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                 *              Secrets of the Little Blue Box               *
                 *                     by Ron Rosenbaum                      *
                 *                 Typed by One Farad Cap/AAG                *
                 *        -A story so incredible it may even make you        *
                 *             feel sorry for the phone company-             *
                 *                  (First of four files)                    *
                 *      +----------------------------------------------+     *
        
             Printed in the October 1971 issue of Esquire Magazine. If you happen to 
        be in a library and come across a collection of Esquire magazines, the October 
        1971 issue is the first issue printed in the smaller format. The story begins 
        on page 116 with a picture of a blue box.
                                          --One Farad Cap, Atlantic Anarchist Guild
        
        The Blue Box Is Introduced: Its Qualities Are Remarked
        
             I am in the expensively furnished living room of Al Gilbertson (His real 
        name has been changed.), the creator of the "blue box." Gilbertson is holding 
        one of his shiny black-and-silver "blue boxes" comfortably in the palm of his 
        hand, pointing out the thirteen little red push buttons sticking up from the 
        console. He is dancing his fingers over the buttons, tapping out discordant 
        beeping electronic jingles. He is trying to explain to me how his little blue 
        box does nothing less than place the entire telephone system of the world, 
        satellites, cables and all, at the service of the blue-box operator, free of 
        charge.
        
             "That's what it does. Essentially it gives you the power of a super 
        operator. You seize a tandem with this top button," he presses the top button 
        with his index finger and the blue box emits a high-pitched cheep, "and like 
        that" -- cheep goes the blue box again -- "you control the phone company's 
        long-distance switching systems from your cute little Princes phone or any old 
        pay phone. And you've got anonymity. An operator has to operate from a defi-
        nite location: the phone company knows where she is and what she's doing.  But 
        with your beeper box, once you hop onto a trunk, say from a Holiday Inn 800 
        (toll-free) number, they don't know where you are, or where you're coming 
        from, they don't know how you slipped into their lines and popped up in that 
        800 number. They don't even know anything illegal is going on. And you can 
        obscure your origins through as many levels as you like. You can call next 
        door by way of White Plains, then over to Liverpool by cable, and then back 
        here by satellite. You can call yourself from one pay phone all the way around 
        the world to a pay phone next to you. And you get your dime back too."
        
             "And they can't trace the calls?  They can't charge you?"
        
             "Not if you do it the right way. But you'll find that the free-call thing 
        isn't really as exciting at first as the feeling of power you get from having 
        one of these babies in your hand. I've watched people when they first get hold 
        of one of these things and start using it, and discover they can make connec-
        tions, set up crisscross and zigzag switching patterns back and forth across 
        the world. They hardly talk to the people they finally reach. They say hello 
        and start thinking of what kind of call to make next. They go a little crazy." 
        He looks down at the neat little package in his palm. His fingers are still 
        dancing, tapping out beeper patterns.
        
             "I think it's something to do with how small my models are. There are 
        lots of blue boxes around, but mine are the smallest and most sophisticated 
        electronically. I wish I could show you the prototype we made for our big 
        syndicate order."
        
             He sighs. "We had this order for a thousand beeper boxes from a syndicate 
        front man in Las Vegas. They use them to place bets coast to coast, keep lines 
        open for hours, all of which can get expensive if you have to pay. The deal 
        was a thousand blue boxes for $300 apiece. Before then we retailed them for 
        $1500 apiece, but $300,000 in one lump was hard to turn down. We had a manu-
        facturing deal worked out in the Philippines. Everything ready to go. Anyway, 
        the model I had ready for limited mass production was small enough to fit 
        inside a flip-top Marlboro box. It had flush touch panels for a keyboard, 
        rather than these unsightly buttons, sticking out. Looked just like a tiny 
        portable radio. In fact, I had designed it with a tiny transistor receiver to 
        get one AM channel, so in case the law became suspicious the owner could 
        switch on the radio part, start snapping his fingers, and no one could tell 
        anything illegal was going on. I thought of everything for this model -- I had 
        it lined with a band of thermite which could be ignited by radio signal from a 
        tiny button transmitter on your belt, so it could be burned to ashes instantly 
        in case of a bust. It was beautiful. A beautiful little machine. You should 
        have seen the faces on these syndicate guys when they came back after trying 
        it out. They'd hold it in their palm like they never wanted to let it go, and 
        they'd say, 'I can't believe it. I can't believe it.' You probably won't 
        believe it until you try it."
        
        The Blue Box Is Tested: Certain Connections Are Made
        
             About eleven o'clock two nights later Fraser Lucey has a blue box in the 
        palm of his left hand and a phone in the palm of his right. He is standing 
        inside a phone booth next to an isolated shut-down motel off Highway 1. I am 
        standing outside the phone booth.
        
             Fraser likes to show off his blue box for people. Until a few weeks ago 
        when Pacific Telephone made a few arrests in his city, Fraser Lucey liked to 
        bring his blue box (This particular blue box, like most blue boxes, is not 
        blue. Blue boxes have come to be called "blue boxes" either because 1) The 
        first blue box ever confiscated by phone-company security men happened to be 
        blue, or 2) To distinguish them from "black boxes." Black boxes are devices, 
        usually a resistor in series, which, when attached to home phones, allow all 
        incoming calls to be made without charge to one's caller.) to parties. It 
        never failed: a few cheeps from his device and Fraser became the center of 
        attention at the very hippest of gatherings, playing phone tricks and doing 
        request numbers for hours. He began to take orders for his manufacturer in 
        Mexico. He became a dealer.
        
             Fraser is cautious now about where he shows off his blue box. But he 
        never gets tired of playing with it. "It's like the first time every time," he 
        tells me.
        
             Fraser puts a dime in the slot. He listens for a tone and holds the 
        receiver up to my ear. I hear the tone. Fraser begins describing, with a 
        certain practiced air, what he does while he does it. "I'm dialing an 800 
        number now. Any 800 number will do. It's toll free. Tonight I think I'll use 
        the --- (he names a well-know rent-a-car company) 800 number. Listen, It's 
        ringing. Here, you hear it? Now watch." He places the blue box over the mouth-
        piece of the phone so that the one silver and twelve black push buttons are 
        facing up toward me. He presses the silver button -the one at the top- and I 
        hear that high-pitched beep. "That's 2600 cycles per second to be exact," says 
        Lucey. "Now, quick. listen." He shoves the earpiece at me. The ringing has 
        vanished. The line gives a slight hiccough, there is a sharp buzz, and then 
        nothing but soft white noise.
        
             "We're home free now," Lucey tells me, taking back the phone and applying 
        the blue box to its mouthpiece once again. "We're up on a tandem, into a long-
        lines trunk. Once you're up on a tandem, you can send yourself anywhere you 
        want to go." He decides to check out London first. He chooses a certain pay 
        phone located in Waterloo Station. This particular pay phone is popular with 
        the phone-phreaks network because there are usually people walking by at all 
        hours who will pick it up and talk for a while.
        
             He presses the lower left-hand corner button which is marked "KP". 
        "That's Key Pulse. It tells the tandem we're ready to give it instructions.  
        First I'll punch out KP 182 START, which will slide us into the overseas 
        sender in White Plains." I hear a neat clunk-cheep. "I think we'll head over 
        to England by satellite. Cable is actually faster and the connection is some-
        what better, but I like going by satellite. So I just punch out KP Zero 44.  
        The Zero is supposed to guarantee a satellite connection and 44 is the country 
        code for England. Okay.. we're there. In Liverpool actually. Now all I have to 
        do is punch out the London area code which is 1, and dial up the pay phone. 
        Here, listen, I've got a ring now."
        
             I hear the soft quick purr-purr of a London ring. Then someone picks up 
        the phone.
        
             "Hello," says the London voice.
        
             "Hello. Who's this?" Fraser asks.
        
             "Hello. There's actually nobody here. I just picked this up while I was 
        passing by. This is a public phone. There's no one here to answer actually."
        
             "Hello. Don't hang up. I'm calling from the United States."
        
             "Oh. What is the purpose of the call? This is a public phone you know."
        
             "Oh. You know. To check out, uh, to find out what's going on in London. 
        How is it there?"
        
             "Its five o'clock in the morning. It's raining now."
        
             "Oh. Who are you?"
        
             The London passerby turns out to be an R.A.F. enlistee on his way back to 
        the base in Lincolnshire, with a terrible hangover after a thirty-six-hour 
        pass.
         
             He and Fraser talk about the rain. They agree that it's nicer when it's 
        not raining. They say good-bye and Fraser hangs up. His dime returns with a 
        nice clink.
        
             "Isn't that far out," he says grinning at me. "London, like that."
        
             Fraser squeezes the little blue box affectionately in his palm. "I told 
        ya this thing is for real. Listen, if you don't mind I'm gonna try this girl I 
        know in Paris. I usually give her a call around this time. It freaks her out. 
        This time I'll use the ------ (a different rent-a-car company) 800 number and 
        we'll go by overseas cable, 133; 33 is the country code for France, the 1 
        sends you by cable. Okay, here we go.. Oh damn. Busy. Who could she be talking 
        to at this time?"
        
             A state police car cruises slowly by the motel. The car does not stop, 
        but Fraser gets nervous. We hop back into his car and drive ten miles in the 
        opposite direction until we reach a Texaco station locked up for the night. We 
        pull up to a phone booth by the tire pump. Fraser dashes inside and tries the 
        Paris number. It is busy again.
        
             "I don't understand who she could be talking to. The circuits may be 
        busy. It's too bad I haven't learned how to tap into lines overseas with this 
        thing yet."
        
             Fraser begins to phreak around, as the phone phreaks say. He dials a 
        leading nationwide charge card's 800 number and punches out the tones that 
        bring him the time recording in Sydney, Australia. He beeps up the weather 
        recording in Rome, in Italian of course. He calls a friend in Boston and talks 
        about a certain over-the-counter stock they are into heavily. He finds the 
        Paris number busy again. He calls up "Dial a Disc" in London, and we listen to 
        Double Barrel by David and Ansil Collins, the number-one hit of the week in 
        London. He calls up a dealer of another sort and talks in code. He calls up 
        Joe Engressia, the original blind phone-phreak genius, and pays his respects. 
        There are other calls. Finally Fraser gets through to his young lady in Paris.
        
             They both agree the circuits must have been busy, and criticize the Paris 
        telephone system. At two-thirty in the morning Fraser hangs up, pockets his 
        dime, and drives off, steering with one hand, holding what he calls his 
        "lovely little blue box" in the other.
        
        You Can Call Long Distance For Less Than You Think
        
             "You see, a few years ago the phone company made one big mistake," Gil-
        bertson explains two days later in his apartment. "They were careless enough 
        to let some technical journal publish the actual frequencies used to create 
        all their multi-frequency tones. Just a theoretical article some Bell Tele-
        phone Laboratories engineer was doing about switching theory, and he listed 
        the tones in passing. At --- (a well-known technical school) I had been fool-
        ing around with phones for several years before I came across a copy of the 
        journal in the engineering library. I ran back to the lab and it took maybe 
        twelve hours from the time I saw that article to put together the first work-
        ing blue box. It was bigger and clumsier than this little baby, but it 
        worked."
        
             It's all there on public record in that technical journal written mainly 
        by Bell Lab people for other telephone engineers. Or at least it was public. 
        "Just try and get a copy of that issue at some engineering-school library now. 
        Bell has had them all red-tagged and withdrawn from circulation," Gilbertson 
        tells me.
        
             "But it's too late. It's all public now. And once they became public the 
        technology needed to create your own beeper device is within the range of any 
        twelve-year-old kid, any twelve-year-old blind kid as a matter of fact. And he 
        can do it in less than the twelve hours it took us. Blind kids do it all the 
        time. They can't build anything as precise and compact as my beeper box, but 
        theirs can do anything mine can do."
        
             "How?"
        
             "Okay. About twenty years ago A.T.&T. made a multi-billion-dollar deci-
        sion to operate its entire long-distance switching system on twelve electroni-
        cally generated combinations of twelve master tones. Those are the tones you 
        sometimes hear in the background after you've dialed a long-distance number. 
        They decided to use some very simple tones -- the tone for each number is just 
        two fixed single-frequency tones played simultaneously to create a certain 
        beat frequency. Like 1300 cycles per second and 900 cycles per second played 
        together give you the tone for digit 5. Now, what some of these phone phreaks 
        have done is get themselves access to an electric organ. Any cheap family 
        home-entertainment organ. Since the frequencies are public knowledge now -- 
        one blind phone phreak has even had them recorded in one of the talking books 
        for the blind -- they just have to find the musical notes on the organ which 
        correspond to the phone tones. Then they tape them. For instance, to get Ma 
        Bell's tone for the number 1, you press down organ keys F~5 and A~5 (900 and 
        700 cycles per second) at the same time. To produce the tone for 2 it's F~5 
        and C~6 (1100 and 700 c.p.s). The phone phreaks circulate the whole list of 
        notes so there's no trial and error anymore."
        
             He shows me a list of the rest of the phone numbers and the two electric 
        organ keys that produce them.
        
             "Actually, you have to record these notes at 3 3/4 inches-per-second tape 
        speed and double it to 7 1/2 inches-per-second when you play them back, to get 
        the proper tones," he adds.
        
             "So once you have all the tones recorded, how do you plug them into the 
        phone system?"
        
             "Well, they take their organ and their cassette recorder, and start 
        banging out entire phone numbers in tones on the organ, including country 
        codes, routing instructions, 'KP' and 'Start' tones. Or, if they don't have an 
        organ, someone in the phone-phreak network sends them a cassette with all the 
        tones recorded, with a voice saying 'Number one,' then you have the tone, 
        'Number two,' then the tone and so on. So with two cassette recorders they can 
        put together a series of phone numbers by switching back and forth from number 
        to number. Any idiot in the country with a cheap cassette recorder can make 
        all the free calls he wants."
        
             "You mean you just hold the cassette recorder up the mouthpiece and 
        switch in a series of beeps you've recorded? The phone thinks that anything 
        that makes these tones must be its own equipment?"
        
             "Right. As long as you get the frequency within thirty cycles per second 
        of the phone company's tones, the phone equipment thinks it hears its own 
        voice talking to it. The original granddaddy phone phreak was this blind kid 
        with perfect pitch, Joe Engressia, who used to whistle into the phone. An 
        operator could tell the difference between his whistle and the phone company's 
        electronic tone generator, but the phone company's switching circuit can't 
        tell them apart. The bigger the phone company gets and the further away from 
        human operators it gets, the more vulnerable it becomes to all sorts of phone 
        phreaking."
        
        A Guide for the Perplexed
        
             "But wait a minute," I stop Gilbertson. "If everything you do sounds like 
        phone-company equipment, why doesn't the phone company charge you for the call 
        the way it charges its own equipment?"
        
             "Okay. That's where the 2600-cycle tone comes in. I better start from the 
        beginning."
        
             The beginning he describes for me is a vision of the phone system of the 
        continent as thousands of webs, of long-line trunks radiating from each of the 
        hundreds of toll switching offices to the other toll switching offices. Each 
        toll switching office is a hive compacted of thousands of long-distance tan-
        dems constantly whistling and beeping to tandems in far-off toll switching 
        offices.
        
             The tandem is the key to the whole system. Each tandem is a line with 
        some relays wih the capability of signalling any other tandem in any other 
        toll switching office on the continent, either directly one-to-one or by 
        programming a roundabout route through several other tandems if all the direct 
        routes are busy. For instance, if you want to call from New York to Los An-
        geles and traffic is heavy on all direct trunks between the two cities, your 
        tandem in New York is programmed to try the next best route, which may send 
        you down to a tandem in New Orleans, then up to San Francisco, or down to a 
        New Orleans tandem, back to an Atlanta tandem, over to an Albuquerque tandem 
        and finally up to Los Angeles.
        
              When a tandem is not being used, when it's sitting there waiting for 
        someone to make a long-distance call, it whistles. One side of the tandem, the 
        side "facing" your home phone, whistles at 2600 cycles per second toward all 
        the home phones serviced by the exchange, telling them it is at their service, 
        should they be interested in making a long-distance call. The other side of 
        the tandem is whistling 2600 c.p.s. into one or more long-distance trunk 
        lines, telling the rest of the phone system that it is neither sending nor 
        receiving a call through that trunk at the moment, that it has no use for that 
        trunk at the moment.
        
             "When you dial a long-distance number the first thing that happens is 
        that you are hooked into a tandem. A register comes up to the side of the 
        tandem facing away from you and presents that side with the number you dialed. 
        This sending side of the tandem stops whistling 2600 into its trunk line. When 
        a tandem stops the 2600 tone it has been sending through a trunk, the trunk is 
        said to be "seized," and is now ready to carry the number you have dialed - 
        converted into multi-frequency beep tones - to a tandem in the area code and 
        central office you want.
        
             Now when a blue-box operator wants to make a call from New Orleans to New 
        York he starts by dialing the 800 number of a company which might happen to 
        have its headquarters in Los Angeles. The sending side of the New Orleans 
        tandem stops sending 2600 out over the trunk to the central office in Los 
        Angeles, thereby seizing the trunk. Your New Orleans tandem begins sending 
        beep tones to a tandem it has discovered idly whistling 2600 cycles in Los 
        Angeles. The receiving end of that L.A. tandem is seized, stops whistling 
        2600, listens to the beep tones which tell it which L.A. phone to ring, and 
        starts ringing the 800 number. Meanwhile a mark made in the New Orleans office 
        accounting tape notes that a call from your New Orleans phone to the 800 
        number in L.A. has been initiated and gives the call a code number. Everything 
        is routine so far.
        
             But then the phone phreak presses his blue box to the mouthpiece and 
        pushes the 2600-cycle button, sending 2600 out from the New Orleans tandem to 
        the L.A. tandem. The L.A. tandem notices 2600 cycles are coming over the line 
        again and assumes that New Orleans has hung up because the trunk is whistling 
        as if idle. The L.A. tandem immediately ceases ringing the L.A. 800 number. 
        But as soon as the phreak takes his finger off the 2600 button, the L.A. 
        tandem assumes the trunk is once again being used because the 2600 is gone, so 
        it listens for a new series of digit tones - to find out where it must send 
        the call.
        
             Thus the blue-box operator in New Orleans now is in touch with a tandem 
        in L.A. which is waiting like an obedient genie to be told what to do next. 
        The blue-box owner then beeps out the ten digits of the New York number which 
        tell the L.A. tandem to relay a call to New York City. Which it promptly does. 
        As soon as your party picks up the phone in New York, the side of the New 
        Orleans tandem facing you stops sending 2600 cycles to you and stars carrying 
        his  voice to you by way of the L.A. tandem. A notation is made on the ac-
        counting tape that the connection has been made on the 800 call which had been 
        initiated and noted earlier. When you stop talking to New York a notation is 
        made that the 800 call has ended.
        
             At three the next morning, when the phone company's accounting computer 
        starts reading back over the master accounting tape for the past day, it 
        records that a call of a certain length of time was made from your New Orleans 
        home to an L.A. 800 number and, of course, the accounting computer has been 
        trained to ignore those toll-free 800 calls when compiling your monthly bill.
        
             "All they can prove is that you made an 800 toll-free call," Gilbertson 
        the inventor concludes. "Of course, if you're foolish enough to talk for two 
        hours on an 800 call, and they've installed one of their special anti-fraud 
        computer programs to watch out for such things, they may spot you and ask why 
        you took two hours talking to Army Recruiting's 800 number when you're 4-F.
        
             But if you do it from a pay phone, they may discover something peculiar 
        the next day -- if they've got a blue-box hunting program in their computer -- 
        but you'll be a long time gone from the pay phone by then. Using a pay phone 
        is almost guaranteed safe."
        
             "What about the recent series of blue-box arrests all across the country 
        -- New York, Cleveland, and so on?" I asked. "How were they caught so easily?"
        
             "From what I can tell, they made one big mistake: they were seizing 
        trunks using an area code plus 555-1212 instead of an 800 number. Using 555 is 
        easy to detect because when you send multi-frequency beep tones of 555 you get 
        a charge for it on your tape and the accounting computer knows there's some-
        thing wrong when it tries to bill you for a two-hour call to Akron, Ohio, 
        information, and it drops a trouble card which goes right into the hands of 
        the security agent if they're looking for blue-box user.
        
             "Whoever sold those guys their blue boxes didn't tell them how to use 
        them properly, which is fairly irresponsible. And they were fairly stupid to 
        use them at home all the time.
        
             "But what those arrests really mean is than an awful lot of blue boxes 
        are flooding into the country and that people are finding them so easy to make 
        that they know how to make them before they know how to use them. Ma Bell is 
        in trouble."
        
             And if a blue-box operator or a cassette-recorder phone phreak sticks to 
        pay phones and 800 numbers, the phone company can't stop them?
        
             "Not unless they change their entire nationwide long-lines technology, 
        which will take them a few billion dollars and twenty years. Right now they 
        can't do a thing.  They're screwed."



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