[00:00.000 --> 00:03.320]  For probably the better part of a decade.
[00:03.640 --> 00:04.980]  No, no, no, not that long.
[00:05.180 --> 00:07.180]  Well, all right, five years.
[00:07.360 --> 00:08.900]  Isn't that the better part of a decade?
[00:09.200 --> 00:10.280]  Or we'll round up.
[00:12.560 --> 00:15.840]  Doing this amazing project to document the history of phone phreaking.
[00:17.640 --> 00:18.860]  And he's writing a book.
[00:19.120 --> 00:20.200]  In fact, he's written a book.
[00:21.020 --> 00:21.780]  Is it done yet?
[00:23.040 --> 00:23.720]  It's done!
[00:26.240 --> 00:28.900]  All right, it's not in print yet, but he'll be telling you about it.
[00:30.320 --> 00:33.880]  Phil's going to tell you about his amazing journey in documenting this book.
[00:34.240 --> 00:36.840]  Like, tons of interviews and FOIA requests.
[00:37.200 --> 00:38.020]  And it was a...
[00:38.960 --> 00:39.720]  He'll say it.
[00:39.780 --> 00:43.500]  It was like this journey down the rabbit hole through all these little twisty, turny mazes.
[00:43.780 --> 00:46.160]  And it was a journey.
[00:46.380 --> 00:48.320]  So, Phil, take it away.
[00:49.060 --> 00:49.360]  Thanks very
[00:54.820 --> 00:56.460]  much, Bernie.
[00:57.440 --> 01:00.040]  By the way, I just have to... I have to be clear.
[01:00.200 --> 01:01.440]  It was not a decade.
[01:01.700 --> 01:02.540]  It's five years.
[01:02.660 --> 01:03.560]  My wife is in the audience.
[01:03.560 --> 01:07.160]  If she hears I was actually secretly working on this for a decade, I'm a dead man.
[01:07.500 --> 01:08.180]  I'm just...
[01:09.600 --> 01:10.280]  Right, exactly.
[01:10.460 --> 01:11.440]  It was only two years, really.
[01:12.080 --> 01:12.820]  So, it's funny.
[01:12.940 --> 01:17.420]  Bernie asked me when we were talking about, you know, come give a talk on phone phreaking.
[01:17.640 --> 01:18.700]  And I said, well, I'd love to.
[01:18.820 --> 01:22.280]  But, you know, my publisher is going to get really mad at me if I give away everything that's in the book.
[01:22.380 --> 01:24.840]  And he said, well, tell us everything that's not in the book.
[01:24.840 --> 01:28.420]  Because the very best story to start with, don't put this in your book, you know.
[01:28.720 --> 01:30.580]  So, that's what I thought I'd do today.
[01:30.680 --> 01:31.920]  And so, that's why we have this L.A.
[01:31.960 --> 01:33.920]  Noire theme of phone phreak confidential.
[01:35.920 --> 01:36.280]  The...
[01:36.640 --> 01:38.940]  So, here's what I'd like to talk about today.
[01:40.440 --> 01:41.940]  And first, I have to disclose.
[01:42.260 --> 01:54.860]  I have developed, from reading all these FOIA requests and FBI files, I've developed a certain love, some would call it a fetish, for old FBI memos and styles and things.
[01:55.100 --> 01:57.760]  And so, you know, you're going to see this kind of throughout.
[01:57.840 --> 01:58.820]  Because it's kind of...
[01:58.820 --> 02:04.520]  I spend much of my life seemingly living in the 1960s and 1970s, reading old memos where things were sent by teletype.
[02:04.740 --> 02:12.820]  But so, what I'd like to do today is tell you a little bit, just for those of you who are not present, for the 1960s and 1970s, tell you a little bit of the background about phone phreaking.
[02:13.400 --> 02:18.900]  I'd then like to describe some of my Freedom of Information Act travails and experiences and fun things.
[02:19.640 --> 02:23.460]  And then I'm going to go off the record and tell you all the stuff that's not in the book.
[02:23.600 --> 02:25.120]  And then conclude with a few lessons learned.
[02:25.240 --> 02:31.200]  And the lessons learned are not just for those of you writing history books, which I can tell you is not a particularly lucrative or good way to spend your time.
[02:31.800 --> 02:33.740]  But it's for any big creative project.
[02:34.440 --> 02:34.760]  And...
[02:34.760 --> 02:37.720]  But especially anyone that has kind of any sort of historical bent to it.
[02:37.720 --> 02:54.100]  And for any of you who may be worried, I just want to stress that all information contained herein is unclassified, at least according to FBI declassification guy 60324, who sounds like he should be working for the Department of HOPEland Security with a name like that.
[02:55.360 --> 02:57.880]  So, here's the background briefing on phone phreaking.
[02:58.100 --> 03:00.500]  And remember my FBI memo fetish.
[03:01.460 --> 03:02.740]  This is beautiful.
[03:03.700 --> 03:08.460]  So, when the FBI sends you something under the Freedom of Information Act, they scan it in.
[03:08.540 --> 03:10.360]  And then they often now send it to you electronically.
[03:10.720 --> 03:16.400]  And their scanner has this amazing way of taking old black and white photographs and making them look just so cool.
[03:16.740 --> 03:18.780]  But admire this for just a moment.
[03:19.240 --> 03:25.340]  Imagine a world where a telephone receiver ends up with an FBI evidence tag on it.
[03:25.340 --> 03:25.760]  Right?
[03:26.040 --> 03:28.420]  I mean, how does that happen?
[03:28.800 --> 03:31.480]  And it turns out there are several reasons how that happens.
[03:31.920 --> 03:33.880]  And the first one starts here.
[03:35.120 --> 03:40.900]  Now, if you are a normal person, you look at that and you think, oh, well, you know, that's an old rotary phone, whatever.
[03:41.120 --> 03:41.800]  It's a phone.
[03:41.980 --> 03:42.280]  Right?
[03:42.340 --> 03:43.160]  It's not that interesting.
[03:43.320 --> 03:45.200]  It's not something that you spend any time thinking about.
[03:45.520 --> 03:51.180]  It is, in the words of phone phreak Evan Doorbell, it is not something that is interesting enough to be interested in at all.
[03:52.120 --> 03:54.960]  If you are in this audience, I posit that you are not a normal person.
[03:57.080 --> 03:57.480]  Yeah.
[03:58.780 --> 04:04.820]  And so, to me, this represents not a black rotary phone, but it represents curiosity personified.
[04:04.820 --> 04:14.320]  Because if you have a certain mental defect, like many of us do, you look at something like that and you say, wow, I wonder how that works.
[04:14.480 --> 04:15.880]  I wonder where it goes to.
[04:15.940 --> 04:17.500]  I wonder what happens if you take it apart.
[04:17.700 --> 04:20.820]  I wonder what happens if you use it in ways that it was not intended to be used.
[04:20.820 --> 04:24.520]  I wonder what happens if you dial numbers that are not in the phone book.
[04:24.700 --> 04:26.620]  I wonder what happens if you play with it.
[04:26.680 --> 04:27.760]  Where do those wires go?
[04:27.920 --> 04:29.440]  How does that all work?
[04:30.580 --> 04:34.520]  In addition, if that's not enough, they made it more tantalizing.
[04:34.520 --> 04:39.700]  Because in the old days, if you placed a call, a long-distance call, you'd hear something like this.
[04:42.160 --> 04:44.920]  Can we maybe up the volume on that just a smidge, please?
[04:50.920 --> 04:52.260]  It's only a show of hands.
[04:52.260 --> 04:55.420]  How many people have placed a long-distance call and heard something like that, right?
[04:55.600 --> 04:56.640]  Okay, so a chunk of you.
[04:56.800 --> 04:58.200]  That says you're of a certain age.
[05:00.160 --> 05:02.340]  But, you know, you place that call.
[05:02.460 --> 05:07.160]  And again, you know, in the words of Bill Murray, there is something wrong with us, something very, very wrong with us.
[05:07.280 --> 05:09.560]  You hear those tones and you think, what are those?
[05:10.220 --> 05:11.420]  It's talking to something.
[05:11.560 --> 05:12.100]  There are these tones.
[05:12.280 --> 05:13.180]  What are they?
[05:13.240 --> 05:13.940]  How does it work?
[05:13.940 --> 05:16.720]  And so, you get this curiosity.
[05:16.960 --> 05:23.120]  And so, starting around, you know, the 1950s, 1960s, you start to get people who want to play with the fun.
[05:23.220 --> 05:24.280]  They're just, they're curious about it.
[05:24.320 --> 05:25.380]  They want to understand how it works.
[05:25.460 --> 05:26.180]  They want to take it apart.
[05:26.320 --> 05:27.640]  They want to, they want to hack with it.
[05:28.240 --> 05:35.140]  Now, there's a, so one thing that causes a telephone receiver to have an FBI evidence tag on it is curiosity.
[05:35.480 --> 05:38.760]  There's another thing which plays into this, which is economics.
[05:39.880 --> 05:46.280]  If you go back to the 1900s, 1890s when the phone starts, you don't have telephones with dials.
[05:46.300 --> 05:46.960]  You just have telephones.
[05:47.040 --> 05:49.140]  You pick up the phone and the operator says, number please.
[05:49.500 --> 05:53.620]  The operator initially was teenage boys, but they figured out pretty quickly that didn't work.
[05:55.220 --> 05:59.340]  So, so they replaced them with, with female operators who were, who were more pleasant.
[05:59.820 --> 06:04.840]  But, you know, initially it's number please, but then eventually you have phones with dials and you can dial, but you still can't dial long distance.
[06:05.000 --> 06:12.160]  And even by the 1950s, 1960s, you know, 70% of long distance calls were still placed through an operator on a cord board.
[06:12.820 --> 06:22.340]  You know, and you, you know, she selects a jack, and maybe she has a little keypad, which was not arranged in a three by four thing, was two by five for, for sending MF tones to the machines.
[06:22.960 --> 06:25.700]  But anyway, someone like this places your calls.
[06:26.560 --> 06:31.380]  Now, the FBI, no, the phone company, sorry, I get them confused sometimes.
[06:32.040 --> 06:39.500]  The, the phone company, you know, pretty smart bunch of people, and they can see the handwriting on the wall, telephone services becoming more and more popular.
[06:40.160 --> 06:48.460]  And they look at something like this, and, and from the 1930s to about the 1950s, 1960s, they employed about 100,000 telephone operators.
[06:48.940 --> 06:49.720]  Now, think about that.
[06:49.860 --> 06:51.180]  That's a pretty staggering number.
[06:51.440 --> 06:53.740]  100,000 people as telephone operators.
[06:53.980 --> 06:59.980]  Initially, they started off doing local calls, but then as local calls get automated, they switch over to, uh, to long distance.
[07:00.640 --> 07:11.680]  Now, that's fine for 100,000 people, but even by the 1950s, they had figured out that, gosh, you know, the current rate of growth by 1965, 1970, we're gonna need a million telephone operators.
[07:11.900 --> 07:13.160]  And there are two problems with that.
[07:13.320 --> 07:14.760]  Problem number one is we can't afford it.
[07:14.860 --> 07:16.720]  Paying a million people is just gonna bankrupt us.
[07:16.860 --> 07:20.260]  Problem number two is it turns out there simply aren't that many women in the workforce, right?
[07:20.420 --> 07:29.920]  I mean, imagine that you're, like, the national HR director of AT&T, and you've got your envelope out in the restaurant, and you're doing the back thing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, a million, uh, no, that doesn't work, right?
[07:29.980 --> 07:30.940]  They just can't do it.
[07:31.380 --> 07:33.180]  So the answer is automation.
[07:36.060 --> 07:42.360]  So this is a photo from the AT&T archives of what was called a 4A tool crossbar, 4A tool machine.
[07:44.060 --> 07:46.260]  Take a look at that for just a second and get the scale.
[07:46.260 --> 07:49.460]  It's not a great photo, but that is a man standing there.
[07:49.580 --> 07:51.600]  Notice that the machine is much, much larger.
[07:51.920 --> 07:54.800]  Then realize that this is only a portion of the machine.
[07:54.800 --> 07:58.920]  This machine, which was, you know, we're not talking transistors, right?
[07:58.980 --> 08:00.640]  This thing was first built in 1943.
[08:01.140 --> 08:02.960]  We're talking electromechanical switches.
[08:02.980 --> 08:03.860]  We're talking relays.
[08:03.980 --> 08:05.000]  We're talking vacuum tubes.
[08:05.480 --> 08:09.220]  This thing took up the better part of a city block, okay?
[08:09.940 --> 08:18.500]  AT&T ended up installing hundreds of these things around the country, and this was the magic switching machine that could figure out how to automatically route a call from point A to point B.
[08:18.660 --> 08:20.340]  It could talk to other switching machines.
[08:20.440 --> 08:23.120]  It was the thing which was going to make long-distance operators obsolete.
[08:24.900 --> 08:28.480]  Now, I still just remain stunned by that, because that is such a tall order, right?
[08:28.620 --> 08:35.440]  Imagine building a machine that knows how to route a call from point A to point B, except you don't have a computer, and in fact, the transistor hasn't even been invented yet.
[08:35.760 --> 08:35.980]  Right?
[08:36.120 --> 08:37.080]  This is a tall order.
[08:37.220 --> 08:39.060]  And yet, AT&T actually did this.
[08:40.480 --> 08:51.300]  So, you've got these machines, but now, in the old days, when the operators wanted to communicate with one another, they'd plug into the jack, and they'd, you know, dial the next city closer to your destination, and, you know, the operator there would say,
[08:51.420 --> 08:59.140]  you know, Denver inward, and you'd say, Denver, this is Chicago, I need to place a call to this number, and it would, the call would move downfield very manually with operators talking to one another.
[09:00.040 --> 09:02.500]  Now, with the machines, the machines have to talk to each other.
[09:02.620 --> 09:03.460]  How are they going to do that?
[09:03.600 --> 09:05.320]  Well, it turns out they're going to do it by tones.
[09:05.620 --> 09:07.760]  And so, the entire network was controlled by tones.
[09:07.760 --> 09:09.260]  That was how the machines communicated.
[09:09.460 --> 09:14.840]  There was a 2600 hertz tone, which controlled whether a phone call was on or off hook.
[09:14.980 --> 09:17.180]  And then, there were these MF tones, kind of like Touch-Tones.
[09:17.380 --> 09:20.160]  The MF tones that we heard before, the ones that we were so curious about.
[09:20.860 --> 09:22.900]  And that's what allows the machines to communicate.
[09:23.520 --> 09:29.420]  The only problem is, if the machines can hear, they can make and hear these tones, then so can clever human beings.
[09:29.640 --> 09:33.520]  And so, it's not very long before you have people making these boxes.
[09:34.160 --> 09:37.340]  The one on the left was a, it was so-called single frequency box.
[09:37.340 --> 09:41.780]  It was made in 1961 by a college student up in the Pacific Northwest.
[09:42.380 --> 09:48.780]  And as you rotated that, that dial there, it would just make beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, you know, whatever number you dialed.
[09:48.940 --> 09:50.220]  And that was the old signaling system.
[09:50.360 --> 09:53.220]  Later, they had a more sophisticated signaling system.
[09:53.360 --> 09:57.640]  So, the one on the right is a multi-frequency box, which made those, those quick little tones that we heard before.
[09:58.260 --> 09:59.940]  Like Touch-Tones, but different frequencies.
[10:01.440 --> 10:04.160]  So, with this, you could make a free phone call.
[10:05.560 --> 10:07.320]  Did I just hear 2600 hertz something?
[10:07.320 --> 10:08.420]  Did somebody just beep?
[10:08.720 --> 10:09.700]  I thought I did.
[10:10.780 --> 10:12.300]  With this, you could make a free phone call.
[10:12.420 --> 10:13.880]  But that's actually almost not the point.
[10:14.420 --> 10:18.800]  Because for the, for the kids of this generation, for the 1960s, yeah, okay, sure.
[10:18.960 --> 10:25.640]  I've talked to so many of these phone phreaks, and they would tell me, we're 15-year-old, 16-year-old, 17-year-old kids.
[10:25.820 --> 10:28.800]  We don't have anybody to call, right?
[10:28.800 --> 10:30.120]  We don't know anybody.
[10:30.420 --> 10:34.600]  The only thing we want to do is we want to call, you know, we want to call non-working test numbers.
[10:34.700 --> 10:36.440]  We want to see how close we can get to the North Pole.
[10:36.620 --> 10:38.620]  We want to, you know, we just want to see how the network works.
[10:38.680 --> 10:40.160]  We're just curious, right?
[10:42.240 --> 10:46.200]  So, so, you know, that's really the, the, that's the impetus for this.
[10:46.460 --> 10:50.560]  If you are a teenage phone phreak in the 1960s or 1970s, you want to play with the network.
[10:50.680 --> 10:54.280]  Not to say that you never made free calls, because you want to talk to your friends, of course, once you discover them.
[10:54.460 --> 10:56.360]  But, that's the main reason.
[10:56.600 --> 10:59.280]  Now, there's another set of people who like this.
[10:59.980 --> 11:01.420]  And there are people like this.
[11:01.580 --> 11:03.840]  This is a bookmaker in the 1940s.
[11:04.780 --> 11:19.400]  And it turns out, pre-Internet, 1940s, if you wanted to keep in touch with your customers, and if you wanted to know, you know, what the betting line was from Las Vegas and Atlantic City on a sporting event, you were constantly on the phone, as, as evidenced by this photo here.
[11:20.300 --> 11:22.740]  And that was two problems for you, if you're a bookmaker.
[11:22.740 --> 11:27.140]  Problem number one is it's really expensive, because AT&T's rates were expensive back in the day, for long distance.
[11:27.420 --> 11:32.720]  Problem number two is that the pesky FBI is constantly looking at your toll records.
[11:32.820 --> 11:35.400]  We just had that talk by the EFF attorney.
[11:35.600 --> 11:39.200]  So, the FBI had figured out, well, we can't really necessarily wiretap these guys.
[11:39.400 --> 11:41.140]  At the time, it wasn't necessarily legal.
[11:41.180 --> 11:47.120]  But, we can certainly subpoena their toll records, and figure out who this guy calls, and build a network map.
[11:47.720 --> 11:59.900]  And so, the organized crime and bookmakers were particularly interested in using Blue Boxes, Black Boxes, to defeat the telephone company's carefully designed billing system, so that there weren't any records anymore of the phone calls that they had made.
[12:00.780 --> 12:04.080]  So, you've got two different users groups here, if you will, right?
[12:04.160 --> 12:06.920]  You've got the phone phreak users group, and you've got the organized crime users group.
[12:07.200 --> 12:12.180]  The phone phreak started off, you know, as people working alone in isolation.
[12:12.460 --> 12:17.180]  But, around 1969, 1970, they start to meet one another.
[12:17.180 --> 12:20.900]  And, it's kind of through a series of really random kind of connections.
[12:21.720 --> 12:26.800]  And so, this is John Draper, Captain Crunch, one of the more notorious phone phreaks in this era.
[12:26.960 --> 12:28.960]  But, there's Joe Engressia, a.k.a. Joybubbles, the blind whistling phone phreak, Bill from New York, a whole bunch of them there.
[12:33.520 --> 12:38.540]  And, they just, they started meeting each other through anonymous loop around circuits, through introductions from one another.
[12:38.780 --> 12:44.840]  And, pretty soon, you've got, by 1969, 1970, you've got this whole underground community that's starting to talk to each other.
[12:45.300 --> 12:48.740]  And, you know, as many of them told me, they're like, this is the greatest thing in the world.
[12:48.800 --> 12:51.820]  Because, up until now, it's just been me and the phone.
[12:51.940 --> 12:54.440]  And, whenever I talk to somebody about it, they're like, ah, stupid phone, whatever.
[12:54.640 --> 12:55.020]  Who cares?
[12:55.120 --> 12:55.840]  What a dumb hobby.
[12:56.060 --> 12:59.380]  Now, I've finally met somebody that actually gets this.
[12:59.400 --> 13:01.020]  Not just somebody, but multiple people.
[13:01.060 --> 13:05.340]  This is an amazing thing if you're a 16-year-old kid, and you're kind of lonely, and you have an odd hobby.
[13:06.440 --> 13:15.160]  Then, Ron Rosenbaum comes along, in 1971, and writes an Esquire magazine article about it, called Secrets of the Little Blue Box.
[13:15.380 --> 13:21.320]  Esquire has a circulation of 500,000 people, and this underground hobby just gets blown out to the entire world.
[13:21.420 --> 13:22.840]  Right now, everybody knows about this.
[13:23.020 --> 13:30.780]  The article reads like fiction, but if you're a certain kind of a person, say you're a Steve Wozniak, and you read this, you look at it, and you're like, this isn't fiction.
[13:31.280 --> 13:32.180]  This isn't fiction.
[13:32.260 --> 13:34.300]  This has got to be real, and I've got to figure this stuff out.
[13:35.280 --> 13:38.620]  By the way, this is something that never ceases to amaze me.
[13:39.300 --> 13:47.260]  Any phone phreak who learned about phone phreaking from the Esquire article can describe the Esquire article on page 116, which begins with a photo of a Blue Box.
[13:47.400 --> 13:48.840]  They can describe it to me in detail.
[13:49.040 --> 13:50.360]  They say, oh, my God, it was great.
[13:50.480 --> 13:51.560]  It was a really well-written article.
[13:51.740 --> 13:53.560]  It's got this fantastic box.
[13:53.660 --> 13:54.580]  It's a plastic box.
[13:54.700 --> 13:57.080]  It's got 13 buttons on it, 12 in front, aluminum...
[13:57.080 --> 13:59.420]  None of them remember the cover of the magazine.
[14:01.400 --> 14:02.120]  Not one.
[14:02.600 --> 14:03.100]  Not one.
[14:05.400 --> 14:10.580]  So the other thing that happens in 1971 is the Yippies get a hold of this.
[14:11.060 --> 14:13.640]  And so this is the Youth International Party line.
[14:13.720 --> 14:14.700]  This is their first newsletter.
[14:14.820 --> 14:16.640]  It's an offshoot of the Youth International Party.
[14:17.000 --> 14:30.140]  And unlike the phone hackers being interested in just experimenting and playing with the telephone network, the Yippies had a very specific political purpose for this, which is this is the way to stick it to the man.
[14:30.140 --> 14:34.160]  And in particular, not just the phone company, who they didn't like, but the United States government.
[14:34.360 --> 14:35.020]  Well, why is that?
[14:35.160 --> 14:37.560]  Well, there was something called the telephone excise tax.
[14:37.820 --> 14:41.180]  And this is a 10% tax on long-distance phone calls.
[14:41.660 --> 14:43.680]  And that was used to pay...
[14:43.680 --> 14:47.440]  It raked in like, you know, a billion, billion and a half dollars in 1970 or so.
[14:47.600 --> 14:48.600]  It's significant money.
[14:48.780 --> 14:50.680]  That's about 10% of the cost of the Vietnam War.
[14:50.900 --> 15:00.620]  So the great news is, if you can figure out how to make free phone calls, not only do you get free phone calls, but you're screwing the government and preventing, you know, the government from sending people off to fight and die in Southeast Asia.
[15:00.740 --> 15:01.620]  What a great thing, right?
[15:02.020 --> 15:09.340]  So, you know, this is the start kind of the cultural hijacking of what was this little geeky hobby of exploring the telephone network.
[15:09.460 --> 15:11.280]  And now you've got people who just want to make free phone calls.
[15:11.340 --> 15:12.900]  You've got the yippies who are getting involved.
[15:13.080 --> 15:14.040]  You get all this stuff.
[15:19.370 --> 15:26.370]  Now, the next thing that comes out is in 1975, you find out that the phone company had not been sitting idly by during this time.
[15:26.370 --> 15:36.950]  They heard in 1961, that's when they first discovered a Blue Box, and in 1964 to 1970, they had built a toll fraud surveillance network, right?
[15:37.030 --> 15:41.170]  Now, they couldn't use their normal billing system because that's what the Blue Box defeats, so they built a separate thing.
[15:41.430 --> 15:45.050]  These were six machines deployed all over the cities of the United States.
[15:45.170 --> 15:46.510]  They moved them around from time to time.
[15:46.750 --> 15:52.850]  It randomly monitored phone calls looking for evidence of fraud, like 2,600 hertz on a line when it shouldn't be there.
[15:53.830 --> 15:56.770]  And when it found it, it would take an audacious next step.
[15:56.930 --> 16:00.070]  It would actually tape record the call onto reel-to-reel tape.
[16:00.310 --> 16:11.130]  They randomly monitored during that time 33 million phone calls and tape recorded and listened to them by ear, 1.5 million of them, all to get an understanding of how big is this problem?
[16:11.290 --> 16:14.150]  Are we totally screwed or are we only just a little bit screwed, right?
[16:14.570 --> 16:21.690]  Because you need statistics like that if you're going to make any sort of decision about maybe having to spend a billion dollars to upgrade your network to get rid of this fraud problem.
[16:22.130 --> 16:27.810]  So that came out in 1975, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch happened to get an expose on it.
[16:28.310 --> 16:33.030]  I'm skipping over a whole bunch of history here, but I just wanted to give you the background on that.
[16:33.330 --> 16:36.350]  So that's phone phreaking in a nutshell during its analog heyday.
[16:37.090 --> 16:45.050]  When I started writing this book in 2006, I was immediately contacted by several modern-day phone rfeaks who said, whatever you do, do not tell people that phone phreaking is dead.
[16:45.190 --> 16:47.350]  And so I hereby tell you phone phreaking is not dead.
[16:47.370 --> 16:49.910]  But that's the 1960-1970 version of it.
[16:51.230 --> 16:54.250]  So now I'd like to talk to you a little bit about the Freedom of Information Act.
[16:54.390 --> 16:58.530]  But before I do, I want us to ogle this very fine FBI evidence photo.
[16:59.910 --> 17:04.130]  An Ever-Ready Energizer transistor or vacuum tube battery.
[17:04.270 --> 17:05.910]  This is not a small battery, my friends.
[17:06.950 --> 17:08.330]  Which is evidence, right?
[17:08.470 --> 17:09.410]  So isn't that awesome?
[17:12.830 --> 17:19.410]  So in the process of writing this book, I ended up relying heavily on the Freedom of Information Act in addition to interviews.
[17:19.650 --> 17:22.490]  I filed over 400 Freedom of Information Act requests.
[17:22.710 --> 17:24.530]  And I got about 100 of them were successful.
[17:24.670 --> 17:28.050]  Meaning that 300 of them I got back basically, you know, go away boy, you bother us.
[17:28.150 --> 17:29.410]  We don't have any records like that.
[17:30.370 --> 17:33.450]  I spammed virtually every federal agency I could think of.
[17:33.450 --> 17:38.970]  You know, FBI, Department of Justice, the National Security Agency, the CIA, the Air Force, the Navy, the Army.
[17:39.490 --> 17:40.330]  I looked.
[17:40.550 --> 17:46.210]  The Federal Agency for the Management of Noxious Weeds I did not send anything to.
[17:46.310 --> 17:47.370]  And that is a real agency.
[17:48.490 --> 17:51.610]  Some of the response, the fastest ones I got back were maybe in three months.
[17:51.850 --> 17:56.010]  In the case of the National Security Agency, it took three years to get a response back.
[17:56.010 --> 18:01.450]  I do not recommend this unless you were working on a five-year PhD or five-year book kind of project.
[18:01.590 --> 18:03.330]  If you need something next week, this is not going to help you.
[18:04.410 --> 18:06.390]  This is the memo here.
[18:06.530 --> 18:09.250]  Not that you can read it, but just it gives you a sense of what this is like.
[18:09.410 --> 18:11.030]  You get stuff back from the government.
[18:11.370 --> 18:14.210]  And they're allowed to redact pieces out.
[18:14.370 --> 18:17.990]  And along the right-hand side of that memo, you'll see these little codes.
[18:21.510 --> 18:23.290]  It doesn't show up so well here, does it?
[18:25.050 --> 18:28.950]  But the codes describe which parts of the memo are blacked out.
[18:29.070 --> 18:32.250]  And so very frequently, you get names that are blacked out under...
[18:32.250 --> 18:35.670]  There's an exemption called B6 or B7C, which has to do with personal privacy.
[18:35.930 --> 18:38.550]  So I spent a lot of time looking at...
[18:38.550 --> 18:44.850]  I got, you know, 10,000 pages of documents that I spent studying like this, trying to figure out, well, who's in that blacked-out space?
[18:45.110 --> 18:47.890]  Huh, that blacked-out space looks like it's four characters long.
[18:48.110 --> 18:50.610]  I know a phone phreak who has a four-character last name, maybe.
[18:50.830 --> 18:57.710]  So I spent a lot of time puzzling over this and developed a number of different techniques for getting more information, for data mining out of paper, if you will.
[18:58.750 --> 19:07.450]  One of which was, if you request the same file by multiple methods, it may turn out that multiple people at the FBI or whoever actually process it.
[19:07.550 --> 19:10.170]  And different people, being human beings, redact different things.
[19:10.330 --> 19:13.870]  And then you can lay the papers on top of each other and see what else is there.
[19:14.930 --> 19:22.590]  The other thing I found, and the EFF person who spoke before me said, you know, you want to be polite to people, right?
[19:22.670 --> 19:26.670]  And I worked really hard to not come off as a total nut job, right?
[19:26.790 --> 19:28.090]  Which, in fact, I am.
[19:28.890 --> 19:33.430]  But, you know, so I would spend time talking to the FBI clerks who were processing these things.
[19:33.450 --> 19:37.330]  And I would explain to them that, you know, this is what I'm doing, and it's a very legitimate historical thing.
[19:37.450 --> 19:39.270]  And I tried to be very, very nice to them.
[19:39.270 --> 19:40.710]  And I think that worked.
[19:41.150 --> 19:44.850]  It got to the point where I may have taken things a little bit far.
[19:44.990 --> 19:46.430]  I started sending them holiday cards.
[19:55.130 --> 19:58.910]  This is a holiday card I sent to the FBI and the NSA in 2008.
[20:00.130 --> 20:05.830]  And, you know, it may not have actually gotten me any additional documents, but it did get me a couple good stories.
[20:06.050 --> 20:12.370]  One of which was, at one point I had requested some file having to do with the San Francisco FBI office and wiretapping.
[20:13.170 --> 20:19.570]  And the FBI FOIA person basically sent me a letter saying, no, you know, we can't send that to you.
[20:19.650 --> 20:21.530]  And so I ended up calling and talking to her on the phone.
[20:22.730 --> 20:24.390]  And we had a very nice chat.
[20:24.710 --> 20:30.730]  And she said, well, you know, when I wrote up the denial letter, I took the denial letter to my supervisor and I handed it to her to approve.
[20:31.010 --> 20:36.010]  And my supervisor took one look at it and said, oh, you're not going to send Mr. Lapsley this, are you?
[20:36.370 --> 20:38.270]  And she said, well, I think I have to.
[20:38.310 --> 20:40.870]  I don't actually think he's entitled to this information under FOIA.
[20:41.290 --> 20:44.930]  And she signed it and handed it back to me and said, well, you're not going to get a Christmas card this year.
[20:52.190 --> 20:54.030]  So you catch more flies with honey, maybe.
[20:55.470 --> 21:00.490]  OK, so some of the things that I've got from FOIA, and you may have seen some of these before.
[21:01.790 --> 21:04.250]  Joybubbles, Joe Engressia, the blind whistling phone phreak.
[21:04.710 --> 21:10.090]  He was arrested in 1971, I think, in Memphis.
[21:10.270 --> 21:13.750]  But it turns out prior to that he had been investigated by the FBI in 1969.
[21:14.330 --> 21:16.150]  And you can't quite read all of this.
[21:16.290 --> 21:31.810]  But what's stunning about this is this is a letter sent by the FBI after they determined that he might, and they weren't even sure that he had, but he might have been listening to both the military Audubon phone system breaking into it, and also the White House system.
[21:32.010 --> 21:33.430]  And so what it says here...
[21:33.430 --> 21:35.810]  This is actually a letter to the Honorable John D. Ehrlichman, Counsel to the President, from the FBI.
[21:38.970 --> 21:46.170]  And, you know, one of the questions I was trying to figure out when I wrote my book is, well, how seriously did the federal government and the FBI take phone phreaking, right?
[21:46.290 --> 21:54.770]  Well, apparently seriously enough to send a letter to President Nixon saying, Hey, we think this blind guy who can whistle broke into the White House phone system, but we're not really sure.
[21:57.270 --> 21:58.270]  Here's another one.
[21:58.530 --> 22:02.890]  This is from the director of the FBI, Clarence Kelly.
[22:03.570 --> 22:05.470]  And it is to Mr. John D. DeButts, who's the chairman of the board of AT&T.
[22:08.150 --> 22:09.130]  This is in 1976.
[22:09.510 --> 22:10.770]  And it was when...
[22:11.290 --> 22:18.490]  Several years before 1976, in the early 70s, the phone phreaks had figured out in some parts of the country you could use a Blue Box to wiretap phone calls.
[22:19.030 --> 22:26.930]  And in 1975, John Draper used his Blue Box to wiretap the FBI's San Francisco field office.
[22:27.510 --> 22:30.510]  And then he bragged about it to somebody who was an informant for the FBI.
[22:31.150 --> 22:32.910]  And that didn't end well for him.
[22:33.790 --> 22:34.350]  But it...
[22:34.790 --> 22:35.830]  Yes, John, are you here?
[22:36.410 --> 22:36.990]  There's John.
[22:37.070 --> 22:37.510]  Give him a hand.
[22:46.080 --> 22:53.000]  So, but it, you know, it generates this letter, which I'll see if I can read and talk into the microphone at the same time.
[22:53.640 --> 22:55.740]  I am advised... Can you hear me on that?
[22:55.980 --> 23:08.960]  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 and other subscribers in that area.
[23:09.700 --> 23:12.040]  This is a most alarming situation.
[23:12.580 --> 23:20.760]  And I request the full cooperation of your organization and its resources to assess the possibility for similar conditions elsewhere and take immediate corrective action wherever they exist.
[23:21.740 --> 23:23.560]  So, you know, the, uh...
[23:23.560 --> 23:25.640]  John, you managed to piss off the director of the FBI.
[23:25.740 --> 23:26.100]  Nice work.
[23:34.450 --> 23:34.850]  Um...
[23:34.850 --> 23:35.170]  All right.
[23:35.370 --> 23:36.890]  Then, um...
[23:36.890 --> 23:37.270]  Uh...
[23:37.270 --> 23:38.390]  This is another thing.
[23:38.510 --> 23:40.290]  These were formerly classified secret.
[23:40.390 --> 23:42.250]  This was my three-year NSA request.
[23:42.490 --> 23:43.390]  And it's a serious...
[23:43.390 --> 23:47.550]  So, if you know about the NSA, they've got the code-breaking portion of the house, right?
[23:47.570 --> 23:50.710]  Which is concerned with communications intelligence, breaking other people's code.
[23:50.710 --> 23:54.730]  And they've got the code-making and communication security or CommSec side of the house.
[23:54.990 --> 24:00.890]  So, it turned out in 1976, because of various things that the phone phreaks were up to, including, uh...
[24:00.890 --> 24:06.750]  Starting to break into computers in the very early days, and also breaking into the military Audubon phone system, and also wiretapping the FBI.
[24:07.590 --> 24:08.010]  Um...
[24:08.010 --> 24:10.350]  The NSA CommSec people got involved in this.
[24:10.490 --> 24:11.970]  And so, um...
[24:11.970 --> 24:13.190]  This is a pair of memos.
[24:13.350 --> 24:17.850]  One of them is titled, Phone Phreaks Invade Audubon, and the other is titled, Phone Phreaks Invade Computer Networks.
[24:17.850 --> 24:19.370]  This is written by the CommSec guys.
[24:19.370 --> 24:20.990]  One of the lines I love out of this.
[24:21.450 --> 24:33.870]  Certain elements of the phone phreak community have expanded their activities to include accessing computer systems, including, drumroll please, those systems, including those accessed by teletypewriters and cathode ray tubes.
[24:34.870 --> 24:35.430]  Uh...
[24:35.430 --> 24:40.070]  One phone phreak stated that he had accessed the Advanced Research Projects Agency, ARPA Network.
[24:40.290 --> 24:43.150]  Once there, he could access other computers, including the NSA.
[24:44.010 --> 24:45.410]  So, um...
[24:45.410 --> 24:50.290]  You know, so it's just interesting to see how the government, you know, dealt with this stuff and how seriously they took it.
[24:50.450 --> 24:57.590]  Now, the final thing is, when you're going through 10,000 pages of FBI documents, you know, you kiss a lot of toads, right?
[24:57.670 --> 25:00.070]  There's an awful lot of pages that are like, yeah, blah, blah, blah.
[25:00.410 --> 25:07.810]  And because a lot of my stuff involved organized crime, I spent a lot of time reading organized crime files, much of which had nothing to do with phone phreaking.
[25:07.990 --> 25:10.590]  But occasionally, you get these things that just sort of make it worthwhile.
[25:10.590 --> 25:11.530]  Um...
[25:11.530 --> 25:15.270]  This, I just remember flipping through a file and then suddenly coming upon this.
[25:16.810 --> 25:17.290]  Um...
[25:17.290 --> 25:20.330]  This is in some random organized crime guy's file.
[25:20.470 --> 25:28.530]  And what I love about this in particular is the fact that the woman's face is blacked out with a B6 and B7C in the corner because of personal privacy, right?
[25:28.630 --> 25:30.490]  The FBI takes their job very seriously.
[25:30.650 --> 25:32.290]  They'll give me the photo, just not the face.
[25:32.710 --> 25:33.050]  So...
[25:34.230 --> 25:34.710]  Um...
[25:34.710 --> 25:35.330]  So that's...
[25:35.330 --> 25:35.930]  That's...
[25:35.930 --> 25:37.590]  That's the Freedom of Information Act.
[25:38.350 --> 25:42.210]  So, now, I'd like to tell you a few off-the-record stories.
[25:44.010 --> 25:44.450]  Um...
[25:44.450 --> 25:46.950]  Again, after we first ogle an FBI evidence photo.
[25:47.150 --> 25:48.490]  I'm not even really sure what that is.
[25:48.610 --> 25:49.650]  I'm not sure what it's evidence of.
[25:49.770 --> 25:50.710]  But something bad, no doubt.
[25:51.890 --> 25:52.330]  Um...
[25:52.330 --> 25:55.630]  I'd like to first introduce you to a fellow named Ken Hopper.
[25:56.430 --> 26:00.710]  And Ken was a long-time employee of the, uh...
[26:01.250 --> 26:02.930]  of the, uh, Bell system.
[26:02.930 --> 26:03.470]  Um...
[26:03.470 --> 26:06.030]  He worked for both Bell, Pennsylvania and Bell Laboratories.
[26:06.210 --> 26:07.070]  He was, uh...
[26:07.070 --> 26:09.070]  the head, at one point, of their telephone crime lab.
[26:09.250 --> 26:12.190]  He worked in their special systems group, which did government projects.
[26:13.010 --> 26:13.350]  Uh...
[26:13.350 --> 26:15.370]  And he was...
[26:15.370 --> 26:16.730]  He was involved in all this stuff.
[26:16.850 --> 26:18.470]  And he was a tremendous resource to me.
[26:18.590 --> 26:20.130]  He made many introductions, uh...
[26:20.130 --> 26:20.810]  on my behalf.
[26:20.970 --> 26:22.930]  He was also a pack rat, as you can see here.
[26:23.130 --> 26:24.090]  This is when he was...
[26:24.090 --> 26:24.950]  This was in 2006.
[26:25.150 --> 26:25.870]  He was 80 years old.
[26:25.970 --> 26:28.190]  Unfortunately, he passed away from cancer about a year later.
[26:29.190 --> 26:29.550]  Um...
[26:29.550 --> 26:30.570]  But, you know...
[26:31.130 --> 26:34.230]  Proof of how helpful pack rats are to historians.
[26:34.430 --> 26:37.030]  Which is a theme which came up over and over again during this book.
[26:37.290 --> 26:38.050]  Of just, you know...
[26:38.050 --> 26:40.290]  There's nothing like actual copies of...
[26:40.290 --> 26:42.330]  Of papers or whatever from the day.
[26:42.890 --> 26:45.030]  By the way, for those of you who are hams, he's like...
[26:45.030 --> 26:45.610]  He was a ham.
[26:46.270 --> 26:46.670]  KD7KH.
[26:47.450 --> 26:47.850]  But...
[26:47.850 --> 26:49.050]  The thing that he said to me...
[26:49.050 --> 26:50.090]  Don't put this in your book.
[26:51.550 --> 26:51.950]  But...
[26:52.750 --> 26:53.970]  Anybody recognize this?
[26:57.750 --> 26:58.930]  I heard submarine.
[27:00.710 --> 27:09.530]  So, back in the 1970s, the United States intercepted a bunch of Soviet undersea cables.
[27:09.770 --> 27:11.610]  It was a thing called Operation Ivy Bells.
[27:12.050 --> 27:15.650]  And if you're going to want help with somebody who...
[27:15.650 --> 27:23.610]  If you want help from somebody building a undersea cable tapping system, well, you turn to Bell Labs and the Government Systems Group.
[27:23.610 --> 27:25.870]  And so, U.S. submarines placed this thing on the floor of the sea outside of...
[27:31.090 --> 27:32.130]  Just off the coast of Russia.
[27:32.490 --> 27:34.910]  And it was an inductive tap probe, self-powered.
[27:35.110 --> 27:38.670]  You know, frogmen get out of the submarine and put it there and hook it up to the cable.
[27:40.330 --> 27:43.270]  And eventually, the Soviets found out about this.
[27:43.450 --> 27:46.150]  It apparently produced a lot of great intelligence for us for several years.
[27:46.450 --> 27:48.870]  There's a book called Blind Man's Bluff, which you should read.
[27:48.870 --> 27:53.490]  It's really fascinating about the submarine espionage program.
[27:53.690 --> 27:57.750]  But this wound up on display in a museum in Moscow.
[27:57.750 --> 28:01.870]  And they talked about the fact that it actually has a thumb in the eye to the Soviets.
[28:01.910 --> 28:07.310]  Because once you open this thing up, there's a sign inside that says, Property of United States Government.
[28:10.250 --> 28:14.710]  And so they talked about how this was, you know, a thumb in the eye to the Soviets and blah, blah, blah.
[28:16.010 --> 28:18.270]  And Ken told me, don't put this in your book.
[28:18.350 --> 28:19.790]  So I guess I'm telling it to you.
[28:21.030 --> 28:22.210]  He said, don't put this in your book.
[28:22.270 --> 28:24.290]  But that wasn't a thumb in the eye to the Soviets.
[28:24.430 --> 28:25.470]  I said, well, what was it, Ken?
[28:25.590 --> 28:29.050]  He said, well, we had this in the yard at Holmdale.
[28:29.150 --> 28:31.110]  We had this big thing set up there.
[28:31.170 --> 28:33.610]  For all I know, this photo may be from Bell Labs Holmdale.
[28:34.170 --> 28:36.430]  And he said, you know, accountants are a real problem.
[28:36.610 --> 28:39.770]  And so some accountant decided that, well, this is Bell Labs property.
[28:39.950 --> 28:41.930]  And so they went and put it on the Bell Labs property book.
[28:41.930 --> 28:45.930]  And he said, it took me months of fighting with the bureaucracy to get this fixed, right?
[28:46.070 --> 28:47.270]  You know how it is with accountants.
[28:47.350 --> 28:48.250]  It's on the property.
[28:48.330 --> 28:48.910]  Oh, no, no, no.
[28:48.950 --> 28:49.450]  We can't do that.
[28:49.610 --> 28:54.610]  So eventually, he managed to get it off and transferred back to its rightful owner, which was the United States Government.
[28:54.730 --> 28:57.490]  And he said, and I vowed at that point, that's never going to happen again.
[28:57.530 --> 28:58.470]  That was two months of my life.
[28:58.470 --> 28:59.150]  I can't afford.
[28:59.410 --> 29:02.650]  So I went and put a sign on it that said, property of United States Government.
[29:07.690 --> 29:08.510]  So there's one.
[29:08.630 --> 29:09.390]  Don't put this in your book.
[29:10.230 --> 29:13.510]  The next thing I'd like to bring back to this Blue Box here on the left.
[29:15.170 --> 29:17.410]  This is from a phone phreak we'll call JT.
[29:17.610 --> 29:18.930]  He was a phone phreak in 1964.
[29:19.090 --> 29:21.710]  He was a student at Rice University.
[29:22.650 --> 29:29.630]  And he learned about phone phreaking from this AT&T book called Principles of Electricity Applied to Telephone and Telegraph Work.
[29:29.630 --> 29:31.350]  He was a smart guy, an engineer.
[29:32.150 --> 29:41.630]  And I'm going to let him, in his own words, tell you a little bit about how he came to build and test this Blue Box in 1964 and 1965.
[29:52.630 --> 29:54.390]  Both of my grandfathers were engineers.
[29:54.390 --> 29:58.130]  My father and all of my uncles were engineers or the equivalent.
[29:58.570 --> 30:00.750]  My children are engineers.
[30:02.390 --> 30:05.650]  So gravitating, I don't know whether that's the right word for it.
[30:05.650 --> 30:07.190]  Or maybe you were just there to begin with.
[30:07.590 --> 30:08.750]  Or it's genetic.
[30:09.290 --> 30:12.150]  My mother believes it's a recessive trait.
[30:12.670 --> 30:15.250]  So it just all of a sudden occurred to me that I knew how it worked.
[30:17.630 --> 30:21.150]  And, hmm, well what do you do about it when you think you know how something works?
[30:21.750 --> 30:24.410]  Well, all of us have been schooled in the scientific method.
[30:24.670 --> 30:26.130]  I mean, it's just really straight forward.
[30:26.250 --> 30:28.810]  The scientific method is you have a theory for something.
[30:29.030 --> 30:32.010]  And, you know, you are just obligated to test it.
[30:32.170 --> 30:32.490]  That's right.
[30:32.730 --> 30:35.910]  I mean, there's just no choice but to go test it.
[30:36.030 --> 30:37.170]  So, what do you do?
[30:37.230 --> 30:37.890]  You have to test it.
[30:38.110 --> 30:38.250]  Yeah.
[30:38.550 --> 30:40.170]  Well, testing it meant building something.
[30:40.170 --> 30:41.030]  Okay.
[30:41.330 --> 30:43.690]  And so I sat down and I designed up something.
[30:44.730 --> 30:50.450]  And I decided not to just stop with push buttons turning on pairs of tones.
[30:50.630 --> 30:53.710]  I decided to build something that incorporated all of the knowledge I had.
[30:53.850 --> 30:56.430]  And that turned into something that is sort of funny now.
[30:56.830 --> 30:58.470]  It was going to cost me 50 bucks.
[30:59.630 --> 31:00.110]  Okay.
[31:00.310 --> 31:05.630]  Now, 50 bucks now back in 1964, 65 was actually kind of a lot of money.
[31:05.810 --> 31:06.010]  Sure.
[31:06.250 --> 31:08.030]  You know, go figure the consumer price index.
[31:08.490 --> 31:08.670]  Yep.
[31:08.670 --> 31:11.690]  You know, and I bet you'll find it's well in excess of 500 dollars now.
[31:12.410 --> 31:14.750]  So, is it really worth spending 500 dollars?
[31:15.950 --> 31:16.710]  By the...
[31:16.710 --> 31:18.150]  The answers...
[31:18.150 --> 31:18.590]  Yeah.
[31:20.170 --> 31:22.690]  So, anyway, I spent all the Christmas break building the thing.
[31:23.230 --> 31:25.170]  And I took it back to Rice with me.
[31:26.130 --> 31:28.250]  By the way, the girl was just totally furious.
[31:28.250 --> 31:32.190]  I ignored her for the whole two weeks except for...
[31:32.190 --> 31:33.610]  I took her to Dr. Zhivago.
[31:34.090 --> 31:40.270]  And I can still remember there's a scene in Dr. Zhivago where they're on a sleigh going out into the middle of the steps.
[31:40.390 --> 31:43.450]  And it's just cold, cold, cold, cold.
[31:43.450 --> 31:53.190]  And I can remember thinking that that didn't look nearly as cold as the woman sitting next to me felt about my having ignored her so thoroughly.
[31:54.430 --> 31:57.250]  So, that is the dedication that a phone phreak has.
[31:57.690 --> 32:04.370]  So, he went on to build this Blue Box after ignoring his girlfriend for two weeks.
[32:05.090 --> 32:08.030]  And went on to use it and play with it and test it out.
[32:10.390 --> 32:15.450]  And the hacker historian and filmmaker Jason Scott read a draft of my book at one point.
[32:15.550 --> 32:21.450]  And he said, you know, Phil, there's sort of an archetypal theme or story that comes through your book.
[32:21.470 --> 32:22.150]  And I said, what's that?
[32:22.230 --> 32:31.270]  And he said, well, it starts off with a teenager, a curious teenager, thinking, wow, I wonder what if we did this.
[32:31.370 --> 32:32.290]  I mean, I wonder how this works.
[32:32.390 --> 32:33.450]  Maybe we should test this.
[32:33.450 --> 32:38.650]  And it ends up with that same teenager in a room with multiple adults yelling at him.
[32:39.730 --> 32:43.250]  And so, sure enough, that was in fact exactly this story.
[32:43.730 --> 32:53.370]  And so, JT, the phone phreak here, in 1965 got a visit from Southwestern Bell Security, John Fry.
[32:53.610 --> 33:02.590]  And what's very interesting is he was interviewed, slapped on the wrist, and Special Agent Fry sent him a card, not signed, that said, thanks very much.
[33:02.590 --> 33:05.710]  I enjoyed your explanation and your interest in the communications industry.
[33:05.950 --> 33:07.810]  He actually got to keep his Blue Box.
[33:08.810 --> 33:19.530]  JT, by the way, now works, he's actually the head of a communications company, which, as he puts it, designs halves of communication systems.
[33:19.830 --> 33:21.850]  That is to say, the receive half.
[33:22.230 --> 33:28.030]  He builds eavesdropping equipment for the National Security Agency and other United States government things.
[33:28.210 --> 33:29.990]  So, you know, it's just a straight line for him.
[33:29.990 --> 33:31.210]  I mean, it's the same thing.
[33:32.250 --> 33:33.830]  And I think he's very good at it.
[33:34.430 --> 33:42.850]  So, the final thing I'd like to tell you about is a story about the International Society of Telephone Enthusiasts and a mysterious fellow named B. David, whom I've never met.
[33:46.910 --> 33:56.970]  When one of my first stories, when I was interviewing, it's one of the first people I interviewed, talked about answering a mysterious ad in the Harvard Crimson newspaper.
[33:58.150 --> 34:01.310]  It was signed by B. David in St. Louis, Missouri.
[34:01.590 --> 34:03.890]  And it was an ad that was almost nonsensical.
[34:04.070 --> 34:05.030]  And it's a fun story.
[34:05.050 --> 34:07.310]  I won't give it to you now.
[34:08.170 --> 34:09.830]  But he started corresponding with B. David.
[34:10.110 --> 34:10.630]  And it turned out B. David was the mysterious head of this organization, which I think consisted of B. David the International Society of Telephone Enthusiasts.
[34:17.930 --> 34:20.790]  And B. David loved paranoia and spy stuff.
[34:20.950 --> 34:22.590]  And he just kept popping up.
[34:22.630 --> 34:24.590]  And I kept trying to find him from my book.
[34:24.650 --> 34:25.450]  I wanted to talk to him.
[34:25.510 --> 34:26.670]  And I would talk to various phone phreaks.
[34:26.990 --> 34:28.310]  No, you know, I don't know a B. David.
[34:28.890 --> 34:30.510]  Oh, I knew a guy who maybe fits that.
[34:30.610 --> 34:31.370]  Kind of paranoid.
[34:31.610 --> 34:32.850]  Kind of, yeah, no, that's that guy.
[34:32.850 --> 34:33.990]  But no, he's not going to talk to you.
[34:34.510 --> 34:38.970]  And so, for several years, you know, I kept trying to make overtures to B. David.
[34:39.530 --> 34:40.210]  Never got anywhere.
[34:41.430 --> 34:45.870]  And then, one day, Saturday morning, 6 a.m., my phone rings.
[34:46.870 --> 34:47.550]  And rings.
[34:48.230 --> 34:48.810]  And rings.
[34:49.050 --> 34:49.830]  And I'm in bed.
[34:49.850 --> 34:51.550]  And I say, well, I'm not going to answer that.
[34:51.610 --> 34:52.130]  It's 6 a.m.
[34:52.130 --> 34:52.670]  This is crazy.
[34:53.270 --> 34:54.170]  Well, it turns out B. David can outlast me.
[34:55.230 --> 34:56.730]  Because the phone rang for 10 minutes.
[34:58.990 --> 34:59.990]  So I get up.
[34:59.990 --> 35:00.770]  And I go down the hall.
[35:00.850 --> 35:01.630]  And I pick up the phone.
[35:01.630 --> 35:02.150]  And I say, hello.
[35:03.070 --> 35:04.130]  And he's like, hi, Phil.
[35:04.250 --> 35:04.510]  This is B. David.
[35:04.770 --> 35:05.870]  I'd like to talk to you about your book.
[35:05.970 --> 35:08.230]  I'm like, well, you know, now's not really a great time.
[35:08.310 --> 35:09.690]  I'm kind of asleep right now.
[35:09.770 --> 35:10.430]  Can I call you back?
[35:10.610 --> 35:11.430]  No, I'm very busy.
[35:11.490 --> 35:13.010]  I'd like to talk to you now, if you'd like to talk.
[35:13.130 --> 35:14.290]  Otherwise, we don't have to talk.
[35:15.030 --> 35:15.710]  Oh, okay.
[35:16.750 --> 35:16.990]  Sure.
[35:17.110 --> 35:18.270]  I guess we'll talk now, then.
[35:18.850 --> 35:21.510]  He said, well, before we talk, there are three things that we have to get straight.
[35:21.630 --> 35:22.250]  There are three rules.
[35:22.390 --> 35:23.430]  And I said, okay, what are those rules?
[35:23.550 --> 35:26.330]  He said, well, rule number one is you can't mention my real name.
[35:26.770 --> 35:27.850]  I said, okay, that's fine.
[35:27.850 --> 35:29.090]  I do that in my book.
[35:29.090 --> 35:29.670]  That's no problem.
[35:29.910 --> 35:32.890]  He said, rule number two is I get to review anything you write about me.
[35:33.050 --> 35:34.990]  I said, okay, well, you know, we can talk about that.
[35:35.050 --> 35:36.810]  I'm not thrilled with that, but I can live with that.
[35:37.130 --> 35:39.470]  Rule number three is I get 10% of the royalties on your book.
[35:41.470 --> 35:45.050]  And I said, well, you know, I don't think I can agree to that, B. David.
[35:45.530 --> 35:46.850]  He said, well, think about it.
[35:46.930 --> 35:48.010]  Just think about it for a while.
[35:48.150 --> 35:49.650]  I said, well, I've thought about it.
[35:50.870 --> 35:51.190]  No.
[35:51.610 --> 35:53.730]  And he said, well, we have nothing further to talk about.
[35:53.850 --> 35:54.530]  And he hung up.
[35:55.290 --> 35:57.070]  So B. David remains an international man of mystery.
[35:57.070 --> 36:05.230]  But what's particularly funny is that through various triangulations and whatnot, you know, I now have FBI files about him.
[36:05.330 --> 36:06.130]  I have all sorts of things.
[36:06.210 --> 36:08.330]  But I tell you he is not mentioned by name in my book.
[36:08.350 --> 36:09.750]  Because that was one of the three rules.
[36:11.330 --> 36:12.630]  And it's an interesting thing.
[36:12.830 --> 36:14.270]  Again, a Jason Scott quote.
[36:15.290 --> 36:20.470]  You know, as I was complaining to him at one point, because some of the phone phreaks I dealt with for the book are just, they're fantastic people.
[36:20.630 --> 36:21.090]  They're friendly.
[36:21.090 --> 36:28.090]  And as I should say, by the way, the phone company people and the FBI agents, some of the happiest, best adjusted people you will ever meet.
[36:28.190 --> 36:29.170]  Just really nice people.
[36:29.370 --> 36:33.290]  And, you know, one of the things I was thinking about was, well, if you're an FBI agent, what's, like, one of the things you need?
[36:33.350 --> 36:34.390]  Well, you've got to like people.
[36:34.450 --> 36:35.770]  You've got to like interacting with people.
[36:35.830 --> 36:38.850]  And that tends to make people, I think, happier later in life.
[36:39.870 --> 36:47.150]  But on the other hand, a few of the phone phreaks, by no means all, but a handful really kind of strange and shocking, right?
[36:47.610 --> 36:48.290]  Look at me.
[36:49.710 --> 37:00.270]  And Jason Scott's comment, he said, well, Phil, you're talking about a group of people whose claim to fame was abusing a piece of equipment for hours on end until it did something they can brag about to their friends.
[37:00.650 --> 37:04.010]  Oddly enough, this doesn't always lead to great outcomes later in life, you know?
[37:04.150 --> 37:06.910]  But at the same time, you know, that's us, right?
[37:06.970 --> 37:10.650]  That's how many of the people in this room are and is what it is.
[37:10.650 --> 37:19.670]  So, you know, you see all kinds, you see the very helpful phone phreaks and you see the slightly more paranoid, you know, I want 10% of the royalties of your book kind of people.
[37:20.630 --> 37:21.110]  Okay.
[37:22.190 --> 37:25.050]  So, I'd like to conclude with a few lessons learned here.
[37:26.770 --> 37:33.690]  Again, after first ogling an FBI evidence thing of a reel of magnetic tape with an evidence tag and the FBI laboratory thing.
[37:35.270 --> 37:47.510]  The very first lesson that I learned from working on this book was, and this applies to any project, whether it's a book, any big project, is a project like this is way harder than you think, right?
[37:47.550 --> 37:48.390]  It takes longer.
[37:48.550 --> 37:49.690]  It involves more people.
[37:50.010 --> 37:55.670]  It requires, well, frankly, giving a piggyback ride to John Draper in his front room, you know?
[37:56.110 --> 37:58.250]  If you want to get an interview from John, that's what you're going to do.
[37:59.290 --> 38:02.230]  And if you thought about it, you probably wouldn't do it, right?
[38:02.230 --> 38:04.070]  I mean, that's just, that's the reality of it.
[38:05.570 --> 38:09.390]  And so, therefore, the lesson number two is don't think about it too hard, right?
[38:09.470 --> 38:19.430]  Because if you want to, you know, it's true, again, of any big project, is once you're starting off, you know, once you're on this path, you really want to, you just really want to let it go.
[38:19.570 --> 38:21.490]  And you want to commit to it, and you want to do it totally.
[38:21.610 --> 38:23.610]  And so I've tried not to think about that too much.
[38:23.730 --> 38:28.850]  And fortunately, I'm married to an extremely understanding wife who supported me in this.
[38:30.370 --> 38:34.830]  Lesson number three is save everything.
[38:36.450 --> 38:45.650]  Even if you're not doing any sort of historical project, you never know when somebody like me is going to show up and say, hey, I want to talk to you about this amazing thing that you were involved in.
[38:45.770 --> 38:56.130]  And believe me, when I talked to various, both phone phreaks and telephone company security agents, but especially the telephone company security agents, they would say things like, what do you mean this special thing I was involved in?
[38:56.130 --> 38:59.250]  I, you know, I was a phone company security agent for God's sake.
[38:59.370 --> 39:00.870]  How special is that, right?
[39:01.190 --> 39:05.070]  I said, still, I want to hear about your story because I think there are people who are interested in it.
[39:05.570 --> 39:10.690]  And in many cases, these people would just save, just, they were pack rats.
[39:10.810 --> 39:14.190]  And they would, you know, you saw that photo of Ken Hopper and all of the documents.
[39:14.350 --> 39:16.330]  And that was repeated time after time after time.
[39:16.410 --> 39:19.270]  I talked to one guy who's a telephone company security agent for Southern Bell.
[39:19.610 --> 39:21.130]  Had a conversation with him on the phone.
[39:22.050 --> 39:24.410]  Two weeks later, a big box of stuff shows up.
[39:24.470 --> 39:25.610]  This guy is in his 80s.
[39:25.610 --> 39:27.990]  So I go through the box of stuff, just great documents.
[39:29.190 --> 39:30.210]  You know, I call him back.
[39:30.330 --> 39:31.910]  I said, I'll send it back to you.
[39:31.990 --> 39:33.190]  He's like, no, no, no, no, no.
[39:33.270 --> 39:34.770]  I really don't need that at this point.
[39:34.910 --> 39:35.930]  You know, you can just keep it.
[39:37.330 --> 39:41.510]  You know, so pack rats are just incredibly important to historians.
[39:41.510 --> 39:46.250]  So if you have anything that you think of as historical value, scan it, digitize it, whatever.
[39:46.550 --> 39:47.710]  You can get rid of the paper if you want.
[39:47.830 --> 39:50.150]  But please save it, because it's going to be important to somebody someplace.
[39:52.230 --> 40:06.430]  So, the final thing that I didn't really expect to, I didn't really expect going into this, was if you think what the phone phreaks did was impressive, try inventing the telephone system from scratch.
[40:07.290 --> 40:13.030]  I didn't really know that much about the history of the telephone company or AT&T or Bell Labs going into this.
[40:15.130 --> 40:18.510]  And, you know, and in fact, actually, if anything, I had a little bit of disdain for them.
[40:18.630 --> 40:22.410]  Oh, the stupid phone company, they designed this system based on tones that anybody could get into.
[40:22.410 --> 40:26.050]  You know, a 14-year-old with a tone generator or even who can whistle can break into it.
[40:26.150 --> 40:27.710]  What a bunch of morons, right?
[40:28.010 --> 40:29.030]  But, no.
[40:29.370 --> 40:34.990]  These guys were building, they were solving really probably in some sense the hardest engineering project in the world.
[40:35.570 --> 40:39.970]  You know, maybe second only to the space program and the atomic bomb, right?
[40:40.290 --> 40:49.890]  Building the world's telephone network, building a computer network, building machines that could do automatic routing and communicate with one another before the transistor or the computer or anything like this.
[40:49.890 --> 40:54.770]  You know, they had tough problems on their plate and they just got right to work and solved them.
[40:54.910 --> 40:59.790]  And they solved them in ways that seem just crazy today, but solved what they did.
[41:00.110 --> 41:07.890]  And in the process, you know, they won, Bell Labs won seven Nobel Prizes for fundamental physical research, right?
[41:07.890 --> 41:11.530]  You know, the Big Bang cosmic microwave background radiation they detected.
[41:12.050 --> 41:13.510]  You know, short list of their inventions.
[41:13.830 --> 41:22.670]  The transistor, the negative feedback amplifier, cell phones, solar cells, the laser, digital transmissions, communication satellites.
[41:23.190 --> 41:27.930]  So, it seems appropriate to give them the second to last word.
[41:28.630 --> 41:35.690]  The second to last word is something that you probably didn't know that they invented, which is the music video.
[41:53.470 --> 41:59.390]  Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Watson, Teddy Vale, George Campbell's wave filter, calling ship to shore.
[41:59.650 --> 42:05.830]  Frank Jewett, Harold Black, negative feedback, television, fax machines, more, more, more.
[42:06.050 --> 42:09.330]  Hi-fi talkies, movie sounds, laying copper by the pound.
[42:09.550 --> 42:12.010]  Systems engineering, quality control.
[42:12.010 --> 42:19.790]  Carl Jansky, Herbert Ives, Davis soon, Nobel Prize, first speech synthesis, Beethoven and stereo.
[42:20.590 --> 42:26.030]  Bell Labs Innovations, make communication for the next generation.
[42:26.910 --> 42:34.550]  Bell Labs Innovations, our contribution to the revolution.
[42:35.510 --> 42:37.470]  Bell Labs Innovations..
[42:39.310 --> 42:41.210]  ...Ollie Buckley mobile phones.
[42:41.230 --> 42:42.770]  Radar John Peirce, GI loans.
[42:42.970 --> 42:45.690]  George Sivitt, cellular, voice spectrography.
[42:45.950 --> 42:47.630]  Cloth Shannon PCM.
[42:47.750 --> 42:49.270]  Richard Hemming, William Phan.
[42:49.410 --> 42:50.790]  Cracker Jack transistor team.
[42:51.070 --> 42:52.410]  Marting, Bretton Shockley.
[42:52.790 --> 42:53.990]  Transatlantic, Embol A.
[42:54.230 --> 42:55.670]  Transistorized, computer-made.
[42:55.670 --> 42:58.410]  Non-blocking networks, macro-coding scheme.
[42:58.790 --> 43:01.730]  Oxide masking solar cell transistors win the Nobel.
[43:02.130 --> 43:03.570]  Hart and Charles, what a team.
[43:03.730 --> 43:06.630]  They left the laser beating.
[43:07.050 --> 43:09.130]  Bell Raps Innovations.
[43:09.530 --> 43:12.970]  Great communication for the next generation.
[43:13.350 --> 43:15.630]  Bell Raps Innovations.
[43:16.230 --> 43:20.950]  Our contribution to the revolution.
[43:23.970 --> 43:26.470]  So, let's have a round of a pause for Bell Labs.
[43:33.480 --> 43:42.360]  The thing that I really didn't realize going into this is, you know, these guys built a telephone system.
[43:43.700 --> 43:45.640]  And they did it from scratch, right?
[43:45.720 --> 43:49.480]  They did it from nothing, from stone knives and bear skins, as Mr. Spock would say.
[43:50.340 --> 43:56.460]  And it's really interesting, then it took the phone pheaks to turn it into a playground.
[43:56.980 --> 43:59.920]  And that also deserves applause.
[43:59.920 --> 44:03.220]  That also deserves, you know, real praise.
[44:03.220 --> 44:09.040]  Because it's this idea of taking mundane utilitarian technology and turning it into something cool.
[44:09.280 --> 44:12.500]  Really, at some level, making art with it, right?
[44:12.500 --> 44:16.220]  This desire to play with technology that I think we all have.
[44:17.080 --> 44:28.320]  And so, I really came to, as a result of all this, and from talking to the people at Bell Labs and AT&T and the phone company, I came away with just a deep, deep respect for really, in some sense, both sides of the house, right?
[44:28.480 --> 44:32.780]  The people who built this network and the people who just simply could not resist playing with it.
[44:35.320 --> 44:37.860]  So, I'd like to, if I can get the video back.
[44:38.280 --> 44:39.420]  We don't want that.
[44:39.600 --> 44:40.660]  We want that.
[44:40.900 --> 44:43.480]  So, now the shameless commercial plug.
[44:45.380 --> 44:51.580]  February 2013, from Grove Atlantic Press, Exploding the Phone, with a foreword by Steve Wozniak.
[44:51.920 --> 44:58.100]  This is my book on the history of phone phreaking, the untold story of the teenagers and outlaws who hacked Ma Bell.
[44:58.540 --> 45:01.400]  Available wherever fine phone pheak history books are sold.
[45:02.100 --> 45:06.660]  It is not yet available for pre-order on Amazon, but it will be in the next few months.
[45:07.060 --> 45:12.840]  And there are postcards, both at the water cooler in the back and up here at the front.
[45:13.520 --> 45:22.800]  And I have a mailing list that you can get on if you're interested, if you go to www.historyofphonephreaking.org or soon, explodingthephone.com.
[45:24.080 --> 45:29.580]  And I'd really like to thank everybody who has contributed to this book, including B. David.
[45:33.400 --> 45:35.820]  People say, oh, writing a book is a lonely thing.
[45:35.880 --> 45:38.960]  If it's a lonely thing, it's the most crowded lonely thing I can imagine.
[45:38.960 --> 45:50.060]  And it relies so much on people making introductions, coming up with, you know, processing my FOIA requests, doing all this stuff, and also allowing me to steal various images and things from my talk.
[45:50.340 --> 45:52.300]  So thank you very much.
[45:52.820 --> 45:54.180]  And I'd love to take your questions.
[46:11.110 --> 46:11.590]  Questions?
[46:15.930 --> 46:17.850]  There's a microphone in the middle.
[46:17.990 --> 46:20.390]  So the question was, what was the first time I took apart a phone?
[46:20.910 --> 46:21.590]  Oh, gosh.
[46:21.710 --> 46:23.350]  I don't know that I can remember back that far.
[46:24.470 --> 46:25.570]  But I will...
[46:25.570 --> 46:28.890]  One story that somebody told me about their experience taking apart a phone.
[46:29.590 --> 46:32.110]  This guy said, well, we had an old white phone.
[46:32.210 --> 46:33.690]  He said it was a really cheaply made phone.
[46:33.970 --> 46:39.150]  He said, and I knew at the time that the ringing voltage in the telephone was 90 volts.
[46:39.970 --> 46:42.750]  And 90 volts is pretty close to 110 volts.
[46:43.170 --> 46:46.170]  So if you plug this into 110 volts, maybe it'll ring.
[46:46.830 --> 46:47.930]  Now, this was...
[46:47.930 --> 46:52.810]  It turns out the old phones with the actual mechanical ringers wouldn't necessarily do that because they needed to be 20 hertz.
[46:53.050 --> 46:55.370]  But this was a slightly different, more modern phone.
[46:55.650 --> 46:58.990]  So he plugged it in, and sure enough, he and his friend were there, and it started to ring.
[46:59.950 --> 47:01.530]  What do you do when a phone's ringing?
[47:02.250 --> 47:03.350]  You answer it.
[47:04.130 --> 47:06.690]  But when you answer the phone, the impedance changes.
[47:06.690 --> 47:08.390]  It's a lot closer to a direct short.
[47:09.610 --> 47:14.010]  And as his friend started to reach for the phone, he said it was one of those slow motion things.
[47:14.490 --> 47:14.890]  No.
[47:18.130 --> 47:23.350]  And his friend picked up the phone, and he concluded, he said, it was a really cheaply made phone.
[47:23.750 --> 47:27.110]  You could see the fireball inside right before it exploded.
[47:28.890 --> 47:32.950]  And I had never thought about it until this very moment, but there you have it, exploding the phone.
[47:35.830 --> 47:36.290]  Hi.
[47:37.010 --> 47:39.010]  Great work, and thanks for sharing so much.
[47:39.270 --> 47:39.350]  Thank you.
[47:39.930 --> 47:42.190]  Having phreaked and worked with Woz and some L.A. phreaks of the time, and having had encounters with the law, I managed to escape.
[47:47.690 --> 47:48.590]  That's another story.
[47:49.410 --> 47:53.070]  What did you find out with the telephone police, as we called them back then?
[47:53.190 --> 47:53.450]  Sure.
[47:54.050 --> 47:57.730]  And TPC, the phone company, out of President's Analysts.
[47:58.090 --> 48:04.790]  Did many of those agents have some remorse, or they have a humorous outlook at the time, or they thought they were doing God's work?
[48:04.810 --> 48:05.890]  What can you share with us on that?
[48:05.970 --> 48:06.270]  Sure.
[48:06.350 --> 48:06.990]  It's a great question.
[48:07.090 --> 48:13.030]  That was something that I spent a lot of time talking to the telephone company security agents that I talked to for the book.
[48:13.990 --> 48:22.330]  The first thing was, the thing that they really stressed is, it turns out if you're a telephone company security agent, the vast majority of stuff that you do has nothing to do with phone phreaks, right?
[48:22.470 --> 48:33.490]  It has to do with, you know, Jenny was embezzling from the company Till, or, you know, Joe backed his truck into somebody's car, and so we've got to go and deal with that.
[48:33.930 --> 48:45.930]  So, you know, it's 80 or 90% of stuff that make up the duties of a kind of a, you know, shoe leather telephone company, or any kind of security officer at a company.
[48:47.750 --> 48:50.570]  What was interesting was, it really, it varied quite a bit.
[48:50.690 --> 48:54.530]  For the most part, I think they felt the phone phreaks were just a pain in the butt, right?
[48:54.810 --> 48:58.410]  And, like, from their perspective, it's like, who would do this stuff?
[48:58.650 --> 49:06.990]  Like, these guys are out there, they're stealing phone company hard hats out of trucks, and, you know, they're coming up with ways to hack into this or that or whatever.
[49:06.990 --> 49:14.930]  And as far as these guys are concerned, the phone company security guys, they're just like, yeah, okay, I mean, come on, surely you've got something better to do than that, right?
[49:15.030 --> 49:17.310]  So there's a certain amount of irritation with it.
[49:17.890 --> 49:24.010]  I think the guys at Bell Labs, who tend to be engineers, right, they sort of appreciated this, and they're like, yeah, okay, we get this.
[49:24.090 --> 49:24.910]  We sort of understand.
[49:24.910 --> 49:30.690]  We get the hacker ethic a little bit more than the average telephone company security officer, although even that varied from place to place.
[49:32.110 --> 49:44.070]  You know, definitely Ken Hopper had much more of a, you know, doing, as you put it, doing the Lord's work, you know, he's like, this is our network, we built it, it's supposed to work in this particular way, people shouldn't be abusing it in this way,
[49:44.310 --> 49:46.150]  you know, so it really varied.
[49:46.590 --> 50:01.730]  I would say for the most part, though, the interesting thing is, and I got this from some of the phone phreaks as well, the phone company figured out, even by the 1970s when they started doing prosecutions, for the most part, they realized, you know, yes,
[50:01.850 --> 50:08.350]  we have to deter people from doing this, but no, we understand that we don't really particularly want to send anybody to jail for doing it.
[50:08.470 --> 50:22.790]  And so there's a couple of phone phreaks in the book, Denny and Jim, who were kids in San Jose, and, you know, as they put it, they're like, God, you know, the phone company was actually really nice to us, they called us, they called our parents, they tried to get us to stop,
[50:22.970 --> 50:27.090]  and, you know, eventually, yeah, we got arrested, and, you know, one of them spent a couple nights in jail.
[50:27.390 --> 50:30.630]  But, you know, he said, in the end, there's really nothing bad I can say about them.
[50:31.090 --> 50:34.570]  Because, you know, yeah, we were kind of dumb, and we kept doing it after they told us not to.
[50:34.650 --> 50:44.510]  And it was clear that, you know, in fact, actually, Denny tells a story about having just done some social engineering to set up a loop around, and it got taken out of service.
[50:44.630 --> 50:50.110]  And he called back in to try and convince the telephone company, Switchman, to put it back in service.
[50:51.110 --> 50:54.630]  And the telephone company, Switchman, said, well, hang on a second.
[50:54.730 --> 51:07.030]  He put him on hold, and about a minute later, the voice of George Alex, the chief special agent in the San Jose area, came on the line, the security guy, and his first words were, Denny, Denny, what are you doing?
[51:10.390 --> 51:16.430]  You know, so I, you know, do you, does that match your, your dealings with the telephone police at all?
[51:16.630 --> 51:17.090]  A little bit.
[51:17.170 --> 51:25.990]  A lot of us were arrested, couldn't get a phone number legally for years, but three out of four thought that they were doing God's work, I think, at the time.
[51:26.090 --> 51:26.390]  Interesting.
[51:26.730 --> 51:31.030]  And one out of four said, we don't want people to know you can make a Blue Box out of a normal phone, but.
[51:31.210 --> 51:31.370]  Right.
[51:31.890 --> 51:33.230]  And we're glad the case is over.
[51:33.330 --> 51:34.390]  May I ask what year that was?
[51:34.970 --> 51:36.530]  This was 73.
[51:37.010 --> 51:37.310]  Yeah.
[51:37.630 --> 51:37.630]  73.
[51:37.930 --> 51:39.610]  And that's, that, that kind of makes sense.
[51:39.690 --> 51:43.250]  Especially if you go back to the earlier days, it was a little bit more on the, wow, that's really weird.
[51:43.370 --> 51:50.690]  What, what, you know, you saw that, that letter to JT, right, of like, you know, the guy saying, hey, thank you for showing me your Blue Box and, you know, your interest in telecommunications or whatever.
[51:50.950 --> 51:53.410]  And that, yeah, that definitely wasn't happening by 1976.
[51:54.010 --> 51:54.150]  Okay.
[51:54.230 --> 51:54.570]  Nice work.
[51:54.670 --> 51:54.970]  Thanks again.
[51:55.110 --> 51:55.410]  Thank you.
[52:03.860 --> 52:04.720]  Any other questions?
[52:06.080 --> 52:06.400]  Hey.
[52:08.120 --> 52:08.720]  Hi, everyone.
[52:08.820 --> 52:10.320]  Jason Scott, who he kept quoting from.
[52:10.620 --> 52:13.660]  I just want to make a quick statement because I want to be on video loving this man.
[52:14.220 --> 52:21.220]  See, there's so many people who write these stories and they tend to be these shallow, one and a half page kind of, this is something that's funny for today.
[52:21.440 --> 52:24.620]  And I've been watching Phil work on this thing for half a decade when he brought me in.
[52:24.640 --> 52:25.520]  Can you stop saying that, please?
[52:25.640 --> 52:27.040]  And I'll say, actually, I'm a half a decade.
[52:27.700 --> 52:28.060]  No?
[52:28.240 --> 52:29.160]  You don't want to think about that?
[52:29.320 --> 52:29.500]  No.
[52:29.700 --> 52:30.320]  Two years.
[52:30.600 --> 52:33.100]  Did you tell them how many people died that you've interviewed?
[52:34.400 --> 52:35.540]  Quite a few, actually.
[52:35.820 --> 52:35.820]  Right.
[52:35.960 --> 52:36.140]  Yeah.
[52:36.480 --> 52:38.860]  I mean, their stories are now gone if it wasn't for Phil.
[52:39.480 --> 52:40.860]  And I think that's really important.
[52:41.040 --> 52:41.620]  People understand.
[52:41.920 --> 52:49.720]  So things that you're part of, even if it's something as new as IRC or if you work at Twitter or if you do anything, please collect those stories.
[52:50.080 --> 52:56.200]  Like, just record some of your buddies talking there because that stuff will be invaluable for people like Phil later or we won't get the real stories.
[52:56.460 --> 52:58.940]  And this one, I mean, like I said, like you said, I've read it.
[52:59.120 --> 52:59.520]  Okay?
[53:00.220 --> 53:00.860]  Buy it.
[53:01.300 --> 53:02.020]  It's good.
[53:02.860 --> 53:03.260]  Endorse.
[53:03.660 --> 53:04.060]  Like.
[53:14.860 --> 53:16.640]  You can see why I quote from him.
[53:18.680 --> 53:19.040]  Yes?
[53:19.420 --> 53:21.040]  I just... Is this thing on?
[53:21.260 --> 53:21.540]  Oh, hi.
[53:22.100 --> 53:23.240]  I just wanted to know...
[53:23.240 --> 53:25.320]  How many interviews on my mind do you have?
[53:25.520 --> 53:27.460]  So the question is, how many interviews did I do?
[53:28.080 --> 53:30.900]  It's... I mean, the audio, and can you make that available?
[53:31.300 --> 53:32.180]  So great question.
[53:32.520 --> 53:36.000]  So I've done, at this point, probably more than a hundred... Oh, sorry.
[53:36.100 --> 53:36.400]  Are we off?
[53:36.820 --> 53:37.800]  Come talk to me later.