What The Phreak?
the early history of phone freaking
Back in the 1950's you didn't own your phone, you rented it from Bell System, and a five-minute call from New York City to Los Angeles cost around twenty-five to thirty dollars in today's money.
Huge (pre-transistor) computers the size of a city block would print out long sheets of paper with hole punches fed into a machine that would translate the information, summarize and sort it, and figure out the correct rate and total up the proper amount to charge. When you place a long-distance call, you will be routed through two central offices, one in your location and the area you're trying to reach. These were connected by a trunk line that constantly played a tone at 2600 Hertz until you wanted to place a call. When you dial a number, the office you're calling from stops emitting this tone, along with the receiving office, and the numbers you dialed are transmitted via a series of beeps. This office then uses a registry to find the number you dialed and connects the call.
Enter the blue box, so named because one of the first was housed inside a box of that color. The technical journal published by Bells Systems (now AT&T) in 1960 had an article called "Signaling Systems for Control of Telephone Switching." The report laid out how the phone system worked, and if you were capable enough to read this very dense text, you were handed out the information needed to make free calls! This article was used to make the first boxes, which could emulate the tones needed to make phone calls. What did AT&T think about this?
Well, surprisingly, the company never thought this possible and was caught off guard.
“At the time we recognized… that we had no immediate defense. This was a breakthrough almost equivalent to the advent of gunpowder, where the hordes of Genghis Khan faced problems of a new sort, the advent of the cannon.”
-AT&T attorney testifying before congress in 1975
AT&T designed surveillance units that became the first illegal wiretappers to find out how widespread the problem was. It randomly surveilled 33 million phone calls and would record the conversation when it found the 2600 Hz tone where it shouldn't be. The company would then listen to the tapes to find out if they were fraudulent. Over five years, they listened to almost two million phone calls, only finding about 25,000 illegal calls. They had to find a solution, which proved problematic because AT&T didn't want to publicize the blue boxes as they were still relatively niche, and AT&T was hesitant to say they had illegally found the cases.
So AT&T did what they could not by going after the phreaks; instead, they went after the mob. The mob had been using the boxes to conduct business without being monitored by the FBI. The FBI was currently uncovering mobsters by monitoring phone bills for an excess of long-distance calls, but the blue boxes made them untraceable. So AT&T handed over their data, and the FBI used it to bust mobsters in NYC, Miami, New Orleans, and several other cities simultaneously, but the partnership ended soon after.
One of the pioneers of phreaking was Joybubbles. Born blind, Joybubbles(his chosen name) was the "granddaddy of phone phreaking." He discovered phreaking while on a long-distance call, and he heard a tone play, so he started whistling along with it until his whistling ended the call. Joybubbles had perfect pitch and was soon able to whistle his way to free long-distance calls. He even showed this off on the NBC Evening News!
So why were the calls free? He would call a 1–800 number, and as it was ringing, he whistled at 2600 Hz long enough to confuse the receiving office, which would retrieve its registry and route him to the digits he whistled, all while still being charged zero cents a minute.
Besides Joybubbles, some famous phreaks are John Draper, aka Cap'n Crunch, who realized the toy whistle given away in a box of Cap'n Crunch played the perfect pitch to fool the system. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak got their start in tech by building and selling blue boxes, many of their customers were caught, but authorities never managed to find the two Steve's.
In the 1970s, new methods of phreaking became popular. "Party Lines" allowed phreaks to call broken numbers that played a recording, but the sound was so low that many phreakers could reach into the recording and make a conference call! "Loop Arounds" let two people talk anonymously by taking numbers used to test transmission loss and using them to chat. Actual conference lines used internally by AT&T were also exploited to speak in large groups without being monitored.
In October of 1971, Esquire published the famous article "Secrets of the Little Blue Box" by Ron Rosenbaum, thrusting phone phreaking into the mainstream and creating a lot of new phreakers. Prosecutions rose drastically after this, peaking in 1975. The downtick afterward was caused by the invention of the digital Common Channel Interoffice Signaling, which separated the voice channel from the signaling channel and rendered Blue Boxes obsolete, but not the phreakers themselves. Only a few years ago, the FBI arrested a man who had made 4 million dollars setting up unused extensions at hundreds of businesses and then dialing pay-per-minute lines he had bought. When the business paid their phone bill, he would split the profits with his fellow hackers.
Phone phreaking birthed an entire generation of hackers and tinkerers whose innovation still lives on in contemporary hacking culture today. While blue boxes may not work today, many other types of boxes have come into existence, giving us more ways to connect on the sly.
