Exploding the Phone
    by Phil Lapsley    

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EXPLODING THE PHONE
EXPLODING THE PHONE
The Untold Story of the Teenagers
and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell



      PHIL LAPSLEY



            Grove Press
             New York
                  Copyright © 2013 by Philip D. Lapsley
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          New York, NY 10003 or permissions@groveatlantic.com.
 Excerpt from IWOZ: COMPUTER GEEK TO CULT ICON: HOW I INVENTED
THE PERSONAL COMPUTER, COFOUNDED APPLE, AND HAD FUN DOING
                   IT by Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith.
            Copyright © 2006 by Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith.
            Used by permission of W W Norton & Company, Inc.
                                   . .

                       ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9375-9
                                 Grove Press
                        an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
                             841 Broadway
                           New York, NY 10003
                  Distributed by Publishers Group West
                          www.groveatlantic.com
                     13 14 15 16 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
  To the men and women of the Bell System, and
 especially to the members of the technical staff of
Bell Laboratories, without whom none of this would
                 have been possible
                       CONTENTS

FOREWORD   BY   STEVE WOZNIAK
A NOTE ON NAMES     AND   TENSES
CHAPTER 1 FINE ARTS 13
CHAPTER 2 BIRTH OF A PLAYGROUND
CHAPTER 3 CAT AND CANARY
CHAPTER 4 THE LARGEST MACHINE IN THE WORLD
CHAPTER 5 BLUE BOX
CHAPTER 6 “SOME PEOPLE COLLECT STAMPS”
CHAPTER 7 HEADACHE
CHAPTER 8 BLUE BOX BOOKIES
CHAPTER 9 LITTLE JOJO LEARNS TO WHISTLE
CHAPTER 10 BILL ACKER LEARNS TO PLAY THE FLUTE
CHAPTER 11 THE PHONE FREAKS OF AMERICA
PHOTO INSERT
CHAPTER 12 THE LAW OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES
CHAPTER 13 COUNTERCULTURE
CHAPTER 14 BUSTED
CHAPTER 15 PRANKS
CHAPTER 16 THE STORY OF A WAR
CHAPTER 17 A LITTLE BIT STUPID
CHAPTER 18 SNITCH
CHAPTER 19 CRUNCHED
CHAPTER 20 TWILIGHT
CHAPTER 21 NIGHTFALL
EPILOGUE
SOURCES    AND   NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX
THE PLAYGROUND
Phone phreak (n.) 1. A person who is obsessively
interested in learning about, exploring, or playing
with the telephone network. 2. A person who is
interested in making free telephone calls.
                   FOREWORD

I FIRST LEARNED ABOUT phone phreaking from a magazine. In
the fall of 1971 I stumbled onto an article that seemed like
a bit of science fiction, about these groups of people who
knew how to crack the phone system all over the world. I
was young, only twenty years old, and I thought this was a
really cool made up story.
  I phoned Steve Jobs halfway through and started reading
him the article. I just had to call him. We researched it and
found out, “Whoa!” It made sense! Who would ever believe
you could put tones into a phone and make calls free
anywhere in the world? I mean, who would believe it? It
was like we stumbled onto some magical mystery that other
people just didn’t know about. And I had no idea the impact
it would end up having on my life.
  We just had to try it, to find out if it really worked. Over the
next few months I started designing a “blue box,” an
electronic gizmo that made the tones you needed to control
the telephone network. I put so much attention into trying
to make it the very best blue box in the world. It was digital,
unlike the ones that everybody else had, and it had some of
the cleverest, most off-the-wall design techniques I’ve ever
put into anything I’ve ever built, even to this day. It was
great, and it was my passport into the phone phreaks’
underground network.
  I had grown up very shy and often felt left out of things.
But for me, phone phreaking was a place in the world that I
was like a leader. It was a place where I could blossom. And
it’s not that I could blossom as a criminal—it wasn’t that we
had lots of people to call or had giant phone bills or really
wanted to rip off the phone company or anything. It’s just
that it was so exciting! When I went into a room and
showed off phone tricks with a blue box, I was like a
magician playing tricks. I was the center of attention. That
was probably partly what drove me. But it was also the
fascination of doing something that nobody would really
believe was possible.
  I was enthusiastic then about very few things, but this one
I was enthusiastic about. Phone phreaking was one of the
first big adventures I had in my life. And it made me want to
have more of those adventures by designing more things
like my blue box, weird things that worked in ways that
people didn’t expect. For the rest of my life, that was the
reason I kept doing project after project after project,
usually with Steve Jobs. You could trace it right up to the
Apple II computer. It was the start of wanting to constantly
design things very, very well and get noticed for it. Steve
and I were a team from that day on. He once said that
Apple wouldn’t have existed without the blue box, and I
agree.
  Today a lot of people are computer hackers and a lot of
them just want to cause problems for others—they’re like
vandals. I was not a vandal, I was just curious. But, boy, I
wanted to find out what the limits of the telephone system
were. What are the limits of any system? I’ve found that for
almost anybody who thinks well in digital electronics or
computer programming, if you go back and look at their
lives they’ll have these areas of misbehavior. And I think
some of the most creative people have all, at some point,
focused their creativity on doing things that they aren’t
supposed to do. But their goal is usually, oh my gosh, can I
discover something? Is there some way to do something
that is not exactly in books and not known? Hackers are the
ultimate example: every hacker I’ve ever run into is always
trying to explore the little tiny nuances of anything looking
for a mistake, a crack they can get through.
 The blue box was this magical, unbelievable adventure.
The fact that nobody else knew about it and I did made it
special knowledge. But it was no good just to know it inside
—it was only good when I shared it with others. It was
playing with magical powers. I would say I had an awful lot
of those experiences in my life, but the blue box was
probably the most special of all.
 I hope that getting to learn a little bit about phone
phreaking turns out to be one tenth as much fun for you as
it was for me to experience it.
                Steve Wozniak
                Cofounder, Apple Computer
      A NOTE ON NAMES AND
             TENSES

ANONYMITY AND PSEUDONYMS       have been a thorn in my side
throughout the writing of this book. Despite my attempts to
convince my interviewees that this all happened a long time
ago, that the statute of limitations has long since expired,
that the phone company doesn’t care and the phone
phreaks don’t care and law enforcement doesn’t care,
several people have insisted on either being anonymous or
being referred to by pseudonyms. For those who wished to
be nameless, I have tried to make their anonymity obvious
(“A source familiar with the matter recalls . . .”).
Pseudonyms are marked with a footnote when they are first
used to call attention to the shy. Each such footnote
indicates whether the pseudonym is historical or modern,
that is, whether the pseudonym used was the person’s nom
de phreak back in the day or is a more recent fabrication
for purposes of present-day identity protection.
 The identity of every source used in the book is known to
me; there have been no “Deep Throat”–style encounters in
which I have received late-night phone calls from truly
anonymous sources telling me outlandish things or, for that
matter, any things at all. I guess I’m just in the wrong line of
work.
 Finally, a note on verb tense: when I have used the present
tense to attribute a quote in this book (e.g., “Acker recalls”
or “Perrin remembers”), it means that the quote was taken
directly from an interview I conducted between 2005 and
2012 or from a document published during that time. When
I have used the past tense (“The memo stated” or “Draper
said”), it indicates that the quote was taken from an older
newspaper article, memo, FBI file, or other document, or
from notes or audiotapes from the time in question.
                                  One

                      FINE ARTS 13

THERE IT WAS again.
 Jake Locke* set down his cup and looked more closely at
the classified ad. It was early afternoon on a clear spring
day in Cambridge in 1967. Locke, an undergrad at Harvard
University, had just gotten out of bed. A transplant from
southern California, he didn’t quite fit in with Harvard’s
button-down culture—another student had told him he
looked like a “nerdy California surfer,” what with his black-
framed eyeglasses, blond hair, blue eyes, and tall, slim
build. Now in the midst of his sophomore slump, Locke
found himself spending a lot of time sleeping late, cutting
classes, and reading the newspaper to find interesting
things to do. Pretty much anything seemed better than
going to classes, in fact.
*A pseudonym.
 It was a slow news day. The Crimson, Harvard’s student
newspaper, didn’t have much in the way of interesting
articles, so Locke once again found himself reading the
classified ads over breakfast. He had become something of
a connoisseur of these little bits of poetry—people selling
cars, looking for roommates, even the occasional kooky
personal ad probably intended as a joke between lovers—all
expressed in a dozen or so words.
 But this ad was different. It had been running for a while
and it had started to bug him.
 WANTED HARVARD MIT Fine Arts no. 13 notebook. (121 pages) & 40 page reply
 K.K. & C.R. plus 2,800; battery; m.f. El presidente no esta aqui asora, que
 lastima. B. David Box 11595 St. Louis, MO 63105.

 Locke had seen similar classified ads from students who
had lost their notes for one class or another and were
panicking as exams rolled around. They often were placed
in the Crimson in the hopes that some kind soul had found
their notes and would return them. Fine Arts 13 was the
introductory art appreciation class at Harvard, so that fit.
 But nothing else about the ad made any sense. Fine Arts
13 wasn’t offered at MIT. And what was all the gibberish
afterward? 2,800? Battery? M.f., K.K., C.R.? What was with
the Spanish? And why was somebody in St. Louis, Missouri,
running an ad in Cambridge, Massachusetts, looking for a
notebook for a class at Harvard? Locke had watched the ad
run every day for the past few weeks. Whoever they were,
and whatever it was, they clearly wanted this notebook.
Why were they so persistent?
 One way to find out.
 Locke looked around for a piece of paper and a pen. He
wrote: “Dear B. David: I have your notebook. Let’s talk.
Sincerely, Jake.”
 He dropped the letter in the mail on his way into Harvard
Square to find something interesting to do.
An envelope with a St. Louis, Missouri, postmark showed up
in Locke’s mailbox a week later. Locke opened the envelope
and read the single sheet of paper. Or rather, he tried to
read it. It wasn’t in English. It seemed to be written in some
sort of alien hieroglyphics. It was brief, only a paragraph or
so long. The characters looked familiar somehow but not
enough that he could decipher them.
 Locke showed the letter to everyone he saw that day but
nobody could read it. Later that evening, as Locke sat at the
kitchen table in his dorm room and stared at the letter,
trying to puzzle it out, one of his roommates came home.
Shocked that Locke might actually be doing something that
looked like homework, his roommate asked what he was
working on. Locke passed the letter across the table and
told him about it.
 His roommate took one look and said, “It looks like
Russian.”
 Locke said, “That’s what I thought. But the characters
don’t seem right.”
 “Yeah. They’re not. In fact . . .” His roommate’s voice
trailed off for a moment. “In fact, they’re mirror writing.”
 “What?”
 “You know, mirror writing. The letters are written
backwards. See?”
 Locke looked. Sure enough: backwards.
 Locke and his roommate went to the mirror and
transcribed the reversed lettering. It was Cyrillic—Russian
letters. Fortunately, Locke’s roommate was taking a Russian
class. They sat back down at the table and translated the
letter.
 “Dear Jake,” the letter read. “Thank you very much for
your reply. However, I seriously doubt that you have what I
need. I would strongly advise you to keep to yourself and
not interfere. This is serious business and you could get into
trouble.” Signed, B. David.
 Locke sat back. Someone had put a cryptic ad in the
newspaper. He’d responded. They sent him a letter. In
mirror writing. In Russian. In 1967. During the cold war.
 Spy ring.
 It just didn’t get much cooler than this, Locke figured.
Intriguing. Terrifying, even. And far, far better than going to
class.
 Locke mailed his reply that day—in English, and not in
mirror writing. “Dear B. David: Actually, I do have your
notebook and I would like to talk to you. Sincerely, Jake.”
 Four days went by before the mailman brought Locke an
odd letter, a piece of card stock folded in half and taped at
the top. The fold line was perforated so that it could be torn
in half. The writing was in English this time.
 “Dear Jake, if you have the information I need, you should
be able to complete the other half of this card and mail it
back to me. Then we can continue our discussions.
Sincerely, B. David.”
 Locke looked at the other half of the postcard. It had a
handful of questions on it:
 Complete the following sequence: 604, 234, 121, ___
 What does M.F. stand for?
 What equipment were the students at Harvard and MIT using?

 Huh?

Locke spent every waking hour over the next several days
working on the postcard questions. The numbers repeated
over and over in his mind: 604, 234, 121 . . . 604, 234, 121 .
. . 604, 234, 121 . . .
  604-234-1212.
  A phone number? It wasn’t directory assistance—Locke
knew that would have been 555-1212—but it sort of
sounded right. Worth a shot, anyway. He picked up the
phone and dialed. A woman’s businesslike voice answered
on the first ring.
  “Cleaner clean,” she said.
  “Excuse me?” said Locke.
  “Cleaner clean inward,” the woman repeated, more
distinctly this time.
  Locke hung up. He stared at the phone. Cleaner clean?
Inward?
  Where was area code 604, anyway? The phone book said
British Columbia. And where was that? Western Canada.
Locke looked around his dorm room, found an atlas, and
flipped to the page on British Columbia. He scanned the
map. The big cities had names he recognized, names like
Vancouver and Prince George. The smaller towns had less
familiar names. Names like Kamloops. Squamish. Quesnel.
Chilanko.
 Kleena Kleene.
At dinner that night Locke mentioned his phone call to
Steve, another of his roommates. Steve said, “Huh. That’s
interesting. My girlfriend Suzy is an inward.”
 “What? What’s an inward?” asked Locke.
 “It’s some kind of special telephone operator. You should
talk to her, she might be able to help you figure some of this
stuff out. She lives over in Revere. Give her a call.”
 Locke did. Suzy explained that an inward is an “operator’s
operator.” When an operator needs assistance in making a
call, she calls the inward operator for the destination city.
The inward operator then completes the call to a local
number.
 “So how do I call an inward?” Locke asked her.
 “You can’t. Inwards have special phone numbers that only
operators can dial. If you wanted to call the New York
inward, you’d have to dial something like 212-049-121. So
121 is what gets you the inward, and 049 is a routing code
inside of New York, and New York is the 212 area code. But
you can’t dial numbers like 049 or 121 from a regular
phone.”
 Locke explained that he seemed to have found a way to
call an inward operator from his regular phone by dialing
604-234-1212.
 “Well,” Suzy said, “I’m mystified. You shouldn’t be able to. I
don’t know, maybe you found a glitch. But here’s how you
can tell. Call them up and ask them to complete a call to
somebody. If they’re really an inward, they’ll be able to do it
no problem.”
 “I don’t know anybody in Canada,” Locke said.
 “That’s okay. An inward can call anywhere. And we
sometimes get calls from the test board within the phone
company asking us to complete calls to places for testing
purposes. Just tell them you’re with the test board. Be
confident and self-assured and act like you know what
you’re doing and they won’t give you any trouble.”
 “Okay. I’ll try that. Hey, any idea what ‘M.F.’ might stand
for?”
 “Well,” Suzy replied, “it could be multifrequency.”
 “Multifrequency. What’s that?” Locke asked.
 “It’s the system that operators use to make calls. It’s kind
of like those touch tones used for push-button dialing, but it
sounds different.” Locke’s dorm phone was rotary dial, but
he knew what touch tones were—they had been introduced
just a few years earlier.
 “Okay. Hey, thanks, Suzy.” They said good-bye. He hung up.
 Locke picked up the phone again and dialed 604-234-
1212. Once again the businesslike female voice answered.
 “Kleena Kleene inward.”
 “Hi, uh, yes,” Locke said. “This is the test board. Could you
connect me to 619-374-8491, please?”
 “One moment.” There was a pause. The long-distance hiss
got louder. A click. Another pause. More hiss. Another click.
Then a ringing signal.
 “Hello?” It was his friend Dave in San Diego.
 Locke chatted with his friend for a few minutes and then
hung up. He felt as if he were floating. It seemed magical.
“Act like you know what you’re doing and they won’t give
you any trouble.” It worked!
Two postcard questions down. One left: “What equipment
were the students at MIT using?”
 Once again, another roommate came to Locke’s rescue—
fortunately, Locke lived in a suite and had lots of
roommates. “We’re talking about phones and MIT students,
right? I remember an article in the Crimson about a year
ago about some MIT students who got in trouble for playing
with the telephone. Could that be it?”
 “Maybe,” said Locke. “But how am I gonna find an old copy
of the Crimson?”
 “The library?” his friend suggested.
 This was a challenge. Locke had never been to the
university’s library before.
 Locke was surprised to find it was close to his dorm and
that other students seemed able to direct him there. Soon
Locke was flipping through page after page of old
Crimsons. An hour later, in an issue from almost a year
earlier in 1966, he found what he was looking for.

FIVE STUDENTS PSYCH BELL SYSTEM,
PLACE FREE LONG DISTANCE CALLS
Five local students, four from Harvard and one from M.I.T., spent eight
months making long distance and international phone calls as guests of the
Bell System before they were finally discovered.

The telephone company accepted the news without bitterness, however,
merely impounding the 121-page Fine Arts 13 notebook that contained the
records of their “researches” and requiring them to submit a full report,
which ran to 40 double-spaced pages, of what they had done.

 Mesmerized, Locke read on, the words from the classified
ad running through his head. The article described how,
starting in 1962, the students had used inward operators—
including one in Kleena Kleene—to complete calls all over
the world. It tantalized with an infuriatingly brief
description of how it was possible to build an electronic
device to control the telephone system for “$50 of common
electronic components.” The article concluded abruptly,
stating that the students were caught in April 1963 when a
telephone company employee turned them in.
 Locke was elated. Pieces were falling into place, and now
he had enough to respond to B. David. But the article was
short on details. He needed to find out more. He needed to
talk to the original Harvard and MIT students. Locke jotted
down the name of the article’s author, another student at
Harvard.
 The next day he filled out the reply postcard and dropped
it in the mail to B. David. Then he called the Crimson
reporter to pump him for details. The reporter wasn’t very
helpful. He didn’t know the names of the Harvard or MIT
students, he said, and it turned out that he had gotten most
of his information from an article in the Boston Herald. He
had then talked to the Herald reporter to get some
additional context.
 “Didn’t the Herald reporter know the names of the
students?” Locke asked.
 “Oh, sure, but he wouldn’t give them to me. And I doubt
he’ll give them to you either,” the Crimson reporter replied.
 Back to the library. Locke dug up the Herald article. It
described the Harvard and MIT students making calls to
the president of Mexico and gave a name—“blue box”—to
the electronic device that had allowed them to control the
telephone network. It spoke of their staying up all night, of
spending eighty hours a week on their research, of dialing
ten thousand numbers over two to three days to find the
information they needed. It even said the students were
questioned by FBI agents who thought they were stealing
defense secrets.
 Locke looked up the telephone number for the newspaper.
Be confident and self-assured and act like you know what
you’re doing. He drew a deep breath, picked up the phone,
dialed the Herald, and asked to be connected to the
reporter who wrote the article. When the reporter
answered, Locke politely explained who he was and what he
was looking for.
 “This is Special Agent Stevenson with the FBI Boston Field
Office. We’ve had a report that there has been some new
activity related to an incident that occurred a few years ago
with some Harvard and MIT students misusing the
telephone system. We’re trying to reach them to talk to
them about this but we don’t have current contact
information for them. I saw your article about them from a
year ago or so. Do you have telephone numbers for any of
them?”
 Not a problem, the reporter replied. He’d be happy to
help.
Before Locke had a chance to call any of the students his
phone rang. It was B. David and he wanted to know about
the Fine Arts 13 notebook. Oh, yes, that notebook: the one
that Locke didn’t actually have. Locke did his best to keep
up the charade. Well, he admitted, he wasn’t actually one of
the Harvard or MIT students but he knew them. He was a
friend of theirs. He had participated in some of their
“research.”
 B. David grilled him. It quickly became apparent that
Locke didn’t know as much as he was claiming. As Locke
would later recall, “You can only fake things so far before
they begin to crumble.” Locke admitted the truth.
 Surprisingly, B. David wasn’t mad, and now that the cat
was out of the bag the two had a pleasant conversation. B.
David explained that there was an informal network of
telephone enthusiasts like himself, and that he had been
trying to reach the Harvard and MIT students to talk to
them about their exploits. “Welcome to our world,” he said.
Locke asked for pointers. B. David demurred on details: “I
don’t want to give you too much information. I will tell you
one thing, though: look for missing exchanges. Look for
patterns. I’ll give you a call back in a few weeks to see how
you’re doing.”
 This all seemed fascinating to Locke. He called the former
MIT student—now living in Berkeley, California—whose
number he had gotten from the Herald reporter. The
student was friendly enough but, like B. David, was also
reluctant to provide much information. The MIT student
explained that he and his friends had been caught and
interrogated by the FBI, although not actually prosecuted.
He stressed that Locke could get in trouble playing with
this stuff and that Locke should stay away from the whole
thing. Locke pressed him for more information. Finally the
MIT student told him, “If you really want to find out more,
everything you need to know is in the library.”
 Great, thought Locke, a third trip to the library.
 But what library would have the sort of information he was
looking for? Some research led him to the physics library
and something called the Bell System Technical Journal.
The one term Locke knew to look up was “multifrequency.”
From the journal’s index he quickly located an article from
the November 1960 issue titled “Signaling Systems for
Control of Telephone Switching.” It was technical but not so
technical that Locke couldn’t understand a good chunk of it.
It laid out in detail exactly how certain aspects of the
telephone system worked, including the multifrequency
signaling system. This article plus the Crimson and Herald
stories, as well as his conversations with B. David and the
former MIT student, gave him everything he needed to get
serious about this stuff.
 Locke started to spend a lot of time on the telephone.
“Look for missing exchanges, look for patterns,” B. David
had told him. Locke knew that an exchange was the first
three digits of a local telephone number. By making a
careful study of the telephone book and doing a lot of
dialing, Locke discovered that there were indeed missing
exchanges in the downtown Boston area. When Locke
found a missing exchange, he would start dialing all the
telephone numbers in it. All ten thousand of them.
 Weeks later Locke had three things to show for his efforts.
The first was an indelible black circle around his index
finger from his repeated dialing. Second was four livid
roommates: because Locke was constantly on the phone,
none of them could make or receive phone calls. But third
was a collection of some very interesting telephone
numbers. Some of these were odd test numbers, numbers
that made weird beeps, boops, clicks, and tones. More
interesting were so-called party lines. These were typically
vacant number recordings (“We’re sorry, you have reached
a nonworking number . . .”) whose audio levels were very
low. All the callers to one of these numbers would be
connected, and because the volume of the recordings was
so low people could talk over the recordings. As a result,
they served as primitive conference calls at a time when
such things were unheard of.
 Most interesting, though, was that several numbers went
to inward operators in various places.
 Locke’s obsession grew. He decided he wanted to build one
of these mystical “blue boxes” so that he, too, could directly
control the telephone network. That meant he’d need to
build electronic oscillators, circuits that would make
musical tones. But Locke didn’t know anything about
electronics. Looking for patterns and missing exchange
numbers was one thing; electronic circuit design was
something else. Locke got a friend of his to introduce him to
a graduate student in the physics department in order to
persuade him to help build the oscillator circuits he needed
for his blue box.
 “What do you need them for?” the grad student asked.
 Be confident and self-assured and act like you know what
you’re doing. “I’m a biology major and I’m studying the
effects of high-frequency audio oscillations on fruitfly
germination.”
 The grad student raised an eyebrow but helped Locke
anyway.
 Locke started haunting the electronics stores in
Cambridge, looking for parts and guidance on assembling
his blue box. Before long he linked up with students at MIT
in the Tech Model Railroad Club, or TMRC, near the Kendall
Square T Station. The TMRC was home to one of the most
technically sophisticated model railroad setups in the
country, possibly the world. MIT students had laid out some
six hundred feet of track simulating ten scale miles of
railroad amid painstakingly detailed scenery. The trains
were controlled by a fantastically complex switching system
based on many of the same principles as the telephone
network. Indeed, the telephone company had donated
equipment to the club for just this purpose, and the club’s
faculty adviser was in charge of MIT’s telephone system, so
it was not surprising that model train operators at TMRC
used a telephone dial to select the train to be controlled. It
was a veritable breeding ground for telephone enthusiasts.
 With help from the more electronically knowledgeable
students at MIT, and only a few soldering iron burns, Locke
was able to piece together a blue box. By now Locke had
been told by enough people that he could get in trouble for
using his blue box and that he should be careful. So Locke
was careful—when it was convenient, anyway. He used his
blue box from the pay phone in his dorm quite a bit, as well
as from friends’ houses. As Locke figured it, the only thing
he was doing with it was using it to learn about how the
phone system worked. He didn’t even really know anybody
far away he wanted to call, so it wasn’t like he was racking
up thousands of dollars in free long-distance calls. He just
couldn’t imagine that anyone cared about his activities that
much.
 Incredibly enough, some people did care, as Locke learned
upon returning to his dorm room in June 1967, just three
months after seeing the Fine Arts 13 ad in the Crimson. He
knew he was in trouble from the moment he walked in the
door: waiting for him in his living room were three men.
One of them was the crestfallen house master, the Harvard
professor who was the head of Locke’s dorm. Locke didn’t
know the other two, but he did notice that one of them was
wearing a trench coat—strange, given that it was a warm
summer day.
 “The jig’s up, Locke,” the house master said.
 Trying to stall for time, Locke asked, “Which jig?”
 Based on the reactions of his three visitors, Locke
surmised this was the wrong thing to have said.
 “You know which jig we’re talking about, Locke,” said one
of the men. “The telephone jig. We’ve been through your
things.” He held up Locke’s blue box. “We need to talk.”
 One of his visitors turned out to be from the telephone
company, AT&T security. The other introduced himself as a
special agent from the FBI’s Boston Field Office. They asked
Locke to come downtown with them. The FBI agent told
him that this was a very serious matter, that they had some
questions they wanted straight answers to, and that they
would arrest him if he didn’t cooperate.
 Locke spent the next twenty-four hours in what felt like a
scene from a 1940s detective movie: a barren room with
nothing more than a wooden table, a chair for him, two
chairs for his interrogators, and a bare lightbulb dangling
from the ceiling. Sitting across from him, the FBI agent and
the telephone security man worked hard to get him to
confess to using the blue box to make free telephone calls.
Despite being scared to death Locke denied everything. He
didn’t know what they were talking about, he said.
 After several hours of questioning, he finally admitted that
yes, the blue box was his, but that he had used it only to
learn about the telephone network. Locke expected them to
start grilling him about how many free calls he had made,
but his interrogators shifted focus. They wanted to know
who had given him the technical information necessary for
him to build a blue box. He explained that he had seen an
article in the Boston Herald and then found the Bell System
Technical Journal article and gone on from there. In other
words, there wasn’t anyone else; he had been all on his
own. It took a long time, but he managed to convince them
of his version of events.
 Again the questioning shifted course. Okay, they said, you
figured out this stuff on your own. Fine. Now tell us who
you’ve been selling the boxes to.
  Locke was flummoxed. Selling the boxes? What boxes? He
had built only the one, and he hadn’t sold it to anyone. The
FBI agent grilled him. They were sure he had been selling
them—or at least supplying them—to others. To whom, they
wouldn’t say. After hours of back and forth, Locke was able
to get across that it was just him, there was just the one box
he had built, and he hadn’t been selling them. (In
retrospect, Locke says he is glad he never thought of this.
“The idea of selling blue boxes had never occurred to me . .
. fortunately! It’s not a bad idea.”)
  Locke spent the evening in the care of the FBI. In the
morning he was told he could leave, but only after he
prepared a written report describing what he had done and
the techniques he had used. He spent the morning writing
this report.
  As he was leaving, Locke turned to the man from the
phone company. His face slipped into a grin. “By the way,”
he said, “I’m not doing anything for the summer. You guys
wouldn’t happen to have any job openings, would you?”
                          Two

 BIRTH OF A PLAYGROUND

THE OBJECT OF    Jake Locke’s obsession—the telephone—
recently celebrated its 135th birthday. Few products can
say that. The telephone’s staying power is testimony to our
species’ deep-seated need to talk with one another. For
thousands of years we humans have tried every trick we
could think of to communicate at a distance: torches on
mountaintops were big with the Greeks, the Romans
released carrier pigeons to report the results of chariot
races, African bush tribes sounded drums, American
Indians had smoke signals, and ships at sea hoisted signal
flags to communicate with each other.
  The problem, of course, was that these techniques all
pretty much sucked; this is why you carry a cell phone in
your pocket and not a signal flag or a pigeon. But we didn’t
get to cell phones overnight. It took repeated assaults on
the problem before humanity managed to make a dent in it.
  In the late 1700s the new new thing in the world of
communications was something called the optical
telegraph. A network of windmill-like towers with pivoting
shutters, blades, arms, or paddles that could be seen from a
distance, the optical telegraph allowed reliable long-
distance communications. Several systems were built but
the best known was created by Claude Chappe and his
brothers and deployed throughout France starting in 1793.
The Chappe system used relay stations a few miles apart
from each other. A station in Lyon, for example, would spin
its paddle to send a particular signal. A few miles to the
southwest, the operator at the Vénissieux station would be
watching, perhaps with the aid of a telescope. He would
spin his paddles to repeat the message on to the station at
Saint-Pierre-de-Chandieu, a few miles farther on down the
line. And so the message would go, one station—and one
spin of the paddle—at a time.
  It was as cumbersome as it sounds. It was expensive,
laborious, and slow. Its use was limited to the government.
It was also public—anyone could watch it, after all—and it
didn’t work in foul weather or at night. Despite this, the
optical     telegraph     was     the     first    successful
telecommunications network, serving for more than sixty
years. By 1852 the Chappe system boasted 556 relay
stations and traced a network distance of some three
thousand miles. Tributaries from the main network
connected many of the capitals of Europe—Amsterdam,
Brussels, Mainz, Milan, Turin, and Venice. News of
Napoleon’s coup d’état in 1848 would have taken just
under half an hour to transit the network, slow by today’s
standards but fast for the time.
  Then the electrical telegraph arrived. It was from the
future and, like many things from the future, it made things
from the present—things like the optical telegraph—look
like they were from the past.
  It was amazing. With a battery and a switch and miles of
wire and a sounder—a thing that clicked when you ran
electrical current through it—you could communicate over
a distance. Instantly. Not half an hour to send a message
but half a minute. Of course, it wasn’t quite as easy as
whipping out your cell phone and texting your friend, but
you could write out a message—a telegram—and take it
down to your local telegraph office, pay some money, and
have it sent.
  It was patented in both England and America in the same
year, 1837. In America the inventor was Samuel Morse,
whose first functioning telegraph line went live between
Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Maryland, in 1844.
Washington to New York followed two years later.
 It seems incredibly primitive today. So primitive, in fact,
that it is difficult to appreciate just how stunning this was at
the time. It let loose a communications revolution that the
writer Tom Standage dubbed the “Victorian Internet.”
Americans took to the telegraph like teenagers to text
messages. By 1850 America had twelve thousand miles of
telegraph lines served by some twenty companies. Only two
years later this had just about doubled to twenty-three
thousand miles, with another ten thousand miles under
construction. A writer chronicling the telegraph’s rapid
growth at the time reported: “It is anticipated that the
whole of the populous parts of the United States will, within
two or three years, be covered with a net-work like a
spider’s web.”
 The prediction was right. The tendrils of the telegraph’s
spiderweb spread rapidly, its threads vibrating with the
dots and dashes of Mr. Morse’s code. The web—the
telegraph web, like its Internet great-grandchild a century
and a half later—conveyed news, facilitated commerce, and
whispered gossip. Romance blossomed over the telegraph;
even weddings took place telegraphically. It reported stock
prices and winning lottery numbers. Gamblers and scam
artists used the telegraphic web as well, passing news of
sporting events and devising schemes to cheat and defraud.
 The spider that owned the web was the Western Union
Telegraph Company. Formed by the merger of several
competing telegraph companies in 1855, it controlled 90
percent of all telegraph traffic in the United States within
just over ten years. But the telegraph’s astonishing growth
was just getting started. In 1867 the telegraph network
carried 5.8 million telegraph messages and Western Union
reported revenues of some $6.6 million—almost $700
million in today’s dollars. By 1875 the number of messages
had grown to about 20 million. So many messages, in fact,
that the lines were becoming clogged. Expanding capacity
by adding more telegraph wires was an expensive
proposition. The network cried out for a way to transmit
multiple telegraph messages over the same pair of wires,
and riches awaited the man who invented the “multiple
telegraph.”
  As a later observer put it, “Nothing, save the hangman’s
noose, concentrates the mind like piles of cash.” Of the
many minds that concentrated on solving this problem, one
belonged to a Boston professor, amateur inventor, and
teacher of the deaf named Alexander Graham Bell. Bell’s
take on the multiple telegraph came from his studies of
hearing, sound, music, and human physiology. Bell knew
that sounds, like music and speech, were made up of
harmonics, that is, of different simultaneous frequencies.
Perhaps it was possible to send multiple telegraph signals
over the same wire using multiple tones of different pitch?
Bell called his idea the “harmonic telegraph.”
  Bell worked intensely on the harmonic telegraph, even
going so far as to accept an investment from Gardiner
Hubbard, a Boston lawyer who would eventually become his
father-in-law. But Bell’s mind kept gravitating toward a
slightly different—and slightly crazy—idea: if you could
send several notes simultaneously down a telegraph line for
a multiple telegraph then maybe . . . just maybe . . . you
could send a human voice down the wires.
  He became obsessed with this new idea, despite his
investors’ attempts to keep him focused on the piles of cash
the harmonic telegraph was going to generate for them.
The telephone “could never be more than a scientific toy,”
Hubbard told Bell. “You had better throw that idea out of
your mind and go ahead with your musical telegraph, which
if it is successful, will make you a millionaire.”
  But he couldn’t. Bell was consumed by a puzzle that was
stuck in his head, a puzzle that wasn’t going anywhere until
he figured it out. As the historian Tim Wu writes, “For him
the thrill of the new was unbeatably compelling, and Bell
knew that in his lab he was closing in on something
miraculous. He, nearly alone in the world, was playing with
magical powers never seen before.” He was also the right
man for the job, the key that fit the lock. Bell himself
recalled later, “I now realize that I should never have
invented the telephone if I had been an electrician. What
electrician would have been so foolish as to try any such
thing? The advantage I had was that sound had been the
study of my life—the study of vibrations.”
 It took three years but on March 10, 1876, Bell finally
succeeded: he managed to send speech through a wire and
into the next room. His prototype telephone was an unlikely
contraption. To use it, Bell spoke into the transmitter, a
funnel-shaped mouthpiece that focused his voice upon a
flexible diaphragm. Suspended from the diaphragm was a
short length of platinum wire, half immersed in a jar of
sulfuric acid, the same sort of corrosive acid you’d find in a
car battery. A wire ran from the platinum to the receiver—a
primitive speaker, basically—in the next room. From the
speaker, a wire ran to a battery and then back to a brass
pipe that was also immersed in the transmitter’s acid bath.
The acid was conductive and completed the circuit between
the transmitter and the receiver. Here was the key
innovation, the thing that made it all work: the louder Bell
spoke into the mouthpiece, the more the diaphragm
deflected and the deeper the platinum wire was plunged
into the acid. The more wire dipped into the acid, the less
electrical resistance there was in the circuit and the more
current flowed to the receiver, causing the speaker to move
proportionately. Using a jar of sulfuric acid Bell had created
what would become known as a variable resistance
transmitter. It was this that allowed his system to accurately
mimic the volume fluctuations of speech over a pair of
wires.
 Bell, Hubbard, investor Thomas Sanders, and Bell’s
assistant Thomas Watson turned their attention to
commercializing the new invention. Western Union, with its
telegraph monopoly and millions of messages and hundreds
of thousands of miles of wire, was the undisputed
telecommunications giant of the day. It would seem to have
been the natural home of telephony, an established
company with a closely related business, technology, and
relevant assets. Bell is said to have offered Western Union
the rights to his telephone patent in 1876 for $100,000.
Western Union’s president is alleged to have responded,
“What use could this company make of an electrical toy?”
Well, then.
 Bell and his associates pressed on with the telephone’s
commercial rollout. This often took Bell and Watson on the
public lecture circuit in Boston and its surrounds,
demonstrating their new invention to crowds that were
usually enthusiastic but sometimes skeptical. As one
newspaper wrote at the time, “It is indeed difficult, hearing
the sounds out of the mysterious box, to wholly resist the
notion that the powers of darkness are somehow in league
with it.” Despite such occasional press commentary they
persevered. By 1877 the first permanent telephone wires
were strung in a suburb of Boston, the first ads for
telephone service appeared, and the first telephone rentals
took place. The Bell Telephone Company itself was founded
in July of that year.
 If you wanted telephone service between your office in
Boston and, say, your home outside of town, Bell would be
glad to set you up. You would be able to call your office from
the comfort of your home, and your coworkers could call
you. But it wasn’t much like telephone service today. Bell’s
offering was point-to-point: a telephone at your home, a
telephone at your office, and a telephone line run directly
between them. In fact, it was your responsibility to hire
telegraph contractors to run the line between your home
and office. If you wanted to talk to multiple shops or
suppliers, you had set up multiple pairs of telephones—and
wires—between them and you.
 This was high-tech wizardry back in the day. But it suffered
from some obvious drawbacks. The maximum distance you
could cover was about twenty miles. Basic service was $20
per year for a pair of telephones for residences, $40 per
year for businesses—equivalent to about $400 and $800
per year today. But the killer expense was telegraph line
installation, which cost between $100 and $150 per mile,
that is, between $2,000 and $3,000 per mile in present
dollars. Note that telephones were rented, never owned
outright; this was a key part of the Bell plan to maintain
ownership over the entire telephone system.
 Forget about all that, though, because these are all small
potatoes compared to this: you couldn’t call anyone you
didn’t have a connection to. Want to talk to Aunt Mabel?
Better get the telegraph installers busy running wires
between your house and hers.
 Bell and others were aware of this problem and knew how
to fix it. Instead of running wires directly from one place to
another, why not run them all to a central place? When you
wanted to make a call you’d pick up the phone and do
something—push a button, turn a crank—to get the
attention of someone at “central.” There a person—an
operator—would answer the phone. You’d ask to be
connected to Mr. Smith (who needed telephone numbers
when only a few people had telephones?). Central would
ring Mr. Smith’s telephone line. When Mr. Smith answered,
the operator would connect the wires together, switching
your call from central to your party.
 As Bell himself put it in a memo from early 1878, “Instead
of erecting a line directly from one to another, I would
advise you to bring the wires from the two points to the
office of the Company and there connect them together . . .
the company should employ a man in each central office for
the purpose of connecting wires as desired. A fixed annual
rental could be charged for the use of the wires, or a toll
could be levied. As all connections would necessarily be
made at the central office, it would be easy to note the time
during which any wires were connected and to make a
charge accordingly—bills could be sent in periodically.” He
added, prophetically, “However small the rate of charges
might be, the revenue would probably be something
enormous.” The switchboard, and with it the concepts of a
telephone central office or exchange—to say nothing of
your monthly telephone bill and its per-minute charges—
was born.
 The first commercial switchboard debuted in January 1878
in New Haven, Connecticut, connecting twenty-one
subscribers over eight telephone lines to a single operator,
all under license from Bell Telephone. The first
switchboards were primitive affairs: pieces of wood with a
handful of metal bits, something that a fourth-grade science
fair participant would scoff at today. But they worked,
quickly establishing their superiority over point-to-point
connections.
 Switchboards rapidly grew in size and complexity. The first
switchboard operators? Teenage boys. As John Murphy
writes in his book The Telephone, “It was believed that they
would have the energy, dexterity, quicksilver reflexes, and
mechanical know-how to connect hundreds of calls an hour
on a switchboard composed of a bewildering maze of
thousands of cords and jacks. It turned out, however, that
they were often impatient, rude, and foulmouthed to
callers.” Goodness, who could have predicted? The teenage
boys soon found themselves out of their jobs, replaced by
women. The ladies, Murphy says, provided a “warmer
human voice for the phone company” and also injected
some sex appeal for the telephone’s primary user base:
businessmen.
 By now Western Union recognized its mistake in
dismissing the telephone as a toy. Sure, Bell had three
thousand installed telephones and Western Union had none.
But Western Union was the largest company on earth at the
time, with financing, engineering and operations skills, and
250,000 miles of installed telegraph wire. In December of
1877 it went head to head with Bell Telephone, launching
the American Speaking Telephone company, with inventor
Thomas Edison as one of its technical wizards. Within the
year Western Union had surpassed Bell Telephone in
several markets and looked poised to crush Bell entirely; it
didn’t even resemble a fair fight.
 But Bell had something that Western Union didn’t: the
fundamental patent on the telephone. Bell sued Western
Union for patent infringement in September 1878. It took
more than a year but in the end Bell won. In November
1879 Western Union settled the lawsuit, agreeing to exit
the telephone business and transfer its telephone
exchanges and thousands of telephone subscribers to Bell.
In exchange, Bell Telephone agreed to limit its involvement
in the telegraph business and to share a portion of its
telephone revenues with Western Union for seventeen
years. By the 1880s Bell Telephone’s publicly traded stock
had become the belle of the Boston Stock Exchange, where
it traded under the ticker symbol “T”—for “telephone.”
 The legal victory also helped Bell go after a smaller but
still vexing problem: people who had illegally connected
telephones—some stolen, some leftovers from independent
telephone companies—to Bell Telephone lines. “During the
past few months the American Bell Telephone Co., of
Boston, has had detectives at work in this city endeavoring
to ascertain how many ‘bogus’ or outlawed telephones were
in use here,” an 1890 trade journal reported. “Over 200
have been discovered, and last Thursday the first batch of
fifteen or twenty liverymen, doctors, dentists, druggists,
and fuel dealers who have been using these infringing
telephones were summoned to appear in the United States
Circuit Court.” As a Bell agent in Philadelphia said, “I
cannot understand how many good business men can
permit themselves to use what they know it is against the
law to use.”
  Despite having to deal with the occasional pirate telephone
user, Bell was now positioned to own the majority of the
telephone network in the United States for the next one
hundred years—but there was one problem. Bell
Telephone’s sacred patents would start expiring in 1894,
opening the field for competition. To prepare for this
coming onslaught, Bell Telephone formed a new subsidiary:
American Telephone and Telegraph. AT&T’s mission was to
build long-distance telephone lines—“long lines,” as they
were called. The idea was to use the time remaining before
its patents expired to develop the nation’s long-distance
telephone network. Then, when the patents ran out, the
company would have a formidable barrier to would-be
competitors. AT&T would be the only company with long-
distance telephone service and it could either charge other
companies for access to its long-distance network or simply
refuse to let other companies use it.
  AT&T’s first long-distance line, between New York and
Philadelphia (capacity: one call), went live in 1885. AT&T
reached Chicago in 1892, St. Louis in 1896, Minneapolis in
1897, and Kansas City in 1898. The far west took longer, as
telephone engineers struggled with the challenge of
sending voice over greater and greater distances. But the
engineers persevered; Denver was reached in 1911 and
San Francisco in 1915.
  Switchboards, meanwhile, still based on the same
fundamentals as the piece of wood with connectors, became
larger and more sophisticated. Electrical cords insulated in
woven cloth were used to connect incoming calls to
destination telephone lines; these are the “cordboards” you
see in old movies, the ones where dozens of operators sit
next to one another, arm by arm, plugging and unplugging
wires into the large connector panels in front of them.
 By 1888 a switchboard had been designed that could serve
more than ten thousand subscribers in New York City. In
the cordboard’s eventual form, an operator would sit in
front of about two hundred answering jacks and roughly
three thousand calling jacks, that is, she could answer calls
from about two hundred customers and connect them to
about three thousand others. Multiple individual
switchboards could be placed next to each other and
ganged together, allowing one operator (with a certain
amount of standing and stretching) to connect calls on the
boards to her left or right, tripling her capacity. The result
was that her two hundred subscribers could be connected
to about nine thousand others. Put fifty of these
switchboards and operators in the room and you had a
complete telephone exchange: almost ten thousand people
could be connected to one another.
 But what if you want to talk to somebody served by an
entirely different switchboard? To do this you need a way of
connecting switchboards in different locations. Wires called
trunk lines were installed between central offices for this
purpose. The central offices are the branches on the tree
and the wires connecting them form the tree’s trunk. But
Bell Telephone quickly ran into the same problem it had
with the original telephone system: trunk lines are point to
point. If you have ten central offices in a given city, and they
all need trunk lines between them, you find yourself having
to run forty-five lines due to all the possible combinations of
central offices that need connections with each other—a
big, expensive mess, and one that gets worse with each
central office you add.
 The tandem switchboard solved this problem. You can
think of a tandem switchboard as a switchboard of other
switchboards, a special switchboard in a special central
office that was used only for connecting other switchboards
together. Just like the original central offices had all the
telephone wires for a given exchange brought to a central
place, a tandem central office had the trunk lines from
other offices brought to a central place. There an operator
on a tandem switchboard could connect trunk lines from
one central office to another. The network was starting to
become hierarchical.
 By 1903 there were about 3 million switchboard
connected phones. The interesting thing about these
millions of lines is that, in every case, a human being was
the switch. It was the operator’s hand, arm, and reach that
switched an incoming call to its destination, and the
operator’s brain that told the hand and arm where to reach
and what to do. Telephone switching was an intensely
manual process, requiring warehouses full of people. By
1902 the Bell System employed some thirty thousand
operators; by 1914 it was about a hundred thousand.
 Humans as switches have lots of advantages, qualities such
as judgment, sympathy, warmth—the personal touch that is
part of customer service. But they have disadvantages too.
For one thing, you have to pay them. For another, they’re
slow. Between a lack of long-distance capacity and humans
having to put through the calls, a coast-to-coast call in 1922
might have taken fifteen minutes or more to be connected.
They make mistakes, for instance, plugging the wrong cord
into the wrong jack. And then there are their all too human
frailties. They eavesdrop on conversations. They gossip.
They have loyalties.
 The last of these qualities, legend has it, was the straw that
broke an undertaker’s back. Back in the late 1880s Almon
Strowger, a mortician in Kansas City, Missouri, noticed a
disturbing drop in his business. As it happened, the wife of
a competing undertaker worked as an operator at the
neighborhood switchboard. She, the story goes, tended to
connect callers to her husband’s business—not Strowger’s
—when someone would call in and ask for the undertaker.
 You can think of many solutions to such a problem. You
could complain to the telephone company. You could have a
friendly chat with your competitor. You could even sue. But
Strowger could see through to the root of the problem:
pesky humans. Eliminate human operators and you’d
eliminate the problem. Strowger set upon inventing a
system to make human operators obsolete. Who needs a
bunch of people plugging cords in boards when a machine
could do the work more quickly, more accurately, less
expensively —and more honestly?
 Strowger’s first mechanical telephone switch was patented
in 1891. It allowed telephone subscribers to “dial” their
own calls without needing to go through an operator. The
original Strowger system didn’t involve an actual circular
telephone dial; rather, each telephone had three buttons:
one for the hundreds digit, one for the tens digit, and one
for the ones digit. To call telephone number 315, you
pressed the hundreds button three times, the tens button
once, and the ones button five times. Inside, the fiddly bits
of the switch worked together to connect you to the person
you wanted. Look Ma Bell, no operator!
  Strowger formed the Automatic Electric Company to build
and sell his mechanical telephone switch. The first
automatic telephone exchange, based on the Strowger
switch, opened in November 1892 in La Porte, Indiana, with
seventy-five subscribers and room for ninety-nine total.
  Like many inventions, the first Strowger switch wasn’t
quite ready for prime time and required a great deal of
additional work before it became a commercially solid
product. But it got there eventually, and with tremendous
success. Bell eventually began using Strowger switches
from Automatic Electric in 1915, and by 1926 Bell had
licensed the Automatic Electric design and was
manufacturing the switches itself. Telephone switches
based on the Strowger switch—called “step-by-step”
switches within the Bell System—would go on to become
the dominant type of telephone switch for more than
seventy years, seeing widespread use around the world. In
the United States, the popularity of the Strowger switch
reached its peak only in 1972 when more than 42 million
telephone lines were connected to step-by-step switches
descended from Strowger’s original design.
  Other types of automatic telephone switches followed the
Strowger switch. The Bell System began a metamorphosis,
from a purely human affair to a gigantic cyber-mechanical-
human endeavor: a mix of operators and machines
switching calls, supported in the background by still more
humans designing, building, installing, and caring for the
switching machines. Functions that were once the domain
of   human     operators    slowly  became     increasingly
mechanized: switchboards became switching machines;
tandem switchboards became tandem switches (“tandems”
for short)—specialized machines designed to connect trunk
lines from other switching machines, building up the long-
distance telephone network link by automated link.
Bell Telephone’s worries about competition starting when
its patents began expiring in 1894 turned out to be well
founded. Just ten years later there were more than six
thousand competing independent telephone companies
providing local telephone service. For Bell Telephone and
its shareholders, this competition was bad enough. But in
some ways it was worse for the customers. Prices varied
considerably, with some telephone companies opting for
flat-rate service in which customers paid a fixed yearly fee
for all the local calls they could make, while other
companies went with measured-rate service and charged
customers per call (and sometimes per minute) for local
calls. Worst of all, the telephone lines of independent
companies didn’t connect with those of the Bell System, or,
for that matter, with other independents. Cities would have
multiple telephone companies and subscribers to one
company couldn’t call those of another. Businesses had to
have different phone lines installed from different
telephone companies to support their customers.
  Despite the chaos caused by these kinds of problems, the
independents looked to be winning. By 1903 Bell had about
fifteen hundred telephone exchanges and about 1.2 million
subscribers. The independents had more than six thousand
exchanges and about 2 million subscribers.
  Bell Telephone fought back with everything it had. It drove
independents out of business through what some would call
predatory pricing, and it bought up many of those it could
not drive out of business. It denied the independents the
use of its long-distance network. And it engaged in more
underhanded tricks, including bribing public officials to
prevent the establishment of independent telephone
companies as well as using company influence with banks to
deny its competitors badly needed loans. It also launched
an effort to dominate the telegraph industry, buying a
controlling interest in its old nemesis Western Union in
1908. AT&T was described as a “ruthless, grinding,
oppressive monopoly.”
  The U.S. Justice Department began an antitrust
investigation against AT&T in 1913, culminating in a
recommendation that the Interstate Commerce Commission
dig into AT&T with an eye toward regulation. The possibility
of breakup of the Bell System—or even government
takeover of the telephone system—loomed. Such a
possibility was not idle speculation. Britain had nationalized
its telephone system in January 1912, and in 1913 the new
U.S. postmaster believed that the telephone system should
be owned by the government just like the postal system.
  AT&T began a series of negotiations with the Justice
Department to forestall such an outcome. By the end of
1913 AT&T vice president Nathan Kingsbury reached a
compromise with the government, the first of what would
be several over the next seventy years. Under what became
known as the Kingsbury Commitment, AT&T agreed to do
three things. First, it would divest itself of Western Union.
Second, it would stop buying up independent telephone
companies, at least without Justice Department permission.
And third, it would allow independent telephone companies
to connect to the Bell System’s precious long lines, allowing
customers of independents to make long-distance calls—for
a fee.
  The Kingsbury Commitment appeared to be a tremendous
victory for the government and independent telephone
companies, and a huge concession for AT&T. But
appearances can be deceiving. Tim Wu writes, “The trick of
the Kingsbury Commitment was to make relatively painless
concessions that preempted more severe actions, just as
inoculation confers immunity by exposing one’s system to a
much less virulent form of a pathogen.” In particular,
Kingsbury traded involvement in an old industry, the
telegraph, for government-approved dominion of a new
industry, long-distance telephone.
  The Kingsbury Commitment started AT&T down the path
of becoming a regulated, government-sanctioned monopoly.
By 1925 the Bell System had coalesced into more or less
the form that would carry the company forward for the next
sixty years: American Telephone and Telegraph as the
headquarters company and long-distance provider, Western
Electric as its manufacturing division, Bell Laboratories as
its research and development arm, and more than a dozen
regional Bell telephone companies that provided local
telephone service: New England Telephone and Telegraph,
New York Telephone, the Bell Telephone Company of
Pennsylvania, Pacific Telephone and Telegraph, etc. It
employed almost three hundred thousand people and had
annual revenues of $761 million in 1925—more than $9
billion in today’s dollars. Its network connected about 50
million telephone calls each day for some 16 million
telephone subscribers over 45 million miles of wire and
cable.
 AT&T’s vast size, clever engineering, and distinct fusion of
humans and machines made this communication network
possible. What AT&T didn’t realize was that, in building this
network, it had also built an electronic playground.
                          Three

            CAT AND CANARY

BY THE MIDDLE    of the twentieth century the playground—
that is, AT&T’s telephone switching network—was largely
formed, at least in its broad outlines. Millions of telephone
subscribers used it to switch their calls across the country,
and even overseas, every day. Not one of them noticed that
the telephone system was anything more than a utility, a
dull, drab, predictable —and predictably expensive—
service for getting calls from point A to point B.
 What the playground needed was someone to start playing
with it.
 David Condon† would turn out to be that person.
†A pseudonym.
 Condon was in a Woolworth’s store in 1955 when he heard
a sound that transfixed him. Louder than the background
noise of the other shoppers in the store, it was also ear
catching, increasing in pitch and then decreasing. Not pure
but warbling. If a pure musical note was still water, this was
water with ripples in it.
 Condon scanned the store, trying to see past the other
customers. Where was it coming from?
 There.
 He walked over to the counter, to the thing that was
making the noise.
 A small electric motor and air compressor were connected
to a brightly colored plastic toy. It was a plastic flute, about
ten inches long, with a small plastic bird in a small plastic
birdcage on it. A plastic cat on the whistle gazed longingly
at the bird. As part of the Woolworth’s display, the motor
ran the slide of the whistle back and forth while the air
blew, producing the rising and falling pitch he had heard. A
small metal clip inside the whistle added the warbling
quality to the sound.
 “Davy Crockett Cat and Canary Bird Call Flute,” read the
sign above it. A picture showed Davy Crockett in his
trademark coonskin cap, playing his flute, while songbirds
swooped down, attracted by the magical melody.
 It was forty-nine cents.
 It was perfect.
 The whistle soon found itself under the knife. Wire cutters
snipped off the plastic birdcage, freeing the canary. A
soldering iron melted the plastic under the canary itself,
freeing it still further—all the way into the garbage can.
 Condon borrowed some equipment from the lab at the
school where he was studying for his master’s degree in
chemistry. He took a motor from a chemical mixer—a
blender for chemistry labs, basically—and mounted an
aluminum disc on it. He placed some tape on the disc to
make an insulated spot that would break an electrical
connection as the disc spun. He adjusted the speed until a
borrowed pulse counter told him it was rotating twenty
times a second. He used a signal generator to feed a
precise tone through this contraption. It made a warbling
noise, a bit like a buzz but more pleasant. He adjusted the
tone until it was centered in pitch about two octaves above
middle C: a thousand cycles per second, or 1,000 Hz, as the
engineers say.
 He adjusted the slide on the Cat and Canary Bird Call
Flute until it, too, made a 1,000 Hz tone when he blew it.
Then he turned his attention to the bronze-phosphor metal
clip in the whistle. He drilled holes in it until, by ear, it
matched the pulses coming from his mixer-motor, wheel-
counter setup: twenty pulses per second.
 It was going to work, he was sure of it.
 He waited for night to fall.
Say you travel back in time to 1955. You land in Miami, the
weather is nice there, and you’d like to call your friend Bill
in snowy Denver to rub it in. Bill’s number, odd as it may
sound, is Race 2-7209. If that doesn’t seem like a
reasonable telephone number to you, remember that you’re
from the future, where telephone numbers are, well,
numbers—ten-digit-long numbers, at that.
 It wasn’t always that way. On the very early switchboards
at the dawn of the telephone age you simply told the
operator the name of the person you wanted to speak to
and she connected you. Although numbers became
necessary as telephone exchanges got larger, you didn’t
need seven- or ten-digit numbers; the original Strowger
switching system used two-digit numbers to accommodate a
hundred subscribers. And since the largest manual
switchboard exchanges could handle only about ten
thousand people, telephone numbers stabilized for a while
at four digits. But of course a given city might have multiple
telephone exchanges. Exchanges were named, not
numbered, and often were christened with the name of the
general area or street where they were located. So Bill
might be in the Race exchange and I might be in the
Atlantic exchange and Joe might be in the Filbert exchange,
depending on which neighborhoods and local landmarks
were prominent where each of us lived.
 This system worked great back in the days when, even for
a local call, you picked up the phone, the operator came on
the line and asked “Number please?,” you told her the
number (“Race 2-7209”), and she connected you. No
dialing involved. In some sense, this was the pinnacle of
telephone service: as the Bell System’s official history says
of this approach to making a phone call, “[The telephone]
user’s operation had been reduced to the minimum effort
ever achieved. He merely lifted his receiver and verbally
informed the operator of his wishes.”
 This business of telephone exchanges having names
created a problem when the rotary dial telephone arrived
on scene: how are you going to dial the number Atlantic 3-
3040? Is the telephone going to have a dial with twenty-six
letters and ten digits? This problem befuddled AT&T for
years, until 1917, when one of the company’s engineers hit
upon the system we’re so familiar with today: the letters
“ABC” would be associated with the digit 2, “DEF” with 3,
and so on. Callers would use just the first two or three
letters of the exchange name plus the telephone number to
dial a call. So Race 2-7209 would be dialed as 722-7209.
“[It] seems so obvious that it is unbelievable that it took so
long to invent, and it is difficult to realize the tremendous
significance of this proposal when it was made,” according
to an AT&T history. The result came to be called “two-letter,
five-digit” dialing and it paved the way for telephone
numbers made up entirely of digits.
 But back to our 1955 long-distance call from Miami to
Denver. By the mid-1950s the telephone system had grown
into an interesting blend of humans and machines. In many
areas of the country you could dial local calls yourself, but
in other places you still might not have a dial on your
telephone—in those places the operator would handle even
local calls for you, just as at the turn of the century. And
whether you dialed your own local calls or needed the
operator to do it for you, in most parts of the country local
calls were free or, perhaps more accurately, were paid for
as part of your flat-rate monthly phone bill.
 Not so long distance. It was expensive, of course, and,
except for a tiny handful of cities with something called
“direct distance dialing”—a newfangled service the
telephone company had introduced in 1951—if you wanted
to make a long-distance call you had to dial 211, where a
special long-distance operator would arrange for your call.
 So you dial 211 on your rotary phone to get the Miami
long-distance operator on the horn. You tell her you want to
talk to Race 2-7209 in Denver. Unfortunately for our
operator—and for you—Miami has no direct circuits to
Denver. This is not unusual; cities don’t have long-distance
trunk lines to every other city. It’s economics: long-distance
trunks are expensive to string from place to place and,
unless those lines are going to be reasonably well utilized,
the telephone company just can’t justify the expense.
 Don’t worry, though, your Miami operator has connections
to operators in lots of other places, and one of those places
probably has trunk lines to Denver. And if they don’t, well,
they’ll have connections to other cities that will—kind of like
the hub-and-spoke system airlines use today. Just like with
air travel, if Bill lived in some tiny, faraway town that most
people have never heard of, the route can get lengthy and
complicated and hard to figure out, requiring multiple
intermediate cities to get you there. A handy guidebook at
the operator’s switchboard position provides a quick
memory jogger for the most common routes. For the
unusual ones, Ma Bell provides a special rate-and-route
operator that our Miami operator can call for advice when
she’s stumped. Rate-and-route is a phone company internal
operator customers cannot call directly. She and her sisters
are the mavens of call routing.
 Denver is easy, though, it’s a big city, and our Miami
operator has that one memorized. Almost by reflex she
reaches for a plug on her switchboard and jacks into an idle
Atlanta trunk, connecting to her opposite number: the
Atlanta inward operator. The Miami operator presses her
“ring forward” button, sending a quick signal—brrrrp!—to
get the attention of the operator up north. A light appears
on the Atlanta operator’s board and she answers by
plugging into the corresponding jack. The operators have a
quick, almost machinelike exchange.
 “Atlanta.”
 “Denver, Race 2-7209.”
 “Right.”
 The Atlanta inward operator goes through the same
process to move the call down field. She has a direct trunk
to Denver; you can hear the hiss of the long-distance noise
when she plugs into it. A similar mechanized conversation
ensues.
 “Denver.”
 “Race 2-7209.”
 The Denver operator does some quick plug-n-jack jujitsu.
“Ringing.”
 Bill answers the phone. The operators drop off the circuit,
their work done. You have a brief conversation. Remember,
long-distance is actually expensive, so you can’t afford to
talk for too long. Your ten-minute call costs $5.90, about
$48 in today’s dollars.
 As it happens, you’ve just experienced the best-case
scenario: the breaks were all in your favor and everything
worked just like it was supposed to. But lots of things could
have gone wrong. All circuits could have been busy
between Miami and Atlanta, or Atlanta and Denver, in which
case the long-distance operator would have arranged to call
you back when a circuit was free. Even if you got through
Bill might not have been home. If his phone just rang and
rang, that would be one thing; you wouldn’t be charged a
cent. But the worst would be if Bill wasn’t home but his
mom was. When she answered the phone, you’d get
charged for the call, and you didn’t even get to talk to Bill!
Given how expensive this could be, that might be enough to
scare you into not calling him at all.
 The phone company doesn’t like it when its customers are
scared to make phone calls—it’s bad for business. To avoid
this, AT&T offered something called a person-to-person call.
With a person-to-person call, you tell the long-distance
operator not just the number to call but the name of the
exact person that you want to speak to. If that person isn’t
home, you pay nothing. But the telephone company has just
become a casino. If the person you’re calling is home, AT&T
charges you an extra fee—in some cases up to twice the
cost of an ordinary station-to-station telephone call. This
double or nothing scheme made long-distance calls more
palatable for many, especially when calling places like
dorms or boarding houses with lots of people and only one
phone. Of course, person-to-person calls also created an
opportunity to cheat the telephone company. Say you’re a
businessperson traveling across country and you want to let
your spouse know that you’re okay, but you don’t want to
pay for a long-distance phone call to your home. You and
your sweetie agree on an imaginary name (“Josefina Q.
Zoetrope”) that means you’ve arrived and you’re fine. When
you arrive at your destination, you ask the operator for a
person-to-person call to Josefina at your home telephone
number. Your spouse answers and says that Josefina isn’t
there. The call was free and your spouse is relieved.
 If Bill wasn’t home but it was really important to reach
him, you could have the Denver operator leave a message
for him to call you. Of course, long-distance calls being
expensive, Bill might not want to spend the money to call
you back. That’s okay, you can have him call you on your
dime. The message left for Bill with whoever answered Bill’s
phone would be something like, “Please call Operator Eight
in Miami, there is a long-distance call for you.” When Bill
got home, he could pick up his phone and ask to speak to
Operator 8 in Miami. Long-distance cordboard magic would
ensue and, when he finally reached Operator 8, he would
give his name and ask if there was a call for him. Assuming
she found his name in the pile of toll tickets on her desk,
she would reply, “Yes sir, there is, let me connect you,” and
then would complete the call back to you in Miami. That call
would cost you money but it would be free to Bill.
Darkness fell. It was time to test the modified Davy Crockett
Cat and Canary Bird Call Flute.
 Condon took his whistle to a pay phone. He dialed 0 and
asked for Operator 6 in Kansas City. He knew his local
operator didn’t have direct trunks to Kansas City so she’d
have to route his call through an intermediate operator in
Chicago. He listened patiently as she set up the call.
 Operator 6 in Kansas City came on the line. Condon gave a
name—not his own—and said he had received a message
that there was a call for him from Kansas City. The operator
checked her toll tickets but couldn’t find any record of such
a call. Both parties expressed the requisite puzzlement—
genuine on her part, feigned on his. Operator 6 in Kansas
City disconnected.
 The moment of truth had arrived. He put his Cat and
Canary Bird Call Flute up to the mouthpiece of the
telephone and blew it several times in quick succession.
“Brrrrp! Brrrrp!” He listened to the hiss of the trunk line as
moments ticked by.
 A different operator’s voice came on the line. “Chicago,”
she said.
 It worked!
 It did just what he felt so sure it would do. He had modified
his Davy Crockett Cat and Canary Bird Call Flute to
generate the special “ring forward” signal—brrrrp!—used
to get the attention of a distant operator. This was the
signal that made the lamp light up on an inward operator’s
switchboard, the one that signaled an incoming call from
another operator. Because it wasn’t just a pure tone—it was
1,000 Hz modulated by a 20 Hz warble—he couldn’t
produce that signal with an ordinary whistle. The flute’s
warble was what had caught his attention in Woolworth’s.
The warble was what made the whistle so perfect.
 With this whistle, he figured, he would be able to make
free calls anywhere in the country. All he’d have to do was
get a pair of long-distance operators on the line, get the
distant one to disconnect, and then blow his whistle. That
would get a new, different operator on the line at an
intermediate city. And since she could be reached only by
other telephone operators, he figured she’d pretty much be
willing to connect him anywhere he wanted.
 Although the term wouldn’t be invented for more than a
decade, David Condon was a phone phreak, that is,
someone obsessed with understanding, exploring, and
playing with the telephone network. In 1955 he was the
only one. He was on his own and would be for years.
Eventually others would follow, and among a select group of
them his whistle, and his discovery, would lead to his phone
phreak nickname: “Davy Crockett”—the original explorer,
the King of the Wild Frontier.
Condon’s hearing the Cat and Canary Bird Call Flute that
day in Woolworth’s was chance, of course. But somehow his
mind made the mental plug-and-jack connection that linked
it with the operator’s ring forward signal the instant he
heard it. As the old saying goes, “Chance favors the
prepared mind.”
 Condon’s mind started its preparations early, as early as
three or four years old. “I was fascinated as a very young
child by the fact that there was a switchboard somewheres,
and when you picked up the phone, a voice said, ‘Number
please.’ My mother used to tell me that that was an
operator, that she was connecting you to other people.”
Young Condon was mesmerized by the idea that there was
something “out there”—a whole network, in fact—that
could connect him to others.
 Born in Philadelphia in 1931 he gravitated toward science.
“Mother had a first cousin who was a science teacher. I
think she first got me started. One of my presents that she
brought me for my birthday was a dry cell.” That is, a large
1.5-volt battery, something that he could use to do basic
science experiments—to make motors spin and lightbulbs
light up. “That thing lasted me for years,” he recalls.
  His father was a banker and his mother, eventually, was
the principal of a four-room school in rural Pennsylvania.
Technical interests ran in the family; his dad was a ham
radio operator. Condon recalls being eleven or twelve years
old and listening to shortwave radio with his father at night
during World War II. They could only listen, since ham radio
transmissions had been outlawed during the war for fear of
use by enemy spies. This listening could sometimes turn
chilling. Every so often they heard the most famous rhythm
of Morse code: dit-dit-dit, dah-dah-dah, dit-dit-dit—SOS
distress signals from Allied ships in the Atlantic under
attack by German U-boats.
  His first telephone—at least the first one that was his own
—came from an elderly couple who lived next door. “I used
to go over there and empty the ashes from their fireplace
and bring them a bucket of coal. They had no running water
in their house except in the kitchen,” he recalls. Despite
their lack of modern conveniences, his neighbors had
something he didn’t. “They had two magneto telephones in
their barn,” he remembers, that is, telephones with cranks
that you turned by hand to generate a ringing voltage. They
were wall mounted, with a box in the bottom for wet-cell
batteries, the kind you put sulfuric acid in, like tiny car
batteries. When the elderly couple passed away he
inherited the phones. He took the magnetos apart and used
them as generators, amazing his school chums by making
lightbulbs glow.
  It will come as no surprise that chemistry and physics were
his favorite subjects; reading, less so. When a book report
was due he would make the trip into the central library in
Philly to borrow a summary of the book and use that to
write his report. Foreshadowing his extraordinary future
efforts with plastic whistles, he recalls, “It was more trouble
to do that than it was to read the book, but I thought I was
getting away with something.”
 In 1950 he left for college in Greensboro, North Carolina,
where he majored in chemistry and mathematics. There he
discovered the school library subscribed to a magazine
called the Bell Laboratories Record. Every month it
summarized Bell Labs’ latest innovations, from the
invention of the transistor to upgrades to the telephone
network. Intended for a general audience, it was easier to
read and more accessible than the engineering-focused Bell
System Technical Journal.
 The Record provided Condon with a great education, one
that had been difficult to get up until then. “How you gonna
find out how the telephone works?” he asks. “The operators
didn’t have time to talk to you, they weren’t allowed to get
into conversations with customers.” Sure, you could make
friends with a repairman and learn a lot—and he did, pretty
much every place he lived—but the Record was like a
topical college seminar devoted to discussing the telephone
network, one that was extraordinary for its breadth, depth,
and currency. “They were proud, they tooted their own
horn,” Condon recalls.
 If it seems incredible to you that a company would publish
the details of its technical achievements and how its
internal systems worked, if it seems as if today these would
be stamped CONFIDENTIAL and locked away and used to crush
competitors, you’d be right. Indeed, many telephone
company documents were deemed confidential—or, AT&T’s
highest classification, RESTRICTED. But remember too that
AT&T didn’t have any serious competitors. It wasn’t just any
company: it was the telephone company, a government-
regulated monopoly, a national institution. For reasons of
corporate pride, national service, and, of course, public
relations, AT&T felt an obligation to share its latest and
greatest feats with the public.
Armed with his Cat and Canary Bird Call Flute, Condon set
about exploring the telephone network. He was living in
Knoxville, Tennessee, at the time but quickly found the
perfect place to carry out his experiments: the town of Oak
Ridge, some twenty-five miles away. Oak Ridge was a
strange place, one that didn’t appear on maps until just a
few years earlier, despite having a population of more than
seventy thousand people. During World War II, Oak Ridge
was a secret town built by the Army Corps of Engineers and
guarded by the military. Known at the time as the Clinton
Engineer Works, Oak Ridge was home to three uranium
separation and processing plants used for the Manhattan
Project, America’s crash program to develop the atomic
bomb. After the war, the town gained its name and its
freedom, unlocking its gates to the outside world for the
first time.
 Two things made Oak Ridge ideal to Condon. First, Oak
Ridge had its own long-distance trunk lines. He figured the
long-distance lines would be routed through Knoxville, the
closest big city, “but no,” Condon recalls, “the Defense
Department didn’t want that.” For security reasons, he
believes, “They wanted Oak Ridge to be autonomous in its
access to the network.”
 The second part was even better. “They did not want the
possibility of people listening to secure calls, so they didn’t
give the operators monitor keys,” Condon says. In most
cities operators had the ability to listen to a telephone call
in order to monitor its progress. But not operators at Oak
Ridge. “As long as you didn’t flash”—that is, push the
telephone hook switch up and down—“and didn’t leave any
indication that you were through, she would leave you
alone! It was wonderful!”
 The only fly in the telephonic ointment had to do with
Condon’s chromosomes. He was a man, in other words, and
men weren’t operators in the 1950s. This presented some
problems, since his whistle hack revolved around the idea
of getting an operator on the line and convincing her to do
something for him. Fortunately, men were employed to do
engineering and troubleshooting work on the long-distance
lines. He quickly learned to pretend to be a test board
engineer—“Oak Ridge number one test” was his standard
dodge when challenged by an operator. “That sounded
good,” he says. “I don’t know if there was such a thing as a
‘number one test board’ but they were happy to help me,
once I made it sound like I was with the telephone
company.”
  Still, there was nothing like a female voice to lull an
operator into carrying out your bidding. Condon’s solution:
girlfriends. “I would train them on what to say. We’d go out
to Oak Ridge and we’d get on a phone that wasn’t
monitorable, a pay station. You call an operator in a distant
city, they don’t have a call for you, and when the operator
releases you, you ring and hand it to the girl! She knew
what to say. I had written it down for her.”
  With a girl and a pair of pay telephones in Oak Ridge he
was set for an evening of fun. Talk about a hot date! “You
could even call back to Oak Ridge if you wanted,” he recalls.
“If there were two pay stations and you had a girlfriend
with you, you’d call her back to Oak Ridge. You could ring
back to Oak Ridge and talk to the person next to you over
this circuit to New York, no ticket, no nothing!”
  But why? What would motivate a person to do such a
thing?
  “Just to be able to do it,” Condon recalls with glee in his
voice. “That’s the thrill of it, isn’t it?”
                           Four

   THE LARGEST MACHINE
       IN THE WORLD

WELL BEFORE DAVY    Crockett was taking his girlfriends on hot
dates to trick operators into making long-distance calls, the
engineers at Bell Laboratories were working hard to get rid
of long-distance operators. In fact, they were working hard
to get rid of operators altogether.
  It wasn’t because they were concerned that people like
Crockett would come along and imitate the ring forward
signal and trick operators into making free calls for them. It
was simply that they realized, early on, that the telephone
network was going to grow to a point where it could no
longer be supported by human beings plugging cords into
jacks. In the 1920s Bell employed about a hundred
thousand operators—a big number but one that could be
made to work. By 1965, however, they figured the company
would need closer to a million operators if it stuck with
manual switching. An AT&T historian later noted that this
was not a very meaningful figure because “the population
could not have supported such a work force.” Besides, even
if AT&T could find enough women to staff a million operator
jobs, the cost of paying them would be heart-stopping.
  Just like Almon Strowger before them, Bell Labs
researchers realized that automation was the way forward.
Significant inroads had already been made for local calling.
By the 1950s the Bell System had thousands of automated
telephone exchanges using switching systems based on Mr.
Strowger’s step-by-step design, a Bell-developed system
called “panel,” and a new arrival—a switching system
developed during the 1930s called crossbar. Dial switching
systems were becoming smarter and able to handle more
calls, automatically, even among multiple exchanges within
a city. And while manual switchboards, with their operators
and cordboards, were still in existence—indeed, in 1955
some 15 percent of telephones were still older models that
didn’t even have dials—it was clear their days were
numbered. The machines were coming.
 Long distance was the big holdout, the largest bastion of
human switching. Even as late as 1960 operators were still
used for about 70 percent of long-distance telephone calls.
Automating it presented some huge challenges.
 First, it took human intelligence to figure out how to route
a call from place to place. Remember your call from Miami
to your friend Bill in Denver and the gyrations that multiple
operators had to engage in to get your call through? That
was for an easy case. God forbid, what would happen if Bill
had lived in the tiny town of Gerlach, Nevada, way off the
beaten path? Figuring out the route for that call would be a
much harder problem. It might have required a
consultation with the experts at rate-and-route, who would
have told your long-distance operator the four or five cities
she needed to connect through in order to make Bill’s
telephone ring.
 Now imagine trying to build a machine in the 1930s or
1940s that is smart enough to solve this routing problem in
a few seconds. Given a starting city and a destination city,
the machine needs to figure out how to get the call from
here to there. While it’s at it, the machine should come up
with an alternate route in case the first route doesn’t work.
But before you go off trying to build such a machine, please
remember that the computer hasn’t been invented yet;
heck, the transistor hasn’t been invented yet. The tools at
your disposal are what Star Trek’s Mr. Spock dismissed as
“stone knives and bearskins,” that is, vacuum tubes and
relays and mechanical switches.
  Second, even if you had magic switching machines that
could figure out how to route a call across the country, your
customers had no way to dial each other directly.
Remember how, when you wanted to make a long-distance
call, you told the long-distance operator the city name and
the telephone number of the person you wanted? Well, the
words Denver and Miami—to say nothing of the names of all
the other cities in the United States—don’t appear on
telephone dials. Just as it took a while for AT&T to come
around to the idea that telephones needed telephone
numbers, and then to figure out that telephone exchanges
needed numbers, it also took a while to realize that cities
needed their own numbers too: area codes, they would
come to be called. AT&T wouldn’t have this so-called
national numbering plan worked out until 1945.
  Even with switching machines and area codes there was
yet another problem. The switching machines would need
to communicate with each other over long distances, just
like operators did. Say you’re in New York City and you
want to call a number in San Francisco. The switching
machine in New York first needs to be smart enough to
know that it should get to San Francisco via, say, Chicago.
Then it needs to connect to Chicago and communicate the
digits of the telephone number you want to call in San
Francisco. Chicago then needs to connect to San Francisco
and pass the destination telephone number to a switching
machine in the city by the bay. This was all information that
human operators would have passed along by voice. AT&T
researchers needed to figure out a way that switching
machines could tell each other what number to dial and
some other information, too, such as whether the person
called had answered the telephone. In fact, they needed to
build something resembling a computer network, a network
over which switching machines could pass signaling
information to one another. It’s just that they needed to do
it well before computers and modems and the Internet had
been invented.
 Finally, AT&T wanted to make money at this game—this is
the telephone company, after all, not Mother Teresa—so it
needed a way to bill customers. In the old days, when
operators were manually switching calls, this was easy:
long-distance operators wrote up a paper toll ticket for
each call. These tickets were collated and processed by
hand. But if machines are doing the switching and routing,
machines need to be able to do the billing too. It wouldn’t
do to have an automated network that could handle millions
of calls a day only to have the entire operation bog down
because humans had to tally up the bills by hand.
 All of this was an incredibly tall order in the 1930s. Yet the
crazy thing is Bell Labs got right to work. It would take tens
of years, thousands of engineers, millions of dollars, and
buildings full of equipment to make it happen. In the end
the telephone network would be transformed into
something previously undreamed of: it would become the
largest machine in the world, one that would eventually
extend over the entire surface of the earth.
 Perhaps the best way to follow this transformation is to
start by putting your finger into the hole marked 7 on an
old-school rotary telephone, maybe back around 1950 or so.
Crank the dial —the actual metal dial—all the way over to
the right until your finger is up against the dial stop.
Remove your finger. A spring unwinds, spinning the dial
back to the left. As it spins, over the course of about three-
quarters of a second, your telephone sends seven electrical
pulses down your telephone line, over the wires and cables
in your neighborhood, and into one of several hundred
Strowger switches in your local central office.
 In movie terms, that Strowger switch was Frankenstein’s
monster writ small: able to follow simple commands—the
simpler the better —but a little short on brains. Each
Strowger “can” was a cylinder about sixteen inches high
and about six inches in diameter, jam-packed with wipers
and ratchets and pawls and blades and other mechanical
clockwork. Your telephone dial directly controlled its
musculo-skeletal system. Every one of those electrical
pulses your phone sent down the wire made something
twitch inside the Strowger switch it was connected to.
“Twitch,” by the way, is not figurative; it is an accurate
description of what physically took place in the switch. The
digit 7 that you dialed caused a pair of metal contacts to
twitch upward seven times, so fast that it seemed to make a
brrrp noise as it went. While waiting for your next digit, it
rotated to the right, connecting your telephone line to the
next idle Strowger switch it could find. That next switch
would then accept whatever digit you dialed next, again
twitching a mechanism inside up and to the right. This
mechanized ballet continued until you had dialed all the
digits of your number; your last digit connected you from
the last Strowger switch in the switching train to the actual
pair of wires running to the telephone you wanted to call.
 The key thing about the Strowger system was that every
pulse your telephone sent down the line caused something
to happen in the switch—physically, immediately, and
directly. This direct control system was innovative when it
was invented in the 1890s. But in addition to having lots of
noisy, moving parts that needed service and eventually
wore out, it suffered from two fundamental problems. First,
every digit you dialed tied up one Strowger switch for the
duration of your telephone call. If telephone numbers in
your local exchange were four digits long, then when you
called your friend down the street and talked for an hour,
you tied up four Strowger cans for the entire call. This
meant the telephone company needed to cram a lot of these
Strowger switches into a central office, and that was
expensive.
  The other problem was that, like Frankenstein’s monster,
Strowger switches were not the sharpest knives in the
switching drawer. Because calls proceeded through a step-
by-step switching system one digit—and one switch—at a
time, no individual Strowger switch ever saw more than a
single digit of the telephone number you were dialing.
Nothing in a Strowger system had the big picture, and that
limited what the telephone system could do.
  The wizards of Bell Laboratories gave telephone switches
a brain of sorts when they developed the successors to the
Strowger switch. Both the panel and crossbar switching
systems used a technology that the telephone company
called common control. Instead of the telephone directly
controlling a switching machine itself, your telephone would
tell the switching system’s brain what you wanted done and
the brain would figure out how to do it. So, for example, in a
crossbar central office, the digits you dialed on your
telephone no longer caused the central office’s switching
system to twitch directly with every pulse your phone sent
out. Instead, your digits were stored in a relay-based
memory called a sender. Once you had dialed the full
number, the switch’s brain, the marker, could look at the
digits and figure out what it needed to do to connect your
call. Once it did this, it could forget about your call and
move on to the next one, freeing up resources. And because
the brain had the entire telephone number you wanted to
dial in one convenient place, it could do clever tricks that a
Strowger switch could only dream of. As Bell Labs’ head of
switching later wrote, “In a word, the [switching] systems
were acquiring a form of machine intelligence.”
  The pinnacle of that era’s telephonic mechanized brain
was something called the #4A crossbar switch. It was
another in a long line of creatively named products from
AT&T, joining the ranks of the #1 manual switchboard, the
#5 manual switchboard, the 500-series desk telephone, and
the #1 crossbar switch. Who needs fancy product names
when you’re a government-sanctioned monopoly?
 For what it was, the 4A deserved a grander name.
Deployed in 1950, it was a triumph of common control
switching, the most advanced switching machine created to
that point in history. Even the word machine doesn’t do it
justice: it conjures up images of a mechanical contrivance,
something bigger than a breadbox but smaller than a car; a
lawn mower, maybe. In contrast, the 4A took up a good
chunk of a city block. Built up of rack after rack of gray
metal cabinets filled with crossbar switches, wiring frames,
markers, senders, and relays, if the Strowger switch was
Frankenstein’s monster, the 4A was Godzilla. By 1960 there
were fifty-nine of them throughout the United States;
almost two hundred of these behemoths would eventually
be installed, the last in 1976.
 The 4A was to be the brains of the long-distance network,
the magic switching machine that could automatically
figure out how to route a long-distance call from one place
to another. Its routing intelligence did not come from a
computer but rather from a device called a card translator.
Hundreds of thin steel cards, each about five inches wide
and ten inches long, had patterns of 181 holes punched in
them to indicate how a call should be routed. Based on the
first six digits of a telephone number—the area code and
the exchange number—electromagnets selected and
dropped cards. Light shined through the holes. By seeing
where light passed through and where it was blocked, the
4A could decide how and where to send the call as well as
figure an alternate route if something went wrong with the
first one. As the telephone network grew and changed, the
4A could be reprogrammed simply by changing out cards.
Even if the 4A fell short of human intelligence, the
telephone company knew that its common control systems
were nothing to sniff at. “At the end of this era,” wrote a
former Bell Labs executive, “Bell engineers were able to
look back on the automated network of switching systems
as the largest distributed computer in world.”
 Just like human operators, the brainy 4A switches passed
calls among themselves and their less intelligent brethren
by talking to each other. And like human operators, there
were only a handful of things the switching machines
needed to tell each other: what number to dial, whether the
called party answered, and whether either party hung up.
The telephone company called these latter two items
supervisory information, since they had to do with how an
operator would supervise a call. They were critically
important: you can’t charge a customer for a call if you
don’t know that the call was answered or when the parties
hung up.
 AT&T enabled its long-distance telephone switching
machines to talk to each other by teaching them two
different signaling languages: single frequency and
multifrequency. Both were based on the switching machines
sending     tones—musical     notes,   basically—down      the
telephone trunk lines to each other. The multifrequency
language, or MF for short, used pairs of tones to
communicate what digits to dial, much the same way that
today you use touch tones to communicate to the telephone
system what digits you want to dial when you make a call
from a landline telephone. The other language, single
frequency or SF, was simpler than MF, and although it was
slower it could be used with less intelligent switching
machines, such as the old step-by-step switches. SF used
pulses of a single tone—2,600 Hz, or seventh octave E for
the musically inclined—to communicate dialing information:
one beep to dial a 1, two beeps to dial a 2, etc. In a sense, it
was just like a rotary phone sending electrical pulses down
a phone line, except that it sent beeps instead. Both SF and
MF also used this 2,600 Hz tone for supervisory
information, that is, to communicate when one machine
wanted to make a call and when the person you were
calling answered the phone so that billing should start.
 Introduced in the 1940s, MF and SF were high tech for
their time. The multifrequency system was speedy, taking
only a second or so to transmit a ten-digit telephone
number from one switch to another. The tones sounded like
fleeting musical notes and customers could sometimes hear
the quick little blips of MF digits as they waited for their
calls to go through. AT&T began acting like a proud parent
of a musically gifted child. Magazine ads in 1950 showed a
musical scale with the pairs of notes that made up each MF
digit and described the system as “playing a tune for a
telephone number.” Telephone bill inserts bragged about
MF and the tones were featured in an educational AT&T
movie as well. In a flight of fancy, one telephone company
manager told the press that new AT&T switching machines
“sing” to each other.
 The cleverest thing about SF and MF signaling was this:
they allowed the switching machines to communicate by
using the exact same wires that humans used to talk to
each other. AT&T had spent millions of dollars running long-
distance cables all across the United States. These cables
were designed to carry voice, since that’s what AT&T’s
human customers and operators used speak to one another.
Instead of building a separate computer network for its
switching machines, AT&T realized it could reuse its
existing long-distance telephone circuits to carry both
human voice and signaling information for each call. This
would cost less than building a separate network and would
be faster to deploy. This approach, called in-band signaling,
meant that signaling information was sent in the same
frequency band and over the same wires that were used for
voice. It was an elegant and economical solution to the
problem.
 With the crossbar switch and the multifrequency signaling
system, AT&T could embark on the next phase of
automating long-distance switching, something called
operator distance dialing. The idea here was to allow
operators to directly dial long-distance calls, even if
customers couldn’t. If you wanted to call coast to coast,
you’d still call the long-distance operator. But instead of the
operator having to plug cords into jacks and talk to other
operators and build up a lengthy chain of connections,
circuit by circuit, she would just key in the area code and
telephone number on a keypad on the console in front of
her. The switching machines would do the rest, routing the
call and talking to each other with MF or SF to set up the
intermediate links. If the place she was calling couldn’t be
reached by just keying a number into her console, she
would use the machines to get her call as far across the
country as she could and then enlist the help of a plug-and-
jack manual inward operator who was closer to the final
destination.
 Operator distance dialing simplified and sped the dialing of
long-distance calls—good for customers since their calls
went through more quickly and good for the phone
company because it needed fewer operators to handle more
calls. But it also provided AT&T with an opportunity to work
the kinks out of automated long-distance switching without
having to directly involve its customers. The long-distance
operators became the first users of the new automated
long-distance network—beta testers, we’d call them today.
Or, as they were called by an AT&T spokesman at the time,
“guinea pigs.”
 The guinea pigs survived and AT&T decided the kinks had
worked out enough to let the customers try it themselves.
On November 10, 1951, the small town of Englewood, New
Jersey, became the first place in the country where
customers could dial their own long-distance calls. Instead
of dialing 211 and telling the long-distance operator they
wanted “Garfield 2-2134 in San Francisco,” lucky
Englewood residents instead picked up the telephone and
dialed ten digits themselves: 318-GA2-2134. Their local
telephone switch would take this number, find a trunk to
the remote city, and then send the musical MF notes down
the line to get the call across the country. In essence, the
local telephone switch acted as a sort of translator, taking
the digits you dialed with your rotary phone and converting
them to the telephone network’s internal language of MF
tones. (It worked the same way when touch-tone dialing
was introduced years later: the local switch translated the
touch-tone digits you dialed on your phone into MF digits
that it sent into the long-distance network; this was
necessary because touch-tones weren’t the same as the MF
tones.) Best of all, all this happened in seconds, not the
minutes that used to be required when operators were
involved.
 To start with, Englewoodians were able to directly dial
some 11 million people in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh,
Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Oakland, San
Francisco, and Sacramento. Over the next twenty years
customer long-distance dialing—later known as direct
distance dialing, or DDD—spread across the country, with
more and more customers able to dial their own long-
distance calls. The largest machine in the world was
growing, and the engineers at Bell Laboratories were
finally getting their wish: a fully automated long-distance
network, one where calls could be dialed coast to coast
without operator intervention.
 It would turn out to be a classic case of that old expression
“Be careful what you wish for.”
                            Five

                    BLUE BOX

RALPH BARCLAY WAS    walking through the engineering library
at Washington State College, just minding his own business,
when it called out to him. He couldn’t say why, it just did.
 It was a booklet, about seven by nine inches and maybe
half an inch thick, on display in the library’s new periodicals
section. Its pale blue cover proclaimed it to be the
November 1960 issue of something called the Bell System
Technical Journal. It had been out for less than a week.
 Barclay looked at the table of contents printed on its cover.
Most of the articles could put even the hardest of hard-core
geeks to sleep at twenty paces: “Magnetic Latching Relays
Using Glass Sealed Contacts,” “Molecular Structure in
Crystal Aggregates of Linear Polyethylene,” and the ever
popular “‘Ionic Radii,’ Spin-Orbit Coupling and the
Geometrical Stability of Inorganic Complexes.”
 Yet one title caught his eye: “Signaling Systems for Control
of Telephone Switching.” He flipped to the article and
started skimming. Minutes passed. His original purpose for
coming to the library shelved for the moment, he sat down
and began to read in earnest.
 Barclay was just eighteen. Athletic and of medium build,
with brown hair and blue eyes, Barclay had started his first
year at Washington State’s Pullman campus, about fifty
miles south of Spokane, just a couple of months earlier. “I
was living in the dorm,” he remembers, “and a lot of people
in the dorm are looking for ways to make cheap phone calls
home to their girlfriends and parents and suchlike.” One of
the guys in the dorm had—“somehow,” he says—acquired
his own personal pay telephone. And although students
weren’t allowed to have telephones installed in their rooms,
for some reason the dorm rooms had telephone lines in
them.
 Barclay’s dorm had quite a few engineers in it, and
engineers, Barclay allows, are a problem. The engineers
soon determined that somebody had left the door unlocked
to the building’s telephone closet, the little room where all
the telephone wires come from. In the dark of night an
operation was mounted. Certain wires were cross-
connected. Et voilà: a pay telephone line from somewhere
on campus ended up connected to the personal pay phone
in Barclay’s dorm. Barclay and the other kids in the dorm
could now make telephone calls by depositing money in the
pay phone, as usual, but the difference was that the owner
of the pay phone—apparently not a business major—was a
nice guy and returned the caller’s money after each call.
 Maybe it was this pay phone hack that caused bells to ring
in Barclay’s brain when he spotted the article in the Bell
System Technical Journal. It laid bare the technical inner
workings of AT&T’s long-distance telephone network with
clarity, completeness, and detail: how the long-distance
switching machines sang to each other with single-
frequency (SF) and multifrequency (MF) tones, how 2,600
Hz was used to indicate whether a telephone had
answered, what the frequencies were of the tones that
made up the MF digits, how overseas calls were made, and
it even included simplified schematic diagrams for the
electrical circuits necessary to generate the tones used to
control the network. It was all there. Nothing was hidden.
 By the time Barclay finished reading it, the vulnerability in
AT&T’s network had crystallized in his mind: “I thought,
this is a better way than using a pay phone . . . this is a way
to get around all that other stuff and do it directly.”
 “It,” of course, was making free calls.
  The ability to absorb sixty-four pages of dry, technical
mumbo jumbo and spot the vulnerability is a rare one. The
engineers from Bell Labs who designed the system and
wrote the article didn’t see it. Thousands of engineers in
the future would read that article and not see it. But
eighteen-year-old Ralph Barclay did. The funny thing about
it is, once the hole is explained to you, it’s obvious. But until
it’s explained to you, most people would never think of it.
Certain people have minds that are tuned in a particular
way to see things like that. Ralph Barclay was one of those
people.
  To understand Barclay’s insight we have to think back to
the things that made up AT&T’s automated long-distance
network, things like the spectacularly named #4A crossbar
switching system that was the brains of the long-distance
telephone network and how the machines talked to each
other by speaking in tones. Because that’s what the Bell
System Technical Journal described and that’s where Ralph
Barclay spotted the flaw. Here’s what he came up with.
  Say you’re in Seattle and, as always, you want to call your
friend Bill in Denver. With Barclay’s hack, your first step is
to pick up the phone and dial directory assistance in any
city—let’s say New York just for fun: 212-555-1212. Unlike
today, calls to directory assistance were free back then.
  Seattle and New York are both big cities and have direct
trunk lines between them. On a given long-distance trunk
line between Seattle and New York, the switching machine
in Seattle sends a 2,600 cycle per second tone—seventh
octave E—to New York to indicate that the line is idle. New
York sends the same tone back to Seattle to indicate that
the line is not in use on its end either. Remember how in a
flight of fancy an AT&T manager described the switching
machines as “singing” to one another? This is the boring
part of that song; you can think of it as the machines
monotonously whistling this single note back and forth. It’s
almost like they’re keeping each other company, reassuring
each other that they’re both still there.
  As you dial the last digit of the number for New York
directory assistance, the fancy switching machines and
their signaling systems spring to life to get your call
through. Seattle finds an idle trunk to New York and stops
whistling 2,600 Hz on it. New York hears the trunk go
silent, indicating that Seattle wants to make a call. New
York sends back a “wink” signal—really just a moment of
silence, of no 2,600 Hz tone, for about a quarter of a
second. This wink tells Seattle that New York is ready and
waiting for Seattle to tell it a phone number to call. Using
either the SF or MF signaling language, Seattle sends New
York the digits 555-1212. In SF-speak, this is a series of
beeps of 2,600 Hz. In MF-speak, it consists of nine quick
little pairs of tones that sound like brief musical notes: KP  ,
555 1212, and ST. The special signal called KP (“key pulse”)
at the beginning tells New York to get ready, and the final
note, ST (“start”), tells New York that it has all the digits
and can start dialing.
  Now that New York knows the number you want to call, it
makes the local connection and the directory assistance
operator’s telephone starts to ring. Up until now everything
that has happened has been perfectly normal, just like Ma
Bell intended. But now you, using Barclay’s hack, insert
yourself into the process. Before the operator can answer,
you—naughty you—hold a speaker up to your phone’s
mouthpiece and play your own 2,600 Hz tone down the line
for a second.
  It is loud and pure and it sounds like this: bleeeeeeep.
  Seattle isn’t paying any attention to this, but the switching
machine in New York sure is. New York hears your 2,600
Hz tone loud and clear and thinks that the Seattle switching
machine sent it. And since this tone indicates the trunk line
is idle, New York figures that Seattle is done using that
trunk line, probably because you hung up. New York
disconnects the call to the directory assistance operator—
maybe before she’s even answered.
 But now you stop sending your tone. When you stop
sending 2,600 Hz, the long-distance switching equipment in
New York City thinks that Seattle wants to make another
call. Just as before, New York sends a wink back to Seattle
to say it’s ready for a new call. Due to the nature of the
circuitry involved, the wink has a bright, metallic ringing
quality to it. It sounds like this: kerchink!
 The noise tells you that you have just fooled New York into
thinking that a new long-distance call is coming in. Once
again, the switching machine in New York is waiting for
Seattle to tell it what digits to dial. But Seattle isn’t going to
tell it anything, because Seattle is blissfully unaware of
everything that has just transpired. The only thing Seattle
knows is that you haven’t hung up—you’re still on the line,
after all—and Seattle believes you can make only one call
every time you pick up the phone. As far as Seattle is
concerned, you’re still talking to New York’s directory
assistance.
 You, on the other hand, know better: you possess guilty
knowledge. Using a simple electronic circuit, you can
generate the same pairs of tones that Ma Bell’s telephone
switches use to serenade each other. Once again holding up
a speaker to your phone, you play the tones needed to send
New York the digits KP + 303 722 7209 + ST—that is, the
number of your friend Bill in Denver. Now, of course, area
code 303 isn’t in New York City, but that’s okay. The
telephone switch in New York is a brainy 4A and knows how
to route calls from one place to another. After all, Bell Labs
worked hard to give it the brains to be able to do that. New
York happily finds a trunk line to Denver and puts your call
through, sending out tones on your behalf to instruct
Denver on what number to dial. Moments later Bill’s phone
starts to ring.
 Congratulations, you’ve just hijacked a phone call to
directory assistance in New York and rerouted it to Bill in
Denver. But that’s only half the trick. The other half is this:
your phone call to Denver is free. Why? Because Seattle is
responsible for the billing of your phone call. As far as
Seattle is concerned, you’re still connected to directory
assistance in New York and directory assistance is a free
call.
 Barclay had three insights when he read that article in the
Bell System Technical Journal. The first was that sending a
2,600 Hz tone down the telephone line resets the remote
switch but doesn’t affect the local switch. The second was
that you could then reroute a phone call from the remote
switch to wherever you want. And the third was that the
local switch is in charge of billing, so it continues to bill you
for whatever call it thinks you originally made. With these
three insights he now owned Ma Bell’s network.
A few weeks after reading the Bell System Technical
Journal article Barclay made the three-hour drive west to
his hometown of Soap Lake, Washington, population 1,200.
Home may be where the heart is, but for Barclay home was
also where his workbench, soldering iron, and electronic
components were. “I was an electronic tinkerer for years
and years and years,” he says. A curious one too; his older
sister remembers Barclay plugging a bobby pin into an
electrical outlet when he was four. His father, a truck driver
in rural Washington, used to bring him broken TVs to fiddle
with, and his bedroom was littered with electrical
equipment, telephones, and radios. Barclay landed his first
job—repairing broken radios—when he was in the fifth
grade.
 Barclay’s first box took a weekend to build. It was a simple
affair, housed in an unpainted metal enclosure about four
inches on a side and perhaps two inches deep. Inside was a
nine-volt battery and a single transistor oscillator circuit.
On the outside the box sported a surplus rotary telephone
dial and a red push button. The red button would allow
Barclay to disconnect a call in progress—to “seize a trunk,”
in both telephone company and phone phreak parlance—by
producing a 2,600 cycle tone for as long as he held it down.
When spun, the rotary dial would make short blips of 2,600
Hz. If Barclay dialed the digit 6, for example, it made six
short beeps. In other words, it would allow him to send
digits using the older single-frequency language.
  “I was surprised!” Barclay recalls. “It worked fine the first
time!”
  As it happens, it also worked best the first time. Barclay
quickly ran into a problem. By 1960 fewer and fewer trunk
lines used SF signaling. In its push for progress and dialing
speed, the Bell System was well on its way to converting
most long-distance trunks to multifrequency signaling. And
those trunks didn’t respond to Barclay’s single-frequency
beeps. The red button still worked—he could disconnect a
call in progress and hear the kerchink come back from the
remote end—but dialing was often a problem. “It worked
sometimes, not consistently,” he says—maybe one in four
calls.
  “That’s when I discovered I needed multifrequency,” he
says— that is, he needed to generate pairs of tones for each
digit as well as for the special “key pulse” and “start”
signals. Barclay started work on his multifrequency box
over Christmas break. It was more complicated than the
first box, what with more transistor oscillators and
associated wiring and all that, so it took a bit longer to
build.
  Barclay added a rotary dial for making blips of 2,600 Hz,
but that was just for old time’s sake; the real way you’d dial
with it, the modern way, was with push buttons. Touch-tone
phones weren’t a commercial reality yet, so Barclay had to
come up with his own telephone keypad. He ended up using
keys from an old mechanical Burroughs adding machine.
Each key was fastened to a push-button switch mounted
underneath it. There were twelve keys in all: ten for the
digits 0 through 9, one for the KP signal that needed to be
sent before the digits, and one for the ST signal that needed
to be sent after the digits.
 He had it finished by Easter and it worked like a charm. He
and his device became popular among a small circle of
friends in his dorm, where he made calls home for them.
But mostly, he says, he used it to play with the telephone
network, “to see where we could call.” As Barclay
remembers it, “There were very, very few calls I made that
were actual phone calls”—that is, calls he made to
somebody he knew and wanted to talk to.
 His new device was housed in a metal box, twelve by seven
by three inches, that happened to be painted a lovely shade
of blue. Barclay did not know it at the time, but the color of
his    device’s   enclosure    would    eventually    become
synonymous with the device itself. The blue box had just
been born.
Back home for the summer, Barclay ran into another
problem: his hometown, Soap Lake, was served by GTE—
General Telephone and Electronics—one of the independent
telephone companies separate from the Bell System. For
whatever reason, GTE’s switching and signaling equipment
just didn’t work with his blue box. Fortunately, Barclay’s
summer job was at a television and radio repair shop in the
town of Ephrata, some five miles down the road. Those five
miles made all the difference for Ephrata was in Bell
territory and his blue box worked like a champ there.
 The shop where he worked was two blocks down the street
from a friend’s photography studio. In exchange for a few
free calls, his friend was happy to let Barclay’s blue box live
in the rear of the studio. If Barclay felt like playing around
he could pop over to the studio on his lunch hour, walking
down the alleyway running behind the buildings so he could
come in through the back door; no need to disturb
customers at either business by going in and out the front
door.
 That summer was a fun and productive one for learning
about the telephone network. Barclay made friends with a
kid who lived in Seattle and whose dad worked for the
telephone company. “He happened to furnish me with a
copy of the ‘Rate and Route’ book,” Barclay says, the loose-
leaf binder of telephone routing information that operators
used to figure out how to get calls from here to there. “I
was able to use that to access more areas. We actually tried
it for overseas calls and were able to do some calls to
England.” Unfortunately, Barclay reports, “I didn’t know
anybody in England to call.”
 Barclay had some other friends whose parents worked for
the telephone company and he mentioned to one of them
that he was interested in learning more about how the
phone system worked. Was there any way he might be able
to get some surplus telephone equipment, he asked? “Oh,
sure,” Barclay recalls his friend’s dad saying. Pacific
Telephone turned out to be in the process of converting a
nearby switching office from three-digit dialing to a more
modern five-digit system. “If you want to drive over there,
I’ll make arrangements,” his friend’s father told him.
 Barclay recalls pulling up at the telephone company
central office in his dad’s pickup truck and chatting with the
switchman there.
 “What are you interested in?” the switchman asked.
 “What have you got?” Barclay replied.
 As it happened, quite a lot. “I ended up taking home the
whole three-digit telephone exchange,” Barclay says. It was
soon set up in his garage.
Summer drew to a close. It was September 15 and Barclay
was scheduled to return to Washington State College for his
sophomore year. He dropped by the photography studio
that morning to pick up his blue box. His friend the
photographer asked if Barclay could leave it for a few more
hours and come get it after lunch. There were some calls he
needed to make, he said. No problem, Barclay replied. He
returned to the TV repair shop.
 About noon that day, two gentlemen entered the repair
shop and asked for Barclay by name. This was unusual,
since he was back-office help and not really known to the
customers. The gentlemen then produced a warrant for his
arrest on charges of bookmaking. This was even more
unusual, given that he wasn’t a bookmaker. The utter
bafflement is evident in his voice even forty years later: “I
mean . . . bookmaking?”
 Barclay accompanied the men down to the local
courthouse where he was interrogated by an assortment of
unhappy-looking people: a sheriff’s deputy, an FBI agent, a
security agent from Pacific Telephone, a security agent from
AT&T, and an engineer from Bell Laboratories.
 Barclay recalls, “The first questions were, ‘Who are you
working for? Who’s the head of this operation?’ I remember
spending quite a while trying to convince them that I wasn’t
working for anybody.” His interrogators weren’t buying.
They knew that Barclay’s partner—the guy who owned the
photography studio, who had also just been arrested—spent
lots of time on the phone talking about horses. (As it turned
out, he owned a horse and photographed horse shows.)
 “Finally,” Barclay says, after several hours of grilling “they
decided that maybe this wasn’t a bookmaking operation
and they started asking different questions.” Questions like:
where were you calling? “I repeatedly said, over and over
and over again, to friends, to New York, to find out what
time it was in New York.” The time in New York? C’mon kid,
you don’t expect us to believe that, do you? Eventually the
Bell Labs engineer cleared his throat and spoke up. The
company had the details of all the calls Barclay made, he
said, and he confirmed that very few of them were to actual
people. Most were to test numbers, or recordings, or
various oddball telephone company internal numbers.
 The investigators threw up their hands. “We’re not going
to get any further on this,” Barclay recalls the FBI agent
saying. They turned to the Bell Labs engineer: “Find out
where he got the information to make this stuff.”
 Barclay told them about the Bell System Technical Journal.
“I remember one of them looked at the guy from Bell Labs
and said, ‘Could that be possible?’ The Bell Labs guy said,
‘Yeah, there was an article . . .’”
 In the end the bookmaking charges were dropped,
replaced with a misdemeanor: making a phone call without
paying for it. It was a speedy trial, Barclay recalls.
 The judge asked, “Did you actually do this?”
 “Well . . . yeah,” Barclay said.
 “Where did you get the information?”
 “Out of a book,” Barclay replied.
 The judge turned to the Pacific Telephone security agent
and asked if indeed the phone company had published this
information. Yes, they had, he said.
 The judge turned back to Barclay. “Where’s this blue box
of yours?”
 “The phone company took it,” Barclay said.
 Back to the security agent. “Is this true?”
 “Well, yes,” he said. “It’s been taken back to Bell
Laboratories for analysis.”
 “Will he get it back?” the judge asked.
 “I don’t think it’s going to be returned,” said the security
agent.
 The judge rendered his verdict. “When I was a kid,” he
said, “we used to freeze water into the shape of nickels to
put into pay phones to make long-distance calls. This is
nothing more than a new and ingenious way to do the same
thing. I can’t see making a big case out of this. You pleaded
guilty. I’m just going to give you a suspended sentence.”
 “The [Pacific Telephone] investigator wasn’t too happy with
that,” Barclay says.
An AT&T memo states that the Barclay investigation began
when someone noticed “an unusual pattern of 555-1212
calls.” Barclay can pin it down further: calls he made to a
nonworking directory assistance telephone number in
Canada.
 “Back then the Bell System was trying to give good
service,” Barclay remembers. As part of that effort,
directory assistance operators often answered on the first
ring—sometimes, in fact, before the phone seemed to have
rung at all. And that meant Barclay would have to whistle
his 2,600 Hz when a live human being was on the other end
of the call, something he didn’t like. “I always was a little bit
nervous about disconnecting when there was a real person
on the line,” he says. “I discovered in playing around that if
you called information in the 407 area code, which was
Alberta, Canada, you got a recording that said, ‘This
number is not in service.’” That seemed perfect to Barclay
because it was a free call but didn’t involve live human
operators. 407-555-1212 became his go-to number.
 Later, a contact he made at the telephone company in
Ephrata told him that the switching machines were set up
to print out a “trouble card” every time a call was made to a
nonworking number. Before April 1961, his contact said,
the nonworking information number in Alberta was getting
about twenty calls a month from Barclay’s area of
Washington. In April it went to fifty calls. After April it went
up to about two hundred calls a month for the rest of the
summer.
 “They didn’t know where they were coming from,” he says,
but they started investigating more seriously. By the middle
of August investigators had tracked it down to Ephrata. By
September 1 they apparently had zeroed in on the
photographer’s studio.
 That timing lined up with another thing, Barclay says.
Sometime during the first week of September Barclay
wanted to make a call using his blue box. He walked down
the usually deserted back alley between the TV repair shop
and the photography studio. “I remember, there was a
black car that was parked in the alleyway with two guys
that were just sitting there.” Barclay entered the
photography studio and made his call. When he came back
out, he says, “the car was still there, and the two guys were
still sitting there. I thought that was strange that these
people were just sitting in the alleyway.”
The vulnerability that Barclay had discovered with AT&T’s
network stemmed from decisions that Bell Labs engineers
had made in the 1930s and ’40s when they were designing
the long-distance network. When they needed to find a way
for their switching machines to communicate with each
other, they decided to reuse the voice path that customers
used to talk over. But this mixing of signaling and voice over
the same channel carried with it a giant flaw: if you could
hear the tones the machines were making, they could hear
you. And that meant you could spoof them. All you had to do
was mimic the tones they used.
 Worse, AT&T had been deploying switching and signaling
equipment based on this design since the 1940s. Now,
twenty years later, there was a large installed base of
equipment that had this hole in it. And this installed base
was hardware, buildings full of machines and equipment
and electronics. Today, when Microsoft finds a security flaw
in its Windows operating system, it can push out a software
patch and have things fixed relatively quickly. No such luck
for AT&T’s switching equipment back in the day. Its
“operating system” was electromechanical, and updating it
would require physical changes, possibly redesigning and
removing and replacing the equipment wholesale.
 It was a flaw that would cost millions, possibly billions, of
dollars to fix. It would be discovered again and again over
the following twenty years. The question for AT&T was:
what do we do about it?
                            Six

            “SOME PEOPLE
           COLLECT STAMPS”

IT WAS A  Sunday morning—the last Sunday morning in April
1959, as it happens—and something approximating a
miracle had just occurred. At least it seemed that way to
Charlie Pyne, a fifteen-year-old high school student in
Marblehead, Massachusetts. A few months earlier, a man
from the telephone company had come to his family’s house
and replaced their telephones. The old phones had no dials.
The new ones did: shiny black metal rotary dials.
 The dials on the new phones didn’t do anything at first. You
could spin them and they’d spin back, the phone making a
clicking noise from its earpiece. And that was all. But things
changed that Sunday morning. The night before,
somewhere in the bowels of the telephone company,
someone flipped the million-dollar switch that enabled the
metal dials on the phones in Marblehead. Yesterday, Pyne
would have had to lift the handset of the telephone and
politely ask the operator to connect him with his buddy Rick
a few blocks away. Today, he could dial Rick’s number
himself: NEptune 1-1559.
 To Pyne, this really was close to a miracle. The miracle part
was because it was so cool not to have to deal with the
operator. But it was only close to a miracle, because the
dialing instructions from the phone company said that there
were really only a handful of places you could call with
these newfangled phones: Marblehead and three adjacent
towns, Salem, Lynn, and Swampscott. That seemed lame. A
real miracle would be if you could call anywhere with the
new phones. That would be cool.
 Charlie Pyne was a technical kid. Slightly heavy for his five-
foot-nine frame, with respectably short brown hair and
brown eyes, Pyne had been interested in electronics since a
young age and had earned his ham radio license a few
years earlier. He was no stranger to playing with things, to
taking them apart, to seeing what they could do, to using
them in ways that others hadn’t thought of. Pyne played
around a bit with the new phone that Sunday morning, first
dialing his friends and later just dialing numbers at random
to see what would happen. When he dialed a nonworking
number he’d get what the phone company called a crybaby:
a loud tone that went up and down and sounded sort of like
woo-ahh, woo-ahh.
 Pyne found himself wondering about the new phone. Did
every number other than those in Salem and Marblehead
get you a crybaby? Or were there maybe some other places
you could get to that the phone company hadn’t told them
about?
 If idle hands are the devil’s tools, then a clever teenager
with idle hands and a methodical personality is the devil’s
munitions factory. Pyne knew that the first three digits of a
local telephone number were called the exchange and that
there might be several exchanges in a city. He also knew
that, for whatever reason, exchanges were never given the
numbers 000 through 199. And he knew that exchange
numbers didn’t have 0 or 1 as the second digit.
 Out of one thousand three-digit numbers, that left 640
possible exchange codes. Pyne made a list. And then he
started dialing, one number in every exchange. 220-1212.
221-1212. 222-1212. And on and on. He ended every
number in 1212 because, for some reason he can’t explain,
he found it easier than dialing 1111.
 Pyne listened to a lot of crybabies—he was a persistent kid.
On the ninety-second try, with a slightly sore index finger,
something interesting happened. When he dialed 331-1212
he didn’t get a crybaby. Instead, a woman’s voice answered:
“Boston.”
 Pyne hung up.
 He continued his dialing experiments over the coming
weeks. He found a few other interesting exchanges. He also
spent a lot of time playing with the 331 exchange,
eventually dialing most of the numbers in it. It was a
strange place, populated with special telephone operators
and weird tones and odd clicky noises. 331-1312 went to a
directory assistance operator, 331-1412 was answered by a
woman who identified herself as “rate and route,” whatever
that was, and 331-1020 gave a loud, continuous tone.
 Pyne finally got up the courage to call back the operator
who had answered the phone “Boston” at 331-1212. He
asked her who she was. She said she was the Boston inward
operator.
 Pyne hung up again, having just learned a valuable lesson:
you could know something’s name yet still have no idea
what it was.
A few months later Pyne was at an electronics junk dealer
in Salem called Young Engineering. While browsing the
surplus electronics on the shelves, he met another teenager
who was also looking for cheap bits of used electronics. Paul
Heckel was a tall, heavyset kid with a slightly unkempt
appearance, a ready smile, and a funny, high-pitched laugh.
Oddly enough, Heckel and Pyne had both grown up in
Marblehead; they had attended the same high school, in
fact. Their paths hadn’t crossed until then because Heckel
was a couple of years older than Pyne and was now off at
MIT, majoring in electrical engineering.
 They quickly became friends. Heckel took Pyne on a trip to
see MIT’s new IBM 7090 computer and to check out Eli
Heffron’s, the premier electronics surplus store in
Cambridge. Pyne was soon telling Heckel about his dialing
experiments. Heckel’s sister was a telephone operator and
was able to fill in a bunch of details for Pyne, such as what
an inward operator was and what a rate-and-route operator
did and what they could do for you.
 Before long Pyne, Heckel, Heckel’s sister, and Pyne’s
buddy Rick Turner were in Pyne’s basement making calls
via the Boston inward operator. Heckel’s sister was an asset
to their games: in addition to her knowledge of the
telephone system, she was a girl. For most fifteen-year-old
boys, that might be reason enough, but Pyne realized that
her female voice meant that calls she placed went through
unquestioned. The boys learned that they had to pretend to
be engineers working on the test board.
 There was just one problem: they didn’t really have anyone
to call. Indeed, most of their calls were to telephone
company test numbers, to operators, or to one another.
They were particularly proud of one call—so much so that
they recorded it. It started with their old friend at 331-
1212.
 “Boston.”
 “Milwaukee inward please,” said Turner.
 Boston inward was suspicious that day. “Where are you
calling from?” she asked, an edge in her voice.
 “Marblehead test board,” Turner replied, his voice 100
percent bored telephone company engineer.
 There was a pause as she put the call through. Click. The
noise on the line got louder. Ring.
 “Milwaukee,” said the distant operator.
 “Milwaukee, this is Boston test board,” said Turner. “Could
you put me through to Portland inward please? Portland,
Oregon?”
 “Portland, right.” Telephone company operators were
trained to use the word right, much like military radio
operators are trained to say roger.
 Ten seconds went by. “Portland,” said the operator in
Oregon.
 Turner had the Portland operator connect him to the
Denver inward. Then he had the Denver inward call Little
Rock. At Little Rock he asked to be connected to New York.
And when he got to the New York inward he asked for
Boston.
 “Boston.” The voice was buried in noise but the operator’s
Boston accent was still recognizable.
 “Could you get me a number in Marblehead, please?
Neptune 1-9819.”
 Ringing. “Hello.”
 “Hello, Charles!”
 Turner had successfully routed a call from Pyne’s house,
across the country, and to a nearby pay phone—about 5,600
miles to go several hundred yards.
The junior and senior years of Pyne’s high school career
were spent at Governor Dummer Academy, an elite
boarding school with a funny name twenty-five miles north
of his hometown. Pyne describes Governor Dummer as
near-Dickensian. “We couldn’t go home on weekends,” he
says, and “we had to say prayers before meals.” The worst
part of being away at boarding school was being out of
touch with his girlfriend Betsy. But thanks to 331, it didn’t
have to be that way; he taught Betsy how to call him at
school by pretending to be an operator. “I was soooo scared
that someone was going to come and arrest me,” Betsy
says. “I would go to a phone booth and put in my dime and
dial 331-1212 . . .” Betsy would ask the operator to connect
her to a pay phone in Pyne’s building. The use of a pay
phone on Pyne’s end wasn’t a security measure as much as
necessity; he simply didn’t have a phone in his room at
school and a lobby pay phone was all that was available.
 In 1962 Pyne left the confines of Governor Dummer and
went on to enjoy the vast freedoms of Harvard University.
That fall, Pyne made his way into the basement that housed
Harvard’s student-run radio station. He was a radio geek,
after all, so getting involved with the radio station seemed
like a natural extracurricular activity. Pyne didn’t know it,
but WHRB was much more than a radio station. As the
journalist and alum Sam Smith wrote, “It also functioned as
a counter-fraternity, a salon des refuses for all those who
because of ethnicity, class or inclination did not fit the mold
of Harvard. Other organizations sought students of the
‘right type,’ WHRB got what was left over. Eccentric WASP
preppies, Brookline Jews, brilliant engineers, persons
obsessed with a musical genre, addicts of show business or
their own voices, seminal journalists, future entrepreneurs,
prospective advertising executives, and persons of
heretofore unrequited imagination and energy filtered
through the door in the alley known as Dudley Gulch to
become part of The Network.”
  Pyne found a home in the WHRB engineering department.
It was there that he met Tony Lauck, a sophomore, and Ed
Ross, a junior. Similar to Pyne in build, Lauck had blue eyes
and blond hair that was slightly longer and a bit unruly, as
opposed to Ross who was thinner and taller but whose
brown hair was already receding; a girlfriend of his
predicted it would all be gone by the time he reached thirty.
(“She was only about seventy percent right,” he says.) Pyne
recalls being impressed by his new acquaintances: “They’re
the type of guys that came into college with 1600 board
scores and advanced placement.” And while he and Lauck
were both ham radio operators and electronics tinkerers,
Ed Ross was a music maven and mathematical prodigy who
prided himself on not knowing anything about electronics.
For example, to legally operate the radio transmitter at
WHRB, you were supposed to have a first-class
radiotelephone operator’s license—called a “first phone”
license—issued      by     the    Federal     Communications
Commission. The exam for this license was a rite of passage
for electrical engineers back in the day, requiring a strong
knowledge of electronics and radio theory. “Ed Ross didn’t
even study. He went and took that test and passed it, just
from the logic of the multiple choice questions,” Pyne says.
  It wasn’t long before Pyne realized something: “These
guys are going to be interested in telephone stuff.”
  The campus telephone system was their gateway drug.
Back in the day it was common for big organizations to
connect their telephone switches via “tie lines,” that is,
private trunk lines run between the different telephone
systems. So, for example, if you dialed 83 on a Harvard
telephone, you’d hear a pause and then a dial tone. You
were now connected to MIT’s telephone system via the tie
line, allowing you to dial an MIT extension. This allowed,
say, a Harvard professor to easily reach a colleague at MIT
—often at a lower cost. But if you were Pyne or Lauck or
Ross, you saw a maze of twisty little telephone passages, all
ripe with possibilities for exploration or prankery. Okay, dial
83 to get to MIT. Now what? What if we dial 83 here? Oh,
look, that connected us back to Harvard! Hey, if we dial 83
repeatedly we can tie up all the lines between the two
schools. Whee!
  That was fun once. More interesting, though, was figuring
out where else you could dial. The phones at WHRB
provided the three convenient access to the campus
telephone system. They spent lots of time dialing every code
they could think of, just as Pyne had done several years
earlier when he was exploring the telephone system in his
hometown of Marblehead.
  “From Harvard you could get a tie line to MIT, and from
MIT there was one that went to Lincoln Labs, and from
Lincoln Labs you could get to MITRE, and from MITRE you
could get to IBM Kingston, and from IBM Kingston you
could get to Stewart Air Force Base, and it went on and on,
trying to put these connections together,” Pyne says. “This
whole process was mainly for our fun and amusement. We
weren’t too serious about making free phone calls or
anything like that. It’s not like we had a lot of people we
wanted to call.”
 “The most useful technological discovery we made was
that you should use a pencil for dialing, and not your
finger,” Ross remembers. “After a couple of hours it is much
less painful if you’re not putting your finger in the dial
holes.”
 Dialing around the tie-line system was addictive, like
solving a never-ending chain of puzzles. First you had to
figure out a code to get you somewhere. Then you had to
figure out where that somewhere was. And then you had to
figure out if there was anywhere interesting you could get
to from there. And sometimes there were interesting places
to visit that you couldn’t dial directly: lots of organizations
had manual switchboard operators who could connect you
to places you couldn’t get to with dialing. “If you dialed 0,
you’d get the operator,” Pyne remembers. “Lots of times,
you’d call the operator, you’d say, We’re testing, we’re doing
this and that, can you tell me about your switchboard and
what’s on your switchboard?” With a few white lies you
could find out all the places she could connect you.
 At the start of his freshman year, Pyne had signed up for
Fine Arts 13, Harvard’s introductory art appreciation class,
also known as “Darkness at Noon” for its darkened room
with dozing students and slide shows of classical artwork.
Within a couple of weeks Pyne decided it was “the stupidest
thing I ever signed up for.” His Fine Arts 13 notebook was
unmolested, free of any writings except for the course title
penned on its cover. It was quickly repurposed as the
journal in which Pyne and his friends recorded their
telephonic research; it would grow to more than a hundred
pages.
 They made a map, a diagram of circles and arrows, that
showed who was connected to whom in the tie-line network.
It wasn’t just schools; the map made clear the close ties
among academia, industry, and the military of the period.
Indeed, the label on the very first circle on the map said, in
capital letters, NIKE CONTROL—the control center for the Nike
missile air defense site in New England.
 At one point during their map making Pyne found himself
connected to the operator at Hanscom Air Force Base
outside of Boston. He did his usual routine, making a bit of
small talk and then asking her for the names of the other
places she could reach from her switchboard. She
obligingly recited a list of locations, ending with “. . . and
Stewart and Rome,” in other words, Stewart Air Force Base
and Rome Air Depot, both in New York.
 Pyne misheard her. To him it sounded like she said “. . . and
Stewart and Jerome.” Why would an air force operator have
direct switchboard connections to two guys named Stewart
and Jerome? How utterly random.
 The names rapidly became a running gag among the
group. “We started joking about Stewart and Jerome, these
mythical characters,” Pyne says. “What are Stewart and
Jerome doing today?” they’d ask each other. Ed Ross was
particularly good at inventing Stewart and Jerome stories.
“Oh, I talked to Jerome today,” he would say, followed by a
detailed soliloquy regarding Jerome’s latest adventures.
“Over a period of time we realized there were any number
of ways in which telephones and telephone systems were
interesting,” Ross remembers. “It was interesting to see
how this strange and mysterious thing worked. And the
more we got to know it, the stranger and mysteriouser it
was.” He adds, “Over the course of that academic year it
became, as undergraduate things do, an obsession.”
 They soon graduated from tie-line dialing to harder drugs.
Pyne told them about the 331 test number exchange and
how he used it to reach inward operators. Before long they
were making trips to Boston’s Logan Airport to conduct
their research; 331 was a local call from Logan, plus the
airport was great because it had tons of pay phones and
you wouldn’t arouse any suspicion by constantly being on
them. But 331 was somewhat limited: you could reach the
inward operator and a few other places but not much else.
And, besides, Pyne had already been through it with a fine-
tooth comb. They wanted a bigger playground to explore.
 Pyne had gotten his hands on a copy of the 1956 edition of
a Bell System book called Notes on Distance Dialing. As
Tony Lauck describes it, Notes “was an overview of the
architecture of the long-distance telephone network that
was written from the point of view of an engineer at an
independent telephone company. So it described all the
ways area codes were assigned, the way the various types
of signaling worked, what the tones were, what the
frequencies were, and all of this kind of stuff.” It wasn’t
exactly secret but it wasn’t widely available—unlike the Bell
System Technical Journal or the Bell Labs Record, it wasn’t
in most engineering libraries.
 The Harvard kids spent a bunch of time studying Notes on
Distance Dialing, but they couldn’t quite make the pieces fit
together. For example, Notes talked about multifrequency
signaling and even gave the frequencies of the two tones
that made up each digit; it explained about the key pulse
(KP) and start (ST) signals too. The good news was that
WHRB had an audio oscillator, which they quickly pressed
into service as a tone generator. The bad news was that
WHRB had only one audio oscillator, so they couldn’t
generate the two simultaneous tones needed for multi‐
frequency signaling. They did have a tape recorder,
however. Lauck recalls, “We had recorded one of the
oscillators and we had dubbed it back on top of it on a strip
of tape, all the various multifrequency tones. . . . We had
tape rolls of zeros, and tape rolls of ones, and tape rolls of
nines, and tape rolls of key pulse, and tape rolls of start. . . .
And we could splice these together with splicing tape and
play them through a tape recorder and it would sound very
much like the tones you would hear when you were making
a long-distance phone call in that era.”
 They tried mightily to use their spliced tapes to make calls
using MF—to no avail. They would make a local call and
press PLAY on the tape recorder and send their tones down
the line. Nothing. They’d make a long-distance call and try
the same thing. Still nothing. “We knew we had the tones
right,” Lauck says. “But every time we played these tones
nothing would happen.”
 They kept at it. Lauck recalls, “On one particular day we
swept the oscillator up to 2,600 while we were dialing into
an information service someplace, or some sort of a useless
free call. And we heard this . . . disconnect, a click, and then
a bomp or a babump or some sort of a noise.” They didn’t
know what it was, exactly, but they knew something
important had just happened. “I looked at Charlie and he
looked at me,” Lauck remembers. “When we heard this
thing go kerbunk we just sort of had this intuitive feeling
that, yeah, now was the time.”
 A tape was cued up on the tape recorder, loaded with “KP
212 121 ST”—the eight quick MF tones required to call the
inward operator in New York City. “When we heard this
bonk sound we flipped the selector switch on the preamp
and pushed play on the tape recorder. It went, dee de de de
de de de dup and then the operator came on and said, ‘New
York.’
 “After struggling with this tape for maybe two or three
days and playing it in various ways and getting nowhere, all
of a sudden when we heard this funny little sound, we had
put the system in a new state. We knew that was it,” Lauck
remembers.
 They had proven it could work. Now they needed to build
an electronic box to generate the tones on command rather
than dorking around with bits of audiotape. “We had some
junk parts, Charlie had a bunch of switches,” Lauck says.
They built an audio oscillator, reusing the vacuum tubes
from Lauck’s stereo amplifier, basing their design on a
circuit from the radio amateur’s handbook. It was a bulky
thing on a metal chassis, Lauck remembers, “But within
twenty-four hours, ’cause we didn’t get much sleep, we had
this thing working and we could then key in whatever
numbers we wanted.”
 Lauck believes it took them longer than it should have.
“See, part of the thing that made it so difficult was that we
didn’t think it was really possible. We didn’t think they
would have been so stupid as to design the system where
we could get into the signaling of the system. So even
though we knew the signaling tones were in-band tones, we
didn’t think that was going to amount to anything. We didn’t
understand that the 2,600 Hz signal could be passed
straight through. . . . We didn’t think it was possible.”
 “The next idea was to make a more miniaturized one,” says
Pyne. “And that’s where Heckel came in.” Paul Heckel was
two subway stations away at MIT, still majoring in electrical
engineering. Heckel told them, “Not only can I make you
one much more miniaturized and transistorized, but we’ll
pot it”—that is, the components would be coated in epoxy so
that nobody would be able to tell what was in it. “Heckel
was the main guy who built that,” Pyne says, though Lauck
and Pyne assisted in its assembly. Pyne remembers
returning to Harvard on the first subway train from MIT’s
Kendall Square station around five a.m. after pulling an all-
nighter in Heckel’s dorm room working on the
transistorized blue box. He vividly recalls spilling an
assortment of resistors all over the floor of the train,
scrambling around trying to find all the pieces and put
them back in their container. Electronic component
mishaps notwithstanding, they soon had a tidy little
portable blue box, suitable for telephonic field trips.
 Ultimately, they realized they could combine their blue box
with the 331 test number: dial 331 plus any four digits,
send a burst of 2,600 Hz down the link, and then use the
blue box to MF whatever digits they wanted. The beauty of
this setup was that 331 was a local call, and because the
phone company didn’t bill for local calls it didn’t bother to
keep records of them either. This, they figured, meant they
were less likely to get caught than, say, calling 555-1212 in
distant area codes.
“Now the only problem would be, sort of, ‘Well, you’ve
solved the problem!’” Pyne recalls with a laugh. “Now what
do you do? You don’t really want to call anybody.” But, he
says, “you still want to be researching more interesting
things.
  “Somehow that got us thinking, ‘Well, what about
receiving calls?’” They had figured out how to make free
outgoing calls; indeed, they had solved that problem six
ways from Sunday. But maybe they could figure out a way
to receive calls that would make it free for the caller?
  By now they knew that the secret to telephone billing was
whether the called telephone answered, that is, went off
hook. That’s what 2,600 Hz indicated, after all: whether a
phone was hung up or not. Pyne recalls their thinking,
“What if you received a call but you never went off hook?
Wouldn’t that mean that the calling party wouldn’t be billed
for the call?”
  Pyne says, “So we wound up building a very simple box,
which was basically a capacitor on the line so you could
pass the voice through but not the DC through.” He knew
that a change in direct current was how the phone system
detected that a phone had answered, so if you blocked DC,
you blocked the telephone company from knowing whether
you had answered the phone. This approach worked, to a
point. It did let them talk while the phone was still ringing
it, but it also let the ringing signal through, and the ringing
signal was much louder than the voice. As Pyne says, “You
had to talk between the rings.” And that, they all agreed,
was lame.
 They pressed on. “A lot of these things are just sort of by
accident,” Pyne says. At some point they were fooling with
the circuit they had built and somebody took the phone off
hook for a moment—the phone was picked up for a fraction
of a second and then hung up again. The ringing instantly
went away. But they could tell from the sound of the
telephone line that billing hadn’t started. They had
discovered another unlikely glitch in the phone system:
although the billing equipment and the ringing signal were
both controlled by the phone going off hook—in other
words, ringing stopped and billing started when you
answered the phone—the timing on the two was different.
The ringing signal stopped the very instant you answered
the phone. But billing didn’t start unless the phone stayed
off hook for several seconds.
 This gap in timing meant that they had just solved their
latest research problem. “We said, Oh!” Pyne recalls. If they
took the phone off hook for just a second, “it’s long enough
to make the ring go away but not long enough to activate
the billing. So then we built this little box, you just go click
[with a switch] and you get rid of the ring. And now
somebody could call you and talk a little while and when
they hang up they get their dime back or they don’t get
billed.” Pyne and his friends didn’t know it at the time, but
this simple device had been discovered by others a few
years earlier. The telephone company called it a “black
box”; it would later come to be called a “mute.”
They were rapidly running out of stuff to research. Bored
and looking for something to do, they decided to borrow
some musical instruments and see if they couldn’t stage a
live concert that would please the telephone system. If a
blue box generated just two different musical notes,
couldn’t you do the same thing with a pair of flutes?
  The trio soon found themselves gathered around a
telephone, instruments in hand, trying to play 2,600 Hz
followed by the MF tones for KP + 121 + ST. “We were able
to generate the tones using some wooden baroque
recorders”—flutelike musical instruments, Lauck says. “It
actually did work,” Pyne remembers. “The 2,600 was easy,
you could just whistle that. The flutes weren’t really a
practical way to do it, but we proved that it could be done.”
Lauck adds, “We were laughing so much it was not very
effective.”
  “We started getting maybe a little bored with it, and we
started getting a little loose,” Pyne remembers. “We started
being a little bit more open about telling people what we
had discovered.” Everybody at the WHRB radio station
knew about their playing with the phone system, for
example.
  It was around this time that, through some other students
they didn’t know very well, “we met a guy by the name of
Ernie Reid,” Pyne remembers. “Reid worked for the phone
company, he was kind of like a repairman-type guy.” Reid
was very interested in what the Harvard kids were up to.
“He said, ‘This is very interesting, this is cool, what are you
doing? I could get you keypads, I could get you equipment .
. .’ He kind of ingratiated himself with us and asked a lot of
questions.” At his request, they loaned him the Fine Arts 13
notebook.
  Pyne didn’t give any of this too much thought, as it was
starting to dawn on him that he had other things to worry
about. Ever since the group had been working on their
telephone research, Pyne’s grades had gone into the toilet.
Sure enough, a bit later that month, Pyne got a phone call
telling him to see his dean. With final exams right around
the corner, there was no way a sudden request to speak to
his dean could be anything good.
  Pyne told Lauck about the meeting. “That’s funny,” Lauck
responded. “I’m supposed to see my dean at nine a.m.
tomorrow too.”
 Hmm. Lauck was an excellent student, so this wouldn’t be
about his grades.
 Pyne and Lauck called Ed Ross. Sure enough, Ross had a
nine a.m. appointment with the headmaster of his
dormitory. The clincher? Paul Heckel also had a nine a.m.
appointment, and he was at an entirely different school.
 It didn’t take a genius—much less several geniuses—to
figure out they were busted.
 “We had always realized that this stuff was not totally
above board, people might look askance at our doing this,”
says Ross. Still, he says, “we never took it horribly
seriously.” The summons from the school officials suggested
it might be time to reevaluate that sentiment. They
scheduled an emergency meeting that evening at the
Boston apartment of a mutual friend to get their stories
straight. As Pyne recalls it, the gist for the group was:
“What story are we going to tell these deans? Can we
conjure up a story that will sound plausible and innocent?”
After much discussion they concluded that, as Pyne puts it,
“There’s no story that you could make up that you could
consistently tell that would be any more innocent than just
the truth.” So that’s what they decided to do: they would
simply tell the truth. They went their separate ways, the
stress of the evening and tomorrow’s impending meetings
aggravated by Ross’s car running out of gas on Boston’s
Storrow Drive on the way home.
 At nine o’clock the next morning—May 10, 1963—each
student went to his respective appointment. Each meeting
was in a different location. Tony Lauck remembers that the
staff in his dean’s office “seemed pretty alarmed” when he
arrived. Their alarm was caused by the two men there to
interview him: “There was one tall one and one short one,
they were both wearing trench coats, one was nice and the
other was nasty, and they were both from the FBI.”
 The same scene played out in the other locations. No
deans or headmasters, just Ross, Pyne, Lauck, and Heckel,
each interrogated by two FBI agents. “I was totally
flabbergasted by people flashing FBI badges,” Pyne says.
He was quickly introduced to the time-honored
interrogation technique called good cop/bad cop. One of the
two FBI agents interviewing him “was nasty,” Pyne recalls.
“He was pushy, he was questioning me. And the other guy
was just the nicest guy in the world. The first guy would go
out . . . and the second guy would say, ‘Isn’t it nice to be
here at Harvard? And what are you studying?’ He was just
very pleasant. And then the other guy would come back in
the room.”
 Periodically one of the agents would step outside and,
apparently, coordinate with the other FBI agents by radio
or telephone. The agents had done their homework,
brandishing thick dossiers on the students. Indeed, the FBI
had apparently gone to the trouble of tailing them, Ross
remembers. The FBI agents knew about their meeting the
night before, including their running out of gas on Storrow
Drive. They tried to explain their research project as an
innocent hobby; as one of the students put it, “Some people
collect stamps.” But they were thrown by the focus of the
FBI agents’ questions. “They were particularly concerned
about the activities via MIT Lincoln Labs, MITRE, and the
defense department phone system,” Ross says. Ross felt this
was the least technically sophisticated thing the group had
done, so he wasn’t sure why the FBI agents were so
interested in it. After all, it was nothing special, just dialing
around. Still, he remembers, “they concentrated on that.”
 It slowly dawned on all the students that the FBI was
convinced that it had stumbled upon an espionage ring. The
FBI agents, it seemed, didn’t really care about AT&T and
long-distance phone calls and blue boxes and whatnot.
Rather, they thought Pyne and company were spies.
 The agents drilled them on one point in particular, over
and over again: Who else was involved? The answer they
got back was always the same: “Just us!” The nasty one of
Pyne’s two FBI agents wasn’t buying it. “What about
Stewart and Jerome?” he finally demanded. “We know
they’re involved!”
 “I almost broke up laughing,” Pyne remembers. It was at
that point, Pyne says, that “we knew that they had either
read the Fine Arts 13 notebook, which mentioned Stewart
and Jerome, or more likely had tapped our lines.”
 The FBI had been investigating Pyne and company for
about three weeks, it turned out, ever since the telephone
company brought the matter to their attention. Ernie Reid,
the telephone company repairman who had befriended
them and who had borrowed their Fine Arts 13 notebook,
was the source of the trouble, passing the notebook on to
the security department of New England Telephone and
Telegraph. “His motives were to make a big deal out of
this,” Pyne says. “He told them things that weren’t even
true, that we were trying to get the keys to Franklin Street
[the headquarters of the telephone company in Boston],
that we were interested in defense things, and NORAD . . .”
 If Reid’s goal was to make a big deal, he succeeded. Within
days Peter Mason, the head of New England Telephone and
Telegraph security, and his deputy, John Desmond, had
contacted the FBI. According to an FBI memo, Mason and
Desmond had been reviewing the Fine Arts 13 notebook
“and felt that this should be called to the attention of the
FBI since it contains information concerning tie lines from
various defense establishments in the Boston, Mass. Area,
in addition to tie lines to defense establishments in other
areas of the country such as Lincoln Laboratory, Raytheon
Company, Arthur D. Little Company, Hanscom Air Force
Base, Millstone Radar Installation, IBM, . . . MITRE
Corporation . . . and General Electric Company.”
 The phone company’s main concern was the specter of
widespread electronic toll fraud. As the FBI memo put it,
“Mr. Desmond furnished a copy of the subject’s notebook . .
. They requested that the information contained in this
notebook not be disseminated at this time since it was felt
by the telephone company that any dissemination outside
the Bureau could lead to wholesale use of telephone
company facilities at no cost.”
  In contrast, the FBI was more concerned about national
security. The possibility that the Harvard kids were a spy
ring was not entirely ludicrous; 1963 was a scary year, with
charges and countercharges of espionage flying back and
forth between the Kremlin and the White House. At the
time, the FBI was deep into an investigation of a Soviet spy
ring in New York and Washington, D.C., and just two years
earlier the British courts had convicted five people in a
damaging Soviet espionage operation. Indeed, Kim Philby,
the so-called third man of England’s notorious Cambridge
Five spy ring, defected to the Soviet Union that very
January; like Pyne and company at Harvard, the Cambridge
spies had all attended one of their country’s top
universities. Could the FBI have stumbled onto the Harvard
Three?
  The Boston FBI office contacted the local U.S. attorney to
see if the students could be prosecuted for making free
phone calls. The answer was no. The U.S. attorney in Boston
said that the facts did not constitute a violation of the Fraud
by Wire section of federal law and that was the only statute
he could see being relevant. But why were these kids so
interested in defense facilities? On May 1, the Boston office
asked FBI headquarters for permission to interview the
students “to determine . . . any possible violation of the
Espionage Statute.” In Washington, the FBI polled each of
its divisions—Domestic Intelligence, Special Investigative,
Laboratory, and General Investigative—to coordinate their
investigation.
  A week went by. The phone company was getting antsy;
according to an urgent FBI teletype message, “[Telephone]
company is most anxious to learn today if Bureau desires to
interview subjects before telephone company conducts own
interview. States [Telephone] Company losing revenue and
practice of fraudulent calls is spreading.”
 On May 7, the Domestic Intelligence Division decided it
was time to interview Pyne and company. The memo from
an FBI national security official was remarkably
evenhanded, allowing that the students’ interests might be
perfectly innocent: “It is possible that this is an instance of
two brilliant mathematicians [Pyne and Ross] embarking on
an unusual research problem, finding initial success and
now endeavoring to ascertain just how far they can go with
this work.” Still, the memo continued, “Their interest in
defense establishments, however, does indicate [a] potential
security problem. They or others, if full access to defense
establishment lines is obtained, could cause the lines to be
jammed or could use them to transmit false messages or tie
up the circuits. In view of this possible harm to our national
security, it is felt we should take steps to ascertain definitely
why the subjects are engaged in their telephonic endeavors
and, specifically, to determine what is their interest in the
military installations involved.”
The FBI agents came and went in one day. “I think they
were maybe a little bit pissed that they were dragged into
something that was a college prank,” Pyne says.
 Now it was AT&T’s turn.
 “We had to go see this guy by the name of Desmond,”
Lauck says. “He was some person in charge of AT&T
security in Boston. . . . He was going to really nail our ass
for stealing phone calls and all the rest of this. We were
going to be prosecuted.” This seemed ridiculous to Lauck.
Stealing phone calls? Really? “We never actually made any
phone calls that anyone in their right minds would ever pay
two cents for,” Lauck says. Ed Ross agrees: “None of us had
anyone else in the world to speak to.” The students soon
invented a nickname for their telephone company
tormenter. “We came to call him the Evil Desmond,” Pyne
says.
 Tony Lauck had an uncle who was a lawyer and a banker in
Philadelphia and who used to play golf with the head of Bell
of Pennsylvania; a call was placed asking if he might be able
to somehow smooth matters over. Similarly, there was an
old friend of Charlie Pyne’s parents who was the chairman
of the New England Electric Company; perhaps he could
help? The old friend said he knew the president of New
England Telephone and Telegraph and would make a phone
call and report back. Pyne remembers getting a phone call
about ten minutes later, in which the chairman of New
England Electric said, “Would you please call me back from
a pay phone?” Pyne did so. “He told me that his friend the
president of New England Telephone knew all about this,”
Pyne says, “and it was a big deal and in all likelihood our
telephones were being monitored”—hence the request to
use a pay phone.
 Maybe it was the string pulling or maybe the telephone
company had simply thought better of prosecuting Harvard
students, something that might end up blowing up in its
face. What the phone company didn’t need, after all, was
for the details of this to get out in the news so that more
people would know about how easy it was to make free
calls. Either way, Lauck recalls their next visit to the Evil
Desmond. “He looked really pissed,” Lauck says. “He was
just seething with rage that these so-called rich kids or
whatever were going to be able to get away with this and
he was not going to be able to nail our asses for anything.”
 That did not stop Desmond from grilling the students. They
were to write a detailed report for the telephone company,
setting forth exactly what they had done, the details of the
vulnerabilities in the system they had found, even giving
suggestions for how to combat fraud in the future. And they
had to get rid of their blue boxes. The transistorized unit
that Heckel built wound up in the Charles River. As for the
one that Pyne and Lauck had built using tubes from Lauck’s
stereo, Desmond and a sidekick showed up in person at
Lauck’s dorm room in order to watch it being dismantled.
 In the end, the only serious result of the entire episode
was that Pyne was told he needed to take a year off from
Harvard. This was a pretty common occurrence, Pyne says:
“You didn’t have to do much to have them ask you to take a
year off.” An unexpected plus was that it stood him in good
stead with his girlfriend Betsy—the girl he had taught to
impersonate an operator to call him at boarding school—
who says now, “I thought it was great. I thought, ‘Oh my
God, this is the most wonderful person in the world, he’s so
brilliant!’” Betsy’s mother thought likewise. Pyne’s mother
was somewhat less enthused.
The Harvard students solved many mysteries during their
research. But their discovery by the telephone company
and the FBI solved one final mystery for Pyne’s freshman
adviser, Robert Watson, who wrote the following when he
filled out the form for Pyne’s year-end review.
Pyne has been an enigma to me all year. I’ve spent more time with him
trying to understand his problems than the combined time I’ve devoted to
all my other freshmen advisees. In an attempt to arouse his motivation I’ve
used my entire bag of tricks to little avail. Then suddenly two weeks ago all
was made clear when we learned from the FBI and Telephone Company of
his tampering with the whole telephone system. Instead of studying, night
after night all year long he and three other Harvard students with the
cooperation of an MIT student have been discovering ways to beat the
Telephone Company and how the whole system works. No wonder his
studies have suffered. From what I now know he has been pursuing this
interest for years. If he once settles down and really applies himself,
there’s no question in my mind that he can do the work. In fact, he
possesses a vast knowledge of electronics in general and the telephone
operation in particular. Surely this should stand him in good stead.

 The evaluation form included a query about Pyne’s
probable academic concentration. “Engineering Sciences,”
Watson wrote.
 The form went on to inquire, “Do you consider this to be a
wise choice?”
 Watson filled in the form honestly, if dryly. “I’m inclined to
think so now,” he wrote.
                        Seven

                  HEADACHE

IT WAS THE   early 1960s and AT&T was starting to get a
headache.
 Actually, that should read headaches, plural.
 First there was the growth-in-electronic-toll-fraud
headache. It wouldn’t have been so bad if whiz kids like
Barclay and Pyne were the only ones who had figured out
blue and black boxes. But they weren’t. Other people were
starting to discover the holes in AT&T’s network. And no
one, even within AT&T, could say with any certainty exactly
how widespread the problem was or how fast it was
growing.
 Then there was the how-are-we-gonna-fix-our-network
headache. In the past twenty years AT&T had already spent
more than $1.4 billion in building out its long-distance
network, with its 2,600 Hz and in-band multifrequency
signaling. This signaling system was fundamental to the
network in the same way that a concrete foundation is
fundamental to your house. For AT&T, finding out that its
network was vulnerable to teenagers with tone generators
was a bit like discovering that you’ve poured the foundation
of your house on top of a nest of some new kind of concrete-
eating termites. How much would it cost and how long
would it take to reengineer the long-distance network to be
immune to blue and black boxes?
 Third was the how-do-we-deal-with-the-phone-phreaks
headache. Should we have them arrested? Sue them? But it
seems like every time we do something, the newspapers
pick it up and carry a story about it. That means more
people know about it. And that probably means more phone
phreaks. Maybe it’s better just to keep things quiet for now.
 The icing on the cake was the oh-crap-what-if-it’s-not-
really-illegal headache. AT&T attorneys had studied the
matter and were worried there was no federal law that
clearly made these telephone shenanigans illegal. Most
states had laws that were probably applicable, but these
varied from state to state. This was a new kind of crime and
the laws just hadn’t caught up with it yet.
 Where’s that bottle of Tylenol again?
People were starting to discover Ma Bell’s secret. Most
were high school or college students, but it wasn’t just
Barclay and Pyne and the others at Harvard and MIT. In
1963 newspapers covered the story of a “brilliant but
disturbed teenager” from Ohio who invented a device to
“bypass operators” and had called all over the world. In
1964 there was a small epidemic of electronic toll fraud
cases. Hoyt Stearns and friends at Cornell University, John
Treichler at Rice University, a former engineering student
who had attended Stanford and Columbia: all had figured
out Ma Bell’s secret. The stories were virtually identical:
clever high school or college kids figure out the hole in
AT&T’s switching system, explore the network, are caught,
and get slapped on the wrist.
 Unfortunately for AT&T, college and high school students
had no monopoly on clever. Another pioneer in the field was
a Los Angeles–area businessman, electrical engineer, and
former army communications officer named Louis
MacKenzie. Perhaps you’ve been to the Los Angeles
International Airport and heard the repeating tape
recordings made famous by the 1980 movie Airplane!—the
ones that droned on and on: “The white zone is for the
immediate loading and unloading of passengers only . . .”?
If so, you have MacKenzie and his company, MacKenzie
Laboratories, to thank for the invention of the machine that
allowed those recordings to play, twenty-four hours a day,
seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year.
 MacKenzie was no stranger to the idea of using tones for
signaling. His firm had been hired by Walt Disney in the
1950s to build tone-based equipment to remotely control
animated special effects at Disneyland. Perhaps that was
what gave him and a colleague of his the insight needed to
spot the vulnerability revealed in the 1960 Bell System
Technical Journal article. Sensing a business opportunity,
he approached the phone company about it, offering his
firm’s services to fix AT&T’s problem—for a price. AT&T
declined. Soon thereafter, in 1963, MacKenzie’s attorney
appeared on the CBS evening news, waving around a blue
box and talking about the giant flaw in the telephone
system. MacKenzie, meanwhile, started a side business
manufacturing and selling blue boxes, something that he
would later note was legal in California at that time.
 And then there were the people who built the mysterious
“suitcase blue box,” a thing of beauty that befuddled the
boffins at Bell Laboratories. A small attaché case that
looked like it came straight out of a James Bond movie, it
was crammed full of cool telephone gear, all lovingly
mounted: a rotary dial, a keypad, an audio level meter,
switches, an auto dialer—a plug board that allowed you to
program one frequently called number using a rat’s nest of
jumper wires—and, of course, a built-in blue box too. The
workmanship was exquisite, as if it had rolled off the
assembly line of a professional manufacturing facility—
which perhaps it had. Bell Labs was certain that a number
of these had been produced, possibly a large number, but
was not sure how many or who was making them or where
they came from. Investigators had leads suggesting that
they originated in California, perhaps manufactured on a
navy base somewhere. As to who was buying them, that
they were convinced of: the mob. Who else could it be?
What else could explain the cartoon—set smack in the
center of the rotary dial on one of the boxes—of a laughing
mobster chomping on his cigar?
 If it were just a handful of clever people figuring this stuff
out, that might be one thing. But the contagion was
threatening to spread more widely via ads, like one that
appeared in 1963.
Slash Communication Costs with TELA-TONE

You’ve been reading about it. Now you can build it yourself. No license
required to operate. 5,000 mile range. Complete details, $5 or money back.
Tela-tone, Box 4304, Pasadena, Calif.

 Or the following gem from the January 1964 hobbyist
magazine Popular Electronics:
TOLL Free Distance Dialing. By-passes operators and billing equipment.
Build for $15.00. Ideal for Telephone Company Executives. Plans $4.75.
Seaway Electronics, 6311 Yucca St., Hollywood 28, California.

 “Ideal for Telephone Company Executives.” Whoever got
mail at 6311 Yucca Street in Hollywood seemed to have a
sense of humor. Formerly the offices of Variety, Hollywood’s
leading newspaper, 6311 Yucca by the early sixties had
become the mail-order headquarters of dozens and dozens
of questionable enterprises, such as Seaway Electronics
(blue box plans), Preview Records (vanity recording studio),
Man International (false beards and mustaches), C. Carrier
Co. (spy equipment), Holley Co. (old scripts from movies
and TV shows), Vanguard Galleries (artwork); the list went
on and on. AT&T had a chat with the owner of Seaway
Electronics. “The advertiser has admitted that about 149
copies of these plans were mailed out,” read a subsequent
AT&T memo. “He increased the price of the plans to $7.50
and bulk-mailed at least 8,950 copies of [a one-page ad for
blue box plans], mostly to amateur radio operators in New
York,    New      Hampshire,    Vermont,     New     Jersey,
Massachusetts, Connecticut, and California.”
 Swell. So now that’s almost nine thousand more people
who know the network is vulnerable. Great, just great.
You would think that making a free call using a blue box or
a black box would have to be illegal, right? I mean, how
could it not? Oddly enough, however, no single law really
nailed it. Individual states had a variety of laws that were—
or might be—applicable. But that meant AT&T had to
become expert in the laws of fifty different states and,
besides, it was crazy that it might be legal in one state and
not in another. What AT&T needed was a single federal law
that was broadly and clearly applicable and that made the
whole enterprise illegal, end of story.
  The law that came closest was Title 18, Section 1343, of
the United States Code: “Fraud by Wire.” Section 1343
made it illegal to transmit over a wire and across state lines
any “writings, signs, signals, pictures or sounds” for the
purpose of fraud. Now, what does a blue box do? It sends
tones—that is, sounds or signals—over a telephone line—
that is, wires. Usually these tones are sent across state lines
—it’s a long-distance phone call, after all—and usually the
telephone company is getting defrauded of revenue in the
process. Seems like an open-and-shut case.
  Alas, when AT&T attorneys met with Justice Department
representatives in February 1964, one of the Justice
lawyers who actually helped write the Fraud by Wire law
said he didn’t think it was intended to apply to blue and
black boxes. Section 1343, he said, was designed to protect
people from being swindled over the telephone—something
like a bad guy calling up your grandma and selling her
bogus life insurance; that’s what was meant by “fraud by
wire.” It was never intended to protect the phone company
itself from being defrauded. In fact, there was a law similar
to 1343 (Section 1341, as it happens) that covered mail
fraud, and that law did not cover fraud against the United
States Postal Service itself. Separate laws had to be written
and enacted to deal with that problem.
  Then there was the black box problem. Unlike blue boxes,
black boxes didn’t send signals or sounds down the wire. In
fact, they actually prevented the sending of a signal that the
phone had answered. Moreover, this signal usually didn’t
cross state lines as the signal was between a telephone and
its local central office. So using 1343 to go after black box
fraud seemed like tough legal sledding.
  The Justice Department lawyers said the government was
generally unwilling to prosecute toll fraud cases under
Section 1343. Indeed, the most the boys at Justice would
agree to was using 1343 to prosecute organized crime, if
organized crime could ever be shown to be using blue or
black boxes, and even that was only because the Organized
Crime and Racketeering section wanted it done.
  None of this was helping AT&T’s headache. AT&T
attorneys met with both the Federal Communications
Commission—the FCC, the people who regulated the
telephone system—and the Justice Department the next
year. Their goal: get a federal law passed specifically
prohibiting fraud due to blue boxes, black boxes, or any
other colored boxes the bad guys might think up in the
future. They even came with proposed legislation in hand: a
two-hundred-word run-on sentence that made illegal just
about any conceivable fraud perpetrated against a
telephone company. While the lawyers were at it, their
proposed new legislation also outlawed making, possessing,
selling, giving, transferring, or offering for sale a blue or
black box or any other “instrument or apparatus” that could
be used for telephone fraud. AT&T argued that “a criminal
sanction is needed which gets at the source of this fraud,
namely, the clandestine manufacture and sale of these
devices, which are now carried on with impunity.”
  AT&T’s proposal was met with a cool reception. “The
proposed legislation has too broad a sweep,” wrote the FCC
attorneys in an internal memo. “It would attempt to outlaw
not only such physical devices but would purport to outlaw
all other actions by ordinary users of the service that might
conceivably be construed as a trick, scheme or false or
fraudulent representation, pretense or credit device to
avoid payment.” The Justice Department was no more
sympathetic: the chief of the Fraud Section of the Criminal
Division expressed “lack of enthusiasm for the proposal on
the ground that it would tend to make the [Justice]
Department a collection agency for selected instances
brought to them by the phone company.” Who could blame
Justice for not wanting to be AT&T’s revenue rottweiler?
The telephone company screws up and builds a network
that’s wide open and now somehow the Justice Department
and the FBI are supposed to clean up the mess and go after
the fraudsters?
 AT&T left its meetings empty-handed, no new law in sight.
All of these things forced AT&T to think about the
unthinkable: would it have to redesign the entire
nationwide telephone network and install a new signaling
system?
 This was a huge question. The estimates of the costs for
such a redesign varied from a quarter of a billion to a billion
dollars (between $2 billion and $8 billion today). It would
take years to deploy whatever new signaling system its
engineers came up with. After all, the design of the original
system had taken decades, starting in the late 1920s and
with effort in earnest during the 1940s and ’50s, and that
deployment was still years from being finished. While the
company was deploying whatever new system it came up
with, the network would still be vulnerable.
 Then there was the niggling question in the back of the
minds of AT&T’s leaders, namely, what if the new system
also turned out to be vulnerable? As one person familiar
with the matter put it, they had “no assurance at all that if
we did modify [the signaling system], that that in turn
would not be overcome, too.”
 None of this sat well with the executives at American
Telephone and Telegraph in New York City. The directive to
the engineers at Bell Labs from AT&T headquarters at 195
Broadway was clear: “You guys created this mess, you clean
it up!”
 Engineers are funny animals. If you tell an engineer about
a problem, any problem, his first instinct is to measure it.
Tell an engineer you don’t love him anymore and he’ll ask
for a graph of your love over time so that he can
understand exactly how big the problem is and when it
started.
 But there were no graphs of the extent of electronic toll
fraud, at least not in the early 1960s. After all, the key thing
that blue and black boxes did was to defeat AT&T’s
carefully designed billing system, the very system that kept
tabs on the number and length of calls being made on its
network. If there were no billing records for fraudulent
calls, there was no way to know how many fraudulent calls
there were or how long they lasted. And that meant AT&T
was gazing into the abyss. Say the phone company catches
some college students with electronic boxes. Fantastic! But
elation is soon replaced by worry. Is that all of them? Or is
that just the tip of the iceberg? Are there another ten
college students doing it? A hundred? Are there a thousand
fraudulent calls a year or are there a million?
 Engineers hate stuff like this.
 Bell Labs, filled to the brim with engineers, proposed a
crash program to build an electronic toll fraud surveillance
system and deploy it throughout the network. It would keep
a watchful eye over the traffic flowing from coast to coast,
ever vigilant for suspicious calls—not every call, mind you,
but a random sampling of a subset of them, enough to
gather statistics. For the first time Bell Labs—and AT&T’s
senior management—would have useful data about the
extent of the electronic toll fraud problem. Then they’d be
in a position to make billion-dollar decisions.
  The project was approved; indeed, AT&T gave Bell Labs a
blank check and told them to get right to work. Tippy-top
secret, the program had the coolest of code names: Project
Greenstar. Within Bell Labs Greenstar documents were
stamped with a star outlined in green ink to highlight their
importance and sensitivity. Perhaps as a joke, the project
lead was given a military dress uniform hat with a green
general’s star on it, an artifact that was passed on from one
team lead to the next over the years.
  Greenstar development began in 1962 and the first
operational unit was installed at the end of 1964. Bill
Caming, AT&T’s corporate attorney for privacy and fraud
matters, became intimately familiar with the program. “We
devised six experimental units which we placed at
representative cities,” Caming said. “Two were placed in
Los Angeles because of not only activity in that area, but
also different signaling arrangements, and one was placed
in Miami, two were originally placed in New York, one
shortly thereafter moving to Newark, NJ, and one was
placed in Detroit, and then about January 1967 moved to
St. Louis.”
  Ken Hopper, a longtime Bell Labs engineer involved in
network security and fraud detection, recalls that the
Greenstar units were big, bulky machines. “I heard the
name ‘yellow submarine’ applied to one of them,” he says.
They lived in locked rooms or behind fenced-in enclosures
in telephone company switching buildings. A single
Greenstar unit would be connected to a hundred outgoing
long-distance trunk lines and could simultaneously monitor
five of them for fraud. The particular long-distance trunk
lines being monitored were selected at random as calls
went out over them. At its core, Greenstar looked for the
presence of 2,600 Hz on a trunk line when it shouldn’t be
there. It could detect both black box and blue box fraud,
since both cases were flagged by unusual 2,600 Hz
signaling.
 As Caming described it, “There were in each of these
locations a hundred trunks selected out of a large number,
and the [. . .] logic equipment would select a call. There
were five temporary scanners which would pick up a call
and look at it with this logic equipment and determine
whether or not it had the proper [. . .] supervisory signals,
whether, for example, there was return answer supervision.
When we have a call, we have a supervisory signal that goes
to and activates the billing equipment which usually we call
return answer supervision. That starts the billing process
and legitimizes the call, and if you find voice conversation
without any return answer signal, and that is what it was
looking for, it is an indication, a strong indication, of a
possible black box that the caller called in; and if, for
example, you heard the tell-tale blue box tone [. . .] this was
a very strong indication of illegality because that tone has
no normal presence upon our network at that point.”
 When Greenstar detected something unusual, it took an
audacious next step: it recorded the telephone call. With no
warrant and with no warning to the people on the line,
suspicious calls were silently preserved on spinning
multitrack reel-to-reel magnetic tapes. If Greenstar judged
it had found a black box call it recorded for sixty to ninety
seconds; if it stumbled upon a blue box it recorded the
entire telephone call. Separate tracks recorded the voice,
supervisory signals, and time stamps.
 When the tapes filled up they were removed by two plant
supervisors. “They were the only two who had access from
the local [telephone] company,” Caming says. Then they
were sent via registered mail to New York City. There, at
the Greenstar analysis bureau, specially trained operators
—“long-term chief operators who had great loyalty to the
system [who] were screened for being people of great
trust,” Ken Hopper says—would listen to the tapes, their
ears alert for indications of fraud. The operators would
determine whether a particular call was illegal or was
merely the result of an equipment malfunction or “talk
off”—somebody whose voice just happened to hit 2,600 Hz
and had caused a false alarm. When these operators were
finished listening, the tapes would be bulk erased and sent
back for reuse.
 “The greatest caution was exercised,” Bill Caming recalls.
“I was very concerned about it. The equipment itself was
fenced in within the central office so that no one could get
to it surreptitiously and extract anything of what we were
doing. We took every pain to preserve the sanctity of the
recordings.”
 Project Greenstar went on for more than five and a half
years. Between the end of 1964 and May 1970, Greenstar
randomly monitored some 33 million U.S. long-distance
phone calls, a number that was at once staggeringly large
and yet still an infinitesimally tiny fraction of the total
number of long-distance calls placed during those years. Of
these 33 million calls, between 1.5 and 1.8 million were
recorded and shipped to New York to be listened to by
human ears. “We had to have statistics,” said Caming.
Statistics they got: they found “at least 25,000 cases of
known illegality” and projected that in 1966 they had “on
the order of 350,000 [fraudulent] calls nationwide.”
 “Boy, did it perk up some ears at 195 Broadway,” says
Hopper. It wasn’t even that 350,000 fraudulent calls was
that big a number. Rather, it was the fact that there was
really nothing that could be done about it, at least not at
once. “It was immediately recognized that if such fraud
could be committed with impunity, losses of staggering
proportions would ensue,” Caming said. “At that time we
recognized—and we can say this more confidently in public
in retrospect—that we had no immediate defense. This was
a breakthrough almost equivalent to the advent of
gunpowder, where the hordes of Genghis Khan faced
problems of a new sort, or the advent of the cannon.”
 The initial plan with Greenstar was simple: Wait. Watch.
Listen. Gather statistics. Tell no one. Most important, don’t
do anything that would give it away. “There was no
prosecution during those first couple of years,” Hopper
says. “It was so the bad guys would not be aware of the fact
that they’re being measured.” It was only later, Hopper
says, that AT&T decided to switch from measurement to
prosecution. Even then, Hopper said, “The presence of
Greenstar would not be divulged and that evidence
gathered to support toll fraud prosecutions would be
gathered by other means.” Instead, Hopper relates,
Greenstar would be used to alert Bell security agents to
possible fraud. The security agents would then use other
means, such as taps and recordings, to get the evidence
needed to convict. “Greenstar bird-dogging it would not be
brought out,” says Hopper. “It was just simply a toll fraud
investigation brought about by unusual signaling and you
would not talk about the fact that there was a Greenstar
device. That was the ground rule as I understood it. Any
court testimony that I ever gave, I never talked about any of
that.” As another telephone company official put it, “If it
ever were necessary to reveal the existence of this
equipment in order to prosecute a toll fraud case, [AT&T]
would simply decline to prosecute.”
Bill Caming became AT&T’s attorney for privacy and fraud
matters in September 1965. Greenstar had been in
operation for about a year when he was briefed on it. His
reaction was immediate: “Change the name. I don’t even
know what it is, but it just sounds illegal. Change the
name.” More innocent-sounding code names like
“Dewdrop” and “Ducky” were apparently unavailable, so
AT&T and Bell Labs opted for something utilitarian and
unlikely to attract attention: Greenstar was rechristened
“Toll Test Unit.”
 As the new legal guy at AT&T headquarters, Caming faced
questions that were both important and sensitive. Forget
how it sounded, was Greenstar actually illegal? And if it
was, what should be done about it? Before joining AT&T
Caming had been a prosecutor at the Nuremberg war
crimes trials after World War II. He was highly regarded,
considered by many to be a model of legal rectitude. Was
there any way he could see that the AT&T program was
legit?
 There was. He later stated under oath that there was “no
question” Greenstar was in fact legal under laws of the day
—a surprising conclusion for what at first blush appears to
be an astonishing overreach on the part of the telephone
company. There were two parts to Caming’s reasoning. The
first had to do with the odd wording of the wiretap laws of
the early 1960s; using this wording Caming was able to
thread a line of legal logic through the eye of a very specific
needle to conclude that the program was legal under the
law prior to 1968. The second part had to do with his
position at American Telephone and Telegraph. In 1968,
when Congress was considering new wiretapping
legislation, Caming was in a position to help lawmakers
draft the new law. He made very sure that the new wiretap
act didn’t conflict with AT&T’s surveillance program.
 Caming even informed the attorneys at the Justice
Department’s Criminal Division about Greenstar in 1966
and 1967, in connection with some prosecutions. “Now, that
does not say that they cleared it or gave me their
imprimatur,” he allowed. But then, he added, “we did not
feel we needed it.”
 Years later, the Congressional Research Service agreed
with Caming regarding the legality of the program—to a
degree. While not going so far as to say there was “no
question” that Greenstar was legal, it was concluded that
“It is not certain that the telephone company violated any
federal laws by the random monitoring of telephone
conversations during the period from 1964 to 1970. This
uncertainty exists because the Congressional intent [in the
law] is not clear, and case law has not clearly explained the
permissible scope of monitoring by the company.”
 This whole mess formed a challenging business
conundrum for AT&T executives, the sort of thing that
would make for a good business school case study. Put
yourself in their shoes. You have made an incredibly
expensive investment in a product—the telephone network
—that turns out to have some gaping security holes in it.
You have, as Bill Caming said, no immediate defense against
the problem. You finally have some statistics about how bad
the problem is. It’s bad, but it’s not terrible, unless it
spreads, in which case it’s catastrophic. Replacing the
network will take years and cost a billion dollars or so. The
Justice Department isn’t sure there are any federal laws on
the books that actually apply. And every time you prosecute
the fraudsters under state laws, not only do you look bad in
the newspapers—witness the Milwaukee Journal’s 1963
front-page headline “Lonely Boy Devises Way of Placing
Free Long Distance Calls”—but the resulting publicity
makes the problem worse.
 AT&T played the best game it could with a bad hand. For
now, it would quietly monitor the network, keeping a
weather eye on the problem. When the company found
college kids playing with the network, investigators would
give them a stern talking-to and confiscate their colored
boxes. Execs would start thinking about a slow, long-term
upgrade to the network to eliminate the underlying
problem. And if opportunity knocked and they could help
out the feds with an organized crime prosecution—and in
the process set a clear precedent for the applicability of the
federal Fraud by Wire law—well, that would be lovely.
 That opportunity came knocking in 1965. As it turned out,
it used a sledgehammer.
                         Eight

        BLUE BOX BOOKIES

IT WAS JANUARY    8, 1966, a cloudy winter day in Miami.
Special Agent Heist rang the doorbell to Kenneth Hanna’s
apartment.
 Nothing.
 Heist glanced down at the clipboard he was carrying
where his FBI identification was clipped—along with arrest
and search warrants. Standing next to Heist was Special
Agent Roussell. Instead of a clipboard, Roussell was
carrying a fourteen-pound sledgehammer.
 “FBI!” Heist shouted. “We are here to execute a search
warrant!”
 Still nothing.
 Heist looked at his watch. Seconds ticked by.
 Heist pounded the door with his fist. He rang the doorbell
a few more times.
 Finally he turned to Roussell. “Hit the door.”
 Roussell swung his sledge. The door buckled but it didn’t
open.
 “Hit it again,” Heist ordered.
 At the second blow the door opened. And with it so did a
legal can of worms—worms that would, over the next four
years, crawl all the way to the Supreme Court.
 Special Agent Heist was there because of a blue box. But
Kenneth Hanna—the guy whose door got sledged—was a
bookie, not a phone phreak. If you’re a bookie, the service
you provide is accepting bets from your customers on a
particular event—in football, say, maybe it’s the upcoming
Packers versus Patriots game. You charge a small
commission for that service. But if that’s the service you
provide, your real business is a delicate balancing act. In
aggregate, you need to get your customers to bet the same
number of dollars on the Packers as they’re betting on the
Patriots. If they don’t, if their bets are lopsided, then you’re
now running a risk: if the wrong side loses, you—personally
—are on the hook for the difference.
  Getting customers to bet evenly on both sides is tough to
do if the Packers are widely expected to kick Patriot butt. So
the way you even things out is with something called “the
line.” The line is the point spread, that is, the number of
points by which the bookie claims one team is going to beat
the other. Kind of like a handicap in golf, it aims to turn an
uneven match into an even one. By adjusting the line, the
bookie can influence which side his customers are betting
on. But even then a bookie might still end up with lopsided
bets and financial risk. When this happens, street-level
bookies turn to higher-level “layoff” bookies: they lay off—
outsource—some of their bets to a bookie higher up in the
bookie food chain, someone with more financial
wherewithal who is able to take on greater risk.
  Even more than teenage girls, bookies are telephone
junkies; good bookies are always on the phone. Not just to
take bets from their customers but to stay in touch with
their colleagues, from the casinos of Las Vegas and Atlantic
City to informants in college football towns across the
country. Did a big bookie in Vegas just change his line?
Better figure out why. And if the Packers’ quarterback
bruised his shoulder in a fender bender, or Michigan State’s
star defensive end is drinking too much while pledging a
fraternity, our bookie needs to know this ASAP In the 1950s
                                                  .
and ’60s, before the Internet, the telephone was a bookie’s
lifeline. In fact, a bookie cut off from his sources is a bookie
who will be out of business very quickly.
 This telephone monkey on their backs gave bookies two
problems. The first was just business, plain old profit and
loss. If you were on the phone all day long to faraway places
back in the 1960s, well, let’s just say that AT&T was getting
rich and you probably weren’t. Money saved on your long-
distance bill was money in your pocket.
 The bigger problem was that pesky Federal Bureau of
Investigation. While many FBI agents felt that sports
betting was simply red-blooded American fun, the problem
was organized crime. It turned out that bookmaking was
one of the mob’s most lucrative businesses; one estimate
put U.S. betting at $20 billion in 1969, as much as one-third
of which was pure profit for gangsters. Although there
might not be anything wrong with betting a few bucks on
the basketball game, the problem was, as one former FBI
special agent put it, “it ends up feeding something else, like
drugs, prostitution, loan sharking.”
 In 1961 Attorney General Robert Kennedy urged Congress
to pass a suite of laws aimed at “the bankrollers and
kingpins of the rackets,” as part of a larger plan to go after
organized crime by cutting off its finances. Several of these
laws specifically targeted bookmaking. Shut down
bookmaking, the logic went, and you cut off the mob’s
largest and most profitable revenue stream; cut off those
revenues and not only do you hurt organized crime across
the board, you limit its ability to invest in growth markets
such as importing illicit drugs. And though not every bookie
was mobbed up, the FBI knew a lot of the bigger layoff
bookies were. So that’s where the law focused.
 But going after the bookies was tough. Bookmaking
doesn’t leave lots of physical evidence like dead bodies or
stolen loot. The actual crime occurs only when you accept a
bet, which might be done in person but more likely
happened over the phone. Then, for it to be a federal crime
under the new laws, the bet had to be placed across state
lines. Even then, the law said, gambling across state lines
was illegal only if you were “in the business of gambling,” a
vague term that was up to the courts to decide on a case-
by-case basis. Merely placing an occasional bet with a
faraway friend or two wasn’t good enough. All of these
requirements made it tricky to gather enough evidence to
get a conviction. Who could the FBI turn to for help?
  Who else? The phone company. Wiretaps were ideal for
taking down bookies, but they were hard to come by—
legally, anyway. Yet the phone company had something
almost as good: long-distance toll records. Phone bills, in
other words. Toll records provided the FBI with what the
military code breakers at the National Security Agency
would call “traffic analysis,” answering the questions of who
called whom, when, and for how long? Even if you don’t
wiretap the bad guys there’s still a lot you can learn just
from seeing the patterns of their phone calls.
  Gil “the Brain” Beckley was a perfect example. “He was
the number one layoff bookmaker in the U.S. and Canada.
He was the guy,” recalls Edwin J. Sharp, a former FBI
assistant director who worked the Beckley case in his early
years at the Bureau. Beckley, reddish-haired and
handsome, was liked and respected by his fellow layoff
bookmakers. His nickname came from his lightning-quick
ability to calculate odds in his head, and he was known to
take in more than $250,000 of bets in a single day. The
government had been tangling with Beckley since the late
1950s and wanted to take him down. Badly.
  “Beckley lived in a plush Miami Beach apartment house,
five or six stories up, well insulated. There was no way to
get in and do anything,” Sharp says. “We were pretty well
restricted to phone record checks.” But the phone records
were a treasure trove. Over a period of months Sharp
amassed a 3x5 index card file—some twenty thousand
cards’ worth—of every long-distance number Beckley
called. “We didn’t know the term then,” Sharp says, “but
what we really needed was a computer database.”
Painstakingly, Sharp and his colleagues built a detailed map
of Beckley and his associates. By combining this with other
intelligence they formed a solid picture of his bookmaking
operation.
 The threat posed by telephone toll records wasn’t news to
the bookies, and they had developed several techniques to
combat it. As early as 1950 bookies were using so-called
cheese boxes to evade capture. The cheese box was a
simple electronic circuit that bridged two telephone lines to
form a two-person conference call. A bookie would get a
pair of telephone lines installed someplace innocuous, such
as an empty apartment, and install a cheese box there. The
bookie would call one of the two telephone numbers and
then just wait. At some point, one of his customers would
call the other number and they would be connected. The
beauty of this setup was that the customer never had the
bookie’s direct telephone number. Moreover, if the police
took the telephone numbers to the phone company to get
an address they could raid, they’d end up looking like
chumps, because all they’d find was an empty apartment
with a pair of telephone lines and some simple electronics
in the closet.
 Cheese boxes didn’t solve the problem of long-distance toll
records, however, because bookies still needed to make
outgoing phone calls. Since the early 1950s bookies had
been using every trick they could think of to make free and,
more important, unrecorded long-distance telephone calls.
One method was as simple as bribing telephone company
operators and technicians to place calls for them so that the
calls never appeared on their own telephone bills. Another
approach took advantage of the fact that the phone
company issued special telephone credit cards to its
customers that allowed them to make phone calls while
they were on the road. The bookies learned that it was
possible to make up bogus credit card numbers, which both
saved them money and guaranteed that records of the calls
wouldn’t wind up on their phone bills. In other cases
bookies would establish legitimate telephone credit cards
under different names and addresses and actually pay the
bills. This latter method might not save them any money,
but it did manage to keep long-distance calls off their own
personal toll records, thus frustrating the Ed Sharps of the
FBI with their thousands of 3x5 cards.
 Around 1960 the bookies discovered a higher-tech
approach. A former telephone company engineer named
Walter Shaw seems to have been the guy who introduced
the mob to the black box, the simple electronic circuit that
makes it look like the telephone was never answered and
that Charlie Pyne and his buddies rediscovered in 1963. A
black box gets installed on the receiving end of a call but it
benefits the caller: if you call a number that has a black box
on it, your phone call is free and no record of the call is ever
made by the phone company. It was easy to combine a black
box with a cheese box so that bookie-bettor conference calls
could be free and also leave no record that they had taken
place.
 Government law enforcement agencies got their first
inkling of this new technology in 1960. Investigators at the
Treasury Department had been investigating a large cross-
country gambling ring with the standard technique of using
long-distance toll records to map out the bad guys. They
had recently received a tip that there was “some type of
instrument or device through which gamblers are able to
make long distance telephone calls but circumvent the
recording of these calls by telephone company equipment.”
Not long afterward, the telephone toll records dried up;
there was suddenly a “surprising decrease in their long
distance telephone activities.” Exactly what you’d expect to
see if bookies started deploying black boxes to hide
evidence of their calls. The next year Walter Shaw was
arrested in Miami after a bookie raid a week earlier turned
up a number of black boxes in Mamaroneck, New York,
which the New York assistant attorney general claimed
Shaw had been selling to bookies for $1,500 a piece.
 Unfortunately—for the bookies, that is—black boxes
weren’t a panacea. A black box is a passive device for
receiving calls. If you have a black box, then people calling
you don’t have to pay for their calls, nor do they have to
worry about leaving a record that the call took place. But
having a black box doesn’t help you make calls; if you
wanted to leave no trace of your outgoing phone calls a
black box didn’t help you.
 Enter the blue box. Blue boxes were active devices: they
allowed you to call people—anybody—without leaving a
record that the call was ever made. It’s not clear exactly
when the bookies learned about blue boxes, or from whom,
but the best guess appears to be about 1963 or 1964. One
source was Louis MacKenzie, the electronics engineer who
offered to fix AT&T’s network, for a price, in the early
1960s. MacKenzie, who later became a witness for the
government in several blue box prosecutions, sold blue
boxes to bookies in 1965 or perhaps earlier. But it is
certainly possible that organized crime members learned
about blue boxes from another source, for example, Walter
Shaw, the former telephone company engineer who
provided the mob with black boxes.
 Regardless of exactly where they came from, or when, blue
boxes are what led to Special Agent Heist knocking on
Kenneth Hanna’s door on that Miami winter morning in
1966. About six months earlier, on July 19, 1965, AT&T
contacted the Department of Justice’s Organized Crime
Division. AT&T’s lawyer explained that the company had
been investigating a toll fraud case and stumbled on
something that the Justice Department might be interested
in. Certain individuals had been “using devices to
circumvent payment of telephone charges in the
transmission of wagering information.” The wording had
special meaning to the feds, for transmission of wagering
information across state lines was a federal crime, one
made so by a law introduced just a few years earlier by one
of Attorney General Kennedy’s laws specifically targeting
bookies and organized crime. The gambling network AT&T
found certainly crossed state lines, spanning Boston, New
Orleans, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, Miami, Washington, D.C.,
and Providence, Rhode Island.
 The best part, though, was that AT&T had made tapes of
the calls. “The Telephone Company investigation has
resulted in obtaining various tapes and recordings, all in
regard to gambling information,” read the FBI memo
regarding the meeting with AT&T. The phone company
“indicated their desire to turn these items over to the
Organized Crime Division.”
 From AT&T’s perspective it must have seemed a master
stroke.What better way to crack down on telephone fraud
while simultaneously cementing good relations with law
enforcement than to hand over the heads of mobsters on a
platter? As Bill Caming, AT&T’s attorney for privacy and
fraud matters, describes it, AT&T “put a blue ribbon around
it and handed it to law enforcement. They would be
delighted because the work was all done and the glory lay
ahead.”
 Well, the work wasn’t all done; the feds had certain
niggling details to attend to, such as launching an
investigation and then prosecuting the bad guys. A grand
jury was convened in Philadelphia, thought to be the center
of the gambling ring. TARCASE—“tapes and recordings,” the
FBI’s code name for the investigation—was born.
 It was about four months into TARCASE, on November 24,
1965, when Jerry Doyle’s phone rang. Doyle, a former FBI
agent, was a security officer for Southern Bell Telephone in
Miami. The call was from the Internal Audit and Security
Group at AT&T headquarters in New York City. The caller
told Doyle that there were indications of a blue box in use
on a telephone number in Miami and the company wanted
Doyle to investigate it.
 The telephone number in question belonged to Kenneth
Hanna. The name was familiar to Doyle, who knew him to
be a Miami-area bookmaker. So did the FBI. In fact, the FBI
had been trying to connect Hanna with TARCASE for some
months.
 Inside the telephone company switching office, Doyle had a
blue box detector installed on Hanna’s telephone line. This
was a device that listened for 2,600 Hz, the telltale tone
emitted by a blue box to disconnect a telephone call. Each
time it heard this tone it incremented a mechanical counter
—a “peg counter”—to keep a running total of the number of
times a blue box might have been used on Hanna’s line. The
peg counter quickly registered plenty of hits, strongly
indicating that Hanna’s line had a blue box on it. Doyle had
the counter replaced with a tape recorder that was
activated by 2,600 Hz. The recorder captured only the first
thirty to forty-five seconds of each call, just enough to hear
the blue box being used, to record what number was being
dialed with it, and to get a few seconds of conversation, it
was hoped enough to ID the people speaking. By limiting
the recordings to just a minute or so at the start of the call,
AT&T also hoped to avoid any later accusations that it had
excessively violated its customers’ privacy rights; the phone
company would be able to tell the courts that it had
engaged in the absolute minimum amount of recording
necessary to catch the bad guys.
 Within a day the tape recordings provided Doyle with all
the evidence he needed (“beyond a shadow of a doubt,” he
would later testify) to prove that Hanna was indeed using a
blue box. But for some reason—perhaps a desire to be extra
thorough, perhaps a desire to help his former colleagues at
the FBI, who knows?—Doyle left the tape recorder on
Hanna’s line for about a month. In all, some nine hours of
Hanna’s conversations were recorded, a minute at a time.
 Toward the end of December, Doyle received a subpoena
in the mail commanding him to turn over his tapes to the
federal grand jury in Philadelphia. A few days later, Miami
FBI special agent Bill Heist was handed the case—and the
tapes. He spent hours listening to them. They contained
everything he needed to go after Hanna and Hanna’s
partner, a New York bookie named Nathan Modell. Not only
did the tapes make it clear that Hanna was using a blue
box, Hanna and Modell’s conversations captured on the
tapes also made it clear that they were in the business of
bookmaking and were transmitting wagering information
across state lines. Even though the tapes had less than a
minute of each conversation, the feds believed it to be more
than enough to convict both of them for illegal gambling
activities.
 It was bad timing for Hanna and Modell but great timing
for the feds because the FBI was just putting together a
nationwide list of gamblers to raid that January. The Bureau
planned to arrest bookies where there was evidence to do
so and to execute search warrants to gather intelligence
where there wasn’t; agents hoped they could get grand jury
indictments after the searches. Hanna and Modell were
added to their list, joining an honor roll of about a dozen
others, a list that started with a planned search of the
apartment of Gil Beckley, the government’s most wanted
bookmaker.
 On January 8, 1966, FBI agents executed raids in New
York, Miami, New Orleans, Baltimore, and five other cities.
As Special Agent Heist and four other FBI agents crashed
through the door of the apartment in Miami, Hanna made a
dash for the bathroom. He was arrested moments later
standing over a just-flushed toilet, the most incriminating of
his bookmaking papers presumably making their way
through the sewer system to Biscayne Bay. Still, the FBI
recovered a blue box and other bookmaking paraphernalia
from his apartment. That same morning the FBI arrested
Modell at his hotel room in New York City. Hanna was
charged with 18 USC 1343, Fraud by Wire, and 18 USC
1084, Interstate Transmission of Wagering Information;
Modell, who only received blue box calls from Hanna, was
charged only with Interstate Transmission of Wagering
Information.
 The raids in the other cities went off without a hitch.
According to newspaper reports, FBI agents “used a
chauffeur-driven Cadillac to get into the swank island
apartment of Gilbert Lee Beckley . . . the chauffeur carried
a carton of whiskey and was flanked by two agents
disguised as the donors. Beckley looked through the
peephole, saw the chauffeur, and opened the door.”
Although Beckley was not arrested, FBI agents obtained a
wealth of gambling information. In the words of a Justice
Department attorney in Miami, the operation was “most
successful.”
 Then, just a few months later, in April 1966—and before
Hanna and Modell even had a chance to get to trial—the
phone company handed over to the FBI still more evidence
of bookie blue box fraud. The setup was similar to the
Hanna case in that gamblers and bookies using blue boxes
to make illegal telephone calls were all caught on tape by
the telephone company. The recordings this time were
courtesy of AT&T’s California subsidiary, Pacific Telephone,
and they were of an alleged Los Angeles bookmaker named
Al Bubis speaking with his associates throughout the
country.
 As in the Hanna case, Pacific Telephone had determined
that Bubis was using a blue box. As Southern Bell had done
with Hanna, Pacific Telephone installed a tape recorder on
Bubis’s line. But Pacific Telephone went further than the
telephone companies back east that were involved in
TARCASE. Instead of recording just the first thirty to forty-five
seconds of each call, Pacific Telephone recorded the entire
duration of all of Bubis’s calls, both incoming and outgoing,
from December 20, 1965, to March 24, 1966.
 It was a gold mine for law enforcement: a chance to listen
to three months’ worth of telephone calls between Bubis
and some of the FBI’s most wanted bookies. Based on the
Bubis tapes the FBI made simultaneous raids across the
country on May 25, 1966. Sixteen alleged gamblers and
bookmakers in nine different states were arrested; four
more were sought as fugitives. As always, Gil “the Brain”
Beckley was at the top of the list, and this time it was an
arrest, not a search. Also arrested was Frank “Lefty”
Rosenthal, a charismatic gambler whose career would later
be reprised by Robert De Niro in the 1995 movie Casino.
An FBI press release described the operation as a
“crippling blow to the users of electronic devices designed
to circumvent toll charges on long-distance telephone
calls.”
 The bookies were not going down without a fight. Mob
attorney Ben Cohen represented both Hanna and Modell in
the Florida case as well as Gil Beckley and Henry Loman in
the first California case to reach trial. Cohen was the
brother of Sam Cohen, one of the five founders of Miami’s
notorious S & G Syndicate—the initials were said to stand
for “stop and go,” a reference to the syndicate’s habit of
suspending operations when things got too hot. At its peak,
S & G ran a network of some two hundred bookies in the
Miami area and raked in about $40 million a year.
 Counsel Ben Cohen could switch instantly from smooth
and charming to tough and intimidating. His balding head,
horn-rimmed glasses, stout frame, expensive gabardine
suits, and three-carat diamond pinky ring quickly became
fixtures in Miami courthouses. The Senate’s Kefauver
hearings on organized crime reported in 1951: “Individual
bookmakers understood that they would be arrested from
time to time; that their fines would be paid out of the profits
so that S & G would participate in one-half of the fine if the
bookie did not have it; and that after the fine was paid, the
bookmaking operation could continue unmolested. The
bookmakers were almost always represented by an
attorney named Ben Cohen [. . .] There is concrete
testimony on the record that Ben Cohen appeared on the
scene of gambling raids almost immediately after the police,
and the evidence indicates that S & G had information in
advance about raids which were to be conducted.”
  By 1966 Cohen was an old pro; he had been at the bar for
thirty-eight years and spent much of that time defending
syndicate members. Together he and his young partner,
Miami attorney James Hogan, assembled their blue box
defense strategy. In both cases the key legal issue boiled
down to this: Under what circumstances did the phone
company have the legal right to wiretap your telephone
line? And, when it did wiretap you, what could it do with the
information?
  In 1966 the law of the land on the subject of wiretapping
was Section 605 of Title 47 of the United States Code. It
read, in part: “No person . . . shall intercept any
communication and divulge or publish the existence or
contents of such intercepted communication.”
  This is fascinating wording. Under Section 605, merely
intercepting a phone call is not illegal; it is interception
followed by divulgence that is a crime. In other words,
under Section 605 you could wiretap to your heart’s
content but you couldn’t tell anybody about what you heard.
  As far as Cohen and Hogan were concerned, this was
precisely what the telephone company had done. That is, it
had wiretapped Hanna’s and Bubis’s lines and then
disclosed the results to the government. AT&T had violated
Section 605, plain and simple. And, as such, all of the
government’s tape recordings—the entirety of the
evidence, really—had to be thrown out. As Hogan argued to
the judge in the Hanna case, “We submit that there are no
exceptions to Title 47, Section 605; that we have proved
interception; that we have proved divulgence.” To Hogan, it
was an open-and-shut case in the defense’s favor: the
telephone company’s tapping of Hanna’s line was clearly
illegal.
  Cohen summed it up this way to the judge.
Now, there is no omnipotence to the telephone company as far as I am
concerned. I can’t see them being any greater than any small corporation.
They have no greater standing than the Government. The President of the
United States issued a proclamation that there shall be no wire tapping
except in national emergencies, and he did not add, “with the exception of
the telephone company.” He didn’t add, “if they are being defrauded.” Now,
the telephone company in this case decided there was probable cause. It
was not done by a court of law. It was they who decided there was probable
cause to tap the phone and divulge. The great telephone company decides
what their probable cause is. They decide whether or not they should tap
the phone, and then they send it over to the Federal government. Now,
Section 605 says, No one shall divulge what they hear over a wire . . . they
don’t say, “Nobody but the telephone company.”

  Nonsense, responded the U.S. attorney prosecuting
Hanna. “The telephone company gets the right to monitor
its lines under certain circumstances because it is their
lines . . . it would be shocking and illogical not to permit
them.” And once they’ve monitored and found hanky panky,
they obviously need to be able to tell law enforcement about
it.
What is the telephone company to do with it? Are they not permitted to take
the results of their own independent investigation to law enforcement
officials to see if these things can’t be stopped? People have been
defrauding them of revenues. Are they not to be punished? Are they
permitted merely to monitor the line and determine that Mr. Hanna has, in
fact, a blue box on there and he is defrauding them out of $500 or $1,000
of revenue per month and do nothing about it? Do they not have the right
to seek whatever steps they deem appropriate in order to correct this
situation?

 The U.S. attorney in the Hanna case had another card up
his sleeve: a Supreme Court case called United States v.
Sugden. In the Sugden case the bad guys used radios while
they were committing a crime. The government overheard
them on the radio and presented recordings of their radio
transmissions as evidence against them in court. The
defendants claimed that this evidence was illegally obtained
under Section 605; as in the Hanna case, they argued that
the government had illegally intercepted and divulged the
contents of their communications and thus the recordings
couldn’t be used as evidence. The government countered
that Section 605 didn’t apply because the defendants did
not have a license to use their radios, that they were on the
air illegally. The government claimed that if you’re using a
communications facility illegally—just like Hanna was, for
example, when he was using his blue box to make free
phone calls—then Section 605 didn’t apply. In other words,
your right to privacy evaporates when you’re on the line
illegally. The Supreme Court agreed.
  The blue box bookies lost both cases. Out in California,
Bubis was convicted in August 1966, fined $2,000, and
given a one-year suspended sentence. Loman, his
codefendant, was acquitted. Beckley, the bookie the
government had been after for so long, escaped on the
thinnest of technicalities: the grand jury indictment against
him had neglected to include the word willfully in a key
sentence. In Florida, Hanna and Modell were both
convicted on December 2, 1966, and sentenced to six
months in prison and five years’ probation. Hanna was also
fined $10,000.
  All three appealed.
  Hanna and Modell’s appeal focused mainly on suppressing
the government’s tape recordings. It hammered home the
idea that Section 605 does apply to telephone companies,
that is, that there is no special right that the telephone
company has to monitor its lines. But it also alleged that the
government was in bed with the phone company to
improperly gather evidence on bookmaking. In California,
Bubis’s attorney argued that the telephone company had
gone nuts. First, he said, the telephone company had
disclosed to the feds that Bubis’s telephone calls “sounded
like gambling” before any subpoena had been issued to
them—a clear violation of Section 605. Second, the
telephone company had recorded not just a few minutes of
Bubis’s calls but all of them—a gross violation of Bubis’s
rights.
  On October 20, 1967, California’s Ninth Circuit Court of
Appeals derailed AT&T and the Justice Department’s
winning streak. By listening to all of Bubis’s calls over a
period of months the phone company had greatly
overreached, the appeals court said, and reversed Bubis’s
conviction. As the three-justice panel wrote:
While we realize the result we have just reached means that the appellant
will go unwhipped of justice, nevertheless, we reach the result on the
ground that that fact is less important than that the telephone company
should not resort to unreasonable and unnecessary practices which we
deem contrary to the provisions of Section 605.

 This was the first loss for the government and the phone
company on the subject of blue boxes. And, of course, the
Hanna case was still up on appeal. In fact, both sides in
Hanna had just presented oral arguments to the Fifth
Circuit Court of Appeals in Florida. Seeing this as either a
great opportunity or a terrible threat, Hanna and the
government both rushed to file supplemental briefs with
the Fifth Circuit to persuade it that the Ninth Circuit was
right, or had lost its marbles, depending on which side was
doing the persuading.
 Six months later, on March 5, 1968, the Fifth Circuit Court
of Appeals in Florida borrowed some poetic phraseology
from its Ninth Circuit brethren in California and handed the
government its second loss.
Congress may have thought it less important that some offenders should go
unwhipped of justice (and that the telephone company lose some long
distance tolls) than that officers (or telephone company employees) should
resort to methods deemed inconsistent with ethical standards and
destructive of personal liberty.
 Yet the court’s decision was strange. Although the appeals
court did direct the lower court to reverse its findings, each
judge wrote his own opinion on the case. Far from being
unanimous, it was a one-one-one split: the senior judge
sided with defendants Hanna and Modell, the second judge
sided with the government, and a third judge took the
position that while the telephone company might have the
right to monitor illegal calls, it did not have the right to
disclose the results of monitoring to law enforcement.
 Faced with two reversals and a crumbling legal strategy,
the government threw a Hail Mary pass: it petitioned for a
rehearing, a legal move that almost never works. It
emphasized that the court of appeals’ ruling left the
government and the telephone company at a loss for legal
guidance going forward. It pointed out that of all the judges
in the Fifth Circuit who had considered blue box cases to
date, only one of them (the senior judge in the three-judge
panel) felt that telephone company tape recordings were
inadmissible. Moreover, the government argued, the Fifth
Circuit Court of Appeals had neglected even to consider the
Sugden case, the only relevant Supreme Court case in the
matter.
 Astonishingly, the appeals court agreed to rehear the case.
 It was time to pull out all the stops. Bill Caming, AT&T’s
attorney, filed a detailed twenty-two-page “friend of the
court” brief that took apart the Fifth Circuit decision piece
by piece. He argued that illegally placed calls cannot enjoy
the protection of Section 605, that there was no reasonable
way to gather evidence in these cases other than by
recording the calls, and that electronic toll fraud was a
large and growing problem for the telephone industry.
Caming elaborated in grim detail on this last point.
Within the past few years the use of electronic toll fraud devices, which are
relatively inexpensive to make, has grown at a disturbing rate. We estimate
that blue boxes can be mass-produced at a cost of about $25 to $50 per
unit, and “black boxes” at a cost of $1.00 or less per unit. Experience has
shown these devices have a unique appeal to the criminal element. It
enables them not only to evade the payment of lawful telephone charges,
but also to falsify or avoid completely any record of the communications
made in furtherance of their various illicit operations. [.   . .]
We can only conjecture at the full scale of the substantial revenue losses
sustained by the telephone industry and its ratepayers. Nonetheless, if the
Court deem it desirable, we are prepared to show that since 1961 over 130
blue boxes, over 300 black boxes, and many “cheese boxes” have been
seized. Some 224 different individuals were implicated. As in many criminal
areas where detection is difficult, the instances of electronic toll fraud
unearthed by the telephone companies represent merely that portion of the
iceberg visible to the eye. [.   . .]
The virtually unchecked use of toll fraud devices which could ensue if the
threat of federal prosecution is removed would impose an unwarranted
financial burden on the telephone industry and its honest customers. The
latter would be required to underwrite the entire cost of these
depredations.

 On November 18, 1968, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals
did something even more rare than granting a rehearing: it
reversed itself. In a judicial mea culpa the court’s opinion
stated:
On original hearing, Judge Rives wrote what was intended to become the
opinion of the Court. Judge Gobold concurred specially, and Judge Hughes
dissented. On further consideration, it appears that Judge Rives’ original
opinion is in error both as to the facts and as to the law.

  The court summarized where it went wrong—quoting
liberally from Caming’s brief—and concluded with the
sentence: “The judgments of conviction of both Hanna and
Modell are therefore affirmed.”
  The Hail Mary had worked. Caming recalls, “Outside of an
opening salutation by the court, they adopted the nine
pages or so of my brief as their opinion, not even
mentioning that it was from my brief. That is the first and
only time that ever happened to me. I couldn’t believe it!”
  Hanna and Modell must have figured that, if it worked for
the prosecution, it could work for them. Two weeks later
they filed a petition for a second rehearing. This time the
court said no, so they appealed to the Supreme Court. On
May 5, 1969, the Supreme Court declined to hear their
case. More than three years after the FBI took a
sledgehammer to Ken Hanna’s door, the issue was finally
settled. If you were making illegal calls you had no right to
privacy. The phone company could tap your line and turn
the recordings over to law enforcement.
 For the phone company, the victory was about much more
than convicting Hanna or Bubis. AT&T now had a case that
had gone all the way to the Supreme Court, one that
proved, definitively, that 18 USC 1343—the Fraud by Wire
law that the Justice Department had believed wasn’t
relevant—did apply to blue boxes. Thanks to Hanna’s failed
appeal, the matter was now settled. AT&T finally had an
arrow in its quiver to use against the fraudsters.
Throughout all of this legal drama one mystery remains:
how had the telephone company found out about Hanna’s
or Bubis’s blue box calls in the first place?
  In the Hanna case, Miami telephone company security
agent Jerry Doyle received a telephone call from the
Internal Audit and Security Group at AT&T headquarters in
New York asking him to investigate Hanna’s telephone line
for a possible blue box. How did investigators in New York
know that somebody in Miami was making illegal calls?
Hanna’s attorneys asked Doyle this very question but Doyle
said he didn’t know.
  There was a one-word answer that nobody was giving:
Greenstar.
  Hanna had been caught up in AT&T’s toll fraud
surveillance network. Imagine what would have happened if
this had come out during Hanna’s trial. After all, the Hanna
case took almost four years to resolve and went to the
Supreme Court based on tape recordings of each of his
illegal calls. Think of the legal circus that would have
ensued if Hanna’s defense attorneys had learned that the
telephone company had been randomly monitoring millions
of telephone calls nationwide and recording hundreds of
thousands of them.
 This added considerably to the stress of prosecuting
Greenstar cases. AT&T attorney Caming recalls, “That was
the problem in the Hanna case! Fortunately, defense
counsel never probed too far as to what our original
sources of information were.” With blue box prosecutions,
he adds, “We were always on pins and needles as to what
might spill over into the public press.”
 Fortunately for AT&T in the Hanna and Bubis cases their
luck held. And although Caming wasn’t a gambler or a
bookmaker, he knew a thing or two about luck. In
particular, he knew it didn’t last forever.
                           Nine

    LITTLE JOJO LEARNS TO
           WHISTLE

“HANG UP THE   phone and leave it alone!”
 Joe was about four years old when his mother first shouted
that phrase at him; it was a shout he would hear again and
again as he grew up. His mother could be forgiven for
raising her voice. She tried to be supportive, she really did,
but sometimes her son’s obsession with the telephone was
just a little much for her. And besides, the shout didn’t
work. Joe soon turned the phrase into a little song, one he
would sing over and over again to himself in a quiet, lilting
voice: “Hang up the phone and leave it alone, hang up the
phone and leave it alone . . .”
 Joe was born in 1949. His given name was Josef Carl
Engressia Jr. but his family called him Jojo. His mom, Esther,
stayed at home and took care of Jojo and his sister, Toni.
Dad—Joe Sr.—was a high school year book photographer.
Though they struggled financially, they lived in a small but
serviceable apartment in Richmond, Virginia. They had a
car. They had a dog. In many ways the Engressias appeared
to be a stereotypical postwar baby boom family.
 But, as we know, appearances can be deceiving.
 First there was the blindness. Joe was born blind, as was
his sister. The doctors didn’t know what caused it for either
of them. It cannot have been an easy thing for Esther and
Joe Sr. having two blind children. Any parent will tell you
that having kids isn’t easy. Having two blind kids is much
harder, the sort of harder that make for stress, for anger,
for fighting. “I won’t lie to you,” says Toni. “Our parents
fought a lot.”
 Then there was the incandescence of little Joe’s mind.
When he was three Jojo would pester the adults to read
aloud to him. Before long, he wanted them not just to read
to him but to tell him how the words were spelled. Soon
after that, he wanted the adults just to read the letters to
him—he would piece the letters together and form them
into words and sentences, handling the work of “reading”
himself. “Before I was four I knew how to be read to with
people spelling the words,” he said. “So when I learned
Braille I already knew how to read and learned in only a
month or two.”
 Jojo didn’t have much use for playtime. “I didn’t like play,”
he said. “I told the kindergarten teacher, ‘play stinks!’”
Instead of play, “I wanted people to read to me by spelling
the words.”
 Then there were the obsessions—many, many obsessions.
Young Josef was famous for them. Shower curtains were
one; he loved the sound that a plastic shower curtain made
as it swished back and forth on itself. Jell-O was another.
Jojo constantly asked his mom to make him a pot of Jell-O,
saying repeatedly, “When is the Jell-O going to jell?” Then
there was his fascination with brassieres. His sister recalls,
“It was all I could do to keep him from going outside with
Mother’s bra wrapped around his head.”
 The greatest of his obsessions was the telephone. It
started around the same time as he learned to read. “I used
to ask what time it was, all the time, so Mother started
dialing it on the phone. It entranced me, how I could hear
another voice like that.” The phone company used to offer a
free recording you could dial that would tell you the correct
time; in Joe’s area that number was 737. Tired of dialing it
for her son, Esther Engressia stuck pieces of tape on the 7
and the 3. Joe could run his fingers over the cool metal dial
of their rotary phone, his fingers seeking the roughness of
the bits of tape. With this, Joe could dial the time himself.
Joe would dial 737 constantly, just to listen to the voice. One
day Joe noticed that the 3 was three holes away from the
dial stop and 7 was seven holes away. “I thought, well, if 3 is
3 away and 7 is 7 away, maybe 2 is 2 away and 4 is 4 away,
and all that.” Joe dialed a number at random, remembering
the digits as he dialed. He heard a ringing signal. A
woman’s voice answered. “I asked, ‘Is this 439011?’ And
she said yes, what do you want? And I said, ‘Oh boy, I just
learned how to dial!’”
 Play in the real world might stink, but play in the world of
the telephone was fantastic. The phone had interesting
things to listen to. It even had people who would talk to
him! And it was challenging: it made the ganglia twitch
inside little Joe’s mind. It was more than a playground, it
was a laboratory, a place where a little kid could try things
out and where he could conduct as many experiments as he
wanted. It was a world of possibility, a world prefaced with
that most intoxicating of words: if.
 “The way I learned [how to dial] sort of characterizes the
way I’ve learned about telephone systems all my life,” he
said later. “You make a theory . . . you think something.”
Then he’d try it out. He’d perform an experiment. “Had that
not worked I would have either had to make another theory
or see why that wouldn’t work,” he says. Not simply trial
and error but guided trial and error. Although Jojo didn’t
know it at the time, the adults had a name for this. They
called it the scientific method. Years later, Nobel Prize–
winning physicist Richard Feynman would write, “The
principle of science, the definition, almost, is the following:
the test of all knowledge is experiment.”
 For Joe the telephone was much more than just an
intellectual playground. It was a warm electronic bosom, a
source of comfort. It was never too busy to spend time with
him. It was never moody. It didn’t fight with anybody.
“Through the years the phone has provided me so much,”
Joe said. “It was like a friend and companion to me.” His
sister recalls that he would sometimes just pick up the
phone and listen to the dial tone, its warm drone drowning
out the angry voices of his arguing parents, arguments that
sometimes wound up with Esther in the emergency room.
“Most people take the little old telephone for granted, but
to me, it was like magic,” he recalled. “I couldn’t even
describe how important it was sometimes.”
 The sounds, the electronic playground, the people to talk
to, a welcoming place that he could escape to—he was
hooked. He remembers, “I was not quite four years old. I
was crawling around the floor, running phone wire. The
phone man had given me a big long piece of phone wire.
Mother wouldn’t let me run it on the wall anymore with the
modeling clay, it made marks and stuff. I was humming, ‘I’m
a telephone man forever, I’m a telephone man forever,’ and
just kind of singing it to myself in the tuneless way of a
three-year-old, and thinking about it, pretending I was
driving the phone truck and all that. I told Mother that. I
kind of credit that time to when I first really remember
saying it out loud, that I was a telephone man.”
 His mother wasn’t thrilled with the news. “She hoped that
I would get over phones someday,” he says. Still, she did her
best to support her son. Joe amassed a collection of
technical books and articles about the telephone system,
documents he would ask his mother to read to him. “She
hated phones, and she kind of hated to do it, but she did it
anyway,” he says.
 He recalls, “We met a phone man and he gave us some
books and Mother was reading to me about #5 crossbar”—
the electromechanical telephone switch system that was a
workhorse of local phone service. “It was a big thick book
from 1955 called something like The #5 Crossbar Job,” he
says. “That was one of my first big, hard books.” When a
telephone man visited their house to install a telephone, Joe
confided how much he was struggling to understand the
book, how frustrating it was. He said, “I can’t quite
understand this #5 crossbar, I’m just stupid, it makes me
want to cry.” The telephone repair man responded, “There’s
guys who’ve been [at the phone company] twenty, thirty
years who can’t understand #5 crossbar!”
 The Engressias moved a lot when Joe was growing up,
from Richmond, Virginia, up to Saugus, Massachusetts,
then back down to Florida: Fort Lauderdale, Pompano
Beach, and finally Miami. (“Daddy hated the snow,” says
Toni.) Each new place exposed Joe to new telephones and
new telephone switching systems. He was constantly on the
phone in each new place, listening to the sounds and
learning how things worked. One of his techniques was to
call the technicians in the telephone company central office
and ask them questions.
 “I called up when I was almost eight years old and asked,
what levels on your selectors are digit absorbing ones and
which ones are absorbing repeatedly?” he remembers.
(Levels and digit absorbing selectors are esoterica related
to the old step-by-step switching system; you are forgiven if
you do not have these terms close at hand.) “The guy said,
‘Who is this, ma’am?’” Joe responded in his little kid’s voice,
“I’m not a ma’am, I’m Joe, and I’m nearly eight years old!”
Joe got himself a tour of the telephone central office and a
trip to a football game from the delighted switchman. “I
learned a whole lot [from that trip],” he remembered. In
fact, he was thinking so hard about what he learned that
day that he was silent during the entire drive home—an
event so unusual that his mother teased him about it later.
 Although he didn’t know it at the time—and wouldn’t for
ten more years—two of his telephonic discoveries would
turn out to be pivotal, both to him and to a generation of
phone phreaks.
 The first of these was learning how to dial with the hook
switch, the little switch that hangs up the phone when you
put the handset back in its cradle. “I remember I used to
hear the clicking of the dial. You could hear the clickings of
the dial way in the background . . . When I hung up I could
hear this tiny click in the background. I remember thinking,
I wonder if the dial is the same as the receiver click, they
both click. Maybe the dial is just faster clicks than the
receiver button. . . . I thought about it and I said, if the hook
switch and the dial are the same, then I should be able to
hang up with the dial, and dial with the hook switch. It
seemed impossible. But what if I did the hook switch real
fast? And sure enough, I was able to dial.” He went for his
old standby, the 737 time number. Pressing and releasing
the hook switch button, “I actually counted 7, and the 3, I
had to do it a couple of times. But finally I actually got the
time with the hook button.” Joe had discovered that dialing
a digit on a rotary phone is just like pressing the hook
switch rapidly and repeatedly. Want to dial a 7? Press and
release the hook switch 7 times in a row. (This still works on
phones today, by the way; you can confirm the results of
Joe’s experiment yourself with most any landline
telephone.)
 Joe was far from the first person to discover that you could
dial with the hook switch. But it tied into his second
discovery, one that would become the basis for his future
nickname. “I was seven or eight years old and I was sitting
on a long-distance circuit, and I heard the background hum
of the tone that controls it . . . I started whistling along with
it and all of a sudden the circuit cut off!” How odd! “I did it
again and it cut off again.” Fascinated, Joe started playing
around with this magic tone. He found he could consistently
disconnect long-distance calls by whistling that tone—
seventh octave E. At the time he wasn’t quite sure why it
worked, or even what exactly it was good for, but he recalls
it had great potential for pranks. “[Mother and I] were
walking one time and there was some guy on a pay phone
and I just thought, in case it was long distance, I just
whistled, it was when I could whistle really loud then, and
we were like ten feet away, and he was going, Hello? Hello?
And I said, I wonder why he’s saying that? And Mother said,
I think he got cut off. She didn’t know about the whistling at
that time. It was just amazing, that tone.”
 Joe didn’t have many friends growing up, perhaps not
surprising given his brightness and his very specific
interests. When he was in the sixth grade he met another
blind kid, Tandy Way, who shared his interests in
technology, even including telephones. But, says Joe, Tandy
“knew less than I did,” and Engressia wasn’t really able to
learn anything from him.
 Engressia got his ham radio license a year before he
started high school in 1963. But phones remained his first
love. Ham radio was “never as important as phones,” he
says, and, as for high school, “I never got into, like, dating
or proms.” He adds, “I’d much rather have a date with the
pay phone than some girl or guy or anything.” True to form,
he says, his high school yearbook featured a photo of him in
the school phone booth. “During breaks between classes
that’s where I’d always hang out,” he said.
 When Engressia was in tenth grade the unthinkable
happened: a financial rough spot necessitated the removal
of his home telephone. The high school pay phone booth
became more important to him than he had anticipated. Joe
began saving up money from his allowance to get his
family’s phone reinstalled. “I got $2.50 a week lunch money
and I did without lunch twice a week for nearly two years
and saved up $1 at a time,” he said. “Back in twelfth grade I
called up and got the phone installed.” It was, he said, the
only day he missed school in his whole senior year, but
somebody had to be home to let the telephone installer in.
“My parents decided that if I had that much persistence
then they’d pay for it.”
 After high school Engressia began taking classes at Dade
County Junior College. Then, in the fall of 1968, he
transferred to the University of South Florida in Tampa. He
lived in Beta Hall, one of the dorms on campus. A little over
a month into his first semester Engressia mentioned to
some other students that he could whistle free long-
distance calls. Yeah, right, was the response. Faced with
such disbelief, Engressia responded with words that would
change his life: “I can whistle like a bird and get any
number you want anywhere. I’ll bet you a dollar I can.”
  Now then, some guy offers to bet you that he can whistle
you a free long-distance call, using just his lips and nothing
else, it’s a sure thing, right? A dollar was wagered.
Whistling ensued. Engressia emerged slightly richer, his
fellow students with egg on their faces. At least they got a
phone call in the bargain.
  Engressia’s whistling trick combined two of the things he
had learned ten years earlier: hook switch dialing and
whistling to disconnect a call. Engressia knew that if he
whistled seventh octave E, that is, 2,600 cycles per second,
he could disconnect a long-distance phone call. But then
what? Engressia figured out that by whistling short bursts
of 2,600 Hz he could mimic the telephone company’s single-
frequency (SF) dialing system, just like Ralph Barclay had
figured out in 1961. To dial the area code 212, for example,
Engressia would whistle two quick bursts of 2,600, followed
by one quick burst, followed by two more quick bursts: beep
beep . . . beep . . . beep beep! So the entire dance went like
this. First, dial a call to a free long-distance number, such as
directory assistance. Then give one long whistle to reset the
long-distance trunk. Then whistle the pulses that made up
the ten-digit phone number, one digit—one pulse—at a
time. It was simply the whistling equivalent of the hook
switch dialing he had learned as a little kid.
  The trick gained him popularity. “The guys in the
dormitory were calling me ‘The Whistler.’ Crowds of up to
forty people would follow me around,” he said. The students
“begged me to make the calls.” Engressia obliged, charging
$1 for a whistled long-distance call to anywhere in the
United States. Though it’s not quite a free call at that point,
Engressia’s rates were still a bargain compared to AT&T’s,
which were then about $2.60 for a five-minute cross-
country call—roughly $17 today.
 While attempting to whistle a call to Long Island, New
York, he “whistled wrong” and wound up connected to an
operator in Montreal, Canada. This was an easy mistake to
make. Long Island is area code 516, Montreal is area code
514; screw up by just two little beeps and you wind up two
hundred miles north. Nonetheless, Engressia managed to
convince the operator to connect him to the New York
number. But the operator “was suspicious and monitored
the call. Naturally the student I put the call through for
talked extensively about the ‘whiz kid’ who had placed his
free call,” he said. “The operator broke in and managed to
get the student to identify himself and where he was calling
from.”
 An investigation ensued. Word eventually made it back
from Bell Canada in Montreal to General Telephone, the
independent telephone company in the Tampa area. GTE
contacted the university, trying to identify the source of the
whistled calls. Engressia was fingered. His sudden
popularity came to an equally sudden end.
 Despite having a crime and a culprit, GTE sensed a
potential publicity black eye. As a security officer for the
company wisely put it, the firm had nothing to gain by
prosecuting a blind college student. Meanwhile, another
GTE spokesman used the incident to pioneer what would
become a standard response by the telephone company—
and, years later, by high-tech software companies—when
presented with claims of security vulnerabilities in their
products and services: disbelief and denial. “It could
happen—but did it really?” the spokesman said. “It would
take a lot of sophisticated equipment and even then the
probability of being able to do this is remote.” Whether this
was genuine ignorance, willful disbelief, or just a bit of
misdirection to discourage would-be imitators is unclear.
  As punishment for his crimes of whistling free telephone
calls the USF dean of student affairs told Engressia that he
would be “allowed to withdraw” for the rest of the term. If
Engressia didn’t want to withdraw, the dean said, he would
be suspended. Engressia declined the dean’s offer. “I didn’t
want to sacrifice all the course work I had done already this
quarter,” he said, and noted that his grade point average
was between an A and a B.
  Engressia was suspended from the University of South
Florida on November 15, 1968. He appealed the decision
soon after. Engressia’s sister Toni was in her last year of
high school in Miami when the USF whistling scandal
occurred. She recalls coming home one day and being told
by her mother, “Your brother has been doing something
illegal with the phone. They say he’s been whistling into the
phone and making long-distance calls.” Her mother
explained about the dean’s decision and Joe’s appeal and
said that they needed to go to Tampa to be with Joe. Toni,
her high school boyfriend, and Esther made the five-hour
drive, leaving Engressia’s father home with his jobs and the
family’s dogs. Asked by a reporter what she thought of her
son’s telephone antics, Esther Engressia responded, “We’re
going to stick right by him. Anyone who can outsmart a
computer—I’m with them.”
  On December 10, Engressia presented his case at a two-
hour public hearing before the university’s nine-member
disciplinary appeals board, where he told his story with the
help of a student advocate. He noted that he had stopped
making the free calls on his own initiative. “It was a mistake
and I’m sorry I did it,” he said, “but not because I got
caught. My action was totally irresponsible and it shouldn’t
be condoned, but I don’t think I should be penalized for a
first offense so severely that it practically cuts off my
education.”
 The appeals board handed down its decision the next day.
Engressia would be allowed to remain in school but would
be placed on probation. The board also ordered him to
donate $25—the amount he said he had made whistling
calls at $1 apiece—to a worthy cause.
 “I think the verdict was very favorable,” Engressia told
newspapers afterward. “I’m happy that I can stay in
school.”
 Engressia’s whistling scandal had another positive
outcome. Shortly after his suspension back in November
the press had gotten wind of things. It started when the
Oracle, the USF student newspaper, did a story on him,
Engressia recalls, “and then the AP or something picked it
up, and then it was on the Huntley-Brinkley network news
show.” Indeed, the AP newswire story was covered in
dozens of papers throughout the world. Calls began
pouring in for him. ”It was sort of exciting, people calling
from Australia and all these places to talk with the
Whistler,” he remembers. The attention amazed and
delighted him; it was a far cry from his mother’s familiar
shout of “Hang up the phone and leave it alone!” Of the
publicity he says, “At that age I had never even thought of
that, ’cause the phone was always something . . . oh, you
know, ‘talking about stupid phones all the time.’ But people
were actually excited about what I could do!”
 Soon after the burst of media attention, Engressia
received a letter in the mail with a Kansas City postmark.
The writer had seen Engressia on the Huntley-Brinkley
television show and wanted to introduce himself. Like
Engressia, he was a ham operator and telephone
enthusiast. Might they talk by phone, or make contact via
amateur radio, and discuss certain items of mutual
interest?
 It was Engressia’s introduction to B. David, the mysterious
correspondent Jake Locke had met via the Fine Arts 13
classified ad at Harvard a year and a half earlier. Over the
next year Engressia and B. David discussed all manner of
things related to the telephone. By April 1969, just four
months after his disciplinary hearing at USF, Engressia was
back to his telephonic games; this time he had tricked a
switchman in a Miami telephone central office into wiring
up a pair of telephone lines to form what was called an
open-sleeve-lead conference. Essentially a cross between a
cheese box and a black box, this circuit allowed two people
to call into it and talk to each other without being billed.
Engressia and B. David used this circuit to stay in touch
between Miami and Kansas City, but they weren’t its only
users. A suspicious Southern Bell employee who discovered
the setup and listened to the calls on it found “a good deal
of discussion that students at the University of South
Florida were being supplied pairs of numbers which would
allow toll free conversations.” Additional investigation
revealed similar circuits had been set up in Orlando and
other cities. The telephone company quietly removed them
from service.
 Then, on August 27, 1969, the telephone cord hit the fan.
A Southwestern Bell security agent working a blue box case
up in Kansas City discovered something alarming and called
the FBI. Though he wouldn’t tell Bureau agents how he had
learned of it, he said that “B. David and Engressia have,
through sophisticated electronic equipment, intercepted
and monitored telephone toll calls.” More disturbingly, he
said, the two had also discovered a way to intercept calls on
a “highly classified, Top Secret telephone system used only
by the White House.” He reported two other people in
connection with this caper: an employee of United Airlines
in Chicago and a young blind man named Tandy Way—Joe
Engressia’s sixth-grade pal down in Miami.
 A flurry of urgent investigation ensued. FBI agents were
dispatched to meet with Southern Bell telephone security in
Miami and interview Engressia, B. David, and Tandy Way. It
was a tempest in a teapot, said Miami telephone company
investigators. Yes, they obviously knew of Engressia and
had been following his and Tandy Way’s activities for the
past year or so, but basically they were considered to be
harmless pests. Their investigation had not revealed that
the two had intercepted any telephone calls or wiretapped
any lines, civilian or military, and that “the activities of
Engressia and Way have been strictly for their own
amusement and harassment of the telephone company.” For
their parts, Engressia, Way, and David all told the FBI, in
essence, that yes, they were fascinated with telephones but,
no, they hadn’t done anything wrong, and they certainly
hadn’t intercepted any calls and didn’t know nuthin’ ’bout
no top secret White House telephone system. FBI
headquarters called a halt to the investigation, but not
before sending off posterior-covering letters to the White
House, the secretary of defense, and the head of the Secret
Service to let them know that their communications
systems were alleged to be vulnerable. A few days later an
attorney at the Justice Department blessed the FBI’s stand-
down: there was “not a sufficient indication of a violation
under the Interception of Communications Statute to justify
investigation,” he said.
 Engressia and company had gotten lucky; cooler heads
had prevailed and decided this was all much ado about
nothing. B. David, however, was not one to leave well
enough alone. After his visit from the FBI, he concluded
that the telephone company must have been illegally
monitoring his conversations with Joe Engressia. In fact, he
believed that the FBI agents had confirmed this during
their interview with him. He proceeded to write an
audacious two-page letter to the Kansas City FBI office
citing chapter and verse of the Communications Act of 1934
and demanding that the Bureau turn the tables and
investigate the telephone company for illegal wiretapping.
It is unclear if the FBI ever gave David the courtesy of a
response, but an internal FBI memo stated that B. David “is
believed to be totally unreliable and his allegations are
unfounded.”
Despite his upbeat quotes to the press after his whistling
incident was resolved, Engressia remembers his years at
USF as far from happy. Partly this was a lack of focus. “I
wasn’t really sure why I was in college,” he says. Engressia
drifted from one major to another—business administration,
mathematics, electrical engineering. “I didn’t really know
why I had come, except that was just the next step that you
do. I hadn’t really thought it through at the time, what I
wanted.”
 The bigger part of his unhappiness was simply this: he was
lonely. Thanks to the publicity surrounding his whistling
escapades he had started getting calls from other phone
phreaks in addition to B. David. “That was the first glimpse
that there were even other people in the world interested
in phones,” he says. But now, even though he finally knew
there were others like him out there, he couldn’t talk to
them—at least not on any regular basis. “In college I didn’t
have a phone where I could dial out direct,” he remembers;
students in the dorms weren’t allowed to have their own
telephone lines. For most this would be a minor
inconvenience, but for Engressia it cut him off from the one
thing that had provided him with years of comfort—and the
thing that now promised to connect him to other people like
him. His phone phreak fixes had to come from quick calls on
the dorm pay phone, occasional trips home on weekends,
and summer vacation.
 “I did get on the phone some in college but I didn’t have
much money to speak of, $40 a month I think it was, of
spending money where they gave me a state scholarship for
the blind. It would be $6 to town for cab fare, so I didn’t get
out much,” he recalls. “I might have stayed in college if I
could have had the contacts, you know, on the phone and
everything,” he says. But as it was, he says, “I was so
lonesome and depressed there, in college. It was just one of
my sad times.”
 Engressia quit school and left USF about a year short of
his degree, moving to Memphis, Tennessee, in March 1971.
“When I left for Memphis, that was when my life started,”
he says.
 He was determined to have his own apartment, one with
his own phone, where he’d be able talk to other phone
phreaks as much as he wanted. Too, he was tired of living
off of his state aid-to-the-blind check. He wanted to be
independent, to have a job, to be part of society—to “be a
man,” as he put it.
 The apartment was easy. The job was harder. He applied at
dozens of places, “as a switchboard operator, or just about
anything, really.” He heard one word a whole lot: no. The
word wasn’t always one syllable with two letters, n-o. “It
came in a lot of forms,” he said, but it always spelled the
same thing in the end. We don’t think it would be safe for
you to work at our company, you might bump into a ladder
and hurt yourself. We don’t see how you could possibly be a
switchboard operator—how would you dial?
 The weeks slipped by. The Nos wore on him. “I got
desperate,” he said, “$97-per-month welfare wasn’t
providing me a decent standard of living . . . I had heard
that when you live on welfare you live on beans and baloney.
Well, I went down to the grocery store and, you know, beans
and baloney aren’t so cheap anymore!”
 Desperation is the mother of invention. Engressia invented
a plan that can only be described as crazy: “I decided that
since I had come so close to getting a job down in Florida by
getting arrested—which was a mistake on my part, to have
gotten caught, at that time—I decided to actually plan to
get caught.” He would engineer his own bust by the
telephone company and use the resulting publicity to get a
job. “I called it my great gamble. I knew it would either pay
off or I’d fail.”
 Engressia set upon his task with urgency. “This was in late
April and I only had money to last me until the end of July,”
he said. “I was running out of money and I needed to do
something.” Worse, much of his great gamble was out of his
control. What if the phone company didn’t do anything or
took too long to do it? “I didn’t want them to wait too long,
either.”
 He called the telephone company and reported troubles
with his line. He knew this would prompt somebody at the
telephone company’s test board to connect to his line to test
it for problems. When he heard what he described as the
“subtle impedance change” indicating that a test man was
on the line, he began narrating a series of telephonic tricks
for the benefit of his invisible audience. “I just said, ‘Oh, I’m
going to call Russia now.’” Calling through a satellite circuit,
“I whistled up the U.S. embassy in Moscow and talked for
about two hours pretending I was a talk show host and [the
embassy operator] was a talk show [guest]. They heard that
and then I made a couple of other free calls and gave my
phone number and then used the blue box after it,” he said.
“Then,” he said, “I called this place called NORAD
headquarters, something to do with the military, and I
called it on a priority circuit. For some reason it rubbed
them the wrong way.”
 After the first evening Engressia felt sure that the phone
company would soon wiretap his line. He hinted cryptically
at his plan to get a job by getting arrested as he talked to
his eavesdroppers: “I have only to July, so I must fly. Don’t
sit home and sob, blue box and get a job.” He performed
more stunts to impress the telephone company. “I
remember one time they were playing around with my line
and they cut the current off and the phone wouldn’t work.
So I hooked up a 30-watt amplifier and a microphone,” he
recalled. This he used to transmit his voice into the
malfunctioning telephone line, betting that technicians in
the telephone company central office or test board would
be listening. “I wonder if a blind person himself could really
hook up an amplifier in the dark all by himself?” he said into
the phone line.
 Engressia figured that, thanks to his attention-getting
tricks, the phone company was probably now wiretapping
his line on a continual basis. But he couldn’t know for sure.
And so, he said, “I hooked up a circuit so I could monitor
the line while it was still on the hook.” With this circuitry in
place he could leave his phone hung up and yet still hear
what the telephone company was up to as his line was being
worked on. He quickly determined that the phone company
was indeed monitoring him. Best of all, the phone
company’s monitoring circuit inadvertently worked both
ways. “Their voice was leaking through the monitor that
they had. I could hear them talking! They said, ‘Did you
hear what they said? He said something about hooking up a
microphone!’
 “In a sense I was tapping the tappers,” Engressia gleefully
recalled. “That made me feel good because I knew my plan
was under way,” he said. “I’m counting the days to my first
paycheck.”
The telephone company later admitted that it began
investigating Engressia when he’d first reported troubles
with his telephone line. A few weeks later they sent an
undercover security agent posing as a magazine reporter to
interview Engressia at his apartment in Memphis. The
agent was “freely shown how the whistle calls were placed
and the equipment in the young man’s possession.”
 On June 2, 1971, as he was waiting on the sidewalk for a
cab, a deep voice of someone nearby asked him if he was
Joe Engressia. He said that he was. The voice replied,
“You’re under arrest.”
 He spent the night in jail. “I was gonna call some
newspapers but two of them came to the jail, and then a TV
network came to interview me the next day.” His publicity
plan seemed to be working but, even so, the experience of
going to jail was unnerving. Everything might go perfectly
or he just might end up stuck in jail. “You talk about a
combination of emotions,” he said. “I was happy, sad,
excited, scared, nervous, everything imaginable lumped
into one.”
 When the police searched Engressia’s place that evening
they found “complex telephone equipment devised by
Engressia in his tiny apartment. It included pushbutton
gadgets that could be programmed to transfer calls to
neighbors’ telephones.”
 Arraigned before Judge Ray Churchill of the Memphis City
Court, Engressia was charged with two counts of fraud for
making free calls. Despite entering an innocent plea to the
charges, he told the court, “I’ve done wrong and the
telephone company has every right to prosecute me.” He
added that he was “just fascinated with phones.” Judge
Churchill released him on $1 bail and ordered the trial
continued until the next week.
 “Some folks are on dope, I was on telephones,” Engressia
told reporters after his arrest. “I knew it would get me into
trouble, but when I got lonely I would reach for the phone
and it would be there.”
 Judge Churchill called Engressia’s trial to order on June 8.
Things did not go swimmingly for the prosecution. A
telephone company security agent in court played a tape of
some of Engressia’s phone calls for the judge, Engressia
recalls. During one of the calls an operator asked Engressia
for his telephone number. “The operator would say ‘number
please’ and I said 526-6156,” Engressia remembers. Judge
Churchill asked whose number that was. The telephone
company security agents responded that, in fact, 526-6156
was Engressia’s telephone number.
 Judge Churchill exploded, Engressia says: “He gave his
own number and you know who he called and you know
how long he talked. Why didn’t you just bill him for the
call?”
 The security agents responded that Engressia was a threat
to national security. He calls through a satellite sometimes,
they said.
 Who owns that satellite? Judge Churchill asked.
 The security agents admitted that they weren’t sure of the
exact ownership of the satellite.
 Engressia recalls Judge Churchill’s response: “You don’t
even own the satellite! I don’t know, I oughta just throw this
whole thing out. You know, if I had known what this is
about, I wouldn’t have signed the warrant.”
 The judge was “more sympathetic to my side than even I
was,” Engressia says.
 Judge Churchill ultimately decided that there was not
enough evidence to convene a grand jury. He reduced the
charges to two counts of malicious mischief. “I can
understand how he was driving them crazy,” the judge
allowed. In addition to a $10 fine, Judge Churchill
sentenced Engressia to sixty days in jail.
 “He paused awhile,” Engressia recalls, and then the judge
said, “Sentence suspended.”
 “Boy, it felt good to go out in the sun that day!” Engressia
says. “That was enough to persuade me that stuff was over.”
From that point forward, Engressia decided, there would
be no more illegal phone calls. In the future, he says, when
there was a knock on his door he wanted to know that it
would always be a friendly knock.
 As for Engressia’s great gamble, his plan to “blue box and
get a job”?
 “I got four job offers the next week,” Engressia said. The
mining and manufacturing company 3M flew him up to
Minnesota for an interview and offered him a job in a
research laboratory but he declined; it didn’t have anything
to do with telephones and he didn’t want to spend his time
“figuring out the right grain pattern for sandpaper,” he
says. In the end he accepted a two-dollar-an-hour job at a
small but nearby independent telephone company called
Millington Telephone. “I guess they’ll have me do whatever
I can that they need done; maybe I can work on the test
board,” he said.
 “I don’t recommend that method of getting a job,”
Engressia said several years later, “but it worked for me.”
                            Ten

    BILL ACKER LEARNS TO
       PLAY THE FLUTE

IT WAS A   conspiracy, obviously. A conspiracy organized by
God himself, one made up of little blind kids out to drive the
phone company crazy. What else could explain the fact that
Bill Acker and Joe Engressia shared a birthday? What else
could explain the fact that, like Engressia, Acker was born
blind?
 As with Engressia and his sister, the doctors didn’t know
what caused it. Acker’s father, who had long suffered from
seizures, killed himself in 1955 when Bill was two, leaving
Bill’s mother to raise him and his brother. Though his aunt
Kaye and their extended Irish Catholic family were a big
help to the three of them, Acker says, they were mostly on
their own. Acker is quick to acknowledge that things were
tough for his mom—“No kidding, she had it hard,” he says—
but he recalls his childhood as being “all about her moods,
her emotions.”
 The public schools in Farmingdale, New York, weren’t
wholly prepared to handle a blind kid. “The one teacher
didn’t know what to do with me and let an itinerant teacher
do it all. I sat in class and didn’t really get any attention,
except from the itinerant teacher,” he says. “Even though I
do remember that I was being ignored, I was fine with it.
From my point of view, school was fine. I could daydream
and do what I do. It didn’t hurt my feelings that I wasn’t
getting an education.” Unfortunately, says Acker, “I wasn’t
catching on to Braille,” something thought to be very
important for the blind in those days. So when Bill was not
yet seven his mom sent him off to the Lavelle School for the
Blind in the Bronx. Run by Dominican nuns, Lavelle was
partly a residential school—along with several hundred
other blind kids, Bill would stay there during the week and
come home on weekends.
 Educationally it may have been an improvement from
being ignored, but it was far from paradise. “I was able to
absorb enough stuff, but I was not motivated,” Acker says.
The nuns “branded me lazy over the whole Braille thing.
That just sort of tuned me out. ‘Okay, fine, if you think I’m
lazy, what the hey . . .’” Some people might work hard to
disprove an accusation of laziness but, Acker says,
“unfortunately, I wasn’t one of them.” So he “skimped by on
my education. That wasn’t where it was at for me.”
 Where it was at for Acker was technology. He had been
fascinated with technology for as long as he can remember.
As a kid, “going outside was almost like a punishment,” he
says. “There was nothing for me outside. There was no
technology outside.”
 Ah, but inside! Inside there was AM radio, shortwave
radio, television. Acker spent much of his childhood
learning about radios, how they work and how to make
them work better. “DXing”—hunting down radio signals
from places as distant as possible—was the equivalent of
collecting baseball cards for young Bill Acker. DXing
required patience, perseverance, and a solid understanding
of how radio worked. Acker had these qualities in spades.
Before he became a teenager, Acker needed almost no
sleep and didn’t like staying in bed. “There was an
unspoken understanding: so long as I didn’t disturb
anybody I could stay up late—or wake up really early, like
3:30 a.m.—and do whatever I wanted,” he says. So on many
occasions Acker tuned old radios and searched for faint
transmissions from faraway places in the wee hours of the
morning.
  In 1963, when Acker was ten, his mother thought her son
needed to get out more. She pushed for him to attend
Camp Wapanacki, a summer camp for blind kids in
Vermont. Acker reluctantly agreed to go, he says, but only
because he saw it as an opportunity to bring his radio and
hear new DX signals from places he hadn’t been able to
receive in Farmingdale.
  Inside had another piece of technology besides radio and
TV: the telephone. “I remember being five or six years old
and picking up the phone,” Acker says. “If you picked up
the phone and waited for the dial tone to go away, you got a
high tone,” a loud, incessant tone that indicated you had left
your phone off hook and that reminded you to hang it up—
designed to get your attention, in other words. The tone
succeeded in getting Acker’s attention. It intrigued him.
What was it? How did it work?
  In hindsight, this was probably not the kind of attention
the telephone company wanted.
  When he was fourteen, Acker decided it would be cool to
find out where all the area codes were. He’s not sure today
exactly why he thought this would be cool, but teenagers
are like that—it seemed like a good idea at the time. Acker
remembered the telephone company commercial where a
little jingle encouraged you to call 555-1212, the so-called
universal information number, a free call in every area
code. For Acker, free was good; his mother wasn’t about to
pay for him to make long-distance calls to every area code.
  Acker’s plan was straightforward. “I’ll just dial every area
code and 555-1212 and learn where the area codes were.
I’d just talk to the operator and say, ‘Where are you? Where
are you located?’” The operators were surprisingly game
for this. Several hundred calls later Acker had constructed
an area code map of the United States in his head, a map
that remains there to this day, revised, updated, and
annotated with all the telephonic esoterica he’s learned
since.
 His fascination grew. “Just being exposed to the network,
how the different directory assistance operators sounded,”
he says, was like discovering a new world. The operators’
accents differed from place to place, but even the sounds of
the calls themselves—that is, the sounds that the telephone
switching equipment made as the calls were being placed
and routed through the network—well, those sounds varied
almost as much as the operators’ accents! Why was that?
How did it all work?
 In December 1968 someone pointed out to Acker an odd
newspaper article about a blind kid at a university down in
Tampa who could make free phone calls just by whistling a
certain tone. Acker found the article interesting but figured
it didn’t apply to him. “I knew enough about the phone
system by then to know that Tampa was independent,” he
says, meaning that its telephone service was provided by a
telephone company other than AT&T and the Bell System.
In contrast, Acker’s community was served by Bell. “So I
basically said, ‘Gee, it’s really nice if you could do those
things if you’re in an independent telephone company such
as Tampa, but I guess that can’t have much bearing on me.
After all, I live in the Bell System, so it must work
completely differently.’”
 Acker continued his experiments with the phone system.
He was fascinated by tones, by the sounds that the
telephone system made. He tried lots of different things—
just playing around, really. For example, Acker knew that
every touch-tone digit is made up of two different tones that
are added together. That is, when you press the 1 button
your phone generates two different tones and adds them
together. Equipment at your telephone company’s central
office hears these two tones and figures out from them that
you dialed a 1. Acker says, “I discovered that if you added a
third tone to a touch-tone, you could block the digits from
being received. So if you pressed the digit one but you
added some arbitrary tone on top of that, the central office
wouldn’t recognize the digit at all.”
 In other words, Acker had found that, with enough work,
you can screw up your own dialing. My goodness, what a
discovery! A normal person wouldn’t think twice about this;
come to think of it, a normal person wouldn’t even think
once about this. But phone phreaks aren’t normal people.
For Acker, the discovery that you could play a tone into the
phone and goof up its operation gave him an idea.
 He knew that when he made a long-distance call from his
house he could hear the switching equipment sending tones
down the line to complete his call. He knew these tones
didn’t sound like touch tones; they were something else.
They weren’t very loud. Probably they were far away, he
thought. But, if he could hear them, maybe whatever
equipment was listening to them could hear him. And if that
equipment could hear him, maybe he could disrupt the
tones, just like he could with his touch-tone phone at home.
“If I make a very loud noise,” Acker recalls thinking, maybe
“I can block those tones from happening, and then I can
substitute my own tones, by tape recording them and
playing them back.”
 Acker looked around to find something that could make a
loud noise. He figured he needed something really loud to
disrupt the tones, given how faint they were.
 “What I came up with was a little toy flute called the
Tonette,” he recalls. “The Tonette had a detachable
mouthpiece and that made a very, very loud shriek if you
blew it. I thought that shriek was the most perfect shriek I
could make.”
 Acker dialed several long-distance calls. Each time he
would wait until the switching equipment began its
electronic concert, sending its quick little musical MF tones
down the line. Each time he would jump into the concert,
uninvited, playing his Tonette flute as loud as he could while
the tones were being played. It was a jam session: he was
trying to jam the switching equipment.
 It didn’t work. Try as he might, he didn’t seem to be able
to block the phone company’s tones. The calls went through
every time. His loud whistle was a loud bust.
 Then something funny happened. Once, Acker recalls, “I
kept that tone on too long after the call started to go
through. And when I let go of the tone, the call didn’t seem
to want to go through. It went chunk wink! It made two
clicks. And I didn’t understand that. It stopped the call from
going through, but I didn’t feel like I had accomplished
anything.” While he might have succeeded in stopping the
call from completing, he didn’t know why. It certainly didn’t
seem to have anything to do with his blocking the musical
tones the phone company was sending. In fact, it seemed to
work best to stop the call if he played the tone after the call
had started to go through.
 After repeating the experiment a few times, some audio
matching circuitry deep in Bill Acker’s brain woke up and
got out of bed. The resonant, hollow sound of the long-
distance circuit between the chunk and the wink that
followed his whistling reminded him of something: the
sound of an operator plugging her cord into an outgoing
long-distance trunk. It all fell into place. “I realized very
quickly that the 2,600 Hz stuff did apply to me, and that’s
what the Tonette squeal happened to be.” Maybe it wasn’t
exactly 2,600 Hz, maybe it was a little bit lower or a little bit
higher in pitch, but it didn’t matter; whatever it was, “it was
close enough to twenty-six to drop a connection reliably.”
The stuff in the newspaper article about the blind kid in
Tampa did apply to him! “It seems strange in retrospect
that I didn’t get it as quickly as I could have,” he says.
 With this, Acker was able to disconnect a call in progress.
But that’s only half the game; you then have to be able to
tell the switching equipment where you want your new call
sent. His original plan to do this had been to tape-record
the faint MF tones that the phone company’s signaling
equipment was sending out and then play them back. This
plan was great in theory but suffered from one slight flaw in
practice: he didn’t have a tape recorder. But he figured he
could do the same thing that the Engressia kid in Florida
did: whistle bursts of 2,600 Hz to dial a call. Acker had no
problem figuring out that his beloved Tonette whistle could
be used to beep the appropriate number of beeps to dial a
telephone number. The problem was finding a place in the
telephone network that would accept this antiquated SF
signaling technique. Lucky Joe Engressia just happened to
live in a place where that worked. Not so Bill Acker.
  “I knew it was my job to find a place that would take SF,”
he recalls.
  Acker had a friend, John, who sometimes joined him on his
telephonic explorations. Together, they started scouting out
locations on the telephone network that would work for
them. They dialed lots of places and tried to make calls
using pulses of 2,600 Hz but didn’t meet with any success.
Then, one Sunday night toward the end of 1968, Acker
happened to call Halifax, Nova Scotia (area code 902, if
you’re wondering). He noticed immediately that “it sounded
like a very different kind of a system.” Unfortunately, Acker
had to go into school the next day, so he didn’t get a chance
to experiment with it that night. The next time he saw his
friend he said, “John, try Halifax, it sounds a little different,
maybe we’ll be able to do it.”
  The next afternoon at school Acker was paged to the
principal’s office, saying that he had a phone call. Acker
went down to the administration office, where he was
handed the telephone. “So I pick up the phone call and I
hear this long-distance noise on the line and a very excited
John on the other end of the line saying, ‘It works, it works!
902! You can do it!’ So then we knew we were in.” From
then on, Acker says, “We routed all of our fun and games
through Halifax, Nova Scotia.” Acker would just dial 902-
555-1212, whistle off, whistle the pulses for the number he
wanted, and he was off to the races.
  Using the Tonette whistle got old quickly. Acker needed a
way to reliably make a controlled number of carefully timed
pulses of 2,600 Hz. What better way than with a telephone
dial? After all, that’s exactly what your telephone dial does:
it makes a controlled number of pulses on your telephone
line. But, of course, he needed more than just a rotary
phone, because a rotary phone just makes clicks or pulses
and Acker needed beeps of 2,600 Hz. Fortunately, Acker
was a ham radio operator and back in those days ham
operators used Morse code to communicate. Acker rewired
an old rotary phone and connected it to a Morse code
practice oscillator that he had lying around. He tuned the
oscillator to 2,600 Hz. Voilà! Now if he dialed a 7 he got
seven perfect beeps at just the right pitch. No Tonette flute
required. He didn’t know it, of course, but Acker had just
independently re-created the very first box that Ralph
Barclay had built back at Washington State some eight
years earlier.
  The Morse code practice oscillator connected to the
telephone dial was a great stopgap measure, but Acker
wanted to get back to his original plan of recording the
outgoing MF tones that he could hear the phone company
equipment sending and then playing them back into the
phone. Finally, early in 1969, Acker got his hands on a small
Panasonic cassette tape recorder. Once he captured the
phone company’s tones on tape he could splice up the tape
to select the particular digits he wanted and play them back
—the network would be his oyster. Not only would this be
easier than playing his Tonette flute or using the slightly
clunky Morse code practice lash-up, it also meant he would
no longer have to dial all his calls through Halifax as
multifrequency tones were accepted pretty much anywhere
in the network.
 He ran into a problem, however. Although he could indeed
hear and record the tones sent out by the switching
equipment, he discovered that the tones were distorted.
“It’s all highs and no lows,” Acker says. If you think of the
phone network as a big stereo, it was as if somebody had
cranked the tone control way over to one side, with the
effect of toning down the bass notes and jacking up the
treble notes. If you recorded these tones and tried to play
them back, you’d be playing what Acker describes as a
“very tinny” concert for the phone company; the remote
switching equipment you were serenading “isn’t really
going to be interested,” he says.
 “So,” Acker says, “I knew I had to do something to the
audio. What could I do? The tape recorder was a cheap
cassette machine with automatic level control,” he recalls.
There was nothing he could do to adjust it. “What you got,
you got. I didn’t have access to an equalizer, I’m not even
sure if I knew such a thing existed back then. So I went to
my junk drawer and pulled out a component.” Unable to see
the components, of course, he worked by feel. “I don’t know
what this is. It’s a can, it has a lead at each end, it could
have been a resistor, it could have been a capacitor. I didn’t
really know,” he recalls.
 “I put it across the output of the tape recorder. And that
did a great thing!” Bill exclaims, excitement in his voice
more than forty years later. “It did a wonderful job of rolling
off the highs, it was much ‘bassier,’ and I was just in.”
 It wasn’t too long before he came up with something even
better than recording tones from the telephone company:
an electronic organ. The Lavelle school had a Hammond
organ that could be used to create the frequencies he
needed to generate MF tones and transfer them to tape. “I
used to go in there and record all the numbers I needed for
the weekend,” he says. Acker and his friends made a master
tape from the Hammond. “You know, KP 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8,
                                         ,
9, ST, and a lot of 2,600 Hz.” With smaller tape recorders
with pause buttons, “we could pretty much make tapes of
whatever we wanted.” What did his teachers think of his
unorthodox use of the school’s organ? “They had no clue!”
Reflecting on it a bit more he allows, “I think the music
teacher did know what we were doing but he kind of looked
the other way.” Either way, he says, it was “a bucket of fun!”
In May 1969, just ten days shy of his sixteenth birthday,
Acker received a surprise telephone call.
 “We had done something that I knew stood a chance of
getting us in trouble,” he recalls. In the old days, when you
made a long-distance call and the person you were calling
answered the phone, a supervision signal was sent back to
the billing equipment instructing it to start charging for the
call. If the phone just rang and rang without ever being
answered, no supervision signal was ever sent back; that’s
why you didn’t get charged for phone calls that weren’t
answered. The phone company also used this technique to
make certain internal test numbers toll-free; the circuitry
for those numbers was configured not to send back
supervision. In phone phreak parlance, such calls were said
not to “supe.”
 The telephone company did this on a large scale with the
directory assistance number, 555-1212. Calls to 555-1212
were free because they didn’t supe—from the telephone
company billing equipment’s standpoint, calls to those
numbers never seemed to be answered.
 But there’s a subtle problem here if you’re a phone phreak
with a blue box or, like Acker, a phone phreak with tape
recordings of blue box tones. If you call 555-1212 in a
distant area code and then whistle it off and use your blue
box or tape recordings to reroute the call to a normal
telephone number, you’ve just given the phone company a
clue that you’re up to no good. Why? Well, remember, a call
to 555-1212 never supes. Except that when you reroute the
call to a normal telephone number and your friend answers
the phone, the call does supe—the instant your friend
answers the phone. Acker was starting his exploration of
the network by dialing 555-1212, a number that should
never look like it answered. “Yet when we were through
with the call, it did, because we connected to things that
answered.”
 At that point, the phone company billing records show
something anomalous: here’s a call to a number, 555-1212,
that should never look like it answered and yet it does. The
phone company doesn’t like anomalies in its network, not so
much because they think somebody might be messing with
them, but just because anomalies probably mean that
something is broken somewhere and needs repair.
 “I knew that was an irregularity,” Acker says. “My fear
was, you know, if this registers on your tape”—Acker knew
the phone company in those days used paper tape for
billing records—“they’ll be able to tell that [the call]
answered, and they know it’s not supposed to.” Acker’s
fears were right on the money. The phone company was
indeed using computer-generated reports of supervision
irregularities to spot blue boxes. Along with Greenstar,
these reports were a primary tool the Bell System used to
detect such fraud and, due to Greenstar’s secrecy, were
among the most effective for prosecution.
 Acker’s surprise caller was a security agent from his
telephone company, New York Telephone. The agent had
already talked to Acker’s friend John, likely because of 555-
1212 supervision anomalies. But the reason the agent
wanted to talk to Acker was more concrete. John had ratted
out Acker to the security agent.
 “He spilled his guts,” Acker says. “That was just an
inconceivable no-no to me. That pretty much trashed our
friendship. Forever and ever.” Forty years later you can still
hear the intensity in Acker’s voice. “When you get in
trouble, you don’t squeal on anybody.” Even today Acker
still sometimes worries that the phone company may have
caught some phone phreaks simply by surreptitiously
monitoring Acker’s telephone line. The thought that he
might have inadvertently gotten people in trouble merely
by talking to them on his home phone is bad enough, he
says. “But to actually give up the name of another phreak
was just . . . just horrible.” Somehow Acker had picked up
the concept of omertà, honoring a code of silence. “I don’t
know where I got that ethic. I believe it was the right ethic,
but I don’t know where I got it from,” he says.
  The New York Telephone security agent told Acker that his
illegal dialing had to stop. “He was as firm as he had to be,”
Acker recalls. “He didn’t go out of his way to scare us, but
he laid it out for us. I don’t even recall him saying, ‘If you
don’t stop we’re gonna send the FBI after you,’ but he
made it clear that it had to stop.”
  “I like learning about the network,” Acker told the security
agent.
  “I can appreciate that,” was the agent’s reply. “It was nice
of him to say that,” says Acker, “but the bottom line was,
you gotta stop.”
  So Acker stopped.
  Or so it appeared, at least to all outward appearances; his
fingers stopped dialing around the network and he quit
playing with the MF tapes on his Panasonic tape recorder.
But his brain just wouldn’t stop thinking about this stuff. “I
realized that 555 had gotten us in trouble,” Acker says.
What he needed, it seemed, was a safer way to access the
network, one that wouldn’t get him in trouble again. The
telephone company delivered. Just a few years earlier the
company had introduced an innovative new service,
something called an 800 number. These numbers were free
to the caller because the person or company being called
paid the bill. That doesn’t seem like such a big deal today,
now that long-distance is so cheap, but back then, given
how expensive calls were, it was a big deal.
  Since calls to 800 numbers were free, like 555-1212, they
were a good place to start a blue-boxed call. But 800
numbers didn’t have the pesky problem that 555-1212 did.
“When an 800 number answers, it answered. It went off
hook, all the way back to you,” Acker says. In other words,
800 numbers returned supervision. Acker’s theory was that
if he used 800 numbers for blue boxing, “they looked like
normal calls to an 800 number.” That meant no telephone
network anomalies for the phone company to investigate.
And that meant no more phone company security calls to
Bill Acker. Or so he hoped. Of course, it might look
suspicious if you had too many calls to 800 numbers—
normal people just didn’t call that many 800 numbers back
in 1969, or talk very long on them—but, says Acker, “it was
obviously safer than 555.”
  The telephone call from the security agent scared him into
going straight for a bit, he says. But it wore off. “That’s the
problem with ‘scared straight,’ it doesn’t hold,” Acker says.
“It lasted for maybe a few months.”
  And then?
  “And then I couldn’t resist doing it again.”
                         Eleven

    THE PHONE FREAKS OF
          AMERICA

JOE ENGRESSIA AND     Bill Acker weren’t the only kids playing
with the telephone in 1968. As early as 1964 teenagers had
begun to discover an interesting quirk of the telephone
system.Certain telephone exchanges in some areas of the
country, notably Los Angeles and San Jose in California, had
busy signals that were shared among all callers. An
example was San Jose’s 291 exchange in the 408 area code.
If you and I both happened to call busy numbers in 408-291
we would be connected, faintly, over the busy signal—along
with anyone else who happened to have called a busy
number at that moment. If we shouted we could hear each
other. Of course, we’d be constantly annoyed by the baaa . .
. baaa . . . baaa of the busy signal. And that busy signal was
loud; our voices would be the background to the busy signal
in the foreground. “It was an insane way to try to
communicate,” recalls Jim Fettgather, a teenager at the
time in San Jose. But talkable busy signals were free and
they became surprisingly popular. Lots of people could be
on one at once and that made them a hangout, a great way
for bored kids to meet each other and trade phone
numbers. They also served as a sort of subtle introduction.
“I didn’t even realize that was the beginning of phone
phreaking for me . . . I didn’t realize it then,” recalls Denny
Teresi, another San Jose teenager.
  Busy signals weren’t the only type of low-tech conference
call service the phone company inadvertently provided.
Nonworking number recordings—you know, “You have
reached a number that is disconnected or no longer in
service, please check the number and dial again or call your
operator to help you”—on certain types of telephone
company switching equipment also could be used in the
same way: everyone calling in to nonworking numbers in
such an exchange would be connected. As with the busy
signal, you had to talk over the repeating announcement,
but the voice announcements were less annoying than the
busy signals, and the long silence between the
announcements provided more opportunity for people to
talk. Best of all, sometimes the announcement recordings
broke down and didn’t play at all. Highly prized, these so-
called party line broken recording numbers were popular in
the New York area in the early 1970s and remained so into
the 1980s.
  It turned out there was something even better than busy
signal and broken recording conferences, something
exciting and magical: loop arounds. These were pairs of
telephone numbers that the phone company used for
testing its circuits. Loop telephone numbers varied from
one city to another, but let’s use a pair from Los Angeles as
an example: 213-286-0209 and 213-286-0210. The idea
was that a phone company technician could call one
number of the pair, say 286-0209, from one telephone line.
This number would answer automatically and respond with
a loud tone. The technician would then call the other side of
the loop, the 0210 number, from a different telephone line.
The tone on 0209 would go away and the equipment in the
telephone company central office would connect the two
lines, looping them around. The technician could now send
a test signal down one line and hear it come back on the
other line, allowing remote line measurements and
troubleshooting.
 Admittedly, this doesn’t sound exciting and magical, but it
was. Here’s why. First, you could talk over a loop around. If
you called one side of a loop and I called the other, we were
both connected and could talk to each other. Second,
because they were telephone company test numbers, many
loop arounds didn’t supe, that is, they didn’t return
answering supervision. To telephone company billing
equipment, calls to loop arounds looked like any other
unanswered call. And that meant calls to such numbers
were free, and they were so from anywhere in the country.
 Also, you could hang out on a loop around. You could call
into one side of a loop and set the phone down on your desk
and do your homework or whatever. Eventually somebody
else would call the other side of the loop and you’d hear a
ring-clunk sound followed by a voice saying “Hello?” Pick up
the phone, stop doing your homework, and bingo: instant
conversation.
 Best of all, though, it was all anonymous. If we both called
a loop around, you and I could chat and you never needed
to give out your telephone number—heck, you didn’t even
need to give out your name. If you met somebody and
wanted to stay in contact, but maybe didn’t quite trust him
entirely, you could always give them one side of a loop
around. That way you could communicate but he wouldn’t
have your actual phone number—less chance of getting you
in trouble that way. Loop arounds served the same function
as the cheese box circuits that bookies had been using for
years, a perfect electronic meeting place for clandestine
activities. The difference was that these cheese boxes were
part of the telephone network and came courtesy of the
telephone company.
 Rick Plath, a blind phone phreak from Los Angeles, recalls
the spread of loop arounds among teenagers in the mid- to
late 1960s. “Al Diamond hired Saul, a friend of mine,” he
says. Diamond, a phone phreak himself, ran a business in
Los Angeles selling maps to stars’ homes. His workers, all
LA teenagers, hung out on likely street corners flagging
down tourists, trading maps for cash. Rick had told Saul all
about loop arounds. Saul quickly spread the word to the
other map workers. “Saul was a friend of Dave. Dave got
Aaron involved,” Plath continues. “Aaron had a way of
spreading the loops all over Fairfax high school. Through
word of mouth it went through Fairfax and then into
Beverly Hills.” Before long loop arounds had taken off in LA.
“That’s what got loops really started in the LA area.
Between a bunch of us we got loops publicized in the LA
area without knowing what we were doing,” says Plath.
 Mark Bernay, ‡ a Los Angeles–area telephone enthusiast
and friend of Al Diamond, took the loop-around bug with
him when he graduated from college and moved to Seattle
in 1967. The phone company certainly had loop-around
telephone numbers up north, but Bernay was sad to find
they were deserted and that nobody in Seattle knew about
them. To help spread the word he printed up pieces of
paper with loop numbers and put them on pay telephones
throughout the area. Soon the loops in Seattle—they called
them “hot lines” up thataway—were “constantly busy,”
recalls Seattle phreak Dennis Heinz. “Mark Bernay really
brought phreaking to the Seattle area,” he says. Loops
were, in his words, the “social networking of the time,” the
“Twitter and Facebook of the day.”
‡The pseudonym he went by at the time.
 All that, taken together, was exciting and magical. As Plath
recalls, “It was like CB radio over the phone. It’s kind of
cool that these circuits work the way they do. We didn’t
care why, we just knew that they did.” Kind of cool. And
incredibly unlikely. Consider that the phone company builds
some obscure, mundane test feature into its network to
allow technicians to do remote troubleshooting. Ma Bell
turns her back for a second and the next thing you know a
bunch of high school kids have remade it in to a free,
anonymous communication system that the CIA would be
proud of. It was almost as if loop arounds and broken
recordings and talkable busy signals had been put there by
the telephonic fates, a divine power that seemed to want
kids to communicate—just not in ways that the designers of
the telephone network had ever intended.
 If such fates exist, John Draper believes they have not been
kind to him. Actually, that’s an understatement. It’s more
that he believes they are out to screw him over, repeatedly
and without lube. The fates arranged for a phone call that
would change Draper’s life. The phone call would set events
in motion that would first make him a countercultural
legend and then lead him to prison. But the worst thing
about the call, and the reason the fates were so clearly
behind it, was this: it was a wrong number.
 A year earlier, in 1968, he was Airman First Class Draper,
five-foot-eleven and 170 pounds, with blue eyes, thick black
GI-issue glasses, and a short military haircut. Draper was
just finishing four years of active duty as a technician in the
United States Air Force. He had grown up in rural towns in
northern California, where he bristled under his father’s
strict control and got beat up a lot in school. As a kid he
loved electronics, so it was natural that he wound up
maintaining radar systems on airbases in Maine and Alaska
for Uncle Sam’s flyboys.
 Now it was 1969 and he was John Thomas Draper, a
twenty-six-year-old civilian. He could wear his hair long,
dress a little more casually (some would say sloppily), and
smoke some pot. He had an honorable discharge, some GI
technical training, and was taking classes part-time at the
local college. He had a job as an electronics technician and
work was plentiful in the heart of what would come to be
known as Silicon Valley. And it was much, much warmer in
San Jose than it was at some stupid radar station up near
the Arctic Circle. Things were looking good for John Draper.
 Then the phone rang.
  Draper had been expecting a call from an old friend who
had just returned from Vietnam, but a few words into the
conversation he realized that it wasn’t his buddy on the
line. It was a deep-voiced stranger, a guy named Denny,
who had reached him by mistake. Despite the wrong
number, Draper says, they struck up a conversation. Denny
was “really interesting, especially when he mentioned he
was into radio. For me, I was always interested in all
aspects of radio, from the DJ end to the technical end,”
Draper recalls. In fact, Draper was a volunteer DJ at a local
radio station. When he was in the air force he had built a
low-power FM radio transmitter to entertain the bored
servicemen stationed with him up in Alaska. He had even
built a pirate radio station in high school.
  Back in the day radio stations used to have listening lines,
telephone numbers you could call to hear what was being
broadcast by the radio station. They were used mostly by
advertising agencies to check that radio stations were
broadcasting the ads that their clients had purchased, but
they were also sometimes used by radio fans to listen to
faraway stations. Of course, they were long-distance calls,
so they were expensive. Denny mentioned to Draper that he
would call and listen to radio stations all over the country.
He’d even call up the radio DJs and spend time talking to
them too.
  Draper commented that Denny must have a big phone bill.
Nah, Denny said, I never pay for my phone calls. Really?
How does that work? I know a million ways to make free
phone calls, Denny replied. Draper wanted to know more,
but Denny said he had to go. Before they hung up Draper
got Denny’s number.
  Sometime later Draper called Denny. Or, rather, he tried
to. Instead of “Hello?” he got an earful of tone—a loud,
constant, high-pitched tone. Puzzled, he asked the operator
to dial Denny’s number for him. Same thing. She told him
that the number he was calling was a telephone company
test number. Had he written down the telephone number
wrong? Whatever the reason, it looked like Draper’s freak
connection to Denny was a onetime thing.
 The fates do not give up that easily, however. A few months
later Draper and a friend were hanging out, listening to the
radio, and they stumbled upon a pirate radio station.
Intrigued, they decided to try to find the pirate broadcaster,
not to complain, mind you, but to compliment him on his
ingenuity and taste in music. They went for a spin around
the neighborhood in Draper’s trusty green VW van, trying
to locate the transmitter. The fates guided them and soon
they found themselves chatting with the bootleg radio
operator. During their conversation they discovered that
the radio pirate just happened to know Denny. Far out!
Before heading home Draper made sure to get Denny’s
phone number from the pirate broadcaster.
 Once again, Draper gave Denny a call. No earful of tone
this time, they picked up their conversation where it had
left off. Soon they arranged to meet in person. Draper got
in his van and drove over to Denny’s house in the suburbs
of San Jose. A middle-aged man answered the door. Is
Denny here? Sure, end of the hall and to the left. Draper
walked down the hall and found a room with the lights out.
 “Denny?”
 “Yeah, buddy.”
 “Can I turn the lights on?”
 “Sure, buddy.”
 Turning on the lights Draper set eyes on the mysterious
Denny Teresi for the first time: “a chubby kid that looks like
a miniature cowboy and sounds like Paul Bunyan and talks
eighty miles per hour,” Draper recalled. The sixteen-year-
old didn’t have much use for lights. Denny was blind.
 The two continued their discussion from months back.
What was up with that weird tone I got when I tried calling
you? Oh, said Teresi, that was a loop around. Teresi
explained how loop arounds worked, how you could call one
side of a loop and somebody else could call the other side
and the two of you could talk without ever having to know
each other’s telephone numbers. But one side often had a
tone on it, and that was what Draper had heard.
 Teresi had a wealth of seemingly incredible knowledge
about the telephone system—how you could have
conference calls by talking over broken busy signals and
recordings, how you could use an electronic organ to make
free phone calls, heck, how you could even just whistle free
calls! Draper says he found it all unbelievable. It couldn’t be
that easy. It just couldn’t.
 But it was, Teresi told him. To prove it, they drove over to
Teresi’s friend Jimmy’s house. Jim Fettgather, also sixteen
and also blind, was a talented musician who had a Farfisa
electronic organ, the same type of organ that the Doors
used on “Light My Fire” two years earlier. Fettgather was a
virtuoso when it came to using his Farfisa to play those
special notes that so charmed Mother Bell.
 Wires spilled out the back of Fettgather’s electronic organ
and, through a pair of alligator clips, connected to the
telephone line. Fettgather picked up the phone and dialed
an 800 number. Just as it started ringing he whistled it off.
Kerchink! He turned to his organ and, as Draper put it,
“hammered out a call”: two keys at a time, twelve times in a
row. Jangly pairs of tones—not quite music —filled the room.
Seconds later Draper heard the ringing signal of the
rerouted call going through: an expensive long-distance call
made free, thanks to a pair of blind kids with an electronic
organ.
 Draper was blown away. “He was really fast,” Draper
recalls of Fettgather’s dialing. “I was just so flabbergasted
that it was so simple. The whole network was controlled by
tones! The whole long-distance network.”
 Teresi and Fettgather wanted to know if Draper could
build them a multifrequency generator—an MFer, a blue
box, a portable electronic gadget that would produce the
same pairs of tones they were making with Fettgather’s
electronic organ. Draper said he could.
 He returned home in a state of shock. “I had to build a blue
box,” Draper recalls. And that night he did. It was a crude
first effort that was difficult to use. It had seven switches:
one for 2,600 Hz and six to generate the tones that made
up multifrequency digits. Just like Fettgather’s electronic
organ, you had to press two of the six buttons
simultaneously to generate the right pairs of tones; it
required practice to get the hang of it. But it worked. And
Draper already had ideas for building more sophisticated
boxes.
 Teresi, Fettgather, and some of their friends were in the
habit of taking “whistle trips”—trips to places with pay
phones where they could explore the network just by
whistling. Just as Acker had discovered, not all trunk lines
were created equal: some were vulnerable to whistling,
some weren’t. San Francisco International Airport, thirty-
five miles north of San Jose, happened to be wide open, and
there was always somebody willing to give the kids a ride
up to the airport in exchange for a few free long-distance
calls. Several years earlier a Los Angeles phone phreak
named Sid Bernay§ had discovered you could generate a
nice, clean 2,600 Hz tone simply by covering one of the
holes in the plastic toy bosun whistle that was given away as
a prize in boxes of Cap’n Crunch cereal. Armed with their
Cap’n Crunch whistles Fettgather and Teresi and friends
would cluster around pay phones at the airport and go nuts.
“We used to have a ball going up to San Francisco,”
Fettgather remembers. “I imagine we must have gotten
quite a few looks . . . six or eight of us at these pay phones,
whistling into these telephones, dialing long-distance
numbers.”
§The pseudonym he went by at the time. As a pseudonym, the surname
“Bernay” among phone phreaks indicated membership in the Mark Bernay
Society—an inside joke stemming from a prank phone call placed in Los
Angeles during the late 1960s.
 With Draper in the club the whistle trips expanded. The
original trips were just to find and use whistleable pay
phones, but the whistle trips soon morphed into what they
came to call “phone trips”—the idea of going to some
oddball location simply for the joy of playing with whatever
telephone system they had there. Where could you call from
there? What did the calls sound like? What techniques
could you use to make free calls? What if you did this? Or
this? Let’s try it! It wasn’t just Draper, Fettgather, and
Teresi; other phone phreaks in other areas of the country
made similar excursions. Mark Bernay in Seattle, for
example, made a special trip to the northernmost town in
Washington, right near the Canadian border, just to see
how its telephones worked.
 By late 1969 a network of phone phreaks had begun to
develop. Like snowflakes forming out of moisture in cold
winter air, it took just the right set of conditions for it to
happen. Instead of humidity and temperature it was the
presence of loop arounds and broken recordings and
talkable busy signals—and, of course, people to talk on
them. And, like snowflakes magically appearing, it was
more accidental than planned.
 Fettgather had been talking to other kids on talkable busy
signals in San Jose since about 1964. He learned about loop
arounds in 1968 when he was at Camp Bloomfield, a
summer camp for blind kids down in southern California.
Because many of the loop arounds didn’t supe—that is, they
were free calls—Fettgather says they “put all of us in San
Jose in communication with folks all around the country.” It
wasn’t long before Bill Acker in New York ran into
Fettgather on the phone. Fettgather introduced Acker to
Teresi. Teresi introduced Acker to Draper. The network
expanded from there via word of mouth and chance
telephonic encounters. The first time Bill Acker called a
loop around and got another phreak on the other end of the
loop, he recalls thinking it was the “coolest thing in the
whole wide world!” You can still hear the amazement in his
voice. “I was willing to work in isolation but to think that
there were people out there that I could talk to . . .” Acker’s
mind boggled.
  This was important, maybe more important than we might
remember. Thanks to the Internet and the Web and Google,
everything and everyone seems to be just a few mouse
clicks away. Interested in something obscure, for instance,
using hypodermic needles to water your Venus flytrap?
Want to collect air raid sirens? Care to meet men and
women who wear furry animal costumes and chase one
another around hotel lobbies at science fiction conventions?
Give ’em a Google, though perhaps you shouldn’t Google
that last one from your place of work. In every case you’ll
find there are websites and groups devoted to the topic.
The Internet seems to be telling us: You Are Not Alone—no
matter who you are or how rare your interests.
  But in 1969, until he discovered loop arounds and talkable
busy signals, Acker felt like he was Very Much Alone. Sure,
he had friends at school who helped him out with his
telephone hobby, but none of them were into the nitty-gritty
like he was. “They were all happy to make free phone calls,”
Acker recalls. “I don’t say that disparagingly. They just
weren’t into the guts of it.” It wasn’t just his schoolmates
who liked free calls, by the way. For a time Acker’s house
mother at school was a woman from South America and
“every night for about four or five months she got to call
home,” Acker says, the joy audible in his voice.
  “My brother was totally into different things,” Acker says.
“I couldn’t tell him what I discovered, he wouldn’t have
gotten it.” In fact, “He was older than I was, so the less he
knew about the legally edgy aspects of it, the better.”
  Until he learned about the other phreaks, Acker recalls, as
far as he was concerned, “I was pretty much the only one,
and I was pretty much operating in isolation.”
Loop arounds and talkable busy signals were unintentional
— happy accidents that made for oases in the network. But
other telephonic watering holes were planned.
  Imagine for a second that you’re a hardworking,
businesslike caveman and you’ve just invented the pencil.
Your cavemate asks you, What’s it good for? You straighten
up slightly, adjust the collar of your starched saber-toothed-
tiger-skin shirt, and say, “Well, my goodness, this invention
will propel us into the zeroth century! It will allow sharp-
eyed cave dwellers—we’ll call them accountants—to keep
track of how many rocks and sticks we owe each other. With
it, we will be able to record instructions for future
generations regarding optimal hunting and gathering
strategies. It will revolutionize the business of being a cave
person!”
  Your cavemate raises a skeptical eyebrow. And then picks
up your pencil and begins sketching a beautiful drawing on
the cave wall. You look on, dumbfounded, as you realize that
the highest technology in the world at that moment—the
pencil—has just been used to make art.
  A telephonic version of this scene played out in Los
Angeles in the 1960s. It went by funny names: “The
Machine.” “VERMONT.” “Z, ZZ, ZZZ.” “Superphone.” All
were telephone numbers you could call to hear tape-
recorded audio performances. Most were comedy skits,
some were horoscope readings, others were political
commentary and humor. They were known as “joke lines” or
“dial-a-joke” numbers. Most were run by high school or
college kids. Once again, someone had taken the day’s high
technology—the telephone—and used it to make art.
  In today’s world it is tempting to dismiss telephone joke
lines as quaint, even laughable. But think about it for a
second. How many of the sites you visit during a day’s
surfing online are the figurative descendants of these
telephone joke lines? The funny website or YouTube link
that your friend emailed you today may have video or
animation, it may be a lot flashier, it’s probably more
professionally produced, but basically it’s the same idea as
a telephone joke line: people sat down, came up with
something they thought was funny, recorded it in some way,
and put it out there for you to enjoy. Today you point and
click, yesterday you dialed. Same deal. The impulse is as old
as cave drawings.
 Practically, though, there’s a big difference between 1969
and now. Today you can go to Facebook or TypePad or
Twitter and have a presence on the Web in five minutes.
Video cameras are cheap and YouTube is free. But setting
up a joke line in 1969 was another matter entirely. Until just
one year earlier you weren’t allowed to connect any non–
Bell System electrical equipment to your telephone line—by
any means. Ma Bell insisted that this had nothing to do with
maintaining AT&T’s telephone monopoly. Rather, she said, it
was to maintain the integrity of the nation’s telephone
network, which AT&T built and that only AT&T understood.
As the president of AT&T said in 1973, “The national
switched telephone network is an interdependent, sensitive,
highly sophisticated system. To work well, the system
depends on technically compatible components. The phone
network is not made of cans and string. It consists of
intricate electrical switches and terminals, precisely
configured, rigorously tested, and built to exact
specifications. If consumers can plug anything they want
into the network—any old piece of junk made who knows
where—the system will break down. A faulty telephone in
one house could conceivably disrupt service to an entire
city. A system such as the switched telephone network is
only as good as its weakest component.”
 This logic extended not just to telephone lines but to
telephones themselves. Consider the case of the Hush-A-
Phone. This was a product first manufactured in the 1920s
by, you guessed it, the Hush-A-Phone Corporation. It was
not a sophisticated electrical circuit that connected up to
Ma Bell’s fragile network. No, it was a molded rubber cup
that fit over the telephone mouthpiece. It allowed you to
whisper into your phone and thus gain a little bit of privacy
from your house or office mates; you can think of it as the
rubber widget equivalent of cupping your hand between
your mouth and the telephone to keep others from hearing
you.
 AT&T didn’t like it; tariffs were passed that made it a
violation to use a telephone with “any device not furnished
by the phone company.” AT&T threatened to disconnect the
telephone service of both vendors and users of the Hush-A-
Phone for violating these rules. Hush-A-Phone Corporation
complained to the Federal Communications Commission in
1948. In 1951 the FCC decided in favor of the telephone
company. Hush-A-Phone objected; briefs were filed. The
FCC took the matter “under advisement” for four more
years. In late 1955 the communications commission
officially sided with AT&T, saying that this sinister rubber
widget was “deleterious to the telephone system and
injures the service rendered by it” because its use
sometimes “results in a loss of voice intelligibility, and also
has an adverse affect on voice recognition and
naturalness.” Hush-A-Phone filed suit in federal court—and
won. The D.C. court of appeals decided in 1956 that the
tariff-imposed ban was “unwarranted interference with the
telephone subscriber’s right reasonably to use his
telephone in ways which are privately beneficial without
being publicly detrimental.”
 Eight years, a protracted FCC hearing, and a lawsuit to
get the right to use a rubber cup on a telephone
mouthpiece.
 The beautiful thing about teenagers is that they rarely pay
attention to this kind of stuff. And thus was born the
Machine, one of the earliest telephone joke lines. It was the
brainchild of two Toms in San Pedro, California: Tom
Plimmer and Tom Politeo; born exactly one week apart, they
were known as Tom 0 and Tom 1 by their friends. While the
Machine may have been their creation, it looked more like
something that Rube Goldberg would have designed. It
consisted of an open-reel tape recorder and some custom
electronics to turn it into an answering machine, with four
thirty-second skits that callers could hear. Each caller
would get the next skit in sequence until it repeated.
Because it had to repeat, the two Toms couldn’t use a
standard cassette system. Reel-to-real audiotape ran at
seven inches per second, so two minutes of audio translated
into seventy feet of audiotape. This audiotape was festooned
around Politeo’s bedroom, fed through dozens of circular
metal binder clips. When the Machine was playing an
announcement, it was as if Politeo’s bedroom had come
alive, a whirling, reeling mass of moving audiotape.
  The Machine launched on Tom 1’s seventeenth birthday in
September 1969. “Eight three three triple three nine” was
the number. “A large part of what we were trying to do was
to breathe more life into the phone system,” says Politeo.
The two Toms succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.
Before long the Machine was receiving two thousand calls
per day, an average of one call every forty-five seconds. A
supervisor who worked in their local telephone company
central office described to them the havoc the Machine’s
popularity was causing with the office’s step-by-step
switching equipment. Your local connector group has eight
switches, he explained. Of these, one of them seems like it’s
permanently connected to your line. The other seven, he
said, are permanently trying to connect to your line.
  Of course, you don’t build something like the Machine
without knowing a little bit about the telephone system
itself. Rick Plath, one of Acker’s friends in LA, knew the two
Toms through the Machine. Sensing kindred spirits, Plath
told Plimmer he should call Bill in New York.
  A few days later Acker’s telephone rang. When he picked it
up he heard a familiar sound: a long-distance call with
unnatural routing. “Hi, this is Tom in San Pedro,” the caller
said. “Vancouverish,” he added. Vancouverish? Between
that odd word and the distinctive sound of the long-distance
trunk, Acker knew instantly what was going on: Tom was
calling him from San Pedro via Vancouver, just like Acker
had learned to do himself from Farmingdale by routing his
long-distance calls through Halifax.
  “Tom Plimmer was one of my first constant connections,”
Acker recalls. “We would talk for hours.”
  The network continued to grow. Before long Acker and the
other phreaks were regularly talking to some twenty or so
people. Some were in Long Island, New York, like Acker,
but more were in California. “California was the epicenter,”
Acker says. It was, he felt, the “capital of phreakdom.”
Acker’s lack of a Long Island accent is testimony to
California’s influence. “It was at that time in my life where I
decided I’d rather sound like the California phone phreaks,”
he says. “I needed to ditch my New York accent.”
  It was late January 1970 before they called the Old Man.
They had all heard of Joe Engressia, of course, the blind
whistling phone phreak mentioned in the newspapers a
year earlier. But nobody had actually talked to him. Finally
Bob Sirmons, a phone phreak in Los Angeles, took it upon
himself to track down Engressia. It wasn’t hard. Sirmons
called Acker after reaching Engressia at his dorm in Tampa:
I found him! He wants to talk to us! Here’s his number!
  Acker dialed Engressia’s number. Acker’s ears were well
trained and he could tell one bit of telephone company
switching equipment from another just by sound. As he
listened to the clicks and clunks the network made during
the ten or so seconds it spent getting his call from Long
Island to Tampa, he heard something unusual. Acker knew
that Engressia lived in an area whose phone service was
provided by General Telephone, an independent telephone
company. But the sound the network made right before
Engressia’s phone started to ring was that of a #5 crossbar
telephone switch, a piece of Bell System equipment. In
other words, it was a piece of equipment that had no
business being down in General Telephone territory.
 Engressia answered the phone. “Hey, where did General
Telephone get a number five crossbar?” Acker asked him.
Not just anyone would know that such a thing was unusual;
indeed, most wouldn’t have the ears to have noticed it at all.
With a telephonic smile, Engressia explained that the #5
crossbar had come from Northern Electric—it was
equipment from the Bell System out of snowy Canada, now
enjoying its quasi-retirement in sunny Florida.
 “It was clear we kind of liked the same things,” Acker
recalls. It was an understatement. That phone call was the
first of thousands of hours he and Engressia would spend
together on the telephone.
 Many of these hours, at least in 1970, would be spent on a
conference call that the phreaks called “2111.” When they
reached the 2111 conference they’d hear a distinctive,
high-pitched hum. It wasn’t so loud that you couldn’t talk
over it, but it was loud enough that you couldn’t miss it.
When they heard that hum, they knew just where they were
in the network. As Bill Acker described it later, “The hum
told us that we were home.”
 The hum came from an obscure little circuit called a TWX
converter that lived deep in the bowels of a step-tandem
switching machine in British Columbia. TWX stood for
“teletypewriter exchange”; in the days before faxes and
email, teletype machines were used by big companies and
organizations to quickly communicate via the printed word
over long distances. Clunky and electromechanical,
teletypes sent data over the telephone line at then blazing
speeds—typically forty-five words per minute—clacking
away, each letter mechanically printed one at a time in ink
on paper. In essence, they were big, remotely controlled
electric typewriters, built by the Teletype Corporation, part
of the AT&T empire.
  The TWX converter was normally used for allowing
different types of teletype machines to talk to one another.
But somebody had left it slightly misconfigured, or maybe it
had fallen into disrepair. Either way, it’s kind of like that
little door to the crawl space under your house: forget to
button it up tight and you’ll wind up with rodents living in
your basement. Leave your TWX converter misconfigured
and it’ll get infested with phone phreaks.
  The rodents like your basement because it’s warm and dry.
The phone phreaks liked the TWX converter because its
misconfiguration turned it into a giant conference call,
something rarer than diamonds in 1970. Its discovery was a
mix of intention and accident, a happy offshoot from the
phone phreaks’ attempts to plumb the mysteries of the
Vancouver step tandem by exhaustively dialing codes within
it. One of the codes they discovered was 21: you’d call a
number in the 604 area code, whistle off with 2,600 Hz, and
then whistle 21 followed by any two digits; 2111 was
popular because it was easy to whistle: bleep bleep . . .
bleep . . . bleep . . . bleep and you’re done. You’d be
rewarded with an unusual dial tone, a constant tone that
sounded like a continuous fourth octave B musical note.
From this you could keep whistling digits to place a free call
to anywhere you wanted.
  The network of phreaks—Acker, Engressia, Draper, Teresi,
Bernay, Fettgather, and the rest—had been using 2111 to
make free phone calls via the Vancouver step tandem since
the start of 1970. But something changed sometime around
May of that year. The fourth octave B dial tone went away,
leaving only the high-pitched hum. No more dial tone meant
no more free calls. The phone phreaks were sad.
  Then someone noticed something odd. If multiple people
called 2111 at the same time they all got connected,
forming one big conference call. In today’s world of three-
way calling and business and personal conference dial-in
numbers, it’s hard to remember just what an unusual
animal an actual conference call circuit was back in 1970.
Back then, about the only people who could afford
conference calls were big businesses and the government.
If you were a businessperson who wanted to have a
conference call, you rang up a special operator and had her
manually connect you to all the people you wanted on your
call. You then paid AT&T’s highest rate for each person you
were calling, the so-called operator assisted rate, per
person, per minute. If you were a phone phreak, you had
loops and talkable busy signals and broken recordings, but
loops supported only two people at once, and the others
were annoying to use, what with busy signals and
recordings interrupting your chatter.
 In contrast, 2111 easily supported a dozen or more
people; in fact, there seemed to be no limit to the number of
people who could be conferenced together on it. Plus, 2111
had a built-in riffraff catcher, something to keep out the
1970s version of what hackers today would call script
kiddies, that is, people who weren’t serious about the
hobby. This was because you couldn’t merely call in to 2111
via a simple telephone call. You needed a whistle or an
electronic tone generator to send the pulses of 2,600 Hz
that the Vancouver step tandem wanted to hear before it
would connect you to the conference.
 By the late summer of 1970 the 2111 conference had
become the electronic meeting place for a burgeoning
collection of phone phreaks, their virtual home in one of the
first virtual places—the long-distance telephone network.
Together the 2111 gang formed an unlikely group, made all
the more unlikely by a couple of things. The first was that
these weren’t the only phone phreaks, just the hard-core
nucleus of a larger, wider, more casual network, one that
stretched across the country. Who would ever have thought
that in 1970 the obscure technical hobby of hacking
telephones—an illegal one with no publicity to speak of—
could possibly bring together dozens of like-minded young
people throughout the United States?
 The second thing was that more than half of the core
group—Engressia, Acker, Teresi, and Fettgather—were
blind. Theories abounded as to why this was so. To be sure,
blind people spent a lot of time on the telephone, perhaps
more than sighted people. Since there were relatively fewer
blind people in the United States, their friendships tended
to be more spread out. Thus suffering from higher-than-
average phone bills, perhaps they were keener than most
for ways to save money on telephone calls. Then too there
was the “blind people have better hearing to compensate
for their blindness” theory that suggested the sightless kids
were better able to appreciate the subtle variations in tone,
noise, and timbre of the long-distance telephone network,
although there would turn out to be several sighted people
with an equally acute appreciation of the sonic qualities of
the telephone network. Finally, the telephone probably
served as a great equalizer. On the telephone, after all,
everyone is blind.
 Regardless, the upshot was that if you were putting
together a cast of characters for a hacker movie, you’d have
a hard time doing better than the original 2111 gang. They
began calling themselves phone freaks—back in those days,
they spelled it with an “f”—and even went so far as to
create an informal organization called the PFA: the Phone
Freaks of America. Joe Engressia quickly found himself
elected president and recalls his inaugural speech: “I said,
‘Well, my pledge to you as president is that any knowledge I
have I’ll share with you and do my best to help people learn
about phones, because knowledge shared is knowledge
expanded, and that’s enough of a presidential speech.’ We
were on a conference call and people clapped, probably
because the speech wasn’t so long that they would get
bored.”
 It was a golden era, and it was the community that made it
so. “The 2111 conference was just a blast,” says Seattle
phone phreak Bob Gudgel. “It was a huge part of my life. I
met a lot of great people on it. I have really, really good
memories of those days.” One of the keys was that it was
big enough to be fun but not so large that people had to be
overly paranoid. Of course, this didn’t stop some people
from trying. Bill Acker recalls getting a phone call one day
from a mysterious person who identified himself only as a
representative of the International Society of Telephone
Enthusiasts, or ISTE. Acker remembers this person’s
opening words: “We are concerned.” Specifically, his
mystery caller was concerned that Acker was talking to too
many people and doing too many things and was somehow
going to mess the whole hobby up for everybody. Acker
later asked Joe Engressia if he knew anything about this.
“Oh, that’s just B. David,” said Engressia. Engressia
explained that he was an old phone phreak who seemed to
love paranoia and spy stuff. Don’t worry about him, said
Engressia. Acker and Engressia went back to their
conference calls.
 It was on one of those conference calls that John Draper
discovered a new identity for himself. For reasons of
anonymity—and, honestly, just for the fun of it—it was
common for phone phreaks to go by nicknames or handles.
Bill Acker was “Bill from New York,” Jim Fettgather was
“Mr. Westin,” the members of the Mark Bernay Society all
had their Bernay handles—Al Bernay, Bob Bernay, Mark
Bernay, Sid Bernay, etc. One day Draper and Engressia
were talking about using a Cap’n Crunch whistle to make
their beloved 2,600 Hz tone, Engressia recalls, when
Draper suddenly said, “You know, I think I’ll just call myself
Captain Crunch. That’d be a good name.” Engressia
immediately liked it. “It just fit him somehow,” he
remembers. “It was just a good name for him. We called
him ‘Captain’ a lot.”
Captain Crunch was born.
                          Photo Insert




A Chappe optical telegraph station at Louvre, Paris. Image courtesy Wikipedia




Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor of the electric telegraph, circa 1860. Photo
courtesy Library of Congress




A telegraph key and sounder, circa 1890. The electrical telegraph made the
optical telegraph obsolete, sending messages across wires in an instant.
Photo courtesy Douglas Palmer
Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, circa 1920. Photo courtesy
Harris & Ewing, Library of Congress




A re-creation of Bell’s original telephone. Photo courtesy Detroit Publishing
Co., Library of Congress




The original Strowger switch from Automatic Electric Company, 1890. Photo
courtesy AT&T Archives and History Center
Long-distance operators at “cord boards” circa 1945. Well until mid-century
the operators’ hands, arms, and brains were the workhorses of long-distance
telephone switching. Photo courtesy National Archives




The inner workings of a bank of Strowger switches showing the ratchets and
pawls and assorted mechanical clockwork required to automate telephone
switching in the early 1900s.
Photo courtesy Túrelio/Wikimedia Commons
A portion of the magnificent 4A toll crossbar switch, 1957. The brains of the
long-distance network, the 4A would enable truly automated long-distance
telephone calls that customers could dial themselves. Photo courtesy AT&T
Archives and History Center




A 1950 magazine ad describing the multifrequency signaling system; the ad
even went so far as to give the musical equivalents of the MF digits.
A Woolworth’s ad for the Davy Crockett Cat and Canary Bird Call Flute, circa
1955, and the genuine article itself—the toy that would be the basis for David
Condon’s whistled exploration of the telephone network. Photos courtesy
Hakes.com




Charlie Pyne (seated), Tony Lauck (standing), and Paul Heckel (on the phone)
as featured in Fortune magazine, 1966. Photo courtesy Fortune




Pyne’s Freshman Adviser Report at Harvard University, 1963. Image courtesy
Charlie Pyne
Joe Engressia, 1968. Photo courtesy AP Images




Bill Acker, 1973. Photo courtesy Bob Gudgel




Bob Gudgel, Jay Dee Pritchard, and John “Captain Crunch” Draper on a phone
trip in Duvall, Washington, 1971. Photo courtesy Bob Gudgel
A Cap’n Crunch Bo’sun Whistle. Photo courtesy Richard Kashdan




The Fine Arts 13 classified ad from the Harvard Crimson, 1967.




Front page of the first issue of the Youth International Party Line.
Assorted blue boxes, 1961 through the late 1970s. Photos courtesy Ed Turnley
or author unless otherwise indicated
Steve Wozniak with blue box in the dorms at Berkeley, 1970s.
Wozniak’s blue box. Photo courtesy of the Computer History Museum




Bernard Cornfeld and friends, 1974. The millionaire financier would
eventually be convicted of Fraud by Wire for using one of Wozniak’s blue
boxes. Photo courtesy AP Images




Chic Eder, the one-man crime wave and FBI informant who provided the feds
with a tape recording of John Draper wiretapping their San Francisco office.
Photo courtesy FBI
A 16-button AUTOVON telephone, whose red-colored fourth column of
precedence buttons made the military telephone network a sensitive and
seemingly irresistible target for certain phone phreaks. Photo courtesy Wayne
Merit, JKL Museum of Telephony




Security Agent Earl Conners and AT&T Attorney Bill Caming testifying before
the U.S. House of Representatives after news of the Greenstar toll fraud
surveillance system broke, February, 1975. Photo courtesy George Tames/The
New York Times/Redux
Ken Hopper and Walter Heinze in the Telephone Crime Lab. Photo courtesy
Ken Hopper




As this joke ad illustrates, the security department at Bell of Pennsylvania
apparently had a sense of humor about the phone phreaks at Carnegie Mellon
University. Image courtesy Ken Hopper
Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey, 1960s. Photo courtesy AT&T
Archives and History Center




Replica of the first transistor, invented at Bell Labs in 1947. Photo courtesy
AT&T Archives and History Center




MCI magazine ad, 1980, showing their long-distance rates to be about ½ of
AT&T’s.
                        Twelve

 THE LAW OF UNINTENDED
     CONSEQUENCES

IT’S A FUNNY    thing, isn’t it, how you never can tell where
things are going to go. You set out to do some thing, some
simple, straightforward thing. Let’s say you even succeed at
it. But because of some niggling detail you didn’t think of,
some connection you didn’t quite anticipate, a freak chance
that you didn’t factor in, in the bigger picture things go
totally off the rails.
  It’s called the Law of Unintended Consequences and it has
sharp, pointy teeth.
  It happened in the 1930s when Bell Labs was busy
inventing the multifrequency signaling system. There they
were, telephone company scientists and engineers just
trying to figure out a way to put through long-distance calls
quickly and efficiently and automatically. But they
overlooked the fact that there were clever people out there
and that their system was wide open to anyone who could
generate a pair of tones. You can forgive them for this. Who
knew from hackers in the 1930s or ’40s? But the next thing
you know, it’s the 1960s and—bleeeeep kerchink—your
network has blind kids and mobsters and college students
making free phone calls with blue boxes.
  It happened again in October 1970 when the phone
company busted a guy in San Francisco for selling blue
boxes. Al Gilbertson¶ had learned about blue boxes in the
late ’60s while he was a grad student at a prestigious East
Coast engineering school. “I had heard a rumor about a
blue box, that phone company people had these things,” he
says. “And apparently some bookies used them, this is what
I understood. I heard a whiff of this. The next thing I heard
was in the newspaper: a guy named Joe Engressia, a blind
kid down in Florida, got busted for whistling 2,600 cycles
per second down the phone line. Well, with those two pieces
of information I went to the engineering library and looked
it up in the Bell System Technical Journal and there were
the goddamn codes.” Gilbertson shakes his head in disbelief
as he recalls his discovery.
¶The pseudonym he went by at the time.
 About three days later he had built his first blue box. “It
was amazing how much fun you could have with it,” he says.
Despite this distraction, Gilbertson somehow managed to
complete his dissertation and finish graduate school. PhD in
hand, he moved out to San Francisco. After a brief career
as a physics postdoc, he decided to try something more
entrepreneurial. Maybe he’d start a company, he thought.
Maybe he’d make a product, perhaps an electronics
product. Say, blue boxes.
 “That was a mistake,” he recalls with a laugh. “I wasn’t a
real sophisticated business guy at the time and I didn’t
understand the law.” The venture ended predictably. “I got
arrested by the phone company.”**
**Of course, the telephone company did not have power of arrest, but getting
“busted” or “arrested” by the phone company was a common phrase among
phone phreaks in those days. It speaks to the telephone company’s immense
size and perceived power. Today nobody would say they “got arrested by
Google,” for example, but being arrested by the phone company made sense
back then.
 From the phone company’s perspective, it was about as
straightforward as it gets. Some guy is using and making
and, worst of all, selling blue boxes. Bust him. Check.
What’s next? Is it lunchtime yet? But it’s on occasions such
as this—the execution of simple, straightforward projects—
that the Law of Unintended Consequences likes to kick in. It
played out in slow motion over the next few months and it
had two triggers.
 First there were the phone calls from the phone phreaks.
For obvious reasons, news of a blue box bust was of great
interest to the phreaks. Even though they didn’t know
Gilbertson, several of the phreaks, including Bill Acker, took
it upon themselves to look him up in the phone book and
whistle up a call to him. Their motivations were mixed.
Partially it was to reach out to someone who might be a
fellow telephone aficionado and get the details of what
happened. As Acker puts it, “If the phone company’s mad at
him, he must be somebody we want to know!”
 But their call was also to chide Gilbertson for selling blue
boxes, something that the phone phreaks frowned upon
almost as much as the phone company. By this time the
phreaks had developed a sort of informal code of conduct. It
was not universally agreed upon or followed within the
phreaking community but, as Tom Politeo remembers it, it
had three basic parts. First, don’t seek publicity—the more
people who know about phone phreaking, the more likely it
was that the phone company would clamp down on it.
Second, don’t call during peak hours—this was to avoid
busying out circuits, inconveniencing people, and drawing
unwanted attention. And third, don’t profit from phreaking.
Anyone selling blue boxes was obviously violating this third
commandment, and their customers would probably end up
causing other problems too. “It sounds funny to say it about
something that was already an illegal hobby,” Acker says,
“but those people gave phreaking a bad name.”
 Gilbertson was a bit older than the mostly teenage phreaks
and his motivations were somewhat different. Acker
remembers, “He didn’t seem to love the phone the way we
did.” Regardless, the phone calls introduced Gilbertson to
the cross-country network of phone phreaks and their
reindeer games. “They were young and foolish and so was
I,” Gilbertson says. “We had tons of fun.”
 The second trigger to the Law of Unintended
Consequences was Gilbertson’s pride. He wasn’t about to
take his bust sitting down. Although he denies revenge was
a motivation, he says that “I thought it made a great story,
and I was interested in not just being snuffed out by the
phone company.” Moreover, his inner engineer was
offended that the phone company had designed such a
vulnerable system and then got huffy when people took
advantage of it. “It was that they were so sloppy! What the
Christ did they think, that there’s not any bad guys in this
world?”
 Gilbertson complained to his attorney about this. “Well, I
know these guys at Esquire magazine,” Gilbertson recalls
his attorney saying. “And I said, ‘Well, call ’em up!’”
 The phone company didn’t know it yet, but that was the
moment when things started to go off the rails.
Ron Rosenbaum read the story memo from an editor at
Esquire. Some guy out in California had been busted for
manufacturing something called a blue box, some sort of
telephone fraud device. More interesting was the
community it described—a “world of electronics whizzes,
teenage blind kids, a whole network of people,” Rosenbaum
recalls. “You know, it sounded completely fascinating. These
people had managed to create a sort of network, a parallel
communications network, of their own.”
  Rosenbaum was just twenty-four, a few years out of Yale
and in the early days of what would turn out to be a
legendary writing career. For several years he had written
for the Village Voice, New York City’s hip alternative weekly
newspaper. Esquire—“the magazine for men,” as it billed
itself, half a million readers strong—wanted to know if
Rosenbaum would be interested in covering the phone
phreak story.
  “It immediately seemed to me to be a story I’d want to do,”
Rosenbaum says.
  In the spring of 1971 Rosenbaum flew out to San
Francisco to meet with Gilbertson and his attorney. “He
showed me a blue box, told me the basics of how it was
manufactured, how the tones worked, how you produce the
phone company tones by merging two different cycles,”
Rosenbaum remembers.
  Gilbertson passed on contact information for the kids in
the network: Engressia, Acker, Teresi, Fettgather—the
usual suspects. Soon, says Rosenbaum, “I started having
running conversations with a bunch of phone phreaks.”
Rosenbaum recalls attending a meeting of phone phreaks in
a suburb of San Francisco. “It was like entering this Alice in
Wonderland electronic outlaw underground,” he said.
  He recalls being surprised by the breadth and depth of the
network. “This network of people doing this was so
extensive, and yet I hadn’t seen anything about it in the
media, I hadn’t seen any reports about it, it was all new to
me. It seemed to be fairly highly evolved and fairly . . . not
well-organized, necessarily, but it just seemed to be a lot of
people with a lot of interchange.” In fact, it reminded him of
fiction, he says. “I think I was also influenced in my vision of
the phone phreaks by the Thomas Pynchon novel The
Crying of Lot 49, which also describes this kind of
underground communication network. They seemed to be
living it out, in a way.” Far from feeling that they were scary
or weird, Rosenbaum says he felt “they were outside the
mainstream of conventional America, but that was a reason
for me to admire them, more than anything else. I admired
their independent spirit and their sort of pioneering
exploration and then their willingness to take risks.”
  “Then Captain Crunch injected himself into the
publication,” Rosenbaum recalls. “All throughout it, during
the reporting of the story, he was injecting himself into the
story. It was fairly clear that, with some justice, he
considered himself if not the star, certainly a star in the
phone phreak firmament. And he was always managing to
interrupt calls I was having with other phone phreaks to
check up on me, demonstrate his talents, stuff like that.”
 Rosenbaum’s experience with Captain Crunch echoed that
of many of the other phreaks in the 2111 gang. Indeed,
John Draper had developed a second nickname among
some of them: Mr. Intense. It was bestowed on him for his
lack of manners, his rapid-fire speech, his supersize ego,
and his impatience for anything that got in his way. Draper
would often go nuts if he was trying to reach someone on
the phone and encountered a busy signal, Bill Acker recalls.
Draper would call the operator in such situations and,
saying it was an emergency, demand to be cut into the line
of whoever it was he was trying to reach. “Bell Labs
invented call waiting for people like John Draper,” Acker
says. If Draper tried to call you and you weren’t
immediately available, he would often berate whoever
answered the phone and insist that they go find you
immediately, a behavior that did not endear him to the
parents of his teenage phone phreak friends. In person
encounters could be even more intense. Draper had a
hatred of cigarette smoke, for example, and was famous for
throwing tantrums when he encountered it at a restaurant.
“He was pretty strange,” says Jim Fettgather.
 Draper claims that he warned the phreaks that talking to
Rosenbaum was a bad idea and would get them all in
trouble and might lead to the end of their hobby. He said he
asked Rosenbaum not to write the article. “When I talked to
Ron, I let him know in no uncertain terms that to publish
this would cause major problems, not just for me, but for
the phone company and all parties concerned, and did
everything in my power to convince him not to publish this
information.” Rosenbaum’s recollection differs: “At the time
Crunch was very happy to be included in the story.”
 Rosenbaum concluded his West Coast interviews and flew
to Memphis to spend some time with Joe Engressia. “He
was a really fascinating character,” Rosenbaum recalls, “a
really likable guy.” Rosenbaum returned home to New York
to finish his assignment.
The picture on the cover of Esquire magazine’s October
1971 issue was striking: a naked 1940s pinup girl on a
swing, blond hair flowing behind her, breasts strategically
hidden by her upraised arms. But for some readers, the
really striking picture came on page 116: a full-page, full-
frontal black-and-white photo—but not of a pinup girl. No,
the photo was of a small plastic box with a silver metal face,
four screws, and thirteen small buttons. The caption read,
simply, “Actual size.”
 The photo was the lead in to Rosenbaum’s article, “Secrets
of the Little Blue Box.” It followed the adventures of a
fanciful mix of characters, members of an otherworldly
underground network of phone phreaks. The soul of the
network was Joe Engressia, a blind twenty-two-year-old
from Memphis who could whistle free phone calls and
whom Rosenbaum dubbed the “granddaddy of phone
phreaking.” Engressia, Rosenbaum wrote, sat like a
sightless spider at the center of a web of other phone
phreaks. A dozen teenagers—some blind, some sighted—
formed the bulk of the network, each with his own odd
nickname: Fraser Lucey from New York, Randy and Mr.
Westin from San Jose, the Midnight Skulker from Seattle,
the list went on. Rosenbaum chronicled their clandestine
activities, their meeting like spies on anonymous loop-
around circuits and their efforts to trick telephone company
employees into manipulating switching equipment for them.
The article spoke of an electronic mecca: a legendary
conference call setup called “2111” that only phone
phreaks could reach, one where dozens of teenagers would
talk for hours, exchanging information on the telephone
system and swapping tales of their adventures.
 Their hobby may have been illegal but Rosenbaum
portrayed most of the phreaks as possessing the innocence
of monks, electronic seminary students studying the Bell
System’s long-distance network as if it were scripture. An
older, worldlier character named Al Gilbertson injected
hints of avarice and danger with his plans to Make Money
Fast by selling blue boxes to the mob. And throughout the
article a maniacal fellow referred to only as Captain Crunch
kept popping up. Crunch appeared to be some kind of crazy
superphreak who claimed to live out of his VW van as he
traveled the country, using his wits and his blue box to tap
phone lines and make calls that circled the globe from one
pay phone to another—all while staying one step ahead of
the telephone company and the FBI.
 All in all, Rosenbaum’s story read like a telephonic cross
between an acid trip and Gulliver’s Travels. It seemed like
it had to be fiction.
 Except that it wasn’t—aside, perhaps, from some
journalistic license. With the exception of Engressia,
Rosenbaum gave the characters pseudonyms and brushed
more than enough makeup over them to obscure their
identities; some, in fact, were composite characters.
Rosenbaum’s distinctive writing style later caused several
of the characters he portrayed to raise their eyebrows just
a smidge when they read the article. “I thought he spiced it
up too much,” recalls Gilbertson. Bill Acker, who says he
was the lion’s share of the composite character “Fraser
Lucey” in the article, agrees. “I didn’t like the technical
inaccuracies,” he says.
 Technical inaccuracies are one thing, Acker allows, and
flavor another: “He captured the spirit of it wonderfully!”
Indeed. The article’s tone and style lent an air of mystery
and hipness to an otherwise geeky hobby. Rosenbaum even
coined a new word in the article: phreak, with a “ph.”
Although they had referred to themselves as phone freaks
prior to the Esquire article, it had always been freaks with
an “f.” Now, forever more, it would be phreaks.
 Readers with a slight bit of technical knowledge found the
article intriguing, something worth investigating. The
article gave enough leads to get people started, but not
enough to hand it to them without some work on their own.
In many ways, like the telephone network itself, it was a
puzzle, a fifteen-thousand-word one that begged to be
solved. To the right sort of reader, the rewards for solving
this puzzle were intoxicating. It wasn’t just the ability to
make free phone calls but the promise of joining a secret
society, one whose members could control the telephone
network and con telephone switchmen into doing their
bidding.
 One part of the article described a phone phreak trick
called tandem stacking. Remember that tandems were like
intermediate stops on the telephone network: if you needed
to call from Long Island to Chicago your call would likely be
routed through at least one tandem switching machine to
get there, and possibly a couple of them. The phone
company spent lots of money and R&D effort in making the
tandems smart enough to route calls automatically, like the
hulking No. 4A switching machine that took up a city block,
with its metal punch cards encoded with routing
information. That was the intelligence that enabled the
switching equipment to automatically route calls across the
country. This is great news if you’re a typical telephone
user; you just want your calls to go through and you don’t
particularly care how they get there. But not if you’re a
phone phreak.
 Phone phreaks like control, to be in charge of the network,
to decide exactly how their calls get from point A to point B.
For some this was a love of discovery. “What happens if I
route the call this way? What does it sound like?” For others
it was a flexing of electronic muscles, a feeling of power
that came from exercising will over Ma Bell’s billion-dollar
network. And for still others it was just fun, a way to goof
off, an interesting mental challenge followed by a lovely
auditory experience.
 Tandem stacking was possible thanks to a bug—some
would call it a feature—in a particular type of telephone
switch called a crossbar tandem. Crossbar tandems could
be tricked with a blue box into sending your call via a
particular route in the network. It might work as follows:
 Say you’re Bill Acker out in Farmingdale, New York. You
dial an 800 number that goes to someplace out of state—
California, let’s say. The first leg of your call gets routed
through a switching machine called White Plains Tandem 2,
which happens to be a 4A tandem. Before anyone in
California answers your call you send a burst of 2,600 Hz
down the line and hear the kerchink come back from White
Plains. This is the “wink” signal that tells you you’ve reset
the call and are now talking directly to the White Plains 4A,
which is waiting for you to send it MF digits.
 Using your blue box you send KP 099 213 ST, a string of
digits that doesn’t look much like a telephone number.
Within a given area code there are of course many different
cities, and many of these cities had their own tandems.
Partially as a holdover from the old days of operators
plugging cords into jacks, each of these tandems was given
a three-digit terminating toll center (TTC) code. In New
York’s 516 area code, 099 refers to a crossbar tandem in
Poughkeepsie. So White Plains sees the 099 you sent, grabs
a trunk to Poughkeepsie, and sends it the remaining digits:
KP 213 ST. Poughkeepsie recognizes 213 as the area code
for Los Angeles, so it takes this as a command to get
southern California on the line. It connects you to a 4A
tandem there called Los Angeles 2. But Poughkeepsie has
run out of digits—that is, it has no further digits to send to
Los Angeles—so while it establishes the connection to LA it
doesn’t do anything more.
 Now it’s your turn again. You and your blue box, via White
Plains and Poughkeepsie, are now whispering into the ear
of Los Angeles 2. You key KP 707 001 042 ST; 707 is the
area code for the northern part of the San Francisco Bay
Area and 001 is the terminating toll center code for Eureka,
a small town in northern California. Los Angeles Tandem 2
recognizes 707 001 and grabs a trunk to Eureka and sends
KP 042 ST. As it happens, 042 is the TTC code for Santa
Rosa, California, so Eureka in turn grabs a trunk to Santa
Rosa. But, like Poughkeepsie, Eureka has run out of digits,
so the action stops for a moment. You’re now talking to the
Santa     Rosa    crossbar     tandem     via   White   Plains,
Poughkeepsie, Los Angeles, and Eureka. Using your blue
box you send KP 312 338 1975 ST, the number of your
friend in Chicago. Santa Rosa finds a trunk to Chicago and
sends it the seven-digit local number to dial. Your friend’s
phone begins to ring.
 You’ve just placed a call that could have taken two hops
through the network and traveled 750 miles and turned it
into one with six hops over more than 5,000 miles. The call
will now be way noisier than it needed to be and the audio
distortion introduced by the extra crossbar tandems will
make it sound like hell. Why on earth would you do this?
Because you could. Because you’re a phone phreak. Most of
all, Acker recalls, because it was just plain fun.
 When your friend in Chicago picks up the phone he will
instantly know this is a special call—if he’s a phone phreak,
that is. He will first hear the hiss of the long-distance trunk
noise, much louder than usual because of the peculiar call
routing you’ve gone to such trouble to create. Over the
course of the next couple of seconds he will hear a series of
phantomlike kerchinky noises, one after another—about six
in all—fading in volume as they go. It will be as if they are
receding into the vapor of the network, almost as if they are
running away from him. As it turns out, they are; these are
the sounds of the supervision signal being sent from his
phone in Chicago to the billing equipment in Long Island, a
signal that is repeated by each intermediate tandem, each
farther away from your friend and closer to you. When you
hang up, the domino process will repeat, but this time the
dominos will be falling toward your friend in Chicago, the
kerchinks getting louder and louder as the supervision
signal races toward him, repeated by each tandem as it
goes.
  Tandem stacking was simply a cool, harmless prank . . .
until Captain Crunch made some hair-raising claims in the
Esquire article, saying that just “three phone phreaks
[could] saturate the phone system of the nation. Saturate it.
Busy it out.” This could be done, he said, by stacking
tandems to tie up long-distance trunk lines between cities.
  It was an alarming claim. It also happened to be nonsense,
at least according to Bill Acker, Crunch’s friend and the
phone phreak probably most versed in long-distance call
routing. “I don’t know what John was smoking when he said
that,” Acker says. “I just don’t know why he said things like
that.” According to Acker there were simply too many trunk
lines between cities, the switching systems all supported
the concept of alternate routing—that is, looking for an
alternative route if the first choice was busy—and, finally, it
was difficult to stack up more than about six or seven
tandems at a time.
  One of the other alarming things in the Esquire article was
the suggestion that phone phreaks somehow had a
preternatural ability to con telephone company employees
into flipping switches in central offices for them. As it turns
out, they did. When it came to the ability to BS telephone
company employees, Denny Teresi—“Randy” in the Esquire
article—was the undisputed master of the phone phreak
phlimphlam, what would later become known as social
engineering: calling someone up, pretending to be someone
else, and getting them to do things for you, things they
shouldn’t oughta do. Teresi’s targets were unwitting
switchmen in telephone company central offices.
Pretending to be another telephone company switchman or
technician, his usual goal was getting his marks to wire up
loop arounds or conference circuits or getting such circuits
restored to operation when they had been removed from
service. His patter might go something like this.
  “Hey buddy, this is Fred in the network service center.
How you doing? Hey, the loop around in your office seems
to be busy. I wonder if you could take a look at it for me?”
Depending on how green the switchman was, he might
need some coaching. “Okay, let’s find out what the trunk
group is. On your computer type VFY-EXG-270100. Look for
a TR02 message. Yeah. See it? Okay, in the TR02 message,
you’ll find on the third line down, on the left-hand side,
you’ll find the trunk group. Do you have that? Great. What
is it? Fifty-five? Okay, now, we wanna find the TRZ in the
trunk group. The way we’ll do that is type TRK-TRZ-QT0055
. . .”
  If you’re wondering how the phone phreaks learned this
kind of stuff, often all they had to do was ask. “Sometimes
you’d call up and get a switchman who knew what he was
doing,” Acker says. “You’d ask him to do something for you
and he’d jump right on it. Then you’d ask him to explain to
you how he did it. You’d say something like, ‘Wow, that’s
great, thanks! You know, I’m finding we’re running into that
problem a lot. Can you talk me through what you did to fix
it?’”
  Teresi explains his modus operandi this way: “I understood
the equipment well enough. You just start trying it and see
what happens. If you knew enough about it and you had the
right tone, you could often get them to do it. Of course, you
had to have the knack of BS a little bit, you needed to be
able to convince them that, even though this was not a
normal channels kind of thing, that it was still okay.” One of
his techniques involved reassuring his target. “For example,
you tell them to choose the line links [i.e., where the wires
should be terminated for a bogus conference call setup],
and then you’d tell them you were immediately going to call
Traffic [Engineering] and clear it with them, so they
wouldn’t reassign them.” That way the target knew he
wasn’t going to get in trouble for whatever strange thing he
was being asked to do. “We were doing things that were
definitely nonstandard but it was just a matter of sounding
authoritative enough to convince them that it was okay to
do,” Teresi says.
 Teresi’s task was made easier by the size of the telephone
company and its sprawling geography, with its roughly one
million employees spread out across virtually every town
and city in the United States. The size and scope of the Bell
System forced it to rely on its own product, the telephone,
to perform its daily business; one historian estimated that
some 95 percent of all telephone company internal business
was conducted over the phone. And besides, say you’re a
telephone company switchman. Just how likely is it, really,
that some kid is going to get your unlisted work telephone
number and then call you up and ask you to do some
obscure technical thing for him? And how could a kid
possibly know enough about your job and the equipment
you use to be able to convince you that he works for your
company and that his is a legitimate request?
 That was—and is—the sort of thinking that allows social
engineering to work. “It’s really kind of wild that we were
able to get them to do it, but it was just a matter of
sounding convincing enough,” Teresi remembers. “If you
got someone with not enough experience, they’d fall for it.”
 “Denny was the best,” says Acker. The term “social
engineering” hadn’t been coined yet, so in Teresi’s honor
the phone phreaks invented a new verb: to DT someone
was to bullshit them so thoroughly that they never
suspected they’d been had.
 Rosenbaum’s writing skill coupled with Esquire’s
circulation did more in one month to spread phone
phreaking into the mainstream than anything before or
after. The Law of Unintended Consequences could brush its
hands together briskly. Its work here was done and the
train was now fully off the rails.
John Draper remembers the publication of the Esquire
article as if it were yesterday. A student at San Jose City
College, Draper went to his first class that morning and
then walked across the street to buy a copy of the
magazine. “I went back to my car and I read it cover to
cover,” Draper says. “I missed three classes. I had to read
it. I could not go to those classes.” When he finished, he
remembers, “I said, ‘Oh my God. Well, I guess that’s pretty
much the end of phone phreaking.’”
  Draper drove home. He called Denny Teresi and read the
article to him over the phone. Draper was certain that with
this much publicity, with this many secrets being exposed,
the telephone company would have to take action. Holes in
the network would be plugged up. Things that used to be
safe now wouldn’t be. The phone company and the FBI
could come swooping down on them at any moment. “I
knew right then and there that phone phreaking as I knew
it was ended,” he recalled.
  Worse, Draper was featured as one of the stars of the
article. The good news was that he was under the alias
Captain Crunch. But many phreaks knew his real name.
And if there were raids, he figured he was likely to be the
prime target. It was just a matter of time, he thought.
Draper took his blue boxes and put them in a shed out back,
where they wouldn’t be discovered if the FBI searched his
apartment. He made a decision, he recalls. From that
moment on, “they don’t live with me anymore.”
  Draper’s instincts were right; as the saying goes, “Even
paranoids have enemies.” While the Esquire article was still
being written the phone company was already beginning to
step up its enforcement activities. In May of that year, after
a three-month investigation, New York Telephone and the
police arrested nine college students for blue box fraud in
New York—eight upstate in Potsdam at Clarkson College of
Technology and the State University of New York and one at
the New York Institute of Technology; the NYIT student was
referred to in the New York Times as a “boy genius.” The
very next day another ten students at Case Western
Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, were arrested on
similar charges. That August, eight more people were
arrested by the FBI for blue box fraud in Billings, Montana.
In September, four more people—including one telephone
company employee, who claimed innocence—were arrested
in Pennsylvania.
 Draper’s worries weren’t helped when Maureen Orth’s
“For Whom Ma Bell Tolls Not” was published on October
31, 1971, in the Sunday supplement to the Los Angeles
Times. The article, which was later reprinted in other
newspapers, read like a shorter version of the Esquire story.
It opened with a description of Captain Crunch in a pay
phone booth at a gas station using his blue box to get the
American embassy in Moscow on the line. It discussed the
blind phreaks, Joe Engressia, tandem stacking and quoted
an independent telephone company source as saying that
the cost of blue box fraud might be as high as $50 million a
year.
 Just a couple of weeks after Orth’s article appeared, Bob
Gudgel (aka Bob Bernay), a seventeen-year-old Seattle-area
phreak and a frequent 2111 conference attendee, had some
unusual trick-or-treaters. Knocking on his door was J. C.
VanInwegen, Pacific Northwest Bell security agent, and two
other men. Wiggy, as he would come to be known to
Seattle-area phreaks, was accompanied by an FBI agent
and a United States marshal with a search warrant. They
hauled away several radios, assorted electronic items, and a
box of what Gudgel recalls as “telephone crap.” The trio
presented Gudgel with a subpoena commanding him to
testify at a federal grand jury in Seattle a few days later.
Gudgel wasn’t the only one. In all, roughly half a dozen
Seattle-area phone phreaks were called before the grand
jury. “The phone phreaks are a public menace—not just a
rip-off of Ma Bell,” a telephone company attorney said,
describing them as “mildly mentally unbalanced.”
 According to an internal AT&T memo, there were six
electronic toll fraud prosecutions in 1970. In 1971 that
number jumped to forty-five. The empire was beginning to
strike back.
Draper wasn’t the only one who studied the Esquire issue
when it came out. The magazine’s target audience was cool
young men, guys who today would be called hipsters. But
two middle-aged engineers who weren’t in the magazine’s
usual demographic also found themselves carefully reading
the October issue. They were Charlie Schulz and Ken
Hopper, members of the technical staff of the Telephone
Crime Lab at Bell Laboratories.
 Hopper’s path to the Telephone Crime Lab was a
circuitous one. In 1971 he was a distinguished-looking
forty-five-year-old electrical engineer, a bit on the heavy
side, with blue eyes, short brown hair, and glasses. Hopper
had joined the Bell System some twenty-five years earlier,
shortly after the end of World War II. Within a few years he
had found himself at Bell Laboratories’ Special Systems
Group working on government electronics projects. The
stereotype of government work is that it’s boring, but
Hopper was a lightning rod for geek adventure: wherever
he went to do technical things physical danger never
seemed far behind. There was the time he had to shoot a
polar bear that had broken into his cabin while he was
stationed up in the Arctic working on the then secret
Distant Early Warning Line, the 1950s-era radar system
that would provide advance warning of a Soviet bomber
attack. Or the time he almost died in a cornfield in Iowa
while building a giant radio antenna for a 55-kilowatt
transmitter to “heat up the ionosphere” for another secret
project. Then there’s the stuff he still can’t really talk about
in detail, involving submarines and special tape recorders
and undersea wiretaps of Soviet communications cables.
 The Special Systems Group was a natural to help AT&T
with the Greenstar toll-fraud surveillance network in the
1960s, Hopper says, and that work led to involvement with
other telephone security matters. But the Telephone Crime
Lab also owes its existence to the FBI. Hopper recalls, “In
the mid-1960s the FBI laboratory came to our upper
management and said they were getting electronic-involved
crimes. They had no people in their laboratory that could
examine evidence in these cases, especially related to
communication systems, and they asked for Bell Labs’
assistance. Upper management of Bell Labs agreed that
this was in the public interest and that we would do that.
The work was assigned to my organization, Charlie Schulz
being the supervisor. We had just a few people, never more
than two or three, working on this stuff. Initially it was to be
a five percent job . . . but within five years it was darn near
a hundred percent job.”
 So it fell to Schulz and Hopper to study that month’s
Esquire magazine in detail. Their report to their bosses—
and to Joe Doherty, AT&T’s director of security—opened
with a glum assessment. “The article entitled ‘Secrets of the
Little Blue Box’ by Ron Rosenbaum in the October 1971
issue of Esquire Magazine is essentially factual,” their
memo began. “Some of his material is very recent and
indicates an active inside source.” It then went through the
article, page by page, dissecting the phone phreak claims,
some acknowledged, many disputed.
 Hopper constructed a two-page appendix to Schulz’s
memo, a detailed table listing twenty-one names mentioned
in the article, setting forth all the information Bell Labs had
about each miscreant: age, whether blind or sighted,
whether or not each knew Joe Engressia, physical
description, and any other information they could glean
from the article. “Fat, has been on LSD, experimenting with
2600 since age 8,” read part of the entry for Engressia, for
example.
  The memo demonstrated that Bell Labs took the Esquire
article seriously, that the phone company was not about to
take this sitting down. But it also demonstrated just how
poor a grasp the Bell Labs engineers had of the phone
phreaks—in terms of both who the phreaks were and what
they were capable of doing. Hopper’s analysis of the names
used in the article provided no useful information about any
of the phreaks other than Engressia, and he was already
well known to the telephone company. Worse, much of Bell
Labs’ technical analysis of the phone phreaking techniques
revealed by the Rosenbaum article was simply wrong. For
example, the Bell Labs memo discounted the phone phreak
parlor trick of tandem stacking, claiming it just wasn’t
possible. “He talks about ‘tandem stacking’ as if he had the
ability to deliberately select multilink routes and to keep
adding on links,” Schulz wrote. This was an “exaggeration”;
the network simply did not work that way, the memo
concluded.
  In fact it was no exaggeration at all. The phone phreaks
did have this ability and they used it to amuse themselves
on a regular basis. It was a great example of how
engineering insiders are often the last to know what is
actually possible with the systems they design. Part of the
problem was probably pride. Bell Labs had created the
telephone switching network and, consciously or
unconsciously, didn’t want to admit how vulnerable it was;
its engineers were, in some sense, spring-loaded to
disbelieve reports to the contrary. The other part of the
problem was both larger and more subtle. Compared to the
phone phreaks, the Bell Labs engineers were laboring
under a great disadvantage, for they understood how the
system was supposed to work and that blinded them to how
the system actually did work—and therefore how it could be
made to do things it was never designed to do.
 The result was that they could not see the holes in their
network that sixteen-year-old blind kids could, even when
Rosenbaum and the blind kids explained it to them.
                        Thirteen

          COUNTERCULTURE

               “FUCK THE BELL SYSTEM!”

THOSE FOUR WORDS,  all in caps, formed the headline of a flyer
handed out at the 1971 May Day demonstrations in
Washington, D.C. More than thirty thousand hippies,
Yippies, students, and radicals had camped out on the
banks of the Potomac. They smoked dope, they listened to
rock music, they marched, they protested—against the
Vietnam War, against the military-industrial complex,
against racism, sexism, the government, and Tricky Dick
Nixon. It was, in some ways, the ultimate realization of
Marlon Brando’s reply in The Wild One when asked what he
was rebelling against: “Whadya got?”
 The flyer heralded the birth of a new newsletter: YIPL, the
Youth International Party Line. Its name was a play on
words that reflected both its roots and its focus. The “YIP”
part made it known that it was an offshoot of the Youth
International Party, the sometimes radical, sometimes
comedic, but always theatrical countercultural movement
and quasi-political party. Founded in 1967, the Yippies
sought to radicalize the hippie movement and called for
revolution in America—or, as they spelled it, Amerika: “We
are a people. We are a new nation. [. . .] We want everyone
to control their own life and care for one another. [. . .] We
will provide free health services: birth control and
abortions, drug information, medical care, that this society
is not providing us with. [. . .] We cannot tolerate attitudes,
institutions, and machines whose purpose is the destruction
of life, the accumulation of ‘profit.’” Despite the serious
rhetoric, the Yippies approached their revolution with
humor. Their flag was a marijuana leaf on a red star and, in
1968, at the Democratic National Convention, they
announced the nomination of a pig—Pigasus the Immortal—
for president of the United States. They were later referred
to, aptly, as Groucho Marxists.
 The “party line” part of YIPL’s name emphasized its focus
on the telephone. Party lines were a form of telephone
service used in rural areas in which multiple houses would
share the same telephone line. Want to make a call? Better
hope that your neighbor down the street isn’t already using
the phone. Want the call to be private? Better hope that
neighbor isn’t listening.
 The connection between the Yippies and the telephone was
this: YIPL was devoted to teaching Yippies and hippies and
rebellious youth how to use the telephone as a tool of civil
disobedience, specifically, how to make free phone calls to
fuck the Bell System and, with it, the United States
government.
YIPL was the brainchild of Alan Fierstein and Yippie
founder Abbie Hoffman. Fierstein was an engineering major
at Cornell University during the late 1960s who had long
been interested in the telephone system. Based on his own
investigations and through conversations with his fellow
engineering students he had learned several ways to make
free telephone calls. But Fierstein differed from many
phone phreaks in one important way: he was strongly
political. As a young liberal student at the end of a
tumultuous decade he recalls feeling that his mission was to
“end the Vietnam War and oppose Nixon in any possible
way.”
 In his travels through the antiwar demonstrations at
Cornell, Fierstein made the acquaintance of the famous and
flamboyant Abbie Hoffman, who was then in the process of
writing Steal This Book, the Yippie manifesto that taught its
readers how to get free food, free postage, free weapons,
even a free buffalo from the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Fierstein told Hoffman of the ways he knew to make free
phone calls and Hoffman was quick to incorporate them
into his stealable book. Hoffman, Fierstein recalls, “felt that
the technology that I had would be useful in fighting the
enemy, which in his case was the United States
government. And while I had no love for the government, of
course I also had a hatred for the phone company.”
 Understanding Fierstein’s hatred of the phone company
requires understanding a few things about the phone
company itself—and the public’s perception of it—in the late
1960s and early 1970s. Back then, AT&T wasn’t simply the
largest company on earth; it was the world’s largest
regulated private monopoly. People generally have little
love for monopolies, associating them with high prices and
poor service, and the telephone company was no exception
to this general rule. “In a country indissolubly wed to free
enterprise, AT&T stands as a corporate enigma, being a
regulated monopoly and the only major phone company in
the world not owned and run by a national government,”
New York Times business reporter Sonny Kleinfield wrote.
“It is like some culture in a Petri dish about which scientists
cannot agree whether it is harmful or beneficial.”
 As a regulated entity, the telephone company couldn’t
increase its rates without permission from its regulatory
masters, the FCC and various state public utility
commissions. But that didn’t stop the company from asking,
and AT&T became notorious for its rate hike requests. At
first glance, this reputation seemed undeserved: AT&T’s
1970 request for a 6 percent increase in telephone long-
distance rates was its first in thirteen years. But AT&T’s
vast size meant that just about every year some part of its
far-flung empire was asking some regulatory body
somewhere for permission to charge its customers more
money. In addition to a long-distance rate hike, the AT&T
corporation wanted to increase rates for private telephone
lines for things like teletype newswires in 1961 and, in
1968, for specialized high-quality leased lines for audio
feeds used by radio and television broadcasters. Bell
System local operating companies had their hands out too.
Southern New England Telephone and Southern Bell both
asked regulators for rate hikes in 1961, Chesapeake and
Potomac Telephone in 1964, Pacific Telephone in 1966 (and
then again in 1967), Pacific Northwest Bell and Southern
Bell in 1968, New York Telephone and—once again—
Southern New England Telephone in 1969.
  Being frequently in the news asking for more money from
rate payers does not endear you to the public. Nor did
AT&T’s insistence that all telephones were rented to
customers, never owned by them outright. This policy, in
place since the inception of the Bell System, wasn’t just for
telephone lines but extended to the telephones themselves.
Want a single telephone line with two or three extension
telephones in your house? Expect to pay the phone
company every month for each telephone; prices varied
across the United States, but figure about $1 per month
per extension in 1970. Local telephone companies ran
“ringer tests” at night using automated equipment to count
the number of telephones on each line in an effort to spot
unauthorized extensions; indeed, in the mid-seventies the
Bell System went so far as to deploy a specialized telephone
testing computer system called DUE—“detect unauthorized
equipment”—to catch subscribers with unauthorized
extensions. (A common technique to get around this was to
install telephone extensions with their ringers disconnected
so they couldn’t be electronically spotted by the phone
company.) Installers—or, more accurately, deinstallers—
would be dispatched to remove offending instruments;
repeat offenders could have telephone service terminated
entirely. Needless to say, these were not the sorts of
interactions that promoted warm gooey feelings toward the
telephone company.
 AT&T’s reputation wasn’t helped by the great service
failures of 1969 and 1970. As a 1969 New York Times
article put it, “Cries of frustration over erratic telephone
service are being heard from more and more of the United
States’ major metropolitan areas. Although most of the
attention has focused on New York, where Federal
Communication Commission officials say the situation is the
most severe, telephone customers in such cities as Miami,
Boston, Denver, Atlanta, and Los Angeles are finding
themselves inconvenienced and angered by a variety of
troubles.” Customer frustrations included the “inability to
get dial tone for minutes or even hours; the rapid ‘buzz
buzz’ that means all circuits are busy; the recorded voice
that informs the customer the number he is calling no
longer is ‘in service,’ when he knows it is; the line that
unaccountably goes dead; the busy signal that intrudes
before the caller finishes dialing; delays in getting
telephones installed, and          assorted   misconnections,
disconnections, and malconnections.” As one writer
described it, “A kind of surrealistic telephone chaos reigned,
all too suggestive of a world gone mad.”
 The madness peaked in July 1969 when an entire
telephone exchange—PLaza 8 on East 56th Street in New
York City—failed completely due to overload; more than
10,400 telephones in that exchange became unreachable
for large chunks of the day for several weeks. AT&T
acknowledged that customer complaints had reached
record numbers; a New York Telephone executive vice
president publicly described service as “lousy.” For its part,
the telephone company blamed the problems on
“unforeseeable expansion in demand for telephone use”—in
other words, AT&T was the victim of its own success, for too
many people were demanding telephone service and the
company was unable to add capacity quickly enough to
serve them. This caused some at the Federal
Communications Commission to wonder, as the New York
Times put it, “whether the telephone companies’
management techniques are equal to the job of maintaining
the United States’ communication network in good order.”
An FCC investigation of telephone service complaints was
launched.
 Then there was the Bell System’s reputation for
discriminatory hiring and promotion practices. “For a long
time,” wrote one historian, “AT&T was the corporate
personification of male chauvinism and racism. It had
acquired a well-known tradition of hiring relatively few
members of racial minorities, and while it was the biggest
employer of women, it traditionally relegated them to low-
level slots as secretaries or operators.” Although the
telephone company was able to offer some evidence that it
was working to correct these problems, in 1970 the federal
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission took an
unprecedented step: it asked the Federal Communications
Commission to deny a $385 million AT&T rate hike request
until the telephone company ended its “callous
indifference” to equal employment laws and stopped its
employment discrimination against “blacks, women, and
Spanish-surnamed Americans.” The FCC responded by
launching another sweeping investigation into AT&T,
covering not only its request for a “major rate increase” but
also its cost structure and “charges of discriminatory hiring
practices.” The feds weren’t the only ones who were
unhappy. Within a year, half a million telephone workers—
members of the AFL-CIO Communications Workers of
America and related unions—would be on strike for
grievances including wages, pensions, health benefits, and
the telephone company’s “anti-feminist job policies.”
 Finally, there was AT&T’s reputation as the world’s most
controlling and straitjacketed company, a company that
prized conformance and discouraged creativity. “In this
office,” said an AT&T junior executive in 1967, “we call it
‘The System,’ and the use of the word ‘the’ means dogmatic
finality. The wall comes up pretty fast when you start
tampering with the way things are done within The System,
and you either slow down and do things Bell’s way or you
knock your brains out.” Another AT&T executive agreed:
“We prefer to have our men use their own initiative, but we
leave as little as possible to the imagination.”
 As part of its program to leave as little as possible to the
imagination, AT&T created an exhaustive collection of
manuals and how-to guides covering every conceivable
situation. Called Bell System Practices or BSPs, they were
the very embodiment of “The System,” codifying precisely
how AT&T equipment was to be assembled, disassembled,
configured, and serviced and the exact way virtually any
task was to be performed by Bell System employees. By
1952 there were more than nine thousand individual BSPs;
millions of copies were printed and distributed to the
operating companies. A particularly illustrative example
was Bell System Practice number 770-130-301 (revised),
dated August 1952. Titled “Sweeping, General,” this three-
page document set forth the authoritative procedure for
sweeping floors within the Bell System. It differentiated
among light sweeping, heavy sweeping, stairway sweeping,
and “pickup” sweeping, offered instructions for each, and
provided a helpful list of tools required (including, not
surprisingly, a broom, which it properly referred to as a
“floor brush”). Finally, lest there be any confusion, it noted
that smooth floors within Bell System buildings should be
swept     by     alternative    sweeping    methods—methods
described in detail in its two sister BSPs 770-130-302 and
770-130-303.
 All this made the phone company a perfect target for
mockery. In 1967, for example, the satirical comedy The
President’s Analyst starred James Coburn as Dr. Sidney
Schaefer, the president’s psychiatrist. A target for every spy
agency on the planet, Schaefer goes increasingly crazy
himself, reeling from one paranoid situation to another until
he is finally kidnapped by the largest, most diabolical
organization of all: The Phone Company—or TPC—which is
run by a “robotic man in a three piece suit.” As one
reviewer wrote at the time, “I find it hard to fault a writer
who has the gall to make the phone company his villain.”
  Then, two years later in 1969, Lily Tomlin introduced a
new character to her comedy repertoire: Ernestine, a
prissy, officious, nasal-voiced telephone company employee.
Sitting before a switchboard on the controversial Laugh-In
television show, Ernestine tormented famous personalities
of the day, including “Mr. Milhous” (Richard Nixon), “Mr.
Spiro” (Spiro Agnew), and “Mr. Hoover” (J. Edgar Hoover),
her punch lines emphasized by her famous snort. “If we do
not receive payment within ten days,” she advised a “Mr.
Veedle” (Gore Vidal) in one skit, “we will send a large burly
serviceman to rip [your phone] out of your wall. I’d advise
you to lock up the liquor cabinet, he’s a mean drunk. Now,
Mr. Veedle, wouldn’t you rather pay than lose your service
and possibly the use of one eye?” Ernestine struck a chord
not just with the public but also with the telephone
company’s rank and file, and she hit a nerve with their
higher-ups too. Telephone operators in Southern California
made Tomlin an honorary operator and presented her with
a trophy, the Cracked Bell Award. “They love the character,
Ernestine, but they said the phone company is a little
uptight,” Tomlin told newspapers at the time. A few years
later, in a fake television commercial shown on Saturday
Night Live, Ernestine captured the telephone company’s
perceived incompetence—“You see, the phone system
consists of a multibillion-dollar matrix of space-age
technology that is so sophisticated even we can’t handle
it”—and immortalized its perceived arrogance with the
motto “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone
company.”
 So, sure, lots of people disliked the telephone company
back in 1970, Fierstein included. But what on earth did
making free phone calls have to do with opposing Abbie
Hoffman’s enemy—that is, the United States government—
and ending the war in Vietnam?
 The answer lay in something called the telephone excise
tax. Way back in 1898 Congress legislated a special tax on
long-distance telephone calls to help fund the Spanish-
American War. Although the tax has come and gone several
times since then, it’s come more than it’s gone, and
somehow it always seemed to be around whenever we were
fighting a war. World Wars I and II both had their telephone
taxes and Vietnam was no different. The 10 percent
telephone tax was added to your telephone bill and
collected by the telephone company, who in turn handed it
over to the government. The feds netted more than $1.5
billion from the telephone tax in 1971, enough to cover
about 10 percent of the costs of the Vietnam War that year.
 So, the theory went, deprive the Bell System of long-
distance revenue and you deprive the United States of
telephone tax revenue that it needs to send young men off
to fight and die in Southeast Asia. See? You can make free
phone calls and feel good about it.
 Fierstein recalls that, as a result of his discussions with
Abbie Hoffman, “We decided that I would start a newsletter
and I would introduce the newsletter to the antiwar
community by distributing leaflets at the May Day
demonstrations in Washington, D.C. So I took a bus down
there, armed with a stack of a few hundred leaflets entitled
‘Fuck the Bell System,’ and putting in the connection
between technology and many other cultural issues of the
time, not just the war but racism, sexism, etc., worker
conditions at big corporations, particularly Ma Bell.”
 “The response was, we got a few, I don’t remember, maybe
high dozens, maybe couple of hundred responses to our
initial leaflet,” Fierstein says. He started selling cheap
subscriptions—$1 per year—to the YIPL newsletter. YIPL
served as a bit of a Trojan horse, he recalls. “One of our
main efforts was to try to make the average person who
hated the phone company identify with that particular
rallying point and use that as a way to sweep them into the
exposure to countercultural ideas about these other
subjects, you know, women’s liberation, etc.”
 YIPL’s first issue premiered in June 1971, with Fierstein
writing under the pen name “Al Bell.” Black and white, four
pages long, its articles explained how to hook up extension
telephone lines yourself (no need to pay Ma Bell an extra
monthly charge) and how to make a simple circuit to
conference two telephone lines together. It concluded with
a bit on the telephone excise tax and War Tax Resistance, a
group that sought to convince Americans not to pay war-
related taxes.
 The front-page story of YIPL’s first issue was titled simply
“The Credit Card Code” and it told how to make free phone
calls using made-up telephone credit card numbers.
Telephone credit cards? Remember, it’s 1971, and cell
phones haven’t yet been invented. But people still need to
make phone calls when they’re out and about. This, of
course, is why God created pay phones. Long-distance
phone calls are expensive, though, and if you’re a traveling
businessperson you’d prefer not to carry around $45 in
coins in order to call your customers and home office when
you’re on the road. What to do?
 AT&T’s answer was the telephone credit card. This wasn’t
a general-purpose credit card like those offered by Visa
(then BankAmericard), MasterCard (then Master Charge),
or American Express but rather was a credit card that
could be used only to make telephone calls. You’d call the
operator and ask to make a credit card call. She’d ask for
your telephone credit card number, place the call for you,
and then write up a billing slip. The cost of your call (plus a
convenience surcharge) would eventually get added to your
monthly telephone bill.
 Telephone credit cards were big business for AT&T. During
the month of March 1970 the telephone company billed
almost $40 million in credit card calls. That’s a tasty little
revenue stream, and it’s tastier still when it’s growing at
almost 10 percent a year.
 Unfortunately for AT&T, almost a million dollars a month of
these billings were “uncollectible.” Uncollectible is one of
those pleasant business euphemisms that means somebody
is stiffing you for something. Sometimes customers don’t
pay their bills. Sometimes operators make mistakes, maybe
writing down the wrong billing information. But the lion’s
share of uncollectibles was due to credit card fraud—people
intentionally using bogus credit card numbers to make free
phone calls. And the uncollectibles problem was rapidly
getting bigger. Between 1966 and 1970 the percentage of
uncollectible credit card revenue had increased 320
percent, and the pace was accelerating; the uncollectible
percentage doubled in just one year between 1969 and
1970.
 This runaway growth in fraud was possible because
AT&T’s credit card numbering system, securitywise, was a
bad joke. In 1970 a telephone credit card number consisted
of a single letter followed by a seven-digit telephone
number followed by a three-digit “revenue accounting
office” (RAO) code. The RAO code was fixed for each area of
the country. For example, anybody who lived in the San
Francisco Bay Area would have a credit card number that
ended in 158. The letter that started a credit card number
was the same everywhere in the country and it changed
just once a year; the letter for 1970 was “S.”
 The upshot was that if you were only slightly craftier than
the average houseplant, you could conjure up AT&T credit
card numbers out of thin air. Perhaps you’re a radical Yippie
pinko who wants to annoy the local FBI office by sticking
them with your long-distance telephone calls. Let’s see, the
FBI’s number in San Francisco is 552-2155. Pick up the
phone. Dial zero. “Hi, operator, I’d like to make a credit
card call. My credit card number is S 552-2155 158 . . .”
You get to talk to your friend and the FBI foots the bill; the
left-wing Students for a Democratic Society did just this in
1973.
 If that wasn’t easy enough, a handful of bogus credit card
numbers attained national prominence via radio programs
and newspapers, especially college and underground
newspapers. Starting in late 1966 a story popped up that
would be repeated over and over in various forms, that the
actor Steve McQueen (or Paul Newman or Sammy Davis Jr.,
depending on the story) had gotten into a fight with the
telephone company. According to one version of the story,
McQueen had won a million-dollar judgment against the
Bell System and wanted to share the bounty, so he took out
a newspaper ad and gave out his telephone credit card
number, encouraging students and military servicemen to
use it up. Another version had it that he had lost his battle
with the telephone company but, refusing to give in, had
taken out an ad in the newspaper giving his telephone
credit card number to all and sundry; he would then refuse
to pay the bill, sticking the phone company with the losses.
A spokesman for McQueen stated, “Steve doesn’t recall
ever having a phone credit card. Besides, no man in his
right mind would give out his credit card number.” Still,
both versions were great stories, and, like other urban
legends, the fact that they weren’t actually true didn’t stop
their spread. AT&T memos show that by 1970 more than a
million dollars’ worth of fraudulent calls had been billed to
the two credit card numbers most commonly associated
with the McQueen-Newman-Davis Jr. stories.
 The utter lack of security in its credit card numbering
system, coupled with the exponential increase in fraud, was
not lost on the telephone company. “It is evident,” a 1970
AT&T memo noted dryly, “that past endeavors to abate
uncollectible losses have failed or have proven to be
ineffective.”
 AT&T’s solution was to introduce a new credit card system,
one that would be harder for the bad guys to crack. The
new, fraud-resistant 1971 credit card code looked like this:
a seven-digit telephone number followed by a three-digit
RAO code (same as last time) followed by the Big Secret:
the “check letter.” The check letter was the thing that
allowed the operator to know if a credit card number was
valid. It was the magic that would solve the fraud problem.
 The Big Secret was that each year AT&T would chose a
particular digit position—in 1971 it was the sixth digit in
your telephone number—and that would serve as an index
into a table of ten letters. For 1971 the letters, in order,
were “QAEHJNRUWZ.” If the sixth digit of your phone
number was a 1, then the check letter was Q. If it was a 2
the check letter was A. And so on.
 Obviously, protecting the Big Secret was key. “It is
necessary that all employees in all departments understand
the importance of protecting the integrity of the new credit
card plan,” read an AT&T memo. “Further, it should be
made clear that under no circumstances should an
employee disclose the characteristics of an acceptable
credit card number to any unauthorized person nor should
an employee ever divulge to a customer how she knew that
a credit card was invalid.”
 The problem with the credit card code’s Big Secret was, of
course, clever people. If it’s simple enough for operators to
be able to figure out on the fly, it’s simple enough for phone
phreaks—or anybody else who was interested—to reverse
engineer with a little bit of time, energy, and effort. While
the network explorer type of phone phreaks may have
looked down their collective noses at making fraudulent
credit card calls, Bill Acker allows that they worked out the
telephone credit card code each year just for fun, just by
using pencil and paper and studying credit card numbers.
It was, after all, both telephone-related and a challenge, so
the phreaks went after it the same way others might solve
crossword puzzles. But, Acker says, “With all the electronic
means we had to get there, you don’t need to mess with
people’s phone bills to make a free call.”
 Unfortunately for AT&T, the world is not made up of
technically minded highbrow phone phreaks like Bill Acker;
most people interested in the credit card code wanted to
make free calls, plain and simple. The switch to the new
credit card system was scheduled for December 1, 1970.
The first underground and college newspaper articles
appeared with the new credit card code just two months
later. By April 1971 Abbie Hoffman was being interviewed
on New York City’s WNET-TV, channel 13, promoting Steal
This Book. He read directly from his book into the camera:
“This is going to be a public disservice announcement,” he
told his viewers. “To make your own credit card numbers,
the 1971 credit card consists of ten digits and a letter. The
first seven digits comprise any New York City telephone
number. The phone company will bill this number, so make
sure the number you use is nonexistent or the number of a
large corporation. The next three digits are the credit card
code. For New York City it’s 021. The letter is based on the
sixth digit of the phone number. If the sixth digit is one,
then the letter is Q. If it’s a two, it’s A . . .” Hoffman went
through the complete list and concluded, “For example, for
New York, you would dial 581-6000-021-Z and Channel
Thirteen would pick up the bill.” The host of the TV show
quickly disclaimed responsibility for this idea.
YIPL’s first issue set the tone of the publication and
subsequent issues offered a similar blend of technological
hackery, countercultural politics, and antiwar and
antigovernment rhetoric, all sprinkled with goofy
illustrations. “I can’t draw very well, as you can see from
the first few issues,” says Fierstein.
  YIPL’s second issue in July 1971 led with a tutorial on the
blue box—what it was, how it worked, and how to use it.
Inside it reprinted an open letter from the New York Times
columnist Russell Baker in which Baker suggested that the
Yippies’ hatred of the telephone company was misplaced;
on the opposite page, YIPL published a rebuttal from
Hoffman that ended with, “Until AT&T and the other
corporations really become public services rather than
power and profit gobblers, we’ll continue to rip them off
every chance we get. If you want to discuss this further, call
me up some time. Because of all the agencies claiming to
have me under surveillance, it’s one of the fastest ways to
speak directly to your government.” Issue no. 2 also
introduced the first version of what would eventually
become YIPL’s icon: the classic bell-shaped Bell System
logo but one with a Liberty Bell–style crack in it.
  Issue no. 3 in August 1971 raised the price of a
subscription to $2 a year—“the best thing you can buy for
two bucks,” it proclaimed. Despite the price increase, the
issue itself was thin on content, exhorting readers to send
in information. “We tried to enlist, as much as possible,
people to send in their own ideas because I had a limited
amount of information I could write myself,” Fierstein says.
As YIPL got going, readers supplied letters, tips, ideas,
technical information, and even finished articles; Fierstein
did pretty much everything else himself. “I got friends to
help fold newsletters,” he says, but “ninety-five percent of it
was from me, probably more than ninety-five percent, for
the first twenty or thirty or forty issues.” He continues, “I
really did it all, I did the whole thing for many, many years—
four years. It was a lot of work . . . I lugged the newsletters
back from the printer, I brought the copies to the printer, I
would paste them up, I would do everything.” Still, he felt, it
was worth the effort. “Every time I received a letter where
people said they supported us, or someone would say, look,
I really don’t have much money but I’m enclosing a dollar to
help the cause . . . I mean, it was so pathetically generous, a
small amount of money but from someone who couldn’t
afford much.”
 YIPL grew rapidly, reaching a peak of between two
thousand and three thousand subscribers. “We were caught
between being smaller and wanting to be bigger,” says
Fierstein, “but at the same time not wanting to be so big
that there would be an incentive for the phone company to
act on us.” There was, of course, no way to keep YIPL’s
existence secret from the telephone company, and soon Bell
Labs, AT&T, and the various telephone operating companies
had purchased subscriptions—usually using assumed
names and employee home addresses. By 1972 YIPL had
become sufficiently prominent that AT&T security chief
Joseph Doherty sent a memo to his security agents: “As you
are aware, efforts are continuing to effectuate deterrent
actions against publications which print detailed
instructions regarding methods to commit toll fraud. It has
been alleged that information published in the Youth
International Party Line (Y.I.P  .L.) newspaper was a source
document for some acts of fraud. It would be helpful to
acquire evidence to substantiate this allegation. Therefore,
it is requested that signed statements (attesting to source
of information) be obtained from fraud perpetrators who
admit acting to defraud the telephone companies based on
information appearing in the Y.I.P      .L. newsletter.” YIPL
obtained a copy of this memo and printed it the next month.
 Although Fierstein did worry that the phone company
might try to shut him down, his spirits were buoyed by an
ace in the hole. “Abbie lent us his lawyer Jerry Lefcourt,”
Fierstein recalls. Lefcourt was a young firebrand who had
made a name for himself as part of the defense team for the
Chicago Seven, a group of antiwar protesters (including
Hoffman) who had been arrested for conspiracy and
incitement of riot in 1968. “He promised to defend us in the
unlikely event that the phone company would ever
prosecute us and elevate our minuscule presence to a
large-scale story, which we didn’t feel they would want to
do.”
YIPL marked the beginning of the cultural hijacking of
phone phreaking. Before this newsletter—and before the
Esquire article, which would be published a few months
after YIPL’s first issue—phone phreaking had been the
domain of the Bill Ackers and Joe Engressias and Charlie
Pynes and Ralph Barclays of the world: people who were
obsessively interested in exploring the telephone network
and understanding how it all worked. To be sure, these
early phreaks weren’t immune to the allure of making free
phone calls, but that wasn’t their primary interest. In
contrast, Hoffman and Fierstein took the hobby in a new
direction, one simultaneously more political and more
utilitarian. If the old game was to understand, appreciate,
and play with the telephone network, the new game was to
make free calls and screw Ma Bell and the government.
 The game was changing. Old Mother Bell couldn’t afford to
ignore this for much longer.
                      Fourteen

                     BUSTED

THE WOMAN WAS    a busybody. The man was rude.
 It was December 1971. They were at a discount gas station
at the corner of Saratoga Avenue and Stevens Creek
Boulevard in Sunnyvale, California, the very heart of the
Silicon Valley. The woman had been waiting patiently to use
the gas station’s lone pay phone when the man cut in front
of her and popped into the telephone booth.
 The woman watched as he took out a small rectangular
box. It had wires coming out of it, wires that went into
something that looked like a mound of clay. The box had a
label on its side. SPEECH SCRAMBLER. Strange sounds came
from inside the booth as the man fiddled with the box. It all
seemed very odd.
 Curiosity piqued—and unable to make her phone call—the
woman wandered over to the man’s vehicle, a green
Volkswagen van. She peered in the back, through the
striped curtains, where she saw what looked like two large
car batteries. She wrote down the van’s license plate
number, WB6EWU, and went to speak to the gas station
attendant.
 When she returned the phone booth was empty. The man
was gone, along with his Volkswagen van. Nearby, a
telephone company employee toiled, doing whatever it is
that telephone company employees do. She walked over
and told him about the rude man and his odd little box.
Months earlier, in April 1971, British Columbia Telephone
took a wrecking ball to the phone phreaks’ home on the
network. In a bit of telephonic urban renewal, the old
mechanical Vancouver step tandem—home to the 2111
conference—was replaced with a shiny new 4A crossbar toll
switching machine. The old step tandem still existed but it
was relegated to other, lesser duties. Unfortunately for the
phreaks, the telephone company thoughtlessly failed to
provide a phone phreak conference call setup in the new
switching machine.
 The 2111 conference really was something special. It was
not the only conference circuit the phreaks had at their
disposal but it was one of the best. It was easy to dial—you
could use just a Cap’n Crunch whistle from many places—
and it supported all the people they could pile on to it. In
contrast, loop arounds were okay for meeting other
phreaks but you could fit only two people on them, not
much of a conference. Another conference bridge
technique, pioneered by Joe Engressia, was something
called an open sleeve-lead conference. This required either
finding a miswired connection in a central office someplace
or, more likely, fast-talking a telephone company switchman
into miswiring such a connection for you. The former
required luck; the latter, balls and skill. If you were
particularly clever, you could engineer such a setup to be
reached via an 800 number, creating a toll-free conference
bridge that any phreak could dial into, whether or not he
had a blue box. Bill Acker recalls setting up two of these,
one in Charleston and one in Benton Harbor; the
Charleston circuit supported up to seven people at once.
 The phreaks searched the nooks and crannies of the
network for a conference that would be as good as 2111.
They did this via the time-honored technique of scanning.
Using a blue box, they would connect to a tandem
somewhere and start exhaustively dialing all the three-digit
codes between 000 and 199—that is, the sequences that
couldn’t be the start of normal telephone numbers—to see
what they did. The network was a varied thing in those
days, so codes that worked on a switching machine in San
Francisco, say, might be quite different from those in
Peoria. It was tedious work, but it was the kind of tedious
work that phone phreaks loved.
 One of the tandems they scanned was White Plains
Tandem 2 in the 914 area code of New York. In that tandem
the code 052 was a bit of an enigma; if you used your blue
box to dial KP + 914 + 052 + ST you’d be connected to
something that gave you a short little beep—and nothing
else. You knew you had reached something but nobody
knew what. Pressing more keys on your blue box to feed it
more MF digits didn’t get you anything. Multiple phreaks
had played with it and couldn’t figure it out. It was the
Sphinx of dial codes.
 Then in January 1972 a phone phreak named Ray
Oklahoma † †      cracked the 052 code. Oklahoma, an
engineering student from Long Island who was studying at
Oklahoma State, had been a phone phreak for about a year.
He had been fascinated by the musical notes he heard on
long-distance calls and, like others before him, soon found
himself headed down the phone phreak rabbit hole. For
some reason, Oklahoma tried something that the others
hadn’t thought of: what if you connected to 052 and then
sent it touch-tones instead of blue box tones? Bingo.
Through a process of trial and error, Oklahoma figured out
that 052 was actually an incredibly sophisticated
conference bridge. Unlike 2111, this conference system
allowed you to dial out. That is, you could dial in to 052 with
your blue box and then, using touch tones, add other people
to the conference by having the 052 conference system call
them for you—for free! In fact, through an unintentional
quirk, you could even use it to conference in people from
overseas.
††The pseudonym he went by at the time.
  The 2111 conference was back in business; its new name
was 052. It quickly became popular, hosting more than a
dozen phreaks at a time, including some from the United
Kingdom.
  That very same week in January, Bill Acker—then a senior
in high school—received an unwelcome visitor, a man the
New York phone phreaks would come to know well: Thomas
J. Duffy, a security agent for New York Telephone. Duffy was
one of roughly 650 Bell System security agents nationwide,
some 10 percent of whom were former FBI special agents.
Blue and black boxes—what the phone company called
electronic toll fraud—took up only a tiny fraction of the
average security agent’s time. Mostly they focused on more
common problems such as robberies and burglaries (a lot of
people paid their phone bills in cash back in those days at
telephone company customer service offices), coin
telephone thefts, stolen vehicles, company car accidents,
and even employee embezzlement. Where toll fraud was
concerned, the vast majority were credit card and third
number billing fraud. Still, Duffy seemed to be the security
agent in the New York area assigned to electronic toll fraud
cases, and, in particular, to dealing with the area’s pesky
teenage phone hackers—a group that had expanded since
the days when Bill Acker felt so alone.
  Acker wasn’t entirely surprised to hear from Duffy, since
Duffy had already had a few interactions with Evan
Doorbell,‡‡ another Long Island phone phreak Acker knew.
What did surprise Acker —and annoyed him too—was that
Duffy actually showed up at his school to talk with him,
instead of visiting him in the privacy of his home. As a result
of Duffy’s visit, the officials and other kids at Acker’s school
now knew he was in trouble. “That was very
uncomfortable,” Acker recalls. “Which maybe was part of it,
part of a ‘shock-and-awe’ approach”—an attempt to
intimidate Acker and keep him off balance during their
conversation.
‡‡The pseudonym he went by at the time.
 The shock-and-awe approach didn’t work out well for
Duffy. “When Tom Duffy said, ‘We want to talk with you,’ I
said the following thing: ‘I have the right to remain silent,
and I wish to do so,’” Acker remembers. Acker flat-out
refused to talk to Duffy.
 “He wasn’t expecting that,” Acker says. After all, Duffy
wasn’t law enforcement, and he wasn’t there to arrest
Acker but just to get him to knock off his telephonic
shenanigans. While he was at it, Duffy maybe figured he
might be able to get some information on phone phreaking
activities in the area. So why the silent treatment? “There
was an element of ‘screw you,’” Acker says. “‘Hey, you’re
the telephone company, you’re the enemy, you don’t
understand us phreaks.’” But there were two other things
that made him keep his mouth shut. First, Acker says, “I
knew I could talk to him as nicely as I wanted to, we could
spend a couple of hours talking, but at the end of the day,
‘Cut it out, kid, or you’re gonna get arrested’ was going to
be the message. I knew that that was where the
conversation was going to end up.”
 More important, Acker says, was this: “He was a trained
interrogator. He wasn’t law enforcement, but he was a
security guy, that’s what he did for a living. I was a kid. I
couldn’t guarantee that if we started talking I wouldn’t let
slip something about somebody else inadvertently. I didn’t
expect to be a match for him if he really was a good
interrogator.” Given his strong feelings about never
squealing on another phreak, Acker says, “I just figured,
‘Don’t talk to him at all.’”
 The right-to-remain-silent approach didn’t work out well
for Acker. “That really pissed him off badly,” Acker
remembers. The very next day, while Acker was still in
school, Duffy drove to Acker’s house, met with his mother,
and drove off with Acker’s most cherished possession: his
blue box.
The busybody woman at the gas station in Sunnyvale was
just the break the General Telephone security department
had been hoping for.
  “On several occasions during the year 1971,” read an April
1972 memorandum from a senior special agent with
General Telephone security, “information was received from
the Security Department of British Columbia Telephone
Company, Vancouver, Canada, that their long-lines
department was observing illegal entry by parties dialing
and multi-frequencing [sic] from points in the United States
into their toll switching system and returning back to points
in the United States.” This was, of course, exactly what the
Esquire phreaks had been using 2111 for back before it
was a conference call, back when it still had a dial tone on
it; they’d whistle into British Columbia via 2111, get a dial
tone, and dial out again.
  “Line traces were made,” continued the memo, “and a
number of them showed that some of the parties came
through switching machines in the San Jose, California
area. On 4/17/71, a new 4-A Type toll switcher was placed
into service in Vancouver. During this cutover it was
observed that a conference call of several hours duration
was set up illegally, and a recording of a portion of this
conference call was made.” BC Tel sent a copy of this tape
to General Telephone security. It was apparent that “one or
more parties on the call were located in Los Gatos,
California, served by Western California Telephone
Company, a part of the General system.”
  When General Telephone security received the report from
the busybody woman about the rude man with the box that
made strange noises, agents ran the license plate number
she’d given them through the Department of Motor Vehicles
—something anyone could do back in those more innocent
days. The registrant turned out to live at 16382 Robie Lane,
Los Gatos. His name? John Thomas Draper. “In exchanging
information between security departments throughout the
United States and Canada,” the memo noted, “the names
John Draper and Captain Crunch were associated on a
number of occasions in matters pertaining to fraudulent use
of multi-frequency signaling.”
 “A night time line observation was made”—GT’s
euphemism for a tap-and-tape recording setup. One night’s
worth of recordings of Draper’s home telephone line on
March 27, 1972, netted “evidence of numerous attempts
and completions of calls using multi-frequency signaling to
points in California and to Sidney, Australia.”
Draper had just finished up a nice long conference call with
the other phreaks on 052 when his telephone rang.
 The caller was an anonymous telephone company
employee, a switchman at White Plains Tandem 2. He was
calling to deliver an urgent message. They’re monitoring
this thing really, really closely, the switchman told Draper.
They’re recording everything. They’re watching what you
dial. You guys need to be careful about this. Bill Acker
observed later that the switchman “stuck his neck out about
a hundred and fifty miles” to deliver that warning.
 While the call proved that not everyone in the phone
company had it in for the phone phreaks, Acker and New
York Telephone security agent Tom Duffy continued their
cat-and-mouse games. Acker’s ability to play with the
network had been curtailed when Duffy took away his blue
box; in particular, Acker needed it to call into the 052
conference. But Acker soon discovered a workaround. Due
to a bug in his phone company’s central office, Acker found
he was able to dial a telephone number like 914 052 1211
and the switch would connect him—sometimes—to the 052
system. He could then use his touch-tone phone to control
the conference, no blue box needed. It would have been
better to have a blue box, to be sure, but this wasn’t bad.
 That April, Tom Duffy made another trip to Acker’s house.
This time he ripped out Acker’s touch-tone phone, replacing
it with a rotary dial one. Acker was aghast. “Rotary dial!” he
wailed, but Acker’s mom was actually kind of pleased. “She
could never understand why anyone would want to push
buttons when God intended us to spin a dial,” he says.
It was May 4, 1972. Draper was in his VW van in the
parking lot of a 7-Eleven in Los Gatos when the alarm bells
began ringing in his reptilian hindbrain: the cars pulling up
around him were predators. He wrestled with his fight-or-
flight instinct for a moment, but neither option seemed like
a smart move. He had no way to fight and a high-speed car
chase pitting his Volkswagen bus against police cruisers
seemed like a losing proposition.
 Plan C, then. Draper got out of his van, walked around
behind it, and—unobserved, he hoped—started dumping
the contents of his pockets on the ground, ridding himself of
incriminating electronics. The last item was a small magnet,
which he stuck on the rear of his van. The magnet was a
clever security precaution, used to activate a tiny magnetic
relay inside his blue box. Draper’s box would not emit even
the slightest peep unless he held the magnet up against it
in just the right place. The idea was that if a cop ever
stopped him and started messing with his blue box, the box
simply wouldn’t work.
 Plan C’s execution did not go unobserved. The arresting
FBI agents recovered every single item Draper had
dumped, magnet and all. Their haul included Draper’s blue
box and a cassette tape containing “numerous multi-
frequency signals representing telephone numbers in
California and other states within the continental United
States; inward operator route codes for all area codes
within the United States; route codes to overseas sender
points, foreign country codes, and foreign operator route
codes.” Between each series of numbers on the tape was a
Morse code sequence identifying the person or place the
tones were used for. The FBI also searched his van and,
later that day, his apartment.
 Draper was arrested for seven counts of violating 18 USC
1343, the Fraud by Wire statute, for making blue box calls
to Australia, New York, and Oklahoma. The feds knew they
were on solid legal ground using Fraud by Wire now, thanks
to the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the bookies’ blue
box appeal under this law back in 1969. Draper was
arraigned and released on his own recognizance the same
day. On June 12, he appeared before U.S. District Court
judge Robert F. Peckham and entered a plea of “not guilty.”
Not long afterward his attorney filed a motion to suppress
the evidence. Captain Crunch was apparently not going to
give up the ship without a fight.
 The newspaper coverage of Draper’s bust increased his
fame from both the Esquire article and the Maureen Orth
article, boosting his ego and status as a counterculture
icon. The San Francisco Chronicle described him as a
“contemporary folk hero,” an “overgrown, misunderstood
kid with the mind of a genius”—though they also noted that
he was “shy, shifty eyed, and slightly myopic.” Both of the
big newswires of the day, Associated Press and United Press
International, covered the story and their copy appeared in
smaller newspapers across the country. UPI described him
as an “electronics whiz” and played up the Cap’n Crunch
whistle angle.
 The same month that Draper entered his not guilty plea, a
magazine article appeared with an intriguing title:
“Regulating the Phone Company in Your Own Home.”
According to its editorial lead, the article showed how
“practically anyone who can change the plug on an electric
toaster—using only a screwdriver, a kitchen knife, and four
dollars’ worth of readily available electric parts—can build
in two or three hours a simple device capable of evading
charges on long distance telephone calls.” It explained to its
readers how to build a black box, also known as a “mute,”
and its author was Ray Oklahoma, the discoverer of the 052
conference.
  Now, it would be one thing if this article was to appear in
YIPL or some obscure underground newspaper. But this
was slated for publication in the June issue of Ramparts, the
darling magazine of the New Left, circulation 100,000.
Ramparts was unique among lefty publications for bridging
the gap to the non–hippie-Yippie set. “It expressed radical
left values in a way mainstream people could understand,”
said a former editor. It even did it with style. It was printed
on “heavy, shiny stock with classy graphics that looked good
on a Danish Modern coffee table.” In a few short years the
magazine developed a scrappy reputation for railing
against the Vietnam War and clashing with the Central
Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the
U.S. military. Its writers were talented and its reporting
newsworthy; follow-on coverage of Ramparts articles by
mainstream newspapers, even the august New York Times,
was common.
  AT&T usually had to react to the publication of phone
phreak articles after the fact. With the Esquire article, for
example, the phone company had no clue it was coming
until it hit the newsstands, and then it had to scramble and
figure out what to do. But this time the phone company
caught a lucky break. Ramparts’ contract printer in
Milwaukee, perhaps worried about enraging Ma Bell, sent
an advance copy of the June issue to the phone company.
  The phone company was not amused. The friendly
illustrations and reassuring text in Oklahoma’s three-page
article—“do not be intimidated by the spaghetti dish of
wiring you see, only a small, identifiable portion concerns
you”—enabled anyone to build a black box and receive long-
distance calls without the caller being billed. The Esquire
article may have inspired a generation of phone phreaks
but at least it didn’t give step-by-step instructions to all the
world on how to make free calls with just a few dollars of
easy-to-get components. Ramparts did.
 This could not be allowed to happen.
 AT&T chose its battleground wisely: California. Ramparts
was headquartered in California but, more important,
California had something that other states did not: section
502.7 of the California Penal Code. Added to California law
in the early sixties, 502.7 made most telephone-related
shenanigans illegal in the Golden State. But in 1965
telephone company lobbyists managed to get its scope
dramatically expanded and the new 502.7 made it a crime
to sell—or even give away—“plans or instructions” for any
device that could be used to steal telephone service. And
what was Ray Oklahoma’s article if not plans or
instructions?
 The timing was tight. On May 12, after the June issue of
Ramparts had been mailed out to subscribers and shipped
to distributors but before it had hit the newsstands, Pacific
Telephone contacted the magazine and its middlemen. The
tone was polite but the company’s demands were firm. To
start with, Ramparts must recall its June issue or face civil
and criminal charges, up to felony conspiracy charges for
the magazine’s editors. In addition, the magazine’s editors
reported later, “Telephone Company attorneys demanded
that the copyright of the ‘phone phreak’ article be assigned
to the Bell System so that they could prosecute
underground or other publications that might reprint it;
that the film and plates from which the article had been
printed be delivered up; and that Ramparts agree never to
print a similar article in the future.” Finally, Pacific
Telephone requested the Ramparts subscriber list “so that
they could place those who had received our June issue
under surveillance.”
 “In the past ten years,” wrote its editors, “Ramparts has
incurred the wrath of power in many forms.” From
Ramparts’ perspective, regardless of what California law
might say, this was a clear violation of the First Amendment,
an affront to all that journalists held holy. It was prior
restraint on a supposedly free press, an unacceptable tactic
that the government had tried and failed to impose just a
few years ago when the New York Times was set to print
the Pentagon Papers—and that case was actually a matter
of national security. In this case, it was just the telephone
company whining. Ramparts’ entire history and radical
ethos had primed it for this fight.
 And yet it caved. As its editors explained later, “We were
willing to have the matter go to court . . . But the Bell
System had hostages we had to consider. Their attorneys
indicated that the whole network handling Ramparts was
also vulnerable to civil and criminal charges. That meant
that the over 500 wholesalers and thousands of retailers
distributing the magazine could also be prosecuted. It was
clear from our conversations that the largest corporation in
the world lacked neither the will nor the resources to do it.
To protect this distribution network, the lifeblood of this and
other publications, we agreed to recall our issue.”
 The result was that some ninety thousand copies of the
June issue never made it to newsstands or were withdrawn
once they reached them; the roughly sixty thousand that
had already been mailed to subscribers were unaffected.
Ramparts’ editors estimated the costs of the recall,
including uncollectible advertising revenues, at almost
$60,000.
 “Within a week,” its editors concluded, “American
Telephone and Telegraph had achieved what the CIA,
Pentagon, FBI and other targets of Ramparts’ journalism
over the last ten years hadn’t been able to bring about: the
nationwide suppression of this magazine.”
 Oddly enough, the 052 conference disappeared just about
the time the Ramparts issue came out. As it turned out, the
reason 052 had made such a great conference system was
that it actually was a conference system, one intended for
use by AT&T corporate executives. The suits at AT&T were
less than amused at its appropriation by the phone phreaks,
and telephone company security had been monitoring the
phone phreak conferences on 052 since February.
 Ray Oklahoma disappeared just about the time the
Ramparts issue came out too; he was arrested by the FBI in
Oklahoma City for Fraud by Wire and spent eleven days in
jail before his father was able to come and bail him out. The
charges were all related to using a blue box to call the 052
conference, he remembers. “As far as I know,” he says,
“they didn’t know I had anything to do with the Ramparts
article.” He pleaded guilty and was given five years’
probation. He also agreed to write an open letter to other
phone phreaks discouraging them from the hobby. His
letter ran in an Oklahoma newspaper and concluded with:
“I know it looks easy but you will get caught. Look at me.
My college days are ruined at least for now. I have lost
money on bond and other expenses. Plus the anxiety and
fear. I hope you don’t make the same mistake. I can only
hope you [. . .] don’t do as I have done because I am sorry.”
 As the summer wore on, and phone phreaks and
conference call setups were disappearing and people were
being arrested, it seemed high time to take a vacation.
National Airlines had been running a series of controversial
television ads featuring attractive stewardesses in revealing
minidresses saying things like, “Hi! I’m Tammy! Fly me to
Miami and back with a stopover for only $100!” Miami was
a good choice of destination in 1972. The Republicans and
Democrats both had decided to host their national
conventions in Miami Beach that summer—the Dems in July,
the Republicans in August. Abbie Hoffman’s Youth
International Party seized the moment by hosting a pair of
events in Miami on the same dates; true to form, the Yippie
events would be part protest, part theater, part smoke-in.
The publicity poster for the Yippie gatherings featured a
hairy-legged Hoffman in a minidress in midflight, having
just leapt into the air. The caption read, “High! I’m Abbie,
fly me to Miami.”
 Unable to help itself, the front page of YIPL’s June–July
1972 issue sported a cartoon telephone with wings
proclaiming, “Hi, I’m Telly! Fly Me to Miami!” The Youth
International Party Line capitalized on the Yippie gathering
by announcing that the World’s First Phone Phreak
Convention would be held July 11–15 in Miami Beach. “The
Celebration of Change will include, in addition, teach-ins on
telephones, contests, meetings with nationally known phone
phreaks,” the newsletter reported. “Plus the unveiling of
new devices never yet revealed. Courses are going to be
held on Phone Politics, Phone rip-offs, establishment rip-
offs, and peoples technology. [. . .] At the same time there
will be other events too, such as antiwar demos, women’s
rights, health care, anti-smack information and actions, and
many other happenings.”
 The YIPL issue reprinted a simplified version of the Ray
Oklahoma article from Ramparts and concluded with an
appeal to “Support Captain Crunch!” “As some of you might
know from a recent Rolling Stone article, the FBI and the
phone co. has arrested the supposed Cap’n Crunch of Blue
Box fame for allegedly making a few Box calls. We are now
setting up the Cap’n Crunch Defense Fund, for the benefit
of such obviously political telephone busts. The money will
go for support of those harassed and busted for phone co.
specials, and for legal and bail fees. Please contribute what
you can, it might be you next.”
 John Draper had to attend the World’s First Phone Phreak
Convention. How could he not? Thanks to the Esquire
article and the publicity from his recent bust, he was
probably the best-known phreak in the world at the time—
more famous even than Joe Engressia, the man Esquire had
dubbed the granddaddy of phone phreaking. Draper would
enjoy the publicity and adulation he would receive at the
conference; he always enjoyed being in the limelight. And
afterward he would head up to New York City and visit Bill
Acker, who was taking classes and staying at a YMCA in
Queens. It would be a nice little vacation from his legal
troubles.
 Draper boarded a flight from San Francisco to Miami and,
as his plane took off and banked toward the beaches of
Florida, his legal troubles multiplied. Draper had
overlooked one sniggly little detail. The terms of his release
after his arrest required him to obtain the court’s
permission if he wanted to leave the San Francisco Bay
Area, and this he did not do. John Draper didn’t know it yet
but he was now officially a fugitive.
 An informant brought Draper’s departure to the attention
of the FBI a few days later. The FBI and an assistant U.S.
attorney wasted no time in appearing before Judge
Peckham, who immediately revoked Draper’s recognizance
bond and issued a bench warrant for his arrest on July 11.
That very afternoon FBI agents raided Draper’s Miami
hotel room but missed him by scant hours. Unbeknownst to
them, the phone phreak convention had been postponed
and was now to be held in New York City later that month.
Draper had already left for the airport, a witness told them,
carrying—naturally enough—“a tape-recorder and a brown
valise with wires protruding from the top.”
 FBI agents caught up with Draper the next day in New
York City, arresting him at the YMCA in Queens where Bill
Acker was staying. Appropriately, Draper was talking on the
hallway pay phone when the FBI agents found him, his
trusty tape recorder perched atop the pay phone and
loaded with another cassette of blue box tones. Unable to
come up with $10,000 bail, Draper spent the next several
days in the care of the United States marshal service until
he was flown back to California to appear before Judge
Peckham. Peckham denied Draper’s motion to suppress the
evidence for his California bust and set a date for trial.
 Despite the absence of its headliner, the World’s First
Phone Phreak Convention took place in New York City on
July 29, 1972. The phreaks congregated in the basement
ballroom of the Hotel Diplomat, a Times Square hotel that
was developing a reputation for hosting rock ’n’ roll shows
and fringe political gatherings—Yippies, Communists, and
Libertarians all had held conventions there. Alan Fierstein
(“Al Bell”) of YIPL was the master of ceremonies, presiding
over attractions that included a black-and-white film
showing three simple ways to make free phone calls from
pay telephones, a presentation on the black box for
receiving free calls, and breakout sessions on building
answering machines and blue boxes. Yippie founder Abbie
Hoffman led a workshop on the legality of phone phreaking
and exhorted the attendees to support the Captain Crunch
defense fund. A spy from New York Telephone later
reported to the FBI that some seventy-five people were in
attendance.
 The telephone company and the FBI continued their
stepped-up enforcement efforts as summer turned to fall.
About a week after Labor Day, on September 12, 1972, the
FBI conducted a series of raids across the country. Over the
course of three days agents arrested fourteen people in
eight cities, including Minneapolis, Dallas, Houston, and
Memphis, charging them with manufacturing, selling, and
using blue boxes. But here was the interesting thing: they
weren’t phone phreaks, or even bookies or hippies. This
time the people arrested were all upstanding members of
society, including real estate agents, stock brokers, two
executives with a vending company, and the president of an
air freight firm. A subsequent news release from AT&T
described it as follows: “Cheat Ma Bell! Rip-off the phone
company! Beat the system! Popular phrases like these were
quite fashionable not so very long ago. Just about everyone
attributed them to well-known anti-establishment types, to
the New Left, and to the self-styled phone phreaks.” It went
on to note, “The 14 persons [arrested] were not those type-
cast as the rip-off set. Rather, they were ordinary middle to
upper-middle class Americans. Everyone seemed to be
getting into the act. While the arrests pointed out that toll
fraud is geographically as well as socially and economically
wide spread, another more important fact became crystal
clear—the Bell System was cracking down on the problem
which had reached epidemic proportions. [. . .] Some
people who wouldn’t dream of stealing from a candy store
seem more than willing to commit theft by wire.”
 “For years,” the release continued, “Bell System
companies were quite lenient with persons who committed
toll fraud. Whenever possible, the company would first
attempt to stop the calls, collect on them, and stay out of
court. But that was before more than $20 million per year
was being lost. Overnight, it would seem that the lamb has
turned into the lion. Today, the Bell System is a vigorous—
and successful—prosecutor.”
 True enough. By the end of 1972 AT&T was on track to
chalk up a total of fifty-seven electronic toll fraud arrests.
The numbers might look even better if the company could
convict Captain Crunch before the end of the year. That
wasn’t looking like too much of a stretch. Despite Abbie
Hoffman’s best fund-raising efforts, the Captain Crunch
defense fund failed miserably, netting a total of $1. Unable
to continue to pay for a private attorney, Draper would have
to be represented by the public defender’s office.
 Draper’s trial was November 29, 1972. Of thirty-three
prospective jurors, two were named Bell. “Don’t think that
didn’t give us pause,” one of Draper’s attorneys remarked
later. The evidence against Draper was extensive. First
there were the tape recordings of his illegal telephone calls.
Then there was the expert witness testimony from
telephone company security agents. And there were the
friends he’d called who would testify that it was indeed
Draper who had made the phone calls, and even that
Draper was indeed the infamous Captain Crunch. It wasn’t
so much that Draper’s friends were rats; it was more that
they had little choice. Before trial the FBI had tracked down
and interviewed some of the people who Draper had called.
In each case the FBI asked if they remembered receiving
any calls from Draper. Not surprisingly, most people
suffered sudden attacks of amnesia and were unable to
remember anything. The FBI would then play a tape
recording of the call, with Draper and the person’s voice
clearly audible. In most cases the person would then agree
that his “recollection had been refreshed” and that now he
did, in fact, remember receiving such a call. The FBI agents
would then hand their new witness a subpoena to testify at
trial.
 “Draper didn’t look very legendary as he stood with his
head bowed while the prosecution offered its overwhelming
evidence gathered by investigations from San Francisco to
Sydney,” wrote the reporter from the San Francisco
Chronicle. Outgunned, Captain Crunch gave up the ship,
changing his plea from “not guilty” to “no contest.” The
judge sentenced him to a one-year suspended sentence, a
$1,000 fine, and five years’ probation, during which he was
required to “refrain from illegal use of the telephone or
other electronics devices for fraudulent means.” As part of
the plea deal, all but the first of the seven counts against
him—the one charging him with an illegal call to a radio
station in Sydney, Australia—were dismissed. In essence,
Draper would pay $1,000 for a two-minute overseas call.
 Judge Peckham concluded Draper’s sentence with a
promise of sorts: “Your electronic gymnastics may have
been thought to be a prank, a frivolity, or a harmless
vocational endeavor, but on the next occasion—if there ever
is one—you will receive a prison sentence.”
 If only Draper had heeded the good judge’s warning.
                        Fifteen

                    PRANKS

LIKE THE FLAP of a butterfly’s wings causing a hurricane half
a world away, the ripples of unintended consequences from
Ron Rosenbaum’s “Secrets of the Little Blue Box” continued
to spread. “You know how some articles just grab you from
the first paragraph? Well, it was one of those articles,”
Steve Wozniak recalls. “It was the most amazing article I’d
ever read!”
  Wozniak happened to pick up a copy of Esquire from his
mother’s kitchen table the day before starting classes at
Berkeley in the fall of 1971. Rosenbaum’s article “described
a whole web of people who were doing this: the phone
phreaks. They were anonymous technical people who went
by fake names and lived all over the place,” he recalls, how
they were “outsmarting phone companies and setting up
networks that nobody imagined existed.” It seemed
unbelievable. And yet, he says, “I kept reading it over and
over, and the more I read it, the more possible and real it
sounded.”
  Oddly enough, part of what made the article seem so real
to him were the characters. Despite their fanciful nature
and funny names, Wozniak remembers, “I could tell that the
characters being described were really tech people, much
like me, people who liked to design things just to see what
was possible, and for no other reason, really.” There was
something about the whole thing that just rang true,
despite how crazy it seemed. “The idea of the Blue Box just
amazed me,” he says. The article even gave a few of the
frequencies it used. As for Joe Engressia being able to
whistle free calls? “I couldn’t believe this was possible, but
there it was and, wow, it just made my imagination run
wild.”
 The twenty-year-old Wozniak put down the magazine. He
picked up the phone and called his friend Steve Jobs—then
a seventeen-year-old senior in high school—to tell him
about it. Less than an hour later the duo were on their way
to raid the library at the Stanford Linear Accelerator
Center. SLAC was the atom smasher at Stanford University.
It had a great technical library, Wozniak says, and he had a
long history of sneaking into it to look stuff up. “If there was
any place that had a phone manual that listed tone
frequencies,” he says, it would be SLAC.
 The two dug through the reference books and before long
they struck pay dirt: an international telephone technical
standard that listed the MF frequencies. “I froze and
grabbed Steve and nearly screamed in excitement that I’d
found it. We both stared at the list, rushing with adrenaline.
We kept saying things like ‘Oh, shit!’ and ‘Wow, this thing is
for real!’ I was practically shaking, with goose bumps and
everything. It was such a Eureka moment. We couldn’t stop
talking all the way home. We were so excited. We knew we
could build this thing. We now had the formula we needed!
And definitely that article was for real.” Jobs agrees: “We
kept saying to ourselves, ‘It’s real. Holy shit, it’s real.’”
 That very day Wozniak and Jobs purchased analog tone
generator kits from a local electronics store; this was the
Silicon Valley in 1971, after all, and such things were easily
available. Later that night they had managed to record
pairs of tones on cassette tape, enough to make a blue box
call. But it didn’t quite work. They were able to disconnect a
call to 555-1212 with 2,600 Hz—they heard the kerchink! of
the trunk—but their MF tone tape recordings didn’t do
anything. They worked late into the night trying to figure
out what was wrong. In the end Wozniak concluded that the
tone generator just wasn’t good enough to make the
telephone network dance to his tunes.
 Wozniak started classes at Berkeley the next day. But he
couldn’t get his mind off of blue boxes and phone
phreaking. “I started posting articles I found about [phone
phreaks] on my dorm room wall. I started telling my friends
what these phone phreaks were all about, how intelligent
they must be, and how I was sure they were starting to take
over the phone system all over the country,” he says.
 He thought more about the analog blue box that he and
Jobs had tried to build. The problem with analog circuits is
that they are imprecise. This is because the components
they are constructed with—resistors and capacitors and
inductors and such—are themselves inexact. For example, if
you want an analog circuit to generate a tone at a
particular frequency, as you would for a blue box, you might
need a resistor of 1000 ohms and a capacitor of 0.1
microfarads. Unfortunately, when you buy a resistor, you
can’t get one that is exactly 1000 ohms; rather, it is
guaranteed to be only within 10 percent of that value. If you
want to spend more money, you can get ones that are more
accurate—ones whose values vary by only 5 percent or even
1 percent—but there is always some inaccuracy in the
individual components. When you combine them to build a
circuit the inaccuracies often compound. Worse, the
component values vary with temperature. So you might
spend time tuning your blue box in the warmth of your
dorm room and get it all working and then go out to a pay
phone in the cold night air only to find that it doesn’t work
anymore.
 Steve Wozniak had been designing electrical circuits for
years; just a year earlier he had designed his own tiny
computer, the “Cream Soda Computer,” so named because
he and a friend drank tons of cream soda while they were
building it. Computers are made out of digital circuits,
circuits that deal with 1s and 0s rather than the full range
of values that analog circuits can handle. While this may
seem like a limitation, it gives digital circuits a huge
advantage. Digital circuits are exact and their building
block components don’t vary from one to another, nor do
they vary with temperature. With this in mind Wozniak
started thinking about how to build a digital blue box, which
would be made up of the chips used to build computers, not
analog components such as resistors and capacitors and
transistor oscillators. It would use a quartz crystal, like
those used in the then newfangled digital watches, for
ultimate accuracy and rock-solid stability.
 By early 1972 Woz had his design worked out. Even more
than the fact that it was digital, he was particularly proud of
a clever trick he used to keep the power consumption down
so the battery would last longer. “I swear to this day,” says
the man who would one day design the revolutionary Apple
I and Apple II computers, “I have never designed a circuit I
was prouder of.” It took a day to build. When he and the
other Steve tested it, it worked the first time.
 Finally they had joined the ranks of phone phreaks. Woz
adopted the phone phreak handle “Berkeley Blue” while
Jobs became “Oaf Tobar.” “I would have died to meet
Captain Crunch, who was really the center of it all. Or any
phone phreak; it just seemed so impossible that I’d ever
meet anyone else with a blue box,” Wozniak says. But
through a happy coincidence involving a friend from high
school they tracked down the Captain at radio station KKUP
in Cupertino. They arranged for Draper to meet them in
Woz’s dorm room at Berkeley.
 Woz recalls the fateful meeting. “Captain Crunch comes to
our door, and it turns out he’s just this really weird-looking
guy. Here, I thought, would be a guy who would look and
act just far away and above any engineer in the world, but
there he was: sloppy-looking, with his hair kind of hanging
down on one side. And he smelled like he hadn’t taken a
shower in two weeks, which turned out to be true. He was
also missing a bunch of teeth.”
 Hoping against hope, Woz asked his visitor if he was
indeed Captain Crunch.
 “I am he,” was Crunch’s reply.
 “He turned out to be this really strange, funny guy, just
bubbling over with energy,” Woz says, “one of these very
hyper people who keep changing topics and jumping
around . . .”
 Draper and Woz and Jobs and a few friends spent the next
several hours trading blue boxing techniques and circuit
designs; Woz was particularly pleased that Draper taught
him how to call overseas using a blue box. They continued
the conversation over pizza until about midnight when they
went their separate ways. The two Steves got in Jobs’s car
and began the hour-long drive from Berkeley to Jobs’s
home in Los Altos.
 About halfway home their car suffered a complete
electrical failure. They managed to pull over and the two
walked to a gas station, where they tried to use their blue
box to call Draper and ask him to rescue them. But for some
reason the blue box call wouldn’t go through. Worse, the
operator came back on the line. They hung up and tried
several more times but it just wouldn’t work. They started
to worry that their blue box had been detected.
 “All of a sudden,” Woz recalls, “a cop pulled into the gas
station and jumped out real fast. Steve was still holding the
blue box when he jumped out, that’s how fast it happened.
We didn’t even have time to hide it. We were sure that the
operator had called the cops on us, and that this was the
end for sure.”
 The cop and his partner spent some time rooting through
the bushes, presumably looking for drugs that the two
hippies had stashed; “I had long hair and a headband back
then,” Woz remembers. Finding no drugs, the cops turned
their attention to the blue box. What was it, they wanted to
know? It was an electronic music synthesizer, Wozniak said.
He gave a demo of a few tones. What’s the orange button
for, the cops asked? Unfortunately for their story, the
orange button was the one that generated 2,600 Hz and it
didn’t sound very musical. “Calibration,” Jobs replied.
 Woz and Jobs explained that their car had broken down.
The cops told them to get in the back of their patrol car and
they would go “check out the car story.” As Woz put it, “In
the back seat of a cop car, you know where you’re going
eventually: to jail.” As the cop car pulled out, one of the
police officers handed Woz back his electronic synthesizer.
“A guy named Moog beat you to it,” he said. Apparently the
two Steves weren’t going to jail after all.
It wasn’t long before the more business savvy of the duo
smelled an opportunity: selling blue boxes. “Steve Jobs
suggested we could sell it for $170 or so, he came up with
the price pretty early in there,” Wozniak recalls. Before
long the two were peddling blue boxes in the dorms at
Berkeley. Their sales technique was inspired. They would
knock on random dorm room doors and ask for an
imaginary person with a made-up name. When the confused
occupant would respond “Who?” they would say, “You know,
the guy who makes all the free phone calls.” Depending on
the occupant’s reaction they might add, “You know, he has
the blue boxes.” If the person they were talking to lit up and
got excited, they knew they had a solid sales prospect who
wasn’t likely to turn them in.
 In addition to going door to door they had another sales
channel through a random phone phreak acquaintance in
Los Angeles. Wozniak and Jobs had dialed into a loop-
around circuit in southern California one day and found
themselves talking to a young teenager named Adam
Schoolsky. Their friendship blossomed. Schoolsky, better
known as Johnny Bagel in Los Angeles phone phreak
circles, had been introduced to the hobby by LA phreak Al
Diamond and his telephone joke lines. As it happened,
Schoolsky had an older friend who was well connected in
Hollywood. Through this connection—and Schoolsky’s help
in assembling and manufacturing the boxes—Jobs and
Wozniak found themselves handling a couple of “quantity
orders,” that is, orders for perhaps ten boxes at a time.
Many of these wound up in the hands of various Hollywood
stars and glitterati.
  “Sales went on through the summer,” Wozniak recalls, but
eventually they dwindled off. He had a job at Hewlett-
Packard and it took a lot of time to build a box, Woz says—it
worked out to a “low paid salary.” That fall Jobs started at
Reed College and lost interest in the business. In all,
Wozniak guesses, they sold maybe thirty or forty boxes;
Jobs remembers it as more like a hundred.
  Every blue box that Woz made and sold came with a
unique guarantee: a small piece of paper was tucked inside
the box and bore the words, “He’s got the whole world in
his hands.” If one of his boxes ever failed to work and it
came back to him with the little note inside, he would repair
it, free of charge. Offering a guarantee on an illegal product
in such a quirky way appealed to Wozniak’s sense of humor.
“It’s kind of strange in itself, it’s kind of unusual, but I felt it
was worth the joke,” he says.
  Between 1973 and 1975 several of Oaf Tobar and Berkeley
Blue’s customers were caught red-handed with their blue
boxes. The boxes wound up at the FBI Laboratory where
they were disassembled and analyzed. On the whole, the
FBI has never been known for its sense of humor. In each
case, Woz’s little bit of paper with its inscription—
sometimes handwritten, sometimes typed—was carefully
noted in the FBI’s report and photographs. The feds knew
that this tied the boxes together in some way, but
fortunately for Woz and Jobs—and perhaps for the rest of
the world—the FBI never linked the blue boxes to the two
of them.
Like most phone phreaks, Woz spent time exploring the
network, using his blue box to figure out how the telephone
system worked. But he soon found another use for it:
pranks.
 Wozniak had always loved pranks, especially clever, high-
tech ones. For example, his first year in college he built a
small circuit that jammed televisions, which he would use to
annoy his dormmates by surreptitiously messing with the
reception on their shared TV set. When the TV went fuzzy,
eventually one of the people in the room could be counted
upon to get up and try to fix things. That era’s TV sets had
adjustment controls for fine tuning that you could fiddle
with, and many TVs had rabbit ear antennas whose
reception could vary quite a bit depending on how the
antenna was oriented and where people and other objects
were in the room. As soon as his victim was in an awkward
position—say, with his hand directly in front of the TV
screen—Wozniak would stop jamming the signal and the
picture would clear up. The other students would shout at
the victim to hold that position since the TV apparently liked
it that way. Woz recalls one evening’s particularly successful
jamming prank: “The dozen or so students stayed for the
second half hour of Mission Impossible with the guy’s hand
over the middle of the TV!” Later, when Steve Jobs was
graduating from high school, Woz and Jobs and a friend
worked hard on a graduation present for Homestead High
School. It was a large banner featuring a middle-finger
salute with the words “Best Wishes”; the idea was that it
would be unrolled dramatically and anonymously during the
graduation ceremony. Sadly, another student discovered it
and it was taken down before it could be unfurled.
 His blue box, Wozniak realized, had great potential for
practical jokes. For reasons he can’t quite recall he got it in
his head one day that they should try calling the pope.
Using his blue box he managed to route his call to the
Vatican. “In this heavy accent I announced that I was Henry
Kissinger calling on behalf of President Nixon. I said, ‘Ve
are at de summit meeting in Moscow, and we need to talk to
de pope.’” The Vatican responded that the pope was
sleeping but that they would send someone to wake him.
Woz arranged to call back in an hour.
 Woz recalls, “Well, an hour later I called back and she said,
‘Okay, we will put the bishop on, who will be the translator.’
So I told him, still in that heavy accent, ‘Dees is Mr.
Kissinger.’ And he said, ‘Listen, I just spoke to Mr. Kissinger
an hour ago.’ You see, they had checked out my story and
had called the real Kissinger in Moscow.”
 Of course, Wozniak wasn’t the only phone phreak with a
love of pranks. Charlie Pyne and company at Harvard had
used their blue box to try to reach the president of Mexico
at two o’clock in the morning on a similar lark some ten
years earlier. As suggested by the slightly misspelled
Spanish in the Fine Arts 13 classified ad of the Harvard
Crimson—“El presidente no esta aqui asora; que lastima”—
they did not succeed. But the phone phreak prank that
generated the most publicity and consternation occurred
on November 10, 1974. Readers of the next day’s Los
Angeles Times were introduced to the gag via the
reassuring headline, “Santa Barbara Is Still OK; A-Blast
Report Just Hoax.” Callers to Santa Barbara, California, the
day before received no such reassurance. Rather, people
calling in to Santa Barbara from out of town found their
calls routed to someone who identified themselves either as
an emergency operator or as a Marine Corps officer. In
either case, the caller was told, “There has been a nuclear
explosion in Santa Barbara and all the telephone lines are
out.” The prank lasted for only thirty minutes, reported the
Times, “but the effects continued throughout the day, with
alarmed calls to General Telephone Co. and to Santa
Barbara police from as far away as Florida and Alaska,
demanding details of the ‘tragedy’ and asking, in some
cases, if World War III had begun.”
  This horrifying prank was the work of a pair of Los
Angeles– area phone phreaks. The hack they used to pull it
off was the result of a bug that the phone company called
“simultaneous seizure”; it could be exploited in a couple of
different ways. One way involved old-school step-by-step
switching equipment, which was still quite prevalent in the
telephone network of the 1970s. Under the right
conditions, if two separate calls were made simultaneously,
step-by-step equipment could become jammed partway
through dialing the calls. In essence, two different sets of
switching equipment in the central office would both
attempt to seize the same circuit at the same time, hence
the term. The upshot was that the two calls would be
inadvertently connected. This was an extremely rare‐
occurrence—the conditions had to be just right and, after
all, very few things truly occur simultaneously in this world.
When it did happen, it wasn’t that big a deal. The two
callers would be surprised to find themselves connected—
halfway through dialing a number—to somebody they didn’t
call; they would curse the phone company and its
incompetence and then both would hang up and try again.
The system would reset and all would be well.
  But what if one of the people didn’t hang up?
  Because of a quirk in the step-by-step switching system,
the person who didn’t hang up would be left in limbo, the
call halfway complete. And there the call would stay, until
eventually some new call would come in and attempt to
seize the circuit in use by the first call. Once again, the two
calls would be connected. How long it took for this to
happen depended on exactly where in the switch the call
failed and how many other calls needed to go through that
portion of the switching equipment.
  And though it’s true that most things don’t occur
simultaneously in nature, sometimes you can stack the deck
in your favor. What if, for example, you had two telephone
lines and connected them both to the same rotary dial? This
would take a bit of electrical wiring, of course, but when
you spun that dial you would be sending dial pulses into two
separate telephone lines in the same step-by-step switching
office at exactly the same time. It might take a few tries, but
using this method you were likely to succeed in jamming a
step-by-step switch.
 Another place that simultaneous seizure could occur was
on the long-distance network, when two long-distance
tandems simultaneously seized the same long-distance
trunk to make a call to the other. For example, imagine a
long-distance trunk line between New York and Los
Angeles; this is a bidirectional trunk, so it can be used for
calls in either direction. If the switching equipment in both
New York and Los Angeles happen to grab this trunk line to
make a call to the other, and do so at the same time, two
unrelated calls will be thrown together. Phone phreaks
could cause this situation to happen by making a long-
distance call and then whistling off with 2,600 Hz and
continuing to send 2,600 Hz down the line, thus mimicking
the idle line condition. At some point the remote tandem
would route a call back to the phone phreak who could then
prank the hapless caller.
 Once you had jammed the switch, you could lie in wait for
incoming calls. If you were a bit clever, you could influence
what part of the switch you jammed and thus what types of
incoming calls you would be getting. For example, phone
phreak Mark Bernay—who had had nothing to do with the
Santa Barbara prank, it should be pointed out—was fond of
jamming incoming directory assistance calls. Sometimes he
would prank the callers, but more often he would actually
look up telephone numbers for them, just like a directory
assistance operator would, leafing through LA-area phone
books as quickly as he could. “We would sit there trying to
look things up fast enough to satisfy the customers,” he
remembers. “It was really hard to do. I became very
impressed with directory assistance!”
  One of the pair of phreaks who pulled off the Santa
Barbara A-bomb pranks recalled that they stayed on the
lines about half an hour, telling callers that their calls to
Santa Barbara had been intercepted due to a nuclear
explosion. “We didn’t even know what we were going to do
—it was all impromptu. . . . It was for the reaction, just to
see how people would react.” In retrospect, he said, “It’s
not something I would ever want to repeat again.”
  Perhaps the ultimate phone phreak prank belongs to
Captain Crunch and a friend of his, though their material
came courtesy of Johnny Carson’s joke writers. The year
1973 had been a rough one for the United States, what
with the ongoing Watergate scandal and the energy crisis
and gas rationing. Carson, the host of the popular Tonight
show, watched by millions of people every evening, joked on
TV in late December about the latest crisis facing the
United States: “You know, we’ve got all sorts of shortages
these days. But have you heard the latest? I’m not kidding. I
saw it in the paper. There’s a shortage of toilet paper.” The
next day Americans rushed to buy toilet tissue, emptying
shelves in stores. Carson later apologized for the joke and
clarified that there was no toilet paper shortage, except
that now it seemed as if there actually were one, since
people could see for themselves that store shelves were
bare. The rumor took hold and it was months before the
situation worked itself out.
  With that as background, Crunch’s prank began with a call
to a particular toll-free 800 number. Back in the 1970s, 800
numbers mapped to regular telephone numbers. In fact,
each prefix within the 800 system translated to a particular
area code. For example, 800-421 mapped to area code 213
in Los Angeles, 800-227 mapped to area code 415 in the
San Francisco Bay Area, and 800-424 mapped to area code
202 in Washington, D.C.
  Now, if you’re a phone phreak and want to scan for
interesting numbers, what better place to dig through than
Washington, D.C.? There are only ten thousand numbers to
dial and it doesn’t cost you anything to call them—they’re
toll-free, after all—and it should be a natural hunting
ground for interesting things. Before long the phone
phreaks had discovered a toll-free number that went to the
White House: (800) 424-9337. Draper believed this was the
“CIA crisis line,” that is, the CIA’s hotline to the White
House, and he claims that he was able to eavesdrop on it
using his blue box. One evening, Draper says, he and a
friend were listening to this line and, through their
wiretapping, learned that the code name for the president
was “Olympus.”
 “Now we had the code word that would summon Nixon to
the phone,” Draper says. He and his friend wasted no time
in dialing the 800 number, though he claims they were
careful to first route their call through several tandems in
order to make it difficult to trace back.
 “9337,” said the person who answered the phone.
 “Olympus, please!” Draper’s friend said.
 “One moment, sir.”
 About a minute later, Draper recalls, a man who sounded
“remarkably like Nixon” asked, “What’s going on?”
 “We have a crisis here in Los Angeles!” Draper’s friend
replied.
 “What’s the nature of the crisis?” the voice asked.
 In the most serious voice he could summon, Draper’s
friend responded, “We’re out of toilet paper, sir!”
 “Who is this!” Draper recalls the Nixon-like voice
demanding. Draper and his friend quickly hung up.
 “I think this was one of the funniest pranks,” Draper says,
“and I don’t think that Woz would even come close to this
one. I think he was jealous for a long time.”
                        Sixteen

      THE STORY OF A WAR

NATIONAL   PUBLIC   RADIO   host Jim Russell’s authoritative
baritone delivered the ominous news. “This is the story of a
war,” he intoned. “This war finds small bands of guerrillas
attacking an enormous conventional army. While the large
conventional army has been quick to publicize its victories,
there is still great uncertainty about who is winning.”
 NPR listeners could be forgiven for thinking this was yet
another story about the Vietnam War. In January 1973
Vietnam was on the minds of Americans everywhere; after
on-again, off-again peace talks with the North Vietnamese,
President Nixon had just ordered a massive resumption of
B-52 bombing raids over the Christmas holidays.
 The story wasn’t about Vietnam, however, it was about
phone phreaks. “The Telephone Company You’re Dialing
Has Been Temporarily Disconnected” was an hour-long
special featuring the likes of Al Bell, Al Gilbertson, and Joe
Engressia. Over jangly background music made up of MF
tones—a song called the “MF Boogie,” composed on an
electronic organ during a conference call by the musical
phone phreak Kim Lingo—the program gave its listeners a
thorough, if slightly exaggerated, introduction to phone
phreaking. It covered blue and black boxes, international
dialing, conference calls, toll-free loop arounds, the YIPL
newsletter, phone phreak conventions, Captain Crunch’s
arrest and conviction, and even early computer hacking.
 For balance, it included counterpoint from Joe Doherty,
AT&T’s director of corporate security—the man NPR
described as the “ranking general in Ma Bell’s war effort
against the phone phreaks.” Doherty admitted that much of
the phreaking problem was a self-inflicted wound. “The
candor with which we have published technical information
through the years, especially the early years, as to how the
system works has come back to plague us to some extent,”
he said. But he also emphasized that the game had
changed: “At one time, to be perfectly frank, we were, in my
view, somewhat overly lenient, in that we would just caution
these people, slap them on the wrist and give them a
deterrent interview. We did not prosecute to any great
extent. We have changed that policy. We are prosecuting as
a rule now, rather than an exception.” In addition, the
network would eventually be modified to make phone
phreaking obsolete. “It’s a tradeoff between the cost of
prevention and what we’re losing,” he said. “We are
restudying the most economical way to modify the network
at the present time.”
 The NPR program seemed to underscore the fact that
phone phreaking had reached a tipping point. Thanks to the
Esquire article, NPR, and other media coverage, coupled
with the rise of the New Left and the hippie-Yippie “rip off
culture,” phone phreaking—at least the sort of phreaking
that was interested primarily in making free phone calls—
was spreading to the mainstream. The host of the NPR
program went so far as to suggest that there were “tens of
millions” of potential phone phreaks due to widespread
hatred of the phone company.
 But it was too soon to count Ma Bell out. Its newly
acquired penchant for prosecution, coupled with improved
technology that was proliferating throughout the network,
would give the phreaks a run for their money.
 One of these bits of technology had been invented more
than twenty-five years earlier. On a workbench in Murray
Hill, New Jersey, in 1947 three Bell Labs researchers—
Walter Brattain, John Bardeen, and William Shockley—had
lashed together a setup that looked about as unlikely as
Alexander Graham Bell’s original telephone back in 1876. It
looked a bit like a high school science fair project, to be
honest. It was a plastic wedge with a sharp edge that was
pressed against a small chunk of germanium. Trapped
between the wedge and the germanium were two small
strips of gold foil.
 Three tiny wires came away from the thing. One, attached
directly to the base of the germanium, was a control input.
If you applied a voltage to this wire, electric current could
flow between the other two wires connected to the gold foil
strips. This odd action happened because germanium was
neither fish nor fowl. It was a semiconductor: not quite a
conductor but not quite an insulator either. And though its
semiconductor properties were not well understood at first,
the practical implication was immediately clear. The little
widget could be used both as an electronic switch and as an
amplifier, just like a vacuum tube or a relay. But unlike
vacuum tubes and relays, this thing could be turned on or
off almost instantaneously. It was tiny, it had no moving
parts, it consumed little power, and it didn’t wear out.
 The researchers called it a transistor, and less than ten
years later the trio would be awarded the Nobel Prize in
physics for its invention.
 It was not lost on the engineers at Bell Labs that the
transistor might be the ideal thing to form the fabric of a
new telephone switching system, the technology the
company needed to replace the old step-by-step and
crossbar switches. Indeed, the first proposals within Bell
Labs for a transistor-based telephone switching system
came as early as 1952. Years earlier Strowger switches,
with their rotors and pawls, had begun to replace operators
who used plugs and jacks to make connections between
pairs of telephone wires. They were in turn replaced by
relays and crossbar switches. Now transistors would
replace these electromechanical contrivances. No longer
would telephone company central offices be filled with the
clicks and clacks of physical switching as calls were placed;
transistors would silently and electronically connect pairs of
wires to one another. This new approach was dubbed
“electronic switching.”
 Bell Labs’ first foray into electronic switching began in
1954. For a variety of technical reasons, the transistor itself
would not be used as the electronic device that would
actually connect pairs of telephone wires together. Instead,
transistors would make up the logic—the brains—that
controlled the switches; in this role transistors were
replacing the relays that had been used as the control logic
in the crossbar system. But by 1955 the engineers working
on the prototype electronic switching system at Bell Labs
had run into problems. The control circuits had grown
complex and unwieldy. Worse, every time the requirements
changed—and given that they were building a pie-in-the-sky
prototype system, requirements changed frequently—the
engineers would have to go back and redesign surprisingly
large chunks of the hardwired control logic.
 During the summer of 1955 one of the Bell Labs engineers
read an article that described a newfangled thing called a
digital computer. He was “struck by the similarity of what
the computer could do and the actions required of the
[telephone switch] control circuits.” Within a few months
Bell Labs had abandoned its approach of using transistors
to create hardwired logic to control the new telephone
switch. Instead, researchers would use transistors to build
a programmable digital computer. The computer and its
program would control the telephone switch. They
christened this concept stored program control, or SPC. If it
worked, SPC promised a much more flexible, capable
telephone system. New features could be added quickly and
telephone switches could be upgraded simply by
reprogramming them, instead of by rewiring or replacing
physical hardware. Moreover, they hoped, such switches
would be cheaper in the long run: computer-controlled
electronic switching systems could serve more telephone
lines than their electromechanical brethren, which in turn
meant fewer central offices would be needed.
  It was a risky approach. Bell Labs had never built a
computer before and its engineers had never written a line
of computer code. Yet now they were proposing to stake the
development of the company’s next-generation switching
system on this new and unproven architecture.
  Development took years, culminating finally in the 1960
trial of the world’s first electronic telephone switching
system—a trial that was fully a year behind schedule.
Known simply as “Morris” after Morris, Illinois, the city that
hosted it, it served only a few hundred telephone lines.
  Now, at some fundamental level, computers haven’t
changed that much. At their most basic, computers still
consist of central processing units (CPUs) and memories.
The CPU executes instructions, that is, simple low-level
commands that tell it what to do. These instructions direct
the CPU to do things such as load a value from memory,
store a value to memory, perform an arithmetic or logic
operation, compare the result of an operation to some other
result, or branch—execute some other set of instructions—
depending on some previous result.
  Today if you want a computer you can buy one for a few
hundred dollars. Your computer will probably have a
central processing unit—a processor—that executes
somewhere between one billion and three billion
instructions per second. This is made possible by about a
billion transistors on a piece of silicon about the size of a
postage stamp. Your computer will probably have several
gigabytes of memory, that is, more than 10 billion bits, the
zeros and ones that make up binary data. It will likely take
less power than a pair of 100-watt lightbulbs and be smaller
than a toaster.
  In contrast, the computer that controlled the Morris switch
consisted of twelve thousand individual transistors
connected to one another by a spider’s web of wires. It
executed its programs at a then blazing three hundred
thousand instructions per second—in other words, about
five thousand times slower than a typical PC today. For
reliability, Morris had two complete CPUs running in sync
with each other. If one detected an error in its
computations, it would take itself out of operation and pass
control to its twin, ideally never dropping a telephone call in
the process. The entire program to operate the Morris
telephone switch took about fifty thousand instructions,
including things such as maintenance tasks; the portion
used for typical phone calls was smaller. This number was
large by the standards of the day but is tiny now. Microsoft’s
popular word-processing program Word is about one
hundred times larger, and that’s not counting the gigantic
Windows operating system.
  Morris’s program memory—the place where its programs
were stored—looked like something out of a 1950s science
fiction movie. Called the “flying spot store,” it consisted of
four ten-inch by twelve-inch glass photographic plates with
thousands of tiny black dots on them. A cathode ray tube—
like an old-school television picture tube—moved a spot of
light across the plate. As the beam of light flew across the
dots, lenses and photodetectors decided whether they were
seeing a “1” (a transparent spot) or a “0” (a black spot that
blocked the light), enabling the bits of Morris’s program to
be read out. Morris’s data memory—the “barrier grid
store”—was similarly Frankensteinian, using electron
beams generated by cathode ray tubes to deposit charges
on an insulating plate. These charges could be changed on
the fly to store 0s or 1s of binary data. The individual
electronic components that Morris was built out of, such as
transistors and diodes, were often designed in-house by
Bell Labs and produced by Western Electric, AT&T’s
manufacturing subsidiary. In total, Morris consisted of four
rows of metal cabinets chock-full of components; each row
was about seven feet tall by two feet deep. Oh, and thirty-
five feet long.
 Perhaps the most amazing thing about Morris was that it
actually worked. Fundamentally, Morris demonstrated two
things. First, the stored program control concept was
viable, and a computer could in fact control a telephone
switching system. Second, however, it demonstrated just
how much more there was to be done before electronic
switching was ready for prime time.
 Bell Labs folded the hard-won knowledge from the Morris
trial into an effort to develop a production-quality electronic
switching system (ESS). It took five more years of hard
work; a senior Bell Labs employee described the ESS
development effort as a “traumatic experience.” But the
new system, called—naturally—the No. 1 ESS, went live in
1965 in Succasunna, New Jersey. Though the No. 1 ESS
differed in many ways from Morris, it retained the basic
concepts of stored program control and dual processors for
reliability. By the end of 1967 some eighteen No. 1 ESS
switches had been deployed throughout the network, with
many more to follow in the 1970s.
 Development of a commercial-grade electronic switching
system had taken ten calendar years, a staggering four
thousand man-years of engineering effort, and cost $500
million—more than $3.5 billion in today’s dollars. It was a
perfect example of the sort of thing that the Bell System
could do, thanks to its being a regulated monopoly with a
guaranteed profit and no competitors to speak of. In the
words of the former AT&T historian Sheldon Hochheiser,
“Absent competition, Bell Labs and AT&T took the time to
get an innovation right (as an engineer would define
right).” Or, as one observer of the ESS effort put it, they
could “take the problem and trample it to death.”
 Deploying computer technology throughout the network
would take still more time and money, but the deployment
was inevitable; henceforth, computers and telephone
switches would be joined at the hip. Even old telephone
switches weren’t safe from the computer revolution, not
even the venerable 4A crossbar switch, the workhorse
tandem of the long-distance network. Designed in the
1950s, 4As were purely electromechanical affairs, with
vacuum tubes and relays and mechanical card translator
systems that looked up routing information by shining light
through steel punch cards. AT&T set about upgrading these
switches, replacing their relay-wired control logic with
computers to allow the switch to make faster, smarter
decisions. As early as 1969, just four years after the debut
of the No. 1 ESS, Bell started upgrading 4As with new
brains. Called the SPC No. 1A, these brains were essentially
clones of the computers used in the No. 1 ESS. It would be
the final evolution of Bell Labs’ cherished concept of
common control—the idea that the smarts of the telephone
switch should be separate from whatever mechanism did
the actual switching. By 1976 more than 132 of the 4As had
been upgraded to computer control.
 From the telephone company’s perspective, the No. 1 ESS
was eventually quite successful, though not without some
initial teething problems. It was physically smaller than
electromechanical telephone switches, offered vastly more
features (such as call waiting and conference calling), and
in the end cost less and could handle more calls. As far as
phone phreaks were concerned, the No. 1 ESS was a mixed
bag. On the plus side, these ESS installations often had
more trunks to more places, and that meant more routes to
explore. And No. 1 ESS had loop-around circuits that didn’t
supe, meaning that they were free calls from anywhere in
the country. Finally, No. 1 ESSes usually came with
something called a touch-tone demonstrator. Believe it or
not, there was a time when most telephone lines supported
only rotary dialing; special circuitry had to be installed at
the central office to enable touch-tone dialing on a given
line, and this created a sales problem for the phone
company. If you were a telephone installer and wanted to
convince Mrs. Smith to upgrade her phone from rotary to
touch tone (for which the telephone company charged an
extra monthly fee), you had no way to show this new service
to her, since her line probably didn’t support touch-tone
dialing. A touch-tone demonstrator was a number that an
installer could call with a rotary phone that would then
connect to a second line, one that had touch tone enabled.
This way the installer could demonstrate to Mrs. Smith how
convenient touch tone was by using it to dial a call with a
touch-tone phone, thereby closing the sale. Since there was
no password on a touch-tone demonstrator, anyone could
use it to make free calls as soon as the number leaked out.
  On the minus side for phone phreaks, the No. 1 ESS
rendered black boxes obsolete. Mostly black boxes didn’t
work at all with them, and even if you could get them to
work a little bit you were limited to about thirty-eight
seconds worth of conversation before you were cut off. And
although the No. 1 ESS didn’t make blue boxing impossible,
it did make it more difficult. After you whistled off a long-
distance call on a No. 1 ESS you had about eleven seconds
to key the number you wanted to call on your blue box and
hope that the network put your call through and the person
you were calling answered the phone within that time; if
that did not happen, you’d wind up listening to dial tone.
  If the potential impact of the transistor was not lost on the
Bell Labs engineers in the 1950s, neither was it lost on
some of the phone phreaks in the 1970s. “Bill Acker said
something so prophetic,” Joe Engressia recalls. “I think it
was in about 1970 or ’71. I didn’t really believe it or
understand it at the time. He said, right now, we have more
control over the phone system than we ever will have
again.”
  Acker was right. As the computer revolution began to
proliferate through the network, the network began to
change. It didn’t happen all at once. Slowly, over the course
of the decade, the network began to homogenize. For
example, a “precise tone plan” would make sure that things
like ringing and busy signals sounded the same in every city
throughout the network. And the various bugs the phreaks
had counted on in the telephone switches began to
disappear. But it was a slow process, and there was enough
older installed equipment throughout the network to
provide years more fun for the phreaks. The playground
hadn’t been shut down just yet but it was certainly
changing.
  One of the new toys that the kids brought to the
playground was featured in YIPL’s February 1973 issue: the
red box. Keeping up with the Bell System’s new,
increasingly computerized network, the red box was a new
twist on an old hack. For many years pay phones had had
actual physical bells in them that communicated to the
operator how much money the customer had deposited: a
nickel was one ding, a dime two dings, and a quarter was
dong. When you needed to make a long-distance call at a
pay phone, the operator would tell you how much money to
deposit and then would listen to—and count—the dings and
dongs as the coins you deposited struck the appropriate
bells; imagine the patience required of an operator when a
customer wanted to make a two-dollar long-distance call
using forty nickels.
  For as long as pay phones had been making noises like
these, people had been figuring out ways to mimic the
noises to avoid paying for calls. One low-tech approach
required two pay phones right next to each other, a
common enough setup back in the day. You’d deposit your
money in the next-door neighbor pay phone while holding
the handset of your pay phone up to it so the operator could
still hear the sounds of the bells; since you weren’t actually
making a call on the other pay phone, it would return your
money once you were finished. A higher-tech approach that
came into vogue in the late 1960s used a portable tape
recorder to play a recording of the bells for the operator.
 One of the problems with the dings and dongs, of course,
was that they were labor intensive for the phone company;
a live operator, after all, had to sit there and count bells.
Paving the way for automation, AT&T began introducing
pay phones that went beep instead of ding. The beeps were
electronically generated tones: one beep for a nickel, two
beeps for a dime, and five shorter beeps for a quarter. The
new beeps weren’t any more secure than the dings and
dongs but they had the advantage that they were easier to
generate electronically—no bulky bells required—and,
eventually, they could be detected by a computer instead of
a human being.
 Of course, the fact that the beeps were easier for AT&T to
generate electronically meant that they were easier for
phone phreaks to generate electronically, too, and that’s
where the red box came in. The red box was simply a tone
generator, producing one, two, or five beeps of the
appropriate duration. To start with, it was a single tone—
2,200 Hz—but later AT&T mixed in a second tone, 1,700
Hz. The phone phreaks quickly modified their red boxes to
follow suit.
 The red box, like the black box, really had no use in
exploring the telephone network. It was, plain and simple, a
way to make free phone calls. “To me, a red box was
unethical,” says Seattle phone phreak Bob Gudgel,
“because it was actually stealing quarters and dimes and
nickels”—in contrast to a blue box, which actually had some
intellectual purpose. Indeed, YIPL was not particularly
popular among the network explorer–type phone phreaks.
Some of this was intellectual snobbery. They felt that YIPL
catered to the lower echelons of phone phreaks, kids who
didn’t know very much and were only able to follow the
instructions of others. But the other problem was both
larger and more practical, and had to do with the size of
YIPL’s mailing list. If some cool network feature, say a
conference bridge or something, made it into the pages of
YIPL, the next month it would have thousands of people
calling it, and the month after that it would be gone.
 So while the network explorer phone phreaks may not
have had much use for YIPL or the red box, the fact was
they were rapidly becoming the minority. Indeed, the
phrase “phone phreak” was becoming synonymous with
someone interested in making free phone calls. There
seemed to be a lot more interest in beating the system—
whatever the system was—than in exploring it.
 YIPL understood its audience and their love of free things.
By August 1973 it had changed its name: it was now TAP,
the Technological American Party. As “Al Bell” wrote in the
introduction to that issue, “No fancy excuses: we changed
our name because we want people to know where we really
are and what we hope to become. Technological American
Party is rapidly becoming a people’s warehouse of
technological information, and a name like Youth
International Party Line simply didn’t ring a bell, even if you
were trying to find out how to contact the phone phreaks,
except of course for the Party Line. We’ve been receiving so
much information lately about gas and electric meters,
locks, even chemistry, that a name change is definitely in
order. We seriously doubt that phones will cease to be our
main interest, but it really isn’t fair to ignore the rest of
what science has to offer.”
 YIPL—er, TAP—didn’t know it but it had dodged a bullet. At
the urging of Pacific Northwest Bell, the FBI had
investigated the newsletter in 1974 but found nothing that
it could be prosecuted for. Indeed, the FBI learned, “the
legal department of [New York Telephone] has gone as high
as the N. Y. State Attorney General’s office in Albany but
was told that no action could be taken against ‘TAP’ for to
do so would constitute a violation of ‘freedom of the press.’”
 Not every group that wanted to publicize phone fraud
techniques was located in a state that shared New York’s
love of freedom of the press. For example, in 1974 Michigan
Bell had a misdemeanor criminal complaint filed against the
Detroit underground newspaper Fifth Estate for publishing
“Taming the Telephone Beast”; essentially a reprint of the
Ramparts article, it also gave the details of the 1974
telephone credit card code.
 Then there was the Telephone Electronics Line newsletter,
or TEL. Started in 1974 and run out of Los Angeles, TEL
was the creation of Jack Kranyak, whose company,
Teletronics of America, also sold electronics plans via mail
order. For $6 per year, TEL subscribers could read
something like a more technical and less political version of
TAP, one focused solely on topics telephonic. “How to Call
Long Distance for Free,” “Modern Phone Phreaking,”
“Detection: How to Avoid It,” “Overseas Dialing
Techniques,” and “Trashing the Phone Company—A Look at
Ma Bell’s ‘Garbage’” were some of the articles published
over the course of seven months. Considering the
provisions of Section 502.7 of the California Penal Code—
the law that made it illegal to publish plans or instructions
for telephone fraud, which Pacific Telephone had
brandished when it had suppressed the Ramparts article—
it was a miracle that TEL lasted as long as it did. After its
eighth issue, Teletronics, Kranyak, and several others
associated with the newsletter were sued by Pacific
Telephone in 1975. The telephone company won, obtaining
an injunction against TEL. Under pain of a $100,000
penalty, Kranyak and company were prohibited from
publishing any further information about defrauding the
telephone system. In addition, Teletronics was required to
turn its mailing list over to the telephone company. Soon
some eight thousand people—both former subscribers to
TEL and people who had just requested a catalog of plans
from Teletronics—received an odd note from Pacific
Telephone in the mail. “Dear Telephone User,” it began.
“Your name appeared on a list (provided under court order)
of subscribers, or potential subscribers, to material
previously published by Teletronics Company of America.” It
went on to remind the Telephone User that it was a
violation of state and federal laws to steal telephone service
or to “provide information to any person which is useful for
such purpose.” It concluded, ”Accordingly, you are urged to
destroy any and all written material or device you may have
which may violate any of these laws.”
 One recipient of this missive wrote a letter to the editor of
Radio Electronics, a hobbyist magazine in which Teletronics
had run ads. The Pacific Telephone letter, he wrote, “would
appear to me to be saying that dissemination or mere
possession of information which could be used for
disapproved purposes is a criminal offense.” He concluded,
“I am committed to the position that curiosity alone is
sufficient ‘need to know’ and that it is a fundamental
freedom that criminality must be judged by what an
individual does, not upon the knowledge which he has
acquired or what he could do with it.”
Phone shenanigans, it turned out, weren’t confined to the
shores of the United States. In January 1973 London’s
Sunday Times ran a front-page exposé charging that
employees of the British Post Office, which ran the nation’s
telephone system, had installed special circuits—so-called
fiddles—inside telephone company central offices that
allowed those in the know to make free or reduced-rate
long-distance or overseas calls. The article claimed that at
least seventy-five telephone central offices had been fiddled
and the cost of the theft was almost 2 million pounds each
year. A post office spokesman described it as “serious
national problem” and a “nationwide telephone fraud that
has cost a vast but unknown sum in lost revenues.”
 That was all internal fraud, however, even if widespread
and headline grabbing. England’s first big, public run-in
with real live phone phreaks came later that year, in
October 1973, with the trial of nineteen young men at Old
Bailey, London’s central criminal court. Arrested at a phone
phreak tea party at a flat in London a year earlier, the
phreaks included Oxford and Cambridge graduates and the
prosecutor in the case allowed that they were all “men of
intellectual stature.” The charges went back to 1968 when
their fun and games began and covered a variety of
offenses, including conspiracy, fraud, and theft of the
government’s electricity. Unlike the fiddlers within the
British Post Office, these gentlemen were in fact network
explorers with little or no interest in fraud. As was revealed
at trial, on the day of the tea party the phreaks had made a
total of 222 calls using a variety of techniques, including the
use of ten different “bleeper boxes.” Of these calls, exactly
three went to live human beings, and those three had all
been made legally. The trial went on for more than a month.
In the end, charges were dismissed against one defendant,
ten pleaded guilty partway through the trial, and eight
were acquitted. To the acquitted the judge remarked, “Your
trial is over and now I can congratulate you. I never did
think you were dishonest, and I never said so.” But, he
added, “Do exercise some care and judgment in the future
because men of your distinction ought never find
themselves in the dock at the Central Criminal Court.”
 Back in the United States, phreaking continued its push
into mainstream society. If anything, in fact, it overshot and
landed among the stars. In 1974, for example, rock star Ike
Turner was arrested along with three others for using a
blue box from a recording studio in Los Angeles—a blue box
that was later said to have come from Steve Wozniak and
Steve Jobs.
 Then there was the case of Bernard Cornfeld, the
flamboyant financier who had built a $2.5 billion hedge
fund called International Overseas Investors that eventually
ran afoul of securities regulators; he was charged with
fraud and spent almost a year in a Swiss prison until he was
eventually acquitted. Cornfeld lived a lavish lifestyle,
surrounded by women as he jetted between his castle in
France and his mansion in Beverly Hills. But in January
1975 his Los Angeles mansion was raided by the FBI and
his secretary was charged with blue box fraud.
“Unfortunately [for the FBI] they just missed the shooting
of a Playboy center spread,” he joked to a reporter.
Cornfeld himself, cracking fewer jokes this time, was
arrested on the same charges about six months later. In all,
FBI agents seized five blue boxes from Cornfeld’s mansion,
four of which, according to FBI files, had Wozniak and
Jobs’s telltale “He’s got the whole world in his hands” notes
inside them.
 Then Lainie Kazan—singer, actress, and a former Playboy
model— pleaded guilty to blue box charges in November
1975 and was fined, ordered to make restitution to the
phone company, and placed on eighteen months’ probation.
The blue box suppliers? Woz and Jobs.
 Finally, in December of that year, police said, Robert‐
Cummings —an Emmy Award–winning actor with more
than fifty movies to his credit, including Dial M for Murder
—was arrested in Seattle with blue box in hand. It was like
a little celebrity blue box crime wave, a good chunk of it
from the two Steves and their Los Angeles connections.
 Its movement into mainstream society had changed the
culture of phreaking once already, shifting it away from
curiosity and into the realm of outright thievery. But now,
even among the hobbyist network-explorer types, it began
changing again. In some ways the NPR announcer had been
right—it really was the story of a war and like any war, this
one was not without its spies and paranoia. Informants
seemed to be everywhere, or so many phone phreaks
believed. This notion began to change the way the phone
phreaks interacted with one another.
 The first evidence of this was the breakup of the phone
phreaks into smaller and more isolated groups made up of
people who knew each other personally. Of the many such
groups across the country, one of them centered on David
Condon—the legendary Davy Crockett, the man who, with
the help of his girlfriends and his Cat and Canary Bird Call
Flute, had tricked long-distance operators back in the
1950s into making free calls for him from Oak Ridge,
Tennessee. Now, almost twenty years later, in 1973, Condon
had moved to California and found himself the nucleus of a
cell of half a dozen phone phreaks, mostly students and
staff from UC Berkeley. Several were gifted electrical
engineers and one was also a talented chef. Together they
spent many evenings in a house on Colby Street in north
Oakland exploring the network with fancy blue boxes after
equally fancy meals. “We’d cook dinner and then we’d play
until the wee hours of the morning. It was a real circus!”
Condon says. They delighted in finding new ways to outfox
the network, including an unlikely but successful scheme
that involved running high-voltage electricity directly into
the telephone line to confuse the switching equipment.
 But the cuisine and calls were served with a healthy side
dish of paranoia. Although Condon’s group had occasional
interactions with other phreaks—Bill Acker was someone
Condon respected and trusted and occasionally talked to—
they kept to themselves as much as possible. They avoided
conference calls and loop arounds, preferring to do their
own research rather than trade information with people
who might be informants. And as a rule universally agreed
upon within their group, they avoided John Draper and his
friends like the plague. “I tell you,” Condon says, “Draper
was the kiss of death. He was asking for it, he was looking
for trouble.” Well, Condon admits, perhaps Draper wasn’t
really looking to get caught, but he was so boastful and
careless and public about everything he did that he might
as well have been. “He was very flagrant,” says Condon.
 A similar cell formed on the East Coast around the same
time. Called Group Bell it included, among several others,
New York phreaks Evan Doorbell and Ben Decibel.§§ Yet
there was one New York phone phreak it specifically did not
include: Bill Acker. “They explicitly excluded me, because
they felt I was not going to keep their secrets,” Acker
remembers. “My exclusion from Group Bell was really Ben
Decibel saying, ‘This guy Bill is a little too free with who he
trusts.’”
§§The pseudonym he went by at the time.
 Being excluded hurt Acker’s feelings, especially after
having believed he’d been alone in the wilderness for so
many years. It “was just nasty,” he says. Still, he is not
without sympathy for the underlying problem. The gems
that the phone phreaks found in the network tended to be
lost as soon as they became widely known —just look at the
2111 and 052 conferences. The more people who knew
about a particular vulnerability, the more likely it was that
someone from the phone company would find out about it
and fix it, and possibly get them all in trouble in the
process. “I think if I found something that was really cool
but that obviously would go away if word of it got around, I
think I’d be a little more selective about who I told,” Acker
says. Similarly, he says, he was perfectly willing to keep
something confidential if someone asked him to. Not so Joe
Engressia. Acker says, “He didn’t want any part of that. His
attitude was, nobody’s going to put restrictions on anything
I do.” Information wants to be free, the saying goes, but it
turns out that certain information also wants to be kept
secret. And therein lies the tension. The more people you
knew and talked to, the more you were likely to learn
interesting things, but it was also more likely that you might
get caught or the cool things you knew about would go
away. “It was a struggle,” Acker recalls.
In retrospect, perhaps it was the phone company that
should have been paranoid. Some phreaks were becoming
bolder in their quest to understand the network. One such
phreak in New York recalls making friends with a fellow
named George,¶¶ an operator at the AT&T overseas
switching center at 32 Avenue of the Americas in
Manhattan in 1975 or so. George provided him with a copy
of the quick reference guide used by the international
operators, giving the phreaks valuable international routing
codes. Before long the phone phreak had talked George
into loaning him his telephone company ID card, allowing
him to slip inside and wander the switching center, looking
for desirable manuals and reference books. “Later, after I
pointed out the location of the books to him,” the phone
phreak recalls, “he put them in a garbage bag, which he
placed in the freight elevator along with the other garbage.
And yes, I went searching for it. It was my first time going
through the telephone company’s garbage, but not my
last.”
¶¶A pseudonym.
 Still, the phone phreaks’ increased paranoia wasn’t
without reason. In addition to celebrities, some of the
original phone phreaks were being busted too. Blind San
Jose–area phone phreak Jim Fettgather’s arrest came in
1973. “The [Telephone Company] chief special agents kept
warning us over and over again,” Fettgather remembers.
“They really were actually friendly. They were not mean in
any way. They talked with my folks, they talked with me,”
Fettgather says, all to warn him to stop phreaking. “They
knew what was happening. I don’t quite know how they
found out, but they knew we were doing all this MFing and
muting and so forth. We were given ample warning, there’s
no question.” Finally, he says, the phone company must
have had enough. The local police showed up with a search
warrant and Fettgather spent a night in jail. “The whole
thing was pretty ugly,” he says.
  It was Denny Teresi’s turn next. Teresi, the blind kid with
what the Esquire article described as the “voice of a crack
oil-rig foreman,” the phreak with the otherworldly skill at
getting telephone company switchmen to wire things up for
him, had gone one call too far. “What finally nailed me was
something that I had wired up in San Francisco,” he says.
“It was a touch-tone demonstrator, where you dial in to one
number and it would grab dial tone from another line . . .
You could make outgoing calls, and all the calls were billed
to an unassigned test number. That was up for a while.
When they took it down I had the balls to call back in and
get it wired up. I probably would have gotten nailed sooner
or later anyway, but that was just the final straw. When I
called back to have it wired in, they went ahead and wired
it up for me, but they set it up and then they watched that
line for three weeks and they billed me for all of the calls. I
probably should have let well enough alone and just let it go
away.”
  Like Fettgather, Teresi agrees that the Pacific Telephone
security agents had given them more than their share of
breaks. “For the longest time the chief special agent, in this
case George Alex, they had working on the case in San Jose,
he was calling my parents or Jim’s parents or whatever, and
he’d let them know what’s going on and he’d try to get us to
cut it out. That went on for five years,” he says. “I guess
they figured that would be enough of a slap on the hand to
get us to slow it down or stop.” Teresi was fined $150 and
had to pay for $320 worth of phone calls.
  For the year 1973, an AT&T internal memo noted, there
were 119 arrests for electronic toll fraud—more than
double of the previous year. By 1974 the number had
jumped to 158. By 1975 it was 176. Joseph Doherty, AT&T’s
director of corporate security, was as good as his word: “We
are prosecuting as a rule now, rather than an exception.”
                      Seventeen

        A LITTLE BIT STUPID

ON JUNE 21,   1975, John Draper did something a little bit
stupid.
  That day he entered a telephone booth in New York City
and dialed an 800 number in Oakland, California. While the
call was going through he held a blue box up to the phone
and pressed a button, sending a burst of 2,600 Hz down the
line.
  “Bleeep!” said the blue box. “Kerchink!” responded the
telephone network.
  Draper pressed more buttons. Key pulse. 127 552 2155.
Start. A few seconds later the telephone network rewarded
him with what sounded like a bad imitation of Donald Duck
talking to one of his nephews. If you squinted your ears and
used your imagination you might think it sounded almost—
almost—like two people talking.
  Draper pressed another button and sent another quick
blip of 2,600 Hz down the line. Donald Duck was replaced
by the clear voices of two people talking about a work-
related matter. Draper was now in the middle of their
conversation, listening quietly. He eavesdropped for a few
minutes and then hung up.
  Draper had just used his blue box to hack into an internal
telephone company service called verification. The need for
this service sprang from one of the most annoying sounds in
the world: the repetitive baaa . . . baaa . . . baaa of the busy
signal. Although it’s less common to run into them today,
what with call waiting being a standard feature on every
mobile phone, it wasn’t that long ago that busy signals
routinely drove people up the wall, especially if you were
trying urgently to reach somebody with important news—
somebody who, let’s say, had a teenage son or daughter
who was constantly on the phone. When your frustration
boiled over in such cases you could call the operator, give
her the number you were trying to reach, and ask her to
verify if someone was indeed talking on the line. After all,
perhaps the person you were calling had simply forgotten
to hang up the phone properly. If a conversation was
actually in progress, you could ask for an emergency
interrupt, in which case the operator would barge into the
conversation and announce to your party that you were
trying to reach them. Naturally, the Bell System charged for
both of these services, typically 25¢ or so in the 1970s.
 Busy line verification service had been around since the
early 1900s. It was kind of a spooky thing, since it allowed
operators to monitor and break in on private telephone
calls. For security reasons, in most places only special
operators had access to busy verification trunks, and these
were limited to a particular city or area or telephone
exchange. That way, an operator in Kansas City couldn’t
eavesdrop on someone in San Francisco, for example.
 It didn’t take phone phreaks long to start playing with
verification, and by 1970 or so they had learned that you
could call an inward operator, pretend to be someone from
the test board, and—if you had the right voice or maybe just
got lucky—talk her into “putting you up” (that is, plugging
you in) to a verify trunk. From there, with a blue box, you
could select the particular telephone line in that area or
exchange that you wanted to eavesdrop upon.
 As with everything else in the telephone network,
verification started out as a manual affair but eventually
became automated. By 1972 phone phreaks like Bill Acker,
Ray Oklahoma, and Joe Engressia had discovered that
verification circuits in some places could be reached with
just a blue box, no operator required, from anywhere in the
country. Telephone calls in parts of Miami, Dallas, San
Francisco, and Long Island, New York, to name the four
that the phreaks had discovered, could all be eavesdropped
upon this way. As scary as this sort of security hole seems,
the phone phreaks viewed verification access primarily as a
harmless prank, the sort of thing you might do to your pal
as a joke.
 Or maybe for bragging rights. So believe it or not using
verification to eavesdrop on a telephone conversation
wasn’t the little-bit-stupid thing that John Draper did that
day. No, the little-bit-stupid thing was the telephone
number he had chosen to eavesdrop upon. Because 415-
552-2155 was the telephone number of the San Francisco
field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
 It would be a couple of more days before Draper did
something really stupid.
 Draper lived in California but was visiting New York,
hanging out with his buddy Chic Eder. Eder was a burly,
forty-five-year-old ex-con whose slightly bulging eyes
perched above a bushy mustache and underneath a balding
head, surrounded on both sides by long, straggly hair.
Outgoing, friendly, intelligent, and intense, Eder was a dope
dealer’s dope dealer, given to introducing himself to
strangers with a handshake and the phrase, “Chic’s the
name, smoke’s my game.” An acquaintance of the stand-up
comic Lenny Bruce—“It was my best friend in LA who sold
Lenny the smack he OD’ed on,” Eder is said to have claimed
—Eder had become a staple of the New York City drug
scene: friends with everybody he met, unafraid to wander
into the toughest neighborhoods, sure that he could take
care of himself in any situation. This confidence came from
hard-won experience. Eder was like a one-man crime wave,
one whose rap sheet spanned almost ten pages. It went as
far back as 1950 and detailed offenses such as fraud,
reckless driving, vagrancy, possession of a concealed
weapon, possession of narcotics, burglary . . . the list went
on. Eder had spent years behind bars in some very tough
places. His most recent legal woes stemmed from his
involvement in the firebombing of a police station in Santa
Barbara, California, an act that appeared to be connected
to the Weather Underground organization, a political
offshoot of the New Left dedicated to the violent overthrow
of the United States. In 1971 Eder was convicted of
possession of marijuana and a firebomb and sentenced to
spend up to fifteen years enjoying the hospitality of the
California state prison system.
 It was hospitality he apparently didn’t care for. Eder
busted out of prison in late 1972, only to be apprehended
six months later. Yet somehow, despite a lengthy original
sentence and subsequent prison escape, he was granted
parole and released just a year and a half later. He moved
to New York City where he began working with his friend
Albert Goldman, a professor and writer, helping research
an article on the dope-dealing trade. Eder’s contribution to
the effort included buying and selling drugs in New York’s
roughest neighborhoods.
 Draper had already told Eder about phone hacking—free
calls and the various colored boxes that phone phreaks
used. This was, after all, four years after the Esquire article
and it’s not like this stuff was that much of a secret
anymore. Besides, keeping quiet was never one of John
Draper’s strengths. It wasn’t too long before Draper was
telling Eder about his eavesdropping on the FBI.
 And that was the really stupid thing. Because Chic Eder
was an informant for the feds. Eder’s career as an
informant began with a letter to the FBI, written just three
months after being back in the clink from his earlier prison
break. “Dear Agent in Charge,” the letter read. “You want
Weather Underground fugitives. I want a parole, and some
money to start a new life. Interested?! As you’re aware, I
can deliver. There will be, however, certain stipulations that
are non-negotiable. The prime requisite—above even the
parole and money—is that you agree to take no action that
might bring suspicion to bear on me as an informant.”
Toward the end of the letter Eder reflected, “This is no snap
decision on my part. It’s taken a great deal of cold, hard
thinking to bring me to a point 180 degrees from my
previous position on informing.”
It is said that no good news comes between midnight and
six a.m.
 True to this maxim, the FBI’s first inkling that its calls
were being wiretapped came at 2:01 a.m. on June 24, 1975,
in the form of an urgent teletype message from its New
York office. The five-page message, wordy by FBI standards,
was marked confidential and was encrypted for added
security. It described Draper’s use of a blue box to wiretap
the San Francisco office, gave a quick sketch of Draper’s
background,      and    described   “‘phone    freaks,’   an
underground clandestine group involved in making ‘blue
boxes.’” It requested FBI headquarters to authorize funds
so that Eder could travel to California with Draper and
purchase a blue box from him “in order to determine the
degree of technology developed by ‘phone freaks.’” Finally,
it asked the San Francisco office to survey its employees to
see if any of them remembered making a telephone call like
the one Eder claimed Draper intercepted.
 The FBI reacted the same way many large organizations
react to surprising and unwelcome news: with disbelief.
Informants make crazy claims all the time. This was
probably just another one. The sort of thing you’re duty
bound to check out but nothing to get too excited about.
 San Francisco responded that there was little point in
asking its employees if any of them remembered making
such a call unless the informant could be “pinned down” as
to specifics. Perhaps headquarters could check with the FBI
Laboratory to see if anyone there knew anything about
these outlandish claims.
 San Francisco asked friends at Pacific Telephone if they
knew anything about this. Was it even possible that some
guy in New York could remotely wiretap the San Francisco
FBI office? Pacific Telephone told them that this was all
nonsense. According to the phone company the only
automatic telephone monitoring equipment in northern
California was in Stinson Beach, Inverness, and Point Reyes,
beautiful rural towns north of San Francisco but far away
from the FBI’s offices. Though it might conceivably be
possible that calls in those small towns could be vulnerable,
Pacific Telephone said, firmly, “San Francisco is not serviced
by this equipment and calls cannot be monitored” by the
procedure Eder claimed Draper had used.
 An anonymous source familiar with the investigation
summarized it this way: “An informant contacts us and tells
us, ‘This guy Draper is bugging your calls.’ Our Laboratory
Division knows nothing about it and people in AT&T and
Pacific Telephone basically say it’s not possible, just can’t be
done.” Shrug.
 Disbelief notwithstanding, FBI headquarters authorized its
New York office to pay for Eder’s round-trip airfare to
California (“coach,” the FBI memo noted) to buy a blue box
from Draper. The FBI also felt it needed to inform other
governmental organizations of the problem. A July 2, 1975,
memo classified SECRET and titled “Alleged Interception of
Telephone Call of Federal Bureau of Investigation Field
Office” was dispatched to several agencies, including the
U.S. Department of Justice and the Secret Service.
 This is to inform that an investigation is currently being conducted
 concerning an allegation that an interception of communication took place
 on a telephonic communication in a field office of the Federal Bureau of
 Investigation (FBI). Information has been received that the device used,
 described to be a sophisticated “blue box,” can not only intercept FBI
 telephone calls but [one sentence redacted] and calls made on the White
 House “hotline.”
  Investigation is continuing to obtain this device for examination by our
 FBI laboratory so that determination may be made as to the capability of
 the device.
  You will be apprised of developments in this matter.

 News of such developments would have to wait for the
FBI’s informant to turn up something more. Fortunately for
the FBI, Chic Eder was a varsity player; he was good as a
drug dealer, he was good as a hustler, and he was good as
an informant. On July 13, he did as his masters bade him:
he bought a blue box from Draper. Actually, blue boxes
being works of art back in those days, he commissioned the
creation of one; it would be ready for pickup in a few weeks.
In the meantime, he got Draper again to demonstrate how
to eavesdrop on the FBI’s San Francisco field office. This
time Eder made sure to get details of the conversation they
eavesdropped on.
 This time, in fact, he got it all on tape.
 Now it’s one thing to have an informant tell you something
fantastic. Oh, you know, some hippie guy from California
with an electronic box can somehow magically tap the FBI’s
phone calls from New York, two thousand miles away. But it
is a different thing to have an informant provide detailed
information that can be checked against reality. It is all the
more unusual when the informant can back it all up with a
tape recording.
 “All hell broke loose,” recalls an anonymous source familiar
with the investigation. “AT&T and Pacific Telephone said it
wasn’t possible. But here’s a tape recording of it
happening.”
 “Headquarters wanted this case solved, fast,” the source
remembers. “In thirty years, it’s the most freedom I’ve ever
seen special agents given in a case. All they had to do was
sneeze and say, ‘I need a Lincoln Continental’ and there
would be one parked out in front of the building.
Headquarters wanted it solved, whatever it would take, and
there were no questions asked. Whatever it will take to nail
this guy and see to it that it doesn’t happen again.”
 Why the urgency? “The implications from a national
security viewpoint, when you consider the consulates that
were there in San Francisco, law enforcement, DEA . . . the
opportunities were limitless [for wiretapping]. And it could
be done from any telephone, anywhere in the country. It
became rather evident that if this technology fell into the
wrong hands, well, the implications were tremendous.”
 The freedom of action may have been a pleasant change
for the FBI agents but it came at a price. The agents
working the case were now under the gun on a case that
headquarters wanted results on, today. “You figure this out!
Solve this! Figure out what he did, how he did it, who else
was involved, who else did he intercept!” is how the source
recalls the orders from HQ.
 A few days later, on July 18, Los Angeles FBI agents
worked with Walter Schmidt—the same General Telephone
security officer who had been instrumental in Draper’s
arrest in 1972—to see if they could duplicate Draper’s
technique for wiretapping calls with a blue box. They
succeeded. According to a teletype from the Los Angeles
FBI office, the group “was able to intercept numerous
telephone calls in progress of the San Francisco office [. . .]
through utilization of a conventional blue box.” As if it
wasn’t bad enough that the FBI’s phone calls could be
intercepted at all, the word “conventional” here was
particularly chilling. It meant that the box Eder obtained
from Draper wasn’t “sophisticated” or anything special. In
other words, anyone who owned a blue box was able to
eavesdrop on San Francisco FBI telephone calls, as well as
calls in other parts of the San Francisco Bay Area. All that
was needed was the magic code “127” and the telephone
number that was to be intercepted.
 The Los Angeles office requested additional pieces of silver
for Eder: “Los Angeles believes [Eder] has performed a
valuable service for the Bureau and accordingly should be
compensated,” agents wrote, describing Eder’s work as
“outstanding.”
 Eder met with his FBI handlers in San Francisco a few
days later, on July 21, and turned over the blue box he’d
purchased from Draper. He reported that “the phone freak
underground has the capability of monitoring calls
throughout the country” by using the verification
technique.
 Eder further reported, “The phone freak underground
currently is not selling information obtained from the
intercept technique.” An FBI memo continued, “[Eder] does
not know how widespread the phone freak underground is
or who the contacts, if any, are with the telephone
companies or the affiliates there. [. . .] As a source of
income, the underground is manufacturing and selling ‘red
boxes’ in large quantities. These boxes duplicate the tones
generated by coins deposited in pay telephones. Through
the use of ‘red boxes’ an individual is able to make long
distance call[s] without depositing money. These boxes cost
the underground $6 or $7 to manufacture and are
currently retailing on the street at $100. All money
obtained from the sale of red boxes is going towards
purchase of technical equipment for further research.”
 Swell. Just swell. A shadowy underground organization
made up of technical wizards—wizards who might have
spies within the phone company—can monitor your calls
from anywhere and who might, if they chose, sell the results
of their wiretapping to the highest bidder. And who might
that bidder be? The Yippies? The mob? The Russians? Who
knows?
 San Francisco FBI agents contacted Assistant U.S.
Attorney F. Steele Langford to discuss prosecuting Draper
for wiretapping. The meeting didn’t go well for the G-men.
Langford thought there was “insufficient information to
consider any action against Draper and that the identity of
the ‘blue box’ manufacturer [was] still unknown.” He kicked
things upstairs, saying he would defer his opinion on the
matter to his bosses in the Department of Justice in
Washington.
 Part of Langford’s reluctance probably stemmed from the
fact that the government’s star witness in the matter, Chic
Eder, was an informant in several different cases. Nobody
wanted to put Eder on the stand since it would blow his
cover and compromise other investigations.
 Meanwhile, Bill Harward, head of the Radio Engineering
Section of the FBI lab in Washington, D.C., had been
working with Ken Hopper at Bell Laboratories to see if they,
too, could duplicate Draper’s wiretapping technique. As
with Walter Schmidt at General Telephone in California,
they found it worked like a charm—at least for intercepting
phones in the San Francisco Bay Area—and could be done
from the East and West Coasts. It was unclear if this
problem existed in places other than San Francisco.
Harward reported in a memo that Hopper was “most
anxious that this condition be corrected as soon as possible
and has stated that Bell resources will be made fully
available on the authority of the highest level of
management.” Harward suggested that the FBI make a
formal request to AT&T to assess the vulnerability of the
telephone network in other parts of the country and to
explain exactly what steps were being taken to fix the
problem. In addition, he recommended that every FBI field
office be alerted via teletype that phone calls to all offices
could be wiretapped and that they should be “extremely
cautious in use of the telephone.”
 As a result of Harward’s memo, on July 23, Clarence M.
Kelley, the director of the FBI, penned a note to John D.
deButts, chairman of the board of AT&T.
 Dear Mr. deButts:
 I am advised that information just developed and confirmed discloses a
 condition which permits any knowledgeable person using a blue box to
 intercept and monitor telephone conversations to and from the San
 Francisco FBI Office, and other subscribers in that area.
   This is a most alarming situation and I request the full cooperation of your
 organization and its resources to assess the possibility for similar
 conditions elsewhere and to take immediate corrective action wherever they
 exist.
   It is requested that, for the purpose of this effort, liaison with the FBI
 Laboratory, Washington, D. C., be established in order that I may be kept
 advised of pertinent results.

 The next day the FBI lab director Jay Cochran received a
telephone call from Joe Doherty, AT&T’s director of
corporate security. Doherty said that AT&T was aware of
the problem, that it was now fixed in San Francisco, and
that instructions had gone out to remove the capability
from any AT&T facilities where it still existed. In a memo to
his bosses at the FBI Cochran noted, in his best passive-
voice Bureauspeak, “It is pointed out that we have received
prior assurances from AT&T that procedures such as
discovered [in this case] are not possible. It is also pointed
out that the condition developed in this case was developed
by FBI investigation and not from any information furnished
by the telephone company. [. . .] In view of the past record
of AT&T in this area, we feel a stronger, more positive
position, must be taken in the absence of any constructive
offering from [AT&T].” Cochran later described Doherty’s
attitude during this call as “rather ‘ho-hum’ and appeared
calculated to downplay the gravity of the situation.”
 The FBI informally approached the President’s Foreign
Intelligence Advisory Board to let its members know of the
problem. A PFIAB representative said that they “would
undoubtedly be sympathetic with any strong initiatives that
the FBI might take . . . to insure the security of
communications.”
 Meanwhile another issue came up. Chic Eder needed to
get his blue box back from the FBI so he could maintain
credibility with Draper. (You can imagine the conversation:
“Hey, Chic, where’s that box I made for you?” “Oh, uh, sorry,
John, I’m sure it’s around here somewhere . . . oh, that’s
right, I loaned it to some friends at the FBI! Um, no, I mean,
uh. Crap.”) A small blizzard of memos bounced back and
forth among those in the FBI lab, the Legal Division, HQ,
and various field offices to figure out how to handle the
situation. Do we really want to give the bad guys back a
piece of equipment that they can use to tap our phones?
But wait a minute, the bad guys made the equipment in the
first place. If we don’t give it back they’ll just make another
one. And besides, Eder is our informant, he’s not a bad guy.
But Eder has friends who might borrow it who are bad
guys. Plus, wasn’t it used in the commission of a crime? Isn’t
it evidence at this point? How would we maintain evidence
chain of custody if we give it back?
 This dilemma continued until late August 1975 when FBI
agents again met with U.S. Attorney Langford in San
Francisco. Per instructions from FBI HQ they explained that
Eder was “a most valuable informant to the FBI who will
not testify” in any legal proceedings but that they wanted to
get the blue box back to him so they could continue their
efforts to “penetrate the underground phone phreaks.”
Langford stated that, as there were no witnesses—or at
least none willing to testify—there could be no prosecution.
Therefore FBI could dispose of the blue box or any other
evidence as it saw fit, so long as the recipient didn’t use it.
 No prosecution. Really? Draper can wiretap the FBI and
just get away with it?
 Up the chain of command went the word that the U.S.
attorney wasn’t going to prosecute. Down came word from
the Department of Justice: “Departmental Attorney Kline,
after reviewing the matter, desired to know whether any of
the telephone companies involved are actively pursuing
investigation . . . in order to establish Fraud by Wire
investigations.” In other words, remember how we got Al
Capone for tax evasion when we couldn’t get him for
murder? If we can’t get Draper for wiretapping us, maybe
we can take him down for making free phone calls. Let’s see
if the phone companies don’t have something on him in that
regard.
  The answer was no. Pacific Telephone’s security office in
Los Angeles said the company was “vitally interested” in
determining whether Draper was phreaking, but until
Draper moved to Los Angeles and started to phreak there
would be no investigating him. General Telephone’s security
office in Los Angeles said much the same. New York
Telephone’s security office said its investigators followed
Draper’s activities by reading the TAP newsletter but “did
not have him under investigation on specific fraud by wire
charges.” And Pacific Telephone’s San Jose security office—
the office in charge of security in the area where Draper
actually lived—simply said that it was “not taking any
further investigative action” toward him.
  AT&T claimed it had fixed the problem, the star witness
wouldn’t testify, the U.S. attorney had declined prosecution,
and not even the phone company was following up on
things. A month passed. Somebody at the Justice
Department poked someone at FBI HQ. You-know-what
rolled downhill, toward San Francisco, Los Angeles, and
New York, on November 17, 1975.
For the information of receiving offices, the [Justice] Department continues
to maintain an interest in this matter.
  San Francisco should timely submit letterhead memoranda, by cover
airtel, reporting results of efforts to penetrate “underground phone freaks”
pursuant to instructions set forth in referenced Bureau air telegram,
9/18/1975. These communications should [. . .] relate exclusively to
investigation regarding penetration of “phone freaks.”
  Consideration should be given to potential prosecution for violations of
Fraud by Wire Statutes should this become apparent.
 The change in strategy was now official. The focus of the
investigation was now on penetrating the underground
phone phreaks and getting Fraud by Wire prosecutions.
The wiretapping business might have started it but that
wasn’t how it was going to end.
                       Eighteen

                      SNITCH

PHONE PHREAKS LIVE     to solve puzzles. They spend time
observing, gathering data, thinking, and inventing theories
about how things fit together. They think up experiments—
things they can try—to solve whatever puzzle they’re
working on. They get a little dopamine hit when they get it
figured out. And that dopamine hit is the kick that causes
them to rinse and repeat.
 What’s funny is that you can replace the phrase “phone
phreak” with “FBI agent” or “telephone company security
officer” in the preceding paragraph and it would be just as
true. Figuring out a new phone hack, catching a bad guy:
same same, at least as far as the brain’s neurotransmitter
receptors are concerned.
 Phone phreak or cop, most of the observing, data
gathering, and experimenting that either one does is a long,
tedious process of running down leads—the 99 percent
perspiration that made Thomas Edison a wealthy man.
 Other times, though, you get lucky and something drops
into your lap that cracks things wide open. If you’re a phone
phreak, this might be a purloined manual that tells you
something of how the telephone network works, or perhaps
an anonymous voice on a long-distance loop-around circuit
who tells you how to do something you had been trying to
figure out for months.
 For the FBI and Pacific Telephone and their case against
John Draper, that lucky break would turn out to be a young
phone phreak from Los Angeles.
Wayne Perrin was a Pacific Telephone lifer. That wasn’t his
plan, it just happened that way. Perrin was a big man,
almost six-foot-two and 220 pounds, but he came across as
affable and friendly rather than imposing; perhaps his
sandy reddish hair, hazel eyes, and easygoing manner
helped with this. Perrin had wanted to be a cop, and while
waiting for a job with the local police force in 1965 he took
a temporary gig with the phone company as a lineman,
climbing telephone poles and such. He was good at it and
was quickly promoted. He stayed with the phone company
and also worked as a reserve police officer for the city of
Alhambra, just east of Los Angeles. Then, in 1971 at the age
of twenty-nine, opportunity knocked. There was an opening
in the telephone company’s chief special agent’s office in
Pasadena. Perrin became a telephone cop.
 Along with the other telephone cops in that office, Perrin
was responsible for investigating security problems for the
phone company in the greater Los Angeles area. Very few of
these investigations had anything to do with phone phreaks
or electronic toll fraud. More often it was pay phone or
office burglaries, petty cash theft, vandalism, or dealing
with a traffic accident involving a company vehicle, pretty
much the same stuff that security people at all large
companies handle.
 The latter half of 1975 had been unusually busy. In just six
months Pacific Telephone’s Los Angeles area had been
caught up in a vortex of telephone crime. But it wasn’t just
that it was unusually busy, it was that the crimes were just
plain weird. Someone had figured out a way to hack the
611 repair service phone number to make free phone calls
all over the world. Meanwhile, telephone company truck
yards were being burglarized, and the things being stolen
were items such as telephone company hard hats, tools, and
“test sets”—the odd-looking telephones with alligator clips
that telephone company repair people always have on their
tool belts.
 “We didn’t have a clue. No clue,” Perrin recalls. “We had
all these little cases. You knew they were related in a
fashion but you couldn’t tie them. . . . We had trucks being
broken into, we had Dumpster diving, the Valley was just
rife with petty thievery. Test sets were taken. Books were
taken. Manuals were taken. Wire is taken. Nothing of great
value, but they would go in and take this stuff. So you’re
looking at this trying to figure it out.” And not getting
anywhere.
 Then there were the really strange cases, the ones that
made no sense at all. Like the $21,000 worth of telephone
calls that had been fraudulently charged to one Dr. Bosley
in what appeared to be a giant, multistate, nineteen-hour-
long conference call over the course of a weekend. Or the
late-night telephone calls to telephone company employees
in Pacific Telephone’s Simi Valley and Panorama City offices,
a creepy mixture of obscene, stalkative calls to operators
peppered with threats of physical violence and bomb blasts.
Strangest of all, some of the bomb threats were then
followed by calls to law enforcement by someone
pretending to be a telephone company security officer
investigating the matter—or, in some cases, the reverse:
calls would be made to the telephone company security
office by someone pretending to be a law enforcement
officer.
 All this left Perrin scratching his head. Who would do this,
and why?
 Whoever was doing this was calling telephone operators to
make these threats simply by dialing 0. You would think that
when you call a telephone operator, the operator would
have your telephone number. You’d think that the operators
would be able to look up Mr. Harassing Caller and hand all
of his info directly to security and then Perrin and Company
could swoop down on this guy. Problem solved.
 Sounds great in theory but in practice it didn’t seem to
work that way, at least not in 1975 in certain parts of Los
Angeles, and at least not with this caller. The one clue they
had—that their harassing caller would sometimes identify
himself as “Robert P Norden”—didn’t seem to be as helpful
                      .
as you might think. They didn’t seem to be able to find any
service records under that name.
  On November 19, 1975, at 3:55 a.m., “Norden” called the
Panorama City office. This time the phone company held his
line. When your line is held it means that you can’t hang up.
Or, more accurately, you can hang up but it won’t
disconnect your call. When you pick the phone back up,
instead of getting a dial tone you’re still connected to the
person you called or you get no dial tone at all.
  This is a very disconcerting thing, and if you’re a telephone
prankster it’s like a creepy phone call in reverse. Imagine
yourself making a late-night harassing phone call, thinking
you’re powerful and anonymous and king of the world, and
then finding that your phone has inexplicably turned on
you. You can’t hang up. No matter what you do you’re
stuck. Your intended victim has you by the tail and won’t let
go.
  His line was held for hours and hours. Eventually he got up
the nerve to go to another phone and call the telephone
company to find out what was going on. He ended up
speaking with Perrin’s security colleague Bill Cheney and
demanded to know why his line was being held. Cheney
gave his best telephonic shrug and told him that probably
there was trouble on his phone line and perhaps he should
call his local repair service. As soon as he hung up Cheney
called the test board supervisor and explained the situation.
As expected, “Norden” called repair service. He was told
that his line was being checked for trouble.
  Meanwhile the phone company was feverishly trying to
find out whose phone line it was holding. Normally this
would be simple. Back in those days every phone line
coming into a central office had a “line card,” a three by
five–inch note card that had on it all the information about
the telephone line—information like whose line it was, for
example. But his line card was missing. It wasn’t in the 611
repair bureau file where it should have been. The next
logical place would be the telephone company business
office, but that didn’t open until later in the morning. And
once it opened, employees there said they didn’t have it
either.
  The phone company finally released his line that afternoon,
almost twelve hours later. “No one could find any records,”
Perrin says. As it turned out, a business office
representative named Angie had the line card in her desk.
“She was having other problems with that guy, so she had
locked it up. So we couldn’t find anything about it until
Angie actually got into the office. Had they had the line card
we would have had him right away.”
  One thing you may have noticed by now about phone
phreaks is that they’re obsessive. True to form, that night
he again called the Panorama City office, this time to
complain about his line being held the night before. But this
time Perrin was ready and had arranged for a trap on the
line that would allow him to trace the call. Finally, he had an
address and telephone number for this mystery caller.
  “Mr. Norden” must have known the jig was close to being
up at that point. “He got scared,” says Perrin. Two days
later he called the phone company and canceled his
telephone service. Three days after that, Perrin says, he
seemed to have a full-fledged panic attack. They were on to
him, it seemed clear. Better to switch sides now, he must
have thought, while the switching was good.
  On November 24, 1975, “Robert P Norden” picked up the
                                     .
phone and called Wayne Perrin. Over the course of a wide-
ranging two-hour conversation, Perrin wrote, he “related
numerous items concerning toll fraud involving 611 toll
trunks, toll fraud concerning the use of call diverters, a
scramble-descrambling method used to monitor telephone
conversations at any location in the country and his ability
to access numerous kinds of telephonically secure systems.”
That fateful phone call began his new career as an
informant, perhaps the single most effective phone phreak
informant that the telephone company ever had.
 The two met and spoke numerous times over the next
several weeks. “Norden” was convinced the phone company
was “three days away” from swooping down and arresting
him. They weren’t, says Perrin, but since “Norden’s”
worries made him talkative and anxious to cooperate,
Perrin wasn’t about to correct him in this regard. Perrin
described this paranoid phone phreak as being in his “early
twenties, five-foot-eleven, approximately 145 to 150
pounds, dark brown hair and eyes, extremely grubby” with
hair that “comes to the shoulders, sideburns down to the
chin line with a partial muttonchop.” Perrin’s notes give a
bit of insight into his psyche.
 Mr. Norden, often times, loses sight of his perspective, he attempts to keep
 everything on a “we, he, they” basis but often times gets so involved in his
 descriptions he changes to “I” and “me” [. . .] If you catch it, he will finally
 admit to you on a rough basis that he was actually involved or did the act.
 He is extremely egotistical, very easy to work with if you do not apply any
 pressure. You can question him subtly, if you question him violently he will
 react and want to back off. Mr. Norden is extremely nervous about being
 followed or whisked away by Secret Service or CIA or FBI. He is so
 paranoid about the situation that he looks over his shoulder at everything
 and anybody, with the exception of young ladies.

 Finally, after many meetings, Perrin learned “Norden’s”
real name: Paul Sheridan.***
***A pseudonym.
 Perrin didn’t know what to make of Sheridan, this unkempt
and unsettled kid who made outlandish claims about all the
crazy things he could do with a telephone. He had mastered
all sorts of telephone tricks and was thoroughly plugged in
to the Los Angeles phone phreak scene. He seemed to know
everyone, from the kids who hung out on LA loop arounds
to the John Drapers and Bill Ackers of the world. But
Sheridan brought an intensity and an intelligence to his
endeavors that not everyone had. He was quick-witted,
foulmouthed, verbally gifted, and had a telephonic self-
confidence—really more of an arrogance—that made him a
talented social engineer. Being able to make free phone
calls was apparently the least of his skills. Sheridan
admitted to being part of the Santa Barbara nuclear hoax a
few years earlier. He said he could wiretap phone calls with
a blue box. He bragged of breaking into the military’s
telephone network and getting the U.S. Air Force Strategic
Air Command in Omaha, Nebraska, on the horn. He could
scramble nuclear bombers by doing this, he claimed. He
said he had a special 800 number that went directly to the
White House; he boasted that he could get President Ford
on the line any time he wanted. In fact, he claimed, he had
spoken to the president several times by phone.
 The president? Really?
 “We did not believe that,” Perrin recalls. So Perrin and his
colleague Bill Cheney decided to try it out. They got the 800
number from Sheridan and gave it a try from their office in
Pasadena. “Here’s two grown adult men, we’re sitting in
Cheney’s office, and we dial that number up and we got
right to the second floor of the White House. It scared the
crap out of us! We hung up!”
 That was the problem, really. It would be easy enough to
dismiss these crazy things Sheridan was saying, but they all
seemed as if either they actually were true or they might be
true. It was a great combination—claims that were
impossible to discount and disturbing as hell.
 Among Sheridan’s most disturbing claims was that phone
phreaks could break into AUTOVON. Though it sounds like a
German highway, AUTOVON—short for Automatic Voice
Network—was the U.S. military’s telephone network. It
started in the United States in the early 1960s but later
expanded into other countries where the United States had
military bases.
 For the most part AUTOVON looked and felt like the plain old
telephone network that civilians used. This was no great
surprise.AUTOVON was built by AT&T, General Telephone, and
Automatic Electric, the same companies that built the
civilian telephone network, and they reused as much
technology as they could. AUTOVON telephone numbers were
seven or ten digits long, just like normal ones. Internally,
AUTOVON used multifrequency signaling, just as the civilian
network did. You could even call into the regular telephone
system from AUTOVON, though you weren’t supposed to be
able to go the other way.
 However, AUTOVON had some features that made admirals
and generals, network engineers, and phone phreaks
salivate. Put into operation just a year after the Cuban
missile crisis, AUTOVON was a child of the cold war, a
telephone network designed to withstand a nuclear attack.
The civilian telephone system was built on Bell’s
hierarchical network concept, one in which lower-level
switching centers forwarded calls to higher-level ones. The
higher-level switches, the brainy ones like 4A crossbars,
had lots of trunks to other cities. This approach made
economic sense, because it minimized the number of
switching centers and long-distance lines you needed. But it
made military planners worry. What if the higher-level
switching centers got taken out by Russian nukes? Civilian
telephone central offices were what the military called “soft
targets”; they might be solid buildings but they simply
weren’t designed to withstand a nearby nuclear blast.
 What the military needed, the Pentagon decided, was a
“survivable” telephone system, one that could survive a
nuclear war. With help from the phone company, the
Defense Communications Agency began constructing its
own network of telephone switching centers, about seventy
of them throughout the United States. Many of these were
underground, in hardened bunkers. Unlike the civilian
telephone network, AUTOVON was nonhierarchical; there
were many more trunk lines between AUTOVON switches than
in the civilian network, and they tried to minimize the
importance of any one switch. That way the Soviets couldn’t
take out just a couple of switching centers and bring down
the entire military phone system.
 The other unique thing about AUTOVON was something
called “precedence.” In the 1960s, the civilian telephone
network wasn’t as developed as it is today; there just
weren’t enough long-distance telephone circuits. So
sometimes you’d try to make a long-distance call and you’d
be treated to a recording telling you, primly, “We’re sorry,
all circuits are busy now. Won’t you please try your call
again later?”
 That didn’t sit well with the military brass. If you’re calling
the president to let him know the country was under attack,
you don’t want to have to listen to any recordings about all
circuits being busy. So the Defense Communications Agency
and its telephone company contractors came up with a
scheme called precedence dialing, the idea being that some
calls are more important than others. If you’re ordering
pizza, that’s low precedence. If you’re reporting war with
the Soviets, that’s high precedence. If the network was
busy, higher-precedence calls trump lower-precedence
calls, automatically booting them and seizing their lines if
necessary to get the important traffic through. This led to
AUTOVON touch-tone phones having sixteen buttons, not just
the twelve we’re used to. These extra buttons weren’t just
any buttons. They were shiny and red, arranged in a neat
military column to the right of the keypad. They were
labeled, cryptically, “FO,” “F,” “I,” and “P.”
 That is: Flash Override. Flash. Immediate. Priority. The
precedence levels, in other words. Flash Override was the
highest precedence, to be used only by the president,
secretary of defense, members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
or commanders reporting an attack on the United States.
 Be honest. Who doesn’t want a phone on his desk with a
Flash Override button? Even if you’re just ordering a pizza,
wouldn’t it make you feel good to press Flash Override
first? Nothing says “I’m important” like Flash Override.
 AUTOVON was an ego blow job delivered via a sixteen-button
keypad. The admirals and generals loved it. So did the
network engineers. And so did the phone phreaks. It was,
after all, another network—one with cool buttons—to
explore.
Perrin struggled with what to do about Sheridan. “He
would call in. He would talk so fast, you couldn’t write fast
enough, so we recorded everything that he gave us and
then later on we transcribed it and we just told him that we
wrote fast,” Perrin recalls. “He was telling you things . . . I
mean, he starts telling you stuff about getting into the
Russian satellite system and I have no idea about the
Russian satellite system. I mean, I didn’t even know about
AUTOVON. So from the standpoint of its functionality and
those kinds of things, he was talking way past what I could
understand.”
 Perrin spent a day or two trying to figure out what to do.
Finally he decided to get the FBI involved. The Bureau
might have a better idea of how to handle things. And
maybe it was hooked up with technical spooks who might
be better able to evaluate Sheridan’s claims. Perrin met
with the FBI on December 5, 1975. He gave their agents an
overview of the Sheridan matter and described the various
outlandish claims that Sheridan had made. Perrin felt that
there was enough information on Sheridan at this point to
charge him with threatening to “bomb the telephone
company”—remember the creepy late-night phone calls and
bomb threats that started this whole thing—but he wasn’t
sure if that was the right way to go. Perhaps the FBI had
some ideas. Maybe they could call Strategic Air Command
in Omaha or the Secret Service in Washington and check
some of this stuff out?
 The FBI agents didn’t seem to take things very seriously,
Perrin says. They told him that they would get back to him.
 Meanwhile, the question of what to do about Sheridan was
also making its way up the food chain within the telephone
company. Pacific Telephone, where Perrin worked, was the
Bell System’s West Coast operating company. Like all the
local Bell companies, it reported to AT&T, its corporate
parent, at 195 Broadway in New York City. Pacific
Telephone decided to get AT&T involved, since Sheridan
was talking about things that were bigger than just
California, things like AUTOVON and defense systems and
satellites. In turn, the higher-ups at AT&T corporate
headquarters decided they needed to talk to the Justice
Department about it, since United States government
communications were involved. AT&T higher-ups had throw
weight. A meeting was soon scheduled with the attorney
general in Washington, D.C., on December 17, 1975. In the
meantime, AT&T decided that this matter was to be held in
the strictest confidence. And that meant Perrin couldn’t talk
to anyone about it anymore. Anyone, Perrin asked? Did that
include the FBI? Anyone.
 Physics teaches us that the fastest thing in the universe is
the speed of light. Common sense and organizational
politics teach us the fastest thing is actually the rumor mill.
So it was no surprise, Perrin says, that the FBI somehow
instantly got word that its bosses at the Justice Department
would soon be meeting with AT&T officials regarding this
Sheridan kid. Suddenly the FBI was very interested. It was
suddenly decided the Bureau needed to talk to Perrin
immediately. But now Perrin couldn’t talk to the Bureau.
Perrin put the FBI off until the meeting with the attorney
general, where it was decided, predictably, that the FBI was
the right agency for the phone company to work with on
this matter.
 On December 22, 1975, Perrin took Sheridan to meet with
Special Agent Bob Jacobs. Jacobs was one of the FBI Los
Angeles tech squad or “sound” agents. He and his fellow
tech squad agents were responsible for the Bureau’s high-
tech field ops in the Los Angeles area, things like wiretaps,
room bugs, and car tracking devices. Jacobs and Sheridan
seemed to hit it off. Among other things they discussed
Sheridan visiting Draper in person next week. Could
Sheridan bring back information or documents from
Draper? Maybe. Could the Bureau help Sheridan out a little
bit with his rent? Maybe.
 On January 7, 1976, Perrin met with Special Agent Bill
Snell, one of Jacob’s FBI tech squad colleagues. Sheridan’s
visit to Draper had born fruit. Snell gave Perrin a four-page
typeset technical document that Sheridan had gotten from
Draper titled “AUTOVON Access Info.” Sheridan even offered
to demonstrate the techniques described in the document
for the FBI and AT&T if they wanted. Sheridan also told the
FBI that Draper had a small assembly line going for red
boxes that were to be sold in the near future. He was
actively using a blue box from the house across the street
from People’s Computer Company, or PCC, a small nonprofit
in Menlo Park dedicated to teaching people about
computers. And Draper was also red boxing from a pay
phone just down the street from PCC, Sheridan reported.
 The AUTOVON document caused quite a stir. It described, in
detail, how to use a blue box to access the military’s phone
system from the civilian telephone network via a phreaking
technique called guard banding. Guard banding added a
higher-pitched tone—usually 3,200 Hz, or seventh octave G
—into the 2,600 Hz normally used by a blue box to reset a
trunk line. If your call went through several telephone
switches, guard banding allowed you to control exactly
which switch you were talking to, simply by varying the
volume of this higher-pitched tone. This in turn meant that
you could stack tandems, building up a call to a particular
place one link—in other words, one telephone switch—at a
time. This was similar to the tandem stacking technique
described in the Esquire article, but guard banding was a
newer and more powerful method that worked on a wider
variety of telephone switches, including the brainy 4A toll
tandems.
  Sheridan’s document explained how guard banding could
be used to hack into AUTOVON. First you call directory
assistance in Alaska and whistle off with 2,600 Hz. You’re
now talking to a civilian telephone switch in Alaska that also
happened to have connections to the military’s AUTOVON
telephone network. You’d then use your blue box to tell the
Alaska switch to connect you to a military telephone switch
at Kalakaket Radio Relay Station in Alaska, originally part of
the military’s Arctic communication system for the Distant
Early Warning line. You’d then use guard banding to send a
mix of 2,600 Hz and 3,200 Hz down the line. This skips over
the Alaska switch and instead resets your connection to the
Kalakaket Creek switch, which then waits for your
commands. You now use your blue box to send Kalakaket
Creek digits to get you to Pedro Dome Radio Relay Station,
also in Alaska. By adding this second link on to your call,
you’re now fully inside the military’s network; as far as
Pedro Dome is concerned, you came in from the U.S. Air
Force network via Kalakaket Creek station and thus look
like a completely legitimate military telephone user. This
means you can now tell Pedro Dome to connect you to
whatever AUTOVON telephone number you want. You can
even set the precedence of your call, from routine up to
Flash Override, just by sending the right digits with your
blue box.
  AT&T representatives met with the FBI in Washington,
D.C., on January 9 to discuss the AUTOVON problem. AT&T
Long Lines security supervisor Nelson Saxe recalls, “The
FBI’s biggest concern was: can the phone phreaks
scramble fighters by using AUTOVON?” AT&T hastened to
assure them that this wasn’t possible; it might be possible
to order pilots to their aircraft using AUTOVON, but any orders
to actually launch aircraft would have to come over a
separate,     point-to-point     alerting    network      called
JCSAN/COPAN. And the phone phreaks hadn’t broken into
JCSAN/COPAN. Well, not as far as anyone knew, anyway.
 As these things go, it was not the most reassuring of
reassurances.
 Discussion turned to Sheridan’s offer to demonstrate
AUTOVON access. The FBI favored a demo in Los Angeles, and
soon. Saxe’s notes from the meeting show that agents in the
FBI’s Los Angeles office felt Sheridan was “mentally
unstable” and might “go off” at any time. Who knew how
long they had to work with him? AT&T attorneys were
against a Sheridan demo, arguing that the less contact
anyone had with the informant the better. After all, how
were they going to successfully prosecute Sheridan if he
could later stand up in court and tell the jury, “Not only did
the phone company and FBI know I was playing with the
AUTOVON network, they asked me to demonstrate it to them!”
And since the FBI and AT&T now had a detailed document
describing exactly how to break into AUTOVON, why did they
need a demonstration from Sheridan? Couldn’t the
engineers at Bell Labs just duplicate his attack on their
own? In fact, it wasn’t clear that Sheridan himself had
actually ever accessed AUTOVON. He simply may have gotten
the information from Draper and might not actually know
how to do it himself. It wouldn’t help anybody if there really
was a security vulnerability in AUTOVON, but Sheridan
convinced them all otherwise by botching the demo. As
Saxe put it, “We’re not about to go out to Los Angeles to see
Sheridan fail to get a call through on AUTOVON!”
 In the end, the FBI was holding all the cards that
mattered; the Bureau had the informant and it wanted a
demo. If the AT&T people didn’t want to attend, well, that
was AT&T’s business.
 AT&T relented. Plans began forming for a joint FBI–AT&T
demo of AUTOVON hackery in Los Angeles in a week or two.
                            Nineteen

                      CRUNCHED

THE SAME MONTH   that Paul Sheridan was starting his career
as an informant for both Pacific Telephone and the FBI and
being asked to take trips up to the Bay Area to snuffle
around John Draper, the December 1975 issue of the phone
phreak newsletter TAP carried the following letter to the
editor.
Dear TAP   ,
This is Capn. Crunch, I would like to mention a few things.
  First, I’m glad to see you boys back in operation & am curious why you
stopped publication for a while. I also want to state my willingness in
contacting as many would-be phreaks as possible. In person only & not by
mail. Therefore I am offering to anyone who wants to come see me in Mt.
View all I know in electronics, computers, & related technologies including
freaking of course. However I dislike talking on the phone, nor
communication by mail. If you even receive this letter I would consider it a
miracle. My current address is: J. T. Draper, 1905 Montecito Ave., Apt. #6,
Mt. View, CA 94040 for those who want to set up a meeting by mail. Of
course I am not underground. A while back National Review published my
phone number in the hopes that people would bug me by calling me at 3
am etc. They didn’t realize that I made hundreds of new friends & taught
hundreds the art of freaking. Any people who want to visit me are welcome.
They can stay with me up to a week (it usually takes that long to teach
them). You might want to publish that fact.

 The letter, which continued on in that vein, was a
wonderful example of why David Condon’s circle of
Berkeley phone phreaks viewed association with Draper as
the “kiss of death.” Multiple sources, including General
Telephone’s security office in Los Angeles, promptly
forwarded the December issue of TAP to the FBI, where it
served as a reminder, as if they needed one, that Draper
was still out there, busy minting new phone phreaks. Who
knew what tricks he was teaching them?
 By January 1976 a dark vibe had begun to spread
throughout certain groups of phone phreaks in both
California and New York. Phreaks who used to talk freely
were now being cagey or simply not returning calls.
Discussions that used to be about the latest telephone
hacks were now concerned with something more
malodorous: who’s the rat? Several people believed
something unwholesome was happening down in LA, but
nobody could prove anything. Paranoia levels were
beginning to run at record highs.
 In fact, something unwholesome was happening that
month down in LA—from a phone phreak perspective,
anyway. It was the FBI–AT&T AUTOVON demo, and it took
place from Wednesday, January 21, 1976, through Friday,
January 23, at the FBI’s Los Angeles field office.
 Team fed was made up of thirteen heavy hitters. From the
FBI there was Jay Cochran, the assistant director of the FBI
Laboratory in Washington, D.C.; R. E. Gebhardt, the
assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles field
office; Bill Harward, the section chief of radio engineering
from FBI headquarters; and Bob Jacobs and Bill Snell, the
FBI tech squad special agents who had been Sheridan’s FBI
handlers. From the local telephone companies there was
Bill Bowren, the security director of Pacific Telephone in Los
Angeles; Roger Edfast, the security manager of Pacific
Telephone in Pasadena; Walter Schmidt from General
Telephone; and, of course, Wayne Perrin. From AT&T, there
was Chuck Israel, the AUTOVON network manager; Nelson
Saxe, the AT&T Long Lines security supervisor; and Ken
Hopper from Bell Laboratories. Finally, there was a
gentleman from Washington, D.C., who is notable for how
his name and organization are blanked out of every
government document describing the meeting: a Mr. B. A.
Fonger from the National Security Agency.
 The two phone phreaks attending, Paul Sheridan and a
clean-cut twenty-something phreak described only as
Michael, † † † were heavily outnumbered. Michael was a
talented, technically sharp Los Angeles–area phone hacker
who had served as a sort of technical adviser to the FBI on
a wiretap case some years earlier. The two phreaks were
brought in separately so as not to have contact with each
other. Figuring the phreaks might be somewhat more
talkative if they weren’t surrounded by so many feds, the
interrogators split into two groups. Harward, Hopper,
Israel, Saxe, and the two FBI agents Jacobs and Snell would
conduct the interviews in the same room as the subjects. A
reel-to-reel tape recorder would record the room
conversation as well as any telephone calls that were made.
As the reels ran out of tape, every forty-five minutes or so,
the tapes would be brought to a second conference room,
where they would be listened to by Bowren, Cochran,
Edfast, Fonger, Perrin, and Schmidt.
†††A pseudonym.
 First up was Sheridan, who would give a guided tour of
AUTOVON access techniques.
 The big question was: could Sheridan really do what he
claimed he could? Could he use a blue box to get into the
military AUTOVON network? Did this guard banding technique
actually work? Sure, everybody understood that he might
be able to get in to AUTOVON by fooling an operator; that was
slightly troubling but it wasn’t nearly as big a deal as being
able to do it with a blue box. Sheridan had made lots of
claims—lots of hair-raising claims. And now a whole lot of
high-ranking people had gone out of their way to see these
techniques demonstrated. Recall AT&T Long Lines security
agent Saxe’s comment a few weeks earlier: “We’re not
about to go out to Los Angeles to see Sheridan fail to get a
call through on AUTOVON!”
 Of course, Sheridan failed to get a call through on AUTOVON.
 Well, that’s not entirely fair. In fact, Sheridan was able to
get a call through by BSing an AUTOVON operator. And he was
able to demonstrate that guard banding worked. He also
demonstrated a bunch of other phone phreak techniques.
But despite multiple attempts he was unable to get into
AUTOVON by the guard banding method described in the
paper he had given the FBI earlier in the month. Later that
afternoon Michael, the second informant, tried a slightly
different guard banding technique for hacking into AUTOVON.
It, too, failed.
 Yet both phreaks swore their techniques worked.
 This situation will be familiar to anyone who has ever had
to give or sit through a demo of any new technology. There
are entities known in Silicon Valley’s high-tech community
as “the demo gods.” It is said that demo gods can smell fear.
An important demo? An audience of VIPs? That’s when then
demo gods suddenly appear and things mysteriously stop
working.
 Fortunately for Sheridan and Michael, the more technical
members of team fed were familiar with this phenomenon.
That evening Fonger, Hopper, Israel, Saxe, and Schmidt
adjourned to the General Telephone security laboratory in
Santa Monica. Breaking out their (legal) blue boxes and
test equipment, they sat down and tried to break into
AUTOVON using the techniques they had seen that day. It was
a long process; had they been phone phreaks, they might
even have enjoyed it. But finally, at 10:30 p.m., they
succeeded in accessing AUTOVON using a blue box. Ken
Hopper’s notes convey the effort they put into it: “Our
success in direct AUTOVON dialing came after many, many
fruitless attempts, perhaps as many as 100.” Given how
difficult guard banding was until you got the hang of it, this
was not entirely surprising. In addition, apparently part of
the problem they had making it work was that that other
people had been tying up the lines between Los Angeles
and Seattle that very evening. Hopper suspected it was
Sheridan and Michael, probably trying to prove to
themselves that the techniques they had tried to
demonstrate to the FBI earlier in the day still worked.
 Perrin remembers being woken up by a late-night phone
call that evening from the engineers at the security lab: “It
works, it works! This stuff really works!” Perrin wasn’t
surprised. Despite Sheridan’s failure to hack into AUTOVON
earlier in the day, Perrin had developed a certain
confidence in Sheridan’s claims ever since getting the
White House on the phone. “What the hell are you calling
me about? I already knew that,” Perrin recalls telling them.
He hung up and went back to sleep.
Just two miles from Stanford University, the 1900 block of
Menalto Avenue in Menlo Park was a collection of small
storefronts on a tree-lined street in a mostly residential
neighborhood. You wouldn’t have thought so from a casual
glance but it was a nexus of nerdly activity.
 A fixture on the block was the electric vehicle pioneer Roy
Kaylor. Kaylor was an inveterate tinkerer, a Stanford
electrical engineer, an odd blend of hippie and West Point
graduate. He had been building electric vehicles since
1965; his “Kaylor Kits” converted Volkswagen Bugs to run
on electric motors and batteries. He had a small store on
Menalto where he sold electric motorcycles—in 1975.
Kaylor’s house, just across the street and down the block
from his electric motorcycle store, doubled as his shop and
laboratory. His garage was filled with electronic test
equipment and machine tools, everything to make a geeky
heart beat faster.
 A few storefronts from Kaylor’s electric motorcycle shop
was the People’s Computer Company. PCC was a sort of
computer commune started in 1972 by personal computing
pioneers Bob Albrecht and George Firedrake. “Computers
are mostly used against people instead of for people; used
to control people instead of to free them,” read PCC’s first
newsletter. “Time to change all that—we need a . . . People’s
Computer Company.”
 PCC became a watering hole for Silicon Valley’s budding
personal computer scene. Of course, they weren’t called
personal computers back then; that term wouldn’t be
popular for years. They were “homebrew” computers, kits
assembled from empty circuit boards and bags of electronic
components, built one part at a time with solder and sweat
and concentration. They were often enclosed in bulky
aluminum boxes or homemade wooden enclosures, that is,
when anyone bothered to enclose them in anything at all.
The computers weren’t powerful; mostly all they could do is
blink lights in response to toggle switch inputs. But for
those bitten by the bug they were like crack cocaine.
 The People’s Computer Company took up two storefronts.
It had computers around its periphery, a social space with a
couch and rug in the center, and a potluck dinner every
Wednesday night. The potlucks were a big draw, not to be
missed events for microcomputer hobbyists in the Valley in
1975. Steve Wozniak was a frequent attendee; Bill Gates
showed up on one occasion as well. Kaylor recalls a PCC
potluck in which he tried to convince Wozniak that Woz
should sell preassembled Apple I computers directly to the
general public instead of as electronic kits to be assembled
by computer geeks. Woz thought this was a hysterically
funny idea—so funny, Kaylor says, that Woz actually fell off
the couch laughing, rolling around on the rug of the
People’s Computer Company, his belly laugh filling the
room.
 John Draper became a frequent sight at the PCC,
programming computers, building electronic gadgets,
hanging out, smoking dope. He and Kaylor quickly became
friends. “I was impressed with Draper’s diligence, his
follow-through, his stick-to-itiveness,” Kaylor recalls. He
knew Draper was building various colored phone phreak
boxes and even let Draper use the electronics lab in his
garage to work on them. But Kaylor made a point of not
asking Draper too many questions. Kaylor had a security
clearance for some defense work he had done, he says, and,
as he later put it, “You learn in that environment that
sometimes it’s better not to know things.”
 In all, the 1900 block of Menalto was a perfect setup.
There were plenty of interesting people to talk to,
computers to hack on, soldering irons and multimeters and
oscilloscopes to play with. There was a corner market a few
doors down where you could buy snacks and soda. The
Menalto Market even had a pay phone booth outside where
you could call your friends—or test your red and blue boxes
to make sure they were in tune. It was everything Draper
needed.
“It was decided that the investigation of Draper should be
intensified.” Thus spake the passive-voice memo to the
special agent in charge of the Los Angeles FBI office,
summarizing the AUTOVON demo and the skull session that
followed. “As such, Assistant Director in Charge Cochran,
Section Chief Harward, and Special Agents [. . .] should
travel to San Francisco in order to brief the San Francisco
FBI Field Office personally of the developments concerning
telephone manipulations. In addition, conscientious efforts
should be made to establish and cultivate informants in this
area with regard to possible prosecution relating to
interception    of   communications,      anti-racketeering-
interference of government communications, and interstate
transportation of stolen property fraud by wire/computer
fraud by wire.”
 A few days later, on January 27, FBI agents met with
Pacific Telephone investigators in San Francisco to discuss
the Draper investigation. Present were Assistant U.S.
Attorney Floy Dawson, the FBI special agent in charge of
the San Francisco office, his deputy, the assistant agent in
charge, and seven other FBI agents. Three representatives
from Pacific Telephone attended. The Pacific Telephone
people said they would need to talk to their attorneys to
figure out how they could help. For its part, the FBI started
spot surveillances on Draper’s known haunts to get a
handle on his activities. Agents were assigned to check two
locations on a random basis. The first was Draper’s
apartment in Mountain View. The second was the People’s
Computer Company in Menlo Park.
Draperism. That was John Draper’s term for what he
viewed as the persistent bad luck that seemed to follow him
around like a rain cloud. Draperism was never his fault,
never the result of anything he had done. Like the weather,
it was a purely external phenomenon, something that just
happened.
 Whatever it was, the Wall Street Journal did Draper no
favors when the newspaper ran a front-page story that
same day—January 27, 1976—titled “Blue Boxes Spread
from Phone Freaks to the Well-Heeled.” It described the
spread of the hobby from “electronics tinkerers who got a
charge out of things like reaching the recorded weather
report for Tokyo without paying for the call” to the
mainstream, to “people who consider themselves basically
honest.” It made Draper’s hobby sound like the Next Big
Thing, one that was spreading like wildfire.
 On January 30 the FBI’s San Francisco office sent a high-
priority teletype message to headquarters. As part of their
“intensification” of the investigation against Draper, San
Francisco agents had procured a tracking device that they
were preparing to surreptitiously install on Draper’s car.
That same day Pacific Telephone reported that equipment
had been deployed that would enable the company to
“detect any unusual or illegal telephone usage” at Kaylor’s
house across the street from People’s Computer Company,
as well as the pay phone down the street outside the
Menalto Market. The FBI continued its “fisur”—
Bureauspeak for physical surveillance—of Draper’s haunts
over the next week.
  On February 10 the San Francisco office decided it was
time to move the investigation along. “San Francisco has no
sources who are phone phreaks,” read the draft of an
urgent teletype message. Given this, San Francisco
requested that Los Angeles send one of its phone phreak
informants up to the Bay Area to visit Draper and
“accomplish the following objectives.”
  What might those objectives be? We may never know. The
FBI’s Freedom of Information Act office suffered an acute
attack of shyness and blanked out the entire next page of
the draft teletype message. But we can bet the objectives
were mundane, certainly nothing exciting, because a few
lines later, after the blanked-out material, the draft teletype
message noted that Floy Dawson, the assistant U.S.
attorney, “advised there would be no entrapment in the
above.” What a relief!
  Except somebody in the FBI drew a line through that
sentence on the draft teletype message—striking it out. A
copy of the final teletype message as received at FBI
headquarters shows that little exculpatory sentence never
made it into the actual teletype message that was sent.
Apparently Assistant U.S. Attorney Dawson did not advise
that there would be no entrapment in the above or perhaps
the FBI thought better of checking with him. Here’s a
suggestion, by the way. If you’re ever in a position to
document something that might appear to be sketchy—
even if it’s perfectly legit—don’t leave drafts of emails or
teletypes or memos in your files. And if you do, try to make
sure they don’t have sentences that say things like “I
checked with our lawyer and he says this is perfectly legal,
whoops, actually, no, he didn’t say that, let me just draw a
line through that sentence.” It just doesn’t look good.
 Whatever the San Francisco office agents were proposing,
FBI agents in Los Angeles were not thrilled with it. Still,
after some back and forth, Los Angeles finally agreed to
send a phone phreak informant up to San Francisco. On
Monday, February 23, an urgent teletype message from Los
Angeles to San Francisco advised that the informant would
drive up the next day and should arrive in the Bay Area late
that afternoon. He was instructed to contact FBI agents in
San Francisco upon his arrival.
Perrin and Sheridan were spending a lot of time together.
“He wasn’t a bad kid,” Perrin recalls. But, Perrin says, “you
couldn’t shut him off. You couldn’t say, ‘Paul, I only talk to
you at work,’ because he wanted to talk. He wanted a
normal life.” Sheridan’s family situation was a shambles. “It
fucked up way back when and it’s been fucked up ever
since,” Perrin recalls Sheridan telling him. Sheridan’s
parents were divorced and he had attended a reform school
in Los Angeles where he had met other teenagers
interested in telephone shenanigans.
 Perrin says he became a father figure of sorts. Sheridan
often dropped by Perrin’s house during the investigation.
“He’d come over here and he would be comfortable. He
played basketball with my son and daughter and talked to
them like he was a long-lost cousin. They were very nice to
him, they liked him. But they knew he was somebody I was
working a case on, and that he wasn’t normal. Kids can pick
things up like that.”
 As much as the normalcy that Perrin was providing him, it
was clear that Sheridan also liked the attention he was
getting from switching sides. Imagine what it must have
been like to have telephone company security officers and
FBI special agents hanging on your every word, being
dazzled by your feats and knowledge, even sending you on
spy missions. Then, too, there was the money the FBI was
paying him. Finally, Sheridan firmly believed that the phone
company had been mere days away from having him
arrested. By turning himself in, he must have figured, he
was avoiding a much worse outcome.
 When Sheridan wasn’t playing basketball with Perrin’s
kids, he could often be found on the couch in Perrin’s living
room, or in a chair in a conference room at Pacific
Telephone, being gently interrogated. “You didn’t have to
lean on Paul real hard,” says Perrin. “Paul wanted you to be
his friend. You had to imply that the world was coming to an
end. If you threatened him—‘listen, you son of a bitch’—it
didn’t work. But if you said, ‘Paul, look, I can’t keep these
people off you for long, you’ve gotta work with me.’”
 The tape recordings and transcripts of Sheridan’s
interrogations piled up over the weeks, first a handful, later
more than a dozen. Sheridan wanted to please. He went
through his notes and address book, combing them for
information and then distilling it all down. It got to the point
that the sessions were closer to dictation than interrogation
—no questions being asked by Perrin, just Sheridan reading
into the microphone from preprepared notes. Names and
addresses of phone phreaks. Their specific phreaking
activities. Recommendations for who should be investigated
—“worked,” in security parlance—due to their “fucking
around.” Recommendations for who the phone company
should go easy on too. It was all there, all on tape.
 The address book Sheridan gave up contained more than
sixty names and telephone numbers of phone phreaks. Over
hours of interviews he provided additional details on more
than fifty of them. Then there were the specific cases that
Wayne Perrin and Pacific Telephone needed tied up.
Remember the telephone crime wave that had hit the
Valley, the burgled phone company trucks, the $21,000
conference call? All of those needed to be explained. The
conference call was “Project 21,” Sheridan said, a prank
against a certain Doctor Bosley who Sheridan and his
buddies were pissed at for some reason. They arranged to
use some telephone lines that belonged to Bosley over the
course of a weekend to call all of their phone phreak friends
around the world. It was nice to talk to their far-flung
network for nineteen hours but the real purpose was to
screw Doc Bosley. Hence Project 21: a goal of racking up
$21,000 in phone bills for the good doctor.
 Then there were the telephone company employees. If
you’re a phone phreak, where do you get your information?
Dumpster diving, playing with the phone, talking to other
phone phreaks? Sure, all that works. But sometimes it’s
easier just to talk to people who actually work for the
telephone company. Big surprise: some telco employees
were phone phreaks too. Others just had a soft spot for a
bright kid who wanted to know how the telephone system
worked.
 Sheridan turned in five Pacific Telephone employees and
one General Telephone employee, all in the Los Angeles
area. Some of these employees were phone phreaks and
had black boxes of their own. Some Sheridan claimed would
use Pacific Telephone computer systems to turn on or off
various features for him on his telephone line. Others
provided technical information to him or other phreaks. An
employee even gave him telephone company equipment. In
at least one case Sheridan actually called a phone
technician from Perrin’s conference room and got him to
divulge confidential company information over the
telephone while Perrin was listening from the sidelines.
 In the end, two Pacific Telephone employees were fired
and two were suspended; the General Telephone
employee’s name was passed on to GTE security.
FBI headquarters wanted this case solved. Pacific
Telephone had blue box detectors and tape recorders and
dialed-number recorders and every other god damn thing
on every telephone that Draper came anywhere near. FBI
agents had Draper under surveillance morning, noon, and
night. Draper doesn’t have the best judgment to begin with.
And just in case Draper’s bad judgment can’t be relied
upon, an informant was being sent up from Los Angeles to
move things along.
  To this day, Draper maintains that he was framed. He says
Sheridan came up from LA and attended a potluck dinner
with him at the PCC. Sometime during the evening, Draper
claims, Sheridan went outside to the pay phone next to the
little market down the street from the PCC and made a blue
box call. “I go out to the store and there he is, inside the
pay phone booth,” Draper says, “but I didn’t see the blue
box.” Draper remembers Sheridan calling him over to the
pay phone—“Jim wants to talk to you, here, say hi to Jim”—
and passing him the phone. “He hands the phone to me,”
Draper says. “I say, ‘Hi Jim, what’s going on?’”
  “Well, it turns out he had arranged with the FBI to tap that
phone,” Draper says. “He told the FBI that I was going to
be making a blue box call at that phone at that date and
time.” The result was that the FBI now had a blue box call
on tape with Draper’s voice on it.
  Given the pressure the FBI agents were under, given the
teletype message in which the San Francisco FBI wanted
an informant to come up from Los Angeles and “accomplish
the following objectives”—the objectives that the assistant
U.S. attorney didn’t sign off on, whatever they were—this all
seems vaguely plausible. A stretch, perhaps, but plausible.
But the dates don’t line up.
  You see, the informant that the Los Angeles office of the
FBI sent up didn’t arrive in the Bay Area until Tuesday,
February 24. The blue box telephone calls that Draper was
eventually busted for occurred four days earlier, on Friday,
February 20. And on that Friday the Los Angeles informant
was still in Los Angeles, enjoying sunny southern California
weather or breathing smog or whatever it is that LA phone
phreak informants do when they’re off duty.
 According to Draper’s FBI file, an FBI special agent had
Draper under surveillance on the Friday that the blue box
phone calls were made.
On February 20, 1976 at 5:23 PM, John Draper was observed in a public
phone booth adjacent to the Menalto Market [. . .]. He was hunched over in
the booth with his face close to the door, as if he were peering out. He was
alone in the booth and no one appeared to be waiting in the vicinity for the
booth.

 Of course, simply being in a pay phone booth isn’t a crime,
even if you’re John Draper, even if you’re hunched over and
peering out. But the phone company’s monitoring setup
finally paid off. It took security agents a few days to review
the tapes (it was over a weekend, after all) but on Monday
Pacific Telephone presented the FBI with a letter.
This will serve to inform you that The Pacific Telephone Company has
reason to believe that instances of toll fraud are being committed within
your jurisdiction (San Mateo County) in violation of Title 18, Section 1343
of the Federal Criminal Code.
 We will be pleased to apprise you of certain evidence in our possession
which you may acquire pursuant to a duly issued subpoena or letter of
demand in accordance with applicable Federal Law.

 The phone company had learned much from the Hanna
and Bubis cases of ten years earlier. If you have tape
recordings of somebody making illegal calls, you don’t just
hand them over to the FBI. No, you make the FBI demand
them from you via a subpoena. That way nobody can make a
stink later about how you violated the wiretap laws.
 Upon receiving his letter of demand from the FBI, George
Alex, the Pacific Telephone security agent for the San Jose
region, met with FBI agents the very next day. He provided
them with a tape recording and detailed analysis of blue
box calls made from the Menalto pay phone on February
20, starting at 4:45 p.m. and continuing until 5:50 p.m., in
other words, during the period when the FBI special agent
had eyeballed Draper in the pay phone booth, alone and
hunched over and peering out. Dozens of blue box calls
were made from that line during that time.
  Many of these calls were to various internal telephone
company test numbers. Some were to numbers in the Bay
Area where no one answered. But two calls were enough to
hang Draper: one to some friends of his in Pennsylvania and
one to his answering service in Mountain View.
  For younger readers who have never heard of such a thing
as an answering service, come with me on a quick trip down
memory lane. Back in the day, long before voice mail, even
before telephone answering machines, busy or self-
important people would hire an answering service, a
company that employed real, live human beings to answer
your telephone calls and take messages, handwritten on
little pink slips of paper. You could then call in to the
answering service, speak to one of these real, live human
beings, and retrieve your messages.
  The reason the calls to his answering service and his
friends were such nails in Draper’s telephonic coffin was
that they proved it was Draper who had made the calls. In
both cases he identified himself as “John.” The FBI even
went so far as to subpoena the little pink slips of paper and
to confirm that it was indeed John Draper who had the
account with the answering service, and the service’s
receptionist said she recognized Draper’s voice on the
tapes the FBI played for her. FBI agents got Draper’s friend
in Pennsylvania to listen to the tapes as well; he, too,
confirmed that it was Draper’s voice.
  With all that, why would Draper still maintain to this very
day that Sheridan made a blue box call and then handed
him the phone in an effort to set him up when the facts
seem so clearly to indicate otherwise? Is Draper simply
delusional?
  Possibly. But it is also possible that Draper’s version of
events happened too. It is clear from FBI files that, despite
knowing about the blue box calls Draper made on February
20, the FBI went through with its plan to send an informant
up from Los Angeles. The FBI learned of Draper’s February
20 calls only on Monday, February 23, the day before the
informant was scheduled to arrive from LA. Agents may not
have known that they had enough to convict Draper at that
point; if so, sending the informant up from LA might still
have made sense to them. This informant may well have
been Sheridan. And Sheridan’s instructions may indeed
have included getting Draper’s voice on a blue-boxed phone
call.
 So Draper may not be delusional. He may actually have
been set up. But, if so, the setup wasn’t what got him. He
got himself, via his own blue box phone calls from three
days earlier.
Draper’s arrest occurred about a month later, at 7:33 a.m.
on April 2. It remains, to this day, a textbook example of
how not to deal with the FBI when being arrested. The
FBI’s after-action report says it best.
John Thomas Draper, 1905 Montecito, Apartment 6, was advised of the
identities of the arresting Agents, as well as the fact that he was being
arrested for a federal violation of Fraud by Wire. Draper was advised of his
rights [. . .] which he waived as shown on an executed Warning and Waiver
form.

 Despite Draper’s having been arrested on Fraud by Wire
charges four years earlier, the report continues,
Draper inquired as to what a Fraud by Wire violation was and it was
explained to him that it involved the use of a “blue box.” Draper stated that
he never used a “blue box” and why didn’t the Agents execute their search
warrant and look for one. Draper was informed that there was no search
warrant but that he could voluntarily consent to a search. He then agreed
to allow his apartment and his Volkswagen Van to be searched.

Oh dear.
As Draper selected each article of clothing that he desired to wear, they
were first searched [. . .] In the pocket of the pants [the agents] found a
 small, black, plastic box approximately one inch by two inches by three
 inches with an on/off switch and three buttons on top.

Oh dear, oh dear.
 After Draper completed dressing, he was transported by Bureau car to the
 Santa Clara County Jail.

 In addition to the mysterious black plastic box (which
turned out to be a red box) the search turned up piles and
piles of stuff that must have looked pretty damning to the
FBI agents: bags of electronic parts, telephone company
documents, computer printouts, teletype tapes, circuit
boards, and reels of audiotapes. Oh, and a copy of a
National Crime Information Center (NCIC) computer
manual, the operating manual to the federal criminal
computer database.
 It turns out that one of the best ways to get the FBI all
riled up, second only to tapping its phones, is to have
manuals to the Bureau’s computer systems casually lying
around your apartment when FBI agents arrest you. The
fact that the agents didn’t have a search warrant but that
Draper invited them to search his apartment anyway just
makes it all the more perfect. Or tragic. Possibly both.
 Draper was booked at the county jail and released on
$5,000 bail. A public defender was appointed. Twenty days
later a federal grand jury indicted Draper on three counts
of Fraud by Wire.
 News of Draper’s bust raced through the phone phreak
community; it was also picked up by the newswires and
widely reported in the press. “Charges Filed Against
Electronics Wizard,” read one headline; “Wizard Whistles
Way into Trouble,” said another. For David Condon and his
friends, it was a vindication of their policy of staying as far
away from Captain Crunch as they could. Others closer to
Draper felt a mix of exasperation and dread. “The first thing
I thought was, what dumb or crazy stunt did Draper pull
this time to get caught?” recalls Dr. Sidney Schaefer,‡ ‡‡ a
phone phreak friend of Draper’s. “Then I began wondering
who else might be next, since the bust meant they probably
now had my name and number too.”
‡ ‡ ‡ The pseudonym he went by at the time, a tip of the hat to the movie The
President’s Analyst.
 For his part, Draper was well and truly screwed. He was
still on probation from his 1972 bust. One of the conditions
of that probation was that “Draper shall refrain from illegal
use of the telephone or other such electronic devices for
fraudulent means,” which meant that even if he somehow
managed to fight the charges the feds still might be able to
get him on probation violations.
 On April 22, 1976, Assistant U.S. Attorney Floy Dawson
met with Draper’s attorney. Dawson proposed that the
government would accept a guilty plea to one count of the
charges and recommend six months’ jail time in return for
Draper’s complete cooperation with the FBI. He went on to
say that, should the government lose at an evidentiary
hearing and if Draper didn’t cooperate, Dawson “would
personally and vigorously pursue every possibility of having
Draper’s current probation revoked and seeing to it that
Draper will spend the remaining one and a half years of his
probation in jail.” Out of options, Draper agreed, but with
two provisos. First, that he be granted immunity for any
related crimes he admitted to during FBI interviews.
Second, that he not be made to name or incriminate
friends.
 Draper met four times with FBI personnel over the course
of the summer. The interviews focused on understanding
exactly what Draper did and how he did it, what the
vulnerabilities were in the telephone system, and how to fix
them. Draper was mostly cooperative but he couldn’t
always keep himself from mocking the agents interviewing
him. “It was a big joke for him,” recalled an FBI source
familiar with the debriefings, a joke that inflated Draper’s
ego to new dimensions.
 On August 23, 1976, Draper was “sentenced to the
custody of the Attorney General for three years to be
imprisoned in a jail-type institution for four months, with
the remainder of the sentence suspended and five years
probation.” On October 4, 1976, Draper arrived at the
Lompoc federal prison to serve his sentence. As he walked
through the prison gate he added another first to the
legend of Captain Crunch: the first phone phreak to serve
time in a federal pen.
What of Paul Sheridan, the informant? And what of the
phone phreaks he left behind?
 On March 5, 1976, Sheridan signed a payment agreement
with Pacific Telephone acknowledging that he owed the
phone company some $10,851 ($10,000 for his part in
Project 21, $457 for fraudulent credit card calls he’d made
while in school, and $394 for his final telephone bill as
Robert P Norden). However, the agreement said, he had to
         .
pay only about $2,000 of this amount, and he could do it in
easy monthly payments over the next six years. Unless, that
is, he started phreaking again. If he made fraudulent calls,
or wrote articles telling others how to phreak or
encouraging them to do so, the entire amount would
immediately be due and payable. The agreement required
him to report his whereabouts to Pacific Telephone’s
Pasadena security office every three months.
 Wayne Perrin says, “In ninety percent of these cases, with
the phone phreaks and the hackers, we had no criminal
case. Everything we had was stuff that you could not
prosecute them for. Either there was no legitimate crime on
the books that you could go after them for or we had only
their word that they did it. In other words, there was no
tangible evidence that you could go into court and show you
that Paul had access to AUTOVON. He showed you how to do it,
and he did it, but he did it at your direction. So you had no
independent crime that you could go and prove. Now, he
didn’t know that. And we never told him. So because he was
smart, we kind of talked to some people, and we talked to
the air force recruiter, and so we got him kind of directed
that way. He talked to the recruiter and they accepted him
and he went in. Get him the hell out of here!” With that
gentle nudge, about two weeks before FBI agents knocked
on John Draper’s door, Paul Sheridan became Airman
Sheridan, joining the United States Air Force and
disappearing from the Los Angeles phone phreak scene.
 After Draper’s arrest, Sheridan’s phone phreak colleagues
were left to sort through the rubble and try to understand
what, exactly, had happened. The sequence of events didn’t
leave much to the imagination, at least as far as who was
responsible. Everyone had been acting paranoid and hinky.
Schaefer had tried to reach Sheridan multiple times in
February and March but didn’t get any calls back. Then one
day, Schaefer says, Sheridan called him to say that he had
run into a little trouble with the phone company, but not to
worry, as he had settled the problem. Sheridan said that
phreaking had become boring to him and that he was going
to disappear for a while. This struck Schaefer as odd,
verging on unbelievable. Two weeks later Draper was in
handcuffs. Captain Crunch was sure he had been framed
and wasn’t shy about saying who had done it.
 “The main reaction I had was a deep sense of betrayal,”
says Schaefer. “I just kept wondering, how could he?”
Draper’s bust also forced Schaefer to think about his
involvement in the hobby. “It made me realize how very
serious a business this was,” he says, “and how I should
probably get out while I could. It was no longer fun, and not
a game really worth playing anymore. I quickly became less
active, I ‘lost’ my blue box and hid a bunch of files I had. I
also couldn’t help but feel sorry for John. He’d been kind of
a leader and my personal inspiration to become a phreak in
the first place. It had all seemed so exciting for a long time,
but slowly it became more dangerous and difficult. It just
wasn’t worth it anymore.”
                         Twenty

                   TWILIGHT

ON MAY 15,  1976, five and a half months before John Draper
would report to the Lompoc prison, AT&T began upgrading
its network with a new technology: CCIS, common channel
interoffice signaling. Over the course of the next ten years
this would spell the end of blue boxes.
  CCIS could trace its roots to 1947, all the way back to Bell
Labs’ invention of the transistor. Transistors enabled
computers, which made telephone switches smarter and
faster. But these smart switches still had to talk to each
other via an old language—the multifrequency signaling
system that dated back to the 1940s. The computerized
switches still had to sing to one another, slowly, over the
same circuits that humans talked over.
  Transistors changed that because transistors also enabled
modems. Remember modems? If you were around in the
early days of the World Wide Web, you may recall dialing up
your Internet service provider using a modem and listening
to the odd noises it made while it established your
connection to the rest of the world. CCIS didn’t connect to
the Internet or the Web, of course, since those things
wouldn’t be invented for years. But it did use modems to let
the computers in telephone switches communicate with
each other digitally, allowing them to quickly trade all the
signaling information that they would have sent slowly via
MF. Moreover, they could do all this via a separate channel,
a channel that phone phreaks couldn’t get at. Analog trunk
lines would still be used for conversations between humans,
but no longer would these trunks resonate with 2,600 Hz
when they were idle; no more would the switches serenade
each other with musical MF tones to communicate the
numbers that customers were dialing. And that meant no
more blue boxes.
 Bell started experimenting with a CCIS-like system in
1968 and the first trial of CCIS itself began in 1970. Two
decades previously it wouldn’t have been economically
possible, maybe even technically possible, to build a
separate computer network for telephone signaling. But
now it was, and that’s exactly what AT&T did. The company
built a CCIS computer network across the nation in which
so-called signal transfer points—kind of like routers in
today’s Internet—were used to gateway telephone signaling
information from telephone switches in one region of the
country to those in another. CCIS ran at a turtle’s pace of
2,400 bits per second by today’s Internet standards, but it
was plenty fast at the time. In May of 1976 it officially
began service between Chicago, Illinois, and Madison,
Wisconsin. By 1977 all ten CCIS regions had been switched
on, though CCIS coverage of the nationwide network was
far from complete.
 CCIS, the Bell System said, was about reducing costs,
speeding calls, and offering new services; with the new
system calls would go through faster and additional
information could be transmitted, such as caller ID. But
eliminating blue box fraud was a motivation as well. The
phone company had also been deploying another innovation
—termed CAMA-C—throughout the network. This was a
computerized billing system that could be retrofitted into
older central offices and was also able to detect blue box
fraud. Thanks to computers and modems, made possible by
the transistor, the telephone network was becoming
immune to blue boxes.
 CCIS was a well-timed bit of good news, because Ma Bell
had been having a bad decade. There were the service
failures in big cities in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
There was the EEOC investigation of AT&T’s hiring
practices in 1970. There was the big strike by telephone
workers in 1971. Esquire, Ramparts, the NPR program, and
the phone phreaks themselves of course all took their toll.
But all of these problems paled in comparison to those
represented by three little words that the Bell System
would encounter multiple times during the 1970s:
competition, antitrust, and scandal.
 Competition raised its head in the late 1960s in the form of
a Texas rancher turned businessman named Thomas Carter.
Carter made his living selling two-way radio systems to
oilmen and his fellow ranchers in the Southwest. In the
days before cell phones, his customers needed a way to
make telephone calls when they were out in the field, on
horseback or in a pickup truck, far away from home or
office or pay phone booth. Carter invented something called
the Carterfone, an electronic widget that connected a
telephone line to a CB or other two-way radio system. It
allowed a person out in the boonies to make a radio call
back to his home base and place a telephone call over the
air.
 Carter sold thousands of his Carterfones before he showed
up on AT&T’s radar and Ma Bell began her inevitable
crackdown. “The phone companies were harassing my
customers—threatening to cut off their phone service
unless they quit using the Carterfone,” Carter recalled.
AT&T had the law on its side, the crystal clear wording of
FCC tariff 132: “No equipment, apparatus, circuit or device
not furnished by the telephone company shall be attached
to or connected with the facilities furnished by the
telephone company, whether physically, by induction, or
otherwise.” If you wanted to attach something to your Bell
System telephone line, that something had to come from
Western Electric, which was to say from AT&T.
 Carter sued the phone company. “The universal comment
was, ‘You’re whistlin’ Dixie—you can’t win,’” he said. After
all, he was but one man against the might of the Bell
System, and Bell’s case seemed open and shut. But Texas
pride and his instinct for self-preservation kept Carter in
the fight. “I didn’t think it was fair to let them run me out of
business,” he said. After the usual tortuous legal process,
his case came before the Federal Communications
Commission. And on June 26, 1968, something unexpected
happened: he won. The FCC decided that the tariff in
question was “unreasonable, unlawful, and unreasonably
discriminatory.” Henceforth, non–Bell devices could be
connected to those telephone wires coming out of your wall,
just so long as they did not cause harm to the network.
 For consumers—and for phone phreaks—this was great
news. It would take several years to catch on, but by the
mid-1970s you’d finally be able to own your own telephones
instead of having to rent them from the telephone company.
It even opened the market to outside innovation; it wouldn’t
be long before fancy new gadgets such as answering
machines would become commonplace.
 The Carterfone was the first chink in AT&T’s monopolistic
armor. The next one came less than a year later from a
small, scrappy start-up company called Microwave
Communications, Incorporated, or MCI for short. In 1969,
to the horror of AT&T, the FCC approved MCI’s request to
construct a point-to-point microwave private line telephone
system between St. Louis and Chicago. MCI’s product
offering was limited. It would not be providing general long-
distance telephone service to either businesses or
consumers. Rather, it would serve companies who had
offices in both cities. MCI would charge these companies a
flat monthly fee, one significantly less expensive than
AT&T’s rates for similar service, to connect their business
telephone systems in each city. AT&T executives were
furious. The only reason MCI could offer lower prices than
the Bell System, they said, was that MCI didn’t have to pay
for billions and billions of dollars of physical plant, in other
words the wires, central offices, repeaters, amplifiers, and
telephones that made up Bell’s network. By focusing on one
thing—building an intercity microwave link—MCI could
avoid all sorts of costs and underprice AT&T. The AT&T
executives had a term for what MCI was trying to do: cream
skimming.
 Of course, MCI had no intention of stopping with St. Louis
and Chicago; why would it? In 1972 the small start-up hit
the big time, raising $100 million through an initial public
offering. The funds were to be used to build out a
microwave network linking 165 cities in the United States,
allowing MCI to replicate its St. Louis/Chicago business
model across the country. By 1973 MCI had persuaded the
FCC to allow it to expand its product offering to include
something called foreign exchange, or FX, service. MCI’s
FX service allowed a big company—an airline, let’s say—to
offer local telephone numbers that customers could call for
free in almost any big city. These were AT&T-provided
telephone numbers, but calls to these numbers got routed
back to the airline’s corporate headquarters over MCI’s
microwave network. For the airline this was a great deal,
because MCI’s rates were less than AT&T’s. But as far as
AT&T was concerned this was FCC-mandated financial
suicide. It was bad enough that MCI got to skim cream, but
to AT&T it was completely outrageous that MCI’s FX service
required AT&T to actually help do it by providing the
company phone numbers and a connection to Bell’s
telephone network.
 AT&T was not about to go gently into this MCI-scripted
good night. The matter quickly wound up in federal court,
where MCI won. AT&T appealed. The appeals court vacated
the lower court’s ruling and kicked the ball over to the FCC,
telling the communications commission to handle it. The
very next day AT&T began disconnecting MCI’s FX lines,
cutting off MCI’s customers. Less than a week later, in April
1974, the FCC ruled in MCI’s favor. AT&T, at regulatory
gunpoint, began reconnecting the lines it had just
disconnected.
 By 1975 MCI expanded its offerings again, this time with
something called Execunet. Execunet was revolutionary.
With it, you simply dialed a local access number and got a
second dial tone. You’d then touch-tone in a four-digit pass
code followed by the phone number you wanted to call in
one of eighteen metropolitan areas. Your call would be
routed over MCI’s microwave network and then out into
AT&T’s local network to complete the call—all for much less
than you’d pay for an AT&T direct-dialed phone call. A
competitor to MCI, Southern Pacific Communications
Company, launched a system called Sprint that was similar
to Execunet.
 AT&T hated Execunet and Sprint but businesses loved
them. The phone phreaks loved them, too, both those
purely interested in exploring a new telephone network to
understand how it worked and those purely interested in
making free phone calls; the access codes were only four
digits and it didn’t take long to find a valid one after a bit of
time spent dialing numbers on a touch-tone keypad. Paul
Sheridan demonstrated Execunet to the FBI during his
AUTOVON demo in 1976. Phone phreaks weren’t the only ones
hacking Execunet, however. In 1977 MCI sued the Hare
Krishnas, accusing the religious organization of stealing
some $20,000 worth of long-distance calls.
 AT&T and MCI continued their legal tussles. MCI sued
AT&T, accusing it of monopolistic practices. With that suit
AT&T met the second word it would become intimately
familiar with during the course of the 1970s: antitrust. Of
course, AT&T was no stranger to the term. Ever since the
Kingsbury Commitment in 1913, the telephone company
and the government had been more or less at peace with
each other. With Kingsbury, AT&T changed its stripes from
a predatory nineteenth-century monopoly to a kinder,
gentler, government-regulated twentieth-century one.
Since that time AT&T had largely played by the rules and
stopped the sort of behavior that had gotten it in trouble in
the early 1900s; for fifty years, Kingsbury had kept the
peace and the specter of antitrust lawsuits had seemed
contained.
 Now, years later, things were different. The Bell System’s
immense size and sometimes questionable business
practices had attracted calls for its breakup. The U.S.
Justice Department had gone as far as filing an antitrust
lawsuit against American Telephone and Telegraph in 1949,
seeking to sever its manufacturing arm, Western Electric.
The lawsuit took seven years to go nowhere. In 1956 AT&T
and the Justice Department reached an agreement in which
AT&T was allowed to keep Western Electric but would have
to license its patents to its competitors—of which at the
time there were, more or less, none. AT&T would also have
to restrict its business to that of communications. Though
the government trumpeted the 1956 agreement in the
press as a major victory, inside the Justice Department it
was considered a travesty. As one historian put it, “The
wounds from that 1956 scandal never healed inside the
Antitrust division. Many of the division’s lawyers believed
that AT&T had abused its political power, circumvented the
legal process, and cheated the American public.
Throughout the 1960s, the division maintained files about
AT&T’s activities, waiting for the right moment to go after
Western Electric again.”
 The MCI lawsuit provided the right moment. On November
20, 1974, the Department of Justice filed an antitrust
lawsuit against American Telephone and Telegraph, the
largest company on earth; fittingly, it would turn out to be
the largest antitrust lawsuit in the history of the world. The
legal action sought nothing less than the total breakup of
the Bell System: the separation of AT&T Long Lines, the
regional Bell telephone companies, and Western Electric
—“severed limbs” was how one Justice Department official
would describe their goal.
  AT&T lawyers argued that the antitrust laws did not apply
to the company. It was, after all, a government-regulated
entity; anything it did was approved by the Federal
Communications Commission. Given that its every move
required permission from the government, how could it
possibly be engaged in improper behavior? Indeed, AT&T
asked, did the courts even have jurisdiction over AT&T
given that the Communications Act made the FCC the
phone company’s overseer? These questions stalled the
lawsuit until 1977, when the Supreme Court settled the
issue. AT&T was subject to the same antitrust laws as any
other big company, FCC oversight or no. Finally, after three
years, the lawsuit could move forward. Due to the case’s
size and complexity, the pretrial preparation work alone
would take almost four more years. It would be 1981 before
the trial itself actually started, and longer still before the
case would be settled.
  The third word the Bell System would become intimately
familiar with in the 1970s was scandal. In this regard the
phone company was in step with the times. From 1972 to
1974 the United States suffered through the Watergate
scandal, in which a botched burglary and an even more
botched cover-up led to the unraveling of the Nixon White
House and culminated in the resignation of the president,
the firing of the White House counsel, the resignation of
multiple attorneys general, the conviction of two top
presidential aides, and the shattering of a nation’s trust in
its government.
  On October 17, 1974, just two months after President Ford
attempted to put Watergate behind the country with the
words “Our long national nightmare is over,” a
Southwestern Bell executive named T. O. Gravitt committed
suicide. Gravitt, fifty-one, was a vice president and the chief
executive for the company’s operations in the state of Texas.
The suicide note and nine-page memo he left behind
accused Bell and its officials of a laundry list of misdeeds. It
concluded, “There is bound to be much more. Watergate is
a gnat compared to the Bell System.” With that note, AT&T
found itself embroiled in a scandal of its own, one that
would dog the phone company over the next six years.
  Gravitt’s friend and colleague James Ashley, an assistant
vice president at Southwestern Bell in charge of telephone
rate cases in Texas, expanded on the charges that Gravitt
left in his note. Ashley claimed that Southwestern Bell
engaged in rate fixing by manipulating data provided to
municipal regulators, that it maintained a slush fund its
executives used to make contributions to sympathetic
politicians, and that the telephone company engaged in
illegal wiretapping against its enemies. For its part,
Southwestern Bell denied any wrongdoing and stated that
both Gravitt and Ashley had been under internal
investigation for improper conduct; the telephone company
suspected Gravitt had misappropriated company funds and
Ashley had been suspended earlier that month for sexual
misconduct. Indeed, Ashley was fired soon after Gravitt’s
death. That November Ashley and Gravitt’s widow together
filed a $29 million lawsuit against Southwestern Bell for
libel and slander, actions, they claimed, that drove Gravitt
to suicide.
  The Ashley-Gravitt affair was much in the newspapers that
fall and attracted the attention of Louis Rose, an
investigative reporter at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
Missouri’s preeminent newspaper. Rose had written a
series of articles examining the apparently cozy relationship
between Southwestern Bell and the Missouri Public Service
Commission, its regulator in that state. “I had been looking
at all the expenditures and all of the salaries and donations
by Southwestern Bell,” Rose recalls. James Ashley, he says,
“found a convenient thing in me, because I was already
looking up these ties.”
  In January 1975 the Texas scandal spread to North
Carolina when a former Southern Bell vice president—
another who had been forced out of the telephone company,
as it happened—admitted during an interview that he had
run a $12,000-a-year political kickback fund for the Bell
System. The telephone company soon found itself being
investigated by an assortment of agencies: the Securities
and Exchange Commission, the Department of Justice, the
Federal Wiretap Commission, the FCC, and the Texas
attorney general.
  The next shoe to drop in the scandal was, in a way,‐
predictable—so predictable, in fact, that Bill Caming,
AT&T’s patrician attorney for privacy and fraud matters,
had predicted it ten years earlier. Caming couldn’t say
exactly when it would happen, or exactly how it would
happen, but he was sure it would happen. Ever since 1965,
when he had first learned about AT&T’s Greenstar toll-
fraud surveillance system, with its tape recordings of
millions of long-distance calls and its racks of monitoring
equipment kept behind locked cages in telephone company
central offices, Caming had maintained it was a matter of
when—and not if—the news of Greenstar would eventually
leak.
  The “when” turned out to be February 2, 1975. The “how”
was a front-page headline in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
“Bell Secretly Monitored Millions of Toll Calls.” The article,
by Louis Rose, quoted an anonymous source within the
phone company and was chock-full of details: a list of the
cities where Greenstar had been installed, the specifics of
its operation, the stunning news that the phone company
had monitored 30 million calls and tape-recorded some 1.5
million of them. Someone—someone high up, it seemed—
had spilled the beans. By the next day the story had been
picked up by the newswires and the New York Times.
 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.’
 “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 golden 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.
 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.
 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., .
To view a pdf of that document, point your browser at
http://explodingthephone.com/docs/db23. Unfortunately, for
reasons of copyright and confidentiality, not all documents
referenced here are available in this manner.

                        Chapter 1: Fine Arts 13
Much of the material in this chapter comes from author interviews conducted
with Jake Locke.
2 “WANTED HARVARD MIT”: Harvard Crimson, March 7, 1967, p. 6
   http://explodingthephone.com/docs/db461 (inactive)
3 transcribed 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 .
8 Locke 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
   .
11 used 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
14 the 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.
15 In 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.
16 Victorian 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.
16 conveyed news, facilitated commerce, and whispered gossip:
  Standage, Victorian Internet, p. 105ff, p. 127ff.
16 90% 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.
16 20 million: Tomas Nonnenmacher, “History of the U.S. Telegraph
  Industry,” Economic History Association, at http://eh.net/encyclopedia/-
  article/nonnenmacher.industry.telegraphic.us (inactive). 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.
17 He 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. (inactive)
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.
18 he 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.
18 unlikely 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.
19 The 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.
19 telegraph 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.
20 The 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.
21 American Speaking Telephone: Farley, Farley’s Telephone History Series,
  “page                                   4,”                               at
  http://www.privateline.com/TelephoneHistory2ATelehistory2A.htm
  (inactive).
21 settled the lawsuit: Kingsbury, Telephone and Telephone Exchanges, p.
  189, and Brooks, Telephone, pp. 71–72.
22 ticker 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: Philadelphia,” The
  Electrical Engineer, April 16, 1890, p. 249.
22 “I cannot understand”: Ibid.
22 AT&T’s first long-distance line: AT&T Long Lines Department, Our
  Company and How It Operates, 1960, p. 3.
23 the engineers persevered: Kingsbury, Telephone and Telephone
  Exchanges, p. 444.
23 more than ten thousand subscribers: Fagen, Bell System, p. 496.
23 Put 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.
24 an operator on a tandem switchboard: Fagen, Bell System, p. 505.
24 3 million switchboard connected phones: Brooks, Telephone, p. 111.
24 warehouses full of people: I am indebted to Paul Heilman for the phrase.
24 thirty 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 . A coast-to-coast call in 1922 would have
  cost “a little more than $5 per minute” during the day, some $67 per
  minute today. There was a 50 percent discount after 8:30 p.m. and a 65
  percent discount after midnight.
24 legend has it: There are multiple versions of this perhaps apocryphal
  story. See Brooks, Telephone, p. 100, for one.
25 Strowger’s first mechanical telephone switch: A. B. Strowger,
  “Automatic Telephone Exchange,” United States Patent No. 447,918, March
  10, 1891.
25 To 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.
25 The first automatic telephone exchange: Roger B. Hill, “The Early
  Years of the Strowger System,” Bell Laboratories Record, vol. 31, no. 3,
  March               1953,              pp.             95ff,             at
  http://www.telecomwriting.com/Switching/EarlyYears.html         (inactive)
  .
26 Bell had licensed: Fagen, Bell System, p. 554.
26 reached its peak: The percentage of lines connected to step-by-step
  switches peaked in 1960 at 49 percent. See ibid., p. 612.
26 more than six thousand: AT&T, “Milestones in AT&T History,” at
  http://www.corp.att.com/history/milestones.html.
26 Prices varied: Kingsbury, Telephone and Telephone Exchanges, pp. 465–
  80.
26 different phone lines installed: Brooks, Telephone, p. 109.
27 Bell had about fifteen hundred: Ibid., p. 111.
27 “ruthless, grinding, oppressive monopoly”: Ibid., pp. 112–14.
27 Interstate Commerce Commission: Letter from Attorney General to
  Chairman of the Interstate Commerce Commission, January 7, 1913, quoted
  in Annual Report of the Directors of the American Telephone and Telegraph
  Company, 1913, p. 29.
27 just like the postal system: Brooks, Telephone, p. 148.
27 Kingsbury Commitment: AT&T, Annual Report of the Directors of the
  American Telephone and Telegraph Company, 1914, pp. 24–27; Brooks,
  Telephone, p. 136.
28 “The trick of the Kingsbury Commitment”:Wu, Master Switch, p. 56.
28 50 million telephone calls: AT&T, Report of the Directors to the
  Stockholders for the Year 1925.

                     Chapter 3: Cat and Canary
Much of the material in this chapter comes from author interviews conducted
with David Condon.
31 “verbally informed the operator of his wishes”: Fagen, Bell System, p.
  502.
32 “it is unbelievable that it took so long to invent”: Ibid., p. 578.
32 two-letter, five-digit: I have simplified a bit of the numbering history
  here. Telephone numbering schemes varied from place to place. Some
  towns had four-digit telephone numbers, others fewer digits. When mixed
  letter-number dialing arrived in 1922, it started out as three letters and
  four digits; it changed to two letters and five digits in 1947. See Amos E.
  Joel Jr., A History of Science and Engineering in the Bell System: Switching
  Technology (1925–1975) (New York: Bell Telephone Laboratories, 1982),
  pp. 12, 608. An informative website that provides history on telephone
  exchange names is the Telephone EXchange Name Project, at
  http://ourwebhome.com/TENP/TENproject.html (inactive).
32 had to dial 211: The long-distance access code varied from place to place,
  but 211 was common in cities with panel or crossbar telephone systems. In
  places with step-by-step switching equipment, 112 was used; the
  telephone company offered a phrase to help customers remember this:
  “dial one-one-two to go straight through.” See Joel, Switching Technology,
  p. 123.
34 costs $5.90: Federal Communications Commission, The Industry Analysis
  Division’s Reference Book of Rates, Price Indices, and Expenditures for
  Telephone Service, July 1998, p. 47 (“AT&T Basic Schedule Residential
  Rates for 10-Minute Interstate Inter-LATA Calls,” Table 2.5), at
  http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/Reports/FCC-
  State_Link/IAD/ref98.pdf.
34 double or nothing scheme: Fagen, Bell System, pp. 618–19, 629.
35 Josefina Q. Zoetrope: Variations of this scheme (e.g., with collect calls
  instead of person-to-person calls) were possible as well.
36 phone phreak nickname: Condon had another nickname, bestowed on
  him by the younger phone phreak Joe Engressia: Manuel Daze, a pun on
  “manual days” since, unlike the other phone phreaks in the 1960s, Condon
  had been playing games with the telephone system since the manual days
  of operators and switchboards.
39 highest classification: Even “unclassified” AT&T documents were often
  stamped “Not for use or disclosure outside the Bell System except under
  written agreement.”
39 Oak Ridge: George O. Robinson Jr., The Oak Ridge Story (Kingsport, TN:
  Southern Publishers, Inc., 1950).

         Chapter 4: The Largest Machine in the World
41 “could not have supported such a work force”: Fagen, Bell System, p.
  613.
42 some 15 percent of telephones: Robert G. Elliott, “Dial Service Is
  Extending Its Reach,” Bell Telephone Magazine, Summer 1955, p. 110.
42 70 percent of long-distance telephone calls: AT&T Long Lines
  Department, Our Company and How It Operates, 1960, p. 6.
42 “stone knives and bearskins”: Star Trek, original series episode 28,
  “City on the Edge of Forever,” April 6, 1967. (Thanks, Mr. Spock.)
43 national numbing plan: AT&T’s first national numbering plan divided the
  country into eighty-six different geographic areas called numbering plan
  areas (NPAs). Each numbering plan area was assigned a three-digit
  “numbering plan area code,” which is where the more familiar term “area
  code” comes from. Within the telephone company and, later, within the
  phone phreak community, area codes were generally referred to as NPAs.
  See F. F. Shipley, “Nation-Wide Dialing,” Bell Laboratories Record, vol. 23,
  October 1945, p. 368; W H. Nunn, “Nationwide Numbering Plan,” Bell
                             .
  System Technical Journal, vol. 31, September 1952, p. 851; and Joel,
  Switching Technology, pp. 123–28.
44 machines need to be able to do the billing: For more on the incredible
  “automatic       message        accounting”       (AMA)       system        see
  http://explodingthephone.com/extra/ama.
44 largest machine in the world: I am indebted to the late Robert Hill for
  the lovely description of the telephone network as the “largest machine in
  the world, extending as it does over the whole surface of the earth.” See
  Robert Hill, “Days at the Old Bailey,” Interface (the house journal of
  Cambridge Consultants Ltd.), vol. 8, no. 1, April 1974, p. 10 .
46 memory called a sender: L. T. Anderson, “Senders for #5 Crossbar,” Bell
  Laboratories Record, November 1949, p. 385. To be fair, it was possible to
  augment step-by-step switches with memory and brains as well, and this
  idea found popularity in the United Kingdom in the 1920s with what were
  called “directorized” step-by-step switches. See the BT Archives at
  http://www.btplc.com/Thegroup/BTsHistory/1912to1968/1922.htm.
46 “In a word, the switching systems”: Joel, Switching Technology, p. 3.
  The boys at Bell Labs were justifiably proud of their intelligent machines
  and suggested they might be compared to a form of human intelligence.
  See John Meszar, “Switching Systems as Mechanical Brains,” Bell
  Laboratories Record, February 1953, p. 63 .
46 4A deserved a grander name: The #4A crossbar switch was an advanced
  version of the original #4 crossbar. The first #4 crossbar was installed in
  Philadelphia in 1943 and was followed by sister installations in Boston,
  New York City, Cleveland, Chicago, and Oakland; all of these systems would
  eventually be upgraded to be more or less the same as a #4A crossbar. The
  first #4A crossbar was installed in Albany, New York, in 1950. See Joel,
  Switching Technology, p. 180.
46 fifty-nine of them: Our Company and How It Operates, p. 6.
47 thin steel cards: Joel, Switching Technology, pp. 180–83.
47 “At the end of this era”: Ibid., p. 3.
47 less intelligent brethren: By the 1950s the telephone network consisted
  of about twenty-six hundred long-distance switching centers divided into
  five different levels of hierarchy. At the top of the hierarchy were the
  “regional” or class 1 centers—nine in the United States and two in Canada
  —followed by the “sectional” (class 2) centers, the “primary” (class 3)
  centers, the “toll” (class 4) centers, and then “toll points” (class 5). At the
  very bottom of the hierarchy were “end offices”—telephone switching
  offices that served only subscribers and weren’t used for switching long-
  distance traffic. Lower-level switching machines were said to “home” on
  higher-level machines, that is, if they didn’t have direct trunk lines to some
  place, they would forward the call to the machine they homed on in the
  hopes that it did. So, for example, a primary center such as Casper,
  Wyoming, might home on a sectional center like Cheyenne, and Cheyenne
  would in turn home on the regional center in Denver, Colorado. Naturally,
  the brainy 4As would go at the top of the network and less intelligent
  switching machines, such as crossbar tandems and step tandems, would
  make up the lower rungs. The telephone company toyed for a time with the
  notion of a “national center” in St. Louis, Missouri, but this idea never
  came to fruition. For the evolution of the hierarchical network concept, see
  H. S. Osborne, “General Switching Plan for Telephone Toll Service,” Bell
  System Technical Journal, vol. 9, no. 3, July 1930, p. 429; AT&T, Notes on
  Nationwide Dialing, 1955 ; and AT&T, Notes on Distance Dialing,
  1956 . AT&T made its network hierarchy somewhat visible (well,
  audible) in 1968 when it began assigning specific area-code-based
  numerical identification codes to each tandem; these identification codes
  would be played back to customers when they misdialed or when a circuit
  condition     prevented     a     call    from    going     through.     See
  http://explodingthephone.com/extra/identcodes.
47 supervisory information: Fagen, Bell System, p. 505.
47 multifrequency language, or MF: The earliest published article on MF
  signaling seems to be D. L. Moody, “Multifrequency Pulsing,” Bell
  Laboratories Record, vol. 23, December 1945, p. 466 . This
  article disclosed the MF frequencies (700 Hz, 900 Hz, etc.) but did not
  explain which digits went with which pairs of frequencies; that information
  didn’t appear in a published article until 1949 in an article by C. A.
  Dahlbom, A. W Horton Jr., and D. L. Moody, “Application of Multifrequency
                 .
  Pulsing,” AIEE Transactions, vol. 68, 1949, pp. 392–96 . As it
  happened, however, several earlier Bell Laboratories patents did include
  this information, for example, Paul B. Murphy of Bell Laboratories, United
  States Patent number 2,2882,251, “Automatic Toll Switching Telephone
  System” (filed December 31, 1940, granted June 30, 1942).
48 used this 2,600 Hz tone: Not all long-distance trunk (“carrier”) systems
  used 2,600 Hz for signaling, but the majority did. See Joel, Switching
  Technology, pp. 128–30. For SF signaling history, see A. Weaver and N. A.
  Newell, “In-Band Single-Frequency Signaling,” Bell System Technical
  Journal, November 1954, pp. 1309–30 .
48 “playing a tune for a telephone number”: “Playing a tune for a
  telephone number” (advertisement), Popular Science Monthly, February
  1950, p. 5 .
48 educational AT&T movie: AT&T, Speeding Speech, 1950s, at
  http://www.archive.org/details/Speeding1950.
48 “sing” to each other: “‘Long Distance Brain,’ Now in Operation Here,
  Hears, Reads, and Sings,” Times-News (Hendersonville, NC), November 22,
  1954, p. 1.
48 in-band signaling: Out-of-band signaling was also used on some long-
  distance trunks transmitted by the N1, O1, and ON carrier systems. See
  Joel, Switching Technology, pp. 129–30.
49 operator distance dialing: Ibid., pp. 52–54. Also known as “operator toll
  dialing,” operator dialing of long-distance calls started on a very limited
  basis as early as the 1920s but suffered from various technical problems in
  its early days.
49 “guinea pigs”: “Direct Long Distance Dialing Told Realtors,” Lodi News-
  Sentinel (Lodi, CA), May 25, 1955, p. 1.
49 Englewood, New Jersey: “Englewood Begins Long Distance Customer
  Dialing,” Bell Laboratories Record, December 1951, p. 571 .
50 318-GA2-2134: Ibid. Yes, in the original numbering plan, San Francisco
  was 318, not 415.

                          Chapter 5: Blue Box
Much of the material in this chapter comes from author interviews conducted
with Ralph Barclay as well as FBI files.
51 “Signaling Systems for Control of Telephone Switching”: Breen and
  Dahlbom, “Signaling Systems for Control of Telephone Switching.” There is
  an oft-repeated legend in the phone phreak community that Bell security
  agents visited university engineering libraries across the country in the
  late 1960s or early 1970s and either demanded that issue be withdrawn
  from circulation or, in some versions of the story, used razor blades to slice
  this article out of the Bell System Technical Journal. Ken Hopper of Bell
  Laboratories denies that this is true, and the existence of the article intact
  at the Berkeley, Stanford, and MIT engineering libraries suggests that he is
  right.
53 dial directory assistance: Actually, you wouldn’t have called it “directory
  assistance” in 1960. Back then it was known simply as “information.” The
  change to directory assistance came in 1968: “Frankly, the term
  ‘information’ has caused a lot of confusion and delay,” said a telephone
  company manager. “Many people call for bus schedules, solutions to
  homework problems, baseball scores and other information which our
  operators do not have . . . we feel the new name is more descriptive and
  should eliminate a lot of customer misunderstanding.” See, e.g.,
  “‘Directory Assistance’ Replacing ‘Information’ on Telephone Calls,”
  Observer-Reporter (Washington, PA), August 24, 1968, p. 6A. By the way,
  555-1212 for information wasn’t introduced until 1959. See “For Phone
  Information, Dial 112 212 555 1212,” New York Times, August 7, 1959, p.
  25 .
56 bobby pin into an electrical outlet: Anita Harris (Ralph Barclay’s sister),
  author interview, 2012.
57 Touch-tone phones: AT&T rolled out touch-tone telephone service to the
  general public in late 1963, although trials of different versions of
  pushbutton dialing date as far back as 1948. See Joel Jr., Switching
  Technology, pp. 336–42. Interestingly, one of the early prototypes of touch-
  tone service used the same tones as those in the multifrequency signaling
  system—and, thus, that blue boxes used. Imagine how much worse AT&T’s
  fraud problems would have been had it inadvertently installed a blue box
  in every household!
57 blue box: Memorandum from J. F. Doherty, AT&T director of security, to H.
  W .      Caming,      AT&T        attorney,    February       13,      1975
  http://explodingthephone.com/docs/db415 (inactive). This memo states that
  Barclay’s was the first “blue box” that AT&T was aware of. Barclay says the
  choice of color wasn’t a conscious decision, that it was simply a standard
  blue metal enclosure (likely from Bud Industries, Barclay recalls) commonly
  used in the electronics industry.
59 set up in his garage: Barclay remembers, “When that came out later,
  there were some people who weren’t too happy about it.”
61 pleaded guilty: FBI file 165-HQ-25, September 1961 ; “Young
  Scientist Warned to Redirect His Talents,” Grant County Journal, September
  18, 1961, p. 1 ; UPI, “Student Accused of Phone Fraud,” Spokane
  Chronicle, September 16, 1961 .

           Chapter 6: “Some People Collect Stamps”
Much of the material in this chapter comes from author interviews conducted
with Charlie Pyne, Tony Lauck, and Ed Ross, as well as FBI files.
66 special telephone operators: For a list of 0xx and 1xx operator codes,
  see http://explodingthephone.com/extra/0xx1xx.
67 particularly proud of one call: Tape recording provided by Charlie Pyne,
  undated but likely 1959 or 1960 http://explodingthephone.com/docs/db521
  (inactive).
68 It also functioned: Sam Smith, “Magna Cum Probation: Falling from
  Grace at Harvard U,” from Multitudes: The Unauthorized Memoirs of Sam
  Smith, 1999, at http://prorev.com/mmintro.htm. “The Network” was
  shorthand for the station’s original call letters, WHCN: the
  Harvard/Crimson Network.
69 connect their telephone switches: A privately run telephone system,
  such as for a university or a big company, was called a “private branch
  exchange,” or PBX. Like early telephone exchanges, these started out as
  purely manual affairs, with an operator sticking plugs into jacks at a
  switchboard. As automated switching developed, it became more common
  for institutions to have their own automatic switching systems; such an
  exchange was properly called a “private automatic branch exchange” or
  PABX.
70 tie up all the lines: “Telephone Hackers Active,” The Tech (MIT student
  newspaper), November 20, 1963 . The article notes that “two or
  three students are expelled each year [from MIT] for abuses on the phone
  system” and that “hackers have accomplished such things as tying up all
  the tie-lines between Harvard and MIT, or making long-distance calls by
  charging them to a local radar installation. One method involved
  connecting the PDP-1 computer to the phone system to search the lines
  until a dialtone, indicating an outside line, was found.” This article is often
  cited as the first published use of the word hacker in its modern meaning.
71 Fine Arts 13 notebook: Charlie Pyne, “Fine Arts 13,” 1963
  http://explodingthephone.com/docs/db917 (inactive).
72 Notes on Distance Dialing: Notes on Distance Dialing became a staple
  phone phreak technical reference. AT&T published versions of it in 1956
  , 1968 , and 1975 . A 1955 predecessor
  was called Notes on Nationwide Dialing , and its 1980 successor
  was Notes on the Network.
76 sound of the telephone line: Telephone lines behaved slightly differently
  —and sounded slightly different—once billing had started. In particular,
  momentarily depressing the hook switch had a very different sound once
  billing had started.
76 black box: See chapter 8 for details.
77 Ernie Reid: Pyne, Lauck, and Ross met Reid through a blind student at
  Harvard named Robert Holdt.
77 Heckel also had a nine a.m. appointment: Pyne recalls Heckel having
  an appointment with his dean at MIT, but FBI records do not confirm this.
80 According to an FBI memo: FBI file 65-HQ-68169, serial 2, April 24,
  1963, p. 3 .
80 As the FBI memo put it: Ibid.
80 spy ring: “FBI Smashes Spy Ring,” Boston Globe, July 3, 1963, p. 1; Seth
  S. King, “Britain Convicts All Five in Spy Trial,” New York Times, March 23,
  1961, p. 1.
81 all attended one of their country’s top universities: “New Reports on
  Philby Spy Case of ’63 Vex Britain,” New York Times, October 8, 1967.
81 prosecuted for making free phone calls: FBI file 65-HQ-68169, serial 3,
  May 1, 1963 . The relevance of the federal Fraud by Wire
  statute (18 USC 1343) would be debated within the Justice Department
  several times before it was eventually decided that it could be used to
  prosecute toll fraud cases; see chapter 7.
81 urgent FBI teletype message: FBI file 65-HQ-68169, serial 10, May 8,
  1963 .
81 remarkably evenhanded: FBI file 65-HQ-68169, serial 9, May 5, 1963
  .
83 solved one final mystery: The story of Pyne, Lauck, Ross, and Heckel was
  told, minus their names, on the front page of the Boston Herald in 1966.
  Indeed, this was the story that Jake Locke discovered, as discussed in
  chapter 1. Three of the four went on to be featured in a photograph in
  Fortune magazine a bit later that same year: “AT&T thought it had an
  unbeatable system for billing its long-distance phone customers—until a
  group of college students turned up who cracked it: Charles Pyne, 22, a
  Harvard engineering senior, Tony Lauck, 22, a ’65 Harvard graduate who
  now programs computers for the Smithsonian Astrophysical Laboratory,
  and Paul Heckel, 25, MIT ’63 and now a systems analyst for G.E. With two
  other friends, they painstakingly worked out ways calling free to any phone
  in the US—and some in Europe—first by tracking down the codes they
  reached internal phone company operators, and later with a home built
  ‘blue box’ that rang numbers electronically. They were interested in
  displaying their analytical prowess, not in bilking the phone company.
  ‘Anything that man can devise can be undevised,’ is the way Heckel
  explains the principle that guided them. ‘The undevising is a challenge.’”
  See Ron Kessler, “Student Dialers Play Their Way to Global Phone Calls,
  Non-Pay,” Boston Herald, May 27, 1966, p. 1 ; and Fortune, July
  1, 1966, p. 34 .

                         Chapter 7: Headache
85 more than $1.4 billion: AT&T Long Lines Department, Our Company and
  How It Operates, 1960, p. 98. The $1.4 billion figure represents the
  difference between AT&T Long Lines plant investment between 1940 and
  1960—a low estimate, since it includes depreciation but does not include
  any investment by Bell Laboratories, Western Electric, or the Bell operating
  companies.
86 “brilliant but disturbed teenager”: UPI, “Lonely Boy Devises Way of
  Placing Free Long Distance Calls,” Milwaukee Journal, July 17, 1963, p. 1.
86 Hoyt Stearns, John Treichler: For more information on these two see
  http://explodingthephone.com/extras/stearns                             and
  http://explodingthephone.com/extras/treichler.
86 Louis MacKenzie: Obituary of Louis G. MacKenzie, Journal of the Audio
  Engineering Society, vol. 23, no. 4, May 1975, p. 352.
86 Los Angeles International Airport: Nagy Khattar (president of
  MacKenzie Laboratories), author interview, 2007. According to Khattar, the
  voice used for the Los Angeles International Airport recordings belonged to
  Addison Taylor, MacKenzie Laboratories’ then head of sales. Taylor and his
  wife were also the voice talent used in the spoof of the recordings in
  Airplane!
87 Sensing a business opportunity: Robert LaFond Sr. (an employee of
  MacKenzie Labs who was arrested with Louis MacKenzie in 1965), author
  interview, 2007. See also “Engineers Pay Toll for Phone ‘Business,’” Los
  Angeles Times, April 9, 1966, p. SG10 , and Bob DiSteffano,
  “Pasadena Man, Employee Indicted in Sale of Phone-Bilking Device,”
  Independent (Pasadena, CA), December 8, 1965, p. 1 . Although
  MacKenzie was correct in stating that selling blue boxes in California was
  legal in 1963, by 1965 the law had changed, hence his subsequent arrest.
  I have been unable to locate a videotape of the CBS news interview with
  MacKenzie’s lawyer, despite it being mentioned in a newspaper article and
  by two interviewees.
87 the mob: Ken Hopper, author interview, 2006. Sometime in the 1960s a
  security consultant to AT&T named Alan Tritter showed the attaché case
  blue box to Charlie Pyne, Tony Lauck, and Ed Ross, the telephone hackers
  from Harvard back in 1963. One of the Harvard trio remarked that it was
  much larger than it needed to be, in fact, that the blue box they had built
  with Paul Heckel at MIT was much smaller. True, allowed Tritter. But
  wasn’t it much more impressive this way? If your goal was to sell expensive
  stuff to the mob and get them to pay top dollar for it, Tritter asked, wasn’t
  this clever packaging? Sadly, the truth appears to be more mundane. In a
  2008 email interview, one of the people who had a hand in making these
  boxes said that they were designed and built around 1962 by a group of
  five telephone enthusiasts who worked at a navy research lab in Pasadena,
  California. They were made simply for their own edification, he said, and
  there was no mob involvement.
88 “Slash Communication Costs with TELA-TONE”: Memorandum to Mr.
  Lesher and Mr. Ohlbaum of the Federal Communications Commission from
  Donald F. Clark, attorney, AT&T, April 27, 1965 (“the Clark memo”). The
  Clark memo is Exhibit B of a Memorandum for the Commission from Henry
  Geller, general counsel, and Bernard Strassburg, chief, Common Carrier
  Bureau, Federal Communications Commission, May 14, 1965 (“the Geller
  memo”) .
88 “TOLL Free Distance Dialing”: Classified ad, Popular Electronics,
  January 1964, p. 115 http://explodingthephone.com/docs/db1004 (inactive).
88 “The advertiser has admitted”: Clark memo, p. 6.
89 covered mail fraud: Two laws protected the U.S. Post Office against
  fraud: 18 USC 1720 and 18 USC 1722, both of which were passed by
  Congress after the mail fraud statute (18 USC 1341) was enacted. If 1341
  protected the post office from fraud, why did Congress need to add 1720
  and 1722? And if 1341 did not protect the post office from fraud, and since
  1343 was almost identical in language to 1341, then 1343 must not protect
  the phone company. As Nathanial Kossack (the Justice Department lawyer
  who helped write section 1343) forecast, these arguments would indeed be
  brought up in blue box cases a few years later. See, e.g., Brief for
  Appellants, Kenneth Herbert Hanna and Nathan Modell, appellants, v.
  United States of America, Appellee, Appeal from the United States District
  Court for the Southern District of Florida, June 22, 1967, p. 19 .
90 organized crime: Geller memo, p. 2.
90 two-hundred-word run-on sentence: “Proposed Statute Proscribing the
  Fraudulent Obtaining of Telecommunication Service,” Exhibit A to the
  Geller memo.
90 “A criminal sanction is needed”: Clark memo, p. 5.
90 “too broad a sweep”: Geller memo, p. 2.
90 “collection agency”: Ibid.
91 quarter of a billion to a billion: Bill Caming, author interview, 2007.
  Testimony of H. W William Caming in “Surveillance: Hearings Before the
                     .
  Subcommittee on Courts, Civil Liberties, and the Administration of Justice
  of the Committee on the Judiciary of the United States House of
  Representatives,” February 2, 1975, p. 220  (hereinafter Caming,
  “Surveillance”).
91 “no assurance at all”: Ibid.
91 “You guys created this mess!”: Hopper, author interview, 2006.
92 blank check: Ibid.
92 stamped with a star, dress uniform hat: Ibid.
92 began in 1962: “ALEX Archive Item Report, Item Number FIL-0115-
  021922,” AT&T Archives, Warren, New Jersey. This is a summary sheet to
  the AT&T Archives file on Project Greenstar development. Unfortunately,
  the file itself could not be located, but the summary sheet indicates the
  creation date of the file as June 26, 1962.
92 “We devised six experimental units”: Caming, “Surveillance,” p. 220.
93 connected to a hundred outgoing long-distance trunk lines: More
  details: each Greenstar unit was made up of five subunits, each capable of
  monitoring twenty trunk lines. Each subunit had one tape recorder, which
  is why a total of five lines could be monitored simultaneously. See ibid., p.
  225, and Louis J. Rose, “Bell Secretly Monitored Millions of Toll Calls,” St.
  Louis Post-Dispatch, February 21, 1975 .
93 As Caming described it: Caming, “Surveillance,” pp. 220–21.
94 “If Greenstar judged”: Black box calls were initially recorded for ninety
  seconds, but this was reduced to sixty seconds in “late 1966 or early
  1967.” Recording of blue box calls eventually was limited to five minutes.
  See ibid., p. 221.
94 33 million, between 1.5 and 1.8 million: Ibid., p. 228.
94 “We had to have statistics”: Ibid., p. 220.
94 “25,000 cases of known illegality”, “350,000 fraudulent calls”: Ibid.,
  p. 222.
95 “It was immediately recognized”: Ibid., p. 210.
95 “Genghis Khan”: Ibid., p. 218.
95 “decline to prosecute”: Rose, “Bell Secretly Monitored Millions of Toll
  Calls.”
96 “Change the name”: During my interviews with Bill Caming I often used
  the term Greenstar in our discussions. Ever the AT&T attorney, he would
  periodically correct me: “No, that’s not its name. That was an internal code
  name that we stopped using.” Sometime later I visited the AT&T Archives
  in Warren, New Jersey, which maintains a computerized index of old Bell
  System files. I typed in “Greenstar” and watched the display light up like a
  Christmas tree as it found relevant documents. When I mentioned this to
  Caming a few days later, he gave a rueful laugh and responded, “Well, I
  guess you can’t keep a good name down.”
96 two parts to Caming’s reasoning: Before 1968, the federal wiretapping
  law was Section 605 of Title 18 of the United States Code. It was a
  strangely written law. As discussed in the next chapter, section 605 did not
  make wiretapping (“interception”) itself illegal. Rather, to commit a crime
  under 605 you had to both intercept a communication and then disclose
  the contents of the communication to someone else. Clearly when
  Greenstar recorded a call and a human listened to it, there was an
  interception, but because the trained operator listening to the tapes never
  discussed the contents of the communication (just the signaling of the call
  itself), there was no disclosure, and thus, AT&T asserted, no crime. In
  1968 the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act became the new law
  that governed wiretapping—but that law had specific carve outs for random
  monitoring and interception of communications by telephone company
  personnel attempting to protect the assets of the telephone company.
96 “imprimatur”: Caming, “Surveillance,” pp. 243–44.
96 Congressional Research Service: Ibid., p. 234.
97 “Lonely Boy”: “Lonely Boy Devises Way of Placing Free Long Distance
  Calls.”

                    Chapter 8: Blue Box Bookies
Much of the background material on bookies, organized crime, gambling, and
the FBI’s prosecution efforts of same comes from author interviews conducted
in 2007 with former FBI special agents Edwin J. Sharp and Warren Welsh and
former U.S. attorney Bill Earle, as well as FBI files.
98 “Hit the door”: Description of Special Agents Heist and Roussell’s entry
  into Hanna’s apartment from United States v. Hanna, District Court of the
  United States for the Southern District of Florida, Transcript of
  Proceedings on Motion to Suppress, September 12, 1966, pp. 62–85
  .
99 the line: The description of “the line” given here is for point-spread
  betting, common among bookmakers and gamblers for sports betting in the
  1960s. Today “the line” may also refer to the money line, which is a
  different way of expressing odds. See Richard O. Davies and Richard G.
  Abram, Betting the Line: Sports Wagering in American Life (Columbus, OH:
  Ohio State University Press, 2001), pp. 53–57, and Gregory Curtis, “The
  Wizard of Odds,” Texas Monthly, December 1973, pp. 78–83.
100 $20 billion: “The Conglomerate of Crime,” Time, August 22, 1969
  .
100 “it ends up feeding something else”: Warren Welsh, author interview,
  2007.
100 “bankrollers and kingpins”: “Robert Kennedy Urges New Laws to Fight
  Rackets,” New York Times, April 7, 1961, p. 1; Robert H. Boyle, “The
  Bookies Close Up Shop,” Sports Illustrated, September 3, 1962 .
101 $250,000 of bets: “Crime: No. 11 Off the Boards,” Time, March 2, 1970
  .
101 “Beckley lived”, twenty thousand cards’ worth: FBI file 165-HQ-1999
  ; Edwin J. Sharp, author interview, 2008.
101 cheese boxes: “‘Cheesebox,’ Remote Control Phone Device, Leads to
  Raid on Bookmaking Headquarters,” New York Times, November 18, 1950,
  p. 32 . The 1974 book Cheesebox by Paul S. Meskil with Gerald M.
  Callahan (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1974), pp. 171–81, claims,
  incorrectly, that the cheese box was invented five years later in 1955.
102 empty apartment with a pair of telephone lines: Gambling and
  Organized Crime: Hearings Before the Permanent Subcommittee on
  Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations of the United
  States Senate, 75th Congress, first session, part 1, August 22, 23, 24, and
  25, 1961, pp. 242–99  (hereafter, “Gambling and Organized
  Crime”).
102 bribing telephone company operators and technicians: Some
  examples: “U.S. Jury Indicts 13 in Betting Ring,” New York Times, June 28,
  1961, p. 20 , in which Gil Beckley, Benjamin and Robert Lassoff,
  Myron Deckelbaum, and more than a dozen others were arrested for
  bribing telephone company employees to make long-distance calls for
  them; FBI file 92-HQ-4957 serial, 10 , describing a conspiracy
  starting in 1952 in which alleged bookies and telephone company
  employees “endeavored to conceal from IRS the existence and scope of
  their widespread horse race betting and other gambling activities by
  securing free unauthorized long distance telephone service, through the
  services of telephone company longlines repairmen, as a consequence of
  which no records would be made concerning the phone calls made by
  defendants . . .”; and, later, in United States v. Gilbert L. Beckley, John C.
  Lowe, and James C. Gunter, United States District Court, Northern District
  of Georgia, Criminal No. 24,167, January 7, 1965.
102 bogus credit card numbers: “Bookmaking Raids Staged in 9 Cities,”
  New York Times, January 9, 1966 .
102 legitimate telephone credit cards: FBI file 92-HQ-3051, serials 53 and
  54, September 6, 1960, p. 19 .
102 Walter Shaw: “Gambling and Organized Crime,” pp. 242–99.
103 “some type of instrument”, “surprising decrease”: FBI file 92-HQ-
  3051, serial 54, page C, September 15, 1960 .
103 arrested in Miami: UPI, “Inventor Seized as Telephone Cheater,” New
  York Times, March 31, 1961, p. 28; see also, “Gambling and Organized
  Crime.”
104 MacKenzie: United States v. McCay, Brandon, Gautreaux, and Danford,
  No. 66-76 Criminal, United States District Court for the Western District of
  Oklahoma, Transcript of Proceedings, August 8, 1966, pp. 128–35
  .
104 “using devices”: FBI file 165-BS-532, serial 1, August 2, 1965 
  and .
104 targeting bookies and organized crime: 18 USC 1084, introduced in
  1961.
104 “indicated their desire”: FBI file 165-BS-532.
105 The caller told Doyle: Testimony of Gerard J. Doyle in United States v.
  Hanna, pp. 4–49.
105 connect Hanna with TARCASE: FBI file 165-BS-532, serial 8,
  September 1, 1965  and .
107 dash for the bathroom: United States v. Hanna and Modell, 66-69-CR,
  Opinion on Motion to Suppress Evidence, 260 F. Supp 430, September 26,
  1966 .
107 raids in other cities: “Bookmaking Raids Staged in Nine Cities.”
107 “used a chauffeur-driven Cadillac”: AP “FBI Says It Broke Up Bookie
                                              ,
  Ring in Nine Cities,” Lowell Sunday Sun, January 9, 1966, p. 38.
107 “most successful”: FBI file 92-HQ-3625, serial 293, January 8, 1966.
108 all of Bubis’s calls: United States v. Bubis, Loman, and Beckley, No.
  36270-CD, United States District Court, Southern District of California,
  Central Division, Complaint for Violation of U.S.C. Title 18 Section 1084,
  Affidavit of Charles Bitner, May 24, 1966 .
108 “crippling blow”: FBI file 166-HQ-1765, serial 82, May 25, 1966
  .
108 mob attorney Ben Cohen: See, for example, Paul Jewett, The Mob and
  the Flock: Memories of a Twentieth Century Shepherd (Maitland, FL: Xulon
  Press, 2010), pp. 132–33; Stuart B. McIver, Touched by the Sun: The
  Florida Chr0nicles, Volume 3 (Sarasota, FL: Pineapple Press, 2001), pp. 80–
  87; and U.S. Senate Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in
  Interstate Commerce, Interim Report on Investigations in Florida and
  Preliminary General Conclusions, August 18, 1950 (the Kefauver
  Committee).
108 $40 million: Charles L. Fontenay, Estes Kefauver: A Biography (Knoxville,
  TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1980), p. 173; Steven Gaines, Fools
  Paradise: Players, Poseurs, and the Culture of Excess in South Beach (New
  York: Three Rivers Press, 2009), p. 45.
108 balding head, etc.: Cohen description from Fred Othman, “Good Boys
  Now,” Pittsburgh Press, August 30, 1951, quoted in FBI file 63-HQ-7046,
  serial 23 .
109 “We submit”: United States v. Hanna, p. 89.
110 “Now, there is no omnipotence”: Ibid., pp. 90–92.
110 “[W]hat is the telephone company to do with it?”: Ibid., p. 96.
111 willfully: United States v. Loman, Bubis, and Beckley, pp. 9–11.
111 Hanna and Modell were both convicted: Amusingly, Hanna’s attorneys
  argued that Hanna did not have a “blue box” because the box he had was
  “black with red buttons.” The court was not persuaded: “It is evident that
  the term ‘blue box’ is nominative rather than descriptive, that is, it is the
  term by which the device is commonly known and, except by accident, has
  no reference to its actual color. [. . .] Implicit in this is the fact that
  whether blue, black with red buttons, red with black buttons, umber or
  indigo, the device is still called a ‘blue box.’” United States v. Hanna and
  Modell.
112 “While we realize”: Alvin Bubis, Appellant, v. United States of America,
  Appellee, United States Court of Appeals Ninth Circuit, 384 F.2d 643,
  October 20, 1967 .
112 “Congress may have thought”: Hanna and Modell, Appellants, v.
  United States, Appellee, United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth
  Circuit, 393 F.2d 700, March 5, 1968 .
113 petitioned for a rehearing: Hanna and Modell, Appellants, v. United
  States, Appellee, United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit,
  Petition for Rehearing En Banc, March 26, 1968.
113 Within the past few years: Hanna and Modell, Appellants, v. United
  States, Appellee, United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, Brief
  of American Telephone and Telegraph as Amicus Curiae, May 7, 1968
  .
114 “On original hearing”: Hanna and Modell, Appellants, v. United States,
  Appellee, United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, Order on
  Rehearing, 404 F.2d 405, November 18, 1968 .
114 “Outside of an opening salutation”: The appeals court adopted more
  like three pages of Caming’s brief but, nonetheless, it was still a home run.

             Chapter 9: Little Jojo Learns to Whistle
As explained in my epilogue, Joe Engressia legally changed his name to
Joybubbles in 1991, hence the references to Joybubbles in the notes below.
Much of the material in this chapter comes from interviews with Joybubbles
(both mine and other published interviews), as well as newspaper articles.
117 “Hang up the phone”: Toni Engressia, author interview, 2008.
118 “I won’t lie to you”: Ibid.
118 “Before I was four”: John Fail and Chris Strunk, “A Conversation with
  Joybubbles,”              May             9,            1998,             at
  http://www.icewhistle.com/static/joybubbles.html .
118 “I didn’t like play”: Ibid.
118 “It was all I could do”: Toni Engressia speaking on the Joybubbles
  memorial telephone conference, September 16, 2007.
118 “I used to ask what time it was”: Tape recording of a speech Engressia
  gave to an unknown community group, 1974  (hereinafter,
  Engressia speech, 1974).
118 “I thought, well, if 3 is 3 away”: Ibid., and tape recording of a speech
  Engressia gave to a different group, 1978 .
119 “The principle of science”: Richard P Feynman, Robert B. Leighton,
                                              .
  and Matthew Sands, The Feynman Lectures on Physics: The Definitive
  Edition, volume I (Boston: Addison Wesley, 2005), p. 1–1.
119 “Through the years”: Engressia speech, 1974.
119 “His sister recalls”: Toni Engressia speaking on the Joybubbles
  memorial telephone conference, September 16, 2007; “emergency room”:
  Joybubbles,      “Stories     and     Stuff,”     May     8,     2004,     at
  http://audio.textfiles.com/shows/storiesandstuff/joybubbles_-
  _stories_and_stuff_-_20040508.mp3.
119 “Most people”: Engressia speech, 1974.
120 “We met a phone man”: Joybubbles, author interview, 2006.
120 The Engressias moved a lot: Ibid.; Toni Engressia, author interview,
  2008; and other Joybubbles/Engressia published interviews.
120 “Daddy hated the snow”: Toni Engressia, author interview, 2008.
121 “I learned a whole lot”: Engressia speech, 1974.
122 “I was seven or eight”: “A Conversation with Joybubbles.”
123 “I got $2.50 a week”: Engressia speech, 1974.
123 Dade County Junior College: Bill Acker, author interview, 2008.
123 “I can whistle like a bird”: Leslie Taylor, “Blind Student Dials Trouble,”
  USF Oracle, November 27, 1968, p. 1 . Past-tense quotes and
  material describing Engressia’s USF whistling escapades are from the
  following newspaper articles: “Whistler Started Young,” USF Oracle,
  November 27, 1968, p. 1 ; Harry Haigley, “If You Want Long
  Distance, Just Whistle,” St. Petersburg Evening Independent, November 27,
  1968, p. 1 ; “Whistle Has Connections,” St. Petersburg Times,
  November 28, 1968, p. B1 ; “Hearing Postponed for ‘The
  Whistler,’” St. Petersburg Times, December 6, 1968 ; “The
  ‘Whistler’ Back at USF,” USF Oracle; December 8, 1968 ; “USF
  to Rule Today on Whistler’s Fate,” St. Petersburg Times, December 11,
  1968, p. 4B ; “Telephone Whistler Connects, Permitted to Stay in
  School,” Miami Herald-Tribune, December 12, 1968, p. 10 ; “USF
  ‘Whistler’ Stays in School,” St. Petersburg Times, December 12, 1968, p.
  B1 .
124 roughly $17 today: Federal Communications Commission, “Statistics of
  Communications Common Carriers, 1995/1996,” Table 7.1, p. 280, at
  http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/Reports/FCC-
  State_Link/SOCC/95socc.pdf.
125 “Your brother has been doing something illegal”: Toni Engressia,
  author interview, 2008.
126 received a letter in the mail: FBI file 139-HQ-3481, August 27, 1969
  , and FBI file 100-KC-13546, August 27, 1969 .
126 Engressia’s introduction to B. David: By 1969 B. David was no longer
  going by that particular pseudonym, but for consistency I use that name
  throughout this book.
127 tricked a switchman: FBI file 139-HQ-3481, serial 15, September 1,
  1969, p. 3 .
127 “a good deal of discussion”: Ibid., p. 4.
127 Though he wouldn’t tell Bureau agents: FBI file 139-HQ-3481, serial
  1, August 27, 1969, p. 2 . It is possible that the Southwestern
  Bell security agent was being coy because his source was Greenstar. One of
  the Greenstar units had been moved to St. Louis, Missouri, in January
  1967, just a few hundred miles away from Kansas City. And later, when the
  Southwestern Bell agent finally did tell the FBI about where the
  information had come from, an FBI teletype message noted, “Bureau will
  protect this source’s identity because it would jeopardize not only [our]
  contact’s employment but would probably destroy the amicable relations
  between the phone company and the Bureau.” See FBI file 139-HQ-3481,
  serial 5, August 28, 1969, p. 3.
127 “highly classified, Top Secret”: Ibid.
128 “the activities of Engressia and Way”: FBI file 139-HQ-3481, serial 3,
  August 27, 1969, p. 1 .
128 posterior-covering letters: FBI file 139-HQ-3481, serials 11, 12, and
  13, August 29, 1969 .
128 “not a sufficient indication”: FBI file 139-HQ-3481, unnumbered serial
  (memo from director, FBI, to assistant attorney general, Criminal Division,
  Department of Justice), September 3, 1969 .
128 “is believed to be totally unreliable”: FBI file 139-HQ-3481,
  unnumbered serial (memo from FBI Kansas City to director, FBI),
  September 8, 1969. See also FBI file 139-HQ-3482 .
128 “I didn’t really know why I had come”: Andrew T. Huse, interview with
  Joybubbles, University of South Florida Oral History Program, August 23,
  2004.
129 “be a man”: Engressia speech, 1974.
129 “as a switchboard operator”: Ibid.
130 “I got desperate”: Ibid.
130 “I decided”: Ibid.
130 “This was in late April”: Ibid.
130 “going to call Russia”: “A Conversation with Joybubbles.”
131 “NORAD”: Engressia speech, 1974.
131 “I have only until July”: Ibid.
131 “I remember one time”: Ibid.
131 “tapping the tappers”: Ibid.
132 “freely shown”: “Police Apprehend Phone-Addicted USF Whistler,” St.
  Petersburg Times, June 4, 1971 .
132 “I was gonna call”: Engressia speech, 1974.
132 “complex telephone equipment”: “Police Apprehend Phone-Addicted
  USF Whistler.”
132 “I’ve done wrong”: AP “Long-Distance Whistler Draws $10 Fine,” St.
                               ,
  Petersburg Times, June 10, 1971 .
132 $1 bail: AP “Fascinated with Phones,” Montreal Gazette, June 5, 1971, p.
                ,
  2 .
132 “Some folks are on dope”: “Police Apprehend Phone-Addicted USF
  Whistler.”
133 “driving them crazy”: AP “Blind Lad Quits Fraud, Joins Phone Firm,”
                                  ,
  Sarasota Herald-Tribune, June 21, 1971, p. 3A .
133 “sixty days in jail”: AP “Long-Distance Whistler Draws $10 Fine.”
                             ,
133 friendly knock: Joybubbles, author interview, 2006.
134 “four job offers”: Engressia speech, 1974; AP “Several Job Offers Given
                                                    ,
  to Blind Man,” Hartford Courant, June 12, 1971, p. 2 .
134 “I guess they’ll have me do”: AP “Blind Lad Quits Fraud, Joins Phone
                                         ,
  Firm.”
134 “I don’t recommend”: Engressia speech, 1974. For more on Engressia’s
  life at Millington, see http://explodingthephone.com/extra/millington.

        Chapter 10: Bill Acker Learns to Play the Flute
Much of the material in this chapter comes from author interviews with Bill
Acker.
142 the tones were distorted: According to Acker this is typical of crossbar
  tandem switching equipment.
144 computer-generated reports of supervision irregularities: Ken
  Hopper, author interview, 2006; testimony of Wallace S. Swenson, United
  States v. Thomas McCay, Herman D. Brandon, Sylvester E. Gautreaux, Jr.,
  and Glenn S. Danford, United States District Court for the Western District
  of Oklahoma, Transcript of Proceedings, August 8, 1966, pp. 188–90
  .
145 something called an 800 number: 800 numbers were more properly
  referred to as “Inward Wide Area Telecommunications Service,” or INWATS,
  and were introduced in 1967. See “AT&T Files Rate Cut of $5 Million a
  Year for Fixed-Fee Long-Distance Telephoning,” Wall Street Journal,
  December 2, 1966.

           Chapter 11: The Phone Freaks of America
Much of the material in this chapter comes from author interviews with Bill
Acker, John Draper, Jim Fettgather, Denny Teresi, and other phone phreaks.
147 busy signals that were shared: Information on busy signal conferences
  from my interviews with Rick Plath, 2008; Jim Fettgather, 2008; Denny
  Teresi, 2007; and Bill Acker, 2007. According to Acker, most busy signal
  conferences were step-by-step PBX equipment, though some were
  occasionally found on crossbar exchanges.
147 party line broken recording numbers: As with the busy signal
  conferences, these tended to be step-by-step PBX equipment. Phone
  phreak Evan Doorbell (a pseudonym) has documented “party lines” in the
  New York area from the early 1970s in detail in his charming and
  wonderfully researched audio series “How Evan Doorbell Became a Phone
  Phreak,” available at http://www.phonetrips.com.
148 213-286-0213 and -0214: 213-737-1118 and -1119 would have been
  more realistic examples. Phone phreaks spent a great deal of time
  collecting and trading loop around numbers; for a list, see
  http://explodingthephone.com/extra/loops.
149 Rick Plath: Plath, author interview, 2008.
149 Al Diamond: For more see http://explodingthephone.com/extra/diamond.
150           Mark           Bernay:           For          more         see
  http://explodingthephone.com/extra/markbernay.
150 “It was like CB radio”: Ibid.
151 Airman First Class Draper: Draper physical description from FBI file
  87-HQ-121189, serial 1, May 4, 1972 . Background on Draper’s
  childhood from Steve Long, “Captain Crunch: Super Phone Phreak,” High
  Times, June 1977, p. 50 , and Chris Rhodes, “The Twilight Years
  of Cap’n Crunch,” Wall Street Journal, January 13, 2007, p. 1 .
151 expecting a call from an old friend: Over the years Draper has told
  several different versions of the story of how he first met Denny Teresi.
  Teresi says he does not remember the details. I have elected to use in my
  recounting the elements common to most stories.
153 “a chubby kid”: Draper notes, undated but circa the mid-1970s.
153 “drove over to Teresi’s friend”: Recollections differ slightly on this
  point. Draper says he met Teresi and they drove over to Fettgather’s house.
  Fettgather says he was at Teresi’s house to begin with.
154 you had to press two of the six: John Draper, author interview, 2008.
154 Sid Bernay had discovered: Mark Bernay and Sid Bernay email
  exchange, 2010. Sid Bernay recalls: “I had heard that 2,600 cycles could
  interrupt long distance. I called a West Covina number, and when it started
  to ring, blew the Cap’n Crunch whistle and it ‘choinked.’ I covered one
  hole, and it still happened. Thus the discovery. I was a freshman at UCLA
  at the time, so I’m guessing 1964 or 1965. Also, Oscar Meyer whistles
  worked, too, but not all. Apparently weren’t exactly 2,600.”
156 the network expanded from there: Author interviews of Acker, Teresi,
  and Fettgather.
157 The Machine, VERMONT, Z, ZZ, ZZZ, Superphone: For history and
  recordings of the Machine and other Los Angeles telephone joke lines see
  “Phone      Recordings,     Los     Angeles    Area     &    Beyond,”    at
  http://www.dialajoke.us/.
158 weren’t allowed to connect: See the Carterfone case discussion in
  chapter 20.
158 “The national switched telephone network”: John D. deButts quoted
  in Steve Coll, The Deal of the Century: The Break Up of AT&T (New York:
  Atheneum, 1986), p. 105.
158–159 Hush-A-Phone: “Phone Company Upheld in Ban on Hush-A-Phone,”
  New York Times, February 17, 1951, p. 29 ; “Hush-A-Phone Hits
  Back at AT&T,” New York Times, March 24, 1951, p. 25 ; “Phone
  Device Ban by AT&T Upheld,” New York Times, December 24, 1955
  , p. 20; “Court Removes Ban Against Phone Device,” New York
  Times, November 9, 1956, p. 25 ; and 238 F.2d 266, HUSH-A-
  PHONE CORPORATION and Harry C. Tuttle, Petitioners, v. UNITED STATES
  of America and Federal Communications Commission, Respondents,
  American Telephone and Telegraph Company et al., and United States
  Independent Telephone Association, Interveners, No. 13175, United States
  Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit, 99 U.S. App. D.C. 190; 238
  F.2d 266; 1956 U.S. App. LEXIS 4023, October 4, 1956, Argued, November
  8, 1956, Decided.
159–160 was born the Machine: Tom Politeo, author interview, 2008.
161 called the Old Man: Bill Acker, author interview, 2008.
161 “number five crossbar”: Ibid.
162 teletype machines: For a fascinating history of teletypes and the
  Teletype Corporation, see Teletype Corporation, The Teletype Story, 1958,
  available                                                               at
  http://www.samhallas.co.uk/repository/telegraph/teletype_story.pdf.
165 International Society of Telephone Enthusiasts: Acker, author
  interview, 2011. Again, B. David was going by a different handle at this
  point in time, but for continuity I am continuing to use “B. David” as his
  pseudonym.
166 Mark Bernay Society: For more on the Mark Bernay Society, see
  http://explodingthephone.com/extra/mbs.

      Chapter 12: The Law of Unintended Consequences
Much of the material in this chapter comes from author interviews with Al
Gilbertson and Ron Rosenbaum.
171 “Alice in Wonderland”: Hackers: Electronic Outlaws, History Channel,
  2001.
171 “Mr. Intense” and Draper idiosyncrasies: Author interviews with Bill
  Acker and Jim Fettgather, 2008, and several sources who prefer to remain
  anonymous.
172 “When I talked to Ron”: John Draper, “Cap’n Crunch Comments on the
  Esquire                               Article,”                            at
  http://davesource.com/Fringe/Fringe/Hacking/Phreaking/Blue_Boxes/Blue_B
  oxes.Esquire_Article.comments . A three-thousand word analysis
  of the Esquire article, this was apparently first posted on the WELL
  conference system around 1998 at http://well.com/user/crunch.
172 “Secrets of the Little Blue Box”: Ron Rosenbaum, “Secrets of the
  Little Blue Box,” Esquire, October 1971, p. 116.
174 “I thought he spiced it up too much”: Gilbertson says that he wasn’t
  selling blue boxes to the mob, as the article described, nor, he says, did he
  ever claim to be the creator of the blue box.
174 “technical inaccuracies”: Draper didn’t like them either; Draper,
  “Cap’n Crunch Comments on the Esquire Article.”
174 “captured the spirit of it”: Bill Acker, author interview, 2010.
175 crossbar tandems could be tricked: Crossbar tandems, also called
  XBTs, should not be confused with 4A tandems—something that is easy to
  do since, confusingly, 4As also used crossbar switching technology.
  Crossbar tandems were smaller switching machines originally intended for
  metropolitan use that were later upgraded with features that made them
  suitable for handling the more complex job of long-distance switching.
  They were used in areas where the bulky and brainy 4A wasn’t economical.
  See A. O. Adam, “Crossbar Tandem as a Long-Distance Switching System,”
  Bell System Technical Journal, vol. 35, pp. 91–108, 1956.
175 “wink” signal: A wink signal was just a momentary absence of the 2,600
  Hz signal sent from the switching machine at the far end of your call. The
  telephone company had electronic filter circuitry that kept subscribers from
  hearing the 2,600 Hz signal on long-distance calls. These filters worked
  great, but when there was a transition in the 2,600 Hz signal—for example,
  when it went away and then came back, as it did during a wink—the
  circuits resonated for a fraction of a second. This resonance was what
  made the bright metallic kerchink that was such music to a blue boxer’s
  ears.
175 KP 099 213 ST: TTC codes were always in the range of 000 to 199 so
  they wouldn’t interfere with area codes and couldn’t be dialed (usually!) by
  customers. For more on TTC and other 0xx/1xx codes, see
  http://explodingthephone.com/extra/0xx1xx. The call routing described for
  the tandem stacking example represents the best recollections of Bill Acker
  and Evan Doorbell, but they caution that it may not be a hundred percent
  accurate.
176 sound like hell: Long-distance calls were typically sent over two pairs of
  wires—one pair for one direction, say New York to Chicago, and one pair
  for the reverse direction. Unfortunately, crossbar tandems were able to
  switch only a single pair of wires at once. An electronic circuit called a
  hybrid merged the two pairs of wires used for a long-distance trunk into a
  single pair so they could be switched by a crossbar tandem. The result was
  a loss in audio quality every time a call went through a crossbar tandem.
  This cumulative audio distortion limited the number of crossbar tandems
  you could stack up. In contrast, 4A switches were true four-wire (two pair)
  switches and didn’t have this problem. But for phone phreaks, alas, 4As
  lacked the bug that allowed them to be stacked up like crossbar tandems.
  All was not lost, however. See the discussion of guard banding in chapter
  18.
176 series of phantomlike kerchinky noises: Evan Doorbell has lovingly
  narrated a recording of tandem stacking from 1975. See Evan Doorbell,
  “Classic Tandem Stacking (January, 1975),” at http://www.phonetrips.com.
177 con telephone employees: The term “social engineering” in the
  phreak/hacker sense seems to have come into vogue in the mid-1980s,
  although Bill Acker recalls it being used as early as 1974 or so. Prior to
  that the term was “pretexting,” that is, calling someone on a pretext to get
  information or convince them to do something for you. The inventors of that
  term? The FBI, which used pretexting to assist in its investigations. “Like
  any other accomplishment,” an FBI manual advised, “a good pretext is a
  satisfying experience.” The phone phreaks surely would have agreed. See
  Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Pretexts and Cover Techniques,” 1956, at
  http://www.governmentattic.org/docs/FBI_Pretexts_and_Cover_Techniques_
  May-1956.pdf.
178 “VFG-EXG-270100”: This example is based on actual #1 ESS commands
  but, because there are still a few #1 ESS telephone switches in the wild,
  the commands have been intentionally altered.
179 95 percent . . . conducted over the phone: Sonny Kleinfield, The
  Biggest Company on Earth: A Profile of AT&T (New York: Holt, Rinehart, &
  Winston, 1981), p. 14.
180 “I knew right then and there”: Hackers: Electronic Outlaws.
180 “boy genius”: Roy R. Silver, “‘Blue Box’ Is Linked to Phone Call Fraud,”
  New York Times, May 6, 1971, p. 45 .
180 Case Western Reserve: AP “Theft Is Charged to Students Who Let
                                   ,
  Fingers Walk Free,” Blade (Toledo, Ohio), May 7, 1971 p. 19.
180 Billings, Montana: Georganne Louis, “3 Plead Guilty in Telephone
  Fraud,” Billings Gazette, September 3, 1971, p. 1; FBI file 65-HQ-73591,
  June 5, 1970 .
180 arrested in Pennsylvania: UPI, “Phreaks” (newswire item), September
  28, 1971 .
181 “For Whom Ma Bell Tolls Not”: Maureen Orth, “For Whom Ma Bell
  Tolls Not,” Los Angeles Times, October 31, 1971, p. P28 .
181 “mildly mentally unbalanced”: UPl, “‘Phone Freak’ Probe Hinted,”
  Spokane Daily Chronicle, November 18, 1971, p. 6; AP “‘Phone Freak’ to
                                                          ,
  Be Subject of Jury Probe,” St. Petersburg Times, November 19, 1971, p.
  20A.
181 internal AT&T memo: “Toll Fraud,” AT&T memo/press backgrounder,
  May 18, 1977 .
182 Telephone Crime Lab: Ken Hopper, author interview, 2006, and
  Kenneth D. Hopper, “Bell Telephone Laboratories at Holmdel, NJ 1929–
  1991 and Certain Other Job-Related Memories,” presented to the Holmdel
  Historical Society, New Jersey, January 31, 1992.
182 undersea wiretaps: See, for example, Sherry Sontag and Christopher
  Drew, Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine
  Espionage (New York: Harper Perennial, 2000), p. 189.
182 Their report to their bosses: C. J. Schulz, “Appraisal of ‘Secrets of the
  Little Blue Box’ Article in the October 1971 Esquire Magazine,” Bell
  Laboratories memo, September 17, 1971 .

                    Chapter 13: Counterculture
Much of the material in this chapter comes from author interviews with Alan
Fierstein.
185 May Day demonstrations: See, e.g., Richard Halloran, “30,000
  Protesters Routed in Capital,” New York Times, May 3, 1971, p. 1.
185 Marlon Brando: The Wild One, Columbia Pictures, 1953.
185 “We are a people”: Youth International Party Manifesto, ca. 1970,
  quoted in Eric v. d. Luft, Die at the Right Time: A Subjective Cultural
  History of the American Sixties (Baltimore: United Book Press, 2009), p.
  437.
187 free buffalo: Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book, 2002 reprint, p. 104:
  “Every year the National Park Service gives away surplus elks in order to
  keep the herds under its jurisdiction from outgrowing the amount of
  available land for grazing . . . Under the same arrangement the
  government will send you a Free Buffalo. Write to: Office of Information,
  Department of the Interior, Washington, D.C. 20420.”
187 largest company on earth: AT&T was the largest company in the world
  as measured by assets or by employees; others were larger by revenue. In
  1974, for example, General Motors had sales of $35 billion to AT&T’s $26
  billion. But AT&T had $74 billion in assets to GM’s $20 billion; even
  accounting for liabilities, AT&T far exceeded it in size. And AT&T had more
  than a million employees, at that time, to GM’s roughly 800,000.
187 “In a country indissolubly”: Kleinfield, The Biggest Company on Earth,
  p. 9.
187 rate hike requests: For a bibliography of AT&T rate increases, see
  http://explodingthephone.com/extra/ratehikes.
188 $1 per month: Email conversations with members of the Telephone
  Collectors International mailing list (Yahoo group “singingwires”), June
  2011.
188 DUE: Brooks, Telephone, p. 299; “Unauthorized Phones Get Their DUE,”
  Bell Laboratories Record, December 1974 .
188 “warm gooey feelings”: I am indebted to Andrea Nemerson for the
  phrase.
188 “Cries of frustration”: William K. Stevens, “Phone Users Cite Service
  Decline,” New York Times, September 22, 1969 .
189 “A kind of surrealistic”: Brooks, Telephone, p. 291.
189 PLaza 8: Ibid., p. 290; Craig R. Whitney, “Phone Company Official Admits
  Increasing Difficulties in City,” New York Times, October 15, 1969
  .
189 “lousy”: Brooks, Telephone, p. 292, quoting a New York Times article.
189 “equal to the job”: Stevens, “Phone Users Cite Service Decline.” See
  also, “Dial-a-Snafu: Phone Foul-Ups Vex More Users as Volume of Calls
  Rises,” Wall Street Journal, February 3, 1969, and Brooks, Telephone, pp.
  292–95.
189 An FCC investigation: “FCC Telephone Probe in Preliminary Phase,”
  Hartford Courant, September 24, 1969.
189 “personification of male chauvinism”: Kleinfield, The Biggest
  Company on Earth, p. 206.
190 “blacks, women”: Brooks, Telephone, p. 288, and AP “AT&T Chairman
                                                             ,
  Denies Bias in Employment,” Sarasota Herald-Tribune, December 12, 1970,
  p. 12-A.
190 another sweeping investigation: Christopher Lydon, “F.C.C. Plans a
  Wide A.T.&T. Inquiry,” New York Times, January 22, 1971, p. 23
  . The Western Electric aspect of the investigation revolved
  around antitrust issues and the idea that AT&T could be hiding profits in
  its manufacturing subsidiary.
190 AFL-CIO: “Half a Million Workers Go on Telephone Strike,” Miami News,
  July 14, 1971, p. 1; Philip Shabecoff, “Telephone Strike Scheduled Today,”
  New York Times, July 14, 1971, p. 1 .
190 “we call it ‘The System’”: Joseph Goulden, Monopoly (New York: G. P      .
  Putnam’s Sons, 1968), p. 16.
190 “as little as possible to the imagination”: Kleinfield, The Biggest
  Company on Earth, p. 208.
190 Bell System Practices: A. B. Covey, “The Bell System’s Best Sellers,”
  Bell Telephone Magazine, Summer 1952, p. 88 .
191 “Sweeping, General”: “Sweeping, General,” Bell System Practice 770-
  130-301, August 1952, available from http://long-lines.net/documents/BSP-
  770-130-301/BSP-770-130-301-p1.html.
191 “robotic man in a three piece suit”: Irv Slifkin, Videohound’s Groovy
  Movies: Far Out Films of the Psychedelic Era (Canton, MI: Visible Ink Press,
  2004), pp. 52–54.
191 “find it hard to fault”: Maurice Rapf, “Bright Debut by Slapstick
  Satirists,” Life, January 26, 1968, p. 8.
191 “If we do not receive payment”: Lily Tomlin, This Is a Recording,
  Polydor Records, 1971.
192 “They love the character”: Gene Handsaker (AP), “Gal on Laugh-In
  Talks Spontaneously,” Kentucky New Era, February 3, 1970, p. 9.
192 “We don’t care. We don’t have to.”: Lily Tomlin on Saturday Night Live,
  season       2,      episode     1,      September    18,    1976.      See
  http://snltranscripts.jt.org/76/76aphonecompany.phtml.
192 telephone excise tax: Louis Allen Talley, “Telephone Excise Tax,”
  Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, RS20119, September
  15, 2000. The tax was largely gutted in 2006; see “U.S. to Repeal Long-
  Distance Telephone Tax,” New York Times, May 26, 2006.
192 $1.5 billion, 10 percent: “Telephone Excise Tax Receipts 1899–2005,”
  Tax                      Policy                  Center,                  at
  http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/Content/PDF/telephone.PDF. The 10
  percent estimate comes from Stephen Daggett, “Cost of Major U.S. Wars,”
  Congressional         Research      Service,   June      29,   2010,      at
  http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RS22926.pdf.
192 make free phone calls and feel good about it: Interestingly, several
  years earlier AT&T cited the telephone company’s duty to collect the
  telephone excise tax as one of the reasons it was legally obligated to
  investigate and prosecute telephone fraud. See Charles Ryan and H. W       .
  William Caming, Brief of American Telephone and Telegraph Company as
  Amicus Curiae, in Kenneth Herbert Hanna and Nathan Modell, Appellants,
  v. United States of America, Appellee, Appeal from the United States
  District Court for the Southern District of Florida, No. 24343, May 7, 1968
  .
193 “Fuck the Bell System”: “Fuck the Bell System” was another play on
  words: in 1967 Abbie Hoffman wrote a precursor to Steal This Book titled
  Fuck the System, which focused on free and low-cost survival strategies in
  New York City.
193 “The response was”: Alan Fierstein, author interview, 2006.
193 God created pay phones: AT&T preferred the term “coin telephone” to
  “pay phone”; as far as AT&T was concerned, all phones were pay phones.
194 the percentage of uncollectible credit card: “Credit Card, Third
  Number and Total Toll Message Uncollectible Study—March 1970,” AT&T
  internal memo, September 10, 1970  (referred to below as
  “Credit Card Study”).
195       Students        for     a       Democratic         Society:     See
  http://blog.historyofphonephreaking.org/2009/06/101973-students-for-a-
  democratic -society-prank-fbi.html.
195 Steve McQueen: AP “College Students Use Credit Card for Phone
                            ,
  Binge,” Lewiston (Maine) Daily Sun, May 23, 1968, p. 24. AT&T memos
  discussing this include William P Mullane Jr., Teletypewriter Message to All
                                   .
  Bell System Newsmen, May 22, 1968 ; J. F. Doherty memo to M.
  Mullane, October 27, 1969 ; “History of 168 Fraud,” AT&T memo,
  February 1970 ; and “Fraudulent Credit Card Usage, Case #C7-
  13-19,” AT&T memo, undated .
195 It is evident: “Credit Card Study.”
195 It is necessary: “Bell System Credit Card Plan–1971 Cards,” AT&T
  internal memo, August 7, 1970 .
196 “With all the electronic means”: Bill Acker, author interview, 2010.
197 The first underground and college newspapers: See, e.g., “Free Phone
  Calls,” Dallas Notes, January 24–February 6, 1971 ; the same
  article was published in a number of college or underground newspapers
  within a week.
197 “public disservice announcement”: Radio TV Reports, Inc., transcript
  of Abbie Hoffman appearance on the TV program Free Time with Julius
  Lester, April 7, 1971, 10:30 p.m. in New York City on WNET-TV .
197 rebuttal from Hoffman: Abbie Hoffman, “Dear Russell (Baker That Is),”
  YIPL, no. 2, July 1971, p. 3.
198 “two thousand and three thousand subscribers”: Bell, author
  interview, 2006.
198-199 assumed names and employee home addresses: Ken Hopper,
  author interview, 2006; Wayne Perrin, author interview, 2008.
199 obtained a copy of this memo: Memorandum from J. F. Doherty,
  Director, Corporate Security, AT&T, to AT&T Security Managers, “Toll Fraud
  —Y.I.P.L. Publication,” October 13, 1972, reprinted in “The AT&T Papers,”
  YIPL, no. 14, November 1972, p. 3.

                         Chapter 14: Busted
201 discount gas station and subsequent descriptions: FBI file 87-HQ-
  121189, serial 3, p. 2, May 10, 1972, and serial 8, July 10, 1972, p. 12
  .
202 wrecking ball to the phone phreaks’ home: The 2111 conference
  continued to exist. The old Vancouver step tandem was still in use on the
  network and its conference could be reached by dialing (with a blue box)
  KP + 604 + 059 + 2111 + ST. It took the phreaks a while to discover this
  and, once they did, they realized it was less convenient than it had been.
  You could dial into the old 2111 conference merely by using a Cap’n
  Crunch whistle; the new one required an actual blue box, which not every
  phreak possessed.
202 open sleeve-lead conference: Telephone lines have two wires, “tip” and
  “ring.” But inside a step-by-step or crossbar central office a third wire is
  added to each line: “sleeve.” The names refer to the positions of the wires
  on the plug of an operator’s cord. The sleeve lead was used by both
  operators and automated switching equipment to determine if a line was
  busy or idle. If a line’s sleeve lead was disconnected, the telephone
  switching equipment could no longer determine if a line was in use. The
  result was that multiple people could call such a number and “pile on,”
  that is, be connected in conference.
202 “Charleston and . . . Benton Harbor”: Bill Acker, author interview,
  2008.
202 time-honored technique of scanning: According to Bill Acker, the 2111
  gang referred to such exhaustive dialing as “Janning,” in honor of a phone
  phreak named Jan from the United Kingdom who was particularly fond of
  the approach.
203 its new name was 052: For audio recordings of the 052 conference from
  January 1972, see “Phreaks from Esquire Article on ‘052’ Conference,”
  parts 1 and 2, at http://www.phonetrips.com.
204 650 Bell System security agents: AP “Though Weaponless, Telephone
                                           ,
  Security Force Wields Power,” Geneva Times, December 26, 1974, p. 19
  .
204 Mostly they focused: Background information on typical telephone
  company security agent concerns from Wayne Perrin, author interview,
  2008.
205 “On several occasions”: FBI file 87-HQ-121189, serial 3, April 13,
  1972, p. 2 .
206 more innocent days: More innocent up to a point. Access to California
  DMV records was restricted in 1989 when the actress Rebecca Schaeffer
  was murdered “after the prime suspect in the case obtained her home
  address from DMV records.” See “In Killing’s Aftermath, State Limits
  Access to Driver’s Data,” Sacramento Bee, August 27, 1989, p. A4.
207 anonymous telephone company employee: Bill Acker and Ray
  Oklahoma, author interview, 2008.
207 Due to a bug: The blocking of telephone calls to ten-digit telephone
  numbers that had a 0 or 1 in the fourth digit was called “D-digit blocking,”
  a feature that made it impossible for ordinary telephone subscribers to call
  numbers like 914-052-1111. A similar safeguard called “E-digit blocking”
  blocked calls with 0 or 1 in the fifth digit of a ten-digit telephone number,
  shooting down calls to numbers like 914-415-1212. But D- and E-digit
  blocking sometimes failed or wasn’t implemented properly, meaning that in
  some places such calls were possible.
208 “numerous multi-frequency signals” and following description: FBI
  file 87-HQ-121189, serial 3, May 10, 1972, p. 27 .
208 “overseas sender points”: Overseas phone calls used to have to be
  routed through special switching facilities called overseas senders, which
  could be done with a blue box. For more on phone phreak international
  dialing techniques see http://explodingthephone.com/extra/overseas.
208 “not guilty”: FBI file 87-HQ-121189, serial 8, July 23, 1972, p. 2
  .
209 “contemporary folk hero”: Rick Carroll, “Captain Crunch’s Story,” San
  Francisco Chronicle, August 16, 1972 .
209 big newswires: See, for example, AP “Electronic Rigging Charged to Call
                                         ,
  Long Distance Free,” Bakersfield Californian, May 5, 1972, p. 4; UPI,
  “Costly Whistle,” The Sun (Lowell, MA), November 30, 1972, p. 1.
209 “Regulating the Phone Company in Your Home”: R. Oklahoma,
  “Regulating the Phone Company in Your Home,” Ramparts, vol. 10, no. 12,
  June 1972, p. 55 .
209 circulation 100,000: Peter Collier, quoted in Pam Black, “Ramparts,”
  Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, April 1, 2004.
209 “It expressed”: Ibid.
209 “heavy, shiny stock”: Ibid.
210 “plans or instructions”: California Penal Code Section 502.7(b)(2). The
  specific wording made a criminal of anyone who “sells, gives, or otherwise
  transfers to another or offers, or advertises plans or instructions for
  [making a toll fraud device] with knowledge or reason to believe that they
  may be used to make [such a device].” For information on the 1965
  amendments that added the “plans or instructions” clause to the law, see
  “Bill Seeks Tough Penalties for Phone Call Chislers,” Fresno Bee, April 21,
  1965, p. 12A.
210 “Telephone company attorneys”: “How the Phone Company
  Interrupted Our Service,” Ramparts, July 1972, pp. 10–11 .
211 “In the past ten years”: Ibid.
211 “we were willing”: Ibid. Ramparts drew the line at its subscriber list,
  refusing to hand that over.
211 some ninety thousand: “Magazine to Call 90,000 Copies Back,” Los
  Angeles Times, May 19, 1972, p. A23 .
211 almost $60,000: “A Ramparts Issue Halted in Dispute; Magazine
  Withdrawn After Protest by Phone Concern,” New York Times, May 22,
  1972, p. 8 .
211 “Within a week”: “How the Phone Company Interrupted Our Service.”
212 monitoring the phone phreak conferences: FBI files 87-HQ-121042,
  serial 2, page B, May 1, 1972 ; see also FBI file 87-OK-17023
  .
212 “I know it looks easy”: “A Toll Thief ’s Tale,” Konowa Leader, September
  14, 1972 .
213 “Celebration of Change”: YIPL, no. 11, June–July 1972, p. 1.
213 “As some of you might know”: Ibid., p. 4.
214 An informant, bench warrant: FBI file 87-HQ-121189, serial 6, July 10,
  1972 .
214 phone phreak convention had been postponed: The phone phreak
  convention’s postponement appears to have been the result of legal
  concerns. According to Ramparts magazine, the convention was “postponed
  and moved to New York where, Yippies said, the laws against phreaking
  are ‘full of loopholes.’” The Village Voice reported, “At Abbie Hoffman’s
  invitation he [Draper] flew to Miami to head a phone freak convention,
  panicked, and flew right out again.” See Robert Sherman, “Phone Phreak-
  Out in Phun City,” Ramparts, vol. 11, no. 4, October 1972, p. 12 ,
  and Maureen Orth, “Sore Losers: Mayor Daley, Meet Captain Crunch,”
  Village Voice, July 20, 1972, p. 18.
214 “a tape-recorder and a brown valise”: FBI file 87-HQ-121189, serial 8,
  July 28, 1972, p. 8 .
214–215 basement ballroom of the Hotel Diplomat (and following
  description): Sherman, “Phone Phreak-Out in Phun City.”
215 spy from New York Telephone: FBI file 87-HQ-121189, serial 9,
  September 18, 1972, p. 10 . For more on the Hotel Diplomat, see
  “The Life and Times of the Hotel Diplomat, 1911–1994,” at
  http://thisaintthesummeroflove.blogspot.com/2009/02/life-and-times-of-
  hotel-diplomat.html.
215 Over 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 . An article based on this
  news release appeared as “Toll Fraud: Beating the Rip-Off Set,” Bell
  Telephone Magazine, November–December 1972 .
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.
216 fifty-seven electronic toll fraud arrests: “Toll Fraud,” AT&T internal
  memorandum, May 18, 1977 .
216 failed 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.
220 vary 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.
221 By 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.
221 clever 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.
223 sales technique was inspired: Wozniak, iWoz, p. 116.
223 Many 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.
223 thirty or forty boxes, more like a hundred: Ibid.; Isaacson, Steve Jobs,
  p. 29.
224 “It’s kind of strange”: Wozniak, author interview, 2008.
224 disassembled 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.
224 Woz’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.
225 Los 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.
227 Another 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 days” and subsequent description:
  Andrew H. Malcolm, “The ‘Shortage’ of Bathroom Tissue: A Classic Study
  in Rumor,” New York Times, February 3, 1974 . The perception
  of a shortage was due to a confluence of factors, not just Carson’s joke. In
  particular, a congressman had issued a press release a few weeks earlier
  stating that the United States might soon face a serious shortage of toilet
  paper and that rationing might be necessary. It concluded: “A toilet paper
  shortage is no laughing matter. It is a problem that will touch every
  American.”
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 . It is hard to know if Draper and his
  friend did actually reach President Nixon; some of the details line up but
  some do not. The 800 number mentioned did indeed go to the White
  House, though it was not in fact the “CIA crisis line” but rather a toll-free
  telephone number used by White House staff on travel; see FBI file 139-
  HQ-0-2098, May 20, 1977 . Draper claims that he discovered the
  code name “Olympus” by using a verification circuit to eavesdrop on this
  line. This was technically possible in a few areas of the country (see
  chapter 18), but no other phone phreak I have spoken to recalls being able
  to do such a thing in the Washington, D.C., area. Finally, Nixon’s Secret
  Service code name was “Searchlight,” not “Olympus”; see “Top 10 Secret
  Service        Code        Names,”         Time          Specials,         at
  http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1860482_186
  0481_1860422,00.html.

                  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.”
230 peace 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.
232 first proposals . . . transistor-based telephone switching: Joel,
  Switching Technology, pp. 203–4.
233 the 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.
234 world’s first electronic: Bell Telephone Laboratories, The Electronic
  Switching System: Trial Installation, Morris, Illinois; General Description,
  1960, at http://www.archive.org/details/TheElectronicSwitchingSystem.
234 five thousand times slower: Ibid., p. 270 (“cycle time is about 3
  microseconds”).
235 flying spot store: Ibid.
236 “traumatic experience”: Brooks, Telephone, p. 279.
236 retained the basic concepts: Bell Telephone Laboratories, Bell
  Laboratories Record, vol. 49, no., 65, June 1965.
236 four 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.
237 more than 132 of the 4As: Joel, Switching Technology, p. 321.
237 physically 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.
237 rendered 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.
238 red 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.
239 modified 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.
240 the 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 .
241 Detroit underground newspaper: “Fifth Estate Charged with Fraud,”
  Fifth Estate, September 26, 1974, p. 2 . The case eventually went
  to trial and ended about a year later in a hung jury.
241 sued 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 . Pacific
  Telephone seemed to be particularly litigious that summer. It also sued
  Wayne Green, the publisher of the ham radio magazine 73, for printing a
  technical overview of the telephone system that included blue box plans.
  See Myrna Oliver, “PTT Sues over Story on How to Duck Call Fees,” Los
  Angeles Times, June 10, 1975, p. B3 , and Spenser Whipple Jr.,
  “Inside Ma Bell,” 73 Magazine, June 1975, p. 67 .
241 some 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.
242 One 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.
243 charges went back to 1968: “Nineteen Accused of Dial-the-World Phone
  Fiddle,” Daily Telegraph, October 4, 1973.
243 exactly 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 . Hill was one of the Old Bailey 19;
  partway through the trial, after Hill gave his testimony, the prosecution
  moved to drop the charges against him. In his recollection of the trial he
  wrote: “The telephone system is the largest machine in the world,
  extending as it does over the whole surface of the earth. It is so easy to
  gain access to it—just pick up a telephone—and having done that, you can
  then explore ways of finding your way around the world. Some people are
  interested in the gadgetry of the system; some in gadgetry they can build
  to affect the system. Some study the system as geographers, some as
  computer programmers.” Hill passed away in 1974 at age twenty-four.
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 Campbell, 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.
243 rock 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 ; “came from Wozniak and
  Jobs”: see Michael Moritz, The Little Kingdom: The Private Story of Apple
  Computer (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1984), p. 78.
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 ; “Cornfeld Charged with Phone Fraud,” Los Angeles
  Times, June 5, 1975, p. B32 ; Diana B. Henriques, “Bernard
  Cornfeld, 67, Dies; Led Flamboyant Mutual Fund,” New York Times, March
  2, 1995. There really was a Playboy photo shoot at Cornfeld’s mansion the
  day the FBI swooped down, by the way; see FBI file 87-LA-40513, serial 29,
  January 30, 1975 .
244 “He’s got the whole world in his hands”: FBI file 87-LA-40513, serial
  55, February 12, 1975 .
244 Lainie Kazan: Sanford L. Jacobs, “Blue Boxes Spread from Phone
  Phreaks to the Well-Heeled,” Wall Street Journal, January 29, 1976, p. 1
  .
244 Woz and Jobs: Adam Schoolsky, author interview, 2011.
244 Robert Cummings: Jacobs, “Blue Boxes Spread.”
244 high-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.
245 Colby Street house, “kiss of death”: Condon, author interview, 2009.
  Additional details provided by John Gilbert and other members of the Colby
  Street gang.
245 “They explicitly excluded me”: Acker author interviews, 2008 and
  2011.
246 The more people who knew: In the physical world economists call this
  the tragedy of the commons. The term describes situations in which a
  natural resource (e.g., fish in the sea, or trees, or grazing land) is overused
  because it does not belong to any one individual and, as a result of such
  overuse, disappears. I think of the electronic security equivalent as a sort
  of “tragedy of the informational commons.” A version of this problem also
  appears in code breaking (if you break your enemy’s codes and then do
  something with the information you obtain, your enemy is likely to figure
  out that you’ve broken his codes and will change them, denying you further
  intelligence) and is explored in Neal Stephenson’s book Cryptonomicon
  (2002). See Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science,
  December               1968,               p.             1243,             at
  http://www.sciencemag.org/content/162/3859/1243.full.pdf.
246 One such phreak in New York: Author interview with a New York–area
  phone phreak who prefers to remain anonymous, 2012. Two of the books in
  question were the Distance Dialing Reference Guide and the Traffic Routing
  Guide, both of which described AT&T’s network routing in excruciating
  detail.
                   Chapter 17: A Little Bit Stupid
249 entered a telephone booth: Ken Hopper notes and author interview,
  2006.
250 had been around since the early 1900s: Joel, Switching Technology, pp.
  45–48. See also J. Atkins, K. A. Raschke, and D. L. Woody, “Traffic Service
  Position System No. 1: Busy Line Verification Feature,” Bell System
  Technical Journal, vol. 59, no. 8, October 1980, pp. 1397–416.
250 verification circuits in some places could be reached: Bill Acker and
  Ray Oklahoma, author interviews, 2008. An internal AT&T memo
  acknowledges that blue box access to verification was possible prior to
  1971 in Miami: “[We] caught this in Miami when they cut over their TSPS
  [a relatively new switchboard system used by operators]. They made a
  vacant area code available to TSPS operators for verification. [We] pointed
  out at the time that anything available via unused area code was available
  to blue box users and would compromise verification.” See C. J. Schulz,
  “Appraisal of ‘Secrets of the Little Blue Box’ Article in the October 1971
  Esquire Magazine,” Bell Laboratories memorandum, September 17, 1971
  . AT&T claimed that blue box verification access in San Francisco
  was due to a misconfiguration of its switching equipment.
251 Eder was a burly, forty-five-year-old: Chic Eder’s real name was Phillip
  Norman Ader. Description of Eder from author interview of John Draper,
  2008, and from Albert Goldman, “What Will Happen When Middle-Class
  America Gets the Straight Dope?” New York Magazine, August 25, 1975, p.
  28.
252 “Dear Agent in Charge”: FBI file 100-LA-82471, serial 22, August 28,
  1973 . The FBI began evaluating Eder as a potential informant
  and seems to have accepted his offer sometime in 1974.
252–253 first inkling (and subsequent description): FBI file 139-SF-188,
  serial 1, June 24, 1975 .
253 “San Francisco is not serviced”: FBI file 139-SF-188, serial 8, June 27,
  1975 .
254 “This is to inform”: FBI file 139-HQ-4991, serial 6, July 2, 1976
  . This page of Draper’s file was actually stored in the “Special
  File Room,” separated from the rest of his file. Curious about the redacted
  sentence? So am I. Even thirty-five years later the FBI refuses to reveal it,
  withholding it on grounds of national security.
254 got it all on tape: FBI file 139-HQ-4991, serial 30, July 15, 1975 and
  bulky enclosure E30. Eder’s tape of the phone call was obtained under
  FOIA     and    you   can    listen   to   it  at   http://explodingthephone
  .com/extra/edertape.
255 Walter Schmidt: Schmidt later received a personal commendation letter
  from FBI director Clarence M. Kelley for “exceptional assistance . . . to our
  Los Angeles Office in the investigation of an Interception of
  Communications case and most significantly for his efforts which facilitated
  the handling of a very sensitive situation.” FBI file 139-HQ-4991, serial 29,
  July 31, 1975 .
256 “valuable service,” “outstanding”: FBI file 139-SF-188, serial 31, July
  21, 1975 . Alas, FBI documents do not reveal how much Eder was
  paid.
256 “capability of monitoring calls”: Ibid. and FBI file 139-HQ-4991 (serial
  number obscured), July 21, 1975 .
256 “not selling information,” “does not know how widespread”: FBI file
  139-SF-188, serial 38, July 25, 1975 .
258 “extremely cautious in use of the telephone” and preceding
  description: FBI file 139-HQ-4991, serial 26, July 22, 1975 .
258 “Dear Mr. deButts”: Ken Hopper notes and author interview, 2006. See
  also FBI file 139-HQ-4991, serial 26, July 22, 1975, and serial 27, July 24,
  1975 .
258 “It is pointed out”: FBI file 139-HQ-4991, serial 25, July 24, 1975
  .
258 “ho-hum”: FBI file 139-HQ-4991, serial 35, August 1, 1975 .
259 “undoubtedly be sympathetic”: FBI file 139-HQ-4991, serial 33 (serial
  number obscured), July 29, 1975 .
259 small blizzard of memos: FBI file 139-SF-188, serial 43, July 30, 1975
  .
259 “most valuable,” “penetrate”: FBI file 139-SF-188, serials 64 and 65,
  139-HQ-4991, serial 31 .
260 “Departmental Attorney Kline”: FBI file 139-SF-188, serial 75,
  September 30, 1975 .
260 answer was no (and subsequent descriptions): FBI file 139-SF-188,
  serials 76–82, October 2–15, 1975 .
260 “For information of receiving”: FBI file 139-SF-188, serial 85,
  November 17, 1975 .

                          Chapter 18: Snitch
Much of the information regarding Wayne Perrin’s investigation of Paul
Sheridan comes from author interviews conducted with Perrin in 2008 and
Perrin’s case notes from the time.
266 “related numerous items”: Wayne Perrin, author interview and case
  notes, 2008.
266 “early twenties, five-foot-eleven”: Ibid.
267 “Mr. Norden, often times”: Ibid.
268 could get President Ford on the line (and preceding description):
  Perrin, author interview, 2008; FBI file 139-LA-430, serial 1, December 5,
  1975.
268 “got right to the second floor of the White House”: Perrin’s
  recollection may be slightly off, since the second floor of the White House is
  the residential area, but the 800 number in Sheridan’s possession (also
  making the rounds of other phone phreaks at that time) definitely did go to
  the White House.
268 AUTOVON: Definitive historical and technical information on AUTOVON is
  difficult to come by. The most authoritative source is Records Group 371
  (Records of the Defense Communications Agency), National Archives and
  Records Administration, College Park, Maryland.
270 to be used only by the President: AUTOVON Telephone Directory, as
  quoted     in   Telecom    Digest    email    list, June    19,    1992,  at
  http://massis.lcs.mit.edu/archives/reports/autovon.instructions.
272 Bob Jacobs: FBI file 139-SF-188, serial 108, December 23, 1975
  .
273 guard banding: Guard banding seems to have been discovered sometime
  between 1971 and 1972. John Draper says he invented it, but Bill Acker
  says this credit belongs to New York phone phreak Jim Roth. It is
  interesting to note that the TAP newsletter did not print an article about it
  until 1979, which gives some indication of the informational time lag
  between the more sophisticated phreaks and the newsletter of the phone
  phreak masses. For more details on guard banding, see Napoleon Solo,
  “Guard Banding,” TAP, no. 56, March–April 1979, p. 4.
273 military’s Arctic communication system: United States Air Force,
  “The          White          Alice        Network,”          1958,        at
  http://www.porticus.org/bell/pdf/whitealice.pdf. For a more personal
  recollection, see Bill Everly, “The White Alice Communications System,” at
  http://www.whitealice.net.
273 Sheridan’s document explained: Author unknown, “AUTOVON Access
  Info,” undated .
274 The FBI’s biggest concern: Nelson Saxe, author interview, 2007.
274 JCSAN/COPAN: JCSAN stood for “Joint Chiefs of Staff Alerting Network”;
  COPAN stood for “Command Post Alerting Network.” See W H. Seckler,
                                                                   .
  “Global Command Post Alerting Network,” Bell Laboratories Record,
  November 1964, pp. 371–74.
274 “mentally unstable,” “go off”: Saxe, author interview and notes, 2007.
275 “We’re not about to go out to Los Angeles”: Saxe, author interview,
  2007.

                        Chapter 19: Crunched
276 “Dear TAP”: “Letters from Readers,” TAP, no. 31, December 1975, p. 3.
  Yes, it was true, William F. Buckley Jr.’s conservative National Review had
  printed Captain Crunch’s telephone number, and Joe Engressia’s too, as
  part of an article covering the 1973 phone phreak convention. It was
  payback for YIPL’s having printed the telephone number of Nixon’s law
  firm. “Call them up the next time you get in at 4 a.m.,” the National Review
  article’s author suggested. “Collect. Tell them they’re stupid.” See D. Keith
  Mano, “Sorry, Wrong Revolution,” National Review, October 26, 1973, pp.
  1183–85 .
277 a dark vibe: Author interviews with several phone phreaks who,
  naturally, wish to remain anonymous, 2008.
277 FBI-AT&T AUTOVON demo: Description of the AUTOVON meetings comes
  from author interviews with Ken Hopper of Bell Laboratories, Nelson Saxe
  of AT&T Long Lines, Wayne Perrin of Pacific Telephone, FBI special agents
  who attended the meeting, and Ken Hopper’s notes.
278 National Security Agency: FBI file 139-SF-188, serial 159 ,
  and Ken Hopper, author interview, 2006. Fonger appears to have worked
  for the Communications Security side of the National Security Agency and
  wrote several memos, all classified SECRET, summarizing the Los Angeles
  AUTOVON demos: “Phone Freaks Invade AUTOVON ,” January 30, 1976
  ; “Phone Freaks Invade Computer Networks,” February 6, 1976
  ; and “Phone Freaks Can Invade Your Privacy,” February 13, 1976
  . The memos noted that an NSA investigation of the phone
  phreak claims was ongoing and that some of the techniques described
  were a “potentially lucrative source of intelligence.”
278 Michael was a talented: Author interview with “Michael,” 2009.
279 Hopper suspected it was Sheridan: Hopper, author interview, 2006.
280 Just two miles from Stanford: Description of the 1900 block of Menalto
  and the story about Steve Wozniak from Roy Kaylor, author interview, 2008.
  Additional information from John Draper, author interview, 2008.
280 “Computers are mostly used against people”: Levy, Hackers, p. 142.
  See       also     DigiBarn      Computer        Museum       website,     at
  http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/peoples-
  computer/index.html.
282 “It was decided”: FBI file 139-LA-430, serial 30, January 29, 1976
  .
282 “agents met with Pacific Telephone” and subsequent description:
  FBI file 139-SF-188, serial 127, January 27, 1976 .
282 “Draperism”: Draper, author interview, 2008.
283 Wall Street Journal: Sanford L. Jacobs, “Blue Boxes Spread from Phone
  Freaks to Well-Heeled,” Wall Street Journal, January 27, 1976, p. 1
  , included in 139-SF-188, serial 131 .
283 “has no sources who are phone phreaks”: The draft teletype message
  described here is FBI file 139-SF-188, serial 154, February 10, 1976
  . The crossed-out text is on page 3. The teletype message as
  received at FBI headquarters is FBI file 139-HQ-4991, serial 70, February
  10, 1976 .
284 agents in Los Angeles were not thrilled: FBI file 139-SF-188, serial
  161, February 18, 1976 .
284 send a phone phreak informant up to San Francisco: FBI file 139-SF-
  188, serial 160, February 19, 1976 .
284 would drive up the next day: FBI file 139-SF-188, serial 173, February
  23, 1976 .
287 Draper maintains he was framed: A version of this story with slightly
  different       details     appears     on      Draper’s       website,     at
  http://www.webcrunchers.com/stories/snitch.html.
288 “On February 20, 1976 at 5:23 pm”: FBI file 139-SF-188, serial 175,
  February 23, 1976 .
288 “This will serve to inform you”: FBI file 139-SF-188, serial 187,
  February 23, 1976 .
289 tape recording and detailed analysis: FBI file 139-SF-188, serial 183,
  February 24, 1976 .
289 service’s receptionist said: FBI file 139-SF-188, unnumbered serial (FD-
  302, numbered page 4*), May 4, 1976 .
289 friend in Pennsylvania: FBI file 139-SF-188, unnumbered serial (FD-
  302, numbered page 2), May 21, 1976 .
290 FBI’s after-action report (and following paragraphs): FBI file 139-SF-
  188, unnumbered serial (FD-302, numbered page 29), April 2, 1976
  .
291–292 picked up by the newswires: AP “Charges Filed Against
                                                  ,
  Electronics Wizard,” Asbury Park Press, April 23, 1976, p. A6 ; AP    ,
  “Wizard Whistles Way into Trouble,” Sarasota Journal, April 23, 1976, p.
  2D.
292 “The first thing I thought”: Sidney Schaefer, author interview, 2012.
292 “Draper shall refrain”: United States v. John Thomas Draper, United
  States District Court for the Northern District of California, No. CR-72-973
  RFP Judgment and Order of Probation, November 29, 1972 .
      ,
292 Dawson met with Draper’s attorney (and following quotes): FBI file
  139-HQ-4991, serial 90, April 22, 1976 .
292 with two provisos: FBI file 139-HQ-4991, serial 92, June 8, 1976
  .
293 “It was a big joke for him”: Author interview with anonymous source
  familiar with the debriefing, 2008.
293 “sentenced to the custody”: FBI file 139-HQ-4991, unnumbered serial
  (FD-204), September 7, 1976 .
293 On March 5, 1976: Wayne Perrin, notes and author interview, 2008.
293 “In ninety percent”: Wayne Perrin, author interview, 2008.

                         Chapter 20: Twilight
296 On May 15, 1976: Victor K. McElheny, “New Phone Setup Started to
  Save Time and Circuits,” New York Times, May 15, 1976, p. 34 .
297 Bell started experimenting: Joel, Switching Technology, pp. 430–38.
297 eliminating blue box fraud: Ibid., p. 434.
297 CAMA-C: Ibid., pp. 379 and 432. “As of January 1, 1977, 155 of these
  [CAMA-C] systems . . . were installed in crossbar tandems and No. 4A
  crossbar offices. Later the programs for these offices were modified to seek
  out potential troubles and suspected fraud situations based upon the
  detected supervisory signals.”
298 Thomas Carter: Ellen Wojan, “Thomas F. Carter of Carter Electronics:
  Calling for Competition,” Inc., April 1, 1984.
298 Carterfone: “In the Matter of Use of the Carterfone Device in Message
  Toll Telephone Service; In the Matter of Thomas F. Carter and Carter
  Electronics Corp., Dallas, Tex. (Complainants) v. American Telephone and
  Telegraph Co., Associated Bell System Companies, Southwestern Bell
  Telephone Company, and General Telephone Company of the Southwest
  (Defendants),” Docket No. 16942; Docket No. 17073, Federal
  Communications Commission, 13 F.C.C. 2d 420 (1968), 13 Rad. Reg 2d (P
  &F) 597, FCC 68-661, June 26, 1968 (hereinafter, “Carterfone”).
298 “[T]he phone companies were harassing my customers”: Wojan,
  “Thomas F. Carter.”
298 FCC tariff 132: FCC tariff 132, April 16, 1957.
298 “The universal comment,” “I didn’t think it was fair”: Wojan,
  “Thomas F. Carter.”
299 “unreasonable, unlawful, and unreasonably discriminatory”:
  “Carterfone.”
299 cream skimming: Coll, The Deal of the Century, pp. 11–14.
300 The very next day: “AT&T to Cut Off MCI’s Connections,” New York
  Times, April 16, 1974 .
300 AT&T, at regulatory gunpoint: “AT&T Ordered to Give Service to MCI,
  Others,” Wall Street Journal, April 24, 1974. In fact, AT&T appealed the
  FCC’s decision and lost; see “AT&T Loses Motion, Will Reconnect MCI’s
  Private-Line Services,” Wall Street Journal, May 3, 1974.
300 all for much less (and preceding description of Execunet): Philip
  Louis Cantelon, The History of MCI: 1968–1988, The Early Years (Dallas:
  Heritage Press, 1993).
301 sued the Hare Krishnas: “Krishna Units Accused of ‘Pirate’ Telephone
  Calls,” Los Angeles Times, September 24, 1977, p. B6 .
301 seeking to sever its manufacturing arm: Charles Zerner, “U.S. Sues to
  Force A.T.&T. to Drop Western Electric Co.,” New York Times, January 15,
  1949, p. 1 .
301 reached an agreement: Anthony Lewis, “A.T.&.T. Settles Antitrust Case;
  Shares Patents,” New York Times, January 25, 1956, p. 1 .
302 “The wounds from that 1956 scandal”: Coll, Deal of the Century, p. 59.
302 On November 20, 1974: Peter T. Kilborn, “The Telephone Suit:
  Competitive Cold Water for the Mighty Bell System,” New York Times,
  November 24, 1974, p. 1 .
302 “severed limbs”: Coll, Deal of the Century, p. 120.
302 AT&T lawyers argued (and subsequent description): “Antitrust
  Immunity for AT&T Is Barred by High Court Ruling,” New York Times,
  November 29, 1977 ; United States v. American Telephone and
  Telegraph, 427 F. Supp. 57 (1976), United States District Court, District of
  Columbia, November 24, 1976.
303 “Watergate is a gnat”: “A Phone Executive Assails Bell System in His
  Suicide Note,” New York Times, November 19, 1974 ; J. Edward
  Hyde, The Phone Book: What the Phone Company Would Rather You Not
  Know (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1976), pp. 98–112; “Phone
  Calls and Philandering,” Time, September 5, 1977.
304 Ashley was fired soon after (and surrounding description): Brooks,
  Telephone, p. 309; Kleinfield, The Biggest Company on Earth, pp. 267–69.
304 “I had been looking at all the expenditures”: Louis J. Rose, author
  interview, 2006.
304 The Texas scandal spread: Kleinfield, The Biggest Company on Earth,
  pp. 271–72.
304 The telephone company soon found itself: Brooks, Telephone, p. 311;
  Kleinfield, The Biggest Company on Earth, p. 272.
305 “I think we’re going”: Bill Caming, author interview, 2007.
306 “arranged for a city councilman” and surrounding description:
  Kleinfield, The Biggest Company on Earth, p. 274.
306 thirteen female employees: Ibid., pp. 275–77; “Six Women Testify in
  Texas Phone Suit,” New York Times, August 28, 1977 ; AP “Suit,
  Against Southwestern Bell in 4th Week of Trial,” Times News
  (Hendersonville, NC), August 30, 1977, p. 9.
306 appeals court overturned: Kleinfield, The Biggest Company on Earth, p.
  278; “$3 Million Award Is Overturned in a Suit Against Southwest Bell,”
  New York Times, November 30, 1978 .
306 Supreme Court of Texas: Dixon v. Southwestern Bell, 607 S.W      .2d 240
  (1980), No. B-8208, Supreme Court of Texas, October 22, 1980 (Rehearing
  Denied November 19, 1980). The Texas Supreme Court did not so much
  uphold the appeals court ruling as simply decide that it did not have
  jurisdiction to hear the case; Texas law granted its Supreme Court very
  limited jurisdiction regarding slander cases.
307 Intel 8008: Roy Allan, A History of the Personal Computer: The People
  and the Technology (London, Ontario, Canada: Allan Publishing, 2001); S.
  P Morse, B. W Raveiel, S. Mazor, and W B. Pohimian, “Intel
   .                  .                              .
  Microprocessors—8008 to 8086,” IEEE Computer, vol. 13, no. 10, October
  1980.
307 “first truly usable microprocessor”: Lamont Wood, “Forgotten PC
  History: The True Origins of the Personal Computer,” Computerworld,
  August                    8,                 2008,                   at
  http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9111341/Forgotten_PC_history_Th
  e_true_origins_of_the_personal_computer.
307 “Project Breakthrough!”: Popular Electronics, January 1975, cover and
  pp. 23ff.
308 “The only word which could come to mind”: Levy, Hackers, p. 192.
309 Wozniak would show off: Ibid., p. 250.
309 “Jobs placed ads”: Ibid., p. 253.

                        Chapter 21: Nightfall
311 “Well, let’s see”: Bill Acker, author interview, 2007.
312 The new legal standard: See, for example, United States of America,
  Plaintiff-Appellee v. Michael William Clegg, Defendant-Appellant, No. 74-
  2557, United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit, 509 F.2d 605 (1975),
  March 5, 1975.
312 Draper walked out of Lompoc: Peter Gorner and Michael Smith, “They
  Still Fear Captain Crunch,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 29, 1977, p. 4
  .
312 slopped pigs: John Draper, “Prisons Are the Universities of Crime,” at
  http://www.webcrunchers.com/stories/prisons.html.
313 PDP-6: Levy, Hackers, p. 95.
313 “A WATS extender is used”: Stephen Wozniak, “An Apple for the
  Captain,” Infoworld, October 1, 1984, p. 57.
313 Draper cracked: Ibid.
313 disliked Draper: Moritz, Return to the Little Kingdom, p. 205.
314 microcomputer laboratory: Bell Laboratories, “Evidence Examination
  Report: Pennsylvania State Police Incident No. N6-39474, Bell Telephone
  Company of Pennsylvania Case No. 23-50-E77,” December 14, 1977
  .
314 “plenty of music, fun, and information”: John Draper, handwritten
  flyer titled “Capt’n Crunch Party,” 1977 .
314 party crashers (and surrounding description): Howard Smith and
  Leslie Harlib, “The Captain Is Crunched Again,” Village Voice, January 16,
  1978 .
314 watching Draper like a hawk (and subsequent description): Bell of
  Pennsylvania, “Case Summary of John Thomas Draper,” September 8, 1978
  .
315 start of a lengthy nightmare (and subsequent description): Smith
  and Harlib, “The Captain Is Crunched Again.” Stories vary as to whether
  the red box was found on Draper’s person or in his car.
315 At one point during the trial: Ken Hopper, author interview, 2006.
316 sentenced to three to six months: Mike Joseph, “‘Phone Phreak’ Jailed
  for 3 to 6 Months,” Pocono Record, August 19, 1978, p. 17 .
316 “I just have a feeling”: K. C. Mason (UPI), “Highrise Joe Is a Whiz in
  Spite of Blindness,” Sarasota Herald-Tribune, July 4, 1982, p. 8G.
316 offered Engressia a job: Description of Engressia’s conversation with
  Leger from Joybubbles, author interview, 2006.
317 “You wouldn’t believe the pressure”: Lloyd Leger, author interview,
  2007.
317 “I feel the Bell insignia”: “The Whistler and the Captain—Veterans of
  Phone ‘Fixing,’” New York Times, March 27, 1978, p. D3 .
318 4ESS: Joel, Switching Technology, p. 294.
318 “tend[s] to pass himself off as the victim”: Dr. Robert B. Blumberg,
  psychiatric evaluation of John T. Draper, August 17, 1978 (included in
  Draper’s 1976 court records).
318 “numerous paranoid delusions”: O’Neil S. Dillon, MD, psychiatric
  evaluation of John T. Draper, December 6, 1978 (included in Draper’s 1976
  court records).
319 “Is this not simple?”: Pete Carey, “Cap’n Crunch Programs His Way from
  Jail to Success,” Chicago Tribune, May 25, 1983, p. D1 .
319 TAP: In 1979 the phone phreak newsletter changed its name again, this
  time from Technological American Party to Technological Assistance
  Program. Was this because they were becoming less political? Not so much,
  said Cheshire Catalyst in 2010. “It had more to do with the difficulty of
  opening up a bank account when you have the word ‘Party’ in your name.”
319 Third Annual Phone Phreak Convention: YIPL ran phone phreak
  conventions in 1972 and 1973, but a dry spell followed until THC-79.
319 “For several reasons, I have permanently retired”: John Draper,
  “Greetings” (open letter to THC-79 attendees), TAP, no. 59, September–
  October 1979.
320 “While intrepidly trekking”: Cheshire Catalyst, “The News Is In from
  the West, and It’s Beige,” TAP, no. 51, July 1978, p. 4.
320 CBBS: Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, “Hobbyist Computerized
  Bulletin Board,” Byte, vol. 3, no. 11, pp. 150–57.
320 first phone phreak/hacker BBSes: Katie Hafner and John Markoff,
  Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier (New York:
  Simon & Schuster, 1991), p. 44; see also a description of the 8BBS in Santa
  Clara,     California,   which      ran    from    1980    to    1982,   at
  http://everything2.com/title/8BBS.
321 “Enclosed for Bureau”: FBI file 117-HQ-2905, serial “X,” April 30,
  1979 .
321 “nuclear yield”: FBI file 117-HQ-2905, serial 3, August 24, 1979
  .
321 Judge Harold Greene: In an odd coincidence, in 1980 as part of a totally
  separate case, Judge Greene “ordered the FBI to stop destroying its
  surveillance files and to design a plan in which no files could be destroyed
  until historians and archivists could review them for historical value.” As it
  turns out, large chunks of this book are based on such FBI files, which
  might well have been destroyed were it not for Judge Greene’s order. See
  William Yurcik, “Judge Harold H. Greene: A Pivotal Figure in
  Telecommunications Policy and His Legacy,” IEEE Global History
  Network, at http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/images/1/1d/Yurcik.pdf. p. 16, and
  John Anthony Scott, “The FBI Files: A Challenge for Historians,”
  Perspectives         on         History,       March         1980,         at
  http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/1980/8003/8003new1.cfm.
321 statistics are mind numbing: Yurcik, “Judge Harold H. Greene.”
321 broken up into eight different companies: Coll, Deal of the Century;
  Kimberly Zarkin and Michael J. Zarkin, The Federal Communications
  Commission: Front Line in the Culture and Regulation Wars (Westport, CT:
  Greenwood Press, 2006).

                                  Epilogue
325 The town of Wawina: Bob Riddell, author interview, 2012.
325 108 historical telephones (and surrounding description): Gail Van
  Horn (AP), “Small Entrepreneur Owns 148 Telephones,” Spokesman
  Review, October 3, 1976, p. B3.
325 “ask your mother to help you”: Telephone World website, “Sounds and
  Recordings from Wawina, MN,” at http://www.phworld.org/sounds/wawina.
325 no other place in the continental United States: Note the qualifier
  “continental.” The town of Livengood, Alaska, also had a 2,600 Hz–based
  telephone system, but it went away sometime in 2011. See “The Death of
  Livengood”     on   the    Binary   Revolution   Forums    website,    at
  http://www.binrev.com/forums/index.php/topic/44301-the-death-of-
  livengood.
326 several hours of goodbyes: You can listen to them at the Telephone
  World website, phworld.org.
326 “even callow youths”: Jake Locke, email to author, 2011.
327 looked like he would be going to prison for ten years: “Bookmaking
  Sentence Against 3 Reimposed,” Miami News, December 18, 1969, p. 10A.
327 “Gil Beckley would be distinctly more valuable”: “Crime: No. 11 Off
  the Boards,” Time, March 2, 1970.
327 shot dead and stuffed into the trunk of a car: AP “Fugitive Mike
                                                          ,
  Thevis Back in Custody,” Spartanburg Herald, November 10, 1978, p. B1.
327 Flamboyant mob attorney: Frank Murray, “Ben Cohen Cries ‘Mercy,’ Is
  Led Off to Jail,” Miami News, November 30, 1966; “Ben Cohen, Mr. Big
  Criminal Lawyer, Dies in Miami Beach of Cancer at 76,” Miami News,
  August 28, 1979, p. 4A.
328 612 was the area code: George Monaghan, “The Child in a Man,”
  Minneapolis Star-Tribune, September 19, 1991, p. 1E.
328 Found a high-rise: Gene Collier, “There’s Martin Luther King, There’s
  Gandhi . . . and There’s Fred Rogers,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, March 9,
  2003.
328 began calling himself Joybubbles: Andrew T. Huse, interview with
  Joybubbles, University of South Florida Oral History Program, August 23,
  2004. Monaghan, in “The Child in a Man,” puts the year Engressia began
  calling himself Joybubbles as 1988.
328 “We were on a retreat”: Jim Ragsdale, “One Name Says It All,” St. Paul
  Pioneer Press, November 27, 2005, p. A1.
328 “I’m a survivor”: Huse, interview with Joybubbles.
329 legally changed his name: Ibid.
329 “Nobody knows how much peace”: Collier, “There’s Martin Luther
  King.”
329 selected it to be the word processor: John Markoff and Paul Freiberger,
  “Visit with Cap’n Software, Forthright Forth Enthusiast,” Infoworld,
  October 11, 1982, p. 31.
329 “wealthy executive”: Pete Carey, “Cap’n Crunch Programs His Way from
  Jail to Success,” Chicago Tribune, May 25, 1983, p. D1.
329 personal fortunes were crumbling: Alexander Besher, “The Crunching
  of America,” Infoworld, June 18, 1984, p. 66.
329 forging tickets to BART: Gary Richards, “‘Captain Crunch’ Charged in
  Ticket Forgery,” San Jose Mercury News, January 9, 1987, p. 1B; “John
  Draper at AutoDesk,” DigiBarn Computer Museum interview with John
  Draper, May 2006, at http://www.digibarn.com/collections/audio/digibarn-
  radio/06-05-john-draper-autodesk.
330 where-are-they-now newspaper article: Chris Rhodes, “The Twilight
  Years of Cap’n Crunch,” Wall Street Journal, January 13, 2007.
330 TAP ceased publication: See http://artofhacking.com/tap. In 1989
  another group not affiliated with the original TAP crew restarted the
  newsletter and printed issues 92 through 107.
330 a new hacker/phone phreak publication: “AHOY!” 2600, January 1984,
  p. 1.
330 area code “321”: “3-2-1, Call Cape Canaveral,” New York Times,
  November 23, 1999.
331–332 wired telephone lines . . . had peaked: Trends in Telephone
  Service, Federal Communications Commission, September 2010, at
  http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-301823A1.pdf.
333 “It was the magic of the fact”: Santa Clara Valley Historical
  Association, interview with Steve Jobs from “Silicon Valley: A 100-Year
  Renaissance,” 1998, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFURM8O-oYI.
334 MIT students proudly displayed: Russell Ryan, Zack Anderson, and
  Alessandro      Chiesa,   “Anatomy    of     a   Subway     Hack,”   at
  http://tech.mit.edu/V128/N30/subway/Defcon_Presentation.pdf;    Michael
  McGraw-Herdeg and Marissa Vogt, “MBTA Sues Three Students to Stop
  Speech on Subway Vulnerabilities,” The Tech, August 25, 2008.
        ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

WRITING IS OFTEN said to be a lonely endeavor. Yet as I look
back over the five years I spent researching and writing
this book, I am awed and humbled both by the number of
people who have been involved and all the things they have
contributed. People have shared their stories with me,
given me documents and recordings and historical artifacts,
made introductions on my behalf, answered my questions,
processed my Freedom of Information Act requests, helped
me with writing or editing or research, and encouraged me
to keep at it.
 I am most grateful to those I interviewed or corresponded
with to collect their stories; this book would not exist
without them. Sadly, not everyone who shared something
with me could be featured as a character or even quoted in
this book. Regardless, every person I talked to contributed
bits of context that I hope I have been able to mold into a
collective and coherent history. I would like to thank the
following:
 The      phone      phreaks,     telephone     enthusiasts,
telecommunications experts, and their friends and
relations: George A., Ralph Barclay, Jack Bariton, Fred
Belton, Mark Bernay, Sid Bernay, Trudy Boardman, Ed
Buckley, John-Elmer Canfield, Cheshire Catalyst, Colin
Chambers, Bob Clements, David Condon, John Covert, Mark
Cuccia, Al Diamond, Richard Dillman, Jed Donnelley, Evan
Doorbell, John Draper, Ron “Ducks,” Stephen Dunne, Tom
Edison, Esther Engressia, Toni Engressia, Jim Fettgather,
Alan Fierstein, Don Froula, Al Gilbertson, Bob Gudgel,
Grant Gysbers, Anita Harris, Max Hauser, Dennis Heinz,
John Higdon, Doug Humphrey, Joybubbles, Roy Kaylor,
Nagy Khattar, Francis Kriokorian, David Kulka, Robert
LaFond, Tony Lauck, David Lewis, Kim Lingo, Robert
Lipman,Jake Locke, Rudolph Loew, Lucky225, Greg
MacPherson, Joe Maximetz, John McNamara, Chuck Meyer,
Onnig Minasian, Stuart Nelson, Jay from New York,
Stephen Owades, Jon D. Paul of the Crypto-Museum, Jerry
Petrizze, Rick Plath, M. J. Poirier, Tom Politeo, Jim Prather,
Larry Rachman, Jodd Readick, Bob Reite, Bob Riddell,
“Rogtag,” Ed Ross, Jim Roth, John Sawyer, Adam Schoolsky,
Robert Shaw, Bill Squire, Hoyt Stearns, David Tarnowski,
Denny Teresi, John Treichler, Brough Turner, Rick Turner,
Richard Weissberg, Steve Wozniak, Herb Yeates, and Norm
Zimon.
 Former employees of the telephone companies and their
associates, friends, and families: H. W. William (Bill) Caming
of AT&T, Bob Ginnings of Hekimian Labs, Ken Hopper and
Amos E. Joel Jr. of Bell Laboratories, Helmut Kaunzinger of
Pacific Telephone, Rob Mang of New York Telephone, Bob
McLuckie of BC Telephone, Wayne Perrin of Pacific
Telephone, Nelson Saxe of AT&T Long Lines, Walter
Schmidt (and his son and daughter-in-law, Bill and Julia) of
General Telephone, Swede Sorensen of Pacific Telephone,
Ed Turnley of Southern Bell and AT&T, and John Whitman
and H. Richard Zapf of New York Telephone.
 Members of the law enforcement community: Jay Cochran,
Bob Federspiel, Dennis Feine, Harold “Skip” Gladden, Bill
Harward, Bud Heister, Dick Lytle, Edwin J. Sharp, Bill Snell,
Ray Wannall, Warren Welsh, and Jack Wilgus, all formerly
with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Bill Earle, a
former Justice Department attorney, and Floy Dawson, a
former assistant U.S. attorney.
 Members of the press: Wayne Green, Ron Kessler, Louis J.
Rose, and Ron Rosenbaum.
 Much of the material in this book is based on documents
released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and
the civil servants responsible for handling this often
thankless task deserve recognition. Since the Federal
Bureau of Investigation was the agency that spent the most
time investigating phone phreaks, it had the misfortune to
receive the lion’s share of my FOIA requests, more than 350
in all. Its representatives bore up under this paper
onslaught with professionalism and even the occasional bit
of laughter. At the FBI I am indebted to Dottie Bailey,
Kathleen Boyle, Craig Clevenger, Theresa Fowler, Kim
Garver, Margaret Jackson, Moira Lattimore, Kara Lewis,
Debbie Lopes, Candy McCulloh, Travis Mumaw, Patricia
Nice, Becky Peterson, Tonia Robertson, Loren Shaver, David
Sobonya, Mike Stevens, Lori Synnamon, Erin Uptigraph,
and Marla Williamson—to say nothing of the many other
members of the FBI Record/Information Dissemination
Section whose names I don’t know and who toiled behind
the scenes processing my requests. My thanks, too, go to
the staff at the Department of Justice Office of Information
Policy, who handled my several FOIA appeals. At the
Department of Justice Criminal Division, Kathleen Segui
was most helpful. At the National Security Agency, Pamela
Phillips and Marianne Stupar and their nameless staff
worked diligently on several of my requests, including one
that took almost three years to complete. Other historical
documents came from the National Archives and Records
Administration, where I am particularly grateful to Steven
Tilley and Jay Olin for slogging through box after box of
records in search of old memos and files.
 At the AT&T Corporate Archives, George Kupczak and Bill
Caughlin helped with my research requests and were kind
enough to let me spend two days at their facility in New
Jersey. Sellam Ismail of VintageTech was good enough to
open his archives for me as well.
 Several people deserve special thanks. One is Bill Acker, a
phone phreak and twenty-seven-year veteran of the Bell
System who spent hundreds of hours on the phone with me,
reliving stories, answering my questions, and patiently
explaining bits of telephone network esoterica. Another is
Ken Hopper, a former distinguished member of the
technical staff at Bell Laboratories and the head of its
Telephone Crime Lab; even though he was quite ill at the
time, Ken and his wife, Barbara, let me invade their home
and spent days with me reviewing documents,
remembering cases, answering questions, and making
introductions. Charlie Pyne hosted me at his home,
answered numerous questions, and worked diligently to
track down relevant FBI files and the Fine Arts 13
notebook. John Gilbert, Wayne Perrin, Alan Rubinstein,
Steve Sawyer, and Ed Turnley all helped with thoughtful
discussions and treasure troves of old documents and
recordings. Former FBI assistant director Edwin J. Sharp
educated me on the fight against organized crime in the
1960s and introduced me to numerous former FBI special
agents, all while keeping my spirits up with well-timed
emails of encouragement. Michael Ravnitzky, my Freedom
of Information Act guru and an irrepressible researcher,
helped craft FOIA requests and appeals, solved missing-
person puzzles, decoded FBI files, and dug up amazing bits
of relevant history on his own initiative. Mio Cohen imposed
order on chaos by developing a filing system that allowed
me to actually locate and use the thousands of documents
and records I had amassed. Jordan Hayes, the best system
administrator in the world, supported my requests for
domain names and Web hosting with patience and humor.
Jackie Cheong loaned me her quiet office so I could write;
her husband, Curt Hardyck, denied me the office wifi
password so that I actually would write. Jason Scott of
textfiles.com    offered     invaluable    insights, guidance,
introductions, and feedback. Steven Gibb, the executor of
Joybubbles’s estate, graciously provided access to
Joybubbles’s (né Joe Engressia’s) old tapes and documents.
Sam Etler, Steph Kerman, and Mark Cuccia became my go-
to resources for technical questions about the telephone
network of the 1960s and ’70s.
 Andy Couturier of the Opening and Jane Brunette of
flamingseed.com provided invaluable help and coaching
with my writing and the book’s organization. I was lucky
enough to be part of several outstanding writing groups
while working on this book; I would like to particularly
thank Katrina Alcorn, Novella Carpenter, Jodi Halpern,
Rachel Lehman-Haupt, Martha Snider, and Robin Bishop
for their help. Mio Cohen, George Cook, John and Nancy
Gilbert, Jake Locke, Charlie and Betsy Pyne, Mary Rowe,
Steve Sawyer, and Jason Scott reviewed early drafts of the
manuscript and provided thoughtful feedback. Jennifer
Eyre White, Katie Hafner, Bobbie Pires, and Dan Shimizu
read some of my earliest writing attempts and book
proposals.
 Don Kennison’s careful copy editing of the manuscript
prevented me from committing both atrocities of grammar
and errors of fact, for which I am grateful; any errors that
remain are, alas, my own. At Grove/Atlantic, Isobel Scott
ably assisted in the production of the book. My editor,
Jamison Stoltz, brought both enthusiasm and focus to the
project. He blends a historian’s eye for detail with a writer’s
love for words and an editor’s clarity of thought; his touch
can be found on every page.
 My ultimate gratitude is to my wife, Rachael Rusting,
whose belief in this project and love for me was
unwavering.
 Thank you all.