Captain Crunch: The World’s foremost Phone Phreaker

Mr Crunch exterior his home in Burbank, California in 2008. Big thrill and worry yesterday after it appeared uber-hacking combined Team Poison had infiltrated the phones of Scotland Yard's Counter violence command.A chat between officers operating the counter intimidation hotline was recorded and up-loaded to YouTube by spokesperson @_TeaMP0isoN.

The recording sounds like a entrust briefing from night-shift staff enlightening details of an earlier attack where the hotline with bombarded with trick calls.Police now insist there was no real ‘hack’. Without admitting it, they’re telling an officer didn’t replace the phone properly after one of the trick calls and the prankster simply listened-in to and recorded the resulting conversation in the room.

They’re probably right, though Team toxic still persist they phreaked (hacked) the phone system. But who knows the very first phone phreaker was a man called boss Crunch? Crunch’s genuine name was John Draper, a US Air Force wangle that in 1971 exposed that a toy whistle given out in a box of Cap’n Crunch muesli could emit the 2600 hertz tone used by A&T to route free telephone calls.

Crunch went on to erect more sophisticated electronic equipment that enabled him to hack into the US phone system to control trunk lines and eavesdrop on other people’s calls, before he was eventually immovable and sentenced to five years audition for wire fraud in 1972. I met him while jacket the international Hackers At Large meeting in Amsterdam in 2000. He expressed dismay the media had warped the word ‘hacker’ to mean someone who caused mischief by flouting into other people’s computer systems.

What it really meant, he said, was someone with dryness for technical familiarity and a desire to ‘understand’ computers by taking them apart to see how they worked. In a conference with Esquire magazine he said of his phone-hacking behavior: "I do it for one reason and one reason only. I'm knowledge about a system. The phone corporation is a system. A computer is a system, do you value? If I do what I do, it is only to discover a system. Computers, systems, that's my container. The phone business is nothing but a computer.

West Midlands Police arrested two youth last night in correlation with yesterdays 'prank', 'hack', 'phreak', total cock-up'. It won't be long before the real chronicle emerges.