[00:00.000 --> 00:03.760]  You can just start talking so you can get a level set... Sure, testing one, two, three, four.
[00:03.940 --> 00:05.180]  That's the traditional thing to say, right?
[00:07.320 --> 00:09.680]  Or do you want something longer than the traditional thing to say?
[00:29.810 --> 00:30.710]  That looks good.
[00:31.930 --> 00:32.650]  Better, anyway.
[00:44.890 --> 00:52.170]  Do you want this?
[00:52.410 --> 00:53.470]  Do you want me to talk into your chest?
[00:53.630 --> 00:54.150]  You can do that.
[00:54.290 --> 00:54.870]  You can do that.
[00:55.050 --> 00:55.630]  We're friends.
[00:59.740 --> 01:00.760]  Now you can hear me.
[01:01.500 --> 01:02.180]  Hello, everyone.
[01:02.740 --> 01:03.980]  My name is Jason Scott.
[01:04.160 --> 01:05.360]  I run textfiles.com.
[01:05.360 --> 01:08.640]  I gave a somewhat rousing rant yesterday about history.
[01:13.240 --> 01:18.740]  Part of what happens when you stay still in one place and collect a lot of crap is that people go, oh good, a place to put my crap.
[01:19.560 --> 01:26.700]  Another thing that happens is other people are collecting crap and come up to you and kind of eye your pile of crap soliciously.
[01:27.500 --> 01:33.280]  So one of the things that happens as you go in history is that you meet other people who consider themselves historians.
[01:33.560 --> 01:38.780]  Some people who are historians were there, and some people are happy they remember what they had for breakfast this morning.
[01:40.500 --> 01:45.420]  Anyway, among this torrent of people that I meet came along Phil here.
[01:46.040 --> 01:49.840]  And we eyed each other trying to figure out where we were.
[01:50.060 --> 01:54.640]  I remember a phone call that we had that was wonderful where we started to say, so you know about this?
[01:54.720 --> 01:56.500]  And he was going, got the transcripts.
[01:56.600 --> 01:57.880]  And he was going, do you have this?
[01:57.980 --> 01:59.220]  And I'm like, here's the files.
[01:59.860 --> 02:02.440]  And what I found was somebody who really impressed me.
[02:02.440 --> 02:05.340]  He's been spending quite some time looking into the history.
[02:05.980 --> 02:13.900]  Phone phreaking, especially in the modern era, is usually the province of really old people and really young people.
[02:14.460 --> 02:17.980]  Because it has a kind of strange dichotomy in today's world.
[02:18.140 --> 02:22.600]  It's hard for us to think about what it is anymore, and it kind of has this sense of old and stuff.
[02:22.920 --> 02:27.900]  So a lot of people don't spend a lot of time really studying it, because it's a fascinating subject.
[02:28.380 --> 02:36.680]  And what I thought and what I found was that Phil really has been studying this subject and has some amazing things to say about it and has some real good insights.
[02:36.960 --> 02:41.400]  So I recommended to him that he try to come here to speak about it, and I'm really glad that he's shown up here.
[02:41.720 --> 02:44.780]  And in my personal opinion, you are in for a real treat.
[02:45.400 --> 02:49.160]  Sounds like I'm building things up, but I don't think you'll think that after he's done.
[02:49.280 --> 02:50.420]  Did the check clear?
[02:51.220 --> 02:51.240]  Yeah.
[02:51.240 --> 02:51.840]  Oh, yeah.
[02:52.320 --> 02:52.920]  Oh, yeah.
[02:53.120 --> 02:54.780]  Right to my Cayman Islands.
[02:55.240 --> 02:56.740]  Anyway, Phil Lapsley.
[02:58.480 --> 02:59.780]  I guess that's all we have to call it.
[02:59.920 --> 03:00.720]  Phil Lapsley.
[03:02.400 --> 03:03.180]  Thanks, Jason.
[03:06.890 --> 03:07.370]  All right.
[03:07.610 --> 03:09.910]  Let me just do one level check here on the computer audio.
[03:10.030 --> 03:12.570]  Hopefully we'll hear the Windows critical stop noise.
[03:13.850 --> 03:14.250]  No.
[03:16.290 --> 03:16.690]  Oh.
[03:16.850 --> 03:17.530]  You were on mute.
[03:17.910 --> 03:18.570]  I'm on mute.
[03:18.590 --> 03:19.490]  Oh, that would work too.
[03:19.650 --> 03:21.270]  I know how to do this.
[03:21.530 --> 03:22.710]  Plus my wife over there.
[03:25.550 --> 03:27.230]  Let's try this one last time.
[03:28.870 --> 03:29.710]  Yeah, exactly.
[03:29.910 --> 03:30.250]  That's right.
[03:31.170 --> 03:36.110]  I'm actually kind of expecting that someone will have broken in to my computer and fixed it by the time I'm done.
[03:36.690 --> 03:37.430]  There we go.
[03:37.550 --> 03:39.710]  That's what I sort of didn't want to hear at some level.
[03:39.890 --> 03:40.930]  But, okay.
[03:41.110 --> 03:50.930]  So as Jason said in his very nice intro, I've been spending a bunch of my life for the last several years researching the history of phone phreaking.
[03:52.970 --> 03:59.550]  And my wife has been very nice to support me in this because I think anyone else would say that I'm wasting my time.
[03:59.910 --> 04:02.350]  But it's been absolutely fascinating.
[04:02.630 --> 04:05.370]  And the title of my talk is A Brief History of Phone phreaking.
[04:05.490 --> 04:11.450]  And the reason I say brief is there is so much material that I'm going to have to skip over a lot of stuff here.
[04:11.450 --> 04:20.770]  And I'm, you know, working on a website and a book, which, you know, will be published sometime in the next year or so, that will have a lot more of the details.
[04:20.810 --> 04:28.110]  So, and I'm also going to be posting original documents, you know, on the website that I have, which is the historyofphonephreaking.org.
[04:29.730 --> 04:44.170]  But actually on that first conversation that I had with Jason, he said something which really struck me very deeply, which is he said you face an interesting challenge because if you look at phone phreaking, at some elemental level it's the same as hacking,
[04:44.290 --> 04:44.890]  it's the same as stuff.
[04:44.990 --> 04:55.370]  But if you talk about the more specifics, the idea of making a free phone call, the idea of exploring the telephone network, these are things that just don't make very much sense today.
[04:55.670 --> 05:03.110]  And so you're really going to have a tough time getting the people who, you know, read your book or listen to your talk to understand that.
[05:03.110 --> 05:06.850]  So what I thought was we could hop into the Wayback Machine for a little bit.
[05:08.250 --> 05:12.630]  And I'd like to take you back to around 1950 or so.
[05:12.730 --> 05:17.910]  And you're really going to have to just use your imagination here for those of you who were born after this time.
[05:18.070 --> 05:24.510]  But I'd like you to imagine a world, as crazy as it sounds, where you don't own your own phone.
[05:24.970 --> 05:25.270]  Okay?
[05:25.570 --> 05:27.650]  You rent your phone from the phone company.
[05:27.710 --> 05:28.770]  You pay a charge every month.
[05:28.930 --> 05:40.670]  The phones that you rent from the phone company are not printed, are not painted, but are stamped in steel on the bottom, Bell System property, not for sale.
[05:41.070 --> 05:44.010]  These are phrases that are familiar to any phone phreak from this era.
[05:44.210 --> 05:50.650]  Because, of course, they all had Bell System property that was not for sale that they bought at Swapmeets or wherever.
[05:52.050 --> 05:54.730]  So it's kind of, it's just a bizarre thing, right?
[05:54.810 --> 05:56.590]  It's like, wow, I don't own my own phone.
[05:56.750 --> 06:08.570]  In fact, the phone company, AT&T, and although there were other phone companies, but AT&T was the phone company, which we're slowly getting back to, I suppose, but we're not quite there yet.
[06:10.250 --> 06:16.110]  Imagine a world, again, it sounds incredible, where long-distance phone calls were actually expensive, right?
[06:16.670 --> 06:23.510]  This chart is looking at the cost of a five-minute call between New York and San Francisco during the day.
[06:23.730 --> 06:27.110]  Those of you old enough to remember, the phone company had day, evening, and night rates.
[06:27.110 --> 06:30.350]  And this is expressed in constant dollars as of 2000.
[06:30.810 --> 06:36.810]  So that call, back in the 1950s, would cost around $25 to $30, okay?
[06:36.990 --> 06:38.230]  And it came down over time.
[06:38.350 --> 06:45.190]  And now, probably, there's some sort of, you know, ad-sponsored thing where they'll pay you to make a phone call or something like that, right?
[06:45.270 --> 06:45.970]  I don't know.
[06:46.210 --> 06:49.310]  But, again, you know, it's like, wow, this is so cool.
[06:49.410 --> 06:52.210]  Look, I did all this work, and now I can make a free call.
[06:52.630 --> 06:52.910]  Huh?
[06:53.870 --> 06:55.270]  You know, they're free.
[06:55.410 --> 06:57.470]  It just doesn't matter, right?
[06:57.630 --> 07:00.270]  So, again, sort of a disconnect between today and back then.
[07:02.330 --> 07:07.670]  Imagine a world where dialing your own long-distance calls was a totally foreign concept.
[07:07.770 --> 07:18.130]  Such a foreign concept that you actually have to educate the public, that they're no longer going to pick up the phone and ask the operator to connect them to San Francisco.
[07:19.390 --> 07:28.010]  And AT&T actually, as it introduced this, the pilot for direct distance dialing, as they called it, was in Englewood, New Jersey in the 1950s.
[07:28.870 --> 07:31.350]  And they actually produced a promotional video.
[07:31.590 --> 07:35.850]  And what I've done is cut it up a little bit just to get it down to its essence.
[07:35.970 --> 07:37.150]  It's still going to be a several-minute bit.
[07:38.170 --> 07:41.030]  And I apologize because I'm not the world's most competent video editor.
[07:41.150 --> 07:43.190]  I do not have Jason's mad skills in this area.
[07:43.710 --> 07:46.610]  But I would like you to see this because I think it's pretty interesting.
[07:48.410 --> 08:03.590]  Englewood could be any one of hundreds of American communities, population 25,000, main street with busy stores, banks, and movie theaters, attractive suburban homes with their neat lawns and their well-groomed look.
[08:04.910 --> 08:10.650]  In size and in the kind of people who live here, Englewood is like many other American towns.
[08:11.610 --> 08:19.110]  And that was one of the reasons it has become the first town in the world to have an unusual kind of telephone service.
[08:19.950 --> 08:23.930]  Remember that number Mrs. Warren looked up in her personal telephone notebook?
[08:26.150 --> 08:29.670]  318-Garfield-5-2368.
[08:30.370 --> 08:35.570]  The only difference between that and a local number is the three digits at the beginning.
[08:37.190 --> 08:40.490]  318 is the code for the San Francisco area.
[08:41.970 --> 08:49.610]  If her daughter had lived in Chicago, Mrs. Warren would have dialed the code 312 and then the telephone number.
[08:51.750 --> 08:53.270]  Cleveland, 216.
[08:55.470 --> 08:56.990]  Boston, 617.
[08:58.830 --> 09:04.210]  Altogether, more than 80 numbered areas are planned for the United States and parts of Canada.
[09:05.010 --> 09:12.210]  For some time past, area numbers like these have been used by telephone operators in dialing long-distance calls.
[09:13.170 --> 09:21.570]  When the people in the Englewood area with one and two party lines were given this service, they could dial to 13 of these areas.
[09:21.950 --> 09:26.990]  That meant that more than 11 million telephones could be dialed from Englewood.
[09:27.970 --> 09:31.630]  Keeping track of the details of the call is done automatically too.
[09:32.310 --> 09:40.530]  When you dial a number, holes are punched in a continuous tape representing your telephone number and the number you dial.
[09:41.730 --> 09:48.270]  More holes are punched to show the time when you start talking and when you finish talking and hang up.
[09:48.950 --> 09:54.270]  If you get a busy signal or the number doesn't answer, no charge is made.
[09:55.810 --> 10:05.530]  Since all this information is in the form of tiny holes in a long piece of paper, the meaning of these tiny holes has to be expressed in words and figures.
[10:06.830 --> 10:24.390]  This is done by running the tape through several machines which assemble the information, translate, sort and summarize it, figure the length of your call, apply the correct rate, and, you guessed it, type your toll statement.
[10:34.380 --> 10:35.980]  Yeah, that's pretty special.
[10:36.100 --> 10:41.400]  You wonder, by the way, how many employees' right arms got lost in that big spinning, you know, woo!
[10:41.920 --> 10:45.040]  But, so, again, right?
[10:45.220 --> 10:46.320]  A different world.
[10:46.820 --> 10:47.960]  It's a different world.
[10:49.980 --> 10:56.220]  And as an aside, 318, the area code for San Francisco, which I grew up in, it was 415.
[10:56.700 --> 11:05.800]  Yeah, in the original dialing plan, all of San Francisco and the East Bay and South Bay and all that was one area code, and it was area code 318.
[11:05.900 --> 11:07.060]  That's like Oakland 415.
[11:07.480 --> 11:07.620]  Yeah.
[11:08.160 --> 11:09.980]  San Francisco 318, Oakland 415.
[11:10.140 --> 11:10.640]  Right, correct.
[11:10.800 --> 11:14.560]  And so what happened was, sorry, and so in the original plan, you're right, it was 318 and 415.
[11:14.780 --> 11:17.700]  And what ended up happening was they ended up making all of it 415.
[11:18.080 --> 11:25.480]  And then later, of course, San Francisco stole 415 from, I live in Oakland, so they stole 415 from us.
[11:28.960 --> 11:35.780]  So, let's fast-forward a little bit from Englewood to Joe Engressia.
[11:36.160 --> 11:41.280]  And Joe Engressia, in 1957, was an eight-year-old boy.
[11:41.420 --> 11:42.400]  He was a lonely kid.
[11:42.940 --> 11:45.380]  He's died, unfortunately, last year.
[11:45.840 --> 11:49.140]  But he is known as the granddaddy of phone phreaking.
[11:49.340 --> 11:51.920]  And one of the reasons for that is this.
[11:53.400 --> 11:56.420]  This was probably in, like, 57 or 58.
[11:56.860 --> 12:00.200]  And I was, I don't know how I happened to be on a long distance.
[12:00.340 --> 12:02.120]  I think we had made a long distance call.
[12:02.580 --> 12:06.460]  And I heard this, you know, kind of sound in the background.
[12:06.840 --> 12:10.320]  And so I kind of whistled along with it.
[12:10.660 --> 12:12.300]  And it cut the line off.
[12:12.940 --> 12:17.680]  And I made a click and cut it off, and I didn't know why.
[12:17.680 --> 12:19.920]  And then I dialed, had the operator.
[12:20.080 --> 12:21.940]  I could have her connect me with information.
[12:22.180 --> 12:23.700]  And that was free back then.
[12:24.520 --> 12:27.880]  And I would whistle that tone, and it would make the line click.
[12:28.100 --> 12:30.380]  And if it was talking, I would cut it off, you know.
[12:31.540 --> 12:35.420]  So, Joe had a lot of fun whistling and making the line disconnect.
[12:35.420 --> 12:38.740]  And in fact, this was from an interview that I had with him last year.
[12:39.060 --> 12:47.080]  And he said, you know, when I figured out that this worked, one of the things I wouldn't do is I would go out with my mom.
[12:47.240 --> 12:48.000]  We'd be going someplace.
[12:49.680 --> 12:52.000]  And as we'd pass by payphones, I'd whistle.
[12:52.520 --> 12:55.100]  And, you know, invariably people would go, hello, hello?
[12:55.340 --> 12:55.920]  Is anyone there?
[12:56.180 --> 12:58.660]  And so he got a kick out of that.
[12:58.840 --> 13:04.880]  Now, as probably most of you know, Joe later changed his name to Joybubbles.
[13:05.220 --> 13:06.400]  And Joe was blind.
[13:06.720 --> 13:09.160]  He was just an exceptionally gifted individual.
[13:09.440 --> 13:13.160]  Very smart, fantastic pitch, perfect pitch.
[13:13.400 --> 13:18.380]  So, you know, able to just gifted in a lot of ways, a lot of sensory ways.
[13:18.380 --> 13:22.660]  I think his last job actually was, he said, smelling pig poop.
[13:23.040 --> 13:28.680]  It was for a laboratory where they were trying to determine the minimum detectable level of pig excrement odor.
[13:29.380 --> 13:33.460]  And so he was very gifted, you know, auditorily and also in an olfactory sense.
[13:35.120 --> 13:39.140]  Now, I'd like to talk a little bit about why Joe got disconnected.
[13:39.460 --> 13:42.720]  And this goes to how the telephone system used to work.
[13:42.880 --> 13:44.980]  It doesn't work this way anymore, sadly.
[13:47.100 --> 13:52.100]  So, imagine two cities, which I've creatively called City 1 and City 2.
[13:52.340 --> 13:55.040]  And they're connected by two telephone companies' central offices.
[13:55.320 --> 14:00.780]  So you've got phones in each city, and then you've got what are called trunk lines, long-distance trunks, between the two cities.
[14:01.140 --> 14:13.900]  Now, in the old system, and this was called single frequency signaling for reasons that will be clearer very shortly, when the trunks were idle, when there was nothing going on, the phone company would play 2600 hertz on the trunks.
[14:13.900 --> 14:15.940]  And 2600 hertz sounds like...
[14:18.240 --> 14:21.160]  So when there's nothing going on, 2600 hertz is there.
[14:22.420 --> 14:22.980]  Yeah.
[14:27.380 --> 14:36.280]  Now, if somebody in City 1 wants to make a phone call and dials a number in City 2, the first central office wants to seize a trunk line.
[14:36.280 --> 14:38.320]  And so what it does is it removes 2600 hertz.
[14:38.500 --> 14:45.140]  And CO2 is listening, and it says, okay, somebody just took off 2600 hertz, so somebody wants a call from CO1.
[14:45.780 --> 14:50.580]  So what it does is, to acknowledge that, it removes 2600 hertz.
[14:50.720 --> 14:52.800]  It's kind of a handshake saying, okay, I heard you.
[14:53.120 --> 14:56.180]  But it's saying, hang on a second, let me get a register.
[14:56.340 --> 14:58.940]  And a register is basically like a memory storage device.
[14:58.940 --> 15:02.840]  And it's saying, I know you're going to be sending me some digits that you want to dial in my city.
[15:03.040 --> 15:07.540]  So, and, you know, memory is expensive, as we know, especially when it's basically relays.
[15:07.720 --> 15:12.080]  So I don't have a lot of these registers lying around, so let me get one and connect it to you.
[15:12.120 --> 15:13.560]  It'll take just a half a second.
[15:13.800 --> 15:21.520]  So as soon as the central office in City 2 has found that, it puts 2600 hertz back on the line saying, okay, I'm there.
[15:21.720 --> 15:22.740]  Go ahead and send me digits.
[15:24.820 --> 15:27.080]  So, first central office transmits digits.
[15:27.320 --> 15:31.820]  Now, back in the old days in single frequency, the way it would do this is with pulses of 2600 hertz.
[15:32.220 --> 15:39.780]  So if you wanted to send the number 1212, you would send beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, 1212.
[15:40.060 --> 15:42.040]  And you do that with pulses of 2600.
[15:44.780 --> 15:50.600]  When, so then, when you're talking, when the other guy has answered, CO2 removes 2600 hertz.
[15:50.600 --> 15:54.940]  And so the fact that 2600 hertz is removed tells you that the other guy answered.
[15:55.220 --> 15:57.120]  And now, you know, you carry on your conversation.
[15:58.100 --> 16:03.680]  And then when CO, when the caller hangs up, we send 2600 hertz in the forward direction.
[16:03.820 --> 16:05.400]  CO1 saying, we're done with the call.
[16:05.620 --> 16:10.880]  And the other side sends 2600 back saying that, okay, I get it.
[16:10.980 --> 16:11.940]  And the lines are back to idle.
[16:12.460 --> 16:15.640]  So 2600 hertz is the key to Ma Bell's heart, right?
[16:15.680 --> 16:18.060]  You can whistle your way into Ma Bell's heart under this system.
[16:18.060 --> 16:23.320]  Because the single frequency, it indicates whether the trunk has answered or not, which is on hook or off hook.
[16:23.480 --> 16:25.160]  It indicates billing, right?
[16:25.300 --> 16:27.100]  Has the other... and this is an interesting thing.
[16:27.400 --> 16:34.740]  Back in the old days, if you were calling, say, 611 or directory assistance, they would just keep the 2600 hertz on the line.
[16:34.820 --> 16:36.300]  It was filtered out so you couldn't hear it.
[16:36.360 --> 16:45.280]  But that 2600 hertz told the big tape machine that chews off people's right arms that, you know, the other party didn't answer.
[16:45.420 --> 16:48.160]  It's as if the call is continuing to ring, and so that's okay.
[16:48.480 --> 16:51.660]  And then, finally, 2600 hertz is used to pass digits via dial pulse.
[16:52.540 --> 16:53.640]  So what does this mean?
[16:54.140 --> 17:00.320]  Well, it means that if you're Joe and you can whistle 2600 hertz, you can cause a call to hang up because the other guy will...
[17:00.320 --> 17:02.460]  the other end will think, ooh, line went idle.
[17:02.500 --> 17:03.620]  I better make my line idle.
[17:03.940 --> 17:07.580]  But if you're really good, which Joe was, you can do better than that.
[17:07.580 --> 17:09.460]  You can dial calls just by whistling.
[17:14.300 --> 17:20.040]  If you had perfect pitch like blind phone phreak Joe Engressia, you could whistle calls through the network.
[17:23.070 --> 17:24.730]  Let's see if I make it this time.
[17:27.430 --> 17:28.690]  This is really hard to do.
[17:28.770 --> 17:32.750]  It sounded like all the tones were present, so the phone should be ringing about now.
[17:34.070 --> 17:35.350]  Okay, it hit the phone.
[17:35.650 --> 17:36.470]  It just takes a little while.
[17:36.490 --> 17:38.910]  He even showed off his skills for the local media.
[17:38.910 --> 17:43.110]  From his one phone to a town in Illinois and back to his other phone.
[17:43.270 --> 17:45.330]  A thousand-mile phone call by whistling.
[17:46.510 --> 17:49.450]  A thousand-mile free phone call by whistling.
[17:50.750 --> 17:55.110]  That was, by the way, on the 1968, November 1968, NBC Evening News.
[17:55.230 --> 17:56.310]  So it wasn't just the local media.
[17:56.430 --> 17:57.530]  That was actually national news.
[17:59.970 --> 18:05.770]  So if you're really good, if you're particularly talented, you can whistle free calls.
[18:05.770 --> 18:08.130]  And so why is the call free?
[18:09.510 --> 18:11.770]  Well, the way this works is...
[18:11.770 --> 18:13.210]  Well, actually, we'll get to that in just a second.
[18:13.250 --> 18:14.750]  I want to get quite ahead of myself.
[18:16.530 --> 18:23.950]  It turns out the system single frequency got upgraded to something called multi-frequency, which eventually got distributed out.
[18:24.050 --> 18:26.330]  And multi-frequency is kind of like Touch-Tones, right?
[18:26.390 --> 18:30.310]  So just when you dial a Touch-Tone every time you press a digit, you're getting two frequencies that are added together.
[18:30.590 --> 18:33.250]  Multi-frequency is a different set of tones.
[18:35.210 --> 18:37.070]  And it's used for dialing.
[18:37.210 --> 18:44.190]  So when we said that you were passing digits for dialing via pulses of single frequency, you can do that, but you can do it a lot faster if you do multi-frequency.
[18:44.510 --> 18:48.930]  And multi-frequency, some of you might have heard this when you were dialing, sounds like this.
[18:53.010 --> 18:58.450]  So not the same as Touch-Tones, but it's internally used by the phone system back in the day.
[18:59.050 --> 19:06.490]  So it turns out if you can generate 2,600 hertz and these multi-frequency or MF tones, you have something called a Blue Box.
[19:07.090 --> 19:11.730]  And what a Blue Box does is allows you to seize a line.
[19:11.830 --> 19:19.310]  So you make a call, say to an 800 number, which is a long distance call, but it's not being charged for me because it's an 800 number.
[19:19.490 --> 19:22.950]  And while it's ringing, I send 2,600 hertz down the line.
[19:23.830 --> 19:29.290]  But I do it only long enough, so I send it for about a second or so, and then I take it away.
[19:29.670 --> 19:32.850]  The remote end says, wow, okay, 2,600 hertz.
[19:33.110 --> 19:33.810]  He hung up.
[19:34.070 --> 19:36.050]  But then suddenly the 2,600 hertz goes away.
[19:36.110 --> 19:38.490]  So the remote end says, ooh, 2,600 hertz is gone.
[19:38.690 --> 19:39.690]  Somebody wants to make a call.
[19:39.970 --> 19:42.230]  Okay, hang on, let me get a register.
[19:42.870 --> 19:45.090]  Okay, good, I'm set, send me the digits.
[19:45.270 --> 19:55.650]  And then with your little MF box, or twangers, as they were called, you can then enter keypulse, which is sort of a start bit, and then the digits that you want to dial and start.
[19:56.110 --> 19:59.210]  And that actually will cause the phone system to dial that number.
[19:59.570 --> 20:04.010]  Remember, though, you're being billed at a 800 number rate of zero cents per minute.
[20:04.190 --> 20:05.230]  So it's a free call.
[20:05.870 --> 20:07.670]  So it sounds something like this.
[20:26.470 --> 20:29.970]  And at that point, the call starts going through to whatever number that person just dialed.
[20:30.180 --> 20:33.200]  I'd like you to listen just to this little bit here.
[20:34.180 --> 20:39.520]  This is just, remember, right after the guy hits 2,600 hertz on his Blue Box, you hear this ker-chink.
[20:47.800 --> 20:55.100]  So that ker-chink, which is music to any phone phreak's heart, is the 2,600 hertz being removed and then applied.
[20:55.240 --> 20:57.280]  And what you're actually hearing is the line filter ringing.
[20:57.520 --> 20:59.120]  But it comes across as a ker-chink.
[20:59.420 --> 21:05.040]  And if you were a phone company's central office, that was telling you, okay, I can send digits now, because the other side's ready to receive them.
[21:05.140 --> 21:07.560]  If you're a phone phreak, you're probably just salivating at that point.
[21:09.280 --> 21:17.000]  Now, the other thing which is interesting about a Blue Box, and one of the reasons why it was such a favorite toy of phone phreaks, is that you can dial telephone company internal numbers.
[21:17.160 --> 21:20.540]  You'll notice that phone numbers don't start with the digit zero or one.
[21:21.040 --> 21:27.200]  And so it turns out there were all these mostly three-digit codes, but some were longer, that were used internal to the phone company.
[21:27.660 --> 21:31.620]  And so, for example, if you dialed with a Blue Box, one, two, one, you would get an inward operator.
[21:31.700 --> 21:33.740]  If you dialed one, three, one, you'd get directory assistance.
[21:33.740 --> 21:35.940]  One, four, one was a rate and route operator.
[21:36.280 --> 21:50.860]  And it's a fascinating thing from a security perspective, because, well, if the only way to reach an inward operator is with a Blue Box, and, of course, Blue Boxes really only officially exist in the phone company as telephone company's central office equipment.
[21:51.200 --> 21:57.640]  Well, then, if I'm an inward operator and I get a phone call from somebody, obviously that person must be legitimate, right?
[21:57.760 --> 22:01.540]  It's clear, because the only person who could possibly call me would be another phone company person.
[22:01.540 --> 22:11.060]  And so, there's a very interesting thing from a security perspective here of, you know, not being particularly, well, of being a little bit too trusting, because, of course, nobody could call me.
[22:11.140 --> 22:12.440]  It's a little bit like caller ID today.
[22:12.540 --> 22:14.040]  Well, of course the caller ID must be correct.
[22:14.120 --> 22:15.660]  It couldn't possibly be forged, right?
[22:19.600 --> 22:21.380]  So, that's what a Blue Box does.
[22:21.600 --> 22:28.000]  Now, the first Blue Box was discovered by AT&T Security in September of 1961.
[22:28.520 --> 22:30.800]  And that's a vague photo of it there.
[22:30.800 --> 22:35.080]  And the reason it's called a Blue Box is because it was actually in a metal chassis that was painted blue.
[22:36.860 --> 22:40.440]  Jason talked a bit in his talk yesterday, if you caught it, about the importance of artifacts.
[22:40.860 --> 22:46.840]  I spent a lot of time talking to people who work for the phone company, Security, as part of this project.
[22:47.080 --> 22:49.060]  And one guy ended up... he was an old security agent.
[22:49.160 --> 22:54.180]  He ended up sending me just a box of documents that he clearly should have shredded before he retired.
[22:54.780 --> 23:01.980]  And one of them was this lovely little memo from the director of AT&T Security describing this first Blue Box.
[23:02.280 --> 23:06.460]  And it gave me enough information to actually track down the guy who built it, who's still alive.
[23:06.580 --> 23:09.620]  He was a little bit nonplussed to hear from me.
[23:09.980 --> 23:12.580]  I said, you know, did you go to this university?
[23:12.580 --> 23:13.180]  He said, yeah.
[23:13.600 --> 23:16.120]  I said, were you involved in something called a Blue Box?
[23:16.280 --> 23:17.400]  And there was a long pause.
[23:17.540 --> 23:19.180]  And he said, that was a long time ago.
[23:21.640 --> 23:26.520]  But he had also saved a bunch of artifacts, which is where this bad photo comes from.
[23:27.220 --> 23:28.860]  I said, you were the first.
[23:29.080 --> 23:31.040]  And he said, well, I don't know that I was the first.
[23:31.120 --> 23:32.500]  I was certainly the first to get caught.
[23:35.440 --> 23:42.920]  Meanwhile, raising him for that honor of being the first to get caught were a group of Harvard and MIT students in 1962 called the Harvard Five.
[23:43.720 --> 23:47.280]  And they had also built some Blue Boxes then.
[23:47.280 --> 23:52.020]  By 1964, this stuff was popular enough that you may not be able to read it there.
[23:52.140 --> 23:55.160]  But this is an ad in February 1964, Popular Electronics.
[23:55.680 --> 23:57.180]  Toll-free distance dialing.
[23:57.520 --> 23:59.340]  Bypasses operators and billing equipment.
[23:59.560 --> 24:00.380]  Billed for $15.
[24:01.140 --> 24:03.380]  Ideal for telephone company executives.
[24:04.060 --> 24:05.640]  Plans $4.75.
[24:06.820 --> 24:10.620]  And by 1964, more people are independently developing Blue Boxes.
[24:11.020 --> 24:13.440]  Now, some of these are plans that are getting handed around.
[24:13.740 --> 24:15.760]  Some of them are people just figuring stuff out.
[24:15.760 --> 24:20.600]  A lot of people end up figuring it out just because they would hear these tones when they'd make a long distance call, right?
[24:20.660 --> 24:21.420]  These MF tones.
[24:21.600 --> 24:22.740]  And they say, well, what are those?
[24:22.960 --> 24:23.280]  Huh.
[24:23.520 --> 24:24.400]  Well, that's interesting.
[24:24.620 --> 24:27.040]  If I can hear them, maybe they can hear me.
[24:27.200 --> 24:29.040]  And let's try and figure out what the tones are.
[24:32.800 --> 24:37.400]  So, something I was really fascinated by is how did people learn this stuff?
[24:38.760 --> 24:47.400]  An off-sighted thing, which indeed the very first one back in 1961, was the November 1960 issue of the Bell System Technical Journal.
[24:47.620 --> 24:50.940]  And there was an article called Signaling Systems for Control of Telephone Switching.
[24:51.040 --> 24:59.700]  And if you were a technical person and you read this article, although this article didn't say, here's how to rip us off, it might as well have said that.
[24:59.700 --> 25:02.360]  I mean, it just completely laid the network open, right?
[25:02.540 --> 25:08.060]  And there were a number of phone phreaks I talked to who said, well, you read this and it just hits you.
[25:08.300 --> 25:10.160]  Like, this is how, this is what you do.
[25:10.380 --> 25:15.800]  And this one guy I talked to who said, he's an engineer, his dad was an engineer, his grandfather was an engineer.
[25:15.800 --> 25:20.080]  And he said, well, he said, I've been taught, I was taught in the scientific method.
[25:20.240 --> 25:25.120]  And if you have a hypothesis, it's almost a sin not to test it.
[25:28.060 --> 25:30.640]  So, you know, in two weeks he had a working Blue Box.
[25:30.740 --> 25:34.500]  He was actually the gentleman who built this Blue Box in the lower right-hand corner there.
[25:37.320 --> 25:40.920]  Another place that it came from was a book that AT&T published in 1953.
[25:40.920 --> 25:47.680]  It was a book for their linemen and plants people called Principles of Electricity Applied to Telephone and Telegraph Work.
[25:47.860 --> 25:50.720]  And it was a little bit earlier and less technical, more tutorial.
[25:51.420 --> 25:56.060]  But, you know, that also had, that was a source of information for a lot of people.
[25:56.760 --> 26:01.600]  There's also a famous book, or actually a series of books, called Notes on Distance Dialing.
[26:01.840 --> 26:04.720]  And this was another AT&T publication in the 1950s.
[26:04.940 --> 26:17.600]  And this was like the, if the Bell System Technical Journal gave away the keys to the kingdom, but, you know, the detailed technical specifications of how the locks worked and how to make a key machine.
[26:17.820 --> 26:19.780]  I mean, it was, you know, just everything you wanted to know.
[26:20.160 --> 26:23.880]  But then, as I said, there were a lot of people who didn't use any of these resources.
[26:24.140 --> 26:29.160]  They just did a lot of skull work, a lot of thinking, a lot of listening, a lot of being clever about things.
[26:30.680 --> 26:39.100]  And what's fascinating is this really is one of these cases of independent invention of different people who knew nothing about it at around the same time coming up with this approach.
[26:42.500 --> 26:44.900]  And I should add, by the way, at this point, I'm mostly...
[26:44.900 --> 26:48.940]  This entire talk is mostly about Blue Boxes, just because I think it's one of the more interesting stories.
[26:49.080 --> 26:52.860]  There were other coloed boxes, Red Boxes, Black Boxes, lots of other colors of the rainbow.
[26:54.640 --> 27:00.720]  And so, again, apropos of this being a brief history of phone phreaking, I'm not going to talk about those others, but they're also quite interesting.
[27:02.460 --> 27:07.580]  Now, you might wonder, what did AT&T think about all this, right?
[27:07.700 --> 27:13.360]  Because it was the biggest company in the world, really the largest company in the world by revenue.
[27:13.520 --> 27:17.020]  It employed an awful lot of people, had Bell Labs, very smart folks.
[27:17.420 --> 27:21.500]  And, you know, you know that they couldn't have just, like, been unaware of this, right?
[27:21.560 --> 27:27.700]  It's not possible that they could have designed their network with this gaping hole and not have thought that anybody would do this.
[27:27.700 --> 27:31.100]  And it turns out that's exactly what happened at the start.
[27:31.600 --> 27:36.680]  I talked to several engineers from Bell Labs, really bright people, and they said, no, this caught us totally unawares.
[27:36.900 --> 27:38.800]  We had no idea.
[27:39.080 --> 27:40.020]  Who would do that?
[27:40.140 --> 27:40.680]  Who would...
[27:40.680 --> 27:42.460]  This is another recurring theme, right?
[27:42.560 --> 27:46.140]  You see the Germans doing this in World War II with the Enigma machine.
[27:46.440 --> 27:55.780]  Well, I mean, sure, I suppose you could break this crypto system, but you'd need warehouses full of people and computers that haven't been invented yet, which is exactly what the British had, you know?
[27:56.820 --> 27:59.220]  And so it's a similar kind of a thing.
[27:59.340 --> 28:01.460]  Like, who would go to the trouble of it?
[28:01.560 --> 28:02.160]  That's insane.
[28:05.160 --> 28:15.820]  So testifying before Congress, AT&T's head attorney for privacy and fraud in 1975 said, At the time, we recognized that we had no immediate defense to Blue and Black Boxes.
[28:16.100 --> 28:24.260]  This was a breakthrough almost equivalent to the advent of gunpowder, where the hordes of Genghis Khan faced problems of a new sort of the advent of the cannon.
[28:24.780 --> 28:26.260]  Now, I know this gentleman.
[28:26.260 --> 28:38.260]  He is an extraordinarily charismatic man and quite gifted in his words and his ability to, you know, horrify Congress with how important this is.
[28:38.380 --> 28:39.900]  You know, the hordes of Genghis Khan, all this.
[28:41.020 --> 28:42.600]  So what did AT&T do?
[28:42.980 --> 28:57.840]  Well, starting in 1964 and ending in May of 1970, as an interim solution, because they're AT&T, they're Bell Labs, they're scientists, they're engineers, they said, we better understand exactly how big this problem is.
[28:57.980 --> 28:59.180]  Maybe it's big, maybe it's small.
[28:59.440 --> 29:01.140]  Maybe we can just hope that it goes away.
[29:01.840 --> 29:07.100]  And so they deployed these rapidly designed toll fraud surveillance units.
[29:07.200 --> 29:10.920]  This was a precursor to warrantless wiretapping.
[29:11.700 --> 29:13.800]  They set up six of these in different cities.
[29:13.820 --> 29:15.240]  And what it would do is a big machine.
[29:15.360 --> 29:17.120]  It lived in a locked cage in a central office.
[29:17.260 --> 29:19.600]  Not even the people in the central office really knew what it was.
[29:19.880 --> 29:20.540]  Highly secret.
[29:20.540 --> 29:25.800]  And it randomly monitored toll calls, looking for 2600 hertz when it shouldn't ought to be there.
[29:26.400 --> 29:29.840]  It randomly monitored 33 million phone calls.
[29:30.000 --> 29:33.720]  When it found one, it thought there was evidence of fraud, it tape-recorded it.
[29:34.500 --> 29:41.420]  And then, so they tape-recorded between 1.5 and 1.8 million telephone calls during this five-year period.
[29:41.780 --> 29:43.860]  Eh, 1.5, 1.8, who really knows?
[29:44.040 --> 29:46.760]  You know, it may have lost 300,000 tapes.
[29:46.760 --> 29:57.080]  They would send these tapes to a service bureau in New York City where very senior operators would do nothing other than listen to these tapes to determine, oh, this one's fraudulent, this one's not.
[29:57.240 --> 30:01.360]  And during that time, they detected at least 25,000 cases of known illegality.
[30:02.500 --> 30:04.760]  Now, you have this classic problem.
[30:05.320 --> 30:08.740]  Okay, I now know that there is fraud on the network.
[30:08.840 --> 30:10.520]  I have some indication of how much fraud.
[30:10.520 --> 30:13.380]  I'd like to get these people arrested.
[30:14.020 --> 30:18.180]  But, number one, I don't really want to publicize this, right?
[30:18.420 --> 30:24.620]  I mean, sure, there are classified ads in popular electronics, but it's not like on the front page of the New York Times, okay?
[30:24.860 --> 30:27.320]  So, I'd prefer not to publicize this, number one.
[30:27.620 --> 30:41.100]  Number two, I don't really want to reveal the fact that we've been monitoring 33 million calls, because, you know, that, I mean, even if we believe, we, the phone company, believe that we have a right to do this, that's just really a conversation we'd really rather not have.
[30:43.060 --> 30:49.000]  And, number three, it's not even really clear at this point what laws have these people broken.
[30:49.440 --> 30:59.880]  There is a fraud by wire law, it's a federal fraud by wire law, but the guy who wrote it for the Justice Department gave an opinion to AT&T saying, I really don't think this applies.
[30:59.880 --> 31:02.440]  It was really constructed for something entirely different.
[31:03.200 --> 31:04.580]  So, what do you do?
[31:04.800 --> 31:07.480]  Well, what you do is you pick your cases very carefully.
[31:08.940 --> 31:14.200]  So, you don't go after people who are just general phone phreaks, hacker types.
[31:14.340 --> 31:16.640]  What you do is you go after the mob.
[31:18.380 --> 31:31.540]  Because it turns out that the mob did a lot of business in gambling and bookmaking, very lucrative business, running what was called layoff betting, essentially sort of being like almost a reinsurance company for individual bookmakers.
[31:31.800 --> 31:37.160]  And the way you do this, if you're the mob, is you spend a lot of time on the phone, you know, quoting odds.
[31:37.320 --> 31:38.720]  They call it the betting line, back and forth.
[31:39.200 --> 31:41.120]  The problem is the FBI is wise to this.
[31:41.220 --> 31:46.280]  And so, what the FBI would do is they would say, hmm, we think that you are a mobster.
[31:46.500 --> 31:48.580]  We're going to get your toll records from the phone company.
[31:49.420 --> 31:53.820]  And we're going to look and see if you call other mobsters, and we're slowly going to roll up your network that way.
[31:53.820 --> 31:56.060]  So, the mob looked at this and said, wow, this is great.
[31:56.160 --> 31:58.000]  This Blue Box and this black box thing, it's great.
[31:58.100 --> 32:01.940]  Because not only does it allow me to make these calls, it doesn't leave any billing records.
[32:02.600 --> 32:03.320]  That's fantastic.
[32:03.740 --> 32:08.320]  So, the FBI goes and looks at the billing records and says, this guy doesn't make any long distance calls.
[32:08.360 --> 32:09.460]  I guess he's not a mobster.
[32:11.220 --> 32:13.740]  So, AT&T handed to the FBI.
[32:14.980 --> 32:16.280]  They rolled up this network.
[32:17.000 --> 32:22.080]  And so, you know, FBI agents made simultaneous raids at five locations in Miami and blah, blah, blah.
[32:22.080 --> 32:25.260]  The arrests stemmed from the use of an electronic device known as a Blue Box.
[32:25.620 --> 32:28.440]  So, this was what AT&T did initially.
[32:28.660 --> 32:30.040]  They said, we're going to cherry pick the cases.
[32:30.200 --> 32:32.520]  We're going to go after things where we know there's going to be public sympathy.
[32:32.800 --> 32:34.760]  The government is going to be eager to do this.
[32:34.880 --> 32:42.660]  There's even a wonderful memo I have from the Department of Justice saying, well, the organized crime people are pretty excited about going after these people with Blue Boxes.
[32:43.040 --> 32:48.220]  The rest of the Justice Department is sort of less interested in being AT&T's revenue enforcement arm.
[32:48.400 --> 32:51.460]  You know, it just doesn't seem like a good use of the public funds.
[32:51.460 --> 32:54.480]  So, this was essentially their M.O.
[32:54.620 --> 32:55.760]  until the 1970s.
[32:57.840 --> 33:03.180]  Now, during this time, you had all these sort of disparate little pockets of phone phreaks all over the country.
[33:03.940 --> 33:07.840]  And they started in the late 60s and early 70s forming a community.
[33:07.980 --> 33:12.600]  And there were several things that were really, really key to that community.
[33:12.940 --> 33:13.640]  One was loop-arounds.
[33:14.400 --> 33:15.840]  Loop-arounds were this amazing thing.
[33:16.000 --> 33:19.960]  It was a test number that phone companies would provide where there'd be two numbers.
[33:20.120 --> 33:23.580]  Like, in California, they would typically end in 0045 and 0046.
[33:24.080 --> 33:26.860]  And they were used for measuring transmission loss.
[33:27.000 --> 33:31.000]  But when one person called it 0045 and another person called it 0046, you'd connect together.
[33:31.820 --> 33:33.600]  Loop-arounds had two things that were really neat.
[33:33.740 --> 33:35.440]  One was that they were anonymous.
[33:35.440 --> 33:41.560]  So, I could tell you, call me, if you're a phone phreak, call me at this loop-around at 0046 at 10 p.m. on a Saturday night.
[33:42.520 --> 33:44.500]  Because I'm probably not doing anything else at 10 p.m. on a Saturday night if I'm a phone phreak.
[33:47.600 --> 33:51.240]  And if other phone phreaks call it, I can talk to them, but I don't have to give out my phone number.
[33:51.320 --> 33:51.700]  That's cool.
[33:51.820 --> 33:55.460]  The second thing that's cool is, frequently these things don't return answer supervision.
[33:55.620 --> 33:58.940]  To the phone company, it looks like they never answered, which is great because it means the call's free.
[34:00.020 --> 34:01.500]  So, loop-arounds were super important.
[34:01.860 --> 34:04.420]  Another thing that was important were what was called party lines.
[34:04.420 --> 34:06.340]  These were essentially broken recordings.
[34:06.580 --> 34:10.760]  Like, you know, you have reached a non-working number in the, you know, 238 exchange.
[34:12.220 --> 34:14.800]  And sometimes the levels on those would be set too low.
[34:14.960 --> 34:16.500]  Sometimes the recordings just wouldn't play.
[34:16.700 --> 34:20.840]  But what that meant was, if other people called into them, they'd all be connected in a big conference call.
[34:21.060 --> 34:22.300]  Again, one of these things, right?
[34:22.460 --> 34:24.200]  Today, conference calls, yeah, okay, big whoop.
[34:24.740 --> 34:27.580]  But back then, it's like, oh my gosh, a conference call.
[34:27.640 --> 34:28.320]  This is amazing.
[34:28.420 --> 34:29.640]  We can communicate with one another.
[34:29.920 --> 34:32.060]  And then, there were actual conference lines.
[34:32.060 --> 34:33.400]  052 is one of them.
[34:33.620 --> 34:35.120]  2111 is another famous one.
[34:36.020 --> 34:39.840]  Which were actually intended to be conference lines that were internal to the phone company.
[34:40.400 --> 34:42.600]  And if you had a Blue Box, you could get into them.
[34:42.960 --> 34:46.000]  And so, that was a really nice way for phone phreaks in terms of filtering.
[34:46.180 --> 34:49.620]  Because, you know, the only people who get onto them are other phone phreaks, right?
[34:49.700 --> 34:50.400]  So, that's pretty cool.
[34:51.460 --> 34:55.460]  So, you have this community that is starting to form in the late 60s, early 70s.
[34:55.460 --> 34:59.000]  And then, that community goes public in a very big way.
[34:59.780 --> 35:08.760]  Esquire Magazine, in October of 1971, with a cover entirely unrelated to phone phreaking, did an article.
[35:08.960 --> 35:12.080]  A guy named Ron Rosenbaum wrote an article called Secrets of Little Blue Box.
[35:12.220 --> 35:16.000]  A story so incredible, it may even make you feel sorry for the phone company.
[35:16.600 --> 35:20.100]  And, what's interesting about this is, it was actually billed as fiction.
[35:21.740 --> 35:23.680]  But, it clearly wasn't fiction.
[35:23.880 --> 35:25.640]  In fact, that's because it wasn't fiction.
[35:26.000 --> 35:35.560]  But, it was so well written, and so interesting, and it made this fundamentally geeky, nerdy thing seem so cool, that I don't know how many phone phreaks I've talked to.
[35:35.640 --> 35:36.940]  I said, how did you get started in phreaking?
[35:37.020 --> 35:39.720]  Oh, there was this article in this magazine, Esquire.
[35:40.200 --> 35:45.800]  And, they don't remember the cover, but they remember, they remember this article.
[35:47.900 --> 35:51.160]  So, this, and there were a couple other articles that came out around this time.
[35:51.300 --> 35:54.900]  But, it really just completely, completely blew the hobby wide open.
[35:57.260 --> 36:01.720]  And, also in that year, 1971, a seminal year, the first phone phreak newsletter was launched.
[36:01.840 --> 36:04.180]  It was something called the Youth International Party Line, or YIPL.
[36:04.440 --> 36:08.320]  And, it later changed its name to the Technological American Party, or TAP.
[36:08.520 --> 36:11.920]  And, then it changed its name again to the Technical Assistance Program.
[36:12.080 --> 36:20.040]  So, it went through, it started out as an offshoot of the Yippie movement, and then became still a political movement, but more focused on technology, and less on the Yippies.
[36:20.280 --> 36:22.380]  And, then finally, it sort of got out of politics altogether.
[36:23.360 --> 36:31.900]  It was really sort of, you know, one of, you know, there's a direct lineage there up to 2600, just about the same year that TAP's top publication 2600 started.
[36:32.640 --> 36:37.820]  And, you know, at least one of the HOPE organizers, Cheshire Catalyst, was, I think, the last editor of TAP.
[36:38.640 --> 36:42.760]  But, so you have, you have really this critical mass now of phone phreaks.
[36:42.880 --> 36:48.900]  And, you also have another thing happening, which is that it starts out with people who are really just interested in exploring the network.
[36:48.900 --> 36:50.420]  The mob gets involved a little bit.
[36:50.680 --> 36:54.240]  But then you also have, now, people who are just in it for the free calls, right?
[36:54.320 --> 36:54.800]  This is great.
[36:55.180 --> 37:08.160]  And then you have people at the TAP had things like, you know, how to get electricity, how to make your gas meter run backwards by disassembling it, hooking up to a source of compressed air and spinning it backwards, and then re-hooking it up to your gas line at your house.
[37:09.140 --> 37:12.820]  You know, so it starts to go off into this whole sort of 1970s rip-off mentality.
[37:12.820 --> 37:16.620]  And so the phone phreak hobby starts to change in different ways.
[37:16.920 --> 37:20.400]  You know, and much like, as Jason was talking about yesterday, you know, hackers, right?
[37:20.880 --> 37:25.680]  You know, hackers, sometime around 1981 and 83, the meaning of the word hacker changes.
[37:25.920 --> 37:27.880]  The meaning of the word phone phreak changes, as well.
[37:28.000 --> 37:29.860]  And so it starts to have this dichotomy.
[37:33.560 --> 37:36.200]  So, some of the more famous phone phreaks that you will have heard about.
[37:36.540 --> 37:40.160]  Captain Crunch, John Draper, old photo there.
[37:40.160 --> 37:47.820]  And it turns out the Cap'n Crunch whistle that came as a prize in the Cap'n Crunch cereal box, if you covered up one of the holes, made 2600 hertz.
[37:48.720 --> 37:53.780]  So, if you blew your Cap'n Crunch whistle with one of those holes covered, you could basically be Joe Engressia.
[37:54.500 --> 37:59.100]  And Steve Wozniak of Apple Computer there in his dorm room at Berkeley with a Blue Box.
[38:02.160 --> 38:05.520]  Now, if you're AT&T, you have a real headache now, right?
[38:05.600 --> 38:09.020]  The headache was a little bit of a problem before, but now it's a real problem.
[38:09.020 --> 38:11.420]  Because, you know, you can't let the...
[38:11.420 --> 38:14.040]  Newspapers start carrying articles about phone phreaks and whatnot.
[38:14.240 --> 38:15.880]  And you just, you can't let this go on.
[38:16.060 --> 38:17.780]  And so AT&T started getting serious.
[38:17.960 --> 38:19.080]  And they started, before it was fine.
[38:19.180 --> 38:22.060]  Yeah, you know, if we caught you with a Blue Box, we'd slap your hands and take it away.
[38:22.400 --> 38:23.260]  Say, don't do that again.
[38:23.460 --> 38:25.480]  But now, we have to start prosecuting.
[38:25.760 --> 38:27.060]  And, you know, you can really...
[38:27.940 --> 38:31.540]  You can really feel for the dilemma that they're in.
[38:31.620 --> 38:34.960]  Because it's like, oh, you know, every time we prosecute, there are newspaper stories.
[38:35.360 --> 38:38.600]  On the other hand, if we don't prosecute, there are still newspaper stories.
[38:39.000 --> 38:40.520]  So, you know, what are we going to do?
[38:40.700 --> 38:43.700]  And so you see, you know, the number of prosecutions just really ramp up.
[38:43.840 --> 38:48.320]  And these, by the way, these are from an AT&T memo on toll fraud.
[38:48.500 --> 38:52.180]  There may have been other prosecutions that AT&T was not directly involved in.
[38:52.220 --> 38:55.300]  So this is, you know, indicative of a portion of the prosecutions.
[38:55.600 --> 38:58.400]  Now, you'll see it peaks there in 75 and starts to fall away.
[38:58.400 --> 39:09.000]  That's because they got better at prosecuting that there were other things that were focusing the minds of people like personal computers started to come out around that time.
[39:10.060 --> 39:12.800]  And then also, there was something...
[39:12.800 --> 39:18.620]  The first deployment of something called Common Channel Inter-Office Signaling, CCIS, which was known as Signaling System Number 6.
[39:19.000 --> 39:21.380]  It's a forerunner to SS7 used today.
[39:22.820 --> 39:34.820]  The key thing that CCIS did is it sent the transmitted digits and answer supervision information out of band, meaning that it wasn't something you could just whistle 2600 hertz to disrupt or send MF tones to disrupt.
[39:35.120 --> 39:38.540]  You know, the signaling information was completely separate from the voice channel.
[39:39.080 --> 39:42.240]  And that was the first deployment in May of 1976.
[39:42.240 --> 39:44.140]  And so the handwriting was on the wall there.
[39:48.760 --> 39:50.580]  Now, wouldn't it be nice...
[39:51.520 --> 39:58.060]  Wouldn't it be nice if it was possible today, just for sake of old times, to use a Blue Box?
[39:58.400 --> 40:00.640]  That would be really cool, I think.
[40:02.520 --> 40:04.100]  You'd need a couple things to do that.
[40:04.320 --> 40:05.820]  One thing you'd need would be a Blue Box.
[40:05.980 --> 40:07.660]  And as it happens, I have a Blue Box here.
[40:08.560 --> 40:10.740]  Very similar to the one in the Esquire article.
[40:11.660 --> 40:13.460]  I'll try not to get this too close to the microphone.
[40:18.960 --> 40:20.500]  And so you can make a Blue Box.
[40:20.660 --> 40:25.640]  We have an advantage of the people in the 1960s who were making them and that we have microcontrollers today.
[40:25.840 --> 40:28.580]  So this actually has an 8-bit PIC microcontroller.
[40:29.000 --> 40:30.800]  It has very few parts in it.
[40:30.880 --> 40:32.260]  It's an easy thing to build.
[40:32.440 --> 40:37.820]  Really, it took me... once I had the printed circuit board for it, it took me about an hour to build it with all the components.
[40:37.980 --> 40:41.260]  And it does all sorts of cool things like memory dialing and all sorts of neat things like that.
[40:41.260 --> 40:43.760]  So the Blue Box, that's a pretty cool thing.
[40:45.860 --> 40:48.580]  Unfortunately, you also need a telephone network to use it on.
[40:48.760 --> 40:51.840]  And because of CCIS, Blue Boxes don't work today.
[40:52.540 --> 40:53.700]  At least in the U.S.
[40:54.860 --> 41:06.000]  But it turns out that Phiber Optik, Mark Abene, and a few other folks worked on a project which was introduced at HOPE I think a year or two ago called Project MF.
[41:06.100 --> 41:12.680]  And what Project MF does is it takes an Asterisk software, open-source PBX, and turns it into an old school network.
[41:13.440 --> 41:16.400]  So it allows you to essentially... you know, it used to be that phone phreaks...
[41:16.860 --> 41:18.980]  you know, it's that old joke about why do you rob banks?
[41:19.080 --> 41:20.680]  Well, that's where the money is, right?
[41:21.040 --> 41:22.560]  You know, why do you hack the phone system?
[41:22.720 --> 41:26.060]  Well, you know, because that's where the phone network is.
[41:26.200 --> 41:27.600]  And I can't own my own phone network.
[41:27.720 --> 41:31.200]  But of course, now as a phone phreak, you can own your own phone network via Asterisk.
[41:31.200 --> 41:39.920]  So if you'd like to take the top of the phone phreak way back machine, you need a Blue Box printed circuit board.
[41:40.100 --> 41:43.440]  You want to go to projectmf.org to learn how to assemble it.
[41:43.940 --> 41:50.540]  And then you want to call 1630-485-2995, where there is this whole thing set up.
[41:50.560 --> 41:51.500]  And you can play around.
[41:51.560 --> 41:52.760]  You can listen to the kerchink.
[41:52.940 --> 41:54.080]  You can stack tandems.
[41:54.140 --> 41:55.560]  You can do all this stuff, right?
[41:55.680 --> 41:56.180]  Very cool.
[41:56.300 --> 41:57.780]  It really is a phone phreak wayback machine.
[41:58.100 --> 42:00.040]  Now, you'll need some printed circuit boards.
[42:00.040 --> 42:02.140]  And it just so happens I have 200 of them here.
[42:05.520 --> 42:08.480]  If I could have somebody put these on the HOPE Coffin, please.
[42:09.560 --> 42:11.280]  Just go ahead and put them up there.
[42:11.420 --> 42:13.400]  And at the end of the talk, feel free to come up and grab them.
[42:13.620 --> 42:18.860]  The website address is written there, and all the phone information and what all is there.
[42:19.120 --> 42:26.520]  You'll need to program a little PIC microcontroller, or the guy who designed that Blue Box, not me, a guy named Don Frohla, will sell it to you.
[42:26.580 --> 42:27.860]  He's not trying to make money on this.
[42:27.940 --> 42:29.580]  He's just trying to cover his postage costs.
[42:29.580 --> 42:30.720]  It's going to be, you know, a couple bucks.
[42:31.400 --> 42:35.240]  But once you have that, it really is, if you can solder, it's an hour-long project, and you're done.
[42:35.400 --> 42:36.880]  And then you can play around with this stuff.
[42:37.020 --> 42:38.700]  And I think it's kind of a fun thing to do.
[42:44.470 --> 42:47.570]  I'm going to end the story there, kind of 1976.
[42:49.150 --> 42:52.970]  There's, like I said, a lot more to talk about here, but I'd like to get questions.
[42:53.410 --> 42:55.790]  I do want to acknowledge a bunch of folks here, though.
[42:56.450 --> 42:58.030]  So many people have helped me with this.
[42:58.150 --> 43:01.110]  These are just people who have contributed directly to this presentation.
[43:01.370 --> 43:03.730]  Bill Acker, one of the original blind phone phreaks.
[43:03.830 --> 43:06.010]  Mark Bernay, who's one of the guys in the Esquire article.
[43:06.270 --> 43:12.010]  Evan Dorbell, who has done an amazing set of telephone recordings at the website PhoneTrips.com.
[43:12.370 --> 43:14.490]  Don Frohla, who designed the circuit there.
[43:15.370 --> 43:22.250]  Dylan, who I met last night when I needed to test out that printed circuit board, and he was kind enough to actually solder it up and test it up while I was in a hurry.
[43:22.790 --> 43:26.150]  Steven Gibb, the executor of Joybubbles Estate, Joybubbles himself.
[43:26.510 --> 43:28.010]  Jason Scott, who introduced me.
[43:28.510 --> 43:34.210]  And John Treichler, who was the fellow who made that big Blue Box that you saw in 1964.
[43:34.610 --> 43:39.490]  If you have a phone phreak story to share from the 1960s to the 1980s, please contact me.
[43:39.870 --> 43:42.010]  You can get me at historyofphonephreaking.org.
[43:42.090 --> 43:43.950]  My email address is on these cards.
[43:44.570 --> 43:46.650]  And these cards meaning circuit boards.
[43:46.650 --> 43:49.750]  And I would love to take your questions.
[44:15.380 --> 44:16.200]  No questions.
[44:17.560 --> 44:19.040]  Everyone wants a printed circuit board.
[44:19.140 --> 44:19.480]  I get it.
[44:20.320 --> 44:20.480]  Hello.
[44:21.180 --> 44:21.360]  Hi.
[44:25.220 --> 44:25.660]  Yeah.
[44:27.480 --> 44:28.580]  Tell them you got a question.
[44:28.580 --> 44:28.860]  All right.
[44:29.040 --> 44:29.960]  I got a question.
[44:30.220 --> 44:30.840]  Yeah, go ahead.
[44:31.680 --> 44:36.580]  I was wondering if you could comment on Red Boxes and if they still work today.
[44:36.580 --> 44:41.380]  Because I know sometimes pay phones, you can still hear those tones as you put coins in them.
[44:41.840 --> 44:44.000]  So I will comment on Red Boxes.
[44:44.140 --> 44:47.200]  I can't comment in any meaningful way as to whether they actually work today.
[44:47.780 --> 44:50.860]  Not because I'm scared to say it, but just because I don't know.
[44:50.940 --> 44:52.780]  I haven't tried doing that in 20 years.
[44:53.420 --> 44:57.420]  But basically a Red Box was a device that made the tones that a pay phone makes.
[44:57.420 --> 45:01.920]  And you'd use them to fool either an operator or a computer that later replaced an operator.
[45:02.400 --> 45:05.000]  And it would generate 2,200 and 1,700 hertz.
[45:05.680 --> 45:07.280]  I'm afraid I just really don't know.
[45:07.400 --> 45:09.740]  Maybe somebody in the audience knows and has tried it recently.
[45:09.920 --> 45:11.060]  But I don't know if it works or not.
[45:12.160 --> 45:12.880]  No, they don't.
[45:12.880 --> 45:13.480]  They don't.
[45:13.620 --> 45:13.820]  Okay.
[45:13.980 --> 45:14.940]  Jod tells me they don't.
[45:16.880 --> 45:17.640]  Other questions?
[45:23.480 --> 45:24.620]  Just a quick comment.
[45:24.900 --> 45:25.120]  Yeah.
[45:25.420 --> 45:26.500]  Cheshire Catalyst here.
[45:26.620 --> 45:27.120]  Hey, Cheshire.
[45:27.120 --> 45:35.740]  And Technological Assistance Program came about because we couldn't open a bank account with Technological Assistance Party unless we were a bonafide political party at the time.
[45:36.240 --> 45:36.620]  Oh, lovely.
[45:37.860 --> 45:39.780]  The address is actually on those boards.
[45:40.420 --> 45:41.420]  My contact info is on.
[45:41.640 --> 45:43.240]  Cheshire, thank you for that artifact.
[45:43.500 --> 45:43.860]  That's great.
[45:44.080 --> 45:44.660]  That's lovely.
[45:44.740 --> 45:45.080]  Happy to help.
[45:54.890 --> 45:55.770]  My question.
[45:56.000 --> 45:56.140]  Yeah.
[45:58.600 --> 46:00.060]  How much of this stuff applies to me?
[46:00.180 --> 46:01.820]  What's the current state of phreaking?
[46:03.160 --> 46:05.920]  So the question was, what's the current state of phreaking?
[46:06.180 --> 46:07.300]  And that's a great question.
[46:07.600 --> 46:10.140]  As a historian, I don't know.
[46:10.250 --> 46:11.230]  I'm focusing on history.
[46:11.710 --> 46:13.860]  Jason would probably be better able to answer that than I.
[46:14.060 --> 46:16.120]  So the state of what about this stuff?
[46:16.120 --> 46:16.250]  Yeah.
[46:16.480 --> 46:19.440]  This particular technology really no longer works, right?
[46:19.520 --> 46:21.800]  Which is why I'm happy to give out printed circuit boards.
[46:21.920 --> 46:23.210]  If it did work, I wouldn't do that.
[46:24.270 --> 46:27.880]  You know, so from a, from a technological perspective, it doesn't work.
[46:28.140 --> 46:31.640]  There are certainly many, many people who still consider themselves phone phreaks today.
[46:31.940 --> 46:40.100]  They're still doing the same sorts of things of exploring the network and looking for holes and playing around and problem solving and doing all these good things that phone phreaks do.
[46:40.750 --> 46:42.580]  You know, they're not using Blue Boxes anymore.
[46:42.580 --> 46:46.300]  They're playing with signaling system 7 and VoIP and Asterisk and things like this.
[46:46.880 --> 46:47.320]  So...
[46:47.320 --> 46:51.960]  A lot of the mojo, a lot of the energy that was going in the Blue Box, I don't get the cell phones and nobody else.
[46:51.980 --> 46:53.340]  And I actually painted them right now.
[46:53.710 --> 46:53.820]  A little blue.
[46:54.420 --> 46:55.160]  A little blue.
[46:55.420 --> 46:55.680]  A little blue.
[46:56.580 --> 46:57.580]  A little blue.
[46:58.180 --> 46:58.660]  Okay.
[46:58.940 --> 47:05.920]  Well, in terms of, in terms of something that a lot of people grabbed onto and thought was great and thought would jump on, was DATUs.
[47:07.160 --> 47:08.200]  D-A-T-U.
[47:08.620 --> 47:11.900]  And there was a major bust involving this.
[47:12.920 --> 47:14.250]  Five years ago.
[47:14.320 --> 47:32.400]  It took so long for them to deploy the new signaling system...
[47:32.400 --> 47:32.580]  Amen.