Wiley The Best Of 2600 A Hacker Odyssey Jul 2008 ISBN 0470294191 pdf
The Best of 2600
A Hacker Odyssey
Emmanuel Goldstein
Wiley Publishing, Inc.
The Best of 2600
A Hacker Odyssey
Emmanuel Goldstein
Wiley Publishing, Inc.
The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey
Published by
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Copyright © 2008 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana
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ISBN: 978-0-470-29419-2
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Goldstein, Emmanuel, 1959The best of 2600 : a hacker odyssey / Emmanuel Goldstein.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-470-29419-2 (cloth)
1. Computer security—History. 2. Computer crimes—History. 3. Computer hackers—History. 4.
Telecommunication—Security measures—History. 5. Wiretapping—History. I. 2600. II. Title. III. Title:
Best of 2,600.
QA76.9.A25G643 2008
005.8—dc22
2008018567
2
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not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.
Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may
not be available in electronic books.
This book, and all of the articles contained herein, is dedicated to anyone
who has in any way proclaimed themselves “different from the rest” and
has had the courage to stand up against the forces of sameness which
pervade our world. You have always been my inspiration.
About the Author
Emmanuel Goldstein (emmanuel@goldste.in) has been publishing 2600 Magazine, The
Hacker Quarterly, since 1984. He traces his hacker roots to his high school days in
the late ’70s, when he first played with a distant computer over high-speed, 300-baud
phone lines. It didn’t take long for him to get into trouble by figuring out how to
access something he wasn’t supposed to access. He continued playing with various
machines in his college days at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. This
resulted in an FBI raid as he once again gained access to something he really shouldn’t
have. It was in the midst of all of this excitement that he cofounded 2600 Magazine,
an outlet for hacker stories and tutorials from all over the world. The rapid growth
and success of the magazine was both shocking and scary to Goldstein, who to this
day has never taken a course in computers. Since 1988, he has also hosted Off The
Hook, a hacker-themed technology talk show on WBAI 99.5 FM in New York City. In
addition to making the hacker documentary Freedom Downtime, Goldstein hosts the
Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE) conferences in New York City every two years,
drawing thousands of hackers from all over the world.
You can contact 2600 online at www.2600.com or by writing to 2600 Magazine, P.O.
Box 752, Middle Island, NY, 11953.
Credits
Executive Editor
Carol Long
Development Editor
Maureen Spears
Production Editor
Elizabeth Ginns Britten
Copy Editors
Kim Cofer
Mildred Sanchez
Editorial Manager
Mary Beth Wakefield
Production Manager
Tim Tate
Vice President and Executive
Group Publisher
Richard Swadley
Vice President and
Executive Publisher
Joseph B. Wikert
Project Coordinator, Cover
Lynsey Stanford
Compositor
Chris Gillespie,
Happenstance Type-O-Rama
Proofreader
Sossity Smith
Indexer
Jack Lewis
Cover Image
©Toledano/Stone+/Getty Images
Cover Designer
Michael E. Trent
Acknowledgments
T
his is far and away the toughest part of the book to write. How do I sum up in
words what so many people have meant over so many years? I’ll undoubtedly forget someone, they’ll notice, words will be exchanged, and new enemies for life will be
formed. It’s a painful yet necessary part of the process.
From the beginning there have been people who have been there to encourage me
in various endeavors, 2600 included. And there have also been those who have actively
sought to discourage me and painstakingly point out the many errors of my ways. I
would like to thank each of these groups equally. The former gave me the positive reinforcement that helped convince me that this was all worth it and that it would eventually
have a beneficial and lasting effect. The latter gave me the obstinacy and unmitigated
wrath to prove them wrong. A positive outlook fueled by anger is really all you need
to succeed in this world.
On to specifics. First, I must thank three people who helped me wade through well
more than 1,000 articles to sort out the ones that would eventually appear here: Tony
Fannin, Mike McTeague, and Kevin Reilly. It was a mountain of material, but I managed
to scale it successfully thanks to their help. The many people at Wiley who dealt with our
rather unconventional way of piecing together a book deserve particular thanks, especially Carol Long and Maureen Spears. The hard work of my agent, Cameron McClure,
made this all come together with remarkable speed and clarity.
My cofounder, Dave Ruderman, deserves special gratitude for coming up with the
name “2600”—which I initially hated—way back in 1983. Those late nights of plotting and scheming are among my most favorite memories on this planet. My good
friend Dave Buchwald defies any sort of description. He’s done everything from office
management to cover design and is somehow able to come up with new skills
overnight like some sort of power computer. We’ve also been blessed with some truly
talented layout artists over the years—Ben Sherman, Scott Skinner, Terrence
McGuckin, and Mark Silverberg—all of whom I’m honored to call my friends. And
without Mary Nixdorf, our office manager, 2600 would last about a day. Her incredible
dedication and attention to detail make the whole enterprise function smoothly—a feat
that people to this day tell me is impossible. Our previous office managers (Pete Kang
and Fran Westbrook) also got us through some vital periods of our growth. People like
Mike Castleman, Carl Shapiro, Mike Kaegler, Ed Cummings, Rob Nixdorf, Nick Jarecki,
Kevin Mitnick, and Mark Abene have always been there to offer encouragement,
expertise, and words of advice for all sorts of projects over the years, no matter how
crazy they may have actually been.
viii Acknowledgments
And some of our projects have been pretty bizarre. And, speaking of bizarre, the
magazine covers, T-shirt art, web site work, and various designs for the HOPE conferences, put together by such artists as Frederic Guimont, Holly Kaufman Spruch, Kiratoy,
Kerry Zero, Tish Valter, and Affra Gibbs, have been nothing short of eye-opening in
every regard.
Oh, yes, the HOPE conferences—how could I forget? Since 1994, we’ve been holding hacker conferences in New York City called Hackers On Planet Earth, which have
drawn thousands of people from all over the globe to the historic Hotel Pennsylvania.
And this has all been made possible by a phenomenal volunteer effort, which would
take many more pages than I have to adequately acknowledge. Nothing symbolizes the
power of the hacker community more than seeing hundreds of people come together
to pull off a feat like this every couple of years, a feat which is, of course, impossible.
Having these conferences is indeed a real motivation to keep doing what we’ve been
doing. It’s one thing to sit back and write stuff from some remote location; it’s quite
another to actually meet the audience and hear their stories and realize that it all actually matters.
And none of this would have ever been possible (for me, at least) without the creative inspiration that I got from working at a magical place called WUSB, the noncommercial radio station at the college I went to: the State University of New York at
Stony Brook. My fondest memories of the station include cohosting the eclectic program “The Voice of Long Island” with my good friend Mike Yuhas back in the early
’80s. That place (both the college and the station) taught me so much about diversity
and imagination. I was able to steer all of the creative energy from there to the various
projects that I became involved in after graduation. I can honestly say that none of this
would have ever happened were it not for that initial inspiration. This also led to my
involvement with another magical place: WBAI-FM in New York City, a full-power
noncommercial station that reaches four states, accepts no corporate money and basically exists to challenge the status quo. (Do I even have to point out how impossible
this is as well?) They gave us an outlet for the hacker perspective on technology and
Off The Hook was thus born. That radio show gave hackers a voice and served as a valuable staging ground for everything from the Free Kevin movement to our defense
against the Motion Picture Association of America when they decided to sue us.
Particular thanks must go to past program director Andrew Phillips, who recognized
this need before even I did.
Three of my very best friends in the world—Walter, Naftali, and Huey—have given
me the spirit I needed when I needed it the most. Inspiration also came from family,
especially Patricia O’Flanagan, who taught me to think for myself, and Monica Clare,
who always makes me remember the value of the small things in life. There are many
other relatives who I must also thank for just letting me do my thing without trying
too hard to stop me.
Acknowledgments
Thanks must also go to Mike Tsvitis who printed our magazine for decades and
truly helped us achieve levels of excellence we had only dreamed about.
The international community of hackers continues to inspire me every day. Nothing
is cooler than going to some far off remote land and discovering that there are people
there who are asking the same questions, performing the same experiments, and generally engaging in the same level of mischief as those of us back home; it’s just further
proof that hacking is a distinct part of the human genome.
And of course, none of any of this would have happened were it not for the many
people who have written for 2600 over the years. Even if your work doesn’t appear in
these pages—for that matter, even if your work hasn’t been published in the magazine
itself—know that your interest, feedback, and willingness to actually put pen to paper
and come up with something different and engaging is the driving force for everything
that we’ve been doing since 1984. I cannot thank all of you enough.
And finally of course, a special thank you to God for not striking me down with a
bolt of lightning despite the many requests s/he must get on a daily basis. Respect.
ix
Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii
I
II
The 1980s: In the Beginning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1
Stories and Adventures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2
The Last Days of Ma Bell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
3
New Toys to Play With . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
4
The Early Days of the Net . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
5
Corporate History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
6
Raids . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
7
The Hacker Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
The 1990s: The World Discovers Hackers . . . . . . 231
8
Pop Culture and the Hacker World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233
9
The Computer Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277
10
Learning to Hack Other Things . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313
11
More Hacker Stories and Adventures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 381
12
The Changing of the Telephone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 421
13
Hackers and the Law . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 491
III
2000 and Beyond: A Changing Landscape . . . . . . 571
14
The Lawsuits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 573
15
Still More Hacker Stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 601
16
A New Era of Telephony . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 651
17
Retail Hacking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 691
18
Toys of the 21st Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 731
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 835
Introduction
T
he question we get asked more than any other at 2600 is how in the world did we
pull this off? Meaning, I suppose, how did we manage to not only put out a magazine for nearly a quarter century that was written by hackers but also to get the mainstream public to take an interest in our subject matter?
Well, it certainly wasn’t easy. I guess the first thing to make clear—and probably the
one fact that both those who love us and those who hate us can agree upon—is that it
was never supposed to get this big. When we first started out in 1984, we never envisioned it going beyond a few dozen people tied together in a closely knit circle of conspiracy and mischief. Those first issues were three sheets of paper with loose leaf holes
punched in the sides stuffed into envelopes. In late 1983, we sent messages to a bunch
of bulletin board systems (BBSes) that had hacker content on them. In these messages,
we invited people to send in self-addressed stamped envelopes and in return they
would get a free copy of the premiere edition of our new hacker magazine. I’ll never
forget the thrill I got from seeing the first responses come in the mail.
As for content, we had grown into an interesting group of storytellers and educators
by way of the BBSes. Basically, by logging onto one of these systems, we would be able
to find other people who seemed able to string together a sentence or two and either
tell an interesting tale of a hacker adventure or explain to someone exactly how a particular computer or phone system worked. This is how the core staff developed. And
we always knew there would be more people out there to add to the mix.
For me, this was a natural expression of my various interests fueled by all sorts of
inspirations. Computers had fascinated me ever since I first encountered one in my
senior year of high school back in 1977. I never was a programmer, and to this day I
have never taken any sort of computer course. That would have taken all of the fun
out of it. No, for me the computer was the ultimate toy, a device that could spit back
all sorts of responses and which had almost endless potential. My main interests,
though, were writing and media. I came from a family of writers and my major in college was English, plus I had worked in some capacity on every high school and college
publication I encountered. Then there was my involvement in radio. I was lucky
enough to stumble upon WUSB at Stony Brook University, a freeform noncommercial
radio station where I was encouraged to be creative and alternative in all sorts of different ways. So when you added all of these elements together, the volatile mix that
was to become 2600 seemed almost inevitable.
xiv Introduction
When we mailed that first issue, we didn’t know what to expect. Arrest and imprisonment was one possibility that crossed our minds. There was, after all, an investigation underway into some of the people involved in the magazine before we had ever
published our first issue—something to do with logging onto computers that didn’t
belong to them using other people’s names. Back then, having a computer was something reserved for very few people. There was no Internet to explore. Apart from the
BBSes, the only way to learn about real systems that actually did something was to figure out a way to get connected to them and absorb as much as you could. It was never
about being malicious or destructive, although even then we had our hands full fighting that misconception, which was fueled by the mass media. We were a diverse bunch
of curious folk, exploring a new universe and sharing our findings with anyone who
cared to listen. We were dangerous.
Strange things started to happen after we sent out the first 2600 in mid January of
1984. People started to send in checks for an entire year! Our magazine became the
talk of the BBS world and, we would later learn, numerous corporate boardrooms and
government agencies. It seemed such a simple idea and yet nobody else was doing it.
There had been a newsletter before 2600 known as TAP, which had started publishing
back in the ’70s with the help of Abbie Hoffman and a bunch of Yippies. It was a fun
publication but it came out sporadically and eventually stopped altogether in the early
’80s. What people saw in 2600 was something previously unheard of in this community: consistency. Every month at the same time we released a new issue. And not only
was it consistent, but it actually looked somewhat professional, thanks to my recently
acquired job as a typesetter for an unsuspecting local newspaper. It really felt as if
everything had come together at just the right time for 2600 to be born.
After the first year, when people started to actually renew their subscriptions, we
knew we were on to something. The word continued to spread, more writers came out
of the woodwork, and the media followed our every move with rapt attention. While
technology was booming, it was still very early in the whole computer revolution. We
were seen as pioneers, and I quickly became a “computer expert” even though I had
never taken a course and wasn’t particularly technical. It didn’t seem to matter. Any
time something happened involving computers or telephones, it was assumed the staff
of 2600 knew all about it—that is, if we weren’t in fact accused of being responsible for
it in the first place!
We expanded from six pages (three double-sided sheets of paper) to eight pages
(two really big sheets folded in half) and kept that format until 1987 when we decided
to try something new entirely. We became a magazine in the true sense of the word
with a color cover and staples and a total of 24 pages. But the workload and expense
for this kind of a format quickly began to exceed our resources, so we switched to a
quarterly format in 1988 with 48 pages. Shortly after that final format change, we got
on the radar of magazine distributors and began to see 2600 show up at newsstands
Introduction
and bookstores! That’s when I realized I must have been dreaming, because this was
never supposed to happen.
A good deal of the reaction and attention that has surrounded 2600 has occurred
because of the almost mystical aura surrounding the world of computer hacking. So
why all the fascination with hackers anyway? To understand this you simply have to
study the American spirit. Despite what much of the world may think today, Americans
cherish individuality and innovation and they simply adore a rebellious spirit. The
hacker world could not be defined more accurately than with these words. How many
movies have been made where the protagonist breaks the rules and fights a system that
doesn’t care and doesn’t understand? Are we not always cheering for the individual and
hoping that they find the truth and blow the whistle? We have only to look at some of
our greatest heroes—Benjamin Franklin, Nikola Tesla, Martin Luther King, Jr.—to see
that individual thought and a steadfastness of purpose are prized attributes that can
often lead to great things. There was a bit of a hacker in all of these great minds.
Of course, Alexander Graham Bell was another of those people that we all look up
to, both inside and outside the hacker community. The Bell system was one of the first
massive networks to capture the imagination of a type of hacker referred to as a phone
phreak. This was what people played with before computers came along, and I have to
admit, it’s always fascinated me more than most other things. Relatively few people
today even know what it used to be like when there was just one telephone network.
We were lucky with our timing of 2600 in that it started publishing at the precise time
when the Bell system was splitting apart. So we were there to explain how it all worked
and also explore all of the new systems that were coming into being at the time. And,
as those in charge seemed incapable of designing easy-to-understand methods of making phone calls through alternative companies, we became by default the experts on
how to place a simple telephone call and, by extension, how to save money.
This ties in to something else the hacker community has always endorsed: free communications. Back before my time, the early phone phreaks were going around
whistling a special frequency into the telephone. The long-distance phone network,
upon hearing that particular tone, would then enter a mode where the caller could
input all sorts of other tones and route phone calls all over the world. In addition to
regular phone numbers, the caller would then be able to access all sorts of internal
numbers as well, things that only operators should be able to do. The trick was that
the system assumed the caller was an operator, which basically opened an almost
unlimited number of doors. This was called blue boxing. Some people used it to avoid
expensive long distance charges. Others used it to map out the system and figure out
how it all tied together. And the special frequency that started this whole process?
Why, 2600 hertz of course!
I actually didn’t like the name “2600” at first. I wanted something stupid like
“American Technological Journal.” I’m forever indebted to those who worked hard to
xv
xvi Introduction
change my mind. “2600” summed it all up. It was all about reaching out and grabbing
technology, making it do what you wanted to do, and communicating with people all
around the globe. Not to mention the fact that in any alphabetical list of publications,
we would always be first. It was a match made in heaven.
Of course, running the magazine itself has been anything but heaven. When you
deal with material that is—to put it mildly—controversial, you wind up with an impressive number of powerful people who want to see you go down in flames. Our very
existence has embarrassed almost every major corporation at some point, resulted in
numerous emergency board meetings, and made some people’s jobs a bit harder. None
of that was our intent, although that’s little comfort to those affected. What we’ve
always been primarily interested in doing is simply getting the information out there
and watching it grow into something productive. Phone companies have learned not
to leave sensitive billing information on computers with default passwords that anyone can access. Credit agencies now actually work to protect all of that data they keep
on every one of us. And the people who design secure systems, many of them our readers and sometimes writers, know how to think like hackers, which makes their creations innovative and flexible. I believe we’ve contributed quite a bit of good to the
world of technology and things are better now than they would have been had we
never come on the scene. Of course, that doesn’t mean there haven’t been numerous
attempts to put us out of other people’s misery. But when someone believes firmly in
freedom of speech and full disclosure, it’s kind of impossible to shut him up.
What has amazed me the most in the decades that followed is that the interest level
has never subsided. Over the years, more and more people have become entranced not
only with the technology itself but also with its social implications and overall importance to the future of humanity. It may sound a bit heavy handed but all of this—the
development of the Internet, computers being used as printing presses, the prevalence
of low-cost or free telecommunications all around the world, the sharing of information and resources—is having a profound impact on the human race in ways that no
one from our forefathers to Aristotle could ever have predicted. Somehow we wound
up right in the middle of all the turmoil. And just like it felt back in the early days
when everything just sort of came together at a particular moment, this feels like the
right people are in the right place at the right time to test the system, develop new
tools, and keep freedom of speech alive.
I
The 1980s:
In the Beginning
Chapter 1: Stories and Adventures
Chapter 2: The Last Days of Ma Bell
Chapter 3: New Toys to Play With
Chapter 4: The Early Days of the Net
Chapter 5: Corporate History
Chapter 6: Raids
Chapter 7: The Hacker Philosophy
1
Stories and Adventures
O
ne of the true joys of the hacker world is the wealth of firsthand accounts that
get shared throughout the community. Everyone has a story and many hackers have a whole treasure trove of them. This is what comes from being an inquisitive
bunch with a tendency to probe and explore, all the while asking entirely too many
questions. The rest of the world simply wasn’t prepared for this sort of thing, a fact that
hackers used to their advantage time and again.
In the hacker world, you can have adventures and obtain information on a whole
variety of levels, using such methods as social engineering, trashing, or simply communicating and meeting up with each other. All of these methods continue to work to
this day. Back in the 1980s, excitement via a keyboard was a fairly new concept but it
was catching on pretty fast as personal computers started to become commonplace. It
seemed incredible (and still does to me) that you could simply stick your telephone
into an acoustic modem, type a few letters on a keyboard, and somehow be communicating with someone in an entirely different part of the country or even another part
of the globe. Of course, hackers had already been having all sorts of adventures on telephones for years before this, whether it was through boxing, teleconferencing, or just
randomly calling people. And there were also the occasional “real-life” adventures,
something hackers were certainly not averse to, contrary to the usual stereotypes of
pasty-faced teenagers who feared going outside and interacting with the world. The
point is that whenever you got a bunch of bored, curious, and daring individuals
together, it didn’t really matter what the setting was. On the screen, over the phone, or
in real life, there was fun to be had and plenty to be learned in the process.
Tales from the Distant Past
Something that is true in any community of forward thinkers is the desire to learn
about the past. In our early years, most of those stories had to do with telephonerelated material from years and decades past. The two examples that follow rewind to
the middle of the 20th century when phones and communications were radically different than what they had become in the 1980s. While the technology may have
become obsolete, the interest in how telephones shaped our world remained strong—
regardless of the era.
4
Chapter 1
A Story of Eavesdropping (April, 1986)
Everybody knows an old man who was in the Second World War and has plenty of war stories to tell. Well sometimes it pays to take the time to listen.
We knew that the enemy was monitoring all of our international radiotelephone
channels, despite the sophisticated voice-scramblers which “inverted” speech, making
high tones into low ones and vice versa. Only authorized persons were permitted to
use overseas telephone circuits.
We were equipped with elaborate recorders and switching control boxes which permitted us to cut off either side of a conversation, or to substitute ourselves for either
party. A strict set of rules forbade us to permit maritime information, weather reports,
cargo information, etc. to pass over the circuits.
Influences in Washington sometimes resulted in orders issued to us to permit use of
the overseas telephone circuits, even though we were suspicious of previous conversations because parables and unusual phrases often used, made it difficult to follow what
was being said. “How can we monitor carefully, when we can’t understand what they’re
saying?” went unheeded.
We caught one fellow red-handed in South America using weird terms like “birds
leaving the nest with a basket of eggs.” I finally cut in the circuit and told him I’d forgotten what they meant. He tried a couple of other phrases, which I also couldn’t
understand. Finally, he lost his patience and blurted out, “Oh hell. I’m talking about
those special munition orders which left yesterday for Germany.”
By this time, a special telephone speech scrambler had been developed which was
small enough to fit and use on a desk. Its availability was extremely limited, but a couple
of army officers—one in the U.S. and the other in Panama—had been able to get hold of
a pair of them, and between them secretly installed them on their desks, unbeknownst
to us of course!
One day I heard the fellow in Panama say, “OK Joe, now over to the scrambler,” and
their ensuing conversation became unintelligible. We quickly checked the radio telephone circuit equipment and discovered that the technical characteristics of the equipment they were using and our own were identical. As a result, when they inserted their
scramblers the speech inversion righted itself and their conversations went out over
the radiotelephone circuit in clear language—readable by anyone! That was the end
of the use of their private “secret conversation system.”
Some of the worst offenders of overseas telephone use security were the top people.
I’ll have to list Generals Eisenhower and Marshall as two of them—at least sometimes.
I can remember one day the circuit between London and Washington happened to be
very poor in quality and “understandability” was stretched to the utmost.
Stories and Adventures
General Marshall in Washington had General Eisenhower on the line in London
who couldn’t understand a word of what Marshall was saying. Marshall repeated several times “Ike, this is GCM—Marshall—GCM—got it?” without results. Finally in
frustration Marshall turned to an aide and could be plainly heard to say “What’s the
code word for my name?”
The next thing we knew, Marshall was slowly and distinctly repeating his code name
interspersed with “GCM” and “Marshall.” Of course, we had to cut the circuit and
notify the code group in Washington to immediately “bust” the code—we couldn’t take
any chances—revelation of the code word for his name might have been all the enemy
intelligence was waiting for to help it “code-break” other communications.
On the other hand, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill were two of the
best and easiest to monitor. Both used references to previously transmitted overheard
messages by numbers and most of the conversations were along the lines: “Well Winnie,
on number 528, I really don’t think we should do that—you know how they are.”
Nobody could gain any information from listening to their telephone conversations.
I always enjoyed listening to Sir Winston originating a call. The British telephone
operators were required on every connection to announce in advance of a conversation:
“You are warned not to mention the names of vessels, sailing dates or conditions, cargoes, weather, etc., etc., etc., any violation on your part will result in the circuit being
cut off and your action being reported to the highest authority. Do you understand?”
Sir Winston always dociley replied. “Yes ma’am. I understand.”
One enemy group had learned the “language” of speech inversion. For example, listening on the air to a radiotelephone circuit, one might hear a word that sounded
exactly like krinkanope. That was the word telephone after it had passed through the
speech inversion system!
The First Atomic Bomb: A True Tale (March, 1984)
This story was originally related by Laura Fermi, widow of the nuclear physicist Enrico
Fermi who, along with assorted colleagues, participated in the first test bomb in the desert
outside Alamogordo, New Mexico, in the early morning hours of a summer day in July 1945.
When the date had been established for the secret test, staff members from the Manhattan
Project (as the secret test was known) were invited to bring their spouses to New Mexico to
watch the results of the several years of research. Each staff member had been assigned specific tasks to handle while there. Generally, they acted as observers and were stationed in a
circle around the perimeter of the bomb site. Enrico and Laura were stationed in an area
about twenty miles to the southwest of the bomb site.
The morning came when the bomb was scheduled to be detonated in the test. Laura told
it like this…
5
6
Chapter 1
Enrico and I woke up at 3:00 a.m., to go to the site. The test was scheduled for 4:30
a.m. that day, which was July 19, 1945. We drove to our post, about twenty miles from
the site. It had been arranged that the nearly 100 of us present would be located in a
circle about 100 miles in circumference surrounding the bomb site. We were all to be
in communication with each other over telephones, all of which were connected
through the exchange in Alamogordo.
We arrived at the site at 4:15 a.m. and almost immediately it began to rain, quite a
heavy, very typical torrential downpour during the summer. We waited in our car, and
at 4:30 a.m. the time came and went, but the bomb did not go off. Enrico and I
assumed it might have been postponed due to the rainstorm, but decided to check with
the other staff members to see for sure. For some reason, the telephone there at the site
did not seem to work; the operator would not respond. (Note: At that time, nearly all
phones in the United States, and certainly in New Mexico, were manual. No dialing of any
sort was possible—you had to use the operator for everything.)
Finally Enrico decided that we would drive into town and try to contact the others
and see what went wrong. So we drove back to town, and got there about 5:15 a.m. The
only place open at that time of night was a hotel, and we stopped in there to use a pay
phone. Strangely enough, the pay phone was not working either, or at least the operator never came on the line to ask what we wanted. Enrico was quite curious about all
this and decided to investigate. We went outside the hotel, and Enrico found where the
telephone wires came off the pole and down into the building. He decided that we
would follow the wires, so we walked down the street looking overhead at the wires on
the pole as we went along. Finally, we turned down one street and saw a house. The
telephone poles and wires from all directions seemed to come down to this house. There
must have been hundreds of wires from telephone poles all coming down onto the side
of this house and going in through an opening.
We noticed that there was a front porch light, which was on. The front door was
open, but there was a screen door, which was closed. We went up on the front porch
and looked into the house. A switchboard was there, and there were a dozen or more
lights on the switchboard lit, blinking off and on as people were flashing the switch
hooks on their phones trying to raise the operator. The room was just dimly lit, and
near the switchboard was a sofa, and a woman was laying on the sofa sound asleep!
Enrico pounded very loudly on the screen door, and shouted at the woman. Suddenly
she opened her eyes and looked at him, very startled. Then she looked at the switchboard. Immediately she sprang up, dashed over to the board, sat down and began frantically answering the calls.
Without saying any more, Enrico and I left, went back to the hotel where our car
was parked, and drove back to our monitoring post twenty miles out into the desert.
We had been at our post only about five minutes when the explosion went off, at about
Stories and Adventures
6:30 a.m., which was two hours behind schedule. Later, we talked to the other staff
members and found that there had been some confusion because of the rain. None of
them had been able to reach the others because the telephone operator had fallen
asleep, and the phones were not getting answered/connected…
We on the staff all had a big laugh out of it, but nothing more was ever said or done,
and I doubt to this day that that woman is even aware that the first atomic explosion
in the world was delayed two hours because of her.
Amazing, but true. Alamogordo was a tiny town back in the ’40s, and it’s very doubtful
that the night operator had ever seen so much traffic in her life as the hundred or so people
all on the line at once that early morning. More than likely, the poor dear had had a very
rough day the day before, in the miserable summer heat, had been unable to sleep during
the day, and had come to work that night thoroughly exhausted. She probably decided that
“it won’t hurt just to close my eyes for a minute…,” and the rest of the story is already told.
After all, experience had taught her that in fact she would not usually get a dozen calls all
night on her shift, and she felt relatively safe in stretching out “just for a minute.”
Numbers That Led to Trouble
Having access to telephones and the increasing variety of new uses for them invariably
led to all sorts of fun for the average phone phreak. (It was quite common in the hacker
world to append a “ph” to any word with an “f” if it had anything at all to do with
phones, such as “phreak,” “phriend,” or “phraud.” Sometimes the exact opposite was
true, which resulted in the word “fone” popping up every now and then.) Of course,
fun in the hacker world usually translated to trouble in the real world, which pretty
much summed up where hackers fit in societywise. Our innocence and adventure was
always seen as evil and threatening to the uninitiated who couldn’t seem to understand
what motivated these strange individuals to go and play with phones for hours on end.
As a result of our hard work, we would share whatever strange phone numbers we
were able to discover with anyone who was interested in hearing about them. Because
there weren’t as many methods of communication as there are today and because there
were significantly less phone numbers floating around, discoveries like the ones that
follow seemed to mean a lot more. And then, of course, there was one of the all-time
favorite phone phreak pastimes: running a teleconference. The unparalleled pleasure
of hooking several dozen of your closest friends together and going on a telephonic
voyage around the world was something so few people could even conceive of in the
1980s. And yet, everyone in the hacker community had some sort of encounter with
teleconferences back then. Some were even rumored to have spent most of the decade
connected to one.
7
8
Chapter 1
The Scariest Number in the World (December, 1984)
Recently, a telephone fanatic in the northwest made an interesting discovery. He was
exploring the 804 area code (Virginia) and found out that the 840 exchange did something strange. In the vast majority of cases, in fact in all of the cases except one, he
would get a recording as if the exchange didn’t exist. However, if he dialed 804-840 and
four rather predictable numbers, he got a ring!
After one or two rings, somebody picked up. Being experienced at this kind of thing,
he could tell that the call didn’t “supervise,” that is, no charges were being incurred for
calling this number. (Calls that get you to an error message, or a special operator, generally don’t supe.) A female voice, with a hint of a southern accent said, “Operator, can
I help you?”
“Yes,” he said. “What number have I reached?”
“What number did you dial, sir?”
He made up a number that was similar.
“I’m sorry, that’s not the number you reached.” Click.
He was fascinated. What in the world was this? He knew he was going to call back,
but before he did, he tried some more experiments. He tried the 840 exchange in several other area codes. In some, it came up as a valid exchange. In others, exactly the
same thing happened—the same last four digits, the same southern belle. Oddly
enough, he later noticed, the areas it worked in seemed to travel in a beeline from
Washington D.C. to Pittsburgh, PA.
He called back from a pay phone. “Operator, can I help you?”
“Yes, this is the phone company. I’m testing this line and we don’t seem to have an
identification on your circuit. What office is this, please?”
“What number are you trying to reach?”
“I’m not trying to reach any number. I’m trying to identify this circuit.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t help you.”
“Ma’am, if I don’t get an ID on this line, I’ll have to disconnect it. We show no record
of it here.”
“Hold on a moment, sir.”
After about a minute, she came back. “Sir, I can have someone speak to you. Would
you give me your number, please?”
He had anticipated this and he had the pay phone number ready. After he gave it,
she said, “Mr. XXX will get right back to you.”
“Thanks.” He hung up the phone. It rang. Instantly! “Oh my God,” he thought,
“They weren’t asking for my number; they were confirming it!”
“Hello,” he said, trying to sound authoritative.
“This is Mr. XXX. Did you just make an inquiry to my office concerning a phone
number?”
“Yes. I need an identi—”
Stories and Adventures
“What you need is advice. Don’t ever call that number again. Don’t even think about
calling that number again. Forget you ever knew it.”
At this point our friend got so nervous he just hung up. He expected to hear the
phone ring again but it didn’t.
Over the next few days he racked his brains trying to figure out what the number
was. He knew it was something big—that was pretty certain at this point. It was so big
that the number was programmed into every central office in the country. He knew this
because if he tried to dial any other number in that exchange, he’d get a local error
message from his CO, as if the exchange didn’t exist.
It finally came to him. He had an uncle who worked in a federal agency. He had a
feeling that this was government related and if it was, his uncle could probably find out
what it was. He asked the next day and his uncle promised to look into the matter.
The next time he saw his uncle, he noticed a big change in his manner. He was trembling. “Where did you get that number?” he shouted. “Do you know I almost got fired
for asking about it?! They kept wanting to know where I got it!”
Our friend couldn’t contain his excitement. “What is it?” he pleaded. “What’s the
number?!”
“It’s the President’s bomb shelter!”
He never called the number after that. He knew that he could probably cause quite
a bit of excitement by calling the number and saying something like, “The weather’s
not good in Washington. We’re coming over for a visit.” But our friend was smart. He
knew that there were some things that were better off unsaid and undone.
(If you have a phone or computer story, call or write us!)
The Truth Behind Those 9999 Numbers (January, 1984)
By Mark Bluebox
Once upon a time, I was talking to one of my favorite friends, one of the nation’s oldest and most experienced telephone enthusiasts—some might refer to him as a phone
phreak. In this particular conversation, he mentioned to me that I might want to experiment with a series of 800 numbers: exchanges starting with 9, followed by the suffix
9999 (800-9xx-9999). And so I did, and a whole new world began to open up in front
of me.
They were mostly weather and time numbers in various locations throughout the
country. And, because these were 800 numbers, there was NO CHARGE! One number
in particular was of a great deal of interest to me and to many others. This was 800957-9999, which hooked up to WWV, the radio station operated by the National
Bureau of Standards that does nothing but tell the time and give shortwave reports.
This is the most accurate clock in the entire world! You either have to tune WWV in
9
10
Chapter 1
on a shortwave receiver or dial 303-499-7111 in Fort Collins, Colorado. Yet, here I was
with an 800 access! Being a bit of a shortwave enthusiast, I don’t have to tell you how
convenient this was for me. Unfortunately, it got too convenient for too many people.
I guess I made the mistake of giving it to a former president of a large amateur radio
club in the Dallas area. He, in turn, printed it in the Amateur Radio News Bulletin
where thousands of people probably saw it. Another statewide News Bulletin picked it
up and printed it. Through an amateur radio news network, which this bulletin was a
part of, the news got as far as California.
One day, I called up the West Link Amateur Radio News Service at 213-768-7333.
(This is a service located in West Link, California that broadcasts news over amateur
radio, VHF, UHF, etc.) Their latest report had this little item: “Speaking of interesting
things, the National Bureau of Standards has got a very convenient time number for
those of you that are not constantly at a shortwave receiver. You can dial 1-800-9579999 for WWV. It’s just another good toll-free service for us to use.” The avalanche had
really begun now.
The West Link report was heard on bulletin stations all around the world and apparently one station in Nashville, Tennessee, broadcast it. From there it fell into the hands
of one of the writers for the DX program on Radio South Africa! I happened to be listening to a program where they were talking about pulling in distant time stations,
weather stations, etc. He then mentioned, “For those of you that live in the United
States, a convenient toll-free 800 number has been provided by the National Bureau of
Standards for WWV and that number is 1-800-957-9999.” Imagine my surprise! Once
again, the number had been broadcast all around the world. People in many, many
nations now had that number. Of course, the number only worked inside the United
States, but the word was being spread by shortwave listeners and QSL people everywhere.
The number was getting swamped. Needless to say, it was busy much of the time. A
government official, who also had this number, thinking that it was legitimate, called
up WWV and complained. He told them that they needed to add some more lines to
their new 800 number. The general manager of the station said, “I don’t know what
you’re talking about. I don’t know of any 800 number that gets you WWV.”
The government official told him what the telephone number was. The general
manager called it and heard his own station. Astounded, he contacted the Mountain
Bell Telephone Company in Denver, Colorado. They said, “You’re not paying for any
800 in-WATS number. We show 303-499-7111 for WWV, but we don’t have any 800957-9999.”
Mountain Bell checked it out and sure enough, the number existed but not on their
records. No one was getting charged for this! Now, of course, you know a monopoly
as well as I do—they’re sure not going to let anyone have a free ride. So they told the
Stories and Adventures
WATS coordinator to find out what happened. He finally made the discovery that some
technicians had hooked that number up f
A Hacker Odyssey
Emmanuel Goldstein
Wiley Publishing, Inc.
The Best of 2600
A Hacker Odyssey
Emmanuel Goldstein
Wiley Publishing, Inc.
The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey
Published by
Wiley Publishing, Inc.
10475 Crosspoint Boulevard
Indianapolis, IN 46256
www.wiley.com
Copyright © 2008 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana
Published simultaneously in Canada
ISBN: 978-0-470-29419-2
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except as
permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior
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the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978)
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Publishing, Inc., 10475 Crosspoint Blvd., Indianapolis, IN 46256, (317) 572-3447, fax (317) 572-4355,
or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: The publisher and the author make no representations or
warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically
disclaim all warranties, including without limitation warranties of fitness for a particular purpose.
No warranty may be created or extended by sales or promotional materials. The advice and strategies
contained herein may not be suitable for every situation. This work is sold with the understanding that
the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional services. If professional
assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought. Neither the
publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom. The fact that an organization or
Website is referred to in this work as a citation and/or a potential source of further information does not
mean that the author or the publisher endorses the information the organization or Website may provide
or recommendations it may make. Further, readers should be aware that Internet Websites listed in this
work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read.
For general information on our other products and services or to obtain technical support, please
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Goldstein, Emmanuel, 1959The best of 2600 : a hacker odyssey / Emmanuel Goldstein.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-470-29419-2 (cloth)
1. Computer security—History. 2. Computer crimes—History. 3. Computer hackers—History. 4.
Telecommunication—Security measures—History. 5. Wiretapping—History. I. 2600. II. Title. III. Title:
Best of 2,600.
QA76.9.A25G643 2008
005.8—dc22
2008018567
2
Trademarks: Wiley and the Wiley logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons,
Inc. and/or its affiliates in the United States and other countries, and may not be used without written
permission. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Wiley Publishing, Inc., is
not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.
Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may
not be available in electronic books.
This book, and all of the articles contained herein, is dedicated to anyone
who has in any way proclaimed themselves “different from the rest” and
has had the courage to stand up against the forces of sameness which
pervade our world. You have always been my inspiration.
About the Author
Emmanuel Goldstein (emmanuel@goldste.in) has been publishing 2600 Magazine, The
Hacker Quarterly, since 1984. He traces his hacker roots to his high school days in
the late ’70s, when he first played with a distant computer over high-speed, 300-baud
phone lines. It didn’t take long for him to get into trouble by figuring out how to
access something he wasn’t supposed to access. He continued playing with various
machines in his college days at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. This
resulted in an FBI raid as he once again gained access to something he really shouldn’t
have. It was in the midst of all of this excitement that he cofounded 2600 Magazine,
an outlet for hacker stories and tutorials from all over the world. The rapid growth
and success of the magazine was both shocking and scary to Goldstein, who to this
day has never taken a course in computers. Since 1988, he has also hosted Off The
Hook, a hacker-themed technology talk show on WBAI 99.5 FM in New York City. In
addition to making the hacker documentary Freedom Downtime, Goldstein hosts the
Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE) conferences in New York City every two years,
drawing thousands of hackers from all over the world.
You can contact 2600 online at www.2600.com or by writing to 2600 Magazine, P.O.
Box 752, Middle Island, NY, 11953.
Credits
Executive Editor
Carol Long
Development Editor
Maureen Spears
Production Editor
Elizabeth Ginns Britten
Copy Editors
Kim Cofer
Mildred Sanchez
Editorial Manager
Mary Beth Wakefield
Production Manager
Tim Tate
Vice President and Executive
Group Publisher
Richard Swadley
Vice President and
Executive Publisher
Joseph B. Wikert
Project Coordinator, Cover
Lynsey Stanford
Compositor
Chris Gillespie,
Happenstance Type-O-Rama
Proofreader
Sossity Smith
Indexer
Jack Lewis
Cover Image
©Toledano/Stone+/Getty Images
Cover Designer
Michael E. Trent
Acknowledgments
T
his is far and away the toughest part of the book to write. How do I sum up in
words what so many people have meant over so many years? I’ll undoubtedly forget someone, they’ll notice, words will be exchanged, and new enemies for life will be
formed. It’s a painful yet necessary part of the process.
From the beginning there have been people who have been there to encourage me
in various endeavors, 2600 included. And there have also been those who have actively
sought to discourage me and painstakingly point out the many errors of my ways. I
would like to thank each of these groups equally. The former gave me the positive reinforcement that helped convince me that this was all worth it and that it would eventually
have a beneficial and lasting effect. The latter gave me the obstinacy and unmitigated
wrath to prove them wrong. A positive outlook fueled by anger is really all you need
to succeed in this world.
On to specifics. First, I must thank three people who helped me wade through well
more than 1,000 articles to sort out the ones that would eventually appear here: Tony
Fannin, Mike McTeague, and Kevin Reilly. It was a mountain of material, but I managed
to scale it successfully thanks to their help. The many people at Wiley who dealt with our
rather unconventional way of piecing together a book deserve particular thanks, especially Carol Long and Maureen Spears. The hard work of my agent, Cameron McClure,
made this all come together with remarkable speed and clarity.
My cofounder, Dave Ruderman, deserves special gratitude for coming up with the
name “2600”—which I initially hated—way back in 1983. Those late nights of plotting and scheming are among my most favorite memories on this planet. My good
friend Dave Buchwald defies any sort of description. He’s done everything from office
management to cover design and is somehow able to come up with new skills
overnight like some sort of power computer. We’ve also been blessed with some truly
talented layout artists over the years—Ben Sherman, Scott Skinner, Terrence
McGuckin, and Mark Silverberg—all of whom I’m honored to call my friends. And
without Mary Nixdorf, our office manager, 2600 would last about a day. Her incredible
dedication and attention to detail make the whole enterprise function smoothly—a feat
that people to this day tell me is impossible. Our previous office managers (Pete Kang
and Fran Westbrook) also got us through some vital periods of our growth. People like
Mike Castleman, Carl Shapiro, Mike Kaegler, Ed Cummings, Rob Nixdorf, Nick Jarecki,
Kevin Mitnick, and Mark Abene have always been there to offer encouragement,
expertise, and words of advice for all sorts of projects over the years, no matter how
crazy they may have actually been.
viii Acknowledgments
And some of our projects have been pretty bizarre. And, speaking of bizarre, the
magazine covers, T-shirt art, web site work, and various designs for the HOPE conferences, put together by such artists as Frederic Guimont, Holly Kaufman Spruch, Kiratoy,
Kerry Zero, Tish Valter, and Affra Gibbs, have been nothing short of eye-opening in
every regard.
Oh, yes, the HOPE conferences—how could I forget? Since 1994, we’ve been holding hacker conferences in New York City called Hackers On Planet Earth, which have
drawn thousands of people from all over the globe to the historic Hotel Pennsylvania.
And this has all been made possible by a phenomenal volunteer effort, which would
take many more pages than I have to adequately acknowledge. Nothing symbolizes the
power of the hacker community more than seeing hundreds of people come together
to pull off a feat like this every couple of years, a feat which is, of course, impossible.
Having these conferences is indeed a real motivation to keep doing what we’ve been
doing. It’s one thing to sit back and write stuff from some remote location; it’s quite
another to actually meet the audience and hear their stories and realize that it all actually matters.
And none of this would have ever been possible (for me, at least) without the creative inspiration that I got from working at a magical place called WUSB, the noncommercial radio station at the college I went to: the State University of New York at
Stony Brook. My fondest memories of the station include cohosting the eclectic program “The Voice of Long Island” with my good friend Mike Yuhas back in the early
’80s. That place (both the college and the station) taught me so much about diversity
and imagination. I was able to steer all of the creative energy from there to the various
projects that I became involved in after graduation. I can honestly say that none of this
would have ever happened were it not for that initial inspiration. This also led to my
involvement with another magical place: WBAI-FM in New York City, a full-power
noncommercial station that reaches four states, accepts no corporate money and basically exists to challenge the status quo. (Do I even have to point out how impossible
this is as well?) They gave us an outlet for the hacker perspective on technology and
Off The Hook was thus born. That radio show gave hackers a voice and served as a valuable staging ground for everything from the Free Kevin movement to our defense
against the Motion Picture Association of America when they decided to sue us.
Particular thanks must go to past program director Andrew Phillips, who recognized
this need before even I did.
Three of my very best friends in the world—Walter, Naftali, and Huey—have given
me the spirit I needed when I needed it the most. Inspiration also came from family,
especially Patricia O’Flanagan, who taught me to think for myself, and Monica Clare,
who always makes me remember the value of the small things in life. There are many
other relatives who I must also thank for just letting me do my thing without trying
too hard to stop me.
Acknowledgments
Thanks must also go to Mike Tsvitis who printed our magazine for decades and
truly helped us achieve levels of excellence we had only dreamed about.
The international community of hackers continues to inspire me every day. Nothing
is cooler than going to some far off remote land and discovering that there are people
there who are asking the same questions, performing the same experiments, and generally engaging in the same level of mischief as those of us back home; it’s just further
proof that hacking is a distinct part of the human genome.
And of course, none of any of this would have happened were it not for the many
people who have written for 2600 over the years. Even if your work doesn’t appear in
these pages—for that matter, even if your work hasn’t been published in the magazine
itself—know that your interest, feedback, and willingness to actually put pen to paper
and come up with something different and engaging is the driving force for everything
that we’ve been doing since 1984. I cannot thank all of you enough.
And finally of course, a special thank you to God for not striking me down with a
bolt of lightning despite the many requests s/he must get on a daily basis. Respect.
ix
Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii
I
II
The 1980s: In the Beginning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1
Stories and Adventures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2
The Last Days of Ma Bell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
3
New Toys to Play With . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
4
The Early Days of the Net . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
5
Corporate History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
6
Raids . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
7
The Hacker Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207
The 1990s: The World Discovers Hackers . . . . . . 231
8
Pop Culture and the Hacker World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233
9
The Computer Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277
10
Learning to Hack Other Things . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313
11
More Hacker Stories and Adventures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 381
12
The Changing of the Telephone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 421
13
Hackers and the Law . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 491
III
2000 and Beyond: A Changing Landscape . . . . . . 571
14
The Lawsuits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 573
15
Still More Hacker Stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 601
16
A New Era of Telephony . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 651
17
Retail Hacking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 691
18
Toys of the 21st Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 731
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 835
Introduction
T
he question we get asked more than any other at 2600 is how in the world did we
pull this off? Meaning, I suppose, how did we manage to not only put out a magazine for nearly a quarter century that was written by hackers but also to get the mainstream public to take an interest in our subject matter?
Well, it certainly wasn’t easy. I guess the first thing to make clear—and probably the
one fact that both those who love us and those who hate us can agree upon—is that it
was never supposed to get this big. When we first started out in 1984, we never envisioned it going beyond a few dozen people tied together in a closely knit circle of conspiracy and mischief. Those first issues were three sheets of paper with loose leaf holes
punched in the sides stuffed into envelopes. In late 1983, we sent messages to a bunch
of bulletin board systems (BBSes) that had hacker content on them. In these messages,
we invited people to send in self-addressed stamped envelopes and in return they
would get a free copy of the premiere edition of our new hacker magazine. I’ll never
forget the thrill I got from seeing the first responses come in the mail.
As for content, we had grown into an interesting group of storytellers and educators
by way of the BBSes. Basically, by logging onto one of these systems, we would be able
to find other people who seemed able to string together a sentence or two and either
tell an interesting tale of a hacker adventure or explain to someone exactly how a particular computer or phone system worked. This is how the core staff developed. And
we always knew there would be more people out there to add to the mix.
For me, this was a natural expression of my various interests fueled by all sorts of
inspirations. Computers had fascinated me ever since I first encountered one in my
senior year of high school back in 1977. I never was a programmer, and to this day I
have never taken any sort of computer course. That would have taken all of the fun
out of it. No, for me the computer was the ultimate toy, a device that could spit back
all sorts of responses and which had almost endless potential. My main interests,
though, were writing and media. I came from a family of writers and my major in college was English, plus I had worked in some capacity on every high school and college
publication I encountered. Then there was my involvement in radio. I was lucky
enough to stumble upon WUSB at Stony Brook University, a freeform noncommercial
radio station where I was encouraged to be creative and alternative in all sorts of different ways. So when you added all of these elements together, the volatile mix that
was to become 2600 seemed almost inevitable.
xiv Introduction
When we mailed that first issue, we didn’t know what to expect. Arrest and imprisonment was one possibility that crossed our minds. There was, after all, an investigation underway into some of the people involved in the magazine before we had ever
published our first issue—something to do with logging onto computers that didn’t
belong to them using other people’s names. Back then, having a computer was something reserved for very few people. There was no Internet to explore. Apart from the
BBSes, the only way to learn about real systems that actually did something was to figure out a way to get connected to them and absorb as much as you could. It was never
about being malicious or destructive, although even then we had our hands full fighting that misconception, which was fueled by the mass media. We were a diverse bunch
of curious folk, exploring a new universe and sharing our findings with anyone who
cared to listen. We were dangerous.
Strange things started to happen after we sent out the first 2600 in mid January of
1984. People started to send in checks for an entire year! Our magazine became the
talk of the BBS world and, we would later learn, numerous corporate boardrooms and
government agencies. It seemed such a simple idea and yet nobody else was doing it.
There had been a newsletter before 2600 known as TAP, which had started publishing
back in the ’70s with the help of Abbie Hoffman and a bunch of Yippies. It was a fun
publication but it came out sporadically and eventually stopped altogether in the early
’80s. What people saw in 2600 was something previously unheard of in this community: consistency. Every month at the same time we released a new issue. And not only
was it consistent, but it actually looked somewhat professional, thanks to my recently
acquired job as a typesetter for an unsuspecting local newspaper. It really felt as if
everything had come together at just the right time for 2600 to be born.
After the first year, when people started to actually renew their subscriptions, we
knew we were on to something. The word continued to spread, more writers came out
of the woodwork, and the media followed our every move with rapt attention. While
technology was booming, it was still very early in the whole computer revolution. We
were seen as pioneers, and I quickly became a “computer expert” even though I had
never taken a course and wasn’t particularly technical. It didn’t seem to matter. Any
time something happened involving computers or telephones, it was assumed the staff
of 2600 knew all about it—that is, if we weren’t in fact accused of being responsible for
it in the first place!
We expanded from six pages (three double-sided sheets of paper) to eight pages
(two really big sheets folded in half) and kept that format until 1987 when we decided
to try something new entirely. We became a magazine in the true sense of the word
with a color cover and staples and a total of 24 pages. But the workload and expense
for this kind of a format quickly began to exceed our resources, so we switched to a
quarterly format in 1988 with 48 pages. Shortly after that final format change, we got
on the radar of magazine distributors and began to see 2600 show up at newsstands
Introduction
and bookstores! That’s when I realized I must have been dreaming, because this was
never supposed to happen.
A good deal of the reaction and attention that has surrounded 2600 has occurred
because of the almost mystical aura surrounding the world of computer hacking. So
why all the fascination with hackers anyway? To understand this you simply have to
study the American spirit. Despite what much of the world may think today, Americans
cherish individuality and innovation and they simply adore a rebellious spirit. The
hacker world could not be defined more accurately than with these words. How many
movies have been made where the protagonist breaks the rules and fights a system that
doesn’t care and doesn’t understand? Are we not always cheering for the individual and
hoping that they find the truth and blow the whistle? We have only to look at some of
our greatest heroes—Benjamin Franklin, Nikola Tesla, Martin Luther King, Jr.—to see
that individual thought and a steadfastness of purpose are prized attributes that can
often lead to great things. There was a bit of a hacker in all of these great minds.
Of course, Alexander Graham Bell was another of those people that we all look up
to, both inside and outside the hacker community. The Bell system was one of the first
massive networks to capture the imagination of a type of hacker referred to as a phone
phreak. This was what people played with before computers came along, and I have to
admit, it’s always fascinated me more than most other things. Relatively few people
today even know what it used to be like when there was just one telephone network.
We were lucky with our timing of 2600 in that it started publishing at the precise time
when the Bell system was splitting apart. So we were there to explain how it all worked
and also explore all of the new systems that were coming into being at the time. And,
as those in charge seemed incapable of designing easy-to-understand methods of making phone calls through alternative companies, we became by default the experts on
how to place a simple telephone call and, by extension, how to save money.
This ties in to something else the hacker community has always endorsed: free communications. Back before my time, the early phone phreaks were going around
whistling a special frequency into the telephone. The long-distance phone network,
upon hearing that particular tone, would then enter a mode where the caller could
input all sorts of other tones and route phone calls all over the world. In addition to
regular phone numbers, the caller would then be able to access all sorts of internal
numbers as well, things that only operators should be able to do. The trick was that
the system assumed the caller was an operator, which basically opened an almost
unlimited number of doors. This was called blue boxing. Some people used it to avoid
expensive long distance charges. Others used it to map out the system and figure out
how it all tied together. And the special frequency that started this whole process?
Why, 2600 hertz of course!
I actually didn’t like the name “2600” at first. I wanted something stupid like
“American Technological Journal.” I’m forever indebted to those who worked hard to
xv
xvi Introduction
change my mind. “2600” summed it all up. It was all about reaching out and grabbing
technology, making it do what you wanted to do, and communicating with people all
around the globe. Not to mention the fact that in any alphabetical list of publications,
we would always be first. It was a match made in heaven.
Of course, running the magazine itself has been anything but heaven. When you
deal with material that is—to put it mildly—controversial, you wind up with an impressive number of powerful people who want to see you go down in flames. Our very
existence has embarrassed almost every major corporation at some point, resulted in
numerous emergency board meetings, and made some people’s jobs a bit harder. None
of that was our intent, although that’s little comfort to those affected. What we’ve
always been primarily interested in doing is simply getting the information out there
and watching it grow into something productive. Phone companies have learned not
to leave sensitive billing information on computers with default passwords that anyone can access. Credit agencies now actually work to protect all of that data they keep
on every one of us. And the people who design secure systems, many of them our readers and sometimes writers, know how to think like hackers, which makes their creations innovative and flexible. I believe we’ve contributed quite a bit of good to the
world of technology and things are better now than they would have been had we
never come on the scene. Of course, that doesn’t mean there haven’t been numerous
attempts to put us out of other people’s misery. But when someone believes firmly in
freedom of speech and full disclosure, it’s kind of impossible to shut him up.
What has amazed me the most in the decades that followed is that the interest level
has never subsided. Over the years, more and more people have become entranced not
only with the technology itself but also with its social implications and overall importance to the future of humanity. It may sound a bit heavy handed but all of this—the
development of the Internet, computers being used as printing presses, the prevalence
of low-cost or free telecommunications all around the world, the sharing of information and resources—is having a profound impact on the human race in ways that no
one from our forefathers to Aristotle could ever have predicted. Somehow we wound
up right in the middle of all the turmoil. And just like it felt back in the early days
when everything just sort of came together at a particular moment, this feels like the
right people are in the right place at the right time to test the system, develop new
tools, and keep freedom of speech alive.
I
The 1980s:
In the Beginning
Chapter 1: Stories and Adventures
Chapter 2: The Last Days of Ma Bell
Chapter 3: New Toys to Play With
Chapter 4: The Early Days of the Net
Chapter 5: Corporate History
Chapter 6: Raids
Chapter 7: The Hacker Philosophy
1
Stories and Adventures
O
ne of the true joys of the hacker world is the wealth of firsthand accounts that
get shared throughout the community. Everyone has a story and many hackers have a whole treasure trove of them. This is what comes from being an inquisitive
bunch with a tendency to probe and explore, all the while asking entirely too many
questions. The rest of the world simply wasn’t prepared for this sort of thing, a fact that
hackers used to their advantage time and again.
In the hacker world, you can have adventures and obtain information on a whole
variety of levels, using such methods as social engineering, trashing, or simply communicating and meeting up with each other. All of these methods continue to work to
this day. Back in the 1980s, excitement via a keyboard was a fairly new concept but it
was catching on pretty fast as personal computers started to become commonplace. It
seemed incredible (and still does to me) that you could simply stick your telephone
into an acoustic modem, type a few letters on a keyboard, and somehow be communicating with someone in an entirely different part of the country or even another part
of the globe. Of course, hackers had already been having all sorts of adventures on telephones for years before this, whether it was through boxing, teleconferencing, or just
randomly calling people. And there were also the occasional “real-life” adventures,
something hackers were certainly not averse to, contrary to the usual stereotypes of
pasty-faced teenagers who feared going outside and interacting with the world. The
point is that whenever you got a bunch of bored, curious, and daring individuals
together, it didn’t really matter what the setting was. On the screen, over the phone, or
in real life, there was fun to be had and plenty to be learned in the process.
Tales from the Distant Past
Something that is true in any community of forward thinkers is the desire to learn
about the past. In our early years, most of those stories had to do with telephonerelated material from years and decades past. The two examples that follow rewind to
the middle of the 20th century when phones and communications were radically different than what they had become in the 1980s. While the technology may have
become obsolete, the interest in how telephones shaped our world remained strong—
regardless of the era.
4
Chapter 1
A Story of Eavesdropping (April, 1986)
Everybody knows an old man who was in the Second World War and has plenty of war stories to tell. Well sometimes it pays to take the time to listen.
We knew that the enemy was monitoring all of our international radiotelephone
channels, despite the sophisticated voice-scramblers which “inverted” speech, making
high tones into low ones and vice versa. Only authorized persons were permitted to
use overseas telephone circuits.
We were equipped with elaborate recorders and switching control boxes which permitted us to cut off either side of a conversation, or to substitute ourselves for either
party. A strict set of rules forbade us to permit maritime information, weather reports,
cargo information, etc. to pass over the circuits.
Influences in Washington sometimes resulted in orders issued to us to permit use of
the overseas telephone circuits, even though we were suspicious of previous conversations because parables and unusual phrases often used, made it difficult to follow what
was being said. “How can we monitor carefully, when we can’t understand what they’re
saying?” went unheeded.
We caught one fellow red-handed in South America using weird terms like “birds
leaving the nest with a basket of eggs.” I finally cut in the circuit and told him I’d forgotten what they meant. He tried a couple of other phrases, which I also couldn’t
understand. Finally, he lost his patience and blurted out, “Oh hell. I’m talking about
those special munition orders which left yesterday for Germany.”
By this time, a special telephone speech scrambler had been developed which was
small enough to fit and use on a desk. Its availability was extremely limited, but a couple
of army officers—one in the U.S. and the other in Panama—had been able to get hold of
a pair of them, and between them secretly installed them on their desks, unbeknownst
to us of course!
One day I heard the fellow in Panama say, “OK Joe, now over to the scrambler,” and
their ensuing conversation became unintelligible. We quickly checked the radio telephone circuit equipment and discovered that the technical characteristics of the equipment they were using and our own were identical. As a result, when they inserted their
scramblers the speech inversion righted itself and their conversations went out over
the radiotelephone circuit in clear language—readable by anyone! That was the end
of the use of their private “secret conversation system.”
Some of the worst offenders of overseas telephone use security were the top people.
I’ll have to list Generals Eisenhower and Marshall as two of them—at least sometimes.
I can remember one day the circuit between London and Washington happened to be
very poor in quality and “understandability” was stretched to the utmost.
Stories and Adventures
General Marshall in Washington had General Eisenhower on the line in London
who couldn’t understand a word of what Marshall was saying. Marshall repeated several times “Ike, this is GCM—Marshall—GCM—got it?” without results. Finally in
frustration Marshall turned to an aide and could be plainly heard to say “What’s the
code word for my name?”
The next thing we knew, Marshall was slowly and distinctly repeating his code name
interspersed with “GCM” and “Marshall.” Of course, we had to cut the circuit and
notify the code group in Washington to immediately “bust” the code—we couldn’t take
any chances—revelation of the code word for his name might have been all the enemy
intelligence was waiting for to help it “code-break” other communications.
On the other hand, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill were two of the
best and easiest to monitor. Both used references to previously transmitted overheard
messages by numbers and most of the conversations were along the lines: “Well Winnie,
on number 528, I really don’t think we should do that—you know how they are.”
Nobody could gain any information from listening to their telephone conversations.
I always enjoyed listening to Sir Winston originating a call. The British telephone
operators were required on every connection to announce in advance of a conversation:
“You are warned not to mention the names of vessels, sailing dates or conditions, cargoes, weather, etc., etc., etc., any violation on your part will result in the circuit being
cut off and your action being reported to the highest authority. Do you understand?”
Sir Winston always dociley replied. “Yes ma’am. I understand.”
One enemy group had learned the “language” of speech inversion. For example, listening on the air to a radiotelephone circuit, one might hear a word that sounded
exactly like krinkanope. That was the word telephone after it had passed through the
speech inversion system!
The First Atomic Bomb: A True Tale (March, 1984)
This story was originally related by Laura Fermi, widow of the nuclear physicist Enrico
Fermi who, along with assorted colleagues, participated in the first test bomb in the desert
outside Alamogordo, New Mexico, in the early morning hours of a summer day in July 1945.
When the date had been established for the secret test, staff members from the Manhattan
Project (as the secret test was known) were invited to bring their spouses to New Mexico to
watch the results of the several years of research. Each staff member had been assigned specific tasks to handle while there. Generally, they acted as observers and were stationed in a
circle around the perimeter of the bomb site. Enrico and Laura were stationed in an area
about twenty miles to the southwest of the bomb site.
The morning came when the bomb was scheduled to be detonated in the test. Laura told
it like this…
5
6
Chapter 1
Enrico and I woke up at 3:00 a.m., to go to the site. The test was scheduled for 4:30
a.m. that day, which was July 19, 1945. We drove to our post, about twenty miles from
the site. It had been arranged that the nearly 100 of us present would be located in a
circle about 100 miles in circumference surrounding the bomb site. We were all to be
in communication with each other over telephones, all of which were connected
through the exchange in Alamogordo.
We arrived at the site at 4:15 a.m. and almost immediately it began to rain, quite a
heavy, very typical torrential downpour during the summer. We waited in our car, and
at 4:30 a.m. the time came and went, but the bomb did not go off. Enrico and I
assumed it might have been postponed due to the rainstorm, but decided to check with
the other staff members to see for sure. For some reason, the telephone there at the site
did not seem to work; the operator would not respond. (Note: At that time, nearly all
phones in the United States, and certainly in New Mexico, were manual. No dialing of any
sort was possible—you had to use the operator for everything.)
Finally Enrico decided that we would drive into town and try to contact the others
and see what went wrong. So we drove back to town, and got there about 5:15 a.m. The
only place open at that time of night was a hotel, and we stopped in there to use a pay
phone. Strangely enough, the pay phone was not working either, or at least the operator never came on the line to ask what we wanted. Enrico was quite curious about all
this and decided to investigate. We went outside the hotel, and Enrico found where the
telephone wires came off the pole and down into the building. He decided that we
would follow the wires, so we walked down the street looking overhead at the wires on
the pole as we went along. Finally, we turned down one street and saw a house. The
telephone poles and wires from all directions seemed to come down to this house. There
must have been hundreds of wires from telephone poles all coming down onto the side
of this house and going in through an opening.
We noticed that there was a front porch light, which was on. The front door was
open, but there was a screen door, which was closed. We went up on the front porch
and looked into the house. A switchboard was there, and there were a dozen or more
lights on the switchboard lit, blinking off and on as people were flashing the switch
hooks on their phones trying to raise the operator. The room was just dimly lit, and
near the switchboard was a sofa, and a woman was laying on the sofa sound asleep!
Enrico pounded very loudly on the screen door, and shouted at the woman. Suddenly
she opened her eyes and looked at him, very startled. Then she looked at the switchboard. Immediately she sprang up, dashed over to the board, sat down and began frantically answering the calls.
Without saying any more, Enrico and I left, went back to the hotel where our car
was parked, and drove back to our monitoring post twenty miles out into the desert.
We had been at our post only about five minutes when the explosion went off, at about
Stories and Adventures
6:30 a.m., which was two hours behind schedule. Later, we talked to the other staff
members and found that there had been some confusion because of the rain. None of
them had been able to reach the others because the telephone operator had fallen
asleep, and the phones were not getting answered/connected…
We on the staff all had a big laugh out of it, but nothing more was ever said or done,
and I doubt to this day that that woman is even aware that the first atomic explosion
in the world was delayed two hours because of her.
Amazing, but true. Alamogordo was a tiny town back in the ’40s, and it’s very doubtful
that the night operator had ever seen so much traffic in her life as the hundred or so people
all on the line at once that early morning. More than likely, the poor dear had had a very
rough day the day before, in the miserable summer heat, had been unable to sleep during
the day, and had come to work that night thoroughly exhausted. She probably decided that
“it won’t hurt just to close my eyes for a minute…,” and the rest of the story is already told.
After all, experience had taught her that in fact she would not usually get a dozen calls all
night on her shift, and she felt relatively safe in stretching out “just for a minute.”
Numbers That Led to Trouble
Having access to telephones and the increasing variety of new uses for them invariably
led to all sorts of fun for the average phone phreak. (It was quite common in the hacker
world to append a “ph” to any word with an “f” if it had anything at all to do with
phones, such as “phreak,” “phriend,” or “phraud.” Sometimes the exact opposite was
true, which resulted in the word “fone” popping up every now and then.) Of course,
fun in the hacker world usually translated to trouble in the real world, which pretty
much summed up where hackers fit in societywise. Our innocence and adventure was
always seen as evil and threatening to the uninitiated who couldn’t seem to understand
what motivated these strange individuals to go and play with phones for hours on end.
As a result of our hard work, we would share whatever strange phone numbers we
were able to discover with anyone who was interested in hearing about them. Because
there weren’t as many methods of communication as there are today and because there
were significantly less phone numbers floating around, discoveries like the ones that
follow seemed to mean a lot more. And then, of course, there was one of the all-time
favorite phone phreak pastimes: running a teleconference. The unparalleled pleasure
of hooking several dozen of your closest friends together and going on a telephonic
voyage around the world was something so few people could even conceive of in the
1980s. And yet, everyone in the hacker community had some sort of encounter with
teleconferences back then. Some were even rumored to have spent most of the decade
connected to one.
7
8
Chapter 1
The Scariest Number in the World (December, 1984)
Recently, a telephone fanatic in the northwest made an interesting discovery. He was
exploring the 804 area code (Virginia) and found out that the 840 exchange did something strange. In the vast majority of cases, in fact in all of the cases except one, he
would get a recording as if the exchange didn’t exist. However, if he dialed 804-840 and
four rather predictable numbers, he got a ring!
After one or two rings, somebody picked up. Being experienced at this kind of thing,
he could tell that the call didn’t “supervise,” that is, no charges were being incurred for
calling this number. (Calls that get you to an error message, or a special operator, generally don’t supe.) A female voice, with a hint of a southern accent said, “Operator, can
I help you?”
“Yes,” he said. “What number have I reached?”
“What number did you dial, sir?”
He made up a number that was similar.
“I’m sorry, that’s not the number you reached.” Click.
He was fascinated. What in the world was this? He knew he was going to call back,
but before he did, he tried some more experiments. He tried the 840 exchange in several other area codes. In some, it came up as a valid exchange. In others, exactly the
same thing happened—the same last four digits, the same southern belle. Oddly
enough, he later noticed, the areas it worked in seemed to travel in a beeline from
Washington D.C. to Pittsburgh, PA.
He called back from a pay phone. “Operator, can I help you?”
“Yes, this is the phone company. I’m testing this line and we don’t seem to have an
identification on your circuit. What office is this, please?”
“What number are you trying to reach?”
“I’m not trying to reach any number. I’m trying to identify this circuit.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t help you.”
“Ma’am, if I don’t get an ID on this line, I’ll have to disconnect it. We show no record
of it here.”
“Hold on a moment, sir.”
After about a minute, she came back. “Sir, I can have someone speak to you. Would
you give me your number, please?”
He had anticipated this and he had the pay phone number ready. After he gave it,
she said, “Mr. XXX will get right back to you.”
“Thanks.” He hung up the phone. It rang. Instantly! “Oh my God,” he thought,
“They weren’t asking for my number; they were confirming it!”
“Hello,” he said, trying to sound authoritative.
“This is Mr. XXX. Did you just make an inquiry to my office concerning a phone
number?”
“Yes. I need an identi—”
Stories and Adventures
“What you need is advice. Don’t ever call that number again. Don’t even think about
calling that number again. Forget you ever knew it.”
At this point our friend got so nervous he just hung up. He expected to hear the
phone ring again but it didn’t.
Over the next few days he racked his brains trying to figure out what the number
was. He knew it was something big—that was pretty certain at this point. It was so big
that the number was programmed into every central office in the country. He knew this
because if he tried to dial any other number in that exchange, he’d get a local error
message from his CO, as if the exchange didn’t exist.
It finally came to him. He had an uncle who worked in a federal agency. He had a
feeling that this was government related and if it was, his uncle could probably find out
what it was. He asked the next day and his uncle promised to look into the matter.
The next time he saw his uncle, he noticed a big change in his manner. He was trembling. “Where did you get that number?” he shouted. “Do you know I almost got fired
for asking about it?! They kept wanting to know where I got it!”
Our friend couldn’t contain his excitement. “What is it?” he pleaded. “What’s the
number?!”
“It’s the President’s bomb shelter!”
He never called the number after that. He knew that he could probably cause quite
a bit of excitement by calling the number and saying something like, “The weather’s
not good in Washington. We’re coming over for a visit.” But our friend was smart. He
knew that there were some things that were better off unsaid and undone.
(If you have a phone or computer story, call or write us!)
The Truth Behind Those 9999 Numbers (January, 1984)
By Mark Bluebox
Once upon a time, I was talking to one of my favorite friends, one of the nation’s oldest and most experienced telephone enthusiasts—some might refer to him as a phone
phreak. In this particular conversation, he mentioned to me that I might want to experiment with a series of 800 numbers: exchanges starting with 9, followed by the suffix
9999 (800-9xx-9999). And so I did, and a whole new world began to open up in front
of me.
They were mostly weather and time numbers in various locations throughout the
country. And, because these were 800 numbers, there was NO CHARGE! One number
in particular was of a great deal of interest to me and to many others. This was 800957-9999, which hooked up to WWV, the radio station operated by the National
Bureau of Standards that does nothing but tell the time and give shortwave reports.
This is the most accurate clock in the entire world! You either have to tune WWV in
9
10
Chapter 1
on a shortwave receiver or dial 303-499-7111 in Fort Collins, Colorado. Yet, here I was
with an 800 access! Being a bit of a shortwave enthusiast, I don’t have to tell you how
convenient this was for me. Unfortunately, it got too convenient for too many people.
I guess I made the mistake of giving it to a former president of a large amateur radio
club in the Dallas area. He, in turn, printed it in the Amateur Radio News Bulletin
where thousands of people probably saw it. Another statewide News Bulletin picked it
up and printed it. Through an amateur radio news network, which this bulletin was a
part of, the news got as far as California.
One day, I called up the West Link Amateur Radio News Service at 213-768-7333.
(This is a service located in West Link, California that broadcasts news over amateur
radio, VHF, UHF, etc.) Their latest report had this little item: “Speaking of interesting
things, the National Bureau of Standards has got a very convenient time number for
those of you that are not constantly at a shortwave receiver. You can dial 1-800-9579999 for WWV. It’s just another good toll-free service for us to use.” The avalanche had
really begun now.
The West Link report was heard on bulletin stations all around the world and apparently one station in Nashville, Tennessee, broadcast it. From there it fell into the hands
of one of the writers for the DX program on Radio South Africa! I happened to be listening to a program where they were talking about pulling in distant time stations,
weather stations, etc. He then mentioned, “For those of you that live in the United
States, a convenient toll-free 800 number has been provided by the National Bureau of
Standards for WWV and that number is 1-800-957-9999.” Imagine my surprise! Once
again, the number had been broadcast all around the world. People in many, many
nations now had that number. Of course, the number only worked inside the United
States, but the word was being spread by shortwave listeners and QSL people everywhere.
The number was getting swamped. Needless to say, it was busy much of the time. A
government official, who also had this number, thinking that it was legitimate, called
up WWV and complained. He told them that they needed to add some more lines to
their new 800 number. The general manager of the station said, “I don’t know what
you’re talking about. I don’t know of any 800 number that gets you WWV.”
The government official told him what the telephone number was. The general
manager called it and heard his own station. Astounded, he contacted the Mountain
Bell Telephone Company in Denver, Colorado. They said, “You’re not paying for any
800 in-WATS number. We show 303-499-7111 for WWV, but we don’t have any 800957-9999.”
Mountain Bell checked it out and sure enough, the number existed but not on their
records. No one was getting charged for this! Now, of course, you know a monopoly
as well as I do—they’re sure not going to let anyone have a free ride. So they told the
Stories and Adventures
WATS coordinator to find out what happened. He finally made the discovery that some
technicians had hooked that number up f