Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws who Hacked Ma Bell
Sporting a foreword by Steve Wozniak (who, before he founded Apple computers, was a phone phreak himself) and the kind of detailed history that will appeal to the book’s target audience, this isn’t just a story about the early phreaks—the term that combines phone and freak and is used to describe the people who figured out how to fool the telephone system into allowing them to make free long-distance calls. It’s also the story of a giant phone company so desperate to maintain its monopoly that it resorted to outrageously illegal practices and of the war between the FBI and the phreaks, who claimed ripping off the phone company was a form of political protest. Like Ammon Shea in The Phone Book (2010), Lapsley uses his main subject as a jumping-off point for a highly engaging history of the telephone itself and plenty of intrigue. Sure, these guys, these phreaks, were breaking the law, but they were also innovators, technological geniuses, precursors of today’s computer hackers. A fascinating book. --David Pitt