Yes it's true.
Before we had digitally encrypted phones i once played with analog
unencrypted brick phones that could be manipulated via software and an
rs232 serial cable into the underbelly of the phone. It was
mindblowing. Becoming a fake repeater cell station and listening in
on cellular conversations that were happening in and around the cell
you were in was like being given the keys to the new technology
frontier. I'll tell you how briefly how all this came about.
It was a regular saturday, i was to head over to my favorite warez
dude and see what new stuff he had and swap him the latest i had. I
remember driving my green mini through junctions and being overly
confident in the city for my age. I never ever took into account
that i was carrying bags of cds and dvds on my passenger seat. Back
then the police did not search your car for such items anyway not like
today. It was cutting edge stuff, i was part of an underground
network that still exists between the fibres and interconnects of the
internet we know of today.
My contact was new in the city, we had met on a bbs system - could
have been mine might have been through an nfo file i had found and
after many 'sounding' out connections via bulletin board systems he
decided 'i knew the score' and we arranged a meet. He was the
typical closet hacker of the time, a building with a strange entrance,
part of a shop disguising the fact that people might actually live
there. It was part of a shop, i think they sold birds downstairs -
always a constant source of noise from below. It was a good
diversion from the humming noise of the backroom that was filled with
duplicators.
It was a usual exchange, my new stuff for his, back then i was on a
training scheme over in birmingham. my life was weird then, i was off
the grid living with a girl who took me in and i lived on a farm with
her parents. it was perfect cover, i went training every day - i
got dropped at the station in the morning and picked up later on in
the evening - days were long then. the job had a really advanced
computer connection of the time. i think it was a 128k bonded isdn2
connection (it prompted me enough to look at getting it at home
eventually) - in geek terms this was a 'big pipe' - after grabbing
some hacker tools to steal the netware admin password i had complete
control over the connection allowing me to call out on the modem and
dedicate the process to my faked admin account - giving me the ability
to zero time counters etc. I remember the final leaving letter
after they fired me saying 'philip has encouraged us to improved our
network security' it was subtle. i liked that.
So because i had this 'big pipe' at work i was a 'supplier' as such, i
could grab lots of .nfo, docs and some of the best text packs. i had
carved myself a niche out that i could get hold of this stuff quickly.
I remember my life being about 3.5" floppies and compiling these on
cd. I swapped my warez with my contact every saturday evening. We
talked about new kit, never really finding out about each other - just
talking around the edges of a friendship. It was an analog exchange
for digital content.
This particular saturday my contact decided that i had earned enough
cred for me to see what else he dabbled with. He was the typical
geek of the time, worked for a massive company as IT manager and has
plenty of income to buy random things on a whim and take them apart
with no concern if things worked or not after. It was an
experimental landscape and taking some of this information from .nfo
files and testing the examples out made you another class of elite.
He reached under his desk and bought up a brick of a mobile phone. A
motorola unit, back then they were called the 'brick phone' - i
remember noticing it has a thin skinny rs232 cable underneath with
poorly soldered connector on the end. A rush job. It looked dodgy.
If he got raided they would go straight too it. He knew he would
never get raided. He was low profile. He had a small network, he
liked it like that - to give him time to solder things up at 2am in
the morning and not worry about leaving the items on the desk till
lunchtime the next day when reheated pizza would be the order of the
day.
He fired up a program in dos. It has a basic graphical interface at
the top, it was like looking at a real life wargames system. It had
power, signal and flashing unique string names in hex shapes along the
top showing calls that could be 'listened in on' - this was hardcore,
my life was about to change and my whole concept of privacy was just
about to be destroyed and show me that this digital age meant that we
were now nameless and the balance of power had shifted. It was like
witnessing something that you never questioned. You assume access to
this was for powers a lot higher than the little spreader/warez dude
who drove around in a beat up mini. It was like being exposed to a
shipment of uranium. You knew what it was but you could not believe
you were seeing it first hand. You had heard about it, but you
never expected in your lifetime to have access to it.
He pressed a few buttons on the phone, suddenly the unit went into a
handsfree mode. I could hear voices in the phone, he flicked a few
buttons and then the sound was coming out of the speakers, i think it
was a crude lineout hookup from the phone to the computer at the time.
I remember that call clear as day, a lady ordering a pizza - as my
eyes widened my contact was quiet, i was quiet like if i spoke they
could hear me. I felt like a digital fly on the wall of this persons
conversation. my mind was racing, my contact pointed at the screen
in a number of locations. signal strength, phone number called,
phone number they were on, part of the phones imei exposed - i was
looking at a digital dashboard of this analog phonecall.
He pulled out some more mobile phones, things just got a bit darker
after that - i really cannot go into those things here. It had gone
from this technology discovery that things were insecure further than
i had every imagined and that every digital device would have in some
way have a backdoor, undiscovered and open to inspection. I remember
driving home that night wondering about my place in the cosmos. From
then on my requirement for knowledge was based on the importance of
being aware rather than being informed. It was a huge shift for a
young mind to deal with.
I was 18.
