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FIGURE 16.1. The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers try phreaking. A. Hoffman, Steal This Book (New York: Pirate Editions, 1971),137. Reprinted by permission of Gilbert Shelton.

By about 1971 -and in practice well before that-phreaking constituted a self-conscious community that "met" in the virtual space of the network and had global reach. It was, as the anthropologist Christopher Kelty has said of more recent open-source communities, a "recursive" public, in that it solidified around expert interventions in its own basic infrastructure.8 The community ostentatiously embraced the claims of the old radio amateurs to openness and knowledge seeking. They aspired to be, and by training often were, practitioners of science. "Like scientists conducting experiments," itwas said, "the phone phreaks report results to each other." In Britain, evidence of a similar community surfacedwhen the Post Office considered adopting a technology akin to that of the Bell system; a publicspirited Cambridge undergraduate cropped up to warn of its vulnerability. It soon turned out that details of the entire British telephone network had been lodged in Cambridge University's mainframe-evidence that these phreaks were computer adepts. In 1973 an Old Bailey judge, faced with a dockful of such reprobates, remarked that the temptation seemed similar to that of heroin addiction. He acquitted the lot, but only after asking them for the access codes to his local exchange. One of the lucky perps-a recent Oxford physics graduate-went home and wrote the episode up for New Scientist (fig. 16.2).9

The Party Line may have had one unintended consequence that was very significant indeed. That October, phreaks suddenly found themselves in the limelight thanks to an expose published in Esquire. "There is an underground telephone network in this country," the magazine re- vealed.10Journalist Ron Rosenbaum introduced readers to the major contours of the phenomenon, and even interviewed the supposed inventor of the blue box himself-who recalled that he had been "fooling around with phones for several years" before he came across the BSTJ at his university, "a well-known technical school." Rosenbaum hinted at connections to Yippie-style political activism, but did not pursue them, noting Cap'n Crunch's anxiety lest he reveal secrets to a "radical underground" that he claimed was on the verge of learning how to freeze the entire U .S. telephone network. The focus was instead on phreaks as explorers. Many of them had apparently come to phreaking from dabbling in radio experimentation. As one put it, "any idiot in the country with a cheap cassette recorder" could blaze a trail anywhere in the world. Phreaks apparently explored the network, discovered knowledge about its properties, and swapped their knowledge (and tapes) with each other. Discoveries, they held, must be shared between those recognized by the group as experts. The phreaks presented themselves as a kind of technical vanguard, liberated from bureaucratic protocols and free to followwhere their expertise led them. They seemed to see their role as akin to that of pop-culture heroes. They would spring up wherever there was a problem, reveal it (and its solution) to the amazed gratitude of the plodding Lestrades of Ma Bell, and then disappear again into their secret identities. They abhorred the system for its conformity, inelegance, and complicity with the government, while at the same time admiring its scale and complexity and wanting to "perfect" it. The attraction lay in solving technical problems-in playing the game-and not a few could envisage acting as anti-phreak detectives, were they to be asked. There was more than a little self-consciousness about such protestations, of course, yet they were impressively consistent.

FIGURE 16.2. Are phone phreaks just telephone addicts?" New .Scientist 6o, no. 876 (December 13, 1973). © New Scientist magazine. Reprinted by permission.

Now, Esquire revealed, the phreaks were headed in