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real, die-hard phone phreaks – but it began to grow in the late 1960s as the techniques became more widely known. Part of the impetus for the growth was the increased access to conference lines, which allowed skills and lore to be more widely disseminated in what became in effect open universities for phreakers.

Conference lines – or conference bridges – are simply special switches that allow several callers to participate in a conversation at the same time. The service, in those days, was generally promoted to businesses, but bridges were also used by the telephone company for testing and training. For instance, the 1121 conference lines were used to train Bell operators: they could dial the number to hear a recording of calls being made from a pay phone, including the pings of the coins as they dropped, so they could become familiar with the system. If two phreakers rang any one of the 1121 training numbers they could converse, though the constant pinging as the coins dropped on the recording was distracting.

Far better were lines like 2111, the internal company code for Telex testing. For six months in the late 1960s phreakers congregated on a disused 2111 test line located somewhere in a telephone office in Vancouver. It became a sort of clubhouse, attracting both neophyte and experienced MF-ers in a continuing conference call. To participate, phreakers needed only to MF their way through a 1–800 number on to the Vancouver exchange and then punch out 2111. The clubhouse may have existed only in the ether around a test number in a switching office somewhere in Canada, but it was a meeting place none the less.

Joe Engressia’s life in Memphis revolved around phreaker conference lines, but when Rosenbaum talked to him he was getting worried about being discovered. “I want to work for Ma Bell. I don’t hate Ma Bell the way some phone freaks do. I don’t want to screw Ma Bell. With me it’s the pleasure of pure knowledge. There’s something beautiful about the system when you know it intimately the way I do. But I don’t know how much they know about me here. I have a very intuitive feel for the condition of the line I’m on, and I think they’re monitoring me off and on lately, but I haven’t been doing much illegal. Once I took an acid trip and was having these auditory hallucinations . . . and all of a sudden I had to phone phreak