New York Times, 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."