The History of Phone Phreaking Blog

DHS Social Media Watch List: Phreaking and 2600

ZDNet just ran a story about the 374 keywords that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) monitors on social media sites.  The list apparently was released some three months ago as a result of a lawsuit filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).  It was part of the Analyst's Desktop Binder of the DHS National Operations Center Media Monitoring Capability.

The sub-list dealing with cyber-security includes the words "phreaking" and "2600."

Awesome.

To all the old-school phone phreaks I interviewed for my book who were worried that the government still cares about this stuff and whom I reassured that the government couldn't possiblly still care: ok, ok, you're right and I'm wrong.

Just don't tweet about it and you'll probably be fine.  :-)

RadioLab: Escape!

If you're not familiar with RadioLab, you should be.  RadioLab is WNYC's periodic radio/podcast exploration of interesting topics, some geeky and some not, all laced together with wonderful music and intelligent questions and commentary from the show's hosts and producers.

I was interviewed by RadioLab about a year ago and the program I'm in was just released last week.  Called "Escape!" it concerns itself with people in unusual situations and their attempts to escape from them.  The last chunk (starting at 48:00 or so in the episode) is about Joybubbles, formerly Joe Engressia, one of the original blind whistling phone phreaks.  I urge you to listen to the entire thing, but if you just want to listen to the phone phreaking bit ("Long Distance"), you can find it here.

For anyone interested in a peek behind the curtains, it was kind of an interesting process to go through. RadioLab contacted me back in March 2011. They're in New York City so we did a remote interview with them there and me at KQED in San Francisco.  It was quite odd being in a slightly darkened and very quiet radio studio, wearing headphones and having Sean Cole and Soren Wheeler's disembodied and crystal clear voices ask me questions.  (Transport was, seriously, 2 "B" channels on an ISDN line!  Old technology never dies...)  I remember feeling slightly disoriented when I walked out into the bright light of day, confused by where the voices had gone.

We ended up doing two different interviews, each a couple of hours long.  RadioLab produces only a handful of shows each year and there was apparently a bit of discussion within the RadioLab gang as to whether they should do an hour-long show just on Joybubbles, or a special short on him, or make him part of a larger episode (which is what they ended up doing).  Amazing how much material it was necessary to record in order to boil it down to what was used, but the same is true of the interviews in my book, I suppose.

Thanks to Sean and Soren for their work and patience on this story.  Great job, guys!  I hope you are as happy with the result as I am.

Ex Libris Joybubbles (Part I)

Sam Etler just posted the following on the Singing Wires and CentralOffice Yahoo groups:

I recently came into possession of a number of documents from the library of Joybubbles (aka Joe Engressia) via Phil Lapsley. There's some interesting documents that I'll hopefully be able to digitize eventually. Here's the first: Telephone Theory and Practice, Automatic Switching and Auxiliary Equipment by Kempster B. Miller, 1933. It was photocopied by someone at AT&T and sent to a reader, since Joybubbles was blind. Because of this a lot of the photos are of poor quality, but the text is readable. It's a nearly 500-page book so someone went to a serious amount of effort to get it to him.

The PDF is large, about 42 megs. It can be found here:

http://etler.com/docs/Books/Telephone%20Theory%20and%20Practice,%201933.pdf

sam

These were documents that Steven and I rescued when we were cleaning out Joybubbles' apartment after he passed away in 2007.  Thanks, Sam, for digitizing this particular volume and for the many other things you do to preserve telephone history.  Joybubbles would have appreciated it.  As he was fond of saying, "knowledge shared is knowledge expanded."

Two Hacks (One Old, One New) For the New Year

Two interesting hacks -- neither really telephone related -- that seemed worth sharing for the new year.

One's from 1903, and comes to us via New Scientist:

LATE one June afternoon in 1903 a hush fell across an expectant audience in the Royal Institution's celebrated lecture theatre in London. Before the crowd, the physicist John Ambrose Fleming was adjusting arcane apparatus as he prepared to demonstrate an emerging technological wonder: a long-range wireless communication system developed by his boss, the Italian radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi. The aim was to showcase publicly for the first time that Morse code messages could be sent wirelessly over long distances. Around 300 miles away, Marconi was preparing to send a signal to London from a clifftop station in Poldhu, Cornwall, UK.

Yet before the demonstration could begin, the apparatus in the lecture theatre began to tap out a message. At first, it spelled out just one word repeated over and over. Then it changed into a facetious poem accusing Marconi of "diddling the public".

To read more about what New Scientist suggests is the first public pwning of a communication system, see Dot-Dash-Diss: The gentleman hacker's 1903 lulz.

The second is from 2011 and comes to us via Boing Boing:

One of the most mind-blowing presentations at this year's Chaos Communications Congress (28C3) was Ang Cui's Print Me If You Dare, in which he explained how he reverse-engineered the firmware-update process for HPs hundreds of millions of printers. Cui discovered that he could load arbitrary software into any printer by embedding it in a malicious document or by connecting to the printer online.

Read on to learn how your mild-mannered HP network printer can be completely taken over and turned into the devil itself, merely by printing a document.  Printer Malware: Print a Malicious Document, Expose Your Whole LAN.

Thanks to the several folks who suggested both stories.

Happy New Year, and welcome to 1903 ... or is that 2012? :-)

The Second Annual Phone Phreak Convention (1973)

The Village Voice web site has been posting blast-from-the-past articles from their archives.  This week was a piece by Ron Rosenbaum from September 13, 1973 titled "Phone Phreak Convention" covering the second annual phone phreak convention at the Hotel Diplomat in New York City.  An excerpt:

"Al Bell," the 20-year-old whiz kid who organized both conventions and who publishes Youth International Party Line, the fact-filled phone phreak newsletter, brought a carton full of black Lone Ranger masks to this year's gathering and handed them out at the door. Most of the serious -- i.e., criminally active -- phone freaks put the masks on. [...] (The only participants not wearing masks, it seemed, were a group of four blind phone phreaks and their two seeing eye dogs.)

[...] Last year's convention barely filled the seedy basement meeting room of the Diplomat. This year's gathering was big enough to crowd the entire seedy "Grand Ballroom" on the third floor.

The phone phreak movement seemed to be moving up from the underground on several other fronts. An NBC network camera crew was present to film the highlights of the five-hour gathering. There were screenings of instructional videotapes illustrating every form of cheating the phone company from number 14 brass washers (they are said to work like quarters) to sophisticated Blue Boxes.

But more important than that, the tide seems to have turned in the chronic technological warfare between phone phreak inventiveness and phone company counter-measures. Just when the phone company security men seemed to have the Blue Box operators on the run, certain advanced phone phreaks perfected an entirely new weapon: The Red Box. Last Saturday's Second Annual Phone Phreak Convention will be remembered as the one in which the Red Box made its official debut.

Rosenbaum, of course, wrote the Esquire article and invented the term "phreak" with a "ph".

Good stuff.

Snarkiest Supreme Court Opinion Ever

I do not normally think of the Supreme Court of the United States as my go-to source for snarky humor regarding the Freedom of Information Act and the telephone company.

I should rethink that.

Long-time readers of this blog (all two of you) will know that I have made extensive use of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in researching my book on the history of phone phreaking.  As such, I have become a reluctant inductee into the arcane world of FOIA, with its jargon and abbreviations and legal concepts and whatnot.

One of these bits of arcana is something called "FOIA exemption b(7)(c)."  (Doesn't that sound like something out of the movie Brazil?)  B(7)(c) says that the government cannot reveal under FOIA records compiled for law enforcement purposes that "could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy."  That's generally a good thing: it provides people a bit of privacy if they're being investigated, by, say, the FBI, or the DEA, or some other Federal three-letter agency.  It means, for example, that I can't get your FBI files without your permission.

Enter the phone company.  In 2004 AT&T was being investigated by the Federal Communications Commission for overcharging the Government.  AT&T and the FCC patched things up and AT&T agreed to pay a fee (let's not call it a fine) of $500,000.  Then a trade association representing some of AT&T's competitors came along and filed a FOIA request for records related to this matter.  AT&T opposed the release of records under FOIA, claiming that corporations are persons under the law, and as such, had personal privacy rights under b(7)(c).  So, AT&T claimed, the FCC could not legally release information about its investigation.

The FCC said "pfffft."

AT&T appealed to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.  And won.  The appeals court said that, legally, "person" includes corporations and that since "personal" derives from "person," corporations must have personal privacy rights as well.

Enter the Supreme Court: The FCC appealed the Third Circuit's decision.  Yesterday, they won: the Supreme Court ruled that, in fact, personal privacy does not extend to corporations.  Justice Roberts, writing for the Court in an 8-0 decision (Justice Kagan recused herself), parsed the language:

Adjectives typically reflect the meaning of corresponding nouns, but not always. Sometimes they acquire distinct meanings of their own. The noun “crab” refers variously to a crustacean and a type of apple, while the related adjective “crabbed” can refer to handwriting that is “difficult to read,”; “corny” can mean “using familiar and stereotyped formulas believed to appeal to the unsophisticated,” which has little to do with “corn,”; and while “crank” is “a part of an axis bent at right angles,” “cranky” can mean “given to fretful fussiness."

So, "personal" does not necessarily mean "having to do with a person," and thus, corporations do not have personal privacy rights.

But that's not the snark.  No, the snark comes from the last line of Justice Robert's closing paragraph:

We reject the argument that because “person” is defined for purposes of FOIA to include a corporation, the phrase “personal privacy” in Exemption 7(C) reaches corporations as well. The protection in FOIA against disclosure of law enforcement information on the ground that it would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy does not extend to corporations. We trust that AT&T will not take it personally.

The opinion: Federal Communications Commission, et al., v. AT&T Inc, et al.  Related: The Verdict is In: Justice Roberts is Hilarious.

Playing a Tune for a Telephone Number

In the 1950s Bell Labs was in the habit of running magazine advertisements touting its latest innovations.  And why not?  They had every right to be proud of their inventions.  Take these three, for example:

The one to the right is Playing a Tune for a Telephone Number (Popular Science, February 1950).

It is beautiful in many ways, including the close-up of the operator's newfangled push-button dialing arrangement and the musical notes representing the tones used to transmit dialed digits.  (If only they had included KP and ST!)

Then there's Does your dial system really think?  (Popular Science, February 1955.) "This question can't be answered until we learn more about the nature of thought.  But dial telephone systems do simulate many of the processes of the human brain..."  You know, like counting, remembering, deciding, testing, selecting, and reporting.  (Today it would be, "Does your dial system really beat humans at Jeopardy?")

And don't forget He's out ... but he's answering his telephone!  (Popular Mechanics, November 1954)  By just giving over a little bit of desk real estate to an imposing electromechanical contrivance you too can have your callers record their messages on "talking rubber, a Laboratories-developed recording medium of rubber-like plastic and iron oxide."  (Next month's ad: "Does your rubber really talk?")

All legitimate things to be proud of.  I must say, though, I am puzzled by the tagline of the latter two ads:

Bell Telephone Laboratories: Improving telephone service for America provides careers for men in scientific and technical fields

Bell Labs: A jobs program for geeks.  Who knew?  :-)

Rachael Morrison's "Joybubbles"

The short version?  Call this number: 718-362-9578.

The long version:

Back in May 2010 I got an email from a woman named Rachael Morrison.  Rachael said she was an artist who wanted to create an audio art piece having to do with Joybubbles, the blind whistling phone phreak who passed away in the summer of 2007.  She wasn't sure exactly what the piece was going to be or what precisely she was going to do with it, but it seemed like a neat idea.  We ended up talking by phone and she interviewed me about phone phreak history and Joybubbles' life.  She also interviewed Steven, Joybubbles' long-time friend and the executor of his estate.

Months past and, honestly, I pretty much forgot all about it.

So it was a lovely surprise to get an email from Rachael saying that she had completed her audio artwork.  You can listen to it old school -- over the phone -- just like an episode of Joybubbles' Stories and Stuff telephone recordings line.  It's at 718-362-9578.  You can listen to it in one 38-minute episode, or, if you don't have that kind of time in one sitting, Rachael has broken it up into four shorter chunks.

I think she did a really nice job with it, especially the way she blended Steven's remembrances with audio from Joybubbles talking on old recordings of Stories and Stuff.

That number again: 718-362-9578.

Call now, operators are standing by.

Some New Bell Laboratories Record Articles Posted

In digging into the birth of nationwide dialing for my book, I copied and scanned a nunber of Bell Laboratories Record articles from the 1950s that may be of interest.

Some bits of history:

• "Englewood Begins Long Distance Customer Dialing", December 1951, p. 571
• "Historic Firsts: Lettered Dial", January 1952, p. 12
• "Early Work on Dial Telephone Systems" by R. B. Hill, January 1953, p. 22
• "The Early Years of the Strowger System" by R. B. Hill, March 1953, p. 95

Articles related to nationwide distance dialing:

• "Problems in Nationwide Dialing" by O. Myers, May 1951, p. 197
• "The 4A Crossbar Toll System for Nationwide Dialing" by O. Myers, October 1953, p. 369
• "Converting Toll Crossbar Offices for Nationwide Dialing" by S. J. Brymer, May 1955, p. 188
• "Common-Control Features in Nationwide Dialing" by J. B. Newsom, December 1953, p. 481

Flights of fancy:

• "Switching Systems as Mechanized Brains" by John Meszar, Feburary 1953, p. 63
• "Switching at Its Boldest" by J. Meszar, December 1954, p. 441

And for the coding geeks (bonus points if you can spot the hand-written numbers in the article and know their significance):

• "Code Patterns in Telephone Switching and Accounting Systems" by J. W. Dehn, January 1952, p. 9

Indices and tables of contents:

• Bell Labs Record tables of contents from 1953, 1954, and 1955
• Bell Labs Record index for 1951 and 1952

The Last Word (?) On The Greatest "Bad Business Decision" Quotation That Never Was

A reader writes:

The Internet sometimes pops up with things you would never expect. Led to your web page for a completely different reason, I found several paragraphs from various people who reviewed the legendary story about Western Union rejecting a chance to buy the Bell Telephone patents for $100,000 in 1876 or 1877 due to a faulty evaluation by their own technical experts [see "The Greatest 'Bad Business Decision' Quotation That Never Was" and "More on the Greatest 'Bad Business Decision' Quotation That Never Was"]. Several people asked "Where did that letter by the WU experts come from? Is it genuine?"

They noted that it was quoted in an IEEE Engineering Management journal in 1965 (approximately) by some guy named Richard C. Levine. One of them said "Levine was born in 1939.  Is he still alive?"

Well, yes, he is still alive. See signature below!  He has had a long career in telecom, having jobs at AT&T Bell Labs and Northern Telecom, to mention just a few. He has had about 15 patents issued during the past 50 years, and is still inventing and seeking venture capital today. He also has been an adjunct Professor of electrical engineering at Southern Methodist University in Dallas Texas for over 20 years. He teaches a course in digital telecommunications technology from time to time. In connection with that course he still distributes copies of the quoted article.

You can find a more recent version of the article, with some historical notes at http://www.lyle.smu.edu/~levine/ee8320/wulet.rtf.

I suggest in particular that you read this 1976 article in the IEEE Spectrum by Michael Wolff that is mentioned in the above document. Also the following report is historically interesting as well: http://faculty.insead.edu/adner/research/Wester%20Union%20case%20sample.pdf.

In response to the question about where I got the letter: I put it together from two similar but not identical versions. One was widely known among engineers and business people in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the Boston area. I even saw a framed copy of the first version on the office wall of Richard E. Dolbear, an electrical engineer and expert on high voltage power systems, who was, by interesting coincidence, the grandson (or great grandson?) of Prof. Amos Dolbear. Amos Dolbear was a professor of science at Tufts Universisty, and he was one of the competitive inventors of a working telephone system in the 1870s, that appeared in the court records of the famous telephone cases. Dolbear's telephone was one of the first devices to use a variable capacitance microphone.

The second version of the letter, which is closer to the one I published, was copied from the files of MIT Professor Carlton Tucker. Tucker was an expert on electromechanical telephone switching and taught a survey class on telephone systems at MIT in the 1950s.  [Phil note: and who is quoted in an article titled "Telephone Hackers Active" from the MIT student newspaper in 1963 -- an article that also happens to be the first published use of the word "hacker" that I am aware of.]

Regards,

Richard C. Levine

The Internet is indeed a funny (and small) place.  If you’re at all interested, be sure to check out the 1976 Michael Wolff IEEE Spectrum article that Richard mentions above – it appears to settle the matter definitively.

Richard, thanks for writing, and glad to hear you’re still alive.  :-)