Secrets of The Little Blue Box Pt.2 
 
A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED 
 
"But wait a minute," I stop Gilbertson.   "if everything you do sounds like
phone-company equipment, why doesn't the phone company charge you for the
call the way it charges its own equipment?" 
 
     "Okay.  That's where the 2600-cycle tone comes in.  I better start from
the beginning." 
 
     The beginning he describes for me is a vision of the phone system of the
continent as thousands of webs, of long-line trunks radiating from each of
the hundreds of toll switching offices to the other toll switching offices.
Each toll switching office is a hive compacted of thousands of long-distance
tandems constantly whistling and beeping to tandems in far-off toll switching
offices. 
 
     The tandem is the key to the whole system.  Each tandem is a line with
some relays with the capability of signaling any other tandem in any other
toll switching office on the continent, either directly one-to-one or by
programming a roundabout route several other tandems if all the direct routes
are busy.  For instance, if you want to call from New York to Los Angeles and
traffic is heavy on all direct trunks between the two cities, your tandem in
New York is programmed to try the next best route, which may send you down
to a tandem in New Orleans, then up to San Francisco,  or down to a New
Orleans tandem, back to an Atlanta tandem, over to an AlbuquerqEue tandem and
finally up to Los Angeles. 
 
     When a tandem is not being used, when it's sitting there waiting for
someone to make a long-distance call, it whistles.  One side of the tandem,
the side "facing" our home phone, whistles at 2600 cycles per second toward
all the home phones serviced by the exchange, telling them it is at their
service, should they be interested in making a long-distance call.  The other
side of the tandem is whistling 2600 c.p.s. into one or more long distance
trunk lines, telling the rest of the phone system that it is neither sending
nor receiving a call through the trunk at the moment, that it has no use for
that trunk at the moment. 
 
     When you dial a long-distance number the first thing that happens is
that you are hooked into a tandem.  A register comes up to the side of the
tandem facing away from you and presents that side with the number you
dialed. This sending side of the tandem stops whistling 2600 into its trunk
line.  When a tandem stops the 2600 tone it has been sending through a trunk,
the trunk is said to be "seized," and is now ready to carry the number you
have dialed -- converted into multi-frequency beep tones -- to a tandem in
the area code and central office you want. 
 
     Now when a blue-box operator wants to make a call from New Orleans to
New York he starts by dialing the 800 number of a company which might happen
to have its headquarters in Los Angeles.  The sending side of this New
Orleans tandem stops sending 2600 out over the trunk to the central office
in Los Angeles, thereby seizing the trunk.  Your New Orleans tandem begins
sending beep tones to a tandem it has discovered idly whistling 2600 cycles
in Los Angeles.  The receiving end of that L.A. tandem is seized, stops
whistling 2600, listens to the beep tones which tell it which L.A. phone to
ring, and starts ringing the 800 number.  Meanwhile a mark made in the New
Orleans office accounting tape indicates that a call from your New Orleans
phone to the 800 number in L.A. has been initiated and gives the call a code
number.  Everything is routine so far. 
 
     But then the phone phreak presses his blue box to the mouthpiece and
pushes the 2600-cycle button, sending 2600 out from the New Orleans tandem
to the L.A. tandem.  The L.A. tandem notices the 2600 cycles are coming over
the line again and assumes that New Orleans has hung up because the trunk is
whistling as if idle.  The L.A. tandem immediately ceases ringing the L.A.
800 number.  But as soon as the phreak takes his finger off the 2600 button,
the L.A. tandem assume s the trunk is once again being used because the 2600
is gone so it listens for a new series of digit tones -- to find out where
it must send the call. 
 
     Thus the blue-box operator in New Orleans now is in touch with a tandem
in L.A. which is waiting like and obedient genie to be told what to do next. 
The blue-box owner then beeps out the ten digits of the New York number which
tell the L.A. tandem to relay a call to New York City.  Which it promptly
does.  As soon as your party picks up the phone in New York, the side of the
New Orleans tandem facing you stops sending 2600 to you and starts carrying
his voice to you by way of the L.A. tandem.  A notation is made on the
accounting tape that the connection has been made on the 800 call which had
been initiated and noted earlier.  When you stop talking to New York a
notation is made that the 800 call has ended. 
 
    At three the next morning, when phone company's accounting computer
starts reading back over the master accounting tape for the past day, it
records that a call of a certain length of time was made from your New
Orleans home to an L.A. 800 number and, of course the accounting computer has
been trained to ignore these toll-free 800 calls when compiling your monthly
bill. 
 
     "All they can prove is that you made an 800 toll-free call," Gilbertson
the inventor concludes. "of course, if you're foolish enough to talk for two
hours on an 800 call, and they've installed one of their special anti-fraud
computer programs to watch out for such things, they may spot you and ask you
why you took two hours talking to Army Recruitig's 800 number when you're
4-F.  But if you do it from a pay phone, they may discover something peculiar
the next day -- if they've got a blue-box hunting program in their computer
-- but you'll be a long time gone from the pay phone by then.  Using a pay
phone is almost guaranteed safe." 
 
     "What about the recent series of blue-box arrests all across the
country--New York, Cleveland, and so on ?" I asked.  "How were they caught
so easily?" 
 
     "From what I can tell, they made one big mistake:  they were seizing
trunks using an area code plus 555-1212 instead of an 800 number.  Using 555
is easy to detect because when you send multi-frequency beep tones off 555
you get a charge for it on your tape and the accounting computer knoes
there's something wrong when it tries to bill you for a two-hour call toAkron, Ohio, information, and it drops a trouble card which goes right into
the hands of the security agent if they're looking for blue-box users. 
 
     "Whoever sold those guys their blue boxes didn't tell them how to use
them propErty, which is fairly irresponsible.  And they were fairly stupid
to use them at home all the time. 
 
     "But what those arrests really mean is that an awful lot of blue boxes
are flooding into the country and that people are finding them so easy to
make that they know how to make them before they know how to use them.  Ma
Bell is in trouble." 
 
     And if a blue-box operator or a cassette-recorder phone phreak sticks
to pay phones and 800 numbers, the phone company can't stop them? 
 
     "Not unless they changes their entire nationwide long-lines technology,
which will take them a few billion dollars and twenty years.  Right now they
can't do a thing.  They're screwed." 
 
CAPTAIN CRUNCH DEMONSTRATES HIS FAMOUS UNIT 
 
     There is an underground telephone network in this country.  Gilbertson
discovered it the very day news of his activities hit the papers.  That
evening his phone began ringing.  Phone phreaks from Seattle, from Florida,
from New York, from San Jose, and from Los Angeles began calling him and
telling him about the phone phreak who's say nothing but, "Hang up and call
this number." 
 
     When he dialed the number he'd find himself tied into a conference of
a dozen phone phreaks arranged through a quirky switching station in British
Columbia.  They identified themselves as phone phreaks, they demonstrated
their homemade blue boxes which they called "M-F-ers" (for "multi-frequency,"
among other things) for him, they talked shop about phone-phreak devices. 
They let him in on their secrets on the theory that if the phone company was
after him he must be trustworthy.  And, Gilbertson r ecalls, they stunned him
with their technical sophistication. 
 
     I ask him how to get in touch with the phone-phreak network.  He digs
around through a file of old schematics and comes up with about a dozen
numbers in three widely separated area codes. 
 
     "Those are the centers," he tells me.  Alongside some of the numbers he
writes in first names or nicknames:  names like Captain Crunch, Dr. No, Frank
Carson (also a code word for free call), Marty Freeman (code word for M-F
device), Peter Perpendicular Pimple, Alfnull, and The Cheshire Cat.  He makes
checks alongside the names of those among these top who are blind.  There are
five checks. 
 
     I ask him who this Captain Crunch person is. 
 
     "Oh.  The Captain.  He's probably he most legendary pho=e phreak.  he
calls himself Captain Crunch after the notorious Cap'n Crunch whistle." 
(Several years ago, Gilbertson explains, the makers of Cap'n Crunch breakfast
cereal offered a toy-whistle prize in every box as a treat for the Cap'nCrunch set.  Somehow a phone phreak discovered that the toy whistle just
happened to produce a perfect 2600-cycle tone.  When the man who calls
himself Captain Crunch was transferred overseas to England with his Air Force
unit, he would receive scores of calls from his friends and "mute" them--make
them free of charge to them--by blowing his Cap'n Crunch whistle into his
end.) 
 
     "Captain Crunch is one of the older phone phreaks,"  Gilbertson tells
me. "He's an engineer who once got in a little trouble for fooling around
with the phone, but he can't stop.  Well, this guy drives across country in
a Volkswagen van with an entire switch board and a computerized
super-sophisticated M-F-er in the back.  He'll pull up to a phone booth on
a lonely hightway somewhere, snake a cable out of his bus, hook it onto the
phone andsit for hours, days sometimes, sending calls zipping back and forth
across the country, all over the world.... 
" 
 
     Back at my motel, I dialed the number he gave me for "Captain Crunch"
and asked for G---- T-----, his real name, or at least the name he uses when
he's not dashing into a phone booth beeping out M-F tones faster than a
speeding bullet, and zipping phantomlike through the phone company's
long-distance lines 
. 
 
     When G---- T----- answered the phone and I told him I was preparing a
story for Esquire about phone phreaks, he became very indignant. 
 
     "I don't do that.  I don't do that anymore at all.  And if I do it, I
do it for one reason and one reason only.  I'm learning about a system.  The
phone company is a System.  A computer is a System.  Do you understand?  If
I do what I do, it is only to explore a System.  Computer Systems.  That's
my bag.  The phone company is nothing but a computer." 
 
     A tone of tightly restrained excitement enters the Captain's voice when
he starts talking about Systems.  He begins to pronounce each syllable with
the hushed deliberation of an obscene caller. 
 
 
     "Ma Bell is a system I want to explore.  It's a beautivful system, you
know, but Ma Bell screwed up.  It's terrible because Ma Bell is such a
beautiful system, but she screwed up.  I learned how she screwed up from a
couple of blind kids who wanted me to build a device. A certain device.  They
said it could make free calls.  I wasn't interested in free calls.  But when
these blind kids told me I could make calls into a computers, my eyes lit up. 
I wanted to learn about computers.  I wanted to learn about Ma Bell's
computers.  So I built the little device.  Only I built it wrong and Ma bell
Found out.  Ma Bell can detect things like that.  Ma Bell knows.  So I'm
strictly out of it now.  I don't do it.  Except for learning purposes."  He
pauses.  "So you want to write an article.  Are you paying for this call? 
Hang up and call this number." 
 
     He gives me a number in an area code a thousand miles north of his own. 
I dial the number. 
 
     "Hello again.  This is Captain Crunch.  You are speaking to me on a
toll-free loop-around in Portland, Oregon.  Do you know what a toll-free
loop-around is?  I'll tell you." 
 
     He explains to me that almost every exchange in the country has open
test numbers which they allow other exchanges to test their connections with
it. Most of these numbers occur in consecutive pairs, such as 302 956-0041
and 956-0042.  Well, certain phone phreaks discovered that if two people from
anywhere in the country dial those two consecutive numbers they can talk
together just as if one had called the other's number, with no charge to
either of them, of course. 
 
     "Your voice is looping around in a 4A switching machine up there in
Canada, zipping back down to me." the Captain tells me.  "My voice is looping
around up there and back down to you.  And it can't ever cost anyone money. 
The phone phreaks and I have compiled a list of many many of these numbers. 
You would be suprised if you saw the list.  I could show it to you.  But I
won't.  I'm out of that now.  I'm not out to screw Ma Bell.  I know better. 
if I do anything it's for the pure knowledge of the System. You can learn to
do fantastic things. Have you ever heard eight tandems stacked up?  Do you
know the sound of tandems stacking and unstacking?  Give me your phone
number.  Okay.  Hang up now and wait a minute." 
 
     Slightly less than a minute later the phone rang and the Captain was on
the line, his voice sounding far more excited, almost aroused. 
 
     "I wanted to show you waht it's like to stack up tandems.  To stack up
tandems."  (Whenever the Captain says "stack up" it sounds as if he is
licking his lips.) 
 
     "How do you like the connection you're on now?  the Captain asks me. 
"It's a raw tandem.  A raw tandem.  Ain't not Ain' up to it but a tandem. 
Now I'm going to show you what it's like to stack up.  Blow off.  Land in a
faraway place.  To stack that tandem up, whip back and forth the country a
few times, then shoot on up to Moscow. 
 
     "Listen," Captain Crunch continues.  "Listen.  I've got a line tie on
my switchboard here, and I'm gonna let you hear me stack and unstack tandems.
Listen to this.  I'm gonna blow your mind." 
 
     First I hear a super rapid-fire pulsing of the flutelike phone tones,
then a pause, then another popping burst of tones, then another, then
another.  Each burst if followed by a beep-kachink sound. 
 
     "We have now stacked up four tandems."  said Captain Crunch, sounding
somewhat remote.  "That's four tandems stacked up.  Do you know what that
means? That means I'm whipping back and forth, back and forth twice, across
the country, before coming to you.  I've been known to stack up twenty
tandems at a time.  Now just like I said, I'm going to shoot up to Moscow." 
 
     There is a new, longer series of beeper pulses over the line, a brief
silence, then a ring. 
 
     "Hello," answers a far-off voice. 

     "Hello.  Is this the American Embassy Moscow?" 
 
     "Yes, sir.  Who is this calling?" says the voice. 
 
     "Yes.  This is a test board here in New York.  We're calling to check
outthe circuits, see what kind of lines you've got.  Everything okay there
in Moscow?" 
 
     "Okay?" 
 
     "Well, yes, how are things there?" 
 
     "Oh.  Well, everything okay, I guess." 
 
     "Okay.  Thank you."  They hang up, leaving a confused series of
beep-kachink soundslike to stack and unstack tandems.  I'll give him a show
that will blow his mind.  What's the nubmer?" 
 
     I ask the Captain what kind of device he was using to accomplish his
feats. The Captain is pleased at the question. 
 
[Continued in part III]