Phil Lapsley

Exploding the Phone (Grove Press)

In EXPLODING THE PHONE, Phil Lapsley illuminates the forgotten history of the proto-hackers, tinkerers, and pranksters who turned AT&T’s telephone system into their electronic playground.

Before smartphones and iPads, before the Internet or the personal computer, a misfit group of technophiles, blind teenagers, hippies, and outlaws figured out how to hack the world’s largest machine: the telephone system. By the middle of the twentieth century the telephone system had grown into something extraordinary, a web of cutting-edge switching machines and human operators that linked together millions of people like never before. But the network had a billion-dollar flaw, and once people discovered it, things would never be the same. Phil Lapsley’s EXPLODING THE PHONE traces the birth of long-distance communication and the telephone, the rise of AT&T’s monopoly, the creation of the sophisticated machines that made it all work, and the discovery of Ma Bell’s Achilles’ heel. Lapsley expertly weaves together the clandestine network of “phone phreaks” who broke into the system to satisfy their curiosity, the mobsters who exploited its flaws to avoid the feds, and the counterculture movement that argued you should rip off the phone company to fight against the war in Vietnam. AT&T responded with “Greenstar,” an unprecedented project that would ultimately tap some thirty-three million telephone calls and record 1.5 million of them. The FBI fought back, too, especially when a phone phreak showed a confidential informant how he could remotely eavesdrop on FBI calls. Phone phreaking exploded into the popular culture, with famous actors, musicians, and investors caught with “blue boxes,” many of them built by two young phone phreaks named Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Soon, the phone phreaks, the feds, and the phone company were at war. Based on original interviews and declassified documents, and featuring a forward by phone phreak turned Apple Computers co-founder Steve Wozniak, EXPLODING THE PHONE is a captivating, ground-breaking work about an important part of our cultural and technological history. "The definitive account of the first generation of network hackers – the scruffy rebels who first plumbed the secrets of the global telephone network, and accidentally earned the wrath of everyone from AT&T to the FBI. At turns a technological love story, a counter cultural history and a generation-spanning epic, Exploding the Phone is obsessively researched and told with wit and clarity. It captures a moment in time that might otherwise have been lost forever." —Kevin Poulsen, news editor of Wired.com and author of Kingpin Phil Lapsley is a cofounder of two high-tech companies, and a former consultant at McKinsey & Company. He holds a masters degree in electrical engineering from U. C. Berkeley and an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management. THIS EVENT WAS RECORDED LIVE AT SKYLIGHT BOOKS FEBRUARY 11, 2013. COPIES OF THE BOOK FROM THIS EVENT CAN BE PURCHASED HERE: http://www.skylightbooks.com/book/9780802120618