Dont Phreak out

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Phone phreaking got its start in the late 1950s in the United States. Its golden age was the late 1960s and early 1970s. Phone phreaks spent a lot of time dialing around the telephone network to understand how the phone system worked. They listened to the pattern of tones to figure out how calls were routed. They read obscure telephone company technical journals. They learned how to impersonate operators and other telephone company personnel. They dug through telephone company trash bins to find "secret" documents. They sneaked into telephone company buildings at night and wired up their own telephones. They built clever little electronic devices called blue boxes, black boxes, and red boxes to help them explore the network and make free phone calls. They hung out on early conference call circuits and "loop arounds" to communicate with one another. They wrote their own newsletters to spread information.

Prior to 1984, long distance telephone calls were a premium item, with archaic regulations. In some locations, calling across the street counted as long distance. To report that a phone call was long distance meant an elevated importance universally accepted as, the calling party is paying by the minute to speak to the called party; transact business quickly.

The origins of phone phreaking trace back at least to AT&T's implementation of fully automatic switches. These switches used tone dialing, a form of in-band signaling, and included some tones which were for internal telephone company use. One internal-use tone was a tone of __A__ Hz which caused a telephone switch to think the call was over, leaving an open carrier line which could be exploited to provide free long-distance and international calls. At that time, long-distance calls were quite expensive.

The tone was discovered in approximately 1957, by Joe Engressia, a blind seven-year old boy. Engressia had perfect pitch, and discovered that whistling the fourth E above middle C (a frequency of __A__ Hz) would stop a dialed phone recording. Unaware of what he had done, Engressia called the phone company and asked why the recordings had stopped. Joe Engressia is considered to be the father of phreaking.

Other early phreaks, such as "Bill from New York", began to develop a rudimentary understanding of how phone networks worked. Bill discovered that a recorder he owned could also play the tone at 2600 Hz with the same effect. John Draper discovered through his friendship with Engressia that the free whistles given out in Cap'n Crunch cereal boxes also produced a __A__ Hz tone when blown (providing his nickname, "Captain Crunch"). This allowed control of phone systems that worked on single frequency (SF) controls. One could sound a long whistle to reset the line, followed by groups of whistles (a short tone for a "1", two for a "2", etc.) to dial numbers.

In October __B__, phreaking was introduced to the masses when Esquire Magazine published a story called "Secrets of the Little Blue Box” by Ron Rosenbaum. This article featured Engressia and John Draper prominently, synonymising their names with phreaking. The article also attracted the interest of other soon-to-be phreaks, such as Steve Wozniakand Steve Jobs, who went on to found Apple Computer.

The Rainbow Series (sometimes known as the Rainbow Books) is a series of computer security standards and guidelines published by the United States government in the 1980s and 1990s. They were originally published by the U.S. Department of Defense Computer Security Center, and then by the National Computer Security Center. These standards describe a process of evaluation for trusted systems. In some cases, U.S. government entities (as well as private firms) would require formal validation of computer technology using this process as part of their procurement criteria. Many of these standards have influenced, and have been superseded by, the Common Criteria.

The books have nicknames based on the color of its cover. For example, the Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria was referred to as "The Orange Book." It was published August 15, __C__. In the book entitled Applied Cryptography, security expert Bruce Schneier states of NCSC-TG-021 that he "can't even begin to describe the color of the cover" and that some of the books in this series have "hideously colored covers."

Prior to these events, people who manipulated telecommunication systems, known as phreakers, were generally not prosecuted within the United States. The majority of phreakers used software to obtain calling card numbers and built simple tone devices in order to make free telephone calls. A small elite, and highly technical segment of phreakers were more interested in information about the inner workings of the telecommunication system than in making free phone calls. Phone companies complained of financial losses from phreaking activities. The switch from analog to digital equipment began to expose more of the inner workings of telephone companies as hackers began to explore the inner workings, switches and trunks. Due to a lack of laws and expertise on the part of American law enforcement, few cases against hackers were prosecuted until Operation Sundevil.

However, starting in 1989, the US Secret Service (USS), which had been given authority from Congress to deal with access device fraud as an extension of wire fraud investigations under Title 18 (§ 1029), began to investigate. Over the course of the 18 month long investigation, the USS gathered alleged evidence of rampant credit card and calling card fraud over state lines.

Operation Sundevil allowed multiple Federal law enforcement agencies, particularly the Secret Service and the FBI, to gain valuable expertise on fighting this new form of criminal activity as well as expanding the agencies' budgets. New laws were created to allow federal prosecutors to charge individuals accused of phreaking, hacking, wire, and credit card fraud. Evidence gained from Operation Sundevil allowed law enforcement to convince the United States Congress of the need for additional funding, training, and overall expansion.

It was revealed in a press release on May 9, __D__. The arrests and subsequent court cases resulted in the creation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The operation is now seen as largely a public-relations stunt. Operation Sundevil has also been viewed as one of the preliminary attacks on the Legion of Doom and similar hacking groups. The raid on Steve Jackson Games, which led to the court case Steve Jackson Games, Inc. v. United States Secret Service, is often attributed to Operation Sundevil, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation states that it is unrelated and cites this attribution as a media error.

The name comes from the Sundevil football stadium of Arizona State University, near the local Secret Service headquarters from where the investigation and raids were coordinated.

To find this cache look up these dates and then use this to get the location :

N38 (A - 2545).(B - 1424)
W104 (C – 1939).(D – 1505)

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