Phreaking as UE

I get the feeling that there is a great lot of things that exist in this 
world that most people do not know about.  I am particularly assailed by this 
feeling when reading anything that deals with phreaking.  While I'm not 
positive as to why I get these feelings, it could be that the phone system 
is so vast and labrynthine.  It is the medium that we use to connect to so 
many others on this planet; I call Johnny B. Good and he calls his brother 
in Europe and he dials into the internet and has a chat with his buddy from 
New York who is on cable/DSL and is scanning (800) 515-2xxx for ANI's or 
VMB's while an FBI agent sits across the street jacked into New York Bob's 
line listening to the mad l33t social engineering skillz0rs....

Anyways, you get the picture.  It's all interconnected.  It's been around 
for long enough for everyone to be connected.  I compare the concept of the 
phone system to a partially abandoned hotel or mall complex.  There are old 
wings of both that house untold secrets; two phreakers in Toronto 
connected into a loop chatting about the thrill of being passed by a cop, 
perhaps it could be a few shady executives planning the next wave of fraud.
I picture the world of the phone as a maze of corridors in some dead 
juggernaut of a building, rusted and rotting in some places and freshly 
painted in others.

I sometimes feel like we are all ignorant of the shady cogs and gears that just
might be out there, lurking.  As if the skin of the world - George Bush and 
Saddam's conflict, Jane and Joe's marriage, Becky's first adult tooth, my 
nights in front of my computer, an illegal drug deal in South America - is
simply a facade that hides the true horror of the real world - demons of the
worst nightmares, lawyers, and other assorted evils.  These feelings are likely
just the creations of a bored mind that wishes for some evil to slay in an
attempt to save the world or some nonsense; irrational paranoia stemming from
an overactive immagination that simply watches too many TV shows and stays up
too late listening to jazz music and reading HackCanada.com articles.  But,
as it has been said in various forms, 'just because someone is paranoid doesn't
mean that people aren't out to get them'.

There seems to be a whole world of possibilities out there, both in the area
of phones and abandoned/restricted/dangerous places.  A system of drains 
presents a maze that begs exploration and mapping, as does the phone system;
at least to the fonejack of olden days, when I was still part of a group 
that found interest in that system of communication that everyone has grown
to love and hate.

I remember nights when me and Ronald X would manually scan from my home line, 
not thinking of the possible risks that may have been associated with that.
I remember the feeling that filled me up when we would hear a strange
combination of tones that signify a test line or whatever it meant.  The
feeling was fear; fear of the unknown and fear of the possibilities of the
sallow underbelly of the world of man swallowing us up for stumbling onto 
some vague and incomprehensible plot.  These fears are unfounded, certainly,
but that never held them at bay.  I remember calling an 800 number that I 
found in a scan by The Clone from HackCanada.com where someone picked up on
the other end with a rather casual "hello?"  After asking where I had reached
and encountering resistance I hung up the phone with the image of some 
massive corporate/government building that was shut off from the public, where
experiments or dirty dealings were held.  I remember the night that prez and
myself found a voice mailbox that housed 500 or so messages from some sort of
Bell automated service... The messages consisted of a computer voice saying
"message from NODE ONE" in that broken speech that computers are prone to.
Some of the messages sounded like a businessman calling home to leave a message
on his home answering machine for his wife, some sounded like a lineman 
calling to test a line, others were strings of numbers read out by that
odd computery voice.  To this day, the thought of that VMB sends my mind into
fits of curiosity, as we never discovered the meaning of the mailbox; prez
accidentally deleted the messages, and the next time we checked for the box,
it was gone, replaced with a "this number is not in service" error message 
from handy ol' Bell.

Nearly everyone has a connection to this vast network of mystery in their
home; cordless, physical or whatever... it connects them to a world of
possibilities that is much like an abandoned factory, beckoning onlookers
to explore the rusted pits and broken machinery that tells of days gone by.

Althought I no longer find terrible interest in the phone system for the sake
of exploration, I turn my attention to buildings and drains.

fonejack
January 16, 2003
http://fone.desrt.ca:81/