http://www.counterpunch.org/price06302008.html
June 30, 2008
Blind Whistling Phreaks and the FBI's Historical
Reliance on Phone Tap Criminality
By DAVID PRICE
In 1971, Ron RosenbaumÂ’s Esquire article,
“Secrets of the Little Blue Box”, introduced
America to phone phreaks, a subterranean network
of geek explorers who probed the global phone
system as the worldÂ’s largest pre-Internet
interconnected machine. A star of RosenbaumÂ’s
piece was Joe Engressia, a blind telephonic
hacking pioneer with perfect pitch and a high IQ,
who seized control over phone systems by
whistling dual-tone, multi-frequency pitches into telephone receivers.
Before the introduction of modern phone-switching
technology, audible tones were used to connect
phones with distant destinations. As a young
child, Engressia was obsessed with the telephone,
finding comfort within the steady blare of the
dial tone. At the age of 5, he discovered he
could dial the phone by clicking the receiverÂ’s
hang-up switch, and at 7 he accidentally
discovered that whistling specific frequencies
could activate phone switches. From there,
experimentation, brilliance, networking and
perseverance led Engressia to probe weaknesses in
the network that allowed him to make free phone
calls. His mastery over this global machine was liberating, if not obsessive.
As Rosenbaum was completing his 1971 article,
Engressia was arrested for theft of telephone
services. At the time it appeared that the phone
company had only recently become aware of his
activities – though a few years earlier he had
been expelled from the University of South
Florida for selling fellow students long-distance calls for a dollar each.
RosenbaumÂ’s 1971 piece put the spotlight on
Engressia, as newspapers, magazines and
television programs ran features on him and his
activities. Engressia became a cultural icon, or
proto-hacker stereotype, as characters with his
abilities were written into cyberpunk novels and
Hollywood screenplays with characters like Sneakers’ Erwin ‘Whistler’ Emory.
EngressiaÂ’s IQ loomed somewhere above 170, but as
an adult he wished to live as a 5 years old,
founding his own church, the Church of Eternal
Childhood. His wish to remain an eternal child
appears to be linked to the repeated sexual abuse
he reported suffering from a nun at the school
for the blind that he attended as a child, as
well as the academic pressures that led him to
miss out on playtime as a child. In 1991,
Engressia legally changed his name to Joybubbles.
Until his death this last year, Joybubbles ran a
phone “story line” in Minneapolis, where callers
would call and hear him tell a different
children’s story each week – adopting a cadence
and personal style reminiscent of his hero, Mister Rogers.
When Joybubbles died last year, I used the
Freedom of Information Act to request his FBI
file, mostly just to see what the FBI had made
of this explorer who had loved and wandered
through this pre-Internet global network. I
figured there might be something in his file
relating to his 1971 arrest, but I hadnÂ’t
expected to find an FBI and phone company
investigation of him from two years before this arrest.
An August 28, 1969, FBI General Investigative
Division report describes an investigation by
Kansas City telephone company of three subjects
in Kansas City, Miami and Chicago, who had
“discovered a means to intercept and monitor WRS
and Autovon” phone lines. Autovon (Automatic
Voice Network) was a Defense Communication Agency
telephone network used for nonsecure military
phone communication. The FBIÂ’s report mistakenly
claimed that Autovon was a “top secret telephone
system utilized only by the White House”, when in
fact Autovon was really a nonclassified military
telephone system, designed to link military
installations even under the unpleasant conditions of nuclear annihilation.
The FBI believed that Engressia was “the ‘brains’
in this matter and was an electronics genius with
an I.Q. of one hundred ninety”. Even though the
FBI’s investigation had “not revealed any
national security aspect to their activities” and
phone company officials stated that this groupÂ’s
use of free phone calls had been “strictly for
their own amusement and [the] harassment of [the]
phone company”, the FBI’s investigation reports
were filed under the heading: “Security matter –
Espionage: interception of communications.”
The FBI thought a blue box may have been used to
avoid tolls, though they realized that Engressia
“was capable of orally emitting a perfect twenty
six hundred cycle tone, which could be used to
direct distance dial any phone number in the country”.
The FBI reported that without any authorization
from law enforcement personnel, an employee of
Southern Bell Telephone & Telegraph had contacted
Engressia, interviewed him, and later gave
information from this interview to the FBI. This
employee told the FBI that “Joseph Engressia, age
twenty and blind, [was] interviewed and he
admitted intense interest in telephone company
systems and equipment. He is familiar with the
practices as to test numbers, circuits, and
operations of telephone companies. Engressia
exhibited ability to whistle twenty six hundred
cycle notes which is utilized by telephone
company in toll network. He claimed he learned
majority of information by trial and error using
his touch-tone instrument. He claimed he did not
wish to violate any law and that his activities
with the telephone were for amusement and education.”
The FBI viewed Engressia as a real threat. On
August 29, 1969, J. Edgar Hover sent a summary
memo regarding EngressiaÂ’s activities to John
Ehrlichman, counselor to President Nixon, to
Melvin Laird, secretary of defense, and to James
J. Rowley, the director of the U.S. Secret
Service. While Hoover apprised these governmental
bodies of his investigation and expressed
concerns that Engressia had the power to
undertake undetectable wiretaps, the FBI had no
actual evidence that Engressia intercepted any
phone calls, they only had concerns about such powers.
Fortunately, the FBI employees processing my FOIA
request accidentally revealed parts of the
identities of the two phone phreaks mentioned in
EngressiaÂ’s file. An individual referred to as
“also known as ‘Tandy Way’” is identified as a
blind radio and telephone enthusiast living in
Miami, and a “Mr. Jacobs” is revealed as the
Kansas City resident accessing free phone calls
to talk with Engressia. Jacobs had first met
Engressia after seeing him on Huntley-Brinkley TV
show, and contacted him first by letter, then by phone.
The FBI report indicates that the phone company
had known about EngressiaÂ’s abilities for about a year:
“Joseph Engressia Jr. first came to the attention
of the SBT&T Company in the summer of 1968. At
about the same time there was a routine trouble
report in the middle of August 1968, that was
received by ___ showing a ‘blue box’ in use on
the telephone number ___ Miami subscribed to
by ___ Miami. ____ explained that a ‘blue box’
is a device that can be used to defraud the
telephone company of the revenue from
long-distance toll calls. This device produces
multi-frequency tones which enable the user to
make long-distance telephone calls and circumvent
the billing equipment in the long-distance network”.
It is not clear if Engressia was using an actual
blue box (an electronic device designed to make
free calls by generating 2600 hz through a
speaker) or if he simply whistled into his phone
to produce the same results. This Sept. 1, 1969,
report includes an account of a Canadian operator
reporting Engressia for selling LD phone calls
for $1.00 each at the University of Southern
Florida. Engressia was suspected and fined
$25.00, “however, he was reinstated with full honors shortly thereafter”.
An 8/29/69 FBI memo states that an employee “of
the Florida Bell Telephone Company in Miami,
Florida, illegally monitored conversations on Joe
EngressiaÂ’s telephone # 274-0760. It is further
alleged that these monitored conversations were
divulged by ____ [presumably the Florida Bell
employee] to an unnamed FBI Agent in Miami,
Florida”. Later interviews confirmed that “the
results of the monitoring [were] furnished to a
Miami FBI Agent”. Another FBI memo reports that
FBI source, employed at Southwestern Bell
Telephone Company, learned undisclosed
information “by monitoring telephone conversation
between [Jacobs] and Engressia”.
On September 3, 1969, Jacobs wrote the FBI a
detailed two-page letter extensively citing
chapter and verse of the Communications Act and
accusing the phone company and the FBI of
violating wiretapping sections of the statute.
“I believe there has been a serious violation of
the Communications Act of 1934, Section #605.
Several days ago, FBI Kansas City agents ____ and
____visited my home and repeated back to me
excerpts from a private conversation I had with a
Mr. Joe Engressia (Tel: 274-0760) of Miami,
Florida. Mr. Engressia for some time believed his
phone was being monitored and in order to get the
tapper to tip his hand, mentioned many words that
might be of interest to the supposed tapper such
as Autovon, etc. It is my information that a ____
of the Florida Bell Telephone Company has
illegally monitored, recorded, and transcribed
telephone conversations without the permission of
the receiver and/or the sender and without a
court order. ____ then divulged this conversation
in the form of a written transcript to a Miami
gent ____ who passed it on. Mssrs. ____
and ____ were good enough to confirm, in their
visit to my home, that there had in fact been
monitoring of a telephone line contrary to 47 U.S.C. 605”.
Jacobs then threatened to expose the FBIÂ’s
complicity in this illegal wiretap. He asked the
FBI if they would fulfill their legal obligations
to investigate his “allegations even though an
FBI agent may indeed have been a part to the
violation of 47 U.S.C. 605”. The letter closed
with a request that the FBI advise him what a
U.S. attorney will do with this information.
The FBI released no memos or files from the
following few days and then, five days later,
there were an odd series of unconvincing memos
that appear designed to establish a paper trail
of plausible deniability, claiming (in
contradiction to FBI report from 8/29/69) that
the FBI had been given records illegally obtained
by the phone company. A September 8, 1969, memo
from the Kansas City Special Agent in Charge to
Hoover has the agent now claiming he doubted that
the information the Bureau received from the
phone company employee was reliable.
The next day the FBI produced a memo designed
formalizing its “story”. A Miami FBI agent wrote
Hoover claiming, “when interviewed Aug. 28 last
by Bureau agents Miami, Re: Activities of Joseph
Carl Engressia Jr. and [Jacobs] ____did not
reveal telephone company had monitored telephone
conversations between [Jacobs] and Engressia”.
Given that previous FBI reports stated that their
conversations had been illegally monitored by the
phone company and illegally shared with the FBI,
this report appears to be a ham-handed effort to
manufacture records later to be used if Jacobs
pushed for an investigation of illegal wiretapping.
In 1967, the Supreme Court ruled in Katz v.
United States that Fourth Amendment protections
against unreasonable searches extended to
telephone conversations, but the following year
Congress added provisions to the 1968 Omnibus
Crime Bill that fought the courtÂ’s decision by
identifying a list of specific crimes
(kidnapping, organized crime, marijuana
distribution, etc.) meriting wiretaps. But the
phone companyÂ’s spying on Engressia was way out of bounds under 1969 laws.
For a few days, the FBI re-circulated several
versions of this same report; it was obviously
feathering its nest in case of further legal
inquiries at some point. The projected faux sotto
voce tone of the FBI memos finds them pretending
to “establish” that no actual records of
illegally intercepted calls is comically damning.
These track-covering memos are the last records appearing in EngressiaÂ’s file.
It seems curious that an incident, which a matter
of days earlier had been of such urgency that the
counselor to the president, the secretary of
defense, and the director of the Secret Service
had been alerted, was so suddenly dropped so
quickly and quietly, never to be mentioned again.
That such a formerly urgent matter would be so
quickly scuttled, set aside and forgotten is a
strong measure of the threat JacobsÂ’ accusations
represented to the FBI and their special relationship with the phone company.
In those years, before Judge Harold Green broke
up the phone monopoly and birthed the baby bells,
it was easy for HooverÂ’s FBI to maintain a
special arrangement with the phone company - an
arrangement under which the FBI ran warrantless
wiretaps and pin registers largely as Hoover saw
fit and with the phone companyÂ’s compliance. No
questions were asked. The public inspection of
such matters would have threatened HooverÂ’s
special relationship with the phone company.
Fearing public disclosure of its illegal
eavesdropping on Engressia, the phone company
waited until 1971 to drop the bag on him, once
some time had passed and JacobÂ’s threats were no longer in play.
But this tale, even 37 years later, has relevance
beyond the particulars of an ingenious blind
renegade phone whistler. It is but one artifact
of the largely unexplored history of the FBIÂ’s
symbiotic enabling of the phone companyÂ’s illegal
wiretapping – a history with increasing relevance
in the present, as the White House pressures
Congress to provide immunity to a historically
abusive industry, long protected by the sort of
formal arrangements with law enforcement documented in these files.
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Received on Sat Mar 02 2024 - 00:57:16 CST