Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [270]
PHREAKING
How did the digital world come to be riven between rival conventions of property and responsibility? The answer involves a history extending back beyond the development of digital technology itself, to ideals of science and media that were forged in the days of the radio and telephone trusts.
It also derives from underground practices seen by their proponents as upholding those ideals in the face of industry and monopoly. Take radio. All the principal participants in the making of the home computer either had backgrounds as ham radio aficionados or came from whole families of them (as did Stewart Brand, founder of the first online community, the WELL). Before their experiences at MIT, Stanford, or any of the other canonical sites of the computer revolution, these figures were already acculturated into norms of open access, technical meritocracy, libertarianism, and the sharing of information. These were the values bequeathed to amateur and pirate radio from the 1920s-1930s patent fights against AT&T and the radio trust and, in the UK, from those around the BBC, and identified, thanks to those fights, with science itself. It was consequently easy for those early digerati to see the disputes about openness and property that arose in home computing as disputes of a certain kind, for which precedents existed to suggest the stances they should adopt and the actions they should take.
The case of telephony is even clearer. Independent ("pirate") telephony survived, just as independent radio did. In the late i96os and early 1970s, radicals revived this tradition of expertise. Ripping off Ma Bell took on an added charge for them as a statement of antagonism to the state and to capitalism. Phreaking- telephone network "piracy" -was away to thumb their nose at the iconic leviathan of corporate America.
Nobody seems to know when the hobby began of gaming AT&T's networks. Its conventionally accepted originwas long placed in the late I96os, when the term "phreaking" appeared in the press, and others mentioned MITin the earlypart of that decade. But the practice certainly has a history a lot longer than that. Even before 1900 teenagers were caught fiddling free calls, and later in Al Capone's Chicago gangs would tweak the phone system to register an illicit bookie's line to some harmless householder. Interviews with leading phreaks in the r96os revealed that they had learned the habit earlier, sometimes in the mid-195os-and often in quite uncosmopolitan places too, like Kansas or Mississippi. Britain's Old Bailey had heard a conspiracy trial in 1953 against a London chemical company director who made long-distance calls by tapping the receiver rest. And MIT's phreaking could be tracked back to that decade too, as key Tech phreaks had learned the craft before they ever arrived in Cambridge. In short, the phreaks of the early 1970s were the tip of a historical iceberg. And that is interesting because in the 195os, 1930s, or 189os telephone piracy could not possibly have had the political meaning attributed to it in San Francisco in the Vietnam era. Instead, it starts to look much more like the enterprise of exploration that arose around early radio.1
Telephone piracy was certainly something portrayed by its practitioners in ethical terms long before 1970. They professed to disdain mere mercenary motives. Instead they proclaimed that theywere dedicated to research, and to sharing the insights that resulted from that research. They maintained that the knowledge gained by exploring the network was justification enough for doing so without constraint. That knowledge must, of course, be made openly