Phone Phreaking: The Advent of Hacking
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Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff You Should Know. That's right. Can you do your little trumpet sound? Announcement trumpet? Yeah. Are you ready? Uh-huh. Sorry, I'm out. No. No? No. Hold on. There we go.

Yeah, we want to announce a new writer that we have working with us. Welcome aboard, Kyle Hoekstra. And everybody, we have just classed up this joint. Yeah, we have. Because Kyle is British, and he lives there. He's not like some dumb British dude living in, you know, Waco, Texas.

Or some American living in Great Britain. This guy is like legit Brit. That's right. He lives in Brighton. And we gave him a test article, and this was it. He did such a good job. We were like, hey, this thing's great, and welcome aboard. And he was interested, and so it seems like the beginning of a new great relationship. Yeah, agreed. So welcome aboard, Kyle, and thanks for this one. I'm excited about this. And this, Chuck, if you'll remember –

came up from the whistling episode. Do you remember that?

Did you mention this? No. One thing that Anna had turned up and kind of included as a sidebar was how Cap'n Crunch Whistle had been used to basically hack the phone system. And I've been wanting to do an episode on phone freaking forever. And it just so happened that reminded me and here we are now. We asked Kyle to do it and this is our episode on phone freaking. That you've been waiting for freaking ever to do. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, for real. With a PH? Both ways, actually. Yeah, I mean, I guess we should introduce what we're talking about here because this is something that if you're maybe of a certain age, you might not know what this is. And I'm of that certain age that should know, but I didn't really know much about it, to be honest. But we're talking about the fact that in...

The 1950s. Well, before that, let's say. You're not of that certain age. In our lifetime. Uh-huh, right. Pre-computers. Yeah. We were all still connected via something called the telephone system. And in the United States, the telephone system was...

It's how humans connected before the Internet. And it was a big interconnected system that was manually operated by switchboards, which we should totally do a switchboard episode at some point. Yeah, it was really, really interesting. But they started to get rid of the switchboard operators in the 1950s for automatic switches. And the one thing they didn't think about was the fact that they had a bit of a design flaw or a weakness in this system that

Whereas the tones they used to let the automatic system know, like, what to do with a telephone call could be mimicked and replicated with sometimes a human voice, sometimes a toy whistle, like you said. Yeah. Or something that somebody made to essentially hack into the phone system by replicating those tones. And AT&T was like, oh, we never thought that anyone would be interested in doing that. Yeah.

That was an outstanding introduction, man. And it's called phone freaking, P-H-P-H. Yeah, and so phone freakers were pretty much the earliest examples of hackers. They were pre-computer hacker culture. As a matter of fact, hacking just grew essentially right out of phone freaking, and a lot of the phone freaks who were...

kind of on the whole jam in the early 80s, just made the leap to computers through phones. It's pretty interesting, as we'll see. But there's one thing we should say about them. As a community, phone freakers were curious individuals. Like, they were technical-minded types. They wanted to see how this vast, huge, connected network worked.

And they knew very well that there were whole huge parts of it that were shielded from public view. You weren't meant to know about this. You didn't need to know about it. Just go in and punch the phone number and we'll connect it for you. That wasn't enough. They wanted to know everything there was to know about it. And one way that you can find out how something works is to try to break it. And that was kind of what they were doing. They weren't doing it maliciously for almost exclusively. They weren't doing it maliciously. They were doing it out of curiosity. Yeah.

Yeah. And it sort of reminded me a little bit of like ham radio operators where like the victory of a like a win for a phone freaker was like, oh, my God, I I connected with someone through the back door in another country and was able to talk to them.

And, yeah, maybe some people like took advantage of like free long distance and stuff like that. But like you said, I think as a whole, the community was just like those were the wins. Like, oh, my God, I was able to do this thing. How cool. Right. So let's let's kind of start at the beginning, shall we? Because freaking did not exist prior to the 50s or 60s when they introduced automatic switches. Right.

Which is a little aside about the switches. The guy who invented them actually invented them in the 19th century. He was a mortician who his competition, the across town mortician, his rival, that guy's wife was the town operator. So when somebody called to ask for a mortician, she automatically connected them to her husband's business, not this guy's business.

So he actually went out of his way to invent an automatic switch to replace human operators. And decades later, they finally came into play. But you couldn't have done this before when somebody was connecting the call for you. Because if you just started whistling in their ear or something like that, they'd be like, what are you doing? This is really bizarre. I'm not going to connect this call. It was once it became automated that it became possible.

I mean, did they even have dial tones with switchboard operators? I don't believe so. I don't see why you would. I think when they converted to automatic switches, they adopted something called multi-frequency tones, and it was all...

where you had a tone, like you pressed a one and it made a certain tone, actually a combination of tones, hence the multi-frequency thing. And it told this network, turn this gear or this dial. And everyone knows I don't know what I'm talking about with gears, but there were gears involved.

And things like actually would move somewhere in space because a tone told it to. That's kind of what they brought online in the 50s and 60s. So if someone whistled at a switchboard operator, they would be from the future.

So, yeah, kind of, or else they'd be fresh. Yeah, they'd be fresh because it's like a wolf whistle or something. So let's talk about phones for a second, because when we talk about these tones, we largely think of like a push button telephone, which is what we use starting. Geez, I'm not even really sure, but they replace the rotary phones, not replace. They worked alongside for many years.

We had both for a long time in my house. Yeah. But the button on the phone isn't exactly key to the system operating. The only thing the phone would do was create that tone. The tone was what mattered. It did get me wondering, like, well, how the heck does a rotary phone even work? And this is just a slight aside, but I never knew...

How that operated and the way a rotary phone would work was you would dial the number around and that part didn't really matter. It was the return back into position that sent this, uh, that would engage basically these electrical contacts to interrupt the electrical continuity. So a nine would go up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up. And it would interrupt it nine different times and sending a signal saying, Hey, this is a nine dumb, dumb.

And I never knew how that worked, so I thought that was pretty fascinating. But as far as the push-button phone, you would just press a button. It would have a tone assigned to it. And it's those tones that freaks were able to replicate themselves

to essentially fool the phone company into thinking that somebody was pressing a button. And in some cases they were, which we'll talk about. And just knowing that you could trick the system into dialing something for you just by whistles or making tones not using your phone, that's fun in and of itself. What fun? But there's a really good example of like how this could be put to use in a way that was like, oh, okay, this is no longer legal. Right.

you're actually hijacking the phone system for your own ends. And this was the basis of freaking. There was a tone that was instrumental to this whole multi-frequency tone system. And it was, I think, the minor E that resonates at 2600 hertz. Okay? Okay.

So whatever sound cycles at 2,600 cycles per second, that tone would tell the phone company that your phone was on the hook.

When your phone stopped making that sound, when your line stopped making that 2,600 hertz sound, all of a sudden the phone system was like, oh, okay, this guy wants a connection somewhere. Let's go pay attention to what's going on here. So let's say you started to dial a number and you dial the 800 number. Your phone stopped making that 2,600 hertz sound.

and the phone company's attention was grabbed by that, and you dialed this 800 number, and it would start to connect to you. And because it was an 800 number, the system would be like, okay, we're connecting this, but we're not going to charge this person for this call because this is a toll-free number. And then before the other person on the other line could pick up, you'd have to call the phone company.

you would make a 2,600 hertz tone. And that told the phone system you had hung up, but you hadn't actually hung up. And now the line was open for you to dial any number you wanted to, anywhere in the world, toll-free. Because as far as the system was concerned, you were still calling a toll-free number, even though you were calling any number you wanted. And now you could make long-distance phone calls for free at a time when they were really, really expensive.

That's right. And these were enabled by what were called trunk lines. So if you think about whatever city you live in, depending on the size of your city, you would have, I guess if you lived in a small enough town, you probably just had one office. But if your city was large enough, you had multiple offices there.

Where these calls were connected, basically. So if you lived in like one neighborhood in Dallas, Texas, and you were calling a neighborhood, you know, 10, 15 miles away in Dallas, Texas, there would be another office there in that neighborhood or that area or region or whatever. And they were all connected by trunk lines, like hundreds to thousands of these things, depending on how big your town was, because each one of these

could only handle one call at a time right so the trunk line line was basically just a medium to carry your voice carry your voice locally uh from one place to the other and like like we both said there was only one that could be going at once that's why there were thousands of these things and if you're able to replicate that tone then you could you know have some good clean fun

Yeah, and trunk lines were also the way that you dialed long distance because they could connect like different parts of a town. They could also connect one city to another and so on and so forth. And so the people who figured this out that you could hijack the phone system by trying out different tones and doing different things were just socked in immediately immediately.

And just began experimenting, started meeting one another, sometimes by happenstance on a phone line that they just happened to try out. And there was some other freak hanging out on it. It just was immediately infectious to their curiosity. They just wanted to figure out how this could work and what all you could make this phone system do by replicating these tones. I think that's a pretty good setup, my friend.

I agree. You want to take a break then? Yeah, let's take a break and we'll come back and talk about who some of these first freakers were right after this. So you should know.

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For easy drive up and go, pickup or delivery. Restrictions apply. See website for full terms and conditions. Visit Safeway.com for more details. All right. So we promised to talk about some early freakers. One was a guy in the in the 1950s. So, you know, this started pretty early on. If you think about early hacking and like what led to hacking starting in the 1950s, it's pretty mind blowing.

But one guy was Joe Ingricia, and he was a blind man who did not use a Cap'n Crunch whistle because that was before they had Cap'n Crunch whistles. He whistled with his mouth and was able to – he had perfect pitch and was able to emit somehow because it's not the easiest tone to hit if you've ever heard it. No, it's pretty serious.

And he, you know, he would whistle into the phone to do this. Other people use usually not their own human voice, but different things like I believe the Captain Crunch cereal was in the 1960s. You can go on YouTube and see people that have these little whistles demonstrating how it works and everything. But this was sort of the idea early in the 1950s and 60s with these people.

Right. So I think the guy who came up with – the guy who's credited with figuring out the Cap'n Crunch cereal whistle. It's like a boat swains whistle, like that – you know, the –

That whistle? You know on Star Trek when they blow the whistle to get everybody's attention? I've never seen Star Trek. Well, anybody who's seen Star Trek, the original one, knows what I'm talking about. That's a boat swings whistle. And so like the Cap'n Crunch whistle, if you covered up one hole, it would make a perfect 2,600 hertz tone. And apparently the guy who came up with that, who figured that out, took the handle Cap'n Crunch. That was his freaker handle, but his real name was Draper, right? I believe Cap'n Crunch.

I saw it both ways. Really? Yeah, I saw more often than not Captain like fully spelled out. I guess he wanted to differentiate himself. Oh, okay. Yeah. I thought you just were saying it as a serial. No, no, no. That was his handle. No, no, no. I know, but he took it from the serial. Sure, sure. Yeah, I didn't think it was a coincidence. What was his first name? Draper? Dave? Dave?

Yeah, David Draper. No, no, no, John. John. I think it was John because I watch videos of him and every time it sounded like he was saying Don Draper for Mad Men. So it was very confusing. Okay, so John, he was the one who was credited with

figuring that out. He was a legendary early phone freaker. Yeah, and he still has videos. And we'll talk about a little bit more about him later on. But like I said, most people did not use their voice. They would use like that whistle or they started building devices. They were called blue boxes and they all look different because they were all homemade. But, you know, if you look up blue box online, there are all kinds of, you know, it basically looks like a

um, a phone without the, the talking ends. It's just like a box usually with, with punch button numbers like you would see on a phone. Yes. Or if, um,

If you were a Bond villain in maybe a 60s Bond movie and you wanted to remotely blow something up, it looks like the kind of thing you'd pull an antenna out of and press a series of numbers on it and something would explode. And then you'd very calmly put the antenna back in and walk away. Yeah, except scratch the antenna. Right, not in the blue box, just in this Bond idea. Yeah.

there's also a red box. There are a ton of different boxes, uh, like by the end of all this, people had figured out all sorts of different weight devices to, to make phones do all sorts of things. And they all had different colors, but the other, uh,

The other two big ones were the red box, which was a blue box, but had the added capacity of creating the tones that told the phone system that this payphone had just accepted a quarter or a dime at the time. And now you can go ahead and connect the call, even though no one had put a dime in. It had just mimicked that tone. Then the black box.

It interrupted the DC signal to your phone to make it seem like you had never picked up a call. So the person calling you long distance would never be charged for it, even though you're sitting there talking. Those are the three big ones, blue, red, and black.

Yeah. And the red one is actually super cool because, uh, you know, if you're came along after pay phones were around, uh, you didn't have to put in, uh, like if you had other, uh, coins that would equal a dime, let's say, Oh, I don't know. Two nickels. Sure. You could put two nickels in and a nickel created a specific tone, a dime created a specific tone and a quarter created one. So the red box was able to mimic each of these coins, uh,

to recreate the tone it made when you, you know, because those little payphones were smart. They knew what you were dropping in there. They were so smart. And they would sing that song thusly. So the whole thing that all these were based on, again, was this multi-frequency tone system. And it turns out that there were six master tones to the whole thing, that if you knew these tones, you could basically make the phone system do anything you wanted.

And they were made up of 12 individual tones. And so, for example, if you wanted to mimic the number one, you had to make the sound of 700 hertz and 900 hertz at the same time. And that would be as far as the phone system is concerned. If it heard that, it would say, oh, OK, one. I'm pressing one for this guy.

And the whole thing is predicated on a mistake that somebody made at Bell, which we haven't said this, but this is kind of important too. At the time, AT&T was known as Ma Bell. It had essentially a monopoly on the phone system in the United States. Not essentially. Exactly. Like it was the phone company for the entire country. And B2B.

because it was so this one big monstrous thing, if you figured out how to mess with AT&T, you figured out how to hijack the entire phone system. That was one thing. But the point of that is that some AT&T engineer wrote an article in a technical journal in the 50s, and they included what those master tones were made of in the article. And that

Gave way to the basis of all those blue boxes and black boxes and red boxes that were made later. Had that article never been published, freaking might have never really taken off. It would probably been a pastime for people with who had a Cap'n Crunch whistle or perfect pitch and could whistle things themselves. I don't know. I bet you nerds prevail.

For sure. But I mean, it would have taken those like hardcore people like Joe and Grecia who figured it out on their own just through trial and error over years. This was, here's a blue box and here's how you use it. And that's how a lot of people got into freaking who wouldn't have otherwise been pulled into it because it would have been too hard. I think it sped up the timeline for sure. For sure. And like we said, people were...

You know, the Wynn was making a call, working around the phone company for a long distance call. Sometimes they would get into pranking a little bit, like they could figure out how to hack into the loudspeakers at a mall and make announcements. There was one pretty famous prank call in Santa Barbara in 1974 when they pranked

They basically took advantage of a bug called simultaneous seizure where two calls at the same time would jam up the switching equipment in the office and you could hijack calls coming into like a city. So people, two guys got, you know, from L.A. got, I guess they got arrested for doing this. It says they, I'm not sure if they served jail time or not, but they,

Essentially, we're able to any call coming into Santa Barbara, they would route it to a voice saying that Santa Barbara had been destroyed by a nuclear bomb. And it kind of got out of hand, like people called emergency services and, you know, they found out what was going on, obviously, but just, you know, sort of.

That was about as harmful as it got, unless you count stealing long distance. Yeah. And stealing long distance was a favorite of the mafia. They were big time into phone freaking. And they weren't the kind who would just sit there and, you know, try out whistling different tones for years on end. They got into it through blue and black and red boxes.

And the reason why is because their bookies would be taking calls from all over the country. And I think I said earlier that long distance was expensive at the time. It was. It was so expensive. Click Americana, which is a great, great website. They found an old Bell ad from 1965.

that boasts the low price of $12 for your first three minutes for long distance in 1965 dollars. Yeah. That's like $118 today.

for three minutes of long distance. It's insane. And it very quickly, as after they introduced the automatic switches, their costs dropped very quickly. So by 1970, it was down to probably 20 bucks for three minutes. But still, that's a lot of money. And if you're a bookie taking long distance calls all night long, all day long, that adds up. So of course you want to start using blue boxes. So the mafia got heavy into it too.

Wait, how much did you say it was at first for three minutes? $12 for three minutes. And according to West Egg, that'd be $118 today. Oh, okay. So you went on the, cause you said it went down to $20. That was conversion wise?

No, from 1965 to about 1970. In just that five years, it dropped that dramatically. From 12 to 20? No, no, no. Sorry. Yes, you're right. From in 2023 dollars. Oh, okay. Yeah. I wanted to make that as confusing as possible. So that's why I chose that.

Well, I mean, I remember even in the 1980s when I would meet a girl at church camp that lived in another place and come home and want to communicate with my little church camp crush. And my parents would be like, yeah, forget about it. Like, you're not dialing along. You're not calling this girl up long distance. Meet a local girl. What's wrong with you? It was a big, big deal. Like, I remember early cell phones used to charge you long distance. And then when all of a sudden it was like,

That just went away. It was like a different world almost. Yeah, totally. So...

Computers came around. Obviously, everything changed after computers came around in the 1980s because you could all of a sudden design a program that could generate tones, like specifically for what you needed. If anyone saw the movie War Games, which we've talked about quite a few times on this show because it's one of the show favorites. But that had a couple of examples of...

phone freaking when Matthew Broderick dialed into the school system at beginning to change Ali Sheedy's grades. He used a technique called war dialing. That's when you're just like use a computer to auto dial, just like hundreds and thousands of numbers scanning for a vulnerability. Or in this case, he was scanning for his own school line to hack into. Right.

And then I know we did talk about this in another episode, but the little payphone hack that he tried apparently is not a real thing and was just made up for the movie. Isn't that right? Yeah, but it does. It definitely gets across the concept of a red box like you could do that. You just couldn't do it the way he did it. But it also kind of got across a little bit the concept of the black box, which would kind of short the circuit, which is what he was doing. So it was a little confused, but interesting.

it certainly got a lot of people interested in hacking, and it also scared the pants off of Ronald Reagan, which you might say, who cares? The problem was at the time, Ronald Reagan was the president of the United States.

And there's a guy named Fred Kaplan who wrote a book about the history of cyber war called Dark Territory. And apparently Reagan saw this film was so freaked out by it that he got the Joint Chiefs together and was like, can this happen? Somebody go find out.

And the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, a guy named General John Vesey, went and investigated and came back. And he said, quote, Mr. President, the problem is much worse than you think. And so three years after War Games came out, Congress passed basically an anti-War Games scary movie law.

That's right. They did. It was called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. And it seemingly came out of watching the movie War Games. Isn't that nuts? Pretty crazy.

So, let's go back a little bit and talk about some of the freaks. We've kind of covered some of them, like Joe Ingressia. His handle was Joy Bubbles. There was also Captain Crunch, John Draper, like you said. These guys were like freaking at the time when it was like a...

I guess a golden age, Chuck. There's only one way to put it. I was trying to avoid it, but it was a golden age of freaking. We love our golden ages. Yeah, and, you know, as far as who these people were, they were who the hackers ended up being. They were kind of early techies. They were kind of nerds, usually. They were...

They were into, you know, some of them may have been into kind of disruption. I think, like we said, most of the time it was just sort of good natured, but there were definitely those that were like, hey, fight the man. We have this monopoly that's controlling the phone system. Let's see if we can poke the bear a little bit. So, you know, they were in there doing a little bit of that as well. But like we said, generally good natured stuff. I think we should mention that, you know,

That Draper later on had allegations of sexual assault that emerged and he was banned from different conferences starting in like the 2010s. So he's a pretty divisive guy. So it's not like we're seeing his praises or anything, but...

He was definitely like one of the first kind of famous freakers, largely because of this Esquire magazine article in 1971 called Secrets of the Little Blue Box.

A guy named Ron Rosenbaum wrote this really long form, detailed, pretty great article about phone freaking, which not only put a spotlight on people like Captain Crunch, but put a spotlight and created more phone freakers because people read it and were like, I got to get out of this thing. Yeah, it's usually in the top 10, 20 at most of like greatest magazine articles of all times list. Yeah.

it's a really good article. But one of the things when people write about it that they like to point out is it's the definitive history of phone freaking up to that point. But then it also serves as a pivotal point because it helped make history because it introduced phone freaking to like a whole bunch of other people who were totally interested in that but just hadn't heard of it before. And one of the reasons why that happened is because he gave just enough information

technical information for how to do it, but left out the, the, some of like the more gory details. But it was, it was tantalizing enough that if you were interested and motivated, you could go fill in the blanks and figure out how to do it. Um, and it turned out in fact that, uh, the guys who founded Apple, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs were two people who read this thing and went and figured it out themselves. Yeah. They got into phone freaking. Um,

They built boxes. They built and sold digital blue boxes. And Steve Wozniak, out of all the circuitry he built as the wizard behind Apple, he said that that digital blue box circuit was the one that he was most proud of. They actually met the Captain Crunch guy, met Mr. Draper.

And they, you know, they were part of that community for a little while. They sold them for about 172 bucks in the early 1970s, which is a lot of money in today dollars. So it was a lot of money back then. They were never busted. Apparently they were some cops came around when Steve Jobs died.

A car broke down one time and they were caught with a blue box, but Woz was able to convince them that it was a synthesizer to play music on in the cop web. Okay, sounds good to me. So Wozniak's handle, Freaker handle, was Berkeley Blue and Steve Jobs' handle was Oath Tobar, which I think prefigured Dungeons and Dragons. That's a pretty good, I guess, fighter's name. Oh, is that a D&D ref?

Yeah, Dungeons and Dragons. No, but is that Oph Tobar from D&D? I think it's a good name for a D&D character is what I'm saying. Oh, I got you. I thought you meant it was linked somehow. No, no, but it just screams D&D to me.

Yeah, I didn't play D&D, so I'm just lost here. I loved it. There's one other quote, too, from, I guess, Steve Jobs, who said that without blue boxes, the blue boxes that he and Wozniak came together to make, there would be no Apple. That was like their first venture together that showed them that they could work well together, and they went on to found Apple after they did this little blue box stint. That's pretty crazy. Very crazy. Another thing that emerged around this time was something called a beep line.

which I had never heard of these. And this is something that I probably should have known about. But when you would call somebody back in the day,

And that person was on the phone and let's say they didn't have call waiting or call waiting wasn't invented at the time, maybe, or they couldn't afford it like we couldn't. You would get a busy signal. But here's the thing. That busy signal that you were dealt didn't mean that your voice path was shut off. Like you were still if you sat there on that busy signal line and didn't hang up.

And maybe this is how people found out about it. Eventually, if you sat around long enough, you would get someone else on that same busy signal line that had been, you know, denied a phone call in some other town. And if those people were teenagers, they,

they realize it was sort of the beginnings of like a party line where you could be like, hey, and you're talking over this busy signal, mind you. So while this thing is going beep, beep, I'm going, hey, this is Chuck. I live in Stone Mountain, Georgia. Like, where are you? And oh, I'm Angela. I live in Dallas, Texas. And then you strike up a conversation and you're having some good, clean teenage fun, making connections, talking to people you ordinarily would never meet. Hmm.

And beep lines were very popular in the 1960s and 70s. Yeah, there's a Time article from, I think, 1961.

That interviews the guy who ran, I think, the Fall River, Massachusetts or somewhere in Massachusetts, their telephone company or station. And that there was a radio station whose beep line was like the place to call into. And when this teen column in like a regional magazine published something on it, calls jumped from 1,500 to 27, 28,000 in a week.

So they were very popular. And apparently once you could shout your number to somebody you were trying to talk to over the busy signal, but when you actually could talk like normal people on the phone, it was just never as fun. Well, it's funny. I mentioned like maybe that's how people found out as they just stayed on that line. But it seems like radio stations is where they actually found out about these things because—

Because you would call in to win, to be the fifth caller or whatever, to win concert tickets. And almost always you would get that busy signal. And so many people are calling in that they would find each other on these busy signal lines and figured out, hey, wait a minute, this is a thing. Yeah, because usually when you got a busy signal, you just, you wouldn't make a sound. You wouldn't try to talk.

And you just hang up immediately. But apparently, that's just how the phone lines worked. If you talked, you could hear somebody else talking back at you. It was just, like you said, you had to shout over the busy signal. I don't know why I never found this out because every time I got a busy signal, I'd be like, hello? What is this? Is someone there? Really? Really? Yeah.

No. Okay. Look, we switch, switching up roles here. What was your favorite phone of all time that you ever had? You know, the first one that jumps to mind and I never had,

I think later on I got, I was able to have a phone in my bedroom when I was like 16 or 17. But previous to that, I very much remember our very first cordless phone that had the antenna that you pull out and the cradle that it sat on. Like, I just remember that being a very big deal. Cause I thought like, wow, we're, we're literally living in the age of the Jetsons. Cause I can, cause we're unbound by a cord. Yeah.

I would have guessed, I would have put a lot of money on you saying the Sports Illustrated football phone that you got with the subscription back in the 80s. You remember that? Yeah. I mean, I was subscribed forever, but you know what happens? And this used to bother me as like a 13 year old.

As you subscribe and you get that first thing, and my mom got me a subscription when I was like 10, and you never got any gifts after that. And I used to get so mad that like, why do only new subscribers get the gift? Like you should get one every year for being a loyal subscriber. That's a great, great point. Did you email the editors or, sorry, did you write a letter to the editors of Sports Illustrated? Yeah.

I don't think so. Did your mom hang out by the mailbox in the month the swimsuit issue came out to intercept it? No, I did. Oh, yeah. That was a very big deal. You disguised yourself as the mailbox? Yeah. That was especially for a young Baptist boy who thought that, like, you know, Playboys were foreboding and stuff like that. That magazine was everything to me. Sure. Yeah.

All right, Chuck. I think that that's a good place for a break, don't you? Yeah. I'm going to go think about Christie Brinkley and Carol Ault and Kathy Ireland, and we'll be right back in a few minutes. Okay. Thank you.

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All right. So we were talking about the golden age of freaking. That was really kind of the 60s, mid to late 60s to the mid 70s probably. Yeah. About a 10-year period where –

People were figuring out how to game the international phone network. But before AT&T could really do anything about it, because I don't think we said, the flaws in these systems, that's what the systems depended on. It's not like they could go in and reconfigure something here or there and shut down Freakers. Freakers were exploiting. We won't use tones anymore. Exactly. Like it would have taken billions and billions of dollars. And eventually they did do that.

Eventually, they did upgrade from electromechanical to straight-up electrical and then eventually digital switches that aren't fooled by those. Apparently, the way that they first really...

made freaking obsolete was they separated the lines. So you could make whistling sounds into the line all you wanted. That line wasn't accepting that tone. The one you talked into wasn't the one that accepted the tones anymore. So that kind of shut freaking down. But for that 10-year period, this amazing community developed. There was a guy who we have to shout out. His handle was Mark Bernay, which is based on a hilarious story

early proto meme that came out of the freaking community that's worth looking up but he went around all up and down the west coast with stickers that he made that said like want an interesting phone call call this number and then he would hang out on this line and talk to people when they called and try to introduce him to freaking he was like a freaking evangelist yeah

And it became a thing among some blind teenagers because there was a guy in Seattle who called this sticker, the number on the sticker, talked to Mark Bernays, got into it, and then I guess met a blind teenager that he became friends with.

introduced him to freaking. That teenager went to a summer camp, introduced his blind friends to freaking. One of them moved east, went to another summer camp, introduced those kids, and it spread among like blind teenagers. It was like a big deal. And there's a session, a hangout session that Ron Rosenbaum chronicled in the little blue box, Secrets of the Blue Box.

article. And like of eight kids hanging out in this one kid's kitchen, I think five of them were blind. So it's like a really big, cool thing among blind teenagers, too. So there's this huge thing that's developing this, the beginning of hacker culture is developing over this 10 year period, then AT&T steps in and is like, we're shutting this down, we're losing way too much money.

Yeah, and you know what was great about our new friend Kyle's article that he put together for us? Was that Carl got right off the bat, like, that there's a story element to these episodes. And he nailed it with this third act reveal, which was this thing was around for a while. It went away. But the legacy of it wasn't just...

Uh, these people had fun talking to each other on beep lines and, and hacking some free long distance calls and, uh, stuff like that. The legacy of this thing was what we're going to get to now, which was, um, the legal aspects of it and legal justifications for recording phone calls and surveilling phone calls in the United States, which, which all came out.

AT&T going after initially those bookies in Miami and Los Angeles that you talked about in 1966 when the FBI raided these bookies they prosecuted one guy this guy named Kenneth Hanna and all of a sudden there was precedent there was legal ground that AT&T had this

that said, we can go after these hackers, we can charge them with a crime, in this case, fraud by wire, and where do we find these people? Well, we're going to wiretap them. And that's what they did. It was an operation called Green Star between 1964 and 1970. They tapped about 33 million phone calls, recorded about half of those, and the United States later on would say, this is great and just fine.

Yeah, it really kind of goes to underscore just how incredibly powerful AT&T was at the time. Like imagine one company having complete control over the Internet in the United States. Yeah. Like that gives you an idea of like how powerful AT&T was. So when they decided they were going to set up their own internal surveillance program and then take it to the feds,

They were fully aware that the feds would totally play ball and wouldn't be like, what did you just do? Instead, they'd be like, oh, yeah, we better go get these laws passed to make sure that what you did was legal retroactively. And then at the same time, let's go get those phone freakers because they really were costing AT&T money. I saw an estimate in the mid 70s. They were losing 30 million a year, which is like 175 million today.

Just the phone freaking. Again, that's how expensive long distance was. It wasn't just your parents, Chuck. Any sane person with a job and a phone would know you don't call long distance on your phone. No, you're not allowed. You just didn't do it. No, it would have to be, you remember the calls like your parents would have to make to like,

the in-laws or their parents or something and like how short they would keep stuff. Hey, how are you doing? We're fine. Okay, bye. Yeah, yeah. Everything's good. Everything's good. We'll be there next week. Tuesday, Tuesday.

The maybe most shocking fact of this whole episode to me is the fact that the last circuit that could be blue boxed in the United States was disconnected in 2006. Yeah. In rural Minnesota, they still had one circuit that was that you could blue box your way in. But they had been, you know, largely eliminated in the in the 1970s and then into the eight or I guess into the 80s, really. And, you know, kind of with that.

Phone freaking, there was no incentive anymore. Now that, you know, when the internet certainly came along and you could just talk to anyone anywhere at any time, there was no incentive to do any sort of long distance hacking. And it was just a moment in time, basically, where this thing was allowed to exist. And it existed because of particular equipment that then went the way of the Dodo. But like you said, it went, they handed the baton right off to internet hacking. And it was a pretty seamless process.

Yeah, absolutely. Like they would literally just like Matthew Broderick did take their phone and connect it to their computer through what's called an acoustic coupler, which basically was like whatever tone your phone made, it did it into the computer through that coupler.

And again, they were like dialing numbers to find interesting numbers or to find other people's modems so they could hack into it. So it was, yeah, it's a perfect word. It was a seamless transition to computer hacking. But it's not like that's all that people did from that point on was everything to do with the internet and computers.

A freaking as far as like phone interest in phones and phone networks still continues, still around today. And it's gotten if it was illegal before, it's eye poppingly illegal. The kind of phone freaking that people are doing today. Yeah. Like cell phone hacking and stuff like that. Yeah. Spoofing a cell tower to intercept phone calls and then decoding them so you can eavesdrop in on people's cell conversations. Like, yeah, there there was, I think, a.

Do you remember, was it a Wired article I sent you from, I think, 2010 that chronicles some conference where a group was like, hey, get this. For $1,500 and parts you can get from the internet, you can make a spoofed cell tower and intercept calls. And this was 2010. So you could probably make one for $10 in five minutes now or buy it for $10 on the internet. Wow.

Yeah. It's just amazing what they're doing now. It's interesting that it still has to do with the phone. It's not just computer-based. There's still interest in messing with phone networks. Oh, yeah. I believe we even talked about it on the show, that thing where you'll get a call on your cell phone that says, like, American Express incoming call. And it's not. It's someone has – I can't remember what they –

Called it because we ended up it happened to us. We ended up talking to American Express and said, no, that's called whatever, not masking or maybe it was masking when they can just basically create, you know, originate a call saying it's from you. And all of a sudden you're talking about your account details and stuff like that. Oh, man. Yes. Social engineering.

No, I just mean like, you know, a phone call coming in that's saying it's from American Express, but it's not. It's from a thief. Right. And they're trying to get your credit info, right? So they can go off and make their own card and charge it to you? I guess so. I mean. Some people try so hard at such bad things. I know. We've talked about it before. Put that energy toward just good, upstanding, legal, hard work, and you could probably make money. Yeah. You know? Yeah.

Yeah. Old man here. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Big thanks to Kyle. Welcome aboard. Great job. Yeah. Way to go, Kyle. And we both said congratulations to Kyle and thanks, which means obviously we've just triggered listener mail. Yeah, this is just short and sweet when I couldn't think of that word in the widow episode.

I think we have the word. Hey, guys, I was listening to Widowhood. Chuck couldn't bring to mind a word for when you come to a conclusion based on your own experience. And I started freaking out with an F, not a PH, because I can never bring that same word to mind either. It's so bad that I actually ask my wife quite often, hey, what's that word I can never remember? And she just says, anecdotally. Oh, yeah. So that was the word. I'm guessing that's the word you were looking for, Chuck. I've tried different ways to get the word to stick in my mind, but nothing has worked.

I bet somewhere out there someone has studied this and there's a podcast episode because I think everyone has weird words they either can never spell correctly or remember. It's kind of a weird phenomenon. Yeah, I have a breed of warm season grass right now at my house and I cannot for the life of me remember the kind it is. Zoysia? It's not zoysia. It's something else.

It's crabgrass. Pescue? I looked it up. No, that's cool season. I looked up all different kinds of southern turf grass. It's warm season. It's not listed. I don't know what's going on. It forms like a thick carpet of grass. It's so pretty. I bet someone will let you know. Yeah, I guess so. I would love it if they did. Well, as long as you got an inch of standing water, it doesn't matter. It's going to grow. It's a quarter inch. Let's not be preposterous.

All right, that was from Joel Dawson. Thanks a lot, Joel. And again, thanks a lot, Kyle. And if you want to be like Joel, you can send us an email too. Send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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For easy drive up and go, pickup or delivery. Restrictions apply. See website for full terms and conditions. Visit Safeway.com for more details. Every day, our world gets a little more connected, but a little further apart. But then there are moments that remind us to be more human.

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