Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [271]
Two innovations lay behind the popularization of telephone piracy in the i96os, which seems to be when it first came to be called phreaking. First, AT&T had recently changed to a new long-distance switching technology known as multiple frequency (MF). MF used audible tones at discrete frequencies as an instruction set to tell the network's switches how to channel each call. The tones were transmitted on the same channel as the telephone conversation itself. Knowing their frequencies, it was therefore possible in principle to blaze a trail through the network simply by playing them into a receiver at the right moments. This was what phreaks sought to do. A few could whistle the required notes, but most used an electronic tone generator, perhaps embedded in a "blue box" device. The phreak simply dialed a free 8o o number and then sent a tone at 2,6oo Hz down the line to trick the exchange into believing that the caller had hung up. "Tandems" (switching devices) in the system emitted this note when they were inactive. Sequences of different tones could then route a call anywhere the network reached-to SouthAmerica, Asia, Europe, or the Soviet Union. From the mid-sixties cassette tapes became the ideal tool for recording and exchanging these tones, making phreaks into natural allies of home tapers.
The difficulty lay in finding those other frequencies, of course. For years, the only way to discover them was by trial and error, or by asking a more experienced explorer. But in 196o a house journal of Bell Labs, the Bell System Technical Journal, published them in an ill-advised moment of scientific openness.2 By coincidence, much the same thing happened a little later in the British Post Office's counterpart journal. Alert readers realized that they had found the equivalent of "open sesame." (That there were amateur readers poring over these abstruse journals, incidentally, confirms that a community already existed.) A legend subsequently arose that Bell Labs tried to recall all the copies of the issue. True or not, it was too late. Following the revelation, phreaking grew into a widespread activity.
As it grew, phreaking developed its own pantheon. Perhaps the most admired member was a blind African American, Joe Engressia (who died in 2007 under the name Joybubbles). Engressia had briefly hit the headlines while a student at the University of South Florida, because he had discovered that he could whistle the crucial MF tones into a receiver with perfect pitch, and thereby maneuver through the network without the need for electronic gizmos. He became the focus of countless urban legends, some ofwhichwere true (or true-ish). It became a rite of passage for phone explorers all over the United States to place a call to him using their homemade MF devices and cassette recorders. He would put them in touch with each other, and so an underground network grew.
Northern California became a major node for this network under the leadership of an ex military technician named John Draper. Draper was one of the many who had been involved in radio before he turned to the telephone system. He had been a radar and radio engineer for the air force, stationed in remote Alaska, where free telephoning proved invaluable. After that he had worked at a variety of technology companies, including Cartrivision, the Palo Alto company that had tried to market a videotape device ahead