The Anarchist Cookbook (49 page)

went from South America to London, I had a London operator connect me to a New York

operator, I had New York connect me to a California operator who rang the phone next to

me. Needless to say I had to shout to hear myself. But the echo was far out. Fantastic.

Delayed. It was delayed twenty seconds, but I could hear myself talk to myself."

"You mean you were speaking into the mouthpiece of one phone sending your voice around

the world into your ear through a phone on the other side of your head?" I asked the

Captain. I had a vision of something vaguely autoerotic going on, in a complex electronic

way.

"That's right," said the Captain. "I've also sent my voice around the world one way, going

east on one phone, and going west on the other, going through cable one way, satellite the

other, coming back together at the same time, ringing the two phones simultaneously and

picking them up and whipping my voice both ways around the world back to me. Wow. That

was a mind blower." "You mean you sit there with both phones on your ear and talk to

yourself around the world," I said incredulously.

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

"What do you say? What do you say to yourself when you're connected?"

"Oh, you know. Hello test one two three," he says in a low-pitched voice.

"Hello test one two three," he replied to himself in a high-pitched voice.

"Hello test one two three," he repeats again, low-pitched.

"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 Ever Taps Phones Anymore

Using internal phone-company codes, phone phreaks have learned a simple method for

tapping phones. Phone-company operators have in front of them a board that holds

verification jacks. It allows them to plug into conversations in case of emergency, to listen

in to a line to determine if the line is busy or the circuits are busy. Phone phreaks have

learned to beep out the codes which lead them to a verification operator, tell the

verification operator they are switchmen from some other area code testing out

verification trunks. Once the operator hooks them into the verification trunk, they

disappear into the board for all practical purposes, slip unnoticed into any one of the

10,000 to 100,000 numbers in that central office without the verification operator

knowing what they're doing, and of course without the two parties to the connection

knowing there is a phantom listener present on their line.

Toward the end of my hour-long first conversation with him, I asked the Captain if he ever

tapped phones.

"Oh no. I don't do that. I don't think it's right," he told me firmly. "I have the power to

do it but I don't... 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

date with her the last weekend and I thought she liked me. I called her up, man, and her

line was busy, and I kept calling and it was still busy. Well, I had just learned about this

system of jumping into lines and I said to myself, 'Hmmm. Why not just see if it works.

It'll surprise her if all of a sudden I should pop up on her line. It'll impress her, if

anything.' So I went ahead and did it. I M-Fed into the line. My M-F-er is powerful enough

when patched directly into the mouthpiece to trigger a verification trunk without using an

operator the way the other phone phreaks have to.

"I slipped into the line and there she was talking to another boyfriend. Making sweet talk

to him. I didn't make a sound because I was so disgusted. So I waited there for her to

hang up, listening to her making sweet talk to the other guy. You know. So as soon as she

hung up I instantly M-F-ed her up and all I said was, 'Linda, we're through.' And I hung up.

And it blew her head off. She couldn't figure out what the hell happened.

"But that was the only time. I did it thinking I would surprise her, impress her. Those were

all my intentions were, and well, it really kind of hurt me pretty badly, and... and ever since

then I don't go into verification trunks."

Moments later my first conversation with the Captain comes to a close.

"Listen," he says, his spirits somewhat cheered, "listen. What you are going to hear when I

hang up is the sound of tandems unstacking. Layer after layer of tandems unstacking until

there's nothing left of the stack, until it melts away into nothing. Cheep, cheep, cheep,

cheep," he concludes, his voice descending to a whisper with each cheep.

He hangs up. The phone suddenly goes into four spasms: kachink cheep. Kachink cheep

kachink cheep kachink cheep, and the complex connection has wiped itself out like the

Cheshire cat's smile.

The MF Boogie Blues

The next number I choose from the select list of phone-phreak alumni, prepared for me by

the blue-box inventor, is a Memphis number. It is the number of Joe Engressia, the first

and still perhaps the most accomplished blind phone phreak.

Three years ago Engressia was a nine-day wonder in newspapers and magazines all over

America because he had been discovered whistling free long-distance connections for

fellow students at the University of South Florida.

Engressia was born with perfect pitch: he could whistle phone tones better than the

phone-company's equipment.

Engressia might have gone on whistling in the dark for a few friends for the rest of his

life if the phone company hadn't decided to expose him. He was warned, disciplined by the

college, and the whole case became public. In the months following media reports of his

talent, Engressia began receiving strange calls. There were calls from a group of kids in

Los Angeles who could do some very strange things with the quirky General Telephone and

Electronics circuitry in LA suburbs. There were calls from a group of mostly blind kids in

----, California, who had been doing some interesting experiments with Cap'n Crunch

whistles and test loops. There was a group in Seattle, a group in Cambridge,

Massachusetts, a few from New York, a few scattered across the country. Some of them

had already equipped themselves with cassette and electronic M-F devices. For some of

these groups, it was the first time they knew of the others.

The exposure of Engressia was the catalyst that linked the separate phone-phreak centers

together. They all called Engressia. They talked to him about what he was doing and what

they were doing. And then he told them -- the scattered regional centers and lonely

independent phone phreakers -- about each other, gave them each other's numbers to call,

and within a year the scattered phone-phreak centers had grown into a nationwide

underground.

Joe Engressia is only twenty-two years old now, but along the phone-phreak network he is

"the old man," accorded by phone phreaks something of the reverence the phone company

bestows on Alexander Graham Bell. He seldom needs to make calls anymore. The phone

phreaks all call him and let him know what new tricks, new codes, new techniques they have

learned. Every night he sits like a sightless spider in his little apartment receiving

messages from every tendril of his web. It is almost a point of pride with Joe that they

call him.

But when I reached him in his Memphis apartment that 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 around here got drunk again tonight and propositioned me again. I keep

telling him we'll never see eye to eye on this subject, if you know what I mean. I try to

make light of it, you know, but he doesn't get it. I can head him out there getting drunker

and I don't know what he'll do next. It's just that I'm really all alone here, just moved to

Memphis, it's the first time I'm living on my own, and I'd hate for it to all collapse now.

But I won't go to bed with him. I'm just not very interested in sex and even if I can't see

him I know he's ugly.

"Did you hear that? That's him banging a bottle against the wall outside. He's nice. Well

forget about it. You're doing a story on phone phreaks? Listen to this. It's the MF Boogie

Blues.

Sure enough, a jumpy version of Muskrat Ramble boogies its way over the line, each note

one of those long-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

HOOK UP AN AMPLIFIER ON HIS OWN?"

The roar ceases. A high-pitched operator-type voice replaces it. "This is Southern Braille

Tel. & Tel. Have tone, will phone."

This is succeeded by a quick series of M-F tones, a swift "kachink" and a deep reassuring

voice: "If you need 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 eye to 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 vaudeville stunts and blind-boy jokes manages

to keep Joe's mind off his tormentor only as long as it lasts.

"The reason I'm in Memphis, the reason I have to depend on that homosexual guy, is that

this is the first time I've been able to live on my own and make phone trips 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 were always harassing me because I was on the

dorm pay phone all the time and making fun of me because of my fat ass, which of course I

do have, it's my physical fatness program, but I don't like to hear it every day, and if I

can't phone trip and I can't phone phreak, I can't imagine what I'd do, I've been devoting

three quarters of my life to it.

"I moved to Memphis because I wanted to be on my own as well as because it has a

Number 5 crossbar switching system and some interesting little independent phone-

company districts nearby and so far they don't seem to know who I am so I can go on

phone tripping, and for me phone tripping is just as important as phone phreaking."

Phone tripping, Joe explains, begins with calling up a central-office switch room. He tells

the switchman in a polite earnest voice that he's a blind college student interested in

telephones, and could he perhaps have a guided tour of the switching station? Each step of

the tour Joe likes to touch and feel relays, caress switching circuits, switchboards,

crossbar arrangements.

So when Joe Engressia phone phreaks he feels his way through the circuitry of the

country garden of forking paths, he feels switches shift, relays shunt, crossbars swivel,

tandems engage and disengage even as he hears -- with perfect pitch -- his M-F pulses

make the entire Bell system dance to his tune.

Just one month ago Joe took all his savings out of his bank and left home, over the

emotional protests of his mother. "I ran away from home almost," he likes to say. Joe

found a small apartment house on Union Avenue and began making phone trips. He'd take a

bus a hundred miles south in Mississippi to see some old-fashioned Bell equipment still in

use in several states, which had been puzzling. He'd take a bus three hundred miles to

Charlotte, North Carolina, to look at some brand-new experimental equipment. He hired a

taxi to drive him twelve miles to a suburb to tour the office of a small phone company with

some interesting idiosyncrasies in its 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-distance phone phreaking from his own phone.

He had begun to apply for a job with the phone company, he told me, and he 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 me because I'm blind. Even though I probably know more than most switchmen.

But that's okay. I want to work for Ma Bell. I don't hate Ma Bell the way Gilbertson and

some phone phreaks do. I don't want to screw Ma Bell. With me it's the pleasure of pure

knowledge. There's something beautiful about the system when you know it intimately the

way I do. But I don't know how much they know about me here. I have a very intuitive feel

for the condition of the line I'm on, and I think they're monitoring me off and on lately,

but I haven't been doing much illegal. I have to make a few calls to switchmen 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 planes were dive-bombing me, and all of

sudden I had to phone phreak out of there. For some reason I had to call Kansas City, but