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FBI Illegally Tapped Phone Phreaks In 1969
Posted by
kdawson
on Monday June 30, @11:09PM
from the nothing-new-under-the-sun dept.
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."
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Incoming republicans (Score:5, Insightful)
Claiming that illegal wiretapping must not be that bad if we've had it for 40 years without knowing.
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Re:Incoming republicans (Score:5, Insightful)
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illegal acts to find illegal acts? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Well... (Score:5, Funny)
"If all the other world leaders jumped of a cliff, would you?"
/sulk
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My Reply: (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
This just in, governments afraid of people thinking outside of the box and applying this to means the government does not approve. Film at 11.
It's hardly news that governments, no matter of what time and day, are mostly absorbed with the will to retain power and don't really enjoy giving away any to its subjects. That's why most governments are actually so keen on retaining the "power monopoly", i.e. being the only ones able to tell what's "right" or "wrong". That's the business they're in.
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Doesn't mean it should be fixed.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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..
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Re:Doesn't mean it should be fixed.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, you are right. Only those that want to shrink government give a damn about the constitution. The rest want to use things as they are. Both main parties have seen it as ok to break the law as long as they win. It IS time to stop this. Unfortunately, the populace is not informed enough to change things this election. God himself only knows what evil will seep out of the whitehouse in the next four years. "It's evil, don't touch it" as was once said. There are days when I think an unexpected Nuke in D.C. would not really be a bad thing. Of course I don't mean that, but you get the gist. sigh
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Re:Doesn't mean it should be fixed.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with government and large government is that it tends to feed itself upon the hard work of the populace, while not actually doing anything, claiming all the "good stuff" (we created 100k jobs last year ....) while denying any of the bad stuff.
Hence the "Crisis" crisis (tm). Everything is a "crisis".
Health Care ... CRISIS! ... CRISIS! ... CRISIS! ... CRISIS! ... CRISIS! ... CRISIS! ... CRISIS! ... CRISIS!
Environment
Energy/Oil
Republicans
Democrats
Terroism
Drugs
Immigration
Do I need to go on??? Every Crisis listed above (and all the others) somehow cry for government involvement as if government has solved any crisis.
And all the reasonable solutions tend to be dismissed by those who are crying CRISIS!!!!! at every turn.
The problem is, they don't have any good solutions besides "more government". More rules, More laws, more policy!
NO MORE! All the rules and laws haven't solved a single problem, and many have caused more problems than they solved.
Government is not the solution, it is the problem. Man barely (if at all) is able to rule himself, what make you think that some other man can rule you better than yourself????
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Re:Doesn't mean it should be fixed.. (Score:5, Insightful)
You're absolutely right, every solution that our politicians are offering is just "more government", even though it's never been shown to solve anything.
I was listening to some idiot on talk radio tonight, talking about how passing more laws would stop illegal aliens from coming into the country (never mind that they're already breaking one immigration law, why not two?) He seemed to think that requiring even more paperwork and proof of citizenship from new employees would accomplish something. I was struck by how far this country has come, when the concept of requiring huge amounts of papers to prove you have the right to a job is now a respectable enough position for people not to be shouted down over it instantly. Who in their right minds thinks that requiring (people claiming to be) citizens to produce evidence of their citizenship just to earn a living is a good thing?
People need to stop thinking government has the answers. It barely even understands what the questions are.
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Re:Doesn't mean it should be fixed.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Screw that, voting probably won't help.* Do what I'm doing:
I never got around to finishing my bachelor's because, frankly, I was too busy working. Now I'm doing it. And once that's done, I'm going to law school. Once I have a few years of experience with the law, I'm running for office, and I'm going to do everything I can to fix what's wrong with our government.
If every decent, respectable, person on Slashdot did the same thing, we could make some real changes in this country.
*I say this because we're not guaranteed of getting the right kind of people in office, unless we are those people. Don't wait for someone to fix all the problems we have, start being a part of the solution.
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Re:Doesn't mean it should be fixed.. (Score:5, Funny)
You're new here, aren't you?
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Re:Doesn't mean it should be fixed.. (Score:4, Insightful)
I never got around to finishing my bachelor's because, frankly, I was too busy working. Now I'm doing it. And once that's done, I'm going to law school. Once I have a few years of experience with the law, I'm running for office, and I'm going to do everything I can to fix what's wrong with our government.
Many politicians start off with the same idealism like you are describing. Chances are that when you reach your goal, you will have been robbed of it. It's naive to think that you can stay true to your ideas and still become successful (i.e. appear appealing to as many voters as possible).
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Re: (Score:3)
We instead ought to vote for the worst candidate instead of the best.
There's 300 million people in our country, more than enough to enact change if they cared. There's one way to make them care: make this country go in the shitter worse than africas countries. We can do this by voting the worst candidate in, regardless of democrat or republican.
I personally would go 8 yrs of repub and 4 years of dem just for the facts that repubs love wars, and dems love "feel good" laws, regardless of unintended consequenc
That's ok (Score:5, Funny)
The phreaks illegally tapped the FBI at the same time!
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Re:That's ok (Score:5, Interesting)
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Sad story, focus is off (Score:5, Interesting)
To me, treating this guy like he's some hacker god is borderline mockery. He had a right to live his life unmolested, and he lost that. And instead of helping him, the government spied on him.
When I look at my old collection of hacker books, I can still feel much of the pain that I felt as a child (never as extreme as sexual abuse) and I feel disgusted that Hollywood tried to make me feel like a genius because I was different and quirky and creative. In fact, if anything, my emotional pain put me at risk of not being able to use my potential at all.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Met him once. When I mentioned he made the NYT list of interesting obits for the year at a Mensa gathering in January I was surprised to discover that several people maintained contact with him and were very fond of him. There are worse ways to make friends than start the Church of the Eternal Child. He wasn't unloved.
Informative. However- (Score:3, Informative)
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No suprises there (Score:4, Insightful)
Illegally taped phones are pretty minor compared to some of the other things they did back then. Google cointelpro, mk-ultra.
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Joe was amazing! (Score:5, Informative)
Though I never met him personally, I know that he had perfect pitch. In other words his ears WERE a frequency counter! Rumor was that he could whistle MF tones-he didn't need the blue box that the rest of us used.
My BB was made with 555 timers in a calculator box and keypad bought from Poly Paks (anyone remember them?). I used a simple 1N914 diode matrix on the back of the keypad (with all its traces hacked away so it was just a bunch of SPST pushbuttons) to apply power to the different 555's configured as astables. For example, pushing the #1 powered on the 700 and 900 Hz oscillators, etc. The astables were all summed by a 741 opamp and then fed an old telco earpiece with the clipping diode across the back removed. Though everything was square waves, the switching equipment didn't seem to care at all and the box worked GREAT! I'd simply acoustically couple it to a handset mouthpiece and call anywhere I wanted.
The display on the unit lit up: 'FUCH BELL' when the CE keypad button was pressed. I couldn't make a K with an 8 segment display :)
I came very close to being busted-a NET security person came to my apt. about 3 months after I left school. Apparently they had a pen tracer on our dorm telephone there and heard my name mentioned. I called his bluff by confronting him ("How did you HEAR my name if all you had a court order to do was use a pen tracer?") and he went away. That day I stopped MFing.
I never met Woz-though we had some common friends. John Draper (AKA: Captain Crunch-called that because he discovered that a small whistle that came with in some Captain Crunch cereal boxes whistled 2600 hz-the main frequency that the entire tandem long distance system ran on) did come to visit me for a few days-he was ok but socially inept. If they illegally wiretapped Joe, then I'd be sure there's also an illegal file on John D. as well-he was HUGE in the phreaking scene at the time.
Ahh, the good old days-today it's too not worth phreaking because VOIP and other technologies make things so cheap that it's not worth the risk any more.
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Oblig. quote (Score:3, Funny)
Mustard: "Why is J. Edgar Hoover on your phone?"
Wadsworth: "I don't know. He's on everybody else's, so why shouldn't he be on mine!"
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Re:If you are illegally hacking phone systems (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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Re:If you are illegally hacking phone systems (Score:5, Informative)
Not to mention that flagrant law breaking by law enforcement agencies may allow the bad guys to walk free. There's a fascinating documentary about the Weather Underground [wikipedia.org] wherein it is stated that many of the members got off simply with fines because the FBI routinely went way across the line in conducting their investigations. These were terrorists essentially, with a penchant for bombing public buildings.
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