What are phone phreaks?

I'll tell you later. Al Right, it relates to what we're gonna talk about today. I yes, the telephone, yes, not just the telephone system though, but how to exploit it for your own nefarious means, well, not necessarily nefarious. We're talking about phone freaking, yes, which actually when it started out, was not necessarily meant as a way of exploiting the phone system. Was more of a way of

exploring it. Yes, And would you believe, actually you would, But would you, the listener believe that at one point in the United States you could make free long distance calls with the help of a toy whistle from a serial box. I don't believe it, except that I know that that's true because Draper did it. Yes, indeed, So let's talk a little bit about what led to phone freaking. So in the old and old and olden days of the telephone system, which really weren't that old when you

think about it. But you know, you know, when we're talking, we're not talking about geologic time periods here. Okay, all right, in the early part of the twentieth century, when the phone system was a new and beautiful thing. Um, you would you would normally connect your calls by connecting to an operator who would complete the circuit to whatever your destination call was going to be, and actually go through

several operators. In fact, yeah, I think even our probably even our youngest list nurse have seen some TV show or movie where they have the operators sitting with the headphones on in front of a giant switchboard, literally a giant switchboard where they plugged in cables to route calls. I mean that that image is sort of iconic, right, So that that was the manual way of routing a call through the system so that you could get hold of whoever it was, whoever it was you were trying to, uh,

speak to um. Now. Eventually we managed to advance technology to the point where we could automate the system, and by automating the system, some interesting things started to pop up. For one thing, people who were interested in electronics and puzzles and that kind of thing sort of looked at the phone system as a big challenge figuring out how it worked from the outside. Yeah. Actually we call these

people hackers. And not because you know that that's we'll get into the connotations of that and more deeply in a few minutes. But um, people who like to take things part and see what they can do with them and employ it for other purposes. Um. Those those people, often especially now call themselves hackers. And uh, you know, it could be used just because you're interested in the technology and what lies behind it and what you can do with it. Um. But unfortunately some people also use that,

uh you know, for their own nefarious purposes. And uh, the the word hacker has taken on that kind of negative connotation. Yeah. What's interesting is that I think you can kind of draw parallels between phone freaking, the history of phone freaking, and the history of computer hacking. Oh. I can definitely draw those parallels because I read about

that in researching this podcast. Right, It's it's not just that some phone freakers, some very prominent ones, switched from phone freaking to computer hacking, but also that the the process in which the uh the the whole concept of freaking started to leak into a larger audience um meant that you suddenly had people who were using it to take advantage of the system. Just as with the earliest hackers, they weren't necessarily interested in in hacking computers for their

own personal gain. They were interested in learning more about the system, how it works, and how you know to get around certain things, and and maybe even ultimately how to improve the system. And then later as more people got interested in hacking, they were getting interested in it in the term of like, how can I make this

work for me? So both freaking and hacking have kind of undergone that sort of that that evolution where it started with people who are just curious, and it ultimately lead to people who are like, how can I how can I leverage my my knowledge of the system to get something that I'm not entitled to Well, according to UH Too Cyberpunk, which is a book by Katie Hafner and John Markoff, UM, the people who were really into phone freaking, UM, including people like Kevin Mitnick, who's you know,

quite famous computer hacker. UM. Part of it stemmed directly from phone freaking. Like, as things changed and and the system became more computerized, they wanted to continue digging into the telephone system, so they began learning how to manipulate the computers that ran the telephone system. So you know, there is a direct It was basically a direct move from one to the other. UM. And then of course

computers became used for other things. And so let's start back all the way back to nineteen sixty one, All right, nineteen sixty ones, when we first kind of know that people were starting to play around with the phone system and find interesting ways to to manipulate it. UM. Back then, they weren't known as phone freaks. They had they had really no term at all. For one thing, they were mostly individuals or maybe a couple of people who knew each other. UM. But there was no like organized group.

There were no newsletter. All of that would come later. It wasn't until nineteen sixty three when an m I t issue of the Tech that was their their newsletter came out. It was their November twenty issue. Actually, uh, the the author of that piece said, called them, uh hackers, telephone hackers. Okay, so that's when we first get the hacker term. And then a few years later, actually quite a few years later, Ron Rosenbaum in Esquire in ninete

coined the term phone freaks to describe these people. So exactly what were these people doing. Well, for one thing, they were getting hold of any kind of technical manuals they could possibly find that would explain the phone system. And then they were kind of exploring it because the phone system was a very mysterious thing. Now, if you just looked at it from a surface level, you thought, oh, well, I've got a phone ideal, these numbers, and then I'm

connected to the person on the other end. The phone freaks were interested with how does that work? How is it that when you pick up the phone and you dial these numbers that this gets routed to this specific person. And they knew that the phone companies had a whole series of secret signals that they would use behind the scenes to keep things running. And they were wondering, what

are these secret signals and what do they do? Yeah, what was going on in between, say the switchboards that we spoke of earlier, and the earlier forms of automation before it got so computerized in the nineties. Uh, and probably a little bit before that, I'm guessing, um is everything was sound based. Um, so there were a lot of different ways to if you if you knew what you were doing and could replicate the right pitch of sound into a phone microphone, then you could take control

of certain aspects of the system. So it one. It was one of those things where it became a a challenge to figure out what these other tones were and how they how they worked, and what you could do with them. Yeah, this kind of leads us to Joe and grass Syria Ingressia. I'm sorry I mispronounced that last name. Ingressia. Yes, the whistler. So Joe was he was a curious kid. Um he he was, Um, well, he's a blind kid. He was like seven years old when he when he

first found out. One of the things he liked to do, because Joe is a wild and crazy kid back then, was he like to listen to automated messages for unconnected phone lines. He just thought that was kind of cool. He would he would dial number and listen to it and listen to the connection. And according to Joe, one time he was listening and he was sort of whistling to himself as he was listening to this this recorded message, and the recording message stopped, and he thought, well, why

did the message stop? So eventually he actually called eight and T and said, hey, I want to know that. I want to know why this happens when I'm whistling into the phone. Why does this recording stop? And the engineer on the other end of the line made a

colossal mistake. The engineer explained that the phone system used a twenty six hundred hurts tone to operate on on the trunk line um and that if you created this tone, it was essentially a message to the trunk line that the call had ended, and it would it would end, it would stop the call. Joe figured out from this that if he could if he could whistle twenty six hurts frequency, which he could because he had perfect pitch hundred hurts. I'm sorry, did I miss It was just

one of those things twenty hurts. So yeah, if he if he could whistle that perfectly, he could signal to this trunk line that a phone call had ended, and if he then whistled at that same frequency a certain number of times, could theoretically dial a number um and and make a free long distance phone call. Now, the way this had to work was you couldn't just call any number and whistle in and have it work. Um. It all depended on the way the phone systems were

constructed regionally. You had to actually first make a long distance call for this to work. But you can make a long distance call to a winning a hundred numbers, so you're not getting a charge. So you make that one a hundred number call, you get connected, uh, and then you make the whistling noise which tells the trunk line, hey, this call is over, so you're still connected through to the trunk and then you whistle again to dial whatever number it is, and then uh, you get connected to

your long distance call for free. Yes, not everyone could do this on their own. No, but but John Draper figured out a way to do it. Yeah, John Draper, he has an interest sting nickname too. You got Joe who was the whistler? What was the Draper's nickname? That would be Captain Crunch And why would his nickname be

Captain Crunch. We know. I saw on TV a few years ago this this person who invented all the different kinds of little toys and gadgets and stuff that they would throw in cereal boxes, little plastic goodies that they would throw in their tops, and and uh jack's and whistles. And as it turns out that draper found out that this little uh actually I've seen pictures of it looks sort of like a Boson's pipe. Yeah, hey, that was good. Do you think we could take over the phone lines anyway?

It turns more, it turns out that when you when you blew through this whistle, it produced a pitch of oh hurts. Yeah, you had to cover one of the there were two holes that would generate the sound. If you covered one of the two, you could generate hurts. I think the other one was if you covered the other one, I'd have to look it up now. And if you covered both, you could wistle to dogs, because he would make a noise that no human could hear. But but yeah, he dug that plastic whistle out of

you know, a cereal box. You know, since his nickname was Captain Crunch, you could guess that it was probably out of a box of prudy pebbles, right, honestly, just so. But you want to understand he actually found out that it made the right tone, not on his own, but because he was in a conversation with Joe the Whistler, and it was through speaking with him that he found out that this this little whistle could do the same

thing that Joe could do naturally. So obviously the Captain Crunch whistles became a sought after item by phone freaks, people who are interested in in, like I said, manipulating the phone system and really finding out how it worked and listening to these beefs and clicks and wondering, okay, well how can I make this to kind of navigate my way through the system. So not not everyone used them, but they became kind of a status symbol, like if you owned one, you were part of the twenty s club,

you know. I actually saw some for sale on eBay, so you can you can still get hold of them, and they're not terribly expensive. They're not really useful either. That's the thing is at this point, they're just sort of a collector's item, right, They're not useful in in phone circles because the phone system is totally different now than what it was back then. But at any rate, so you started seeing a culture of these people start up.

Whereas all these folks who are who are finding out ways to manipulate the phone system and not since not everyone could get hold of a Captain crunch whistle or make the whistle on their own, uh, they had to

find or create devices that could do it for them. Also, we should mention that the whistling technique, this hurts technique only worked on single frequency phone systems, and the phone systems at that time we're undergoing a transformation where a lot of them were switching to multiple multiple frequency systems, which meant that you would have too frequencies play at

the same time. I see whistle sophisticated right, Whistling to frequencies at the same time not an easy task to do so, um, so you had to start creating a system device that could do this for you. And that's where the blue box came from. Yes, yes, I would like to point out that everybody, uh you know, recently, everybody, lots and lots of people recently have been picking on people who have I devices the iPhone, the iPad, because you know, they want to be just like everybody else

and they want to be part of the crowd. Well, as it turns out, the people at Apple have not always been as uh, you know, part of the mainstream culture because two of the people who were involved early in the blue box phenomenon were people who are making them to sell to other people at college. And those people would be Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniac, the founders of Apple. And I think that is hilarious. Actually, Steve

woznia acts blue boxes in the Computer History Museum. You can see hit the one that the first one he built. I just think that's very funny. But now now that you know every you know, lots and lots and lots of people have these devices. And the people who started the company started out as counterculture hackers. But the blue box is not named because it is blue. In fact, it could be pretty much any size or any color. It has nothing to do with that. It's just a

nickname that it got. Yeah, and it it. It wouldn't have been possible to make this, or at least it would have let me backtrack, I won't say it wouldn't have been possible. It would have been exceptionally difficult to make this if it weren't for the fact that once again a telephone company made a massive error in judgment, which was in this case it was the Bell System Technical Journal, which released the information of what frequencies each

number needed now in order to to dial them. Yeah. No, normal, normally people wouldn't be looking for that kind of information. But the kinds of people who would be into phone freaking I would know exactly where to find that kind of information, and they would be already monitoring those journals

because they were interested in how the phone system work. Right, So you look at this journal and you find out that, let's see, I think I even have an example here, like the the number UM four, for example, had two tones, all of them did. One of them was in the seven hundred hurts frequency and the other was hurts frequency. So you had to generate both of those in order

to dial a four. So once you know that, once you know which frequencies will generate, which you know won't translate to which numbers, you could create a device that when you when you input the number, it would make that noise. You connect that to phone and suddenly you can make these long distance phone calls again, just like Joe was doing by whistling in the receiver. Um. And it was you know, it was a heck of a thing, man. I mean, you could you could uh make joke prank

phone calls. I heard of one. I don't know the story, maybe apocryphal, um, but I heard one about how the wa was made a certain prank phone call to uh a particularly high ranking member of the Catholic Church, in fact, the highest He supposedly prank called the Pope and impersonated Henry Kissinger. Yeah. I had actually heard that story to the Pope. He was asleep and so he didn't He did not come to the phone. He said, I'll call

Hank back later. Um. That was lovely. We're gonna get mail mail about that or comments on Facebook, or because I called Henry Kissinger Hank, Come on people. Um. But there were other kinds of boxes too. There were red boxes and beige boxes and black boxes, and they all did something different. Red boxes theoretically allow you to make free pay phone calls. Yeah. The thing about the red box was that it would generate a frequency, you would

replace a crystal within the dialer of the tell. Most of these involved having to take apart a public phone to some extent um or sometimes a regular phone depended on the thing. But this was a public phone. You go to a pay phone, you take it apart. You replaced the the crystal within the dialer system with a different crystal that would resonate at a higher frequency. And and it it would it would simulate the sound of

a quarter going into the pay phone. Yes, so you were simulating as if you were feeding change into the payphone. And you could so your calls technically weren't quote unquote free because as far as the machine could tell, you were actually feeding coins into it. But but you were just simulating that. Um. Yeah, and and and here I am going to teach some of our younger listeners. At one point there were phones on every corner and you

had to put money into them to make a call. So, you know, because no one had cell phones, I'm just eating they weren't on every corner. But you know what, you don't see them anymore because of the rise of cell phones. This is something that would be Yeah, and then there are some in some places, but not nearly as many as there used to be right right, Yeah,

this is something that may be unfamiliar to people. Honestly, they may not realize that there were payphones so frequently available, and you you know, it would be difficult, I would imagine, to install a red box because you'd have to do it when people weren't looking, right, So you'd have to you in there payphone that's in a fairly remote location. Although there there were plenty of them in remote locations

and there still are. Yeah. Um, and again these these systems won't work with that anymore because the whole basis for the phone network is different now. In fact, phone freaking in general has really shifted. Now it's no longer really about finding ways to make free long distance phone calls, because that's not as not nearly as big a deal

as it used to be. No, No, as a matter of fact, as as time went on, at least according to uh Halfner and Markoff's book, Um, you know, when the systems involved into computer technology, you had a couple of things going on. You did have hackers looking to hack computer networks because they were interested in learning more about them and sometimes for other purposes. But one thing that people were doing, they were looking to replicate m C I UM, which was I think one of the

baby bells and is now part of it. May I may be wrong on that. Anyway, it was an independent phone company and UH UM they were they had calling cards UM, and what the phone hackers were doing at that point was trying to find ways to replicate UH m CI calling card numbers. And they would basically call an m C I UH network and enter numbers with their computer and when they found one that worked, they

would use that to make free phone calls. But it was a different way of doing it than manipulating the phone system itself. It was really manipulating the payment system. I would say more than more than that. UM. But by the mid nineteen seventies, according to the the aforementioned book, UM A T N T said UH or they were losing. The company was losing approximately thirty million dollars a year to UH to fraudulent phone calls. And UM I just picked nineteen seventy five is a year plugged it into

wall from Alpha. UH thirty million dollars in nineteen seventy five would be about a hundred and twenty point six million dollars in two thousand ten. UM so that's you know, not sizeable, but it's certainly not a lot. They certainly don't want to lose that money. Um. And apparently professional, professional white color uh people were using these techniques to I mean, when we're past the era of that the hacker, you know, being interested in the network and taking over.

These are people who you know, maybe for maybe they were just trying to get free phone calls from themselves. Maybe they were small businesses trying to find ways to avoid paying long distance charges. Um. You know. So basically that had a lot to do with why Bell Labs um basically found ways to scan the network for things

like black boxes. Black boxes allowed you to hook up you hook it up to your own phone and when people would call you, um, it would basically nullify the charges for the person on the other end making the phone call, but a scanner would pick up on that on the call, so you'd have to cut it short to avoid being detected by the scanners on the network. And basically they started finding people who were doing these things and prosecuting them, and they got quite a few

of them. Captain Crunch got caught, yep, but it did it did spawn a lot of the things that I had no idea about. Like Abby Hoffman, remember him, the political activist. UM. He started a group with a guy named Al Bell apparently no relation to Alexander Graham. I don't know, maybe so anyway, it was called a Youth International Party Line YEP. And uh, basically the idea of being that once you liberated communication UM from the man, you'd be able to give people more control over it.

But Al really wasn't interested in the political side of things. UM. He he broke off from the group and called called a new group, the Technical Assistance Program TAP, which you

probably ran into. And uh, they published a lot of the material from a T and T S Technical manuals UM and they had more than people subscribed by n UM, one of whom, apparently, according according again to the Halfner and Markoff book, apparently, uh, this woman had subscribed not because she was interested in phone freaking, but because she just wanted to stick it to the phone company. So she's like, anything you guys can do to to uh, you know, subvert these guys, go ahead and do it.

Here's my money. Yeah. There that that did become an issue. That and now we're going from beyond the exploration to either personal gain or political gain, um, or you know, some sort of anarchy kind of thing going on on. They published numbers to Buckingham Palace in the White House, they told you how to pick locks and use slugs and vending machines. It's kind of like the anarchist cookbook types. Yeah, definitely, so yeah, it's it's it's that was definitely kind of

a child of the time. You know, we're talking about the whole Vietnam era as well. So um, yeah, you know, you've got this mistrust in the government and corporations that really started to peak in the seventies and uh, and

so that freaking became kind of a problem. But it did start to shift because once the personal computer entered the picture, a lot of the freaks, like uh, the laws and jobs shifted their attention from from phones to computers and it was a brand new system to learn how to manipulate and exploit and all that kind of good stuff. Um. Freaking did continue for a while, but there was there. There were some pretty famous big crackdowns, including one in the Do you hear about this one?

A T and T did this massive crackdown on freaks because A T and T experienced a national wide long distance service crash on Martin Luther King Junior day In and day laid the blame uh for that crash on on hackers and phone freaks. Now, whether or not there was actual legitimate h that was a legitimate excuse remains

a matter of debate. Hackers. A lot of hackers say, hey, we weren't doing anything that would have led to this big crash in it may be that you know, this is a T and T S blunder, and there they've chosen a very very convenient scapegoat. A T and T of course would say, no, this is I mean, what are they gonna do? Say, yep, it was us. I mean some of them would. I mean, some hackers, of course take great pride in bringing down systems and we'll

brag about it. But other hackers will be like, WHOA, I totally did not mean to hit the off switch. I just wanted to look around. So that's still a matter of debate about. I'm sure there are people who do know the truth of what happened, but I am not among them. Um well, it's kind of interesting too that. Uh, if you've ever seen the magazine, you probably now know where the name came from. The do um you know,

I do. I think they think of themselves as a hackers magazine UM, and you know, things like things like Make magazine you know, are for hackers, people who like to take things apart and see what it is. So I think it really the idea behind it still exists, But there are a lot of people who are like the very early phone freaks who who say, you know what, there's this thing that somebody else came up with, and I'm really interested in how, you know, how it works,

what makes it tick? You know, why does it work the way it does, and what can I get it to do that it's not supposed to do. They really have no interested in, you know, taking advantage of the system or making a statement, and you're like, yeah, you know, I wanted to take it apart and see if I can make it do something really cool. Right. This is

a philosophy that dates back ages. In fact, without without this kind of intense curiosity, you could argue that that fields like architecture and engineering wouldn't be what they are today. In fact, it just occurred to me that what we should do in a future podcast is do an episode called Leonardo da Vinci Renaissance Hacker. Hey, there you go, because really that's what he was when you get down to it. Um. Also, I want to point out that m c I was not one of the baby Bells.

It was a competitor to the baby Bells. So I

looked that up. So sorry about that. And uh, yeah, if you guys do some research into freaking, you'll find some pretty crazy stories out there, including some fair fairly cryptic terms and names of groups and stuff, because, uh, like hackers, freakers often would would adopt a nickname or have a nickname attributed to them, and uh, some of them ended up getting into some pretty serious trouble, including a group of freakers and hackers known as the four

one four group the four fourteen Yes I heard them. Well that that's named after a Milwaukee area code. That's where they were based out of. So if you ever wonder where the four or fourteen group's name came from, it came from that. UM and they got they they got into some big trouble when when uh, it was discovered that they had infiltrated around sixty different major computer systems and including ones for like hospitals, and governments and

things like that. Yeah, yeah, it's uh, it's funny though, because these skills do, uh do payoff in the long run for people who you know, are interested in in in getting into the nuts and bolts of what makes things take um, including Whistler Whistler Joe, who ended up working for a phone company because he just wanted to uh he want that was one of the things he

really wanted to do in life. And uh, you know, the phone company apparently went him tour the facilities of this one operation, and he had a difficult time because he had a reputation as a phone freak. But what you know, once he got an opportunity to work for the phone company, he had absolutely no he wanted to mess with the technology. Well, the whole reason that he would got into phone freaking in the first place was because he found the phone system to be absolutely fascinating.

Yeah again, it wasn't It wasn't that he had some some evil plan in mind or something. He just it was it was a really cool system and he wanted to know how it worked. You know. Even even Kevin Mitnick, now you know, a very famous computer hacker and former phone freak, h you know, he has his own security consulting organization. Poor guy can't even get through an airport, but he has a sown security consulting he h, poor guy.

But yeah, I mean he's he certainly knows a lot about technology and security of technology, and uh so therefore he's a very valuable person to have as a security consultant. But you know, it's from taking things apart and manipulating things, and well, the only way your reputation is someone who knows these things and sign it out right. The only the only way you can figure out how to keep people out of a system is to know how to

infiltrate a system. Yes, so, yeah, a lot of these hackers have have joined the man in one way or another, and in some cases I think it's a lot more lucrative than what they were doing. Yeah, well it's certainly less risky. Yes, that's true. All right. Well, that that's a great conversation on phone freaking. We're gonna wrap it up, guys. If you have any suggestions on comments or comments or anything like that, why don't you join our Facebook page

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