July 29, 1996 - Art Bell
02:55:58
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
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WWTN, Manchester, Nashville. | |
| We'll be right back. | ||
| You're listening to the best of Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell. | ||
| Tonight, it's Art's interview with Captain Crunch, the telephone hacker. | ||
| Now, back to the best of Art Bell. | ||
| Art Bell. | ||
| I've got him. | ||
| I will not give you his real name unless he says we can do it, but this man is a legend in his own time, literally. | ||
| Not his own mind, his own time. | ||
| He's actually become a legend. | ||
| I interviewed, we'll have to talk about how long ago it was, Captain Crunch. | ||
| Now, many of you, many of you who hate the phone company, stick around. | ||
| You're about to have a good time. | ||
| This man's story is legendary to those old enough to remember it. | ||
| For the rest of you, you're in for a treat. | ||
| Captain Crunch is coming up. | ||
| And now, to a payphone in the wilderness we go. | ||
| That's where he is. | ||
| Payphone in the wilderness, I think. | ||
| This is... | ||
| Captain Crunch, are you there? | ||
| Uh, yeah. | ||
| Do you hear me okay? | ||
| I do, as a matter of fact. | ||
| Captain, can we utter or should we not utter your real name? | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| It's John Draper. | ||
| John Draper. | ||
| John Draper the Infamous. | ||
| Well, John, a lot of the audience here is young, and they will not remember you, nor will they know you from coast to coast. | ||
| John, let me first ask you, how long ago was it that I interviewed you in, I think it was Monterey, wasn't it? | ||
| Oh, is that where you interviewed me? | ||
| Don't you remember that? | ||
| I remember that, yeah. | ||
| Okay, that was... | ||
| Remember when we... | ||
| Yes, I do. | ||
| Let's not talk about that, John. | ||
| How long ago? | ||
| That was like, I'm guessing. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| It was a long time ago. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| John, we're getting old. | ||
| I don't really feel old. | ||
| Well, I bet. | ||
| Do you look old? | ||
| Yeah, I'm not either. | ||
| John, I'm not either. | ||
| I'm still, there's more kid in me than I would want to admit. | ||
| It's just thinking about that many years ago we did the interview. | ||
| Anyway, we need to begin at the beginning, and I know you told the story a gazillion times to a gazillion people, but there are a gazillion people here now. | ||
| And so, why are you called, this is a good way to begin, why are you called Captain Crunch? | ||
| Well, Captain Crunch, of course, came from the Captain Crunch cereal. | ||
| And back in those days, there was a toy whistle that came in the Captain Crunch cereal box. | ||
| I remember stuff in cereal. | ||
| I used to empty out entire boxes of cereal like all kids did to get down to the good stuff, you know, the prize. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And that they were giving away a whistle? | ||
| Uh, yeah, and uh apparently if you glue one of the holes up in the whistle and blow the whistle, it's uh it the pitch is 2,600 hertz, and that's the signal used by the phone company to disconnect a long-distance call. | ||
| Disconnect it? | ||
| To disconnect it, yeah. | ||
| Um to disconnect it. | ||
| So you glued up now, see I didn't remember that part. | ||
| You glued up one little hole and that produced a 2,600 hertz tone, and that would disconnect a long distance call. | ||
|
unidentified
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Correct. | |
| Okay, so but what good does that do you? | ||
| You whistle, you're talking to somebody long distance, and you whistle, and it disconnects, and then you're disconnected. | ||
| Right, but but the beauty of it is after you're disconnected, it it leaves you on a trunk. | ||
| The same kind of trunk that operators use. | ||
| A trunk. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Is that... | ||
| A big open party line. | ||
| Not a party line, just an open line that it would be it would behave very similar to what an operator's console would be. | ||
| See, now I don't know. | ||
| I've never been an operator. | ||
| So do you hear a dial tone or what are you left with? | ||
| No, you're just left with a silent nothingness. | ||
| It's just there. | ||
| And what you do is if you wanted to dial three, you'd pulse the whistle three times. | ||
| And if you wanted to dial one, you'd pulse it once. | ||
|
unidentified
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And then if you dial five, you'd pulse it five times. | |
| And you'd eventually dial a number that way. | ||
| Any number. | ||
| Any long distance number. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really. | |
| With area code first. | ||
| With area code first. | ||
| You wouldn't have to dial the one, though. | ||
| No one first. | ||
| Just the area code number? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| And it would reconnect you to another number. | ||
| Cool. | ||
| Really cool. | ||
| I don't know why people think it's cool to cheat the phone company, except that the phone company... | ||
| They provided me with the first ever international toll-free 800 number. | ||
| So it should be, please bear in mind, everybody, that what John is explaining and what he did, the well, you did go to jail, didn't you? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, I was eventually caught. | |
| Caught and went to jail, yeah. | ||
| Anyway, I was going to say the statute of limitations is far gone on this, but it doesn't matter. | ||
| You have paid your debt to society, right, John? | ||
| Right, and I've told my story through my website. | ||
| Oh, and oh, I meant to say my website was down, but I understand it is only down through AOL. | ||
| Any other person can access it, and I suppose AOL will get it fixed shortly. | ||
| In the meantime, if you will give me your website, My webmaster, Keith, will put in a link to yours. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So let me hear what your URL is. | ||
| It's not too long, is it? | ||
| No. | ||
| All right, let's hear it. | ||
| Okay, it's usual http://slash that you always get. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And a www.well, like W-E-L-L, dot com, C-O-M, a forward slash user, U-S-E-R, another forward slash, and crunch, C-R-U-N-C-H. | ||
| And my email address is crunch at well.com. | ||
| All right, that's www.well, W-E-L-L, dot com, forward slash user, forward slash crunch. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| I've got my whole story up there. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Are there any photographs up there for people? | ||
| Plenty of them. | ||
| Oh, there are. | ||
| So, anyway, you found out all of this about this silly little whistle, and then what did you do with that information, John? | ||
| Well, soon after I discovered the whistle, or other people turned me on to the whistle, the phone company was slowly switching their equipment to accept what are called multi-frequency tones. | ||
| The whistle, when I used it to pulse a long-distance call, that was called a single-frequency tone. | ||
| It was just a single 2,600 hertz. | ||
| Later on, the phone company decided to use multi-frequency tones, either combinations of tone pairs. | ||
| Now, when you press a button on a modern touch tone phone, you hear a dual tone, right? | ||
| Correct, but those tones on a touch tone dial are different than the tones used in the internal switching. | ||
| In other words, in the trunking system. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| I've got you. | ||
| They use two tones out of six. | ||
| So you began to get very interested, I presume, in I mean the word is hacking, in trying to figure out how the phone company worked. | ||
| In the meantime, had you begun to make a whole lot of long-distance calls? | ||
| Initially, when I first discovered it, when the idea occurred to me, I just completely went off the wall. | ||
| I was bouncing off the wall. | ||
| I was real happy that I was able to do it. | ||
| After about the first few calls, where I called a few of my buddies back in the Air Force that I knew, you know, it started getting old and I just stopped making long-distance calls. | ||
| There's nobody to call. | ||
| I mean, I didn't have that many people that I knew that were long-distance. | ||
| Yeah, the fun was going out of it because once you call anybody you know who's long distance, they get tired of hearing from you and you get tired of calling them. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| So after I've talked just about everything I needed to say to all my long distance friends, which really wasn't that much, I focused a lot of my efforts on understanding the internal codes used by the operators. | ||
| This is called hacking. | ||
| It's now progressed, of course, to the computer world. | ||
| But this was before all of that, really, and the home computer was a big deal. | ||
| So there you were hacking away at their tones. | ||
| What did you manage to discover? | ||
| Well, we discovered a lot of things. | ||
| We discovered, for instance, that it was possible to stack tandems. | ||
| Let me explain what that means. | ||
| Please. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| When you call into, let's say one, let's say you're in Fresno and the area code for Fresno is 209. | ||
| And let's say there's Modesto, and Modesto also has area code 209. | ||
| To reach a distant operator in a distant city, you dial 209121. | ||
| 121 is the operator code. | ||
| I don't believe these codes are used anymore. | ||
| This is why I can talk about them. | ||
| When that happens, there's no way to distinguish whether you want to call Fresno or Modesto. | ||
| So what you do is they add another three-digit code in there. | ||
| For instance, if you dial 209042121, that would specify that you were calling, let's say, Fresno. | ||
| And then if you dial 209044121, that would then specify the other city. | ||
| I see. | ||
| So we call these O codes. | ||
| Another name for them are called TTC codes. | ||
| That's the internal telephone company jargon for the use of those codes. | ||
| Well, what good was this doing you? | ||
| In other words, you were then in the Modesto area. | ||
| I can see how you would get to Modesto or any other city. | ||
| And then what? | ||
| Well, if you left out the 121 and dialed just 209044, you would get a wink back and you'd get dropped on the Fresno trunk. | ||
| And then from Fresno, if you dialed 044042, or the other way around, you'd get another wink back and you'd loop back to Fresno and back to Modesto again, one loop, and you'd do it again and do it again and keep looping back and keep looping back until all the trunks are busy. | ||
| Until all the trunks are busy? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| And then people can't call out of Modesto? | ||
| Only between the two cities. | ||
| Other cities coming into Stockholm or Modesto, it would probably work. | ||
| But you were locking out entire areas. | ||
| And you were doing this with purpose or just to... | ||
| We did it to understand the system. | ||
| And of course, we were very careful not to do it during times, during peak calling times. | ||
| What do you mean we, Tonto? | ||
| Oh, me and quite a few other friends that were hacking the system at the time. | ||
| Now, I understand there was a way that... | ||
| You told me that you could sort of have some mass hackers party line. | ||
| In other words, you guys could find some empty, was it trunk? | ||
| How did you do that? | ||
| Okay, there existed a phone line in Vancouver, Canada called the 2111 Conference. | ||
| To get into it, you could either use a Captain Crunch whistle and dial 604-555-1212 And then whistle it off and then dial with the whistle, and then one, doot, one, doot, one, doot, and you would drop into that conference. | ||
| That was the favorite conference to the blind phone freak kids who can whistle that with their mouths because they have perfect pitch. | ||
| Oh, there are people who can do this and don't even need a whistle? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Yikes. | ||
| And these became very popular. | ||
| In fact, it was on one of those conferences that I was officially given the name Captain Crunch. | ||
| How did you earn that? | ||
| Sort of the first or what earned you Captaincy? | ||
| Well, I kept getting on the conference for quite a while and started talking to these kids, and I'd put it up on a speakerphone while I was doing my homework or other studies. | ||
|
unidentified
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I see. | |
| And I'd be listening to them talking all about this phone jargon, and I started picking up on it and understanding what was going on. | ||
| And then they said, well, we got this other guy from San Jose, John Draper. | ||
| Are you there? | ||
| And I said, yeah, I'm here. | ||
| And he said, well, how come you're using your real name? | ||
| Good point. | ||
| And I said, well, I don't know. | ||
| He said, why don't you use a fictitious name? | ||
| It'll probably be safer. | ||
| And I said, yeah, I guess you're right. | ||
| Well, let's see. | ||
| Why don't I just use the name Captain Crunch? | ||
| Is that name taken? | ||
| They said, nah, that's a good name. | ||
| Let's use that name. | ||
| So I sort of became known as Captain Crunch in the 2111 Conference, which was my first exposure to a large group of people all over the country that were accessing this big giant party line called the 2111 Conference. | ||
| All right, well, Captain, that was the day, those were the days that AT ⁇ T had it all. | ||
| They were the phone company, right? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| There was only one phone company. | ||
| The phone company. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| The bells. | ||
| The bells. | ||
| By the way, do you still favor, do you favor, do you have favorite? | ||
| AT ⁇ T is still your favorite? | ||
| No, I don't use AT ⁇ T on my phone. | ||
|
unidentified
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You don't use AT ⁇ T? | |
| No. | ||
| You know why? | ||
| No, why? | ||
| They charge that 80-cent ridiculous surcharge on calling card calls. | ||
| Oh, I see. | ||
| So you take you to the cleaners on that. | ||
| You want to check my mail message because I can get on and off in less than six seconds. | ||
| Well, I noticed that you don't have a regular phone. | ||
| You've got a mail service now. | ||
| After all, I have voicemail because I don't have a place to live. | ||
| Oh, I see. | ||
| Has the phone company banned you forever? | ||
| No, I pay my bill just like everybody else. | ||
| I have voicemail and I have an inexpensive long-distance service that provides me with exceptionally good rates and six-second billing increments and no surcharge with an 800 access number. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And that's, you know, it's a pretty good service and very reliable and very good. | ||
| Well, all right, so here you guys were all having this great meeting and I presume exchanging new discoveries about how to hack. | ||
| Is that about right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So there you are. | ||
| Now, when did you begin to think that the phone company would be unhappy about this and would begin to try and monitor you, if not catch your butt? | ||
| Oh, I was fully aware of that. | ||
| And I was very careful not to make any free phone calls from home. | ||
| But that didn't preclude me from using a blue box and experimenting around with the O codes. | ||
| I felt that if I were to dial into the internal network and not actually make free calls, actually just study and learn how the system went wouldn't would. | ||
| There's this thing with intent here, but my intention was not to defraud the phone company. | ||
| You were on a learning curve. | ||
| You wanted to learn about the internals of their system more than you wanted to make free calls. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| But it was possible, by the way, for you to... | ||
| Yes. | ||
| All right, sure. | ||
| You're listening to John Draper, aka Captain Crunch. | ||
| And we're doing a radio interview. | ||
| Okay, I'm back. | ||
| I am at a private campground at the moment, up on Mount Tamil Pias in Lorin. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| And that is sort of your temporary home, I take it? | ||
| It's one of many places that I usually wind up sleeping. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| I've got a story to tell about why I have become this way. | ||
| It's an interesting story. | ||
| It involves hacking, actually. | ||
| It does. | ||
| Yeah, I'll show you. | ||
| Let me explain. | ||
| About a couple of months ago, I was trying to apply for a job, and it turns out that somebody turned me on to a hacking mailing list. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| Now we're to computers. | ||
| Everybody ought to know that we're talking computers here, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And in this hacking mailing list, somebody was actually saying a lot of derogatory terms about me that came to my attention. | ||
| And I took these messages and passed them to my attorney. | ||
| And my attorney to ask him for advice. | ||
| I basically wanted to ask him if I had any legal grounds for a lawsuit for this slanderous material on the net. | ||
| But it turned out this very same hacker that was slandering me was also reading my mail. | ||
| Oh, hacking your mail? | ||
| Well, yeah, you can imagine how many hackers want to hack Captain Crunch's mail. | ||
| I can, yes, of course. | ||
| So there was a war on. | ||
| Well, you know, you're almost a public person, Captain. | ||
| Yes, that's precisely it. | ||
| And I'm sure that's what your attorney told you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's very hard to sue a public person. | ||
| That is, to sue somebody else. | ||
| But here's the funny part. | ||
| My intention, of course, was not to sue. | ||
| My intention was to just investigate the possibilities at this point. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Maybe scare the hell out of the guy, maybe. | ||
| Yeah, in my investigation, the hacker found out that I was talking about him to my attorney and got very mad. | ||
| And he started to monitor my mail more. | ||
| And he discovered, through listening and reading my mail, that I was in the process of interviewing for jobs, found out about it, and contact these potential employers not to hire me. | ||
| John, do you think this might be karma? | ||
| Don't know. | ||
| you know what I mean, don't you? | ||
| In other words, in your younger incarnation, you got the phone company. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And now, in later days, the computer people are getting you. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| That crossed my mind many times. | ||
| I mean, it might be just plain old karma. | ||
| And so, in other words, this guy ruined jobs for you. | ||
| Well, that is indeed seriously damaging. | ||
| So that's why you are now without job, without home, more or less on the move? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, sort of. | |
| I've actually been invited to quite a few places, and I am considering taking up some invitations for these places. | ||
| And I'm at the moment just enjoying my freedom of being able to travel around and not have any particular place that I have to go to. | ||
| Freedom is good, isn't it, John? | ||
| Yeah, I am enjoying the freedom. | ||
| And we're making the best of it. | ||
| John, hold on. | ||
| We're at the top of the hour. | ||
| Just hang in there. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
| This is CBC. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Super Top 997 | |
| WTN. | ||
| It's live. | ||
| Overnight talk for the Ark Bell Show. | ||
| Because you deserve the best. | ||
| Only from Nashville's Super Talk FM. | ||
| 99.7 WTN. | ||
| Yeah, now, baby, baby, twirling, ooh, yeah. | ||
| Stay tuned for more of this encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM coming up after these messages. | ||
| Coast to Coast AM All right, back now to the captain, Captain Crunch, who found out a way years ago, many years ago now, to defeat the telephone company's internal system. | ||
| And he did things like locking up trunk systems, having meetings with his friends in these big party chat trunk basements. | ||
| He was so far into the phone company, it wasn't even funny. | ||
| John, are you there? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Tell me, do they still call you Captain today, mostly? | ||
| Well, I've sort of been given the name Crunchman. | ||
| Crunchman? | ||
| Yeah, and that's kind of what I've used for my website. | ||
| I see. | ||
| Now, it is worth asking you, Crunchman, Captain Crunch, how a person who is now without a home, and that's a long story we began to sell, has a website. | ||
| Oh, well, I've been on the well ever since the Well started back in 1982, 83, or 84, somewhere in that general area. | ||
| So you jumped right on the computer bandwagon. | ||
| Back then, yeah, actually the Well people invited me on to comment on some of the hacker conferences that they had way back then. | ||
| The well was sort of like a local community system conferencing system. | ||
| Is it kind of like what came before the web? | ||
| Oh, much before the web. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, look, let us back up a little bit to the telephone company troubles all those years ago. | ||
| The FBI finally got on to you. | ||
| Right, Captain? | ||
| How did they do it? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, soon after we were playing around with the blue boxes, somebody who was also playing around with blue boxes was using blue boxes as well, totally independent from us. | ||
| Did you build the first blue box? | ||
| Probably not the first one, but one of the first ones. | ||
| One of the first ones. | ||
| A blue box was a technical improvement on the whistle, right? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Basically, all a blue box is, is a multi-frequency tone generator. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That's all it is. | ||
| Can a blue box still be used? | ||
| I don't believe so. | ||
| I haven't tried, and I'm not going to. | ||
| Do you hear that, guys? | ||
| He's not going to. | ||
| You have truly given up your phone hacking days, right? | ||
| Absolutely, without a doubt. | ||
| Absolutely, without a doubt. | ||
| All right, so anyway, here's the blue box. | ||
| This sucker will allow you to access satellites, all kinds of things, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I got a call. | ||
| Actually, I got a call from this guy, Ron Rosenbaum, who was working on an article for Es Squire magazine called The Secrets of the Little Blue Box. | ||
| Uh-uh. | ||
| And these blind kids begged me to talk to this guy, because these blind kids had already talked to this guy and given him way too much information already. | ||
| So I somehow wound up talking to him, God knows why. | ||
| You did an interview about this? | ||
| Uh, yeah. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| But, you see, the interview was very, was done at a place where I called him, and I called him from a very remote phone. | ||
| I don't believe the interview was tapped, even if it was. | ||
| I don't think there would have been any problem with me. | ||
| Okay, at this point, you were not giving him your real name, right? | ||
| Oh, absolutely no way. | ||
| Okay, well, that's not so bad, then. | ||
| So you did an analysis. | ||
| I was still underground. | ||
| I had not been busted. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So you were just still Captain Crunch, period, and you were doing a... | ||
| All right, well, that's not so bad, I guess. | ||
| So I consented to Be interviewed by him under certain restrictions that I wouldn't give him my real name. | ||
| And the article came out in Esquire magazine, and when it did, I mean, it hit the phone companies like a bomb. | ||
| I mean, their secret was literally out. | ||
| It didn't take long before Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer, was pawing through the technical Bell journals at his local college and discovered a certain Bell technical journal that gave the frequencies of the little blue box. | ||
| He discovered that the frequencies of the little blue box were quite different than the frequencies that were published in Esquire Magazine, which were deliberately given to prevent people from doing it. | ||
| Very good. | ||
| At the time, I was working for a community radio station in Cooper Keno. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And word got out that a friend of Woz knew me and wanted me to contact Woz about this. | ||
| He needed operational help. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| So Woz somehow convinced me or talked me into going down to the, or going up to UC Berkeley campus, at which time I gave him a demonstration on how to use the thing. | ||
| His jaw no doubt dropped open. | ||
| Uh yeah. | ||
| He was quite impressed with what you could do with it. | ||
| You could call overseas numbers and call anything, you know. | ||
| I gave him some typical operator codes and says, here's what you can do with it. | ||
| and eventually... | ||
| It's 702-727-1295. | ||
| We did not at any time want to use our technology for personal. | ||
| So in other words, you didn't want it to be commercialized. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I personally was adamant against any commercial gain using this technology back then, though, as making free calls and selling them. | ||
| You were absolutely a pure amateur. | ||
| Well, I was a pure hacker. | ||
| I was the hacker ethics. | ||
| Amateur as opposed to professional, I suppose when you turn around and start selling this stuff, So at this point, Woz was selling these things. | ||
| And I remember him putting a little note inside the little blue box saying he has the whole world in his hands. | ||
| One of the things that Woz did with the box was he called the Vatican and asked to talk to the Pope. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I once tried to call Castro in Cuba, too. | ||
| I didn't get through. | ||
| I got close. | ||
| I actually got close. | ||
| Surprised me. | ||
| You can actually call world leaders. | ||
| Anyway, so he tried to call the Pope. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| It's possible. | ||
| I mean, you know, these people are not as inaccessible as you might imagine. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Soon after that, Woz's car broke down on the way to UC Berkeley, and he happened to have been somewhere in Fremont or Hayward. | ||
| He was at a pay phone, and he decided that he wanted to try the blue box to see if he can call for help on his car. | ||
| Oh, geez. | ||
| Well, just as he gets to the payphone with a blue box, a cop car pulls up. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| And the cop says, what you doing? | ||
| And Woz says, making a phone call. | ||
| And the cop sees the blue box in Woz's hand and says, what's that? | ||
| And Woz says, it's a music synthesizer. | ||
| Good answer. | ||
| The cop was playing with the tones for a while with that little acoustical coupler thing that they used to put to the mouthpiece to make the call. | ||
| Ah, yes. | ||
| Cop hands it back to Woz and says, a guy by the name of Moog beats it to it. | ||
| Moog is the person that makes the music synthesizers. | ||
| I see. | ||
| And Woz said, and sort of got in his car and left. | ||
| But back then, you know, the police weren't really aware of what the blue boxes could do, even though maybe the Esquire magazine article did come out at that point. | ||
| Still, there was not a full awareness yet. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It took a while for the impact of the Esquire article to hit home. | ||
| About a month or so later, the 2111 conference was getting switched over to the multi-frequency because the 2111 conference was on one of the very few remaining single-frequency trunks in Vancouver. | ||
| They were switching over now to the multi-frequency trunking. | ||
| And all of the phone hackers decided to have one big glass bash at the 2111 conference and have a huge party line to commemorate the death of the 2111 conference. | ||
| And as the phone company was making the cutover to the new switching office, we're fully aware at this point of all these calls coming into this very strange trunking mechanism. | ||
| Do you think somebody at the phone company was sitting there listening to these parties you guys were having? | ||
| Oh, without a doubt. | ||
| We didn't really care. | ||
| We weren't really concerned with that because we weren't really making free calls. | ||
| We were only just using their internal trunking. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Sort of. | ||
| Well, it's just a matter of opinion. | ||
| We thought so anyway. | ||
| What happened at that point was calls were starting to get traced back to the individuals making the calls. | ||
| Now, how many of these people were doing this from their house? | ||
| I was actually doing it from my house at the time, but I was jumping on somebody's auto-verified trunk. | ||
| The auto-verified trunks is what you use to pop in on somebody else's line. | ||
| And with my friend Fred's permission, I jumped in on his line and sat there with this bridged across his line. | ||
|
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wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. | |
| Jump in on somebody's line. | ||
| Now, tell me something, and everybody else, too, at the same time, Captain. | ||
| There have been many times, not many, but enough, when I've made a call. | ||
| And instead of reaching the party I was trying to call, I get dumped into the middle of somebody's conversation. | ||
| And occasionally, I'll yell, hey, and they'll go, hey, who the hell are you? | ||
| And there'll be a two-way. | ||
| A lot of times, I'll go, hey, and there'll be no answer. | ||
| Nobody, but and yet their conversation just goes on. | ||
| How does that happen? | ||
| That happens because sometimes the switching equipment screws up and switches on an incorrect trunk. | ||
| And if it switches on an incorrect trunk, sometimes it switches just a one-way trunk, sometimes it switches a two-way trunk. | ||
| I see. | ||
| And so what you probably got was a one-way trunk where you could hear them, but they couldn't hear you. | ||
| Exactly right. | ||
| And so you had the ability somehow to... | ||
| It was the same kind of thing that the emergency operators used to tell the party talking to the line to give up the call. | ||
| Oh, right. | ||
| So you had a set of tones that, in other words, you would just dial the number that's busy and then hit some special sequence of tones and boom, you're in the middle of the conversation? | ||
| Well, actually, it was quite even simpler than that. | ||
| We just call the operator, we'd use a loop around, and through the loop around, we'd call the operator, and we'd simply say, operator, would you please put us up on a no test trunk? | ||
| A no test trunk? | ||
| Yeah, and she'd say, yes, sir. | ||
| And she'd click us in and she'd leave the line. | ||
| And then we'd just, with the blue box, I'll pulse the last five digits of the phone number that we wanted to tap in on. | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| Why would the operator be willing to do that? | ||
| First of all, I don't know what a no test trunk is, but why would she be willing to do that? | ||
| Did she assume that you were like a repair guy? | ||
|
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Exactly. | |
| The phone company didn't have a very good mechanism for identifying their own internal employees. | ||
| They are the masters of communication, but within their system, their communications was very weak. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| And so it was not uncommon, if you used the right telephone company jargon, to just simply get the regular old operator to do things for you and put you up on certain lines. | ||
| Yeah, I get that. | ||
| I can imagine that's absolutely true. | ||
| Because back in those days, it was not a problem. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So you could do that, and then you could jump in on the middle of anybody. | ||
| Yeah, anybody that's talking on the line. | ||
| Now, here there's a big ethical moral dilemma, of course. | ||
| Well, in my particular case, I didn't jump on somebody's line without his permission. | ||
| I had his permission to jump on the line. | ||
| Well said, Captain. | ||
| I want to talk to my friend Fred on his other line. | ||
| I says, Fred, I'd like to get back in on the 2111 conference. | ||
| I just got knocked off. | ||
| Do I have your permission to bridge on the line you're already calling on? | ||
| He said, sure, go ahead and just no test up on my line. | ||
| I says, okay, fine. | ||
| I went and called the operator up and I said, operator, would you please connect me to a no test trunk, please? | ||
| He said, sure, one moment, sir. | ||
| Click. | ||
| And then I outpulsed his number and I got right up on Fred's line. | ||
| I said, hi, Fred, I'm up. | ||
| He says, great. | ||
| And then that way I was still able to participate in the conference because my particular incoming line to the 2N11 conference had already been knocked down. | ||
| I guess the phone company read the Esquire article. | ||
| They probably went crackers and said... | ||
| Yeah, I can imagine. | ||
| In other words, you were a bunch of... | ||
| You were like a gnat on Bell's butt, so to speak. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Until the Esquire article. | ||
| Now, and then the confirming tones, and then all of a sudden the whole country had it. | ||
| So the phone company went crackers. | ||
| I'm sure they called the FBI and said, we're in deep doo-doo here. | ||
| If this gets out, we're ruined. | ||
| We've got to get these guys. | ||
| Well. | ||
| Or something like that. | ||
| Or something like that. | ||
| As far as I could tell, what happened next, the phone company basically contacted the Justice Department and the FBI to set up grand jury investigations in about 10 different cities all over the country. | ||
| The purpose of the grand jury investigation were to subpoena these young kids who they were able to trace back to quite a few people's phone lines that were on the 2111 conference. | ||
| They then subpoenaed these people to testify before a grand jury. | ||
| How old were these? | ||
| How old were you then? | ||
| Oh, I was still in my mid-30s. | ||
| You were in your mid-30s. | ||
| A lot of these kids were in their 17, 16-year range. | ||
| Typical hacker age. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so a lot of these kids got visited by the FBI, who then said, you are subpoenaed. | ||
| And they were then forced to testify before a grand jury, who then asked them a lot of questions about who they knew. | ||
| And of course, my name came up. | ||
| Captain Crunch. | ||
| The name Captain Crunch was repeated probably in several grand juries at once. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So then the Justice Department, I guess, was building a case against me. | ||
| Was building a case still, though, they had not walked in on you? | ||
|
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No. | |
| Yikes. | ||
| But during that, and I mean, you know, of course I did. | ||
| From that point on, I didn't do anything from home. | ||
| I was very careful. | ||
| Oh, I see. | ||
| So where would you go? | ||
| To friends' houses or to phone booths? | ||
| Yeah, I wouldn't do it from home. | ||
| I wouldn't do it from a place where it would be easy to trace me. | ||
| Yeah, but wouldn't you be afraid that if, like, you went to a friend's house, they would trace a number to there? | ||
| And, you know, I mean, the FBI walking in on you is a very unpleasant experience. | ||
| And you tend to talk. | ||
| So if they walked in on a friend of yours, just idle thinking here. | ||
| Well, that's what happened. | ||
| They did talk, and that's why I got indicted. | ||
| I see. | ||
| So somebody, you don't have to give me a name, but somebody gave you up, or several people gave you up? | ||
| Yeah, I might say that. | ||
| They just did. | ||
| I was a football guy. | ||
| Yeah, so you were living in the Bay Area, right, Sanfran? | ||
| Yeah, down in the Los Gattis area, actually. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| And so they finally, I guess, got a warrant for your grand jury indictment or what? | ||
| Yeah, so in May 1972, I was picked up just as I was coming home from the college. | ||
| And what did they do? | ||
| Did they arrest you on the spot, or did they... | ||
| Well, they needed physical evidence. | ||
| Did they have a search warrant go in and... | ||
| Bad, bad, bad. | ||
| Well, what did you do? | ||
| Did you say, it's not me. | ||
| I don't have any idea how those damn things got there. | ||
| Somebody must have come in in the middle of the night and left them in my apartment. | ||
| Well, after I contacted the attorney, I was told to say nothing. | ||
| Good advice. | ||
| So you shut your mouth? | ||
| Pretty much. | ||
| And then, and so then they probably, they sat you down and sweated you a little, didn't they? | ||
| No, they took me down to the Santa Clara County colding tank, and when the magistrate saw me, she, or he rather, uh, basically released me on my own recognizance. | ||
| Was that a good idea? | ||
| Well, I wasn't really a flight risk. | ||
| So in other words, you didn't run away. | ||
| That's what I'm asking. | ||
| You remained around. | ||
| So you got released. | ||
| All right, look, we're at the bottom of the hour. | ||
| That's where we'll break and come back and resume Captain Crunch's story. | ||
| It's John Draper, a.k.a. | ||
| Captain Crunch. | ||
| The man who had the phone company for some time by the throat. | ||
| He is a legend, and he'll be back. | ||
| This is CBC. | ||
|
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|
CBC. | |
| Stay tuned for more with telephone hacker Captain Crunch on this encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell. | ||
| The End Art Bell, live on Supertalk FM. | ||
| 99.7 WTN. | ||
| 99.7 WTN. | ||
| Well, all right, back now to Captain Crunch. | ||
| And here he was in the not-so-gentle hands, no doubt, of the FBI. | ||
| And they had you in custody. | ||
| They had you in the pokey, in fact, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So what happened? | ||
| So, well, I stayed in the holding tank about four hours. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And then I got to see the magistrate in the morning. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And the magistrate released me on your right. | ||
| Then I went and contacted my attorney. | ||
| I managed to evade the press. | ||
| There was a couple of reporters there, as I recall. | ||
| I think John Carroll from San Jose Mercury was there. | ||
| This was a big story. | ||
| As a matter of fact, Captain, it broke nationally, really, didn't it? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, it was in the news. | ||
| It was quite newsworthy at the point. | ||
| What happened was, I believe he actually, as I recall, I believe one of the reporters actually gave me a ride home. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| No doubt, out of the goodness of his heart and desiring an interview. | ||
| Did you give him an interview on the way home? | ||
| I told him that I was really not supposed to talk about it. | ||
| I only showed him the arrest warrant in the police report that I was handed, which was public information and knowledge anyway. | ||
| I mean, they could have gotten it. | ||
| And I found out later that was okay to do. | ||
| I went to my attorney's place who prepared the case, and they basically had Did he say, hey, John, you're screwed? | ||
| No, he didn't. | ||
| He said he was very methodical and very business-like. | ||
| He says, well, let's see what they got. | ||
| So they went through the discovery process and they discovered that they had some of my equipment and it was illegal for me to possess it. | ||
| So they had me. | ||
| They had you on possession. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Of a blue box. | ||
| Of the equipment. | ||
| Of the equipment. | ||
| How much equipment did you have? | ||
| All I had was a small blue box. | ||
| That was it? | ||
| That was it, yeah. | ||
| But that was enough? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, well, so they've got the physical evidence, and no doubt they had phone records. | ||
| Could they connect? | ||
| The next thing they had to do, right, was connect the use of that box. | ||
| Because you can possess things. | ||
| Well, maybe you can't. | ||
| Well, they had tapes of my voice on the 2111 conference. | ||
| Oh, that's me. | ||
| Tapes of me, tapes of me making calls when I was bridged to the 211 conference with my voice. | ||
| Even worse. | ||
| So they had you. | ||
| Yeah, pretty much. | ||
| Um what happened later was I was offered a deal. | ||
| A deal? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What kind of deal? | ||
| I was offered a $1,000 fine and probation for five years. | ||
| If? | ||
| If I pled guilty to one of the crimes. | ||
| Possession? | ||
| Uh no. | ||
| Title 18, Section 1343, Fraud by Wire. | ||
| Fraud by Wire. | ||
| Wire fraud, they call it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I see. | ||
| After I pled guilty to that, I was able to, in five years, go and have it expunged from my record as part of the deal. | ||
| So it has now been expunged? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| So this is now, at least that part of your life, is totally behind you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When you think back on those days, and I did a few things, Captain, myself, that the statute of limitations, fortunately, is long since passed on, that when I look back on them, I know it shouldn't be true, but they were fun. | ||
| Is that the way you look back on that? | ||
| Well, you probably don't, huh? | ||
| Because you ended up in jail. | ||
| Well, that part certainly wasn't. | ||
| But the part where we had a lot of fun with the system was. | ||
| Were you ever officially contacted by the phone company? | ||
| No. | ||
| I thought about it, and I thought about what I would do if I were contacted. | ||
| And I don't understand why they didn't contact me. | ||
| It's probably thought I was such an evil person. | ||
| Evil? | ||
| Yeah, I suppose from their point of view, you were evil. | ||
| And so it was like, I assume that they probably didn't contact me because of like asking the fox to guard the hen house. | ||
| Well, yeah, but that is what a lot of companies like that do. | ||
| I mean, these days, the best of the computer hackers, a subject yet to be covered, really, are frequently hired by companies to protect them from their brother. | ||
| They made a bad decision not to hire me, because if they would have hired me, I certainly would have signed a non-disclosure agreement. | ||
| I certainly would have shut up. | ||
| But instead, they throw me in jail. | ||
| And while I was in jail, I was exposed to the cranium of people that shouldn't have that kind of technology. | ||
| And I had classes in jail. | ||
| I taught everybody how to do it. | ||
| You did what? | ||
| You taught them in jail how to operate blue boxes and whistles and all that? | ||
| Oh, John. | ||
| I've heard that our penal institutions are. | ||
| They're universities of crime. | ||
| Universities of crime, and you were a professor. | ||
| To some extent. | ||
| Oh, geez. | ||
| How long were you in school? | ||
| Well, I was sentenced to four months in Lompak. | ||
| Longhook. | ||
| And that was where... | ||
| It's a minimum security camp. | ||
| It really didn't have any walls. | ||
| It didn't have very clearly marked areas which you could not go. | ||
| And of course, at this point, the nation's, you know, publicity was all over the place, so I guess everybody in jail knew who you were and naturally wanted to know how to do what you do. | ||
| I was approached by many people in jail, yes, indeed. | ||
| Did you give of information freely? | ||
| Initially not, because I was really unsure of what was going on. | ||
| But when it became very clear what would happen to me if I didn't, I changed my mind. | ||
| In other words, you'd end up with something sticking out of your belly. | ||
| Or reasonable facsimile thereof. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| So you began to teach people how to do this, and then... | ||
| Shortly after that, I mean, the things just took off. | ||
| I mean, everybody was using them. | ||
| And so the phone company was, at this point, they were beginning to lose big money. | ||
| I would assume so. | ||
| It became well known. | ||
| More and more people, of course, being busted for using them. | ||
| I'm sure as far as they were concerned, the death penalty would have been a light sentence for you if the phone company could have set your penalty. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But what they should have done was to just say, hey, look, let's hire this guy. | ||
| Sure. | ||
|
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I would have worked for him. | |
| Technology. | ||
| I would have certainly helped them get rid of quite a few of their bugs. | ||
| Yeah, but John, wouldn't you have felt poorly literally busting your old buddy? | ||
| No, because I wouldn't focus on busting my friends. | ||
| You'd go after the work for them under certain conditions, and the conditions are that maybe I fix their system or help them fix their system. | ||
| I wouldn't go out and snitch on my fellow man. | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| I see. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So you would have just, you'd have taken down the, quote, bad guys, end quote. | ||
| No, I wouldn't even have taken down the bad guys. | ||
| I would have just fixed the system for them. | ||
| I would have made it impossible to use them. | ||
| How long boxes are. | ||
| Captain, how long did the problem, after you got out of jail, how long do you think the phone company was continuing to put up with massive intrusion? | ||
| Well, the phone company, of course, was using a flawed system to begin with. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| And their whole system was using this in-band signaling technique. | ||
| Back in the 50s, when they were bragging about how they were using the same wire pair for talking as signaling, they thought it was quite clever and economic. | ||
| But it turned out to be a very, very major security flaw. | ||
| Achilles' heel. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| So slowly in the mid-70s, early, I'd say mid to late 70s, the phone companies started to replace their old in-band signaling system to an out-of-band CCIS signaling system. | ||
| It used a separate data path to actually send this information back. | ||
| Well, you're talking over some heads. | ||
| What that meant is that. | ||
| The signaling information is the phone number that you're calling. | ||
| Instead of being sent out to the distant end through tones, it's sent out digitally. | ||
| Now, let me ask you, in the years that have passed, even though, of course, we all know that you have never hatched so much as a single number. | ||
| Well, I can't say that, but... | ||
| What I was going on to say was, technology has changed, and even though I was trying to help you there, John, even though you've never done anything since, have you kept up on phone company changing technology? | ||
| To some extent, yeah. | ||
| I mean, my notoriety has certainly gotten quite a few people to contact me who call me up and say, hey, did you know you can do this? | ||
| No. | ||
| Or did you know you can do that? | ||
| And I say, yeah, yeah, yeah, well, interesting, but I'm not going to do it. | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| But it is, thank you, interesting to know, and I appreciate the information. | ||
| Is there any law against people passing this kind of information on to each other? | ||
| Yeah, I believe it's called conspiracy. | ||
| Yes, it probably is. | ||
|
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And so you'd be surprised. | |
| I'm sure I would. | ||
| Now, we don't want to be charged with conspiracy here, John, so be careful. | ||
| If you have any modern techniques, let us not talk about those. | ||
| Oh, of course not. | ||
| But suffice to say, without discussing them, it is still possible to play if one wants to. | ||
| I'm sure it is. | ||
| I'm sure it's been done. | ||
| And it's, you know, obviously different than the way it was then. | ||
| And it is against the law, folks, and you should not do that. | ||
| Yeah, don't play this at home, folks. | ||
| There is a lot of interesting new technology like caller ID, for example. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's so easy to get around. | ||
| Here's a question. | ||
| I'm getting them by facts. | ||
| Question, Captain. | ||
| Are all local calls traceable after the call with new wiretapped technology? | ||
| How long is it safe to stay on a line, if at all, before your call can be traced? | ||
| It can be immediately traced. | ||
| Immediately? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Now, you know, the guy who called 911, of course, 911 with the bomb threat, they knew exactly what phone that came from instantly. | ||
| But you're telling us that any local call can be instantly identified? | ||
| Yeah, using the new digital switch, of course. | ||
| So the old days of keep them on the line, keep them talking, we've almost got it, we've almost got it. | ||
| Those days are gone? | ||
| They've been gone throughout the past seven or eight years. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Another thing I want to talk to you about, Captain, is they have the National Security Agency in Washington monitors calls. | ||
| As a matter of fact, President Clinton right now, because of the terrorism and the horrible stuff going on, is lobbying to be able to do even more of it. | ||
| But I understand that back in Washington and at NSA, there is this big computer that monitors randomly zillions of calls going on all at the same time for keywords, what are called keywords. | ||
| And, for example, a word like kilo, kilo, or I'm sure bomb, or, you know, words like that. | ||
| And when the computer catches those words, it flags somebody who then records the call, or the call is recorded automatically and then monitored. | ||
| Do you know anything about that? | ||
| I've heard that rumor from many sources. | ||
| I see. | ||
| As to whether or not that rumor is true, I have no clue. | ||
| I believe that it would probably be safe to assume that it is true. | ||
| However, nowadays, it's certainly possible to keep very secure telephone communications with data encryption programs like PGP. | ||
| And there's another program. | ||
| That's a pretty good privacy. | ||
| Yeah, Philip Zimmerman's program. | ||
| And there's also got a program called PGP Phone, which works on the Macintosh now, the 28.8 odd modem. | ||
| Now, is this so good? | ||
| You can use it to actually communicate by voice in a way. | ||
| But is this so good that even the government could not listen? | ||
| I'm told that it is. | ||
| Oh, they're not going to like that. | ||
| Well, the government for a long time has been cringing on the program PGP. | ||
| I mean, it's a very good encryption mechanism. | ||
| It uses an encryption that was designed and developed in Europe. | ||
| In fact, a lot of the PGP code was written from programmers in Sweden and actually they're joking. | ||
| It's called PGP Pretty Good Privacy, but it really is very good privacy, isn't it? | ||
| Yeah, it's very good. | ||
| If you use a very large key, it's going to keep those government-craig computers clinching for many millions of years. | ||
| Before they decode it, really. | ||
| Well, I guess the government does not like the idea that its citizens, and frankly, John, I understand a little of it. | ||
| In other words, we've got nutball cases, not like you who's just having fun with the phone company, but nutball cases out there. | ||
| You know, it's become a very serious... | ||
|
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|
It's a double... | |
| It's a double-edged sword. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And people want their privacy, but at the same time, criminals can certainly communicate without being tapped. | ||
| And so what are we going to do about that? | ||
| Well, that's a good question. | ||
| I can't answer that question. | ||
| Well, okay, here's an old one maybe you can answer. | ||
| Captain, one of the other whistles in use at the time, I don't know this to be true, he says the Oscar Wire. | ||
| Oscar Mayer Wiener whistle, yes. | ||
| That is another whistle that is... | ||
| He goes on. | ||
| Lots of hot dogs were consumed by blind teenage kids in search of that wonderful whistle, Dave in Bisalia, California. | ||
| True? | ||
| That is true. | ||
| The Oscar Marowiner whistle. | ||
| Yeah, it came out about a year or so after the Captain Crunch whistle. | ||
| Hey, Captain, here's a couple of calls. | ||
| Let's see who we've got. | ||
| East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Mega Kilos from America's Dairyland. | |
| Oh, Wisconsin. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How are you doing tonight, Art? | |
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is definitely a pleasure. | |
| I just got a question for the captain. | ||
| I guess, overall, was it worth it? | ||
| You know, what you had to go through after you got caught, was it worth that excitement and the fun that you were talking about? | ||
| Oh, that's a really good question. | ||
| Well, at the time, yes and no. | ||
| Yes, in the sense of the knowledge that I gained, but no in the sense of all the harassment that I've had. | ||
| Well, as you look back on it now, you can probably put a smile on your face and say, yes, those were wonderful, adventuresome years, but I'm sure that at the time the FBI walked in, you were saying a very big no. | ||
| It wasn't worth it at all. | ||
| Oh, yeah, of course. | ||
| I'm sorry, I'll never do anything bad again in my whole life. | ||
| Let me go, Mama. | ||
| I want my mama. | ||
| That's the way I'd feel. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| It's a natural reaction, I'm sure. | ||
| So there you are, Color. | ||
|
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|
All right, thanks. | |
| All right, thank you. | ||
| West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, this is Steve from San Diego. | |
| Hey, Steve. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, I have a couple of issues just run by John here. | |
| First of all, I'm a little put off by your recent finding of piety about all this. | ||
| You were busted three or four times before you finally gave up the ghost as far as your notoriety. | ||
| Oh, wait. | ||
| I didn't know that. | ||
| Let's ask you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let me finish. | |
| Well, I'll let you finish. | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| I want to find out if that's true. | ||
| You were busted three or four times, John? | ||
| Well, actually, three times, but the second time was because I was set up by the FBI through an informant. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, let's talk about this. | |
| Am I still on the line? | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| As I recall the last one I read about, you had a mobile operation in a truck so that you would not be traced. | ||
| That was the earlier days. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| But it wasn't the first bus when they busted you in the truck. | ||
| No. | ||
| That was before the first bust. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All I'm getting at is, it's been a long time and memories seem to fade, but I'm a contemporary of yours, and I remember fully well how you persisted in spite of the fact that you'd been given... | |
| Okay, give me my chance. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| All right. | ||
| The second time, 1976 it was, I got visited by a very, very persistent individual down in the Los Angeles area who just begged to come up and have me help him with his blue box. | ||
| To get this guy off my back, I consented to having him come and visit me, provided that he would never bring the blue box in my presence or take it into my house for any reason. | ||
| I agreed to meet him at a place in a place far away from where I was. | ||
| You were just going to talk to him? | ||
| I was just going to talk to him to get him off my back. | ||
| He wanted me to help him tune a blue box. | ||
| So to get him off my back, I said, look, you know, I don't want to do this, but just to get you off my back, I'll do it just this one time at the, you know. | ||
| And he says, well, can I try it now on this payphone? | ||
| He unfortunately picked a place, you know. | ||
| He says, can you meet me at this restaurant at such and such time and place? | ||
| And what happened was he'd made prior arrangements for the FBI to have a phone tapped. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| All right, look, you two. | ||
| Caller, hold on the line. | ||
| We've got a newscast coming up. | ||
| I'll hold you on, okay? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| All right, stay there. | ||
| And Captain, you stay where you are, all right? | ||
| I'm right here. | ||
| All right, and so are we. | ||
| And we will continue after this break. | ||
| Captain Crunch. | ||
| Captain Crunch, the amazing. | ||
| Back shortly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
WWTN, Manchester, Nashville. | |
| It's live. | ||
| Overnight talk with the Art Bell Show. | ||
| Because you deserve the best. | ||
| Only from Nashville's Super Talk FM. | ||
| 997WTN. | ||
| Back to the best of Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell. | ||
| Hey, I found it. | ||
| Thank you, WTAZ in Morton, Illinois. | ||
| They sent it to me. | ||
| It's Maxine Nightingale. | ||
| By the way, good morning. | ||
| My guest is Captain Crunch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't think that. | |
| Otherwise known as John Draper. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Miles, I'm gone to your home bed And in his honor When it's all right and it's coming up We gotta get right back together Win the ball. | |
| The honor accorded to an old con. | ||
| Here's a modern, modern-day tribute to the computer world. | ||
| I love this thing. | ||
| Listen to it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of Airport 75 comes another epic tale of man versus machine. | |
| Charleston Heston stars in Windows 95. | ||
| Product Spot, how may I help you? | ||
| Please, I can't save my document. | ||
| I need your help. | ||
| Yeah, I'll have to duck you down. | ||
| You see the save icon? | ||
| You have to click it once. | ||
| I can't. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| Miss Woman, you've got to try. | ||
| Okay, okay, I'll click it twice. | ||
| I mean, one menu. | ||
| No, we're rebooting. | ||
| We're going to crash. | ||
| So complicated. | ||
| Charlton Hesse, Karen Black, and George Kennedy as billionaire Bill Gates, Windows 95. | ||
| So, Captain Crunch, we'll be back here in a moment. | ||
| If you've got a question for him, I'll get the numbers on the air here in a second. | ||
| The End Probably the world's most famous hacker, Captain Crunch, otherwise known as John Draper. | ||
| And he's in the Bay Area at an undisclosed location. | ||
|
unidentified
|
On a payphone, I might add. | |
| And he is somebody who many years ago hacked into the phone company's trunking systems, learned how to make free calls, had lots of conferences with buddies and other hackers until the FBI closed in on the captain. | ||
| Captain did a little time, paid his debt to society, had his record expunged, and is telling his story now. | ||
| And we've got Captain, I think, still there, right? | ||
| Captain? | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Captain, where are you? | |
| Oh. | ||
| Captain seems to have disappeared. | ||
| Captain? | ||
| Captain, where are you? | ||
| Captain, Captain, Captain, what happened? | ||
| You know, I might have expected this. | ||
| The captain seems to be... | ||
| This is very sad. | ||
| Caller, are you there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Yes, something seems to have happened to the captain, as in a disconnect. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I hope I didn't scare him off, but I have some other more relevant information to direct towards him that maybe he didn't want to talk about. | |
| Would you like to talk about it? | ||
| I'll talk about it. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, Captain, are you there? | ||
| No, he's still not there. | ||
| I've got a number I can ring back here in a moment if he doesn't show back up. | ||
| It may be. | ||
| It may be. | ||
| Maybe the phone company cut us off. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You never know. | |
| But as I said, I was a contemporary of his, and I have a little trouble with his Nixon-esque amnesia and deniability of culpability. | ||
| Well, now, wait a minute. | ||
| He didn't deny anything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, let's put it to you this way. | |
| You know how Washington politics works, and they will soft peddle a difficult issue? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's doing that. | |
| And the other additional issues I wanted to bring up included a contemporary of his named Trey. | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| My name was Trey. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Pardon me? | |
| My parents call me Trey. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, okay, Trey, Trey. | |
| Trey, Trey, that's right, Trey. | ||
| And look, I'll tell you what I'm going to do. | ||
| Let me put you back on hold, okay? | ||
| And let me see if I can get the captain back on the line. | ||
| Obviously, we've run into some difficulty here, so stand by. | ||
| Captain Crunch has been disconnected. | ||
| No big surprise there, I'm afraid. | ||
| We're going to see if we can get him back on the line. | ||
| So, Captain, if you're out there, get the line back open or something. | ||
| And I've got a couple of good relevant faxes, too. | ||
| So let's see if we can get the captain back. | ||
| me not. | ||
| If you would like... | ||
| Well, guess what? | ||
| We've got the captain back, I think. | ||
| Captain? | ||
| Yeah, I'm here. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Do you think they got us? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Don't. | |
| Well, such things happen. | ||
| We'll let it slide. | ||
| Anyway, here's that caller who was kind of on your case. | ||
| He's back again. | ||
| Now you've got the captain. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, yeah, this is Steve again from San Diego. | |
| Yes, Steve. | ||
| Send me email, by the way. | ||
| I'll be down there after the 10th of August. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I'm a little reluctant to be in contact with you as I was back 25 years ago. | |
| That's cool. | ||
| Yep, that's right. | ||
| That's why I'm poisoned. | ||
| You don't want to touch me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, you seem to have sort of a Nixon-esque amnesia right now, and I'm wondering if you would also respond to a couple of other issues of why the government was so paranoid about what you were up to. | |
| And I'll just run the... | ||
| I mean, Nixon simply said, I am not a criminal. | ||
| Now, the captain has freely admitted that he did his time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, no, but I'm speaking of Nixon because of the timeline. | |
| I see. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's all. | |
| Oh, I see. | ||
|
unidentified
|
First of all, it was a contemporary of yours named Trey, who had bugged the Republican National Convention for 72 in San Diego. | |
| Oh, no. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I don't know if he was the result of their moving it to Florida, but it got moved. | |
| Trey was very disappointed. | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| One thing at a time, Captain, is there any truth to that allegation? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, wait. | |
| Run that by me one more time, please. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know who Trey is. | |
| Do you? | ||
| Man, I meet so many people. | ||
| I can't remember anybody. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Think back in the'70s, he was one of the premier phone freaks of the time. | |
| All right. | ||
| I'm shocked. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He was going to. | |
| Going to, I see. | ||
| Does that ring any AT ⁇ D bells for you, Captain? | ||
| Not that I recall. | ||
| Can you give me more details? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, he physically phone-tapped the convention center and was prepared to provide that to the underground press. | |
| I'm sure you were aware of that. | ||
| It doesn't sound like the captain removed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't recall that. | |
| I don't recall that. | ||
| Okay, well, let's move on. | ||
| That is indeed the classic line. | ||
| I do not recall that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Here's one I know you have to respond to, and this is... | |
| Excuse me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Excuse me. | |
| That's right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Don't make me so presumptive. | |
| There was a publication put up by the Yippies through the late 60s through 1980 called Yipple and Tap. | ||
| And it publicized on how to do not only all of these things of phone taps and blue boxes and all the other good stuff, but how to take over public utilities and break into payphones and how to just about do anything else to undermine structured society. | ||
| And so what is your question? | ||
|
unidentified
|
My question is, what did you do about that? | |
| What did I do about it? | ||
| I did nothing about it. | ||
| TAP was this technology American party or whatever they call it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, but you were a resource. | |
| And I'm Kirk and my views and their views differ in many respects. | ||
| They have asked me on occasion to write several articles on certain things, and I thought about it. | ||
| And I wrote a few things, but I didn't write anything that was very detrimental to American society, if you know what I mean. | ||
| All right, look, here's a friend of yours, Captain. | ||
| It says, God bless you, man. | ||
| You have my hero, Ma Bell's Antichrist. | ||
| I'm just 23 years old, but I am a student of hacker and computer history. | ||
| And they still sell the whistle. | ||
| Read the magazine 2600. | ||
| You'll find a lot of interesting stuff. | ||
| And by the way, he says, Art, you're in the latest Wired magazine. | ||
| I am in Wired. | ||
| And they want to ask you the following, or give you credit for the following, and see if you want to take credit for it. | ||
| Had Captain Crunch not done what he did, it would not have led to Steve Jobs, and we would not have the Mac computer. | ||
| And as a dedicated Mac user, I'd like to say thanks to Crunch, Bill in Portland. | ||
| Would you take credit for that? | ||
| I don't know that I could really take credit for that, because I admit I've known Steve Jobs and Wozniak long before they started Apple Computer. | ||
| Jobs was really not into the blue box as much as Woz was. | ||
| Woz was the one that was really into it. | ||
| So you can't take credit for the Mac. | ||
| I really honestly couldn't take credit for that. | ||
| It wasn't far-fetched. | ||
| No, but you may have launched his interest further into the direction he was going. | ||
| That could have very well launched his interest in that general direction, sure. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| By the way, everybody, the webpage is now fully back up, and it's got a link to Captain Crunch's. | ||
| So if you want to go up on my webpage, you will see a link already installed going to Captain Crunch's. | ||
| And to give you some idea of the traffic we take, Captain, over a typical weekend we take about a quarter million hits. | ||
| Yeah, my website's been averaging about 1,000 hits an hour. | ||
| About 1,000 an hour. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I'm sure the well can handle that no problem. | ||
| The well, yes, I'm sure it can. | ||
| They've got a T3 link with a 25-megabit pipe directly into it, so I'm pretty sure it'll handle the throughput. | ||
| Well, it's going to be busy. | ||
| East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
| Where are you calling from, please? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Baton Rouge, Louisiana. | |
| All right. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've got a couple of recent things for you. | |
| Since the blue box, they've come out with the red box and the green box. | ||
| Really? | ||
| And they have plans, and I'm not even sure if they've already made it, for a gold box. | ||
| Really? | ||
|
unidentified
|
With all the new technology and the digital lines and stuff like that, will allow you to tap into the different lines and stuff. | |
| Oh, man. | ||
| I don't see them anymore for just boxes. | ||
| Caller, have you fooled with these kinds of things? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've tried to play around with them, but I mean, I'm not much into that. | |
| Alright, what was that, Captain? | ||
| I asked the caller what the gold box was. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The gold box had plans so that anything that was attached to, like, that phone line, or if somebody's called into and you're talking to somebody, it would make every phone around there ring. | |
| And it's happened where it would make the entire neighborhood light. | ||
| All the phones would start ringing. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Never heard of that. | ||
| Well. | ||
| I've heard a lot of strange stuff in my life. | ||
| In other words, Captain, it's still going on. | ||
| Oh, there's no doubt that it's going on. | ||
| I mean, look at the publicity that Kevin Metnick got with his antics with the phones. | ||
| Will it be true, do you think, Captain, with PGP and the advances, all the advances, are the hackers always going to manage to keep up or either be a step of or one step behind those people trying to keep people like you used to be, used to be, out? | ||
| It's always going to be that way. | ||
| There's always going to be one group going to go out and figure something else out, and then they're going to come out and counter it with something else. | ||
| Well, one of the reasons I asked you whether you kept up with telephone company technology was because you are now jobless. | ||
| I mean, if the phone company still, to this day, would come to you and offer you some kind of work because it's still going on, would you be receptive? | ||
| I would be receptive to that. | ||
| You would? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, I've got a few connections in the phone company, and a lot of phone company people, trust me on this, listen to this program. | ||
| So if you want to take this opportunity to say something nice about the phone company, are you there? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I heard a big crunch sound on the line, Captain. | ||
| Now, why don't you say something nice about the phone company so we don't lose you during the next break? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well. | |
| This is your big chance, Captain. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| What can I say nice about them? | ||
| Something, something. | ||
| Anything nice. | ||
| I mean, there are many phone companies now, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's not exactly nice. | ||
| In fact, even AT ⁇ T isn't so happy about being split apart. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So. | |
| I mean, there must be, surely, there must be one nice thing, you could say, but one nice thing. | ||
| I mean, they... | ||
| I'll help you, John. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I've been to a lot of other countries. | ||
| I'm getting ready to travel again. | ||
| Come here. | ||
| You know what would be really nice? | ||
| Wait, don't stop me, John. | ||
| I'm trying to say something nice for you. | ||
| Compared to other countries, the Bell system, MCI, all the current to big phone companies make other countries' phone systems look like dog poop. | ||
| Well, the quality of the connections are definitely good, and that's something nice to say. | ||
| There you are. | ||
| I got something else to say, too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Now, it sounds like a conference is going on there. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Somebody's come up here and needs to use this phone to make an emergency call. | ||
| An emergency call. | ||
| Could I just finish this one thing real quick? | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| Is it going to be a long call? | ||
| I don't want to keep anybody away from an emergency here. | ||
| So we'll find out. | ||
| We've got the captain, you see, on a phone. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, can I just finish this one sentence first? | |
| Okay, one thing I wanted to say was that I traveled a lot and I went to Australia and the phone infrastructure there is amazing. | ||
| A lot of the phones there have data jacks you can plug your laptop in and get your email. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| In this country, they don't allow that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Where can you find a data jack to plug into a phone and check your email? | ||
| Come on, you guys of the phone company, provide us with our data jacks. | ||
| Well, I mean, you can use a data jack. | ||
| How about on a cellular phone? | ||
| Now, there's more technology that's come along. | ||
| Look, I don't want to keep anybody from an emergency call. | ||
| Does he think he can get this done in about five or six minutes? | ||
| Do you think you can, sir? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you think you can get this done in five or six minutes? | |
| Okay, yeah, he can. | ||
| All right, then I'll do you get ready to call me back? | ||
| Yeah, I'm going to release the phone right now so he can make his emergency call, or maybe you can even help him. | ||
| Don't do it, John. | ||
| And we'll call you back. | ||
| Okay, call me back in, let's say, five minutes, okay? | ||
| Yes, Captain. | ||
| Okay, bye. | ||
| Five minutes it is. | ||
| Trunk 4-5. | ||
| My guest is Captain Crunch, and I think he'll be back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The Art Bell Show on Super Talk Aven, 29-7, WTN. | |
| I think that we have got the captain back. | ||
| Let's find out. | ||
| Captain, are you there? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| All right, cool. | ||
| It came right at a break, so it was fine. | ||
| I take it the emergency got taken care of. | ||
| It sure did. | ||
| All right, excellent. | ||
| All parties are happy. | ||
| All the parties are happy. | ||
| Where were we talking about here? | ||
| Well, we were talking to callers, so let's go back to that. | ||
| First-time caller line, you're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Where are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm calling from Houston. | |
| Houston, Texas. | ||
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I have a question. | |
| Actually, I have two questions. | ||
| My first question, Captain, I was wondering if you had any sort of relationship, whether it was positive or negative, with Mitnik or Roscoe during the break-in at Cosmos back in the early 80s. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I remember getting a call from Susan Thunder, I believe, at one of the conferences. | ||
| They had an AT ⁇ T conference bridge set up at one point. | ||
| I was at that time living in Hawaii. | ||
| I did, believe, get another call shortly after that, a few months after I'd returned back to the mainland. | ||
| And that was probably about it. | ||
| I hadn't really had no contact at all with Netnik. | ||
| Netnik came at a much later time, nor have I I've actually I recall talking to him one time, but it was a very brief conversation. | ||
| It was with another person, and that was it. | ||
| He wasn't that interested in talking to me. | ||
| What about Roscoe? | ||
| Roscoe I talked with. | ||
| I actually visited Roscoe at one point. | ||
| Okay, now none of the rest of us know who these people are. | ||
| Yeah, I actually visited him. | ||
| Very smart individual, this Roscoe guy. | ||
| He seemed to know quite a lot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did y'all because I've just been reading a whole bunch of books on a lot of the hackers back in the early 80s and stuff. | |
| And it seems like there was a tight-knit group of people back then, but for some reason or another, there was a lot of backstabbing also. | ||
| And you had to care. | ||
| From what I understand, I believe this happened in 83, 84. | ||
| There were what we called the L.A. Wars. | ||
| The L.A. Wars? | ||
| Yeah, this. | ||
| It seems like a warring faction of the hackers. | ||
| Well, now, wait a minute. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| I mean, what is that like? | ||
| Well, they were doing all sorts of naughty things to each other. | ||
| I'm not sure that it actually erupted in L.A., per se, but that number of people in L.A. were having their differences. | ||
| And they were resolving their differences in hacker ways by doing certain things to each other. | ||
| I don't know what they were doing, probably changing each other's phone numbers or doing things to some extent. | ||
| So, in other words, playing havoc with each other's phones. | ||
| Yeah, pretty much. | ||
| Well, you would think it would be a tight-knit group, and the enemy would be either the phone company or the FBI or feds or whatever, but not each other. | ||
| Obviously, the hacker wars did draw quite a bit of attention to these people. | ||
| I see. | ||
| All right, West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
| Where are you, please? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey there, this is Pseudo-Spy from Washington State, and I want to say hello to Pound 2600. | |
| Yes, Pound 2600. | ||
| You're talking about the RSC channel? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, IRC. | |
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
First off, I had to ask you a question about the Esquire article. | |
| You know, I refute the Esquire article in my webpage. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I kind of I saw that a little bit in there. | |
| Didn't you come right out and say that half of that he kind of misquoted from you? | ||
| There were quite a few places in there that he misquoted. | ||
| Mostly it was just due to just inaccurate information. | ||
| I refute it all on my webpage. | ||
| So link up to my webpage and you'll see it in there. | ||
| I also have a link to the Esquire article as well. | ||
| Oh, you can read the Esquire article? | ||
| From my webpage, yeah. | ||
| Oh, cool. | ||
| How did they treat you in that article? | ||
| I mean, were you sort of the king of the bad guys? | ||
| That was sort of like the depiction that Ron did when he wrote about it. | ||
| I see. | ||
| Oh, there you are, caller. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Art? | |
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I had a couple comments for you, too. | |
| I don't know if you know this, but you can still do some pretty strange stuff with the phone company, and the S Blue Boxes still do. | ||
| Yeah, wait a minute, we don't really want to promote the idea of doing that, do we, Captain? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But like he points out, I always keep pointing out to those people that email me. | ||
| You know, I mean, I get a lot of email. | ||
| People still call me up, and you would be surprised how many people will Email me asking me questions about blue boxes. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, the old sidebar doesn't, crossbar doesn't work anymore, but there is a way to do it. | |
| All right, well, I'm going to leave. | ||
| Oh, I'm sure there is. | ||
| Hey, Captain, when people email you asking for help with blue boxes and such, how do you respond now? | ||
| Do you have a form response, or do you take pity on them? | ||
| I mean, surely you don't help people out anymore, do you? | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| I usually tell them, you know, don't try this at home kind of attitude. | ||
| Captain Crunch no longer does this sort of thing. | ||
| Thank you for your email. | ||
| Yeah, basically. | ||
| I mean, I have mentioned to most people that write about, you know, I say that, you know, they don't work like they used to work, but at the same time, I don't go out there and advocate its use. | ||
| I try to be really careful. | ||
| Captain Crunch has done his time and doesn't want to do more. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And come on, you guys out there when you send the email. | ||
| I mean, some of these messages I'm getting are just ridiculous. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| But I do reply to all messages. | ||
| Have they now turned around to the point where they're saying, what a lousy traitor you are to the system? | ||
| I've had quite a few hackers say that, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I bet. | ||
| First time caller line, you're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
| Where are you, please? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, this is Dark Knight from 503, Oregon. | |
| Oh, area code 503. | ||
| Yeah, I know you, Dark Knight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, probably off the DEF CON. | |
| Yeah, don't you? | ||
| Okay, yeah. | ||
| Well, Captain, how was DEF CON? | ||
| Wait a minute, Alan. | ||
| One at a time. | ||
| How was the DEF CON conference this last weekend? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, Captain. | |
| So is my buddy Seven. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, you know, Seven. | |
| Do I sense we have adversaries here? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Um, yeah, well, I guess you can say so, Art. | |
| I'm a big listener of you, but uh, Captain, my main thing is, why is your ego so big after 30 years? | ||
| Seven and I both ask you that. | ||
| Well, wait a minute now. | ||
| I've said more grandiose things about him than he's said about himself. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, but I mean, you're still coming off like you're the top cheese guy. | |
| And you don't do anything anymore. | ||
| Well, come back there. | ||
| Of course I don't do anything anymore. | ||
| What do you want me to do? | ||
| Go back to jail? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, guy, I'm not saying that. | |
| I'm just saying that, you know, you don't need to come across like that, you know. | ||
| And you've come across pretty poorly. | ||
| Well, how would you have him come across? | ||
| Yeah, I'm looking for suggestions. | ||
| Should I say the same thing that Seven said on Channel 4 yesterday or day before yesterday or whenever he was on TV last Saturday night? | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| I missed it too. | ||
| What did he basically say? | ||
| Norm, maybe you better not tell me. | ||
| Oh, I don't exactly know for word for word what he said, but I do hearing Channel 4 mention some of his services that he performs. | ||
| Services? | ||
| And it was pretty good if you asked me. | ||
| I see. | ||
| All right, so it's obvious a lot of this is still going on, isn't it? | ||
| Oh, yeah, I'm sure it is. | ||
| I mean, just from the phone calls I'm getting here, this sounds like a lot of inside. | ||
| Why is it so cutthroat, Captain? | ||
| I don't know why. | ||
| And it's a good question. | ||
| I mean, it's so self-destructive. | ||
| It's very self-destructive. | ||
| In fact, I would say a good portion of the hackers that get busted have been busted as a result of their actions against each other. | ||
| It's like a death wish or something. | ||
| Death wish, yeah. | ||
| Wildcard line, you're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Hello. | ||
| This is Dr. Don from Oregon. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And my question is, I listened earlier when, Captain Crunch, you were talking about the technology's been here for quite some time to tap phone lines instantly, like six years, you said, or something. | |
| And my question is, well, I just saw something on the news the other night on CNN where President Clinton was stating this new supercomputer that IBM is commissioned to build, and they said that it's amazing speed. | ||
| Now, don't quote me because I can't remember exactly what he said, but he said the calculation time in one second would be equivalent to someone with the hand calculator to do the same task would take like over 30,000 years. | ||
| Yeah, I heard this, that they were about to come out with a computer 100,000 times faster or something like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go online in 97 or 98. | |
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, okay, well, this is something I was talking to my dad last night, and he listens to UART a lot. | |
| And, you know, it just popped in my head. | ||
| I thought, well, whoa, what are we going to use that for? | ||
| And what is its capabilities? | ||
| They were saying it would model weather and predict hurricanes and stuff. | ||
| But, you know, my question for Captain Crunch is, are you aware of technology that not only would tap a call, but could it not be possible to log in every phone call and record it, crunch it, store it, associate it with your phone number and then go back a year later and say, okay, I want to listen to all the... | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| There is a logistical problem in that, and it would take one heck of a lot of mass storage. | ||
| I suppose it would, but we are getting to the age where a lot of mass storage, truly gigantic amounts of storage, I mean, even in the private home computer market, it's getting pretty incredible. | ||
| So imagine what our government could do. | ||
| Yeah, and the super fast computer he was talking about would probably make it almost feasible to crack shorter key sizes of PVP. | ||
| All right. | ||
| East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Good morning. | ||
| Where are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nashville, Tennessee. | |
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Captain Crunch, sir. | |
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you like Howard Stern? | |
| Howard Stern. | ||
| Have you ever heard of Howard Stern, Captain? | ||
| I've heard reports about him. | ||
| Good or bad? | ||
| Both. | ||
| Take it on, Captain. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| That's a Stern call. | ||
| Wildcard line, you're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
| Hi. | ||
| Hi. | ||
| Captain Crunch? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Are you familiar with the Jolly Rogers cookbook? | ||
| That has come across my attention, actually. | ||
| I believe somebody was actually mentioning that to me in an email message a couple weeks ago. | ||
| Yeah, I was wondering if it was you that wrote it, because there's a lot of mentioned, I mean, there's a lot of... | ||
| I'd have to really look at it to tell you. | ||
| Do you happen to have a URL where it's located on the web? | ||
| Why don't you send me some email? | ||
| I own a computer of my own, but there's a bulletin board called Books for a Free People in all capital letters. | ||
| Books for a Free People. | ||
| You can search that and find it. | ||
| It'll say books the government don't want you to read or something like that. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Listen, Captain, I actually would like to ask you about this myself. | ||
| Now, we are really in a terrible age. | ||
| Bombings here, bombings there, airplanes, this, Atlanta, the whole business. | ||
| You know, the militia groups and all the rest of it. | ||
| And the government is now, obviously, with its new terrorism bill, the press is on again, and the president wants this and that. | ||
| How do you feel about that? | ||
| Is it going to be a horrible intrusion on our privacy, or is this awful stuff going on, in your opinion, does it justify what they're getting ready to do? | ||
| Well. | ||
| From an old hacker. | ||
| I certainly don't want to have my private email read by anybody, hackers included. | ||
| At the same time, I certainly don't want to be in an airplane and have it blow up underneath my feet. | ||
| That is the quandary. | ||
| So that's the other edge of the sword. | ||
| So what can you do about it? | ||
| Well, if you were the guy in charge, captain in charge, what would you do? | ||
| I mean, on the one side, the public screaming at you, things are blowing up. | ||
| On the other, you're trying not to step on their privacy. | ||
| So it is an interesting perspective from one who act. | ||
| What would you do? | ||
| That is a very good question. | ||
| I know. | ||
| It takes an awful lot of thought on that one. | ||
| What would I do? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, you were total anti-establishment in every way, and yet even you have got to realize that we're facing people who want to kill us. | ||
| Uh, yeah. | ||
| Uh, yeah. | ||
| Well, you think about how many times somebody's going to be using some communication channel to organize this thing. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And are they, you know, I mean, is any self-respecting terrorist going to go out there and use the telephone and brag about something that he's going to blow up? | ||
| No, but he sure as hell might use PGP on the internet to coordinate the thing with his buddies. | ||
| I mean, let's lay it out here. | ||
| That's a possibility. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it sure is. | ||
| Well, think about that one, Captain. | ||
| East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
| Where are you, please? | ||
| Calling from Galveston, Texas. | ||
| Galveston, all right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sir. | |
| I want to ask the captain if his life has ever been threatened. | ||
| Oh, that's a good question. | ||
| John, has your life ever been on the line? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, has anybody ever threatened to... | |
| No? | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, hacking is dangerous, but it shouldn't be life-threatening. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| Yeah, all right. | ||
| Wildcard line, you're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
| Where are you, please? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah, Tyler, San Francisco. | |
| Yes, sir. | ||
| I've heard about a box. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know what they call them, blue, red, or purple, but a friend of mine told me there's actually boxes out that can turn the phones into a home, into microphones, without having to bug the home. | |
| Yeah, that's called an infinity bug. | ||
| It requires some wiring on the phone in order to work. | ||
| Oh, so they can't just do that from the office, then? | ||
| No, but they'd have to actually, like, like w uh modify the phone s to some extent to have that work. | ||
| In other words, somebody would have to, in effect, almost break into your apartment and replace the handset with another handset that would maybe have a live microphone in it. | ||
| That's comforting because nobody wants to think that somebody on the other end is just listening to a phone that is hung up. | ||
| God, that's awful. | ||
| All right, East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
| Hello. | ||
| How you doing? | ||
| Okay, where are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. | |
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'd like to know, is there any way we could tell if our own home lines are being tapped? | |
| Ooh, that's a really good question. | ||
| It's not really possible to tell if your phone is being tapped. | ||
| It's not? | ||
| No. | ||
| Well, then, yeah, but they sell these little gizmos that you can put on a line and supposed to fire. | ||
| Well, all these gizmos do is measure the line resistance. | ||
| And if somebody were to pick up an extension phone, the voltage changes in these gizmos detect it. | ||
| But a really good tap. | ||
| A really good tap that was placed on the phone line at the central office would be almost undetectable. | ||
| It would be virtually undetectable. | ||
| Yeah, and it's funny, as much as we sit here and talk about a click on the phone or whatever, you'd never hear a click, would you? | ||
| No, that's true. | ||
| My guess is that plenty of offices are listening to us right this moment. | ||
| I'm sure the people... | ||
| Do you think that they occasionally listen to this or that? | ||
| Oh, I'm sure of it. | ||
| I mean, but they're not going to tell anybody. | ||
| They're certainly not going to tell their boss. | ||
| However, the phone company also has got a pretty effective, so they claim, a pretty effective way of monitoring their employees. | ||
| For instance, it's not uncommon for the phone company to monitor the operators and how they perform by doing spot check monitoring of calls. | ||
| But they don't monitor the calls primarily to learn what people are talking about. | ||
| They only monitor the calls long enough to learn that the operator is doing her job correctly and that she's processing the call fast enough. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Captain, whoever it was who wrote earlier called you the Antichrist of the phone company. | ||
| Would you acknowledge that title? | ||
| I would tend to, the way things are going these days, I would almost tend to believe that. | ||
| All right, listen, we're at the hour. | ||
| Can you hold on? | ||
| Sure, I can hold on to that. | ||
| All right, we'll do one more then. | ||
| My guest is Captain Crunch, John Draper, a legend certainly in his own time. | ||
| I'm Mark Bell. | ||
| This is CBC. | ||
|
unidentified
|
CBC. | |
| All right, we'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Summit WTF. | |
| Back now to the captain. | ||
| Are you there? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Excellent. | ||
| Captain, here we go. | ||
| First time caller line, you're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
| Where are you calling from, please? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm calling from Hawaii. | |
| From Hawaii. | ||
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Now, my question had to do with red boxes and AT ⁇ T. All right. | |
| And I was wondering, I was using the red box, and I was wondering if you think AT ⁇ T listens into the conversations all the time. | ||
| You mean of people using the boxes? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, anytime. | |
| Oh, anytime. | ||
| We kind of just covered that. | ||
| And the answer was sort of probably yes. | ||
| I mean, it's their work. | ||
| Well, a lot of the calls now are being handled automatically, so it's probably a lot less likely now than before. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Captain, listen to this. | ||
| It probably says it pretty well. | ||
| This is for you. | ||
| Sadly, it is very cutthroat today. | ||
| Everyone is egotistical, vengeful, and doing or saying the wrong thing in the scene can get you in great heaps of trouble. | ||
| It's almost like street gangs, in a sense, one group trying to take control of the NPA. | ||
| But it's not too hard to separate the men from the boys. | ||
| Let me tell you, the ones that talk the most are the least dangerous. | ||
| It's the ones that you don't hear, the ones that wouldn't touch IRC 2600 with a 10-foot pole. | ||
| That's where the concern ought to be, not these kids talking about boxes, making phones ring and free calls. | ||
| I try to be humble. | ||
| Well, when I hear these guys today putting down one of the pioneers, like the captain, it bugs me a bit. | ||
| Phone freaking is wonderful, to put it bluntly, but it's not meant for the loose-lipped. | ||
| And Captain, I was delighted when I turned on art tonight and heard you. | ||
| Captain, you are a legend. | ||
| Say what you will. | ||
| I understand completely, but you've got your fans. | ||
| Yeah, well, like they said, you know, about loose-lips. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I remember an old World War II slow that loose lips think shit. | |
| That's right. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Or this, Captain, if, do you know anything about a modem device called the modem jammer? | ||
| He says, I understand the principle, but I don't believe it really works. | ||
| Is there such a thing as a modem jammer? | ||
| I've never heard of it. | ||
| Modem jammer? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know what to mean? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| All right. | ||
| Let us move ahead here. | ||
| Wildcard line, you're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh hey, Captain. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Where are you, sir? | ||
| Uh, Madison, West Pansy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Um, I was just wondering, I've I've heard some rumors that you developed the Tron box. | ||
| I was wondering if that was true. | ||
| Uh, the Tron box? | ||
| Can you fill me in on what that does? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I guess we probably didn't make it then. | |
| Uh it's kinda it's used to fool the electric company. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Kind of reduce your electric company. | |
| No, I'm afraid I can't take credit for that. | ||
| And the last caller? | ||
| The what? | ||
| The last caller. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What about him? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, I forgot what I was going to say. | |
| All right. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, you blank out sometimes. | ||
| East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
| Where are you calling from, please? | ||
|
unidentified
|
612, Minneapolis, Minnesota. | |
| All right. | ||
| Everybody's giving his area a code. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is Liquidist from Powell and 2600. | |
| Oh, geez, here we go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Former blue boxer. | |
| Former, of course. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Former, of course, after small problem. | |
| You too, huh? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Well, they didn't get me, but the question is here. | ||
| Let me get this straight here. | ||
| You're, Captain, you were the one that had a little fun with the whistle that hit the proper tone. | ||
| Yep, then a little fun with the blue box, and then not as much fun with the FBI. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've just been having this thought here. | |
| You blast the tone on the whistle, correct? | ||
| And then how do you dial your KP and your ST and your C five tones? | ||
| No, we're not going to give instructions on the radio. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, send an instruction. | |
| Yes, it is too. | ||
| No, we're not going to do that. | ||
| We're discussing this in a very general way, not a specific way. | ||
| The captain doesn't answer email. | ||
| How do you expect him to answer on the radio here, national radio, about things he ought not be talking about? | ||
| Right, Captain? | ||
| Well. | ||
| That is right, isn't it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, the thing... | |
| And if he wants to email me the question, I can probably answer him to some extent. | ||
| Oh, Lordy. | ||
| All right. | ||
| But the thing is, you know, there's I mean, all of this information that I'm giving is already published in public manuals. | ||
| Well, then, one easy way for you to do this without sticking your neck out would be to reference them to certain publications. | ||
| That's what I do. | ||
| And in fact, even when people email me, I'll sometimes often refer to them, I'll refer them to a website that's got the information. | ||
| So while you're not really doing this anymore, Captain, it's not totally fair to say that you've lost all interest in it, is it? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| You see, it's a little hard to lose interest when you're surrounded by millions of people that are interested in it. | ||
| Yes, I do understand. | ||
| West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
| Where are you, please? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm in Phoenix. | |
| Phoenix, Arizona. | ||
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And my name is Linda. | |
| I'm Linda. | ||
| I'm an operator for the phone company. | ||
| Oh, my goodness. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was just wondering, you know, when he first started talking about when the captains started talking about the blue box that began in 1972, did it, no, some other people were talking about the red box. | |
| Is that, did the name change? | ||
| Is it the same thing, or is that different? | ||
| Let me give you the difference. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| As an operator, you know that when you handle coin calls and they put coins in the phone, you hear these little beep beep beep beeps. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, those little beep beep beep beeps can often be generated by the red box. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's called red box, okay, because we do have that code that we put in if we think it's a red box. | |
| What's that? | ||
| If we think it's a red box, there's a code that we put in. | ||
| No kidding. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so they're aware of that. | |
| Because operators can say we can tell that we can see that change. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, because we're not really collecting the coins, and they think we are, so we kind of trick them into, you know. | |
| Yeah, and operators are instructive to let the call go through, is that right? | ||
| Yeah, if it sounds like it's legitimate and we really can't prove it to ourselves, we have to let it go through, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, but then there's no way to really know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We suspect it. | |
| We have a way we do it, and I don't want to say it, but. | ||
| Yeah, you punch in a code. | ||
| Code, and then they keep track of it. | ||
| Since you're an operator, Linda, it's great to have you here with us. | ||
| I want to ask you a question. | ||
| How much of this, Linda, in modern day, do you think is going on? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Every day. | |
| Really? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Every day. | |
| Not just the red box coins, that kind of stuff goes on. | ||
| I'm surprised they still work, Linda. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Huh? | |
| I'm surprised they still work on it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It does, you know, and it's all on overseas, you know, mostly overseas calls. | |
| And also, we get, I don't know how they do it. | ||
| This is kind of really strange to me, but they access somehow into hotels or main switch operators, and then they go, and they get a free line, and then we can place calls for them anywhere, and we think that we're billing it to them, and we have no way of knowing really where they're calling from. | ||
| Wow. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And they do that all the time. | |
| That's, you know. | ||
| Yeah, it happens. | ||
| I get it all the time. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| Have you been with the phone company for a long time, Linda? | ||
|
unidentified
|
15 years. | |
| Well, that's a long time. | ||
| Is this kind of thing on the increase, or is there less of it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's on the increase. | |
| On the increase? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's so interesting to me to listen to him, you know, the originator of it from way back then, and it's still going on. | |
| Does the name Captain Crunch get brought up occasionally in the phone company? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I've never heard that. | |
| No? | ||
| Yeah, probably in smoke-filled rooms. | ||
| Yeah, really. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Places where I'm not there. | |
| Linda, it's wonderful that you called. | ||
| Any other questions for the captain? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I think that's about it. | |
| That's it, huh? | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Thank you, Linda. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, bye-bye. | |
| Take care. | ||
| There's a 602 area code operator. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| She said there's more of it going on now, Captain. | ||
| Well, what can I say? | ||
| I'm shocked. | ||
| Shocked to the quick. | ||
| I mean, I thought this kind of thing with modern technology for the phone company anyway was basically a thing of the past. | ||
| I mean, it's so easy, technically, to stop that boxes from working. | ||
| The phone company needs you, Captain. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I'm appalled to find that some of these techniques people are using still work. | ||
| I'm appalled, too. | ||
| And that they do. | ||
| I mean, you could save them millions of dollars. | ||
| Now, the phone company can contact you through your website, right? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Well, I can assure you there are people on high listening right now. | ||
| So the captain is without job, right? | ||
| Yeah, I'm crunch at well.com, so send me an email and we'll talk about it. | ||
| All right, well, and to get there, you can go to my website and jump to his. | ||
| We've got that in there now. | ||
| It's www.artbell.com. | ||
| Wildcard line, you're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Hi, I had a question and a comment. | ||
| All right, where are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Los Angeles. | |
| Los Angeles. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I wondered if the captain was in L.A. or knows of the old party line before the 976 came in. | |
| Called like Hobo UFO. | ||
| I heard something about that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That was, yeah, they had like a busy signal going on, but everybody was calling in and could talk to each other. | |
| This was early 80s, I guess. | ||
| Was this like where they talked over the busy signal? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But then somebody was always monitoring, calling up and saying, well, if you're not going to talk, you know, clear the line. | ||
| And that was going on, but I just wondered if he was around that time. | ||
| My comment was also about AT ⁇ T. I had tried to let them know I had a skill of possibly crashing a certain new system that they were putting together. | ||
| And well, I wanted to test it. | ||
| So I called up AT ⁇ T and they gave me the New Jersey address, phone number in New Jersey. | ||
| I talked to people in New Jersey, got cartered around about five different names and people, and then they wound up sending me over to Dallas. | ||
| I called up Dallas, and another five people transferred me over, and then they said, well, write a letter to our personnel department and tell us what your service is that you can do. | ||
| And if we're looking for something like that, we'll call you. | ||
| And I say, yeah, they're going to say, let's find somebody who can crash our system. | ||
| Go through the file. | ||
| Actually, that's a very important service. | ||
| Don't underrate that service. | ||
| I would think they'd be very interested in it. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That's why I think they ought to give the captain a job after all these years. | ||
| Captain Crunch working for the phone company. | ||
| I mean, it would even be a good PR thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm trying to help you here, Captain. | ||
| Oh, I appreciate that. | ||
| First time caller line. | ||
| You're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Hi, Art. | ||
| I'd like to ask the captain. | ||
| I was back in the 70s, I was doing it, too. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Where are you, sir? | ||
| Oh, I'm calling from San Francisco. | ||
| You sound too young to have been doing that in the 70s. | ||
| Oh, thanks, but I'm 48. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| So I was doing that, and we heard a rumor that he was actually moved to satellite, and we tried to duplicate that, and we were never able to do it, and we didn't know if it was true or not. | ||
| That who was moved to satellite? | ||
| That Captain Crunch moved a communications satellite. | ||
| Oh, I'm afraid not. | ||
| You didn't do that? | ||
| They really would have hated that, Captain. | ||
| Oh, I'm sure they would. | ||
| And I would never have done that, even if I knew how. | ||
| You would never have done it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| I mean, the temptation to do that. | ||
| The incredible temptation of being able to move something in space wouldn't tempt you. | ||
| Not if it would disrupt a lot of things. | ||
| Of course not. | ||
| What about if it just disrupted, like, HBO and Showtime and all of that? | ||
| Anything. | ||
| East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
| Where are you calling from, please? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Kansas City. | |
| Kansas City, yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, John. | |
| Hey, Art. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
John might actually remember me. | |
| I sent him a car window a couple of years back. | ||
| You sent him a car window? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, your name again? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Vance. | |
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Hi, Vance. | ||
| How you doing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, great. | |
| Just thought you might. | ||
| Sir, could I butt in and ask why you would send the captain a car window? | ||
| Because he had access to a car, a window that was very hard to get. | ||
| And in Kansas City, you could get car parts there that you can't get here. | ||
| All right, I'm sorry. | ||
| I wanted to know. | ||
| Go ahead, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And somebody fussed out the captain's window, and he couldn't get one there. | |
| Anyway, I thought Art's audience might be very interested in the toilet paper crisis story. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Well, that's on the website. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, but it's straight from the horse's mouth. | |
| Yeah, indeed. | ||
| Straight from the horse's mouth. | ||
| What do you mean, toilet paper? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| There was this. | ||
| I was scanning the Washington, D.C. 800 prefix. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Looking and digging up every number I could find in Washington, D.C. You're on the air in Washington, D.C. right now. | ||
| Remember that, Captain? | ||
| And we found a number where this person answered the phone in a very obnoxious way. | ||
| He was very rude to me when he answered the phone. | ||
| I asked him what company we reached, and he said he huffed and puffed and said, you haven't reached a company. | ||
| And he started being very hostile toward me verbally. | ||
| I see. | ||
| And so. | ||
| Mistreating the captain. | ||
| Well, I was a little confused why anybody would want to do that when they have an 800 number used. | ||
| Back then, 800 numbers were used for companies. | ||
| Usually companies had 800 numbers, and they used them primarily to sell things. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And why would somebody have a public number and be so rude to somebody? | ||
| Understood. | ||
| So I had somebody else call back the number and a social engineer and tell this party that we called that we were the White Plains Tandem Switching Office and we were having some translation problems into that number. | ||
| What number have we reached? | ||
| And the man said, you reached the White House. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| And it turns out to have been the CIA crisis line into the White House, a number that the CIA uses to contact the President. | ||
| Well then no wonder they weren't so then what? | ||
| Well what happened then during a party, that number was just one of many numbers that I'd collected and somebody said, what's this? | ||
| And I said, oh, that's the White House. | ||
| And he said, can I have it? | ||
| And he said, hey, sure. | ||
| Here you go. | ||
| So in other words. | ||
| Well, we often traded numbers. | ||
| So I said, what have you got to trade? | ||
| So it turned out that the person who'd had the number, we were at this party. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And we used the verify lines to listen in on the calls, which at that time it was possible to do. | ||
| Now it's not. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And we'd learned what the code name was for a president. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| What was it then? | ||
| Olympus. | ||
| Olympus? | ||
| That was during which administration? | ||
| Nixon. | ||
| Nixon. | ||
| So Nixon was Olympus, and you had the phone number, and you could listen in. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Where does toilet paper come into this? | ||
| Well, I was at a party with about 300 people, and one of the persons took the number and called it and asked for Olympus. | ||
| Now, I was in the other room at the time, and one guy ran in and got me in the room. | ||
| He says, come here, listen to this. | ||
| And just as I was walking in, he was saying, sir, we're in the middle of a national crisis, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And he said that to the president and says, what's the national crisis? | |
| He says, sir, we're out of toilet paper. | ||
| And he hung up. | ||
| I put that on my website. | ||
| So you'll read it in there. | ||
| So you tell me they actually got Richard Nixon on the phone? | ||
| Well, It sounded like him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And although I didn't catch all of the dialogue, this was with a bunch of us. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We were all just together at this party, and it was down in L.A. Well, think of these as the good old days, huh, John? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| East of the Rockies, you're on here with Captain Crunch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Yes, Art? | ||
| Yes, where are you, please? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Area Coach 6156FM. | |
| Where's that, please? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Middle Tennessee. | |
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, I'd be interested in knowing if the captain can help us understand what these services like America Online and CompuServe can read back off of your computer, for example. | |
| Can they read any information off your hard drive? | ||
| Yeah, a lot of people want to know about that, this cookie thing. | ||
| Yeah, in fact, I've been getting a lot of email on that last couple days. | ||
| I'm not exactly sure how all this stuff works. | ||
| I haven't really investigated it myself, but I know that other people have claimed, well, this cookie thing is this thing where I don't know exactly the details, but when you have a website and somebody accesses your website, you have your website usually is your files on your website are stored on a server. | ||
| And when the server, when you make a connection with the server, you run this program called the CGI program. | ||
| And it's a program that runs on the server, not on the client. | ||
| And it sends back various different things to your client, which is your Netscape program on your machine. | ||
| So in other words, what it's doing, to cut it short here, is that the website is actually making inquiries and getting information from your computer. | ||
| Do you believe that that is going on, John? | ||
| Well, I don't really see how that can happen. | ||
| I don't either. | ||
| I've wondered about the same thing, and yet it seems as though people keep saying that it's going on. | ||
| There's a lot of accusations going on. | ||
| You never can really tell what kind of queries are taking place on some of these net connections. | ||
| Yeah, that's true. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, you do have to have IP connections here. | |
| Captain, Captain, hold on. | ||
| We're at the bottom of the air. | ||
| We'll be right back, all right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, John. | |
| Oh, my God. | ||
| You're forgiven me. | ||
| Constant. | ||
| Where is that? | ||
| Well, my guest is Captain Crunch, otherwise known as John Draper. | ||
| He's doing his time. | ||
| He'll be right back. | ||
| This is CBC. | ||
| What the deck of this do you want? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Art Bell, live on Supertalk FM. | |
| 99.7 WTN. | ||
| The End. | ||
| Back now to Captain Crunch. | ||
| And Captain, are you still there? | ||
| Yeah, I am still. | ||
| I want to thank you for hanging in there so long. | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| Great. | ||
| No problem. | ||
| No worries. | ||
| Back earlier before the break, you asked me a question about reading files off of a person's hard disk on a machine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And I've been thinking about that during the break, and a couple of comments I'd like to make on that. | ||
| All right, go. | ||
| When you connect your machine to the net and use Netscape to go browse the web, you instigate what is called an IP socket to the Internet itself. | ||
| Now, the browser, like Netscape or Microsoft's version of it, has code that certainly knows how to go out there and read hard disks and get directories off of hard disks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yikes. | |
| Okay, so it's, in answer to your question, it is certainly absolutely possible to do that. | ||
| But the person writing the browser would have to, of course, have integrity to do that. | ||
| Have integrity not to do that. | ||
| Not not to do it, right? | ||
| Yeah, no, no, the point I'm making now is this. | ||
| There's this new programming language out called Java. | ||
| And Java is supposed to be secure, and it's supposed to keep and prevent people from injecting viruses that run on your computer. | ||
| However, there have been numerous news reports of some security problems with Java. | ||
| I don't know whether this has been resolved or not, and I don't know whether a new security leak will be discovered in the future. | ||
| All right, I'll leave it there. | ||
| I've got a lot of callers for you, Captain. | ||
| Go ahead, let's deal with them. | ||
| First time caller line. | ||
| You're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Art. | |
| My name's Mark. | ||
| I'm calling from Hilo, Hawaii. | ||
| Hilo, Hawaii, the big island. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I'm listening to you on KHVH. | |
| I can barely pick you up with my Sea Crane selected town. | ||
| Well, I live near Hilo. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah? | |
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, okay. | |
| Well, I'm a frequent, I've surfed the net a lot and check out Arda on his website. | ||
| And I was going to ask you about PGP encryption that you were familiar with. | ||
| Is the U.S., have they made regulations that have made encryption more or less unsafe and you should use the international version of PGP? | ||
| I've been trying to understand. | ||
| I was wondering if someone helped me out with that. | ||
| All right, what's safe, in other words? | ||
| Well, okay. | ||
| There are several different versions of PGP. | ||
| There are U.S. domestic versions which are not allowed to be exported. | ||
| Really? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh-huh. | |
| That's right. | ||
| Our government has seemed to think that encryption is classified as a weapons, as a weapon. | ||
| And a lot of companies that get licenses to export cryptography software for handling credit card transactions and things like that actually have to become a weapons dealer legally in order for them to be able to have the ability to or the permission to sell this kind of technology overseas. | ||
| Now, PGP was originally written and developed overseas. | ||
| And in that case, a lot of the tight encryption, now these are earlier versions of PGP, 2.3 I think is one of them, or 2.1 or 2.2. | ||
| In that range, do they have varying degrees of safety? | ||
| That's really the question. | ||
| Yeah, the earlier versions of PGP I would trust more because I would tend to believe they would probably be using the idea cipher method which was developed in Europe. | ||
| I would have much more trust in that cipher. | ||
| What you're really saying, when you read between these lines, you're saying that the later versions of PGP, in your opinion, might have been designed to seem safe. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right. | ||
| You're going to love this call, Captain. | ||
| West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
| Who is this, please? | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is Seven. | |
| Seven? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Your name has been brought up a few times tonight. | |
| Your name has been mentioned, Seven. | ||
| Do you recognize this person, Captain? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| What seven do you have for the captain? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm a San Francisco Bay resident. | |
| I'm currently on the road calling out at Denver, Colorado. | ||
| I don't have access to the radio show at this time. | ||
| Yes, you do. | ||
| Kay Howe in Denver. | ||
| 6.30 on the dial. | ||
|
unidentified
|
6.30 on the dial. | |
| Yep. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've only been here a few hours. | |
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Now, I believe there was an issue brought up about a television appearance I made in a San Francisco area station regarding hackers. | |
| Somebody mentioned it, yes. | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I don't know what that issue was, but I was basically alert about a lot of people that should call in. | |
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Well, you're on. | ||
| So what did you say on that TV show? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The television show was produced by Anthony Moore to basically try and give a fair shake to the hacker hysteria that's been covering the press the past couple of years. | |
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And he basically wanted to talk to a bunch of people that are on the inside track of the underground, people that have been around a while and have done some things, to see if that perception by the public is actually reality or if it's a bad deal, a bad shake. | |
| They want to know exactly what the underground was like and interviewed a little over half a dozen people in the San Francisco Bay Area. | ||
| We've been one of them and try to dispel some of the myths by showing them the reality of hacking. | ||
| We aren't all bad people that we don't allow out there. | ||
| Go read people's email, destroy people's files, steal proprietary information. | ||
| And I don't know why there's an issue with that. | ||
| Seven, tell me, describe the difference between a good hacker and a bad hacker. | ||
| The bad hacker obviously destroys email, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| What is a good hacker? | ||
|
unidentified
|
A good hacker is someone who understands the technology they have before them, the foundation of the Internet, the different tools they have available to them, the programming languages, has a fair understanding of it, and has the ability to explore the limits of the technology. | |
| In other words, not doing what they're told to do, but exploring the boundaries, maybe finding some new uses for the Internet. | ||
| Actually being a productive member of the Internet community and designing new uses for the Internet, letting it just stay where it is now, and hoping that someone else comes along and develops something. | ||
| For example, one of the things you say good hackers have done is created the World Wide Web. | ||
| That was created by hackers because of their exploration and knowledge of the Internet. | ||
| We're able to put two and two together and come up with a new use for it. | ||
| That's the kind of thing that needs to continue to happen. | ||
| There are good hackers out there. | ||
| There are bad ones, obviously. | ||
| In the same way that I'm a ham operator, and ham operators, early in electronics, developed a lot of things that contributed to national security and the advancement of electronics generally. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| So the amateurs dump it in the laps of the pros. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Amateurs dump it in the laps of the pros. | |
| Some will have different motivations. | ||
| I mean, it all comes down to the intent of the individual hacker. | ||
| Well, Seven, what is your take on Captain Crunch as a legendary beginning hacker? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Captain Crunch, in my opinion, was the one that brought freakdoms basically to the masses. | |
| He was the one that originally brought it to the masses. | ||
| He wasn't by far the first freak because he would say he could stay on the telephone. | ||
| No, but one of the grandmasters, eh? | ||
|
unidentified
|
One of the grandmasters, yes. | |
| He did bring it out to the masters. | ||
| He was the one that took the little underground technology or basically in the hands of the select few and showed everyone out there. | ||
| It's like, hey, look at this. | ||
| You know, here's something we can learn about, exploit, learn something from. | ||
| And, I mean, I have respect for him in that fact, despite what he may think. | ||
| I do have respect for him in that aspect that he did bring it to the masses. | ||
| All right, Captain, do you have any big problem with Seven? | ||
| He said pretty nice things about you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not a problem. | |
| No? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think there's been some communication between us, but I don't feel any ill will towards them, despite the fact that you have a kind of a temper that gets out of hand sometimes. | |
| Oh, really, Captain, do you have a temper? | ||
| Hey, Seven, let's get together in Frisco sometime and we'll talk it over coffee, huh? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, no problem. | |
| All right. | ||
| Peace. | ||
| Peace, gentlemen. | ||
| Peace. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Take care, Seven. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Bye. | ||
| The famous or infamous, I'm not sure which, Seven. | ||
| East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, Mr. Bell. | |
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| I had a couple of questions for Mr. Crunch. | ||
| Oh, I'm fine. | ||
| That's Captain Seven. | ||
| Where are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm in Duluth, Minnesota. | |
| All right. | ||
| Are you familiar with the so-called K-Rad movement, H-P-A-C, out on the internet? | ||
| The K-Rad movement. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| Not exactly. | ||
| What is that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, this is also like my little theory about the Atlanta bombings. | |
| Basically, it's people that believe that you can solve a lot of problems by blowing stuff up. | ||
| Mostly it's like little teenagers running around proclaiming anarchy and all this crap. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm just wondering if you're, like... | ||
| No, but that... | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| That really is the dilemma, and that is it. | ||
| Yeah, but we do have a lot of these little bastards running around, as he said, thinking that it's cool to blow things up and kill people. | ||
| And, you know, this is going to bring everybody on the net, and everybody, I'm sure in circles you run in, Captain, is scared to death of the government coming in and slamming down the big hammer of oppression. | ||
| But, you know, if things continue the way they are, I'm afraid it's going to turn into that. | ||
| It's like inevitable. | ||
| That's what I'm afraid of. | ||
| Yeah, that's what we all ought to be afraid of. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And so, I guess to me the difference between a good hacker and a bad hacker is a good hacker who heard of somebody who was planning to do something really awful like that, they'd turn him in. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How you doing, Bart? | |
| All right. | ||
| Where are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fresno, California. | |
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I was kind of curious. | |
| I had a couple questions, but the first one was something that I had heard, and I'm just wondering if you guys had heard anything about it. | ||
| You were talking about the supercomputer the government might have or is developing, the tap lines, and I had heard that they are preparing some kind of a computer that will, or maybe it's even in existence now, that will key in on certain words over all the phones, over all the phones in the, well, I don't know, maybe in the country. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And that they'll begin to tape at certain words. | |
| No, I don't know. | ||
| That was already brought up earlier. | ||
| Yeah, and it absolutely must exist because they've got the SETI project that can look at billions of frequencies. | ||
| So you can be damn sure they've got something that can look. | ||
| It's certainly possible to do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And then another thing, too, a while back I had heard, well, I was listening to your program, Art, and there was some guy on there, and you gave his phone number out. | |
| It was a kid that had the transformer. | ||
| This was quite some time ago that stole the transformer. | ||
| Madman Markham. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, a young kid. | |
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Anyhow, I talked to him. | |
| Do you know what? | ||
| I talked to Madman Markham earlier today. | ||
| Are you kidding? | ||
| No, I'm not kidding. | ||
| He has this giant diesel generator now, and I think Madman's getting close to going into another dimension. | ||
| I'm going to have him on the air again soon. | ||
| Don't laugh. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I know, but he's not going to get in trouble yet, is he? | |
| No, because he's got now this giant generator. | ||
| So he says, I'm disconnected from the power company, and what I do is up to me. | ||
| And he's right, but I'm sure he's going to step through it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Stargate, huh? | |
| So I want to get him on before he, you know... | ||
|
unidentified
|
You put his number on the air, and I called him up, and he told me about this. | |
| Well, I guess there's a code that can find out if you're being tapped. | ||
| Do you know about that code? | ||
| Yes, I do. | ||
| And I can't discuss it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I thank you for the call. | ||
| There is. | ||
| Captain, are you aware there is a number you can call that will tell you with a signal, signal, sort of, I don't even want to describe it, actually, three different signals to tell whether you're being tapped locally or regionally or federally? | ||
| I haven't really heard of this, but I wouldn't be surprised. | ||
| I know about something you don't then, huh? | ||
| I wouldn't. | ||
| No, I said I wouldn't be surprised. | ||
| Yeah, there is such a thing. | ||
| West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello, this is my kid. | |
| Area code 808. | ||
| What does all that mean? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's Hawaii. | |
| Oh, Hawaii, yes. | ||
| I'm sorry, area code 808. | ||
| Everybody's giving their area codes tonight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It seemed applicable. | |
| In honor of the captain, I think. | ||
| Very appropriate. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Spoiler captain, sir. | |
| What island are you on? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm on Oahu, sir. | |
| I'm in Hawaii. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Very briefly, I work at a small hotel here, and we had a, three weeks ago, I had a meeting with the general manager, and he was ranting and raving. | ||
| It's a small hotel, so there's only one person that staffs the front desk and does everything. | ||
| Answers phone, checks people in, check out, concierge, right? | ||
| You get real busy. | ||
| So the general manager is walking around, and he's waving this phone bill in his hand, and he's just pissed. | ||
| I mean, he's really mad. | ||
| And so what he says is there's a scam going on, and people are calling in and getting to a room in a hotel and getting, talking to the person in the room to taking the phone off the hook and leaving it off the hook. | ||
| And he says what happens is at that point they can then call around the world and he shows us the phone bill and it was three separate calls on the same day to Vietnam totaling $870. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| You know I've heard of this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Have you, Captain? | |
| It wouldn't surprise me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, he described it as being a box. | |
| They put a cheese box on his line. | ||
| A what? | ||
| And I call it a cheese box. | ||
| Cheese box. | ||
| Yeah, it just ties two lines together. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, we got nailed. | |
| Sorry. | ||
| Did the phone company make good? | ||
| I mean, or did they? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I actually didn't hear that part. | |
| Well, you know, the operator earlier from 602 said that. | ||
| They don't really know, but, you know, I guess if you can prove that, I don't know. | ||
| Yeah, but she thank you. | ||
| She did say, though, that if they suspect, they let it go through, but they turn it over to security is what she said. | ||
| Is that right, John? | ||
| Yeah, they, well, like the operator said, when she detects something funny going on, she just punches in a code. | ||
| And that nails a lot? | ||
| I'm sure it identifies the line somehow. | ||
| Marks it, as it were. | ||
| First time caller line, you're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Hello. | ||
| Hello, you're on the air, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, good. | |
| Where are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm in rural Colorado. | |
| My name's Dave. | ||
| Hi, Dave. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I've been trying to get on Bell's webpage from American Online. | |
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I connected first couple times, and now I'm getting a message back saying that the server is... | |
| Listen, it's a problem with America Online. | ||
| Our webpage is up, but AOL is having some kind of problem connecting to it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, they're saying it's you. | |
| Well, they'll get it worked out. | ||
| It'll be all okay soon. | ||
| All right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What about I've been trying to get you through CompassServe and been having the same damn problem. | |
| I can't get through you just. | ||
| Yeah, I got a call from the person who runs my webpage earlier, and he said there's a widespread problem going on right now. | ||
| And it may still be going on. | ||
| Well, you know, maybe there's so many people trying to get on the web page right now that it's like overloading the server. | ||
| Yeah, that's entirely possible, Captain. | ||
| That's happened many times to us. | ||
| West of the Rockies. | ||
| You're on the air with Captain Grunch. | ||
| Aye. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, this is Rick, 602KFYI in Phoenix. | |
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Hey, I'd like to ask the captain, you always advertise these digital phones, 900 megahertz. | ||
| That's right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How foolproof is that power being tapped into? | |
| It's a good question. | ||
| Captain, we have a digital... | ||
| We do have a fully digital phone. | ||
| I mean, at 900 megahertz, this thing is totally digital. | ||
| If you listen to it on a scanner, it's nothing but white noise. | ||
| And it's... | ||
| But still, they can tap your phone at the central office, right? | ||
| Yeah, but it's more or less a software tap. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So the only... | ||
| Right. | ||
| You don't hear anything. | ||
| It's just white noise. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Not even human sounding. | ||
| Wildcard line, you're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, RMD.com. | |
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Alias Commander Keyboard here. | |
| Commander Keyboard? | ||
| Where are you, sir? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Calling from Las Vegas, Art. | |
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And just tried to get through on your video line. | |
| Are you still using that? | ||
| I don't have it up at the moment. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, that was a really exciting program, and I'm one of your beta testers out here. | |
| Yes, sir. | ||
| We'll get it up again. | ||
| Okay, has anybody gotten into my site yet? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I have. | |
| I just went there and sent you an email. | ||
| Okay, and you're from Las Vegas? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so I hope I'm one of you. | |
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh-huh. | |
| I'll be looking for your email tomorrow when I check in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I hope I'm one of your 20 people that can sign up for your Internet Service Guide and web page construction. | |
| Yeah, good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, that's cool. | |
| So anyway, Captain, I feel that you're more of a colonel now than a captain. | ||
| See, I've been promoted. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I did go up to your web page. | |
| I couldn't access your web page on AOL and tried chatting with people briefly in the grassy knoll. | ||
| Got off of AOL and went on. | ||
| I have five different servers. | ||
| Lucky you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I'm trying them out, and I have unlimited access with one. | |
| Yeah, I'm hearing the problem is with AOL. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I use AOL because you can have five email addresses and up to two megs of web storage space for each address. | |
| If you say any more, it'll constitute an advertisement. | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, we need to start artbill.com. | |
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So anyway, I accessed your page art from my other server. | |
| It works just fine. | ||
| A little bit slow on some of the pages, you know, with images because I'm using 14.4. | ||
| But I would suggest that anybody goes to web crawler and pull up, oh, I typed in Captain Crunch for search, and I got, because I didn't quite catch the web page address or, you know, I couldn't hyperlink to it. | ||
| Well, a good search engine will find it with Captain Crunch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, found it easily. | |
| Yeah, okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And so. | |
| Yeah, I got myself listed in about 15 or 20 different databases. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so you're the Crunch Man. | |
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right on. | |
| Yeah, the Crunch Man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And so browse that page and everything. | |
| Pretty good stuff? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Excellent, excellent. | |
| I'm going to go back up there and read the Esquire article right now. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, listen, thank you for the call. | ||
| Captain, we're at the end of the hour. | ||
| I'll tell you, I've got one more hour to show. | ||
| If you don't have anything to do, I'll keep it. | ||
| What time is it now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's 3 o'clock almost. | |
| So we got one more hour to go? | ||
| Yeah, why not? | ||
| Can you do it? | ||
| You can do it, Captain. | ||
| Stay right there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
997WTN. | |
| Now back to Captain Crunch. | ||
| Captain, are you there? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I've got a fax here from, it says, good morning, Art. | ||
| I work as a telephone operator during the graveyard shift at the grand Well, a hotel in San Francisco. | ||
| I'm not going to give the name. | ||
| I can always tell, she says, when a PBX hacker is calling into, well, a hotel in San Francisco, I'm not going to give the name. | ||
| I can always tell, she says, when a PBX hacker is calling in to access a hotel line, most common way is they pose as a Pac-Bell or AT ⁇ T employee, and they say they're having a problem calling his or her office and will call our hotel and ask to be connected to an operator with a telephone company. | ||
| Oh, I see what they're doing now. | ||
| I see what they're doing. | ||
| So is that a new way to hack to get free calls? | ||
| Apparently so. | ||
| Oh, shh. | ||
| I've known for quite some time that ever since they did the 10XXX codes, those like 10288 for AT ⁇ T, you know, the dial before the number. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| A lot of the hotel PBXs were programmed to ignore those. | ||
| And it turns out that a lot of hackers would go to a hotel phone and do 10XXX and then dial out on the hotel phone. | ||
| It wouldn't know how to handle it, so it just put the call through. | ||
| So in other words, that guy whose hotel manager was going crazy probably was correct. | ||
| That's how they did it. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, that's just an example, although that sticker code that I gave probably wouldn't work. | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| Mr. Bell, please ask Mr. Draper if he has seen the movie Sneakers and what he thinks of it, especially the character Whistler. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, yeah, in fact, I've seen Sneakers probably four or five weeks before everybody else saw it. | ||
| I was invited by the movie publishing company to actually be at a special showing. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And it was quite interesting. | ||
| The writer who wrote the movie actually says he based some of the script of the movie on some papers that I had written in jail. | ||
| So a lot of the stuff in the movie was sort of based on me as a character, but not quite my story. | ||
| They took their hints from it. | ||
| Yeah, and the very next day, after the movie was shown or debuted, I got interviewed on This Morning America. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, talked about the movie. | ||
| Boy, you have to do it. | ||
| And I mentioned on this, I was actually men I mentioned to the the host of This Morning America, I said, you know, you should check out my story. | ||
| It's a lot more interesting. | ||
| So anybody out there who wants to do a good movie deal, I'm available. | ||
| You're available generally from the phone company to Hollywood. | ||
| Well, you're being heard in Hollywood right now on KBC in Los Angeles. | ||
| So maybe somebody will... | ||
| That would make a hell of a movie. | ||
| Oh, I would certainly cooperate. | ||
| Would you? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You'd be, what, the technical advisor? | ||
| Well, yeah, I've been the TA to WizKids. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow, I'm learning all these things about you. | ||
| So you've already really had sort of a Hollywood connection. | ||
| But in terms of, I mean, you know... | ||
| I mean, all these guys would do is send me the script, and I kind of like look it over and comment on it and send it back. | ||
| But, I mean, somebody ought to actually do your life. | ||
| I mean, I don't know that. | ||
| I can tell from reading. | ||
| I put it on my website. | ||
| I put it on my website in the hopes that somebody would go out there and look at my story and say, hey, this guy's interesting. | ||
| Contact me, you know. | ||
| All right. | ||
| My website's got kind of like the outline of my story. | ||
| I haven't gotten all my memoirs typed in yet. | ||
| It's a long process. | ||
| I've been working on my website now for a long time, and I'm constantly making changes and updates to it. | ||
| I'm always adding new and interesting stories to it, so it's like a never-ending thing. | ||
| Well, I think what's happened is we have crashed the AOL and CompuServe connections to the website. | ||
| That wouldn't surprise me in the least. | ||
| Yeah, so we'll get it fixed, folks. | ||
| Hang in there, and remember, when you go to my website, there's a jump over to the captains. | ||
| It's right at the very top of the page. | ||
| And if you want to go directly to my website, I'm sure the well can handle all the traffic you can give it. | ||
| Sure, it's www.well, w-l.com forward slash user forward slash crunch. | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| All right. | ||
| East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, Art Bill. | |
| Fantastic. | ||
| Hey, Captain. | ||
| How you doing? | ||
| Where are you, sir? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I remember reading about you when I was young. | |
| I'm from Youngstown, Ohio. | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, fantastic. | |
| Hey, my own philosophy with this new anti-terrorism bill is unlike that guy, that gangster boss and Brookfellows. | ||
| I won't even have a phone or computer in my house. | ||
| That's what I think about it. | ||
| What's your take on that? | ||
| Well, I don't think I'd go that far. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| It gives you a lot of peace and quiet, though. | ||
| Well, it does. | ||
| That's true, and if that's what you want, then, sir, that is certainly what you should... | ||
| It did? | ||
| Yeah, it's okay now. | ||
| I didn't hear what he said. | ||
| Can you repeat that, please? | ||
| No, he was just saying that as far as he was concerned, having no telephone, having no computer, having no electronics gives him peace of mind. | ||
| And I understand that. | ||
| Well, let me tell you something about that. | ||
| Just recently, I went to the rainbow gathering. | ||
| I drove to Missouri. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And I was without a computer and a phone for a week. | ||
| I loved every minute of it. | ||
| Really? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| But when I got back and checked my mail, I had probably close to a thousand mail messages waiting for me in a week. | ||
| Oh, good lord. | ||
| It took me about a week to go through it all. | ||
| Oh, I can process mail pretty fast and rapidly. | ||
| I usually answer and respond to just about anybody that sends mail to me. | ||
| Well, wait till you see your mail after this, Captain. | ||
| Yeah, crunch at well.com. | ||
| Crunch at well.com. | ||
| All right. | ||
| West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
| Hi, where are you, please? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, I'm in 209, Fresno. | |
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I have a couple of questions. | |
| One, a few years back, they had a crack on the master locks, and master lock, I mean, it's a common thing, everybody has one. | ||
| You know, the combination one? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, they rebuilt, they had to rebuild all their master locks because somebody figured out how to crack that. | |
| I learned how to manipulate those locks in jail. | ||
| Those are pretty cool. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I also was wondering about the DSS satellite chips that they're hacking with now. | |
| No, what's the DSS again? | ||
| No, I don't want to get into that. | ||
| That'll get us in trouble. | ||
| I know about that, but I don't want to talk about it. | ||
| It's satellite service, and the various encryption modes. | ||
| Oh, oh, well, the data encryption. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Call us toll-free at 1-800-618-8255. | ||
| No stuff. | ||
| I bleeped that out, Captain. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| You're talking about HBO. | ||
| Well, yeah, more or less. | ||
| That's right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| That's exactly. | ||
| And deciphering it. | ||
| Yeah, we don't want to talk about that. | ||
| No, I agree. | ||
| All right. | ||
| West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, Captain Crunch. | |
| Forget about the, this is 408, The Economist. | ||
| Forget about the commercial, or forget about the phone company. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What about the commercial applications in terms of bypass systems, i.e., ISDN? | |
| Okay. | ||
| That's a subject we haven't even touched. | ||
| Well, there is something I'd like to say about that. | ||
| And all those manufacturers of ISDN equipment out there or any other kind of network connection out there, we've got to come up with a standard connection, and it's got to have to be everywhere in order for it to really work right. | ||
| Boy, do I agree? | ||
| You're going to have to take your laptop, your portable, and you want to be able to plug it into a high-speed network from anywhere. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And that's what I want. | ||
| And I'm hoping that all you manufacturers out there get your act together. | ||
| Yes, I agree, Captain. | ||
| You see, the broadcast industry extensively uses ISDN and things like it. | ||
| And there are so many different lines and so many different protocols. | ||
| So many different standard connection jacks and protocols and this and that. | ||
| I know, I know. | ||
| You've got to come up with a standard, man. | ||
| I think that they're doing it on purpose. | ||
| So you've got to keep buying all this different peripheral crap that they sell. | ||
| I'm convinced of it. | ||
| Wildcard line, you're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| My name is Jerry, and I'm in Colorado here, and I had a couple of weird questions. | ||
| There was a point in time when there used to be a bunch of rumors going around that you could transmit like colds and viruses and stuff to other people by talking on the phone. | ||
| Now I'm in that's all a rumor and it's a bunch of oh I know it's not true. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But my curiosity is what how do rumors like that get national well because people because people are crazy. | ||
| I mean it's like you hear somebody sneeze on the phone even me when I hear somebody sneeze like a you know stand back a little bit even though it's on the phone. | ||
| That's I mean it's just dumb stuff sir. | ||
| There's nothing to it. | ||
| Obviously anybody who can catch a cold over a phone is a psycho case that's what I think. | ||
| West of the Rockies you're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, call him from Alaska, K-E-I country. | |
| Way up in Alaska, yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, you know, I think we're getting a little bit too carried away with this technology stuff. | |
| You know, I think we're getting a little too techno-dependent. | ||
| Actually, that's a really good question. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, I went to the gas station the other day, and from the time it took me to pay for my gas to get to the register, the register went down. | |
| Well, actually, it's not a register. | ||
| It's a computer screen. | ||
| And the lady said she couldn't take my money because she couldn't punch your finger on the computer screen there to... | ||
| I mean, you know, that's why I went to the rainbow gathering. | ||
| What was the rainbow gathering? | ||
| And caller, don't go away. | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| The rainbow gathering is a gathering of all kinds of different people, and they usually wind up gathering at a national park or in a wilderness. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They have drum circles dancing. | ||
| They have kitchens. | ||
| In other words, it's almost anti-technology. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, totally. | |
| Absolutely, totally. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, well, I'm curious because the highest tech device I had was a flashlight. | |
| All right, Color, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, you know, if the power grid shuts down and nobody can operate their computer equipment or whatever, are they going to look like my 12-year-old when I take his Nintendo away for a week, kind of dazed and useless? | |
| It's going to be a hell of a lot worse than that. | ||
| Now, I'll tell you something. | ||
| If there ever was a nuclear detonation of sufficient size above our country, two or three of them, the EMP would wipe out just about every computer system within... | ||
| Anything, transistors. | ||
| It would all go down and stay down. | ||
| And people have no idea the precarious edge we are perched on with technology. | ||
| It really is true, isn't it? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| You almost sound like a... | ||
| Are you? | ||
| Uh, no. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Have you... | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Have you, really, Captain? | ||
| Well, what do you mean? | ||
| What do you know what I mean? | ||
| Have you hugged a tree? | ||
| I mean, are you on the one hand, you are the quintessential earned myth of the hacker and the guy deeply into electronics. | ||
| But on the other hand, it sounds like you're beginning to say to yourself, God, maybe all this is wrong. | ||
| Well, I've been known to get out of technology for long periods of time. | ||
| Cast it off. | ||
| But you always come back. | ||
| Yeah, it's always nice to communicate with people, of course. | ||
| All right, well, here, communicate with this people. | ||
| West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
| Hi, this is Dr. Kak. | ||
| Doctor, whoever you are, you've got to talk up louder because we can't hear you. | ||
| Where are you calling from? | ||
|
unidentified
|
213. | |
| I guess that's BLA. | ||
| LA, yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Number one, you were talking about encryption methods. | |
| Yes, mm-hmm. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And reliability. | |
| As far as the hacker community is concerned, encryption does not exist because the encryption methods that are in the United States today have been hacked. | ||
| Well, in all probability, yeah, we talked about that, really. | ||
| In other words, the newer encryption methods, for all we know, there are little doors specifically that were designed with the help of intelligent people, that kind of thing, right? | ||
| Well, actually, when Phil Zurman released PGP, he released it in source code, which meant that anybody could go into PGP and verify that it was written correctly and not have any back doors. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So the source code of PGP is available. | |
| Yeah, but we're now talking about the later versions. | ||
| The later versions of PGP, the commercial versions of PGP, I would tend to not trust as much because usually commercial versions of software do not provide you with source code. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| They don't. | ||
| All right. | ||
| First time caller line. | ||
| You're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Hi. | ||
| This is Bill, and I'm calling from Eric Code 602. | ||
| I love doing that. | ||
| I have two questions. | ||
| One is the commercial devices that you can buy in stores that will tell you if your phone is bugged. | ||
| All right, that's one we covered. | ||
| Captain says they are useless. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, okay, good. | |
| And also, is there any way you can tell if your line is either being bugged or tape recorded without technology? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, actually, Kevin Nednick did it. | ||
| It's called social engineering. | ||
| Talking to the right kind of people. | ||
| Convincing the person at the other end of the telephone that you are who you are not who you are, but are somebody else. | ||
| In other words, social engineering. | ||
| You know, calling the switching office and say, hey, you've got a box on this phone, mine drew out the phone number and say, yeah, let me go check. | ||
| Oh, my gosh, really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If you read the book, Takedown, www.takedown.com, by the way, is the website. | ||
| Takedown? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Kai. | ||
| It's a Japanese name Kevin Hampson from UC, San Diego, wrote the book. | ||
| It was the victim of Kevin Metnick's antics and went on a rampage trying to hunt him down. | ||
| And that was how he got busted. | ||
| He cooperated very well with the FBI, and the FBI did a very good job of tracking him down. | ||
| So in other words, you can actually convince Netnick was able to actually contact, according to the book anyway, Netnik was actually able to contact the phone company switching office and actually got a tap removed from his line and actually put it on the FBI's line. | ||
| Does that answer your question, Claire? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you so much. | |
| Oh, geez. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| So off his line, and that must have been very, very embarrassing for the FBI when they realized what happened. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| All right, Captain, listen, once again, we are here at the bottom of the era, so relax. | ||
| We've only got another hour. | ||
| Time and a half hour to go. | ||
| That's right, and then you're done, and this will be a classic all-time show. | ||
| Again, anybody out there in Hollywood wanting to do a movie on this man's life, and there's a lot more that's been said. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You hear that, uh, yeah? | |
| Lots to read there. | ||
| Captain Crunch, John Draper is my guest. | ||
| You're listening to the CBC Radio Network. | ||
|
unidentified
|
CBC Radio Network. | |
| Back down to Captain Crunch. | ||
| Captain, where did the expression freaking come from? | ||
| Um, okay. | ||
| Uh, when I was originally contacted by the blind kids, who turned me on to freaking altogether, they called themselves phone freaks. | ||
| They were just sort of like blind kids. | ||
| Now, these are kids, you say blind kids, you mean without sight. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, I guess a telephone to a blind person is their connection to the world. | ||
| In the 60s, a freak is also sometimes a person with long hair or an outsider or a person outside the establishment. | ||
| Somebody different. | ||
| Somebody different, yeah, yeah, you got it. | ||
| And so that term could have been derived from that as well. | ||
| So it's sort of like could be this or could be that, you know. | ||
| No, I've got it. | ||
| No, that's a, I've always wanted to know about that, and you just told me, thank you. | ||
| First time caller line, you're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi. | |
| I'm calling because I'm one of those phone freaks from back in the 60s. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| Where are you now? | ||
| Can you tell us? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I'm in Denver, Colorado. | |
| Denver, all right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I used to whistle the 2600 cycle tone, and I used to listen to the other tones, and then go home and build oscillators that would duplicate them. | |
| Yep. | ||
| And unfortunately, or fortunately, whichever way you want to look at it, I never got tied up with a group of people that knew what they were doing with all this stuff. | ||
| And I accidentally got into a few places and made a couple of phone calls and also had worked a little bit with the boxes that would trip the ringer before the billing cycle knew that that happened, that kind of thing. | ||
| But the main question that I had today is, do you know enough to talk a little bit about how they work the billing cycles these days and the time increments that they bill you for and phone companies? | ||
| That is a fair question. | ||
| I don't want to get into any freaking modern details because we'll get into freaking trouble. | ||
| So Captain, the phone companies do bill differently, don't they? | ||
| In other words, I see a lot of advertisements. | ||
| Some guys bill you for seconds, minutes rounded off to the nearest minute, that kind of thing. | ||
| Well, okay, Pac-Bell and AT ⁇ T bill you for the first minute, whether or not you talk for the first minute. | ||
| They also, if you're using a calling card, they also will bill you, I believe, 80 cents for every call. | ||
| That's AT ⁇ T's rates. | ||
| At least that's what the AT ⁇ T's rates were the last time I checked. | ||
| Now they may have changed. | ||
| Don't quote me on this, please. | ||
| Pac-Bell also, I believe, charges a smaller surcharge fee, but they're also charged by the minute. | ||
| You pay for the first minute whether you use it or not. | ||
| Now that's a very good tactic on the part of the phone companies because they're going to make a lot of money doing that because a lot of times calls are very short. | ||
| Sometimes most of the calls I make, for instance, are always less than 30 seconds. | ||
| I go up on my voicemail, check to see if I have any messages. | ||
| I don't, I hang up. | ||
| I'm on and off for six seconds. | ||
| Why should I have to pay for a minute? | ||
| Well, now, there is one good thing, though, about the phone companies breaking up. | ||
| In other words, there is all this advertising now, and they're all trashing each other, saying, so-and-so bills you for a minute, whether you use it or not, we don't. | ||
| And so it's like this company. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| There's definitely a good side of the breakup. | ||
| There are a lot of long-distance companies now. | ||
| In fact, if you get onto my website, there is a long-distance company that I'm helping promote as well. | ||
| I won't go into details. | ||
| You just have to go up there and look at it yourself. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Listen, this is probably the longest phone call you've had. | ||
| It's been a long time. | ||
| Yeah, my ear hurts. | ||
| I've been on here now for how long? | ||
| Have you had guests on this long? | ||
| Oh, yeah, sure, sure. | ||
| Yeah, listen, this is not like other talk shows. | ||
| And I'll just leave it there. | ||
| It's not like other talk shows. | ||
| East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Oklahoma City here. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
About 30 years ago, I had a problem with the phone company, with the telephone cough that took place on an old rotary phone. | |
| And I had called my wife, and the phone, they never picked it up off the cradle, but the line opened up. | ||
| And I was able to hear everything that was going on inside the house. | ||
| And I listened long enough until I finally, you know, I hung up and called back and could tell them what was being said. | ||
| And my question Is about the phone company's ability, say, just to eavesdrop what. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah, we covered that one already. | ||
| Captain, it is not possible, is it? | ||
| Well, I hope. | ||
| That depends on whether that phone you're using has been modified. | ||
| Yeah, if they've modified the phone, sir, he says such a thing is possible. | ||
| So you would want to check and see if that if that maybe you want to hire an expert and have somebody come in and look at it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, this was like 30 years ago on an old rotary phone. | |
| It was just kind of a crude deal, but it's always kind of bothered me that that ability could exist. | ||
| Well, I guess it can. | ||
| I thank you for the call. | ||
| And maybe somebody jostled it at the wrong time or something. | ||
| Who knows what might have happened? | ||
| Well, I don't want to think that could be possible. | ||
| Nobody does. | ||
| West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, I just have a few questions. | |
| All right, where are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm in, well, 805, SID 6.7. | |
| But I'm small time, so you probably wouldn't even recognize me. | ||
| I just have a few questions. | ||
| Have you ever heard of the Mov box? | ||
| The what box? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mov? | |
| Stella. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Um, M-A-U-V-E. | |
| Pearl, Mov box. | ||
| No, I haven't. | ||
| What is it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Um, well, it basically says here that it's it's kind of like a tap without leaving leaving fingerprints. | |
| It, um, it's kind of like when you put soap in water and it repels things. | ||
| Oh. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It, let's see. | |
| Um, it lets your phone transmit to another phone, basically. | ||
| And it accomplishes a tap. | ||
| That's all it says. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| What would that be, Captain? | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Uh, okay. | ||
| Uh good enough. | ||
| Wildcard line, you're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
| Hello. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
| Uh, this is Mr. White in area code 602. | ||
| And uh, I basically want to give you a quick analogy and then I'll ask you a question. | ||
| And uh, this can okay, I'm basically a chess player, and sometimes I'll look over the board and analyze a game I played, and I look at the uh position, and a lot of times I discover that there were opportunities for my opponent that I didn't realize neither did they. | ||
| That's how I ended up winning the game. | ||
| So my basic point is, is that everything has its weaknesses, and whatever man creates can be deciphered. | ||
| So my question to you, when are we going to learn this, and when are we going to understand this, especially considering computers and security? | ||
| All right, it's a good question. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, well, computers are complicated things. | |
| Software is a complicated thing. | ||
| There are many, many, many ways of writing a program. | ||
| And a program can be written one way and can be written a totally different way and have it totally different and have yet the same behavior, but maybe inside have it be totally different. | ||
| Computers are very complicated things. | ||
| No matter what we do, our privacy is going to continue to be eroded, isn't it? | ||
| Yeah, and there's going to be some thing inside that computer, or I mean some program inside that computer that may not behave right. | ||
| Maybe some fluke, maybe some glitch caused that program to branch off into somewhere else. | ||
| It happens, yes. | ||
| So it's really hard to have something totally secure. | ||
| Well, and it's going to get increasingly hard as well. | ||
| As the complexity of machines increase, which that seems to be the trend, it's going to get worse. | ||
| Chaos theory eventually. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right, Wildcard Line, you're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| Hello. | ||
| Where are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm another one of 602, but right now, I'm a private citizen. | |
| Two years. | ||
| We've been trying to find out who was on my line, and I just found out this week, and I wondered if you'd like to know how they did it. | ||
| I'd like to know how you found out, yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, remember you were saying sometimes when you pick up the phone, someone's on it? | |
| Yep. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, in 94, I've been fighting this since 93, US West came out, did a complete overhaul of my telephone system. | |
| This is when my trouble started. | ||
| Okay, but we don't have time for the whole thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So when I was on the phone, the man, the new owner, was irate. | |
| What are you doing on my line? | ||
| So we were. | ||
| You know what happened? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, tell me. | |
| There's a junction box near every home, and all of the wires of every phone line goes inside the junction box. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They said there's 100 fiber optics in each one. | |
| Oh, boy, you really got hacked. | ||
| They hacked fiber optics. | ||
| Well, and yet fiber optics turns into analog. | ||
| Eventually it's going to turn into analog, and at that point when it turns into analog is where it's going to get switched around. | ||
| So she had somebody actually... | ||
| Boy. | ||
| Now that is one case. | ||
| That's like an extension, really. | ||
| I was about to say, that's one case where those little devices that are supposed to show you whether it's tapped or not should have shown her. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's correct. | |
| Yeah, that would definitely indicate that. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| First time caller line, you're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
| Hi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, I have a question. | |
| I'm Jeff calling from the Seattle area. | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
206? | |
| 206, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm curious, Captain, if hackers can use the phone company's billing system to bill things onto my phone and even change the numbers where the call originated, where it went to. | |
| Yeah, that's it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's been happening to me, I believe. | |
| That's possible. | ||
| It can be done. | ||
| Yeah, they can. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The phone company won't tell me that can be done. | |
| I would be very surprised if they would admit that that can be done. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, they get very vague and they say, well, we'll get back to you and we try to trace this call and we haven't gotten a call back. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it's totally possible. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, that's what I suspect. | |
| Thank you very much. | ||
| What about this new form that's really insidious of people out there with scanners and decoders grabbing people's cellular phone numbers and going crazy with that? | ||
| Cloning, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, that is a problem. | |
| There's all kinds of ways that people are trying to prevent that, like having a digital signature or an analog signature of your radio. | ||
| The captain has not fooled with cloning, of course. | ||
| All right, Captain, don't see it. | ||
| First-time callers, area 702-727-1222. | ||
| No, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. | ||
| The one thing you're not allowed to do is give your last name on the air, sir. | ||
| No, I didn't give my last name, Art. | ||
| Oh, you didn't? | ||
| I thought you did. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, Harrison. | |
| Harrison, all right, and you're where? | ||
|
unidentified
|
309. | |
| Where is it? | ||
| ATAZ country, Art? | ||
| Illinois. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You got it. | |
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, just for the record, Art, your website drops cookies. | |
| It does not. | ||
| Well, the hell it does. | ||
| No, it doesn't. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You ask Keith. | |
| I got a question for you. | ||
| I did ask Keith, and it was the browser that was falsely detecting cookies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I don't know, Art. | |
| I'm telling you. | ||
| Can I ask Captain a question? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Captain, would you think that somebody that claims to be on the cutting edge of the internet and computers would be on AOL? | |
| Oh, now, now, see, don't. | ||
| I decline to answer that in respect for AOL and making them look like cruel. | ||
| Yeah, don't. | ||
| Obviously, his guys. | ||
| Let me tell you, there are Internet snobs, and AOL is an IOP. | ||
| I don't care what anybody says. | ||
| I have an AOL account. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| It's easy, and it brings a lot of people into the net who otherwise wouldn't. | ||
| Beginners who going through some sort of other provider would be totally lost. | ||
| So it's got its uses. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's right. | |
| Yeah, that's true. | ||
| But I personally, of course, would not use it. | ||
| Well, once you've passed a certain level, I understand some people move on. | ||
| But it's still bringing people into the net that otherwise wouldn't be there. | ||
| So I like it. | ||
| East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning, Art 941 area coast, Sarasota, Florida. | |
| Wow. | ||
| All right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So how you doing? | |
| Fine. | ||
| My neighbor told me that he had heard that you can actually view someone sitting there watching TV if your TV set is on, that that technology is possible. | ||
| Has Captain Crunch heard of that? | ||
| No, I've not heard of that, and I don't think it's possible. | ||
| I'll tell you what is possible, though. | ||
| Thank you, Caller. | ||
| We have now video. | ||
| I've got a camera sitting right here in front of me, Captain. | ||
| And we've got a software program. | ||
| Yeah, CU, CME. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| No, it's a different version running up like 17 frames per second of moving video in color with sound. | ||
| And I've got it here now. | ||
| Yeah, well, what bandwidth? | ||
| Standard 288 modem. | ||
| 288 modem with 16 frames? | ||
| 17. | ||
| 17 frames? | ||
| 16 frames? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| I've got it. | ||
| It's working. | ||
| I've got it here now. | ||
| That's pretty good. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| How big is the picture? | ||
| It's about the size of a postage scan? | ||
| No, sir. | ||
| It's about a third of your screen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Huh? | |
| A third of the screen isn't it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| That's new technology. | ||
| West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
| Hello. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Art isn't recognized in 909. | |
| Where is that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's in Southern California. | |
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You were the news. | |
| What I got a problem is, I've got a phone bill for $185. | ||
| And you didn't make the calls? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, these are correct calls to me. | |
| My answer machine. | ||
| Everybody picked it up and everything. | ||
| We called the company in Dallas, Texas, which is in Kansas City, and they said we have to pay the bill. | ||
| All right, now listen to what he says. | ||
| I think he's got to know. | ||
| Let me say that. | ||
| Let me say something here now. | ||
| A lot of the new equipment that the phone company is installing allow you to be able to have speech detection on collect calls. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| Well, when you make a collect call now on some phones, especially some of the phones that are in the prisons, so only allow you to make collect calls, it's possible to fool those machines and to get it to accept your call. | ||
| Oh my gosh. | ||
| You mean to say it's, in other words, it connects to an answering machine? | ||
| Or whatever. | ||
| And recognizes a voice? | ||
| Yeah, because when you, it'll come on with a recorded announcement saying we have a correct call from, and then the name of the person gets announced, you know, because it records the name of the person. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Do you accept the call? | ||
| Okay, and the person at the other end can sometimes persuade the machine at this end, you know, the call end to say yes. | ||
| So how does he approach the phone company and get rid of this bill? | ||
| That can sometimes be hard to convince them of a flaw in their system. | ||
| And he's going to have a hard time trying to convince them of that. | ||
| That is a problem. | ||
| Dealing with phone companies is a little like dealing with a government, isn't it? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I know. | ||
| You better than anybody. | ||
| One more, I guess. | ||
| West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Captain Crunch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello. | |
| How you doing, Mr. Bill? | ||
| Okay, where are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Portland, Oregon. | |
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
|
K-E-X. | |
| Of course. | ||
| Mighty, mighty, mighty. | ||
| Anyways, Captain Crunch, I have a question for you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| How do you feel about the legislation pending about computer or internet information flow? | ||
| Information flow? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| In other words, the internet, you remember they were threatening to, in effect, censor the internet. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I'm kind of glad the bill got shut, you know, got shot down. | ||
| I mean, that's, I mean, the internet is, I mean, how can you police it? | ||
| I mean, come on. | ||
| You can't. | ||
| You can't. | ||
| And it would have been fun to watch them try to have the bill passed. | ||
| I mean, it's just really a tangled... | ||
| I think that with the software programs out there now that prevent children from getting access to certain webpages is the way to go to prevent that. | ||
| It's really the only way. | ||
| It's called personal responsibility. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And it should start in the home and with the family and nowhere else. | ||
| Well, that's right. | ||
| Listen, I have a question for you, Art. | ||
| All right. | ||
| What station in the Bay Area carries your program? | ||
| KSFO in San Francisco. | ||
| Okay, 560. | ||
| Yeah, 560 in San Francisco, sure. | ||
| Listen, give out, now, anybody going to my website, whenever it can be accessed again, and it can really now, all through, except AOL, I guess. | ||
| Mine is www.artbell.com. | ||
| And the captain's is, give it to him, Captain. | ||
| www.well.com forward slash user forward slash crunch. | ||
| And your email address? | ||
| Crunch at well.com. | ||
| Crunch at well.com. | ||
| All right, those are, certainly your web address is a little long. | ||
| As soon as, we'll leave up that link for some number of days, if not weeks. | ||
| So www.artbell.com, and you can jump right over to the captain's location. | ||
| Yeah, I'm in all the databases. | ||
| Yahoo knows about me, too. | ||
| Just type in Captain Crunt into your favorite search engine. | ||
| You'll find me. | ||
| Hey, Captain, do me a favor. | ||
| Captain? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Say goodnight, America. | ||
| Good night, America. |
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