4 Extra Debut. The story of phone phreaking: the teenagers who hacked into the US phone system, and the blind genius at the centre. From 2017.
In the 1960s and 70s, a whole subculture of teenagers – many of them blind – became fascinated by the telephone system of the United States of America.
They spent their time finding ingenious ways to hack into it and make the network do things that not even the phone company could have imagined.
They were known as the phone phreaks.
This is the story of a love affair with the phone network and of the precocious teens who outwitted and explored it.
It’s also the story of the genius at the centre of that subculture.
Producer: Jeremy Grange
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in March 2017.
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