Book Log 2013 #16: Exploding the Phone by Phil Lapsley

For every technology, there's someone who is going to hack it. That's most obvious with computers, but for any technology you can name you'll find someone who is going to put the full weight of their intellect behind getting to know it and doing all sorts of things to see what it can do. This is no less true of the phone system, which for two or three decades in the mid-20th century found itself at the mercy of a group of dedicated phone enthusiasts (or phreakers).

The folks at Bell didn't anticipate this. So as they developed the phone system, they did it in a way that wasn't particularly secure. They also made a lot of their technical information available in journals and other publications. As the phreakers discovered the system's vulnerabilities, and plumbed the available information to develop ways to make the system work for them (most notably the blue and red boxes that let people make free calls), Bell reacted by using the power of a large corporation (allied with the power of government and law enforcement) to go after the phreakers while trying to implement fixes (which were often costly and time-consuming).

That pursuit of the phreakers takes up much of the last half of the book, and is decidedly less interesting than the stories of the phreakers. That really makes the book, and while it's not always easy to identify with the phreakers, they are generally presented as more than the expected stereotype. The stories of how phreaking entered the general populace - and may have had a hand in bringing about the personal computer revolution - carry the book. Definitely worth a read.