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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 revolution that the term 'the Sixties' has come to represent, and it remains an anti-establishment, 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. This was accomplished more by accident than design, and the process began not with computers, but with a fad that later became known as 'phreaking' — a play on the words freak, phone and free. Phreaking, at first, was a simple pastime: its purpose was nothing more than the manipulation of the Bell telephone system in the US, where most phreakers lived, for free long-distance phone calls.

Most of the earliest phreakers were blind kids. It was a natural pastime for unsighted and perhaps lonely youngsters. Phreaking was also 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, direct-dial system. 'Ma Bell' was the company the counterculture both loved and loathed: it allowed communication, but at a price. Ripping off the phone company was liberating technology. No one would ever think of it as criminal.

Phreakers had been carrying on their activities for almost a decade, forming an underground of electronic pirates, before the American public eventually heard about them. In October 1971 Esquire magazine heralded the phreaker craze in an article by Ron Rosenbaum,

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