The Anarchist Cookbook (52 page)

whole system. And there are holes in it and you slip into them like Alice and you're

pretending you're doing something you're actually not, or at least it's no longer you that's

doing what you thought you were doing. It's all Lewis Carroll. Physical chemistry and

phone-phreaking. That's why you have these phone-phreak pseudonyms like The Cheshire

Cat, the Red King, and The Snark. But there's something about phone-phreaking that you

don't find in physical chemistry." He looks up at me:

"Did you ever steal anything?"

"Well yes, I..."

"Then you know! You know the rush you get. It's not just knowledge, like physical

chemistry. It's forbidden knowledge. You know. You can learn about anything under the sun

and be bored to death with it. But the idea that it's illegal. Look: you can be small and

mobile and smart and you're ripping off somebody large and powerful and very dangerous."

People like Gilbertson and Alexander Graham Bell are always talking about ripping off the

phone company and screwing Ma Bell. But if they were shown a single button and told that

by pushing it they could turn the entire circuitry of A.T.&T. into molten puddles, they

probably wouldn't push it. The disgruntled-inventor phone phreak needs the phone system

the way the lapsed Catholic needs the Church, the way Satan needs a God, the way The

Midnight Skulker needed, more than anything else, response.

Later that evening Gilbertson finished telling me how delighted he was at the flood of blue

boxes spreading throughout the country, how delighted he was to know that "this time

they're really screwed." He suddenly shifted gears.

"Of course. I do have this love/hate thing about Ma Bell. In a way I almost like the phone

company. I guess I'd be very sad if they were to disintegrate. In a way it's just that after

having been so good they turn out to have these things wrong with them. It's those flaws

that allow me to get in and mess with them, but I don't know. There's something about it

that gets to you and makes you want to get to it, you know."

I ask him what happens when he runs out of interesting, forbidden things to learn about

the phone system.

"I don't know, maybe I'd go to work for 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 the phone phreaks.

Of course if I got too good at it, it might become boring again. Then I'd have to hope the

phone phreaks got much better and outsmarted me for a while. That would move the

quality of the game up one level. I might even have to help them out, you know, 'Well, kids,

I wouldn't want this to get around but did you ever think of -- ?' I could keep it going at

higher and higher levels forever."

The dealer speaks up for the first time. He has been staring at the soft blinking patterns

of light and colors on the translucent tiled wall facing him. (Actually there are no patterns:

the color and illumination of every tile is determined by a computerized random-number

generator designed by Gilbertson which insures that there can be no meaning to any

sequence of events in the tiles.)

"Those are nice games you're talking about," says the dealer to his friend. "But I wouldn't

mind seeing them screwed. A telephone isn't private anymore. You can't say anything you

really want to say on a telephone or you have to go through that paranoid bullshit. '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. 'Is it cool,' then it isn't cool. You know. Like those blind kids, people

are going to start putting together their own private telephone companies if they want to

really talk. And you know what else. You don't hear silences on the phone anymore. They've

got this time-sharing thing on long-distance lines where you make a pause and they snip out

that piece of time and use it to carry part of somebody else's conversation.Instead of a

pause, where somebody's maybe breathing or sighing, you get this blank hole and you only

start hearing again when someone says a word and even the beginning of the word is

clipped off. Silences don't count -- you're paying for them, but they take them away from

you. It's not cool to talk and you can't hear someone when they don't talk. What the hell

good is the phone? I wouldn't mind seeing them totally screwed."

The Big Memphis Bust

Joe Engressia never wanted to screw Ma Bell. His dream had always been to work for her.

The day I visited Joe in his small apartment on Union Avenue in Memphis, he was upset

about another setback in his application for a telephone job.

"They're stalling on it. I got a letter today telling me they'd have to postpone the

interview I requested again. My landlord read it for me. They gave me some runaround

about wanting papers on my rehabilitation status but I think there's something else going

on."

When I switched on the 40-watt bulb in Joe's room -- he sometimes forgets when he has

guests -- it looked as if there was enough telephone hardware to start a small phone

company of his own.

There is one phone on top of his desk, one phone sitting in an open drawer beneath the

desk top. Next to the desk-top phone is a cigar-box-size M-F device with big toggle

switches, and next to that is some kind of switching and coupling device with jacks and

alligator plugs hanging loose. Next to that is a Braille typewriter. On the floor next to the

desk, lying upside down like a dead tortoise, is the half-gutted body of an old black

standard phone. Across the room on a torn and dusty couch are two more phones, one of

them a touch-tone model; two tape recorders; a heap of phone patches and cassettes, and

a life-size toy telephone.

Our conversation is interrupted every ten minutes by phone phreaks from all over the

country ringing Joe on just about every piece of equipment but the toy phone and the

Braille typewriter. One fourteen-year-old blind kid from Connecticut calls up and tells Joe

he's got a girl friend. He wants to talk to Joe about girl friends. Joe says they'll talk later

in the evening when they can be alone on the line. Joe draws a deep breath, whistles him

off the air with an earsplitting 2600-cycle whistle. Joe is pleased to get the calls but he

looked worried and preoccupied that evening, his brow constantly furrowed over his dark

wandering eyes. In addition to the phone-company stall, he has just learned that his

apartment house is due to be demolished in sixty days for urban renewal. For all its

shabbiness, the Union Avenue apartment house has been Joe's first home-of-his-own and

he's worried that he may not find another before this one is demolished.

But what really bothers Joe is that switchmen haven't been listening to him. "I've been

doing some checking on 800 numbers lately, and I've discovered that certain 800 numbers

in New Hampshire couldn't be reached from Missouri and Kansas. Now it may sound like a

small thing, but I don't like to see sloppy work; it makes me feel bad about the lines. So

I've been calling up switching offices and reporting it, but they haven't corrected it. I

called them up for the third time today and instead of checking they just got mad. Well,

that gets me mad. I mean, I do try to help them. There's something about them I can't

understand -- you want to help them and they just try to say you're defrauding them."

It is Sunday evening and Joe invites me to join him for dinner at a Holiday Inn. Frequently

on Sunday evening Joe takes some of his welfare money, calls a cab, and treats himself to

a steak dinner at one of Memphis' thirteen Holiday Inns. (Memphis is the headquarters of

Holiday Inn. Holiday Inns have been a favorite for Joe ever since he made his first solo

phone trip to a Bell switching office in Jacksonville, Florida, and stayed in the Holiday Inn

there. He likes to stay at Holiday Inns, he explains, because they represent freedom to

him and because the rooms are arranged the same all over the country so he knows that

any Holiday Inn room is familiar territory to him. Just like any telephone.)

Over steaks in the Pinnacle Restaurant of the Holiday Inn Medical Center on Madison

Avenue in Memphis, Joe tells me the highlights of his life as a phone phreak.

At age seven, Joe learned his first phone trick. A mean baby-sitter, tired of listening to

little Joe play with the phone as he always did, constantly, put a lock on the phone dial. "I

got so mad. When there's a phone sitting there and I can't use it... so I started getting

mad and banging the receiver up and down. I noticed I banged it once and it dialed one.

Well, then I tried banging it twice...." In a few minutes Joe learned how to dial by pressing

the hook switch at the right time. "I was so excited I remember going 'whoo whoo' and

beat a box down on the floor."

At age eight Joe learned about whistling. "I was listening to some intercept non working-

number recording in L.A.- I was calling L.A. as far back as that, but I'd mainly dial non

working numbers because there was no charge, and I'd listen to these recordings all day.

Well, I was whistling 'cause listening to these recordings can be boring after a while even

if they are from L.A., and all of a sudden, in the middle of whistling, the recording clicked

off. I fiddled around whistling some more, and the same thing happened. So I called up the

switch room and said, 'I'm Joe. I'm eight years old and I want to know why when I whistle

this tune the line clicks off.' He tried to explain it to me, but it was a little too technical

at the time. I went on learning. That was a thing nobody was going to stop me from doing.

The phones were my life, and I was going to pay any price to keep on learning. I knew I

could go to jail. But I had to do what I had to do to keep on learning."

The phone is ringing when we walk back into Joe's apartment on Union Avenue. It is

Captain Crunch. The Captain has been following me around by phone, calling up everywhere

I go with additional bits of advice and explanation for me and whatever phone phreak I

happen to be visiting. This time the Captain reports he is calling from what he describes as

"my hideaway high up in the Sierra Nevada." He pulses out lusty salvos of M-F and tells

Joe he is about to "go out and get a little action tonight. Do some phreaking of another

kind, if you know what I mean." Joe chuckles.

The Captain then tells me to make sure I understand that what he told me about tying up

the nation's phone lines was true, but that he and the phone phreaks he knew never used

the technique for sabotage. They only learned the technique to help the phone company.

"We do a lot of troubleshooting for them. Like this New Hampshire/Missouri WATS-line

flaw I've been screaming about. We help them more than they know."

After we say good-bye to the Captain and Joe whistles him off the line, Joe tells me about

a disturbing dream he had the night before: "I had been caught and they were taking me

to a prison. It was a long trip. They were taking me to a prison a long long way away. And

we stopped at a Holiday Inn and it was my last night ever using the phone and I was crying

and crying, and the lady at the Holiday Inn said, 'Gosh, honey, you should never be sad at a

Holiday Inn. You should always be happy here. Especially since it's your last night.' And

that just made it worse and I was sobbing so much I couldn't stand it."

Two weeks after I left Joe Engressia's apartment, phone-company security agents and

Memphis police broke into it. Armed with a warrant, which they left pinned to a wall, they

confiscated every piece of equipment in the room, including his toy telephone. Joe was

placed under arrest and taken to the city jail where he was forced to spend the night

since he had no money and knew no one in Memphis to call.

It is not clear who told Joe what that night, but someone told him that the phone company

had an open-and-shut case against him because of revelations of illegal activity he had

made to a phone-company undercover agent.

By morning Joe had become convinced that the reporter from Esquire, with whom he had

spoken two weeks ago, was the undercover agent. He probably had ugly thoughts about

someone he couldn't see gaining his confidence, listening to him talk about his personal

obsessions and dreams, while planning all the while to lock him up.

"I really thought he was a reporter," Engressia told the Memphis Press-Seminar. "I told

him everything...." Feeling betrayed, Joe proceeded to confess everything to the press and

police.

As it turns out, the phone company did use an undercover agent to trap Joe, although it

was not the Esquire reporter.

Ironically, security agents were alerted and began to compile a case against Joe because

of one of his acts of love for the system: Joe had called an internal service department to