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out of there. For some reason I had to call Kansas City, but that’s all.’

Joe’s intuition was correct: he was indeed being monitored. Shortly after that interview agents from the phone company’s security department accompanied by local police broke into his room and confiscated every bit of telecommunications equipment. Joe was arrested and spent the night in jail.

The charges against Joe were eventually reduced from possession of a blue box and theft of service to malicious mischief. His jail sentence was suspended. But in return he had to promise never to phreak again – and to make sure he kept his promise the local phone company refused to restore his telephone line.²

One of Joe’s friends when he was a phreaker was a man called John Draper, better known as Captain Crunch. Like Joe, Draper was interested in the system: he liked to play on it, to chart the links and connections between phone switching offices, overseas lines and satellites. His alias came from the Quaker Oats breakfast cereal ‘Cap’n Crunch’ which once, in the late 1960s, had included a tiny plastic whistle in each box as a children’s toy. Unknown to the company, it could be used to phreak calls.

The potential of the little whistle was said to have been discovered by accident. The toy was tuned to a high A note that closely reproduced the 2600-cycle tone used by Bell in its long-distance lines. Kids demonstrating their new toy over the phone to granny in another city would sometimes find that the phone went dead. Bell spent a perplexing few weeks looking for the source of the faults.

Draper first became involved with phreaking in 1969, when he was aged twenty-six and living in San José. He received what he later described as a ‘very strange call’ from a man who introduced himself as Denny and who wanted to show him something to do with musical notes and phones. Intrigued, Draper visited Denny, who demonstrated that tones played on a Hammond organ could be recorded and sent down the line to produce a free long-distance call. The problem was that a recording had to be made for each number required. What was needed was an electronic device that could com-