#phreaks — Public Fediverse posts

70s Newspaper Illustrations of Computer Crime

There was a previous early realhackhistory blog on how print media illustrations in the 1980s portrayed hackers, this blog will do the same but for the 1970s.

The term “hacker” was not in common usage around this time and neither was “hacking”, so instead there were references to “computer crime” or “computer fraud” or sometimes, unfortunately, “DP crime” or “data processing crime”. “Hacker” would enter the mainstream of pop culture in 1983.

Crimes committed via computer in this decade were generally done by insiders, employees or trusted third parties who worked with or for companies or organizations. The crimes that made headlines were generally financial fraud related and generally involved physical access to computers, punch cards or storage tapes.

In this decade home computing was not really a thing for the vast majority of people, if you were to encounter a computer at all it would be as part of a job or education in school.

The 70s was also an era that phone phreaks, people who exploited vulnerabilities in the phone system for fun and profit, were heavily covered in the media. I’ve included some illustrations relating to them too.

Where possible I have tried to include context from news stories around the time the illustrations appeared, but this blog is more about the images themselves than that.

This blog will start in 1970 and work through illustrations through to 1979. Most of the illustrations are from U.S. newspapers.

1970

In 1970 almost all of the news stories that revolved around crime and computers were actually about law enforcement agencies across the U.S. starting to use “crime computers” to store data relating to criminal investigations. The stories that related to computers and fraud are mostly predictions as to potential issues down the line or concerns around computers and the potential for voting fraud.

Here we have two police officers proudly posing with their department’s new computer.

The illustrations attached to these stories of a new, more efficient computerized police force are generally very positive in tone.

Some of the illustrations relate to potential misunderstandings as police get to grips with the advanced technology that is the 1970 computer.

This cartoon accompanied an article about “crime computers” but imagines criminals making use of an equivalent system. Can you imagine?

1971

Phone phreaks were big news in 1971 and there were many articles written about how phone phreaks made calls and the antics they got up to on the global phone network.

I really enjoy this illustration attached to an article about a crackdown on phone phreaking with the sinister phone phreak calling up some innocent and perplexed man on the beach.

There was no shortage of helpful hints as to how to get into phone phreaking included in many of the articles on the topic, some even included helpful diagrams of equipment that could be made or purchased to enable to making of free phone calls.

1972

1972 saw increasing concerns about the security of computer systems holding sensitive data, like the aforementioned “crime computers”, and headlines that were literally along the lines of “Criminals Using Computers Now”.

Alongside these more pessimistic articles were a slew of positive coverage of computers and computing as a way to combat welfare, phone and credit card fraud.

A big story in 1972 that related loosely to computer crime involved a database of stolen or invalid credit card companies that telephone operators from Pacific Telephone could query. Operators would enter the number given into a computer terminal and a computerized voice would come on the line to tell them “okay” or “no”, if they heard “okay” the phone call would be billed to the card number they had been provided and they could connect the call.

This illustration was attached to an article that detailed more concerns about potential for fraud when computers are used in voting. I don’t fully understand what it is portraying though, maybe a computer in a voting booth that has been prised open?

Articles that got illustrations still mostly related to phone phreaking though. We have this very detailed photo:

And this illustration which I think relates to stories about phone phreaks prank calling people around the world.

1973

Based on reviewing a lot of newspaper articles from 1973 that deal with computer crime, this is the year that journalists started really taking notice of potential and actual hacking and fraud and newspapers started getting their illustrators to create cartoons to accompany the coverage.

One of the reasons for this interest in computer crimes was probably the man pictured below, Jerry Schneider, a future realhackhistory blog topic. Jerry was able to fool a telephone company procurement computer system into having deliveries of telephone equipment left at phone company warehouses for him to pick up and resell. His story, along with his showmanship and personality, helped drive curiosity and fears around computing.

1973 is also when we see the imagery around bank robbers and computer crime become more set in stone as a trope in newspaper illustrations. The people pictured are adult men, often dressed as spies, bandits or robbers and the cartoons often revolve around some variation on the theme of an armed stick up.

The computers pictured are massive, as computers of the time were, so they can be depicted as being almost like a bank vault themselves, or as an anthropomorphised robot that can be threatened or scared.

Phones are still often present in these images, as some of these crimes were committed remotely via modem or by someone social engineering someone over the phone to surrender information that was needed to access a computer.

These images below were in a two page spread as part of a lengthy article about phreaking published in The Toronto Star on Saturday, April 21st, 1973. It shows a young phone phreak calling various people including Richard Nixon, Brigitte Bardot, a kangaroo and perhaps most inexplicably, Adolph Hitler.

1974

1974 saw the return of Jerry Schneider to the news, this time on a redemption arc as a former computer fraudster turned high sought after security consultant. We got some cool imagery created by the Associated Press and reprinted in a lot of newspapers as a result.

There is a dramatic warning captioning this photo of a man handling magnetic tapes, “TAMPERING WITH TAPES COULD COST LIVES”. As computers became more and more integrated into important businesses and organizations people became concerned with the integrity of that data and the safety of the computers themselves.

Anxiety about computing and what it means for the future continued to feature in the cartoons as well, as in this illustration of Uncle Sam lost in a maze created from computer tape archives.

This cartoon below is one of my favorite of all the images in this blog, a monolithic computer being attacked on multiple fronts. There is a little computer burglar camped out behind the computer who seems to be intercepting data through some headphones he has on, there is a little burglar in between the magnetic tape spools with a magnet and another burglar chopping up and tying printouts in knots before they reach a troupe of businessmen.

The best element of all for me is the little burglar playing puppetmaster with the various cables connected to the computer, I wish the puppetmaster trope had taken off more as it is visually compelling. Finally we have a tiny Sherlock Holmes with a question mark over his head who has clearly been walking in circles.

We also get this kind of fun visualization of computer security, with two security guards hastily dropping a giant metal cage over a towering computer while a banker gestures for them to hurry up.

Finally for 1974 we have the less popular style of cartoon where the computer itself is a bank robber, or the willing accomplice of a bank robber. A lot of articles throughout the 1970s described people who used a computer as their “partner” in committing crimes.

1975

It wouldn’t be a selection of images attached to articles on computer crime from the early to mid 1970s without at least a few photos of Jerry Schneider, so here he is demonstrating how a public phone and a portable terminal can be used to connect to computers.

This image of a Frankenstein’s monster partially composed of computer parts accompanied an article on the many potential pitfalls of computing, with becoming the victim of computer crime being on of them.

Below, a very literal image of computer security.

We see a hint of nerds as computer criminals here, where a man is writing out a formula on a blackboard that is clearly intended to make him a lot of money.

This cartoon is very interesting as it the only cartoon I found that accompanies an article discussing fears around privacy and data held in computers. In this case the man at the “National Data Bank” is asking to “withdraw the deposits in my name”, in other words to remove that data that has been stored relating to him.

This image is fairly unremarkable but does feature the robber character physically stealing computer tapes, which was a concern voiced by some who thought that data stolen in this manner could be held to ransom eventually. Can you imagine it?

Closing out 1975 with this dual wielding bank robber computer.

1976

The contrast of this image has been somewhat decimated by the scanning process for the archive but I wanted to include it because I love the imagery of someone with leather gloves on typing on a keyboard in the dark with a big clunky 1970s flashlight.

Linking computers to theft of money below with what seems to be a large printer that someone has laid some bank notes on.

There was an attempt here to make a collage showing I suppose the timeline of a person on a terminal using that terminal to access a computer to somehow get to money at the other end but it is a really discordant looking image.

I wish this image was less ruined by the scanning process change in darkness but I like to think that the computer has some sort of shocked expression while the pinstripe wearing hoodlum picks its pocket.

Again much less common than a computer being the innocent victim of a burglar or robber but becoming more popular as the decade went on, below is a great cartoon of computer as criminal accomplice. Extra points for “Mr Big” being in a sort of 1970s era computer font script.

Another image of the computer as accomplice below, in this case wearing a bandit mask while acting as a lookout and holding a flashlight for a bank robber cracking a safe. The mid 70s seemed to be a turning point for attitudes towards the privacy and security implications of computing and the collection of sensitive data within computers. Newspaper headlines started to imply negative human qualities such as untrustworthiness and being cold blooded relating to computers.

This illustration of a computer scientist kissing a computer was everywhere in newspapers in the mid 70s, it was usually attached to an article about Japanese scientists trying to create computer security access technology from lip prints. I don’t fully understand why but it was apparently a popular idea among Japanese computer scientists in the 1970s.

The cartoon below I think is meant to show the contrast between a burglar of the past being bamboozled by a burglar of the future, who can confidently use a computer.

Finally for 1976, in compiling these cartoons and writing this blog I have discovered that I find a bunch of little robbers scaling a giant computer to steal data just an adorable image, so here we are again.

1977

I really like a large illustration that the article itself fits around, this one shows a computer shocked by its own printout, like a bank teller reading a note passed by a bank robber. I also enjoy that the computer criminal in this case is wearing a ski mask but is actually on a computer terminal, visualizing that these crimes can be carried out remotely.

This punch card illustration is very simple but it is fun that they made the effort to theme it like this.

This 70s computer font is a recurring theme, it seems to have been a way to add some extra computer credibility to images.

This composite image of a photo and cartoon accompanies an article about phone phreaks being able to dial numbers all over the world for free.

Computer on a wanted poster here, I really like this imagery and the fact that the text of the poster is indecipherable, in decades to come it would probably have been binary.

Looking over all of these illustrations it is obvious that the trope of computer nerd had not really solidified in pop culture at this time, computer criminals are portrayed as bank robbers or businessmen for the most part. This illustration below feels like it is closer to what the nerd trope would become, a little man with glasses and a bowtie.

This is an excellent cartoon of an FBI agent made out of phones, with the handsets as pistols. There were two types of phone phreak stories in the 1970s, one tended to be whimsical stories about the adventures phreaks got up to and the other was about technical or legal moves against phone phreaking.

Not everyone was so enamored with the FBI though, there was a lot of controversy caused by attempts to create a national police network of computers that would have been administered by the FBI. People voiced serious concerns about the privacy and civil rights implications.

1978

Donn B. Parker, a computer security expert who was a very popular commentator on computer crime in media circles throughout the 70s and 80s, testified to the U.S. Congress that computers could be used to murder, in July of 1978. Parker had already made this prediction at computer conferences and made headlines like the one below.

I wish we had seen computer criminals as cowboys become more of a trope, but people got stuck on bank robbers as a visual metaphor instead.

This image accompanied an article about encryption, cryptography and even a little about whether the National Security Agency was trying to stifle public discussion of encryption to maintain the ability to tap into communication systems.

Back to the computer as accomplice here, I find it interesting that in this case the computer is dressed like a bank robber but the man telling it that “we’re a perfect team!” is dressed relatively formally for the time.

This is one of the most abstract illustrations in this entire blog.

One of the few images I discovered while looking through newspaper archives that deals directly with computer security, in this case a way to get inside the computer room and gain precious terminal access.

I don’t understand this image at all but I find it oddly compelling.

A slightly different take on bank robber robbing a computer, in this case the robber looks like he might be from an earlier era than the usual visual trope.

Computer criminal as safe cracker or lock picker is less popular as a visual representation than a bank robber but I think is probably more apt. In this case we get a man with dark gloves and sunglasses at a computer with his tools spread out beside him.

My favorite illustration of this entire blog, it accompanied an article that came about because of more statements by Donn B. Parker, in this case that universities and colleges were becoming hotbeds of computer crime. The cartoon has real Mad Magazine energy combined with something you might see in a college textbook on computer security. I think it is meant to show a university computer department as a fraternity house complete with hijinx and mayhem. I’m assuming the old man tied up at the bottom of the image is the crusty Dean or the ageing professor who was meant to have been preventing the chaos taking place.

1979

Joe Engressia, the infamous blind phone phreak known as joybubbles, featured in a lot of stories about phreaking throughout the 1970s and it only feels fitting to close out this look at the decade with this photo of him reading a Braille magazine in his Denver home.

Sadly a lot is lost contrast wise by these scans of photos in old newspapers, this photo of a man at a computer is accompanied by a caption that states that “experts suspect few of the “new criminals” are ever caught.” Computer crime in these days is still very much thought of as the realm of knowledgeable insiders who will have the expertise to cover their tracks.

Again we have a bank robber with a computer and a phone here, showing that crimes involving computers can also involve phone lines.

I like the caricature level of detail that went into this image of a bank robber committing a robbery over the phone, he reminds me a little of a Dick Tracy villain.

The silhouette here could be as much a spy as a bank robber.

Another one of these sort of odd collages, this time with a circuit-board motif accompanying it.

Slenderman businessman with a gun, this image looks oddly anachronistic to me for 1979.

Ending with another of my favorite images, this time an image that links a computer, a wad of cash and a hand pushing buttons, with a circuit-board motif in the background again. Something about the way this image flows makes it very effective to me.

Conclusion

What was your favorite of these images? Did anything mentioned in this blog jump out as a potential topic for a future blog? Feel free to comment or follow realhackhistory on social media (Bluesky and Mastodon).

70s Newspaper Illustrations of Computer Crime

There was a previous early realhackhistory blog on how print media illustrations in the 1980s portrayed hackers, this blog will do the same but for the 1970s.

The term “hacker” was not in common usage around this time and neither was “hacking”, so instead there were references to “computer crime” or “computer fraud” or sometimes, unfortunately, “DP crime” or “data processing crime”. “Hacker” would enter the mainstream of pop culture in 1983.

Crimes committed via computer in this decade were generally done by insiders, employees or trusted third parties who worked with or for companies or organizations. The crimes that made headlines were generally financial fraud related and generally involved physical access to computers, punch cards or storage tapes.

In this decade home computing was not really a thing for the vast majority of people, if you were to encounter a computer at all it would be as part of a job or education in school.

The 70s was also an era that phone phreaks, people who exploited vulnerabilities in the phone system for fun and profit, were heavily covered in the media. I’ve included some illustrations relating to them too.

Where possible I have tried to include context from news stories around the time the illustrations appeared, but this blog is more about the images themselves than that.

This blog will start in 1970 and work through illustrations through to 1979. Most of the illustrations are from U.S. newspapers.

1970

In 1970 almost all of the news stories that revolved around crime and computers were actually about law enforcement agencies across the U.S. starting to use “crime computers” to store data relating to criminal investigations. The stories that related to computers and fraud are mostly predictions as to potential issues down the line or concerns around computers and the potential for voting fraud.

Here we have two police officers proudly posing with their department’s new computer.

The illustrations attached to these stories of a new, more efficient computerized police force are generally very positive in tone.

Some of the illustrations relate to potential misunderstandings as police get to grips with the advanced technology that is the 1970 computer.

This cartoon accompanied an article about “crime computers” but imagines criminals making use of an equivalent system. Can you imagine?

1971

Phone phreaks were big news in 1971 and there were many articles written about how phone phreaks made calls and the antics they got up to on the global phone network.

I really enjoy this illustration attached to an article about a crackdown on phone phreaking with the sinister phone phreak calling up some innocent and perplexed man on the beach.

There was no shortage of helpful hints as to how to get into phone phreaking included in many of the articles on the topic, some even included helpful diagrams of equipment that could be made or purchased to enable to making of free phone calls.

1972

1972 saw increasing concerns about the security of computer systems holding sensitive data, like the aforementioned “crime computers”, and headlines that were literally along the lines of “Criminals Using Computers Now”.

Alongside these more pessimistic articles were a slew of positive coverage of computers and computing as a way to combat welfare, phone and credit card fraud.

A big story in 1972 that related loosely to computer crime involved a database of stolen or invalid credit card companies that telephone operators from Pacific Telephone could query. Operators would enter the number given into a computer terminal and a computerized voice would come on the line to tell them “okay” or “no”, if they heard “okay” the phone call would be billed to the card number they had been provided and they could connect the call.

This illustration was attached to an article that detailed more concerns about potential for fraud when computers are used in voting. I don’t fully understand what it is portraying though, maybe a computer in a voting booth that has been prised open?

Articles that got illustrations still mostly related to phone phreaking though. We have this very detailed photo:

And this illustration which I think relates to stories about phone phreaks prank calling people around the world.

1973

Based on reviewing a lot of newspaper articles from 1973 that deal with computer crime, this is the year that journalists started really taking notice of potential and actual hacking and fraud and newspapers started getting their illustrators to create cartoons to accompany the coverage.

One of the reasons for this interest in computer crimes was probably the man pictured below, Jerry Schneider, a future realhackhistory blog topic. Jerry was able to fool a telephone company procurement computer system into having deliveries of telephone equipment left at phone company warehouses for him to pick up and resell. His story, along with his showmanship and personality, helped drive curiosity and fears around computing.

1973 is also when we see the imagery around bank robbers and computer crime become more set in stone as a trope in newspaper illustrations. The people pictured are adult men, often dressed as spies, bandits or robbers and the cartoons often revolve around some variation on the theme of an armed stick up.

The computers pictured are massive, as computers of the time were, so they can be depicted as being almost like a bank vault themselves, or as an anthropomorphised robot that can be threatened or scared.

Phones are still often present in these images, as some of these crimes were committed remotely via modem or by someone social engineering someone over the phone to surrender information that was needed to access a computer.

These images below were in a two page spread as part of a lengthy article about phreaking published in The Toronto Star on Saturday, April 21st, 1973. It shows a young phone phreak calling various people including Richard Nixon, Brigitte Bardot, a kangaroo and perhaps most inexplicably, Adolph Hitler.

1974

1974 saw the return of Jerry Schneider to the news, this time on a redemption arc as a former computer fraudster turned high sought after security consultant. We got some cool imagery created by the Associated Press and reprinted in a lot of newspapers as a result.

There is a dramatic warning captioning this photo of a man handling magnetic tapes, “TAMPERING WITH TAPES COULD COST LIVES”. As computers became more and more integrated into important businesses and organizations people became concerned with the integrity of that data and the safety of the computers themselves.

Anxiety about computing and what it means for the future continued to feature in the cartoons as well, as in this illustration of Uncle Sam lost in a maze created from computer tape archives.

This cartoon below is one of my favorite of all the images in this blog, a monolithic computer being attacked on multiple fronts. There is a little computer burglar camped out behind the computer who seems to be intercepting data through some headphones he has on, there is a little burglar in between the magnetic tape spools with a magnet and another burglar chopping up and tying printouts in knots before they reach a troupe of businessmen.

The best element of all for me is the little burglar playing puppetmaster with the various cables connected to the computer, I wish the puppetmaster trope had taken off more as it is visually compelling. Finally we have a tiny Sherlock Holmes with a question mark over his head who has clearly been walking in circles.

We also get this kind of fun visualization of computer security, with two security guards hastily dropping a giant metal cage over a towering computer while a banker gestures for them to hurry up.

Finally for 1974 we have the less popular style of cartoon where the computer itself is a bank robber, or the willing accomplice of a bank robber. A lot of articles throughout the 1970s described people who used a computer as their “partner” in committing crimes.

1975

It wouldn’t be a selection of images attached to articles on computer crime from the early to mid 1970s without at least a few photos of Jerry Schneider, so here he is demonstrating how a public phone and a portable terminal can be used to connect to computers.

This image of a Frankenstein’s monster partially composed of computer parts accompanied an article on the many potential pitfalls of computing, with becoming the victim of computer crime being on of them.

Below, a very literal image of computer security.

We see a hint of nerds as computer criminals here, where a man is writing out a formula on a blackboard that is clearly intended to make him a lot of money.

This cartoon is very interesting as it the only cartoon I found that accompanies an article discussing fears around privacy and data held in computers. In this case the man at the “National Data Bank” is asking to “withdraw the deposits in my name”, in other words to remove that data that has been stored relating to him.

This image is fairly unremarkable but does feature the robber character physically stealing computer tapes, which was a concern voiced by some who thought that data stolen in this manner could be held to ransom eventually. Can you imagine it?

Closing out 1975 with this dual wielding bank robber computer.

1976

The contrast of this image has been somewhat decimated by the scanning process for the archive but I wanted to include it because I love the imagery of someone with leather gloves on typing on a keyboard in the dark with a big clunky 1970s flashlight.

Linking computers to theft of money below with what seems to be a large printer that someone has laid some bank notes on.

There was an attempt here to make a collage showing I suppose the timeline of a person on a terminal using that terminal to access a computer to somehow get to money at the other end but it is a really discordant looking image.

I wish this image was less ruined by the scanning process change in darkness but I like to think that the computer has some sort of shocked expression while the pinstripe wearing hoodlum picks its pocket.

Again much less common than a computer being the innocent victim of a burglar or robber but becoming more popular as the decade went on, below is a great cartoon of computer as criminal accomplice. Extra points for “Mr Big” being in a sort of 1970s era computer font script.

Another image of the computer as accomplice below, in this case wearing a bandit mask while acting as a lookout and holding a flashlight for a bank robber cracking a safe. The mid 70s seemed to be a turning point for attitudes towards the privacy and security implications of computing and the collection of sensitive data within computers. Newspaper headlines started to imply negative human qualities such as untrustworthiness and being cold blooded relating to computers.

This illustration of a computer scientist kissing a computer was everywhere in newspapers in the mid 70s, it was usually attached to an article about Japanese scientists trying to create computer security access technology from lip prints. I don’t fully understand why but it was apparently a popular idea among Japanese computer scientists in the 1970s.

The cartoon below I think is meant to show the contrast between a burglar of the past being bamboozled by a burglar of the future, who can confidently use a computer.

Finally for 1976, in compiling these cartoons and writing this blog I have discovered that I find a bunch of little robbers scaling a giant computer to steal data just an adorable image, so here we are again.

1977

I really like a large illustration that the article itself fits around, this one shows a computer shocked by its own printout, like a bank teller reading a note passed by a bank robber. I also enjoy that the computer criminal in this case is wearing a ski mask but is actually on a computer terminal, visualizing that these crimes can be carried out remotely.

This punch card illustration is very simple but it is fun that they made the effort to theme it like this.

This 70s computer font is a recurring theme, it seems to have been a way to add some extra computer credibility to images.

This composite image of a photo and cartoon accompanies an article about phone phreaks being able to dial numbers all over the world for free.

Computer on a wanted poster here, I really like this imagery and the fact that the text of the poster is indecipherable, in decades to come it would probably have been binary.

Looking over all of these illustrations it is obvious that the trope of computer nerd had not really solidified in pop culture at this time, computer criminals are portrayed as bank robbers or businessmen for the most part. This illustration below feels like it is closer to what the nerd trope would become, a little man with glasses and a bowtie.

This is an excellent cartoon of an FBI agent made out of phones, with the handsets as pistols. There were two types of phone phreak stories in the 1970s, one tended to be whimsical stories about the adventures phreaks got up to and the other was about technical or legal moves against phone phreaking.

Not everyone was so enamored with the FBI though, there was a lot of controversy caused by attempts to create a national police network of computers that would have been administered by the FBI. People voiced serious concerns about the privacy and civil rights implications.

1978

Donn B. Parker, a computer security expert who was a very popular commentator on computer crime in media circles throughout the 70s and 80s, testified to the U.S. Congress that computers could be used to murder, in July of 1978. Parker had already made this prediction at computer conferences and made headlines like the one below.

I wish we had seen computer criminals as cowboys become more of a trope, but people got stuck on bank robbers as a visual metaphor instead.

This image accompanied an article about encryption, cryptography and even a little about whether the National Security Agency was trying to stifle public discussion of encryption to maintain the ability to tap into communication systems.

Back to the computer as accomplice here, I find it interesting that in this case the computer is dressed like a bank robber but the man telling it that “we’re a perfect team!” is dressed relatively formally for the time.

This is one of the most abstract illustrations in this entire blog.

One of the few images I discovered while looking through newspaper archives that deals directly with computer security, in this case a way to get inside the computer room and gain precious terminal access.

I don’t understand this image at all but I find it oddly compelling.

A slightly different take on bank robber robbing a computer, in this case the robber looks like he might be from an earlier era than the usual visual trope.

Computer criminal as safe cracker or lock picker is less popular as a visual representation than a bank robber but I think is probably more apt. In this case we get a man with dark gloves and sunglasses at a computer with his tools spread out beside him.

My favorite illustration of this entire blog, it accompanied an article that came about because of more statements by Donn B. Parker, in this case that universities and colleges were becoming hotbeds of computer crime. The cartoon has real Mad Magazine energy combined with something you might see in a college textbook on computer security. I think it is meant to show a university computer department as a fraternity house complete with hijinx and mayhem. I’m assuming the old man tied up at the bottom of the image is the crusty Dean or the ageing professor who was meant to have been preventing the chaos taking place.

1979

Joe Engressia, the infamous blind phone phreak known as joybubbles, featured in a lot of stories about phreaking throughout the 1970s and it only feels fitting to close out this look at the decade with this photo of him reading a Braille magazine in his Denver home.

Sadly a lot is lost contrast wise by these scans of photos in old newspapers, this photo of a man at a computer is accompanied by a caption that states that “experts suspect few of the “new criminals” are ever caught.” Computer crime in these days is still very much thought of as the realm of knowledgeable insiders who will have the expertise to cover their tracks.

Again we have a bank robber with a computer and a phone here, showing that crimes involving computers can also involve phone lines.

I like the caricature level of detail that went into this image of a bank robber committing a robbery over the phone, he reminds me a little of a Dick Tracy villain.

The silhouette here could be as much a spy as a bank robber.

Another one of these sort of odd collages, this time with a circuit-board motif accompanying it.

Slenderman businessman with a gun, this image looks oddly anachronistic to me for 1979.

Ending with another of my favorite images, this time an image that links a computer, a wad of cash and a hand pushing buttons, with a circuit-board motif in the background again. Something about the way this image flows makes it very effective to me.

Conclusion

What was your favorite of these images? Did anything mentioned in this blog jump out as a potential topic for a future blog? Feel free to comment or follow realhackhistory on social media (Bluesky and Mastodon).

70s Newspaper Illustrations of Computer Crime

There was a previous early realhackhistory blog on how print media illustrations in the 1980s portrayed hackers, this blog will do the same but for the 1970s.

The term “hacker” was not in common usage around this time and neither was “hacking”, so instead there were references to “computer crime” or “computer fraud” or sometimes, unfortunately, “DP crime” or “data processing crime”. “Hacker” would enter the mainstream of pop culture in 1983.

Crimes committed via computer in this decade were generally done by insiders, employees or trusted third parties who worked with or for companies or organizations. The crimes that made headlines were generally financial fraud related and generally involved physical access to computers, punch cards or storage tapes.

In this decade home computing was not really a thing for the vast majority of people, if you were to encounter a computer at all it would be as part of a job or education in school.

The 70s was also an era that phone phreaks, people who exploited vulnerabilities in the phone system for fun and profit, were heavily covered in the media. I’ve included some illustrations relating to them too.

Where possible I have tried to include context from news stories around the time the illustrations appeared, but this blog is more about the images themselves than that.

This blog will start in 1970 and work through illustrations through to 1979. Most of the illustrations are from U.S. newspapers.

1970

In 1970 almost all of the news stories that revolved around crime and computers were actually about law enforcement agencies across the U.S. starting to use “crime computers” to store data relating to criminal investigations. The stories that related to computers and fraud are mostly predictions as to potential issues down the line or concerns around computers and the potential for voting fraud.

Here we have two police officers proudly posing with their department’s new computer.

The illustrations attached to these stories of a new, more efficient computerized police force are generally very positive in tone.

Some of the illustrations relate to potential misunderstandings as police get to grips with the advanced technology that is the 1970 computer.

This cartoon accompanied an article about “crime computers” but imagines criminals making use of an equivalent system. Can you imagine?

1971

Phone phreaks were big news in 1971 and there were many articles written about how phone phreaks made calls and the antics they got up to on the global phone network.

I really enjoy this illustration attached to an article about a crackdown on phone phreaking with the sinister phone phreak calling up some innocent and perplexed man on the beach.

There was no shortage of helpful hints as to how to get into phone phreaking included in many of the articles on the topic, some even included helpful diagrams of equipment that could be made or purchased to enable to making of free phone calls.

1972

1972 saw increasing concerns about the security of computer systems holding sensitive data, like the aforementioned “crime computers”, and headlines that were literally along the lines of “Criminals Using Computers Now”.

Alongside these more pessimistic articles were a slew of positive coverage of computers and computing as a way to combat welfare, phone and credit card fraud.

A big story in 1972 that related loosely to computer crime involved a database of stolen or invalid credit card companies that telephone operators from Pacific Telephone could query. Operators would enter the number given into a computer terminal and a computerized voice would come on the line to tell them “okay” or “no”, if they heard “okay” the phone call would be billed to the card number they had been provided and they could connect the call.

This illustration was attached to an article that detailed more concerns about potential for fraud when computers are used in voting. I don’t fully understand what it is portraying though, maybe a computer in a voting booth that has been prised open?

Articles that got illustrations still mostly related to phone phreaking though. We have this very detailed photo:

And this illustration which I think relates to stories about phone phreaks prank calling people around the world.

1973

Based on reviewing a lot of newspaper articles from 1973 that deal with computer crime, this is the year that journalists started really taking notice of potential and actual hacking and fraud and newspapers started getting their illustrators to create cartoons to accompany the coverage.

One of the reasons for this interest in computer crimes was probably the man pictured below, Jerry Schneider, a future realhackhistory blog topic. Jerry was able to fool a telephone company procurement computer system into having deliveries of telephone equipment left at phone company warehouses for him to pick up and resell. His story, along with his showmanship and personality, helped drive curiosity and fears around computing.

1973 is also when we see the imagery around bank robbers and computer crime become more set in stone as a trope in newspaper illustrations. The people pictured are adult men, often dressed as spies, bandits or robbers and the cartoons often revolve around some variation on the theme of an armed stick up.

The computers pictured are massive, as computers of the time were, so they can be depicted as being almost like a bank vault themselves, or as an anthropomorphised robot that can be threatened or scared.

Phones are still often present in these images, as some of these crimes were committed remotely via modem or by someone social engineering someone over the phone to surrender information that was needed to access a computer.

These images below were in a two page spread as part of a lengthy article about phreaking published in The Toronto Star on Saturday, April 21st, 1973. It shows a young phone phreak calling various people including Richard Nixon, Brigitte Bardot, a kangaroo and perhaps most inexplicably, Adolph Hitler.

1974

1974 saw the return of Jerry Schneider to the news, this time on a redemption arc as a former computer fraudster turned high sought after security consultant. We got some cool imagery created by the Associated Press and reprinted in a lot of newspapers as a result.

There is a dramatic warning captioning this photo of a man handling magnetic tapes, “TAMPERING WITH TAPES COULD COST LIVES”. As computers became more and more integrated into important businesses and organizations people became concerned with the integrity of that data and the safety of the computers themselves.

Anxiety about computing and what it means for the future continued to feature in the cartoons as well, as in this illustration of Uncle Sam lost in a maze created from computer tape archives.

This cartoon below is one of my favorite of all the images in this blog, a monolithic computer being attacked on multiple fronts. There is a little computer burglar camped out behind the computer who seems to be intercepting data through some headphones he has on, there is a little burglar in between the magnetic tape spools with a magnet and another burglar chopping up and tying printouts in knots before they reach a troupe of businessmen.

The best element of all for me is the little burglar playing puppetmaster with the various cables connected to the computer, I wish the puppetmaster trope had taken off more as it is visually compelling. Finally we have a tiny Sherlock Holmes with a question mark over his head who has clearly been walking in circles.

We also get this kind of fun visualization of computer security, with two security guards hastily dropping a giant metal cage over a towering computer while a banker gestures for them to hurry up.

Finally for 1974 we have the less popular style of cartoon where the computer itself is a bank robber, or the willing accomplice of a bank robber. A lot of articles throughout the 1970s described people who used a computer as their “partner” in committing crimes.

1975

It wouldn’t be a selection of images attached to articles on computer crime from the early to mid 1970s without at least a few photos of Jerry Schneider, so here he is demonstrating how a public phone and a portable terminal can be used to connect to computers.

This image of a Frankenstein’s monster partially composed of computer parts accompanied an article on the many potential pitfalls of computing, with becoming the victim of computer crime being on of them.

Below, a very literal image of computer security.

We see a hint of nerds as computer criminals here, where a man is writing out a formula on a blackboard that is clearly intended to make him a lot of money.

This cartoon is very interesting as it the only cartoon I found that accompanies an article discussing fears around privacy and data held in computers. In this case the man at the “National Data Bank” is asking to “withdraw the deposits in my name”, in other words to remove that data that has been stored relating to him.

This image is fairly unremarkable but does feature the robber character physically stealing computer tapes, which was a concern voiced by some who thought that data stolen in this manner could be held to ransom eventually. Can you imagine it?

Closing out 1975 with this dual wielding bank robber computer.

1976

The contrast of this image has been somewhat decimated by the scanning process for the archive but I wanted to include it because I love the imagery of someone with leather gloves on typing on a keyboard in the dark with a big clunky 1970s flashlight.

Linking computers to theft of money below with what seems to be a large printer that someone has laid some bank notes on.

There was an attempt here to make a collage showing I suppose the timeline of a person on a terminal using that terminal to access a computer to somehow get to money at the other end but it is a really discordant looking image.

I wish this image was less ruined by the scanning process change in darkness but I like to think that the computer has some sort of shocked expression while the pinstripe wearing hoodlum picks its pocket.

Again much less common than a computer being the innocent victim of a burglar or robber but becoming more popular as the decade went on, below is a great cartoon of computer as criminal accomplice. Extra points for “Mr Big” being in a sort of 1970s era computer font script.

Another image of the computer as accomplice below, in this case wearing a bandit mask while acting as a lookout and holding a flashlight for a bank robber cracking a safe. The mid 70s seemed to be a turning point for attitudes towards the privacy and security implications of computing and the collection of sensitive data within computers. Newspaper headlines started to imply negative human qualities such as untrustworthiness and being cold blooded relating to computers.

This illustration of a computer scientist kissing a computer was everywhere in newspapers in the mid 70s, it was usually attached to an article about Japanese scientists trying to create computer security access technology from lip prints. I don’t fully understand why but it was apparently a popular idea among Japanese computer scientists in the 1970s.

The cartoon below I think is meant to show the contrast between a burglar of the past being bamboozled by a burglar of the future, who can confidently use a computer.

Finally for 1976, in compiling these cartoons and writing this blog I have discovered that I find a bunch of little robbers scaling a giant computer to steal data just an adorable image, so here we are again.

1977

I really like a large illustration that the article itself fits around, this one shows a computer shocked by its own printout, like a bank teller reading a note passed by a bank robber. I also enjoy that the computer criminal in this case is wearing a ski mask but is actually on a computer terminal, visualizing that these crimes can be carried out remotely.

This punch card illustration is very simple but it is fun that they made the effort to theme it like this.

This 70s computer font is a recurring theme, it seems to have been a way to add some extra computer credibility to images.

This composite image of a photo and cartoon accompanies an article about phone phreaks being able to dial numbers all over the world for free.

Computer on a wanted poster here, I really like this imagery and the fact that the text of the poster is indecipherable, in decades to come it would probably have been binary.

Looking over all of these illustrations it is obvious that the trope of computer nerd had not really solidified in pop culture at this time, computer criminals are portrayed as bank robbers or businessmen for the most part. This illustration below feels like it is closer to what the nerd trope would become, a little man with glasses and a bowtie.

This is an excellent cartoon of an FBI agent made out of phones, with the handsets as pistols. There were two types of phone phreak stories in the 1970s, one tended to be whimsical stories about the adventures phreaks got up to and the other was about technical or legal moves against phone phreaking.

Not everyone was so enamored with the FBI though, there was a lot of controversy caused by attempts to create a national police network of computers that would have been administered by the FBI. People voiced serious concerns about the privacy and civil rights implications.

1978

Donn B. Parker, a computer security expert who was a very popular commentator on computer crime in media circles throughout the 70s and 80s, testified to the U.S. Congress that computers could be used to murder, in July of 1978. Parker had already made this prediction at computer conferences and made headlines like the one below.

I wish we had seen computer criminals as cowboys become more of a trope, but people got stuck on bank robbers as a visual metaphor instead.

This image accompanied an article about encryption, cryptography and even a little about whether the National Security Agency was trying to stifle public discussion of encryption to maintain the ability to tap into communication systems.

Back to the computer as accomplice here, I find it interesting that in this case the computer is dressed like a bank robber but the man telling it that “we’re a perfect team!” is dressed relatively formally for the time.

This is one of the most abstract illustrations in this entire blog.

One of the few images I discovered while looking through newspaper archives that deals directly with computer security, in this case a way to get inside the computer room and gain precious terminal access.

I don’t understand this image at all but I find it oddly compelling.

A slightly different take on bank robber robbing a computer, in this case the robber looks like he might be from an earlier era than the usual visual trope.

Computer criminal as safe cracker or lock picker is less popular as a visual representation than a bank robber but I think is probably more apt. In this case we get a man with dark gloves and sunglasses at a computer with his tools spread out beside him.

My favorite illustration of this entire blog, it accompanied an article that came about because of more statements by Donn B. Parker, in this case that universities and colleges were becoming hotbeds of computer crime. The cartoon has real Mad Magazine energy combined with something you might see in a college textbook on computer security. I think it is meant to show a university computer department as a fraternity house complete with hijinx and mayhem. I’m assuming the old man tied up at the bottom of the image is the crusty Dean or the ageing professor who was meant to have been preventing the chaos taking place.

1979

Joe Engressia, the infamous blind phone phreak known as joybubbles, featured in a lot of stories about phreaking throughout the 1970s and it only feels fitting to close out this look at the decade with this photo of him reading a Braille magazine in his Denver home.

Sadly a lot is lost contrast wise by these scans of photos in old newspapers, this photo of a man at a computer is accompanied by a caption that states that “experts suspect few of the “new criminals” are ever caught.” Computer crime in these days is still very much thought of as the realm of knowledgeable insiders who will have the expertise to cover their tracks.

Again we have a bank robber with a computer and a phone here, showing that crimes involving computers can also involve phone lines.

I like the caricature level of detail that went into this image of a bank robber committing a robbery over the phone, he reminds me a little of a Dick Tracy villain.

The silhouette here could be as much a spy as a bank robber.

Another one of these sort of odd collages, this time with a circuit-board motif accompanying it.

Slenderman businessman with a gun, this image looks oddly anachronistic to me for 1979.

Ending with another of my favorite images, this time an image that links a computer, a wad of cash and a hand pushing buttons, with a circuit-board motif in the background again. Something about the way this image flows makes it very effective to me.

Conclusion

What was your favorite of these images? Did anything mentioned in this blog jump out as a potential topic for a future blog? Feel free to comment or follow realhackhistory on social media (Bluesky and Mastodon).

70s Newspaper Illustrations of Computer Crime

There was a previous early realhackhistory blog on how print media illustrations in the 1980s portrayed hackers, this blog will do the same but for the 1970s.

The term “hacker” was not in common usage around this time and neither was “hacking”, so instead there were references to “computer crime” or “computer fraud” or sometimes, unfortunately, “DP crime” or “data processing crime”. “Hacker” would enter the mainstream of pop culture in 1983.

Crimes committed via computer in this decade were generally done by insiders, employees or trusted third parties who worked with or for companies or organizations. The crimes that made headlines were generally financial fraud related and generally involved physical access to computers, punch cards or storage tapes.

In this decade home computing was not really a thing for the vast majority of people, if you were to encounter a computer at all it would be as part of a job or education in school.

The 70s was also an era that phone phreaks, people who exploited vulnerabilities in the phone system for fun and profit, were heavily covered in the media. I’ve included some illustrations relating to them too.

Where possible I have tried to include context from news stories around the time the illustrations appeared, but this blog is more about the images themselves than that.

This blog will start in 1970 and work through illustrations through to 1979. Most of the illustrations are from U.S. newspapers.

1970

In 1970 almost all of the news stories that revolved around crime and computers were actually about law enforcement agencies across the U.S. starting to use “crime computers” to store data relating to criminal investigations. The stories that related to computers and fraud are mostly predictions as to potential issues down the line or concerns around computers and the potential for voting fraud.

Here we have two police officers proudly posing with their department’s new computer.

The illustrations attached to these stories of a new, more efficient computerized police force are generally very positive in tone.

Some of the illustrations relate to potential misunderstandings as police get to grips with the advanced technology that is the 1970 computer.

This cartoon accompanied an article about “crime computers” but imagines criminals making use of an equivalent system. Can you imagine?

1971

Phone phreaks were big news in 1971 and there were many articles written about how phone phreaks made calls and the antics they got up to on the global phone network.

I really enjoy this illustration attached to an article about a crackdown on phone phreaking with the sinister phone phreak calling up some innocent and perplexed man on the beach.

There was no shortage of helpful hints as to how to get into phone phreaking included in many of the articles on the topic, some even included helpful diagrams of equipment that could be made or purchased to enable to making of free phone calls.

1972

1972 saw increasing concerns about the security of computer systems holding sensitive data, like the aforementioned “crime computers”, and headlines that were literally along the lines of “Criminals Using Computers Now”.

Alongside these more pessimistic articles were a slew of positive coverage of computers and computing as a way to combat welfare, phone and credit card fraud.

A big story in 1972 that related loosely to computer crime involved a database of stolen or invalid credit card companies that telephone operators from Pacific Telephone could query. Operators would enter the number given into a computer terminal and a computerized voice would come on the line to tell them “okay” or “no”, if they heard “okay” the phone call would be billed to the card number they had been provided and they could connect the call.

This illustration was attached to an article that detailed more concerns about potential for fraud when computers are used in voting. I don’t fully understand what it is portraying though, maybe a computer in a voting booth that has been prised open?

Articles that got illustrations still mostly related to phone phreaking though. We have this very detailed photo:

And this illustration which I think relates to stories about phone phreaks prank calling people around the world.

1973

Based on reviewing a lot of newspaper articles from 1973 that deal with computer crime, this is the year that journalists started really taking notice of potential and actual hacking and fraud and newspapers started getting their illustrators to create cartoons to accompany the coverage.

One of the reasons for this interest in computer crimes was probably the man pictured below, Jerry Schneider, a future realhackhistory blog topic. Jerry was able to fool a telephone company procurement computer system into having deliveries of telephone equipment left at phone company warehouses for him to pick up and resell. His story, along with his showmanship and personality, helped drive curiosity and fears around computing.

1973 is also when we see the imagery around bank robbers and computer crime become more set in stone as a trope in newspaper illustrations. The people pictured are adult men, often dressed as spies, bandits or robbers and the cartoons often revolve around some variation on the theme of an armed stick up.

The computers pictured are massive, as computers of the time were, so they can be depicted as being almost like a bank vault themselves, or as an anthropomorphised robot that can be threatened or scared.

Phones are still often present in these images, as some of these crimes were committed remotely via modem or by someone social engineering someone over the phone to surrender information that was needed to access a computer.

These images below were in a two page spread as part of a lengthy article about phreaking published in The Toronto Star on Saturday, April 21st, 1973. It shows a young phone phreak calling various people including Richard Nixon, Brigitte Bardot, a kangaroo and perhaps most inexplicably, Adolph Hitler.

1974

1974 saw the return of Jerry Schneider to the news, this time on a redemption arc as a former computer fraudster turned high sought after security consultant. We got some cool imagery created by the Associated Press and reprinted in a lot of newspapers as a result.

There is a dramatic warning captioning this photo of a man handling magnetic tapes, “TAMPERING WITH TAPES COULD COST LIVES”. As computers became more and more integrated into important businesses and organizations people became concerned with the integrity of that data and the safety of the computers themselves.

Anxiety about computing and what it means for the future continued to feature in the cartoons as well, as in this illustration of Uncle Sam lost in a maze created from computer tape archives.

This cartoon below is one of my favorite of all the images in this blog, a monolithic computer being attacked on multiple fronts. There is a little computer burglar camped out behind the computer who seems to be intercepting data through some headphones he has on, there is a little burglar in between the magnetic tape spools with a magnet and another burglar chopping up and tying printouts in knots before they reach a troupe of businessmen.

The best element of all for me is the little burglar playing puppetmaster with the various cables connected to the computer, I wish the puppetmaster trope had taken off more as it is visually compelling. Finally we have a tiny Sherlock Holmes with a question mark over his head who has clearly been walking in circles.

We also get this kind of fun visualization of computer security, with two security guards hastily dropping a giant metal cage over a towering computer while a banker gestures for them to hurry up.

Finally for 1974 we have the less popular style of cartoon where the computer itself is a bank robber, or the willing accomplice of a bank robber. A lot of articles throughout the 1970s described people who used a computer as their “partner” in committing crimes.

1975

It wouldn’t be a selection of images attached to articles on computer crime from the early to mid 1970s without at least a few photos of Jerry Schneider, so here he is demonstrating how a public phone and a portable terminal can be used to connect to computers.

This image of a Frankenstein’s monster partially composed of computer parts accompanied an article on the many potential pitfalls of computing, with becoming the victim of computer crime being on of them.

Below, a very literal image of computer security.

We see a hint of nerds as computer criminals here, where a man is writing out a formula on a blackboard that is clearly intended to make him a lot of money.

This cartoon is very interesting as it the only cartoon I found that accompanies an article discussing fears around privacy and data held in computers. In this case the man at the “National Data Bank” is asking to “withdraw the deposits in my name”, in other words to remove that data that has been stored relating to him.

This image is fairly unremarkable but does feature the robber character physically stealing computer tapes, which was a concern voiced by some who thought that data stolen in this manner could be held to ransom eventually. Can you imagine it?

Closing out 1975 with this dual wielding bank robber computer.

1976

The contrast of this image has been somewhat decimated by the scanning process for the archive but I wanted to include it because I love the imagery of someone with leather gloves on typing on a keyboard in the dark with a big clunky 1970s flashlight.

Linking computers to theft of money below with what seems to be a large printer that someone has laid some bank notes on.

There was an attempt here to make a collage showing I suppose the timeline of a person on a terminal using that terminal to access a computer to somehow get to money at the other end but it is a really discordant looking image.

I wish this image was less ruined by the scanning process change in darkness but I like to think that the computer has some sort of shocked expression while the pinstripe wearing hoodlum picks its pocket.

Again much less common than a computer being the innocent victim of a burglar or robber but becoming more popular as the decade went on, below is a great cartoon of computer as criminal accomplice. Extra points for “Mr Big” being in a sort of 1970s era computer font script.

Another image of the computer as accomplice below, in this case wearing a bandit mask while acting as a lookout and holding a flashlight for a bank robber cracking a safe. The mid 70s seemed to be a turning point for attitudes towards the privacy and security implications of computing and the collection of sensitive data within computers. Newspaper headlines started to imply negative human qualities such as untrustworthiness and being cold blooded relating to computers.

This illustration of a computer scientist kissing a computer was everywhere in newspapers in the mid 70s, it was usually attached to an article about Japanese scientists trying to create computer security access technology from lip prints. I don’t fully understand why but it was apparently a popular idea among Japanese computer scientists in the 1970s.

The cartoon below I think is meant to show the contrast between a burglar of the past being bamboozled by a burglar of the future, who can confidently use a computer.

Finally for 1976, in compiling these cartoons and writing this blog I have discovered that I find a bunch of little robbers scaling a giant computer to steal data just an adorable image, so here we are again.

1977

I really like a large illustration that the article itself fits around, this one shows a computer shocked by its own printout, like a bank teller reading a note passed by a bank robber. I also enjoy that the computer criminal in this case is wearing a ski mask but is actually on a computer terminal, visualizing that these crimes can be carried out remotely.

This punch card illustration is very simple but it is fun that they made the effort to theme it like this.

This 70s computer font is a recurring theme, it seems to have been a way to add some extra computer credibility to images.

This composite image of a photo and cartoon accompanies an article about phone phreaks being able to dial numbers all over the world for free.

Computer on a wanted poster here, I really like this imagery and the fact that the text of the poster is indecipherable, in decades to come it would probably have been binary.

Looking over all of these illustrations it is obvious that the trope of computer nerd had not really solidified in pop culture at this time, computer criminals are portrayed as bank robbers or businessmen for the most part. This illustration below feels like it is closer to what the nerd trope would become, a little man with glasses and a bowtie.

This is an excellent cartoon of an FBI agent made out of phones, with the handsets as pistols. There were two types of phone phreak stories in the 1970s, one tended to be whimsical stories about the adventures phreaks got up to and the other was about technical or legal moves against phone phreaking.

Not everyone was so enamored with the FBI though, there was a lot of controversy caused by attempts to create a national police network of computers that would have been administered by the FBI. People voiced serious concerns about the privacy and civil rights implications.

1978

Donn B. Parker, a computer security expert who was a very popular commentator on computer crime in media circles throughout the 70s and 80s, testified to the U.S. Congress that computers could be used to murder, in July of 1978. Parker had already made this prediction at computer conferences and made headlines like the one below.

I wish we had seen computer criminals as cowboys become more of a trope, but people got stuck on bank robbers as a visual metaphor instead.

This image accompanied an article about encryption, cryptography and even a little about whether the National Security Agency was trying to stifle public discussion of encryption to maintain the ability to tap into communication systems.

Back to the computer as accomplice here, I find it interesting that in this case the computer is dressed like a bank robber but the man telling it that “we’re a perfect team!” is dressed relatively formally for the time.

This is one of the most abstract illustrations in this entire blog.

One of the few images I discovered while looking through newspaper archives that deals directly with computer security, in this case a way to get inside the computer room and gain precious terminal access.

I don’t understand this image at all but I find it oddly compelling.

A slightly different take on bank robber robbing a computer, in this case the robber looks like he might be from an earlier era than the usual visual trope.

Computer criminal as safe cracker or lock picker is less popular as a visual representation than a bank robber but I think is probably more apt. In this case we get a man with dark gloves and sunglasses at a computer with his tools spread out beside him.

My favorite illustration of this entire blog, it accompanied an article that came about because of more statements by Donn B. Parker, in this case that universities and colleges were becoming hotbeds of computer crime. The cartoon has real Mad Magazine energy combined with something you might see in a college textbook on computer security. I think it is meant to show a university computer department as a fraternity house complete with hijinx and mayhem. I’m assuming the old man tied up at the bottom of the image is the crusty Dean or the ageing professor who was meant to have been preventing the chaos taking place.

1979

Joe Engressia, the infamous blind phone phreak known as joybubbles, featured in a lot of stories about phreaking throughout the 1970s and it only feels fitting to close out this look at the decade with this photo of him reading a Braille magazine in his Denver home.

Sadly a lot is lost contrast wise by these scans of photos in old newspapers, this photo of a man at a computer is accompanied by a caption that states that “experts suspect few of the “new criminals” are ever caught.” Computer crime in these days is still very much thought of as the realm of knowledgeable insiders who will have the expertise to cover their tracks.

Again we have a bank robber with a computer and a phone here, showing that crimes involving computers can also involve phone lines.

I like the caricature level of detail that went into this image of a bank robber committing a robbery over the phone, he reminds me a little of a Dick Tracy villain.

The silhouette here could be as much a spy as a bank robber.

Another one of these sort of odd collages, this time with a circuit-board motif accompanying it.

Slenderman businessman with a gun, this image looks oddly anachronistic to me for 1979.

Ending with another of my favorite images, this time an image that links a computer, a wad of cash and a hand pushing buttons, with a circuit-board motif in the background again. Something about the way this image flows makes it very effective to me.

Conclusion

What was your favorite of these images? Did anything mentioned in this blog jump out as a potential topic for a future blog? Feel free to comment or follow realhackhistory on social media (Bluesky and Mastodon).

70s Newspaper Illustrations of Computer Crime

There was a previous early realhackhistory blog on how print media illustrations in the 1980s portrayed hackers, this blog will do the same but for the 1970s.

The term “hacker” was not in common usage around this time and neither was “hacking”, so instead there were references to “computer crime” or “computer fraud” or sometimes, unfortunately, “DP crime” or “data processing crime”. “Hacker” would enter the mainstream of pop culture in 1983.

Crimes committed via computer in this decade were generally done by insiders, employees or trusted third parties who worked with or for companies or organizations. The crimes that made headlines were generally financial fraud related and generally involved physical access to computers, punch cards or storage tapes.

In this decade home computing was not really a thing for the vast majority of people, if you were to encounter a computer at all it would be as part of a job or education in school.

The 70s was also an era that phone phreaks, people who exploited vulnerabilities in the phone system for fun and profit, were heavily covered in the media. I’ve included some illustrations relating to them too.

Where possible I have tried to include context from news stories around the time the illustrations appeared, but this blog is more about the images themselves than that.

This blog will start in 1970 and work through illustrations through to 1979. Most of the illustrations are from U.S. newspapers.

1970

In 1970 almost all of the news stories that revolved around crime and computers were actually about law enforcement agencies across the U.S. starting to use “crime computers” to store data relating to criminal investigations. The stories that related to computers and fraud are mostly predictions as to potential issues down the line or concerns around computers and the potential for voting fraud.

Here we have two police officers proudly posing with their department’s new computer.

The illustrations attached to these stories of a new, more efficient computerized police force are generally very positive in tone.

Some of the illustrations relate to potential misunderstandings as police get to grips with the advanced technology that is the 1970 computer.

This cartoon accompanied an article about “crime computers” but imagines criminals making use of an equivalent system. Can you imagine?

1971

Phone phreaks were big news in 1971 and there were many articles written about how phone phreaks made calls and the antics they got up to on the global phone network.

I really enjoy this illustration attached to an article about a crackdown on phone phreaking with the sinister phone phreak calling up some innocent and perplexed man on the beach.

There was no shortage of helpful hints as to how to get into phone phreaking included in many of the articles on the topic, some even included helpful diagrams of equipment that could be made or purchased to enable to making of free phone calls.

1972

1972 saw increasing concerns about the security of computer systems holding sensitive data, like the aforementioned “crime computers”, and headlines that were literally along the lines of “Criminals Using Computers Now”.

Alongside these more pessimistic articles were a slew of positive coverage of computers and computing as a way to combat welfare, phone and credit card fraud.

A big story in 1972 that related loosely to computer crime involved a database of stolen or invalid credit card companies that telephone operators from Pacific Telephone could query. Operators would enter the number given into a computer terminal and a computerized voice would come on the line to tell them “okay” or “no”, if they heard “okay” the phone call would be billed to the card number they had been provided and they could connect the call.

This illustration was attached to an article that detailed more concerns about potential for fraud when computers are used in voting. I don’t fully understand what it is portraying though, maybe a computer in a voting booth that has been prised open?

Articles that got illustrations still mostly related to phone phreaking though. We have this very detailed photo:

And this illustration which I think relates to stories about phone phreaks prank calling people around the world.

1973

Based on reviewing a lot of newspaper articles from 1973 that deal with computer crime, this is the year that journalists started really taking notice of potential and actual hacking and fraud and newspapers started getting their illustrators to create cartoons to accompany the coverage.

One of the reasons for this interest in computer crimes was probably the man pictured below, Jerry Schneider, a future realhackhistory blog topic. Jerry was able to fool a telephone company procurement computer system into having deliveries of telephone equipment left at phone company warehouses for him to pick up and resell. His story, along with his showmanship and personality, helped drive curiosity and fears around computing.

1973 is also when we see the imagery around bank robbers and computer crime become more set in stone as a trope in newspaper illustrations. The people pictured are adult men, often dressed as spies, bandits or robbers and the cartoons often revolve around some variation on the theme of an armed stick up.

The computers pictured are massive, as computers of the time were, so they can be depicted as being almost like a bank vault themselves, or as an anthropomorphised robot that can be threatened or scared.

Phones are still often present in these images, as some of these crimes were committed remotely via modem or by someone social engineering someone over the phone to surrender information that was needed to access a computer.

These images below were in a two page spread as part of a lengthy article about phreaking published in The Toronto Star on Saturday, April 21st, 1973. It shows a young phone phreak calling various people including Richard Nixon, Brigitte Bardot, a kangaroo and perhaps most inexplicably, Adolph Hitler.

1974

1974 saw the return of Jerry Schneider to the news, this time on a redemption arc as a former computer fraudster turned high sought after security consultant. We got some cool imagery created by the Associated Press and reprinted in a lot of newspapers as a result.

There is a dramatic warning captioning this photo of a man handling magnetic tapes, “TAMPERING WITH TAPES COULD COST LIVES”. As computers became more and more integrated into important businesses and organizations people became concerned with the integrity of that data and the safety of the computers themselves.

Anxiety about computing and what it means for the future continued to feature in the cartoons as well, as in this illustration of Uncle Sam lost in a maze created from computer tape archives.

This cartoon below is one of my favorite of all the images in this blog, a monolithic computer being attacked on multiple fronts. There is a little computer burglar camped out behind the computer who seems to be intercepting data through some headphones he has on, there is a little burglar in between the magnetic tape spools with a magnet and another burglar chopping up and tying printouts in knots before they reach a troupe of businessmen.

The best element of all for me is the little burglar playing puppetmaster with the various cables connected to the computer, I wish the puppetmaster trope had taken off more as it is visually compelling. Finally we have a tiny Sherlock Holmes with a question mark over his head who has clearly been walking in circles.

We also get this kind of fun visualization of computer security, with two security guards hastily dropping a giant metal cage over a towering computer while a banker gestures for them to hurry up.

Finally for 1974 we have the less popular style of cartoon where the computer itself is a bank robber, or the willing accomplice of a bank robber. A lot of articles throughout the 1970s described people who used a computer as their “partner” in committing crimes.

1975

It wouldn’t be a selection of images attached to articles on computer crime from the early to mid 1970s without at least a few photos of Jerry Schneider, so here he is demonstrating how a public phone and a portable terminal can be used to connect to computers.

This image of a Frankenstein’s monster partially composed of computer parts accompanied an article on the many potential pitfalls of computing, with becoming the victim of computer crime being on of them.

Below, a very literal image of computer security.

We see a hint of nerds as computer criminals here, where a man is writing out a formula on a blackboard that is clearly intended to make him a lot of money.

This cartoon is very interesting as it the only cartoon I found that accompanies an article discussing fears around privacy and data held in computers. In this case the man at the “National Data Bank” is asking to “withdraw the deposits in my name”, in other words to remove that data that has been stored relating to him.

This image is fairly unremarkable but does feature the robber character physically stealing computer tapes, which was a concern voiced by some who thought that data stolen in this manner could be held to ransom eventually. Can you imagine it?

Closing out 1975 with this dual wielding bank robber computer.

1976

The contrast of this image has been somewhat decimated by the scanning process for the archive but I wanted to include it because I love the imagery of someone with leather gloves on typing on a keyboard in the dark with a big clunky 1970s flashlight.

Linking computers to theft of money below with what seems to be a large printer that someone has laid some bank notes on.

There was an attempt here to make a collage showing I suppose the timeline of a person on a terminal using that terminal to access a computer to somehow get to money at the other end but it is a really discordant looking image.

I wish this image was less ruined by the scanning process change in darkness but I like to think that the computer has some sort of shocked expression while the pinstripe wearing hoodlum picks its pocket.

Again much less common than a computer being the innocent victim of a burglar or robber but becoming more popular as the decade went on, below is a great cartoon of computer as criminal accomplice. Extra points for “Mr Big” being in a sort of 1970s era computer font script.

Another image of the computer as accomplice below, in this case wearing a bandit mask while acting as a lookout and holding a flashlight for a bank robber cracking a safe. The mid 70s seemed to be a turning point for attitudes towards the privacy and security implications of computing and the collection of sensitive data within computers. Newspaper headlines started to imply negative human qualities such as untrustworthiness and being cold blooded relating to computers.

This illustration of a computer scientist kissing a computer was everywhere in newspapers in the mid 70s, it was usually attached to an article about Japanese scientists trying to create computer security access technology from lip prints. I don’t fully understand why but it was apparently a popular idea among Japanese computer scientists in the 1970s.

The cartoon below I think is meant to show the contrast between a burglar of the past being bamboozled by a burglar of the future, who can confidently use a computer.

Finally for 1976, in compiling these cartoons and writing this blog I have discovered that I find a bunch of little robbers scaling a giant computer to steal data just an adorable image, so here we are again.

1977

I really like a large illustration that the article itself fits around, this one shows a computer shocked by its own printout, like a bank teller reading a note passed by a bank robber. I also enjoy that the computer criminal in this case is wearing a ski mask but is actually on a computer terminal, visualizing that these crimes can be carried out remotely.

This punch card illustration is very simple but it is fun that they made the effort to theme it like this.

This 70s computer font is a recurring theme, it seems to have been a way to add some extra computer credibility to images.

This composite image of a photo and cartoon accompanies an article about phone phreaks being able to dial numbers all over the world for free.

Computer on a wanted poster here, I really like this imagery and the fact that the text of the poster is indecipherable, in decades to come it would probably have been binary.

Looking over all of these illustrations it is obvious that the trope of computer nerd had not really solidified in pop culture at this time, computer criminals are portrayed as bank robbers or businessmen for the most part. This illustration below feels like it is closer to what the nerd trope would become, a little man with glasses and a bowtie.

This is an excellent cartoon of an FBI agent made out of phones, with the handsets as pistols. There were two types of phone phreak stories in the 1970s, one tended to be whimsical stories about the adventures phreaks got up to and the other was about technical or legal moves against phone phreaking.

Not everyone was so enamored with the FBI though, there was a lot of controversy caused by attempts to create a national police network of computers that would have been administered by the FBI. People voiced serious concerns about the privacy and civil rights implications.

1978

Donn B. Parker, a computer security expert who was a very popular commentator on computer crime in media circles throughout the 70s and 80s, testified to the U.S. Congress that computers could be used to murder, in July of 1978. Parker had already made this prediction at computer conferences and made headlines like the one below.

I wish we had seen computer criminals as cowboys become more of a trope, but people got stuck on bank robbers as a visual metaphor instead.

This image accompanied an article about encryption, cryptography and even a little about whether the National Security Agency was trying to stifle public discussion of encryption to maintain the ability to tap into communication systems.

Back to the computer as accomplice here, I find it interesting that in this case the computer is dressed like a bank robber but the man telling it that “we’re a perfect team!” is dressed relatively formally for the time.

This is one of the most abstract illustrations in this entire blog.

One of the few images I discovered while looking through newspaper archives that deals directly with computer security, in this case a way to get inside the computer room and gain precious terminal access.

I don’t understand this image at all but I find it oddly compelling.

A slightly different take on bank robber robbing a computer, in this case the robber looks like he might be from an earlier era than the usual visual trope.

Computer criminal as safe cracker or lock picker is less popular as a visual representation than a bank robber but I think is probably more apt. In this case we get a man with dark gloves and sunglasses at a computer with his tools spread out beside him.

My favorite illustration of this entire blog, it accompanied an article that came about because of more statements by Donn B. Parker, in this case that universities and colleges were becoming hotbeds of computer crime. The cartoon has real Mad Magazine energy combined with something you might see in a college textbook on computer security. I think it is meant to show a university computer department as a fraternity house complete with hijinx and mayhem. I’m assuming the old man tied up at the bottom of the image is the crusty Dean or the ageing professor who was meant to have been preventing the chaos taking place.

1979

Joe Engressia, the infamous blind phone phreak known as joybubbles, featured in a lot of stories about phreaking throughout the 1970s and it only feels fitting to close out this look at the decade with this photo of him reading a Braille magazine in his Denver home.

Sadly a lot is lost contrast wise by these scans of photos in old newspapers, this photo of a man at a computer is accompanied by a caption that states that “experts suspect few of the “new criminals” are ever caught.” Computer crime in these days is still very much thought of as the realm of knowledgeable insiders who will have the expertise to cover their tracks.

Again we have a bank robber with a computer and a phone here, showing that crimes involving computers can also involve phone lines.

I like the caricature level of detail that went into this image of a bank robber committing a robbery over the phone, he reminds me a little of a Dick Tracy villain.

The silhouette here could be as much a spy as a bank robber.

Another one of these sort of odd collages, this time with a circuit-board motif accompanying it.

Slenderman businessman with a gun, this image looks oddly anachronistic to me for 1979.

Ending with another of my favorite images, this time an image that links a computer, a wad of cash and a hand pushing buttons, with a circuit-board motif in the background again. Something about the way this image flows makes it very effective to me.

Conclusion

What was your favorite of these images? Did anything mentioned in this blog jump out as a potential topic for a future blog? Feel free to comment or follow realhackhistory on social media (Bluesky and Mastodon).

Heheheh

#phreaks

Heheheh

#phreaks

They're not as famous as their male counterparts, and yet women were at the core of phreaking operations: Susan Headley, Jude Milhon, and many others knew phone systems inside out, and were not afraid to exploit them.

#hacking #hackers #phreaks

https://negativepid.blog/the-women-of-the-phreaking-era/
https://negativepid.blog/the-women-of-the-phreaking-era/

They're not as famous as their male counterparts, and yet women were at the core of phreaking operations: Susan Headley, Jude Milhon, and many others knew phone systems inside out, and were not afraid to exploit them.

#hacking #hackers #phreaks

https://negativepid.blog/the-women-of-the-phreaking-era/
https://negativepid.blog/the-women-of-the-phreaking-era/

That latest report on mass location surveillance using SS7 makes me want to try a test.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/10/firstwap-altamides-phone-tracking-surveillance-secrets-assad-erik-prince-jared-leto-anne-wojcicki/

I’ll enable airplane mode and VoLTE, and see how calls and messages perform when only using VPN over WiFi.

If that works reasonably well then the next step is to us a mobile hotspot for the WiFi.

In the end my SS7 location would always show the geolocated IP address of where the VPN terminates.

Does that sound about right #Privacy #DefCon #Phreaks?

That latest report on mass location surveillance using SS7 makes me want to try a test.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/10/firstwap-altamides-phone-tracking-surveillance-secrets-assad-erik-prince-jared-leto-anne-wojcicki/

I’ll enable airplane mode and VoLTE, and see how calls and messages perform when only using VPN over WiFi.

If that works reasonably well then the next step is to us a mobile hotspot for the WiFi.

In the end my SS7 location would always show the geolocated IP address of where the VPN terminates.

Does that sound about right #Privacy #DefCon #Phreaks?

For all my old #phreaks out there, I picked up this beauty on a recent trip to Oregon.

For all my old #phreaks out there, I picked up this beauty on a recent trip to Oregon.

Exposing The Flaw In Our Phone System
#Science #Engineering #Phreaks #Hackers #History
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVyu7NB7W6Y

Exposing The Flaw In Our Phone System
#Science #Engineering #Phreaks #Hackers #History
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVyu7NB7W6Y

Now this is a nice find!

I've been passed a scan of a notebook from the late 1950s containing details of all the #telephoneExchanges in the UK

This sort of information was used by #telephone enthusiasts (UK #phreaks) to navigate their way around the toll (trunk) network

There were various techniques to get yourself onto a trunk, but once you were there the dialling codes in this notebook would get you anywhere in the country!

#phone #telephoneHistory #telecoms #phreak #telephoneHeritage

Now this is a nice find!

I've been passed a scan of a notebook from the late 1950s containing details of all the #telephoneExchanges in the UK

This sort of information was used by #telephone enthusiasts (UK #phreaks) to navigate their way around the toll (trunk) network

There were various techniques to get yourself onto a trunk, but once you were there the dialling codes in this notebook would get you anywhere in the country!

#phone #telephoneHistory #telecoms #phreak #telephoneHeritage

Operators have expressed confidence in the security measures implemented within the system. They believe that the existing safeguards are sufficient to deter or prevent any unauthorized access attempts.

#aiart #circuits #phreaks

Hello phreaks and hackers! I just fully modernized my python blue box DTMF tone generator, apparently someone was actually using it :blobcatawauu: check it out! https://github.com/zeyus/Python3BlueBox

#phreak #phreaks #phreaking #dtmf #bluebox #blueboxing #python #coding

Any old #phone #phreaks about? I’ve seen a couple of historical references recently to people #phreaking transatlantic calls from the USA to London, terminating the call on a payphone at Waterloo train station because it was in a busy area and was likely to be answered by a passer by.

Most of those #payphones are long gone, but

Does anyone have a record of what the #payphone number was?

@annmlipton Trivia: Back in the early 90s in #Sweden two things happened at once: We got toll numbers anybody could set up for some service, and #hackers (phone #phreaks) found an exploit for the public phone booths.

I happen to know for a fact that some of the more profitable toll numbers got there by paying people to abuse the phone booths (scamming the phone company) to call them over and over.

Very profitable.

«#Phreaks and #l33ts: Inside the early ‘90s tech scene that created #L0pht, the legendary #hackerspace»  | CyberScoop. Ah, nostalgia for that hacker era. I was more around the NYC 2600 & HOPE scene then. #Hackers #HackerHistory

https://cyberscoop.com/boston-l0pht-hackers-tech-scene/

«#Phreaks and #l33ts: Inside the early ‘90s tech scene that created #L0pht, the legendary #hackerspace»  | CyberScoop. Ah, nostalgia for that hacker era. I was more around the NYC 2600 & HOPE scene then. #Hackers #HackerHistory

https://cyberscoop.com/boston-l0pht-hackers-tech-scene/

Great article.

#L0pht
#Phreaks
#l33ts
#BBS
#Cyberpunks
#2600
#Hackers

https://cyberscoop.com/boston-l0pht-hackers-tech-scene/

Authored by:
@spacerog

Great article.

#L0pht
#Phreaks
#l33ts
#BBS
#Cyberpunks
#2600
#Hackers

https://cyberscoop.com/boston-l0pht-hackers-tech-scene/

Authored by:
@spacerog