John Draper

John Thomas Draper
Draper at Maker Faire Berlin, 2015
Born	John Thomas Draper (1943-03-11) March 11, 1943 (age 83)
Other names	Captain Crunch Crunchman Crunch
Occupations	Computer programmer Former phone phreak
Website	https://johndraper.us/ www.webcrunchers.com & www.crunchcreations.com/

John Thomas Draper (also known as Captain Crunch, Crunch, or Crunchman; born March 11, 1943) is an American computer programmer and former phone phreak. He is a widely known figure within the hacker and computer security community.^[1] He is primarily known as a colorful and unconventional figure in Silicon Valley history and lore. He befriended and influenced Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs in the years before they founded Apple Computer. His determined probing and exploration of the telephone network earned him a reputation for his technical acumen. However, his activities sometimes crossed ethical lines, leading to criminal charges and prison time for toll fraud.

In the 1970s and 1980s, he worked intermittently as a software engineer for Apple and Autodesk and briefly ran his own software company, producing the EasyWriter word processor.^[2]: 319 He worked only intermittently from the 1990s on.^[2]: 329 In 2017, organizers of four computer security conferences banned him from attending after credible allegations of inappropriate behavior emerged in media reports.^[3] Draper denied some of the allegations and did not respond to others.^[4]

Draper is the son of a United States Air Force engineer. As a child, he built a home radio station from discarded military components.^[5] He was frequently bullied in school and briefly received psychological treatment.^{[2]: 150-155}

Draper enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in 1964. While stationed in Alaska, he helped his fellow service members make free phone calls home by devising access to a local telephone switchboard. In 1967, while stationed at Charleston Air Force Station in Maine, he created WKOS (W-"chaos"), a pirate radio station based in nearby Dover-Foxcroft, Maine.

Following his honorable discharge from the Air Force as an airman first class in 1968, he moved to San Jose, California.^{[2]: 150-155} He worked briefly for National Semiconductor as an engineering technician and at Hugle International, where he worked on early designs for a cordless telephone. He also attended De Anza College part-time through 1972.^[6] During this period, he also worked as an engineer and disc jockey for KKUP in Cupertino, California.^[7]

Draper was introduced to the world of phone phreaking in 1969 by Denny Teresi, who, like Draper, was a pirate radio broadcaster. Accounts of how their first meeting came about differ in the retelling. Sometime after his discharge from the Air Force and while he was living in San Jose, Draper received a phone call from Teresi, a blind teenager living in a San Jose suburb. In one version, the call came after Draper had broadcast his phone number seeking feedback from listeners.^[8] In another version, the call was a chance wrong number dialed by Teresi, that ended up in a conversation.^{[2]: 150-155} Whatever the circumstances, that call led to Draper seeking Teresi out and ultimately meeting him at his home in the San Jose suburbs. Teresi told Draper about a network of friends who called themselves phone phreaks, many of whom were also blind. Using cassette tape recordings and a Farfisa electric organ to replicate electronic tones used to control it, they explored the phone network to understand how it worked and to make free long distance calls. Among the group of friends was Joseph Engressia, who went by the moniker Joybubbles, who had perfect pitch and could whistle precisely the 2600 hertz tone used by AT&T to indicate that a trunk line was available to make a call. Gathering around clusters of payphones, they would play the tones into the receiver and explore the network, calling distant locations for free.^[9]

Draper learned from Teresi that a toy whistle packaged in boxes of Cap'n Crunch cereal in 1963 emitted the same 2600-hertz tone precisely.^[10] The tone disconnected one end of the trunk while the still-connected side entered operator mode. The vulnerability they had exploited was limited to call-routing switches that relied on in-band signaling. The original discovery that the toy whistle could be used to generate the correct tone is credited to a Los Angeles-based phone phreaker who went by the pseudonym Sid Bernay.^[2]: 155

Learning of Draper's knowledge of electronic design, Teresi and other phreakers asked him to build a multifrequency tone generator, known informally as a blue box, that could play the 2600-hertz tone and other tones associated with controlling the phone network. Draper built his first crude electronic blue box and soon designed a more sophisticated one. By 1970, the phreaking hobby had spread, and its enthusiasts in the know had started to gather regularly on a conference call-like system they called 2111. The name came from a misconfigured teletype switching machine in British Columbia designed for connecting multiple teletype lines at once. The phreakers discovered that if they called the number at the same time, they would all be connected at once, creating a primitive conference call. During one of these calls, Draper took on the moniker Captain Crunch, inspired by the toy whistle.^[2]: 163

After 1980 and the introduction of Signalling System No. 7, the tones were largely deprecated and the whistles and blue boxes became useless for phone phreaking purposes. The whistles are considered collectible souvenirs of a bygone era, and the magazine 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, founded in 1984, is named after the tone.^[11]

In 1971, journalist Ron Rosenbaum wrote about phone phreaking for Esquire.^[12] The article relied heavily on interviews with Draper and conferred upon him a sort of celebrity status among people interested in the counterculture. Reflecting on the reporting of the story years later, Rosenbaum described Draper as determined to make himself the central character in it. Draper frequently interrupted phone calls between Rosenbaum and other phreaks as a way of demonstrating his technical abilities. "All throughout it, during the reporting of the story, he was injecting himself into the story. It was fairly clear that, with some justice, he considered himself if not the star, certainly a star in the phone phreak firmament."^{[2]: 171-173}

In one interview with Rosenbaum, Draper explained his prevailing ethos concerning phone phreaking:

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.

The article caught the attention of Steve Wozniak, an engineering student at the University of California, Berkeley, who located Draper while working as an engineer at the radio station KKUP.^[13] Wozniak and Draper met to compare techniques for building blue boxes. Also present was Wozniak's friend Steve Jobs. Wozniak and Jobs later took to selling blue boxes. In 1976 the pair went on to found Apple Computer.^[5]

The notoriety of the Esquire article led to Draper's arrest by the FBI in May 1972 on seven counts of fraud by wire. The charges stemmed from illegal long distance and international calls to New York and Oklahoma, and a phone number answering service in Sydney, Australia, that played a recorded message listing that country's most popular songs. After pleading no contest he was given a suspended sentence of one year in prison, a $1,000 fine and five years probation.^{[2]: 216-217} Under the terms of his probation, he was forbidden to share his technical knowledge for building blue boxes and making free calls.^[14][15]

Following that conviction, Draper remained under FBI surveillance. In 1975, while visiting New York City, he bragged to a friend who happened to be an FBI informant that phone phreakers had learned how to use phone company technology to eavesdrop on calls and specifically claimed to have done so on phone lines belonging to the FBI's San Francisco field office. That friend, a longtime drug dealer named Chic Eder, offered to provide evidence against Draper in exchange for parole and money. He traveled to California with Draper to purchase a Blue Box. The informant also prodded Draper to demonstrate the interception of an FBI call and recorded the evidence on tape. FBI investigators, working with phone company engineers, replicated the technique described. The episode triggered a complex investigation that ultimately led to Draper being indicted on two charges of toll fraud.^{[16][2]: 251-259}

His sentence of four months at the federal prison in Lompoc, California, made him the first phone phreak to spend time in federal prison. As part of a plea deal, he agreed to cooperate with the FBI by explaining phone system vulnerabilities, how to exploit them, and how to fix them.^{[14][17][2]: 314-316}

In 1978, Draper pled guilty to one count of possession of a device to steal telecommunications services and was sentenced to three to six months in a Pennsylvania jail.^[18] The conviction violated the terms of his federal parole.^[5][17] He returned to California to face the impact of his parole violations. He underwent two psychiatric evaluations which found that "Draper tend[s] to pass himself off as the victim claiming that he has almost no control over all of the troubles that now beset him", and that he had "numerous paranoid delusions" concerning being singled out for persecution because of his knowledge about the phone system. In March of 1979, he was sentenced to spend one year in a work furlough program.^[19] He spent nights in the Alameda County jail, where he wrote computer code on paper, and days entering it into an Apple II. The result was EasyWriter.^[2]: 319

While on a work-release program during his third period of incarceration in 1979, Draper wrote EasyWriter, the first word processor for the Apple II.^[5] He was inspired in part by Electric Pencil, an early word processor. Draper later ported EasyWriter to the IBM PC after a demonstration of it at a computer fair caught the attention of the founders of Information Unlimited Software, a small software company based in Marin County. IBM selected it as the machine's official word processor after failing to reach a deal with MicroPro International for WordStar. While the original was popular with Apple II users, the IBM port was poorly received by customers. IBM was forced to offer free updates.^[20]

Draper formed a software company called Capn' Software, but it booked less than $1 million in revenue over six years. Distributor Bill Baker hired other programmers to create a follow-up program, Easywriter II, without Draper's knowledge. Draper sued and the case was later settled out-of-court.^[5]

In 1977, Draper worked for Apple as an independent contractor,^[7] and was assigned by Wozniak to develop a device that could connect the Apple II computer to phone lines. Wozniak said he thought computers could act like an answering machine, and modems were not yet widely available. Draper designed an interface device dubbed the "Charley Board", which was designed to dial toll-free telephone numbers used by many corporations and to emit touch tones that would grant access to the WATS lines in use by those companies. In theory, this would allow unlimited and free long-distance phone calls. Upon learning of the Charlie Board's capabilities, Apple's CEO Mike Scott canceled the project immediately.^[14] Some of its techniques were later used in tone-activated calling menus, voicemail, and other services.^[5]

"It was an incredible board. But no one at Apple liked Crunch. Only me. They wouldn't let his device become a product," Wozniak said of the episode in 2004.^[21]

Draper joined Autodesk in 1986, designing video driver software in a role offered to him directly by co-founder John Walker. In 1987, Draper was charged in a scheme to forge tickets for the Bay Area Rapid Transit system.^[22] He pled guilty to lesser misdemeanor charges in 1988 and entered a diversion program.^[23] While facing prosecution, he remained on the Autodesk payroll but did no work for the company. Autodesk fired him the following year.^[24]

From 1999 to 2004, Draper was the chief technical officer for ShopIP,^[25] a computer security firm that designed The Crunchbox GE, a firewall device running OpenBSD. Despite endorsements from Wozniak and publicity from media profiles, the product failed to achieve commercial success.^[26][27]

In 2007, Draper was named chief technology officer of En2go, a software company that developed media delivery tools. The company had previously been named Medusa Style Corp. It is unclear when Draper's involvement ceased; however, filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission document the resignations of several of its officers, including Wozniak, during the summer of 2009. En2Go never achieved commercial success.^[28][29][30]

In 2017, organizers of at least four hacking and security-related conferences, including DEF CON and Hackers on Planet Earth, said they had banned Draper from attending in the wake of allegations against him concerning unwanted sexual attention toward other attendees. The allegations were reported in two stories by BuzzFeed News.^[3]

Further allegations of sexual assault and stalking against Draper emerged in reporting by the cybersecurity newsletter The Parallax View. In the story, a hacker given the pseudonym Jay claimed that in 2000, Draper invited him to a room in a San Diego office building. The story also covers claims by University of Pennsylvania computer science professor Matt Blaze who asserted in a series of social media posts that Draper subjected him to a stalking campaign in the 1970s when he was a teenager and when Draper would have been in his thirties.^[31]

Additionally, journalist Phil Lapsley alleged that Draper consented to an interview in exchange for a partially clothed piggyback ride, which he described as "a kind of informal 'Draper initiation ritual' that all interviewers must survive before they get anything out of him."^[2]: 337 In his 1985 book "Software People: An Insider's Look at the Personal Computer Software Industry", author Doug Carlston described similar behavior by Draper.^[32]

Following reports of the allegations, Draper said that he has Asperger syndrome, which he said could have contributed to his behavior.^[3] He denied some of the allegations in an interview with The Daily Dot and did not answer others. He denied any explicit sexual intent during these encounters and instead described them as invitations to participate in an "energy workout" employing techniques of applied kinesiology, a pseudoscience-based form of alternative medicine of which he claims to be an advocate. Draper conceded that in some instances he may have experienced an erection during the encounters, which allegedly included massages of the leg and arm muscles as well as squats and pushups while carrying Draper's bodyweight.^[4]

In 2018, Draper co-authored a self-published autobiography, Beyond the Little Blue Box, with C Wilson Fraser. It details Draper’s experiences in the phone phreaking movement, and his contributions to early hacking culture and includes a foreword by Steve Wozniak. Draper was interviewed about the book by The Daily Dot.^[33]

The actor Wayne Péré played Draper in some brief scenes for the 1999 made-for-TV film Pirates of Silicon Valley.^[34]

The 2001 documentary film The Secret History of Hacking made for the U.K.'s Channel 4 features interviews with Draper, Steve Wozniak, Kevin Mitnick, and other notable figures in the hacking community.^[35]

Draper is also mentioned throughout the poem "Phreaking" by the poet Neil Hilborn in his collection "Our Numbered Days".^[36]