Untold stories about teenagers and hackers who cracked Ma Bell

When computers were big and trees were small, all of these smartphones, iPads and tablets, before the days of the Internet or personal computers, a group of technophiles, teenagers, hippies and criminals figured out how to hack the world's largest machine: a telephone system.

The following is a translation of an excerpt from the book “Exploding the Phone,” written by Phil Lapsley, which tells the story of “phone freaks.”

Title photo: Bob Gudgel, Jay Dee Pritchard, and John “Captain Crunch” Draper with a bluebox used to trick the phone system into making free calls during a trip to Duvall, Washington, 1971. Photo by Bob Gudgel.

Blasting phone

Jake Locke (Jake Locke is a pseudonym of course) put down his cup and looked intently at the ad. It was a clear spring day in Cambridge in 1967 in the afternoon. Locke, a student at Harvard University, just got out of bed.

Transplanted from southern Califonia, he did not quite fit into the conservative culture of Harvard. One student told him that he looked like an “angry Californian surfer,” with his black glasses, blond hair, tall and slim.

Now, in the middle of the second year, Locke found that he spends a lot of time to sleep a little longer, he shortens his classes and reads the newspaper to find interesting things. In fact, anything seemed better than going to class.

It was a slow news day. In the Harvard student newspaper, The Crimson, there were no interesting articles, so Locke again found himself reading breakfast announcements. He became something of a connoisseur of these little pieces of poetry — people selling cars looking for roommates, even the occasional personal announcement, which was probably a joke between lovers — all expressed in about a dozen words.

But this announcement was different. He ran it, but after a while it began to annoy him.

WANTED HARVARD MIT Fine Arts no. 13 notebook. (121 pages) & 40 page reply KK & CR plus 2,800; battery; mf El presidente no esta aqui asora, que lastima. B. David Box 11595 St. Louis, MO 63105.

Locke saw similar announcements from students who had lost their notes for a particular course and panicked before passing exams. Announcements of the loss were often placed in Crimson in the hope that some soul would find and return them. Fine Arts 13 was an elementary course in fine arts at Harvard, so it was the same.

But everything else in this ad had no meaning.

Fine Arts 13 was not taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

And what is this gibberish after?

2,800? Battery? Mf, KK, CR? What was there with the Spaniards?

And why did someone from St. Louis, Missouri, run an ad in Cambridge, Massachusetts, looking for a synopsis for a course at Harvard?

Locke watched the ad appear every day for the past few weeks.

Whoever they are, and whatever it is, they clearly wanted this notebook. Why are they so persistent?

There is one way to find out.

Locke searched for a piece of paper and a pen. He wrote: “Dear B. David: I have a notebook. Let's talk. Sincerely, Jake. ” He mailed the letter, heading for Harvard Square, to find something interesting.

A week later, an envelope with a postmark of St. Louis, Missouri appeared in Locke's mailbox. Locke opened the envelope and read a single sheet of paper. Rather, he tried to read it. It was not in English. It seemed to be scribbled by aliens. It was brief, only one paragraph or so. The letters looked familiar, but not enough for him to decipher them.

Locke showed the letter to everyone he saw that day, but no one could read it. Later that evening, when Locke sat at the kitchen table in his dorm room and stared at the letter, trying to solve it, one of his roommates returned home. Shocked that Locke could really do something like homework, his roommate asked what he was working on. Locke handed the letter across the table and talked about it.

His roommate looked at the letter and said: "It looks like Russian."

Locke said, "I also thought about this, but these characters do not seem to be correct."

"Yes. They do not look like. In fact ... ”His roommate’s voice was silent for a moment. "This is actually a mirror letter."

“What?”

“You know, this is a mirror letter. Letters are written in reverse order. See? ”

Locke looked. Of course: in reverse order.

Locke and his roommate went to the mirror and wrote down the inverted inscription. They were Cyrillic - Russian letters. Fortunately, a neighbor, Locke studied Russian. They sat down at the table and translated the message.

“Dear Jake,” the letter said. "Thank you very much for your response. However, I seriously doubt that you have what I need. I would strongly advise you to stay away and not interfere. This is a serious business, you can get into trouble. ” Signed, B. David.

Locke leaned back. Someone put a mysterious ad in the newspaper. He replied. They sent him a letter. In the mirror recording . In Russian . In 1967. In the midst of the Cold War .

Spy network!

Locke realized that things were getting much better. Intriguing. Awful even. And much more cool than going to class.

Locke sent his answer the same day - in English, not in a mirror recording.

“Dear B. David: In fact, I have a notebook, and I would like to talk to you. Regards, Jake. ”

Four days passed before the postman brought a strange letter to Locke, a piece of invitation card folded in half, and sealed on top. The fold line was perforated so that it could be cut in half. This time the letter was written in English.

“Dear Jake, if you have the necessary information, you should be able to fill out the other half of this card and send it back to me. Then we will continue our communication. Yours, B. David. ”

Locke looked at the other half of the postcard. She had a few questions:

• Complete the following sequence: 604, 234, 121, ...
• What does MF mean?
• What equipment is used by students at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology?

BUT?

Over the next few days, Locke spent every waking hour working on postcard issues. The numbers repeated over and over in his head:

604, 234, 121 ...
604, 234, 121 ...
604, 234, 121 ...

604-234-1212.

Phone number?

It was not a reference number of subscribers - Locke knew that then it would have been number 555-1212, - but this one also seemed to be correct. Anyway. He picked up the phone and dialed the number.

After the first ringing tone, a business woman’s voice answered

“Pure cleansing,” she said.

“Excuse me?” Said Locke.

“Pure purification is internal,” the woman repeated this time more distinctly.

Locke hung up. He stared at the phone. Pure cleansing? Interior?

Area code 604, where is it?

The phone book said that this is British Columbia. And where is it located? Western Canada.

Locke looked at his dorm room, found an atlas, and opened a page in British Columbia. He looked at the map. Major cities had names that he learned, names like Vancouver and Prince George. Smaller cities had less familiar names. Type Kamloops, Squamish. Quesnel. Chilanko.

Klena Klin (Kleena Kleene).

At dinner that evening, Lake mentioned his phone call to Steve, another of his roommates.

Steve said, “Yes. It is interesting. My friend Suzy is internal. ”

“What? What is internal? ”Asked Locke.

“This is some kind of special telephone operator. You have to talk to her, she could help you understand what it is. She lives in Revere. Call her."

Locke did it. Suzy explained that the internal is the operator for the operator. When an operator needs help making a call, she calls the internal operator of the city of destination. Then the internal operator brings the call to the local number.

“So, how do I call inside?” Locke asked.

"You can not. Inside there are special phone numbers that only operators can dial. If you want to call the New York domestic operator, then you need to dial something like 212-049-121. Where 121 is the entrance to the inside, 049 is the routing code inside New York, and 212 is the area code for New York. But you cannot dial numbers, for example, 049 or 121 from a regular telephone. ”

“Well,” said Susie, “you have puzzled me. You do not have to do this. I don't know, maybe you discovered a crash. But here's how you can check it out. Call them and ask them to call someone. If they are really inside, they can do it without any problems. ”

“But I don't know anyone in Canada,” said Locke.

"This is normal. Going inside can call anywhere. And we in the telephone company sometimes receive calls from a test telephone switchboard, and make calls to testing sites.
Just tell them you're from the test switch. Be confident in yourself and act as if you know what you are doing, and everything will pass without any problems. ”

"Good. I'll try. Hey, any idea what 'MF' is? "

"Well," answered Susie, "it can be multifrequency (multifrequency)."

“Multifrequency. What is this? ”Asked Locke.

“This is a system that operators use to make calls. This is similar to those tones that are used for button dialing, but it sounds different. ”Lock's touch phone was a dial (with a dial pad, probably), but he knew about touch tone phones — they were introduced by just a few years earlier.

"Good. Hey, thanks, Susie. ”They said goodbye. He hung up.

Locke picked up the phone again and dialed number 604-234-1212. Once again, a female business voice answered.

"Wedge Wedge, internal."

“Hi, wow, yes,” said Locke. “This is a test switch. Could you connect me with 619-374-8491? ”

"One moment". There was a pause. Hissing at long distances became louder. Click. Another pause. Another hiss. One more click. Then beep.

“Hi?” It was his friend Dave in San Diego.

Locke chatted with his friend for a few minutes and then hung up. It seemed to him that he was swimming. It seemed magical. "Act as if you know what you are doing, and everything will pass without any problems."

It worked!

Two open questions. One of them: "What equipment was used by students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology?"

And once again, another roommate came to Locke’s help - fortunately, Locke lived in a hostel and had many roommates. “We're talking about MIT phones and students, right? I remember an article in Crimson about a year ago about some MIT students who had problems playing with the phone. Maybe this is it? "

“Maybe,” said Locke. “But how do I find an old copy of Crimson?”

“Library?” His friend suggested.

It was a test. Previously, Locke was never in the university library.

Locke was surprised to find that it was close to his dorm, and other students seemed to be able to send him there. Soon, Locke turned over page after page of the old Crimson. An hour later, in a release almost a year ago in 1966, he found what he was looking for.

From the translator, here’s this article: Five Students Psych Bell System, Place Free Long Distance Calls :

Five local students, four from Harvard and one from MIT, spent eight months on long-distance and international telephone calls as guests of the Bell System, before they were finally discovered.

The telephone company accepted the news without disappointment, only however, by confiscating the 121-page Fine Arts 13 notebook, which contained records of these “studies” and demanded that they submit a full report, which was 40 pages double-spaced, from what they made.

During the "studies", students discovered one internal operator in Kleena Kleene BC, who could redirect (and redirect) them to any phone in the United States.
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An even more useful internal operator turned out to be the one who was in Mexico City, who linked them with numbers all over the world, including the President of Mexico. However, in the presidential palace, someone said that there is no president. It was 2 in the morning.

However, students also found that they could do without any operators, inside and in other cases, when calling in the United States. They simply had to emit a tone of the correct frequency in the telephone transmitter after dialing the appropriate code to connect to the trunk line.

They also found that musical instruments or even a person’s whistle can activate equipment.

As hypnotized, Locke read the words from the article and various thoughts crossed his mind.

The article also described that it was possible to create an electronic device to control the telephone system for "$ 50 from ordinary electronic components." The article was abruptly cut off, the students were caught in April 1963, when an employee of the telephone company from whom they received information, passed them.

Locke was delighted. Pieces of the mosaic rose in place, and now he had enough information to respond to B. David. But the article was stingy in details. He needed to learn more. He needed to talk to the original students at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Locke recorded the name of the author of the article - a student at Harvard.

The next day, he filled out a response card and threw it on B.David's post. He then called the reporter Crimson to get more detailed information. But the reporter did not help much. He did not know the names of the students at Harvard or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and it turned out that he had received most of his information from an article in the Boston Herald. He then spoke to the Herald reporter to get additional context.

“Didn't the reporter Herald know the names of the students?” Locke asked.

“Oh, of course, but he did not give them to me. And I doubt that he will provide them to you, ”replied the purple reporter.

Returning to the library, Locke dug up an article from the Herald. It described how students at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology called the president of Mexico and gave the name "blue box" - an electronic device that allowed them to hack the telephone network. It was also said that they did not sleep at night, spending eighty hours a week on research, dialing ten thousand numbers for two or three days to find the information they need. It even stated that students were interrogated by FBI agents who thought they were stealing protected secrets.

Locke recognized the telephone number of the newspaper.

"Be confident and act as if you know what you are doing." He took a deep breath, picked up the phone, dialed the "Herald" and asked to connect it to the reporter who wrote the article.
When the reporter answered, Locke politely explained who he was and what he needed.

“This is Special Agent Stevenson from the FBI Boston office. We have a report that there was some kind of new activity related to the incident that occurred several years ago when some students from Harvard and MIT misused the telephone system. We are trying to contact them to talk to them about this, but we do not have current contact information. I saw your article about them a year ago or so. Do you have any of their phone numbers? ”

No problem, replied the reporter. He would be glad to help.

Before Locke could call any of the students, his phone rang. It was B. David, and he wanted to know about the Fine Arts 13 notebook. Oh, yes, this notebook: the one that Locke actually did not have. Locke did his best to keep intrigue. He "admitted" that he was not actually one of the students at Harvard or MIT, but he knew them. He was their friend. He participated in some of their "studies."

B. David frowned. It quickly became apparent that Locke did not know as much as he demanded. As Locke later remarked, "you can only fake things before they begin to collapse." Locke admitted the truth.

Surprisingly, B. David was not angry, and now, when the cat came out of the bag, they had a pleasant conversation. B.David explained that there is an informal network of such enthusiasts like him, and that he tried to contact students at Harvard and MIT to talk with them about their exploits.

“Welcome to our world,” he said. Locke asked for help. B. David replied: “I don’t want to give you too much information. However, I will tell you one thing: find information on automatic telephone exchanges. Select the desired sequence of signals. I'll call you in a few weeks to see how you moved. "

It all seemed exciting to Locke. He called a former student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - now living in Berkeley, California - whose number he got from a reporter at the Herald. The student was quite friendly, but, like B. David, was also reluctant to provide information. A student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology explained that he and his friends were caught and interrogated by the FBI, although they were not actually prosecuted. He stressed that it is not easy for Locke to play with this item and that he should stay away from it all. Locke gave him more information. Finally, an MIT student said to him: “If you really want to learn more, everything you need to know is in the library.”

Great, Locke thought, the third trip to the library.

But which library has the information he was looking for? Some studies led him to a library called the Bell System Technical Journal.

One term that Locke knew to start searching for was “multi-frequency”. According to the journal index, he quickly found an article from the November 1960 issue titled “Alarm Systems for Monitoring Switching Telephone Devices”. The article was technical, but not so technical that Locke could not understand it.

The article details the operation of certain aspects of the telephone system, including multi-frequency signaling. This article, as well as stories from Crimson and the Herald, his conversations with B. David and a former student, M. I. T. gave him everything he needed to get serious about it.

Locke began to spend a lot of time on the phone.

“Look for missing PBXs, look for number patterns,” David told him.

Locke knew that the PBX code was the first three digits of the local telephone number. Conducting a thorough study of the phone book and making a lot of calls, Locke discovered unknown PBXs in the Boston area. When Locke found a PBX, he began to redial all of her phone numbers. All ten thousand.

A few weeks later, Locke had three signs showing his efforts. The first was the indelible black circle around his index finger from the redial. Secondly, there were four very angry roommates: since Locke was constantly on the phone, none of them could make or receive phone calls.

But thirdly, there was a collection of some very interesting telephone numbers. Some of them were unusual test numbers, numbers that made strange beeps, flip flops, clicks and tones.

More interesting were the so-called twin lines. They, as a rule, were free numbers (“Sorry, you called a non-working number ...”), the answering machine’s sound level was very low. All subscribers who called to this number connected to each other, and since the recording of the answering machine was not too loud, people could talk to each other. As a result, such numbers served as primitive conferences at a time when such things were unheard of.

The most valuable thing, however, was that several of the numbers it discovered were inputs to the internal carrier networks in different places.

Locke's obsession grew. He decided that he wanted to build one of these mystical “blue boxes” so that he too could directly manage the telephone network. This meant that he would need to create electronic oscillators, circuits that would create musical tones. But Locke knew nothing about electronics. Finding PBXs and numbers is one thing; The design of electronic circuits was something different. Locke asked his friend to introduce him to a graduate student in the physics department in order to convince him to help him build the oscillator circuitry he needs for his blue box.

“What is it for?” Asked the graduate student.

"Be confident and act as if you know what you are doing."

"I am a senior biologist, and I study the effects of high-frequency sound vibrations on the germination of fruits."

The graduate student was very surprised, but he helped.

Locke began to frequent electronics stores in Cambridge, looking for parts and instructions for assembling his blue box. Soon, he met MIT students at Tech Model Railroad or TMRC, not far from Kendall Square T metro station. TMRC was home to one of the most technically sophisticated railway models in the country, perhaps in the world.

MIT students laid about six hundred feet of the road, imitating a scale of ten miles of railroad among painstakingly made detailed landscapes. Trains were controlled by a fantastically complex switching system based on many principles, such as the telephone network. Indeed, the telephone company donated equipment for the club for this very purpose, and the adviser to the faculty of the club was in charge of the MIT telephone system, so it’s not surprising that the train model operators at TMRC used a phone call to select the train to control.

It was a real breeding ground for telephony enthusiasts.

With the help of more electronically experienced students at MIT and only a few soldering iron burns, Locke was able to assemble his blue box, his “blue box”. By this time, Locke was told that he might have problems using his blue box and that he should be careful. Therefore, Locke was careful - when it was convenient, anyway.

He used his blue box from the phone in his dorm quite a bit, as well as from the houses of friends. As Locke noted, the only thing he did to him was using him to find out how the telephone system worked. He did not even know anyone he would like to call, so he did not save thousands of dollars on free long-distance calls.

And he simply could not imagine that anyone would attend to his activities.

Incredibly, some people have become concerned, Locke learned about this after returning to his room in a hostel in June 1967, only three months after seeing the advertisement for Fine Arts 13 in Crimson. He realized that he had problems from the moment he entered the door: three men were waiting for him.

One of them was an embarrassed head of the hostel, a Harvard professor. Locke did not know the other two, but he noticed that one of them was wearing a coat — strangely, considering that it was a warm summer day.

“You got it, Locke,” said the manager.

Trying to win time, Locke asked, “Who got caught?”.

Locke, on the basis of the reactions of his three visitors, suggested that it was wrong.

“You know what kind of thing we're talking about, Locke,” said one of the men. “Telephone jig. We searched your belongings. ” He lifted Locke's blue box. "We need to talk."

One of his visitors was from the AT & T telephone company.
Another introduced himself as a special agent from the FBI Boston office.
They asked Locke to go to the business part of the city. An FBI agent told him that this is a very serious question, that they have some questions that they would like to receive direct answers to, and that they will arrest him if he does not cooperate.

The next twenty-four hours, Locke was there, which seemed like a scene from a 1940s detective film: an empty room with a wooden table, an armchair for him, two chairs for the investigators and a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. Sitting opposite him, the FBI agent and the security man at the phone company worked hard to make him admit to using the blue box for free phone calls. Despite deadly fear, Locke denied everything. I do not understand what you are talking about, he said.

After several hours of questioning, he finally admitted that yes, the blue box was his, but he used it only to learn about the telephone network. Locke expected them to fry him, how many free calls he made, but his investigators changed direction. , , .
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“By the way,” he said, “I’m not busy this summer. You guys have no open positions? ”