So there was the telephone, there was the computer, and there was an undaunted inquisitiveness in the collective human subconscious. It took another war to shake that curious imagination loose onto the world, and on May Day, 1971, the Youth International Party Line became the newsletter of the fun-seeking, disenfranchised riffraff of New York City's Greenwich Village. Abbie Hoffman and a phone phreak who went by the handle Al Bell used YIPL to disburse information about cracking the phone network. It was the first instance of subver-sive information of its kind finding a wide audi-ence. Subscriptions to the journal spread the word of this arm of the underground far away from Bleecker Street to people of all walks of life. Today this distribution would be done by computer, and indeed, a great deal of hacker/phreaker/anarchist material surfs around the world on the
invisible waves of cyberspace.
A few years after YIPL's inception, it became TAP - Technological Assistance Program - when the goals of the phreaks collided with the more po-litically-minded members of YIPL. TAP was more technical than partisan, and more suited for hackers and their kin.
