John Draper

John T. Draper
John Draper outside his home in Burbank
Born	1943 (age 70–71)
Website
www.webcrunchers.com & www.crunchcreations.com/

John Thomas Draper (born 1943), also known as Captain Crunch, Crunch or Crunchman (after Cap'n Crunch, the mascot of a breakfast cereal), is an American computer programmer and former phone phreak. He is a legendary figure within the computer programming world and the hacker and security community. Draper has long maintained a nomadic lifestyle;^[1] as of May 2013, he resides in Las Vegas, Nevada.^[2]

Background

Draper is the son of a United States Air Force engineer; he has characterized his father as a distant and imposing figure.^[3] As a child, he built a home radio station from discarded military components.^[3] He was frequently bullied in school and briefly received psychological treatment due to a perceived "chemical imbalance."^[4] After taking college courses, Draper himself entered the Air Force in 1964. While stationed in Alaska, he helped his fellow servicemen make free phone calls home by devising access to a local telephone switchboard. After Alaska, he was stationed at Charleston Air Force Station in Maine. In 1967, he created WKOS [W-"chaos"], a pirate station in nearby Dover-Foxcroft, but had to shut it down when a legitimate radio station, WDME, objected. He was honorably discharged from the Air Force as an airman first class^[4] or sergeant^[5] in 1968. Thereafter, he relocated to the incipient Silicon Valley and briefly held military-related^[3] positions with National Semiconductor (as an engineering technician) and Hugle International (tasked with working on an early cordless phone design) while concurrently enrolled at De Anza College, where he claims to have studied part-time through 1972.^[6] During this period, he also worked as an engineer/DJ for KKUP in Cupertino, California^[7] and adopted the countercultural ethos of the times, including long hair and a predilection for marijuana.^[8] Draper is renowned for his lifelong intolerance of tobacco smoke and his poor personal hygiene.^[9][10]

Cap'n Crunch Bosun whistle ca. 1971

Phreaking

While Draper was driving around in his Volkswagen Microbus to test a pirate radio transmitter he had built, he broadcast a telephone number to listeners as feedback to gauge his station's reception. A callback from a "Denny" (identified in a Discovery Channel documentary as Denny Teresi^[11]) resulted in a meeting that caused him to blunder into the world of the phone phreaks. Teresi and a large percentage of the phone phreaks were blind. Learning of his electronic capability, they wanted him to build a multifrequency tone generator (the "blue box") to gain easier entry into the AT&T system, which was controlled by tones. Then they would not have to use an organ and cassette recordings of tones to get free calls. A blind boy who had taken the moniker of Joybubbles had perfect pitch and was able to identify the exact frequencies. They informed him that a toy whistle that was, at the time, packaged in boxes of Cap'n Crunch cereal could emit a tone at precisely 2600 hertz—the same frequency that was used by AT&T long lines to indicate that a trunk line was ready and available to route a new call.^[12] This would effectively disconnect one end of the trunk, allowing the still connected side to enter an operator mode. Experimenting with this whistle inspired Draper to build blue boxes: electronic devices capable of reproducing other tones used by the phone company.

I don't do that. I don't do that anymore at all. And if I do it, I do it for one reason and one reason only. I'm learning about a system. The phone company is a System. A computer is a System, do you understand? If I do what I do, it is only to explore a system. Computers, systems, that's my bag. The phone company is nothing but a computer.

— Secrets of the Little Blue Box, Ron Rosenbaum, Esquire Magazine (October 1971)

The class of vulnerabilities Draper and others discovered was limited to call-routing switches that employed in-band signaling, whereas newer equipment relies almost exclusively on out-of-band signaling, the use of separate circuits to transmit voice and signals. Though they no longer serve a practical use, the Cap'n Crunch whistles did become valued collector's items. Some hackers sometimes go by the handle "Captain Crunch" even today; 2600: The Hacker Quarterly is named after this whistle frequency.

The expense of sustaining the unbilled phone calls, the redesign of the line protocols, and the accelerated equipment replacement due to the blue box is difficult to calculate, or even to separate from something as complex and dynamic as the telephone long-distance network.

Homebrew Computer Club members: John Draper, Lee Felsenstein, Roger Melen.

The ubiquity of the 1971 Esquire article precipitated Draper's eventual arrest on toll fraud charges in 1972; he was sentenced to five years' probation. However, it also elicited the attention of University of California, Berkeley engineering student and future Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who located Draper while working as an engineer at KKUP, a public radio station in Cupertino, California.^[13] After arranging to meet Wozniak in his dorm room (whereupon the latter noted Draper's disheveled appearance and body odor), he began to teach his phone phreaking skills to Wozniak and one of his friends, Steve Jobs; a phone phreaking business formed by Wozniak and Jobs presaged the eventual emergence of Apple.^[3] Draper was a member of the Homebrew Computer Club.^[12] By 1977, he was employed as an independent contractor^[7] by Apple, where he created the "Charlie Board," a telephone interface board for the Apple II personal computer "that could immediately identify phone signals and lines -- such as ones that made free calls -- something modems were not able to do for a decade... the technology would later be used for tone-activated calling menus, voice mail and other purposes."^[3] The board was never marketed due to a litany of factors, including the prohibitive cost of a corequisite AT&T-approved connection interface device, industrial suppression by the aforementioned corporation, Draper's previous arrest & conviction for wire fraud, and Jobs' personal animus against Draper.^[3] Draper also wrote the BASIC cross-assembler used by Wozniak in the development of Apple I and Apple II.^[14]

Software developer

In 1976 and 1978, Draper served two prison sentences for phone fraud. During this period, "two court-appointed psychiatrists examined... Draper. One concluded he had an 'underdeveloped sense of people' and was 'psychotic'; the other found nothing wrong with him."^[3] Draper wrote EasyWriter, the first word processor for the Apple II, in 1979 during a third prison sentence (a year of nights, subsequently reduced to several months) in the Alameda County jail.^[3] Under a work furlough program, he had access to a computer at Receiving Studios, a small band practice studio, where he coded much of EasyWriter; however he did take copies of the code "home" to prison overnight to work on it.^[15]

Draper later ported EasyWriter to the IBM PC, beating Bill Gates on the bid for the IBM contract; the lucrative deal enabled Draper to buy a Mercedes and a house in Hawaii. However, Draper's company, Capn' Software, posted less than $1 million revenue over six years, and he subsequently sued his software's distributor, Bill Baker, over an unauthorized version of EasyWriter that Baker released without Draper's permission; they eventually settled out of court.

His last major corporate position was with Autodesk in the late 1980s; because of his criminal record and eccentricities, many corporations have demonstrated reticence toward hiring Draper in spite of his pedigree and demonstrated qualifications. He spent most of the 1990s enmeshed in the burgeoning rave scene, supporting his itinerant lifestyle by developing websites and writing code in Australia and India, among other locales.^[3] In the early 2000s, he developed computer security software, although this project foundered after a fellow raver absconded with most of the funds allocated for the project. He also worked as a senior developer of KanTalk!, a VoIP client built around singer and actress Lola Blanc (born Kandice Melonakos).^[16]

From 2005 to 2010, Draper was the Chief Technical Officer (CTO) for media delivery company En2go, that delivers music, video and other digital content to desktops.^[14]

In 2011 Draper joined the group Canadian Pirates Inc^[17] with longtime friend Rod Thacker.^[18]

Draper's software development history includes:

• The Motorola 6800 Cross Assembler for CallComputer (1974)
• The Charlie Board (1977)
• Forth 1.7 for the Apple II (1978)
• EasyWriter© (1980)
• Advanced 3-D Graphic Design Systems for Autodesk(1986–89)
• Website Development (1994 to present)
• The Crunchbox Firewall (CTO of ShopIp 1999–2004)
• VOIP application for OnInstant (2005)
• The Channel Manager for the Flyxo Media System (CTO of En2Go 2005–10)

Legends

One oft-repeated story featuring Captain Crunch goes as follows: Draper picked up a public phone, then proceeded to "phreak" his call around the world. At no charge, he routed a call through different phone switches in countries such as Japan, Russia and England. Once he had set the call to go through dozens of countries, he dialed the number of the public phone next to him. A few minutes later, the phone next to him rang. Draper spoke into the first phone, and, after quite a few seconds, he heard his own voice very faintly on the other phone. He sometimes repeated this stunt at parties. Draper also claimed that he and a friend once placed a direct call to the White House during the Nixon administration, and after giving the operator President Nixon's secret code name of "Olympus" [sic], and asking to speak to the president about a national emergency, they were connected with someone who sounded like Richard Nixon; Draper's friend told the man about a toilet paper shortage in Los Angeles, at which point the person on the other end of the line angrily asked them how they'd managed to get connected to him.^[3]

In popular culture

John Draper appears as himself in the unreleased documentary Hackers Wanted.

John Draper's story has also inspired several mentions in popular culture. Elements of the movie Sneakers recall Draper and Joybubbles; the character Erwin "Whistler" Emory portrayed by David Strathairn, as well as Cosmo's experience of offering phreaking services to criminals while in prison, were based on them.^[19]

John Draper is specifically mentioned as "Captain Crunch" in one scene in Cowboy Bebop: The Movie, in which a hacker mentions that "Cap'n Crunch broke into the national phone system with a plastic whistle."

He is portrayed by Wayne Pére in the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley.

Captain Crunch is being searched for by Rockford during a murder investigation on the TV show The Rockford Files, season 5, episode 5, "Kill the Messenger".

In Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, John Draper is key to unlocking one of the mysteries within the story.

See also

• The Secret History of Hacking, a 2001 documentary film featuring Draper.

References

External links

• "The Real Captain Crunch", Draper's personal web page.
• "Crunch Creations", Draper’s business homepage.
• John Draper interviewed on the TV show Trianglation on the TWiT.tv network