John Draper

For other people named John Draper, see John Draper (disambiguation).

John T. Draper
Draper at Maker Faire Berlin, 2015
Born	John Thomas Draper (1943-03-11) March 11, 1943
Other names	Nicknames include Captain Crunch, Crunch, and Crunchman
Occupation(s)	Computer programmer, former phone phreak
Website	www.webcrunchers.com & www.crunchcreations.com/

John Thomas Draper (born March 11, 1943), also known as Captain Crunch, Crunch, or Crunchman after a toy boatswain's call whistle once given away in boxes of Cap'n Crunch breakfast cereal that for some years could be used to make free long distance phone calls, is an American computer programmer and former phone phreak. He is a widely known figure within the hacker and computer security community. He is primarily known for having befriended and influenced Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs in the years before they founded Apple Computer, and for his criminal activities stemming from instances of telephone 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. He worked only intermittently from the 1990s on.

Early life

Draper is the son of a United States Air Force engineer. As a child, he built a home radio station from discarded military components. He was frequently bullied in school and briefly received psychological treatment.

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.

Following his honorable discharge from the Air Force as an airman first class in 1968, he moved to San Jose, California. 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. During this period, he also worked as an engineer and disc jockey for KKUP in Cupertino, California.

Career

Phreaking

A Cap'n Crunch boatswain's pipe

While testing a pirate radio transmitter he had built, Draper broadcast a telephone number to listeners seeking feedback to gauge the station's reception. A call from fellow pirate radio operator Denny Teresi resulted in a meeting that led Draper into the world of "phone phreaks", people who study and experiment with telephone networks, and who sometimes use that knowledge to make free calls. Teresi and several other phone phreaks were blind. Learning of Draper's knowledge of electronic design, they asked him to build a multifrequency tone generator, known informally as a blue box, a device for emitting audio tones used to control the phone network. The group had previously used an organ and cassette recordings of tones to make free calls. Among the phone phreaks, one blind boy who had taken the moniker of Joybubbles had perfect pitch and was able to identify frequencies precisely.

Draper learned that a toy whistle packaged in boxes of Cap'n Crunch cereal emitted a tone at precisely 2600 hertz—the same frequency that AT&T long lines used to indicate that a trunk line was available for routing a new call. 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. After 1980 and the introduction of Signalling System No. 7, most U.S. phone lines relied almost exclusively on out-of-band signaling. This change rendered the toy whistles and blue boxes useless for phreaking purposes. The whistles are considered collectible souvenirs of a bygone era, and the magazine 2600: The Hacker Quarterly is named after the audio frequency.

Profile by Esquire

In 1971, journalist Ron Rosenbaum wrote about phone phreaking for Esquire. The article relied heavily on interviews with Draper and conferred upon him a sort of celebrity status among people interested in the counterculture. When first contacted by Rosenbaum about the story, Draper was ambivalent about being interviewed, but also, in the same breath, explained his prevailing ethos:

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.

— Secrets of the Little Blue Box, Ron Rosenbaum, Esquire Magazine (October 1971) as republished by Slate

The article caught the attention of University of California, Berkeley engineering student and future Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who located Draper while working as an engineer at the radio station KKUP. Wozniak and Draper met to compare techniques for building blue boxes. Also present was Wozniak's friend Steve Jobs. Wozniak and Jobs later set up a small business selling blue boxes.

Criminal cases and cooperation with FBI

The notoriety of the Esquire article led to Draper's arrest by the FBI in May 1972 on charges of toll fraud. The charges stemmed from having been caught illegally calling a phone number in Sydney, Australia, that played a recorded message listing that country's most popular songs. He was sentenced to five years probation, and under its terms, he was forbidden to share his technical knowledge for building blue boxes and making free calls.

Following that conviction, Draper remained under FBI surveillance. In 1975, while visiting New York City, Draper 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 cited that he had 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 another FBI phone 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 two charges of toll fraud and a sentence of four months incarcerated at the federal prison in Lompoc, California, making him the first phone phreak to spend time in federal prison. As part of a plea deal, he agreed to cooperate with the FBI, explaining the phone system vulnerabilities, how he exploited them, and how they might be fixed.

In 1978, he 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. The conviction violated the terms of his federal parole. 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. 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.

Hardware and software developer

Easywriter

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. 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.

Draper formed a software company called Capn' Software, but it booked less than $1 million in revenue over six years. Distributor Bill Baker also 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.

John Draper in Canberra, Australia, 1995

Apple Computer and the Charley Board

In 1977, Draper worked for Apple as an independent contractor, 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. Some of its techniques were later used in tone-activated calling menus, voicemail, and other services.

"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 a speech in 2004.

Autodesk and other ventures

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. He pled guilty to lesser misdemeanor charges in 1988 and entered a diversion program. While facing prosecution, he remained on the Autodesk payroll but did no work for the company until he was fired the following year.

From 1999 to 2004, Draper was the chief technical officer for ShopIP, 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.

In 2007, Draper was named chief technology officer at 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 in the company 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.

Allegations of sexually inappropriate behavior

In 2017, organizers of at least four hacking and security-related conferences (including DEF CON, HOPE, and ToorCon) 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.

Further allegations against Draper emerged in reporting by The Parallax. In the story, University of Pennsylvania computer science professor Matt Blaze asserted 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. Additionally, journalist Phil Lapsley alleged that Draper consented to an interview in exchange for a partially clothed piggyback ride.

Following reports of the allegations, Draper said that he has Asperger syndrome, which he said could have contributed to his behavior. He denied some of the allegations in an interview with The Daily Dot and did not answer others. He denied any explicit sexual intent and instead described the encounters as an "energy workout" employing techniques of applied kinesiology, a discredited 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.

In popular culture

Draper was one of the key figures in the 1984 book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy. The book chronicles the rise of the hacker subculture in the 1970s and 1980s.

In scenes depicting his interactions with Wozniak and Jobs, Draper was portrayed by the actor Wayne Péré in the 1999 made-for-TV film Pirates of Silicon Valley.

The 2001 documentary film The Secret History of Hacking, features interviews with Draper, Steve Wozniak, Kevin Mitnick, and other notable figures in the hacking community.

Draper is also mentioned throughout the poem "Phone Phreaking" by Neil Hilborn, in his collection "Our Numbered Days".