The Anarchist Cookbook (51 page)

wheezing sound. Then there were breaks. Some people got cut off and called right back in,

but after a while some people were finding they were cut off and couldn't get back in at

all. It was terrible. I lost it about one a.m., but managed to slip in again and stay on until

the thing died... I think it was about four in the morning. There were four of us still

hanging on when the conference disappeared into nowhere for good. We all tried to M-F up

to it again of course, but we got silent termination. There was nothing there."

The Legendary Mark Bernay Turns Out To Be "The Midnight Skulker"

Mark Bernay. I had come across that name before. It was on Gilbertson's select list of

phone phreaks. The California phone phreaks had spoken of a mysterious Mark Bernay as

perhaps the first and oldest phone phreak on the West Coast. And in fact almost every

phone phreak in the West can trace his origins either directly to Mark Bernay or to a

disciple of Mark Bernay.

It seems that five years ago this Mark Bernay (a pseudonym he chose for himself) began

traveling up and down the West Coast pasting tiny stickers in phone books all along his way.

The stickers read something like "Want to hear an interesting tape recording? Call these

numbers." The numbers that followed were toll-free loop-around pairs. When one of the

curious called one of the numbers he would hear a tape recording pre-hooked into the loop

by Bernay which explained the use of loop-around pairs, gave the numbers of several more,

and ended by telling the caller, "At six o'clock tonight this recording will stop and you and

your friends can try it out. Have fun."

"I was disappointed by the response at first," Bernay told me, when I finally reached him

at one of his many numbers and he had dispensed with the usual "I never do anything

illegal" formalities which experienced phone phreaks open most conversations.

"I went all over the coast with these stickers not only on pay phones, but I'd throw them

in front of high schools in the middle of the night, I'd leave them unobtrusively in candy

stores, scatter them on main streets of small towns. At first hardly anyone bothered to

try it out. I would listen in for hours and hours after six o'clock and no one came on. I

couldn't figure out why people wouldn't be interested. Finally these two girls in Oregon

tried it out and told all their friends and suddenly it began to spread."

Before his Johny Appleseed trip Bernay had already gathered a sizable group of early pre-

blue-box phone phreaks together on loop-arounds in Los Angeles. Bernay does not claim

credit for the original discovery of the loop-around numbers. He attributes the discovery

to an eighteen-year-old reform school kid in Long Beach whose name he forgets and who,

he says, "just disappeared one day." When Bernay himself discovered loop-arounds

independently, from clues in his readings in old issues of the Automatic Electric Technical

Journal, he found dozens of the reform-school kid's friends already using them. However,

it was one of Bernay's disciples in Seattle that introduced phone phreaking to blind kids.

The Seattle kid who learned about loops through Bernay's recording told a blind friend,

the blind kid taught the secret to his friends at a winter camp for blind kids in Los

Angeles. When the camp session was over these kids took the secret back to towns all over

the West. This is how the original blind kids became phone phreaks. For them, for most

phone phreaks in general, it was the discovery of the possibilities of loop-arounds which

led them on to far more serious and sophisticated phone-phreak methods, and which gave

them a medium for sharing their discoveries.

A year later a blind kid who moved back east brought the technique to a blind kids'

summer camp in Vermont, which spread it along the East Coast. All from a Mark Bernay

sticker.

Bernay, who is nearly thirty years old now, got his start when he was fifteen and his family

moved into an L.A. suburb serviced by General Telephone and Electronics equipment. He

became fascinated with the differences between Bell and G.T.&E. equipment. He learned

he could make interesting things happen by carefully timed clicks with the disengage

button. He learned to interpret subtle differences in the array of clicks, whirrs and

kachinks he could hear on his lines. He learned he could shift himself around the switching

relays of the L.A. area code in a not-too-predictable fashion by interspersing his own hook-

switch clicks with the clicks within the line. (Independent phone companies -- there are

nineteen hundred of them still left, most of them tiny island principalities in Ma Bell's vast

empire -- have always been favorites with phone phreaks, first as learning tools, then as

Archimedes platforms from which to manipulate the huge Bell system. A phone phreak in

Bell territory will often M-F himself into an independent's switching system, with

switching idiosyncrasies which can give him marvelous leverage over the Bell System.

"I have a real affection for Automatic Electric Equipment," Bernay told me. "There are a

lot of things you can play with. Things break down in interesting ways."

Shortly after Bernay graduated from college (with a double major in chemistry and

philosophy), he graduated from phreaking around with G.T.&E. to the Bell System itself,

and made his legendary sticker-pasting journey north along the coast, settling finally in

Northwest Pacific Bell territory. He discovered that if Bell does not break down as

interestingly as G.T.&E., it nevertheless offers a lot of "things to play with."

Bernay learned to play with blue boxes. He established his own personal switchboard and

phone-phreak research laboratory complex. He continued his phone-phreak evangelism with

ongoing sticker campaigns. He set up two recording numbers, one with instructions for

beginning phone phreaks, the other with latest news and technical developments (along

with some advanced instruction) gathered from sources all over the country.

These days, Bernay told me, he had gone beyond phone-phreaking itself. "Lately I've been

enjoying playing with computers more than playing with phones. My personal thing in

computers is just like with phones, I guess -- the kick is in finding out how to beat the

system, how to get at things I'm not supposed to know about, how to do things with the

system that I'm not supposed to be able to do."

As a matter of fact, Bernay told me, he had just been fired from his computer-

programming job for doing things he was not supposed to be able to do. He had been

working with a huge time-sharing computer owned by a large corporation but shared by

many others. Access to the computer was limited to those programmers and corporations

that had been assigned certain passwords. And each password restricted its user to access

to only the one section of the computer cordoned off from its own information storager.

The password system prevented companies and individuals from stealing each other's

information.

"I figured out how to write a program that would let me read everyone else's password,"

Bernay reports. "I began playing around with passwords. I began letting the people who

used the computer know, in subtle ways, that I knew their passwords. I began dropping

notes to the computer supervisors with hints that I knew what I know. I signed them 'The

Midnight Skulker.' I kept getting cleverer and cleverer with my messages and devising

ways of showing them what I could do. I'm sure they couldn't imagine I could do the

things I was showing them. But they never responded to me. Every once in a while they'd

change the passwords, but I found out how to discover what the new ones were, and I let

them know. But they never responded directly to the Midnight Skulker. I even finally

designed a program which they could use to prevent my program from finding out what it

did. In effect I told them how to wipe me out, The Midnight Skulker. It was a very clever

program. I started leaving clues about myself. I wanted them to try and use it and then

try to come up with something to get around that and reappear again. But they wouldn't

play. I wanted to get caught. I mean I didn't want to get caught personally, but I wanted

them to notice me and admit that they noticed me. I wanted them to attempt to respond,

maybe in some interesting way." Finally the computer managers became concerned enough

about the threat of information-stealing to respond. However, instead of using The

Midnight Skulker's own elegant self-destruct program, they called in their security

personnel, interrogated everyone, found an informer to identify Bernay as The Midnight

Skulker, and fired him.

"At first the security people advised the company to hire me full-time to search out other

flaws and discover other computer freaks. I might have liked that. But I probably would

have turned into a double double agent rather than the double agent they wanted. I might

have resurrected The Midnight Skulker and tried to catch myself. Who knows? Anyway,

the higher-ups turned the whole idea down."

You Can Tap the F.B.I.'s Crime Control Computer in the Comfort of Your Own Home,

Perhaps.

Computer freaking may be the wave of the future. It suits the phone-phreak sensibility

perfectly. Gilbertson, the blue-box inventor and a lifelong phone phreak, has also gone on

from phone-phreaking to computer-freaking. Before he got into the blue-box business

Gilbertson, who is a highly skilled programmer, devised programs for international currency

arbitrage.

But he began playing with computers in earnest when he learned he could use his blue box

in tandem with the computer terminal installed in his apartment by the instrumentation

firm he worked for. The print-out terminal and keyboard was equipped with acoustical

coupling, so that by coupling his little ivory Princess phone to the terminal and then

coupling his blue box on that, he could M-F his way into other computers with complete

anonymity, and without charge; program and re-program them at will; feed them false or

misleading information; tap and steal from them. He explained to me that he taps

computers by busying out all the lines, then going into a verification trunk, listening into

the passwords and instructions one of the time sharers uses, and them M-F-ing in and

imitating them. He believes it would not be impossible to creep into the F.B.I's crime

control computer through a local police computer terminal and phreak around with the

F.B.I.'s memory banks. He claims he has succeeded in re-programming a certain huge

institutional computer in such a way that it has cordoned off an entire section of its

circuitry for his personal use, and at the same time conceals that arrangement from

anyone else's notice. I have been unable to verify this claim.

Like Captain Crunch, like Alexander Graham Bell (pseudonym of a disgruntled-looking East

Coast engineer who claims to have invented the black box and now sells black and blue

boxes to gamblers and radical heavies), like most phone phreaks, Gilbertson began his

career trying to rip off pay phones as a teenager. Figure them out, then rip them off.

Getting his dime back from the pay phone is the phone phreak's first thrilling rite of

passage. After learning the usual eighteen different ways of getting his dime back,

Gilbertson learned how to make master keys to coin-phone cash boxes, and get everyone

else's dimes back. He stole some phone-company equipment and put together his own home

switchboard with it. He learned to make a simple "bread-box" device, of the kind used by

bookies in the Thirties (bookie gives a number to his betting clients; the phone with that

number is installed in some widow lady's apartment, but is rigged to ring in the bookie's

shop across town, cops trace big betting number and find nothing but the widow).

Not long after that afternoon in 1968 when, deep in the stacks of an engineering library,

he came across a technical journal with the phone tone frequencies and rushed off to make

his first blue box, not long after that Gilbertson abandoned a very promising career in

physical chemistry and began selling blue boxes for $1,500 apiece.

"I had to leave physical chemistry. I just ran out of interesting things to learn," he told me

one evening. We had been talking in the apartment of the man who served as the link

between Gilbertson and the syndicate in arranging the big $300,000 blue-box deal which

fell through because of legal trouble. There has been some smoking.

"No more interesting things to learn," he continues. "Physical chemistry turns out to be a

sick subject when you take it to its highest level. I don't know. I don't think I could

explain to you how it's sick. You have to be there. But you get, I don't know, a false feeling

of omnipotence. I suppose it's like phone-phreaking that way. This huge thing is there. This