John Thomas Draper (born March 11, 1943), also known as Captain Crunch, Crunch or Crunchman (after the Cap'n Crunch breakfast cereal mascot), is an American computer programmer and former phone phreak. He is a widely-known figure within the computer programming world and the hacker and security community and generally lives a nomadic lifestyle. Since 2013 he has lived in Las Vegas, Nevada. In 2017 allegations were made about Draper's sexual behavior.
Video John Draper
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.
After taking college courses, 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. After Alaska, he was stationed at Charleston Air Force Station in Maine. In 1967, he created WKOS [W-"chaos"], a pirate station in nearby Dover-Foxcroft, but had to shut it down when a legally-licensed radio station, WDME, objected.
Draper was honorably discharged from the Air Force as an airman first class in 1968. He moved to Silicon Valley and briefly worked for National Semiconductor as an engineering technician and at Hugle International where he worked on an early designs for a cordless telephone. He also attended De Anza College on a part-time basis through 1972.
During this period, he also worked as an engineer and disc jockey for KKUP in Cupertino, California and adopted the countercultural styles of the time by wearing long hair and smoking marijuana.
Maps John Draper
Career
Phreaking
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 Denny Teresi resulted in a meeting that led Draper into the world of so-called phone phreaks, a term applied to 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.
The phreakers informed Draper that a toy whistle that was, at the time, packaged in boxes of Cap'n Crunch cereal could emit a tone at precisely 2600 hertz--the same frequency that was used by AT&T long lines to indicate that a trunk line was ready and available to route a new call. This would effectively disconnect one end of the trunk, allowing the still connected side to enter an operator mode. Experimenting with this whistle inspired Draper to build blue boxes.
The class of vulnerabilities Draper and others discovered was limited to call-routing switches that employed in-band signaling, whereas newer equipment relies almost exclusively on out-of-band signaling, the use of separate circuits to transmit voice and signals. Though they no longer serve a practical use, the Cap'n Crunch whistles did become valued collector's items. The publication 2600: The Hacker Quarterly is named after this audio frequency.
According to one often-repeated anecdote, Draper picked up a public phone, then proceeded to "phreak" his call through phone systems around the world, terminating the call at a second public phone right next to the first. In another, Draper claimed that he and a friend placed a prank call to the White House during the Richard Nixon administration. After giving an operator President Nixon's secret code name of "Olympus", the story goes that they asked to speak to the president about a national emergency. When a voice sounding like Nixon's came to the line they said there was a toilet paper shortage in Los Angeles. The anecdote has never been independently confirmed.
In 1971, the 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.
After the article was published, Draper was in 1972 arrested and charged with toll fraud. He was sentenced to five years' probation. However, it also 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 KKUP, a public radio station in Cupertino, California. After arranging to meet Wozniak in his dorm room Draper and Wozniak compared techniques on blue boxes. Also present at the meeting was Wozniak's friend Steve Jobs. Jobs and Wozniak went on to set up a small business selling phone-phreaking tools. Draper was a member of the Homebrew Computer Club.
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 "Charlie Board," which was designed to dial toll-free telephone numbers used by many to corporations and then and emit touch-tones that would grant access to the WATS lines in use by those companies. The end result: A Charlie Board user could make unlimited free long-distance phone calls. Wozniak was enthusiastic about the design, but Apple did not market it as a product. "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. Some of its techniques would later be used in tone-activated calling menus, voicemail and other services." Draper also claims to have written the BASIC cross-assembler used by Wozniak in the development of Apple I and Apple II.
Software developer
In 1976 and 1978, Draper served two prison sentences for phone fraud. During this period, two court-appointed psychiatrists examined Draper. One concluded he had an 'underdeveloped sense of people' and was 'psychotic' while the second found nothing wrong with him." Draper wrote EasyWriter, the first word processor for the Apple II, in 1979 while on a work-release program during a third period of incarceration.
Draper later ported EasyWriter to the IBM PC, and it was selected by IBM as the machine's official word processor, beating competing bids from Microsoft. Draper formed a software company called Capn' Software, but it booked less than $1 million in revenue over six years. The company's 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.
Draper joined Autodesk in 1986, designing video driver software, in role offered directly by the company's co-founder John Walker. In 1987, Draper was charged in a scheme for forge tickets for the Bay Area Rapid Transit system. In 1988 he pled guilty to a lesser misdemeanor charges and entered a diversion program. While facing prosecution he remained on the Autodesk payroll, but did no work for the company. He was fired from Autodesk in 1989.
Draper spent most of the 1990s involved in the rave culture, and earned money to support his itinerant lifestyle building websites and writing code for small businesses Australia and India.
From 1999 to 2004, Draper was the Chief Technical Officer (CTO) for ShopIP, a computer security firm which 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 (CTO) at En2go, a software company that developed media delivery tools. The company had previously been named Medusa Style Corp. It's 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.
Personal life
Allegations of sexually inappropriate behavior
Allegations from two individuals against Draper surfaced in The Parallax, a computer security news website. The site confirmed that Draper has been banned by organizers of at least four hacking and security-related conferences due to his exercise routine. Additionally, it is alleged that in 2008 Draper required Phil Lapsley to give him a "half-naked piggyback ride" before agreeing to an interview for his book 'Exploding the Phone, A History of Phone Phreaking.' Lapsley complied with the request in order to obtain the interview.
Further allegations came to light in a Buzzfeed story on Dec. 8, 2017. In it, a man named Craig Ellenwood claims to have been sexually assaulted and briefly held against his will in Draper's apartment after the two met at rave event in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood in the summer of 1991. Ellenwood claims that Draper complained of a pain in his back and asked him to stand behind in order to help adjust it, only to be forced to the floor by Draper. Ellenwood further alleges that Draper attempted to pull down his pants. When Ellenwood tried to escape, Draper blocked the door, and briefly refused to let him leave.
In an interview with The Daily Dot following the Buzzfeed story, Draper denied the allegations. He described the encounters as a type of 'energy workout' employing techniques of applied kinesiology, a form of alternative medicine. Draper claims to have learned the methods from a team of medical professionals in California in 1990 and has claimed to be an advocate of the practice. Draper conceded that in some instances he may have experienced an unwanted erection during some of the encounters which included squats and pushups while carrying Draper's bodyweight, and massages of the leg and arm muscles, while denying any explicit sexual intent.
In popular culture
In Chapter 17 of the novel Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, Draper's Cap'n Crunch pseudonym, the breakfast cereal of the same name, and a whistle are clues to unlocking one of the keys in the Easter Egg hunt.
In scenes depicting his interactions with Wozniak and Jobs, Draper was portrayed by the actor Wayne Pére in the 1999 made-for-TV film Pirates of Silicon Valley.
References
External links
- Media related to John T. Draper at Wikimedia Commons
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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