Remembering “The Case”

I might just be getting out of jail around now, would I not? Hmmm. Here I am thinking about this again after finding one round of paperwork from July, 1990. It’s not the most interesting story to tell, or is it? For me the details remain somewhere between tedious and seductively worth repeating to myself just to understand how my life could have been flushed down the toilet.

I said in the shower talk earlier that it started at Sewanee. Now I don’t think that could be. That would mean I engaged in this stuff from high school all the way through 4 years of college and I just don’t think that is true. I remember delivering a particularly enthusiastic description of how it all worked to a friend in college, someone who I don’t think I knew yet as a freshman… This account of mine would have been around the time I first discovered VMBs (Voice Mail Boxes) and what I later learned was called phreaking. So it must have been later, maybe sophomore year, that it all started.

I remember screaming into a payphone when I called a number that led to what sounded like a fax machine. I thought I’d make some kind of connection if I made a noise that matched that of the modem signal. There was a specific building I went to because it had a row of phone booths that were isolated, so I could scream at the fax signal all I wanted without anyone hearing. Where was that building, though? Oberlin or Sewanee? I am not sure why I associate any of this with Sewanee except that I did have an avid interest the payphones there. It was a memory of my roommate calling his girlfriend from one of those phones and hijacking my jar of quarters to do it that pushed memories of the VMB escapades back to Sewanee.

“The Case”, as we came to refer to it, is not something I think about that much anymore, though you might think otherwise from how much I’ve talked about it on the .MOBI and now here.  At times it feels like a vacuum that might reappear one day and swallow my life. By that I don’t mean that any prosecution or reopening of charges regarding what happened 27+ years ago is in the offing. I guess my fear is that I might return to action as a phone phreak or something else, a scene I have astutely and deliberately avoided almost completely since The Case closed. The closest I came to that scene was when I lethargically entertained the idea of being a guest speaker at a hacker conference a few years ago. I had been invited to speak at a hacker conference once before, some years previous. I just ignored that inquiry as I should have done with the more recent inquiry.

Jumping to the conclusion (we all walked) I think there were two key factor that got us off the hook, no pun intended. One was the fact that only one of us owned a computer, and that machine did not even have a modem. This made it essentially impossible for us to have done the kind of real damage that was done by the Legion of Doom or whoever the hell was ultimately responsible for felling the voicemail system at the greeting card company. The other reason was that we never accessed the voicemail of a financial institution, at least as far as I or anybody else could remember. It seems odd that we somehow managed not to do that, since we fanned out our activities on dozens of company’s networks and could have landed on a financial institution just as easily as any other kind of company.

We were unaware that such trespass into a banking or investment company’s systems would have been taken far more seriously by the investigators. It’s just damn lucky that we managed to avoid those type of companies. But I would also assume that banks and their ilk must have had better security for their voicemail systems, making it prohibitively difficult for us to just waltz in.

I don’t remember what kind of access everyone else involved had to computers but I would have been limited to the computer room at college. There must have been Internet access from there but if there was it was lost on me, and I would have had no idea how I might have utilized the Internet with regard to VMBs and phone networks. This was 1988 through 1990. I never saw the Internet until 1992 or 1993, when I landed on a dialup BBS (bulletin board system) frequented by hackers and phreaks. It took me years to connect that BBS to what went down on the VMBs I accessed, but I became convinced that individuals from that BBS had to have had a hand in getting myself and the others in trouble. There simply were not that many people out there doing that sort of thing in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and this BBS was one of the places where they congregated. I would have no idea which individuals had a part of it but I stand by the conclusion even as I have no unassailable evidence.

I don’t make this comment with any malice or as an accusation. I just thought it was a curious bit of randomness that I ended up in the company years later of those people who likely had no idea what kind of trouble they got me into. I was just roadkill to them.

In a nutshell what happened was my friends and I left a bunch of messages for each other on a voicemail system that got taken over by hackers and bad guys who desired to crash the system and cause some trouble. They probably had no idea our voicemail messages were even in there.

If there was any possible connection between those people and me it might have been that they heard about this particular voicemail system from an acquaintance I made while exploring other corporate voicemail systems. He called himself Jim. I called him “Wisconsin Jim”, or “Wiscy Jim”, since he said he was in Wisconsin. Since “Wiscy” looks wrong to me now that I’ve typed it out for the first time in 30 years I think I’ll go with “Whiskey Jim”. Whickey Jim’s presence in my life did not last long but he was happy to educate me on “The Jungle”, as he called it, referring to the wider world of phone phreaking, VMBs, and hijacking free phone calls via unsecured networks. A lot of what he said was lost on me but I remembered how he said “There used to be this thing called ‘The Bridge’.” He said it like it was a source of awe. The Bridge was basically a party line where any number of people could call in and chat. I never knew how these open lines were found or how long they lasted but these were places where phreaks would convene to trade VMB numbers and passwords and talk about other things. I tuned into one of these one time and felt like I’d gone too far, even though I don’t think I communicated with anyone or obtained any significant bit of information. The only person I think I might have chatted with would have been “The Flash”, but it escapes me now if a voicemail message I heard from him was directed at me or someone else. Another name that flew past was Professor Falken, a reference to “Wargames.” Another person called himself “Condor”. I did not know until just this moment that “Condor” was the handle used by Kevin Mitnick. Was that really him? I don’t know but as I listened in on a swirl of live and recorded voices reading off VMB numbers and access codes I thought how interesting it would be to play this live on the radio — I had called in from the studio of the college station where I did a show.

I decided not to air it on account of there being so much obscenity in the conversation.

The BBS I found in 1992 or 1993 did host active discussion of hacking and phreaking and such things but I paid no attention to it. I think that at the time it was lost on me that hacking had anything to do with telephones. I thought that was all computer-centric, which just goes to show how little I really knew about those things.

I guess it’s inevitable that my interest in payphones has led certain observers to assume I am some kind of phreaker anarchist. I am not and, as I said earlier, I’ve made deliberate attempts over time to make it clear that I have no association with that scene. I don’t have any kind of problem with it, mind you, but breaking into networks and causing trouble is not my thing. Our accesses of VMBs and voicemail systems were done with the intention of doing as little damage as possible. We never deleted anything and limited our activities to well outside of normal business hours.

Today I could probably be lured into ethical hacking if it served any kind of benefit but I don’t see any reason for that to happen.

I might never know this for certain but I did an interview once with a reporter from Reader’s Digest (the story was never published) who seemed to be pretty well informed about the nature of our VMB escapades. She specifically asked if we had ever accessed a financial institution. I said no, adding that through this unintentional omission we might have accidentally avoided a mandatory sentence. The reporter essentially completed my thought, saying “You would probably be in jail today” if we had accessed any kind of bank or investment firm. I think that interview was 2005, 15 years since the prosecution commenced. She implied that there could have been a mandatory sentence of 25 years.

A lingering problem I have with this is that I cannot be certain how truthful is the claim that we never accessed the network of a financial institution. If we did then I can at least be certain that we never got anywhere or only accessed it in passing, since I have no memory of doing anything of substance on the network of that kind of company. I also have to question whether accessing the voicemail network of a bank would have been taken as seriously as if we got into their computer networks or records. But of course we had no ability to do that.

Only one of us owned a computer and that machine was used to print out what we called “Thousand Sheets.” I might still have one of those around here. If I remember them right they were sheets where every possible toll-free phone number starting from some arbitrary point was printed out so we could dial the numbers and notate by hand what company they connected to. It was, without doubt, OCD material, and it burned a lot of time over one particular summer vacation. I don’t remember using those sheets myself very much but the others did and I can see them in my mind.

WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH DEBBIE GIBSON?

What a good question.

Unlike the others and their Thousand Sheets I preferred to dial numbers based on the words they spelled using the letters on a telephone’s touchtone keypad. A lot of companies had toll-free numbers that spelled out their business name or a word that reflected the nature of what they do. Think 1-800-FLOWERS (a florist), or 1-800-COLLECT (a number you would dial to make collect calls). I would make up numbers based on 7-letter words or phrases I saw around me or that otherwise came to mind. I remember dialing 1-800-ABCNEWS and connecting to the newsroom at the ABC television and radio network. One night I dialed 1-800-BITCHIN, telling the woman who answered “Hey, you have a bitchin’ phone number!” She laughed and asked what I meant. After I explained she put me on hold, saying she wanted to verify this. She did and a few moments later she returned, laughing and telling me to have a nice night.

To this day I cannot see a 7-letter word or phrase without thinking I should call it just to see what it connects to on the toll-free.

Dialing 7-letter words and phrases led me to see what happened if I tried 1-800-DGIBSON. At the time I had a schoolboy crush on the singer Debbie Gibson, and by dialing her initial plus last name I might have thought I’d connect to a Debbie Gibson fan club or something similar. No luck on that but what I did land on proved to be the voicemail system where our exploits all came crashing down. Instead of hearing Debbie Gibson songs I heard an outgoing message from someone at the C.R. Gibson, the nation’s second-largest greeting card company. I did not know what the C.R. Gibson company did but I didn’t care. I could tell  from the moment I connected that they used the same voicemail system as several other companies we had breached.  It was almost too easy since we had all the voicemail navigation commands memorized.

Debbie Gibson was never mentioned in the court proceedings, but the thousand sheets were introduced as evidence for the trial that never happened, as were numerous other bits of incriminating papyral effluvia. On one piece of paper I wrote step-by-step instructions for how to access a particular VMB, and I think I added instructions for how to explore the wider world of toll free numbers and voicemail systems by making up 7-letter words and phrases and seeing what they connect to. My logic of this tip was that companies with those kind of vanity numbers were more likely than others to have voicemail systems.

Somewhere in those instructions I shouted in all caps “THIS IS A FEDERAL OFFENSE!” This document was taken in by prosecutors but somehow it never came back to haunt me. Truth be told I did not even know if the actions for which I gave instruction truly did constitute a federal crime. I wrote those words in all caps just to scare people into being careful.

Thinking about it now reminds me of when I started to feel like the scene was getting out of control. I wrote those instructions for a bunch of friends of  a friend, none of whom I knew. It was like unleashing a multi-headed hydra. I don’t know how involved those people got but I seem to remember them getting paranoid and dropping out all of a sudden. At first they were gung-ho enthusiastic about it, as I recall, embracing unsecured VMBs like they were some kind of can’t-miss business opportunity. Today I would have no idea who those people were.

There were 3 of us who put the most energy into all this, with a fourth individual checking in once in a while. I am still friends with them, though inevitably we’ve drifted apart. Outside of that core group I don’t think I ever knew how much trouble anyone else got into. I have a foggy memory of hearing that one individual who called in one time just to check it out got stuck with the same punishment as we did: 5 years of probation, a financial penalty, and of course legal fees. Others got off scot-free. Good for them, I guess.

I’m the one who started everything but I don’t feel any kind of guilt for having been the instigator. The Thousand Sheets were not my idea and, if I remember right, I made little use of them. That’s not to lay blame on or point a finger at anybody, though. As The Case unfolded I seem to remember thinking this was all my fault. Since then I’ve come to think that my behavior was anything but coercive nor could it even be characterized as exercising peer pressure. Everybody involved was altogether in on it without encouragement from me or anyone else.

Adding a smidgen of insult to the whole sordid affair I remembering feeling slighted that two of the core individuals had gone off on their own to talk privately on a VMB that I don’t think they ever told me about. They were talking about personal stuff, and I don’t remember anything of it except that I found it and that it was there. The three of us were thicker than thieves, or so I thought. I guess I imagined the three of us had no secrets so I didn’t understand why they were talking away from me or if they had some reason to keep me out of the loop. It worked out in the end. I grew up a little and realized that friends can do these things like that without it being meant in a hurtful way.

But then I had my secrets, too, or one of them at least. I never told anybody at any stage of this how much my mother and I used VMBs to communicate. She really glommed on to it, leaving me countless messages and creating numerous running jokes involving the sound of the automated voicemail attendant’s voice and the idiosyncrasies of navigating the systems. Thinking of it now, as an adult, I find it hard to believe that she did not see what we were doing and order us to stop. Instead she just fueled the flames.

I don’t know if we ever spoke of it but I sensed somewhere in her comments about The Case that she felt guilty for having been something of a facilitator when what she should have done was tell us to knock that shit off and unplug every telephone in the house. By me not saying anything to prosecutors about her involvement I felt like I was covering up for her. It’s possible she could have faced the same punishment as the rest of us. She did not, but that’s not to suggest she was unaffected by or uninvolved in the proceedings. She sat there in the room when the District Attorney questioned me and she was there in the courtroom when we entered our “Not Guilty” pleas — something I was told we were not going to have to do. We were also fingerprinted and I think photographed mugshot style, but I might be off about that last detail. The court record is sealed and the case was eventually dismissed, leaving all involved with no criminal records.

I never faced FBI or prosecuting attorneys for as long as the other two who were the core actors in this nonsense. One of the others talked to an agent in Miami for hours, the other spent what sounded like days in the company of FBI and Secret Service agents who played back some of our voicemail recordings. That must have been extremely uncomfortable but somehow I was never required to do anything like that. I remember the FBI agent coming to my apartment in college, drawing some attention to himself (and me) by asking the manager of the Army Navy store downstairs if he knew where “the Thomas kid” was. I don’t think I knew anybody at that store but the agent’s question was overheard by a couple of fellow conservatory students standing nearby. They were understandably intrigued enough to ask me later what the hell the FBI wanted from me. Similarly the agent spoke with my roommate, a slight Asian woman whose normally measured voice cracked when she asked what business the FBI had coming around looking for me.

I don’t remember what I told her but I think I waved it off by suggesting that someone else was in trouble and I was a character witness, or some bullshit like that. Whatever I said  seemed to ease her worries, though at the time I felt that the platonic nature of our relationship should not have made this as pressing a concern for her as it seemed to be. I also don’t remember what I told those other two friends who overheard the FBI agent asking about me but I don’t think I was as vague with them as with the roommate.

The FBI agent handed me a card. On that card was printed the text for my Miranda rights. The agent seemed surprised that this upset me, and tried to make me relax by pointing at the number “3” handwritten on his case file. He said that number reflected how many cases of this nature the bureau had handled, and that 3 is an extremely low count. I don’t know if that number represented the number of investigations for the entire FBI or just his particular office or district, but in 1988 or 1989 I guess the number of cases involving voicemail networks that made it to the FBI’s attention might have been pretty low. I’d be curious to know more about those other 2 cases.

I don’t know what made the agent think that pointing out this low number to me would ease my mind. Instead it made me nervous that the prosecution for this would be going after us for crimes they did not even understand, and that they would go after us with more energy if they thought they were breaking new legal ground. This hunger was unmistakably present in the early stages of the investigation.

In the end, to the credit of everyone involved at the FBI and Secret Service, that is not what happened. It became clear to them that we were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that while we deserved some kind of punishment our crimes did not merit throwing the book at us. We each got 5 years probation and were ordered to pay restitution for damages we could not possibly have done. I moved on to New York in October, 1990, and made restitution payments as best I could on a $5/hour salary at Tower Records and with something like $12,000 in student loan debt to boot. I reported to a probation officer in Lower Manhattan for a while but I think he got tired of having to deal with me. His first comments when I showed up were something like “I guess you never thought you’d be reporting to a probation officer over that stupid shit you guys did.” That made me laugh. In the end, it seemed, everyone got it. Everyone understood how marginal our transgressions had been.

I don’t remember for how long I reported to this person but I think he wanted to spend his working time with real criminals. Those probation officer check-ins are among my earliest memories of New York.

Reading back over this I see a rather chaotic attempt at explaining the details of The Case. It feels good getting some of this out. If there is something fundamentally missing from the narrative it is, simply, what were we doing there? We were not endeavoring to cause trouble. No, we were there just to talk, and to keep in touch. In that capacity it was an amazing resource for us, as we spent countless hours talking and listening without ever paying a nickel for the calls.

I said that I had one secret, about my mother’s involvement and me covering up for her. There is actually another secret, one shared by the both of us and, as far as I know, mother took it to her grave. The secret lurked over everything the Case comprised. That secret involved my sister. Perhaps it is time to come clean once and for all in letting her know that it was the voicemail system at her job in Hollywood, FL, where we all got started with this stuff. I used to call her at work from payphones, since there was a toll-free number there. I remember hearing the voice of the automated voicemail attendant, instructing me to press 1 for this, or 2 for that. I thought there had to be more to this system than just following the directions. There had to be something underneath, right? So I took the momentous step of pressing the button with the pound sign on it. As if I’d opened a sealed safe I heard the automated voice say “Please enter your mailbox number.” I wasn’t in yet, and I don’t know how long it took me to figure everything out, but that almost magical sounding voice (which I still hear in my head) confirmed my suspicions that intrigue was brewing beneath the surface of this voicemail system. I just had to figure out what I had just accessed.

I must have sensed right from the start that this might be illegal, because even though I had no experience with this sort of thing I was careful to cover my tracks and leave no trace. But it was keeping this discovery hidden from my sister that proved to be the most enduring secret, one which I stuck to all the way through to the end. I did not want her getting into any trouble over this, and why should she when she had absolutely nothing to do with my activities there. I do not remember why this was suggested but at some point in The Case my mother suggested to me that my sister was going to have be informed about all this given her connection to how it all started. I do not know what made my mother think that but she was serious about it. I think she might have just felt guilty about keeping this thing away from my sister but I guess I’ll never know. As far as I know my sister remained blissfully unaware of the phone havoc being wrought right in front of her, beneath her radar.

But I was also quick to find other voicemail systems at other companies and set up shop on one of those, shifting any conspicuousness from what I guess I thought of as the home system, or the home VMB. That’s where I and the others learned how to use these things and from there we could quickly figure out other systems at other places. It is also the first place where we listened in on these voice correspondences and learned a few things about what grownup lives are like.

The first time I heard the voice say to enter a mailbox number I deduced that mailbox numbers were the same as telephone extensions. From there it was, in the years 1988 and 1989, ridiculously easy to access people’s private voicemail boxes. In those days most people did not put passwords on their accounts, so all I had to do was enter a mailbox number and listen away to messages from people inside and outside the company. Others who did have passwords used stupidly guessable strings like “1234” and “password”. Listening in on this kind of stuff was a bit voyeuristic but as far as I could tell all harmless. It’s not like this was anyone’s home answering machine, where one might expect messages of a more personal nature. This was mostly just meetings being scheduled, deliveries being confirmed, and the general stuff of corporata.

It became something of a learning experience for me as I ventured out onto other voicemail systems, listening in on stuff like distressed calls from accident victims trying to contact an insurance adjuster, or stranded rental car customers calling from roadside payphones to summon some kind of assistance. I listened in on this sort of stuff and, when my friends from school got on board, so did they. We would talk and sometimes joke about situations we heard played out in these little dramas, which usually involved someone repeatedly trying to get in touch with someone at the company but having no luck whatsoever. It was our little window into what adulthood was going to sound like if we actually made it there.

A few years later I found myself at the helm of another voicemail system, this one on the home turf of my first office job in New York. Like the VMBs of yore mine was reachable via a toll-free number and I gave instructions for one of the partners in crime from The Case to access it. We left hours and hours of messages like this, just like the old days, and nobody in charge of the voicemail system at that company ever complained. I have never managed a voicemail system but I have to assume that whoever does is aware that some people store huge quantities of messages, hogging resources that might fill up the hard drive storage and make it impossible for others to receive voicemail messages. I further assume that whoever manages these systems has rightful access to listen in on anything they wish, should one person’s quantity of saved messages be deemed suspicious or questionable for some reason. This would be the same assumption of non-privacy that characterizes corporate e-mail communications, which are monitored in many companies.

If any of that went on at that company it was lost on me.

I rarely venture into this kind of telephone stuff anymore. I think the last time I revisited this sort of thing was 5 or 6 years ago, when there was still a payphone at the corner of 34th Street and 36th Avenue. I dialed 1-800- followed by a very generic 7-letter word that I happened to spot on a nearby sign. I was connected to a recorded message for a company that sold some kind of scammy-sounding brain supplement. Almost instinctively I pressed the button with the pound sign on it and heard those magic words: “Please enter your mailbox number.” It was the same voicemail system as the Home VMB from all those years ago. It was shockingly easy to get into to the customer service voicemail box and listen to one angry call after another from people calling to complain about their brain pills either not working or not arriving. I thought about recording it at home and making an audio piece out of it all but I never even tried. I found these messages from people that were sad, angry, depressed, and confused to be depressing as hell, and making some kind of audio piece out of it would most likely violate some kind of wiretapping law.