THII: MAOAZINII: FOIt MII:N

Welcome back to the 40'sThe last time America was happy. See Page 98

Secrets ofthe Little Blue Box

by Ron Rosenbaum

A story so incredible it may even make you feel sorry for the phone company'

The Blue Box Is Introduced:Its Qualities Are Remarked

I am in the expensively furnished living room of AlGilbertson*, the creator of the "blue box." Gilbertson isholding one of his shiny black-and-silver "blue boxes"comfortably in the palm of his hand, pointing out thethirteen little red push buttons sticking up from the'console. He is dancing his fingers over the buttons, tap­ping out discordant beeping electronic jingles. He is try­ing to explain to me how his little blue box does nothingless than place the entire telephone system of the world,satellites, cables and all, at the service of the blue-boxoperator, free of charge.

"That's what it does. E sentially it gives you the powerof a super operator. You seize a tandem with this topbutton," he presses the top button with his index fingerand the blue box emits a high-pitched cheep, "and likethat"-cheep goes the blue box again-"you control thephone company's long-distance switching systems fromyour cute little Princess phone or any old pay phone. Andyou've got anonymity. An operator has to operate froma definite location: the phone company knows where sheis and what she's doing. But with your beeper box, onceyou hop onto a trunk, say from a Holiday Inn 800 [toll­free] number, they don't know where you are, or whereyou're cpming from, they don't know how you slippedinto their lines and popped up in that 800 number. Theydon't even know anything illegal is going on. And youcan obscure your origins through as many levels as youlike. You can call next door by way of White Plains, thenover to Liverpool by cable, and then back here by satel­lite. You can call yourself from one pay phone all the wayaround the world to a pay phone next to you. And you getyour dime back too."

"And they can't trace the calls? They can't chargeyou?"

" ot if you do it the right way. But you'll find that thefree-call thing isn't really as exciting at first as the feel­ing of power you get from having one of these babiesin your hand. I've watched people when they first gethold of one of these things and start using it, and dis­cover they can make connections, set up crisscross andzigzag switching patterns back and forth across theworld. They hardly talk to the people they finally reach.They say hello and start thinking of what kind of callto make next. They go a little crazy." He looks down atthe neat little package in his palm. His fingers are stilldancing, tapping out beeper patterns.

"I think it's something to do with how small my models

• His "eal name has been changed,.

Photographed by Ronald Barnett

are. There are lots of blue boxes around, but mine arethe smallest and most sophisticated electronically, I wishI could show you the prototype we made for our bigsyndicate order.~'

He sighs. "We had this order for a thousand beeperboxes from a syndicate fi'ont man in Las Vegas, Theyuse them to place bets coast to coast, keep'lines openfor hours, all of which can get expensive if you haveto pay. The deal was a thousand blue boxes for $300apiece. Before then we retailed them for $1,500 apiece,but $300,000 in one lump was hard to turn down. We hada manufacturing deal worked out in the Philippines.Everything ready to go. Anyway, the model I had readyfor limited mass production was small enough to fit in­side a flip-top Marlboro box. It had flush.touch panels fora keyboard, rather than these unsightly buttons stickingout. Looked ju t like a tiny portable radio. In fact, I haddesigned it with a tiny transistor receiver to get one AMchannel, so in case the law became suspicious the ownercould switch on the radio part, start snapping his fingers,and no one could tell anything illegal was going on. Ithought of e\ erything for thi model-I had it lined witha band of thermite which could be ignited by radio signalfrom a tiny button transmitter on your belt, so it couldbe burned to ashes instantly in case of a bust. It wasbeautiful. A beautiful little machine. You should haveseen the faces on the e syndicate guys when they cameback after trying it out. They'd hold it in their palmlike they never wanted to let it go, and they'd say, 'I can'tbelieve it. I can't believe it.' You probably won't believeit until you try it."

The Blue Box Is Tested:Certain Connections Are Made

About eleven o'clock two nights later Fraser Lucey has ablue box in the palm of his left hand and a phone in thepalm of his right. He is standing inside a phone boothnext to an isolated shut-down motel off Highway 1. I amstanding outside the phone booth.

Fraser likes to show off his blue box for people. Untila few weeks ago when Pacific Telephone made a fewarrests in his city; Fraser Lucey liked to bring his bluebox** to parties. It never failed: a few cheeps from hisdevice and Fraser became the center of attention at thevery hippest of gatherings, playing phone tricks anddoing request numbers for hours. He began to take

•• This pm·ticula>· bille box, Hke 1IIost blue boxes, is not blue. Blueboxes /lave come to be called "blue boxes" either 1) bec(t1Lse the /irstblue box eve1' c01./iscated by lJho1le-company security men happenedto be blue, 01' ~) to distinguish them !,'om Ublack boxes," Blackboxes «I'e devic s 1,sltally a resistor in selies, which, whe,~ (.ttachedto home Ilhones, allow all incoming calls to be m«de without chm'geto one's callC'·.

ESQUIRE: OCTOBER 117

orders for his manufacturer in Mexico. He became adealer.

Fraser is cautious now about where he shows off hisblue box. But he never gets tired of playing with it. "It'slike the first time every time," he tells me.

Fraser puts a dime in the slot. He listens for a toneand holds the receiver up to my ear. I hear the tone.

Fraser begins describing, with a ~rtain practiced air,what he does while he does it.

"J'm dialing an 800 number now. Any 800 number willdo. It's toll free. Tonight I think I'll use the - - - - - [henames a well-known rent-a-car company) 800 number.Listen. It's ringing. Here, you hear it? Now watch."

He places the blue box over the mouthpiece of thephone 80 that the one silver and twelve black pushbuttons are facing up toward me. He presses the silverbutton-the one at the top-and I hear that high-pitched",",p.

"That's 2600 cycles per second to be exact," saysLucey. "Now, quick, listen."

He shoves the earpiece at me. The ringing has van­ished. The line gives a slight hiccough, thel'e is a sharpbuzz, and then nothing hut soft white noise.

"We're home free now," Lucey tells me, taking backthe phone and applying the blue box to its mouthpieceonce again. "We're up on a tandem, into a long-linestrunk. Once you're up on a tandem, you can send yourselfanY'vhere you want to go." He decides to check out Lon­don first. He chooses a certain pay phone located inWaterloo Station. This particular pay phone is popularwith the phone-phreaks network because there are usu­ally people walking by at all hours who will pick it upand talk for a while.

He presses the lower left-hand corner button which ismarked "KP" on the face of the box.

"That's Key Pulse. It tells the tandem we're ready togive it instructions. First J'1l punch out KP 182 START,which will slide us into the overseas sender in WhitePlains." I hear a neat c1unk-cheep. "I think we'll headover to England by satellite. Cable is actually faster andthe connection is somewhat better, but I like going bysatellite. So I just punch out KP Zero 44. The Zerois supposed to guarantee a satellite connection and 44 isthe country code for England. Okay ... we're there. InLiverpool actually. Now all I have to do is punch out theLondon area code which is I, and dial up the pay phone.Here, listen, I've got a ring now."

I hear the soft quick purr-purr of a London ring. Thensomeone picks up the phone. "Hello," says the Londonvoice.

"Hello. Who's this?" Fraser asks."Hello. There's actually nobody here. I just picked this

up while I was passing by. This is a public phone. There'sno one here to answer actually."

"Hello. Don't hang up. I'm calling from the UnitedStates."

"Oh. What is the purpose of the call? This is a publicphone you know."

"Oh. You know. To check out, uh, to find out what'sgoing on in London. How is it there?"

"It's five o'clock in the morning. It's raining now,""Oh. Who are you?"The London passerby turns out to be an R.A.F. enlistee

on his way back to the base in Lincolnshire, with aterrible hangover after a thirty-six-hour pass. He andFraser talk about the rain. They agree that it's nicerwhen it's not raining. They say good-bye and Fraserhangs up. His dime returns with a nice clink.

"Isn't that far out," he says grinning at me. "London.Like that."

Fraser squeezes the little blue box affectionately in his

llS ESQUIRE: OCTOBER

palm. "I told ya this thing is for real. Listen, if you don'tmind I'm gonna try this girl I know in Paris. I usuallygive her a call around this time. It freaks her out. Thistime I'll use the - - - - ~ (a different rent-a-car company)800 number and we'll go by overseas cable. 133; 33 is thecountry code for France. the 1 sends you by cable. Okay,here we go.... Oh damn. Busy. Who could she be talkingto at this time?"

A state police car cruises slowly by the motel. The cardoes not stop, but Fraser gets nervous. We hop hack intohis car and drive ten miles in the opposite direction untilwe reach a Texaco station locked up for the night. Wepull up to a phone booth by the tire pump. Fraser dashesinside and tries the Paris number. It is busy again.

"I don't understand who she could be talking to. Thecircuits may be busy. It's too bad I haven't learned howto tap into lines overseas with this thing yet."

Fraser begins to phreak around, as the phone phreakssay. He dials a leading nationwide charge card's 800number and punches out the tones that bring him theTime recording in Sydney, Australia. He beeps up theWeather recording in Rome, in Italian of course. He callsa friend in Boston and talks about a certain over-the­counter stock they are into heavily. He finds the Parisnumber busy again. He calls up "Dial a Disc" in London,and we listen to Double Banel by David and Ansil Col­lins, the number-one hit of the week in London. He callsup a dealer of another sort and talks in code. He calls upJoe Engressia, the original blind phone-phreak genius,and pays his respects. There are other calls. FinallyFraser gets through to his young lady in Paris. Theyboth agree the circuits must have been busy, and criticizethe Paris telephone system. At two-thirty in the morningFraser hangs up, pockets his dime, and drives off. steer­ing with one hand, holding what he calls his "lovely littleblue box" in the other.

You Can Call Long Distance forLess Than You Think

"You see. a few years ago the phone company made onebig mistake," Gilbertson explains two days later in hisapartment. "They were careless enough to let sometechnical journal publish the actual frequencies used tocreate all their multi-frequency tones. Just a theoreticalarticle some Bell Telephone Laboratories engineer wasdoing about switching theory, and he listed the tonesin passing. At • ~ - - - [a well-known technical school) Ihad been fooling around with phones for sevel'al yearsbefore I came across a copy of the journal in the engi­neering library. I ran hack to the lab and it took maybetwelve hours from the time I saw that article to put to­gether the first working blue box. It was bigger andclumsier than this little baby, but it worked."

It's all there on public record in that technical journalwritten mainly by Bell Lab people for other telephoneengineers. Or at least it was public. "Just try and get acopy of that issue at some engineering-school librar~'

now. Bell has had them all red-tagged and withdrawnfrom circulation," Gilbertson tells me.

"But it's too late. It's all public now. And once theybecame public the technology needed to create your ownbeeper devi~ is within the range of any twelve-year-oldkid, any twelve-year-old blind kid as a matter of fact.And he can do it in less than the twelve hours it took us.Blind kids do it all the time. They can't build anythingas precise and compact as my beeper box, but theirs cando anything mine can do."

"How?""Okay. About twenty years ago A.T.&T. made a multi­

billion-dollar decision to operate its entire long-distanceswitching system on twelve electronically generated

combinations of six master tones. Those are the tonesyou sometimes hear in the background after you'vedialed a long-distance number. They decided to use somevery simple tones-the tone for each number is just twofixed single-frequency tones played simultaneously tocreate a certain beat frequency. Like 1300 cycles persecond and 900 cycles per second played together giveyou the tone for digit 5. ow, what some of these phonephreaks have done is get themselves access to an electricorgan. Any cheap family home-entertainment organ.Since the frequencies are public knowledge now-oneblind phone phreak has even had them recorded in one ofthose talking books for the blind-they just have to finthe musical notes on the organ which corre pond to thephone tones. Then they tape them. For instance, to getMa Bell's tone for the number 1, you press down organkeys F5 and AS [900 and 700 cycles per second] at thesame time. To produce the tone for 2 it's F5 and CG [1100and 700 c.p.s]. The phone phreaks circulate the wholelist of notes so there's no trial and error anymore."

He shows me a list of the rest of the phone numbersand the two electric organ keys that produce them.

"Actually, you have to record these notes at 33,4inches-per-second tape speed and double it to 7% inches­per-second when you play them back, to get the propertones," he adds.

"So once you have all the tones recorded, how do youplug them into the phone system?"

"Well, they take their organ and their cassette re­corder, and start banging out entire phone numbers intones on the organ, including country codes, routinginstructions, 'KP' and 'Start' tones. Or, if they don'thave an organ, someone in the phone-phreak networksends them a cassette with all the tones recorded, witha voice saying' umber one,' then you have the tone,, Tumber two,' then the tone and so on. 0 with twocassette recorders they can put together a series of phonenumbers by switching back and forth from number tonumber. Any idiot in the country with a cheap cassetterecorder can make all the free calls he wants."

"You mean you just hold the cassette recorder up tothe mouthpiece and switch in a series of beep you'verecorded? The phone thinks that anything that makesthese tones must be its own equipment?"

"Right. As long as you get the frequency within thirtycycles per second of the phone company's tones, the phoneequipment thinks it hears its own voice talking to it. Theoriginal granddaddy phone phreak was this blind kid withperfect pitch, Joe Engressia, who used to whistle into thephone. An operator could tell the difference between hiswhistle and the phone company's electronic tone gener­ator, but the phone company's switching circuit can't tellthem apart. The bigger the phone company gets and thefurther away from human operators it gets, the morevulnerable it becomes to all sorts of phone phreaking."

A Guide for the Perplexed

"But wait a minute," I stop Gilbertson. "If everythingyou do sounds like phone-company equipment, whydoesn't the phone company charge you for the call theway it charges its own equipment?"

"Okay. That's where the 2600-cycle tone comes in. Ibetter start from the beginning." .

The beginning he describes for me is a vision of thephone system of the continent as thousands of webs, oflong-line trunks radiating from each of the hundreds oftoll switching offices to the other toll switching offices.Each toll switching office is a hive compacted of thou­sands of long-distance tandems constantly whistling andbeeping to tandems in far-off toll switching offices.

The tandem is the key to the whole system. Each

tandem is a line with some relays with the capability ofsignaling any other tandem in any other toll switchingoffice on the continent, either directly one-to-one or byprogramming a roundabout route through several othertandems if all the direct routes are busy. For instance,if you want to call from ew York to Los Angeles andtraffic is heavy on all direct trunks between the two cities,your tandem in New York is programmed to try the nextbest route, which may send you down to a tandem in NewOrleans, then up to San Francisco, or down to aNewOrleans tandem, back to an Atlanta tandem, over to anAlbuquerque tandem and finally up to Los Angeles.

When a tandem is not being used, when it's sittingthere waiting for someone to make a long-distance call,it whistles. One side of the tandem, the side "facing"your home phone, whistles at 2600 cycles per secondtoward all the home phones serviced by the exchange,telling them it is at their service, should they be inter­ested in making a long-distance call. The other side of thetandem is whistling 2600 c.p.S. into one or more long­distance trunk lines, telling the rest of the phone systemthat it is neither sending nor receiving a call throughthat trunk at the moment, that it has no use for thattrunk at the moment.

When you dial a long-distance number the first thingthat happens is that you are hooked into a tandem. Aregister comes up to the side of the tandem facing awayfrom you and presents that side with the number youdialed. This sending side of the tandem stops whistling2600 into its trunk line. When a tandem stops the 2600tone it has been sending through a trunk, the trunk issaid to be "seized," and is now ready to carry the num­ber you have dialed---eonverted into multi-frequencybeep tones-to a tandem in the area code and centraloffice you want.

ow when a blue-box operator wants to make a callfrom ew Orleans to ew York he starts by dialing the800 number of a company which might happen to haveits headquarters in Los Angeles. The sending side of theNew Orleans tandem stops sending 2600 out over thetrunk to the central office in Los Angeles, thereby seizingthe trunk. Your New Orleans tandem begins sendingbeep tones to a tandem it has discovered idly whistling2600 cycles in Los Angeles. The receiving end of thatL.A. tandem is seized, stops whistling 2600, iistens to thebeep tones which tell it which L.A. phone to ring, andstarts ringing the 800 number. Meanwhile a markmade in the ew Orleans office accounting tape notesthat a call from your New Orleans phone to the 800number in L.A. has been initiated and gives the call acode number. Everything is routine so far.

But then the phone phreak presses his blue box to themouthpiece and pushes the 2600-cycle button, sending2600 out from the New Orleans tandem to the L.A. tan­dem. The L.A. tandem notices 2600 cycles are comingover the line again and assumes that ew Orleans hashung up because the trunk is whistling as if idle. TheL.A. tandem immediately ceases ringing the L.A. 800number. But as soon as the phreak takes his finger offthe 2600 button, the L.A. tandem assumes the trunk isonce again being used because the 2600 is gone, so itlistens for a new series of digit tones-to find out whereit must send the call.

Thus the blue-box operator in ew Orleans now is intouch with a tandem in L.A. which is waiting like anobedient genie to be told what to do next. The blue-boxowner then beeps out the ten digits of the New Yorknumber which tell the L.A. tandem to relay a call to ewYork City. Which it promptly does. As soon as yl;lUrparty picks up the phone in New York, the side of theNew Orleans tandem facing you stops sending 2600

ESQUIRE: OCTOBER 119

cycles to you and starts carrying his voice to you by wayof the L.A. tandem. A notation is made on the accountingtape that the connection has been made on the 800 callwhich had been initiated and noted earlier. When youstop talking to New York a notation is made that the800 call has ended.

At three the next morning, when the phone company'saccounting computer starts reading back over the mas­ter accounting tape for the past day, it records thata caU of a certain length of time was made from yourNew Orleans home to an L.A. 800 number and, ofcourse, the aeeounting computer has been trained toignore these toll-free 800 calls when compiling yourmonthly bill.

"All they can prove is that you made an 800 toll-freecall," Gilbertson the inventor concludes. "Of course, ifyou're foolish enough to talk for two hours on an 800call, and they've installed one of their special anti-fraudcomputer programs to watch out for such things, theymay spot you and ask you why you took two hours talk­ing to Army Recruiting's 800 number when you're 4-F.But if you do it from a pay phone, they may discoversomething peculiar the next day-if they've got a blue­box hunting program in their computer-but you'll bea long time gone from the pay phone by then. Using apay phone is almost guaranteed safe."

"What about the recent series of blue-box arrests allacross the country-New York, Cleveland, and so on?"I asked. "How were they caught so easily?"

"From what I can tell, they made one big mistake:they were seizing trunks using an area code plus 555­1212 instead of an 800 number. Using 555 is easy to de­teet because when you send multi-frequency beep tonesoff 555 you get a charge for it on your tape and the ac­counting computer knows there's something wrong whenit tries to bill you for a two-hour call to Akron, Ohio,information, and it drops a trouble card which goes rightinto the hands of the security agent if they're looking forblue-box users.

"Whoever sok! those guys their blue boxes didn't tellthem how to use them properly, which is fairly irrespon­sible. And they were fairly stupid to use them at homeall the time.

"But what those arrests really mean is that an awfullot of blue boxes are flooding into the country and thatpeople are finding them so easy to make that they knowhow to make them before they know how to use them.M8 Bell is in trouble."

And if a blue-box operator or a cassette-recorderphone phreak sticks to pay phones and 800 numbers,the phone company can't stop them?

"Not unless they change their entire nationwide long­lines technology, which will take them a few billiondollars and twenty years. Right now they can't do athing. They're screwed."

Captain Crunch Demonstrates His Famous Unit

There is an underground telephone network in this coun­try. Gilbertson discovered it the very day news of hisactivities hit the papers. That evening his phone beganringing. Phone phreaks from Seattle, from Florida,from New York, from San Jose, and from Los Angelesbegan calling him and telling him about the phone­phreak network. He'd get a call from a phone phreakwho'd say nothing but, "Hang up and call this number."

When he dialed the number he'd find himself tied intoa conference of a dozen phone phreak!l arranged througha quirky switching station in British Columbia. Theyidentified themselves as phone phreaks, they demon­strated their homemade blue boxes which they called"M-F-ers" (for "multi-frequency," among other things)

120 ESQUIRE: OCTOBER

for him, they talked shop about phone-phreak devices.They let him in on their secrets on the theory that if thephone company was after him he must be trustworthy.And, Gilbertson recalls, they stunned him with theirtechnical sophistication.

I ask him how to get in touch with the phone-phreaknetwork. He digs around through a file of old schematicsand comes up with about a dozen numbers in threewidely separated area codes.

"Those are the centers," he tells me. Alongside someof the numbers he writes in first names or nicknames:names like Captain Crunch, Dr. No, Frank Carson (alsoa code word for free caU), Marty Freeman (code wordfor M-F device), Peter Perpendicular Pimple, Alefnull,and The Cheshire Cal He makes checks alongside thenames of those among these top twelve who are blind.There are five checks.

I ask him who this Captain Crunch person is."Dh. The Captain. He's probably the most legendary

phone phreak. He calls himself Captain Crunch after thenotorious Cap'n Crunch 2600 whistle." (Several yearsago, Gilbertson explains, the makers of Cap'n Crunchbreakfa!!t cel'eal offered a toy-whistle prize in every boxas a treat. for the Cap'n Crunch set. Somehow a phonephreak discovered that the toy whistle just happened topl'oduce a perfect 2600-cycle tOile. When the man whocalls himself Captain Crunch was transferred overseas toEngland with his Air Force unit, he would receive ~cores

of calls from his friends and "mute" them-make themfree of charge to them-by blowing his Cap'n Crunchwhistle into his end.)

"Captain Crunch is one of the older phone phreaks,"Gilbertson tells me. "He's an engineer who once got in alittle trouble for fooling around with the phone, but hecan't stop. Well, this guy drives across country in aVolkswagen van with an entire swilehboard and a com­puterized super-sophisticated M-F-er in the back. He'llpull up to a phone booth on a lonely highway somewhere,snake a cable out of his bus, hook it onto the phone andsit for hours, days sometimes, sending calls zipping backand forth across the country, all over the world...."

Back at my motel, I dialed the number he gave me for"Captain Crunch" and aaked for G - - - - T - - - - -, hisreal name, or at leaat the name he uses when he's notdashing into a phone booth beeping out M-F tones fastert.han a speeding bullet, and zipping phantomlike throughthe phone company's long-distance lines.

When G - - - - T - - - • - answered the phone and I toldhim I was preparing a story for Esquire about phonephreaks, he became very indignant.

"I don't do that. I don't do that anymore at all. And ifI do it, 1 do it for one reason and one reaaon ollly. I'mlearning about a system. The phone company is a System.A computer is a System. Do you understand? If I dowhat I do, it is only to explore a System. Computers.Systems. That's my bag. The phone company is nothingbut a computer."

A tone of tightly restrained excitement enters theCaptain's voice when he starts talking about Systems.He begins to pronounce each syllable with the husheddeliberation of an obscene caller.

"Ma Bell is a system I want to explore. It's a beau­tiful system, you know, but 1Ia Bell screwed up. It'sterrible because !'lIa Bell is such a beautiful system, butshe screwed up. 1 learned how she screwed up from acouple of blind kids who wanted me to build a device. Acertain device. They said it could make free calls. Iwasn't interested in free calls. But when these blind kidstold me I could make calls into a computer, my eyes litup. I wanted to learn about computers. I wanted to learnabout Ma Bell's computers. So 1 built the little device.

Only I built it wrong and Ma Bell found out. Ma Bellcan detect things like that. Ma Bell knows. So I'm strictlyout of it now. I don't do it. Except for learning pur­poses." He pauses. "So you want to write an article. Areyou paying for this call? Hang up and call this number."

He gives me a number in an area code a thousand milesnorth of his own. I dial the number.

"Hello again. This is Captain Crunch. You are speak­ing to me on a toll-free loop-around in Portland, Oregon.Do you know what a toll-free loop-around is? I'll tellyou."

He explains to me that almo t every exchange in thecountry has open test numbers which allow other ex­changes to test their connections with it. Most of the enumbers occur in consecutive pairs, such as 302 956-0041and 956-0042. Well, certain phone phl'eaks discoveredthat if two people from anywhere in the country dialthose two consecutive numbers they can talk togetherjust as if one had called the other's number, with nocharge to either of them, of course.

"Your voice is looping around in a 4A switching ma­chine up there in Canada, zipping back down to me," theCaptain tells me. "My voice. is looping around up thereand back down to you. And it can't ever cost anyonemoney. The phone phreaks and I have compiled a list ofmany many of these numbers. You would be surprisedif you saw the list. I could show it to you. But I won't.I'm out of that now. I'm not out to screw Ma Bell. I knowbetter. If I do anything it's for the pure knowledgeof the System. You can learn to do fantastic things.Have you ever heard eight tandems stacked up? Do youknow the ound of tandems stacking and unstacking?Give me your phone number. Okay. Hang up now andwait a minute."

Slightly less than a minute later the phone rang andthe Captain was on the line, his voice sounding far moreexcited, almost aroused.

"I wanted to show you what it's like to stack up tan­dems. To stack up tandems." (Whenever the Captainsays "stack up" it sounds as if he is licking his lips.)

"How do you like the connection you're on now?" theCaptain asks me. "It's a raw tandem. A 1'aw tandem.Ain't nothin' up to it but a tandem. Now I'm going toshow you what it's like to stack up. Blow off. Land in afaraway place. To stack that tandem up, whip back and'forth across the country a few times, then shoot on upto Moscow.

"Listen," Captain Crunch continues. "Listen. I've gota line tie on my switchboard here, and I'm gonna letyou hear me stack and unstack tandems. Listen to this.I'm gonna blow your mind."

First I hear a super rapid-fire pulsing of the flutelikephone tones, then a pause, then another popping burst oftones, then another, then another. Each burst is followedby a beep-kachink sound.

"We have now stacked up four tandems," said CaptainCrunch. sounding somewhat remote. "That's four tan­dems stacked up. Do you know what that means? Thatmeans I'm whipping back and forth, back and forthtwice, across the country, before coming to you. I'vebeen known to stack up twenty tandems at a time. ow,just like I said, I'm going to shoot up to Moscow."

There is a new, longer series of beeper pulses over theline, a brief silence, then a ring.

"Hello," answers a far-off voice."Hello. Is this the American Embassy Moscow?""Yes, sir. Who is this calling?" says the voice."Yes. This is test board here in ew York. We're call­

ing to check out the circuits, see what kind of lines you'vegot. Everything okay there in Moscow?"

"Okay?"

"Well, yes, how are things there?""Oh. Well, everything okay, I guess.""Okay. Thank you." They hang up, leaving a confused

series of beep-kachink sounds hanging in mid-ether inthe wake of the call before dis olving away.

The Captain is pleased. "You believe me now, don'tyou? Do you know what I'd like to do? I'd like to call upyour editor at Esquire and show him ,iust what it soundlike to stack and unstack tandems. I'll give him a showthat will blow his mind. What's his number?"

I ask the Captain what kind of device he was using toaccomplish all his feats. The Captain i pleased at thequestion.

"You could tell it was special, couldn't you? Ten pulsesper second. That's faster than the phone company'sequipment. Believe me, this unit is the most famous unitin the country. There is no other unit like it. Believeme."

"Yes, I've heard about it. Some other phone phreakshave told me about it."

"They have been referring to my, ahem, unit? What isit they said? Just out of curiosity, did they tell you itwas a highly sophisticated computer-operated unit, withacoustical coupling for receiving outputs and a switch­board with multiple-line-tie capability'! Did they tell youthat the frequency tolerance is guaranteed to be notmore than .05 percent? The amplitude tolel'ance Ie s than.01 decibel? Those pul es .you heard were perfect. Theyjust come faster than the phone company. Those werehigh-precision op-amps. Op-amps are instrumentationamplifiers designed for ultra-stable amplification, super­low distortion and accurate frequency respon e. Did theytell you it can operate in temperatures from -55°C to+125°C?"

I admit that they did not tell me all that."I built it myself," the Captain goes on. "If you were

to go out and buy the components from an industrialwholesaler it would cost you at least $1,500. I onceworked for a semiconductor company and all this didn'tcost me a cent. Do you know what I mean? Did they tellyou about how I put a call completely al'ound the world?I'll tell you how I did it. I M-F-ed Tokyo inward, whoconnected me to India. India connected me to Greece,Greece connected me to Pretoria, South Africa, SouthAfrica connected me to South America, I went fromSouth America to London, I had a London operator con­nect me to a New York operator, I had ew York connectme to a California operator who rang the phone next tome. Needless to say I had to shout to hear myself. Butthe echo was far out. Fantastic. Delayed. It was delayedtwenty seconds, but I could hear myself talk to myself."

"You mean you were speaking into the mouthpiece ofone phone sending your voice around the world into yourear through a phone on the other side of your head?" Iasked the Captain. I had a vision of something vaguelyautoerotic going on, in a complex electronic way.

"That's right," said the Captain. "I've also sent myvoice around the world one way, going cast on one phone,and going west on the other, going through cable oneway, satellite the other, coming back together at thesame time, ringing the two phones simultaneously andpicking them up and whipping my voice both waysaroupd the world back to me. Wow. That was a mindblower."

"You mean you sit there with both phones on yourear and talk to yourself around the world," I saidincredulously.

"Yeah. Um hum. That's what I do. I connect the phonestogether and sit there and talk."

"What do you say? What do you say to yourself whenyou're connected'!"

ESQUIRE: OCTOBER 121

"Oh, you know. Hello test one two thl'ee," he says ina low-pitched voice.

"Hello test one two three," he replies to himself in ahigh-pitched voice.

"Hello test one two three," he repeats again, low­pitched.

"Hello test one two three," he replies, high-pitched."I sometimes do this: Hello hello hello hello. hello,

hello," he trails off and breaks into laughter.

Why Captain Crunch Hardly EverTaps Phones Anymore

Using internal phone-company codes, phone phreakshave learned a simple method. for tapping phones. Phone­company operators have in front of them a board thatholds verification jacks. It allows them to plug into con­versations in case of emergency. to listen in to a line todetermine if the line is busy or the circuits are busy.Phone phreaks have Icarned to beep out the codes whichlead them to a \'crification operator. tell the \'erifica­tion operator they are switchmen from some other areacode testing out verification trunks. Once the operatorhooks them into the verification trunk, they disappearinto the board (or all practical purposes, slip unnoticedinto anyone o( the 10.000 to 100,000 numbers in thatcentral office without the \'eriflcation operator knowingwhat they're doing. and of course without the two par­ties to the connection knOWing there is a phantomlistener present on their line.

Toward the end of lTl..y hour-long first conversationwith him, I asked the Captain if he ever tapped phones.

"Oh no. I don't do that. I don't think it's right," hetold me firmly. "I have the power to do it but I don'L ...Well one time, just one time. I have to admit that I did.There was this girl Linda. and I wanted to find out ...you know. I tried to call her up for a date. I had a datewith her the last weekend and I thought she liked me.I called her up. man. and her line was busy, and I keptcalling and it was still busy. Well, I had just learnedabout this system of jumping into lines and I said tomyself, ·Hmmm. Why not just see if it works. It'll sur­prise hel' if atl of a sudden I should pop up on her line.It'll impress her, if anything.' So I went ahead and didit.ll\I-F-ed into the line. My l\I-F-er is powerful enoughwhen patched directly into the mouthpiece to triggel' averification trunk without using an operator the waythe other phone phreaks havc to.

"I slipped into the line lind there she was talking toanother boyfriend. ~Iaking sweet tlllk to him. I didn'tmake a sound becuuse I was so disgusted. So I waitedthere for her to hang up, listening to her making sweettalk to another guy. You know, So as soon as she hungup I instantly M-F-ed her up and all I said was, 'Linda,we'I'e through.' And I hung up, And it blew her headoff. She couldn't figure out what the hell had happened.

"But that was the only time. I did it thinking I wouldsurprise her, impress her. Those were all my intentionswere, and well, it really kind of hurt me pretty badly,and ... and ever since then I don't go into verificationtrunks."

Moments later my first conversation with the Captaincomes to a close.

"Listen," he says, his spirits somewhat cheered,"listen. What you are going to hear when I hang up isthe sound of tandems unstacking. Layer after layer oftandems unstacking until there's nothing left of thestack, until it melts away into nothing. Cheep, cheep,cheep, cheep," he concludes, his voice descending to awhisper with each cheep.

He hangs up. The phone suddenly goes into fourspasms: kaehink cheep. Kachink cheep kachink cheep

122 ESQUIRE: OCTOBER

kachink cheep, and the complex connection has wipeditself out like the Cheshire cat's smile.

The l\lF Boogie Rlues

The next number I choose from the select list of phone­phreak illuminati prepared for me by the blue-box in­ventor is a Memphis number. It is the number of JoeEllgressia, the first and still perhaps the most accom­plished blind phone phreak.

Three years ago Engressia was a nine-day wonder innewspapers and magazines all over America because hehad been discovered whistling free long-distance con.nections for fellow students at the University of SouthFlorida. Engressia was born with perfect pitch; hecould whistle phone tones better than the phone-companyequipment.

Engressia might have gone on \\:histling in the darkfor a few (riends for the rest of his life if the phonecompany hadn't decided to expose him. He was warned,disciplined by the college, and the whole case becamepublic. In the months foHowing media reports o( histalent, Engressia began receiving strange calls. Therewere calls from a group of kids in Los Angeles whocould do some very strange thing, with the quirky Gen­eral Telephone and Electronics circuitry in L.A. su}).urns. There were calls from a group of mostly blind kidsin - - - -, California. who had been doing some interestingexperiments with Cap'n Crunch whistles and test loops.There wag a group in Seattle, a group in Cambridge,Massachusetts, a few fron} New York, a few scatteredacross the country. Some of them had already equippedthemselves with cassette and clectronic l\I·F devices. Forsome of these groups. it \\·{l.S the first time they kncw ofthe others.

The exposure of Engressia was the catalyst thatlinked the separate phone-phreak centers together. Theyall called Engressia. The~f talked to him about what hewas doing and what they were doing. And then he toldthem-the scattered regional centers and lonely inde­pendent phone phreakers-about each other, gave themeach other's numbers to call, and within a year thescattered phone-phreak centers had grown into a nation­wide undergl'ound.

Joe Engressia is only twenty-two years old now, butalong the phone-phl'eak network he is "the old mall,"accorded by phone phreaks something of the reverencethe phone company bestows on Alexander Graham Bell.He seldom needs to make calls anymOI'e. The phonephreaks all call him and let him know what new tricks,new codes, new techniques they have learncd. Everynight he sils like a sightless spidel' in his little apart­ment receiving messages from every tendl'i\ of his web,It is almost a point of Ilride with Joe that they call him.

But when I reached him in his Memphis apartmentthat night, Joe Engressia was lonely, jumpy and upset..

"God, I'm glad somebody called, I don't know why to­night of all nights I don't get any calls, This guy aroundhere got drunk again tonight and propositioned meagain. I keep telling him we'll never see eye to eye onthis subject, if you know what I mean. I try to makelight of it, you know, but he doesn't get it. I can hearhim out there getting drunker and I don't know whathe'll do next. It's just that I'm really all alone here. Ijust moved to Memphis, it's the first time I'm living outon my own, and I'd hate (or it to all collapse now. ButI won't go to bed with him. I'm just not very interestedin sex and even i( I can't see him I 1..-n()W he's ugly.

"Did you hear that? That's him banging a bottleagainst the wall outside. He's nice. Well (orget about it.You're doing a story on phone phreaks? Listen to this.It's the M F B()()gi~ blues."

Sure .enough, a jumpy version of Muskrat Rambleboogies its way over the line, each note one of thoselong-distance phone tones. The music stops. A huge roar­ing voice blasts the phone off my ear: "AND THE QUES­TION IS ..•" roars the voice, "CAN A BLIND PERSON HOOKUP AN AMPLIFIER ON HIS OWN ?"

The roar ceases. A high-pitched operator-type voicereplaces it. "This is Southern Braille Tel. & Tel. Havetone, will phone."

This is succeeded by a quick series of M-F tones, aswift "kachink" and a deep reassuring voice: "If youneed home care, call the visiting-nurses association.First National time in Honolulu is 4 :32 p.m."

Joe back in his Joe voice again: "Are we seeing eyeto eye? 'Si, si,' said the blind Mexican. Ahem. Yes.Would you like to know the weather in Tokyo?"

This swift manic sequence of phone-phreak vaudevillestunts and blind-boy jokes manages to keep Joe's mindoff his tormentor only as long as it lasts.

"The reason I'm in Memphis, the reason I have todepend on that homosexual guy, is that this is the firsttime I've been able to live on my own and make phonetrips on my own. I've been banned from all central of­fices around home in Florida, they knew me too well,and at the University some of my fellow scholars werealways harassing me because I was on the dorm payphone all the time and making fun of me because of myfat ass, which of course I do have, it's my physical fat­ness program, but I don't like to hear it every day, andif I can't phone trip and I can't phone phreak, I can'timagine what I'd do, I've been devoting three quartersof my life to it.

"I moved to Memphis because I wanted to be on myown as well as because it has a umber 5 crossbarswitching system and some interesting little independentphone-company districts nearby and so far they don'tseem to know who I am so I can go on phone tripping,and for me phone tripping is just as important as phonephreaking."

Phone tripping, Joe explains, begins with calling upa central-office switch room. He tells the switchman ina polite earnest voice that he's a blind college studentinterested in telephones, and could he perhaps have aguided tour of the switching station? Each step of thetour Joe likes to touch and feel relays, caress switchingcircuits, switchboards, crossbar arrangements.

So when Joe Engressia phone phreaks he feels hisway through the circuitry of the country garden of fork­ing paths, he feels switches shift, relays shunt, crossbarsswivel, tandems engage and disengage even as he hears-with perfect pitch-his M-F pulses make the entireBell system dance to his tune.

Just one month ago Joe took all his savings out of hisbank and left home, over the emotional protests of hismother. "I ran away from home almost," he likes to say.Joe found a small apartment house on Union Avenue andbegan making phone trips. He'd take a bus a hundredmiles south into Mississippi to see some old-fashionedBell equipment still in use in several states, which hadbeen puzzling. He'd take a bus three hundred miles toCharlotte, North Carolina, to look at some brand-newexperimental equipment. He hired a taxi to drive himtwelve miles to a suburb to tour the office of a smallphone company with some interesting idiosyncracies inits routing system. He was having the time of his life,he said, the most freedom and pleasure he had known.

In that month he had done very little long-distancephone phreaking from his own phone. He had begun toapply for a job with the phone company, he told me, andhe wanted to stay away from anything illegal.

"Any kind of job will do, anything as menial as the

most lowly operator. That's probably all they'd give mebecause I'm blind. Even though I probably knew morethan most switchmen. But that's okay. I want to workfor Ma Bell. I don't hate Ma Bell the way Gilbertsonand some phone phreaks do. I don't want to screw MaBell. With me it's the pleasure of pure knowledge.There's something beautiful about the system when youknow it intimately the way I do. But I don't know howmuch they know about me here. I have a very intuitivefeel for the condition of the line I'm on, and I thinkthey're monitoring me off and on lately, but I haven'tbeen doing much illegal. I have to make a few calls toswitchmen once in a while which aren't strictly legal,and once I took an acid trip and was having these audi­tory hallucinations as if I were trapped and these planeswere dive-bombing me, and all of a sudden I had tophone phreak out of there. For some reason I had to callKansas City, but that's all."

A Warning Is Delivered

At this point-one o'clock in my time zone-a loudknock on my motel-room door interrupts our conversa­tion. Outside the door I find a uniformed security guardwho informs me that there has been an "emergencyphone call" for me while I have been on the line and thatthe front desk has sent him up to let me know.

Two seconds after I say good-bye to Joe and hang up,the phone rings.

"Who were you talking to?" the agitated voice de­mands. The voice belongs to Captain Crunch. "I calledbecause I decided to warn you of something. I decidedto warn you to be careful. I don't want this informationyou get to get to the radical underground. I don't wantit to get into the wrong hands. What would you say ifI told you it's possible for three phone phreaks to sat­urate the phone system of the nation. Saturate it. Busyit out. All of it. I know how to do this. I'm not gonna tell.I friend of mine has already saturated the trunks be­tween Seattle and New York. He did it with a computer­ized M-F-er hitched into a special Manitoba exchange.But there are other, easier ways to do it."

Just three people? I ask. How is that possible?"Have you ever heard of the long-lines guard fre­

quency? Do you know about stacking tandems with 17and 2600? Well, I'd advise you to find out about it. I'mnot gonna tell you. But whatever you do, don't let thisget into the hands of the radical underground."

(Later Gilbertson the inventor confessed that whilehe had ahyays been skeptical about the Captain's claimof the sabotage potential of trunk-tying phone phreaks,he had recently heard certain demonstrations whichconvinced him the Captain was not speaking idly. "Ithink it might take more than three people, dependingon how many machines like Captain Crunch's were avail­able. But even though the Captain sounds a little weird,he generally turns out to know what he's talking about.")

"You know," Captain Crunch continues in his admoni­tory tone, "you know the younger phone phreaks callMoscow all the time. Suppose everybody were to callMoscow. I'm no right-winger. But I value my life. Idon't want the Commies coming over and dropping abomb on my head. That's why I say you've got to becareful about who gets this information."

The Captain suddenly shifts into a diatribe againstthose phone phreaks who don't like the phone company.

"They don't understand, but Ma Bell knows every­thing they do. Ma Bell knows. Listen, is this line hot?I just heard someone tap in. I'm not paranoid, but I candetect things like that. Well, even if it is, they knowthat I know that they know that I have a bulk eraser.I'm very clean." The Captain pauses, evidently torn be-

ESQUIRE: OCTOBER 123

tween wanting to prove to the phone-company monitorsthat he does nothing illegal, and the desire to impressMa Bell with his prowess. "1I1a Bell knows the things Ican do," he continues. "!'Ita Bell knows how good I am.And I am quite good. I can detect reversals, tandemswitching, everything that goes on on a line. I have rela­tive pitch now. Do you know what that means? My earsare a $20,000 piece of equipmenl With my ears I candetect things they can't hear with their equipment. I'vehad employment problems. I've lost jobs. But I want toshow Ma Bell how good I am. I don't want to screw her,I want to work for her. I want to do good for her. I wantto help her get rid of her flaws and become perfect.That's my numbel'-one goal in life now." The Captainconcludes his warnings and tells me he has to be going."I've got a little action lined up for tonight," he ex­plains and hangs up.

Before I hang up for the night, I call Joe Engressiaback. He reports that his tormentor has finally goneto sleep---"He's not blind drunk, that's the way I get,ahem, yes; but you might say he's in a drunken stupor."I make a date to visit Joe in Memphis in two days.

A Phone Phreak Cell Takes Care of BusinessThe next morning I attend a gathering of four phonephreaks in - - - - - (a California suburb). The gather­ing takes place in a comfortable split-level home in anupper-middle-class subdivision. Heaped on the kitchentable are the portable cassette recorders, M-F cassettes,phone patches, and line ties of the four phone phreakspresent. On the kitchen counter next to the telephone isa shoe-box-size blue box with thirteen large toggleswitches for the tones. The I>arents of the host phonephreak, Ralph, who is blind, stay in the living room withtheir sighted children. They are not sure exactly whatRalph and his friends do with the phone or if it's strictlylegal, but he is blind and they are pleased he has a hobbywhich keeps him busy.

The group hag been working at reestablishing the his·toric "2111" conference, reopening some toll-free loops,and trying to discover the dimensions of what seem tobe new initiatives against phone phreaks by phone-com­pany security agents.

It is not long before I get a chance to see, to hear,Randy at work. Randy is known among the phonephreaks as perhaps the finest con man in the game.Ranely is blind. He is pale, soft and pear-shaped, hewears baggy pants and a wrinkly nylon white sportshirt, pushes his head forward from hunched shouldel·ssomewhat like a turtle inching out of its shell. His eyeswander, crossing and recrossing. and his forehead issomewhat pimply. He is only sixteen years old.

But when Randy starts speaking into a telephonemouthpiece his voice becomes so stunningly authorita·tive it is necessary to look again to convince yourself itcomes from chubby adolescent Randy. Imagine the voiceof a crack oil-rig foreman, a tough, sharp, weather­beaten Marlboro man of forty. Imagine the voice of abrilliant performance-fund gunslinger explaining howhe beats the Dow Jones by thirty percent. Then imaginea voice that could make thoae two sound like StepinFetchit. That is sixteen-year-old Randy's voice.

He is speaking to a switchman in Detroit. The phonecompany in Detroit had closed up two toll·free looppairs for no apparent reason, although heavy use byphone phreaks all over the country may have beendetected. Randy is telling the switchman how to open upthe loop and make it free again:

"How are you, buddy. Yeah, I'm on the board in herein Tulsa, Oklahoma, and we've been trying to run sometests on your loop-arounds, and we find 'em busied out on

1U ESQUIRE.: OCTOBER

both sides.. " Yeah, we've been getting a 'BY' on them,what d'ya say, can you drop cards on 'em? Do you have08 on your number group? Oh that's okay, we've hadthis trouble before, we may have to go after the circuit.Here, lemme give 'em to you: your frame is 05, verticalgroup 03, horizontal 6, vertical file 3. Yeah, we'll hangon here.... Okay, found it? Good. Right, yeah, we'd liketo clear that busy out. Righl All you have to do is lookfor your key on the mounting plate, it's in your miscel·laneous trunk frame. Okay? Right. Now pull your keyfrom NOR over to LCT. Yeah. I don't know why thathappened, but we've been having trouble with that one.Okay. Thanks a lot, fella. Be seein' ya."

Randy hangs up, repol'ts that the switchman was alittle inexperienced with the loop-around circuits on the.miscellaneous trunk frame. but that the loop has beenretul'lled to its free-call status.

Delighted, phone phreak Ed returns the pair of num­bers to the active·status column in his direetory. Ed is asuperb and painstaking researcher. With almost Talmud·ic thoroughness he will trace tendrils of hints throughsoft·wired mll-zes of intervening phone-company circuit­ry back through complex linkages of switching relays tofind the location and identity of just one toll-free loop.He spends hours and hours, every day, doing this sort ofthing. He has somehow compiled a directory of eight hun­dred "Band-six in-WATS numbers" located in over fortystates. Band-six in-WATS numbers are the big 800 num­bers-the ones that can be dialed into free from any­where in the country.

Ed the researcher, a nineteen·year-old engineeringstudent, is also a superb technician. He put together hisown working blue box from scratch at age seventeen.(He is sighted.) This evening after distributing thelatest issue of his in-WATS directory (which has beentyped into Braille for the blind phone phreaks), heannounces he has made a major new breakthrough:

"I finally tested it and it works. perfectly. I've gotthis switching matrix which converts any touch-tonephone into an I\,I-F-er."

The tones you hear in touch-tone phones are not thelaI-F tones that operate the long-distance switching sys­tem. Phone phreaks believe A.T.&T. had deliberatelyequipped. touch tones with a different set of frequenciesto avoid putting the six master M-F tones in the handsof every touch-tone owner. Ed's complex switchingmatrix puts the six master tones, in effect puts a bluebox, in the hands of every touch-tone owner.

Ed shows me pages of schematics. specifications andparts lists. "It's not easy to build, but everything here isin the Heathkit catalog."

Ed asks Ralph what progress he has made in his at­tempts to reestablish a long-term open conference linefor phone phreaks. The last big conference---the historic"2111" conference---had been arranged through an un­used Telex test-board trunk somewhere in the innardsof a 4A switching machine in Vancouver, Canada. Formonths phone phreaks could M-F their way into Van­couver, beep out 604 (the Vancouver area code) and thenbeep out 2111 (the internal phone-company code forTelex testing), and find themselves at any time, day ornight, on an open wire talking with an array of phonephreaks from coast to coast, operators from Bermuda,Tokyo and London who are phone-phreak sympathizers,and miscellaneous guests and technical experts. Theconference was a massive exchange of information.Phone phreaks picked each other's brains clean, thendeveloped new ways to pick the phone company's brainsclean. Ralph gave ltt F Boogie concerts with his home·entertainment·type electric organ, Captain Crunch dem·onatrated his round·the-world prowess with his notori·

us computerized unit and dropped leering hints of the"action" he was getting with his girl friends. (TheCaptain lives out or pretends to live out several kinds offantasies to the gossipy delight of the blind phonephreaks who urge him on to further triumphs on behalfof all of them.) The somewhat rowdy Northwest phone­phreak crowd let their bitter internal feud spill over intothe peaceable conference line, escalating shortly intoguerrilla warfare; Carl the East Coast internationaltone relations expert demonstrated newly opened directM-F routes to central offices on the island of Bahrein inthe Persian Gulf, introduced a new phone-phreak friendof his in Pretoria, and explained the technical operationof the new Oakland-to-Vietnam linkages. (Many phonephreaks pick up spending money by 1-F-ing calls fromrelatives to Vietnam G.I.'s, charging $5 for a whole hourof tran -Pacific conversation.)

Day and night the conference line was nevel' dead.Blind phone phreaks all over the country, lonely and iso­lated in homes filled with active sighted brother andsisters, or trapped with slow and unimaginative blindkids in straitjacket schools for the blind, knew that nomatter how late it got they could dial up the conferenceand find instant electronic communion with two or threeother blind kids awake over on the other side of Amer­ica. Talking together 011 a phone hookup, the blind phonephreaks say, is not much different from being theretogether. Physically there was nothing more than a two­inch-square wafer of titanium inside a vast machine onVancouver Island. FOl' the blind kids the1'e meant anexhilarating feeling of being in touch, through a kindof skill and magic which was peculiarly their own.

Last April 1, however, the long Vancouver Conferencewas shut off. The phone phreaks knew it was coming.Vancouver was in the process of converting from a step­by-step system to a 4A machine and the 2111 Telex cir­cuit was to be wiped out in the proce s. The phonephreaks learned the actual day on which the conferencewould be erased about a week ahead of time over thephone company's internal-news-and-shop-talk recording.

For the next frantic seven days every phone phreak inAmerica was on and off the 2111 conference twenty-fourhours a day. Phone phreaks who were just learning thegame or didn't have f-F capability were boosted up tothe conference by more experienced phreaks so theycould get a glimpse of what it was like before it dis­appeared. Top phone phreaks searched distan't areacodes for new conference possibilities without success.Finally in the early morning of April 1, the end came.

"I could feel it coming a couple hours before mid­night," Ralph remembers. "You could feel somethinggoing on in the lines. Some static began showing up,then some whistling wheezing sound. Then there werebreaks. Some people got cut off and called right back in,but after a while some people were finding they were cutoff and couldn't get back in at all. It was terrible. I lostit about one a.m" but managed to slip in again and stayon until the thing died ... I think it was about four inthe morning. There were four of us still hanging onwhen the conference disappeared into nowhere for good.We all tried to M-F up to it again of course, but we gotsilent termination. There was nothing there."

The Legendary Mark Bernay Turns Out To Be"The Midnight Skulker"

Mark Bernay. I had come across that name before. Itwas on Gilbertson's select list of phone phreaks. The Cal­ifornia phone phreaks had spoken of a mysterious MarkBernay as perhaps the first and oldest phone phreak onthe West Coast. And in fact almost every phone phreakin the West can trace his origins either directly to Mark

Bernay or to a disciple of Mark Bernay.It seems that five years ago this bl'k Bernay (a

pseudonym he chose for himself) began traveling up anddown the West Coast pasting tiny stickers in phone booksall along his way. The stickers read something like "Wantto hear an interesting tape recording? Call these num­bers," The numbers that followed were toll-free loop­around pairs. When one of the curious called one of thenumbers he would hear a tape recording pre-hooked intothe loop by Bernay which explained the use of loop­around pairs, gave the numbers of several more, andended by telling the caller, "At six o'clock tonight thisrecording will stop and you and your friends can try itout. Have fun."

"I was disappointed by the response at first," Bernaytold me, when I finally reached him at one of his manynumbers and he had dispensed with the usual "I never doanything illegal" formalities with which experiencedphone phreaks open most conversations. "I went all overthe coast with these stickers not only on pay phones. butI'd throw them in front of high schools in the middle of .the night, I'd leave them unobtru ively in candy stores,scatter them on main streets of small towns. At firsthardly anyone bothered to try it out. I would listen in forhours and hours after six o'clock and 110 one came on. Icouldn't fi ure out why people wouldn't be interested.Finally these two girls in Or gon tried it out and told alltheir friends and suddenly it began to spread."

Before his Johnny Appleseed trip Bernay had alreadygathered a sizable group of early pre-blue-box phonephreaks together on loop-around in Los Angeles. Bernaydoes not claim credit for the original discovery of theloop-around numbers. He attributes the discovery to aneighteen-year-old reform-school kid in Long Beach whosename he forgets and who, he ays, "ju t disappeared oneday." When Bernay himself discovered loop-arounds in­dependently, from clues in his reading in old i sues ofthe Automatic Elect1'ic Technical Journal, he found doz­ens of the reform-school kid's friends already usingthem. However, it was one of Bernay's disciples in

eattle that introduced phone phreaking to blind kids.The Seattle kid who learned about loops through Ber­nay's recording told a blind fri nd, the blind kid taughtthe secret to his friends at a winter camp for blind kidsin Los Angeles. When the camp session was over thesekids took the secret back to towns all over the West. Thisis how the original blind kids became phone phreaks. Forthem, for most phone phreaks in general, it was thediscovery of the possibilities of loop-arounds which ledthem on to far more serious and sophisticated phone­phreak methods, and which gave them a medium forsharing .their discoveri s.

A year later a blind kid who moved back ea t broughtthe technique to a blind kids' summer camp in Vermont,which spread it along the East Coast. All from a MarkBernay sticker.

Bernay, who is nearly thirty years old now, got hisstart when he was fifteen and his family moved into anL.A. suburb erviced by General Telephone and Electron­ics equipment. He became fascinated with the differencesbetween Bell and G.T.&E. equipment. He learned he couldmake interesting things happen by carefully timed clickswith the disengage button. He learned to interpret subtledifferences in the array of clicks, whirrs and kachinkshe could hear on his lines. He learned he could shift him­self around the switching relays of the L.A. area code ina not-too-predictable fashion by interspersing his ownhook-switch clicks with the clicks within the line. (Inde­pendent phone companies-there are nineteen hundredof them still left, most of them tiny island principalitiesin Ma Bell's vast empire-have (Continued on page 222)

ESQUIRE: OCTOBER 125

SECRETS OF THE UTILE BLUE BOX

(Continued /.,._ fJ(tUfl1f5) always beenfavorites with phone phnaks, first aslearning tools, then as Archimedes plat­forms from which to manipulate thehuge Bell system. A phone phreak inBell territory will often M·F himselfinto an independent's switching system,with switching idiosyncrasies which eangive him marvelous leverage over theBell System.

"I have a real affection for AutomaticElectric equipment," Bernay told me."There are a lot of things you canplay with. Things break down in inter.esting ways."

Shortly after Bernay graduated fromcollege (with a double major in ehemig.try and philosophy), he graduated fromphreaking around with G.T.&E. to theBell S)'stem itselJ, and made his legend_ary sticker-pasting journey north alongthe coast, settling finally in NorthwestPacific Bell teTritory. He discoveredthat if Bell does not break down asinterestingly as G.T.&E., it neverthe­leu offers a lot of "things to play with."

Bernay learned to play with blueboxes. He established his own personalswitchboard and phone-phreak researchlaboratory complex. He continued hisphone-phreak evangelism with ongoingsticker campaigns. He set up two re­cording numbers, one with instructionsfor beginning phone phreaks, the otherwith latest news and technical develop­ments (along with some advanced in­struction) gathered from sources allover the country.

These days, Bernay told me, he hadgone beyond phone-phreaking itself."Lately I've been enjoying playing withcomputers more than playing withphones. My personal thing in com­puters is just like with phones, I guess-the kick is in finding out how to beatthe system, how to get lit things I'm notsupposed to kno..... about, how to dothings with the system that I'm notsupposed to be able to do."

As a matler of fact, Bernay told me,he had just been fired from his com­puter.programming job for doing thingshe was not supposed to be able to do.He had been working with a huge time­sharing computer owned by a large cor­poration but shared by many others.Aceeu to the computer was limited tothose programmers and corporationsthat had been assigned certain pass­words. And each password restricted itsuser to access to only the one section ofthe computer cordoned off from its owninformation storager. The passwordsystem prevented companies and indi­viduals from stealing each other'sinformation.

"I figured out how to write a programthat would let me read everyone else'spassword," Bernay reports. "I beganplaying around with passwords. I beganletting the people who used the com­puter know, in subtle ways, that I knewtheir pauwords. I began dropping notesto the computer supervisors with hintsthat I knew what I know. I signed them'The Midnight Skulker.' I kept gettingcleverer and cleverer with my mes­sages and devising ways of showing

222 ESQUIRE: OCTOBER

them what I could do. I'm sure theycouldn't imagine I CQuld do the thingsI was showing them. But they neverresponded to me. Every once in a whilethey'd change the pauwords, but Ifound out how to discover what the newones were, and I let them know. Butthey never responded directly to TheMidnight Skulker. I even finally de­signed a program which they could useto prevent my program from finding outwhat it did. In effect I told them how towipe me out, The Midnight Skulker. Itwas a very clever program. I startedleaving clues about myself. I wantedthem to try and use it and then try tocome up with something to get aroundthat and reappear again. But theywouldn't play. I wanted to get caught.I mean I didn't want to get caught per_sonally, but I wanted them to notice meand admit that they noticed me. I wantedthem to attempt to respond, maybe insome interesting way."

Finally the computer managers be­came concerned enough about the threatof information-stealing to respond.However, instead of using The MidnightSkulker's own elegant self-destruct pro­gram, they called in their security per­sonnel, interrogated everyone, foundan informer to identify Bernay as TheMidnight Skulker, and tired him.

"At first the security people advisedthe company to hire me full-time tosearch out other tlaws and discoverother computer freaks. I might haveliked that. But I probably would haveturned into a double double agent ratherthan the double agent they wanted. Imight have resurrected The MidnightSkulker and tried to catch myself. Whoknows! Anyway, the higher-ups turnedthe whole idea down."

You Can Tap the F.B.I:s Crime ControlComputer in the Comfort of Your

Own Home, Perhaps

Computer freaking Illay be the wave ofthe future. It suits the phone-phreaksensibility perfectly. Gilbertson, theblue-box inventor and a lifelong phonephreak, has also gone on from phone­phreaking to computer-freaking. Beforehe got into the blue-box business Gil­bertson, who is a highly skilled pro­grammer, devised programs for inter­national t':urrent':y arbitrage.

But he began playing with computersin earnest when he learned he eould usehis blue box in tandem with the com­puter terminal installed in his apart­ment by the instrumentation finn heworked for. The print.-out terminal andkeyboard was equipped with acousticalcoupling, so that by coupling his littleivory Princess phone to the terminaland then coupling his blue box on that,he could M.F his way into other com­puters with complete anonymity, andwithout charge; program and re-pro­gram them at will; feed them false ormisleading information; tap and stealfrom them. He explained to me that hetaps computers by busying out all thelines, then going into a verificationtrunk, listening into the passwords and

instructions one of the time sharersuses, and then M-F-ing in and imitat­ing them. He believes it would not beimpossible to creep into the F.B.I.'scrime control CQmputer through a localpolice eomputer terminal and phreakaround with the F .B.I.'s memory banks.He claim.s he has succeeded in re-pro­gramming a certain huge institutionalcomputer in such a way that it hasrordoned off an entire section of its t':ir­cuitry for his personal use, and at thesame time CQnceals the arrangementfrom anyone else's notice. I have beenunable to verify this claim.

Like Captain Crunch, like AlexanderGraham Bell (pseudonym of a disgrun­tled-looking East Coast engineer whoclaims to have invented the black boxand now sells black and blue boxes togamblers and radical heavies), likemost phone phreaks, Gilbertson beganhis career trying to rip off pay phonesa.s a teen-ager. Fi,gure them out, thenrip them off. Getting his dime backfrom the pay phone is the phonephreak's first thrilling rite of passage.After learning the usual eighteen dif­ferent ways of getting his dime back,Gilbertson learned how to make masterkeys to coin-phone cash boxes, and geteveryone else's dimes back. He stolesome phone-company equipment and puttogether his own home switchboard withit. He learned to make a simple "bread­box" device, of the kind used by bookiesin the Thirties (bookie gives a num­ber to his betting clients; the phonewith that number is installed in somewidow lady's apartment, but is riggedto ring in the bookie's shop across town,COPI trace big betting number and findnothing but the widow).

Not long after that afternoon in 1968when, deep in the stacks of an engineer­ing library, he came across a techniealjournal with the phone tone frequenciesand rushed off to make his first bluebox, not long after that Gilbertsonabandoned a very promising career inphysieal chemistry and began sellingblue boxes for $1,500 apiece.

"I had to leave physical chemistry.I just ran out of interesting things tolearn," he told me one evening. We hadbeen talking in the apartment of theman who served as the link betweenGilbertson and the syndicate in arrang­ing the big $300,000 blue-box deal whichfell through because of legal trouble.There has been some smoking.

"No more interesting things to learn,"he CQntinucs- "Physical chemistry turnsout to be a sick subject when you takeit to its highest level. I don't know. Idon't think I could explain to you howit's lick. You have to be there. But youget, I don't know, a false feeling ofomnipotence. I suppose it's like phone­phreaking that way. This huge thing isthere. This whole system. And there archoles in it and you slip into them likeAlice and you're pretending you're do­ing something you're actually not, orat least it's no longer you that's doingwhat you thought you were doing. It'sall Lewis Carroll. Physical chemistryand phone-phreaking. That's why youhave these phone.phreak pseu90nymslike The Cheshire Cat, The Red King,

Cit.y·. _

State Zip--_Regiue'eJ ("fA·OBO) ",i'h the U. S. Go\ernment'sAdvisory Comml1lcc on VoJunt~ry Foreign Ald.Giil$ are t4> deductible. CanadIan. Write 1407Yonge. Toronlo 7 £S.IOOO

supplies exhau ted, babie abandonedby unwed mother .

Since 193 , thOli ands of Americansponsors have found lhi to be an intI­mate person-to-person way of sharingtheir ble sing with young ters aroundthe world.

Lillie ie-Wen and children like herneed your love-won't you help? Today?

Sponsor urgently ne ded thi monthfor children in: India, Brazil, Taiwan(Formo a) and Hong Kong. (Or let usel t a child for you from our emer­gency list.)

Write today: crCnl 1. Mill

CHRISTIAN CHILDREN'S FUND, Inc.Do 26511. Rkhmond, \3. 23261

1 \ i b to ponsor a 0 boy [J girl in ame.e _(CountT)}-) _o Cho se a child who needs me mo t. Addre:s:'>- _I will pay $12 a month.I encl se my first payment of S-.Send m child's name, stOf) , addrcsand picture.1 cannot pan or a child but want togive $ .o Please send me more information.

SheNeedsYour

oveLittle Mie-Wen in Formosa

already knows many things . . .the gnawing of hunger ... thehi ering of fear .• , the misery of

being unwanted.But he ha never known love.

Her mother died when she waborn. Her father wa poor-anddidn't want a girl child. So Mie­Wen has spent her baby yearswithout the affection and ecurityevery child craves.

Your love can give Mie-Wen,and children ju t a needy, theprivileges you would wi h for yourown child.

Through Christian Children'sFund you can sponsor one of theseyoungster. We u e the word pon­or to ymbolize the bond of love

that exists between you and thechild.

The cost? Only 12 a month.Your love i demon trated in apractical way because your moneyhelp with nouri hing meal ...medical care . . . warm clothing

, . education understandinghou emother .

And in rdurn you will receiveyour child' per onal hi tory.photograph, plu a de riplJon ofthe rphanage where your childlive. You can write and endpackage. Your child will know who youare and will am wer your letter . Cor­respondence i tran ]a(ed at our over easoffices.

(If you want your child to have a spe­cial gift-a pair f hoe , a warm jacket,a fuzzy bear-you can end your checkto our office, and the entire amOUf/( willbe forwarded, along with your instru ­tion .)

Will you help? Reque t come fromorphanage every day. And they areurgent. Children wrapping rag on theirfeet, cho I books years out of date, milk

and The Snark. But there's somethingabout phone-phreaking that you don'tfind in physical chemistry." He looks upat me:

"Did you ever steal anything?"Well yes, 1-"Then you know I You know the rush

you get. It's not just knowledge, likephysical chemistry. It's forbiddenknowledge. You know. You can learnabout anything under the sun and bebored to death with it. But the ideathat it's illegal. Look: you can be smalland mobile and smart and you're l'ip­ping off somebody large and powerfuland very dangerous."

People like Gilbertson and AlexanderGraham Bell are always talking aboutripping off the phone company andcrewing Ma Bell. But if they were

shown a single button and told that bypushing it they could turn the entirecircuitry of A.T.&T. into molten pud­dles, they probably wouldn't push it.The disgruntled-inventor phone phreakneeds the phone system the wa·y thelapsed Catholic needs the Church, theway Satan needs a God, the way TheMidnight Skulker needed, more thananything else, response.

Later that evening Gilbertson fin­i~hed telling me how delighted he wasat the flood of blue boxes spreadingthroughout the country, how delightedhe was to know that "thi time they'rereally screwed." He suddenly shiftedgears.

"Of course, I do have this love/hatething about Ma Bell. In a way I almostlike the phone company. I guess I'd bevery sad if they were to go away or iftheir services were to disintegrate. Ina way it's just that after having beenso good they turn out to have thesethings wrong with them. It's thoseflaws that allow me to get in and messwith them, but I don't know. There'ssomething about it that gets to you andmakes you want to get to it, you know."

I ask him what happens when he runsout of interesting, forbidden things tolearn about the phone system.

"I dOll't know, maybe I'd go to workfor them for a while."

In security even?"I'd do it, sure. I just as soon play­

I'd just as soon work on either side."Even figuring out how to trap phone

phreaks? I said, recalling Mark Ber­nay's game.

"Yes, that might be interesting. Yes,I could figure out how to outwit thephone phreaks. Of course if I got toogood at it it might become boringagain. Then I'd have to hope the phonephreaks got much better and out­smarted me for a while. That wouldmove the quality of the game up onelevel. I might even have to help themout, you know, 'Well kids, I wouldn'twant this to get around but did youever think of-?' I could keep it goingat higher and higher levels forever."

The'dealer speaks up for the first time.He has been staring at the soft blinkingpatterns of lights and colors on thetranslucent tiled wall facing him. (Ac­tually there are no patterns: the colorand illumination of every tile is de­termined by a computerized random-

ESQUIRE: OCTOBER 223

number generator designed by Gilbert-.son which insures that there can be nomeaning to any sequence of events inthe tiles.)

"Those are nice games you're talkingabout," $8Ys the dealer to his friend."But I wouldn't mind seeing themscrewed. A telephone isn't private any­more. You can't say anything you reallywant to say on a telephone or :IOU haveto go through that paranoid bulls_ --.'Is it cool to talk on the phone?' I mean,even if it is cool, if you have to ask'Is it cool,' then it isn't cool. You know.Like those blind kids, people are goingto start putting together their own pri­vate telephone companies if they wantto reully talk. And you know what else.You don't hear silences on ~he phoneanymore. They've got this time_sharingthing on long-distance Hnes where youmake a pause and they s:lip out thatpiece of time and use it to carry partof somebody else's conversa~ion. Insteadof a pause, where somebody's maybebreathing or sighing, you get this blankhole and you only start hearing againwhen someone says a word and even thebeginning of the word is clipped oft'. Si­lences don't count--you're paying forthem, but they take them away fromyou. It's not cool to talk and you ean'thear someone when they don't talk.What the hell good is the phone? Iwouldn't mind seeing them totallyscrewed."

The BiJ,l: Memphis Bust

Joe Engressia never wanted to screwMa Bell. His dream had always been towork (or her.

The day I visited Joe in his smallapartment on Union Avenue in Mem­phis, he was upset about another set­back in his application for a telephonejob.

"They're stalling on it. I got a lettertoday telling me they'd have to postponethe interview J requested again. Mylandlord read it for me. They ~ave mesome runaround about wanting paperson Illy rehabilitation status but I thinkthere's sOll1ething else going on."

When I switched on the 40-watt bulbin Joe's room-he sometimes forgetswhen he has guests-it looked as ifthere was enough telephone hardwareto start a small phone company of hisown.

There is one phone on top of his desk,one phone sitting in an open drawer be­neath the desk top. Next to the desk-topphone is a cigar-box-size M-F devicewith big tol{"gle switches, and next tothat is some kind of lIwitehing Ilnd cou­pling device with jacks and alligatorplugs hanging loose. Next to that is aBraille typewriter. On the ftoar next tothe desk, lying upside down like a deadtortoise, is the half-gutted body of anold bllick standard phone. Across theI'oom on a torn and dusty couch are twomore phones, one of them a touch-tonemodel; two tape reeorders; a heap ofphone patches and cassettes, and a life­lIize toy telephone.

Our conversation is interrupted everyten minutes by phone phreaks from allover the country ringing Joe on just

224 ESQUIRE: OCTOBER

about every piece of equipment but thetoy phone and the Braille typewriter.One fou~n-year-old blind kid fromConnectic:ut caiis up and tells Joe he'sgot a girl friend. He wants to talk toJoe about girl friends. Joe says they'lltalk later in the evening when they canbe alone on the line. Joe draws a deepbreath, whistles him off" the air with anearspli~ting 2600-cycle whistle. Joe ispleased to get the calls but he lookedworried and preoccupied that evening,his brow constantly furrowed over hisdark wand~ring eyes. In addition tothe phone_company stall, he has justlearned that his apartment house is dueto be demolished in sixty days for urbanrenewal. For all its shabbir.ess, theUnion Avenue apurtment has been Joe'sfirst home-of-his-own and he's worriedthat he may not find another before thisone is dllmolished.

But what really bother'll Joe is thatswitchmen haven't been listening tohim. "I've been doing some checking on800 number'll lately, and I've discoveredthat certain 800 numbers in New Hamp­shire couldn't be reached from Missouriand Kansas. Now it may sound like asmall thing, but I don't like to see slop­py work; it makes me ieel bad about thelines. So I've been calling up switchingoffices and reportinR" it, but they haven'tcorrected it. I called them up for thethird time today and instead of checkingthey just got mad. Well, that gets memad. I mean, I do try to help them.There's something about them I can'tunderstand-you wallt to help them andthey just try to say you're defraudingthem."

It is Sunday evening and Joe invitesme to join him for dinner at a HolidayInn. Frequently on Sunday evening Joetakes some of his welfare money, callsa cab, and treats himself to a lIteak din­ner at one of Memphis' thirteen HolidayInns. (Memphis is the headquarters ofHoliday Inn. Holiday Inns have been afavorite for Joe ever since he made hisfirst solo phone trip to a Bell switchingoffice in Jacksonville, Florida, andstayed in the H;:,Iiday Inn there. Helikes to stay at Holiday Inns, he ex­plains, because they represent freedomto him and because the rooms are ar­ranged the same all over the country sohe knows that any Holiday Inn room illfamili:\r territory to him. Just like anytelephone.)

Over steaks in the Pinnacle Restau­rant of the Holiday Inn l'tIedieal Centeron Madison Avenue in Memphis, Joetells me the highlights of his life as aphone phreak.

At age seven, Joe learned his firstphone trick. A mean bab~'-sitter, tiredof listening to little Joe play with thephone as he always did, constantly, puta lock on the phone dial. "I got so mad.When there's a phone sitting there andI can't use it. . so I started gettir.gmad and banging the receiver up anddown. I noticed I banged it once and itdialed one. Well, then I tried banging ittwice...." In a few minutes Joelearned how to dial by pressing thehook switch at the right lime. "I was soexcited I remember going 'whoo whoo'and beat a box down on the floor."

Al age eight Joe learned about whis­tling. "I was listening to some interceptnonworking-number recordin~in L.A._I was calling L.A. as far back as that,but I'd mainly dial nonworking numbersbecause there was no charge, and I'dlisten to tilese recordings all day. Well,I was whistling 'cause listening to theserecordings can be boring after a whileeven if they are from L.A., and all of Ilsudden, in the middle of whistling, thel-ecording clicked off. I fiddled aroundwhistling some more, and ~he 1\1Imething happened. So I called up theswitch room and said, 'I'm Joe. I'meight ~'e:J.rs old and I want to know whywhen I whistle thi~ tune the line clicklloff.' He tried to explain it to me, but itwas a little too techniC'al at the time. Iwent on learning. That wa~ a thilLg no­body was going to stop Ine from doing.The phones were my life, and! was g0.­

ing to pay any price to keep on learning.I knew I could go to jail. But I had to dowhat I had to do to keep on learning."

The phone is ringing when we walkback into Joe's apartment on UllionAvenue. It is Captain Crunch. The Cap­tain has been following me around byphone, callinK up e"er~'wher(' I go withadditional bits of advice snd explana­tion for me and whatever phone phro:akI happen to be vbiting. This time theCaptain reports he is calling from wnathe (Ieseribes as "my hidf'Il\\'IlY hil:h upin the Sierra Nevada." He p'Jises outlusty salvos of M_F and tElls Joe he isabout to "g'Q out and get II ::~t1e actiontoni~ht. Do some phreaking of anotherkind, if you know what I mean." Joechuckles.

The Captain then tells me to makesure I understand ~hat 'vhat he told meabout tying up the nation's phone lineswas true, but that he and the phonephreaks "8 knew never used the tech­nique for sabotage. They only learnedthe t~hnique to help the phone com­pany.

"We do a lot of troubleshootin,:r forthem. Like thill New HampshirelMis_souri WATS-line flaw I've been scream­ing about. We help them more thanthey know."

A fter we say A"ood-bye to the Captainand Joe whistles him off ~he line, Joetells me nbout a disturbing dream hehad the night before: "I had beencaught and they were taking me to aprison. It was a long trip. They weretakinA:' me to a prison a long 10:lg wayaway. And we stopped at a Holiday Innand it Wl\lI my last night ever at a Holi­day Inn, and it WlllI my Illst niKht everusing the phone and I was crying andcrying, and the lady at the Holiday Innsaid, 'Gosh, honey, )'ou should never besad at a Holiday Inn. You I\hould al­ways be happy here. Especially sinceit's your last night.' And that just madeit worse and I was sobbing so much Icouldn't stand it."

Two weeks lifter I left Joe Engn~s·

sia's apartment, phone-company secu­rity agents and Memphis police brokeinto it. Anned with a wanant, whichthey left pinned to a wall, they confis­cated every piece of equipment in theroom, including his toy telephone. Joewas placed under arrest and taken to

the city jail where he was forced tospend the night since he had no moneyand knew no one in Memphis to call.

It is not clear who told Joe what thatnight, but someone told him that thephone company had an open-and-shutcase against him because of revelationsof illegal activity he had made to aphone-company undercover agent.

By morning Joe had become convincedthat the reporter from Esquire, withwhom he had spoken two weeks ago,was the undercover agent. He probablyhad ugly thoughts about someone hecouldn't see gaining his confidence, lis­tening to him talk about his personalobsessions and dreams, while planningall the while to lock him up.

"I really thought he was a reporter,"Engressia told the Memphis Press­Scimitar. "I told him everything. . . ."Feeling betrayed, Joe proceeded to con­fess everything to the press and police.

As it turns out, the phone companydid use an undercover agent to trapJoe, although it was not the Esquirereporter.

Ironically, security agents werealerted and began to compile a caseagainst Joe because of one of his actsof love for the system: Joe had calledan internal service department to reportthat he had located a group of defectivelong-distance trunks, and to complainagain about th~ ew Hampshire/Mis­souri WATS problem. Joe always likedMa Bell's lines to be clean and respon­sive. A suspicious switchman reportedJoe to the security agents who discov­ered that Joe had never had a long­distance call charged to his name.

Then the security agents learned thatJoe was planning one of his phone tripsto a local switching office. The securitypeople planted one of their agents inthe switching office. He posed as astudent switchman and followed Joearound on a tour. He was extremelyfriendly and helpful to Joe, leading himaround the office by the arm. When thetour was over he offered Joe a ride backto his apartment house. On the way heasked J oe-one tech man to another­about "those blue boxes" he'd heardabout. Joe talked about them freely,talked about his blue box freely, andabout all the other things he could dowith the phones.

The next day the phone-company se­curity agents slapped a monitoring tapeon Joe's line, which eventually picked upan illegal call. Then they applied for thesearch warrant and broke in.

In court Joe pleaded not guilty to pos­session of a blue box and theft of ser­vice. A sympathetic judge reduced thecharges to malicious mischief and foundhim guilty on that count, sentenced himto two thirty-day sentences to be servedconcurrently and then uspended thesentence on condition that Joe promisenever to play with phones again. Joepromised, but the phone company re­fused to restore his service. For twoweeks after the trial Joe could not be

- reached except through the pay phoneat his apartment house, and the land­lord screened all calls for him.

Phone-phreak Carl managed to getthrough to Joe after the trial, and re-

ESQUIRE: OCTOBER 225

ported that Joe sounded crushed by thewhole affair.

"What I'm worried about," Carl toldme, "is that Joe means it this time. Thepromise. That he'll never phone-phreakagain. That's what he told me, that he'sgiven up phone.phreaking for good. Imean his entire life. He says he knowsthey're going to be watching him soclosely for the rest of his life he'll neverbe able to make a move without goingstraight to jail. He sounded very brokenup by the whole experience of being injail. It was awful to hear him talk thatway. I don't know. I hope maybe he hadto sound that wa~'. Over the phone, youknow."

He reports that the entire phone.phreak underground is up in arms overthe phone company's treatment of Joe."All thc while Joe had his hopes pinnedon his application for a phone.compsnyjob, they were stringing him along get­ting ready to bust him. That gets memad. Joe spent most of his time helpingthem out. The bastards. They think theycan use him as an example. All of a sud·den they're harassing us on the coast.Agents are jumping up on our lines.They just busted··· - - - 's mute yester_day and ripped out his lines. But nomatter what Joe does, I don't thinkwe're going to take this lying down."

Two weeks Inter my phone dngs andabout eight phone phreaks in successionsay hello from about eight differentplaces in the country, among them Carl,Ed, and Captain Crunch. A nationwideIJhone-phreak conference line has beenreestablished through a switching maochine in . - _. _... , with the coopera­tion of a disgruntled switchman.

"We have a special guest with us to·day," Carl tells me.

The next voice I hear is Joe's. He re.­ports happily that he has just moved toa place called Millington, Tennessee, fifoteen miles outside of Memphis, wherehe has been hired as a telephone-set reopairman by a small independent phonecompany. Someday he hopes to be anequipment troubleshooter.

"It's the kind of job I dreamed about.They found out about me from the pub·licity surrounding the trial. Maybe MaBell did me a favor busting me. I'll havetelephones in my hands all day long."

"You know the expression, 'Don't getmad, get even'?" phone·phreak Carlasked me. "Well, I think they're goingto be very sorry about what they didto Joe and what they're trying to doto us." it+-

United States SavingsBonds constitute one ofthe easiest and safestways to build a nest eggfor yourself. They now paythe highest interest rateever. and can be boughtthrough payroll savingswhere you work or on theBond·A·Month plan whereyou bank. Ask about them

at either place.

Heu.

•-~I.=~,1/'.---.. :I

ne..... dimensionin His and

. ....~...~ .~,~,,~.~"4'

............ '" ".o:>:t,"" •

_.,..,..,. ..........,e.-._.'''''....."'_"'o~"'_<o.

.. --- ....._.._.... ...,

••. a

One .;z. ',te "'" C.,.".......ct<-eecw. girt:box w,cr> tn. ,-UV GLOVE g.",.t>oc~.

""==_...,=,===-==

Tn,. ,s va'" k"'" 01 g,fc eolt-. lu~~V

."'" we~rn Tn. LUV GLOVE ,. v-.cw th tootf..too """'Q, v.,.,.~ <'hOI<:. c'conc~••t.<r>g fo.I- <:>e/rnoI .,.,..".. cr.. en._" .....,... ,.,too<"_t "lI g,ft,

~~~~~"l"~eSlzes 24" to 40· Up to now lhe hell has been a slflctly functionalitem-necessary but dull. All of thai changes Wllh these unique leatherinnovations wilh burnished solid brass buckles. Crafted Irom lhe Itnestimported and domestic hides. each bell 1$ tailored for SPirit. liS well aslooks. MetIculously rubbed oil lanned harnen leathers make Iheselhe best bell buys milable anywhere. All bells are 1JA" Wide, Orderyours today. Sallsfadlon guaranteed Dr your money back. Circle your

color choice on llle coupon. ==~~~~===::::==-=-

A new madallle art aeries lor the collector­or lor the man who has everything elael99+% pure $jlver. A sound Investment, 100.Med,ls are Oye, 1\~" In d,.mele, an., W.<lIh .pp.o>370 1I•• ,n,. The hillh P1J"ty I'CIC, lmo,e Ih.n ,'e,lonll)and nu\')' w"lIhl m'~e lhlJ one Of lhe be., med,llIe.no..lmenl o,lue. ,."I,bl 11 medii. ",e wuc~ by,he Lelch., Mint lhe W ,.. '"geSi p".e'e "''hI. ....,10" ou,IOly c,nllic.IIl I. l$Sued w,lh Uch CO'h,

InU<H!ucto,y oUe" Sign up now 10' your subsc.lptionto. Ihe ,e"" 01 12 cOJn, 10. t", low p"ca 01 $a.0Ilpe, "",<s.I, FREEl H.nd c..fled d"ol,y .lllum inClUded---------------_.I Free Brochure! Mail Today! II C...h,,. Sco'p,o," Do'" E·ll0 I

P,O, I,.. S62, c... lln" 1.I.nd, C'h!, 9010.0 II - Pk,,' • • M« m~ '"',.",O','~10' c~.Y'" '12I '. "" " ,ou' '.'... 0' 0.'"','"' ~"" ,n ~",••,.....' I

...J Eo, ""'~'. m, <""." '" ,"one, 0',,"' 1o," 0(1 t,.. II eMo' ,no 1, ..1 m.d.1 Send 1<.. b"'<1'.'.I ~ I "0 10111<. mot. ,"'O,,,,",, I

I'W"E II AOORESS. II ':IT~ ST"T~ ZIP. I

I ~IG~~~.'-::~.;;, I' " ;,;, I" " " II . ~ ...... ,"T ,ro",~;!.~:t'':;.-'' ,'••- ~.", I._---------------226 ESQUIRE' OCTOBER Acquired, Scanned I Laid out by Nu~ber Six cDD~