plapsley

Loew's 1972 article in Ramparts magazine, "Regulating the Telephone Company In Your Home" (http://explodingthephone.com/docs/dbx0431.pdf) taught phone hacking to thousands and resulted in the telephone company suppressing publication of a major American magazine (http://explodingthephone.com/docs/dbx0271.pdf). (I had the pleasure of interviewing Rudolph for my book on phone phreaks, "Exploding The Phone", at http://explodingthephone.com)

<shameless plug> I love this stuff. So much so that I spent years researching and writing a book about it: "Exploding the Phone", a history of phone phreaking and the telephone systems the phreaks hacked on, from 1950-1980. http://explodingthephone.com/ </shameless plug>

Regarding MF being an informal or loose standard, it was described in detail in the the 1955 AT&T publication "Notes on Nationwide Dialing" (http://explodingthephone.com/hoppdocs/nond1955.pdf, pdf page 95) and the 11956 AT&T subsequent technical publication "Notes on Distance Dialing" (http://explodingthephone.com/hoppdocs/nodd1956.pdf, starting pdf page 82) and then in subsequent editions of "Notes on Distance Dialing" (1968, 1975) and then in "Notes on the Network" 1980. It was also specified in several international standards (CCITT, now ITU). For those interested in this kind of stuff, this page will be of interest: http://explodingthephone.com/docs.php

Search of autovon docs: http://explodingthephone.com/search.php?q=autovon&sort=relev... Some interesting stuff there because you get a sense of AT&T, FBI,, and NSA being worried about this stuff. Also, this particular hack is interesting -- it describes a clever technique called guardbanding to get into AUTOVON from the civilian telephone network: http://explodingthephone.com/docs/dbx1032.pdf

If you are interested in this stuff, here's a somewhat shameless plug for my book: Exploding The Phone, which is a deep dive into the history of phone hacking from 1950 to the mid-1980s. http://explodingthephone.com/