Tag: Spiro
Spiro was the name given to the blue box, a piece of telephone hacking equipment used in the 1970s to make long distance telephone calls without being billed. In a sarcastic reference, it was named after Spiro Agnew, the vice-president of the United States at the time, who was greatly unpopular with the youth and counterculture who largely made up the telephone hacking community. Other pieces of hacking equipment were named the Agnew, and even the T, Agnew’s middle initial.
The Spiro consisted of a set of audio oscillators, a telephone keypad, an audio amplifier and speaker. Its use relied, like much of the telephone hacking methodology of the time, on the use of a constant tone of 2600 hertz to indicate an unused telephone line. A free long distance telephone call (such as the information operator from another area code) was made using a regular telephone, and when the line was connected, a 2600 Hz tone from the Spiro was fed into the mouthpiece of the telephone, causing the…
