It does not seem to have occurred to any telco official that the hackers accused would demand a day in court; that journalists would smile upon the hackers as "good copy;" that wealthy high-tech entrepreneurs would offer moral and financial support to crackdown victims; that constitutional lawyers would show up with briefcases, frowning mightily. This possibility does not seem to have ever entered the game-plan.
And even if it had, it probably would not have slowed the ferocious pursuit of a stolen phone-company document, mellifluously known as "Control Office Administration of Enhanced 911 Services for Special Services and Major Account Centers."
In the chapters to follow, we will explore the worlds of police and the computer underground, and the large shadowy area where they overlap. But first, we must explore the battleground. Before we leave the world of the telcos, we must understand what a switching system actually is and how your telephone actually works.
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To the average citizen, the idea of the telephone is represented by, well, a TELEPHONE: a device that you talk into. To a telco professional, however, the telephone itself is known, in lordly fashion, as a "subset." The "subset" in your house is a mere adjunct, a distant nerve ending, of the central switching stations, which are ranked in levels of heirarchy, up to the long-distance electronic switching stations, which are some of the largest computers on earth.
Let us imagine that it is, say, 1925, before the introduction of computers, when the phone system was simpler and somewhat easier to grasp. Let's further imagine that you are Miss Leticia Luthor, a fictional operator for Ma Bell in New York City of the 20s.
Basically, you, Miss Luthor, ARE the "switching system." You are sitting in front of a large vertical switchboard, known as a "cordboard," made of shiny wooden panels, with ten thousand metal-rimmed holes punched in them, known as jacks. The engineers would have put more holes into your switchboard, but ten thousand is as many as you can reach without actually having to get up out of your chair.
Each of these ten thousand holes has its own little electric lightbulb, known as a "lamp," and its own neatly printed number code.
With the ease of long habit, you are scanning your board for lit-up bulbs. This is what you do most of the time, so you are used to it.
A lamp lights up. This means that the phone at the end of that line has been taken off the hook. Whenever a handset is taken off the hook, that closes a circuit inside the phone which then signals the local office, i.e. you, automatically. There might be somebody calling, or then again the phone might be simply off the hook, but this does not matter to you yet. The first thing you do, is record that number in your logbook, in your fine American public-school handwriting. This comes first, naturally, since it is done for billing purposes.