[00:05.520 --> 00:06.120]  Hi there.
[00:06.760 --> 00:20.640]  So, my name is Phil Lapsley, and as some of you may know, I've been working on a book on the history of phone phreaking I presented at The Last HOPE, and both my wife and the FBI believe that I'm never going to be done with this book, but I assure you it will be done soon.
[00:21.740 --> 00:30.340]  But what I'd like to do today is talk about the cats and mice, the phone phreaks and the telephone company and the FBI.
[00:30.340 --> 00:43.760]  And this is great because, you know, I tend to come at this stuff from a little bit of a history perspective, but the thing which is cool about this talk and why I'm excited to give it is I get to tell war stories, and they don't even involve me.
[00:43.940 --> 00:44.760]  This is just wonderful.
[00:45.300 --> 00:55.920]  So, before we talk about the actual stories, I do need to give you a little bit of context for those who weren't actually around during the 1960s and 1970s doing phone phreak stuff.
[00:56.340 --> 01:00.380]  So, I want to kind of give you the background on who the players are and what they're up to.
[01:00.580 --> 01:04.040]  And we're going to start with the phone phreaks, that is to say, the mice.
[01:10.440 --> 01:11.680]  So, what's a phone phreak?
[01:11.820 --> 01:13.620]  A phone phreak is a phone hacker, right?
[01:13.900 --> 01:17.060]  And just like how the word hacker kind of has two meanings, right?
[01:17.140 --> 01:22.680]  There's the meaning that we tend to use in this crowd, which is, you know, somebody who likes to explore things and play with things and poke at things.
[01:23.620 --> 01:28.040]  There's also the hacker meaning of, oh, it's a person who, you know, breaks into computers and rice viruses and whatever.
[01:28.780 --> 01:30.480]  Phone phreaks, same thing, right?
[01:30.620 --> 01:42.000]  So, the best possible kind of spin on being a phone phreak or on phone phreaking is it's somebody who's interested in learning about the telephone network, somebody who's fascinated by how the phone system works, who likes playing with it, likes exploring it,
[01:42.280 --> 01:45.300]  takes great joy and pleasure in figuring stuff out.
[01:45.420 --> 01:51.080]  Better still, figuring out a way to make the phone system do something that it wasn't designed to do or isn't supposed to be able to do.
[01:51.080 --> 01:55.480]  And it's just, it's a pure exploration and sort of creative joy.
[01:56.680 --> 02:08.710]  Of course, there's another definition of phone phreak, which is in use, and it's in some ways an equally valid definition, or at least certainly, you know, it's commonly used, which is a phone phreak is somebody who likes to make free phone calls, right?
[02:08.780 --> 02:14.960]  It's somebody who wants to rip off the phone company, who wants to screw up the telephone network, play pranks, you know, jam switches, whatever.
[02:18.570 --> 02:27.110]  So, phone phreaking was, well, still is commonplace, but for purposes of this talk and my book, I'm concentrating on 1960 to 1980.
[02:27.360 --> 02:30.710]  So this is, you know, at some level, at this point, almost ancient history.
[02:30.830 --> 02:31.430]  It's certainly history.
[02:31.720 --> 02:33.960]  So what did phone phreaks do?
[02:34.060 --> 02:35.110]  What were the tools of the trade?
[02:35.620 --> 02:37.490]  Well, let's talk about this baby.
[02:38.170 --> 02:40.330]  This is a blue box, even though it's not blue.
[02:40.580 --> 02:41.840]  This is from 1964.
[02:41.840 --> 02:45.120]  You'll note on the dial there, this is a homebrew contraption.
[02:45.240 --> 02:45.780]  You'll note on the dial.
[02:45.900 --> 02:46.580]  I don't know if you can read it.
[02:46.620 --> 02:54.260]  It says, please wait for dial tone, which is an old thing that you used to find on telephones, instructing you because you probably weren't familiar with dial tones back in the day.
[02:56.880 --> 03:07.000]  The phone company in the 1930s based its entire signaling system, its entire switching system on these tones for controlling the way phone calls worked.
[03:08.480 --> 03:14.900]  And because of that, if you were able to generate these tones, you essentially had the phone system at your disposal.
[03:15.080 --> 03:15.780]  You could route calls.
[03:15.800 --> 03:17.120]  You could bypass billing equipment.
[03:17.220 --> 03:18.040]  You could do almost anything.
[03:19.600 --> 03:20.460]  This made sense.
[03:20.600 --> 03:24.180]  The design that they did in the 1930s was really very high-tech for the 1930s.
[03:24.200 --> 03:25.960]  It was first put into operation in 1943.
[03:26.750 --> 03:30.040]  And, you know, they didn't realize at the time that, gosh, anybody could do this.
[03:30.120 --> 03:34.040]  They thought, well, gosh, you need big equipment and everything else in order to be able to generate these tones.
[03:34.040 --> 03:36.500]  And this equipment is, in fact, fairly large.
[03:37.720 --> 03:40.620]  By 19... even by the 1960s, it had gotten smaller.
[03:40.740 --> 03:42.200]  By 1970, it was a handheld unit.
[03:42.300 --> 03:45.200]  You can actually get a blue box app for the iPhone and Android now.
[03:46.670 --> 03:57.580]  You won't have much luck on the actual telephone network to actually make calls, but there is a website you can go to called projectmf.org, where they have lovingly recreated the old telephone network on the digital switch.
[03:57.580 --> 04:04.820]  And if you have a blue box application on your iPhone or Android or whatever, you can, you know, make blue box calls there.
[04:08.040 --> 04:10.040]  So, there were other colored boxes, too.
[04:10.220 --> 04:11.320]  Black boxes, red boxes.
[04:11.450 --> 04:12.500]  I'm not really going to talk about those.
[04:12.980 --> 04:16.080]  But, so this is what phone phreaks were doing, is they were playing around with the network.
[04:16.180 --> 04:16.960]  They were exploring things.
[04:17.080 --> 04:20.100]  They were building blue boxes, making free phone calls, exploring stuff.
[04:20.620 --> 04:22.920]  So, who cared about this other than the phone phreaks?
[04:24.120 --> 04:27.020]  Well, for one, the phone company cared about it.
[04:28.890 --> 04:33.440]  AT&T, back in the 1960s, was the largest corporation in the world.
[04:34.450 --> 04:44.320]  It had, you know, employed thousands of people, and it had made a huge investment in this telephone switching system only to find out that, oh boy, we screwed up.
[04:44.460 --> 04:50.220]  And it might actually take a billion dollars worth of investment to actually fix this problem so that the phone phreaks can't use their blue boxes.
[04:50.600 --> 04:52.740]  And that was back when a billion dollars was real money.
[04:54.170 --> 04:58.280]  So, you know, this is not, by the way, like, you know, okay, so Microsoft has a security flaw.
[04:58.420 --> 04:59.740]  We'll just push out a security patch.
[04:59.840 --> 05:02.660]  No, this is actual, like, hard physical goods, right?
[05:02.800 --> 05:05.440]  You know, switching equipment in central offices that need to be replaced.
[05:05.560 --> 05:06.480]  So, this is a big deal.
[05:06.780 --> 05:10.840]  So, AT&T is pretty unhappy about this whole thing.
[05:10.900 --> 05:12.460]  They don't like the potential for loss of revenue.
[05:12.500 --> 05:13.880]  They don't like this really at all.
[05:14.500 --> 05:19.480]  Now, there's another group that cares about this phone phreaking business, and that's the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
[05:21.920 --> 05:23.840]  They cared about it for some funny reasons.
[05:24.160 --> 05:26.140]  First off, they technically had to care about it.
[05:26.220 --> 05:32.840]  There's a law in the book called Fraud by Wire, and that would make it a federal crime if a phone call crossed state lines.
[05:32.960 --> 05:36.640]  Now, of course, if you're doing long-distance fraud, it's going to cross straight lines.
[05:36.760 --> 05:38.320]  So, it falls to the FBI to do this.
[05:38.440 --> 05:43.780]  But the FBI wasn't super enthusiastic about becoming AT&T's revenue police, right?
[05:43.940 --> 05:47.880]  The FBI didn't want to be AT&T's watchdog, like, hey, this guy's ripping us off.
[05:47.880 --> 05:49.180]  You better go out and arrest him, right?
[05:49.280 --> 05:50.720]  It's like, oh, look, we've got better things to do.
[05:51.100 --> 05:52.780]  What better things do we have to do?
[05:53.120 --> 05:55.020]  Well, there's organized crime.
[05:56.300 --> 06:02.560]  Now, this is a photo I got from a guy at San Francisco State University who has an interest, an academic interest, in bookies.
[06:03.420 --> 06:10.280]  And this was described, the caption for this photo is, high-tech bookie operation, 1930s, which I love.
[06:10.580 --> 06:16.640]  But if you're a bookie, what you do is you take bets from your customers, and you're essentially playing one customer off against another.
[06:16.640 --> 06:20.780]  You're trying to balance this thing, and you have a line that you move in order to make the bets work out.
[06:20.860 --> 06:23.380]  But what it means is you're on the phone all the time.
[06:23.800 --> 06:28.940]  So if you're a bookie, you love the idea that you could make free phone calls, because that's good.
[06:29.040 --> 06:29.920]  That cuts down your costs.
[06:30.060 --> 06:36.640]  But you also love the idea that your phone calls would be untraceable in the sense that you don't leave billing records.
[06:36.760 --> 06:42.280]  Because it turns out one of the big weapons the FBI had against organized crime was looking at billing records.
[06:42.280 --> 06:46.120]  And so they would say, okay, well, this guy talked to this guy, and this guy talks to this guy.
[06:46.200 --> 06:47.280]  This guy's a known mobster.
[06:47.440 --> 06:48.720]  You know, you can fill in the blank, right?
[06:48.940 --> 06:51.640]  If you're using a blue box or a black box, that data goes away.
[06:51.720 --> 07:00.800]  And so if you're the FBI, while you might not be thrilled about being AT&T's revenue police, you're plenty thrilled about figuring out a way to stop that data from going away.
[07:01.580 --> 07:01.900]  Okay?
[07:02.260 --> 07:05.480]  So you got the phone phreaks, you got the FBI, and you got the telephone company.
[07:05.580 --> 07:07.520]  And so those are the sort of players in the drama.
[07:07.520 --> 07:11.320]  And with that, we can actually get into the actual stories here.
[07:12.920 --> 07:17.260]  Our first story is in 1962, and it's from 617 land.
[07:17.360 --> 07:18.020]  Where's 617?
[07:18.820 --> 07:19.300]  Boston.
[07:19.880 --> 07:20.180]  Right.
[07:24.540 --> 07:26.380]  And I'd like to show you...
[07:26.380 --> 07:28.060]  It takes place on the Harvard campus.
[07:28.560 --> 07:31.220]  This is a map of Harvard University, and it surrounds.
[07:31.460 --> 07:32.380]  This is in 2010.
[07:32.580 --> 07:33.280]  It's a lovely campus.
[07:33.300 --> 07:34.100]  You should visit it.
[07:35.820 --> 07:37.600]  Here's a more interesting map to me.
[07:37.780 --> 07:44.180]  This is a map of Harvard campus, and it surrounds, in 1962, looking at telephone tie lines.
[07:44.880 --> 07:46.480]  So what's a telephone tie line?
[07:47.160 --> 07:54.600]  If you and I are companies, campuses, organizations, schools, and we each have our own phone switches, a tie line is the connection between those two switches.
[07:54.900 --> 07:59.700]  And so instead of actually having to dial your number, maybe I dial 8 and I get connected to your phone switch.
[08:01.460 --> 08:07.500]  So this is a map of how all the phone switches were interconnected at Harvard, and it surrounds.
[08:07.660 --> 08:11.100]  It's kind of hard to read, so I've cleaned it up a little bit here, and I'll show it to you.
[08:12.200 --> 08:15.040]  It starts off at the top with Nike control.
[08:15.040 --> 08:34.360]  That's referring to the Nike Air Defense Missile Control System, which is then connected to MITRE, which is a defense think tank, which is connected to Otis Air Force Base, Lincoln Labs, IBM, Hanscom Air Force Base, MIT, MIT University, BBN, the people who built the original hardware for the ARPANET.
[08:34.360 --> 08:40.000]  You might remember President Eisenhower talked in 1961 about a military-industrial complex.
[08:40.190 --> 08:43.550]  You can see the military-industrial complex here in 1962, right?
[08:43.600 --> 08:46.880]  All these people, their phone systems are connected together because they call each other all the time.
[08:48.250 --> 08:54.980]  So this map came from a group of folks who are known as the Harvard Five.
[08:55.480 --> 08:57.170]  And you've got three of them here.
[08:57.450 --> 08:59.710]  Harvard Five is actually a misnomer.
[08:59.860 --> 09:02.080]  It's actually the Harvard Four and the MIT One.
[09:03.380 --> 09:07.330]  But Harvard, I guess, is better at marketing, so they get the...
[09:08.330 --> 09:13.070]  So these guys were all freshmen at Harvard in 1962.
[09:13.740 --> 09:15.530]  They were sort of the first...
[09:15.530 --> 09:24.600]  They weren't necessarily the first phone phreaks, but they were the first real group of phone phreaks, at least that I'm aware of, of a group of people who pooled their talent and imagination and playing around with this stuff.
[09:24.910 --> 09:37.210]  Now, that timeline chart that you saw there, back there, they discovered this by a very old and venerable phone phreak technique, which is picking up the phone and dialing, right?
[09:37.410 --> 09:39.080]  You pick up the phone, you get a dial tone.
[09:39.220 --> 09:40.640]  Oh, I wonder what happens if, right?
[09:40.720 --> 09:43.100]  This is how phone phreaks always get into trouble.
[09:43.260 --> 09:45.310]  I wonder what happens if, right?
[09:45.410 --> 09:46.460]  I'm going to pick up the phone and dial.
[09:46.810 --> 09:51.910]  So they had been doing a lot of stuff like this, but it turns out that a couple of them had actually been doing stuff even earlier.
[09:51.910 --> 09:55.860]  And what I'd like to do is, I'd like to play you a tape recording of a phone call.
[09:56.220 --> 09:57.500]  This is from 1960.
[09:57.910 --> 10:03.430]  And in order to get this, to make sense of this recording, there are a couple of things you have to know.
[10:03.930 --> 10:11.840]  In the old days, in the long distance network, direct distance dialing, the idea that you could pick up a phone and dial a long distance number, was a relatively new invention.
[10:13.190 --> 10:16.190]  And inside the phone company, they had these folks called inward operators.
[10:16.340 --> 10:18.580]  And an inward operator is basically an operator's operator.
[10:18.760 --> 10:20.640]  So every big city would have one.
[10:20.640 --> 10:27.720]  And so if you were trying to make a call, say, to San Francisco, and it wasn't going through, you might call your local operator.
[10:27.860 --> 10:29.910]  Your local operator would call San Francisco inward.
[10:30.050 --> 10:32.290]  The San Francisco inward operator would place the call for you.
[10:32.460 --> 10:35.260]  And inward operators were great, because they could basically do anything.
[10:36.460 --> 10:37.840]  Now, if you show up...
[10:37.840 --> 10:40.000]  Customers can't call inward operators, right?
[10:40.260 --> 10:41.600]  But you can if you have a blue box.
[10:41.790 --> 10:45.600]  So if you show up on an inward operator's position, pretty much you're with the band, right?
[10:45.600 --> 10:47.570]  We assume that you've got to be a phone company person.
[10:48.080 --> 10:53.100]  Except for one niggling detail, which is that in those days, because it's the phone company, all operators are women.
[10:54.010 --> 10:56.540]  You don't see a lot of women in this group, right?
[10:57.040 --> 11:06.720]  So they can't quite pretend to be operators, but they can pretend to be on a test board, which is essentially a testing position, because in those days, again, the phone company, test engineers are all men.
[11:07.960 --> 11:12.600]  So the final thing you need to know is, these guys are starting out in Boston.
[11:12.910 --> 11:14.500]  And with that, here's the call.
[11:23.890 --> 11:24.370]  Boston.
[11:25.090 --> 11:26.130]  Milwaukee, Inwick, please.
[11:27.190 --> 11:28.370]  Where are you calling from?
[11:28.830 --> 11:29.590]  Marmalade Test Board.
[11:43.740 --> 11:44.000]  Okay.
[11:44.640 --> 11:46.140]  Milwaukee, this is Boston Test Board.
[11:46.260 --> 11:48.180]  Could you get me Portland, Inwick?
[11:48.720 --> 11:49.280]  Portland, Oregon.
[11:49.740 --> 11:50.920]  Portland, Oregon, right?
[12:19.750 --> 12:21.390]  Milwaukee, Oregon.
[13:13.930 --> 13:16.250]  LITTLE ROCK, this is Denver Test Board.
[13:16.450 --> 13:18.570]  Could you give me New York please, I.N.W.A .U.N WARD?
[13:40.170 --> 13:40.750]  New York?
[13:40.750 --> 13:42.270]  New York, could you give me Boston I.N.W.A.U.A.U.A.U.A.U.
[13:44.130 --> 13:44.570]  Boston?
[13:45.870 --> 13:45.870]  Boston?
[13:45.970 --> 13:46.650]  Right, hold on.
[13:52.500 --> 13:53.400]  Who are my mum?
[13:53.900 --> 13:54.820]  LITTLE ROCK Test Board.
[13:55.360 --> 13:55.520]  Who?
[13:55.760 --> 13:57.060]  LITTLE ROCK Test Board.
[13:57.660 --> 13:58.240]  Your what?
[13:58.800 --> 14:00.620]  LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS Test Board.
[14:00.620 --> 14:06.960]  I can't say, uh, Boston and... Boston and Ewood is on the left side.
[14:07.600 --> 14:08.160]  Boston.
[14:08.520 --> 14:09.200]  Hello, Boston?
[14:09.840 --> 14:10.140]  Yes.
[14:10.940 --> 14:13.200]  Could you give me a number in Marblehead, please?
[14:14.560 --> 14:16.940]  Neptune 1-9819.
[14:27.740 --> 14:28.300]  Hello?
[14:28.820 --> 14:29.640]  Hello, Charles.
[14:30.140 --> 14:31.620]  Hey, what's your routing?
[14:32.520 --> 14:33.840]  Uh, all the way.
[14:34.520 --> 14:35.460]  Good, good, good.
[14:36.200 --> 14:38.240]  Uh, how are you copying me there?
[14:38.540 --> 14:39.660]  Pretty good, pretty good.
[14:39.700 --> 14:40.840]  No trouble on this circuit.
[14:41.580 --> 14:42.460]  Beautiful, beautiful.
[14:43.320 --> 14:44.440]  Okay, thank you very much.
[14:44.740 --> 14:46.420]  Uh, we'll see why this one.
[14:46.680 --> 14:47.120]  Right out.
[14:47.460 --> 14:47.920]  Under out.
[14:48.260 --> 14:48.420]  Yeah.
[14:51.080 --> 14:54.840]  Could I get a round of applause, please, for the Harvard Five?
[14:59.900 --> 15:02.360]  So that's 1960, roughly.
[15:02.740 --> 15:06.580]  It was, uh, the person who made the tape was not sure if it was 1960 or 1959.
[15:06.640 --> 15:10.380]  He was actually in high school at the time, so he hadn't actually yet gotten to Harvard.
[15:10.940 --> 15:19.140]  Um, so those of you who saw the social engineering panel, last night, you know, social engineering, long been used by phone phreaks.
[15:19.380 --> 15:24.020]  It helps if you can come in as an inward operator, uh, you know, in a position where it looks like you're trusted.
[15:24.800 --> 15:33.180]  Um, the other thing that's funny is, uh, a common phone phreak thing later was tandem stacking, where you would use your blue box to essentially set up a manual link.
[15:33.280 --> 15:35.580]  And what this is basically is operator stacking, right?
[15:35.640 --> 15:38.100]  And he didn't quite call around the world, but he certainly called around the U.S.
[15:38.160 --> 15:38.720]  That's kind of cool.
[15:40.300 --> 15:42.080]  Okay, so back to our Harvard Five.
[15:42.660 --> 15:48.880]  Um, so these guys, by 1962, their freshman year at Harvard, they've got this pretty well figured out.
[15:48.960 --> 15:50.020]  They've figured out blue boxes.
[15:50.120 --> 15:51.320]  They've figured out black boxes.
[15:51.760 --> 15:54.460]  Um, they know about these MF tones that you need to do.
[15:54.700 --> 15:59.260]  They've managed to call the president of Mexico, or try to call him anyway, one night just as a prank.
[15:59.920 --> 16:05.720]  Um, they actually, at one point, uh, you need to generate two tones at a time to make these blue box tones.
[16:05.720 --> 16:12.220]  So what they actually did was, they organized a concert in front of a phone using flutes to try and play the tones, um, together.
[16:12.540 --> 16:17.200]  Although they said, one of them said later that, um, it didn't work very well because we were laughing too much.
[16:17.500 --> 16:20.860]  Um, so they had this whole notebook of their experiments.
[16:21.520 --> 16:29.300]  Um, and the thing which is amazing to me about these guys is, they figured out stuff that really at some level wouldn't be rediscovered for another five, ten years.
[16:29.720 --> 16:31.360]  Um, so they were, they were way ahead of their time.
[16:31.600 --> 16:32.460]  So what happened?
[16:33.640 --> 16:36.560]  This is a recurring theme in phone phreak stuff.
[16:36.720 --> 16:37.860]  They talked to the wrong people.
[16:38.640 --> 16:43.700]  They talked to a guy who is a friendly phone company employee, except he turned out not to be so friendly.
[16:43.940 --> 16:49.740]  In fact, he ended up going to telephone company security because he wanted to get ahead in, you know, the, in the phone company.
[16:50.520 --> 17:00.420]  And the phone company security guy turned out to be ex-FBI, which is another thing which happens a lot in the phone company and in the phone phreaking, is that a lot of the security people are ex-FBI.
[17:00.560 --> 17:01.320]  So he called the FBI.
[17:02.840 --> 17:08.230]  Now, one of the problems that you have is, remember that tie-line chart that I showed you, right?
[17:08.300 --> 17:09.940]  You have all this defense stuff around it.
[17:10.730 --> 17:18.080]  And as an example, one of the things they would do when they would make those tie-line charts is they would, you know, they'd call up various operators.
[17:18.250 --> 17:23.490]  So you call Hanscom Air Force Base, and you talk to the operator there, and after chatting with her for a few moments, say, well, what do you got on your board?
[17:23.530 --> 17:25.180]  She's got a board of cords that you plug in.
[17:25.750 --> 17:30.360]  Oh, well, I got, you know, I got Stewart Air Force Base, I got Rome Air Force Base.
[17:30.470 --> 17:32.040]  Now, these guys don't know from Air Force Bases.
[17:32.180 --> 17:33.640]  They're freshmen in college.
[17:33.840 --> 17:37.140]  And so that's really weird, because what they heard is Stewart and Jerome.
[17:37.900 --> 17:39.750]  So they're like, wow, okay, you can call Stewart and Jerome.
[17:39.840 --> 17:40.250]  How strange.
[17:40.400 --> 17:43.940]  So this becomes a joke among the group that, yeah, you know, our friend Stewart and Jerome.
[17:44.040 --> 17:48.840]  And every time they'd have a phone call, they'd start with this conversation about, you know, how was lunch with Stewart?
[17:48.970 --> 17:49.940]  Oh, Stewart's doing great.
[17:50.010 --> 17:50.510]  How's Jerome?
[17:50.710 --> 17:51.990]  You know, it just became the shtick that they do.
[17:52.600 --> 17:58.940]  So one night, they're having dinner, and one of them says to the other, you know, I'm supposed to go and see the dean tomorrow at 10 a.m.
[17:59.990 --> 18:03.490]  And the other one says, that's really kind of weird, because I'm supposed to see the dean tomorrow at 10 a.m.
[18:03.540 --> 18:03.710]  too.
[18:04.230 --> 18:07.440]  And they kind of look at each other, and they find their compatriot.
[18:07.940 --> 18:10.560]  He's supposed to see the dean tomorrow at 10 a.m., as is the fourth.
[18:10.660 --> 18:11.770]  They call their friend at MIT.
[18:12.010 --> 18:15.440]  Oddly enough, at a separate campus, he's supposed to see the dean at 10 a.m.
[18:15.730 --> 18:16.080]  as well.
[18:17.420 --> 18:22.140]  And at the dean's office the next day at 10 a.m., there are no deans to be seen, really.
[18:22.270 --> 18:27.510]  There are just FBI agents, Grim, humorless FBI agents, who are certain that they've stumbled on a spy ring.
[18:29.420 --> 18:30.490]  Why are they certain of this?
[18:30.620 --> 18:35.710]  Well, they've got maps of, you know, Nike missile control, telephone systems, and this and that.
[18:35.940 --> 18:41.600]  And at one point, it says, you know, it says, look, we know that you have people inside.
[18:41.790 --> 18:43.010]  Tell us about Stuart and Jerome.
[18:46.370 --> 18:48.910]  And they say, no, no, no, Stuart and Jerome is a joke.
[18:49.050 --> 18:50.390]  And they say, oh, this is no joke.
[18:53.110 --> 18:55.510]  So, it all wound up okay.
[18:55.890 --> 18:59.970]  And I'd like to just read you, probably you can't read this, but this is one of the Harvard Five.
[19:00.130 --> 19:05.710]  This is his freshman advisor's evaluation card of him as a freshman student.
[19:05.790 --> 19:06.630]  I'm just going to read it here.
[19:08.050 --> 19:10.630]  So-and-so has been an enigma to me all year.
[19:10.810 --> 19:16.890]  I've spent more time with him trying to understand his problems than the combined time I've devoted to all my other freshman advisees.
[19:17.070 --> 19:21.010]  In an attempt to arouse his motivation, I've used my entire bag of tricks to little avail.
[19:21.430 --> 19:27.550]  Then suddenly two weeks ago, all was made clear when we learned from the FBI and telephone company of his tampering with the whole telephone system.
[19:28.150 --> 19:37.030]  Instead of studying night after night, all year long, he and three other Harvard students with the cooperation of an MIT student have been discovering ways to beat the telephone company and how the whole system works.
[19:37.410 --> 19:39.030]  No wonder his studies have suffered.
[19:39.310 --> 19:41.770]  From what I now know, he's been pursuing this interest for years.
[19:41.950 --> 19:46.030]  If he once settles down and really applies himself, there's no question in my mind that he can do the work.
[19:46.170 --> 19:50.190]  In fact, he possesses a vast knowledge of electronics in general and the telephone operation in particular.
[19:50.690 --> 19:52.310]  Surely this should stand him in good stead.
[19:52.830 --> 19:59.290]  Now, my favorite line on this is, probable concentration, probable major, engineering sciences.
[19:59.570 --> 20:01.350]  Do you consider this a wise choice?
[20:01.430 --> 20:04.170]  To which the advisor writes, I'm inclined to think so now.
[20:09.810 --> 20:10.330]  All right.
[20:10.950 --> 20:17.110]  So, what I'm trying to do, what I've been trying to figure out as we go through this, let's kind of keep track of the cats and mice in their playbook.
[20:17.370 --> 20:19.510]  So, you know, what are the lessons that we can learn from this?
[20:19.830 --> 20:20.070]  Okay.
[20:20.490 --> 20:25.990]  So, the playbook here for the telco and the FBI is, first off, take defense and espionage issues seriously.
[20:26.130 --> 20:32.230]  If somebody is breaking into your, you know, claims to be breaking into or looks like they might be breaking into your defense thing, you want to take that seriously.
[20:32.610 --> 20:34.930]  The second thing is informants are your friends, right?
[20:35.070 --> 20:37.030]  You can get a lot of good information from informants.
[20:37.130 --> 20:37.990]  People tend to talk.
[20:39.090 --> 20:44.610]  On the phone phreak side, the lessons learned are, don't screw with anything that looks remotely like defense or espionage.
[20:44.950 --> 20:47.350]  And informants are not your friends, okay?
[20:49.310 --> 20:49.950]  All right.
[20:52.870 --> 20:57.330]  So, our next story is in 305 land.
[20:58.210 --> 21:00.030]  Miami, that's right.
[21:00.290 --> 21:01.670]  And this is in 1969.
[21:01.990 --> 21:03.450]  So, this is seven years later.
[21:03.810 --> 21:05.930]  And it involves Joe Engressia.
[21:07.250 --> 21:10.450]  Joybubbles since the mid-90s.
[21:10.870 --> 21:24.250]  So, Joybubbles was, he was one of the stars of Ron Rosenbaum's article in Esquire magazine in 1971 called Secrets of the Little Blue Box, which was the magazine that sort of brought phone phreaking into the mainstream.
[21:24.710 --> 21:29.930]  He was actually, at the time, he was 22 years old, and he had already been described by Rosenbaum as the granddaddy of the phone phreaks.
[21:30.990 --> 21:32.770]  He's a guy who's been blind since birth.
[21:33.610 --> 21:38.970]  He has, you know, been interested in telephones since he was a little kid.
[21:39.070 --> 21:40.910]  He unfortunately passed away in 2007.
[21:41.710 --> 21:42.630]  Super nice guy.
[21:42.830 --> 21:44.350]  Super, just interesting guy.
[21:46.030 --> 21:50.210]  And in 1968, when he was in college, he drew widespread national attention.
[21:50.230 --> 21:56.290]  He was written up in the newspapers and actually got on TV for being able to actually whistle free phone calls.
[21:56.490 --> 22:01.950]  So, he didn't need a blue box, he could just whistle 2600 hertz, and by whistling pulses of that, he could actually make a call.
[22:02.050 --> 22:09.030]  And if you YouTube, if you do a Google or look on YouTube for Joybubbles or Joe Engressia, you can find a video of him making these free phone calls.
[22:10.130 --> 22:11.370]  So, it's 1969.
[22:11.790 --> 22:12.850]  He's home from school.
[22:13.050 --> 22:19.830]  He's actually just been in trouble with the, you know, he's gotten, you know, busted by the phone company and gotten in trouble and gotten all this media attention.
[22:20.010 --> 22:21.330]  But it's summer, he's home from school.
[22:21.390 --> 22:23.490]  If you're a phone phreak, what do you do when you're home from school?
[22:23.710 --> 22:24.950]  You play with the telephone.
[22:25.690 --> 22:35.130]  And so, the thing that he had figured out how to do is, again, a social engineering thing, which is he would do something called an open sleeve conference circuit.
[22:35.930 --> 22:37.950]  Now, an open sleeve lead conference circuit.
[22:38.050 --> 22:47.450]  Now, what this has to do with is, in the phone, within the telephone company's central office, you've got tip and ring, which are the voice signals, and there's a sleeve lead, which basically says, at some level, is this line busy?
[22:47.790 --> 22:54.330]  By opening those two things, by opening the sleeve lead, you can actually cause multiple lines to get conference together.
[22:54.570 --> 22:56.850]  This is sort of a non-technical explanation, but it'll do.
[22:57.750 --> 23:02.150]  So, the key thing, though, is that you have to be able to talk to somebody at the central office.
[23:02.250 --> 23:09.330]  You have to be able to call up a switch man and know what you're doing enough to get him to do this, and more importantly, sound like you know what you're doing enough to get him to do this.
[23:09.570 --> 23:11.230]  This was not really a problem for Joe.
[23:11.410 --> 23:13.270]  Joe pretty much had this kind of thing wired.
[23:14.270 --> 23:19.930]  So, he was able to call up his local central office and create these conference numbers that people could dial into.
[23:20.230 --> 23:27.830]  And in particular, it was him and another fellow, another phone phreak by the name of RJ, and they were spending a lot of time talking on these conference calls.
[23:28.770 --> 23:34.910]  Unfortunately, it turns out, and this is another recurring theme, the phone company had gotten suspicious and was listening.
[23:35.550 --> 23:42.590]  And the phone company security agent in Miami was ex-FBI.
[23:43.530 --> 23:50.010]  And so, while he heard this, he heard, gosh, mention of AUTOVON, which is the military telephone system.
[23:50.730 --> 23:54.250]  And so, he called the FBI, and they started an investigation.
[23:56.810 --> 24:01.210]  This is a letter from Herbert Hoover, the director...
[24:01.210 --> 24:01.630]  Excuse me, J.
[24:01.730 --> 24:02.050]  Edgar Hoover.
[24:03.190 --> 24:03.670]  J.
[24:04.050 --> 24:07.790]  Edgar Hoover, to John Ehrlichman, the counsel to the president.
[24:08.050 --> 24:09.610]  And it was also sent to the Secret Service.
[24:11.070 --> 24:14.450]  And it's essentially a report on the investigation they did on Engressia.
[24:14.530 --> 24:15.950]  They really couldn't prove anything.
[24:16.530 --> 24:18.030]  And so, it didn't really go anywhere.
[24:18.210 --> 24:19.830]  But it's just an interesting thing.
[24:19.970 --> 24:34.470]  On August 27, 1969, this bureau's Kansas City office was confidentially advised that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that these guys have allegedly discovered a means to intercept telephone calls transmitted over the Defense Communications Agency's AUTOVON Voice Network,
[24:34.650 --> 24:37.830]  Automatic Voice Network, AUTOVON, and the Wide Area Telephone Service.
[24:38.610 --> 24:41.790]  We don't know whether they've actually done it or not, but they say they can.
[24:43.270 --> 24:46.570]  So, again, you know, sort of that same lesson that comes up, right?
[24:46.710 --> 24:53.030]  Of, you know, if you're the phone company, wiretaps are your friends, and you take defense and espionage stuff seriously.
[24:53.030 --> 24:58.990]  If this guy says that he can break into government communication stuff, you better pay attention to that.
[24:59.070 --> 24:59.970]  You better investigate it.
[25:01.070 --> 25:03.810]  And on the phone phreak side, shut up!
[25:04.970 --> 25:05.410]  Right?
[25:05.530 --> 25:09.190]  It's not just that you don't screw with anything that looks remotely like defense or espionage.
[25:09.190 --> 25:10.810]  You don't talk about screwing.
[25:10.910 --> 25:12.290]  You don't even think about it, right?
[25:12.910 --> 25:15.030]  You know, just be quiet about that.
[25:15.150 --> 25:17.410]  And if you see this, this comes back to haunt us later.
[25:18.230 --> 25:18.730]  Okay.
[25:21.010 --> 25:21.630]  All right.
[25:22.090 --> 25:27.090]  For our third area, we're going to go to 415, which is?
[25:27.250 --> 25:27.810]  San Francisco.
[25:27.870 --> 25:28.670]  San Francisco.
[25:29.790 --> 25:31.850]  And I'm going to play another tape.
[25:32.230 --> 25:35.230]  Mercifully, it is briefer than the previous one you heard.
[25:35.550 --> 25:37.850]  Although I can't say that the audio quality is any better.
[25:43.100 --> 25:44.960]  Santa Cruz Sheriff's Department will help you.
[25:45.120 --> 25:46.220]  Hi, San Francisco.
[25:46.500 --> 25:46.900]  Uh-huh.
[25:47.160 --> 25:58.140]  And I just wanted to talk to somebody there on an NCIC hit you made sometime today on a guy's parole violation out of Texas.
[25:58.500 --> 25:58.780]  Right.
[25:59.060 --> 25:59.400]  Yeah.
[25:59.640 --> 26:01.280]  Oh, I wish you hadn't asked that.
[26:02.140 --> 26:02.580]  All right.
[26:02.980 --> 26:09.520]  So that's a call from the FBI San Francisco Field Office to the Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Office.
[26:11.640 --> 26:13.980]  And there's nothing unusual about that, right?
[26:14.100 --> 26:16.840]  The FBI calls various sheriff offices all the time.
[26:16.960 --> 26:19.560]  NCIC, by the way, is the National Crime Information Center.
[26:20.200 --> 26:24.880]  So, you know, this is just an FBI agent checking on the whereabouts of some guy that they're trying to find.
[26:25.000 --> 26:25.720]  No big deal there.
[26:28.620 --> 26:35.820]  The big deal, though, is that this was wiretapped by a phone phreak.
[26:36.620 --> 26:37.060]  Okay.
[26:37.680 --> 26:42.320]  So that tape recording that you just heard was a wiretap.
[26:42.400 --> 26:43.220]  And not just a wiretap.
[26:43.260 --> 26:44.940]  It turns out to be a remote wiretap.
[26:45.020 --> 26:47.420]  It was not a guy sitting there with test leads clipping on.
[26:49.560 --> 26:57.300]  So this is actually a recording of a telephone call that occurred without the FBI or the Santa Cruz County Sheriff knowing about this.
[26:57.500 --> 26:57.620]  Okay.
[26:58.640 --> 27:00.520]  That's a big deal.
[27:00.920 --> 27:05.540]  You can imagine that the FBI is not going to be real enthusiastic about that idea.
[27:06.160 --> 27:06.760]  Okay.
[27:09.000 --> 27:11.800]  So who would do such a thing?
[27:12.300 --> 27:16.720]  Who would have the audacity to wiretap the FBI?
[27:20.520 --> 27:25.200]  So there's really... I would guess there's one guy who might have done it.
[27:26.590 --> 27:31.570]  And the FBI would have told you that it's one guy who's actually in the audience right now.
[27:31.860 --> 27:33.810]  And perhaps he'd like to stand up and take a bow.
[27:43.750 --> 27:46.650]  So that's John Draper, AKA Captain Crunch.
[27:49.010 --> 27:52.590]  Now, this was another one of the stars of the Ron Rosenbaum article.
[27:53.190 --> 27:54.890]  The Secrets to the Little Blue Box.
[27:57.810 --> 28:09.430]  And as a result of the publicity that he got from the Secrets to the Little Blue Box article, he was arrested in 1972 for making a phone call to Australia to a radio station.
[28:10.390 --> 28:14.110]  And ended up getting convicted for that and getting a suspended sentence.
[28:14.310 --> 28:18.750]  And so in 1975, he was on probation.
[28:19.230 --> 28:20.890]  So this was sort of an iffy thing.
[28:21.990 --> 28:22.430]  Now...
[28:25.250 --> 28:28.090]  But we've got this tape and we've got this intercepted call.
[28:28.210 --> 28:32.510]  And so one of the questions that comes up is, how is such a thing possible?
[28:32.710 --> 28:37.510]  How is it possible for a phone phreak with a blue box to remotely wiretap the FBI?
[28:37.510 --> 28:40.050]  And there's a couple different ways that you can ask that question.
[28:40.130 --> 28:42.030]  The first one is at a technical level.
[28:42.550 --> 28:46.630]  The technical level is, technically, how did that work?
[28:46.750 --> 29:00.250]  And the answer is, it turns out, due to a configuration of the telephone switch in the San Francisco Bay Area, if you had a blue box, you just needed only a blue box, you needed to connect up to San Francisco, and then if you knew the three-digit code 127,
[29:00.770 --> 29:06.630]  and then a seven-digit phone number that you wanted to actually connect to, that's what you needed.
[29:06.790 --> 29:18.410]  Now, it didn't work for every seven-digit number in the San Francisco Bay Area, but it turns out, randomly, that 552-2155, which is the FBI field office, that happens to be one of the ones it did work for.
[29:20.410 --> 29:24.390]  And you can kind of imagine from there, just kind of how things go, right?
[29:24.550 --> 29:29.090]  It's just, it's sort of, there's, you're a moth, and there's a flame, you know, it's just, you can't help yourself, really.
[29:32.250 --> 29:33.990]  John's actually doing a palm face over there.
[29:38.250 --> 29:44.970]  Now, and it turns out to be a little bit more, I mean, you know, why would such a thing even, even, I mean, why would the phone company allow such a thing?
[29:44.970 --> 29:48.670]  The answer is, how many people here remember what busy signals sound like?
[29:48.730 --> 29:51.390]  You don't really get them anymore, but you do occasionally, right?
[29:51.610 --> 29:56.790]  So, if you would call a busy phone number, maybe it's busy, or maybe the person left the phone off the hook.
[29:56.890 --> 30:02.690]  And so, you used to have a service called verification, where you would ask the operator, could you please verify that this number is actually busy?
[30:03.370 --> 30:05.310]  And so, that's what this service was for.
[30:05.470 --> 30:08.050]  It was for allowing the operator to actually check that a number was busy.
[30:08.110 --> 30:17.110]  And if she dialed this using her operator keypad, she would be connected to the phone line in question, and she would hear encrypted speech, it would be scrambled speech.
[30:17.250 --> 30:20.610]  So, she wouldn't be able to tell what was going on, but she could tell that somebody actually was talking on it.
[30:20.670 --> 30:23.070]  She could report back to you that, yeah, the line's really actually in use.
[30:23.490 --> 30:26.990]  Now, if it was an emergency, you could tell the operator, hey, I need you to break in.
[30:27.070 --> 30:33.650]  In which case, she would connect up just like before, but she'd hit ring forward, which would send a little burst of 2600 hertz down the line.
[30:33.750 --> 30:38.890]  At that point, boop, the encryption goes away, and now you're actually on the line.
[30:39.070 --> 30:43.690]  Now, there's a beep that it's supposed to be generating, letting the people know we're now on your line.
[30:43.690 --> 30:45.590]  That beep turns out to be pretty faint.
[30:45.750 --> 30:50.450]  I don't know if you guys heard it in the San Francisco to Santa Cruz call.
[30:50.690 --> 30:51.970]  It is indeed pretty faint.
[30:52.090 --> 30:56.130]  I think with a pair of headphones, I can pick it out every so often, but it's real quiet.
[30:56.490 --> 31:02.530]  In addition, of course, if you're a law enforcement agency, you probably have a beep like that anyway, so when you hear it, you're probably not thinking anything big, right?
[31:03.630 --> 31:07.550]  Okay, so that's the technical question of how is such a thing possible at a technical level.
[31:07.550 --> 31:24.570]  There's a different question that comes up, which is more like, if you're the, say, special agent in charge of the San Francisco field office, or the assistant director of the FBI labs, or Clarence Kelly, the director of the FBI, it's more like, how the hell is this possible?
[31:24.830 --> 31:26.930]  What is wrong with these people at AT&T?
[31:27.070 --> 31:28.010]  This can't be.
[31:29.170 --> 31:36.570]  And so a letter ends up getting sent from the director of the FBI to the chairman of AT&T.
[31:36.970 --> 31:48.170]  I am advised that information just developed and confirmed discloses a condition which permits any knowledgeable person using a blue box to intercept and monitor telephone conversations to and from the San Francisco FBI office.
[31:48.370 --> 31:50.730]  This is the most alarming situation.
[31:55.890 --> 32:02.790]  People that I've talked to who are familiar with the investigation at the FBI, their phrase was, all hell broke loose.
[32:04.990 --> 32:14.430]  One comment was, the agents were told, you solve this, you solve it quick, you figure out who did it, you figure out how he did it, you make sure it never happens again.
[32:14.650 --> 32:17.110]  This was a big deal to the FBI.
[32:20.230 --> 32:21.530]  So, how are you going to solve it?
[32:22.930 --> 32:24.730]  Well, what have we learned thus far?
[32:24.850 --> 32:26.310]  What's a great way to solve a case?
[32:27.850 --> 32:28.230]  Informants.
[32:28.330 --> 32:29.350]  Informants, exactly.
[32:29.650 --> 32:32.270]  It's not the only way to solve a case, but it's a good way to solve a case.
[32:32.490 --> 32:34.990]  What's another thing that we've learned that's a good way to solve a case?
[32:35.310 --> 32:35.690]  Wiretaps.
[32:36.050 --> 32:36.970]  Wiretaps, exactly.
[32:39.110 --> 32:53.090]  So, for several months after this happens, this was in mid-1975, the FBI spends a lot of time trying to figure out, you know, how do we, how do we, the phrase was, because it wasn't just viewed as just a John Draper thing.
[32:53.310 --> 32:55.130]  This was a phone phreak problem.
[32:55.310 --> 33:00.150]  Specifically, as they were referred to in FBI memos, it was the underground phone phreaks.
[33:00.570 --> 33:04.610]  And so, FBI agents were instructed to, quote, penetrate the underground phone phreaks.
[33:07.450 --> 33:09.210]  So, you recruit informants.
[33:09.410 --> 33:10.410]  You do wiretaps.
[33:11.530 --> 33:16.590]  One of the problems that you run into sometimes with informants is that informants don't particularly want to testify.
[33:17.430 --> 33:20.770]  And in some cases, you may not want your informants to testify, right?
[33:20.850 --> 33:24.930]  Because your informants may be pretty, pretty well placed within whatever circle they run in.
[33:25.170 --> 33:28.170]  And so informants help you, but they don't always help you.
[33:28.250 --> 33:29.610]  They, they may actually help you get facts.
[33:29.730 --> 33:31.570]  They may actually help you figure out who did this.
[33:31.570 --> 33:35.230]  They may actually, in fact, get a tape recording of a call being intercepted.
[33:35.290 --> 33:38.430]  But that alone may not be enough to actually get you anything like a conviction.
[33:39.050 --> 33:42.410]  And so, the FBI had a lot of problems that it was trying to juggle with.
[33:42.590 --> 33:49.290]  Now, at the same time, they became aware of another problem.
[33:50.810 --> 33:52.450]  Anyone recognize this sort of keypad?
[33:53.210 --> 33:54.590]  Okay, so this is AUTOVON.
[33:54.670 --> 33:55.790]  This is the automatic voice network.
[33:55.930 --> 33:57.170]  This is the military phone system.
[33:58.490 --> 34:00.590]  This is actually a fake keypad.
[34:01.450 --> 34:04.030]  Somebody has built an AUTOVON payphone keypad.
[34:04.210 --> 34:05.670]  But it sort of illustrates the idea.
[34:05.890 --> 34:09.910]  Which is that AUTOVON phones don't just have the normal 12 buttons that you're used to.
[34:09.970 --> 34:12.850]  They have this nice red column on the right-hand side.
[34:13.070 --> 34:16.470]  The letters stand for Flash Override, Flash Immediate, and Priority.
[34:16.630 --> 34:22.030]  And they're for placing precedence calls if the country's under attack, or, you know, whatever bad thing has happened.
[34:22.830 --> 34:25.030]  And it's not a, it's not a secret network.
[34:25.270 --> 34:26.570]  It's not a secure network, even.
[34:26.570 --> 34:28.190]  But it is the military's phone system.
[34:28.510 --> 34:30.830]  And, you know, they took it pretty seriously.
[34:31.650 --> 34:41.130]  So, around this same time, around end of 1975, beginning of 1976, the FBI is getting reports that phone phreaks have been hacking into the AUTOVON network.
[34:42.270 --> 34:43.410]  And they don't like that either.
[34:44.450 --> 34:50.330]  And, in particular, one of their sources tells them, well, you know, you know who knows all about this?
[34:50.590 --> 34:52.910]  This John Draper guy knows all about this stuff.
[34:53.710 --> 34:55.370]  And so, now it's like, okay.
[34:55.670 --> 34:56.630]  So, we got Draper.
[34:56.690 --> 34:57.830]  Draper's wiretapping us.
[34:57.970 --> 34:59.430]  We got him breaking into AUTOVON.
[35:00.750 --> 35:02.490]  We got to do something about this.
[35:02.970 --> 35:06.010]  So, you know, it's, you redouble the effort.
[35:06.130 --> 35:07.070]  You recruit more informants.
[35:07.090 --> 35:08.030]  You do more wiretaps.
[35:08.110 --> 35:10.170]  You get the phone company more involved than they already are.
[35:12.930 --> 35:20.490]  There's a bunch of stuff that happens around this time, which is really unclear from the people I've talked to.
[35:20.570 --> 35:24.230]  I get lots of different, confusing, contradictory versions of the story.
[35:24.350 --> 35:27.930]  And I think part of the problem is, not necessarily everybody has the complete picture.
[35:28.270 --> 35:30.290]  Or, if they do, perhaps they're not saying.
[35:31.690 --> 35:37.290]  You can go to John Draper's website, and you can read a version of the story.
[35:38.270 --> 35:44.710]  One of the versions of the story is that he, Draper, ends up getting set up by an informant.
[35:45.710 --> 35:51.650]  Another version of the story is that, no, he, John Draper, just ended up making an illegal call.
[35:52.770 --> 36:03.750]  But, much like getting Al Capone for income tax evasion, what the FBI eventually managed to get Captain Crunch for was simply making a couple of phone calls with a blue box.
[36:04.850 --> 36:07.790]  No AUTOVON, no wiretapping, no anything else.
[36:07.930 --> 36:10.530]  Just your basic garden variety fraud by wire charges.
[36:11.390 --> 36:13.070]  And that was enough for them.
[36:13.250 --> 36:14.590]  They were happy at that point.
[36:14.790 --> 36:27.230]  Because what they really wanted, besides sort of making Crunch an example and getting him to not do this anymore, was to get a chance to talk to him and debrief him and find out exactly how he did this and what he knew and all this other stuff.
[36:28.310 --> 36:37.390]  So, indeed, on April 2, 1976, the FBI knocked on John Draper's door and ended up arresting him.
[36:37.670 --> 36:41.290]  And he ended up serving four months at Lompoc.
[36:41.310 --> 36:41.770]  Is that right?
[36:42.050 --> 36:44.250]  So, he ended up going to prison.
[36:44.850 --> 36:48.450]  I think the first phone phreak to actually go to prison for making an illegal phone call.
[36:51.790 --> 36:53.290]  So, what did we learn?
[36:54.730 --> 37:00.770]  Well, the first thing is that you take reports of your communication system being pwned seriously.
[37:01.190 --> 37:01.270]  Right?
[37:01.390 --> 37:07.810]  If you're the FBI or the telephone company, if somebody is allegedly wiretapping your calls, you take that seriously.
[37:07.850 --> 37:08.610]  That's a big deal.
[37:09.770 --> 37:20.270]  Now, the second thing is, and I didn't really mention this, but when the FBI went to the phone company and said, this guy is breaking into our system, he's listening to our phone calls, they said, no, it's not possible.
[37:20.790 --> 37:22.930]  And this is another thing that comes up a lot, right?
[37:22.930 --> 37:23.970]  Not possible.
[37:24.250 --> 37:25.070]  Absolutely not possible.
[37:25.530 --> 37:30.830]  Well, don't believe people when they tell you things aren't possible because the one thing we've always learned is that things are always possible.
[37:31.070 --> 37:33.710]  It may not be in a way that you anticipated, but it's possible.
[37:36.130 --> 37:39.870]  On the phone phreak side, you don't wiretap the FBI.
[37:39.930 --> 37:41.290]  You just don't.
[37:41.870 --> 37:43.090]  I know it's tempting.
[37:43.650 --> 37:46.090]  Believe me, I know it's tempting, but you don't do that.
[37:48.010 --> 37:48.610]  All right.
[37:48.990 --> 37:52.390]  So, that's actually my formal talk.
[37:52.390 --> 37:54.190]  I wanted to save a lot of time for questions here.
[37:54.370 --> 37:56.030]  But I did want to make some thanks.
[37:56.130 --> 38:02.970]  I want to thank the many phone phreaks, telephone company and law enforcement people who've helped me via interviews and providing materials.
[38:03.190 --> 38:08.370]  In particular, I want to thank the Harvard Five for a lot of their archival material and photos and things.
[38:08.590 --> 38:12.950]  And then a few people who provided some photos that I ended up just swiping off the net.
[38:13.070 --> 38:14.050]  But they were Creative Commons.
[38:14.890 --> 38:17.730]  No cats or mice were harmed in this production.
[38:18.550 --> 38:18.990]  So...
[38:18.990 --> 38:19.210]  Questions?
[38:37.480 --> 38:38.120]  Hey, Phil.
[38:38.280 --> 38:38.680]  Great talk.
[38:38.880 --> 38:39.220]  Thank you.
[38:39.480 --> 38:41.800]  I understand you're working on a book documenting all this.
[38:41.920 --> 38:49.320]  Could you explain a little bit about the progress, the project, how long you've been working on it, where it's going, and when we might see it in print?
[38:51.160 --> 38:54.740]  You should probably wait for my check to clear before actually asking questions like that.
[38:54.740 --> 38:55.700]  That's such a good question.
[38:56.860 --> 38:59.880]  So, I've been working on this book for actually quite a while.
[39:00.320 --> 39:02.340]  I started in 2005 part-time.
[39:02.440 --> 39:03.900]  I'm really now working on it full-time.
[39:04.360 --> 39:06.100]  My target is 100,000 words.
[39:06.300 --> 39:08.620]  I'm at 45,000 words at this point.
[39:08.760 --> 39:10.360]  I'm pretty much done with the research.
[39:10.600 --> 39:11.080]  I'm just...
[39:11.080 --> 39:12.140]  Well, actually, no, sorry.
[39:12.280 --> 39:13.480]  I'm like a recovering alcoholic.
[39:13.700 --> 39:15.100]  I am done with the research.
[39:15.100 --> 39:15.880]  I really am.
[39:16.860 --> 39:17.300]  I'm...
[39:17.300 --> 39:19.760]  So, I'm about halfway through the writing.
[39:19.760 --> 39:23.420]  I would figure that the book will be finished by the end of this year, certainly.
[39:24.540 --> 39:25.740]  And that...
[39:26.720 --> 39:29.800]  And then what that means is that it'll be done...
[39:29.800 --> 39:32.060]  It'll be actually in print sometime in 2011.
[39:32.060 --> 39:32.840]  I don't know when.
[39:32.840 --> 39:34.340]  It sort of depends on the publishing schedule.
[39:34.960 --> 39:35.560]  So...
[39:35.560 --> 39:37.040]  Not decided yet.
[39:37.580 --> 39:37.940]  So...
[39:37.940 --> 39:43.420]  There was a question on the timing on multifreq.
[39:43.580 --> 39:52.500]  I heard that during the mid-'70s there were some modifications that were made on the multifreq timing.
[39:52.500 --> 39:54.220]  I was wondering if you have any information about that.
[39:54.460 --> 39:54.560]  Sure.
[39:55.040 --> 39:57.940]  So, let me just explain the question a little bit.
[39:58.840 --> 40:08.720]  When you're sending out these multifrequency pulses, these blue box tones, you can send them just like as if you're dialing at a touch-tone pad, and so, you know, one or two pulses per second.
[40:09.340 --> 40:12.040]  But, of course, the telephone company equipment actually sends faster.
[40:12.180 --> 40:14.560]  It's more like about seven pulses per second.
[40:14.560 --> 40:20.180]  And one of the ways that they thought they could detect fraud was by looking at the pulse rate.
[40:20.340 --> 40:26.040]  So, if somebody is sending out pulses that are very slow or not timed correctly, that's maybe an indicator of fraud.
[40:26.180 --> 40:27.440]  And that is true.
[40:27.540 --> 40:28.580]  That is an indicator of fraud.
[40:28.720 --> 40:33.220]  More though, it was mostly an indicator of bad equipment somewhere in the network.
[40:33.460 --> 40:39.400]  And so, certainly if you were using a manual blue box, you might be generating trouble cards at the various switches, right?
[40:39.480 --> 40:42.960]  These were actually these IBM-like cards that print out trouble reports.
[40:43.340 --> 40:49.820]  But from the people I've talked to in telephone company security, they said, yeah, you know, for the most part, the switchmen weren't really interested in that.
[40:49.940 --> 40:52.180]  What they mostly just wanted to do was for this problem to go away.
[40:52.260 --> 40:55.120]  And usually their first thought was, well, this is just an equipment malfunction.
[40:55.260 --> 40:59.060]  If you were generating hundreds of them because you were using it a lot, eventually that might get to security.
[40:59.200 --> 41:04.520]  But they said that wasn't really the most effective way of detecting, you know, a blue box use.
[41:05.240 --> 41:12.580]  What was actually much more effective was people would call 555-1212 numbers to make a blue box call.
[41:13.220 --> 41:18.380]  And the thing is, 555-1212 numbers should never return answering supervision in telephone company lingo.
[41:18.460 --> 41:19.660]  They should never look like they answered.
[41:19.820 --> 41:23.100]  But when you redirect a call with a blue box, it goes to a number that does answer.
[41:23.220 --> 41:28.860]  And that was, as one telephone company engineer put it, he said that's an immediate bird dog that something fraudulent has taken place.
[41:29.560 --> 41:29.900]  So...
[41:29.900 --> 41:34.720]  Yes, Phil, I was wondering, I'm a fan of the audio programs made by Evan Doorbell.
[41:35.360 --> 41:39.820]  And I was wondering if your massive archive there might have an image of the phreak known as Evan Doorbell.
[41:40.660 --> 41:41.060]  If...
[41:41.060 --> 41:42.040]  I'm sorry, repeat the question.
[41:42.160 --> 41:42.320]  If what?
[41:42.320 --> 41:43.720]  I was wondering if you might have an image.
[41:43.940 --> 41:45.900]  Oh, I do not have an image of Evan Doorbell.
[41:46.000 --> 41:50.880]  Evan Doorbell is a fairly reclusive guy.
[41:51.040 --> 41:52.240]  And so I've never seen an image of him.
[41:52.620 --> 41:53.800]  Evan's not his real name.
[41:54.180 --> 41:57.920]  But he has done some amazing, amazing audio material.
[41:58.560 --> 42:00.200]  I've talked to him on the phone a couple times.
[42:00.200 --> 42:01.060]  You should all...
[42:01.060 --> 42:09.200]  If you're interested in this sort of thing, which I hope you are if you just sat through 45 minutes of it, I would go to phonetrips.com and you can download...
[42:10.020 --> 42:13.220]  Specifically, Evan Doorbell has a series called How I Became a Phone Phreak.
[42:13.260 --> 42:14.480]  It's about six parts now.
[42:14.620 --> 42:15.460]  It's wonderful.
[42:15.680 --> 42:17.860]  It's like listening to this American life for phone phreaks.
[42:19.280 --> 42:29.800]  And then if you're a little bit harder core, there is a 13 or 14 part series called Sounds of Long Distance, which is basically tape recordings that are narrated by Evan of how the old long distance network sounded.
[42:29.940 --> 42:32.240]  What does a crossbar switch sound like when it cuts over?
[42:32.360 --> 42:32.800]  This sort of thing.
[42:32.900 --> 42:33.200]  It's great.
[42:33.740 --> 42:34.180]  So...
[42:34.180 --> 42:34.480]  Thank you.
[42:34.700 --> 42:35.080]  Thank you.
[42:40.090 --> 42:40.710]  Hey there.
[42:40.930 --> 42:44.630]  Do you plan to get into anything more contemporary in your book?
[42:44.990 --> 42:54.870]  You know, it's kind of interesting that the things that you brought up are all actually possible today on modern digital switches, and especially with some of the wipe stuff that we have.
[42:55.390 --> 42:55.830]  Right.
[42:55.830 --> 42:58.370]  So a couple of thoughts on that.
[42:58.510 --> 43:10.630]  One is that from many of the modern-day phone phreaks that I've talked to, because I am focusing on the 1960-1980 period, one of the things that says do not, whatever you do, do not tell people that phone phreaking is dead.
[43:10.790 --> 43:11.370]  It's not dead.
[43:11.510 --> 43:12.590]  We still do phone phreaking.
[43:12.810 --> 43:13.750]  And that makes sense.
[43:13.850 --> 43:16.970]  I think as long as there are telephone networks, there are going to be people who want to explore it.
[43:17.070 --> 43:20.810]  And it's, you know, back to that first slide talking about what a phone phreak is and the love of exploration.
[43:23.150 --> 43:27.770]  And to your comment that this stuff is still possible, I really, I take your word for that.
[43:27.910 --> 43:28.850]  I completely believe it.
[43:28.930 --> 43:34.790]  In particular, I know that a lot of the, one of the big problems has been the law enforcement access, right, for wiretapping.
[43:34.990 --> 43:38.810]  You know, law enforcement needs a legitimate way, they claim, to be able to wiretap calls.
[43:38.930 --> 43:41.290]  But if they can do that, it turns out other people can do it too.
[43:42.130 --> 43:43.150]  It's like Goatey.
[43:43.710 --> 43:44.070]  Indeed.
[43:45.810 --> 43:59.430]  So, I'm not, the most I'm really planning on doing in my book is talking about, in a kind of an epilogue chapter, you know, here are a bunch of themes, kind of like we were talking about here, that come up from the 1960 to 1980 period, and kind of how they apply,
[43:59.770 --> 44:01.570]  you know, to the modern day.
[44:01.790 --> 44:04.150]  But I'm not really planning on covering any of the modern stuff.
[44:04.270 --> 44:05.210]  And I'm actually kind of embarrassed.
[44:05.330 --> 44:06.970]  I just don't know that much about the modern stuff.
[44:07.070 --> 44:09.030]  Although, I do have an asterisk switch at home.
[44:09.410 --> 44:09.990]  So, yeah.
[44:10.030 --> 44:10.190]  Awesome.
[44:10.470 --> 44:10.890]  Thank you.
[44:11.110 --> 44:11.350]  Thanks.
[44:13.850 --> 44:19.250]  So, I noticed that you definitely obscured the names of the Harvard people.
[44:19.470 --> 44:19.610]  Yes.
[44:20.990 --> 44:38.650]  But can you, and not to ruin an ending or some major piece of your book, obviously, but can you give us a little bit more about, well, they went on to be engineers, or they did this, or they did that, or, you know, how many of them are still alive, and things like that.
[44:38.810 --> 44:38.890]  Right.
[44:39.110 --> 44:40.290]  They went on to be engineers.
[44:40.290 --> 44:41.770]  They did this, and they did that.
[44:42.170 --> 44:42.930]  Several of them are still...
[44:42.930 --> 44:43.030]  No.
[44:43.110 --> 44:43.250]  Sorry.
[44:45.430 --> 44:45.790]  No.
[44:45.890 --> 44:46.490]  I wasn't actually...
[44:46.490 --> 44:50.090]  And I'm not actually trying to obscure anything in terms of the story of the book.
[44:50.170 --> 44:53.230]  It was just more out of privacy that, you know, they didn't want their name out there.
[44:54.750 --> 44:56.050]  So, they actually...
[44:56.570 --> 44:57.090]  Let's see.
[44:57.310 --> 45:00.850]  Of the five guys, all of them went on to become engineers.
[45:00.850 --> 45:04.890]  All of them have had very successful careers and done good things.
[45:05.570 --> 45:08.250]  One of them has passed away, sadly.
[45:08.570 --> 45:11.050]  The rest are still alive.
[45:11.370 --> 45:15.790]  And they're just all happy, fun, great people.
[45:16.050 --> 45:20.250]  And it was really kind of fun, you know, tracking them down and actually chatting with them.
[45:20.350 --> 45:21.850]  And they had a great time reminiscing.
[45:21.850 --> 45:24.570]  Do they still talk to each other regularly?
[45:24.790 --> 45:25.030]  They do.
[45:25.150 --> 45:25.510]  Or was it...
[45:26.850 --> 45:27.550]  Regularly is probably...
[45:27.550 --> 45:28.250]  But they pay for the phone calls now.
[45:28.250 --> 45:29.730]  They do indeed pay for the phone calls.
[45:29.910 --> 45:34.230]  And regularly is too strong a word, but they definitely do talk to each other.
[45:34.230 --> 45:35.090]  Hi.
[45:35.210 --> 45:41.690]  You said you omitted any research on black boxes and possibly red boxes from your book?
[45:41.930 --> 45:42.430]  No.
[45:42.510 --> 45:43.110]  Not from the book.
[45:43.190 --> 45:43.830]  Just from this talk.
[45:44.010 --> 45:44.830]  Oh, just from this talk.
[45:44.970 --> 45:45.030]  Okay.
[45:45.490 --> 45:54.090]  And do you have any documented or anecdotal, you know, information on, let's say, foreign intelligence penetration into the system using black boxing?
[45:54.770 --> 45:55.730]  Great question.
[45:56.070 --> 46:01.230]  This is something that I think should be really worrisome.
[46:01.230 --> 46:11.170]  And in fact, actually, that was... there was definitely from the 1975 wiretapping of the FBI, there was definitely a concern about that, right?
[46:11.330 --> 46:14.890]  That, you know, gosh, if Captain Crunch can do it, then probably the Soviets can do it, too.
[46:16.210 --> 46:20.950]  Although I think that was actually almost in the background just because they were still reeling from the idea that anyone could do it, right?
[46:22.130 --> 46:28.150]  It seems to me like you would be... you, we as a country, would be super concerned about that.
[46:29.410 --> 46:31.950]  Oddly enough, it doesn't seem to be the case.
[46:32.070 --> 46:36.590]  And I actually talked to some folks who are familiar with the matter from NSA.
[46:37.250 --> 46:41.550]  And they said, ah, yes, that's the commercial phone system.
[46:41.730 --> 46:43.450]  We don't deal with commercial things.
[46:43.650 --> 46:44.870]  We don't worry about that.
[46:44.970 --> 46:49.590]  We worry about, you know, things like, you know, the military phone system.
[46:49.690 --> 46:53.270]  And even then, we mostly just worry about things that are encrypted because that's what we do.
[46:54.870 --> 46:59.010]  So it's sort of like there was no one really watching the store other than AT&T.
[46:59.210 --> 47:04.810]  And I think AT&T, you know, definitely took secrecy of communications as an important thing, right?
[47:04.870 --> 47:06.270]  They instructed their employees on it.
[47:06.330 --> 47:11.130]  And this specific telephone thing that allowed this wiretapping to happen was not per AT&T policy.
[47:11.270 --> 47:12.810]  This wasn't something that was everywhere in the country.
[47:13.430 --> 47:20.210]  But there, it's an interesting thing because it's definitely something as I was doing this, I was like, wow, gosh, it seems like if, you know, it seems like this would be a real concern.
[47:20.350 --> 47:23.170]  I haven't found anything that actually indicated it really was on anybody's radar.
[47:23.390 --> 47:25.810]  No freedom, no freedom of the information requests.
[47:26.810 --> 47:28.370]  Nothing, nothing that's turned up anything.
[47:29.050 --> 47:29.370]  So...
[47:29.370 --> 47:29.710]  Thanks.
[47:30.030 --> 47:30.210]  Sure.
[47:33.240 --> 47:33.760]  Hi, Phil.
[47:33.840 --> 47:34.440]  Cheshire Catalyst.
[47:34.620 --> 47:35.020]  Hey, Cheshire.
[47:35.860 --> 47:40.260]  I'm wondering, the links that you've mentioned here, will you put them on your phonephreakinghistory.org?
[47:41.060 --> 47:41.420]  Absolutely.
[47:42.060 --> 47:42.780]  Great, thank you.
[47:42.780 --> 47:49.000]  And, of course, my small claim to fame is having published the TAP newsletter for a few years before its death.
[47:49.320 --> 47:49.480]  Yes, indeed.
[47:49.480 --> 47:55.140]  And I have recently created a small CD-ROM with images of all the TAP issues.
[47:55.160 --> 47:58.040]  And that will be in the back at one of the tables after your talk.
[47:58.420 --> 47:59.780]  The disc will be available for $30.
[48:00.220 --> 48:01.680]  That is fantastic, Cheshire.
[48:01.780 --> 48:02.640]  Thank you for doing that.
[48:02.820 --> 48:04.460]  And is there...
[48:04.460 --> 48:05.360]  Let me ask you a question.
[48:05.500 --> 48:05.600]  Sure.
[48:05.600 --> 48:06.980]  Are there any plans to do...
[48:06.980 --> 48:10.460]  There was the Best of 2600 that was published a couple of years ago.
[48:10.460 --> 48:13.240]  Are there any plans to do any sort of a printed...
[48:13.240 --> 48:13.760]  I'm...
[48:13.760 --> 48:16.520]  Despite being a high-tech guy, I like printed things.
[48:16.680 --> 48:18.500]  Is there any plans for a printed version of that?
[48:18.700 --> 48:25.100]  Well, I was at the broadcast for Off the Hook the other night and made sure that Emanuel brought in his publisher.
[48:25.640 --> 48:31.340]  And so I got in pretty good with her and I gave a copy of the disc to the marketing lady here at the conference.
[48:31.340 --> 48:35.860]  So I may wind up putting something on dead trees myself fairly soon.
[48:36.000 --> 48:36.900]  That would be awesome.
[48:37.320 --> 48:37.580]  Thank you.
[48:38.240 --> 48:38.580]  The...
[48:38.580 --> 48:44.360]  Just as background for those who don't know it, there was a newsletter started in 1971 called YIPL.
[48:44.640 --> 48:46.680]  It was an offshoot of the Youth International Party.
[48:46.840 --> 48:48.520]  It was the Youth International Party line.
[48:48.880 --> 48:52.020]  And that was the phone phreak part of the Yippies.
[48:52.020 --> 48:56.520]  And that eventually became Tap, which Cheshire was one of...
[48:56.520 --> 49:00.300]  I think there were three editors, Al Bell, Tom Edison, and then Cheshire.
[49:00.880 --> 49:03.380]  And that was essentially the forerunner of 2600.
[49:03.580 --> 49:05.340]  And it's wonderful stuff.
[49:05.480 --> 49:15.100]  When you flip through it and you see this stuff from 1971 to 1980 roughly, it's like taking a societal core sample of hackers and phone phreaks over the years.
[49:15.260 --> 49:16.200]  It's really fun to read.
[49:16.680 --> 49:17.060]  So...
[49:18.140 --> 49:18.800]  Other questions?
[49:23.110 --> 49:23.590]  All right.
[49:23.710 --> 49:24.470]  Well, thank you very much.