Captain Crunch

[Steve Orrin]

This article from NYTimes.com
has been sent to you by sorrin at lockstar.com.



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>From Outlaw to Consultant

January 29, 2001

By JOHN MARKOFF

MENLO PARK, Calif.  There are many legendary figures here in Silicon
Valley. There are men like Steven Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, Bill
Hewlett and . There are stories of brilliance and innovation and
avarice.

But there may be no tale so poignant as that of John T. Draper,
the mythical "phone phreak" who became a national figure in 1971
after being one of the first to discover that a toy whistle in the
Cap'n Crunch cereal box could trick the telephone network into
giving free telephone calls.

Widely known as Captain Crunch, Mr. Draper has had a remarkable
career since then. He was arrested and sent to prison for his
telephone exploits several times and graduated from phones to
computers.

He did the early design from a jail cell for EasyWriter, the word
processing program that came with the first I.B.M. PC in 1981.

In the intervening decades he was for a while a millionaire who
owned a house in Hawaii. But he has also lost jobs and been
homeless more than once. He hacked into computer networks, using
some of the same skills he honed on the telephone system. His back
was permanently injured in a prison beating in Pennsylvania. He was
robbed on a Texas highway where he lost a notebook computer
containing the only copy of his autobiography. For years he
wandered the world working where he could as a high-tech hobo 
including the Goa coast in India, where in 1999 he spent six months
coding Web sites for an Indian entrepreneur.

Throughout all of his travels and travails, however, Mr. Draper
has maintained an almost childlike sense of optimism, and now he is
trying to start over.

With a small group of partners  and perhaps a little late to the
game  Mr. Draper is seeking to take part in the Internet boom. In
a venture that will no doubt raise concerns for some, he and his
confederates have set up an Internet security software and
consulting firm, aimed at protecting the online property of
corporations.

The company, which has been self- financed but is not soliciting
venture capital, is called ShopIP. Mr. Draper, 57, describes
himself as a "white-hat hacker" these days and sees his new venture
as his way of repaying society for his misadventures three decades
ago.

Mr. Draper vows that his hacking days are behind him. In the last
year, he says, he has thrown himself into the study of computer
security techniques with the same passion with which he once
studied the intricacies of the nation's phone system.

"My eyes were opened, and this has been a real change in direction
in my life," he said in an interview at a coffee house here, just a
mile from the telephone booth where a government informer once
cornered him for his antics with a so-called blue box  an
electronic device that could generate the tones necessary for
commanding the phone network. "It made me realize that I could pay
back society for my deeds in the past," he added.

After starting to develop a type of network-security software
program known as a fire wall in 1999, Mr. Draper met a young
businessman, Daniel Baggett, now 29, who had known the older man by
reputation and who now takes a sheltering stance toward him.

"Part of my mission is to protect Crunch; I respect him," Mr.
Baggett said. "He played a huge role in the early days of the
personal computer industry, and it's a crime he hasn't been able to
reap the rewards."

And yet, the issue of white-hat vs. black-hat hackers has long
been a thorny ethical debate in the computer security world, where
some people have argued that there is no room for outlaws 
reformed or otherwise. Others respond that the people who can best
protect network computer systems are those with the most experience
at testing their weaknesses.

"Whether black hats can become white hats is not a black-and-white
question," said Peter Neumann, a computer security expert at SRI
International, a research firm here. "In general, there are quite a
few black hats who have gone straight and become very effective.
But the simplistic idea that hiring overtly black-hat folks will
increase your security is clearly a myth."

Mr. Draper's past was largely defined by a widely read article by
Ron Rosenbaum, "Secrets of the Little Blue Box," which appeared in
the October 1971 issue of Esquire.

The article described the activities of a small group of telephone
"hobbyists," including Mr. Draper, who had learned how to control
and misuse the nation's telephone network.

In an essay in The New York Observer this month, Mr. Rosenbaum
wrote that Captain Crunch became an American antihero and a
cultural icon in the intervening years.

Two young men who devoured the 1971 article were Steven Jobs and
Stephen Wozniak. At the time Mr. Wozniak was a student at the
University of California at Berkeley. He and Mr. Jobs spent several
weeks frantically searching for Mr. Draper, who then lived in the
San Jose area.

After they contacted him, Mr. Draper arrived at Mr. Wozniak's dorm
room. Mr. Jobs recalls an outlandish character with moustache and
horn- rim glasses who walked in and announced with a flourish, "It
is I."

Mr. Draper tutored Mr. Wozniak and Mr. Jobs in the art of
programming their own blue boxes, capable of gaining free  and
illegal  access to the phone network. The two novice entrepreneurs
sold the blue boxes door-to-door on the Berkeley campus, several
years before they founded Apple Computer.

Things turned out less favorably for Mr. Draper. After the Esquire
article he became a target of the F.B.I. and in 1972 was arrested
and spent a short while in jail before being sentenced to five
years probation.

Around this time he discovered Call Computer, a tiny company in
Mountain View, Calif., that provided computer time-sharing
services. Mr. Draper was still a student at a local community
college, but the owner of Call Computer discovered that Mr. Draper
had a flair for programming and offered him a job. Later, the
programming tools Mr. Draper had developed while working at Call
Computer were widely used by many of the first personal computer
designers.

And while he did not entirely end his phone activities, he became
a regular at the potluck dinners at the People's Computer Company,
a counterculture educational organization in Menlo Park dedicated
to making computers widely available.

Mr. Draper's new passion was computing, but he was a phone- phreak
recidivist. In fact, it was at a pay phone across the street from
the People's Computer office near here where a government informer
caught him in the act of telephone fraud.

This time, Mr. Draper went to prison, spending October 1976 to
February 1977 at the federal prison in Lompoc, Calif. For the final
portion of his sentence he was in a work- release program back in
the San Francisco Bay Area, where he began developing his
EasyWriter program.

During the day, he recalled, he would write the code. Then, at
night, after returning to jail, he would study the paper list of
programming commands, looking for errors. "It was an ideal
situation," he said. "It forced me to get off the computer and
think and debug my program."

Shortly after leaving prison, Mr. Draper was hired by Apple
Computer, at a time when the company had only 15 employees. He
developed a telephone-dialing card for the original Apple II
computer. But Apple never marketed it for fear that it could be
used as a powerful computer-controlled blue box.

In an online posting a number of years ago Mr. Draper described
the antics during Apple's early period, which may help explain the
company's hesitation to put his modem on the market. "I can
remember Woz programming it to repeatedly call Steve Jobs's
parents' phone over and over again (in those days, there were very
few answering machines). I got blamed for what Woz did."

He also was blamed, by federal authorities, for a parole violation
later that year for associating with known phone phreaks, and was
sent to a federal penitentiary in Pennsylvania. There, as Mr.
Draper recalls the episode, a fellow inmate asked for instructions
on hacking into the telephone network. Suspecting the man to be an
informer, he gave him bogus information. Unfortunately, when the
inmate could not get the free phone calls he was expecting, he beat
up Mr. Draper, who still has several damaged vertebrae from the
run-in.

Despite his prison stints, Mr. Draper enjoyed an unaccustomed
affluence in the early 80's, after Easy- Writer hit it big on the
early I.B.M. PC's. But his life lacked the structure and discipline
to make his comfort last.

He drifted in and out of jobs, the most promising one with Ted
Nelson, a social scientist and software designer at Autodesk, in
Sausalito, Calif. Mr. Nelson was trying to perfect his hypertext
software, a forerunner of the World Wide Web.

But all too soon, Mr. Draper lost his job. He spent the mid-1990's
kicking about, winding up in San Diego in September 1996. There, he
lived in an artists' collective known as the Loft, which had a
high-speed Internet connection.

When the Loft fell apart, Mr. Draper was homeless. He spent time
in Tijuana, then decided to move to Florida, where he had heard of
an opportunity to work in Web-site development. It was on the road
to Florida, at a roadside rest area in Texas, that the manuscript
for his autobiography which he had worked on for four years was
stolen from his car as he slept.

But things started looking up in Florida, where he showed a
natural aptitude as a Web programmer and his work came to the
attention of an Indian businessman. That contact resulted in Mr.
Draper's spending six months on the Goa coast, designing Web pages
for companies there that were anxious to be on the Internet.

After returning from India in late 1999, Mr. Draper settled in
Fremont, across the San Francisco Bay from Palo Alto. Sharing a
cramped apartment with several friends, he began work on his
software company.

Today, Mr. Draper still lives a largely hand-to-mouth existence.
Known for his manic intensity and insistent curiosity, he has the
distinction of being one of the few people to lose his invitation
to the Hackers Conference, the annual gathering of the pioneers of
the personal computing industry, where social graces are not
usually a criterion for admission.

But there are those who have loyally stuck by Mr. Draper 
including Mr. Wozniak, who gave him an Apple Macintosh PowerBook
for Christmas.

For his part, Mr. Draper is enthusiastic about his new venture and
conveys a true believer's faith in the strength of his security
software, which ShopIP plans to release to a group of test
customers next month.

Yet he acknowledged the difficulties of living down the Captain
Crunch legend. "I'm not a bad guy," he said. "But I'm being treated
like a fox trying to guard the hen house."




http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/29/technology/29CAP.html?ex=981799181&ei=1&en
=5647f14cb6ae2919

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