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Phone Phreaking: The Advent of Hacking · Stuff You Should Know

0:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
0:11
Speaker 1: and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck
0:14
Speaker 1: and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you should know.
0:19
Speaker 2: That's right. Can can we can you do your little
0:22
Speaker 2: trumpet sound announcement? Trumpet?
0:25
Speaker 1: Yeah? Are you ready?
0:26
Speaker 2: Huh?
0:28
Speaker 1: Sorry? No, hold on.
0:33
Speaker 2: There we go. Yeah, we want to announce the a
0:39
Speaker 2: new writer that we have working with us, and welcome
0:42
Speaker 2: aboard Kyle Hookstra and everybody. We have just classed up
0:48
Speaker 2: this joint, Yeah, we have because Kyle is British and
0:53
Speaker 2: he lives there. He's not like some some dumb British
0:56
Speaker 2: dude living in you know, Waco, Texas, or.
1:00
Speaker 1: Some American living in Great Britain. This guy is like
1:03
Speaker 1: legit brit that's right.
1:05
Speaker 2: He lives in Brighton and we gave him a test
1:09
Speaker 2: article and this was it. He did such a good job.
1:11
Speaker 2: We were like, hey, this thing's great and welcome aboard
1:14
Speaker 2: and he was interested and so it seems like the
1:17
Speaker 2: beginning of a new great relationship.
1:19
Speaker 1: Yeah, agreed, So welcome aboard, Kyle, and thanks for this one.
1:23
Speaker 1: I'm excited about this and this, Chuck, if you'll remember
1:28
Speaker 1: came up from the whistling episode. Do you remember that?
1:32
Speaker 2: Did you mention this?
1:35
Speaker 1: I know one thing that Anna had turned up and
1:37
Speaker 1: kind of included as a sidebar was how capt'n crunch
1:41
Speaker 1: Whistle had been used to basically hack the phone system.
1:46
Speaker 1: And I've been wanting to do an episode on phae
1:48
Speaker 1: freaking forever and it just so happened that reminded me,
1:52
Speaker 1: And here we are now we ask Kyle to do it,
1:55
Speaker 1: and this is our episode on phone freaking.
1:58
Speaker 2: That you've been waiting for freaking ever to do. Yeah, yeah,
2:03
Speaker 2: with a pH both ways. Actually, yeah, I mean, I
2:09
Speaker 2: guess we should introduce what we're talking about here, because
2:12
Speaker 2: this is something that if you're, oh, maybe have a
2:15
Speaker 2: certain age, you might not know what this is. And
2:17
Speaker 2: I'm of that certain age that should know, but I
2:20
Speaker 2: didn't really know much about it, to be honest. But
2:24
Speaker 2: we're talking about the fact that in the nineteen fifties,
2:29
Speaker 2: well before that, let's.
2:30
Speaker 1: Say you're not of that certain age, in.
2:35
Speaker 2: Our lifetime, uh huh right, pre computers, Yeah, we were
2:40
Speaker 2: all still connected via something called the telephone system. And
2:44
Speaker 2: in the United States, the telephone system was It's how
2:47
Speaker 2: humans connected before the Internet, and it was a big
2:49
Speaker 2: interconnected system that was manually operated by switchboards, which we
2:54
Speaker 2: should totally do a switchboard episode at some point.
2:56
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was very really interesting.
2:59
Speaker 2: But they started to get rid of the switchboard operators
3:02
Speaker 2: in the nineteen fifties for automatic switches. And the one
3:07
Speaker 2: thing they didn't think about was the fact that they
3:09
Speaker 2: had a bit of a design flaw or a weakness
3:12
Speaker 2: in this system, whereas the tones they use to let
3:18
Speaker 2: the automatic system know like what to do with a
3:20
Speaker 2: telephone call, could be mimicked and replicated with sometimes a
3:26
Speaker 2: human voice, sometimes a toy whistle like you said, or
3:29
Speaker 2: something that somebody made to essentially hack into the phone
3:33
Speaker 2: system by replicating those tones. And AT and T was like, oh,
3:38
Speaker 2: we never thought that anyone would be interested in doing that.
3:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was an outstanding introduction man.
3:45
Speaker 2: And it's called phone freaking phph Yeah.
3:48
Speaker 1: And so phone freakers were pretty much the earliest examples
3:53
Speaker 1: of hackers. They were free computer hacker culture. As a
3:58
Speaker 1: matter of fact, hacking just grew essentially right out of
4:01
Speaker 1: phone freaking and a lot of the phone freaks who
4:04
Speaker 1: were kind of on the whole jam in the early
4:07
Speaker 1: eighties just made the leap to computers through phones. It's
4:11
Speaker 1: pretty interesting, as we'll see. But there's one thing we
4:14
Speaker 1: should say about them as a community. Phone freakers were
4:20
Speaker 1: curious individuals. Like they were technical minded types. They wanted
4:25
Speaker 1: to see how this vast, huge connected network worked, and
4:32
Speaker 1: they knew very well that there were whole, huge parts
4:35
Speaker 1: of it that were shielded from public view. You weren't
4:38
Speaker 1: meant to know about this. You didn't need to know
4:39
Speaker 1: about it. Just go in and punch the phone number
4:42
Speaker 1: and we'll connect it for you. That wasn't enough. They
4:44
Speaker 1: wanted to know everything there was to know about it.
4:46
Speaker 1: And one way that you can find out how something
4:49
Speaker 1: works is to try to break it, and that was
4:51
Speaker 1: kind of what they were doing. They weren't doing it
4:53
Speaker 1: maliciously for almost exclusively, They weren't doing it maliciously. They
4:57
Speaker 1: were doing it out of curiosity.
5:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it sort of reminded me a little bit
5:03
Speaker 2: of like ham radio operators, where like the victory of
5:07
Speaker 2: a like a win for a phone freaker was like,
5:11
Speaker 2: oh my god, I connected with someone through the back
5:16
Speaker 2: door in another country and was able to talk to them.
5:20
Speaker 2: And yeah, maybe some people took advantage of like free
5:23
Speaker 2: long distance and stuff like that. But like you said,
5:26
Speaker 2: I think as a whole the community was just like
5:29
Speaker 2: those were the wins, like, oh my god, I was
5:31
Speaker 2: able to do this thing. How cool?
5:33
Speaker 1: Right, So let's kind of start at the beginning, shall we,
5:36
Speaker 1: because freaking did not exist prior to the fifties or
5:40
Speaker 1: sixties when they introduced automatic switches. Which is a little
5:45
Speaker 1: aside about the switches. The guy who invented him actually
5:48
Speaker 1: invented him in the nineteenth century. He was a mortician
5:52
Speaker 1: who his competition, the across town mortician rival. That guy's
5:59
Speaker 1: wife was the operators, so when somebody called to ask
6:01
Speaker 1: for a mortician, she automatically connected them to her husband's business,
6:05
Speaker 1: not this guy's business. So he actually went out of
6:07
Speaker 1: his way to invent an automatic switch to replace human operators,
6:11
Speaker 1: and decades later they finally came into into play. But
6:15
Speaker 1: you couldn't have done this before when somebody was like
6:19
Speaker 1: connecting the call for you, because if you just started
6:21
Speaker 1: whistling in their ear something like that, they'd be like,
6:23
Speaker 1: what are you doing? This isn't this is really bizarre.
6:26
Speaker 1: I'm not going to connect this call. It was once
6:29
Speaker 1: it became automated that it became possible.
6:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, did they even have dial tones with
6:34
Speaker 2: switchboard operators?
6:35
Speaker 1: I don't believe, so, I don't see why you would.
6:37
Speaker 1: I think when they converted to automatic switches, they adopted
6:41
Speaker 1: something called multi frequency tones, and it was all where
6:45
Speaker 1: you had a tone, like you pressed a one and
6:48
Speaker 1: it made a certain tone actually a combination of tones,
6:51
Speaker 1: hence the multi frequency thing, and it told this this network,
6:55
Speaker 1: turn this gear or this dial and everyone knows. I
6:58
Speaker 1: don't know what I'm talking about with gear, but there
7:00
Speaker 1: were gears involved, and things like actually would move somewhere
7:04
Speaker 1: in space because a tone told it to. That's that's
7:08
Speaker 1: kind of what they brought online in the fifties and sixties.
7:11
Speaker 2: So if someone whistled at a switchboard operator, they would
7:14
Speaker 2: be from the.
7:15
Speaker 1: Future because so yeah kind of, or else they'd be fresh.
7:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, they'd be fresh because they like a wolf whistle
7:24
Speaker 2: or something.
7:24
Speaker 1: Mm hm.
7:25
Speaker 2: So let's talk about phones for a second, because when
7:28
Speaker 2: we talk about these tones, we largely think of like
7:32
Speaker 2: a push button telephone, which is what we use starting geez,
7:37
Speaker 2: I'm not even really sure. But they replaced the rotary phones,
7:40
Speaker 2: not replaced. They worked alongside for many years. We had
7:44
Speaker 2: both for a long time in my house. Yeah, but
7:47
Speaker 2: the button on the phone isn't exactly a key to
7:50
Speaker 2: the system operating. The only thing the phone would do
7:52
Speaker 2: was create that tone. The tone was what mattered. It
7:55
Speaker 2: did get me wondering, like, well, how the heck does
7:57
Speaker 2: the rotary phone even work? And this is just a
8:00
Speaker 2: slight aside, but I never knew how that operated. And
8:05
Speaker 2: the way a rotary phone would work was you would
8:07
Speaker 2: dial the number around and that part didn't really matter.
8:11
Speaker 2: It was the return back into position that sent this
8:15
Speaker 2: that would engage basically these electrical contacts to interrupt the
8:20
Speaker 2: electrical continuity. So a nine would go bup up, up, up, up, up,
8:24
Speaker 2: up up up, and it would interrupt at nine different
8:27
Speaker 2: times and sending a signal saying, hey, this is a nine,
8:30
Speaker 2: dumb dumb. And I never knew how that worked, so
8:33
Speaker 2: I thought that was pretty fascinating. But as far as
8:35
Speaker 2: the push button phone, you would just press a button,
8:37
Speaker 2: it would have a tone assigned to it. And it's
8:39
Speaker 2: those tones that freaks were able to replicate to essentially
8:44
Speaker 2: fool the phone company into thinking that somebody was pressing
8:48
Speaker 2: a button, and in some case cases they were, which
8:51
Speaker 2: we'll talk about and.
8:52
Speaker 1: Just knowing that you could trick the system into dialing
8:56
Speaker 1: something for you just by whistles or making tones, not
9:00
Speaker 1: using your phone. That's fun in and of itself, but
9:04
Speaker 1: there's a really good example of like how this could
9:06
Speaker 1: be put to use in a way that was like, oh, okay,
9:09
Speaker 1: this is no longer legal. You're actually you're you're you're
9:13
Speaker 1: actually hijacking the phone system for your own ends, and
9:16
Speaker 1: this is the basis of freaking. There was a there
9:19
Speaker 1: was a tone that was instrumental to this whole multi
9:23
Speaker 1: frequency tone system, and it was that I think the
9:28
Speaker 1: minor e. It was that that resonates at twenty six
9:32
Speaker 1: hundred hertz. Okay, so whatever sound cycles at twenty six
9:37
Speaker 1: hundred cycles per second, that tone would tell the phone
9:43
Speaker 1: company that your phone was on the hook. When when
9:47
Speaker 1: your phone stopped making that sound, when your line stopped
9:49
Speaker 1: making that twenty six hundred hertz sound, all of a sudden,
9:52
Speaker 1: the phone system was like, oh, okay, this guy wants
9:55
Speaker 1: a connection somewhere. Let's go pay attention to what's going
9:57
Speaker 1: on here. So let's say you started dialing them, and
10:00
Speaker 1: you dial the eight hundred number. Your phone stopped making
10:04
Speaker 1: that twenty six hundred hurt sound, and the phone company's
10:08
Speaker 1: attention was grabbed by that. And you dial this eight
10:11
Speaker 1: hundred number and it would start to connect to you,
10:13
Speaker 1: and because it was an eight hundred number, the system
10:16
Speaker 1: would be like, Okay, we're connecting this, but we're not
10:18
Speaker 1: going to charge this person for this call because this
10:20
Speaker 1: is a toll free number. And then before the other
10:23
Speaker 1: person on the other line could pick up, you would
10:26
Speaker 1: blow that. You would make a twenty six hundred hurtz
10:29
Speaker 1: tone and that told the phone system you had hung up,
10:32
Speaker 1: but you hadn't actually hung up. And now the line
10:35
Speaker 1: was open for you to dial any number you wanted
10:37
Speaker 1: to anywhere in the world toll free, because as far
10:41
Speaker 1: as the system was concerned, you were still calling a
10:44
Speaker 1: toll free number even though you were calling any number
10:46
Speaker 1: you wanted. And now you can make long distance phone
10:49
Speaker 1: calls for free at a time when they were really
10:52
Speaker 1: really expensive.
10:53
Speaker 2: That's right. And these were enabled by what we're called
10:56
Speaker 2: trunk lines. So if you think about whatever city you
10:59
Speaker 2: live in, depending on the size of your city, you
11:02
Speaker 2: would have I guess if you lived in a small
11:04
Speaker 2: up town, you probably just had one office. But if
11:07
Speaker 2: your city was large enough, you had multiple offices where
11:11
Speaker 2: these calls were connected. Basically, so if you lived in
11:16
Speaker 2: like one neighborhood in Dallas, Texas, and you were calling
11:19
Speaker 2: a neighborhood, you know, ten fifteen miles away in Dallas, Texas,
11:24
Speaker 2: there would be another office there in that neighborhood or
11:27
Speaker 2: that area or region or whatever, and they were all
11:30
Speaker 2: connected by trunk lines, like hundreds to thousands of these things,
11:35
Speaker 2: depending on how big your town was, because each one
11:37
Speaker 2: of these could only handle one call at a time,
11:40
Speaker 2: So the trunkline line was basically just a medium to
11:43
Speaker 2: carry your vote, carry your voice locally from one place
11:48
Speaker 2: to the other. And we both said there was only
11:52
Speaker 2: one that could be going at once. That's why there
11:54
Speaker 2: were thousands of these things. And if you were able
11:56
Speaker 2: to replicate that tone, then you could, you know, have
12:00
Speaker 2: some good, clean fun.
12:01
Speaker 1: Yeah. And trunk lines were also the way that you
12:03
Speaker 1: died long distance because they could connect like different parts
12:06
Speaker 1: of a town. They could also connect one city to
12:08
Speaker 1: another and so on and so forth. And so the
12:11
Speaker 1: people who figured this out that you could you could
12:14
Speaker 1: hijack the phone system by trying out different tones and
12:18
Speaker 1: doing different things were just socked in immediately and just
12:21
Speaker 1: began experimenting, started meeting one another, sometimes by happenstance on
12:26
Speaker 1: a phone line that they just happened to try out
12:29
Speaker 1: and there was some other freak hanging out on it.
12:32
Speaker 1: It just was immediately infectious to their to their curiosity
12:38
Speaker 1: that you just wanted to figure out how this could
12:40
Speaker 1: work and what all you could make this phone system
12:42
Speaker 1: do by replicating these tones.
12:45
Speaker 2: I think that's a pretty good setup, my friend.
12:47
Speaker 1: I agree. You want to take a break, then, yeah, let's.
12:49
Speaker 2: Take a break and we'll come back and talk about
12:52
Speaker 2: who some of these first freakers were right after this,
13:21
Speaker 2: all right, so we promised to talk about some early freakers.
13:24
Speaker 2: One was a guy in the nineteen fifties, so you know,
13:27
Speaker 2: this started pretty early on. If you think about early
13:30
Speaker 2: hacking and like what led to hacking starting in the
13:33
Speaker 2: nineteen fifties, it's pretty mind blowing. But one guy was
13:37
Speaker 2: Joe and Grecia, and he was a blind man who
13:42
Speaker 2: did not use a captain crunch whistle because that was
13:45
Speaker 2: before they had captain crunch whistles. He whistled with his
13:48
Speaker 2: mouth and was able to he had perfect pitch and
13:52
Speaker 2: was able to emit somehow because it's not the easiest
13:55
Speaker 2: tone to hit. And if you've ever heard it, series
13:57
Speaker 2: that twenty six hundred hurts signal and he, you know,
14:02
Speaker 2: he would whistle into the phone to do this. Other
14:04
Speaker 2: people use, usually not their own human voice, but different things,
14:08
Speaker 2: like I believe the Captain Crunch Cereal was in the
14:12
Speaker 2: nineteen sixties. You can go on YouTube and see people
14:15
Speaker 2: that have these little whistles demonstrating how it works and everything.
14:18
Speaker 2: But this was sort of the idea early in the
14:20
Speaker 2: nineteen fifties and sixties with these.
14:22
Speaker 1: People, right, So, I think the guy who came up
14:27
Speaker 1: with the guy who's credited with figuring out the cap'n
14:30
Speaker 1: Crunch serial whistle, it's like a boatswain's whistle like that,
14:34
Speaker 1: you know that that whistle you know on Star Trek
14:38
Speaker 1: when they blow the whistle to get everybody's attention.
14:41
Speaker 2: I'd never seen Star Trek.
14:43
Speaker 1: Well, anybody who's seen Star Trek, the original one knows
14:45
Speaker 1: what we're talking about. That's a boatswain's whistle. And so
14:47
Speaker 1: like the cap'n Crunch whistle would if you covered up
14:49
Speaker 1: one hole, it would make a perfect twenty six hundred
14:52
Speaker 1: hertz tone and Apparently the guy who came up with that,
14:54
Speaker 1: who figured that out, took the handle Captain Crunch. That
14:58
Speaker 1: was his freaker handle, but his real name was Draper.
15:01
Speaker 2: Right, I believe cap'n Crunch. I saw it.
15:05
Speaker 1: Both ways, really, yeah, I saw more often than not
15:09
Speaker 1: captain like fully fully spelled out. I guess he was himself.
15:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh okay, yeah, I thought you just were saying
15:17
Speaker 2: it as a serial.
15:18
Speaker 1: No, no, no, that was his that was his handle.
15:20
Speaker 2: No, no, no, I know, but he took it from the Cereal.
15:23
Speaker 1: Sure, sure, yeah. I didn't think it was a coincidence.
15:27
Speaker 1: What was his first name, Draper?
15:29
Speaker 2: Uh?
15:31
Speaker 1: Dave, Yeah, David Draper.
15:33
Speaker 2: No, no, no, John John. I think it was John
15:36
Speaker 2: because I watched videos of him and every time it
15:39
Speaker 2: sounded like he was saying Don Draper for Madman. So
15:43
Speaker 2: it was very confusing.
15:44
Speaker 1: Okay, So so John he was the one who was
15:47
Speaker 1: credited with figuring that out. He was a legendary early
15:51
Speaker 1: phone freaker.
15:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, and he still has videos and we'll talk about
15:56
Speaker 2: a little bit more about him later on. But uh,
16:00
Speaker 2: like I said, most people did not use their voice.
16:02
Speaker 2: They would use like that whistle or they started building devices.
16:05
Speaker 2: They were called blue boxes, and they all look different
16:09
Speaker 2: because they were all homemade. But you know, if you
16:12
Speaker 2: look up blue box online, there are all kinds of
16:15
Speaker 2: you know, it basically looks like a a phone without
16:20
Speaker 2: the talking ends. It's just like a box, usually with
16:24
Speaker 2: punch button numbers like you would see on a phone.
16:27
Speaker 1: Yes, or if if you were a Bond villain in
16:32
Speaker 1: maybe a sixties Bond movie, Yeah, and you wanted to
16:36
Speaker 1: remotely blow something up, it looks like the kind of
16:38
Speaker 1: thing you'd pull an antenna out of, impress a series
16:41
Speaker 1: of numbers on it, and something would explode, and then
16:45
Speaker 1: you'd very calmly put the antenna back in and walk away. Yeah,
16:49
Speaker 1: except scratch the antenna right, Not in the blue box,
16:53
Speaker 1: just in this Bond idea. Yeah, there's also a red box.
16:57
Speaker 1: There are a ton of different boxes. Like by the
17:00
Speaker 1: end of all this, people had figured out all sorts
17:01
Speaker 1: of different devices to make phones do all sorts of things,
17:06
Speaker 1: and they all had different colors. But the other, the
17:09
Speaker 1: other two big ones where the red box, which was
17:12
Speaker 1: a blue box but had the added capacity of creating
17:16
Speaker 1: the tones that told the phone system that this payphone
17:19
Speaker 1: had just accepted a quarter or a dime at the time,
17:22
Speaker 1: and now you can go ahead and connect the call
17:25
Speaker 1: even though no one had put a dime in. It
17:27
Speaker 1: had just mimicked that tone. Then the black box made
17:30
Speaker 1: it interrupted like the DC signal to your phone, to
17:35
Speaker 1: make it seem like you had never picked up a call,
17:38
Speaker 1: so the person calling you long distance would never be
17:40
Speaker 1: charged for it even though you're sitting there talking. Those
17:42
Speaker 1: are the three big ones, Blue, red, and black.
17:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the red one is actually super cool because
17:48
Speaker 2: you know, if you came along after payphones were around,
17:53
Speaker 2: you didn't have to put in like if you had
17:56
Speaker 2: other coins that would equal a dime. Let's say, oh,
18:00
Speaker 2: I don't know two nickels. Sure, you could put two
18:02
Speaker 2: nickels in, and a nickel created a specific tone, a
18:05
Speaker 2: dime created a specific tone, and a quarter created one.
18:09
Speaker 2: So the red box was able to mimic each of
18:12
Speaker 2: these coins to recreate the tone it made when you
18:16
Speaker 2: you know, because those little paper ones were smart. They
18:18
Speaker 2: they knew what you were dropping in there. They were
18:20
Speaker 2: so smart, and they would sing that song lussly.
18:25
Speaker 1: So the whole thing that all these were based on,
18:27
Speaker 1: again was this multi frequency tone system. And it turns
18:33
Speaker 1: out that there were six master tones to the whole
18:36
Speaker 1: thing that if you knew these tones, you could basically
18:38
Speaker 1: make the phone system do anything you wanted. And they
18:42
Speaker 1: were made up of twelve individual tones, and so, for example,
18:46
Speaker 1: if you wanted to mimic the number one, you had
18:49
Speaker 1: to make the sound of seven hundred hertz and nine
18:52
Speaker 1: hundred herts at the same time, and that would be
18:55
Speaker 1: as far as the phone system is concerned. If it
18:57
Speaker 1: heard that, it would say, oh, okay, one, I mean,
19:00
Speaker 1: I'm pressing one for this guy. And the whole thing
19:03
Speaker 1: is predicated on a mistake that somebody made at Bell,
19:08
Speaker 1: which we haven't said this, but this is kind of
19:10
Speaker 1: important too. At the time AT and T was known
19:14
Speaker 1: as mob Bell, it had essentially a monopoly on the
19:18
Speaker 1: phone system in.
19:19
Speaker 2: The United States, exactly like it.
19:23
Speaker 1: Was the phone company for the entire country. And because
19:27
Speaker 1: it was so this one big monstrous thing, if you
19:30
Speaker 1: figured out how to mess with AT and T, you
19:32
Speaker 1: figured out how to hijack the entire phone system. That
19:35
Speaker 1: was one thing. But the point of that is that
19:38
Speaker 1: some AT and T engineer wrote an article in a
19:41
Speaker 1: technical journal in the fifties and they included what those
19:46
Speaker 1: master tones were made of. In the article, and that
19:50
Speaker 1: gave way to the basis of all those blue boxes
19:52
Speaker 1: and black boxes and red boxes that were made later.
19:55
Speaker 1: Had that article never been published, freaking might have never
19:58
Speaker 1: really taken off. It would probably been a pastime for
20:01
Speaker 1: people with who had a captain crunch whistle or perfect
20:05
Speaker 1: pitch and could whistle things themselves.
20:09
Speaker 2: I don't know. I bet you nerds prevail.
20:13
Speaker 1: For sure, but I mean it would have taken those
20:15
Speaker 1: like hardcore people like Joe and Grecia who figured it
20:19
Speaker 1: out on their own, just in trial and error over years.
20:22
Speaker 1: This was here's here's a blue box, and here's how
20:26
Speaker 1: you use it. And that's how a lot of people
20:28
Speaker 1: got into freaking who wouldn't wouldn't have otherwise been pulled
20:31
Speaker 1: into it because it would have been too hard.
20:33
Speaker 2: I think it's sped up the timeline for sure, for sure.
20:36
Speaker 2: And like we said, people were, you know, the win
20:39
Speaker 2: was making a call working around the phone company for
20:43
Speaker 2: a long distance call. Sometimes they would get into pranking
20:46
Speaker 2: a little bit, like they could figure out how to
20:49
Speaker 2: hack into the the loud speakers at a mall and
20:52
Speaker 2: make announcements. That was one pretty famous prank call in
20:56
Speaker 2: Santa Barbara in nineteen seventy four when they they had
21:01
Speaker 2: they basically took advantage of a bug called simultaneous seizure,
21:05
Speaker 2: where two calls at the same time would jam ups
21:08
Speaker 2: the switching equipment in the office and you could hijack
21:12
Speaker 2: calls coming into like a city. So people two guys
21:16
Speaker 2: got you know, from La Got. I guess they got
21:19
Speaker 2: arrested for doing this, it says they. I'm not sure
21:22
Speaker 2: if they served jail time or not, but they essentially
21:25
Speaker 2: were able to any call coming into Santa Barbara. They
21:29
Speaker 2: would route it to a voice saying that Santa Barbara
21:32
Speaker 2: had been destroyed by a nuclear bomb, and it kind
21:36
Speaker 2: of got out of a hand, like people called emergency services,
21:38
Speaker 2: and you know, they found out what was going on, obviously,
21:42
Speaker 2: but just you know, sort of that was about as
21:45
Speaker 2: harmful as it got, unless you count stealing long distance.
21:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, and stealing long distance was a favorite of the mafia.
21:53
Speaker 1: They were a big time into phone freaking, and they
21:56
Speaker 1: weren't the kind who would just sit there and you know,
21:58
Speaker 1: try out whistling different tones for years on end. They
22:01
Speaker 1: got into it through blue and black and red boxes.
22:04
Speaker 1: And the reason why is because their bookies would be
22:07
Speaker 1: taking calls from all over the country. And I think
22:10
Speaker 1: I said earlier that that long distance was expensive at
22:13
Speaker 1: the time, it was so expensive. Click Americana, which is
22:18
Speaker 1: a great, great website. They found an old Bell ad
22:21
Speaker 1: from nineteen sixty five that boasts the low price of
22:26
Speaker 1: twelve dollars for your first three minutes for long distance
22:30
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty five dollars. Yeah, that's like one hundred
22:33
Speaker 1: and eighteen dollars today for three minutes of long distance.
22:38
Speaker 1: It's insane, and it very quickly as after they introduced
22:41
Speaker 1: the automatic switches, their costs dropped very quickly, so by
22:45
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy it was down to probably twenty bucks for
22:48
Speaker 1: three minutes. But still that's a lot of money. And
22:51
Speaker 1: if you're a bookie taking long distance calls all night long,
22:54
Speaker 1: all day long, that adds up. So of course you
22:56
Speaker 1: want to start using blue boxes. So the mafia got
22:58
Speaker 1: heavy into it too.
23:00
Speaker 2: Wait, how much did you say it was at first
23:02
Speaker 2: for three minutes?
23:03
Speaker 1: Twelve dollars for three minutes, and according to Westig, there'd
23:07
Speaker 1: be one hundred and eighteen dollars today.
23:09
Speaker 2: Oh okay, so you went on the cause you said
23:11
Speaker 2: it went down to twenty dollars.
23:12
Speaker 1: That was conversion wise, no, from nineteen sixty five to
23:16
Speaker 1: about nineteen seventy, and just that five years it dropped
23:18
Speaker 1: that dramatically.
23:20
Speaker 2: From twelve to twenty No, no.
23:21
Speaker 1: No, sorry, yes, you're right, from in twenty twenty three dollars.
23:26
Speaker 2: Oh okay, Yeah.
23:27
Speaker 1: I wanted to make that as confusing as possible, So
23:29
Speaker 1: that's why I chose that.
23:32
Speaker 2: Well. I mean, I remember even in the nineteen eighties
23:34
Speaker 2: when I would meet a girl at church camp that
23:38
Speaker 2: lived in another place and come home and want to
23:42
Speaker 2: communicate with my little church camp crush, and my parents
23:46
Speaker 2: would be like, yeah, I forget about it, Like you're
23:49
Speaker 2: not dialing along, You're not calling this girl a long
23:51
Speaker 2: distance meet a local girl. What's wrong with you?
23:53
Speaker 1: It was a big, big deal. Like I remember, early
23:57
Speaker 1: cell phones used to charge you long distance, and then
23:59
Speaker 1: when all of a sudden, it was like that just
24:01
Speaker 1: went away. It was like a different world almost.
24:05
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally. So computers came around. Obviously, everything changed after
24:11
Speaker 2: computers came around the nineteen eighties, because you could all
24:15
Speaker 2: of a sudden design a program that could generate tones,
24:20
Speaker 2: like specifically for what you needed. If everyone or if
24:24
Speaker 2: anyone saw the movie Wargames, which we've talked about quite
24:27
Speaker 2: a few times on the show because it's one of
24:29
Speaker 2: the show favorites, But that had a couple of examples
24:32
Speaker 2: of phone freaking. When Matthew Broderick dialed into the school
24:38
Speaker 2: system at Beginning to change Ali Sheety's grades, he used
24:43
Speaker 2: a technique called war dialing. That's when you're just like us,
24:46
Speaker 2: a computer to auto dial, just like hundreds and thousands
24:49
Speaker 2: of numbers, scanning for a vulnerability, or in this case,
24:53
Speaker 2: he was scanning for his own school line to hack into. Right,
24:58
Speaker 2: And then I know we did talk about this in
24:59
Speaker 2: an episode, but the little payphone hack that he tried
25:02
Speaker 2: apparently is not a real thing and was just made
25:05
Speaker 2: up for the movie, Isn't that right?
25:07
Speaker 1: Yeah, but it does. It definitely gets across the concept
25:10
Speaker 1: of a red box, like you could do that, you
25:12
Speaker 1: just couldn't do it the way he did it. But
25:13
Speaker 1: it also kind of got across a little bit the
25:15
Speaker 1: concept of the black box, which would kind of short
25:18
Speaker 1: the circuit, which is what he was doing. So it
25:20
Speaker 1: was a little confused, but it certainly got like a
25:24
Speaker 1: lot of people interested in hacking, and it also scared
25:27
Speaker 1: the pants off of Ronald Reagan, which you might say,
25:30
Speaker 1: who cares the problem was At the time, Ronald Reagan
25:33
Speaker 1: was the President of the United States. And there's a
25:36
Speaker 1: guy named Fred Kaplan who wrote a book about a
25:39
Speaker 1: history of cyber war called Dark Territory. And apparently Reagan
25:43
Speaker 1: saw this film was so freaked out by it that
25:47
Speaker 1: he got the Joint Chiefs together and was like, can
25:49
Speaker 1: this happen? Somebody go find out. And the chairman of
25:53
Speaker 1: the Joint Chiefs, a guy named General John Vessy, went
25:56
Speaker 1: and investigated and came back and he said, quote, President,
26:00
Speaker 1: the problem is much worse than you think. And so
26:04
Speaker 1: three years after Wargames came out, Congress passed basically an
26:08
Speaker 1: anti Wargames scary movie law.
26:13
Speaker 2: That's right, they did. It was called the Computer Fraud
26:16
Speaker 2: and Abuse Act, And you know, seemingly came out of
26:20
Speaker 2: watching the movie Wargames.
26:22
Speaker 1: Isn't that nuts?
26:23
Speaker 2: Pretty crazy?
26:25
Speaker 1: So let's go back a little bit and talk about
26:29
Speaker 1: some of the freaks. We've kind of covered some of them,
26:31
Speaker 1: like Joe and Grecia. His handle was Joy Bubbles. There
26:35
Speaker 1: was also Captain Crunch John Draper. Like you said, these
26:39
Speaker 1: guys were like freaking at the time when it was
26:44
Speaker 1: it was like a I guess, a golden age, chuck,
26:49
Speaker 1: There's only one way to put it. I was trying
26:50
Speaker 1: to avoid it. But it was a golden age of freaking.
26:53
Speaker 2: We love our golden ages. Yeah, And you know, as
26:56
Speaker 2: far as these people were, they were they were who
26:59
Speaker 2: the hackers in it. They were kind of early techies.
27:02
Speaker 2: They were kind of nerds. Usually they were into you know,
27:09
Speaker 2: some of them maybe have been into kind of disruption.
27:12
Speaker 2: I think, like we said, most of the time, it
27:14
Speaker 2: was just sort of good natured, but there were definitely
27:16
Speaker 2: those that were like, hey, fight the man. We have
27:20
Speaker 2: this monopoly, this controlling the phone system. Let's see if
27:22
Speaker 2: we can poke the bear a little bit. So, you know,
27:26
Speaker 2: they were and they're doing a little bit of that
27:29
Speaker 2: as well. But like we said, generally good natured stuff.
27:34
Speaker 2: I think we should mention that that draper later on
27:39
Speaker 2: had allegation the sexual assault that emerged and he was
27:43
Speaker 2: banned from different conferences starting in like the twenty tens.
27:48
Speaker 2: So he's a pretty divisive guy. So it's not like
27:52
Speaker 2: we're seeing his praises or anything, but he was definitely
27:56
Speaker 2: like one of the first kind of famous freakers largely
28:00
Speaker 2: because of this Esquire magazine article in nineteen seventy one
28:04
Speaker 2: called Secrets of the Little Blue Box, where a guy
28:07
Speaker 2: named Ron Rosenbaum wrote this really long form, detailed, pretty
28:11
Speaker 2: great article about phone freaking which not only put a
28:15
Speaker 2: spotlight on people like Captain Crunch, but put a spotlight
28:18
Speaker 2: and created more phone freakers because people read it and
28:21
Speaker 2: were like, I got to get out on this thing. Yeah.
28:23
Speaker 1: It's usually in the top ten twenty at most of
28:26
Speaker 1: Greatest Magazine Articles of All Times lists. It's a really
28:31
Speaker 1: good article. But one of the things when people write
28:34
Speaker 1: about it that they like to point out is it's
28:37
Speaker 1: the definitive history of phone freaking up to that point.
28:41
Speaker 1: But then it also serves as a pivotal point because
28:44
Speaker 1: it helped make history because it introduced phone freaking to
28:47
Speaker 1: like a whole bunch of other people who were totally
28:50
Speaker 1: interested in that but just hadn't heard of it before.
28:53
Speaker 1: And one of the reasons why that happened is because
28:57
Speaker 1: he gave just enough technical information for how to do it,
29:02
Speaker 1: but left out some of the more gory details. But
29:07
Speaker 1: it was it was tantalizing enough that if you were
29:09
Speaker 1: interested and motivated, you could go fill in the blanks
29:13
Speaker 1: and figure out how to do it. And it turned out,
29:16
Speaker 1: in fact that the guys who founded Apple, Steve Wozniak
29:20
Speaker 1: and Steve Jobs, were two people who read this thing
29:23
Speaker 1: and went and figured it out themselves.
29:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, they got into phone freaking. They built boxes, They
29:30
Speaker 2: built and sold digital blue boxes, and Steve Wozniak, out
29:35
Speaker 2: of all the circuitry he built as the wizard behind Apple,
29:41
Speaker 2: he said that that digital blue box circuit was the
29:44
Speaker 2: one that he was most proud of. They actually met
29:48
Speaker 2: the captain, Crunch Guy, met mister Draper and they you know,
29:52
Speaker 2: they were part of that community for a little while.
29:54
Speaker 2: They sold them for about one hundred and seventy two
29:56
Speaker 2: bucks in the early nineteen seventies, which is a lot
29:58
Speaker 2: of money in today dollars. Uh So it was a
30:01
Speaker 2: lot of money back then. They were never busted. Apparently
30:04
Speaker 2: they were. Some cops came around when Steve jobs car
30:08
Speaker 2: broke down one time and they were caught with a
30:11
Speaker 2: blue box, but was was able to convince them that
30:15
Speaker 2: it was a synthesizer to play music on in the
30:18
Speaker 2: copway right. Wok, He sounds good to me.
30:21
Speaker 1: So U was the next handle freaker handle was Berkeley Blue,
30:25
Speaker 1: and Steve Jobs handle was of Tobar, which I think
30:30
Speaker 1: prefigured Dungeons and Dragons. That's a pretty good I guess
30:34
Speaker 1: fighter's name.
30:36
Speaker 2: Oh is that a D and D reff?
30:38
Speaker 1: Yeah, Dungeons and Dragons.
30:40
Speaker 2: No, But is that oaf Tobar from D and D.
30:45
Speaker 1: I think it's a good name for a D and
30:47
Speaker 1: D characters.
30:48
Speaker 2: What Oh, I got you and there link somehow?
30:51
Speaker 1: No. No, but it just screams D and D to me.
30:54
Speaker 2: Yeah. I didn't play D and D, so I'm just
30:55
Speaker 2: lost here.
30:56
Speaker 1: I loved it. There's one other quote too, from the
31:00
Speaker 1: I guess Steve Jobs who said that without blue boxes,
31:03
Speaker 1: the blue boxes that he and Wosneak came together to make,
31:06
Speaker 1: there would be no Apple. That was like their first
31:07
Speaker 1: venture together.
31:08
Speaker 2: Yeah.
31:09
Speaker 1: That showed them that they could work well together, and
31:11
Speaker 1: they went on to found Apple after they did this
31:15
Speaker 1: little blue box tint. That's pretty crazy, very crazy.
31:19
Speaker 2: Another thing that emerged around this time was something called
31:22
Speaker 2: a beep line, which I had never heard of these
31:25
Speaker 2: and this is something that I probably should have known about.
31:28
Speaker 2: But when you would call somebody back in the day
31:33
Speaker 2: and that person was on the phone and let's say
31:35
Speaker 2: they didn't have call waiting, or call waiting wasn't invented
31:38
Speaker 2: at the time, maybe or they couldn't afford it, like
31:40
Speaker 2: we couldn't. You would get a busy signal. But here's
31:44
Speaker 2: the thing. That busy signal that you were dealt didn't
31:48
Speaker 2: mean that your voice path was shut off like you
31:51
Speaker 2: were still if you sat there on that busy signal
31:54
Speaker 2: line and didn't hang up, and maybe this is how
31:57
Speaker 2: people found out about it. Eventually, if you around long enough,
32:00
Speaker 2: you would get someone else on that same busy signal
32:03
Speaker 2: line that had been you know, denied a phone call
32:07
Speaker 2: in some other town. And if those people were teenagers,
32:10
Speaker 2: they realize it was sort of the beginnings of like
32:14
Speaker 2: a party line where you could be like, hey, and
32:17
Speaker 2: you're talking over this busy signal, mind you, So while
32:20
Speaker 2: this thing is going beep beep, I'm going, hey, this
32:23
Speaker 2: is Chuck. I live in Stone Mountain, Georgia, Like where
32:25
Speaker 2: are you? And oh, I'm Angela. I live in Dallas, Texas.
32:29
Speaker 2: And then you strike up a conversation and you're having
32:33
Speaker 2: some good, clean, teenage fun making connections talking to people
32:37
Speaker 2: you ordinarily would never meet. And beep lines were very
32:41
Speaker 2: popular in the nineteen sixties and seventies.
32:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a Time article from I think nineteen sixty
32:47
Speaker 1: one that interviews the guy who ran I think the
32:50
Speaker 1: Fall River, Massachusetts or somewhere in Massachusetts their telephone company
32:55
Speaker 1: or station, and that there was a radio station whose
32:59
Speaker 1: beepline was like the place to call into and when
33:02
Speaker 1: this team call them in a like a regional magazine
33:05
Speaker 1: published something on it, calls jump from fifteen hundred to
33:09
Speaker 1: twenty seven twenty eight thousand in a week, So they
33:12
Speaker 1: were very popular. And apparently once you could shout your
33:15
Speaker 1: number to somebody you were trying to talk to over
33:17
Speaker 1: the busy signal, but when you actually could talk like
33:22
Speaker 1: normal people on the phone, it was just never as fun.
33:26
Speaker 2: Well it's funny. I mentioned, like maybe that's how people
33:28
Speaker 2: found out, as they just stayed on that line. But
33:31
Speaker 2: it seems like radio stations is where they actually found
33:34
Speaker 2: out about these things, because you would call in to win,
33:37
Speaker 2: to be the fifth caller or whatever to win concert tickets,
33:40
Speaker 2: and almost always you would get that busy signal and
33:43
Speaker 2: so many people are calling in that they would find
33:46
Speaker 2: each other on these busy signal lines and figured it out. Hey,
33:49
Speaker 2: wait a minute, this is a thing.
33:51
Speaker 1: Yeah, because usually when you got a busy signal, you
33:53
Speaker 1: just you wouldn't make a sound, you wouldn't try to talk,
33:56
Speaker 1: and you just hang up immediately. But if apparently that's
34:00
Speaker 1: just how the phone lines worked. If you talked, you
34:03
Speaker 1: could hear somebody else talking back at you. It was
34:05
Speaker 1: just like you said, you had to shout over the
34:07
Speaker 1: busy signal.
34:08
Speaker 2: I talked. I don't know why I never found this out,
34:10
Speaker 2: because every time I got a busy signal, I'd be like, Hello,
34:14
Speaker 2: what is this? Is someone there?
34:15
Speaker 1: Really? Really?
34:19
Speaker 2: No? Okay, look we switch switching up roles here.
34:23
Speaker 1: What was your favorite phone of all time that you
34:26
Speaker 1: ever had?
34:29
Speaker 2: You know, the first one that jumps to mine? And
34:31
Speaker 2: I never had. I think later on I was able
34:34
Speaker 2: to have a phone in my bedroom when I was
34:36
Speaker 2: like sixteen or seventeen. But previous to that, I very
34:39
Speaker 2: much remember our very first cordless phone that had the
34:43
Speaker 2: intenna that you pull out and the cradle that it
34:45
Speaker 2: sat on, Like I just remember that being a very
34:48
Speaker 2: big deal because I thought like, wow, we're literally living
34:51
Speaker 2: in the age of the Jetsons, because I can because
34:53
Speaker 2: we're unbound by a chord.
34:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, I like you. I would have guessed I would
34:57
Speaker 1: have put a lot of money on you saying the
35:00
Speaker 1: Sports Illustrated football phone. Then you got with the subscription
35:04
Speaker 1: back in the eighties, you remember that.
35:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I subscribe forever. But here do you
35:08
Speaker 2: know what happens? And this used to bother me as
35:11
Speaker 2: like a thirteen year old is you subscribe and you
35:14
Speaker 2: get that first thing? And my mom got me a
35:16
Speaker 2: subscription when I was like ten. Huh, And you never
35:20
Speaker 2: got any gifts after that, And I used to get
35:22
Speaker 2: so mad that, like what, only new subscribers get the gift,
35:25
Speaker 2: Like you should get one every year for being a
35:26
Speaker 2: loyal subscriber.
35:27
Speaker 1: That's a great, great point. Did you email the editors
35:30
Speaker 1: or sorry, did you write a letter to the editors.
35:33
Speaker 2: The Sports Illustrating I don't think so.
35:36
Speaker 1: Did your mom hang out by the mailbox and the
35:39
Speaker 1: month the swimsuit issue came out to intercept it?
35:42
Speaker 2: No I did. Oh yeah, that was a very.
35:45
Speaker 1: Big disguise yourself as the mailbox.
35:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was especially for young Baptist boy who thought that,
35:52
Speaker 2: like you know, playboys were for boting and stuff like that.
35:56
Speaker 2: That magazine was everything to me.
35:57
Speaker 1: Sure, yeah, all right, I think that that's a good
36:02
Speaker 1: place for a break, don't you.
36:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm gonna go think about Christie Brinkley and Carol Alton,
36:07
Speaker 2: Kathy Ireland, and we'll be right back in a few minutes.
36:10
Speaker 1: Okay, all right, So we were talking about the golden
36:39
Speaker 1: age of freaking that was really kind of the sixties,
36:43
Speaker 1: mid to late sixties to the mid seventies, probably about
36:47
Speaker 1: a ten year period where people were figuring out how
36:52
Speaker 1: to game the international phone network, but before AT and
36:58
Speaker 1: T could really do anything about it, because I don't
37:01
Speaker 1: think we said the flaws in these systems, that's what
37:05
Speaker 1: the systems depended on. It's not like they could go
37:07
Speaker 1: in and reconfigure something here or there and shut down freakers.
37:10
Speaker 1: Freakers were exploiting exactly like it would have taken billions
37:16
Speaker 1: and billions of dollars. And eventually they did do that.
37:18
Speaker 1: Eventually they did upgrade from electro mechanical to straight up
37:24
Speaker 1: electrical and then eventually digital switches that aren't fooled by those. Apparently,
37:29
Speaker 1: the way that they first really made freaking obsolete was
37:34
Speaker 1: they separated the lines so you could make whistling sounds
37:38
Speaker 1: into the line. All you wanted that line wasn't accepting
37:42
Speaker 1: that tone. The one you talked into wasn't the one
37:44
Speaker 1: that accepted the tones anymore. So that kind of shut
37:47
Speaker 1: freaking down. But for that ten year period, this amazing
37:50
Speaker 1: community developed. There was a guy who we have to
37:53
Speaker 1: shout out. His handle was Mark Burnet, which is based
37:57
Speaker 1: on a hilarious early proto meme that came out of
38:01
Speaker 1: the freaking community that's worth looking up. But he went
38:04
Speaker 1: around all up and down the West Coast with stickers
38:07
Speaker 1: that he made that said, like wan an interesting phone call,
38:11
Speaker 1: call this number, and then he would hang out on
38:13
Speaker 1: this line and talk to people when they called and
38:16
Speaker 1: try to introduce him to freaking. He was like a
38:18
Speaker 1: freaking evangelist. Yeah, and it became a thing among some
38:23
Speaker 1: blind teenagers because there was a guy in Seattle who
38:27
Speaker 1: called this sticker, the number on the sticker talked to.
38:30
Speaker 1: Mark Burnets got into it, and then I guess met
38:33
Speaker 1: a blind teenager that he became friends with, introduced him
38:36
Speaker 1: to freaking. That teenager went to a summer camp, introduced
38:39
Speaker 1: his blind friends to freaking. One of them moved east,
38:43
Speaker 1: went to another summer camp, introduced those kids, and it
38:46
Speaker 1: spread among like blind teenagers it was like a big deal.
38:49
Speaker 1: And there's a session, a hangout session that Ron Rosenbaum
38:53
Speaker 1: chronicled in the Little Blue Box Secrets of the Blue
38:56
Speaker 1: Box article and of eight kids hanging out in this
39:02
Speaker 1: one kid's kitchen. I think five of them were blind,
39:04
Speaker 1: So it's like a really big cool thing among blind
39:07
Speaker 1: teenagers too. So there's this huge thing that's developing. This
39:11
Speaker 1: the beginning of hacker cultures developing over this ten year period.
39:14
Speaker 1: Then at and T steps in and is like, we're
39:17
Speaker 1: shutting this down. We're losing way too much money.
39:20
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you know it was great about our new
39:24
Speaker 2: friend Kyle's article that he put together for us was
39:27
Speaker 2: that Carl got right off the bat like that there's
39:30
Speaker 2: a story element to these episodes, and he nailed it
39:35
Speaker 2: with this third act reveal, which was this thing was
39:39
Speaker 2: around for a while, it went away, but the legacy
39:44
Speaker 2: of it wasn't just these people had fun talking to
39:47
Speaker 2: each other on beeplines and hacking some free long distance
39:51
Speaker 2: calls and stuff like that. The legacy of this thing
39:55
Speaker 2: was what we're going to get to now, which was
40:00
Speaker 2: the legal aspects of it and legal justifications for recording
40:05
Speaker 2: phone calls and surveilling phone calls in the United States,
40:09
Speaker 2: which all came out of AT and T going after
40:14
Speaker 2: initially those bookies in Miami and Los Angeles that you
40:17
Speaker 2: talked about. In nineteen sixty six, when the FBI rated
40:21
Speaker 2: these bookies, they prosecuted one guy, this guy named Kenneth Hannah,
40:25
Speaker 2: and all of a sudden, there was precedent, there was
40:27
Speaker 2: legal ground the AT and T had that said we
40:30
Speaker 2: can go after these hackers. We can charge them with
40:34
Speaker 2: a crime, in this case, fraud by wire And where
40:39
Speaker 2: do we find these people, Well, we're going to wire
40:41
Speaker 2: tap them. And that's what they did. It was an
40:43
Speaker 2: operation called Green Star. Between sixty four and nineteen seventy.
40:47
Speaker 2: They tapped about thirty three million phone calls, recorded about
40:51
Speaker 2: half of those, and the United States later on would
40:54
Speaker 2: say this is great and just fine.
40:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, it really kind of goes to score just how
41:01
Speaker 1: incredibly powerful AT and T was at the time. Like,
41:05
Speaker 1: imagine one company having complete control over the Internet in
41:09
Speaker 1: the United States. Yeah, like that that gives you an
41:12
Speaker 1: idea of like how powerful AT and T was. So
41:15
Speaker 1: when they decided they were going to set up their
41:17
Speaker 1: own internal surveillance program and then take it to the Feds.
41:23
Speaker 1: They were fully aware that the Feds would totally play
41:26
Speaker 1: ball and wouldn't be like, uh, what did you just do. Instead,
41:29
Speaker 1: they'd be like, oh, yeah, we better go get these
41:31
Speaker 1: laws passed to make sure that what you did was
41:33
Speaker 1: legal retroactively. And then at the same time, let's go
41:37
Speaker 1: get those phone freakers, because they really were costing at
41:40
Speaker 1: and T money. I saw an estimate in the mid
41:43
Speaker 1: seventies they were losing thirty million a year, which is
41:46
Speaker 1: like one hundred and seventy five million today just a
41:49
Speaker 1: phone freaking. Again, that's how expensive long distance was. It
41:52
Speaker 1: wasn't just your parents, Chuck. Any sane person with a
41:56
Speaker 1: job and a phone would know you don't call long
41:59
Speaker 1: disas since on your phone. No, you just didn't do it.
42:05
Speaker 2: No, it'd have to be you remember the calls like
42:07
Speaker 2: your parents would have to make to like the in
42:11
Speaker 2: laws of their parents or something, and then like how
42:13
Speaker 2: short they would keep stuff.
42:15
Speaker 1: Hey, how are you doing her? Fine? Okay?
42:16
Speaker 2: Bye, yeah, yeah, everything's good, everything's good. We'll be there
42:18
Speaker 2: next week Tuesday, Tuesday. The maybe most shocking fact of
42:25
Speaker 2: this whole episode to me is the fact that the
42:28
Speaker 2: last circuit that could be blue boxed in the United
42:31
Speaker 2: States was disconnected two thousand and six. Yeah, in rural Minnesota,
42:36
Speaker 2: they still had one circuit that was that you could
42:39
Speaker 2: blue box your way in. But they had been you know,
42:43
Speaker 2: largely eliminated in the in the nineteen seventies and then
42:46
Speaker 2: into the eight or I guess into the eighties really,
42:50
Speaker 2: and you know, kind of with that phone freaking there
42:53
Speaker 2: was no incentive anymore. Now that when you know, when
42:55
Speaker 2: the Internet certainly came along and you could just talk
42:58
Speaker 2: to anyone anywhere at any time, there was no incentive
43:01
Speaker 2: to do any sort of long distance hacking. And it
43:04
Speaker 2: was just a moment in time basically where this thing
43:08
Speaker 2: was allowed to exist, and it existed because of particular
43:11
Speaker 2: equipment that then went the way of the DODO. But
43:14
Speaker 2: like you said, it went, it went. They handed the
43:16
Speaker 2: baton right off to internet hacking, and it was a
43:19
Speaker 2: pretty seamless, uh you know, transition.
43:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, Like they would literally, just like Matthew Broderick did,
43:25
Speaker 1: take their phone and connect it to their computer through
43:28
Speaker 1: what's called an acoustic coupler, which basically was like whatever
43:32
Speaker 1: tone your phone made, it did it into the computer
43:34
Speaker 1: through that coupler. And again they were like dialing numbers
43:38
Speaker 1: to find interesting numbers or to find other people's motives
43:40
Speaker 1: so they could hack into it. So it's yeah, it's
43:43
Speaker 1: perfect word. It was a seamless transition to computer hacking.
43:47
Speaker 1: But it's not like that's all that people did from
43:51
Speaker 1: that point on was everything everything to do with the
43:53
Speaker 1: Internet and computers. Freaking as far as like phone. Interest
43:57
Speaker 1: in phones and phone networks still continues still today and
44:01
Speaker 1: it's gotten. If it was illegal before, it's eye poppingly illegal.
44:05
Speaker 1: The kind of phone freaking that people are doing today.
44:07
Speaker 2: Yeah, like cell phone hacking and stuff like that.
44:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, spoofing a cell tower to intercept phone calls and
44:14
Speaker 1: then decoding them so you can eavesdrop in on people's
44:17
Speaker 1: sell conversations. Like, Yeah, there was a I think a
44:21
Speaker 1: do you remember was it a Wired article I sent
44:23
Speaker 1: you from I think twenty ten that chronicles some some
44:28
Speaker 1: like a conference where a group was like, hey, get
44:31
Speaker 1: this for fifteen hundred dollars and parts you can get
44:35
Speaker 1: from the internet. You can make a spoofed cell tower
44:38
Speaker 1: and intercept calls. And this was twenty ten, so you
44:42
Speaker 1: could probably make one for ten bucks in five minutes
44:44
Speaker 1: now or buy it for ten bucks on the Internet.
44:49
Speaker 1: It's just amazing what they're doing now. It's interesting that
44:51
Speaker 1: it still has to do with the phone. It's not
44:54
Speaker 1: just computer base. It's there's still interest in messing with
44:58
Speaker 1: phone networks.
44:59
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I believe we've even talked about on the
45:01
Speaker 2: show that thing where you'll get a call on your
45:03
Speaker 2: cell phone that says like American Express incoming call, and
45:07
Speaker 2: it's not, it's it's someone has I can't remember what
45:10
Speaker 2: they called it, because we ended up it happened to
45:13
Speaker 2: us and we ended up talking to American Express and so,
45:15
Speaker 2: and now that's called whatever. Not masking or maybe it
45:18
Speaker 2: was masking when they can just basically create, you know,
45:22
Speaker 2: originate a call saying it's from you, and all of
45:24
Speaker 2: a sudden, you're you know, talking about your account details
45:27
Speaker 2: and stuff like that.
45:28
Speaker 1: Oh man, yes, social engineering.
45:33
Speaker 2: No, I just mean, like, you know, a phone call
45:36
Speaker 2: coming in that's saying it's from American Express, but it's not.
45:38
Speaker 1: It's from a thief, right, and they're trying to get
45:40
Speaker 1: your credit info right so they can go off and
45:43
Speaker 1: make their own card and charge it to you.
45:46
Speaker 2: I guess. So. I mean, some.
45:48
Speaker 1: People try so hard at such bad things.
45:51
Speaker 2: I know, we've talked about it before. Put that energy
45:53
Speaker 2: toward just good upstanding legal hard work and you could
45:57
Speaker 2: probably make money. Yeah you know, yeah, old.
46:01
Speaker 1: Man, here, you got anything else?
46:04
Speaker 2: I got nothing else. Big thanks to Kyle, Welcome aboard,
46:07
Speaker 2: great job.
46:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, way to go, Kyle. And we both said congratulations
46:12
Speaker 1: a Kyle and thanks, which means obviously we've just triggered
46:15
Speaker 1: listener mail.
46:18
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is just short and sweet. When I couldn't
46:20
Speaker 2: think of that word in the widow episode, I think
46:25
Speaker 2: we have the word. Hey, guys, was listening to Widowhood,
46:28
Speaker 2: Chuck couldn't bring to mind a word for when you
46:30
Speaker 2: come to a conclusion based on your own experience, and
46:33
Speaker 2: I started freaking out with an F not a pH,
46:36
Speaker 2: because I can never bring that same word to mind either.
46:39
Speaker 2: It's so bad that I actually asked my wife quite often, Hey,
46:42
Speaker 2: what's that word I can never remember? And she just
46:44
Speaker 2: says anecdotally, Oh, yeah, so that was a word. I'm
46:48
Speaker 2: guessing that's the word you were looking for, Chuck. I've
46:50
Speaker 2: tried different ways to get the word to stick in
46:52
Speaker 2: my mind, but nothing is worked. I bet somewhere out
46:55
Speaker 2: there someone to study this, and there's a podcast episode
46:59
Speaker 2: because I think. I think everyone has weird words. They
47:02
Speaker 2: either can never spell correctly or remember it's it's kind
47:05
Speaker 2: of a weird phenomenon.
47:07
Speaker 1: Yeah. I have a breed of warm season grass right
47:10
Speaker 1: now at my house, and I cannot, for the life
47:13
Speaker 1: of me remember the kind.
47:15
Speaker 2: It is Zoysia.
47:16
Speaker 1: It's not zoysa, something else, crab grass grass. I looked
47:23
Speaker 1: it up. No, that's cool season. I looked up all
47:25
Speaker 1: different kinds of southern turf grass. It's warm season. It's
47:29
Speaker 1: not listed. I don't know what's going on. It forms
47:31
Speaker 1: like a thick carpet of grass. It's so pretty.
47:36
Speaker 2: I bet someone I'll let you know.
47:38
Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess so. I would love it if they did.
47:41
Speaker 2: Well. As long as you got an inch of staining water,
47:42
Speaker 2: it doesn't matter. It's going to grow.
47:44
Speaker 1: It's a quarter inch. Let's not be preposterous, all right.
47:47
Speaker 2: That was from Joel Dawson.
47:49
Speaker 1: Thanks a lot, Joel, And again thanks a lot, Kyle.
47:52
Speaker 1: And if you want to be like Joel, you can
47:54
Speaker 1: send us an email too. Send it off to stuff
47:57
Speaker 1: podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is
48:03
Speaker 1: a production of iHeartRadio.
48:05
Speaker 2: For more podcasts my Heeart Radio visit the iHeartRadio app,
48:08
Speaker 2: Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.