CAPTAIN CRUNCH DEMONSTRATES HIS FAMOUS UNIT

There is an underground telephone network in this country. Gilbertson discovered it the very day news of his activities hit the papers. That evening his phone began ringing. Phone phreaks from Seattle, from Florida, from New York, from San Jose, and from Los Angeles began calling him and telling him about the phone-phreak network. He’d get a call from a phone phreak who’d say nothing but, “Hang up and call this number.”

When he dialed the number he’d find himself tied into a conference of a dozen phone phreaks arranged through a quirky switching station in British Columbia. They identified themselves as phone phreaks, they demonstrated their homemade blue boxes which they called “M-F-ers” (for “multi-frequency,” among other things) for him, they talked shop about phone-phreak devices. They let him in on their secrets on the theory that if the phone company was after him he must be trustworthy. And, Gilbertson recalls, they stunned him with their technical sophistication.

I ask him how to get in touch with the phone-phreak network. He digs around through a file of old schematics and comes up with about a dozen numbers in three widely separated area codes.

“Those are the centers,” he tells me. Alongside some of the numbers he writes in first names or nicknames: names like Captain Crunch, Dr. No, Frank Carson (also a code word for free call), Marty Freeman (code word for M-F device), Peter Perpendicular Pimple, Alefnull, and The Cheshire Cat. He makes checks alongside the names of those among these top twelve who are blind. There are five checks.

I ask him who this Captain Crunch person is.

“Oh. The Captain. He’s probably the most legendary phone phreak. He calls himself Captain Crunch after the notorious Cap’n Crunch 2600 whistle.” (Several years ago, Gilbertson explains, the makers of Cap’n Crunch breakfast cereal offered a toy-whistle prize in every box as a treat for the Cap’n Crunch set. Somehow a phone phreak discovered that the toy whistle just happened to produce a perfect 2600-cycle tone. When the man who calls himself Captain Crunch was transferred overseas to England with his Air Force unit, he would receive scores of calls from his friends and “mute” them—make them free of charge to them—by blowing his Cap’n Crunch whistle into his end.)

“Captain Crunch is one of the older phone phreaks,” Gilbertson tells me. “He’s an engineer who once got in a little trouble for fooling around with the phone, but he can’t stop. Well, this guy drives across country in a Volkswagen van with an entire switchboard and a computerized super-sophisticated M-F-er in the back. He’ll pull up to a phone booth on a lonely highway somewhere, snake a cable out of his bus, hook it onto the phone and sit for hours, days sometimes, sending calls zipping back and forth across the country, all over the world….”

Back at my motel, I dialed the number he gave me for “Captain Crunch” and asked for G—- T—–, his real name, or at least the name he uses when he’s not dashing into a phone booth beeping out M-F tones faster than a speeding bullet, and zipping phantomlike through the phone company’s long-distance lines.

When G—- T—– answered the phone and I told him I was preparing a story for Esquire about phone phreaks, he became very indignant.

“I don’t do that. I don’t do that anymore at all. And if I do it, I do it for one reason and one reason only. I’m learning about a system. The phone company is a System. A computer is a System. Do you understand? If I do what I do, it is only to explore a System. Computers. Systems. That’s my bag. The phone company is nothing but a computer.”

A tone of tightly restrained excitement enters the Captain’s voice when he starts talking about Systems. He begins to pronounce each syllable with the hushed deliberation of an obscene caller.

“Ma Bell is a system I want to explore. It’s a beautiful system, you know, but Ma Bell screwed up. It’s terrible because Ma Bell is such a beautiful system, but she screwed up. I learned how she screwed up from a couple of blind kids who wanted me to build a device. A certain device. They said it could make free calls. I wasn’t interested in free calls. But when these blind kids told me I could make calls into a computer, my eyes lit up. I wanted to learn about computers. I wanted to learn about Ma Bell’s computers. So I built the little device. Only I built it wrong and Ma Bell found out. Ma Bell can detect things like that. Ma Bell knows. So I’m strictly out of it now. I don’t do it. Except for learning purposes.” He pauses. “So you want to write an article. Are you paying for this call? Hang up and call this number.”

He gives me a number in an area code a thousand miles north of his own. I dial the number.

“Hello again. This is Captain Crunch. You are speaking to me on a toll-free loop-around in Portland, Oregon. Do you know what a toll-free loop-around is? I’ll tell you.”

He explains to me that almost every exchange in the country has open test numbers which allow other exchanges to test their connections with it. Most of these numbers occur in consecutive pairs, such as 302 956-0041 and 956-0042. Well, certain phone phreaks discovered that if two people from anywhere in the country dial those two consecutive numbers they can talk together just as if one had called the other’s number, with no charge to either of them, of course.

“Your voice is looping around in a 4A switching machine up there in Canada, zipping back down to me,” the Captain tells me. “My voice is looping around up there and back down to you. And it can’t ever cost anyone money. The phone phreaks and I have compiled a list of many many of these numbers. You would be surprised if you saw the list. I could show it to you. But I won’t. I’m out of that now. I’m not out to screw Ma Bell. I know better. If I do anything it’s for the pure knowledge of the System. You can learn to do fantastic things. Have you ever heard eight tandems stacked up? Do you know the sound of tandems stacking and unstacking? Give me your phone number. Okay. Hang up now and wait a minute.”

Slightly less than a minute later the phone rang and the Captain was on the line, his voice sounding far more excited, almost aroused.

“I wanted to show you what it’s like to stack up tandems. To stack up tandems.” (Whenever the Captain says “stack up” it sounds as if he is licking his lips.)

“How do you like the connection you’re on now?” the Captain asks me. “It’s a

raw

tandem. A

raw

tandem. Ain’t nothin’ up to it but a tandem. Now I’m going to show you what it’s like to stack up. Blow off. Land in a faraway place. To stack

that

tandem up, whip back and forth across the country a few times, then shoot on up to Moscow.

“Listen,” Captain Crunch continues. “Listen. I’ve got a line tie on my switchboard here, and I’m gonna let you hear me stack and unstack tandems. Listen to this. I’m gonna blow your mind.”

First I hear a super rapid-fire pulsing of the flutelike phone tones, then a pause, then another popping burst of tones, then another, then another. Each burst is followed by a beep-kachink sound.

“We have now stacked up four tandems,” said Captain Crunch, sounding somewhat remote. “That’s four tandems stacked up. Do you know what that means? That means I’m whipping back and forth, back and forth twice, across the country, before coming to you. I’ve been known to stack up twenty tandems at a time. Now, just like I said, I’m going to shoot up to Moscow.”

There is a new, longer series of beeper pulses over the line, a brief silence, then a ring.

“Hello,” answers a far-off voice.

“Hello. Is this the American Embassy Moscow?”

“Yes, sir. Who is this calling?” says the voice.

“Yes. This is test board here in New York. We’re calling to check out the circuits, see what kind of lines you’ve got. Everything okay there in Moscow?”

“Okay?”

“Well, yes, how are things there?”

“Oh. Well, everything okay, I guess.”

“Okay. Thank you.” They hang up, leaving a confused series of beep-kachink sounds hanging in mid-ether in the wake of the call before dissolving away.

The Captain is pleased. “You believe me now, don’t you? Do you know what I’d like to do? I’d like to call up your editor at Esquire and show him

just

what it sounds like to stack and unstack tandems. I’ll give him a show that will blow his

mind.

What’s his number?”

I ask the Captain what kind of device he was using to accomplish all his feats. The Captain is pleased at the question.

“You could tell it was special, couldn’t you? Ten pulses per second. That’s faster than the phone company’s equipment. Believe me, this unit is the most famous unit in the country. There is no other unit like it. Believe me.”

“Yes, I’ve heard about it. Some other phone phreaks have told me about it.”

“They have been referring to my, ahem, unit? What is it they said? Just out of curiosity, did they tell you it was a highly sophisticated computer-operated unit, with acoustical coupling for receiving outputs and a switchboard with multiple-line-tie capability? Did they tell you that the frequency tolerance is guaranteed to be not more than .05 percent? The amplitude tolerance less than .01 decibel? Those pulses you heard were perfect. They just come faster than the phone company. Those were high-precision op-amps. Op-amps are instrumentation amplifiers designed for ultra-stable amplification, superlow distortion and accurate frequency response. Did they tell you it can operate in temperatures from —55°C to +125°C?”

I admit that they did not tell me all that.

“I built it myself,” the Captain goes on. “If you were to go out and

buy

the components from an industrial wholesaler it would cost you at least $1,500. I once worked for a semiconductor company and all this didn’t cost me a cent. Do you know what I mean? Did they tell you about how I put a call completely around the world? I’ll tell you how I did it. I M-F-ed Tokyo inward, who connected me to India, India connected me to Greece, Greece connected me to Pretoria, South Africa, South Africa connected me to South America, I went from South America to London, I had a London operator connect me to a New York operator, I had New York connect me to a California operator who rang the phone next to me. Needless to say I had to shout to hear myself. But the echo was far out. Fantastic. Delayed. It was delayed twenty seconds, but I could hear myself talk to myself.”

“You mean you were speaking into the mouthpiece of one phone sending your voice around the world into your ear through a phone on the other side of your head?” I asked the Captain. I had a vision of something vaguely autoerotic going on, in a complex electronic way.

“That’s right,” said the Captain. “I’ve also sent my voice around the world one way, going east on one phone, and going west on the other, going through cable one way, satellite the other, coming back together at the same time, ringing the two phones simultaneously and picking them up and whipping my voice both ways around the world back to me. Wow. That was a mind blower.”

“You mean you sit there with both phones on your ear and talk to yourself around the world,” I said incredulously.

“Yeah. Um hum. That’s what I do. I connect the phones together and sit there and talk.”

“What do you say? What do you say to yourself when you’re connected?”

“Oh, you know. Hello test one two three,” he says in a low-pitched voice.

“Hello test one two three,” he replies to himself in a high-pitched voice.

“Hello test one two three,” he repeats again, low-pitched.

“Hello test one two three,” he replies, high-pitched.

“I sometimes do this:

Hello

hello

hello

hello,

hello,

hello,” he trails off and breaks into laughter.

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