Secrets of The Little Blue Box Pt.3

     "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 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 switchboard with multiple-line-tie capability?  Did they tell you that the
frequency tolerance is guaranteed to be  not more than .05%?  The amplitude
tolerance 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 whole saler it would cost you at least
$1500. I once worked for a semiconductor company and all this didn't cost me
one red cent.  Do you know what I mean?  Did they tell about how I put a call
completely around the world?  I'll tell you how I did it.  I M-F-ed Tokyo
inward, who connected 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 phones 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 replies 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 alllows them to plug into
conversations in case of emergency, to listen in to a line to determine if
the line is busy or the corcuits 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-F-ed 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 heve 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 another 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 had 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 some what cheered, "listen.  What you are
going to hear whan I hang up is the sound of tandems unstacking. Layer after
layer of tandems unstacking until there's nothing left of the stack, 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
illuminati 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
magazines all over America because he had been diccovered 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 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 elctronic 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 nationwideunderground.

    Joe Engressia is only twenty-two years old now, but among 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
propositioned me again.  I keep telling  him we'll never see eye to eye on
this subject, if you know what I mean.  I try to make light of it, you know,
but he doesn't get it.  I can hear him out there getting drunker and I don't
know what he'll do next.  It's just that I'm real ly all alone here. I just
moved to Memphis, it's the first time I'm living  out on my own, and I'd hate
for it to 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 M-F boggie blues."

     Sure enough, a jumpy version of Muskrat Ramble boogies it's 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
association.  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
homosexual guy, is that this is the first time I've been on my own.  I've
been banned from all central offices around home in Florida, they know 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 fatnessprogram 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
independent 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 like to
touch and feel relays, caress switching circuits, switchboards, crossbar
arrangements.

     So when Joe Engressia phone phreaks he feels his way through the
circuitry 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
almost," 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 into
Mississippi to see some old-fashioned Bell equipment still in use in several
states, which had seen 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 idiosyncracies 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 knew more than most switchmen.  Bit that's okay.  I want to work
for Ma Bell.  I don't hate Ma Bell the way Gilbertson and some of the phone
phreaks do.  I don't want to screw Ma Bell.  With me it's the pleasure of
pure knowledge.  There's something 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 yrip and was having these
auditory hallucinations as if I were trapped and these planes were
dive-bombing me, and all of a sudden I had to phone phreak out of there.  For
some reason I had to call Kansas City, but that's all."

[Continued in Part IV]