phones, to the joy of the freewheeling underground and
the insensate rage of all straight people. As a political tactic,
phone-service theft ensured that Yippie advocates would always have
ready access to the long-distance telephone as a medium, despite the
Yippies' chronic lack of organization, discipline, money, or even a
steady home address.

PARTY LINE was run out of Greenwich Village for a couple of years, then
"Al Bell" more or less defected from the faltering ranks of Yippiedom,
changing the newsletter's name to TAP or Technical Assistance Program.
After the Vietnam War ended, the steam began leaking rapidly out of
American radical dissent. But by this time, "Bell" and his dozen or so
core contributors had the bit between their teeth, and had begun to
derive tremendous gut-level satisfaction from the sensation of pure
TECHNICAL POWER.

TAP articles, once highly politicized, became pitilessly jargonized and
technical, in homage or parody to the Bell System's own technical
documents, which TAP studied closely, gutted, and reproduced without
permission. The TAP elite revelled in gloating possession of the
specialized knowledge necessary to beat the system.

"Al Bell" dropped out of the game by the late 70s, and "Tom Edison"
took over; TAP readers (some 1400 of them, all told) now began to show
more interest in telex switches and the growing phenomenon of computer
systems.

In 1983, "Tom Edison" had his computer stolen and his house set on fire
by an arsonist. This was an eventually mortal blow to TAP (though the
legendary name was to be resurrected in 1990 by a young Kentuckian
computer-outlaw named "Predat0r.")

#

Ever since telephones began to make money, there have been people
willing to rob and defraud phone companies. The legions of petty phone
thieves vastly outnumber those "phone phreaks" who "explore the
system" for the sake of the intellectual challenge. The New York
metropolitan area (long in the vanguard of American crime) claims over
150,000 physical attacks on pay telephones every year! Studied
carefully, a modern payphone reveals itself as a little fortress,
carefully designed and redesigned over generations, to resist
coin-slugs, zaps of electricity, chunks of coin-shaped ice, prybars,
magnets, lockpicks, blasting caps. Public pay-phones must survive in a
world of unfriendly, greedy people, and a modern payphone is as
exquisitely evolved as a cactus.

Because the phone network pre