Phreaking

Phreaking is a slang term coined to describe the activity of a culture of people who study, experiment with, or explore telecommunication systems, such as equipment and systems connected to public telephone networks.^[1] The term phreak is a sensational spelling of the word freak with the ph- from phone, and may also refer to the use of various audio frequencies to manipulate a phone system. Phreak, phreaker, or phone phreak are names used for and by individuals who participate in phreaking.

The term first referred to groups who had reverse engineered the system of tones used to route long-distance calls. By re-creating the signaling tones, phreaks could switch calls from the phone handset while avoiding long-distance calling charges which were common then. These fees could be significant, depending on the time, duration and destination of the call. To ease the creation of the routing tones, electronic tone generators known as blue boxes became a staple of the phreaker community. This community included future Apple Inc. co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

The blue box era came to an end with the ever-increasing use of digital telephone networks which allowed telecommunication companies to discontinue the use of in-band signaling for call routing purposes. Instead, telecom companies began employing common-channel signaling (CCS), through which dialing information was sent on a separate channel that was inaccessible to the telecom customer. By the 1980s, most of the public switched telephone network (PSTN) in the US and Western Europe had adopted the SS7 system which uses out-of-band signaling for call control (and which is still in use to this day), therefore rendering blue boxes obsolete. Phreaking has since become closely linked with computer hacking.^[2]