Slashdot Mirror
FBI Illegally Tapped Phone Phreaks In 1969
xmedar writes "In his talks about the history of Apple, Woz has often recounted how the 1971 Esquire article 'Secrets of the Little Blue Box' set him on the road to phone phreaking. Now someone has obtained the FBI file of one of the phreaks, Joe Engressia (who later changed his name to Joybubbles), via Freedom of Information requests. The file reveals that Engressia was illegally wiretapped by the FBI and the phone company back in 1969. J. Edgar Hoover considered the blind college student a national security risk and wrote a memo about him to John Ehrlichman."
Claiming that illegal wiretapping must not be that bad if we've had it for 40 years without knowing.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Well I guess this proves it. Government's ideas of what is a "security risk" and illegal wiretapping happened before Bush.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
The law works like this: If YOU break it, you BROKE it. If EVERYONE breaks it, it is BROKEN. If the GOVERNMENT breaks it, the government is BROKEN.
Just because the law has been broken for a long time does not mean it should be ignored now. Fix the government..
Start with voting against every single incumbent - except for the libertarian-leaning and third-party outsiders..
--- We need more Ron Paul!
You don't really have much of a leg to stand on.
That level of ignorance is dangerous. In short, two wrongs don't make a right. If he was breaking the law, there is a procedure in place to deal with it. Investigate, go to a judge and get a warrant, go to a grand jury and indict. It was wrong then, and it's wrong now.
As soon as they make "dangerous thoughts" illegal, some asshole will be saying the same thing about you when they are violating your rights.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Security by obscurity, it does not work.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
The FBI has got to be one of the most disliked agencies in America right now.
But at least they have been consistent in violating American's privacy for the past half century.
My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my Father! Prepare to die!
If it CAN be done, it WILL be done. Back then "being paranoid" was standard for Phreaks and considered a good thing. Honestly, I think that things are FAR WORSE now, then under Nixon. If they want to get your for something, they will. We've had enough examples of "the law be damned" over the past dozen years or so that it should be clear to all. The things that you have to fear are getting caught up in the "justice system" at all. You'll be facing incompetent, sometimes evil, always political and usually aggressive investigators, lawyers and judges. Anybody who's ever done work with or for an attorney knows that they are the most technophobic people you'll ever meet, and while this can work in your favor, most often it doesn't. This won't get fixed because they don't recognize a problem. Be very afraid!
Illegally taped phones are pretty minor compared to some of the other things they did back then. Google cointelpro, mk-ultra.
Did anyone expect otherwise from the Nixon Administration? :)
Funny... "illegal wiretapping" of an illegal activity on the phone wires. There's an irony in here somewhere.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
It is a bad idea that government should be whittled down to almost nothing, so much so that it would cease to function. The idea that the democrat wants to turn the USA into a communist country is just plain propaganda. It is fear mongering.
The republican is just afraid that what they have might be taken away from them or be expected to play fair. And whatever tools are available are used to keep you in check. The republican is guilty of using the fear of socialism all the way to claiming it is a gods plan to push their agenda. It is ironic that many of the ideas that are spewed from these people end up being more socialist than what they accuse the other side of doing.
I agree the state should not be responsible for everyone's does and don'ts, but a measure of reason is in order. The state should be "not too much government and not too little either". The middle way.
Thats ok, in the post 9/11 world you just declare them enemy combatants and send them off to the Gitmo.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
I lived in Massachusetts and went to Lowell Tech. Institute (now U Mass Lowell). I was familiar with the Intersil 8038 design, but went with 555s configured as astables because their output frequency only depended on their R/C time constant and wasn't affected by the battery voltage changing as the 9 volt battery went dead like so many other designs (like the 8038) were. I used 10 turn trimpots to set the oscillator frequencies and found that they only needed to be set once. Someone I know was selling boxes in Boston and he was winding and tapping his own coils for LC oscillators. A few years ago while moving, I found one of his boxes in my cellar, but it would not emit tones any more. He had given it to me as a present. I was pretty much out of Phreaking by 1976/77. In 1979, a friend of mine made a similar BB out from the same design as mine. I warned him to never use it at home, because by then the telcos were using DEC PDP-1178s for billing computers-and using their excess capacity to scan for 2600 Hz tones coming FROM the subscriber side of the CO. Of course, he didn't listen-and they had him nabbed from his very first call! He got fined 500 bucks, had to turn in his BB and had to do 50 hours of community service. MF Pheaking wasn't the only form of telco hacking though. Test loops were also big-these were numbers installed by the telcos that they used as a loopback to test between exchanges, For example, they would be paired as xxx-9933 and xxx-9934. If you called into the 9933 side, you got a 1 kHz tone at 1 milliwatt level-until someone else called into the 9934 number. Then the tone would go away and the two lines would be connected together-a sort of underground party line. In my late teens/early '20s, I got laid so many times thanks to these loops! ;-) Many of these test lines all over North America were set up to not 'supervise' (trip the billing computer), so calling them was free (to the computer, it looked like you had sat on a ringing line for an hour, waiting for someone to answer). Some of these were modified by telco people so if you called into 9933, you got a dial tone that was 9934's. Then you could touch tone call any number you wanted-for free. There were more then a few telco people that moonlighted as Phreakers!
Finally the other two color boxes were black and red. Black boxes allowed you to call their owner's phone number without being charged. Most used a neon bulb to seize the line when it rang, then blocked the DC connection that cause supervision to come on (the billing started 2 seconds after the called phone went off hook, so transient things would not be recorded as calls-the black box exploited this).
The red box was simply an electronic quarter-it's single pushbutton beeped the five quick 2200 Hz tones that pay phones sent when a quarter was deposited. In theory, these stil work-though you now have to put at least one coin in first so the phone office can see the DC connection made by the coin. With pay phones turning into dinosaurs, this will soon also be gone.
So there you have the whole story in a nutshell...
What wrath? It's not like you can do anything to them once they're in office.
And before they get in, they promise you the sky to get your vote. After that, the sky is everything you may keep after they're done stripping you.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And their rationale for breaking the laws, whether it's the FBI, Nixon, or Bush, is "It takes a crook to catch a crook ..."
Though with Bush and his attacks on the Constitution, it needs to be updated to "It takes a terr'rist to catch a terr'rist."
"10's of thousands of wiretaps"
Given the way things are going, in a few years, its going to be 10's of millions of automated wiretaps, in every country regardless of political party. These wiretaps will then feed into automatic data formatting transcriptions of all data of whatever form (on phones and Internet) about anything that is said and done. Then the formatted transcriptions will feed into automatic profiling systems to work out overall types of views on subjects. Then anyone expressing any views of any political or other ideologically different opinions will be automatically placed on watch lists. Then anything the governments want to do, will be able to refer to the watch lists, to workout what sort of person they are dealing with.
So any dealings with government will be biased by the watch lists. For example, try to set up a business and it turns out you were critical of the current government, ah sorry, no business grant for you. Try to ask for a grant to help with your house or anything else, ah sorry, no grant for you. But then, if you have don't nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry away. But the problem is, who defines what is wrong?
People who seek power over others want the power to dictate the rules by how others live. That is power, but that underlying nature of power has always opposed democracy and freedom. (Power seekers don't want fairness, they after all, want to dictate the rules and have the power to dictate rules). But democracy cannot truly exist when the ones in power know the views of the voters. Its the principle of the secret vote, which prevents political manipulation of the voters to try to get them to vote in a certain ways. The more we move towards vast automated profiling, the more we undermined democracy, freedom and fairness.
So a time of 10's of thousands of wiretaps is nothing compared with where we are going, especially as the 10s of thousands were mostly targeted against criminal gangs, whereas the 10s of millions will be mostly innocent of any crime. Then again, expressing any view different from the ones in power, is considered a crime by some people who want others to follow what they tell them.
Researchers have already shown its possible to profile people from what they say. Its not long before we will have automated transcriptions of data into a form that's easy to profile. So give it a few years, almost everyone worldwide is going to be "wiretapped/watched" in everything they do. Where they drive, where they travel on buses, trains and planes. What they buy. What friends they have (phone and email records) and what views their friends have. What news papers they buy. What they say on the phone to everyone. What they say in emails. The news website articles they read. (Combined with the profiles of the people who write the news articles, which gives an automated measure of their views). They will also know what Internet streamed TV shows you watch, including any political documentaries, especially ones critical of the current government. They will know everything you like and dislike and it will be cataloged and listed and readily available of use in political campaigns.
But that's just the beginning. Once you can profile individuals, you can extend that to profile groups of people. For example, profile the kinds of people working for a company. Workout what sort of views they hold. Workout if a company, is the sort of company the current government wants to help or wants to hold back?. That in turn will put pressure on employers to refer to the profile watch lists, to avoid employing anyone who could give their company a bad image to the current government.
I don't see how democracy, freedom and fairness is going to survive in such a world?. But I suspect and fear the unfairness is going to build up to a point where it forces large numbers of people to stand up to their governments and we will be back to the bad old days of political revolutions, only this time, the watch lists will prevent anyone standing up to any government until things get really bad. So much for progress, democracy, freedom and fairness. All we seem to be doing, is repeating the mistakes of the past, but this time, automating the processes involved.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
Lee Harvey Oswald would disagree with you.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Moot? So the people who have been sitting in their cell for 5 years without trial are vindicated now, and justice has been restored? I don't think so. Do their family even know if they are alive or dead yet?
Can they even afford to sue the government in U.S. courts? I can't. It wouldn't even matter if they could, the U.S. government lost several court cases involving softwood lumber from Canada, and they just completely ignored the ruling and went on imposing their tariff.
Being given the right to sue the government is supposed to make up for this gross hypocrisy?
When the only distinguishing characteristics between a so-called law enforcement agency and a criminal enterprise is a government seal of approval and non-profit status (sometimes not even that apparently), it's time to disband it.
The FBI has consistently demonstrated little regard for the law or the citizens it is charged with protecting. Much of that has been attributed to J.E. Hoover, but I can't imagine that he lead the organization so long without imprinting his casual disregard for the law and the Constitution on all levels of the organization. That would naturally include the promotion of agents who fit his mold.
After Hoover's death, there did not appear to be the sort of massive re-organization that would be required to purge itself of such criminals in the guise of law enforcement.
It's hardly surprising that decades later, the organization still demonstrates a casual disregard for the law more befitting organized crime.
Given the problems that have been discovered within the organization including a crime lab that thinks voting is an acceptable scientific procedure, were it not for the pass that our courts routinely give law enforcement, I would think the FBI's testimony should carry negative credibility by now.
While I'm aware that cops are people too and that we can't expect (nor would we necessarily want) Dudley Do-Right, I don't think respect for the law, the Constitution, and the citizens is too much to expect of law enforcement. A sense of proportion would be a good thing as well.
Firearms allow you to challenge jack-booted thugs that are smashing down your front door to take you away to a concentration camp.
This is how the second amendment keeps you free.
The correlary of this is that as long as no jack booted thugs show up at your doorstep, you have nothing to worry about.
If you can't defend against it with a firearm, then it can't really be a threat, right?
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
Thank you for the insane comment. If you have a firearm, the jack-booted thugs will have a machine gun. If you have a machine gun, the jack-booted thugs will have a grenade launcher. If you have a grenade launcher, the jack-booted thugs will call in an airstrike. While you can "challenge" the jack-booted thugs with your puny little firearm, you won't be able to stop them. It isn't your little gun, dummy, that protects you--it's the respect that we citizens give the Constitution. When that's gone, your puny little gun will be gone too. . .
The second amendment was put in for a very good reason; to grant the citizens the power to overthrow a corrupt government. However, as with a number of things in the Constitution, culture and technology has outpaced the implementation of that reason. Guns cannot currently overthrow the government.
Rather, the government is propped up by two things; it's ability to arbitrarily hide information about what it's doing (severely weakening the idea of 'for, of and by the people'), and massive economic support of corporations who have insane control over people's lives, and who similarly have the power to hide what they're doing.
In the modern age, one or ideally both of these things need to change to protect the individual, and thus the People. The easiest to change is the governmental ability to hide stuff. Any law that reduces the amount of oversight or government transparency is something that works directly against the best interest of the people.
If I could have a single constitutional amendment, it would be forcing the government to have a balanced budget. If I could have a second, it would be 100% transparency, the torpedoes be damned. I don't care if the 'terrorists' know what we're doing, I think our country's better angels would prevail if we could see what was going on: simply because we could overthrow anything that worked against our interests - and that's the spirit of the 2nd anyway.
[Ego]out
A firearm is pretty much useless against a tank rolling towards you, yet I'd consider that pretty threatening.
Which, of course, is why we won in Viet Nam and the Soviets won in Afghanistan.
Advice: on VPS providers