Tom Edison reports TAP survived its financial crisis but lost much of its subscriber base, forcing a rate increase; a column on obtaining a driver’s license under an alias as a privacy measure is followed by a reprinted New York Times piece on New York Telephone’s new system for instantly tracing blue-box calls. Read more →

Tom Edison warns that TAP is on the verge of folding due to unsustainable printing, postage, and rent costs, announces new fees and the end of most free subscriptions, and pleads for readers to recruit new subscribers to keep the publication alive. Read more →

New editor Tom Edison announces that TAP’s founder has stepped back, restates the newsletter’s policy of covering topics beyond phones, lays out administrative housekeeping, and celebrates TAP’s sixth anniversary with new T-shirts. Read more →

A UK reader’s letter compares British and American credit-card billing schemes and phone-network quirks and closes with commentary on British telecom monopoly practices, civil liberties, and TAP’s Libertarian-leaning politics. Read more →

Jim Phelps interviews an anonymous prankster nicknamed ‘Guy Grand’ about years of elaborate hoaxes targeting institutions, including a fabricated reservation billed to a Federal Reserve official that drew Senate scrutiny and national news coverage. Read more →

Opens with a holiday parody about a parking-meter maintenance visit, announces a growing informal directory connecting readers by specialized skill, and recounts a reader’s out-of-court settlement against the phone company over unauthorized tree-cutting. Read more →

Reviews Jacques Bergier’s Secret Armies, a history of industrial espionage and exotic weapons research, and runs reader mail on recycled-envelope mail tricks, PCB fabrication offers, alternative-energy projects, and a request about infrasonic and ultrasonic effects on the body. Read more →

Jim Phelps endorses Libertarian presidential candidate Roger MacBride and frames taxation as ’the biggest monopoly of all,’ reports John ‘Captain Crunch’ Draper’s four-month prison sentence after FBI interrogation, and includes a satirical mock ‘citizen’s arrest’ legal document. Read more →

Reader letters on water-meter tampering and utility-side detection methods lead into broader commentary on energy waste, sewage-to-methane conversion, and skepticism toward a utility-sponsored solar water heating program. Read more →

Corrects an earlier Red Box schematic error, prints a dispatch from an isolated phreak in rural Canada whose phone service runs through a military/NATO network with priority-override tones, and describes a rumored surveillance system for detecting illegal phone extensions. Read more →

Al Bell presents the ‘Ultimate Red Box,’ a redesigned circuit built around a precision programmable counter-timer chip that fixes the imprecise pulse timing of earlier oscillator-based designs. Read more →

Marks TAP’s fifth anniversary, reports John ‘Captain Crunch’ Draper’s second arrest on wire fraud charges tied to blue-box calls, troubleshoots a common Red Box failure mode, and pushes back forcefully against readers who complained TAP was too political. Read more →

Mr. Phelps argues the Social Security Number has become a de facto universal identifier enabling cradle-to-grave surveillance and advocates purpose-specific IDs instead, while Tom Edison revisits ‘Fortress’ payphone coin-box access methods with a more practical technique. Read more →

Mr. Phelps pairs a pitch for radical life-extension research with a constitutional argument for tax resistance, while an ‘Odds & Ends’ column reports a crackdown on illegal phone extensions and answering machines and asks readers for off-hook line current readings. Read more →

Admits an earlier prediction about a new credit-card numbering scheme was wrong and publishes the actual 1976 code, and retracts prior coverage of the ‘Telident’ instant-caller-ID device after learning it was fabricated for a stock fraud scheme. Read more →