Secrets of The Little Blue Box Pt.4 

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 t he 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 des k 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 Captian 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 saturated the trunks between Seattle
and New York.  He did it with a computerized M-F-er hitched to a
specila Manitoba exchange.  But there are other, easier ways to do
it." 

     Just three people?  I ask.  How is  that possilbe? 

     "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
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 thin k it might take more that 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 t he time. 
Suppose everybody were to call Moscow.  I'm no right-winger.  but
I value my life.  I don't want Commies coming over and dropping a
bomb on my head.  T hat'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 know everything they do. 
Ma Bell knows.  Listen, is this line hot?  I just heard someonetap in.  I'm not paranoid, 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 the things  I can do, "
he continues.  "Ma Bell knows how good I am.  And I am quite go od. 
I can detect reversals, tandem switching, everything that goes on
a line.  I have relative 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 equipment.  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 line up for tonight," he explain s and
hangs up. 

     Before I hand up for that 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, yet; but you might say 
he's in a drunken stupor."  I make a date to visit Joe in Memphis
in two day s. 

A PHONE PHREAK CELL TAKES CARE OF BUSINESS. 

The next morning I attend a gathering of four phone phreaks in
----- (a California suburg).  The gathering take s 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 i
s 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" conference, reopening some toll-free loops, and trying to
discover the dimensions of what seem to be new initiatives against
phone phreaks by phone- company security agents. 

     It is not long before I get a chance to see, to hear, Randy
at work.  Rand y is known among the phone phreaks as perhaps the
finest con man in the game. Randy is blind.  He is pale, soft and
p ear-shaped, he wears baggy pants and a wrinkly nylon white sports
shirt, pushes his head forward from hunched shoulder s 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 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 Stepin Fetchit.  That is six teen-year-old
Randy's voice. 

     He is speaking to a switchman in Detroit.  The phone company
in Detroit ha d closed up two toll-free loop pairs for  no apparent
reason, although heavy use b y 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 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 0 5, vertical
group 03, horizontal 5, vertical file 3.  Yeah, we'll hang on h
ere.... 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  to 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
stat us. 

     Delighted, phone phreak Ed returns the pair of numbers to the
active-statu s column in his directory.  Ed is a super b 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 a nd 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 i n 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 ag e seventeen.  (He is sighted.)  This evening
after distributing the latest issue of his in-WATS directory (which
has bee n 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 ph one into an
M-F-er." 

     The tones you hear in touch-tone phones are not the M-F tones
that operate the long-distance switching system.  Ph one phreaks
believe A.T.&T. has 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 m aster tones, in effect put a blue
box, i n the hands of every touch-tone owner. 

     Ed shows me pages of schematics, specifications and parts
lists.  "It's no t easy to build, but everything here is i n the
Heathkit catalog." 

     Ed asks Ralph what progress he has made in his attempts to
reestablish a long-term conference--the historic "211 1"
conference--had been arranged through a unused Telex test-board
trunk somewhere in the innards of a 4A switching machine in
Vancouver, Canada.  For months the 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 Tel ex
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
sympathizers, and miscellaneous guests and technical experts.  The
conference was a massive exchange of information.   Phone phreask
picked each other's brain s clean, then developed new ways to pick 
the phone company's brains clean.  Ralph gave M F Boogie 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 pre tends
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 int o guerrilla
warfare; Carl the East Coast international tone relations expert
demonstrates newly opened direct M-F routes to central offices on
the island of Bah rein in the Persian Gulf, introduced a new
phone-phreak friend of his in Pretoria, and explained the technical
operations of the new Oakland-to-Vietnam linkages.  (Many phone
phreaks pick up spending money by M-F-ing calls from relatives to
Vietname 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 i n homes filled
with active sighted brothers and sisters, or trapped with s low and
unimaginative blind kids in straitjacket schools for the blind,
knew that no matter how late it got they could dial up theconference and find instant electronic communion with two or three
other blind kids awake over on the other side of America.  Talking
together 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  maching on Vancouver Island.  For the blind kids there meant
an exhilarating  feeling of being in touch, through a kin d 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 circuitry 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 of didn't have M-F
capability were boosted up to the conference by more experience
phreaks s o 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 of hours before mid-night,
Ralph remebers . "You could feel something going on in t he lines. 
Some static began showing up, the some whistling wheezing sound. 
The n 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
tying died... I thing it was about four in the morning.   There
were four of us still hanging on when the conference disappeared
into now here for good.  We all tried to M-F up t o it again of
course, but we got silent termination.  There was nothing there." 
[Continued in part V]