Chuckanut Radio Hour with Special Guest Phil Lapsley, Exploding the Phone

Join us this month as we host special guest Philip Lapsley on the Chuckanut Radio Hour for his new book, "Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell." The Chuckanut Radio Hour is a radio variety show that began in January 2007. The Feb. 22 Radio Hour features a guest author and includes guest musicians The Holly Swanson Trio, performance poet Kevin Murphy, Cascadia Weekly columnist Alan Rhodes, an episode of "The Bellingham Bean" serial radio comedy, and… Show more some groaner jokes by hosts Chuck & Dee Robinson and announcer Rich Donnelly. The Radio Hour airs every Saturday evening at 6pm and Sunday at 9pm on Spark Radio, Kmre 102.3FM.
Phil Lapsley's Exploding the Phone traces the birth of long-distance communication and the telephone, the rise of AT&T's monopoly, the creation of the sophisticated machines that made it all work, and the discovery of Ma Bell's Achilles' heel. Lapsley expertly weaves together the clandestine network of "phone phreaks" who broke into the system to satisfy their curiosity, the mobsters who exploited its flaws to avoid the feds, and the counterculture movement that argued you should rip off the phone company to fight against the war in Vietnam.
AT&T responded with "Greenstar," an unprecedented project that would ultimately tap some thirty-three million telephone calls and record 1.5 million of them. The FBI fought back, too, especially when a phone phreak showed a confidential informant how he could remotely eavesdrop on FBI calls. Phone phreaking exploded into the popular culture, with famous actors, musicians, and investors caught with "blue boxes," many of them built by two young phone phreaks named Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Soon, the phone phreaks, the feds, and the phone company were at war. Based on original interviews and declassified documents, and featuring a forward by phone phreak turned Apple Computers co-founder Steve Wozniak, Exploding the Phone is a captivating, ground-breaking work about an important part of our cultural and technological history.
Phil Lapsley co-founded two high technology companies in the San Francisco Bay Area and was a consultant at McKinsey & Company where he advised Fortune 100 companies on strategy. He holds a Master's degree in electrical engineering and computer sciences from UC Berkeley and an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management. Lapsley has been interviewed by NPR and the BBC and quoted in The New York Times and Boston Globe on telephone and computer security issues, and is the author of one textbook, sixteen patents, an Internet standard, and many technical articles.
Tickets for the Chuckanut Radio Hour are $5 and are available at BrownPaperTickets.com and at Village Books. Receive a free ticket to the show with purchase of one hard cover copy of the book at Village Books. Doors open at 6:30pm, and you must be seated by 6:45pm as the show begins promptly at 7pm. Co-sponsored by the Leopold Retirement Residence, 12th Street Shoes, Fairhaven Pizza, and the Fairhaven Village Inn.

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