The rise of the computer underworld to the point at which a single malicious program like Michelangelo can cause law enforcement agencies, government ministries, and corporations to take special precautions, when credit bureau information can be stolen and individuals' credit card accounts can be easily plundered, began thirty years ago. Its impetus, curiously enough, was a simple decision by Bell Telephone to replace its human operators with computers.
PHREAKING FOR FUN
The culture of the technological underworld was - formed in the early sixties, at a time when computers were vast pieces of complex machinery used only by big corporations and big government. It grew out of the social revolu- tion that the term the sixties has come to represent, and it remains an antiestablishment, anarchic, and sometimes "New Age" technological movement organized against a background of music, drugs, and the remains of the counterculture.
The goal of the underground was to liberate technology from the controls of state and industry, a feat that was accomplished more by accident than by design. The process began not with computers but with a fad that later became known as phreaking--a play on the wordsfreak, phone, andfree. In the beginning phreaking was a simple pastime: its purpose was nothing more than the manipulation of the Bell Telephone system in the United States, where most phreakers lived, for free long-distance phone calls.
Most of the earliest phreakers happened to be blind children, in part because it was a natural hobby for unsighted lonely youngsters. Phreaking was something they could excel at: you didn't need sight to phreak, just hearing and a talent for electronics.
Phreaking exploited the holes in Bell's long-distance, directdial system. "Ma Bell" was the company the counterculture both loved and loathed: it allowed communication, but at a price. Thus, ripping off the phone company was liberating technology, and not really criminal.
Phreakers had been carrying on their activities for almost a decade, forming an underground community of electronic pirates long before the American public had heard about them. In October 1971 Esquire magazine heralded the phreaker craze in an article by Ron Rosenbaum entitled "The Secrets of the Little Blue Box,"
the first account of phreaking in a mass-circulation publication, and still the only article to trace its beginnings. It was also undoubtedly the principal popularizer of the movement. But of course Rosenbaum was only the messenger; the subculture existed before he wrote about it and would have continued to grow even if the article had never been published. Nonetheless, his piece had an extraordinary impact: until then most Americans had thought of the phone, if they thought of it at all, as an unattractive lump of metal and plastic that sat on a desk and could be used to make and receive calls. That it was also the gateway to an Alice-in-Wonderland world where the user controlled the phone company and not vice versa was a revelation. Rosenbaum himself acknowledges that the revelations contained in his story had far more impact than he had expected at the time.
The inspiration for the first generation of phreakers was said to be a man known as Mark Bernay (though that wasn't his real name). Bernay was identified in Rosenbaum's article as a sort of electronic Pied Piper who traveled up and down the West Coast of the United States, pasting stickers in phone booths, inviting everyone to share his discovery of the mysteries of "loop-around- pairs," a mechanism that allowed users to make toll-free calls.
