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FBI Illegally Tapped Phone Phreaks In 1969

Posted by kdawson on from the nothing-new-under-the-sun dept.

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."

2 of 296 comments (clear)

  1. Re:That's ok by jgardner100 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I still love Rutger Hauer's quote in Blade Runner "Aren't you supposed to be the good guy?" It applies more and more to the behaviour of Western Governments these days. (Yes I know a lot of the other's are misbehaving, but that doesn't mean they should become the norm that we strive for.)

  2. Re:Doesn't mean it should be fixed.. by TheLink · · Score: 5, Interesting

    a) get a group of people who regularly go through the laws and remove the crap.
    b) have most of your laws expire after a certain time unless manually renewed - the lifespan is linked to how many legislators required to pass that sort of law.
    c) all of the above.

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