John Thomas Draper (also known as Captain Crunch, Crunch, or Crunchman; born March 11, 1943) is an American computer programmer and former phone phreak. He is a widely known figure within the hacker and computer security community. He is primarily known as a colorful and unconventional figure in Silicon Valley history and lore. He befriended and influenced Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs in the years before they founded Apple Computer. His determined probing and exploration of the telephone network earned him a reputation for his technical acumen. However, his activities sometimes crossed ethical lines, leading to criminal charges and prison time for toll fraud.
In the 1970s and 1980s, he worked intermittently as a software engineer for Apple and Autodesk and briefly ran his own software company, producing the EasyWriter word processor. He was frequently bullied in school and briefly received psychological treatment.
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. In 1967, while stationed at Charleston Air Force Station in Maine, he created WKOS (W-"chaos"), a pirate radio station based in nearby Dover-Foxcroft, Maine.
Following his honorable discharge from the Air Force as an airman first class in 1968, he moved to San Jose, California. During this period, he also worked as an engineer and disc jockey for KKUP in Cupertino, California.
Career
Phreaking
thumb|left|A Cap'n Crunch boatswain's pipe
Draper was introduced to the world of phone phreaking in 1969 by Denny Teresi, who, like Draper, was a pirate radio broadcaster. Accounts of how their first meeting came about differ in the retelling. Sometime after his discharge from the Air Force and while he was living in San Jose, Draper received a phone call from Teresi, a blind teenager living in a San Jose suburb. In one version, the call came after Draper had broadcast his phone number seeking feedback from listeners. In another version, the call was a chance wrong number dialed by Teresi, that ended up in a conversation.
Draper learned from Teresi that a toy whistle packaged in boxes of Cap'n Crunch cereal in 1963 emitted the same 2600-hertz tone precisely. The tone disconnected one end of the trunk while the still-connected side entered operator mode. The vulnerability they had exploited was limited to call-routing switches that relied on in-band signaling. The original discovery that the toy whistle could be used to generate the correct tone is credited to a Los Angeles-based phone phreaker who went by the pseudonym Sid Bernay.
Profile by Esquire
In 1971, 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. Reflecting on the reporting of the story years later, Rosenbaum described Draper as determined to make himself the central character in it. Draper frequently interrupted phone calls between Rosenbaum and other phreaks as a way of demonstrating his technical abilities. "All throughout it, during the reporting of the story, he was injecting himself into the story. It was fairly clear that, with some justice, he considered himself if not the star, certainly a star in the phone phreak firmament." Wozniak and Draper met to compare techniques for building blue boxes. Also present was Wozniak's friend Steve Jobs. Wozniak and Jobs later took to selling blue boxes. In 1976 the pair went on to found Apple Computer.
Following that conviction, Draper remained under FBI surveillance. In 1975, while visiting New York City, he bragged to a friend who happened to be an FBI informant that phone phreakers had learned how to use phone company technology to eavesdrop on calls and specifically claimed to have done so on phone lines belonging to the FBI's San Francisco field office. That friend, a longtime drug dealer named Chic Eder, offered to provide evidence against Draper in exchange for parole and money. He traveled to California with Draper to purchase a Blue Box. The informant also prodded Draper to demonstrate the interception of an FBI call and recorded the evidence on tape. FBI investigators, working with phone company engineers, replicated the technique described. The episode triggered a complex investigation that ultimately led to Draper being indicted on two charges of toll fraud. The conviction violated the terms of his federal parole. He spent nights in the Alameda County jail, where he wrote computer code on paper, and days entering it into an Apple II. The result was EasyWriter.
Draper formed a software company called Capn' Software, but it booked less than $1 million in revenue over six years. 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.
Autodesk and other ventures
Draper joined Autodesk in 1986, designing video driver software in a role offered to him directly by co-founder John Walker. In 1987, Draper was charged in a scheme to forge tickets for the Bay Area Rapid Transit system. He pled guilty to lesser misdemeanor charges in 1988 and entered a diversion program. While facing prosecution, he remained on the Autodesk payroll but did no work for the company. Autodesk fired him the following year.
From 1999 to 2004, Draper was the chief technical officer for ShopIP, a computer security firm that 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 of En2go, a software company that developed media delivery tools. The company had previously been named Medusa Style Corp. It is unclear when Draper's involvement 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.
Allegations of sexually inappropriate behavior
In 2017, organizers of at least four hacking and security-related conferences, including DEF CON and Hackers on Planet Earth, said they had banned Draper from attending in the wake of allegations against him concerning unwanted sexual attention toward other attendees. The allegations were reported in two stories by BuzzFeed News.
Further allegations of sexual assault and stalking against Draper emerged in reporting by the cybersecurity newsletter The Parallax View. In the story, a hacker given the pseudonym Jay claimed that in 2000, Draper invited him to a room in a San Diego office building. The story also covers claims by University of Pennsylvania computer science professor Matt Blaze who asserted in a series of social media posts that Draper subjected him to a stalking campaign in the 1970s when he was a teenager and when Draper would have been in his thirties.
Additionally, journalist Phil Lapsley alleged that Draper consented to an interview in exchange for a partially clothed piggyback ride, which he described as "a kind of informal 'Draper initiation ritual' that all interviewers must survive before they get anything out of him."
Following reports of the allegations, Draper said that he has Asperger syndrome, which he said could have contributed to his behavior.
Autobiography
In 2018, Draper co-authored a self-published autobiography, Beyond the Little Blue Box, with C Wilson Fraser. It details Draper’s experiences in the phone phreaking movement, and his contributions to early hacking culture and includes a foreword by Steve Wozniak. Draper was interviewed about the book by The Daily Dot.
In popular culture
The actor Wayne Péré played Draper in some brief scenes for the 1999 made-for-TV film Pirates of Silicon Valley.
The 2001 documentary film The Secret History of Hacking made for the U.K.'s Channel 4 features interviews with Draper, Steve Wozniak, Kevin Mitnick, and other notable figures in the hacking community.
Draper is also mentioned throughout the poem "Phreaking" by the poet Neil Hilborn in his collection Our Numbered Days.