The News Journal from Wilmington, Delaware • Page 25

ViSe 2i Tuesday 25, 1972 VENING JOURNAL Man Alum j-lTTown -Jin All Started in Cereal Box Freeks Bel. Ma St' iM wijt be, fti, I I IN long time ago and it just keeps getting worse. Around 1900, the massive network that is Ma Bell began a changeover from direct mechanical switching, relays and such, to acoustical switching. It cost $1 billion or $2 billion but in the long run such switching is cheaper, faster, more efficient and easier to maintain. It is also susceptible to control by the Blue Box.

As described in the Bell Systems Technical Journal of November, 1900, the switching equipment of the Bell Systems is controlled by 13 tones. TWELVE of these tones are what are called "matrix tones," a precise combination of two or more tones (two in the Bell System) which, when sounded together, produced the right frequency to actuate the switch. The one pure tone used is the 2.UM cycle per second tone of Captain Crunch's whistle. That is a disconnect tone and serves to seize the tandem board of a long-distance line. The tandem is an electronic device which translates the caller's dialing signals in'o the acoustical switching signals used by Bell.

As used by lone freeks. a toll-free long distance number is dialed, such as long-distance information in another city or an "800" number, used by car rental companies, hotel and motel chains and Army recruiting. When the dialing is completed and the phone rings or is picked up, the 2,000 cycle tone is sounded to disconnect the telephone from the tandem, and in effect, tell the phone company's computers that the caller has hunt? im In actuality, the tandem is now seized and is open to Mie switching signals of the Blue P.ox, just as it would be opori to those same frequencies sent out by a phone company operator. The Blue Box user is "inside." in the network itself, able to bounce around the millions of miles and switches of the grid. DIALING is begun by simulating Key Pulse matrix frequency.

Dialing rs then carried through whatever number frequencies are required for the call. This frequency information, along with a photograph of the interior parts and wiring vi what is essentially a Blue Box. was made available to Hk a ssy A V. ihtfiwNft Carl IVt't. telephone company public in the Bell Laboratories journal.

This has since become a matter of some embarrassment to BRIGHT and studious young engineering students, reading that article, said to themselves: All of those matrix tones can be produced with six oscillators tuned to the base frequencies and hooked up to a small speaker or feeding directly by wire into a phone line. A seventh oscillator will duplicate the 2,000 cycle tone. Tuning the oscillators is a problem though. The more affluent could buy custom oscillators already tuned to the right frequencies by ordering them from any of a number of speciality electronics shops in large cities. The true enthusiast, however, tunes his own.

Tuning the oscillator can be done by ear, which is unscientific but works if one is fairly careful and has good hearing, by striking the correct frequency tone on an electric organ, where it is known, and tuning the oscillator with a screwdriver until the two tones sound the same. The whole thing was powered by a 9-volt transistor radio battery and could fit in a eoat pocket. IN the 19tiUs Teets started making arrests. Guys would be using the Blue Box from their home phones. There would be no billing for the calls but it would begin to look mighty odd at the phone company when someone was making 200-300 calls a month to long-distance information or toll-free 800 numbers and with no corresponding toll call to follow up.

i Of lU'St mi piCNCU UJ NU. at Carnegie Tech. His Blue Box was confiscated and he was given a lecture. The number of arrests has gone up each year, but the number of Blue Boxes seems to be going up faster. Teets says no one has gone to prison yet for using a Blue Box.

just some convictions and $500 fines. At first. Bell's attitude was to just shrug off the Blue Boxes. "But now it's getting above and beyond what we can tolerate." Teets says. IT'S not jtisl the money They tie up equipment.

They can even tie up a whole exchange, like a small town or a large business. mm ii.iiMiw liy Carl C. Smilh They'll never replace the airline calendar whose January sheet offers a color photo of Paris at dusk, with street lights reflected in Ihe Seine. But two local black-and-white calendars do have special interest for Delawareans. Each local calendar has only four designs, with three months to a sheet.

You have to like each page for 90 days. One calendar was put out by the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental control as part of its educational function. The January-to-March page is deviled to "Deciduous Woodland," with a drawing by Paul Catts of a stump. That's right, a stump. It shows how the American chestnut tree, although destroyed by blight earlier in this century, still serves a function in the balance of nature.

Various life forms of the forest floor now huddle around ihe stumps of the once-giant chestnut trees. Beneath Catts' drawing, the smaller items around the stump are itemized: "Mushrooms, Virginia creeper, false Solomon's seal, Christmas fern, and beer can." The other local four-page calendar, published by Delaware Trust has a more pleasant scene for the first quarter of the year. It is a drawing by Harrison Van Duyke of "The Long Room" in Wilmington's Old Town Hall. An ultimate tribute has been paid to the Delaware Trust Co. calendar.

A copy of it was seen yesterday hanging in one of the safe-deposit customers' cubicles in a branch of Wilmington Trust Co. That's almost like finding an American Airlines calendar in a TWA waiting room. IIoiH'sly in When Maryland's Sen. Charles McC. Malliias was handed a gift-wrapped package aft or giving a speech to the Wilmington Jaycees last Friday, he raised an eyebrow toward Delaware's Sen.

J. Caleb Boggs and said: "We can't accept gifts if they are bigger ilian a ham or wetter than a quart, can we, Cale?" The gift was a Delaware Delft vase made in the Netherlands, and Sen. Mathias accepted it without measuring its size against a ham. But nobody in the audience saw any way in which the senator's vote was likely to be influenced by Ihe possession of a delft vase from Delaware. (fame Plan in Last year there was a sad tale here CenkTville entrepreneur II.

Budd's efforts to watch the 11)71 Super Bowl game on television while wintering in The last part of it was pre-empted by a Mexican soccer game. The word has arrived by air mail that Budd tried again this year. Here's bis story: "We arrived at Morelia, 230 miles over the mountains from Mexico City, on Saturday, Jan. 15. Some of our friends had arranged with the U.S.

consul in Morelia to let us watch the game on TV at his home. There were eight of us gathered around the black-and-white set. "The soccer game did not pre-empt it this year, but the audio, relayed by cable, was in Spanish. Our host rigged up his short-wave radio outfit. We used the TV picture, shut off the TV sound and tuned in the radio to somewhere in the U.S.A., probably Dallas or Houston.

"The result was that we saw two games. We saw the action on the screen, and precisely 14 seconds later there was a play on the audio, plus crowd noises. It took us a time to realize that this was a description of the play we had seen 14 seconds before. "When a Dolphin ran back a kiekoff 38 yards, 14 seconds later the announcer said: 'He picked up the ball on the goal line, he's across the 5. the 10, the If), the 20 he may go all the But we had already seen him stopped at the Shades of Ted Musing!" Halftime ceremonies, Budd added, were mercifully blanked off the audio, avoiding an insoluble lip sync problem.

Today's Horror As evidence that a younger generation of horrorists is coming right along, 9-year-old Eric Hutz of Delwyn credits this one to his 6-year-old sister, Diana: Knock, knock. Who's there? Olive. Olive who? Olive you. Eric's own offering goes like this: "What is green and goes, 'Slam, slam, slam, slam'?" A four-door pickle. 10 Charges Result From City Chases Kenneth H.

Morton, 20, of the 2430 block West was arrested on 10 charges early today after he was allegedly involved in two separate high-speed chases with Wilmington police. Morton was held in default of $2,000 bail pending appearance in Municipal Court on charges of disorderly conduct, reckless driving, speeding (65 miles an hour in a 25 mile zonei. failing to stop at the command of a police officer, disregarding a stop sign, disobedience toward a police officer, failing to change registration, failing to change certificate of title and failing to signal. The first chase started about 1:15 this morning in the 2508 block Market police said, when officers in a patrol car observed a car being driven at a high rate of speed. They took up pursuit but lost sight of the car at 25th and Lamotte and abandoned the chase.

Minutes later, however, the car was again spotted traveling north in the 2503 block Market and the second chase started. With the patrol car in pursuit the other driver, later identified as Morton turned east on 25th turning off his lights as he increased speed. The chase continued to the 2100 block Thatcher Street. Police reported that Morton bucked traffic on several streets, forcing oncoming traffic to swerve aside, and aLso went through at least one stop sign. Two companions with Morton were released without charges.

Dy BOB SCHWABACH The Blue Box a small electronic device with the singular property of permitting its user to make telephone calls anywhere in the world, for any length of time, at no charge. That's the kind of thing that gets attention, every time. With the Blue Box you can call Moscow, Hong Kong, Tierra del Fuego, and Weeha Liken. N.J. You can call the public booth at London's Victoria Station, and the guard's gate at the Topkapi.

You can call the house next door, and route the call through Melbourne, Australia, if you feel like it. And you can talk all day long. NOT only can you chatter to your heart's content, you can play at will with the world's largest electronic toy and it will all be free. The experienced say you can even tap telephones with it. All of this has the American Telephone Telegraph Co.

the largest corporation in the world Ma Bell climbing the walls. No one knows just how much revenue has lost because of the Blue Box estimates range from $50,000 a year to $50 million. Nobody knows why it's called the Blue Box (even the phone company refers to it as the Blue Box). Some say it's called that because the first one confiscated by the phone company was blue. In various sizes, colors and degrees of sophistication, the Blue Box is a set of audio oscillators tuned to the frequencies of the longdistance switching equipment.

ALMOST any time you make a call you hear that switching working bloop-bloop bloop bloop bleep-bleep-blup, and so on until the phone rings. The noise is a series of switches being actuated by the operator or by automatic equipment. And the device used to actuate those switches is (you guessed it) a Blue Box. The irony of the Blue Box and its growing widespread illegal use is that it was designed by the phone company itself. It cos'ts about $30 to build and can be put together by virtually anyone with a minim-mal understanding of electricity and electronics.

Virtually complete instructions were published by the telephone company itself more than a decade ago in one of its technical journals. That November 196 issue of the Bell Systems Technical Journal has become the blue boxer's bible. It is available at most technical libraries, including the University of Delaware. JUST slightly behind in reverence is the 196G International Telecommunications Union Blue Book, which gives complete details on how the worldwide 'telephone system works. As Carl Teets, security supervisor for Bell Telephone of Pennsylvania and Diamond Slate Telephone says, it is mainly the whiz-kid type who builds and experiments with the Blue Box.

Those who have been caught are almost uniformally young, extremely intelligent and used their Blue Box more or less as a lark. "Most of them feel they haven't really done anything wrong," Teets says. "They feel there is this giant, monolithic corporation and it's fair game." Many Blue Box users in the United States, Canada and Great Britain have gotten into informal contact through using the box and lend to share information and tips by phone. They speak of themselves as lone freeks and outsmarting the phone company is the name of their global game. THIS kind of attitude makes Teets' job a lot harder.

Blue Box people can eventually get the dialing coding information, such as how to use the Telstar satellite to call Pago Pago, by trial and error experimentation with the box. But because it's all just a big game anyway, they often get the information from a telephone company employe. When one fone freek gets it i't's almost instantly transmitted to other fone freeks. They even have their own folk heroes. Captain Crunch tops the lot.

lie has been interviewed before, always incognito, of course, and is reported to be an electronics student in California. It is he ho discovered the first key frequency to make the telephone company switching equipment turn on the 2.C0O cycle per second pure tone that seizes the tandem switching equipment that controls a long-distance line. That's how he got his nickname. SEVERAL years ago, Captain Crunch breakfast cereal put little whistles in its cereal boxes as premiums. It was to the everlasting glory of fone freekdum, so the legend goes, that the then unknown Captain Crunch discovered that the whistle's frequency was a pure 2.l'i()0 cycles.

By picking up a telephone, direct-dialing information in a distant city so as to get onto a long-distance line), Captain Crunch could blow his toy whistle and seize command of the switching equipment. There was then nothing else he could do ith equipment so the whistle's utility was extremely limited. Further control was to come later with the Blue Box. The whistle did have a use on incoming calls, r. When someone called in long distance, Captain Crunch could lift the receiver, emit a blast from his cereal box whistle and the phone a 's billing equipment would record that line as having hung up.

The caller would be billed for the initial connection but not for all the subsequent minutes of talk. Since those days, the fone freeks have come a much longer way with the Blue Box. Consider the following item taken from an Esquire Magazine article in October. A lone freek named l'razcr is demonstrating his Blue Box to writer, Ron Rosenbaum: "I'm dialing an 800 number now. Any 800 number will do.

It's toll free. It's ringing. Now watch "First I'll punch out KP (Key Pu 1 sei 182 START, which will slide us into the overseas sender in White Plains (New York) I think we'll head over to England by satellite (Telstar). Cable is usually faster and the connection is somewhat better, but I like going by satellite. "So I just punch out KP zero 44.

The zero is supposed to guarantee a satellite connection and 44 is the country code for England. Okay, "we're there. In Liverpool, actually. Now all I have to do is punch out the London area code, which is 1, and dial up HE can dial any number he wants at that point. In the article, he chooses to dial a pay phone in Waterloo station.

Sometimes fone freeks will locate a vacant switching interchange, such as one in British Columbia shut down last year. Hundreds of them will get the word to dial in th.it number and there will be this mass conference call, like an enormous- electronic kalfee latch. The phone company is not amused. It all started a long, "if 4" A sophisticated tone Ircik can fiddle around with trial and error combinations of digits until he finds access, if he knows only the general exchange number that gives access to that computer. That number he could get simply by signing up to buy a minute's worth of time, or even pretending to.

Some fone freeks claim to have already done this and that a few have actually been able to reprogram the computer to give them space in the memory banks, process their calculations and then ignore their calls on the billing printout. Teets says some of the claims made by fone freeks are wild bragging. He says he knows of no computer thefts. He says he does know, however, of a group from an exclusive boys school near Philadelphia that played with a computer by telephone for several months, taking information from it. programming their own problems on it.

ALMOST eery time-share computer company in the country has already experienced actual or attempted information theft from their computers. The next obvious danger is to militarly phone exchanges and computers, to the White House and other government exchanges. A group of Blue Box users could kill a military exchange. "I have Nixon's number in Key Biscav ne." a fone freek recently told a Los Angcle Times reporter. "And the number of one of his private lines in the White House.

It's hooked up to the mili'ary ohor.e Autovahn. I call him whenever 1 want, but that would just he inviting trouble. It wou'd be easier to tap into whoever (ie calling if that's what yc.ii'n' inio LTOVAHN is the mot secure communications system in the world." Teets says. "I don't think anyone could break through into Autovahn That is. unless you had the cooperation of someone inside or someone who knew the stem." 1 i 'hat scn-e.

the use ot 'lie blue 1) can be rather fright-ening. In another sense, it is heartening to know, that ro matter how complex our technology gets, somebody, at lea-t, can still figure it out. 4 I a security man. uilli a Blue l5o In fact it's already happened in Georgia. "They all think of it as fun and games Man Against the Machine sort of thing.

It's not funny." There were 40 Blue Box arrests in 1971. four of them in Philadelphia two of those were phone company employes. But fone freeks are continuing to experiment with their toys and continue to find broader and broader applications. Some of the variations are making very nervous indeed and could threaten national security. A FONE freek from New York says he could tap telephones using the Blue Box.

"I dial into the operator by way of another town and I ask lor the intercept operator," he says. "Only once was I ever asked who I was and why I wanted the intercept operator. I told her I was a lineman and she said "When I get the intercept operator I tell her I would like to know if such and such a line the number I want to tap is working. She connects on that line and tells me if it's ringing or there's someone talking on it. "If there is someone talking on the line I just press disconnect and I'm in the line without her.

If she unplugs it makes no difference, I'm in the net." The Blue Box can also tap into computers. IT has already become common for computer customers to use a time-share system instead of buying their own. 1,1 single large computer is sold to customers who are then able to use that computer as if it were theirs exclusively. The tremendous speed of the machine will make it appear as if it were only their problems, when in actuality, is serving many customers at once squeezing them into the electronic spaces left by the slow humans at response terminals. In these the memory banks of computers are programs and data on mI.1i matters as production, profit mai'ms.

even secet maiiulactunng processes cess is controlled through special private codings transmitted by telephone.