                 *              Secrets of the Little Blue Box               *
                 *                                                           *
                 *                  (Third of four files)                    *
        
        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" confer-
        ence, reopening some toll-free loops, and trying to discover the dimensions of 
        what seem to be new initiatives against phone phreaks by phone-company securi-
        ty 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 Step 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 oper-
        ate the long-distance switching system. Phone phreaks believe A.T.&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 Vancou-
        ver, 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 sympa-
        thizers, 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 
        G.I.'s, 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 to-
        gether 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 confer-
        ence 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 wheezing sound.  Then there were breaks.  Some people got cut
        off and called right back in, but after a while some people were finding they
        were cut off and couldn't get back in at all.  It was terrible.  I lost it
        about one a.m., but managed to slip in again and stay on until the thing
        died... I think it was about four in the morning.  There were four of us still
        hanging on when the conference disappeared into nowhere for good.  We all tried
        to M-F up to it again of course, but we got silent termination.  There was
        nothing there."
        
        The Legendary Mark Bernay Turns Out To Be "The Midnight Skulker"
        
             Mark Bernay. I had come across that name before. It was on Gilbertson's 
        select list of phone phreaks. The California phone phreaks had spoken of a 
        mysterious Mark Bernay as perhaps the first and oldest phone phreak on the 
        West Coast. And in fact almost every phone phreak in the West can trace his 
        origins either directly to Mark Bernay or to a disciple of Mark Bernay.
        
             It seems that five years ago this Mark Bernay (a pseudonym he chose for 
        himself) began traveling up and down the West Coast pasting tiny stickers in 
        phone books all along his way. The stickers read something like "Want to hear 
        an interesting tape recording? Call these numbers." The numbers that followed 
        were toll-free loop-around pairs. When one of the curious called one of the 
        numbers he would hear a tape recording pre-hooked into the loop by Bernay 
        which explained the use of loop-around pairs, gave the numbers of several 
        more, and ended by telling the caller, "At six o'clock tonight this recording 
        will stop and you and your friends can try it out. Have fun."
        
             "I was disappointed by the response at first," Bernay told me, when I 
        finally reached him at one of his many numbers and he had dispensed with the 
        usual "I never do anything illegal" formalities which experienced phone 
        phreaks open most conversations.
        
             "I went all over the coast with these stickers not only on pay phones, 
        but I'd throw them in front of high schools in the middle of the night, I'd 
        leave them unobtrusively in candy stores, scatter them on main streets of 
        small towns. At first hardly anyone bothered to try it out. I would listen in 
        for hours and hours after six o'clock and no one came on. I couldn't figure 
        out why people wouldn't be interested. Finally these two girls in Oregon tried 
        it out and told all their friends and suddenly it began to spread."
        
             Before his Johny Appleseed trip Bernay had already gathered a sizable 
        group of early pre-blue-box phone phreaks together on loop-arounds in Los 
        Angeles. Bernay does not claim credit for the original discovery of the loop-
        around numbers. He attributes the discovery to an eighteen-year-old reform 
        school kid in Long Beach whose name he forgets and who, he says, "just disap-
        peared one day." When Bernay himself discovered loop-arounds independently, 
        from clues in his readings in old issues of the Automatic Electric Technical 
        Journal, he found dozens of the reform-school kid's friends already using 
        them. However, it was one of Bernay's disciples in Seattle that introduced 
        phone phreaking to blind kids. The Seattle kid who learned about loops through 
        Bernay's recording told a blind friend, the blind kid taught the secret to his 
        friends at a winter camp for blind kids in Los Angeles. When the camp session 
        was over these kids took the secret back to towns all over the West. This is 
        how the original blind kids became phone phreaks. For them, for most phone 
        phreaks in general, it was the discovery of the possibilities of loop-arounds 
        which led them on to far more serious and sophisticated phone-phreak methods, 
        and which gave them a medium for sharing their discoveries.
        
             A year later a blind kid who moved back east brought the technique to a 
        blind kids' summer camp in Vermont, which spread it along the East Coast. All 
        from  Mark Bernay sticker.
        
             Bernay, who is nearly thirty years old now, got his start when he was 
        fifteen and his family moved into an L.A. suburb serviced by General Telephone 
        and Electronics equipment. He became fascinated with the differences between 
        Bell and G.T.&E. equipment. He learned he could make interesting things happen 
        by carefully timed clicks with the disengage button. He learned to interpret 
        subtle differences in the array of clicks, whirrs and kachinks he could hear 
        on his lines. He learned he could shift himself around the switching relays of 
        the L.A. area code in a not-too-predictable fashion by interspersing his own 
        hook-switch clicks with the clicks within the line. (Independent phone compa-
        nies - there are nineteen hundred of them still left, most of them tiny island 
        principalities in Ma Bell's vast empire - have always been favorites with 
        phone phreaks, first as learning tools, then as Archimedes platforms from 
        which to manipulate the huge Bell system. A phone phreak in Bell territory 
        will often M-F himself into an independent's switching system, with switching 
        idiosyncrasies which can give him marvelous leverage over the Bell System.
        
             "I have a real affection for Automatic Electric Equipment," Bernay told 
        me. "There are a lot of things you can play with. Things break down in inter-
        esting ways."
        
             Shortly after Bernay graduated from college (with a double major in 
        chemistry and philosophy), he graduated from phreaking around with G.T.&E. to 
        the Bell System itself, and made his legendary sticker-pasting journey north 
        along the coast, settling finally in Northwest Pacific Bell territory. He 
        discovered that if Bell does not break down as interestingly as G.T.&E., it 
        nevertheless offers a lot of "things to play with."
        
             Bernay learned to play with blue boxes. He established his own personal 
        switchboard and phone-phreak research laboratory complex. He continued his 
        phone-phreak evangelism with ongoing sticker campaigns. He set up two record-
        ing numbers, one with instructions for beginning phone phreaks, the other with 
        latest news and technical developments (along with some advanced instruction) 
        gathered from sources all over the country.
        
             These days, Bernay told me, he had gone beyond phone-phreaking itself. 
        "Lately I've been enjoying playing with computers more than playing with 
        phones. My personal thing in computers is just like with phones, I guess - the 
        kick is in finding out how to beat the system, how to get at things I'm not 
        supposed to know about, how to do things with the system that I'm not supposed 
        to be able to do."
        
             As a matter of fact, Bernay told me, he had just been fired from his 
        computer-programming job for doing things he was not supposed to be able to 
        do. He had been working with a huge time-sharing computer owned by a large 
        corporation but shared by many others. Access to the computer was limited to 
        those programmers and corporations that had been assigned certain passwords. 
        And each password restricted its user to access to only the one section of the 
        computer cordoned off from its own information storager. The password system 
        prevented companies and individuals from stealing each other's information.
        
             "I figured out how to write a program that would let me read everyone 
        else's password," Bernay reports. "I began playing around with passwords. I 
        began letting the people who used the computer know, in subtle ways, that I 
        knew their passwords. I began dropping notes to the computer supervisors with 
        hints that I knew what I know. I signed them 'The Midnight Skulker.' I kept 
        getting cleverer and cleverer with my messages and devising ways of showing 
        them what I could do. I'm sure they couldn't imagine I could do the things I 
        was showing them.  But they never responded to me. Every once in a while 
        they'd change the passwords, but I found out how to discover what the new ones 
        were, and I let them know. But they never responded directly to the Midnight 
        Skulker. I even finally designed a program which they could use to prevent my 
        program from finding out what it did. In effect I told them how to wipe me 
        out, The Midnight Skulker. It was a very clever program. I started leaving 
        clues about myself. I wanted them to try and use it and then try to come up 
        with something to get around that and reappear again. But they wouldn't play.  
        I wanted to get caught. I mean I didn't want to get caught personally, but I 
        wanted them to notice me and admit that they noticed me. I wanted them to 
        attempt to respond, maybe in some interesting way."
        
             Finally the computer managers became concerned enough about the threat of 
        information-stealing to respond. However, instead of using The Midnight Skulk-
        er's own elegant self-destruct program, they called in their security person-
        nel, interrogated everyone, found an informer to identify Bernay as The Mid-
        night Skulker, and fired him.
        
             "At first the security people advised the company to hire me full-time to 
        search out other flaws and discover other computer freaks. I might have liked 
        that. But I probably would have turned into a double double agent rather than 
        the double agent they wanted. I might have resurrected The Midnight Skulker 
        and tried to catch myself. Who knows? Anyway, the higher-ups turned the whole 
        idea down."
        
        You Can Tap the F.B.I.'s Crime Control Computer in the Comfort of Your Own 
        Home, Perhaps
        
             Computer freaking may be the wave of the future. It suits the phone-
        phreak sensibility perfectly. Gilbertson, the blue-box inventor and a lifelong 
        phone phreak, has also gone on from phone-phreaking to computer-freaking. 
        Before he got into the blue-box business Gilbertson, who is a highly skilled 
        programmer, devised programs for international currency arbitrage.
        
             But he began playing with computers in earnest when he learned he could 
        use his blue box in tandem with the computer terminal installed in his apart-
        ment by the instrumentation firm he worked for. The print-out terminal and 
        keyboard was equipped with acoustical coupling, so that by coupling his little 
        ivory Princess phone to the terminal and then coupling his blue box on that, 
        he could M-F his way into other computers with complete anonymity, and without 
        charge; program and re-program them at will; feed them false or misleading 
        information; tap and steal from them. He explained to me that he taps comput-
        ers by busying out all the lines, then going into a verification trunk, lis-
        tening into the passwords and instructions one of the time sharers uses, and 
        them M-F-ing in and imitating them. He believes it would not be impossible to 
        creep into the F.B.I's crime control computer through a local police computer 
        terminal and phreak around with the F.B.I.'s memory banks. He claims he has 
        succeeded in re-programming a certain huge institutional computer in such a 
        way that it has cordoned off an entire section of its circuitry for his per-
        sonal use, and at the same time conceals that arrangement from anyone else's 
        notice. I have been unable to verify this claim.
        
             Like Captain Crunch, like Alexander Graham Bell (pseudonym of a disgrun-
        tled-looking East Coast engineer who claims to have invented the black box and 
        now sells black and blue boxes to gamblers and radical heavies), like most 
        phone phreaks, Gilbertson began his career trying to rip off pay phones as a 
        teenager. Figure them out, then rip them off. Getting his dime back from the 
        pay phone is the phone phreak's first thrilling rite of passage. After learn-
        ing the usual eighteen different ways of getting his dime back, Gilbertson 
        learned how to make master keys to coin-phone cash boxes, and get everyone 
        else's dimes back. He stole some phone-company equipment and put together his 
        own home switchboard with it. He learned to make a simple "bread-box" device, 
        of the kind used by bookies in the Thirties (bookie gives a number to his 
        betting clients; the phone with that number is installed in some widow lady's 
        apartment, but is rigged to ring in the bookie's shop across town, cops trace 
        big betting number and find nothing but the widow).
        
             Not long after that afternoon in 1968 when, deep in the stacks of an 
        engineering library, he came across a technical journal with the phone tone 
        frequencies and rushed off to make his first blue box, not long after that 
        Gilbertson abandoned a very promising career in physical chemistry and began 
        selling blue boxes for $1,500 apiece.
        
             "I had to leave physical chemistry. I just ran out of interesting things 
        to learn," he told me one evening. We had been talking in the apartment of the 
        man who served as the link between Gilbertson and the syndicate in arranging 
        the big $300,000 blue-box deal which fell through because of legal trouble. 
        There has been some smoking.
        
             "No more interesting things to learn," he continues. "Physical chemistry 
        turns out to be a sick subject when you take it to its highest level. I don't 
        know. I don't think I could explain to you how it's sick. You have to be 
        there. But you get, I don't know, a false feeling of omnipotence. I suppose 
        it's like phone-phreaking that way. This huge thing is there. This 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 Car-
        roll. 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 chem-
        istry." He looks up at me:
        
             "Did you ever steal anything?"
        
             "Well yes, .."
        
             "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 disgrun-
        tled-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 disin-
        tegrate. 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."
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