Phreak (pronounced freek)
(1) Illicitly to tamper with or connect to various systems using telephones (in the sense of phone phreaking.
(2) To act as a phone phreak.
1972: An altered spelling of freak, applied by, to and of the "phone phreakers", the construct being Ph(one) + (f)reak. Phone (a clipping of "telephone" and in use at least since the early 1880s) was from the Ancient Greek φωνή (phōnḗ) (sound). Freak was first used circa 1560 in the sense of a "sudden change of mind or something done on a whim" and is of uncertain origin but thought probably from a dialectal word related to the Middle English frekynge (capricious behaviour; whims) and friken & frikien (briskly or nimbly to move) from the Old English frician (to leap, dance) or Middle English frek (insolent, daring) from the Old English frec (desirous, greedy, eager, bold, daring). The ultimate root may be the Proto-Germanic frekaz & frakaz (hard, efficient, greedy, bold, audacious) in which case, it would be related to the phreak as a noun. Related were the Old High German freh (eager) and the Old English frēcne (dangerous, daring, courageous, bold). In linguistics, words like phreak are known as a sensational spelling and the trend continued in the post-web world from the 1990s onwards with creations such as phat and phishing. Phreak is a noun & verb, phreaker is a noun and phreaked & phreaking are verbs; the noun plural is phreaks.
The phone phreakers
Phone phreaking was a term coined to describe the activities of the sub-culture of people who explored and exploited public telephone networks. The term first referred to groups which, since the late 1950s, had reverse engineered the analogue system of audio tones used to route long-distance calls. By re-creating these tones, phreaks could switch calls from the handset, allowing free calls to be made around the world; this at a time when even local calls could cost money and long distance or international calls could cost hundreds of dollars per hour. Electronic tone generators known as blue boxes soon became available, making phreaking possible even for those without much technical knowledge. This early aspect of phreaking effectively ended by the 1980s as most phone networks switched from acoustic tones to digital computer systems. The 1960s were something of a "golden age" for hacking for its own sake (rather than for malice or illicit profits) and the hackers are best remembered for their early "break-ins" to the big mainframes of operations like NASA, the Pentagon and the CIA. The hackers were pleased to find a military mainframe might be in a secure facility with industrial strength air-conditioning & power supply systems behind doors with armed guards yet be hard-wired to the public telephone network.
The idea of phone phreaking has survived phonetically as the phone freak-out and there are there are are public freak-outs and private freak-outs' those who have private freak-outs can subsequently make them public by posting content somewhere. hone freak-outs can relate to the device, the connection (or lack of connectivity), the content received or the content sent. Device related freak-outs include (1) misplacing one's phone, (2) forgetting to bring one's phone, (3) dropping one's phone (into waterways or smashing it on a hard surface among the worst of this type), (4) phone failure (hardware, firmware or software) and (5) the "shock of the new" which describes an iOS user trying for the first time to use and Android phone. The shock of the new is a documented phenomenon and many tech sites have concluded iOS and Android users are two separate populations and even dating (much less marriage) between them is likely to end badly. Connectivity-related freak-outs are induced by (1) an inability to connect to a telco (telephony company) or ISP (internet service provider) or (2) an erratic or slow connection. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, expectations of the speed and reliability of wireless connections had been raised and below a certain age (or degree of prosperity) that expectation is something like "instantaneous", wryly noted even by those whose memories don't stretch back to terminals and 300 baud modems. A content-related freak out can be induced by being offended, shocked, outraged etc by something one sees on one's phone X (formerly known as Twitter), the usually cited example of "an outrage generator" but there are plenty of others. The phenomenon is here to stay because the advertisement-centric dynamic of sites like X is dependent on generating and spreading outrage. Until the advent of social media, a business model based on attracting customers anxious to find ways to be offended might have seemed improbable but it has become Western civilization's latest instance of determinism. The classic phone phreak-out is of course the type a staple of many Reddit subs: people shouting into their phones, preferably on subways, in airport departure areas, at Walmart, or in a fast food outlet.
Quaker State’s Cap’t Crunch breakfast cereal (left & centre left), the infamous whistle (centre right) and modern reproductions (right). Cap’t Crunch was introduced in 1963, a time when it was good marketing practice to advertise a produce aimed at children as “Sugar-sweet cereal”. Not until 1973 would manufacturers be compelled to include on packaging a breakdown of the ingredients, another reform for which Richard Nixon's (1913-1994; US president 1969-1974) administration receives scant credit.
The legend in the hacking community is phreaking began in the early 1960s when a child playing with a toy whistle noticed the similarity in sound with that he’d (in the story it’s always a boy) heard on pay-phones. Sure enough, his modest plastic toy produced a tone which replicated the 2600 Hz pitch used in phone signalling systems in the US. Whether it really happened that way isn’t certain but the whistle cited did enable phone freaking (and thus phone-fraud). Parents might have been dismayed the gift was a noisy device like a “bo’sun whistle” but AT&T (American Telephone and Telegraph Company, better known as “Ma Bell”, a reference to the old American Bell Telephone Company) soon had cause to be more upset as Cap’t Crunch munchers (and may others) were soon costing the company millions in revenue by using generated tones to “fool” their automated system into connecting calls “for free”.
In the 1960s, folk getting free phone calls was quite something because not only were calls then expensive (charged by the minute) but just about every connection beyond a “local call” was then subject to a tool and the greater the distance (which could be the next suburb) the higher the charge. Most phone phreaking wasn’t done with the whistles but by the use of purpose-built electronic tone generators (known a “blue (or black, green, red etc) box”), many of which were produced in some volume and traded on a vibrant black market. Predictably, universities were a hotbed of phreaking because in such places there was a (1) a large number of young people often far from family and friends and (2) easy access to the expertise and components needed to build the boxes. Although they can no longer be used to defraud telcos, as a nostalgia piece reproductions of the whistles are now available in twenty-first century designer colors and they retain the same capacity to annoy parents.
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