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investigate phone phreaking and, incidentally, Captain Crunch’s part in it. The authorities also began to monitor Draper’s movements and the phones he used. He was first arrested in 1972, about a year after the article appeared, while phreaking a call to Sydney, Australia. Typically, he wasn’t actually speaking to anyone. He had called up a number that played a recording of the Australian Top Ten.

Four years later he was convicted and sent to Lompoc Federal Prison in California for two months. That was where the criminal classes first learned the details of his techniques. It was, he says, a matter of life or death. As soon as he was inside, he was asked to co-operate and was badly beaten up when he refused. He got the message. If he was to survive, he would have to share his knowledge. In jail, he figured, it was too easy to get killed. ‘It happens all the time. There are just too many members of the “500 Club”, guys who spend most of their time pumping iron and lifting 500lb weights.’

He picked out the top dog, the biggest, meanest and strongest inmate, as his protector. After that there was no more harassment. But in return Draper had to tell what he knew. Every day he gave his protector a tutorial about phreaking: how to set up secure loops and how to eavesdrop on other telephone conversations. Every day the information was passed on to people who could put it to use on the outside. Draper remains convinced that techniques which are still in use today by drug runners for computer surveillance of federal agents can be traced back to his tutorials.

Nor were criminals the only parties to whom Draper’s skills appealed. Rosenbaum’s 1971 article introduced Americans for the first time to a new high-tech counterculture that had grown up in their midst, a group of technology junkies that epitomized the ethos of the new decade. As the Sixties had turned into the Seventies, youth culture – that odd mix of music, fashion and adolescent posturing – had become hardened, more radical. Woodstock had succumbed to Altamont; Haight-Ashbury to political activism; the Berkeley Free Speech Movement to the Weathermen and the Students for a Democratic Society.

Playing with Ma Bell’s phone system was too intriguing to be dismissed as just a simple technological game. It was seen as an attack on corporate America – or ‘Amerika’, as it was often spelt then by

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