From recorded future news and PRX, this is Click Here. The phone, to me, was the closest thing to God on Earth as I was growing up. As a kid, Joe and Grecia spent hours on the telephone, mostly listening. Joe was blind, and growing up in the 1950s, there were plenty of places the world told him he didn't belong. But the phone was different. It answered, it made sounds, it had rules, and Joe discovered that if he listened carefully enough, it would reveal things to him. Eventually, Joe learned how to make the telephone do things no one expected, things the phone company definitely did not want it to do. John Garcia. The blind whistling phone freak is kind of the stuff of legend. From Recorded Future News and PRX, this is Click Here, the show about how technology is changing everything. I'm Dina Templerastin. And today, a story of a kid who heard something in the telephone system that almost nobody else could. A sound that would change his life. And in a small but important way, the technology that came after him. We'll be right back. If you're looking for a daily guide to cybersecurity news and policy, sign up for the Cyber Daily from Recorded Future News. It serves up today's most interesting and important cyber stories from our sister publication, The Record, and then aggregates all of the big cyber stories you might have missed from news outlets around the world. Just go to therecord.media and click on Cyber Daily to get all you need to know about the world of cybersecurity right in your inbox. Joe Ingressio was eight years old when he started correcting the phone company. And I remember calling up a telephone office and telling them that I couldn't get dial tone. And they said, oh, your line's probably just busy. Sometimes the line finders get overloaded. The phone company had an explanation. Joe had a better one. I said, well, no, why would it get dial tone right away when I pick it up again? Well, yeah, you've got a point there, I guess. He was eight. And already Joe had figured out something that would shape the rest of his life. And that was, if you listened closely enough to a machine, sometimes it would tell you things that even the people who built it didn't know. Joe had been listening to the telephone almost from the moment he learned to use one. Just ask Rachel Morrison. She directed a documentary about Joe called Joy Bubbles. It premiered at Sundance earlier this year. His mother showed him how to use the telephone when he was a young kid, and he was just fascinated with the fact that he could pick up the handset and call someone and reach someone, you know, a real human being at the end of the line. And you can understand why that would matter to him. Because the phone didn't just connect Joe to people who were far away. Sometimes it helped him get away from what was happening right next to him, things he didn't want to hear. Daddy would slam mother and hurt her and break things, and there'd be things thrown around and lots of scary sounds and stuff at night. Sometimes I'd hug my phone up close and listen to the dial tone, the soft hum of the dial tone that was always there. What a wonderful thing a telephone is. especially during those long nights. At home wasn't the only place Joe was made to feel different. This was the 1950s, a time when blind kids were often separated from everyone else and sent to special schools and treated as fragile or worse. But the phone, it didn't treat Joe as less than. In fact, it was one of the first places where Joe discovered he knew things other people didn't. The longer Joe listened, the more he learned. And eventually, he would hear something that almost nobody else could. Joe's breakthrough came when he was about seven, doing what he always did, listening. One day, when he was on a long-distance call, Joe heard something. A tone, a very specific sound buried in the line. And because Joe had perfect pitch, he did what came naturally. He tried to copy it by whistling. This is a recording of him doing it. And then something strange happened The call dropped A moment later the dial tone came back For most people, that would have been the end of it, a weird glitch. But Joe couldn't let it go. So he tried it again. And again. Eventually, he realized the phone was responding to his whistle. Because that tone wasn't just a sound. It was a command. The phone system was listening for instructions in those tones, and completely by accident, Joe had learned how to speak its language. In the early days, phones were connected by human operators. This is long distance. May I help you? Yeah, I want to call an area coach. Later, as Joe was growing up, switching systems took over. And those systems used tones to tell one another what to do. And one of those tones, 2600 hertz, meant the call had ended. That's the tone Joe whistled. Perfectly, it turns out. And when he did, the system thought the call was over, but the line stayed open. And that's where things got interesting. Joe discovered that he could then make a second call. Now back then, long-distance calls were expensive. A local call might cost a nickel or a dime, but a call across the country could cost real money. And Joe discovered he could make a local call, do that whistle, and get the dial tone back and then place a long-distance call. And because the network still thought he was on the original local connection, he could make long-distance calls for free. Today, a hacker might call that exploiting a vulnerability. But imagine being seven years old, blind, holding a telephone receiver to your ear, and realizing that a machine millions of people used every day had a secret. And somehow, you'd figured it out. It must have felt like magic. Joe didn't set out to become famous. He didn't even set out to become a hacker. He was just a kid who discovered something unusual, something entirely his. And for years, he mostly kept it that way. Then he went to college. And one day, almost casually, Joe told another student what he could do. The student didn't believe him, so Joe showed him. Which is how Joe discovered something else about his whistle. It didn't just make the telephone behave differently. It made people behave differently, too. That's after the break. Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. There's going to be two types of companies. Those are great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future that is human-centered? I'm Rana Elkha-Yubi, and on my podcast, Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future, and we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in. The first person Joe told about the whistle didn't believe him. And really, why would he? A blind kid tells you he can make free long-distance calls just by whistling? It seemed far-fetched on the face of it. So Joe showed him. He listened for the tone, matched it perfectly. Here's Rachel Morrison, the documentary filmmaker, again. My impression is that, you know, kids started just running over to the payphone. They're in the dorms. It created a whole scene. You can almost picture it. Kids sprinting down dorm hallways toward the payphones, dragging friends behind them. Try it again. Call California. No, call Europe. One other student heard about it, another one, another one. One night it was about 40 people wanting phone calls. some to Israel and places I'd never heard of. Like, one had me to call Abu Dhabi. It sounds so retro now. College kids crowding around a payphone. But you have to remember how expensive long-distance calls were at the time. A lot of students probably really never called home or made calls really at all. And so this was a huge deal. And suddenly, this guy who'd spent much of his life on the outside looking in had something everybody wanted. And Joe got something he wanted too. For the first time in a very long time, people were coming to Joe. Not because he needed help, but because they did. Because he could do something they couldn't. I think that relatable for blind people is feeling like people are always doing things for you sometimes even without you asking them This is Will Butler, one of the producers on the Joe Ingressia documentary. And when he says this is relatable, he means that literally. Will is blind too. You get into a rhythm of not being the giver, but just feeling like a receiver all the time. And I think college was the first time where he thought, maybe I have something to offer. When this group of people excitedly gathers around him and he's able to give them these opportunities to connect with their friends and family, he felt like he finally had something to give. Maybe that's why the whistle mattered so much. Not because it got people free phone calls, but because it gave Joe something he'd wanted since he was a kid. Back when he was holding a telephone receiver in the dark. to be the reason people called, to have something to give. But attention has a way of attracting more attention. One night, a student used Joe's whistle to make a free long-distance call, and afterward, he forgot to hang up the phone. So an operator in Canada overheard the students talking about Joe and his ability to make free calls. So now, the phone company knew about Joe, too. This is filmmaker Rachel Morrison again. They call the university, you know, so the telephone company in the university, you know, they come knock on his door and they think about kicking him out of school and arresting him, but that ends up not happening. But it does create this whole media sensation. One day you're a philosophy student trying to fit in, and the next reporters are calling, television crews are showing up, and everyone wants to talk to the blind kid who can whistle his way through the telephone system. ABC, NBC. He was on BBC. He went to the UK and was on, I believe it was ITV. So, I mean, this was like national and even international news. All of that attention had an unexpected side effect. Until then, Joe had mostly thought of the whistle as his thing, a strange talent, a curiosity. But now he was meeting people who were fascinated by the telephone the same way he was. People who wanted to know not just how the system worked, but what happened when you pushed it a little further than it was supposed to go. And it turns out, around this time, the late 60s and early 70s, there was a community of people quietly experimenting with the telephone network. Some used homemade electronic devices. Some used tape recorders. Some, like Joe, relied mostly on their ears. And they called it phone-freaking. Phil Lapsley literally wrote the book on the phone-freaking movement. It's called Exploding the Phone. So, if there were a Mount Rushmore of phone-freaks, who would be up there? That's a great question. A Mount Rushmore of phone-freaks, I think we can only have four names. So, I think that first would be Joy Bubbles, Joan Garcia. The blind whistling phone freak is kind of the stuff of legend. Legend. And Joe wasn't the only one. John Draper, a.k.a. Captain Crunch, was one of the most famous phone freaks, the contemporary of Joy Bubbles. Captain Crunch got his name in a way that tells you something about this whole world. There was a toy whistle that came free in boxes of Captain Crunch cereal. And someone discovered that when you blew it into a phone, it made the same 2600 hertz tone Joe could make with his mouth. Which meant this vast, enormous, complicated telephone network could be fooled by a toy from a cereal box. A few years later came Kevin Mitnick, who would go on to become one of the most famous hackers in the world. And you can start to see what this was becoming. A question of, you know, if I do this thing, what happens? And can I come up with a creative way of finding a hole in the system and being able to make the telephone system do something it wasn't meant to do? It was about asking a deceptively simple question. Are you sure this is the only way this has to work? And once people started asking that question, it didn't stay inside the telephone system. In the early 1970s, two young men in California read an Esquire article about phone freaking, the thing that Joe was doing. And they became fascinated by the tones people were using to control the network. And the two of them drove over to the library and they looked around until they found the technical specs they needed and they built what was called a blue box. The blue box, which could make the tones, the joy bubbles, could whistle. It was actually the first thing they made and sold together, even though it was illegal to sell it. They were selling it to people at Berkeley. That's Joy Bubbles film director Rachel Morrison again. And the two young men she's talking about? Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs Years later Steve Jobs told his biographer that if they hadn made those blue boxes there would have been no Apple. Kind of like a funny start to like the history of Apple. Funny, but also a pretty direct line. Because the thing the phone freaks figured out wasn't just how to make free calls. It was that technology comes with rules, and those rules are worth testing. I do think that phone freaking led to some things that we take for granted in terms of cybersecurity and network security. Phil points out that when the telephone companies built the first long-distance networks, they weren't thinking about hackers. Because there weren't any network hackers, right? You can forgive them for that. But what the fun freaks really taught us is that there are going to be people who are going to be looking at whatever you're building, and it doesn't matter what the product is. Today, that lesson feels almost obvious. If you build it, people will come and then try to take it apart. That's true of phone networks, it's true of the internet, and it's likely true of whatever comes next. Joe Ingressia understood that long before most people. He spent much of his life navigating systems that weren't designed with him in mind. But that outsider's perspective turned out to be its own kind of advantage. He listened differently. He noticed things other people missed. And in a technology millions of people used every day, he found possibility hidden in plain sight. Not because he was trying to break the system, but because he was curious enough to hear it differently. Later in life, after the phone freaks had faded and the world had moved on to computers and the internet, Joe went back in search of the thing that drew him to all of this in the first place. Connection. I began to get kind of lonesome and I just had to find a way of having loads and loads of good people from all walks of life to call me. And I'd ask people, hey, how can I get lots of people to talk to and lots of people calling me? So he came up with an idea. A phone number anyone could call, and if you dialed it, you'd hear him tell you a story. And sometimes even years after that, when we'd mention those balloons and the security guard, the way he ran and everything, sometimes we'd still laugh over that. Or maybe a poem. The little old man said to a little boy, I often cry. The little old man nodded. So do I. Or words of encouragement. Stay strong and take care of each other and find some time to play. Around this time, he changed his name to Joy Bubbles, legally. For some callers, Joy Bubbles became a late-night companion, a kind of telephone Mr. Rogers. And maybe that's why it worked. It's because I love the phone so much. If you love anything enough, it'll love you back. For Joe, Joy Bubbles, the phone was never really the point. It was the connection. The phone was just a way in, a way to build a world that felt a little less lonely. And maybe that's what Joe kept discovering over and over again. The thing a technology is designed to do, and the thing people actually need from it, aren't always the same thing. This is Click Here. Click Here is a production of Recorded Future News and PRX. Today's show was written and produced by Megan Dietry, Sean Powers, Erica Guida, Zach Hirsch, and Maya Fawaz. It was edited by Karen Duffin and Sarah Covedo, and fact-checked by Darren Ancrum. Original music is by Ben Levingston, with additional music from Blue Dot Sessions. Our staff writer is Lucas Riley, our illustrator is Megan Goff, and our sound designers and engineers are Jake Cook and Jesse Neiswonger. I'm Dina Templerastin, and thanks for listening. cybersecurity news and policy, sign up for the Cyber Daily from Recorded Future News. It serves up today's most interesting and important cyber stories from our sister publication, The Record, and then aggregates all of the big cyber stories you might have missed from news outlets around the world. Just go to therecord.media and click on Cyber Daily to get all you need to know about the world of cybersecurity right in your inbox.
