The clubhouse may have existed only in the electronic ether around a test number in a switching office somewhere in Canada, but it was a meeting place nonetheless.
Joe Engressia's life in Memphis revolved around phreaker conference lines, but when Rosenbaum talked to him, he was getting worried about being discovered.
"I want to work for Ma Bell. I don't hate Ma Bell the way some phone phreaks do. I don't want to screw Ma Bell. With me it's the pleasure of pure knowledge.
There's something beautiful about the system when you know it intimately the way I do. But I don't know how much they know about me here. I have a very intuitive feel for the condition of the line I'm on, and I think they're monitoring me off and on lately, but I haven't been doing much illegal.... Once I took an acid trip and was havin these auditory hallucinations . . . and all of a sudden I had to phone phreak out of there. For some reason I had to call Kansas City, but that's all."
Joe's intuition was correct: he was indeed being monitored. Shortly after that interview, agents from the phone company's security department, accompanied by local police, broke into his room and confiscated every bit of telecommunications equipment. Joe was arrested and spent the night in jail.
The charges against him were eventually reduced from possession of a blue box and theft of service to malicious mischief. His jail sentence was suspended. But in return he had to promise never to phreak again--and to make sure he kept his promise, the local phone company refused to restore his telephone line.2
One of Joe's friends at that time was a man called John Draper, better known as Captain Crunch. Like Joe, Draper was interested in the system: he liked to play on it, to chart out the links and connections between phone switching offices, overseas lines, and satellites. His alias came from the Quaker Oats breakfast cereal Cap'n Crunch, which once, in the late 1960s, had included a tiny plastic whistle in each box as a children's toy. Unknown to the company, it could be used to phreak calls.
The potential of the little whistle was said to have been discovered by accident. The toy was tuned to a high-A note that closely reproduced the 2600-cycle tone used by Bell in its long-distance lines. Kids demonstrating their new toy over the phone to Granny in another city would sometimes find that the phone went dead, which caused Bell to spend a perplexing few weeks looking for the source of the problem.
Draper first became involved with phreaking in 1969, when he was twenty-six and living in San Jose. One day he received what he later described as a "very strange call" from a man who introduced himself as Denny and said he wanted to show him something to do with musical notes and phones. Intrigued, Draper visited Denny, who demonstrated how tones played on a Hammond organ could be recorded and sent down the line to produce free long-distance calls. The problem was that a recording had to be made for each number required, unless Draper, who was an electronics engineer, could build a device that could com- bine the abilities of the organ and the recorder. The man explained that such a device would be very useful to a certain group of blind kids, and he wanted to know if Draper could help.
After the meeting Draper went home and immediately wired up a primitive multifrequency transmitter--a blue box. The device was about the size of a telephone. Ironically it wouldn't work in San Jose (where long-distance calls were still routed through an operator), so Draper had to drive back to San Francisco to demonstrate it. To his surprise it worked perfectly. "Stay low," he told the youngsters. "This thing's illegal."
But the blind kids were already into phreaking in a big way. They had already discovered the potential of the Cap'n Crunch plastic whistle, and had even found that to make it hit the 2600cycle tone every time, all it needed was a drop of glue on the outlet hole.
