.
214–215 basement ballroom of the Hotel Diplomat (and following description): Sherman, “Phone Phreak-Out in Phun City.”
215spy from New York Telephone: FBI file 87-HQ-121189, serial 9, September 18, 1972, p. 10
215Over the course of three days: AT&T memorandum from Dennis Mollura to Bill Mullane, September 28, 1972
215“Cheat Ma Bell!”: Don Schroeder, “Beating the Rip-Off Set,” Bell System News Features, January 1973
216“more than $20 million”: The $20 million figure is likely inclusive of credit card fraud and does not reflect just electronic (blue box, black box) toll fraud.
216fifty-seven electronic toll fraud arrests: “Toll Fraud,” AT&T internal memorandum, May 18, 1977
216failed miserably: “Capt. Crunch Defense Fund Fails,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 12, 1972, p. 8
216“Don’t think that didn’t give us pause”: Rick Carroll, “They Got His Number,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 30, 1972, p. 2
216“recollection had been refreshed”: See, for example, FBI file 87-HQ-121189, serial 12, November 17, 1972, p. 5
216“Draper didn’t look very legendary”: Carroll, “They got his number.”
217“refrain from illegal use” and description of plea deal: Judgment, United States v. John Thomas Draper, United States District Court, Northern District of California, No. CR-72-973 RFP (SJ), November 29, 1972
217“Your electronic gymnastics”: Carroll, “They Got His Number.”
Chapter 15: Pranks
218“You know how some articles”: Steve Wozniak with Gina Smith, iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), p. 93.
218“most amazing thing”: The Secret History of Hacking, Channel 4 Television, July 22, 2001. Although produced for British television, this program was seen in the United States on the Discovery Channel with the title History of Hacking.
218“described a whole web of people”: Wozniak, iWoz, p. 94.
218“outsmarting phone companies”: Secret History of Hacking.
218“I kept reading it”: Wozniak, iWoz, p. 94.
218“I could tell that”: Ibid., p. 95.
218“The idea of the Blue Box”: Ibid., p. 97.
219“I couldn’t believe”: Ibid., p. 96.
219“I froze and grabbed Steve”: Ibid., p. 99.
219“It’s real. Holy shit, it’s real”: Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), p. 28.
219–220 “I started posting articles”: Wozniak, iWoz, p. 100.
220vary with temperature: The phone phreak Jim Roth, a gifted analog circuit designer, built analog blue boxes that cleverly avoided the temperature variation problem. The values of some of the components in his design increased with temperature while others decreased, and the variations canceled each other out. The result, several phone phreaks told me, was that you could tune one of his blue boxes at room temperature and then put it in a freezer for an hour and it would still work perfectly. Roth later received an accolade of sorts from New York Telephone security agent Thomas J. Duffy, who told the FBI that Roth built “excellent quality blue boxes.” See FBI file 139-SF-188, serial 179, February 25, 1976, p. 2.
221By early 1972: Steve Wozniak, author interview, 2008. Isaacson, in Steve Jobs (p. 28), states that Wozniak had the digital box “built before Thanksgiving,” but Wozniak, in my 2008 interview with him, says it wasn’t until early 1972.
221clever trick . . . to keep the power consumption down, “I swear to this day”: Wozniak, iWoz, p. 102. For electrical engineers reading this book, Wozniak described his low-power design trick in a 2008 email as follows: “I ran the TTL inputs through the diode matrix to the number buttons. I ran the common of this number button pad into a Darlington, which grounded the circuit. I used a couple more diodes to drop a 9v battery the right amount for the TTL to work. Low power TTL worked as well. Even the CMOS version worked. The TTL inputs can be thought of as supplying a small amount of positive current, acting as tiny outputs. This current triggered the Darlington to ground the chips. I’m still a bit amazed how it worked but it worked extremely well and I don’t think I came up with anything as off the wall clever again.” It is worth noting that Wozniak may not have been the first phone phreak to build a digital blue box; Brough Turner recalls building a digital blue box shortly after graduating from MIT in 1971. Turner’s design was similar to Wozniak’s, minus the clever low-power design trick.
221“Berkeley Blue”, “Oaf Tobar”: Isaacson, Steve Jobs, p. 29. Some reports on the Internet say the pair went by the names “Hans” and “Gribble,” but Wozniak does not remember this.
221“I would have died”: Wozniak, iWoz, p. 103.
221“Captain Crunch comes to our door”: Ibid., p. 105.
221“He turns out to be”: Ibid., p. 106.
222“All of a sudden”: Ibid., p. 108.
222“A guy named Moog”: Ibid., pp. 109–11.
222“sell it for $170 or so”: Wozniak, author interview, 2008.
223sales technique was inspired: Wozniak, iWoz, p. 116.
223Many of these wound up in the hands: Adam Schoolsky, author interview, 2011; see below for related FBI files.
223“Sales went on through the summer”, “low paid salary”: Wozniak, author interview, 2008.
223thirty or forty boxes, more like a hundred: Ibid.; Isaacson, Steve Jobs, p. 29.
224“It’s kind of strange”: Wozniak, author interview, 2008.
224disassembled and analyzed: By the mid-1970s blue box analysis requests were common enough that the FBI Laboratory created a “Blue Box Work Sheet Guide” that prompted its lab technicians to gather the relevant information when inspecting a blue box. Its categories included physical description (keyboard format, size and type, coupling method, power supply), frequency measurements (for digits 0-9, KP, ST, and 2,600 Hz), interior circuitry arrangement and description, and results of a test call using the blue box.
224Woz’s little bit of paper: FBI files 87-HQ-130192, 1973; 87-HQ-133306, 1974; and 87-LA-40513, serial 55, February 12, 1975. In particular, an unnumbered serial of file 87-HQ-130192 from 1975 discusses several blue boxes that contained Wozniak’s note, and the 87-LA-40513 serial discusses one of the blue boxes discovered at Bernard Cornfeld’s mansion that also contained Wozniak’s note; see
224“The dozen or so students”: Wozniak, iWoz, p. 64.
225“[I]n this heavy accent” and description of Vatican prank: Ibid., p. 115.
225Los Angeles Times: “Santa Barbara Is Still OK; A-Blast Report Just Hoax,” Los Angeles Times, November 11, 1974, p. A3
226“nuclear explosion,” “continued throughout the day”: Ibid.
227Another place that simultaneous seizure: This situation was called “glare.” To make this hack work, a phone phreak had to send 2,600 Hz down the line and then listen until he heard the remote end stop sending its 2,600 Hz. At that point, he had to momentarily stop sending 2,600 Hz, simulating the wink that told the remote end to send the digits of the number to be dialed. See AT&T, Notes on Distance Dialing, 1968, section 5, p. 14
227–228 “We would sit there”: Mark Bernay, author interview, 2011.
228“We didn’t even know,” “It’s not something”: Wayne Perrin, notes and author interview, 2008.
228“all sorts of shortages these da
ys” and subsequent description: Andrew H. Malcolm, “The ‘Shortage’ of Bathroom Tissue: A Classic Study in Rumor,” New York Times, February 3, 1974
228“Crunch’s prank began” and subsequent description: John Draper, author interview, 2008, and http://www.webcrunchers.com/stories/toilet.html; a similar version of this story is told in Steve Long, “Captain Crunch: Super Phone Phreak,” High Times, June 1977, p. 51
Chapter 16: The Story of a War
230“This is the story of a war”: Jim Russell, “The Telephone Company You’re Dialing Has Been Temporarily Disconnected,” a one-hour feature from the National Public Radio program Options, January 30, 1973. In a November 16, 2007, email Jim Russell recalled that “AT&T tried to stop its distribution by threatening stations all over the country.”
230peace talks: Bernard Gwertzman, “Thuy Rejects Peace Talks While U.S. Raids Continue,” New York Times, December 24, 1972, p. NJ35.
230“MF Boogie”: Kim Lingo, author interview, 2012. Lingo says “MF Boogie” was composed on a Wurlitzer electronic piano that doubled as his blue box. A recording is available at ftp://ftp.wideweb.com/GroupBell/MFBoogie1.zip.
232first proposals . . . transistor-based telephone switching: Joel, Switching Technology, pp. 203–4.
233the transistor itself would not be used: Bell Laboratories never used the transistor (more accurately, the pnpn diode) as the actual switching element in any production telephone switching system. One of the main problems with using semiconductors for switching telephone lines was their inability to handle the relatively high-voltage ringing signal used in the telephone network. See ibid., pp. 203–4 and pp. 243–45.
233“struck by the similarity”: Ibid., pp. 225–27.
234world’s first electronic: Bell Telephone Laboratories, The Electronic Switching System: Trial Installation, Morris, Illinois; General Description, 1960, at http://www.archive.org/details/TheElectronicSwitchingSystem.
234five thousand times slower: Ibid., p. 270 (“cycle time is about 3 microseconds”).
235flying spot store: Ibid.
236“traumatic experience”: Brooks, Telephone, p. 279.
236retained the basic concepts: Bell Telephone Laboratories, Bell Laboratories Record, vol. 49, no., 65, June 1965.
236four thousand man years, $500 million: Brooks, Telephone, pp. 278–79.
236“Absent competition”: Sheldon Hochheiser, “Bell Labs: Research, Development, and Innovation in a Monopoly” (presentation given at Reed College), December 2011
236“trample it to death”: Brooks, Telephone, p. 279.
237more than 132 of the 4As: Joel, Switching Technology, p. 321.
237physically smaller (and other features): Robert J. Chapuis and Amos E. Joel Jr., One Hundred Years of Telephone Switching, Volume 2: Electronics, Computers, and Telephone Switching (Amsterdam: Ios Press, 2003), pp. 154–60.
237rendered black boxes obsolete, eleven seconds: Bill Acker, author interview, 2011. A later version of No. 1 ESS software, introduced around 1980, added additional anti–blue box features: after seeing a wink from a remote trunk while a call was in progress, the No. 1 would attach an MF digit detector to the line to catch any subsequent digits sent by a blue box.
238red box: YIPL, no. 16, February 1973. In fact the term red box had been around for at least six months prior to this introduction; it was mentioned, if not described in detail, at the 1972 phone phreak convention.
239modified their red boxes: Through an odd coincidence having to do with ratios of the various tones involved, a Radio Shack touch-tone dialer could easily be turned into a red box simply by swapping out a single inexpensive component, the crystal oscillator; see http://www.phonelosers.org/redbox/tonedialer.
240the month after that, it would be gone: Evan Doorbell, author interview, 2012.
240“No fancy excuses”: TAP, no. 21, August–September 1973, p. 1.
241“the legal department of [New York Telephone]”: FBI file 100-NY-179649, serial 13, February 22, 1974
241Detroit underground newspaper: “Fifth Estate Charged with Fraud,” Fifth Estate, September 26, 1974, p. 2
241sued by Pacific Telephone: The Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company, Plaintiff, vs. Jack Kranyak, doing business as Teletronics Company of America; et al, defendants, Superior Court of California, County of Los Angeles, No. NWC45558, July 14, 1975
241some eight thousand people: Southwestern Bell memorandum/Q&A backgrounder titled “Fraud,” undated but circa 1977.
242“Dear Telephone User”: “Dear Telephone User” letter from Pacific Telephone and Telegraph, mailed May 28, 1976. In the original, the last three paragraphs of the letter were all in capital letters; see http://pdf.textfiles.com/zines/TEL/TEL_spec2.jpg.
242One recipient of this missive: Radio Electronics, 1976.
242“serious national problem,” “nationwide telephone fraud”: “Free-Phone Racket Inside Post Office,” Sunday Times (London), January 21, 1973, p. 1.
243“men of intellectual stature”: “Phone Fiddle by Bleep Box,” Daily Mirror, October 4, 1973.
243charges went back to 1968: “Nineteen Accused of Dial-the-World Phone Fiddle,” Daily Telegraph, October 4, 1973.
243exactly three went to live human beings: Robert Hill, “Days at the Old Bailey,” Interface (the house journal of Cambridge Consultants Ltd.), vol. 8, no. 1, April 1974, p. 10
243“Your trial is now over”: “Eight Not Guilty of Phone Fraud,” Daily Telegraph, November 14, 1973. Interestingly, one of the Old Bailey 19, Duncan Campb
ell, had previously been arrested and fined 200 pounds (plus 200 pounds for court costs) in April 1972 for using a blue box to call “Moscow, Melbourne, Washington, and Los Angeles.” See Kenelm Jenour, “The Man Who Dialed the World,” Daily Mirror, April 15, 1972.
243rock star Ike Turner: AP, “Ike Turner Arrested,” St. Joseph News Press, March 27, 1974, p. 5A. Turner and two of the individuals arrested with him were later acquitted; one was convicted. See “Sorry, Wrong Voiceprint,” Detroit Free News, August 8, 1974
243–244 “just missed the shooting of a Playboy center spread”: Ted Thackery Jr. and Ronald L. Soble, “FBI Raids Financier Cornfeld’s Mansion, Arrests Aide, Seizes Illegal Phone Boxes,” Los Angeles Times, January 29, 1975, p. A3
244“He’s got the whole world in his hands”: FBI file 87-LA-40513, serial 55, February 12, 1975
244Lainie Kazan: Sanford L. Jacobs, “Blue Boxes Spread from Phone Phreaks to the Well-Heeled,” Wall Street Journal, January 29, 1976, p. 1
244Woz and Jobs: Adam Schoolsky, author interview, 2011.
244Robert Cummings: Jacobs, “Blue Boxes Spread.”
244high-voltage electricity: David Condon and John Gilbert, author interviews, 2009. Called “juicing” or “nerping,” the high-voltage technique involved sending a 110-volt AC signal (preferably 80 Hz, but 60 Hz would do) into the telephone line. Though no one is sure exactly how it worked, it had the effect of causing the local central office to reset a call much in the same way as whistling 2,600 Hz would. The benefit was that it could work even on trunk lines that did not use 2,600 Hz signaling, such as a T carrier. For more details, listen to Evan Doorbell’s “A HiFi 914 Routing Tape, Part 1” (December 1975), at http://www.phonetrips.com.
Exploding the Phone : The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell (9780802193759) Page 42