Phreak Box (Because They Can)

The first time I heard about “boxing” was back in 1986, when I got my first copy of Phone Man for the Commodore 64. Up until that point, the only thing I knew about “phreaking” (a conglomeration of “phone” and “hacking”) was from the movie Wargames. In the movie, stranded and broke David Lightman (Matthew Broderick) disassembles a payphone receiver, grounds or shorts something out with a soda can pop top, and manages to get a free dial tone. That scene sent thousands of curious kids, including myself, off to jam bits of metal into every pay phone we could find in hopes of making free calls. Although I never got that particular trick to work, something about that scene inspired many of us to go out and explore the phone system.

Of course, boxing wasn’t new by any means when I discovered it. “Blue boxes,” one of the (if not the) earliest boxes, was developed back in the 60s. Blue boxes allowed phreakers to take control of phone lines and make free phone calls. (Wikipedia has an in depth article, if you’re interested.) There were dozens of different types of boxes, each identified by a unique color and performing a specific task. The one that interested me was the Red Box, a box that allowed people to make free calls from pay phones.

If you want to “hack teh planet” today you need to learn TCP/IP. TCP/IP is the language that the Internet runs on. If you want to hack the phone system, you do it with audio. Red Boxes emulate the sound a pay phone makes when you insert money into them. A nickel made one beep, dimes made two, and quarters made five. (Listen to a quarter tone here.) The term Red Box isn’t a brand name, like iPod — it’s more like a concept. Anything that could play those tones back could be considered a “Red Box”. People used Walkmans, Radio Shack tone dialers, and even modified greeting cards, which is what mine was made out of.

So, back to Phone Man. The Commodore 64 was known for its incredible sound capabilities, which allowed Phone Man to create exact copies of all those sounds one needed for phone phreaking. Unfortunately the biggest logistical problem was the Commodore 64 wasn’t very portable, so unless you had a pay phone in your house it wasn’t very practical. That’s why you had to get those sounds copied over on to some sort of portable device — so the tones could be played directly into the pay phone’s receiver.

Like many technological “tricks,” it took infinitely more brains to come up with the concept of Red Boxing than it did to pull it off. To Red Box, all you had to do was call someone from a pay phone and wait for the recording to say, “Please deposit $x.xx into the phone.” Then you simply held the Red Box up to the phone and played the sound enough times to cover the charges. I don’t know if the sounds were processed automatically or if an operator listened to them, but assuming all went well you would be credited with the additional time.

Fellow OKC scoundrel “Prong” gave me my first Red Box. It was a small plastic box with a red button with the guts from one of those “recordable” greeting cards inside. We simply overwrote the greeting with the Red Box tones, and off I went. I used that thing all over the place, mostly just for the fun of it. I only got challenged by an operator once; while in Minnesota it was so cold that the battery of my device started draining and the sounds began playing slower and slower. While making a call I heard the operator say, “I’m sorry honey, but those aren’t real tones.” I even think she offered to make a collect call for me and asked me who was calling. I hung up and drove off in a hurry. I was just messing around and never thought I could get into any trouble for playing around. (In 1995, Bernie S was busted for holding a Red Box and served 7 months in federal prison. For what it’s worth, I met Bernie S once and he’s one of the nicest guys ever.)

In the mid-90s people who spoke of phone phreaking would refer to it in the past tense. “Oh, that stuff doesn’t work anymore.” The thing was though, it did. Sometimes it depended on the area of the country you were in and sometimes it depended on whether or not the phone was a COCOT (Customer Owned Coin Operated Telephone). Regardless, when people would say “that stuff doesn’t work anymore,” they were wrong, I promise you. For that matter, phreaking is still alive today. Of course the same tricks don’t work any longer; digital switching and computer upgrades have taken away most of the old tricks, but new holes are being discovered all the time. A couple of years ago, a group of phreakers was busted for “SWATting” — a trick that involves spoofing someone’s Caller ID information, calling 911 and reporting something like a hostage crisis. I’m sure you can see how that could go bad real quick.

So what brings me to all of this is Phreak Box, a new app for the iPhone with built-in Blue Box, Green Box, Silver Box and (of course) Red Box tones. For practicality purposes they’re worthless, but for guys like me who grew up playing around with things, those tones bring back memories of being young and curious with the world at our fingertips. It is somewhat ironic that these tones are available in an application that runs on a magic device that, for $40/month, allows you to make free and unlimited long distance calls to anyone you could dream of.

Then again it never was about the calls, not really.