Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology with
Speaker 1: tex Stole from how stuff works dot com. Hello again, everyone,
Speaker 1: Welcome to tex stuff. My name is Chris Poette and
Speaker 1: I am an editor here at how stuff works dot Com.
Speaker 1: Across from me, as he usually is, is senior writer
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. Did you hear about Kim? Did she kiss
Speaker 1: him and cry? Did he pin the pin on? Or
Speaker 1: was he too shy? Alright, wow, I don't know that one.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you later. Al Right, it relates to what
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk about today. I yes, the telephone, yes,
Speaker 1: not just the telephone system though, but how to exploit
Speaker 1: it for your own nefarious means, well, not necessarily nefarious.
Speaker 1: We're talking about phone freaking, yes, which actually when it
Speaker 1: started out, was not necessarily meant as a way of
Speaker 1: exploiting the phone system. Was more of a way of
Speaker 1: exploring it. Yes, And would you believe, actually you would,
Speaker 1: But would you, the listener believe that at one point
Speaker 1: in the United States you could make free long distance
Speaker 1: calls with the help of a toy whistle from a
Speaker 1: serial box. I don't believe it, except that I know
Speaker 1: that that's true because Draper did it. Yes, indeed, So
Speaker 1: let's talk a little bit about what led to phone freaking.
Speaker 1: So in the old and old and olden days of
Speaker 1: the telephone system, which really weren't that old when you
Speaker 1: think about it. But you know, you know, when we're talking,
Speaker 1: we're not talking about geologic time periods here. Okay, all right,
Speaker 1: in the early part of the twentieth century, when the
Speaker 1: phone system was a new and beautiful thing. Um, you
Speaker 1: would you would normally connect your calls by connecting to
Speaker 1: an operator who would complete the circuit to whatever your
Speaker 1: destination call was going to be, and actually go through
Speaker 1: several operators. In fact, yeah, I think even our probably
Speaker 1: even our youngest list nurse have seen some TV show
Speaker 1: or movie where they have the operators sitting with the
Speaker 1: headphones on in front of a giant switchboard, literally a
Speaker 1: giant switchboard where they plugged in cables to route calls.
Speaker 1: I mean that that image is sort of iconic, right,
Speaker 1: So that that was the manual way of routing a
Speaker 1: call through the system so that you could get hold
Speaker 1: of whoever it was, whoever it was you were trying to, uh,
Speaker 1: speak to um. Now. Eventually we managed to advance technology
Speaker 1: to the point where we could automate the system, and
Speaker 1: by automating the system, some interesting things started to pop up.
Speaker 1: For one thing, people who were interested in electronics and
Speaker 1: puzzles and that kind of thing sort of looked at
Speaker 1: the phone system as a big challenge figuring out how
Speaker 1: it worked from the outside. Yeah. Actually we call these
Speaker 1: people hackers. And not because you know that that's we'll
Speaker 1: get into the connotations of that and more deeply in
Speaker 1: a few minutes. But um, people who like to take
Speaker 1: things part and see what they can do with them
Speaker 1: and employ it for other purposes. Um. Those those people,
Speaker 1: often especially now call themselves hackers. And uh, you know,
Speaker 1: it could be used just because you're interested in the
Speaker 1: technology and what lies behind it and what you can
Speaker 1: do with it. Um. But unfortunately some people also use that,
Speaker 1: uh you know, for their own nefarious purposes. And uh,
Speaker 1: the the word hacker has taken on that kind of
Speaker 1: negative connotation. Yeah. What's interesting is that I think you
Speaker 1: can kind of draw parallels between phone freaking, the history
Speaker 1: of phone freaking, and the history of computer hacking. Oh.
Speaker 1: I can definitely draw those parallels because I read about
Speaker 1: that in researching this podcast. Right, It's it's not just
Speaker 1: that some phone freakers, some very prominent ones, switched from
Speaker 1: phone freaking to computer hacking, but also that the the
Speaker 1: process in which the uh the the whole concept of
Speaker 1: freaking started to leak into a larger audience um meant
Speaker 1: that you suddenly had people who were using it to
Speaker 1: take advantage of the system. Just as with the earliest hackers,
Speaker 1: they weren't necessarily interested in in hacking computers for their
Speaker 1: own personal gain. They were interested in learning more about
Speaker 1: the system, how it works, and how you know to
Speaker 1: get around certain things, and and maybe even ultimately how
Speaker 1: to improve the system. And then later as more people
Speaker 1: got interested in hacking, they were getting interested in it
Speaker 1: in the term of like, how can I make this
Speaker 1: work for me? So both freaking and hacking have kind
Speaker 1: of undergone that sort of that that evolution where it
Speaker 1: started with people who are just curious, and it ultimately
Speaker 1: lead to people who are like, how can I how
Speaker 1: can I leverage my my knowledge of the system to
Speaker 1: get something that I'm not entitled to Well, according to
Speaker 1: UH Too Cyberpunk, which is a book by Katie Hafner
Speaker 1: and John Markoff, UM, the people who were really into
Speaker 1: phone freaking, UM, including people like Kevin Mitnick, who's you know,
Speaker 1: quite famous computer hacker. UM. Part of it stemmed directly
Speaker 1: from phone freaking. Like, as things changed and and the
Speaker 1: system became more computerized, they wanted to continue digging into
Speaker 1: the telephone system, so they began learning how to manipulate
Speaker 1: the computers that ran the telephone system. So you know,
Speaker 1: there is a direct It was basically a direct move
Speaker 1: from one to the other. UM. And then of course
Speaker 1: computers became used for other things. And so let's start
Speaker 1: back all the way back to nineteen sixty one, All right,
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty ones, when we first kind of know that
Speaker 1: people were starting to play around with the phone system
Speaker 1: and find interesting ways to to manipulate it. UM. Back then,
Speaker 1: they weren't known as phone freaks. They had they had
Speaker 1: really no term at all. For one thing, they were
Speaker 1: mostly individuals or maybe a couple of people who knew
Speaker 1: each other. UM. But there was no like organized group.
Speaker 1: There were no newsletter. All of that would come later.
Speaker 1: It wasn't until nineteen sixty three when an m I
Speaker 1: t issue of the Tech that was their their newsletter
Speaker 1: came out. It was their November twenty issue. Actually, uh,
Speaker 1: the the author of that piece said, called them, uh hackers,
Speaker 1: telephone hackers. Okay, so that's when we first get the
Speaker 1: hacker term. And then a few years later, actually quite
Speaker 1: a few years later, Ron Rosenbaum in Esquire in ninete
Speaker 1: coined the term phone freaks to describe these people. So
Speaker 1: exactly what were these people doing. Well, for one thing,
Speaker 1: they were getting hold of any kind of technical manuals
Speaker 1: they could possibly find that would explain the phone system.
Speaker 1: And then they were kind of exploring it because the
Speaker 1: phone system was a very mysterious thing. Now, if you
Speaker 1: just looked at it from a surface level, you thought, oh, well,
Speaker 1: I've got a phone ideal, these numbers, and then I'm
Speaker 1: connected to the person on the other end. The phone
Speaker 1: freaks were interested with how does that work? How is
Speaker 1: it that when you pick up the phone and you
Speaker 1: dial these numbers that this gets routed to this specific person.
Speaker 1: And they knew that the phone companies had a whole
Speaker 1: series of secret signals that they would use behind the
Speaker 1: scenes to keep things running. And they were wondering, what
Speaker 1: are these secret signals and what do they do? Yeah,
Speaker 1: what was going on in between, say the switchboards that
Speaker 1: we spoke of earlier, and the earlier forms of automation
Speaker 1: before it got so computerized in the nineties. Uh, and
Speaker 1: probably a little bit before that, I'm guessing, um is
Speaker 1: everything was sound based. Um, so there were a lot
Speaker 1: of different ways to if you if you knew what
Speaker 1: you were doing and could replicate the right pitch of
Speaker 1: sound into a phone microphone, then you could take control
Speaker 1: of certain aspects of the system. So it one. It
Speaker 1: was one of those things where it became a a
Speaker 1: challenge to figure out what these other tones were and
Speaker 1: how they how they worked, and what you could do
Speaker 1: with them. Yeah, this kind of leads us to Joe
Speaker 1: and grass Syria Ingressia. I'm sorry I mispronounced that last name. Ingressia. Yes,
Speaker 1: the whistler. So Joe was he was a curious kid.
Speaker 1: Um he he was, Um, well, he's a blind kid.
Speaker 1: He was like seven years old when he when he
Speaker 1: first found out. One of the things he liked to do,
Speaker 1: because Joe is a wild and crazy kid back then,
Speaker 1: was he like to listen to automated messages for unconnected
Speaker 1: phone lines. He just thought that was kind of cool.
Speaker 1: He would he would dial number and listen to it
Speaker 1: and listen to the connection. And according to Joe, one
Speaker 1: time he was listening and he was sort of whistling
Speaker 1: to himself as he was listening to this this recorded message,
Speaker 1: and the recording message stopped, and he thought, well, why
Speaker 1: did the message stop? So eventually he actually called eight
Speaker 1: and T and said, hey, I want to know that.
Speaker 1: I want to know why this happens when I'm whistling
Speaker 1: into the phone. Why does this recording stop? And the
Speaker 1: engineer on the other end of the line made a
Speaker 1: colossal mistake. The engineer explained that the phone system used
Speaker 1: a twenty six hundred hurts tone to operate on on
Speaker 1: the trunk line um and that if you created this tone,
Speaker 1: it was essentially a message to the trunk line that
Speaker 1: the call had ended, and it would it would end,
Speaker 1: it would stop the call. Joe figured out from this
Speaker 1: that if he could if he could whistle twenty six
Speaker 1: hurts frequency, which he could because he had perfect pitch
Speaker 1: hundred hurts. I'm sorry, did I miss It was just
Speaker 1: one of those things twenty hurts. So yeah, if he
Speaker 1: if he could whistle that perfectly, he could signal to
Speaker 1: this trunk line that a phone call had ended, and
Speaker 1: if he then whistled at that same frequency a certain
Speaker 1: number of times, could theoretically dial a number um and
Speaker 1: and make a free long distance phone call. Now, the
Speaker 1: way this had to work was you couldn't just call
Speaker 1: any number and whistle in and have it work. Um.
Speaker 1: It all depended on the way the phone systems were
Speaker 1: constructed regionally. You had to actually first make a long
Speaker 1: distance call for this to work. But you can make
Speaker 1: a long distance call to a winning a hundred numbers,
Speaker 1: so you're not getting a charge. So you make that
Speaker 1: one a hundred number call, you get connected, uh, and
Speaker 1: then you make the whistling noise which tells the trunk line, hey,
Speaker 1: this call is over, so you're still connected through to
Speaker 1: the trunk and then you whistle again to dial whatever
Speaker 1: number it is, and then uh, you get connected to
Speaker 1: your long distance call for free. Yes, not everyone could
Speaker 1: do this on their own. No, but but John Draper
Speaker 1: figured out a way to do it. Yeah, John Draper,
Speaker 1: he has an interest sting nickname too. You got Joe
Speaker 1: who was the whistler? What was the Draper's nickname? That
Speaker 1: would be Captain Crunch And why would his nickname be
Speaker 1: Captain Crunch. We know. I saw on TV a few
Speaker 1: years ago this this person who invented all the different
Speaker 1: kinds of little toys and gadgets and stuff that they
Speaker 1: would throw in cereal boxes, little plastic goodies that they
Speaker 1: would throw in their tops, and and uh jack's and whistles.
Speaker 1: And as it turns out that draper found out that
Speaker 1: this little uh actually I've seen pictures of it looks
Speaker 1: sort of like a Boson's pipe. Yeah, hey, that was good.
Speaker 1: Do you think we could take over the phone lines anyway?
Speaker 1: It turns more, it turns out that when you when
Speaker 1: you blew through this whistle, it produced a pitch of
Speaker 1: oh hurts. Yeah, you had to cover one of the
Speaker 1: there were two holes that would generate the sound. If
Speaker 1: you covered one of the two, you could generate hurts.
Speaker 1: I think the other one was if you covered the
Speaker 1: other one, I'd have to look it up now. And
Speaker 1: if you covered both, you could wistle to dogs, because
Speaker 1: he would make a noise that no human could hear.
Speaker 1: But but yeah, he dug that plastic whistle out of
Speaker 1: you know, a cereal box. You know, since his nickname
Speaker 1: was Captain Crunch, you could guess that it was probably
Speaker 1: out of a box of prudy pebbles, right, honestly, just so.
Speaker 1: But you want to understand he actually found out that
Speaker 1: it made the right tone, not on his own, but
Speaker 1: because he was in a conversation with Joe the Whistler,
Speaker 1: and it was through speaking with him that he found
Speaker 1: out that this this little whistle could do the same
Speaker 1: thing that Joe could do naturally. So obviously the Captain
Speaker 1: Crunch whistles became a sought after item by phone freaks,
Speaker 1: people who are interested in in, like I said, manipulating
Speaker 1: the phone system and really finding out how it worked
Speaker 1: and listening to these beefs and clicks and wondering, okay,
Speaker 1: well how can I make this to kind of navigate
Speaker 1: my way through the system. So not not everyone used them,
Speaker 1: but they became kind of a status symbol, like if
Speaker 1: you owned one, you were part of the twenty s club,
Speaker 1: you know. I actually saw some for sale on eBay,
Speaker 1: so you can you can still get hold of them,
Speaker 1: and they're not terribly expensive. They're not really useful either.
Speaker 1: That's the thing is at this point, they're just sort
Speaker 1: of a collector's item, right, They're not useful in in
Speaker 1: phone circles because the phone system is totally different now
Speaker 1: than what it was back then. But at any rate,
Speaker 1: so you started seeing a culture of these people start up.
Speaker 1: Whereas all these folks who are who are finding out
Speaker 1: ways to manipulate the phone system and not since not
Speaker 1: everyone could get hold of a Captain crunch whistle or
Speaker 1: make the whistle on their own, uh, they had to
Speaker 1: find or create devices that could do it for them. Also,
Speaker 1: we should mention that the whistling technique, this hurts technique
Speaker 1: only worked on single frequency phone systems, and the phone
Speaker 1: systems at that time we're undergoing a transformation where a
Speaker 1: lot of them were switching to multiple multiple frequency systems,
Speaker 1: which meant that you would have too frequencies play at
Speaker 1: the same time. I see whistle sophisticated right, Whistling to
Speaker 1: frequencies at the same time not an easy task to
Speaker 1: do so, um, so you had to start creating a
Speaker 1: system device that could do this for you. And that's
Speaker 1: where the blue box came from. Yes, yes, I would
Speaker 1: like to point out that everybody, uh you know, recently, everybody,
Speaker 1: lots and lots of people recently have been picking on
Speaker 1: people who have I devices the iPhone, the iPad, because
Speaker 1: you know, they want to be just like everybody else
Speaker 1: and they want to be part of the crowd. Well,
Speaker 1: as it turns out, the people at Apple have not
Speaker 1: always been as uh, you know, part of the mainstream
Speaker 1: culture because two of the people who were involved early
Speaker 1: in the blue box phenomenon were people who are making
Speaker 1: them to sell to other people at college. And those
Speaker 1: people would be Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniac, the founders
Speaker 1: of Apple. And I think that is hilarious. Actually, Steve
Speaker 1: woznia acts blue boxes in the Computer History Museum. You
Speaker 1: can see hit the one that the first one he built.
Speaker 1: I just think that's very funny. But now now that
Speaker 1: you know every you know, lots and lots and lots
Speaker 1: of people have these devices. And the people who started
Speaker 1: the company started out as counterculture hackers. But the blue
Speaker 1: box is not named because it is blue. In fact,
Speaker 1: it could be pretty much any size or any color.
Speaker 1: It has nothing to do with that. It's just a
Speaker 1: nickname that it got. Yeah, and it it. It wouldn't
Speaker 1: have been possible to make this, or at least it
Speaker 1: would have let me backtrack, I won't say it wouldn't
Speaker 1: have been possible. It would have been exceptionally difficult to
Speaker 1: make this if it weren't for the fact that once
Speaker 1: again a telephone company made a massive error in judgment,
Speaker 1: which was in this case it was the Bell System
Speaker 1: Technical Journal, which released the information of what frequencies each
Speaker 1: number needed now in order to to dial them. Yeah. No, normal,
Speaker 1: normally people wouldn't be looking for that kind of information.
Speaker 1: But the kinds of people who would be into phone
Speaker 1: freaking I would know exactly where to find that kind
Speaker 1: of information, and they would be already monitoring those journals
Speaker 1: because they were interested in how the phone system work. Right,
Speaker 1: So you look at this journal and you find out that,
Speaker 1: let's see, I think I even have an example here,
Speaker 1: like the the number UM four, for example, had two tones,
Speaker 1: all of them did. One of them was in the
Speaker 1: seven hundred hurts frequency and the other was hurts frequency.
Speaker 1: So you had to generate both of those in order
Speaker 1: to dial a four. So once you know that, once
Speaker 1: you know which frequencies will generate, which you know won't
Speaker 1: translate to which numbers, you could create a device that
Speaker 1: when you when you input the number, it would make
Speaker 1: that noise. You connect that to phone and suddenly you
Speaker 1: can make these long distance phone calls again, just like
Speaker 1: Joe was doing by whistling in the receiver. Um. And
Speaker 1: it was you know, it was a heck of a thing, man.
Speaker 1: I mean, you could you could uh make joke prank
Speaker 1: phone calls. I heard of one. I don't know the story,
Speaker 1: maybe apocryphal, um, but I heard one about how the
Speaker 1: wa was made a certain prank phone call to uh
Speaker 1: a particularly high ranking member of the Catholic Church, in fact,
Speaker 1: the highest He supposedly prank called the Pope and impersonated
Speaker 1: Henry Kissinger. Yeah. I had actually heard that story to
Speaker 1: the Pope. He was asleep and so he didn't He
Speaker 1: did not come to the phone. He said, I'll call
Speaker 1: Hank back later. Um. That was lovely. We're gonna get
Speaker 1: mail mail about that or comments on Facebook, or because
Speaker 1: I called Henry Kissinger Hank, Come on people. Um. But
Speaker 1: there were other kinds of boxes too. There were red
Speaker 1: boxes and beige boxes and black boxes, and they all
Speaker 1: did something different. Red boxes theoretically allow you to make
Speaker 1: free pay phone calls. Yeah. The thing about the red
Speaker 1: box was that it would generate a frequency, you would
Speaker 1: replace a crystal within the dialer of the tell. Most
Speaker 1: of these involved having to take apart a public phone
Speaker 1: to some extent um or sometimes a regular phone depended
Speaker 1: on the thing. But this was a public phone. You
Speaker 1: go to a pay phone, you take it apart. You
Speaker 1: replaced the the crystal within the dialer system with a
Speaker 1: different crystal that would resonate at a higher frequency. And
Speaker 1: and it it would it would simulate the sound of
Speaker 1: a quarter going into the pay phone. Yes, so you
Speaker 1: were simulating as if you were feeding change into the payphone.
Speaker 1: And you could so your calls technically weren't quote unquote
Speaker 1: free because as far as the machine could tell, you
Speaker 1: were actually feeding coins into it. But but you were
Speaker 1: just simulating that. Um. Yeah, and and and here I
Speaker 1: am going to teach some of our younger listeners. At
Speaker 1: one point there were phones on every corner and you
Speaker 1: had to put money into them to make a call. So,
Speaker 1: you know, because no one had cell phones, I'm just
Speaker 1: eating they weren't on every corner. But you know what,
Speaker 1: you don't see them anymore because of the rise of
Speaker 1: cell phones. This is something that would be Yeah, and
Speaker 1: then there are some in some places, but not nearly
Speaker 1: as many as there used to be right right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is something that may be unfamiliar to people. Honestly,
Speaker 1: they may not realize that there were payphones so frequently available,
Speaker 1: and you you know, it would be difficult, I would imagine,
Speaker 1: to install a red box because you'd have to do
Speaker 1: it when people weren't looking, right, So you'd have to
Speaker 1: you in there payphone that's in a fairly remote location.
Speaker 1: Although there there were plenty of them in remote locations
Speaker 1: and there still are. Yeah. Um, and again these these
Speaker 1: systems won't work with that anymore because the whole basis
Speaker 1: for the phone network is different now. In fact, phone
Speaker 1: freaking in general has really shifted. Now it's no longer
Speaker 1: really about finding ways to make free long distance phone calls,
Speaker 1: because that's not as not nearly as big a deal
Speaker 1: as it used to be. No, No, as a matter
Speaker 1: of fact, as as time went on, at least according
Speaker 1: to uh Halfner and Markoff's book, Um, you know, when
Speaker 1: the systems involved into computer technology, you had a couple
Speaker 1: of things going on. You did have hackers looking to
Speaker 1: hack computer networks because they were interested in learning more
Speaker 1: about them and sometimes for other purposes. But one thing
Speaker 1: that people were doing, they were looking to replicate m
Speaker 1: C I UM, which was I think one of the
Speaker 1: baby bells and is now part of it. May I
Speaker 1: may be wrong on that. Anyway, it was an independent
Speaker 1: phone company and UH UM they were they had calling
Speaker 1: cards UM, and what the phone hackers were doing at
Speaker 1: that point was trying to find ways to replicate UH
Speaker 1: m CI calling card numbers. And they would basically call
Speaker 1: an m C I UH network and enter numbers with
Speaker 1: their computer and when they found one that worked, they
Speaker 1: would use that to make free phone calls. But it
Speaker 1: was a different way of doing it than manipulating the
Speaker 1: phone system itself. It was really manipulating the payment system.
Speaker 1: I would say more than more than that. UM. But
Speaker 1: by the mid nineteen seventies, according to the the aforementioned book,
Speaker 1: UM A T N T said UH or they were losing.
Speaker 1: The company was losing approximately thirty million dollars a year
Speaker 1: to UH to fraudulent phone calls. And UM I just
Speaker 1: picked nineteen seventy five is a year plugged it into
Speaker 1: wall from Alpha. UH thirty million dollars in nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: five would be about a hundred and twenty point six
Speaker 1: million dollars in two thousand ten. UM so that's you know,
Speaker 1: not sizeable, but it's certainly not a lot. They certainly
Speaker 1: don't want to lose that money. Um. And apparently professional,
Speaker 1: professional white color uh people were using these techniques to
Speaker 1: I mean, when we're past the era of that the hacker,
Speaker 1: you know, being interested in the network and taking over.
Speaker 1: These are people who you know, maybe for maybe they
Speaker 1: were just trying to get free phone calls from themselves.
Speaker 1: Maybe they were small businesses trying to find ways to
Speaker 1: avoid paying long distance charges. Um. You know. So basically
Speaker 1: that had a lot to do with why Bell Labs
Speaker 1: um basically found ways to scan the network for things
Speaker 1: like black boxes. Black boxes allowed you to hook up
Speaker 1: you hook it up to your own phone and when
Speaker 1: people would call you, um, it would basically nullify the
Speaker 1: charges for the person on the other end making the
Speaker 1: phone call, but a scanner would pick up on that
Speaker 1: on the call, so you'd have to cut it short
Speaker 1: to avoid being detected by the scanners on the network.
Speaker 1: And basically they started finding people who were doing these
Speaker 1: things and prosecuting them, and they got quite a few
Speaker 1: of them. Captain Crunch got caught, yep, but it did
Speaker 1: it did spawn a lot of the things that I
Speaker 1: had no idea about. Like Abby Hoffman, remember him, the
Speaker 1: political activist. UM. He started a group with a guy
Speaker 1: named Al Bell apparently no relation to Alexander Graham. I
Speaker 1: don't know, maybe so anyway, it was called a Youth
Speaker 1: International Party Line YEP. And uh, basically the idea of
Speaker 1: being that once you liberated communication UM from the man,
Speaker 1: you'd be able to give people more control over it.
Speaker 1: But Al really wasn't interested in the political side of things. UM.
Speaker 1: He he broke off from the group and called called
Speaker 1: a new group, the Technical Assistance Program TAP, which you
Speaker 1: probably ran into. And uh, they published a lot of
Speaker 1: the material from a T and T S Technical manuals
Speaker 1: UM and they had more than people subscribed by n UM,
Speaker 1: one of whom, apparently, according according again to the Halfner
Speaker 1: and Markoff book, apparently, uh, this woman had subscribed not
Speaker 1: because she was interested in phone freaking, but because she
Speaker 1: just wanted to stick it to the phone company. So
Speaker 1: she's like, anything you guys can do to to uh,
Speaker 1: you know, subvert these guys, go ahead and do it.
Speaker 1: Here's my money. Yeah. There that that did become an issue.
Speaker 1: That and now we're going from beyond the exploration to
Speaker 1: either personal gain or political gain, um, or you know,
Speaker 1: some sort of anarchy kind of thing going on on.
Speaker 1: They published numbers to Buckingham Palace in the White House,
Speaker 1: they told you how to pick locks and use slugs
Speaker 1: and vending machines. It's kind of like the anarchist cookbook types. Yeah, definitely,
Speaker 1: so yeah, it's it's it's that was definitely kind of
Speaker 1: a child of the time. You know, we're talking about
Speaker 1: the whole Vietnam era as well. So um, yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: you've got this mistrust in the government and corporations that
Speaker 1: really started to peak in the seventies and uh, and
Speaker 1: so that freaking became kind of a problem. But it
Speaker 1: did start to shift because once the personal computer entered
Speaker 1: the picture, a lot of the freaks, like uh, the
Speaker 1: laws and jobs shifted their attention from from phones to
Speaker 1: computers and it was a brand new system to learn
Speaker 1: how to manipulate and exploit and all that kind of
Speaker 1: good stuff. Um. Freaking did continue for a while, but
Speaker 1: there was there. There were some pretty famous big crackdowns,
Speaker 1: including one in the Do you hear about this one?
Speaker 1: A T and T did this massive crackdown on freaks
Speaker 1: because A T and T experienced a national wide long
Speaker 1: distance service crash on Martin Luther King Junior day In
Speaker 1: and day laid the blame uh for that crash on
Speaker 1: on hackers and phone freaks. Now, whether or not there
Speaker 1: was actual legitimate h that was a legitimate excuse remains
Speaker 1: a matter of debate. Hackers. A lot of hackers say, hey,
Speaker 1: we weren't doing anything that would have led to this
Speaker 1: big crash in it may be that you know, this
Speaker 1: is a T and T S blunder, and there they've
Speaker 1: chosen a very very convenient scapegoat. A T and T
Speaker 1: of course would say, no, this is I mean, what
Speaker 1: are they gonna do? Say, yep, it was us. I
Speaker 1: mean some of them would. I mean, some hackers, of
Speaker 1: course take great pride in bringing down systems and we'll
Speaker 1: brag about it. But other hackers will be like, WHOA,
Speaker 1: I totally did not mean to hit the off switch.
Speaker 1: I just wanted to look around. So that's still a
Speaker 1: matter of debate about. I'm sure there are people who
Speaker 1: do know the truth of what happened, but I am
Speaker 1: not among them. Um well, it's kind of interesting too that. Uh,
Speaker 1: if you've ever seen the magazine, you probably now know
Speaker 1: where the name came from. The do um you know,
Speaker 1: I do. I think they think of themselves as a
Speaker 1: hackers magazine UM, and you know, things like things like
Speaker 1: Make magazine you know, are for hackers, people who like
Speaker 1: to take things apart and see what it is. So
Speaker 1: I think it really the idea behind it still exists,
Speaker 1: But there are a lot of people who are like
Speaker 1: the very early phone freaks who who say, you know what,
Speaker 1: there's this thing that somebody else came up with, and
Speaker 1: I'm really interested in how, you know, how it works,
Speaker 1: what makes it tick? You know, why does it work
Speaker 1: the way it does, and what can I get it
Speaker 1: to do that it's not supposed to do. They really
Speaker 1: have no interested in, you know, taking advantage of the
Speaker 1: system or making a statement, and you're like, yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: I wanted to take it apart and see if I
Speaker 1: can make it do something really cool. Right. This is
Speaker 1: a philosophy that dates back ages. In fact, without without
Speaker 1: this kind of intense curiosity, you could argue that that
Speaker 1: fields like architecture and engineering wouldn't be what they are today.
Speaker 1: In fact, it just occurred to me that what we
Speaker 1: should do in a future podcast is do an episode
Speaker 1: called Leonardo da Vinci Renaissance Hacker. Hey, there you go,
Speaker 1: because really that's what he was when you get down
Speaker 1: to it. Um. Also, I want to point out that
Speaker 1: m c I was not one of the baby Bells.
Speaker 1: It was a competitor to the baby Bells. So I
Speaker 1: looked that up. So sorry about that. And uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: if you guys do some research into freaking, you'll find
Speaker 1: some pretty crazy stories out there, including some fair fairly
Speaker 1: cryptic terms and names of groups and stuff, because, uh,
Speaker 1: like hackers, freakers often would would adopt a nickname or
Speaker 1: have a nickname attributed to them, and uh, some of
Speaker 1: them ended up getting into some pretty serious trouble, including
Speaker 1: a group of freakers and hackers known as the four
Speaker 1: one four group the four fourteen Yes I heard them.
Speaker 1: Well that that's named after a Milwaukee area code. That's
Speaker 1: where they were based out of. So if you ever
Speaker 1: wonder where the four or fourteen group's name came from,
Speaker 1: it came from that. UM and they got they they
Speaker 1: got into some big trouble when when uh, it was
Speaker 1: discovered that they had infiltrated around sixty different major computer
Speaker 1: systems and including ones for like hospitals, and governments and
Speaker 1: things like that. Yeah, yeah, it's uh, it's funny though,
Speaker 1: because these skills do, uh do payoff in the long
Speaker 1: run for people who you know, are interested in in
Speaker 1: in getting into the nuts and bolts of what makes
Speaker 1: things take um, including Whistler Whistler Joe, who ended up
Speaker 1: working for a phone company because he just wanted to
Speaker 1: uh he want that was one of the things he
Speaker 1: really wanted to do in life. And uh, you know,
Speaker 1: the phone company apparently went him tour the facilities of
Speaker 1: this one operation, and he had a difficult time because
Speaker 1: he had a reputation as a phone freak. But what
Speaker 1: you know, once he got an opportunity to work for
Speaker 1: the phone company, he had absolutely no he wanted to
Speaker 1: mess with the technology. Well, the whole reason that he
Speaker 1: would got into phone freaking in the first place was
Speaker 1: because he found the phone system to be absolutely fascinating.
Speaker 1: Yeah again, it wasn't It wasn't that he had some
Speaker 1: some evil plan in mind or something. He just it
Speaker 1: was it was a really cool system and he wanted
Speaker 1: to know how it worked. You know. Even even Kevin Mitnick,
Speaker 1: now you know, a very famous computer hacker and former
Speaker 1: phone freak, h you know, he has his own security
Speaker 1: consulting organization. Poor guy can't even get through an airport,
Speaker 1: but he has a sown security consulting he h, poor guy.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I mean he's he certainly knows a lot
Speaker 1: about technology and security of technology, and uh so therefore
Speaker 1: he's a very valuable person to have as a security consultant.
Speaker 1: But you know, it's from taking things apart and manipulating things,
Speaker 1: and well, the only way your reputation is someone who
Speaker 1: knows these things and sign it out right. The only
Speaker 1: the only way you can figure out how to keep
Speaker 1: people out of a system is to know how to
Speaker 1: infiltrate a system. Yes, so, yeah, a lot of these
Speaker 1: hackers have have joined the man in one way or another,
Speaker 1: and in some cases I think it's a lot more
Speaker 1: lucrative than what they were doing. Yeah, well it's certainly
Speaker 1: less risky. Yes, that's true. All right. Well, that that's
Speaker 1: a great conversation on phone freaking. We're gonna wrap it up, guys.
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