The Anarchist Cookbook (50 page)

that's all."

A Warning Is Delivered

At this point -- one o'clock in my time zone -- a loud knock on my motel-room door

interrupts our conversation. Outside the door I find a uniformed security guard who

informs me that there has been an "emergency phone call" for me while I have been on the

line and that the 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 called because I decided to warn you of something. I decided to warn you to be

careful. I don't want this information you get to get to the radical underground. I don't

want it to get into the wrong hands. What would you say if I told you it's possible for

three phone phreaks to saturate the phone system of the nation. Saturate it. Busy it out.

All of it. I know how to do this. I'm not gonna tell. A 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 frequency? Do you know about stacking

tandems with 17 and 2600? Well, I'd advise you to find out about it. I'm not gonna tell

you. But whatever you do, don't let this get into the hands of the radical underground."

(Later Gilbertson, the inventor, confessed that while he had always been skeptical about

the Captain's claim of the sabotage potential of trunk-tying phone phreaks, he had

recently heard certain demonstrations which convinced him the Captain was not speaking

idly. "I think it might take more than three people, depending on 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 call Moscow all the time. Suppose everybody were to call Moscow. I'm no right-

winger. But I value my life. I don't want the Commies coming over and dropping a bomb on

my head. That's why I say you've got to be careful about who gets this information."

The Captain suddenly shifts into a diatribe against those 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 can detect things like

that. Well, even if it is, they know that I know that they know that I have a bulk eraser.

I'm very clean." The Captain pauses, evidently torn between wanting to prove to the

phone-company monitors that he does nothing illegal, and the desire to impress Ma Bell

with his prowess. "Ma Bell knows how good I am. And I am quite good. I can detect

reversals, tandem switching, everything that goes on a line. I have relative pitch now. Do

you know what that means? My ears are a $20,000 piece of equipment. With my ears I can

detect things they can't hear with their equipment. I've had employment problems. I've

lost jobs. But I want to show 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 want to help her get rid of her flaws and

become perfect. That's my number-one goal in life now." The Captain concludes 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 Engressia back. He reports that his tormentor

has finally gone to 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 Call Takes Care of Business

The next morning I attend a gathering of four phone phreaks in ----- (a California suburb).

The gathering takes place in a comfortable split-level home in an upper-middle-class

subdivision. Heaped on the kitchen table are the portable cassette recorders, M-F

cassettes, phone patches, and line ties of the four phone phreaks present. On the kitchen

counter next to the telephone is a shoe-box-size blue box with thirteen large toggle

switches for the tones. The parents of the host phone phreak, Ralph, who is blind, stay in

the living room with their sighted children. They are not sure exactly what Ralph and his

friends do with the phone or if it's strictly legal, but he is blind and they are pleased he

has a hobby which keeps him busy.

The group has been working at reestablishing the historic "2111" conference, reopening

some toll-free loops, and trying to discover the dimensions of what seem to be 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 phone phreaks as perhaps the finest con man in the game. Randy is blind. He is pale,

soft and pear-shaped, he wears baggy pants and a wrinkly nylon white sport shirt, pushes

his head forward from hunched shoulders somewhat like a turtle inching out of its shell.

His eyes wander, crossing and recrossing, and his forehead is somewhat pimply. He is only

sixteen years old.

But when Randy starts speaking into a telephone mouthpiece his voice becomes so

stunningly authoritative it is necessary to look again to convince yourself it comes from a

chubby adolescent Randy. Imagine the voice of a crack oil-rig foreman, a tough, sharp,

weather-beaten Marlboro man of forty. Imagine the voice of a brilliant performance-fund

gunslinger explaining how he beats the Dow Jones by thirty percent. Then imagine a voice

that could make those two sound like Stepin Fetchit. That is sixteen-year-old Randy's

voice.

He is speaking to a switchman in Detroit. The phone company in Detroit had closed up two

toll-free loop pairs for no apparent reason, although heavy use by phone phreaks all over

the country may have been detected. Randy is telling the switchman how to open up the

loop and make it free again:

"How are you, buddy. Yeah. I'm on the board in here in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and we've been

trying to run some tests on your loop-arounds and we find'em busied out on both sides...

Yeah, we've been getting a 'BY' on them, what d'ya say, can you drop cards on 'em? Do

you have 08 on your number group? Oh that's okay, we've had this trouble before, we may

have to go after the circuit. Here lemme give 'em to you: your frame is 05, vertical group

03, horizontal 5, vertical file 3. Yeah, we'll hang on here.... Okay, found it? Good. Right,

yeah, we'd like to clear that busy out. Right. All you have to do is look for your key on the

mounting plate, it's in your miscellaneous trunk frame. Okay? Right. Now pull your key from

NOR over the LCT. Yeah. I don't know why that happened, but we've been having trouble

with that one. Okay. Thanks a lot fella. Be seein' ya."

Randy hangs up, reports that the switchman was a little inexperienced with the loop-

around circuits on the miscellaneous trunk frame, but that the loop has been returned to

its free-call status.

Delighted, phone phreak Ed returns the pair of numbers to the active-status column in his

directory. Ed is a superb and painstaking researcher. With almost Talmudic thoroughness

he will trace tendrils of hints through soft-wired mazes of intervening phone-company

circuitry back through complex linkages of switching relays to find the location and

identity of just one toll-free loop. He spends hours and hours, every day, doing this sort of

thing. He has somehow compiled a directory of eight hundred "Band-six in-WATS numbers"

located in over forty states. 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 engineering student, is also a superb technician. He

put together his own working blue box from scratch at age seventeen. (He is sighted.) This

evening after distributing the latest issue of his in-WATS directory (which has been typed

into Braille for the blind phone phreaks), he announces he has made a major new

breakthrough:

"I finally tested it and it works, perfectly. I've got this switching matrix which converts

any touch-tone phone into an M-F-er."

The tones you hear in touch-tone phones are not the M-F tones that operate the long-

distance switching system. Phone phreaks believe AT&T. had deliberately equipped touch

tones with a different set of frequencies to avoid putting the six master M-F tones in the

hands of every touch-tone owner. Ed's complex switching matrix puts the six master

tones, in effect put a blue box, in the hands of every touch-tone owner.

Ed shows me pages of schematics, specifications and parts lists. "It's not easy to build,

but everything here is in the Heathkit catalog."

Ed asks Ralph what progress he has made in his attempts to reestablish a long-term open

conference line for phone phreaks. The last big conference -- the historic "2111"

conference -- had been arranged through an unused Telex test-board trunk somewhere in

the innards of a 4A switching machine in Vancouver, Canada. For months phone phreaks

could M-F their way into Vancouver, beep out 604 (the Vancouver area code) and then beep

out 2111 (the internal phone-company code for Telex testing), and find themselves at any

time, day or night, on an open wire talking with an array of phone phreaks from coast to

coast, operators from Bermuda, Tokyo and London who are phone-phreak sympathizers,

and miscellaneous guests and technical experts. The conference was a massive exchange of

information. Phone phreaks picked each other's brains clean, then developed new ways to

pick the phone company's brains clean. Ralph gave M F Boogies concerts with his home-

entertainment-type electric organ, Captain Crunch demonstrated his round-the-world

prowess with his notorious computerized unit and dropped leering hints of the "action" he

was getting with his girl friends. (The Captain lives out or pretends to live out several

kinds of fantasies to the gossipy delight of the blind phone phreaks who urge him on to

further triumphs on behalf of all of them.) The somewhat rowdy Northwest phone-phreak

crowd let their bitter internal feud spill over into the peaceable conference line,

escalating shortly into guerrilla warfare; Carl the East Coast international tone relations

expert demonstrated newly opened direct M-F routes to central offices on the island of

Bahrein in the Persian Gulf, introduced a new phone-phreak friend of his in Pretoria, and

explained the technical operation of the new Oakland-to Vietnam linkages. (Many phone

phreaks pick up spending money by M-F-ing calls from relatives to Vietnam GIs charging $5

for a whole hour of trans-Pacific conversation.)

Day and night the conference line was never dead. Blind phone phreaks all over the

country, lonely and isolated in homes filled with active sighted brothers and sisters, or

trapped with slow and unimaginative blind kids in straitjacket schools for the blind, knew

that no matter how late it got they could dial up the conference and find instant

electronic communion with two or three other blind kids awake over on the other side of

America. Talking together on a phone hookup, the blind phone phreaks say, is not much

different from being there together. Physically, there was nothing more than a two-inch-

square wafer of titanium inside a vast machine on Vancouver Island. For the blind kids

>there< meant an exhilarating feeling of being in touch, through a kind of skill and magic

which was peculiarly their own.

Last April 1, however, the long Vancouver Conference was shut off. The phone phreaks

knew it was coming. Vancouver was in the process of converting from a step-by-step

system to a 4A machine and the 2111 Telex circuit was to be wiped out in the process. The

phone phreaks learned the actual day on which the conference would be erased about a

week ahead of time over the phone company's internal-news-and-shop-talk recording.

For the next frantic seven days every phone phreak in America was on and off the 2111

conference twenty-four hours a day. Phone phreaks who were just learning the game or

didn't have M-F capability were boosted up to the conference by more experienced

phreaks so they could get a glimpse of what it was like before it disappeared. Top phone

phreaks searched distant area codes 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

something going on in the lines. Some static began showing up, then some whistling