Four years later he was convicted and sent to Lompoc Federal Prison in California for two months, which was where the criminal classes first learned the details of his techniques. It was, he says, a matter of life or death. As soon as he was inside, he was asked to cooperate and was badly beaten up when he refused. He realized that in order to survive, he would have to share his knowledge. In jail, he figured, it was too easy to get killed. "It happens all the time. There are just too many members of the 'Five Hundred Club,' guys who spend most of their time pumping iron and lifting five-hundred-pound weights,"
he says.
So he picked out the top dog, the biggest, meanest, and strongest inmate, as his protector. But in return Draper had to tell what he knew. Every day he gave his protector a tutorial about phreaking: how to set up secure loops, or eavesdrop on other telephone conversations. Every day the information was passed on to people who could put it to use on the outside. Draper remains convinced that the techniques that are still used by drug runners for computer surveillance of federal agents can be traced back to his tutorials.
But criminals were far from the only group to whom Draper's skills appealed. Rosenbaum's 1971 article introduced Americans for the first time to a new high-tech counterculture that had grown up in their midst, a group of technology junkies that epitomized the ethos of the new decade. As the sixties ended, and the seventies began, youth culture--that odd mix of music, fashion, and adolescent posturing--had become hardened and more radical. Woodstock had succumbed to Altamont; Haight-Ashbury to political activism; the Berkeley Free Speech Movement to the Weathermen and the Students for a Democratic Society.
Playing with Ma Bell's phone system was too intriguing to be dismissed as just a simple technological game. It was seen as an attack on corporate America--or "Amerika," as it was often spelt then to suggest an incipient Nazism within the state--and phreaking, a mostly apolitical pastime, was adopted by the radical movement. It was an odd mix, the high-tech junkies alongside the theatrical revolutionaries of the far left, but they were all part of the counterculture.
Draper himself was adopted by the guru of the whole revolutionary movement. Shortly after his arrest, he was contacted by Abbie Hoffman, the cofounder of the Youth International Party Line (YIPL). Hoffman invited Draper to attend the group's 1972 national convention in Miami and offered to organize a campaign fund for his defense.
At the time Hoffman was the best-known political activist in America. An anti-Vietnam war campai~ner, a defendant in the Chicago Seven trial, he had floated YIPL in 1971 as the technical offshoot of his radical Yippie party. Hoffman had decided that communications would be an important factor in his revolution and had committed the party to the "liberation" of Ma Bell, inevitably portrayed as a fascist organization whose influence needed to be stemmed.
YIPL produced the first underground phreaker newsletter, initially under its own name. In September 1973 it became TAP, an acronym that stood for Technological Assistance Program. The newsletter provided its readers with information on telephone tapping and phreaking techniques and agitated against the profits being made by Ma Bell.
Draper went to the YIPL convention, at his own expense, but came back empty-handed. It was, according to Draper, "a total waste of time," and the defense fund was never organized. But ironically, while the political posturing of the radicals had little discernible effect on the world, the new dimensions of technology--represented, if imperfectly, by the phreakers--would undeniably engender a revolution.
Before he went to jail, Draper was an habitue of the People's Computer Company (PCC), which met in Menlo Park, California. Started in 1972 with the aim of demystifying computers, it was a highly informal association, with no members as such; the twenty-five or so enthusiasts who gathered at PCC meetings would simply be taught the mysteries of computing, using an old DEC machine. They also hosted pot-luck dinners and Greek dances; it was as much a social club as a computer group.
But there was a new buzz in the air: personal computers, small, compact machines that could be used by anyone. A few of the PCC-ites gathered together to form a new society, one that would "brew" their own home computers, which would be called the Homebrew Computer Club. Thirty-two people turned up for the inaugural meeting of the society on March 5, 1975, held in a garage in Menlo Park.
