These were not people who were out to make free phone calls, you know, for the sake of making free phone calls. "These people kind of crystallise what I love about this subject," explains Lapsley, "Which is simply the combination of innocence and curiosity. Others were gifted engineers.Ī few still were blind kids with perfect pitch like Joe Engressia who, through whistling into their telephone at precise frequencies, found ways to unlock a vibrant world of interaction and exploration within which natural sight became irrelevant. Many of them were students at top universities like Harvard. Without much hesitation, he says, "the early days." "The early days," in this context, refers to phone phreaks of the late 1950s and early 1960s. To answer the first question I spoke to Phil Lapsley, author of a brilliantly researched new book entitled, Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws who Hacked Ma Bell.Įarly in our interview I ask Lapsley what his personal favorite stories about phone phreaking are. But where did the practice of accessing internal numbers, or making long-distance calls for free, or setting up phreak "conferences" that could endure from dusk till dawn actually begin? And what is left of it all today? This, essentially, is phreaking's twilight. This is the point at which "phone phreaking" (hacking the telephone system) and the modern sense of computer hacking intersect. He tells me that finding access to things like telephones in elevators was at the time a matter of using computers to "scan" sets of hundreds of numbers for what he terms "gems" - call destinations (such as people's hotel rooms) which were worth exploring with a little creativity. Belial experimented with phone phreaking in the 1990s as an Internet-curious teenager. You can say, 'Due to technical issues, we're going to have to cut the cable on this lift, we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you,' and stuff like that." And you can hear people walking in and out, and you can speak to them and prank them. "You can monitor what's going on inside, so you can hear the lift saying 'you are on the third floor'. The speaker inside the lift has an extension like a phone would and you can dial the phone inside the lifts. "The elevators or lifts inside have emergency telephones and these telephones are attached to the PBX. He's British, but is using an alias, 'Belial', and I don't know his real name. "Let's say a shopping center," says the hacker I'm talking to online. Cartoon from Volume 1, Issue 1 of Telephone Electronics Line (1974), a newsletter devoted to phone phreaking ()
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