What exactly was going on during those few minutes?
Well usually the negotiator would ask the criminal mundane questions like:
“How are you doing?”
“Is everybody okay over there?”
“What do you hope to get out of this?”
“What’s your favorite color?”
All the while Barney in the back would be on another phone with someone down at Southwestern Bell who was actually tracing the call.
Invariably, the criminal would disconnect just a few seconds before Ma Bell could locate them.
For local calls I would assume they’d just go downstairs and look at the physical positions of the switching mechanisms?
The local police were kind enough to supply me with a phone number and password for the modern day equivalent. (Different from *57 or whatever.) Actually they inadvertently supplied it to everyone listening to their frequency that day, but that is not important. The procedure is now called “trap and trace”. I find the usage of the word “trap” interesting, in light of the question and the old days.
I suspect the “trap” means: get a picture of the call routing switches so we can decipher the routing.
Not nearly as romantic as it sounds, sorry.
I once heard it took 1.5 minutes (minimum) to trace a call. This was after tone dialing was used inside ATT, while the phones still used pulse. Electro-mechanical switches, long before digital.
This.
Back in the day the phone switches were mechanical. To trace a call you had to literally, physically interact with the switches (like attach a lead to one switch at a time).
IIRC there was a case back in the early days of computers (think mainframes) where a little discrepancy in billing got a U-Cal Berkley (I think) computer administrator on the trail of what turned out to be a spy running out of Germany. They had narrowed it down to a town but the spy only would connect for a minute or two to the Berkley mainframe. So they sat in the phone company switching station and had to check the switches manually each time they made a connection. There are a lot of switches so it took them days till they eventually got it.
Ah…here it is:
Cliff’s book is a great read, I re-read it recently. The point in the story that involved a mechanical exchange was the final step of the trace. Whilst the US and international exchanges were all electronic, the local exchange where the hacker lived was still mechanical. So they were stymied at the last hurdle. Cliff prepared a honeypot of apparently very interesting information that he hoped would entice the hacker to stay on-line downloading long enough for the trace to be made. It worked.
As a counterpoint to the modern understanding and use of computer hacking in crime and national security the book is a very interesting marker in history.
Cliff is still about. As a sideline he sells Klein Bottles.
Yes, Cliff Stoll’s book and the episode of Nova that followed were quite entertaining; but you make me feel really old by calling 1986 “… the early days of computers …” That was 35 years after the first commercial computers.
And some 12 years after I learned BASIC programming on one of the first desktop computers. If he says it again, I’m’a hittin’ him with my walker.
What’s interesting is that in the 1970s, AT&T was still claiming that it took special techniques to trace calls, even in urban areas… until, IIRC, someone who was dependent on a harassment trace showed the cops and phone company reps an internal billing strip that listed the source of every call to a number. Oops.
I’m 48 so I remember things like the Altair 8800 and TRS-80 and Commodore-64 and Apple II.
I get there were computers prior to 1986 (going back to WWII) but they were just barely coming into home consumer use around the early to mid-80s when this happened.
And, as noted, this all started on a mainframe that charged its use by time. I doubt many under 40 these days even know such a world existed.
I know, another geezer and I tried to explain a keypunch machine to a thirty something and he kept asking questions like, where is the monitor, and where do you plug in the mouse?
P.S. The Nova episode starring Cliff Stoll is on Youtube. If you don’t want to watch it, DO NOT WATCH the first 30 seconds.
Awesome! I enjoyed that episode.
For those who do not want to watch the whole thing and see the part relevant to the OP here is the link time skipped to that part.
If that doesn’t work the time stamp is 39:00 into the video.
I remember that scene in Three Days of the Condor, where they are trying to trace Condor’s phone call into HQ, and it shows the electro-mechanical switches that he had wired together at the substation in some way so that he couldn’t be traced. That was in 1975, so I guess it was still realistic.
As an old electro-mechanical telephone switch technician, I used to get involved in tracing calls. My experience is in New Zealand using BPO 2000 type switches, so somewhat different from the North American environment. For emergency service calls, the call would normally be held in the switch as long as the operator still had her plug in the jack at the exchange. For other types, to an ordinary connection, if there was a series of calls that needed to be traced, we could plug in a special adapter in the final selectors which would hold the call as long as the called party didn’t hang up. So if you called someone that was prepared that way, we could trace the call back to the originator even if they hung up. Ordinarily, though, you did have to have the call in progress to trace it.
This applied in the NZ system because we use a system known as first party release. Once either party hangs up, the switches release and return to their home position. In the UK they used called party release. As long as they kept the phone off, the switch path would remain. Because of the way the exchange sends dial tone to the line, the caller could still make new calls because a new path could be originated even if the first path was still in place in the exchange.
(The NZ term telephone exchange = USA central office)
OMG! Thank you! I loved this book and have been meaning to try to remember what the name of it was. Thank you!
I’m glad to see so many people remember this and like this.
In my circles seems like I am the only one. It is gratifying to know I am not the only one who thought this was pretty cool.
(I mean, I know intellectually I am not the only person in the world who liked it…just seemed like it since I never met anyone else who had a clue what I was talking about…probably need to go meet more people :D).
I just bought it on Kindle, so thank you very much for this reminder. Cliff Stoll writes excellently and entertainingly.
I have one of Cliff’s Klein bottles. Just the packing list is hilarious.
Didn’t Cliff break a password by looking at a pack of cigarettes and guessing “Malboro” or some such?
I liked the book too.
I’d be doubtful about this. In the British Post Office system the line did not release until the calling party’s phone transmitted Calling Subscriber Cleardown (CSC) - or failing that until a set delay time had passed after the called party had cleared down - can’t remember how long now.
Some time after ANI (Automatic Number Identification) was in place by the phone company TV shows and movies still would use that old ploy that they must keep someone on the phone long enough to trace a call. I wonder how many crooks were caught because they thought if they didn’t stay on the phone long, they couldn’t be traced. I have seen them still use that ploy in TV/movies, and it’s with cell phones where they are trying to triangulate the signal and claim they need more time to do so.