July 23, 2024 • 48 mins
Years ago the telephone network was like the internet is to us today: a vast, interconnected means of communicating and sharing information. And, like the internet today, it attracted people who were interested in learning how it worked by hacking it.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck
and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you should know.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
That's right. Can can we can you do your little
trumpet sound announcement? Trumpet?
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Yeah? Are you ready?
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Huh?
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Sorry? No, hold on.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
There we go. Yeah, we want to announce the a
new writer that we have working with us, and welcome
aboard Kyle Hookstra and everybody. We have just classed up
this joint, Yeah, we have because Kyle is British and
he lives there. He's not like some some dumb British
(00:56):
dude living in you know, Waco, Texas, or.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Some American living in Great Britain. This guy is like
legit brit that's right.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
He lives in Brighton and we gave him a test
article and this was it. He did such a good job.
We were like, hey, this thing's great and welcome aboard
and he was interested and so it seems like the
beginning of a new great relationship.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Yeah, agreed, So welcome aboard, Kyle, and thanks for this one.
I'm excited about this and this, Chuck, if you'll remember
came up from the whistling episode. Do you remember that?
Speaker 2 (01:32):
Did you mention this?
Speaker 1 (01:35):
I know one thing that Anna had turned up and
kind of included as a sidebar was how capt'n crunch
Whistle had been used to basically hack the phone system.
And I've been wanting to do an episode on phae
freaking forever and it just so happened that reminded me,
And here we are now we ask Kyle to do it,
and this is our episode on phone freaking.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
That you've been waiting for freaking ever to do. Yeah, yeah,
with a pH both ways. Actually, yeah, I mean, I
guess we should introduce what we're talking about here, because
this is something that if you're, oh, maybe have a
certain age, you might not know what this is. And
I'm of that certain age that should know, but I
(02:20):
didn't really know much about it, to be honest. But
we're talking about the fact that in the nineteen fifties,
well before that, let's.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Say you're not of that certain age, in.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
Our lifetime, uh huh right, pre computers, Yeah, we were
all still connected via something called the telephone system. And
in the United States, the telephone system was It's how
humans connected before the Internet, and it was a big
interconnected system that was manually operated by switchboards, which we
should totally do a switchboard episode at some point.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Yeah, it was very really interesting.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
But they started to get rid of the switchboard operators
in the nineteen fifties for automatic switches. And the one
thing they didn't think about was the fact that they
had a bit of a design flaw or a weakness
in this system, whereas the tones they use to let
the automatic system know like what to do with a
(03:20):
telephone call, could be mimicked and replicated with sometimes a
human voice, sometimes a toy whistle like you said, or
something that somebody made to essentially hack into the phone
system by replicating those tones. And AT and T was like, oh,
we never thought that anyone would be interested in doing that.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Yeah, that was an outstanding introduction man.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
And it's called phone freaking phph Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
And so phone freakers were pretty much the earliest examples
of hackers. They were free computer hacker culture. As a
matter of fact, hacking just grew essentially right out of
phone freaking and a lot of the phone freaks who
were kind of on the whole jam in the early
eighties just made the leap to computers through phones. It's
(04:11):
pretty interesting, as we'll see. But there's one thing we
should say about them as a community. Phone freakers were
curious individuals. Like they were technical minded types. They wanted
to see how this vast, huge connected network worked, and
(04:32):
they knew very well that there were whole, huge parts
of it that were shielded from public view. You weren't
meant to know about this. You didn't need to know
about it. Just go in and punch the phone number
and we'll connect it for you. That wasn't enough. They
wanted to know everything there was to know about it.
And one way that you can find out how something
works is to try to break it, and that was
kind of what they were doing. They weren't doing it
(04:53):
maliciously for almost exclusively, They weren't doing it maliciously. They
were doing it out of curiosity.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
Yeah, and it sort of reminded me a little bit
of like ham radio operators, where like the victory of
a like a win for a phone freaker was like,
oh my god, I connected with someone through the back
door in another country and was able to talk to them.
(05:20):
And yeah, maybe some people took advantage of like free
long distance and stuff like that. But like you said,
I think as a whole the community was just like
those were the wins, like, oh my god, I was
able to do this thing. How cool?
Speaker 1 (05:33):
Right, So let's kind of start at the beginning, shall we,
because freaking did not exist prior to the fifties or
sixties when they introduced automatic switches. Which is a little
aside about the switches. The guy who invented him actually
invented him in the nineteenth century. He was a mortician
who his competition, the across town mortician rival. That guy's
(05:59):
wife was the operators, so when somebody called to ask
for a mortician, she automatically connected them to her husband's business,
not this guy's business. So he actually went out of
his way to invent an automatic switch to replace human operators,
and decades later they finally came into into play. But
you couldn't have done this before when somebody was like
(06:19):
connecting the call for you, because if you just started
whistling in their ear something like that, they'd be like,
what are you doing? This isn't this is really bizarre.
I'm not going to connect this call. It was once
it became automated that it became possible.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Yeah, I mean, did they even have dial tones with
switchboard operators?
Speaker 1 (06:35):
I don't believe, so, I don't see why you would.
I think when they converted to automatic switches, they adopted
something called multi frequency tones, and it was all where
you had a tone, like you pressed a one and
it made a certain tone actually a combination of tones,
hence the multi frequency thing, and it told this this network,
(06:55):
turn this gear or this dial and everyone knows. I
don't know what I'm talking about with gear, but there
were gears involved, and things like actually would move somewhere
in space because a tone told it to. That's that's
kind of what they brought online in the fifties and sixties.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
So if someone whistled at a switchboard operator, they would
be from the.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Future because so yeah kind of, or else they'd be fresh.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
Yeah, they'd be fresh because they like a wolf whistle
or something.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Mm hm.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
So let's talk about phones for a second, because when
we talk about these tones, we largely think of like
a push button telephone, which is what we use starting geez,
I'm not even really sure. But they replaced the rotary phones,
not replaced. They worked alongside for many years. We had
both for a long time in my house. Yeah, but
(07:47):
the button on the phone isn't exactly a key to
the system operating. The only thing the phone would do
was create that tone. The tone was what mattered. It
did get me wondering, like, well, how the heck does
the rotary phone even work? And this is just a
slight aside, but I never knew how that operated. And
the way a rotary phone would work was you would
(08:07):
dial the number around and that part didn't really matter.
It was the return back into position that sent this
that would engage basically these electrical contacts to interrupt the
electrical continuity. So a nine would go bup up, up, up, up, up,
up up up, and it would interrupt at nine different
(08:27):
times and sending a signal saying, hey, this is a nine,
dumb dumb. And I never knew how that worked, so
I thought that was pretty fascinating. But as far as
the push button phone, you would just press a button,
it would have a tone assigned to it. And it's
those tones that freaks were able to replicate to essentially
fool the phone company into thinking that somebody was pressing
(08:48):
a button, and in some case cases they were, which
we'll talk about and.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
Just knowing that you could trick the system into dialing
something for you just by whistles or making tones, not
using your phone. That's fun in and of itself, but
there's a really good example of like how this could
be put to use in a way that was like, oh, okay,
this is no longer legal. You're actually you're you're you're
(09:13):
actually hijacking the phone system for your own ends, and
this is the basis of freaking. There was a there
was a tone that was instrumental to this whole multi
frequency tone system, and it was that I think the
minor e. It was that that resonates at twenty six
hundred hertz. Okay, so whatever sound cycles at twenty six
(09:37):
hundred cycles per second, that tone would tell the phone
company that your phone was on the hook. When when
your phone stopped making that sound, when your line stopped
making that twenty six hundred hertz sound, all of a sudden,
the phone system was like, oh, okay, this guy wants
a connection somewhere. Let's go pay attention to what's going
on here. So let's say you started dialing them, and
(10:00):
you dial the eight hundred number. Your phone stopped making
that twenty six hundred hurt sound, and the phone company's
attention was grabbed by that. And you dial this eight
hundred number and it would start to connect to you,
and because it was an eight hundred number, the system
would be like, Okay, we're connecting this, but we're not
going to charge this person for this call because this
(10:20):
is a toll free number. And then before the other
person on the other line could pick up, you would
blow that. You would make a twenty six hundred hurtz
tone and that told the phone system you had hung up,
but you hadn't actually hung up. And now the line
was open for you to dial any number you wanted
to anywhere in the world toll free, because as far
(10:41):
as the system was concerned, you were still calling a
toll free number even though you were calling any number
you wanted. And now you can make long distance phone
calls for free at a time when they were really
really expensive.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
That's right. And these were enabled by what we're called
trunk lines. So if you think about whatever city you
live in, depending on the size of your city, you
would have I guess if you lived in a small
up town, you probably just had one office. But if
your city was large enough, you had multiple offices where
these calls were connected. Basically, so if you lived in
(11:16):
like one neighborhood in Dallas, Texas, and you were calling
a neighborhood, you know, ten fifteen miles away in Dallas, Texas,
there would be another office there in that neighborhood or
that area or region or whatever, and they were all
connected by trunk lines, like hundreds to thousands of these things,
depending on how big your town was, because each one
(11:37):
of these could only handle one call at a time,
So the trunkline line was basically just a medium to
carry your vote, carry your voice locally from one place
to the other. And we both said there was only
one that could be going at once. That's why there
were thousands of these things. And if you were able
to replicate that tone, then you could, you know, have
(12:00):
some good, clean fun.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
Yeah. And trunk lines were also the way that you
died long distance because they could connect like different parts
of a town. They could also connect one city to
another and so on and so forth. And so the
people who figured this out that you could you could
hijack the phone system by trying out different tones and
doing different things were just socked in immediately and just
began experimenting, started meeting one another, sometimes by happenstance on
(12:26):
a phone line that they just happened to try out
and there was some other freak hanging out on it.
It just was immediately infectious to their to their curiosity
that you just wanted to figure out how this could
work and what all you could make this phone system
do by replicating these tones.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
I think that's a pretty good setup, my friend.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
I agree. You want to take a break, then, yeah, let's.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
Take a break and we'll come back and talk about
who some of these first freakers were right after this,
(13:21):
all right, so we promised to talk about some early freakers.
One was a guy in the nineteen fifties, so you know,
this started pretty early on. If you think about early
hacking and like what led to hacking starting in the
nineteen fifties, it's pretty mind blowing. But one guy was
Joe and Grecia, and he was a blind man who
(13:42):
did not use a captain crunch whistle because that was
before they had captain crunch whistles. He whistled with his
mouth and was able to he had perfect pitch and
was able to emit somehow because it's not the easiest
tone to hit. And if you've ever heard it, series
that twenty six hundred hurts signal and he, you know,
(14:02):
he would whistle into the phone to do this. Other
people use, usually not their own human voice, but different things,
like I believe the Captain Crunch Cereal was in the
nineteen sixties. You can go on YouTube and see people
that have these little whistles demonstrating how it works and everything.
But this was sort of the idea early in the
nineteen fifties and sixties with these.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
People, right, So, I think the guy who came up
with the guy who's credited with figuring out the cap'n
Crunch serial whistle, it's like a boatswain's whistle like that,
you know that that whistle you know on Star Trek
when they blow the whistle to get everybody's attention.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
I'd never seen Star Trek.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
Well, anybody who's seen Star Trek, the original one knows
what we're talking about. That's a boatswain's whistle. And so
like the cap'n Crunch whistle would if you covered up
one hole, it would make a perfect twenty six hundred
hertz tone and Apparently the guy who came up with that,
who figured that out, took the handle Captain Crunch. That
was his freaker handle, but his real name was Draper.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
Right, I believe cap'n Crunch. I saw it.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
Both ways, really, yeah, I saw more often than not
captain like fully fully spelled out. I guess he was himself.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Yeah, oh okay, yeah, I thought you just were saying
it as a serial.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
No, no, no, that was his that was his handle.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
No, no, no, I know, but he took it from the Cereal.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
Sure, sure, yeah. I didn't think it was a coincidence.
What was his first name, Draper?
Speaker 2 (15:29):
Uh?
Speaker 1 (15:31):
Dave, Yeah, David Draper.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
No, no, no, John John. I think it was John
because I watched videos of him and every time it
sounded like he was saying Don Draper for Madman. So
it was very confusing.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
Okay, So so John he was the one who was
credited with figuring that out. He was a legendary early
phone freaker.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
Yeah, and he still has videos and we'll talk about
a little bit more about him later on. But uh,
like I said, most people did not use their voice.
They would use like that whistle or they started building devices.
They were called blue boxes, and they all look different
because they were all homemade. But you know, if you
look up blue box online, there are all kinds of
(16:15):
you know, it basically looks like a a phone without
the talking ends. It's just like a box, usually with
punch button numbers like you would see on a phone.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
Yes, or if if you were a Bond villain in
maybe a sixties Bond movie, Yeah, and you wanted to
remotely blow something up, it looks like the kind of
thing you'd pull an antenna out of, impress a series
of numbers on it, and something would explode, and then
you'd very calmly put the antenna back in and walk away. Yeah,
(16:49):
except scratch the antenna right, Not in the blue box,
just in this Bond idea. Yeah, there's also a red box.
There are a ton of different boxes. Like by the
end of all this, people had figured out all sorts
of different devices to make phones do all sorts of things,
and they all had different colors. But the other, the
other two big ones where the red box, which was
(17:12):
a blue box but had the added capacity of creating
the tones that told the phone system that this payphone
had just accepted a quarter or a dime at the time,
and now you can go ahead and connect the call
even though no one had put a dime in. It
had just mimicked that tone. Then the black box made
it interrupted like the DC signal to your phone, to
(17:35):
make it seem like you had never picked up a call,
so the person calling you long distance would never be
charged for it even though you're sitting there talking. Those
are the three big ones, Blue, red, and black.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
Yeah, and the red one is actually super cool because
you know, if you came along after payphones were around,
you didn't have to put in like if you had
other coins that would equal a dime. Let's say, oh,
I don't know two nickels. Sure, you could put two
nickels in, and a nickel created a specific tone, a
(18:05):
dime created a specific tone, and a quarter created one.
So the red box was able to mimic each of
these coins to recreate the tone it made when you
you know, because those little paper ones were smart. They
they knew what you were dropping in there. They were
so smart, and they would sing that song lussly.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
So the whole thing that all these were based on,
again was this multi frequency tone system. And it turns
out that there were six master tones to the whole
thing that if you knew these tones, you could basically
make the phone system do anything you wanted. And they
were made up of twelve individual tones, and so, for example,
(18:46):
if you wanted to mimic the number one, you had
to make the sound of seven hundred hertz and nine
hundred herts at the same time, and that would be
as far as the phone system is concerned. If it
heard that, it would say, oh, okay, one, I mean,
I'm pressing one for this guy. And the whole thing
is predicated on a mistake that somebody made at Bell,
(19:08):
which we haven't said this, but this is kind of
important too. At the time AT and T was known
as mob Bell, it had essentially a monopoly on the
phone system in.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
The United States, exactly like it.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
Was the phone company for the entire country. And because
it was so this one big monstrous thing, if you
figured out how to mess with AT and T, you
figured out how to hijack the entire phone system. That
was one thing. But the point of that is that
some AT and T engineer wrote an article in a
technical journal in the fifties and they included what those
(19:46):
master tones were made of. In the article, and that
gave way to the basis of all those blue boxes
and black boxes and red boxes that were made later.
Had that article never been published, freaking might have never
really taken off. It would probably been a pastime for
people with who had a captain crunch whistle or perfect
pitch and could whistle things themselves.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
I don't know. I bet you nerds prevail.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
For sure, but I mean it would have taken those
like hardcore people like Joe and Grecia who figured it
out on their own, just in trial and error over years.
This was here's here's a blue box, and here's how
you use it. And that's how a lot of people
got into freaking who wouldn't wouldn't have otherwise been pulled
into it because it would have been too hard.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
I think it's sped up the timeline for sure, for sure.
And like we said, people were, you know, the win
was making a call working around the phone company for
a long distance call. Sometimes they would get into pranking
a little bit, like they could figure out how to
hack into the the loud speakers at a mall and
make announcements. That was one pretty famous prank call in
(20:56):
Santa Barbara in nineteen seventy four when they they had
they basically took advantage of a bug called simultaneous seizure,
where two calls at the same time would jam ups
the switching equipment in the office and you could hijack
calls coming into like a city. So people two guys
got you know, from La Got. I guess they got
(21:19):
arrested for doing this, it says they. I'm not sure
if they served jail time or not, but they essentially
were able to any call coming into Santa Barbara. They
would route it to a voice saying that Santa Barbara
had been destroyed by a nuclear bomb, and it kind
of got out of a hand, like people called emergency services,
and you know, they found out what was going on, obviously,
(21:42):
but just you know, sort of that was about as
harmful as it got, unless you count stealing long distance.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
Yeah, and stealing long distance was a favorite of the mafia.
They were a big time into phone freaking, and they
weren't the kind who would just sit there and you know,
try out whistling different tones for years on end. They
got into it through blue and black and red boxes.
And the reason why is because their bookies would be
taking calls from all over the country. And I think
(22:10):
I said earlier that that long distance was expensive at
the time, it was so expensive. Click Americana, which is
a great, great website. They found an old Bell ad
from nineteen sixty five that boasts the low price of
twelve dollars for your first three minutes for long distance
(22:30):
in nineteen sixty five dollars. Yeah, that's like one hundred
and eighteen dollars today for three minutes of long distance.
It's insane, and it very quickly as after they introduced
the automatic switches, their costs dropped very quickly, so by
nineteen seventy it was down to probably twenty bucks for
three minutes. But still that's a lot of money. And
(22:51):
if you're a bookie taking long distance calls all night long,
all day long, that adds up. So of course you
want to start using blue boxes. So the mafia got
heavy into it too.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
Wait, how much did you say it was at first
for three minutes?
Speaker 1 (23:03):
Twelve dollars for three minutes, and according to Westig, there'd
be one hundred and eighteen dollars today.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
Oh okay, so you went on the cause you said
it went down to twenty dollars.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
That was conversion wise, no, from nineteen sixty five to
about nineteen seventy, and just that five years it dropped
that dramatically.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
From twelve to twenty No, no.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
No, sorry, yes, you're right, from in twenty twenty three dollars.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
Oh okay, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
I wanted to make that as confusing as possible, So
that's why I chose that.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
Well. I mean, I remember even in the nineteen eighties
when I would meet a girl at church camp that
lived in another place and come home and want to
communicate with my little church camp crush, and my parents
would be like, yeah, I forget about it, Like you're
not dialing along, You're not calling this girl a long
distance meet a local girl. What's wrong with you?
Speaker 1 (23:53):
It was a big, big deal. Like I remember, early
cell phones used to charge you long distance, and then
when all of a sudden, it was like that just
went away. It was like a different world almost.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
Yeah, totally. So computers came around. Obviously, everything changed after
computers came around the nineteen eighties, because you could all
of a sudden design a program that could generate tones,
like specifically for what you needed. If everyone or if
anyone saw the movie Wargames, which we've talked about quite
(24:27):
a few times on the show because it's one of
the show favorites, But that had a couple of examples
of phone freaking. When Matthew Broderick dialed into the school
system at Beginning to change Ali Sheety's grades, he used
a technique called war dialing. That's when you're just like us,
a computer to auto dial, just like hundreds and thousands
(24:49):
of numbers, scanning for a vulnerability, or in this case,
he was scanning for his own school line to hack into. Right,
And then I know we did talk about this in
an episode, but the little payphone hack that he tried
apparently is not a real thing and was just made
up for the movie, Isn't that right?
Speaker 1 (25:07):
Yeah, but it does. It definitely gets across the concept
of a red box, like you could do that, you
just couldn't do it the way he did it. But
it also kind of got across a little bit the
concept of the black box, which would kind of short
the circuit, which is what he was doing. So it
was a little confused, but it certainly got like a
lot of people interested in hacking, and it also scared
(25:27):
the pants off of Ronald Reagan, which you might say,
who cares the problem was At the time, Ronald Reagan
was the President of the United States. And there's a
guy named Fred Kaplan who wrote a book about a
history of cyber war called Dark Territory. And apparently Reagan
saw this film was so freaked out by it that
he got the Joint Chiefs together and was like, can
(25:49):
this happen? Somebody go find out. And the chairman of
the Joint Chiefs, a guy named General John Vessy, went
and investigated and came back and he said, quote, President,
the problem is much worse than you think. And so
three years after Wargames came out, Congress passed basically an
anti Wargames scary movie law.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
That's right, they did. It was called the Computer Fraud
and Abuse Act, And you know, seemingly came out of
watching the movie Wargames.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
Isn't that nuts?
Speaker 2 (26:23):
Pretty crazy?
Speaker 1 (26:25):
So let's go back a little bit and talk about
some of the freaks. We've kind of covered some of them,
like Joe and Grecia. His handle was Joy Bubbles. There
was also Captain Crunch John Draper. Like you said, these
guys were like freaking at the time when it was
it was like a I guess, a golden age, chuck,
(26:49):
There's only one way to put it. I was trying
to avoid it. But it was a golden age of freaking.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
We love our golden ages. Yeah, And you know, as
far as these people were, they were they were who
the hackers in it. They were kind of early techies.
They were kind of nerds. Usually they were into you know,
some of them maybe have been into kind of disruption.
I think, like we said, most of the time, it
(27:14):
was just sort of good natured, but there were definitely
those that were like, hey, fight the man. We have
this monopoly, this controlling the phone system. Let's see if
we can poke the bear a little bit. So, you know,
they were and they're doing a little bit of that
as well. But like we said, generally good natured stuff.
I think we should mention that that draper later on
(27:39):
had allegation the sexual assault that emerged and he was
banned from different conferences starting in like the twenty tens.
So he's a pretty divisive guy. So it's not like
we're seeing his praises or anything, but he was definitely
like one of the first kind of famous freakers largely
(28:00):
because of this Esquire magazine article in nineteen seventy one
called Secrets of the Little Blue Box, where a guy
named Ron Rosenbaum wrote this really long form, detailed, pretty
great article about phone freaking which not only put a
spotlight on people like Captain Crunch, but put a spotlight
and created more phone freakers because people read it and
(28:21):
were like, I got to get out on this thing. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
It's usually in the top ten twenty at most of
Greatest Magazine Articles of All Times lists. It's a really
good article. But one of the things when people write
about it that they like to point out is it's
the definitive history of phone freaking up to that point.
But then it also serves as a pivotal point because
(28:44):
it helped make history because it introduced phone freaking to
like a whole bunch of other people who were totally
interested in that but just hadn't heard of it before.
And one of the reasons why that happened is because
he gave just enough technical information for how to do it,
but left out some of the more gory details. But
(29:07):
it was it was tantalizing enough that if you were
interested and motivated, you could go fill in the blanks
and figure out how to do it. And it turned out,
in fact that the guys who founded Apple, Steve Wozniak
and Steve Jobs, were two people who read this thing
and went and figured it out themselves.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
Yeah, they got into phone freaking. They built boxes, They
built and sold digital blue boxes, and Steve Wozniak, out
of all the circuitry he built as the wizard behind Apple,
he said that that digital blue box circuit was the
one that he was most proud of. They actually met
(29:48):
the captain, Crunch Guy, met mister Draper and they you know,
they were part of that community for a little while.
They sold them for about one hundred and seventy two
bucks in the early nineteen seventies, which is a lot
of money in today dollars. Uh So it was a
lot of money back then. They were never busted. Apparently
they were. Some cops came around when Steve jobs car
(30:08):
broke down one time and they were caught with a
blue box, but was was able to convince them that
it was a synthesizer to play music on in the
copway right. Wok, He sounds good to me.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
So U was the next handle freaker handle was Berkeley Blue,
and Steve Jobs handle was of Tobar, which I think
prefigured Dungeons and Dragons. That's a pretty good I guess
fighter's name.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
Oh is that a D and D reff?
Speaker 1 (30:38):
Yeah, Dungeons and Dragons.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
No, But is that oaf Tobar from D and D.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
I think it's a good name for a D and
D characters.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
What Oh, I got you and there link somehow?
Speaker 1 (30:51):
No. No, but it just screams D and D to me.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
Yeah. I didn't play D and D, so I'm just
lost here.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
I loved it. There's one other quote too, from the
I guess Steve Jobs who said that without blue boxes,
the blue boxes that he and Wosneak came together to make,
there would be no Apple. That was like their first
venture together.
Speaker 2 (31:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
That showed them that they could work well together, and
they went on to found Apple after they did this
little blue box tint. That's pretty crazy, very crazy.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
Another thing that emerged around this time was something called
a beep line, which I had never heard of these
and this is something that I probably should have known about.
But when you would call somebody back in the day
and that person was on the phone and let's say
they didn't have call waiting, or call waiting wasn't invented
at the time, maybe or they couldn't afford it, like
(31:40):
we couldn't. You would get a busy signal. But here's
the thing. That busy signal that you were dealt didn't
mean that your voice path was shut off like you
were still if you sat there on that busy signal
line and didn't hang up, and maybe this is how
people found out about it. Eventually, if you around long enough,
(32:00):
you would get someone else on that same busy signal
line that had been you know, denied a phone call
in some other town. And if those people were teenagers,
they realize it was sort of the beginnings of like
a party line where you could be like, hey, and
you're talking over this busy signal, mind you, So while
this thing is going beep beep, I'm going, hey, this
(32:23):
is Chuck. I live in Stone Mountain, Georgia, Like where
are you? And oh, I'm Angela. I live in Dallas, Texas.
And then you strike up a conversation and you're having
some good, clean, teenage fun making connections talking to people
you ordinarily would never meet. And beep lines were very
popular in the nineteen sixties and seventies.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
Yeah, there's a Time article from I think nineteen sixty
one that interviews the guy who ran I think the
Fall River, Massachusetts or somewhere in Massachusetts their telephone company
or station, and that there was a radio station whose
beepline was like the place to call into and when
this team call them in a like a regional magazine
(33:05):
published something on it, calls jump from fifteen hundred to
twenty seven twenty eight thousand in a week, So they
were very popular. And apparently once you could shout your
number to somebody you were trying to talk to over
the busy signal, but when you actually could talk like
normal people on the phone, it was just never as fun.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
Well it's funny. I mentioned, like maybe that's how people
found out, as they just stayed on that line. But
it seems like radio stations is where they actually found
out about these things, because you would call in to win,
to be the fifth caller or whatever to win concert tickets,
and almost always you would get that busy signal and
so many people are calling in that they would find
(33:46):
each other on these busy signal lines and figured it out. Hey,
wait a minute, this is a thing.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
Yeah, because usually when you got a busy signal, you
just you wouldn't make a sound, you wouldn't try to talk,
and you just hang up immediately. But if apparently that's
just how the phone lines worked. If you talked, you
could hear somebody else talking back at you. It was
just like you said, you had to shout over the
busy signal.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
I talked. I don't know why I never found this out,
because every time I got a busy signal, I'd be like, Hello,
what is this? Is someone there?
Speaker 1 (34:15):
Really? Really?
Speaker 2 (34:19):
No? Okay, look we switch switching up roles here.
Speaker 1 (34:23):
What was your favorite phone of all time that you
ever had?
Speaker 2 (34:29):
You know, the first one that jumps to mine? And
I never had. I think later on I was able
to have a phone in my bedroom when I was
like sixteen or seventeen. But previous to that, I very
much remember our very first cordless phone that had the
intenna that you pull out and the cradle that it
sat on, Like I just remember that being a very
big deal because I thought like, wow, we're literally living
(34:51):
in the age of the Jetsons, because I can because
we're unbound by a chord.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
Yeah, I like you. I would have guessed I would
have put a lot of money on you saying the
Sports Illustrated football phone. Then you got with the subscription
back in the eighties, you remember that.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
Yeah, I mean I subscribe forever. But here do you
know what happens? And this used to bother me as
like a thirteen year old is you subscribe and you
get that first thing? And my mom got me a
subscription when I was like ten. Huh, And you never
got any gifts after that, And I used to get
so mad that, like what, only new subscribers get the gift,
Like you should get one every year for being a
(35:26):
loyal subscriber.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
That's a great, great point. Did you email the editors
or sorry, did you write a letter to the editors.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
The Sports Illustrating I don't think so.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
Did your mom hang out by the mailbox and the
month the swimsuit issue came out to intercept it?
Speaker 2 (35:42):
No I did. Oh yeah, that was a very.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
Big disguise yourself as the mailbox.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
Yeah, that was especially for young Baptist boy who thought that,
like you know, playboys were for boting and stuff like that.
That magazine was everything to me.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
Sure, yeah, all right, I think that that's a good
place for a break, don't you.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
Yeah, I'm gonna go think about Christie Brinkley and Carol Alton,
Kathy Ireland, and we'll be right back in a few minutes.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
Okay, all right, So we were talking about the golden
(36:39):
age of freaking that was really kind of the sixties,
mid to late sixties to the mid seventies, probably about
a ten year period where people were figuring out how
to game the international phone network, but before AT and
T could really do anything about it, because I don't
(37:01):
think we said the flaws in these systems, that's what
the systems depended on. It's not like they could go
in and reconfigure something here or there and shut down freakers.
Freakers were exploiting exactly like it would have taken billions
and billions of dollars. And eventually they did do that.
Eventually they did upgrade from electro mechanical to straight up
(37:24):
electrical and then eventually digital switches that aren't fooled by those. Apparently,
the way that they first really made freaking obsolete was
they separated the lines so you could make whistling sounds
into the line. All you wanted that line wasn't accepting
that tone. The one you talked into wasn't the one
(37:44):
that accepted the tones anymore. So that kind of shut
freaking down. But for that ten year period, this amazing
community developed. There was a guy who we have to
shout out. His handle was Mark Burnet, which is based
on a hilarious early proto meme that came out of
the freaking community that's worth looking up. But he went
around all up and down the West Coast with stickers
(38:07):
that he made that said, like wan an interesting phone call,
call this number, and then he would hang out on
this line and talk to people when they called and
try to introduce him to freaking. He was like a
freaking evangelist. Yeah, and it became a thing among some
blind teenagers because there was a guy in Seattle who
(38:27):
called this sticker, the number on the sticker talked to.
Mark Burnets got into it, and then I guess met
a blind teenager that he became friends with, introduced him
to freaking. That teenager went to a summer camp, introduced
his blind friends to freaking. One of them moved east,
went to another summer camp, introduced those kids, and it
spread among like blind teenagers it was like a big deal.
(38:49):
And there's a session, a hangout session that Ron Rosenbaum
chronicled in the Little Blue Box Secrets of the Blue
Box article and of eight kids hanging out in this
one kid's kitchen. I think five of them were blind,
So it's like a really big cool thing among blind
teenagers too. So there's this huge thing that's developing. This
(39:11):
the beginning of hacker cultures developing over this ten year period.
Then at and T steps in and is like, we're
shutting this down. We're losing way too much money.
Speaker 2 (39:20):
Yeah, and you know it was great about our new
friend Kyle's article that he put together for us was
that Carl got right off the bat like that there's
a story element to these episodes, and he nailed it
with this third act reveal, which was this thing was
around for a while, it went away, but the legacy
(39:44):
of it wasn't just these people had fun talking to
each other on beeplines and hacking some free long distance
calls and stuff like that. The legacy of this thing
was what we're going to get to now, which was
the legal aspects of it and legal justifications for recording
(40:05):
phone calls and surveilling phone calls in the United States,
which all came out of AT and T going after
initially those bookies in Miami and Los Angeles that you
talked about. In nineteen sixty six, when the FBI rated
these bookies, they prosecuted one guy, this guy named Kenneth Hannah,
and all of a sudden, there was precedent, there was
(40:27):
legal ground the AT and T had that said we
can go after these hackers. We can charge them with
a crime, in this case, fraud by wire And where
do we find these people, Well, we're going to wire
tap them. And that's what they did. It was an
operation called Green Star. Between sixty four and nineteen seventy.
(40:47):
They tapped about thirty three million phone calls, recorded about
half of those, and the United States later on would
say this is great and just fine.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
Yeah, it really kind of goes to score just how
incredibly powerful AT and T was at the time. Like,
imagine one company having complete control over the Internet in
the United States. Yeah, like that that gives you an
idea of like how powerful AT and T was. So
when they decided they were going to set up their
own internal surveillance program and then take it to the Feds.
(41:23):
They were fully aware that the Feds would totally play
ball and wouldn't be like, uh, what did you just do. Instead,
they'd be like, oh, yeah, we better go get these
laws passed to make sure that what you did was
legal retroactively. And then at the same time, let's go
get those phone freakers, because they really were costing at
and T money. I saw an estimate in the mid
(41:43):
seventies they were losing thirty million a year, which is
like one hundred and seventy five million today just a
phone freaking. Again, that's how expensive long distance was. It
wasn't just your parents, Chuck. Any sane person with a
job and a phone would know you don't call long
disas since on your phone. No, you just didn't do it.
Speaker 2 (42:05):
No, it'd have to be you remember the calls like
your parents would have to make to like the in
laws of their parents or something, and then like how
short they would keep stuff.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
Hey, how are you doing her? Fine? Okay?
Speaker 2 (42:16):
Bye, yeah, yeah, everything's good, everything's good. We'll be there
next week Tuesday, Tuesday. The maybe most shocking fact of
this whole episode to me is the fact that the
last circuit that could be blue boxed in the United
States was disconnected two thousand and six. Yeah, in rural Minnesota,
(42:36):
they still had one circuit that was that you could
blue box your way in. But they had been you know,
largely eliminated in the in the nineteen seventies and then
into the eight or I guess into the eighties really,
and you know, kind of with that phone freaking there
was no incentive anymore. Now that when you know, when
the Internet certainly came along and you could just talk
(42:58):
to anyone anywhere at any time, there was no incentive
to do any sort of long distance hacking. And it
was just a moment in time basically where this thing
was allowed to exist, and it existed because of particular
equipment that then went the way of the DODO. But
like you said, it went, it went. They handed the
baton right off to internet hacking, and it was a
(43:19):
pretty seamless, uh you know, transition.
Speaker 1 (43:22):
Yeah, absolutely, Like they would literally, just like Matthew Broderick did,
take their phone and connect it to their computer through
what's called an acoustic coupler, which basically was like whatever
tone your phone made, it did it into the computer
through that coupler. And again they were like dialing numbers
to find interesting numbers or to find other people's motives
so they could hack into it. So it's yeah, it's
(43:43):
perfect word. It was a seamless transition to computer hacking.
But it's not like that's all that people did from
that point on was everything everything to do with the
Internet and computers. Freaking as far as like phone. Interest
in phones and phone networks still continues still today and
it's gotten. If it was illegal before, it's eye poppingly illegal.
(44:05):
The kind of phone freaking that people are doing today.
Speaker 2 (44:07):
Yeah, like cell phone hacking and stuff like that.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
Yeah, spoofing a cell tower to intercept phone calls and
then decoding them so you can eavesdrop in on people's
sell conversations. Like, Yeah, there was a I think a
do you remember was it a Wired article I sent
you from I think twenty ten that chronicles some some
like a conference where a group was like, hey, get
(44:31):
this for fifteen hundred dollars and parts you can get
from the internet. You can make a spoofed cell tower
and intercept calls. And this was twenty ten, so you
could probably make one for ten bucks in five minutes
now or buy it for ten bucks on the Internet.
It's just amazing what they're doing now. It's interesting that
(44:51):
it still has to do with the phone. It's not
just computer base. It's there's still interest in messing with
phone networks.
Speaker 2 (44:59):
Oh yeah, I believe we've even talked about on the
show that thing where you'll get a call on your
cell phone that says like American Express incoming call, and
it's not, it's it's someone has I can't remember what
they called it, because we ended up it happened to
us and we ended up talking to American Express and so,
and now that's called whatever. Not masking or maybe it
was masking when they can just basically create, you know,
(45:22):
originate a call saying it's from you, and all of
a sudden, you're you know, talking about your account details
and stuff like that.
Speaker 1 (45:28):
Oh man, yes, social engineering.
Speaker 2 (45:33):
No, I just mean, like, you know, a phone call
coming in that's saying it's from American Express, but it's not.
Speaker 1 (45:38):
It's from a thief, right, and they're trying to get
your credit info right so they can go off and
make their own card and charge it to you.
Speaker 2 (45:46):
I guess. So. I mean, some.
Speaker 1 (45:48):
People try so hard at such bad things.
Speaker 2 (45:51):
I know, we've talked about it before. Put that energy
toward just good upstanding legal hard work and you could
probably make money. Yeah you know, yeah, old.
Speaker 1 (46:01):
Man, here, you got anything else?
Speaker 2 (46:04):
I got nothing else. Big thanks to Kyle, Welcome aboard,
great job.
Speaker 1 (46:08):
Yeah, way to go, Kyle. And we both said congratulations
a Kyle and thanks, which means obviously we've just triggered
listener mail.
Speaker 2 (46:18):
Yeah, this is just short and sweet. When I couldn't
think of that word in the widow episode, I think
we have the word. Hey, guys, was listening to Widowhood,
Chuck couldn't bring to mind a word for when you
come to a conclusion based on your own experience, and
I started freaking out with an F not a pH,
because I can never bring that same word to mind either.
(46:39):
It's so bad that I actually asked my wife quite often, Hey,
what's that word I can never remember? And she just
says anecdotally, Oh, yeah, so that was a word. I'm
guessing that's the word you were looking for, Chuck. I've
tried different ways to get the word to stick in
my mind, but nothing is worked. I bet somewhere out
there someone to study this, and there's a podcast episode
because I think. I think everyone has weird words. They
(47:02):
either can never spell correctly or remember it's it's kind
of a weird phenomenon.
Speaker 1 (47:07):
Yeah. I have a breed of warm season grass right
now at my house, and I cannot, for the life
of me remember the kind.
Speaker 2 (47:15):
It is Zoysia.
Speaker 1 (47:16):
It's not zoysa, something else, crab grass grass. I looked
it up. No, that's cool season. I looked up all
different kinds of southern turf grass. It's warm season. It's
not listed. I don't know what's going on. It forms
like a thick carpet of grass. It's so pretty.
Speaker 2 (47:36):
I bet someone I'll let you know.
Speaker 1 (47:38):
Yeah, I guess so. I would love it if they did.
Speaker 2 (47:41):
Well. As long as you got an inch of staining water,
it doesn't matter. It's going to grow.
Speaker 1 (47:44):
It's a quarter inch. Let's not be preposterous, all right.
Speaker 2 (47:47):
That was from Joel Dawson.
Speaker 1 (47:49):
Thanks a lot, Joel, And again thanks a lot, Kyle.
And if you want to be like Joel, you can
send us an email too. Send it off to stuff
podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is
a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (48:05):
For more podcasts my Heeart Radio visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck
and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you should know.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
That's right. Can can we can you do your little
trumpet sound announcement? Trumpet?
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Yeah? Are you ready?
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Huh?
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Sorry? No, hold on.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
There we go. Yeah, we want to announce the a
new writer that we have working with us, and welcome
aboard Kyle Hookstra and everybody. We have just classed up
this joint, Yeah, we have because Kyle is British and
he lives there. He's not like some some dumb British
(00:56):
dude living in you know, Waco, Texas, or.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Some American living in Great Britain. This guy is like
legit brit that's right.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
He lives in Brighton and we gave him a test
article and this was it. He did such a good job.
We were like, hey, this thing's great and welcome aboard
and he was interested and so it seems like the
beginning of a new great relationship.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Yeah, agreed, So welcome aboard, Kyle, and thanks for this one.
I'm excited about this and this, Chuck, if you'll remember
came up from the whistling episode. Do you remember that?
Speaker 2 (01:32):
Did you mention this?
Speaker 1 (01:35):
I know one thing that Anna had turned up and
kind of included as a sidebar was how capt'n crunch
Whistle had been used to basically hack the phone system.
And I've been wanting to do an episode on phae
freaking forever and it just so happened that reminded me,
And here we are now we ask Kyle to do it,
and this is our episode on phone freaking.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
That you've been waiting for freaking ever to do. Yeah, yeah,
with a pH both ways. Actually, yeah, I mean, I
guess we should introduce what we're talking about here, because
this is something that if you're, oh, maybe have a
certain age, you might not know what this is. And
I'm of that certain age that should know, but I
(02:20):
didn't really know much about it, to be honest. But
we're talking about the fact that in the nineteen fifties,
well before that, let's.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
Say you're not of that certain age, in.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
Our lifetime, uh huh right, pre computers, Yeah, we were
all still connected via something called the telephone system. And
in the United States, the telephone system was It's how
humans connected before the Internet, and it was a big
interconnected system that was manually operated by switchboards, which we
should totally do a switchboard episode at some point.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Yeah, it was very really interesting.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
But they started to get rid of the switchboard operators
in the nineteen fifties for automatic switches. And the one
thing they didn't think about was the fact that they
had a bit of a design flaw or a weakness
in this system, whereas the tones they use to let
the automatic system know like what to do with a
(03:20):
telephone call, could be mimicked and replicated with sometimes a
human voice, sometimes a toy whistle like you said, or
something that somebody made to essentially hack into the phone
system by replicating those tones. And AT and T was like, oh,
we never thought that anyone would be interested in doing that.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Yeah, that was an outstanding introduction man.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
And it's called phone freaking phph Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
And so phone freakers were pretty much the earliest examples
of hackers. They were free computer hacker culture. As a
matter of fact, hacking just grew essentially right out of
phone freaking and a lot of the phone freaks who
were kind of on the whole jam in the early
eighties just made the leap to computers through phones. It's
(04:11):
pretty interesting, as we'll see. But there's one thing we
should say about them as a community. Phone freakers were
curious individuals. Like they were technical minded types. They wanted
to see how this vast, huge connected network worked, and
(04:32):
they knew very well that there were whole, huge parts
of it that were shielded from public view. You weren't
meant to know about this. You didn't need to know
about it. Just go in and punch the phone number
and we'll connect it for you. That wasn't enough. They
wanted to know everything there was to know about it.
And one way that you can find out how something
works is to try to break it, and that was
kind of what they were doing. They weren't doing it
(04:53):
maliciously for almost exclusively, They weren't doing it maliciously. They
were doing it out of curiosity.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
Yeah, and it sort of reminded me a little bit
of like ham radio operators, where like the victory of
a like a win for a phone freaker was like,
oh my god, I connected with someone through the back
door in another country and was able to talk to them.
(05:20):
And yeah, maybe some people took advantage of like free
long distance and stuff like that. But like you said,
I think as a whole the community was just like
those were the wins, like, oh my god, I was
able to do this thing. How cool?
Speaker 1 (05:33):
Right, So let's kind of start at the beginning, shall we,
because freaking did not exist prior to the fifties or
sixties when they introduced automatic switches. Which is a little
aside about the switches. The guy who invented him actually
invented him in the nineteenth century. He was a mortician
who his competition, the across town mortician rival. That guy's
(05:59):
wife was the operators, so when somebody called to ask
for a mortician, she automatically connected them to her husband's business,
not this guy's business. So he actually went out of
his way to invent an automatic switch to replace human operators,
and decades later they finally came into into play. But
you couldn't have done this before when somebody was like
(06:19):
connecting the call for you, because if you just started
whistling in their ear something like that, they'd be like,
what are you doing? This isn't this is really bizarre.
I'm not going to connect this call. It was once
it became automated that it became possible.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Yeah, I mean, did they even have dial tones with
switchboard operators?
Speaker 1 (06:35):
I don't believe, so, I don't see why you would.
I think when they converted to automatic switches, they adopted
something called multi frequency tones, and it was all where
you had a tone, like you pressed a one and
it made a certain tone actually a combination of tones,
hence the multi frequency thing, and it told this this network,
(06:55):
turn this gear or this dial and everyone knows. I
don't know what I'm talking about with gear, but there
were gears involved, and things like actually would move somewhere
in space because a tone told it to. That's that's
kind of what they brought online in the fifties and sixties.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
So if someone whistled at a switchboard operator, they would
be from the.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Future because so yeah kind of, or else they'd be fresh.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
Yeah, they'd be fresh because they like a wolf whistle
or something.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Mm hm.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
So let's talk about phones for a second, because when
we talk about these tones, we largely think of like
a push button telephone, which is what we use starting geez,
I'm not even really sure. But they replaced the rotary phones,
not replaced. They worked alongside for many years. We had
both for a long time in my house. Yeah, but
(07:47):
the button on the phone isn't exactly a key to
the system operating. The only thing the phone would do
was create that tone. The tone was what mattered. It
did get me wondering, like, well, how the heck does
the rotary phone even work? And this is just a
slight aside, but I never knew how that operated. And
the way a rotary phone would work was you would
(08:07):
dial the number around and that part didn't really matter.
It was the return back into position that sent this
that would engage basically these electrical contacts to interrupt the
electrical continuity. So a nine would go bup up, up, up, up, up,
up up up, and it would interrupt at nine different
(08:27):
times and sending a signal saying, hey, this is a nine,
dumb dumb. And I never knew how that worked, so
I thought that was pretty fascinating. But as far as
the push button phone, you would just press a button,
it would have a tone assigned to it. And it's
those tones that freaks were able to replicate to essentially
fool the phone company into thinking that somebody was pressing
(08:48):
a button, and in some case cases they were, which
we'll talk about and.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
Just knowing that you could trick the system into dialing
something for you just by whistles or making tones, not
using your phone. That's fun in and of itself, but
there's a really good example of like how this could
be put to use in a way that was like, oh, okay,
this is no longer legal. You're actually you're you're you're
(09:13):
actually hijacking the phone system for your own ends, and
this is the basis of freaking. There was a there
was a tone that was instrumental to this whole multi
frequency tone system, and it was that I think the
minor e. It was that that resonates at twenty six
hundred hertz. Okay, so whatever sound cycles at twenty six
(09:37):
hundred cycles per second, that tone would tell the phone
company that your phone was on the hook. When when
your phone stopped making that sound, when your line stopped
making that twenty six hundred hertz sound, all of a sudden,
the phone system was like, oh, okay, this guy wants
a connection somewhere. Let's go pay attention to what's going
on here. So let's say you started dialing them, and
(10:00):
you dial the eight hundred number. Your phone stopped making
that twenty six hundred hurt sound, and the phone company's
attention was grabbed by that. And you dial this eight
hundred number and it would start to connect to you,
and because it was an eight hundred number, the system
would be like, Okay, we're connecting this, but we're not
going to charge this person for this call because this
(10:20):
is a toll free number. And then before the other
person on the other line could pick up, you would
blow that. You would make a twenty six hundred hurtz
tone and that told the phone system you had hung up,
but you hadn't actually hung up. And now the line
was open for you to dial any number you wanted
to anywhere in the world toll free, because as far
(10:41):
as the system was concerned, you were still calling a
toll free number even though you were calling any number
you wanted. And now you can make long distance phone
calls for free at a time when they were really
really expensive.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
That's right. And these were enabled by what we're called
trunk lines. So if you think about whatever city you
live in, depending on the size of your city, you
would have I guess if you lived in a small
up town, you probably just had one office. But if
your city was large enough, you had multiple offices where
these calls were connected. Basically, so if you lived in
(11:16):
like one neighborhood in Dallas, Texas, and you were calling
a neighborhood, you know, ten fifteen miles away in Dallas, Texas,
there would be another office there in that neighborhood or
that area or region or whatever, and they were all
connected by trunk lines, like hundreds to thousands of these things,
depending on how big your town was, because each one
(11:37):
of these could only handle one call at a time,
So the trunkline line was basically just a medium to
carry your vote, carry your voice locally from one place
to the other. And we both said there was only
one that could be going at once. That's why there
were thousands of these things. And if you were able
to replicate that tone, then you could, you know, have
(12:00):
some good, clean fun.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
Yeah. And trunk lines were also the way that you
died long distance because they could connect like different parts
of a town. They could also connect one city to
another and so on and so forth. And so the
people who figured this out that you could you could
hijack the phone system by trying out different tones and
doing different things were just socked in immediately and just
began experimenting, started meeting one another, sometimes by happenstance on
(12:26):
a phone line that they just happened to try out
and there was some other freak hanging out on it.
It just was immediately infectious to their to their curiosity
that you just wanted to figure out how this could
work and what all you could make this phone system
do by replicating these tones.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
I think that's a pretty good setup, my friend.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
I agree. You want to take a break, then, yeah, let's.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
Take a break and we'll come back and talk about
who some of these first freakers were right after this,
(13:21):
all right, so we promised to talk about some early freakers.
One was a guy in the nineteen fifties, so you know,
this started pretty early on. If you think about early
hacking and like what led to hacking starting in the
nineteen fifties, it's pretty mind blowing. But one guy was
Joe and Grecia, and he was a blind man who
(13:42):
did not use a captain crunch whistle because that was
before they had captain crunch whistles. He whistled with his
mouth and was able to he had perfect pitch and
was able to emit somehow because it's not the easiest
tone to hit. And if you've ever heard it, series
that twenty six hundred hurts signal and he, you know,
(14:02):
he would whistle into the phone to do this. Other
people use, usually not their own human voice, but different things,
like I believe the Captain Crunch Cereal was in the
nineteen sixties. You can go on YouTube and see people
that have these little whistles demonstrating how it works and everything.
But this was sort of the idea early in the
nineteen fifties and sixties with these.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
People, right, So, I think the guy who came up
with the guy who's credited with figuring out the cap'n
Crunch serial whistle, it's like a boatswain's whistle like that,
you know that that whistle you know on Star Trek
when they blow the whistle to get everybody's attention.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
I'd never seen Star Trek.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
Well, anybody who's seen Star Trek, the original one knows
what we're talking about. That's a boatswain's whistle. And so
like the cap'n Crunch whistle would if you covered up
one hole, it would make a perfect twenty six hundred
hertz tone and Apparently the guy who came up with that,
who figured that out, took the handle Captain Crunch. That
was his freaker handle, but his real name was Draper.
Speaker 2 (15:01):
Right, I believe cap'n Crunch. I saw it.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
Both ways, really, yeah, I saw more often than not
captain like fully fully spelled out. I guess he was himself.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Yeah, oh okay, yeah, I thought you just were saying
it as a serial.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
No, no, no, that was his that was his handle.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
No, no, no, I know, but he took it from the Cereal.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
Sure, sure, yeah. I didn't think it was a coincidence.
What was his first name, Draper?
Speaker 2 (15:29):
Uh?
Speaker 1 (15:31):
Dave, Yeah, David Draper.
Speaker 2 (15:33):
No, no, no, John John. I think it was John
because I watched videos of him and every time it
sounded like he was saying Don Draper for Madman. So
it was very confusing.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
Okay, So so John he was the one who was
credited with figuring that out. He was a legendary early
phone freaker.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
Yeah, and he still has videos and we'll talk about
a little bit more about him later on. But uh,
like I said, most people did not use their voice.
They would use like that whistle or they started building devices.
They were called blue boxes, and they all look different
because they were all homemade. But you know, if you
look up blue box online, there are all kinds of
(16:15):
you know, it basically looks like a a phone without
the talking ends. It's just like a box, usually with
punch button numbers like you would see on a phone.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
Yes, or if if you were a Bond villain in
maybe a sixties Bond movie, Yeah, and you wanted to
remotely blow something up, it looks like the kind of
thing you'd pull an antenna out of, impress a series
of numbers on it, and something would explode, and then
you'd very calmly put the antenna back in and walk away. Yeah,
(16:49):
except scratch the antenna right, Not in the blue box,
just in this Bond idea. Yeah, there's also a red box.
There are a ton of different boxes. Like by the
end of all this, people had figured out all sorts
of different devices to make phones do all sorts of things,
and they all had different colors. But the other, the
other two big ones where the red box, which was
(17:12):
a blue box but had the added capacity of creating
the tones that told the phone system that this payphone
had just accepted a quarter or a dime at the time,
and now you can go ahead and connect the call
even though no one had put a dime in. It
had just mimicked that tone. Then the black box made
it interrupted like the DC signal to your phone, to
(17:35):
make it seem like you had never picked up a call,
so the person calling you long distance would never be
charged for it even though you're sitting there talking. Those
are the three big ones, Blue, red, and black.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
Yeah, and the red one is actually super cool because
you know, if you came along after payphones were around,
you didn't have to put in like if you had
other coins that would equal a dime. Let's say, oh,
I don't know two nickels. Sure, you could put two
nickels in, and a nickel created a specific tone, a
(18:05):
dime created a specific tone, and a quarter created one.
So the red box was able to mimic each of
these coins to recreate the tone it made when you
you know, because those little paper ones were smart. They
they knew what you were dropping in there. They were
so smart, and they would sing that song lussly.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
So the whole thing that all these were based on,
again was this multi frequency tone system. And it turns
out that there were six master tones to the whole
thing that if you knew these tones, you could basically
make the phone system do anything you wanted. And they
were made up of twelve individual tones, and so, for example,
(18:46):
if you wanted to mimic the number one, you had
to make the sound of seven hundred hertz and nine
hundred herts at the same time, and that would be
as far as the phone system is concerned. If it
heard that, it would say, oh, okay, one, I mean,
I'm pressing one for this guy. And the whole thing
is predicated on a mistake that somebody made at Bell,
(19:08):
which we haven't said this, but this is kind of
important too. At the time AT and T was known
as mob Bell, it had essentially a monopoly on the
phone system in.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
The United States, exactly like it.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
Was the phone company for the entire country. And because
it was so this one big monstrous thing, if you
figured out how to mess with AT and T, you
figured out how to hijack the entire phone system. That
was one thing. But the point of that is that
some AT and T engineer wrote an article in a
technical journal in the fifties and they included what those
(19:46):
master tones were made of. In the article, and that
gave way to the basis of all those blue boxes
and black boxes and red boxes that were made later.
Had that article never been published, freaking might have never
really taken off. It would probably been a pastime for
people with who had a captain crunch whistle or perfect
pitch and could whistle things themselves.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
I don't know. I bet you nerds prevail.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
For sure, but I mean it would have taken those
like hardcore people like Joe and Grecia who figured it
out on their own, just in trial and error over years.
This was here's here's a blue box, and here's how
you use it. And that's how a lot of people
got into freaking who wouldn't wouldn't have otherwise been pulled
into it because it would have been too hard.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
I think it's sped up the timeline for sure, for sure.
And like we said, people were, you know, the win
was making a call working around the phone company for
a long distance call. Sometimes they would get into pranking
a little bit, like they could figure out how to
hack into the the loud speakers at a mall and
make announcements. That was one pretty famous prank call in
(20:56):
Santa Barbara in nineteen seventy four when they they had
they basically took advantage of a bug called simultaneous seizure,
where two calls at the same time would jam ups
the switching equipment in the office and you could hijack
calls coming into like a city. So people two guys
got you know, from La Got. I guess they got
(21:19):
arrested for doing this, it says they. I'm not sure
if they served jail time or not, but they essentially
were able to any call coming into Santa Barbara. They
would route it to a voice saying that Santa Barbara
had been destroyed by a nuclear bomb, and it kind
of got out of a hand, like people called emergency services,
and you know, they found out what was going on, obviously,
(21:42):
but just you know, sort of that was about as
harmful as it got, unless you count stealing long distance.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
Yeah, and stealing long distance was a favorite of the mafia.
They were a big time into phone freaking, and they
weren't the kind who would just sit there and you know,
try out whistling different tones for years on end. They
got into it through blue and black and red boxes.
And the reason why is because their bookies would be
taking calls from all over the country. And I think
(22:10):
I said earlier that that long distance was expensive at
the time, it was so expensive. Click Americana, which is
a great, great website. They found an old Bell ad
from nineteen sixty five that boasts the low price of
twelve dollars for your first three minutes for long distance
(22:30):
in nineteen sixty five dollars. Yeah, that's like one hundred
and eighteen dollars today for three minutes of long distance.
It's insane, and it very quickly as after they introduced
the automatic switches, their costs dropped very quickly, so by
nineteen seventy it was down to probably twenty bucks for
three minutes. But still that's a lot of money. And
(22:51):
if you're a bookie taking long distance calls all night long,
all day long, that adds up. So of course you
want to start using blue boxes. So the mafia got
heavy into it too.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
Wait, how much did you say it was at first
for three minutes?
Speaker 1 (23:03):
Twelve dollars for three minutes, and according to Westig, there'd
be one hundred and eighteen dollars today.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
Oh okay, so you went on the cause you said
it went down to twenty dollars.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
That was conversion wise, no, from nineteen sixty five to
about nineteen seventy, and just that five years it dropped
that dramatically.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
From twelve to twenty No, no.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
No, sorry, yes, you're right, from in twenty twenty three dollars.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
Oh okay, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
I wanted to make that as confusing as possible, So
that's why I chose that.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
Well. I mean, I remember even in the nineteen eighties
when I would meet a girl at church camp that
lived in another place and come home and want to
communicate with my little church camp crush, and my parents
would be like, yeah, I forget about it, Like you're
not dialing along, You're not calling this girl a long
distance meet a local girl. What's wrong with you?
Speaker 1 (23:53):
It was a big, big deal. Like I remember, early
cell phones used to charge you long distance, and then
when all of a sudden, it was like that just
went away. It was like a different world almost.
Speaker 2 (24:05):
Yeah, totally. So computers came around. Obviously, everything changed after
computers came around the nineteen eighties, because you could all
of a sudden design a program that could generate tones,
like specifically for what you needed. If everyone or if
anyone saw the movie Wargames, which we've talked about quite
(24:27):
a few times on the show because it's one of
the show favorites, But that had a couple of examples
of phone freaking. When Matthew Broderick dialed into the school
system at Beginning to change Ali Sheety's grades, he used
a technique called war dialing. That's when you're just like us,
a computer to auto dial, just like hundreds and thousands
(24:49):
of numbers, scanning for a vulnerability, or in this case,
he was scanning for his own school line to hack into. Right,
And then I know we did talk about this in
an episode, but the little payphone hack that he tried
apparently is not a real thing and was just made
up for the movie, Isn't that right?
Speaker 1 (25:07):
Yeah, but it does. It definitely gets across the concept
of a red box, like you could do that, you
just couldn't do it the way he did it. But
it also kind of got across a little bit the
concept of the black box, which would kind of short
the circuit, which is what he was doing. So it
was a little confused, but it certainly got like a
lot of people interested in hacking, and it also scared
(25:27):
the pants off of Ronald Reagan, which you might say,
who cares the problem was At the time, Ronald Reagan
was the President of the United States. And there's a
guy named Fred Kaplan who wrote a book about a
history of cyber war called Dark Territory. And apparently Reagan
saw this film was so freaked out by it that
he got the Joint Chiefs together and was like, can
(25:49):
this happen? Somebody go find out. And the chairman of
the Joint Chiefs, a guy named General John Vessy, went
and investigated and came back and he said, quote, President,
the problem is much worse than you think. And so
three years after Wargames came out, Congress passed basically an
anti Wargames scary movie law.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
That's right, they did. It was called the Computer Fraud
and Abuse Act, And you know, seemingly came out of
watching the movie Wargames.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
Isn't that nuts?
Speaker 2 (26:23):
Pretty crazy?
Speaker 1 (26:25):
So let's go back a little bit and talk about
some of the freaks. We've kind of covered some of them,
like Joe and Grecia. His handle was Joy Bubbles. There
was also Captain Crunch John Draper. Like you said, these
guys were like freaking at the time when it was
it was like a I guess, a golden age, chuck,
(26:49):
There's only one way to put it. I was trying
to avoid it. But it was a golden age of freaking.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
We love our golden ages. Yeah, And you know, as
far as these people were, they were they were who
the hackers in it. They were kind of early techies.
They were kind of nerds. Usually they were into you know,
some of them maybe have been into kind of disruption.
I think, like we said, most of the time, it
(27:14):
was just sort of good natured, but there were definitely
those that were like, hey, fight the man. We have
this monopoly, this controlling the phone system. Let's see if
we can poke the bear a little bit. So, you know,
they were and they're doing a little bit of that
as well. But like we said, generally good natured stuff.
I think we should mention that that draper later on
(27:39):
had allegation the sexual assault that emerged and he was
banned from different conferences starting in like the twenty tens.
So he's a pretty divisive guy. So it's not like
we're seeing his praises or anything, but he was definitely
like one of the first kind of famous freakers largely
(28:00):
because of this Esquire magazine article in nineteen seventy one
called Secrets of the Little Blue Box, where a guy
named Ron Rosenbaum wrote this really long form, detailed, pretty
great article about phone freaking which not only put a
spotlight on people like Captain Crunch, but put a spotlight
and created more phone freakers because people read it and
(28:21):
were like, I got to get out on this thing. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
It's usually in the top ten twenty at most of
Greatest Magazine Articles of All Times lists. It's a really
good article. But one of the things when people write
about it that they like to point out is it's
the definitive history of phone freaking up to that point.
But then it also serves as a pivotal point because
(28:44):
it helped make history because it introduced phone freaking to
like a whole bunch of other people who were totally
interested in that but just hadn't heard of it before.
And one of the reasons why that happened is because
he gave just enough technical information for how to do it,
but left out some of the more gory details. But
(29:07):
it was it was tantalizing enough that if you were
interested and motivated, you could go fill in the blanks
and figure out how to do it. And it turned out,
in fact that the guys who founded Apple, Steve Wozniak
and Steve Jobs, were two people who read this thing
and went and figured it out themselves.
Speaker 2 (29:26):
Yeah, they got into phone freaking. They built boxes, They
built and sold digital blue boxes, and Steve Wozniak, out
of all the circuitry he built as the wizard behind Apple,
he said that that digital blue box circuit was the
one that he was most proud of. They actually met
(29:48):
the captain, Crunch Guy, met mister Draper and they you know,
they were part of that community for a little while.
They sold them for about one hundred and seventy two
bucks in the early nineteen seventies, which is a lot
of money in today dollars. Uh So it was a
lot of money back then. They were never busted. Apparently
they were. Some cops came around when Steve jobs car
(30:08):
broke down one time and they were caught with a
blue box, but was was able to convince them that
it was a synthesizer to play music on in the
copway right. Wok, He sounds good to me.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
So U was the next handle freaker handle was Berkeley Blue,
and Steve Jobs handle was of Tobar, which I think
prefigured Dungeons and Dragons. That's a pretty good I guess
fighter's name.
Speaker 2 (30:36):
Oh is that a D and D reff?
Speaker 1 (30:38):
Yeah, Dungeons and Dragons.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
No, But is that oaf Tobar from D and D.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
I think it's a good name for a D and
D characters.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
What Oh, I got you and there link somehow?
Speaker 1 (30:51):
No. No, but it just screams D and D to me.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
Yeah. I didn't play D and D, so I'm just
lost here.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
I loved it. There's one other quote too, from the
I guess Steve Jobs who said that without blue boxes,
the blue boxes that he and Wosneak came together to make,
there would be no Apple. That was like their first
venture together.
Speaker 2 (31:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
That showed them that they could work well together, and
they went on to found Apple after they did this
little blue box tint. That's pretty crazy, very crazy.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
Another thing that emerged around this time was something called
a beep line, which I had never heard of these
and this is something that I probably should have known about.
But when you would call somebody back in the day
and that person was on the phone and let's say
they didn't have call waiting, or call waiting wasn't invented
at the time, maybe or they couldn't afford it, like
(31:40):
we couldn't. You would get a busy signal. But here's
the thing. That busy signal that you were dealt didn't
mean that your voice path was shut off like you
were still if you sat there on that busy signal
line and didn't hang up, and maybe this is how
people found out about it. Eventually, if you around long enough,
(32:00):
you would get someone else on that same busy signal
line that had been you know, denied a phone call
in some other town. And if those people were teenagers,
they realize it was sort of the beginnings of like
a party line where you could be like, hey, and
you're talking over this busy signal, mind you, So while
this thing is going beep beep, I'm going, hey, this
(32:23):
is Chuck. I live in Stone Mountain, Georgia, Like where
are you? And oh, I'm Angela. I live in Dallas, Texas.
And then you strike up a conversation and you're having
some good, clean, teenage fun making connections talking to people
you ordinarily would never meet. And beep lines were very
popular in the nineteen sixties and seventies.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
Yeah, there's a Time article from I think nineteen sixty
one that interviews the guy who ran I think the
Fall River, Massachusetts or somewhere in Massachusetts their telephone company
or station, and that there was a radio station whose
beepline was like the place to call into and when
this team call them in a like a regional magazine
(33:05):
published something on it, calls jump from fifteen hundred to
twenty seven twenty eight thousand in a week, So they
were very popular. And apparently once you could shout your
number to somebody you were trying to talk to over
the busy signal, but when you actually could talk like
normal people on the phone, it was just never as fun.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
Well it's funny. I mentioned, like maybe that's how people
found out, as they just stayed on that line. But
it seems like radio stations is where they actually found
out about these things, because you would call in to win,
to be the fifth caller or whatever to win concert tickets,
and almost always you would get that busy signal and
so many people are calling in that they would find
(33:46):
each other on these busy signal lines and figured it out. Hey,
wait a minute, this is a thing.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
Yeah, because usually when you got a busy signal, you
just you wouldn't make a sound, you wouldn't try to talk,
and you just hang up immediately. But if apparently that's
just how the phone lines worked. If you talked, you
could hear somebody else talking back at you. It was
just like you said, you had to shout over the
busy signal.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
I talked. I don't know why I never found this out,
because every time I got a busy signal, I'd be like, Hello,
what is this? Is someone there?
Speaker 1 (34:15):
Really? Really?
Speaker 2 (34:19):
No? Okay, look we switch switching up roles here.
Speaker 1 (34:23):
What was your favorite phone of all time that you
ever had?
Speaker 2 (34:29):
You know, the first one that jumps to mine? And
I never had. I think later on I was able
to have a phone in my bedroom when I was
like sixteen or seventeen. But previous to that, I very
much remember our very first cordless phone that had the
intenna that you pull out and the cradle that it
sat on, Like I just remember that being a very
big deal because I thought like, wow, we're literally living
(34:51):
in the age of the Jetsons, because I can because
we're unbound by a chord.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
Yeah, I like you. I would have guessed I would
have put a lot of money on you saying the
Sports Illustrated football phone. Then you got with the subscription
back in the eighties, you remember that.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
Yeah, I mean I subscribe forever. But here do you
know what happens? And this used to bother me as
like a thirteen year old is you subscribe and you
get that first thing? And my mom got me a
subscription when I was like ten. Huh, And you never
got any gifts after that, And I used to get
so mad that, like what, only new subscribers get the gift,
Like you should get one every year for being a
(35:26):
loyal subscriber.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
That's a great, great point. Did you email the editors
or sorry, did you write a letter to the editors.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
The Sports Illustrating I don't think so.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
Did your mom hang out by the mailbox and the
month the swimsuit issue came out to intercept it?
Speaker 2 (35:42):
No I did. Oh yeah, that was a very.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
Big disguise yourself as the mailbox.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
Yeah, that was especially for young Baptist boy who thought that,
like you know, playboys were for boting and stuff like that.
That magazine was everything to me.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
Sure, yeah, all right, I think that that's a good
place for a break, don't you.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
Yeah, I'm gonna go think about Christie Brinkley and Carol Alton,
Kathy Ireland, and we'll be right back in a few minutes.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
Okay, all right, So we were talking about the golden
(36:39):
age of freaking that was really kind of the sixties,
mid to late sixties to the mid seventies, probably about
a ten year period where people were figuring out how
to game the international phone network, but before AT and
T could really do anything about it, because I don't
(37:01):
think we said the flaws in these systems, that's what
the systems depended on. It's not like they could go
in and reconfigure something here or there and shut down freakers.
Freakers were exploiting exactly like it would have taken billions
and billions of dollars. And eventually they did do that.
Eventually they did upgrade from electro mechanical to straight up
(37:24):
electrical and then eventually digital switches that aren't fooled by those. Apparently,
the way that they first really made freaking obsolete was
they separated the lines so you could make whistling sounds
into the line. All you wanted that line wasn't accepting
that tone. The one you talked into wasn't the one
(37:44):
that accepted the tones anymore. So that kind of shut
freaking down. But for that ten year period, this amazing
community developed. There was a guy who we have to
shout out. His handle was Mark Burnet, which is based
on a hilarious early proto meme that came out of
the freaking community that's worth looking up. But he went
around all up and down the West Coast with stickers
(38:07):
that he made that said, like wan an interesting phone call,
call this number, and then he would hang out on
this line and talk to people when they called and
try to introduce him to freaking. He was like a
freaking evangelist. Yeah, and it became a thing among some
blind teenagers because there was a guy in Seattle who
(38:27):
called this sticker, the number on the sticker talked to.
Mark Burnets got into it, and then I guess met
a blind teenager that he became friends with, introduced him
to freaking. That teenager went to a summer camp, introduced
his blind friends to freaking. One of them moved east,
went to another summer camp, introduced those kids, and it
spread among like blind teenagers it was like a big deal.
(38:49):
And there's a session, a hangout session that Ron Rosenbaum
chronicled in the Little Blue Box Secrets of the Blue
Box article and of eight kids hanging out in this
one kid's kitchen. I think five of them were blind,
So it's like a really big cool thing among blind
teenagers too. So there's this huge thing that's developing. This
(39:11):
the beginning of hacker cultures developing over this ten year period.
Then at and T steps in and is like, we're
shutting this down. We're losing way too much money.
Speaker 2 (39:20):
Yeah, and you know it was great about our new
friend Kyle's article that he put together for us was
that Carl got right off the bat like that there's
a story element to these episodes, and he nailed it
with this third act reveal, which was this thing was
around for a while, it went away, but the legacy
(39:44):
of it wasn't just these people had fun talking to
each other on beeplines and hacking some free long distance
calls and stuff like that. The legacy of this thing
was what we're going to get to now, which was
the legal aspects of it and legal justifications for recording
(40:05):
phone calls and surveilling phone calls in the United States,
which all came out of AT and T going after
initially those bookies in Miami and Los Angeles that you
talked about. In nineteen sixty six, when the FBI rated
these bookies, they prosecuted one guy, this guy named Kenneth Hannah,
and all of a sudden, there was precedent, there was
(40:27):
legal ground the AT and T had that said we
can go after these hackers. We can charge them with
a crime, in this case, fraud by wire And where
do we find these people, Well, we're going to wire
tap them. And that's what they did. It was an
operation called Green Star. Between sixty four and nineteen seventy.
(40:47):
They tapped about thirty three million phone calls, recorded about
half of those, and the United States later on would
say this is great and just fine.
Speaker 1 (40:58):
Yeah, it really kind of goes to score just how
incredibly powerful AT and T was at the time. Like,
imagine one company having complete control over the Internet in
the United States. Yeah, like that that gives you an
idea of like how powerful AT and T was. So
when they decided they were going to set up their
own internal surveillance program and then take it to the Feds.
(41:23):
They were fully aware that the Feds would totally play
ball and wouldn't be like, uh, what did you just do. Instead,
they'd be like, oh, yeah, we better go get these
laws passed to make sure that what you did was
legal retroactively. And then at the same time, let's go
get those phone freakers, because they really were costing at
and T money. I saw an estimate in the mid
(41:43):
seventies they were losing thirty million a year, which is
like one hundred and seventy five million today just a
phone freaking. Again, that's how expensive long distance was. It
wasn't just your parents, Chuck. Any sane person with a
job and a phone would know you don't call long
disas since on your phone. No, you just didn't do it.
Speaker 2 (42:05):
No, it'd have to be you remember the calls like
your parents would have to make to like the in
laws of their parents or something, and then like how
short they would keep stuff.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
Hey, how are you doing her? Fine? Okay?
Speaker 2 (42:16):
Bye, yeah, yeah, everything's good, everything's good. We'll be there
next week Tuesday, Tuesday. The maybe most shocking fact of
this whole episode to me is the fact that the
last circuit that could be blue boxed in the United
States was disconnected two thousand and six. Yeah, in rural Minnesota,
(42:36):
they still had one circuit that was that you could
blue box your way in. But they had been you know,
largely eliminated in the in the nineteen seventies and then
into the eight or I guess into the eighties really,
and you know, kind of with that phone freaking there
was no incentive anymore. Now that when you know, when
the Internet certainly came along and you could just talk
(42:58):
to anyone anywhere at any time, there was no incentive
to do any sort of long distance hacking. And it
was just a moment in time basically where this thing
was allowed to exist, and it existed because of particular
equipment that then went the way of the DODO. But
like you said, it went, it went. They handed the
baton right off to internet hacking, and it was a
(43:19):
pretty seamless, uh you know, transition.
Speaker 1 (43:22):
Yeah, absolutely, Like they would literally, just like Matthew Broderick did,
take their phone and connect it to their computer through
what's called an acoustic coupler, which basically was like whatever
tone your phone made, it did it into the computer
through that coupler. And again they were like dialing numbers
to find interesting numbers or to find other people's motives
so they could hack into it. So it's yeah, it's
(43:43):
perfect word. It was a seamless transition to computer hacking.
But it's not like that's all that people did from
that point on was everything everything to do with the
Internet and computers. Freaking as far as like phone. Interest
in phones and phone networks still continues still today and
it's gotten. If it was illegal before, it's eye poppingly illegal.
(44:05):
The kind of phone freaking that people are doing today.
Speaker 2 (44:07):
Yeah, like cell phone hacking and stuff like that.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
Yeah, spoofing a cell tower to intercept phone calls and
then decoding them so you can eavesdrop in on people's
sell conversations. Like, Yeah, there was a I think a
do you remember was it a Wired article I sent
you from I think twenty ten that chronicles some some
like a conference where a group was like, hey, get
(44:31):
this for fifteen hundred dollars and parts you can get
from the internet. You can make a spoofed cell tower
and intercept calls. And this was twenty ten, so you
could probably make one for ten bucks in five minutes
now or buy it for ten bucks on the Internet.
It's just amazing what they're doing now. It's interesting that
(44:51):
it still has to do with the phone. It's not
just computer base. It's there's still interest in messing with
phone networks.
Speaker 2 (44:59):
Oh yeah, I believe we've even talked about on the
show that thing where you'll get a call on your
cell phone that says like American Express incoming call, and
it's not, it's it's someone has I can't remember what
they called it, because we ended up it happened to
us and we ended up talking to American Express and so,
and now that's called whatever. Not masking or maybe it
was masking when they can just basically create, you know,
(45:22):
originate a call saying it's from you, and all of
a sudden, you're you know, talking about your account details
and stuff like that.
Speaker 1 (45:28):
Oh man, yes, social engineering.
Speaker 2 (45:33):
No, I just mean, like, you know, a phone call
coming in that's saying it's from American Express, but it's not.
Speaker 1 (45:38):
It's from a thief, right, and they're trying to get
your credit info right so they can go off and
make their own card and charge it to you.
Speaker 2 (45:46):
I guess. So. I mean, some.
Speaker 1 (45:48):
People try so hard at such bad things.
Speaker 2 (45:51):
I know, we've talked about it before. Put that energy
toward just good upstanding legal hard work and you could
probably make money. Yeah you know, yeah, old.
Speaker 1 (46:01):
Man, here, you got anything else?
Speaker 2 (46:04):
I got nothing else. Big thanks to Kyle, Welcome aboard,
great job.
Speaker 1 (46:08):
Yeah, way to go, Kyle. And we both said congratulations
a Kyle and thanks, which means obviously we've just triggered
listener mail.
Speaker 2 (46:18):
Yeah, this is just short and sweet. When I couldn't
think of that word in the widow episode, I think
we have the word. Hey, guys, was listening to Widowhood,
Chuck couldn't bring to mind a word for when you
come to a conclusion based on your own experience, and
I started freaking out with an F not a pH,
because I can never bring that same word to mind either.
(46:39):
It's so bad that I actually asked my wife quite often, Hey,
what's that word I can never remember? And she just
says anecdotally, Oh, yeah, so that was a word. I'm
guessing that's the word you were looking for, Chuck. I've
tried different ways to get the word to stick in
my mind, but nothing is worked. I bet somewhere out
there someone to study this, and there's a podcast episode
because I think. I think everyone has weird words. They
(47:02):
either can never spell correctly or remember it's it's kind
of a weird phenomenon.
Speaker 1 (47:07):
Yeah. I have a breed of warm season grass right
now at my house, and I cannot, for the life
of me remember the kind.
Speaker 2 (47:15):
It is Zoysia.
Speaker 1 (47:16):
It's not zoysa, something else, crab grass grass. I looked
it up. No, that's cool season. I looked up all
different kinds of southern turf grass. It's warm season. It's
not listed. I don't know what's going on. It forms
like a thick carpet of grass. It's so pretty.
Speaker 2 (47:36):
I bet someone I'll let you know.
Speaker 1 (47:38):
Yeah, I guess so. I would love it if they did.
Speaker 2 (47:41):
Well. As long as you got an inch of staining water,
it doesn't matter. It's going to grow.
Speaker 1 (47:44):
It's a quarter inch. Let's not be preposterous, all right.
Speaker 2 (47:47):
That was from Joel Dawson.
Speaker 1 (47:49):
Thanks a lot, Joel, And again thanks a lot, Kyle.
And if you want to be like Joel, you can
send us an email too. Send it off to stuff
podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is
a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (48:05):
For more podcasts my Heeart Radio visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
Show Links
AboutOrder Our BookStoreSYSK ArmyRSSPopular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.