The Corner Pub
ficient enough with electronics hardware to have rigged up the computer and modem to the car battery. The Phreaker’s Five could now call any computer without being traced or billed. The phone call charges would appear at the end of a local resi- dent’s phone bill. Telecom did not itemise residential telephone bills at the time. True, it was a major drama to zoom around suburban streets in the middle of the night with computers, alli- gator clips and battery adaptors in tow, but that didn’t matter so much. In fact, the thrill of such a cloak-and-dagger operation was as good as the actual hacking itself. It was illicit. In the phreakers’ own eyes, it was clever. And therefore it was fun.
Craig Bowen didn’t think much of the Phreakers Five’s style of phreaking. In fact, the whole growth of phreaking as a pastime depressed him a bit. He believed it just didn’t require the technical skills of proper hacking. Hacking was, in his view, about the exploration of a brave new world of computers. Phreaking was, well, a bit beneath a good hacker. Somehow it demeaned the task at hand.
Still, he could see how in some cases it was necessary in order to continue hacking. Most people in the underground developed some basic skills in phreaking, though people like Bowen always viewed it more as a means to an end - just a way of getting from computer A to computer B, nothing more. Nonetheless, he allowed phreaking discussion areas in the private sections of PI.
What he refused to allow was discussion areas around credit card fraud. Carding was anathema to Bowen and he watched with alarm as some members of the underground began to shift from phreaking into carding.
Like the transition into phreaking, the move into carding was a logical progression. It occurred over a period of perhaps six months in 1988 and was as obvious as a group of giggling schoolgirls.
Many phreakers saw it simply as another type of phreaking. In fact it was a lot less hassle than manipulating some company’s PABX. Instead, you just call up an operator, give him some