ANARCHY ONLINE Extract #1 FOR MORE INFORMATION SEE THE END OF THIS MESSAGE. +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | | | The Phreaks of Tap | | | | Back in the early 1970s I hung out with a bunch of phone | | phreaks. They used handles such as Al Bell or Mr. Phelps; I | | never knew their real names. Once a month I went to a crummy | | little office on Broadway near 28th Street in Manhattan and | | helped them stick mailing labels on envelopes for their | | newsletter, which was called Tap. | | These ragged, paranoid, hairy weirdos looked like | | archetypal anarchists as they sat around on broken furniture | | and traded tips on how to exploit quirks of the telephone | | network. Sometimes they shared recent mail from John Draper, | | better known as Captain Crunch, the most notorious phreak of | | all. Draper was serving time in jail for his bad habit of | | using a blue box to make free long-distance phone calls. I | | took my turn reading the mail, and then maybe I'd make a beer | | run with Al Bell, who warned me not to walk too close to the | | buildings in case security personnel working for the | | telephone company tried to drop file cabinets on our heads. | | Was he serious? He obviously thought he was. Like most | | phreaks, Bell was smart, neurotic, rebellious, and full of | | melodrama. I don't think he ever tried to get rich from his | | knowledge of telephones and electronics, but he could have if | | he'd wanted to. One time a shifty-looking guy dropped in at | | the office and hunkered down in a corner with Bell, talking | | about component values in a badly photocopied circuit | | diagram. Later I asked what the circuit was for. "Burglar | | alarm system," Bell said. He shrugged. "I guess some business | | in midtown is going to get knocked over next week." | | Was he concerned? He didn't seem to be. He had simply | | provided some information; if someone chose to use it for | | illegal purposes, that wasn't Bell's responsibility. | | At another meeting I met a grouchy old guy who had spent | | many years working for the local utility company. We all sat | | around listening while he told us how to short out electric | | meters or remove rollersmith locks from gas meters. His | | attitude was just like Bell's: He passed along some | | information, and if we used it to commit crimes, that had | | nothing to do with him. | | Two decades later Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole | | Earth Catalogue, came up with his famous phrase, "Information | | just wants to be free." Of course, information isn't capable | | of wanting anything; _people_ want it to be free. But why? | | What motivated the subversives of Tap to spend time and money | | holding meetings and printing a newsletter just to spread | | their knowledge around? | | | | | | Refugees from the Straight World | | | | Phone phreaks of the early 1970s were descended from | | Yippies of the late 1960s. Al Bell had worked with Abbie | | Hoffman, and Hoffman had mentioned the phreaks in his Yippie | | manifesto, _Steal This Book_ (which was how I first heard | | about them myself). | | According to Yippie ideology, capitalist society is | | dominated by unscrupulous corporations and corrupt | | politicians who lie, cheat, and steal to maximize their own | | well-being at everyone else's expense. Consequently, we | | should screw the system before it screws us first. | | Most phone phreaks seemed uninterested in radical | | politics, but they shared the underlying mind-set. They | | didn't trust business or government and felt alienated from | | the status quo. They were loners, the kind of guys who never | | tried out for the football team, didn't score with girls, and | | had a hard time fitting in. Most of them weren't even | | successful academically, because they refused to waste time | | learning stuff that didn't interest them. | | As a result, they acquired a grudge against the straight | | world and an all-purpose "fuck you" attitude. In an earlier | | era they might have turned into smarter-than-average juvenile | | delinquents, but the long-distance telephone system saved | | them from that. It enabled them to find each other, and it | | also served as an environment where they did fit in. | | They literally lived in the lines, exploring phone | | switches and setting up open-ended conference calls where | | people dialed in from all over the country and talked for | | hours. This was the first true electronic community, a | | primitive preview of what would later be known as virtual | | reality. | | The community was small because it imposed some | | formidable entry qualifications. To make your own blue box, | | you had to interpret badly printed schematics that were | | usually full of errors, and you needed sufficient manual | | dexterity to solder electronic components to a piece of | | perforated board without overheating them. Even after you had | | assembled your hardware, you still couldn't use it till you | | learned undocumented technical features of the long-distance | | telephone system. | | _Tap_ was the primary public source of this special | | knowledge. From a law-enforcement perspective, the newsletter | | looked like a subversive document encouraging people to | | become electronic criminals, but that wasn't the real | | purpose. The phreak subculture felt threatened and | | vulnerable, operating out beyond the boundaries of | | conventional society. Naturally enough, like any oppressed | | minority, they wanted to attract more members so that they | | | | [Sorry, but to view the rest of this text | | you'll have to read the book!] | | | +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ The text above is from ANARCHY ONLINE copyright 1996 by Charles Platt. ANARCHY ONLINE intimately portrays the major players in the online world: pirates, pornographers, feds, phreaks, pedophiles, legislators, prosecutors, thieves, Christians, crackers, hackers, anarchists, supremacists, fetishists, scammers, spammers, and cypherpunks. Many are profiled from first-hand experience. With ruthless honesty this book tackles Internet scare- topics ranging from hacking and terrorism to hate speech and netporn. It describes the most destructive acts and shocking extremes of speech--but demonstrates that net laws are not the answer. In fact, they may be more destructive than the sins they are supposed to prevent. This is a powerful argument in defense of online freedoms. ** THIS BOOK WON'T BE IN STORES TILL NEXT YEAR-- ** ** BUT AN ADVANCE EDITION IS NOW AVAILABLE BY MAIL. ** HarperCollins will be publishing ANARCHY ONLINE as a paperback in March, 1997, but a special limited hardcover edition is available right now. Its cover price is $24.95, but people of the online community can get it for a discount. For netizens the book is only $12.95--virtually half price. ^^^^^^ ** For credit card orders ONLY call 1-800-879-4214. ** ** To get your discount, you must tell the operator ** ** that you heard about the book on the net. ** The hardcover edition is handsome. It measures 6 inches by 9 inches, contains 384 pages, and is printed on high quality, heavy weight, pure white paper. There are 45 photographs, including pictures of many Net personalities-- from Mike Godwin to Martin Rimm. According to HarperCollins, their paperback edition will be priced at $12.95 when it appears next year. Well, you can get a more durable, more elegant hardcover edition for the same price right now! To purchase by credit card, call 1-800-879-4214 (from 8am to 11pm Eastern Time). Remember, you must say "I heard about it on the net" in order to get your discount. ------------------------------------------------------------- Some of the people you'll meet in ANARCHY ONLINE: Jake Baker (his Usenet fiction outraged the feds) Ann Beeson (net expert at ACLU who helped to kill CDA) Scott Charney (Dept. of Justice expert on computer crime) David Chaum (founder of DigiCash) Eric Corley (editor/publisher of 2600, hacker magazine) Barry Crimmins (debated child porn with Senator Grassley) Bruce Fancher (ex-hacker, cofounder of DigitaLiberty) Dan Farmer (his SATAN program shocked security experts) Mike Godwin (counsel for Electronic Frontier Foundation) Katie Hafner (coauthor of "Cyberpunk") Colin Hatcher (online agent for the Guardian Angels) Kevin Kelly (executive editor of Wired magazine) Simon Leis (infamous smut-busting, BBS-hating sheriff) John Markoff (coauthor of "Takedown") Declan McCullagh (he uncovered Rimm's secret smut novel) Brock Meeks (first with the dirt on Rimm) Kevin Mitnick (arch hacker or media victim?) Brian Reid (world authority on Usenet usage) Martin Rimm (infamous investigator of netporn) "Roscoe" (long-time ally of hacker Kevin Mitnick) Louis Rossetto (editor/publisher of Wired magazine) Robert Steele (formerly CIA) Jim Thomas (custodian of Computer Underground Digest) Phil Zimmermann (legendary author of PGP) ------------------------------------------------------------- There are 16 extracts from ANARCHY ONLINE in circulation. You can find them all at http://charlesplatt.com. ------------------------------------------------------------- This message may be freely copied and circulated so long as all parts of it, including this section, remain intact. =============================================================