8
University Daily Kansar
Phone 'Phreaking' Plotted by Opponents of 'Ma Bell'
By SIMON WINCHESTER The Manchester Guardian
NEW YORK-The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution declares resolutely that "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech."
But according to the rate schedule issued by the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company, it now costs me $1.35 to speak for three minutes to someone in San Francisco from my telephone in Maryland. And that is not free speech.
Not in the view of the Technological American Party, that is. This thousand-strong group, which held its second annual convention in a scruffy New York hotel this month, believes that America, which undoubtedly has one of the best telephone systems in the world, should also have the free-est system.
Accordingly, for the past 2½ years the youthful technocrats who make up the membership of TAP have been issuing messages that are difficult to defraud, fiddle, steal from, or generally rip off the American telephone system. Since they have the Constitution behind them, they reason, it all good, clean fun, in the public interest and morally right.
"PHONE PHEAKING," as the practice of riping off the phone company is inegligent known, began here about five years ago when two bright young students named John Draper and Joe Engrgress discovered there were more ways of speaking to the corner store than dropping a dime in the slot.
John Draper came to be known in prehaking circles as "Captain Crunch" when he discovered that the frequency of a call from his phone could trick telephone lines, and thus the potential to make free calls across the globe, was the same frequency as that emitted by a small plastic shell supplied free with every dose of some sugar-frosted breakfast cereal.
Blind Joe Engressia had no such serendipity. He had, instead, a super mind for international dialing codes and operator commands and switching procedures, and over the months became an expert in winning free telephone calls from Moscow to Madagascar from his home telephone in Memphis.
JOE CLAIMS NO animosity towards the Bell system, the manager of the major portion of America's internal communications network. In fact he says that when he was seven, "I used to lie awake and think of myself as working for Ma Bell and going out at a stormy night in my big boots on a rainy day," and I had hundred phones back on circuit, I had a romantic view of Ma Bell which it still keep, tucked away, to this day.
"All I have done (and what Joe has done cost him a hefty fee and a threatened five year term in a federal penitentiary) has been purely for the fun of it — I have never really wanted to defraud the system. Some day I guess I'd like to work for Bell, if they'd ever have me . . . " and his voice trails away as he speaks. "I don't want my phone tapster is listening out there for his appeals for work, and warning to his secret love affair with old Ma Bell.
But the boys of TAP, who took their boost from Abbie Hoffman of the Chicago Seven, of the Yippies and of "steal this book" fame, take no such charitable view of Ma Bell. Such visions of dedicated storm repair man tramping through the hurricane to bring service back to an isolated village have gone viral. The town was a south Texas town who called the local doctor for you if you ever had a midnight 'badache and couldn't find the number.
CALL "INFORMATION" now from that small Texas town and you will be connected to the long-distance information operator way up in Dallas, who probably never heard of the town you're in and who will give you a phone number. You won't only hear you have given her all the information that your fuddled mind can remember. Ma Bell—or Miss Bell, as the system's public relations men are now trying to tell us—is becoming with every day even more enormously efficient, increasingly impersonal, and enormously wealthy.
It is the wealth and the apparent monopoly of the Bell system that really jars the technology hippies of TAP. The "Bell Telephone System" as such does not exist; it is instead a vast $80 billion conglomerate, which, in the name of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, has huge stockholdings in most of the major local Bell companies (like C and P in the Middle Atlantic region, or Pacific Northeast Bell or New Jersey Bell, all owned by 65 per cent and 100 per cent by AT 1).
THE SAME COMPANY owns Western Electric, which makes nearly all telephone equipment used in the states, and in addition it owes half of the stock in the Bell telephone laboratories which do most of the basic communications research.
AT and T, from its dusty offices down at the lower end of Broadway, controls a vast empire of communications, the very nerves and ganglia of American society. It owns it, operates it purely for profit, and offloads hundreds of millions of dollars each year in insurance companies, insurance insurance companies and brokerage houses who own the bulk of the company stock.
To be sure, there are, in this free enterprise America, many, many small and private telephone companies—more than 2,000 of them, in fact, ranging in size from a few dozen to over one thousand. Theor, Mo, which owns 160 telephones that netted less than 2,000 dollars in 1965, right up to the huge, AT and T general telephone of California, which owns nearly 2 million instruments in suburban Los Angeles, which also has multiplicity of local Bell systems, controls nearly 90 million of America's 110 million telephones.
IT 18. AS writers and congressmen and competitors have repeatedly pointed out, though to little avail, a monopoly, which regulates the flow of speech from one American to another purely for the benefits of its stockholders—and that, in the view of the boys at TAP, is constitutionally improper and morally wrong.
To defraud Ma Bell, whom TAP identifies as public enemy No. 1, the phreaks have devised any number of clever, not so clever and totally bizarre ways of getting around the system which was held at the room in which he was held in an upstairs room at a hotel off Times Square.
To explain the techniques they all wear masks and to preserve their anonymity all called themselves Al (for Alexander Graham) Bell.
One of these Al Bells called me up to invite me to the convention. So elaborately did he rig his call; it came from Honolulu, he said. "We had all been completely insane for the next two hours.
A BELL said it was the company's way of getting their revenge for what they had realized must have been a free call. (To me the way of getting revenge for a moment I was back in Britain.)
The simplest way of getting a free call from a coin box is when the operator asks you to put in money. Coins register at the exchange—in the older boxes—by making a
"dinq" for a Nickel, a "dink ding" for a fume and "donq" for a quarter.
What you do to beat the system is to put all your coins, when the operator asks you, in the phone box next to you, making sure that you hold the mouthpiece of your phone up against the card box of your phone and the dings and the dongs and the ding-dings. The bell lady says that it's fine and connects you. You have your talk and hang up; and then you press the coin return button of your neighbor's phone—back up, and back up, and you make a free call.
But the Bell System began to get wise to that about a year ago, and so the TAP people have now invented something called an iPad, which was put on display at the convention.
DINGS and dongs are out, it seems,
in the interests of security. Bleeps and blurps
By electronic noises can be simulated, as the moog synthesizer has demonstrated. The red box is a little Moog synthesizer which accurately duplicates the sound of a speaker. All a caller has to do is to order his call through the operator, put the speaker end of his Red Box up against the mouthpiece of his phone, and the operator will connect him for nought. You can also sell the speaker by selling like hot cakes at the convention. The Bell System fears that it could lose $100
million or more this year in fraudulent calls made with red Boxes.
Another, nonelectronic way of busting the system is to use busog or stolen telephone credit card numbers. I use my信用卡 nearly every day; it contains a number, which I have to give to the operator, which I want to be charged for. The number, a three-digit city code, and a letter which, according to a code system which changes every year, relates to one of the digits in my phone number. Give this number to the operator and she will punch it on to a computer for a recorded female call her "OK," and your call will be connected.
But these methods, and many, many more of similar kinds are horribly crude in the eyes and the ears of the devotees of the church. They also cause trouble for the brother, the Black Box, which remain the Hope diamonds of the craft, and the language that surrounds their use remains to the true pheasels like Eegregressia, John Pine and old phreaking grand-daddies in the TAP.
uancee Automatic Message Accountant. This machine records your number, the date and the time, and the number you have just dialed; it then relay all the information received to you, which swings your call on to a free transcontinental telephone trunk line.
The Blue Box is basically a system of electronic oscillators that emit precise double tones that exactly simulate the tones used to activate the worldwide telephone switching systems. To use one is simplicity and efficiency; however, requires a little explanation of the method of trunk line switching and accounting.
Once the toll sender was found a free line it sends a series of multifrequency pulses (or MF pulses)—the same double pulses which a Blue Box is designed to generate—across to something called "incoming sent calls" and then back to New York. To office receive the call, send it down to the central office exchange identified by the three first digits of the number; the control office sends it farther, to the telephone you're calling, by identifying the last four numbers. And then, once the distant phone is picked up, a signal goes all the way back to the California central office and to the CAMA machine, which notes that the call has begun, and activates the charging mechanism.
PHREAKS MAKE up their own card numbers just as soon as they have cracked the code each January. Some braver and more impertinent souls simply find the credit card numbers of the representatives who work for them in General Motors, and let these vast and wealthy corporations pick up the tab for all their trunk calls.
stereo components
LET US SAY you are in Los Angeles and want to dial a call to New York City. First, the pulses from your dialing go to your local phone number. Then, the vibrator device calls the CAMA, the Cen-
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