PLAYING TRICKS ON 'MA BELL'

Early hackers made free phone calls with a toy whistle and managed to reach the president on an unlisted hotline.
By HOWARD SCHNEIDER

John 'Captain Crunch' Draper in 1978

Exploding the Phone
By Phil Lapsley 
Grove, 431 pages, $26


AT&T, like Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, once bestrode the world like a colossus. In its heyday, from 1925 to 1984, it was a government-sanctioned and -regulated nationwide monopoly that was nearly all-powerful within its purview. Like Caesar, AT&T deployed legions—support and security personnel, scientists, engineers and lawyers—to buttress and enhance its domain. Also like Caesar, it was skewered by a small band of rebels. AT&T's perforators—proto-hackers who saw the phone system as an illicit puzzle to be conquered—became known as "phone phreaks"; their daggers were cunning electronic devices, technical expertise and nerve. Phil Lapsley's "Exploding the Phone" is an authoritative, jaunty and enjoyable account of their sometimes comical, sometimes impressive and sometimes disquieting misdeeds. (click below to read more)




Founded in 1877 as the Bell Telephone Co., AT&T by the late 1960s and early 1970s "was the largest company in the world as measured by assets or by employees," Mr. Lapsley writes (there were more than a million of the latter). The phone network was also, in effect, "the largest machine in the world"—a globe-spanning web of copper wires punctuated by human operators and clacking electromechanical switches.

The network was an irresistible lure for certain technology buffs. One or two young men first realized in the 1950s that they could explore the network by bluffing their way past operators and applying scraps of technical knowledge. But the phone-phreak phenomenon began in earnest a few years later. In 1960, an 18-year-old freshman named Ralph Barclay came across the latest issue of the Bell System Technical Journal in the Washington State University library. He was amazed: "It laid bare the technical inner workings of AT&T's long-distance telephone network." Building on what he read, Barclay cobbled together the first "blue box," a device that, by generating the musical tones that AT&T used to route calls, allowed the user to make free long-distance calls.

One insidious invention or technique led to another. Subsequent phreakers, who sought each other out by word of mouth and even cryptic classified ads, taught each other how to finesse AT&T in all sorts of ways. They made free conference calls, eavesdropped on other users (including the FBI) and sent mischievous calls along ridiculously complicated paths, such as from Boston to Milwaukee to Portland, Ore., to Denver to Little Rock, Ark., to New York and back via Boston to a nearby pay phone.

Mr. Lapsley conscientiously chronicles how organized crime and counterculture types hoodwinked Ma Bell for financial and ideological reasons. Bookies used blue boxes to avoid being monitored by the authorities. The left-wing radical Abbie Hoffman co-founded a newsletter, the Youth International Party Line, that urged readers to rip off AT&T as a way to ding the Establishment. Mr. Lapsley's heart, however, is clearly with the "idealists" who infiltrated the phone company for amusement and the challenge—guys (all the phreaks seem to be male) like Joe Engressia, a blind teenager who could produce the precisely modulated control tones by whistling.

Mr. Lapsley also describes John Draper, aka Captain Crunch, who was probably the most celebrated of the phreakers; his nickname derived from the fact that whistles that used to come in Cap'n Crunch cereal boxes happened to generate the key 2600-Hz tone used in long-distance switching. Draper didn't discover the extracurricular use of that whistle, but among the exploits he did take credit for was discovering an unlisted hotline to the White House. When he called and confidently asked for the president by code name—"Olympus, please"—he was connected to someone who sounded "remarkably like Nixon."

The phone-phreak netherworld was introduced to a mass audience by the October 1971 issue of Esquire magazine, which included what has to be (at least indirectly) one of the most influential articles ever written: Ron Rosenbaum's "Secrets of the Little Blue Box." Not only did it turn phreakers into folk heroes, but it inspired two young men, Steve Wozniak (who provided the foreword for this book) and Steve Jobs, to construct and sell blue boxes. Going door to door in Berkeley dorms, they managed to sell several dozen at $170 each. The "two Steves" savored this mix of clever engineering and entrepreneurial hustle: As Mr. Lapsley quotes Jobs saying: "If we hadn't made blue boxes, there would have been no Apple." (Mr. Rosenbaum's article also put the "phreak" into "phone phreak.")

Needless to say, the phone phreaks made Ma Bell (AT&T's ambivalent nickname) livid. The company's efforts at suppression were fairly successful because they made the phreaks profoundly paranoid; but what finished them off, for the most part, was, ironically, technology: By the 1980s, computerized phone systems and fiber-optic cables rendered many of the old phreaking modes obsolete. In addition, I can't help suspecting that the breakup of AT&T in 1984—the result of an antitrust lawsuit filed by the federal government—deeply discouraged the hard-core phreaks. Surreptitiously penetrating one of the shriveled new regional phone companies must have seemed a paltry caper compared with taking on mighty, majestic AT&T.

Mr. Lapsley is a former consultant at McKinsey & Co. and startup entrepreneur. His prose, though playfully breezy, is sometimes too dependent on clichés ("appearances can be deceiving," "he was off to the races"); and non-geeks will find some of the technology descriptions hard to navigate. Nevertheless, said non-geeks will usually, I think, be able to follow who is doing what to what. Moreover, the author's love of his subject pervades "Exploding the Phone" and persuaded this reader, at least, that the phone phreaks are worthy of thoughtful attention.

I must, however, take issue with one of Mr. Lapsley's conclusions. In reflecting on the phreaks' legacy, he writes: "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." Is that truly what they taught us? I think the phone-company officials and FBI agents in this book come off better than the phreaks: They were diligent, professional and, for the most part, sensitive to relevant legal issues. (For the most part: Project Greenstar, a secret warrantless wiretapping campaign implemented by AT&T in the 1960s to combat phreaking, though technically legal, wasn't the company's finest hour.) The phreaks strike me as puerile and sinister—sinister because I see them as the precursors of today's malicious, pernicious cyberpranksters.

Wilt Chamberlain supposedly once said that "nobody roots for Goliath." Perhaps. But the lesson to be learned from those waging guerrilla war against giants like the phone company and the Internet is that sophomoric savants who tamper with society's indispensable systems ultimately harm all too many innocent people.