The Unsorted BBS Collection/thegreatunsorted.tar/thegreatunsorted/texts/boxes/sotlbb5.txt

Text File | 1991-02-05 | 18KB | 284 lines

Secrets of The Little Blue Box Pt.5

THE LEGENDARY MARK BERNAY TURNS OUT TO BE "THE MIDNIGHT SKULKER"

Mark Bernay.  I had come across that name before.  It was on Gilbertson's
selectlist of phone phreaks.  The California phone phreaks had spoken of a
mysterious Mark Bernay as perhaps the first and oldest phone phreak on the
West Coast.  An d in fact almost every phone phreak in th e West can trace
his origins either directly to Mark Bernay of to a discipl e of Mark Bernay.

     It seems that five years ago this Mark Bernay (a pseudonym he chose for
himself) began traveling up and down the West Coast pasting tiny stickers in
phone booths all along his way.  The stickers read something like "Want to
hear an interesting tape recording?  Call these numbers."  The numbers that
followed were toll-free loop-around pairs.  When  one of the curious called
one of the numbers he would hear a tape recording  pre-hooked into the loop
by Bernay which explained the use of loop-around pairs,  gave the numbers of
several more, and ended by telling the caller, "At six o' clock tonight this
recording will stop and you and your friends can try it out .  Have fun."

     "I was disappointed by the response at first," Bernay told me, when I
finally reached him at one of his many  numbers and he had dispensed with the
usual "I never do anything illegal" for malities with with which experienced
phone phreaks open most conversations.   "I went all over the coast with
these stickers not only on pay phones, but I'd throw them in front of high
schools in the middle of the night, I'd leave them  unobtrusively in candy
stores, hardly anyone bothered to try it out.  I would  listen in for hours
and hours after six o'clock and no one came on.  I couldn't  figure out why
people wouldn't be interested.  Finally these two girls in  Oregon tried it
out and told all their friends and suddenly it began to spread ."

     Before his Johnny Appleseed trip Bernay had already gathered a sizable
group of early pre-blue-box phone phrea ks together on loop-arounds in Los
Angeles.  Bernay does not claim credit  for the original discovery of loop-
around numbers.  He attributes the disc overy to an eighteen-year-old reform-
school kid in Long Beach whose name he  forgets and who, he says, "just
disappeared one day."  When Bernay hims elf discovered loop-arounds
independentl y from clues in his readings in old issue s of the Automatic
Electric Technical Journal, he found dozens of the reform-school kid's
friends already using them. However, it was one of Bernay's discipl es in
Seattle that introduced phone phreaking to blind kids.  The Seattle k id who
learned about loops through Bernay's recording told a blind friend,  the
blind kid taught the secret to his friends at a winter camp for blind kids
in Los Angeles.  When the camp session was over these kids took the secret
bac k to towns all over the West.  This is how the original blind kids became
phon e phreaks.  For them, for most phone phreaks in gneral, it was the
discovery  of the possibilities of loop-arounds which led them on to far more
serious a nd sophisticated phone-phreak methods, and which gave them a medium
for sharin g their discoveries.

     A year later a blind kid who moved back east brought the technique to
a blind kids' summer camp in Vermont, whi ch spread it along the East Coast.
All from a Mark Bernay sticker.

     Bernay, who is nearly thirty years old now, got his start when he was
fifteen and his family moved into an L. A. suburb serviced by General
Telephone and Electronics equipment.  he bacame fascinated with the
differences between Bell and G.T.&E. equipment.  He learned  he could make
interesting things happen by carefully timed clicks with the dise ngage
button.  He learned to interpret subtle differences in the array of clic ks,
whirrs and kachinks he could hear on his lines.  He learned the could shift
himself around the switching relays of the L.A. area code in a
not-too-predica table fashion by interspersing his own hook-switch clicks
with the clicks with in the line.  (Independent phone companies--there are
nineteen hundred o f them still left, most of them tiny island principalities
in Ma Bell's vast  empire--have always been favorites with phone phreaks,
first as learning tools,  then as Archimedes platforms from which to
manipulate the huge Bell system.  A  phone phreak in Bell territory will ofte
n M-F himself into an independent's switc hhing system, with switching
idiosyncrasies which can give him marve lous leverage over the Bell System.

     "I have a real affection for Automatic Electric equipment," Berany told
me . "There are a lot of things you can play  with.  Things break down in
interesting ways."

     Shortly after Bernay graduated fro m college (with a double major in
chemistry and philosophy), he graduated  from phreaking around with G.T.&E.
to the Bell System itself, and made his le gendary sticker-pasting journey
north along the coast, settling finally in No rthwest Pacific Bell territory.
He discovered that if Bell does not break  down as interestingly as G.T.&E.,
it nevertheless offers a lot of "things to  play with."

     Bernay learned to play with blue boxes.  He established his own personal
switchboard and phone-phreak research l aboratory complex.  he continued his
phone-phreak evangelism with ongoing st icker campaigns.  He set up two
recordin g numbers, one with instructions for begi nning phone phreaks, the
other with latest news and technical developments  (along with some advanced
instruction) gathered from sources all over the coun try.

     These days, Bernay told me, he had gone beyond phone-phreaking itself.
"Lately, I've been enjoying playing with computers more than playing with
phones.  My personal thing in computers is just like with phones, I
guess--the kick is in finding out how to beat the  system, how to get at
things I'm not supposed to know about, how to do thing s with the system that
I'm not supposed to be able to do."

     As a matter of fact, Bernay told me, he had just been fired from his
compuer-programming job for doing things he was not supposed to be able to
do.He had been working with a huge time-sharing computer owned by a large
corporation but shared by many others.  Access to the computer was limited
to those programmers and corporations that  had been assigned certain
passwords. And each password restricted its user t o access to only the one
section of the computer cordoned off from it own infor mation storager.  The
password system prevented companies and individuals fro m stealing each
other's information.

     "I figured out how to write a program that would let me read everyone
else's password," Berany reports.  "I began playing around with passwords. I began letting people who used the computer know, in subtle ways, that I
knew their passwords.  I began dropping notes on to the computer supervisors
with hints that I knew what I know.  I signed them 'The Midnight Skulker.'
I kept getting cleverer and cleverer with my messages and devising ways of
showing the m what I could do.  I'm sure they couldn't imagine I could do
the things I was showing them.  But they never responded to me.  Every once
in a while they'd change the passwords, but I found out how to discover what
the new ones were, and I let them know.  but they never responded directly
to The Midnight Skulker . I even finally designed a program which they could
use to prevent my program from finding out what it did.  In effect I told
them how to wipe me out, The Midnight Skulker.  It was a very clever
program.  I started leaving clues about myself.  I wanted them to try and use
i t and then try to come up with something to get around that and reappear
again.   But they wouldn't play.  I wanted to get caught.  I mean I didn't
want to get ca ught personally, but I wanted them to notice me and admit that
they noticed m e.  I wanted them to attempt to respond, maybe in some
interesting way."

     Finally the computer managers became concerned enough about the threat
of information-stealing to respond.  However, instead of using The Midnight
Skulker's own elegant self-destruct program, they called in their security
personnel, interrogated everyone, found an informer to identify Bernay as
The Midnight Skulker, and fired him.

     "At first the security people advised the comapany to hire me full-time
to search out other flaws and discover other computer freaks.  I might have
liked that.  But I probably would have turned into a double double agent
rather than the double agent they wanted.  I might have resurrected The
Midnight Skulker an d tried to catch myself.  Who knows?  Any way, the
higher-ups turned the whole ide a down."

YOU CAN TAP THE F.B.I.'s CRIME CONTROL COMPUTER IN THE COMFORT OF YOUR OWN
HOME ,
                                    PERHAPS

Computer freaking may be the wave of the future.  It suits the phone-phreak
sensibility perfectly.  Gilbertson, the blue-box inventor and a lifelong
phone phreak, has also gone on from phone-phreaking to computer-freaking.
Before he got into the blue-box business Gilberts on, who is a highly skilled
programmer, devised programs for international curr ency arbitrage.

     But he began playing with computers in earnest when he learned he could
us e his blue box in tandem with the computer terminal installed in his
apartment by the instrumentation firm he worked for.  The print-out terminal
and keyboard wa s equipped with acoustical coupling, so t hat by coupling his
little ivory Princes s phone to the terminal and them coupling  his blue box
on that, he could M-F his way into other computers with complete  anonymity,
and without charge; program and re-program them at will; feed them  false or
misleading information; tap and steal from them.  He explained to me th at
he taps computers by busying out all the lines, them going into a verificati
on trunk, listening into the passwords and instrutions one of the time
sharers  uses, and them M-F-ing in and imitating them.  He believes it would
not be impo ssible to creep into the F.B.I.'s crime control computer through
a local police  computer terminal and phreak around with the F.B.I.'s memorybanks.  He cla ims he has succeded in re-programming a certain huge
institutional computer in  such a way that it has cordoned off an entire
section of its circuitry for his  personal use, and at the same time conceals
the arrangement from anyone el se's notice.  I have been unable to verify
this claim.

     Like Captain Crunch, like Alexander Graham Bell (pseudonym of a
disgruntled-looking East Coast engineer who claims to have invented the black
box and now sells black and blue boxes to gamblers and radical heavies), like
most phone phreaks, Gilbertson began his career trying to rip off pay phones
as a teen-ager.  Figure them out, then rip them off.  Getting his dime back
from the pay phone is the phone phreak's first thrilling rite of passage.
After learning the usual eighteen different ways of getting his dime back,
Gilbertson learned how to make master keys to coin-phone cash boxes, and get
everyone else's dimes back.  He stole some phone-company equipment and put
together his own home switchboard with it.  He learned to make simple
"bread-box" device, of the kind used by bookies in the Thirties (bookie gives
a number to his betting clients; the phone with that number is installed in
some widow lady's apartment , but it is rigged to ring in the bookie's shop
across town, cops trace big betting number and find nothing but the widow.)

     Not long after that afternoon in 1968 when, deep in the stacks of an
engineering library, he came across a technical journal with the phone tone
frequencies and rushed off to make his first blue box, not so long after that
Gilbertson abandoned a very promising career in physical chemistry and began
selling blue boxes for $1,500 apiece.

     "I had to leave physical chemisty.  I just ran out of interesting things
t o learn," he told me one evening.  We had been talking in the apartment of
the ma n who served as the link between Gilberts on and the syndicate in
arranging the bi g $300,000 blue-box deal which fell throu gh because of
legal trouble.  There has been some smoking.

     "No more interesting things to learn," he continues.  "Physical
chemistry turns out to be a sick subject when you  take it to its highest
level.  I don't know.  I don't think I could expalin to  you how it's sick..
You have to be there.  But you get, I don't know, a fa lse feeling of
omnipotence.  I suppose it's like phone-phreaking in that way.   This huge
thing is there.  This whole system.  And there are holes in it and  you slip
into them like Alice and you're pretending you're doing something you'r e
actually not, or at least it's no longer you that's doing what you though t
you were doing.  It's all Lewis Carroll.  Physical chemistry and phone-
phreaking.  That's why you have these phone-phreak pseudonyms like The Cheshi
re Cat, The Red King, and The Snark.  Bu t there's somehthing about phone
phreakin g that you don't find in physical chemistry."  He looks up at me:

     "Did you ever steal anything?"

     Well, yes, I--

     "Then you know!  You know the rush you get.  It's not just knowledge,
like physical chemistry.  It's forbidden knowledge.  You know.  You can learn
about anything under the sun and be bored to death with it.  But the idea
that it's illegal.  Look:  you can be small and mobile and smart and you'reripping off somebody large and powerful and very da ngerous."

     People like Gilbertson and Alexander Graham Bell are always talking
about ripping off the phone company and screwing Ma Bell.  But if they were
shown a single button and told that by pushing  it they could turn the entire
circuitry of A.T.&T. into molten puddles, they pr obably wouldn't push it.
The disgruntle d inventor phone phreak needs the phone s ystem the way the
lapsed Catholic needs the Church, the way Satan needs a God,  the way The
Midnight Skulker needed, mor e than anything else, response.

     Later that evening Gilbertson finished telling me how delighted he was
at the flood of blue boxes spreading throu ghout the country, how delighted
he was to know that "this time they're really  screwed."  He suddenly shifted
gears.
     "Of course, I do have this love/hate thing about Ma Bell.  In a way I
almost like the phone company.  I guess I'd be very sad if they were to go
away or if their services were to disintegrate.  In a way it's just that
after havin g been so good they turn out to have thes e things wrong with
them.  It's those flaws that allow me to get in and mess  with them, but I
don't know.  There's
something about it that gets to you and  makes you want to get to it, you
know."

     I ask him what happens when he runs out of interesting, forbidden things
t o learn about the phone system.

     "I don't know, maybe I'd go to work for them for a while."

     In security even?

     "I'd do it, sure.  I just as soon play--I'd just as soon work on either
side."

     Even figuring out how to trap phone phreaks?  I said, recalling Mark
Bernay's game.

     "Yes, that might be interesting.  Yes, I could figure out how to outwit
th e phone phreaks.  Of course if I got too  good at it, it might become
boring again . Then I'd have to hope the phone phreaks  got much better and
outsmarted me for a while.  That would move the quality of the game up one
level.  I might even have to help them out, you know,  'Well  kids, I
wouldn't want this to get aroun d but did you ever think of--?' I could keep
it going at higher and higher levels forever."

     The dealer speaks up for the first time.  He has been staring at the
soft blinking patterns of lights and colors  on the translucent tiled wall
facing him . (Actually there are no patterns:  the color and illumination of
every tile is determined by a computerized random-num ber generator designed
by Gilbertson which insures that there can be no mean ing to any sequence of
events in those tiles.)

     "Those are nice games you're talking about,"  says the dealer to his
friend.  "But I wouldn't mind seeing them screwed.  A telephone isn't private
anymore.  You can't say anything you really want to say on a telephone oryou have to go through that paranoid bulls---.  'Is it cool to talk on the
phone?'  I mean, even if it is cool, if you have to ask 'Is it cool,' Then
it isn't cool. You know.  Like those blind kids, people are going to start
putting together their own private telephone companies i f they want to
really talk.  And you kno w what else.  You don't hear silences on  the phone
anymore.  They've got this time-sharing thing on long-distance lin es where
you make a pause and they snip out that piece of time and use it to ca rry
part of somebody else's converstation.  Instead of a pause, whe re somebody's
maybe breathing or sighing , you get this blank hole and you only st art
hearing again when someone says a word and even the beginning of the word
is clipped off.  Silences don't count-- you're paying for them, but they take
t hem away from you.  It's not cool to tal k and you can't hear someone when
they do n't talk.  What the hell good is the phone?  I wouldn't mind seeing
them tot ally screwed."

[Continued in part VI]