Once, making a call around the world, he sent a call to Tokyo, which connected him to India, then Greece, then South Africa, South America, and London, which put him through to New York, which connected him to an L.A. operator--who dialed the number of the phone booth next to the one he was using. He had to shout to hear himself but, he claimed, the echo was "far out." Another time, using two phone booths located side by side, Draper sent his voice one way around the world from one of the telephones to the other, and simultaneously from the second phone booth he placed a call via satellite in the other direction back to the first phone. The trick had absolutely no practical value, but the Captain was much more interested in the mechanics of telecommunications than in actually calling anyone. "I'm learning about a system," he once said. "The phone company is a system, a computer is a system. Computers and systems-- that's my bag."
But by this time the Captain was only stating the obvious. To advanced phreakers the system linking the millions of phones around the world--that spider's web of lines, loops, and tandems--was infinitely more interesting than anything they would ever hope to see. Most of the phreakers were technology junkies anyway, the sort of kids who took apart radios to see how they worked, who played with electronics when they were older, and who naturally progressed to exploring the phone system, if only because it was the biggest and best piece of technology they could lay their hands on. And the growing awareness that they were liberating computer technology from Ma Bell made their hobby even more exciting.
In time even Mark Bernay, who had helped spread phone phreaking across America, found that his interests were changing. By 1969, he had settled in the Pacific Northwest and was working as a computer programmer in a company with access to a large time-share mainframe--a central computer accessed by telephone that was shared among hundreds of smaller companies. Following normal practice, each user had his own log-in--identification code, or ID--and password, which he would need to type in before being allowed access to the computer's files. Even then, to prevent companies from seeing each other's data, users were confined to their own sectors of the computer.
But Bernay quickly tired of this arrangement. He wrote a program that allowed him to read everyone else's ID and password, which he then used to enter the other sectors, and he began leaving messages for users in their files, signing them "The Midnight Skulker." He didn't particularly want to get caught, but he did want to impress others with what he could do; he wanted some sort of reaction. When the computer operators changed the passwords, Bernay quickly found another way to access them. He left clues about his identity in certain files, and even wrote a program that, if activated, would destroy his own passwordcatching program. He wanted to play, to have his original program destroyed so that he could write another one to undo what he had, in effect, done to himself, and then reappear. But the management refused to play. So he left more clues, all signed by "The Midnight Skulker."
Eventually the management reacted: they interrogated everyone who had access to the mainframe, and inevitably, one of Bernay's colleagues fingered him. Bernay was fired.
When Rosenbaum wrote his article in 1971 the practice of breaking into computers was so new and so bizarre, it didn't even have a name. Rosenbaum called it computer freaking--thef used to distinguish it from ordinary phone phreaking. But what was being described was the birth of hacking.
It was Draper, alias Captain Crunch, who, while serving a jail sentence, unintentionally spread the techniques of phreaking and hacking to the underworld--the real underworld of criminals and drug dealers. Part of the reason Draper went to jail, he now says, was because of the Esquire article: "I knew I was in trouble as soon as I read it." As a direct result of the article, five states set up grand juries to investigate phone phreaking and, incidentally, Captain Crunch's part in it. The authorities also began to monitor Draper's movements and the phones he used. He was first arrested in 1972, about a year after the article appeared, while phreaking a call to Sydney, Australia. Typically, he wasn't actually speaking to anyone; he had called up a number that played a recording of the Australian Top Ten.
