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If you grew up with the fun kind of parents that let you stay up late, play violent video
games, skip school three to four days a week, set fire to the neighbor’s cat, and eat
bowls of tiny little cookies for breakfast, you might remember that all of the very best
breakfast cereals used to include some sort of prize inside.
Ever since 1909, when Kellogg’s realized that plain cornflakes might be almost palatable
if you just bribe children with a 3-page picture book, cereal boxes have been stuffed with
all sorts of plastic knick-knacks—yoyo’s, digital watches, lightsaber spoons, a ghost
detector that doesn’t work, straight up cash, a deed to 1 square inch of land in the
Yukon that doesn’t even have mineral rights and was repossessed by Canada in 1965, and,
completely accidentally, a tiny whistle that could hack into the back-end of AT&T’s phone
lines.
You see, back when phones had buttons and handsets and didn’t waste your time with
YouTube videos about cereal box prizes, every bit of information that your phone received
and produced needed to travel along a big web of physical telephone lines—these wires
carried all of your greetings, your gossip, and your scary horror-movie heavy breathing
sounds, but they also needed to carry certain metadata about the call, like the number you
were calling from and who you were.
Since early telephone lines were only built to transport a single stream of audio, this
metadata needed to take the form of audio as well.
For example, if you’re one of the fifteen viewers of this channel who have ever touched
a push-button telephone, you’d know that the phone produces certain tones when certain
numbers are pressed—and no, this was not just so that you could play the first 4 seconds
of “Funky Town” by typing a long string of numbers into the keypad.
It was because the phone actually recorded and sent the tones to a central switching
station, where they could decode them into numbers and connect the call to the right
telephone line.
It’s sort of like how nowadays, when the NSA hears a dissenting tone, like you talking
about how the United States Postal Service is kinda slow, they know to connect you with
the nearest friendly neighborhood surveillance center.
This system of recorded tones is called “in-band signaling,” and, as you might imagine, it
didn’t take very long for nerds to start abusing it.
In the late 1960’s, a group of hackers called “phone phreaks” discovered that AT&T used
a certain tone—2600 hertz—to indicate that a long-distance phone line was empty.
Of course that’s different to how it is today.
Now, if you call them, specifically about why their retail employee literally stabbed
you in your chest when you tried to buy a Galaxy Note 9, you hear a cruel tone from
the agent, saying that you shouldn’t have gone to to the store if you didn’t want
to get stabbed in the chest by their employee.
But back in the 1960’s, if they didn’t have the 2600 hertz tone, the unused phone
lines would just be silent and they’d be indistinguishable from a long-distance phone
call between two sad mimes who are in love and tragically separated by fate.
Now, playing that exact tone back into the phone would disconnect one line, but it would
indicate to the switching station that the other line was an operator, which would free
them up to make long-distance phone calls without any charge.
The phone phreaks experimented with an organ, a few exotic birds, whistlers with perfect
pitch, but the easiest way to crack AT&T’s phone lines was discovered by this guy: John
Draper, who realized that the Captain Crunch Bo’Sun Whistle that came in his box of cereal
just so happened to emit a tone of exactly 2600 hertz.
Oh, and for those of you who are wondering, 2600 hertz sounds a little like this.
So, really, my point is: it’s probably better that these whistles were in the hands of a
criminal syndicate than the actual children they were intended for.
Now, while Captain Crunch eventually stopped putting telecom hijacking tools in their boxes
of breakfast cereal, phone phreaking continued to evolve over the next decade or so.
Many hackers began using tone-generating devices called “blue boxes,” a design that was
perfected by this nerd and sold at an egregious markup by this nerd, who later dropped out
of college to run a fruit stand, or something like that.
But, before you run over to your dusty old house phone and begin blowing whistles into
it, you should know that, much like beloved actor Rick Moranis, these sorts of techniques
haven’t really worked since the 80s.
Landlines slowly became more sophisticated over the years—Bell Telephone started putting
filters over long-distance lines that blocked out single-frequency tones, and eventually
shifted all of their hardware over to a system of out-of-band signaling, where telephone
lines had dedicated data channels for information like the number dialed and the identity of
the person who dialed it.
On top of that, many modern landline phones don’t even actually use landlines at all,
and rely on internet protocols to send and receive data instead.
So, until Kellogg’s starts accidentally dropping black-market WiFi-cracking kits in
their boxes of Honey Smacks, no cereal box prize will ever quite live up to the humble
Bo’Sun whistle.
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