship of the telephone: Elisha Gray, Johann Philipp Reis, and Daniel Drawbaugh, to name but three. Each has his adherents, but the fact remains that, rightly or wrongly, Bell’s patents carried the day.
18unlikely contraption: John Brooks, Telephone: The First Hundred Years (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), pp. 46–50, and John Murphy, The Telephone: Wiring America (New York: Chelsea House Publications, 2009), pp. 33–36. For a drawing of the variable resistance setup from Bell’s laboratory notebook, see “Bell’s Experimental Notebook, 10 March 1876” at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/bellhtml/bell1.html.
18$100,000: M. D. Fagen, A History of Science and Engineering in the Bell System: The Early Years (1875–1925) (New York: Bell Telephone Laboratories, 1975), p. 31. Bell’s offering of the telephone patent to Western Union for $100,000 is reported in AT&T’s own official history and other sources. Despite this, the evidence for it is thin. See Michael Wolff, “The Marriage That Almost Was,” IEEE Spectrum, February 1976, p. 41, for a detailed investigation.
18“What use could this company make”: Casson, History of the Telephone, pp. 58–59.
19“It is indeed difficult”: Providence Press, undated, quoted in Brooks, Telephone, p. 54.
19The Bell Telephone Company itself: Brooks, Telephone, pp. 53–55. In this chapter I use the term “Bell Telephone” to refer to any of the incarnations of Bell’s company, which reorganized and changed its name several times during its early years. It was founded as Bell Telephone Company in 1877. It reorganized in 1878, keeping its name but also creating New England Telephone Company. In 1879 it reorganized again, changing its name to National Bell Company. In 1880 it changed its name to American Bell. In 1882 it acquired Western Electric, which became the company’s manufacturing arm. In 1885 American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) was formed as a subsidiary to handle long-distance lines for American Bell. In an 1899 reorganization, the child became the parent when AT&T acquired American Bell. For more information see AT&T’s website, “A Brief History: Origins” at http://www.corp.att.com/history/history1.html, or Brooks, Telephone, chapters 1–4.
19telegraph contractors: John E. Kingsbury, The Telephone and Telephone Exchanges: Their Invention and Development (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1915), p. 67, quoting from an 1877 Bell Telephone advertisement. Note that this Kingsbury is not related to the Nathan Kingsbury of the AT&T Kingsbury Commitment.
19$20 per year: Ibid.
20“Instead of erecting a line directly”: Kingsbury, Telephone and Telephone Exchanges, pp. 90–91, quoting from a letter from Bell to the investors of the Electrical Telephone Company in March 1878.
20The switchboard . . . telephone central office or exchange: Telegraph central exchanges were apparently first patented in 1851 and in use by the late 1860s. Multiple parties, including Bell, thought of applying this hub-and-spoke architecture to the telephone. See ibid., pp. 77ff.
21“It was believed that they would have the energy”: Murphy, Telephone: Wiring America, p. 81.
21“warmer human voice”: Ibid.
21American Speaking Telephone: Farley, Farley’s Telephone History Series, “page 4,” at http://www.privateline.com/TelephoneHistory2A /Telehistory2A.htm.
21settled the lawsuit: Kingsbury, Telephone and Telephone Exchanges, p. 189, and Brooks, Telephone, pp. 71–72.
22ticker symbol “T”: Domenic Vitiello and George E. Thomas, The Philadelphia Stock Exchange and the City It Made (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), p. 111; AT&T news release, “New AT&T to Begin Trading Under ‘T’ Ticker Symbol,” November 30, 2005.
22“During the past few months”: “Correspondence: Philade
lphia,” The Electrical Engineer, April 16, 1890, p. 249.
22“I cannot understand”: Ibid.
22AT&T’s first long-distance line: AT&T Long Lines Department, Our Company and How It Operates, 1960, p. 3.
23the engineers persevered: Kingsbury, Telephone and Telephone Exchanges, p. 444.
23more than ten thousand subscribers: Fagen, Bell System, p. 496.
23Put fifty of these switchboards: AT&T, Principles of Electricity Applied to Telephone and Telegraph Work, 1953, pp. 79-80. The switchboard went through a lengthy evolution with many design iterations; the switchboard described here is just one example.
24an operator on a tandem switchboard: Fagen, Bell System, p. 505.
243 million switchboard connected phones: Brooks, Telephone, p. 111.
24warehouses full of people: I am indebted to Paul Heilman for the phrase.
24thirty thousand operators . . . hundred thousand: Fagen, Bell System, p. 550.
24“a coast-to-coast call”: F. A. Collins, “Telephone Night Habits,” New York Times, March 19, 1922
24legend has it: There are multiple versions of this perhaps apocryphal story. See Brooks, Telephone, p. 100, for one.
25Strowger’s first mechanical telephone switch: A. B. Strowger, “Automatic Telephone Exchange,” United States Patent No. 447,918, March 10, 1891.
25To call telephone number 315: Kingsbury, Telephone and Telephone Exchanges, p. 400. The original Strowger patent required each telephone to have five wires: three for dialing, one for hanging up, and one for audio. Ground was handled by a connection to earth ground.