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In Reply to: RE: One thing to point out... posted by Tony Lauck on March 19, 2014 at 13:33:19
"2600"One of my favorite publications! :)
Fond memories of says gone by... Did you actually use your Blue Box?
Edits: 03/20/14Follow Ups:
Our group were the first people east of the Mississippi to build a blue box. We thought we were the first in the world, but it turns out that one lone wolf in the Pacific NW had figured out how to build one a year or two before us. The term "blue box" came from the color of the chassis that we built our hardware on, which came from an electronics surplus supply house called Eli's, later acquired by Fry's.
We used our blue box to demonstrate that it worked. We called the weather in Nome, Alaska, etc... We did not use it to cheat ATT out of phone calls that we would conceivably have paid for, nor did we sell any products or services. As it turned out, this was fortunate, because had we done so, then the Deputy Federal District Attorney for Boston would not have told the Boston ATT security head that we had not committed any crime and hence could not be prosecuted. (This letter in files obtained by FOIA by the book's author, with our release.) ATT dropped all civil charges against us as part of a deal we negotiated in return for writing up a detailed report on what we had done, how we had done it, how they should design future networks to be less hackable, and how they could detect fellow blue boxers. When we handed in our report we had to sign a contract and were paid $1.00 for the report and given promises of jobs at Bell Labs after college graduation.
N.B. Were someone to do the same thing today (or otherwise hack any computer) they would be sent up for hard time. A lot of fascist laws have been passed since 1963. No thinking person can continue to claim that the USA is still a free country.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Very cool story. :)
" one lone wolf in the Pacific NW"
John Draper "Captain Crunch"
Yes fun times. Build Blue, Red, and Back boxes also. Lots of fun. Never did anything crazy with them, but they were fun. Old pre digital Telco was interesting with loops, busy signals etc... The good old days.
No, Captain Crunch came later. You have to read the book to learn about the first guy.
Captain Crunch came to visit me at one time during the 1970's. Ron Kessler from the Washington Post who wrote the first articles on us for the Boston Herald, The Wall Street Journal and later Fortune Magazine, had contacted me regarding a story that it was possible to bug any phone in the US by keying in various tones on a random pay phone. I had a brief meeting with John Draper at my home in this regard. Later, I did some digging and asking various people who know (ex Bell Labs people, spooks, etc.) and found out that this could have been done for most phones if someone could have done the appropriate computer hacking. I conducted this research in such a way that the people involved thought it was casual questions and no one of them saw more than a piece of the puzzle so they had no idea what I was up to. I declined to come out of the shadows at that time and told Ron Kessler that I did not want to talk to a Congressional Committee.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
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