A True Saga of Teleconferencing (April, 1984) --------------------------------------------- By Electric Moon "God, I wish I had a box. David said. I can see it now. I bump off information in Wisconsin and get an empty WATS line to play with. I keypunch a few multifrequency operator tones, and ta da! It gives me a conference. But I can't do that anyway, because I'm on ESS." "David," I responded. "I know this sounds stupid, but I don't understand a word of what you just said. Okay, this is what I know from the conference: With a blue box you make tones of certain pitches, so that the phone thinks you're an operator. That way you can make long-distance calls for free or start a conference." "Very good." "But what's ESS?" "Anyway," David said. "It's easier and safer to use an extender to call long distance than to box. "But what's ESS?" I repeated. "Okay here we go. The famous Smith briefing for beginning phreaks. Fasten your seatbelts, ladies and gentlemen." "I resent being called a beginner," I said. "In the history of our great phone system, Ma Bell has undergone many changes in her youth. She was made up of so-called step-by-step systems. These were lovely and easy to circumvent, but noisy and slow. Also, 2600 Hertz disconnects a step system, so you can't box off of one. Most of these were switched by hand by small-town operators. Then someone came up with crossbar switching, and Ma Bell made little clicking noises all day long as she switched almost automatically." "But, horror of horrors, Ma Bell finally got old. She grew senile and paranoid. In order not to forget things, she wrote them down. Every time a little customer called a number he shouldn't have known, she wrote up a trouble card on him and filed it neatly away. This system was noiseless and easy. Soon Ma came up with better security measures, longer customer records, and tighter filing cabinets. She buried light-fiber cables, and everyone knows you can't splice two light-fiber cables together. She changed her own phone numbers regularly, and computerized everything. Each change came about slowly, but the final product was ESS. So the main phone systems are step, crossbar, and ESS." "Which one am I on?" I asked. "I don't know. Some people can tell by listening to the ring or the busy signal, but I can't, he admitted. If you can get call-waiting, you're on ESS. Call customer service and ask." We talked on conferences almost every night for two weeks. Napoleon Bonaparte set them up, and we talked to the Hacker, Cracker, Tom Keevis, and Max Wilke. I learned a few things from conferences, and a lot from David. He told me about the Michigan loops. Apparently, if I called a certain number, some stranger would pick up the other end and we could talk. How stupid. Then David explained that the other person was calling a phone number too, and we'd get connected somehow. A loop around here was 424-9900 and 424-9901. If I called one end and someone else called the other, we'd be connected. This was useful if we didn't want to give out our phone numbers. In Detroit, lots of people - not only phreaks - know about loops. If you call up one end of a Detroit loop, someone else is likely to call within five minutes. "You never know who you'll get, David said. Hacker and I call and wait, and sometimes homosexuals get on and say, 'Looking for guys?' or girls get on and say, 'Guess what color underwear I have on?' But you also get other people car salesmen, teenagers, and college students lots of college students." He gave me some Michigan loop numbers and I started calling them through extenders. I talked to a lot of weird people and a lot of normal people. I also called some pay phones in Berkeley and Carnegie-Mellon, and talked to whoever answered. The Phreak was my idol. He was the idol of most of the phreaks I knew. Lots agreed that he was the best phreak and hacker (okay, little did we know then). He was only fourteen years old, and lived in Boston. One day I called up a Michigan loop and heard a lot of static and clicking. I also heard some people talking mainly two boys. One of them had an unmistakable Boston accent. It was Steve the Phreak. "Hey Phreak," I said. "This is Electric Moon!" "Hi Electric," he said. Then he asked his friend, "Should we keep her?" "Yeah, what the heck!" said the anonymous phreak. A beep signaled the departure of the Phreak. "Where'd Steve go?" I asked. "Off to look for more loops, the idiot," said the boy. "It's too loud in here already." "What's your name?" I asked. "I'm lvanhoe. I'm a Steve too, but you can call me George." "What?" "To differentiate between me and Phreak." "I'll just call you lvanhoe," I said. "Where're you located?" "I'm in California. I'm seventeen. And you?" "I'm in Ohio. I'm sixteen. Call me Electric." I suddenly realized I was yelling above the din of the loops. The Phreak kept putting on more and more. The loops themselves made clicks and static, but the people on them made it even worse. They couldn't hear us and they couldn't hear the people on the other loops, so they loudly chatted away. Every time lvanhoe or I heard the Phreak beep on or off, we screamed at him to stop adding loops, but he pretended not to notice, and continued at a rate of six or so a minute. Finally I couldn't take the noise, I yelled a loop number to lvanhoe, and we ducked out. "Hello?" asked a quiet, low voice. "Hi," I panted. "Thank God we're out of that mess." "Yeah. He'll probably have it up for a few days before they figure it out." "He's crazy!" I said. "Yeah, but he knows a lot. He still has a long way to go, though. He has to learn to be careful." "I know." I tried to act experienced. "Boxing a conference from his home is incredibly stupid." "Have you heard him on AUTOVON, though? He's a riot, but I'd never do what he does!" "What does he do?" I asked. "He'll have to show you," lvanhoe said. Click! "Emergency break from G.I. Joe. Will you accept?" asked the operator. "No," we said in unison. I smiled, imagining the shocked operator. She probably thought his mother was dying. "No?" she asked uncertainly. "NO!" we yelled, and laughed as she clicked off again. "Well," Ivanhoe said, "that must be Phreak. He probably wants me to call him. I'll tell him to start another conference." "Okay," I said. I hung up the phone and walked into the kitchen. I set my notebook and pencil on the kitchen desk and took a cold apple from the refrigerator. The phone rang as I crunched the first bite. "Hello?" "Hi. Anyone you want to add?" asked the Phreak. "Sure. Add Trader Vic." "Okay," he said. I heard a beep, silence, then people talking. "Quiet down, everyone!" Ivanhoe said. "The Phreak is going to show off, but what he's going to do is pretty dangerous." Beep-beep! Beep-beep! The Phreak had brought Trader Vic on. "Hey dudes, what's going on?" he asked. "Shh!" we said. "You can't hang up on them once they're on a conference," said lvanhoe. "If someone suspects what we're doing, we'll have to hang up the whole conference." The Phreak beeped off. He was back in a minute, talking officiously. "Yes, I have a Flash Override call for location four-zero-two-niner," he said calmly. "Flash Override? Who is this, suh?" asked a deep southern accent. "This is General Watt." The Phreak had to make the guy believe he was a Joint Chief of Staff. A nasal tenor came on the line, heralded by an amazing overture of clicks, beeps, and tones. "General, for whom are you placing this call?" "For Ronald Reagan," said the Phreak. I felt like I had been stabbed. What an idiot! But I couldn't hang up, because the operator would hear the beeps. I listened instead. "Ronald Reagan?" asked the voice disbelievingly. "Sir, what is the code on this call?" "I'm at the White House right now," said the Phreak coolly. I knew he was stalling for time as he flipped through stolen AUTOVON manuals. "Sergeant, I have the code right here. I'm at location C-one-four-six-two-D, placing a Flash Override for Timberwolf to location four-zero-two-niner. The operation code is zero-five-zero-niner." "That is correct," the operator said, and I could have hugged the Phreak. "Please hold, sir, and I'll put your call through." Beep! Beep! ... ker-chunk. "Andrews Air Force Base," said a woman. "General Hodge is out right now. Should I sound his beeper?" Silence. What now? Two people spoke at once. Trader Vic broke through loudly. "Yeah, like, this is a conference call, and we just, like, wanted to see how you were doing, you know?" "Excuse me?" asked the startled woman. "I'm sorry, I interrupted quietly. The time had come to try and salvage this thing. I'm the White House internal operator, and we seem to have given the wrong location identifier. Thank you very much." The General's secretary clicked off and our nasal operator checked on. "What seems to be the problem, General?" he asked. "I'm sorry," lvanhoe said. The President decided not to make the call after all. Thank you, though. "Yes sir, thank you," the operator said, and checked off. We held our breaths until we heard the final beep-beep. "Vic, you idiot!" I cried. "What?" he asked. "I thought it was pretty funny!" "Funny, my foot," lvanhoe said angrily. "That was a stupid thing to say. And Steve, why didn't you answer?" "My mom called me and I had to go take out the trash," said the Phreak. "Phreak, you're crazy," I said. "I know," he said in his deepest Boston accent. "But you all love it." A week later, the Software Pirate called me and said the Phreak had been caught. I called lvanhoe, who told me that Steve was visited that morning by three FBI and two Bell Security agents. Ten other people were also caught. The FBI woke all the boys up at 6:00 a.m. so they wouldn't have a chance to warn friends. As soon as school was over, the Phreak called lvanhoe and told him all this. He waited an hour until it was 4:00 in Utah and called the Software Pirate, who called me. The news spread among phreaks and pirates so that anyone involved knew about it by dinnertime on the East Coast. Late that night, the White Knight set up what we thought was the last conference call. Ivanhoe, David, Demon Diode, and the Cracker all expected they would be caught. We called the Cracker and asked him to talk. "Why not?" he said dryly. "I'm just sitting here waiting for the FBI. I have nothing better to do." They got him the next morning. (The names and locations used in this story have all been changed, so don't even bother.)