Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws who Hacked Ma Bell

by Phil Lapsley

Phone phreaking was one of the first big adventures I had in my life. And it made me want to have more of those adventures by designing more things like my blue box, weird things that worked in ways that people didn’t expect.

It seems incredibly primitive today. So primitive, in fact, that it is difficult to appreciate just how stunning this was at the time. It let loose a communications revolution that the writer Tom Standage dubbed the “Victorian Internet.” Americans took to the telegraph like teenagers to text messages.

Look Ma Bell, no operator!

But why? What would motivate a person to do such a thing? “Just to be able to do it,” Condon recalls with glee in his voice. “That’s the thrill of it, isn’t it?”

He was no stranger to playing with things, to taking them apart, to seeing what they could do, to using them in ways that others hadn’t thought of.

If idle hands are the devil’s tools, then a clever teenager with idle hands and a methodical personality is the devil’s munitions factory.

Engineers are funny animals. If you tell an engineer about a problem, any problem, his first instinct is to measure it. Tell an engineer you don’t love him anymore and he’ll ask for a graph of your love over time so that he can understand exactly how big the problem is and when it started.

“Absent competition, Bell Labs and AT&T took the time to get an innovation right (as an engineer would define right).” Or, as one observer of the ESS effort put it, they could “take the problem and trample it to death.”

It was, after all, a government-regulated entity; anything it did was approved by the Federal Communications Commission. Given that its every move required permission from the government, how could it possibly be engaged in improper behavior?