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PHREAKING FOR FUN

Secrets of the Little Blue Box. This was the first account of phreaking in a mass-circulation publication, and it remains the only article to trace its beginnings. It was undoubtedly the principal popularizer of the movement. Rosenbaum was, of course, only the messenger; the sub-culture existed before he wrote about it and would have continued to grow had Esquire never published the article. But none the less 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 allowed one 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, in a recently published collection of his articles, acknowledges that the information contained in his story had far more impact than he 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 travelled 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.

Bernay himself found out about loop-around-pairs from a friendly telephone company engineer, who explained that within the millions of connections and interlinked local exchanges of what in those days made up the Bell network there existed test numbers, used by engineers to check connections between the exchanges. These numbers were often in consecutive pairs, say (213) - - - 9001 and (213) - - - 9002, and were wired together, so a caller to one number was automatically looped around to the other. Hence the name, loop-around-pairs. They existed on most exchanges in the United States. What Bernay publicized was the knowledge that if two people anywhere in the country dialled any set of consecutive test numbers they could talk together, for free.

Bernay was a pioneer. He introduced a whole generation to the idea that the phone company wasn't an impregnable fortress: Ma Bell, Bernay taught, had a gap in its defences that anyone could use.

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