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from Peninsula Times Tribune Saturday Juanuary 25, 1986
>-= 'Phone Phreak' Eyes Computers =-<
By John Raess
If historians should ever trace the history of electronic outlawry jown as
computer hacking, they probably will draw a line under the name of John T.
Draper. Also known as "Cap'n Crunch" the 42-year-old draper was a leagandary
figure in the electronics subculrture of Silicon Valley before it became famous.
He also had a small following amound the security people at the Pacific
Telephone Co., but they weren't admirers. For a handful of years in the late
1960's and 70's Draper scampered through the telephone system like a rat in a
garbage bin. Akthought not the first he was argubuly the most famous user - the
phone company would say abuser - of el ectronic devices that tricked telephones
into giving him free calls. His notoriety, curiousity and a notable laxity
concerning communications law got him three criminal convictions for mousing
around in the telephone system.
The past 15 years have seen Draper move from electronics engineer to disc
jokey to counterculture telephone guerrilla to federal prisoner to computer
programmer. Once again he is at the cutting edge of homegrown electronics
society, legitmately this time, writing computer programs in his cluttered
one-bedroom apartment.
Fifteen years ago Draper was a disc jockey and an engineer at a Cupertine
radio station. Then he got the call that changed his life. It was from a blind
San Jose teen-ager who began telling him about flukes in the telephone system.
"Phone freaks," as they called themselvces could take advantage of certain
toll-free numbers and open conference curcuits. It wasn't too much later that
Draper earned his nickname.
He discovered that a free whistle in boxes of Cp'n Crunch cereal could
approxmiate the pitch of code tones for the telephone. Blow the right tones,
and phone calls were free. One thing led to another and Draper soon was making
"blue boxes," elecronic gadgets that could fool telephones out of free calls.
[the press sure does have a lot to learn about Blue Boxes! -ed]
Living in Mountain View and working as a disc jockey at the time Draper said
he was one of a small handful of electronics hobbeyists who viewed the telephone
systems as a vast, uncharted wilderness.
"I treated it as a system I was mapping and exploring, and any calls I made
personally, I paid for. But any calls I made while phone freaking, that was
part of the hacking, that was different," Draper said recently.
Phone Company officials failed to see the distinction. Draper was arrested
and convicted in 1972 of violations of ferderal communications law and placed on
probation. He was not the first phone phreaker to get arrested but probably the
most celebrated. At the time, it was an attractive image: a b rillian 1960's
anti-hero fighting a gigantic and pervasive bureaucracy. In 1976 he was
conviceted again of a similair offense and this time he was sent to jail for
four months.
He said it was the hard stance taken by telephone comapny officials and
prosecutors that took telephone tinkering out of its circle of faddists and made
it and underground hit with the criminal set.
"They should have patched up the (telephone) system, instead of making an
example of me," he said, "waht eyh didn't count on was that by birtue of putting
me in jail, they made thousands of Cap'n Crunches all over the world.
"Once I got in I started telling everybody in jail what I knew. And those
were the people who were really, really intersted in making free callss.
"Because of that, it increased phone freaking by a magnitude of 100. No
longer did you have a select few doing it. You had all these Mafia people
setting up massive rip-offs."
Once out of jail his fascination with the phone system continued. Fascination
later became obseession and led to his third and final arrest. Sometimes in the
mid-1970's Draper said, he became aware of a secret telephone circuit, one with
sinister implications. [getting good, huh?] Other phone phreakers demonstrated
to him that they could tap in - un detected - on any telephone conversation they
wanted, he said.
He said, "you could be anywhere in the world and listen to any conversation
anywhere."
"It was ued on me and it was demonstrated to me. I spent the next two years
seartching for it. I was obsessed with trying to find it."
The search got him his third conviction, for which he sepent four months in a
Pennsylvania jail [hint! -ed.]
It also earned him a three-day visit to testify before a federal grand jury in
Des Moines, Iowa in 1979 [hint #2 - ed.]
They asked me questions about (the secret circuit's) existence. Do I think it
existed? Yes. I don't know if it still exists," he said.
The investigation went to further than the federal grand jury(!).
Roxanne Conlin, former U.S. attorney and now in private practice said no
indictments arose from the investigation of the mysterious telephone circuit.
But the grand jury emembers were charmed by Draper who gave the impression of a
likeable but "erratic genius."
[the article goes on about his currect suit against the company that published
one of his programs.]