                 *              Secrets of the Little Blue Box               *
                 *                  (Second of four files)                   *
        
        Captain Crunch Demonstrates His Famous Unit
        
             There is an underground telephone network in this country. Gilbertson 
        discovered it the very day news of his activities hit the papers. That evening 
        his phone began ringing. Phone phreaks from Seattle, from Florida, from New 
        York, from San Jose, and from Los Angeles began calling him and telling him 
        about the phone-phreak network. He'd get a call from a phone phreak who'd say 
        nothing but, "Hang up and call this number."
        
             When he dialed the number he'd find himself tied into a conference of a 
        dozen phone phreaks arranged through a quirky switching station in British 
        Columbia. They identified themselves as phone phreaks, they demonstrated their 
        homemade blue boxes which they called "M-Fers" (for "multi-frequency," among 
        other things) for him, they talked shop about phone-phreak devices. They let 
        him in on their secrets on the theory that if the phone company was after him 
        he must be trustworthy. And, Gilbertson recalls, they stunned him with their 
        technical sophistication.
        
             I ask him how to get in touch with the phone-phreak network. He digs 
        around through a file of old schematics and comes up with about a dozen num-
        bers in three widely separated area codes.
        
             "Those are the centers," he tells me. Alongside some of the numbers he 
        writes in first names or nicknames: names like Captain Crunch, Dr. No, Frank 
        Carson (also a code word for a free call), Marty Freeman (code word for M-F 
        device), Peter Perpendicular Pimple, Alefnull, and The Cheshire Cat. He makes 
        checks alongside the names of those among these top twelve who are blind. 
        There are five checks.
        
             I ask him who this Captain Crunch person is.
        
             "Oh. The Captain. He's probably the most legendary phone phreak. He calls 
        himself Captain Crunch after the notorious Cap'n Crunch 2600 whistle." (Sever-
        al years ago, Gilbertson explains, the makers of Cap'n Crunch breakfast cereal 
        offered a toy-whistle prize in every box as a treat for the Cap'n Crunch set.  
        Somehow a phone phreak discovered that the toy whistle just happened to pro-
        duce a perfect 2600-cycle tone. When the man who calls himself Captain Crunch 
        was transferred overseas to England with his Air Force unit, he would receive 
        scores of calls from his friends and "mute" them -- make them free of charge 
        to them -- by blowing his Cap'n Crunch whistle into his end.)
        
             "Captain Crunch is one of the older phone phreaks," Gilbertson tells me.  
        "He's an engineer who once got in a little trouble for fooling around with the 
        phone, but he can't stop. Well, this guy drives across country in a Volkswagen 
        van with an entire switchboard and a computerized super-sophisticated M-F-er 
        in the back. He'll pull up to a phone booth on a lonely highway somewhere, 
        snake a cable out of his bus, hook it onto the phone and sit for hours, days 
        sometimes, sending calls zipping back and forth across the country, all over 
        the world...."
      
             Back at my motel, I dialed the number he gave me for "Captain Crunch" and 
        asked for G---- T-----, his real name, or at least the name he uses when he's 
        not dashing into a phone booth beeping out M-F tones faster than a speeding 
        bullet and zipping phantomlike through the phone company's long-distance 
        lines.
        
             When G---- T----- answered the phone and I told him I was preparing a 
        story for Esquire about phone phreaks, he became very indignant.
        
             "I don't do that. I don't do that anymore at all. And if I do it, I do it 
        for one reason and one reason only. I'm learning about a system. The phone 
        company is a System. A computer is a System, do you understand? If I do what I 
        do, it is only to explore a system. Computers, systems, that's my bag. The 
        phone company is nothing but a computer."
        
             A tone of tightly restrained excitement enters the Captain's voice when 
        he starts talking about systems. He begins to pronounce each syllable with the 
        hushed deliberation of an obscene caller.
        
             "Ma Bell is a system I want to explore. It's a beautiful system, you 
        know, but Ma Bell screwed up. It's terrible because Ma Bell is such a beauti-
        ful system, but she screwed up. I learned how she screwed up from a couple of 
        blind kids who wanted me to build a device. A certain device. They said it 
        could make free calls. I wasn't interested in free calls. But when these blind 
        kids told me I could make calls into a computer, my eyes lit up. I wanted to 
        learn about computers. I wanted to learn about Ma Bell's computers. So I build 
        the little device, but I built it wrong and Ma Bell found out. Ma Bell can 
        detect things like that. Ma Bell knows. So I'm strictly rid of it now. I don't 
        do it. Except for learning purposes." He pauses. "So you want to write an 
        article. Are you paying for this call? Hang up and call this number." He gives 
        me a number in a area code a thousand miles away of his own. I dial the num-
        ber.
        
             "Hello again. This is Captain Crunch. You are speaking to me on a toll-
        free loop-around in Portland, Oregon. Do you know what a toll-free loop around 
        is? I'll tell you.
        
             He explains to me that almost every exchange in the country has open test 
        numbers which allow other exchanges to test their connections with it. Most of 
        these numbers occur in consecutive pairs, such as 302 956-0041 and 302 956-
        0042. Well, certain phone phreaks discovered that if two people from anywhere 
        in the country dial the two consecutive numbers they can talk together just as 
        if one had called the other's number, with no charge to either of them, of 
        course.
        
             "Now our voice is looping around in a 4A switching machine up there in 
        Canada, zipping back down to me," the Captain tells me. "My voice is looping 
        around up there and back down to you. And it can't ever cost anyone money. The 
        phone phreaks and I have compiled a list of many many of these numbers. You 
        would be surprised if you saw the list. I could show it to you. But I won't. 
        I'm out of that now. I'm not out to screw Ma Bell. I know better. If I do 
        anything it's for the pure knowledge of the System. You can learn to do fan-
        tastic things. Have you ever heard eight tandems stacked up? Do you know the 
        sound of tandems stacking and unstacking? Give me your phone number. Okay. 
        Hang up now and wait a minute."
        
             Slightly less than a minute later the phone rang and the Captain was on 
        the line, his voice sounding far more excited, almost aroused.
        
             "I wanted to show you what it's like to stack up tandems. To stack up 
        tandems." (Whenever the Captain says "stack up" it sounds as if he is licking 
        his lips.)
        
             "How do you like the connection you're on now?" the Captain asks me. 
        "It's a raw tandem. A raw tandem. Ain't nothin' up to it but a tandem. Now I'm 
        going to show you what it's like to stack up. Blow off. Land in a far away 
        place. To stack that tandem up, whip back and forth across the country a few 
        times, then shoot on up to Moscow.
        
             "Listen," Captain Crunch continues. "Listen. I've got line tie on my 
        switchboard here, and I'm gonna let you hear me stack and unstack tandems. 
        Listen to this. It's gonna blow your mind."
        
             First I hear a super rapid-fire pulsing of the flutelike phone tones, 
        then a pause, then another popping burst of tones, then another, then another.  
        Each burst is followed by a beep-kachink sound.
        
             "We have now stacked up four tandems," said Captain Crunch, sounding 
        somewhat remote. "That's four tandems stacked up. Do you know what that means? 
        That means I'm whipping back and forth, back and forth twice, across the 
        country, before coming to you. I've been known to stack up twenty tandems at a 
        time. Now, just like I said, I'm going to shoot up to Moscow."
        
             There is a new, longer series of beeper pulses over the line, a brief 
        silence, then a ring.
        
             "Hello," answers a far-off voice.
        
             "Hello. Is this the American Embassy Moscow?"
        
             "Yes, sir. Who is this calling you've got. Everything okay there in 
        Moscow?"
        
             "Okay?"
        
             "Well, yes, how are things there?"
        
             "Oh. Well, everything okay, I guess."
        
             "Okay. Thank you."
        
             They hang up, leaving a confused series of beep-kachink sounds hanging in 
        mid-ether in the wake of the call before dissolving away.
        
             The Captain is pleased. "You believe me now, don't you? Do you know what 
        I'd like to do? I'd just like to call up your editor at Esquire and show him 
        just what it sounds like to stack and unstack tandems. I'll give him a show 
        that will blow his mind. What's his number?
        
             I ask the Captain what kind of device he was using to accomplish all his 
        feats. The Captain is pleased at the question.
        
             "You could tell it was special, couldn't you?" Ten pulses per second. 
        That's faster than the phone company's equipment. Believe me, this unit is the 
        most famous unit in the country. There is no other unit like it. Believe me."
        
             "Yes, I've heard about it. Some other phone phreaks have told me about 
        it."
        
             "They have been referring to my, ahem, unit? What is it they said? Just 
        out of curiosity, did they tell you it was a highly sophisticated computer-
        operated unit, with acoustical coupling for receiving outputs and a switch-
        board with multiple-line-tie capability? Did they tell you that the frequency 
        tolerance is guaranteed to be not more than .05 percent? The amplitude toler-
        ance less than .01 decibel? Those pulses you heard were perfect. They just 
        come faster than the phone company. Those were high-precision op-amps. Op-amps 
        are instrumentation amplifiers designed for ultra-stable amplification, super-
        low distortion and accurate frequency response. Did they tell you it can 
        operate in temperatures from -55 degrees C to +125 degrees C?"
        
             I admit that they did not tell me all that.
        
             "I built it myself," the Captain goes on. "If you were to go out and buy 
        the components from an industrial wholesaler it would cost you at least $1500. 
        I once worked for a semiconductor company and all this didn't cost me a cent. 
        Do you know what I mean? Did they tell you about how I put a call completely 
        around the world? I'll tell you how I did it. I M-Fed Tokyo inward, who con-
        nected me to India, India connected me to Greece, Greece connected me to 
        Pretoria, South Africa, South Africa connected me to South America, I 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 maga-
        zines 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 L.A. 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 elec-
        tronic 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 proposi-
        tioned me again. I keep telling him we'll never see eye to eye on this sub-
        ject, 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 Mem-
        phis, 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 asso-
        ciation. 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 homosex-
        ual 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 inde-
        pendent 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 arrange-
        ments.
        
             So when Joe Engressia phone phreaks he feels his way through the circuit-
        ry 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 al-
        most," 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 some-
        thing 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 
        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 satu-
        rated 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 para-
        noid, 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 on a line. I have rela-
        tive 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 equip-
        ment. 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.
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