u
done? What exactly HAVE you "stolen," anyway? If a tree falls in the
forest and nobody hears it, how much is the noise worth? Even now this
remains a rather dicey question.

Blue-boxing was no joke to the phone companies, however. Indeed, when
Ramparts magazine, a radical publication in California, printed the
wiring schematics necessary to create a mute box in June 1972, the
magazine was seized by police and Pacific Bell phone-company officials.
The mute box, a blue-box variant, allowed its user to receive
long-distance calls free of charge to the caller. This device was
closely described in a Ramparts article wryly titled "Regulating the
Phone Company In Your Home." Publication of this article was held to be
in violation of Californian State Penal Code section 502.7, which
outlaws ownership of wire-fraud devices and the selling of "plans or
instructions for any instrument, apparatus, or device intended to avoid
telephone toll charges."

Issues of Ramparts were recalled or seized on the newsstands, and the
resultant loss of income helped put the magazine out of business. This
was an ominous precedent for free-expression issues, but the telco's
crushing of a radical-fringe magazine passed without serious challenge
at the time. Even in the freewheeling California 1970s, it was widely
felt that there was something sacrosanct about what the phone company
knew; that the telco had a legal and moral right to protect itself by
shutting off the flow of such illicit information. Most telco
information was so "specialized" that it would scarcely be understood
by any honest member of the public. If not published, it would not be
missed. To print such material did not seem part of the legitimate
role of a free press.

In 1990 there would be a similar telco-inspired attack on the
electronic phreak/hacking "magazine" Phrack. The Phrack legal case
became a central issue in the Hacker Crackdown, and gave rise to great
controversy. Phrack would also be shut down, for a time, at least,
but this time both the telcos and their law-enforcement allies would
pay a much larger price for their actions. The Phrack case will be
examined in detail, later.

Phone-phreaking as a social practice is still very much alive at this
moment. Today, phone-phreaking is thriving much more vigorously than
the better-known and worse-feared practice of "computer hacking." New
forms of phreaking are spreading rapidly, following new vulnerabil