irelessly, around
the clock. Instead of eyes, it uses "ferrod scanners" to check the
condition of local lines and trunks. Instead of hands, it has "signal
distributors," "central pulse distributors," "magnetic latching
relays," and "reed switches," which complete and break the calls.
Instead of a brain, it has a "central processor." Instead of an
instruction manual, it has a program. Instead of a handwritten logbook
for recording and billing calls, it has magnetic tapes. And it never
has to talk to anybody. Everything a customer might say to it is done
by punching the direct-dial tone buttons on your subset.

Although an Electronic Switching Station can't talk, it does need an
interface, some way to relate to its, er, employers. This interface is
known as the "master control center." (This interface might be better
known simply as "the interface," since it doesn't actually "control"
phone calls directly. However, a term like "Master Control Center" is
just the kind of rhetoric that telco maintenance engineers--and
hackers--find particularly satisfying.)

Using the master control center, a phone engineer can test local and
trunk lines for malfunctions. He (rarely she) can check various alarm
displays, measure traffic on the lines, examine the records of
telephone usage and the charges for those calls, and change the
programming.

And, of course, anybody else who gets into the master control center by
remote control can also do these things, if he (rarely she) has managed
to figure them out, or, more likely, has somehow swiped the knowledge
from people who already know.

In 1989 and 1990, one particular RBOC, BellSouth, which felt
particularly troubled, spent a purported $1.2 million on computer
security. Some think it spent as much as two million, if you count all
the associated costs. Two million dollars is still very little
compared to the great cost-saving utility of telephonic computer
systems.

Unfortunately, computers are also stupid. Unlike human beings,
computers possess the truly profound stupidity of the inanimate.

In the 1960s, in the first shocks of spreading computerization, there
was much easy talk about the stupidity of computers--how they could
"only follow the program" and were rigidly required to do "only what
they were told." There has been rather less talk about the stupidity
of computers since they began to achieve grandmaster status in chess
tournaments, and to manifest many oth