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FBI Illegally Tapped Phone Phreaks In 1969
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Jun 30, 2008 10:09 PM
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.
Re:Incoming republicans (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:whither now, 2nd amendment? (Score:5, Insightful)
Firearms allow you to challenge jack-booted thugs that are smashing down your front door to take you away to a concentration camp.
This is how the second amendment keeps you free.
The correlary of this is that as long as no jack booted thugs show up at your doorstep, you have nothing to worry about.
If you can't defend against it with a firearm, then it can't really be a threat, right?
Parent
Re:whither now, 2nd amendment? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Spirit of the 2nd (Score:5, Insightful)
The second amendment was put in for a very good reason; to grant the citizens the power to overthrow a corrupt government. However, as with a number of things in the Constitution, culture and technology has outpaced the implementation of that reason. Guns cannot currently overthrow the government.
Rather, the government is propped up by two things; it's ability to arbitrarily hide information about what it's doing (severely weakening the idea of 'for, of and by the people'), and massive economic support of corporations who have insane control over people's lives, and who similarly have the power to hide what they're doing.
In the modern age, one or ideally both of these things need to change to protect the individual, and thus the People. The easiest to change is the governmental ability to hide stuff. Any law that reduces the amount of oversight or government transparency is something that works directly against the best interest of the people.
If I could have a single constitutional amendment, it would be forcing the government to have a balanced budget. If I could have a second, it would be 100% transparency, the torpedoes be damned. I don't care if the 'terrorists' know what we're doing, I think our country's better angels would prevail if we could see what was going on: simply because we could overthrow anything that worked against our interests - and that's the spirit of the 2nd anyway.
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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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Re:illegal acts to find illegal acts? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah its sorta like how if the police break into your home and find drugs but forget the warrant... Its illegal and because they used illegal methods to get the evidence they cant throw you in jail forever even if you have a monsterous drug lab supplying the entire country with .
Same goes for wiretapping, if they dont get a warrant they cant use the evidence they obtain through that wiretap in a court of law which includes getting other warrants theoretically and even if they did once a lawyer dug up this they'd throw the case out.
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Re:illegal acts to find illegal acts? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:No they can't, have you been paying attention? (Score:4, Insightful)
Moot? So the people who have been sitting in their cell for 5 years without trial are vindicated now, and justice has been restored? I don't think so. Do their family even know if they are alive or dead yet?
Can they even afford to sue the government in U.S. courts? I can't. It wouldn't even matter if they could, the U.S. government lost several court cases involving softwood lumber from Canada, and they just completely ignored the ruling and went on imposing their tariff.
Being given the right to sue the government is supposed to make up for this gross hypocrisy?
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Re:Incoming republicans (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because Bush is worse than Nixon doesn't mean Nixon wasn't really bad. He was.
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Re:Incoming republicans (Score:5, Insightful)
"Just because Bush is worse than Nixon doesn't mean Nixon wasn't really bad. He was."
I'll forgive Nixon for detente with China (vastly more important than any crimes his underlings committed, and we can't blame any POTUS for Hoover...) and getting us out of Viet Nam.
Nixon was not nice, but he was shrewd and tough (with enough street cred to negotiate with Mao). I'd take him over Shrub any day.
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Re:Incoming republicans (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, 6 years and thousands of casualties later than he should have.
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Re:Incoming republicans (Score:5, Interesting)
You won't be pleased to know that Hunter had such a low opinion of today's politicians that he said were Nixon running against them, he'd vote for Nixon.
Hell, I'd vote for Nixon over any of the current crop. Nixon actually had an environmental policy, for example.
Parent
So much for democracy, freedom and fairness. (Score:5, Insightful)
Given the way things are going, in a few years, its going to be 10's of millions of automated wiretaps, in every country regardless of political party. These wiretaps will then feed into automatic data formatting transcriptions of all data of whatever form (on phones and Internet) about anything that is said and done. Then the formatted transcriptions will feed into automatic profiling systems to work out overall types of views on subjects. Then anyone expressing any views of any political or other ideologically different opinions will be automatically placed on watch lists. Then anything the governments want to do, will be able to refer to the watch lists, to workout what sort of person they are dealing with.
So any dealings with government will be biased by the watch lists. For example, try to set up a business and it turns out you were critical of the current government, ah sorry, no business grant for you. Try to ask for a grant to help with your house or anything else, ah sorry, no grant for you. But then, if you have don't nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry away. But the problem is, who defines what is wrong?
People who seek power over others want the power to dictate the rules by how others live. That is power, but that underlying nature of power has always opposed democracy and freedom. (Power seekers don't want fairness, they after all, want to dictate the rules and have the power to dictate rules). But democracy cannot truly exist when the ones in power know the views of the voters. Its the principle of the secret vote, which prevents political manipulation of the voters to try to get them to vote in a certain ways. The more we move towards vast automated profiling, the more we undermined democracy, freedom and fairness.
So a time of 10's of thousands of wiretaps is nothing compared with where we are going, especially as the 10s of thousands were mostly targeted against criminal gangs, whereas the 10s of millions will be mostly innocent of any crime. Then again, expressing any view different from the ones in power, is considered a crime by some people who want others to follow what they tell them.
Researchers have already shown its possible to profile people from what they say. Its not long before we will have automated transcriptions of data into a form that's easy to profile. So give it a few years, almost everyone worldwide is going to be "wiretapped/watched" in everything they do. Where they drive, where they travel on buses, trains and planes. What they buy. What friends they have (phone and email records) and what views their friends have. What news papers they buy. What they say on the phone to everyone. What they say in emails. The news website articles they read. (Combined with the profiles of the people who write the news articles, which gives an automated measure of their views). They will also know what Internet streamed TV shows you watch, including any political documentaries, especially ones critical of the current government. They will know everything you like and dislike and it will be cataloged and listed and readily available of use in political campaigns.
But that's just the beginning. Once you can profile individuals, you can extend that to profile groups of people. For example, profile the kinds of people working for a company. Workout what sort of views they hold. Workout if a company, is the sort of company the current government wants to help or wants to hold back?. That in turn will put pressure on employers to refer to the profile watch lists, to avoid employing anyone who could give their company a bad image to the current government.
I don't see how democracy, freedom and fairness is going to survive in such a world?. But I suspect and fear the unfairness is going to build up to a point where it forces large numbers of people to stand up to their governments and we will be back to the bad old days of political revolutions, only this time, the watch lists will prevent anyone standing up to any government until things get really bad. So much for progress, democracy, freedom and fairness. All we seem to be doing, is repeating the mistakes of the past, but this time, automating the processes involved.
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Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
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:My Reply: (Score:5, Funny)
If you were Control, you'd have jumped off the cliff.
Neither of us have jumped off the cliff, so obviously I'm not Control.
Parent
Re:How about nudging a likely future leader on FIS (Score:4, Insightful)
What wrath? It's not like you can do anything to them once they're in office.
And before they get in, they promise you the sky to get your vote. After that, the sky is everything you may keep after they're done stripping you.
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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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Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
The reasons for the fall of the GDR (and the east bloc in general) are many. Most of them having to do with the "west" being there. First of all, they couldn't keep up with the arms race. Basically, the arms race between east and west was an economy war. Who could waste more resources on weapons that weren't meant to be used?
And second, the people in the GDR had a prime example of a better world. They could see that their peers in the west were better off, driving better cars, living better lives and generally have it better than they do. Such a display of a preferable way of living does make people unhappy.
We lack such a "better" country today. We don't have a Federal Republic of Germany to compare ourselves too and see first of all how inapt our governments are and second, that there is a better way to live.
That's sorely lacking.
Parent
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..
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
In other words, except for YOUR guys eh? Sure, completely benevolent and not self serving advice there...
Re: (Score:3, 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
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)
An election is a job interview. When you elect a lawmaker, you are picking somebody for the profession of making laws. Naturally, if a person is good at that profession, he will make as many laws as possible. Every two, four, or six years, he has to re-interview for his job, so he wants to be able to get in front of people and explain what a good job he did making laws.
Lawmakers offer "more government" because a careful (s)election process proved that the majority of people thought that person actually would be good at making more government. It's the whole point.
Of course, if I ever run for office, I'll pledge to be incompetant at the job.
Parent
Re:Doesn't mean it should be fixed.. (Score:5, Interesting)
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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Re:Doesn't mean it should be fixed.. (Score:4, Insightful)
For a long time, our laws were very ... "flexible". They were more like guidelines rather than exact definitions. Sure, there were things like "kill someone, go to jail 'til you die", but usually, laws required a judge to interpret them.
The good thing about this was that people didn't look for loopholes. Flexible laws have none. When you're tried, you end up in front of a judge and those people COULD definitly see through your plot. When they smelled you trying to tiptoe around some legal definition, they'd whip out some obscure legal detour to jail you. At the same time, they let you off the hook when they noticed that, yes, you broke the law, but it was accidental.
Our judges were actually quite good at sorting these things out. And behold, the jails were filled with crooks.
This changed somewhere in the last 20 years. Now our laws are written down without much leeway to a judge. So now we have a lot of people in jail that didn't really do anything wrong but literally being in the wrong spot at the wrong time, while at the same time we have crooks ripping you off while dancing around the loopholes those rigid laws created, without a judge being able to do anything against it.
Personally, I prefered the old version.
Parent
Re:Doesn't mean it should be fixed.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Also true to a point.
I usually point the blame at the media. Basically what I call the "cult of the loser" that's running rampart.
The examples are manifold. Let's start with afternoon talk shows. What do you get to see? Some washouts who sit there, telling you that they've been unemployed for years, living off wellfare and that it's all a great party. Message: Being unemployed and mooching off society isn't something to be ashamed of, it makes you a TV star.
Then we switch over to court TV. Here again, petty cases that are little more than neighborhood bickering. Message: Be a jerk and sue without any reason, and you are a celebrity.
We switch over to early evening shows and watch The Simpsons (as much as I love them, they broadcast the same message). A total and complete loser in a dead end job experiencing the most interesting adventures, simply by being a loudmouth and constant nuisance, his son being an elementary school soon-to-be-dropout and quite "successful" with his peers while Lisa, the brain in the family, usually gets the short end of the stick. Message: Be dumb and loud and you're successful in life.
Works just as well for everything else, from King of Queens to Home Improvement.
And finally the day culminates in American Idol, the show where it is carried to the extreme. Be loud, be a complete washout, have the intelligence of a doorknob and be a freak, as long as you can look cute and sing halfway decently (the latter is optional), you can become a huge teenage hero!
Do you need anything more?
People believe what they see on TV. They idolize the people they see there and they learn from them. Especially when it's "real" people (like in the first mentioned afternoon "reality" shows). They may not be heros, but they show you that it's ok to be a slob, that it's no shame to mooch off the rest of the country, that it's acceptable to be a nuisance to everyone around.
And far too often the message that sticks is: Why not be an annoying, mooching slob yourself, "everyone" does it.
Parent
Re:Doesn't mean it should be fixed.. (Score:4, Funny)
Hence the "Crisis" crisis (tm). Everything is a "crisis".
Funny, I thought it was "FUCK YEAH!" (from Team America: World Police)
Health Care ... FUCK YEAH! ... FUCK YEAH! ... FUCK YEAH! ... FUCK YEAH! ... FUCK YEAH! ... FUCK YEAH! ... FUCK YEAH! ... FUCK YEAH!
Environment
Energy/Oil
Republicans
Democrats
Terroism
Drugs
Immigration
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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:5, 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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That's ok (Score:5, Funny)
The phreaks illegally tapped the FBI at the same time!
Re:That's ok (Score:5, Interesting)
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Sad story, focus is off (Score:4, 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.
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.
Well, the telcos were phreaking out (Score:3, Insightful)
Security by obscurity, it does not work.
So what files do they have on the other phreaks? (Score:3, Funny)
Seems way out of line, this kid could dial phones by whistling up 2600Hz, and this rates memos from Hoover (head of FBI) to Laird (head of DoD) to Ehrlichmann (WH Chief of Staff), in the middle of the Vietnam War?? Imagine the files they must have on the phreaks who could only whistle up to 2540Hz or so.
The FBI has got to be one of the most disliked (Score:3, Insightful)
But at least they have been consistent in violating American's privacy for the past half century.
Informative. However- (Score:3, Informative)
If it CAN be done, it WILL be done (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
are things worse now? (Score:4, Interesting)
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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Re:Oh, now it's time for the Nixon haters! (Score:4, Funny)
Of course not, he's dead. It's more like:
He was like Bush. A crook that couldn't be trusted.
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Re:Oh, now it's time for the Nixon haters! (Score:5, Insightful)
And their rationale for breaking the laws, whether it's the FBI, Nixon, or Bush, is "It takes a crook to catch a crook ..."
Though with Bush and his attacks on the Constitution, it needs to be updated to "It takes a terr'rist to catch a terr'rist."
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