everything you need to know about phreaking, vol. 1

OK, so I kinda lied yesterday when I said I was going to answer more questions. The problem is, none of you sent me any, and I didn't feel like doing more philosophy stuff. I will add to it again soon, though. 

Today's article is about phreaking. If you don't know what phreaking is, it's a term that basically means "doing nefarious shit with telephones". Phreaking was particularly popular in the 70s and 80s, and as a result, the majority of the information in this article will be outdated. For the record: I don't condone any of this stuff, as it is (or was) highly illegal. Though you'd be hard-pressed to red-box a payphone in this day and age. It also wouldn't work.

Long before the days of the modern internet, people used to transfer information peer-to-peer via decentralized, text-only pages known as Bulletin Board Systems (or BBS for short). This was essentially a precursor to the internet, and was in wide use throughout the 80s and 90s. Users would connect their landline phones to a modem and - in turn, their computers - and call a specific phone number that would then transmit information to the computer via the modem. Yes, that's right: you had to call websites.

These pages contained a wide variety of information and was mostly unmoderated. Everything from chat rooms, software piracy, instructions on making and buying guns, explosives, drugs, and everything else you could possibly think of, was widely available for anyone with a computer and a telephone. Among the information shared throughout these boards was the subject of phreaking. Phreaking was the external manipulation of telephones that allowed the user to accomplish a number of things - everything from making long-distance phone calls for free (calling across the country was expensive in the 80s) to snagging free calls from payphones, to scheming up elaborate pranks to play on your friends (or your phone company). 

This was long before digital phone lines were a thing, so everything was analog. In order to understand how phreaking worked, you first have to understand how analog phone lines work. You see, with analog phone signals, the telephone keypad itself does not control the numbers being dialed, but instead, a 4x3 row-and-column system of tone-generating buttons would combine tones vertically and horizontally based on which button you pressed (hence the differently-pitched beeps you hear when dialing a phone number). The telephone company (usually at your town or neighborhood's phone exchange) would then interpret those tones and redirect your phone line to the corresponding number of the one you dialed. This replaced the original system used in the very early days of phones when you'd have to call the operator first and tell them which person's phone line you wished to be connected to.

In short, you didn't control the dialing, but you did control the device that created the audio signals that told the phone company what you wanted to dial. This also meant that, in theory, you could record a dial tone on to, say, a cassette tape recorder, and play it back into the phone and it would dial the number. In fact, this is exactly how speed dial worked; when a specified button on the phone was pressed, it would rapidly generate the signals necessary to dial the stored phone number. 

When long-distance calling became available , phone companies would often charge a fee (typically billed by the minute) for calls made to other area codes. This was in the days of seven-digit dialing, when area codes were larger and there were fewer of them. You also didn't need to dial the area code if the number you were calling was in the same area code as yours (hence why you'll often see seven-digit phone numbers written on things made before the 2000s). The next set of digits, known as an area prefix, further broke down the area codes into smaller areas, typically by neighborhood (in urban areas) or by town (in rural areas). This also meant that if you were making a call within your town or neighborhood, you may have only had to use four or five digits.

Now that we've established what a phone number contains and how it works, it's time to get into the fun stuff.

Whenever you made a long-distance phone call, a minutely charge would be tacked on to your phone bill at the end of the month. When long-distance calls are made, your local phone exchange will transfer your call to a trunk line to connect you to the phone exchange of the destination phone number in a sort of elaborate relay system. When the call would reach the trunk line, a tone of 2600hz would be generated, the generation of which would signify to your phone company that you were making a long-distance call and that you should therefore be billed for it. Eventually, people began to figure out that if you could create these tones externally and make them audible to the phone, you could circumvent the charge and call for as long as you want with no charges whatsoever. This was because the 2600hz tone would trick the phone system into thinking that the call had ended, thus ignoring the charge and leaving the line open for a long-distance call to be placed.

Conversely, this also meant that anyone with a bosun whistle (specifically, the ones included with boxes of Captain Crunch  cereal), could create these tones by covering one of the holes, allowing basically anyone to circumvent the charge. It also meant that you could walk up to, say, a bank of payphones (like you'd find at an airport) and blow the whistle and, as the majority of calls made at airports are long-distance, the tone would cause the trunk line to hang up, ultimately ending the call and costing the caller additional money to call back, as they'd have to re-dial the number and thus pay another long-distance fee.

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This concludes today's article. Thanks for reading. More will (probably) be published tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Au revoir.