Phreaking

Today in class I told the students the story about how Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak raised capital for the early Apple computer by selling blue boxes to the mafia and to college students. It's such a cool story. Wikipedia has many interesting articles about the early phreaking devices. The blue box allowed you to make free long distance calls. The concept of the blue box was apparently discovered by a 7-year-old blind kid with perfect pitch named Joe Engressia. Joe, when he was seven, noticed that when he whistled at a certain frequency (technically at 2600 hz), that it would disconnect one end of the trunk line of the phone system, allowing the user to remain on the trunk and make calls without supervision (and ultimately without pay). Joe told his friend, John Draper, that there was a whistle packaged as a toy in a Captain Crunch box that emitted the 2600 hz tone. From there, Draper apparently became the architect of the blue box, and taught the skill to Wozniak and Jobs who sold them for a pretty penny to bookies and college kids. Joe Engressia has a sad ending to his story which you can read at that link.

Other boxes were created. There was, for instance, the red box, which simulated the sound of coins falling into a payphone, and thus fooling the system into thinking money had been deposited. There was also the black box, which worked similarly to the blue box. The black box would allow the receiver to cancel the charges to the sender when the long distance call was made.

These early phreakers were pioneers of the computing systems and phone systems. I always wanted to be one, and was technically doing some of that stuff in 8th grade, but the most sophisticated thing I ever did was set up my modem to randomly dial long distance dialing numbers all night, cycling through different numbers of a partially cracked 16-digit calling card. This was a brute force method, though, and required zero skill and sophistication. I was not a programmer, and thus was never able to get into the unix hacking. I also remember getting a username and password to TRW, and got a bunch of credit card histories, including numbers, for a ton of people in my town, including the mayors. That was cool. Of course, it required no skill, since I found the username and password on a message board. I never could figure out where the expiration dates were on the list, and so nothing ever came of it, but it was nonetheless fascinating to see these people's credit histories.

But despite a fascination with hacking and phreaking, I always had a much smaller ambition. I basically just wanted to play games, manage my own bulletin board service and make friends. But, I had some high points too. Like when I made some hit list of hack BBSs and ended up in an issue of Phrack Magazine. I won't say which of those in the hit list is me, since this is still an anonymous blog, but for those who know me, they will recognize the area code. The issue of Phrack says that the hit list was put together by some vigilantes who were wanting to "take down" system operators of BBSs that distributed viruses (which my BBS had - about 100 or so. I have no idea why I distributed those. At the time, you really couldn't have a phreak/hack BBS and not, though). This was probably pure junk, made up by some random person who got my phone number and BBS name off one off the many lists out there where we advertised. My experience with phreakers and hackers, as limited as it was, taught me that they were incredibly petty, vindictive people doing essentially vandalism and unproductive things. I believe there were people doing interesting things, and whose work probably did ultimately lead to productive outcomes for society, in the form of strengthening security systems and through the kinds of side projects that Woz did with Apple. But I personally never met those people. The people I met were usually kind of creepy, and weird. And of course, I have to include myself in that category, too. Thankfully, this never materialized. I didn't realize I was on a hit list until a decade later when I randomly googled my old BBS and phone number, and saw it show up in Phrack! Reading the "Hit List" section is a little chilling, though, assuming that it happened the way the magazine said it did (which I take with a little grain of salt).

Sadly, it all ended somewhat abruptly when I made some actual physical friends in high school. But I spent my entire 8th grade completely obsessed with hacking, phreaking and credit card scamming.