Exploding the Phone : The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell (9780802193759)

by Lapsley, Phil

  EXPLODING THE PHONE

  EXPLODING THE PHONE

  The Untold Story of the Teenagers

  and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell

  phil lapsley

  Grove Press

  New York

  Copyright © 2013 by Philip D. Lapsley

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003 or permissions@groveatlantic.com.

  Excerpt from IWOZ: COMPUTER GEEK TO CULT ICON: HOW I INVENTED THE PERSONAL COMPUTER, COFOUNDED APPLE, AND HAD FUN DOING IT by Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith.

  Copyright © 2006 by Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith.

  Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9375-9

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  13 14 15 16 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To the men and women of the Bell System, and especially to the members of the technical staff of Bell Laboratories, without whom none of this would have been possible

  CONTENTS

  Foreword by Steve Wozniak

  A Note on Names and Tenses

  Chapter 1Fine Arts 13

  Chapter 2Birth of a Playground

  Chapter 3Cat and Canary

  Chapter 4The Largest Machine in the World

  Chapter 5Blue Box

  Chapter 6“Some People Collect Stamps”

  Chapter 7Headache

  Chapter 8Blue Box Bookies

  Chapter 9Little Jojo Learns to Whistle

  Chapter 10Bill Acker Learns to Play the Flute

  Chapter 11The Phone Freaks of America

  Photo Insert

  Chapter 12The Law of Unintended Consequences

  Chapter 13Counterculture

  Chapter 14Busted

  Chapter 15Pranks

  Chapter 16The Story of a War

  Chapter 17A Little Bit Stupid

  Chapter 18Snitch

  Chapter 19Crunched

  Chapter 20Twilight

  Chapter 21Nightfall

  Epilogue

  Sources and Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  The Playground

  Phone phreak (n.) 1. A person who is obsessively interested in learning about, exploring, or playing with the telephone network. 2. A person who is interested in making free telephone calls.

  FOREWORD

  I FIRST LEARNED ABOUT phone phreaking from a magazine. In the fall of 1971 I stumbled onto an article that seemed like a bit of science fiction, about these groups of people who knew how to crack the phone system all over the world. I was young, only twenty years old, and I thought this was a really cool made up story.

  I phoned Steve Jobs halfway through and started reading him the article. I just had to call him. We researched it and found out, “Whoa!” It made sense! Who would ever believe you could put tones into a phone and make calls free anywhere in the world? I mean, who would believe it? It was like we stumbled onto to some magical mystery that other people just didn’t know about. And I had no idea the impact it would end up having on my life.

  We just had to try it, to find out if it really worked. Over the next few months I started designing a “blue box,” an electronic gizmo that made the tones you needed to control the telephone network. I put so much attention into trying to make it the very best blue box in the world. It was digital, unlike the ones that everybody else had, and it had some of the cleverest, most off-the-wall design techniques I’ve ever put into anything I’ve ever built, even to this day. It was great, and it was my passport into the phone phreaks’ underground network.

  I had grown up very shy and often felt left out of things. But for me, phone phreaking was a place in the world that I was like a leader. It was a place where I could blossom. And it’s not that I could blossom as a criminal—it wasn’t that we had lots of people to call or had giant phone bills or really wanted to rip off the phone company or anything. It’s just that it was so exciting! When I went into a room and showed off phone tricks with a blue box, I was like a magician playing tricks. I was the center of attention. That was probably partly what drove me. But it was also the fascination of doing something that nobody would really believe was possible.

  I was enthusiastic then about very few things, but this one I was enthusiastic about. Phone phreaking was one of the first big adventures I had in my life. And it made me want to have more of those adventures by designing more things like my blue box, weird things that worked in ways that people didn’t expect. For the rest of my life, that was the reason I kept doing project after project after project, usually with Steve Jobs. You could trace it right up to the Apple II computer. It was the start of wanting to constantly design things very, very well and get noticed for it. Steve and I were a team from that day on. He once said that Apple wouldn’t have existed without the blue box, and I agree.

  Today a lot of people are computer hackers and a lot of them just want to cause problems for others—they’re like vandals. I was not a vandal, I was just curious. But, boy, I wanted to find out what the limits of the telephone system were. What are the limits of any system? I’ve found that for almost anybody who thinks well in digital electronics or computer programming, if you go back and look at their lives they’ll have these areas of misbehavior. And I think some of the most creative people have all, at some point, focused their creativity on doing things that they aren’t supposed to do. But their goal is usually, oh my gosh, can I discover something? Is there some way to do something that is not exactly in books and not known? Hackers are the ultimate example: every hacker I’ve ever run into is always trying to explore the little tiny nuances of anything looking for a mistake, a crack they can get through.

  The blue box was this magical, unbelievable adventure. The fact that nobody else knew about it and I did made it special knowledge. But it was no good just to know it inside—it was only good when I shared it with others. It was playing with magical powers. I would say I had an awful lot of those experiences in my life, but the blue box was probably the most special of all.

  I hope that getting to learn a little bit about phone phreaking turns out to be one tenth as much fun for you as it was for me to experience it.

  Steve Wozniak

  Cofounder, Apple Computer

  A NOTE ON NAMES AND TENSES

  ANONYMITY AND PSEUDONYMS have been a thorn in my side throughou
t the writing of this book. Despite my attempts to convince my interviewees that this all happened a long time ago, that the statute of limitations has long since expired, that the phone company doesn’t care and the phone phreaks don’t care and law enforcement doesn’t care, several people have insisted on either being anonymous or being referred to by pseudonyms. For those who wished to be nameless, I have tried to make their anonymity obvious (“A source familiar with the matter recalls . . .”). Pseudonyms are marked with a footnote when they are first used to call attention to the shy. Each such footnote indicates whether the pseudonym is historical or modern, that is, whether the pseudonym used was the person’s nom de phreak back in the day or is a more recent fabrication for purposes of present-day identity protection.

  The identity of every source used in the book is known to me; there have been no “Deep Throat”–style encounters in which I have received late-night phone calls from truly anonymous sources telling me outlandish things or, for that matter, any things at all. I guess I’m just in the wrong line of work.

  Finally, a note on verb tense: when I have used the present tense to attribute a quote in this book (e.g., “Acker recalls” or “Perrin remembers”), it means that the quote was taken directly from an interview I conducted between 2005 and 2012 or from a document published during that time. When I have used the past tense (“The memo stated” or “Draper said”), it indicates that the quote was taken from an older newspaper article, memo, FBI file, or other document, or from notes or audiotapes from the time in question.

  One

  Fine Arts 13

  THERE IT WAS again.

  Jake Locke* set down his cup and looked more closely at the classified ad. It was early afternoon on a clear spring day in Cambridge in 1967. Locke, an undergrad at Harvard University, had just gotten out of bed. A transplant from southern California, he didn’t quite fit in with Harvard’s button-down culture—another student had told him he looked like a “nerdy California surfer,” what with his black-framed eyeglasses, blond hair, blue eyes, and tall, slim build. Now in the midst of his sophomore slump, Locke found himself spending a lot of time sleeping late, cutting classes, and reading the newspaper to find interesting things to do. Pretty much anything seemed better than going to classes, in fact.

  *A pseudonym.

  It was a slow news day. The Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, didn’t have much in the way of interesting articles, so Locke once again found himself reading the classified ads over breakfast. He had become something of a connoisseur of these little bits of poetry—people selling cars, looking for roommates, even the occasional kooky personal ad probably intended as a joke between lovers—all expressed in a dozen or so words.

  But this ad was different. It had been running for a while and it had started to bug him.

  wanted harvard mit Fine Arts no. 13 notebook. (121 pages) & 40 page reply K.K. & C.R. plus 2,800; battery; m.f. El presidente no esta aqui asora, que lastima. B. David Box 11595 St. Louis, MO 63105.

  Locke had seen similar classified ads from students who had lost their notes for one class or another and were panicking as exams rolled around. They often were placed in the Crimson in the hopes that some kind soul had found their notes and would return them. Fine Arts 13 was the introductory art appreciation class at Harvard, so that fit.

  But nothing else about the ad made any sense. Fine Arts 13 wasn’t offered at MIT. And what was all the gibberish afterward? 2,800? Battery? M.f., K.K., C.R.? What was with the Spanish? And why was somebody in St. Louis, Missouri, running an ad in Cambridge, Massachusetts, looking for a notebook for a class at Harvard? Locke had watched the ad run every day for the past few weeks. Whoever they were, and whatever it was, they clearly wanted this notebook. Why were they so persistent?

  One way to find out.

  Locke looked around for a piece of paper and a pen. He wrote: “Dear B. David: I have your notebook. Let’s talk. Sincerely, Jake.”

  He dropped the letter in the mail on his way into Harvard Square to find something interesting to do.

  An envelope with a St. Louis, Missouri, postmark showed up in Locke’s mailbox a week later. Locke opened the envelope and read the single sheet of paper. Or rather, he tried to read it. It wasn’t in English. It seemed to be written in some sort of alien hieroglyphics. It was brief, only a paragraph or so long. The characters looked familiar somehow but not enough that he could decipher them.

  Locke showed the letter to everyone he saw that day but nobody could read it. Later that evening, as Locke sat at the kitchen table in his dorm room and stared at the letter, trying to puzzle it out, one of his roommates came home. Shocked that Locke might actually be doing something that looked like homework, his roommate asked what he was working on. Locke passed the letter across the table and told him about it.

  His roommate took one look and said, “It looks like Russian.”

  Locke said, “That’s what I thought. But the characters don’t seem right.”

  “Yeah. They’re not. In fact . . .” His roommate’s voice trailed off for a moment. “In fact, they’re mirror writing.”

  “What?”

  “You know, mirror writing. The letters are written backwards. See?”

  Locke looked. Sure enough: backwards.

  Locke and his roommate went to the mirror and transcribed the reversed lettering. It was Cyrillic—Russian letters. Fortunately, Locke’s roommate was taking a Russian class. They sat back down at the table and translated the letter.

  “Dear Jake,” the letter read. “Thank you very much for your reply. However, I seriously doubt that you have what I need. I would strongly advise you to keep to yourself and not interfere. This is serious business and you could get into trouble.” Signed, B. David.

  Locke sat back. Someone had put a cryptic ad in the newspaper. He’d responded. They sent him a letter. In mirror writing. In Russian. In 1967. During the cold war.

  Spy ring.

  It just didn’t get much cooler than this, Locke figured. Intriguing. Terrifying, even. And far, far better than going to class.

  Locke mailed his reply that day—in English, and not in mirror writing. “Dear B. David: Actually, I do have your notebook and I would like to talk to you. Sincerely, Jake.”

  Four days went by before the mailman brought Locke an odd letter, a piece of card stock folded in half and taped at the top. The fold line was perforated so that it could be torn in half. The writing was in English this time.

  “Dear Jake, if you have the information I need, you should be able to complete the other half of this card and mail it back to me. Then we can continue our discussions. Sincerely, B. David.”

  Locke looked at the other half of the postcard. It had a handful of questions on it:

  Complete the following sequence: 604, 234, 121, ___

  What does M.F. stand for?

  What equipment were the students at Harvard and MIT using?

  Huh?

  Locke spent every waking hour over the next several days working on the postcard questions. The numbers repeated over and over in his mind: 604, 234, 121 . . . 604, 234, 121 . . . 604, 234, 121 . . .

  604-234-1212.

  A phone number? It wasn’t directory assistance—Locke knew that would have been 555-1212—but it sort of sounded right. Worth a shot, anyway. He picked up the phone and dialed. A woman’s businesslike voice answered on the first ring.

  “Cleaner clean,” she said.

  “Excuse me?” said Locke.

  “Cleaner clean inward,” the woman repeated, more distinctly this time.

  Locke hung up. He stared at the phone. Cleaner clean? Inward?

  Where was area code 604, anyway? The phone book said British Columbia. And where was that? Western Canada. Locke looked around his dorm room, found an atlas, and flipped to the page on Br
itish Columbia. He scanned the map. The big cities had names he recognized, names like Vancouver and Prince George. The smaller towns had less familiar names. Names like Kamloops. Squamish. Quesnel. Chilanko.

  Kleena Kleene.

  At dinner that night Locke mentioned his phone call to Steve, another of his roommates. Steve said, “Huh. That’s interesting. My girlfriend Suzy is an inward.”

  “What? What’s an inward?” asked Locke.

  “It’s some kind of special telephone operator. You should talk to her, she might be able to help you figure some of this stuff out. She lives over in Revere. Give her a call.”

  Locke did. Suzy explained that an inward is an “operator’s operator.” When an operator needs assistance in making a call, she calls the inward operator for the destination city. The inward operator then completes the call to a local number.

  “So how do I call an inward?” Locke asked her.

  “You can’t. Inwards have special phone numbers that only operators can dial. If you wanted to call the New York inward, you’d have to dial something like 212-049-121. So 121 is what gets you the inward, and 049 is a routing code inside of New York, and New York is the 212 area code. But you can’t dial numbers like 049 or 121 from a regular phone.”

  Locke explained that he seemed to have found a way to call an inward operator from his regular phone by dialing 604-234-1212.

  “Well,” Suzy said, “I’m mystified. You shouldn’t be able to. I don’t know, maybe you found a glitch. But here’s how you can tell. Call them up and ask them to complete a call to somebody. If they’re really an inward, they’ll be able to do it no problem.”

  “I don’t know anybody in Canada,” Locke said.

  “That’s okay. An inward can call anywhere. And we sometimes get calls from the test board within the phone company asking us to complete calls to places for testing purposes. Just tell them you’re with the test board. Be confident and self-assured and act like you know what you’re doing and they won’t give you any trouble.”