Hey, it's Bonnie White and you're listening to WBAI-FM, my kind of radio. Don't change that dial.
I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cryin', I'm cry
I am the Eggman I am the Walrus
Cuckoo, look at you
Sitting in my English garden, waiting for the sun
If you're so alone, come and get your tan
I'm standing in the English Way
I am the Eggman
Yeah, I'm the Eggman
I am the Walrus
Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo
Experts, experts, choking smokers
Don't you think the joker laughs at you?
See how they smile like pigs in the sky
See how this night, I'm crying
Siberian Pilcher
Driving up the Eiffel Tower
Go and let your demons sing in Holy Krishna
And be sure to save the kids if you are my daughter
I am the Eggman
Yeah, I'm the Eggman
I am the Walrus
Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo
Peep, peep, peep, peep, peep
Peep, peep, peep beak
Peep, peep, peep
Peep, peep, peep, peep
This is listener sponsored radio
WBAI broadcast at 99.5 FM in New York City.
Tonight, beginning at midnight, hearings on Intro 475 will be heard.
Last Monday, the General Welfare Committee of the City Council
held the third and final day of open hearings on Intro 475,
a bill which would outlaw discrimination against homosexuals in hiring and public accommodations.
At midnight tonight, we'll broadcast the last four hours of the hearings.
Listen to the hearings on Intro 475 tonight, beginning at midnight, here on WBAI.
We're now running about 16 minutes behind schedule.
In 1963, Eric Fromm delivered a series of three weekly lectures at the 92nd Street Y
on the psychological roots of war and destruction.
We're going to hear the first two lectures in the series next.
The last three will be heard later on this afternoon at about 4.30.
Here is the first lecture.
The topic of this lecture is, the psychological, of these lectures,
is the psychological roots of war and destructiveness.
Hold on, hold on. Sorry folks, we accidentally wound up back in 1972.
Fast forward, 2015, off the hook.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving, now I can't make a call.
We couldn't get much worse, but if they could, they would.
Bon dilly bon for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood. Bon dilly bon!
And a very good evening to everybody. The program is Off the Hook.
Emmanuel Goldstein here with you, joined tonight by Mike.
Good evening.
Rob T. Firefly.
Good evening.
Kyle.
Hola.
And Bernie S.
Greetings from Philadelphia.
Okay, and just to explain a little bit what you heard just now,
all kinds of chaos going on here.
But Kyle, I think you and I can sort of explain what we just heard from 1972.
That was actually a BAI recording from 1972.
We used to announce, like a train, how late we are in our program
because it always got out of schedule.
I didn't even listen back then. I was just a kid, so I wasn't able to appreciate this.
And it mattered.
It did. What mattered?
To be on time.
Oh, to be on time. It usually does.
But the interesting thing about all that was that it came off a reel-to-reel tape
that we are encoding for a friend of ours.
Basically, her dad made all these recordings of WBAI
and other radio stations in New York, and it was about to be trashed.
And we found ourselves a little reel-to-reel tape recorder, and we're encoding it.
We're finding all kinds of gems like that.
This is what WBAI has always been about.
It's always been about broadcasting interesting topics.
Maybe we don't do four hours of a lecture at midnight, but we could.
And we've always been at the center of all the controversy and all the forward thinking.
It's a cool time capsule to unearth these treasures of history
and stuff that may not have been saved otherwise.
It's also cool the recording method is a tape style that I wasn't familiar with.
It was obviously a little bit before my time.
I was familiar with tape decks and tape recorders like cassettes.
But to be able to work with this and restore
and then be able to manipulate it with a lot of new technology, too, to restore it,
it's really cool.
There was one that we were working on that you could barely hear anything.
It was so faint.
And then through the magic of a couple plug-ins and some restoration stuff,
you could filter it and really hear this stuff
and go back and try to figure out what the context was.
Old technology meets new technology.
And, yes, new technology was able to save this little bit of old history of reel-to-reel tape.
And what you were mentioning before, yes, you can get four different channels on a single reel.
So one of the small reels, not a big reel, a small reel, you could have four channels.
And at the slowest speed, it could be three hours per channel.
So you could get 12 hours on a small tape like that.
It wouldn't sound very good.
The speed we're working at is the slow speed, 3 3⁄4,
and we get 90 minutes per channel, so about six hours.
When you say small, you mean?
I mean the size of your head.
No, not that big.
Let's see.
What would you say?
Seven-inch reel?
It's a seven-inch reel.
That's what it is, as opposed to a 10-inch reel.
Right, right.
It's like a small salad plate or a soup bowl.
Well, some people eat big salads, so that wouldn't really help.
Yeah, maybe a Frisbee.
What are you saying about the size of my head?
You know, we'll have to get back to that later.
But Frisbees are also variable size.
Well, disc golfing Frisbee, then.
The size of a 2600 mousepad.
How about that?
If you pledged for our premium last week, you would know how big that was,
because I was one of them.
And we can get those?
Wait, that's being offered tonight as well?
I don't think so.
I think that's part of the package that's sold out immediately.
I hope so.
Yeah.
Well, you have one, so you can always look at it.
Bernie, I know you've worked with reel-to-reel tapes.
Have you not?
I have several reel-to-reel decks.
I like finding reels of tape that are in thrift stores and things
that people have recorded at home, like a New Year's Eve party from 1958.
Just weird stuff you find.
And it's fun.
Before that, I have some spools of wire.
Stainless steel wire was used as a recording medium before magnetic tape.
I've never understood how anybody figured that was going to work, but it did.
It worked great.
It worked great for many years.
I mean, magnetic tape is basically the same thing.
It's just a magnetic material.
And I have a wire recorder, and I have a bunch of stainless steel reels.
My father recorded back in the 40s.
Do you have wire recordings?
Yeah, some that he recorded when he was in college back in the 40s.
Wow.
Okay, yeah, you've got to bring one of those by, and we'll see if we can play it on the air.
It's big and heavy.
The hardest part with those stainless steel wire recordings is splicing them.
You actually had to tie a knot in the stainless steel wire with a microscope,
and it would always jam the machine.
I'm sure you've spliced reel-to-reel tapes yourself.
Oh, yeah.
But try doing that with stainless steel wire.
It's fun.
Well, maybe I will.
It sounds like a blast.
Hey, you know, we weren't sure if we were on tonight.
We didn't find out until the last minute that we were on,
and then we found out at the last minute that some people thought we weren't on.
So there were all kinds of confusion, but the crux of it is that we don't have premiums.
We have generic premiums from the radio station.
Actually, we might have a couple.
Rob, do we have some leftovers?
We do.
We have some of our premiums from fundraisers past, which you can still get hold of.
I can go through them.
There are just a few.
There are some more remaining, a limited amount,
but some more remaining of the luminaries of the Hacker World paintings, which I will be doing.
Why don't you describe what that is?
That is a painting on a stretched canvas of a certain luminary from the Hacker World,
somebody who's had an impact on the Hacker World as it stands today.
I think the sorts of people we've named Hope Rooms after, people like Nikola Tesla,
Grace Hopper, Ada Lovelace, all sorts of historical figures like that.
And you can get a painting, a painted portrait that I will do of one of these people
for a pledge of at least $50.
And you can pledge by calling 212-209-2950 or by going to give2wbai.org,
which I have some other news about, but I'll leave that until after I've gone through these.
Also for a pledge of $50, if you're not into the painting, we have Teach Your Kids to Code,
which is a parent-teacher's guide to teaching kids basic programming.
We had the author of this book on, I think it was three weeks ago or two weeks ago,
and it's a very interesting book, a very good piece of teaching material
if you want to teach your child or learn with your child on how to code.
Or just random children.
Nieces, nephews, anyone.
Well, you could teach anybody, really, couldn't you? It doesn't have to be a child.
Yes, indeed.
Well, I mean, it's called Teach Your Kid to Code, and adults can use it, too.
Your kid could be 45 years old.
It doesn't have to be your kid, either.
Yeah, exactly. A lot of rules here in the title.
For kids, kids at heart, and this is by Bryson Payne, who we spoke with.
The whole point, I think, is definitely to ignore the rules in the title.
Yeah, so teach whoever you damn well please to code. How about that?
You can get that, actually.
I misspoke. That's not for a pledge of $50.
That's for a pledge of $55, Teach Your Kid to Code.
And the $5 does make a difference.
Yes, it does.
Or for a pledge of $55, you can get a book called Beautiful Lego,
which is a book full of projects that you can do with Lego.
Mix hundreds of thousands of Lego bricks with dozens of artists,
and what do you get?
Beautiful Lego, a compendium of Lego artwork.
Kind of redundant.
If you say Lego, I mean, beautiful's already in there.
Absolutely.
And it is a beautiful book with some great Lego-based projects you can do.
Or you could get both of those books, Teach Your Kids to Code and Beautiful Lego,
for a contribution of at least $75.
You can get the package of both books.
Wait, two $55 pledges for $75?
We're just terrible at counting here.
But we've decided that $55 plus $55 equals $75.
So you can get both of those books.
And, yeah, give us a call at 212-209-2950
and ask for the Teach Your Kids to Code and Beautiful Lego package,
and you'll get both of the books.
Or you could get Teach Your Kids to Code or Beautiful Lego for an individual pledge of $55.
Or you could get Illuminaries of the Hacker World painting for a pledge of $50.
And now in the past, when we've told you about the website where you can go to pledge for these things,
the website was give the numeral to WBAI.org, and that's still the case.
But we can also tell you now that because of the wonders of homophones
and the way they work on the radio,
some people were instead going to givetowbai.org and ending up at a completely different site,
which was not one of ours.
But now it's one of ours.
If you go to givetowbai.org, you will be directed to the site where you could pledge to WBAI.
And that's thanks to you that this happened, right?
That is thanks to me, because I saw that whoever owned it last let it go.
And so I grabbed it and redirected it, and it's all good now.
And that means we won't say the numeral anymore when we give that address out.
It will be implied that either work.
Well, now my next question is what about givetwo, WBAI, and also give two, as in also WBAI.
We have to get them all, you know?
It sounds like an excellent project for you after the show.
Yeah.
Someone else can get the next one.
I got this one.
Yeah, I don't think I was going to spell that.
But givetowbai.org, great.
So you can pledge for that.
And we should warn you that the premiums that Rob just described, we don't know how many are left.
We just know that there are some left.
So as last week proved, we can go through these awfully quickly,
and we might be talking about something that is no longer available,
because I can't see on the screen exactly how many are going.
So I would suggest calling now, 212-209-2950.
This is the last week of the fundraisers, so they won't be available at all after this week,
regardless of if there are any left.
And since we did not have the ability to prepare anything unique and different for this particular program,
this is the best way that you can support us now, 212-209-2950.
And all of those pledge levels would make you eligible to become a member,
and they're all tax-deductible.
Just thought I'd mention that.
Yes, indeed.
And if none of that stuff is interesting to you, you can still donate any amount you want.
You can look on givetowbai.org and see some WBAI premiums that the station has.
Just indicate that you're donating toward your favorite show, which we hope is off the hook.
And it'll still count.
So give us a call, 212-209-2950, or go to givetowbai.org.
And join what's going on here.
Support the station.
Keep the show, the station, on the air.
Anything from you, Bernie?
Anything from me?
Well, any comments?
Because whenever I bring you up, you hear what happens to my voice.
That's why you have to be kept down so my voice can sound better.
Well, I have a comment.
I would like to ask if any of you there can find out if you can call London from the studio.
Because we'd like to bring in Alex, but that's the only way we can bring in Alex.
Yeah, we don't know if we can look into it, but we will.
Can you ask somebody if you can look into it?
Wait, what are you asking us?
Can you call London from the studio?
You're asking us in the middle of a show if we can call London in the studio.
If you want Alex in the show, you're going to have to find out.
I'd like the Dalai Lama on the show, but I don't know if we can make this work while we're doing a show.
I thought you guys were working that out amongst yourselves.
We're working on it out.
Something is not working, so I'm asking if one of you can find it.
Okay, well, we're probably the worst people to ask because we're actually involved in doing a radio show right now.
But I'm sure somebody out there may be hearing us pleading to them in the studio.
Maybe they can figure out how to do that.
I honestly think if we don't know how to call London at this point, we're not going to be calling London.
And that's our colleague Alex, who is in London.
Maybe he could call us.
Is that possible?
I have asked if I could call you, we could make this work, but I've been told that that's impossible.
Okay, he can't call us.
He cannot call us.
What's our phone number?
I don't even know.
What's our phone number?
We don't know our own phone number?
Do you know our own phone number?
Well, I can hang up and dial 958 and find out that way.
Folks, that's another tip for you right there.
Dial 958 in the New York area and you'll find out your phone number.
I can do that and find out, but I have to disconnect Bernie to do it.
I can't believe no one has figured out what the phone number is by now.
Perhaps you can text me the number that Reggie gives you.
Well, Reggie's not in here.
Bernie, you know, these are conversations to have before the program, not during the program.
Alex, if you're out there, you know what, text us on our cell phones.
I'm sure one of us will be distracted enough to try and figure out a way to bring you on.
And that'll be our mission.
That'll be our mission.
Let's get Alex on the air by the end of the hour without talking about it for the rest of the hour.
All right.
Freedom Act.
The Freedom Act, this is what we should be talking about.
The Freedom Act passed.
What do you guys think about this?
It's a very small step.
I'm bordering on negligible, but the fact that—
Aren't you glad they came up with another acronym that spells out ridiculous things?
I was just going to skip right over the acronym because it's as stupid as all the acronyms.
But the fact that even a very small step has happened means that it is the largest step
in decades because it is the only step in decades.
And it makes me just ever so slightly optimistic for more steps to come.
Yeah, I suppose so.
This might want to talk to Max, who might be able to help us with our problem.
Maybe talk to him outside the studio so we don't hear all the technical details.
Okay.
So, Kyle, we were watching C-SPAN 2 on Sunday, and we were seeing all kinds of—
We did, yeah.
A lot of people were watching C-SPAN 2.
We were watching the Patriot Act be criticized by at least one senator.
What amazed me was how so many others were very afraid of saying anything
that could be used against them at some point.
And obviously what Rand Paul was doing was electioneering.
This is great for his campaign.
Absolutely.
A lot of eyeballs.
Definitely some airtime for free as politicians.
And everybody knows in the electorate, too, that that's their aim is to get on TV
and get people talking about them and what their position is.
Yes.
And so we wind up with something that—
You know, tell me—I'm being paranoid here,
but I don't think we really got all that much out of this.
I think basically we've switched who is gathering the metadata
and added a small step, which I don't think is really a step at all
because I think they're all in bed together anyway.
And I think probably the people that really want surveillance to remain
are just as happy this way as any other way.
It was all just a big circus show.
Am I being paranoid?
Well, Obama, chief among them, he says he's excited for this act,
so it's a pretty good sign that the amount of surveillance is not going to go down a whole lot.
Yeah, yeah, but Republicans are angry, but then they're always angry,
so I don't know if that's a good measurement as to whether or not this is a good thing.
Yeah, I mean, the NSA itself is not too upset about this,
which should give you a sign as to how much it'll do.
But there are Republicans in the Congress who want to give the surveillance state
more than even the surveillance state itself demands, and they're upset.
Well, okay, maybe somebody can explain this who has more knowledge of the phone companies.
But my understanding is that the Freedom Act basically mandates
that the phone companies keep the metadata and that they give it up to the government
when they're presented with a warrant, which is a unique and novel idea,
getting a warrant to actually get this information,
but the government's learning how the process works.
But my question is, isn't metadata something that phone companies hold on to by default?
Metadata is basically what we're talking about, phone calls.
If you make a phone call, they keep records of who you called.
They even keep records of your text messages, from what I understand.
And that can be used for different purposes, some of it good, some of it bad.
But you're using their network, so they basically can keep anything that goes over that network.
Is that a correct assessment?
Yeah, I mean, so this term metadata is a real special term because it's data.
It's just a form of data.
It is not the contents of what you say on the telephone.
So we're talking on the phone to Bernie, I think, and our conversation is not part of that.
But the fact that we call him at precisely this time every week and all that kind of stuff,
if we're using a cell phone, the location of the call, if he's using a cell phone, the location of him,
all this stuff is the sort of data that is actually most dangerous
because it is the easiest to analyze in bulk, and that is all called metadata.
And so, therefore, they pretend like it's not an invasion of privacy to collect it.
Yeah, it's all the data surrounding a phone call, which is when the phone call takes place,
how long the phone call lasts, who's calling who, who calls who with what frequency.
So, yeah, it's all the pieces of information attached to a phone call
except the content of the conversation that's happening.
And metadata, as we've talked about in the past, is very powerful data.
You load it up into a database and you can quickly cross-reference who's calling who,
who's associated with who, who's a friend of a friend of who,
who's spending significant amounts of time on the phone with who.
But the phone company has that information already.
They need that information to bill you.
Maybe not where you're standing, what cell tower you're using,
but for technical purposes, they need that information.
The issue is now sharing that information with authorities.
Yes, they've always kept hold of that information just so they could write up the phone bills,
which is reasonable, but on the other half of it,
they're basically opening up access to this data to the powers that be
without any sort of oversight or due diligence.
I'm curious.
This strikes me just the way it is presented in the Freedom Act.
The distinction is a bit more aligned with what we've seen.
And correct me if I'm wrong, the policies of data retention in Europe,
is that kind of it where an institution or a corporation is required to keep
a certain amount of information with their networks for a certain time?
And it was a contentious issue at the time.
And the way they handle that is that the information is handled for only a certain period of time.
And then after that, those kinds of logs and daily operational databases are then kind of purged
or they're not available after a certain date.
And I'm curious if the Freedom Active companies are going to be, since they're responsible,
are they going to be running their systems in similar ways?
Or what are the similarities and distinctions there if this is indeed falling back into
private companies' hands?
But it was also part of the rhetoric I noticed when we were watching the debate,
just that the definition of metadata and the way it was being described was very,
that's it, it's just what's on your phone bill.
I heard that a lot in some of the discussions.
And I think it's really important for everyone to understand and to communicate to one another
that it is not that the information itself can be used or is used in a vacuum or innocently.
It is being used with a really vast array of other techniques and information,
stuff we know about here on this show.
I think we've heard about in the Privacy is Dead series, those talks at HOPE, and so on and so forth.
So it was sort of funny to watch that and be like, yeah, yeah, that's part of it.
But it's not that you're just having long lists of what looks like a phone bill of everybody everywhere,
and that's all you're doing is evaluating that.
That's not, it sounds nice and innocent and very limited, or you might want it to sound that way,
but it is certainly not how institutions and governments are using it.
Bernie, I know you wanted to step up here.
Bernie?
Okay, I heard him talking.
All right, Bernie's no longer with us.
I'm sorry, did you have something, Mike?
No, I was just going to say I think we lost Bernie, which seems like we did.
All right.
Well, I'll keep him halfway up in case he comes back to the phone.
I'll remind our listeners that we're actually in our third week here, fourth week.
I've lost track.
I think it's more than one hand.
Oh, Bernie's back.
There's Bernie.
What's on the Freedom Act and what we've been talking about?
I'd like to bring Alex's thoughts on this, too.
Can you call me back?
Oh, boy, here we go again.
Then I can call Alex and we can patch us through.
It's just how the telecom system works here that we're dealing with.
Okay, you want us to call you back?
Right.
Can you call me back in five minutes?
I'll see if I'm busy at the time, and I'll try to do that.
Did you want to say anything about the Freedom Act since we're on the radio?
Yeah, I don't think it provides us with any more freedom than we had.
I think it provides us with exactly the amount of telephone privacy freedom as we had before,
which is effectively zero.
This is just a shell game, and it makes it look like we have more security and safety.
It's no different.
If the NSA has access to the phone company's records, it's no different than having access
to the data anyway.
Okay.
Well, we're going to call you back in five minutes, and hopefully you'll have a connection
to London somehow, and we'll talk about some other stories in the interim.
And that is a way it's been discussed.
That's come up quite a bit, that this is operationally not going to be a lot different.
The same kinds of accusations, situations where there isn't probable cause, abuses.
These kinds of things will crop up.
They'll continue.
And so it is important now more than ever for us to go through what is now being run out
as this USA Freedom Act, the horrible acronym that we described, the dragnet, eavesdropping,
whatever act.
That actually has to be really seriously looked at.
And I think the vigilance from a perspective of people who use the internet and telephones
and are interested in their privacy, their right to privacy, it's on us, I think, more
than ever, is what I'm saying, to really double down on the efforts to find better ways of
handling this stuff in a, quote, dangerous world.
Well, I guess what I'd like to conclude with, should we be happy by this, or should we just
be kind of glum?
I mean, I think it is a small bit of good news.
And the thing that we will see that we have to remain vigilant for in the future is, is
this the beginning of the pendulum swinging back towards reducing the size of the security
apparatus?
Or is this just one tiny little setback for them, and they're just going to keep growing
and growing and growing more or less as planned?
And that's really up to us if we keep attention on this sort of issue.
Yeah.
Well, it is up to us.
You're right about that.
And it definitely will keep growing.
Because they're not just going to give up.
They could get a resounding condemnation.
They could have everybody in the NSA sent to prison.
They're still going to keep trying to do this.
I didn't see a big abandonment of encryption overnight.
No.
And the few comments by members of Congress other than Rand Paul were so timid.
There was one senator, a Democrat that I couldn't, I forget who, he might have been from New
Mexico or somewhere out there.
And he basically just said, yeah, Edward Snowden stole all these documents, basically condemning
Edward Snowden, but agreeing with everything that he was concerned with without giving
him a bit of credit, saying that, yeah, we would have done this ourselves had we not
been sidetracked by the truth coming out and all that.
Who is going to believe that?
Is anyone actually going to believe that the Senate or the House of Representatives was
going to do something about mass surveillance, was going to uncover it, first of all, and
then do something about it?
I really don't think so.
I just like that they were actually acknowledging that this is an issue that exists.
And the conversation was happening at all in the first place, which I think is an improvement
from how things have been for a very long time, possibly at any point over the last
14 years.
And that conversation was happening because of Edward Snowden, by the way, our keynote
speaker at Hope.
And he's happy about, obviously, the way the conversation is now going.
There is a story that came out this week saying that becoming an international fugitive was
worth it, he said.
That's according to the headline, anyway.
Who knows how true that actually is?
But I can see that point.
I can see the point of view where you sacrifice your life, basically.
You sacrifice everything you have in this country and you have to live as a fugitive.
Was it worth it?
And for where we are now, for the conversations we're having, for the awareness amongst the
commenters like us, I would say, yeah, because you have people sacrificing their lives every
day for lesser causes, willingly, and being honored as heroes.
So I think it's about time we did the same for him.
I mean, he's not dead yet.
No.
And he's not dead yet, too.
That's the other plus.
Russia is not my first choice of countries to live in, but it's a lot better than a jail
cell in the US.
He's doing okay.
Have you lived in Russia?
No.
Have you lived in a jail cell?
No.
All right.
Well, you should try a little bit of both, and I'll bet you'll like Russia a whole lot
more.
That's precisely my point.
Okay.
Well, I'm just underlining that point.
And it's also a lot bigger than a jail cell.
That is very true.
Yeah.
Okay.
And that's pretty much it as far as this kind of thing goes.
A quick statement from the EFF, our friends over there.
Basically, you should trust what they say, their interpretation on this.
They're the ones that have been fighting for many years to preserve our freedoms.
The Senate passed the USA Freedom Act, 67 to 32, marking the first time in over 30 years
that both houses of Congress have approved a bill placing real restrictions and oversight
on the NSA's surveillance powers.
The weakening amendments to the legislation proposed by NSA defender, Senate Majority
Mitch McConnell, were defeated, and we have every reason to believe that President Obama
will sign USA Freedom into law.
Technology users everywhere should celebrate.
There, okay.
We should celebrate.
Now we know.
Knowing that the NSA will be a little more hampered in its surveillance overreach, and
both the NSA and the FISA court will be more transparent and accountable than it was before
the USA Freedom Act.
It's no secret that we wanted more.
In the wake of the damning evidence of surveillance abuses disclosed by Edward Snowden, Congress
had an opportunity to champion comprehensive surveillance reform and undertake a thorough
investigation like it did with the Church Committee.
Congress could have tried to completely end mass surveillance and taken numerous other
steps to rein in the NSA and FBI, but of course we know that will never happen.
So yeah, I feel this way.
We should celebrate, but know that there's a lot of work ahead of us.
Yeah, that's super hard, all that extra stuff.
Yeah.
But hey, we have freedom, right?
That's what I hear, yes.
Now I'm going to try and stumble through this phone call to Bernie now, if you guys can
maybe, you know, I have nothing else to do but make a phone call right now.
Okay, well, while you're doing that, I'll remind our listeners that we are in the process
of wrapping up this fundraiser, and yet we still need to raise funds.
So if you call 212-209-2950, or if you go to give2wbai.org, you can get hold of some
premiums that we've got that we've got left over from past weeks.
For a pledge of at least $50, you can get the Luminaries of the Hacker World painting,
which I will do.
It's an actual physical painting, not a copy, not a print or anything like that.
You will be getting an actual original painting of a figure from hacker history.
And that's for a pledge of at least $50.
For a pledge of $55, you can get the Teach Your Kids to Code book, or you could get the
beautiful Lego book, either of those books for a pledge of $55, or both of those books
for a pledge of at least $75.
Or you can pledge any amount you wish.
There are some other premiums available that WBAI has.
Just specify that you're pledging toward your favorite show, which we hope is off the hook.
And you'll be part of what keeps the station going.
A pledge of at least $25 gets you a membership in BAI.
You get a say in what goes on and how things go forward from here.
And all sorts of other perks and things that there are to membership.
You can get more information on that by calling 212-209-2950 or going to give2wbai.org.
But you know what the best thing is?
The best thing is that you keep 99.5 FM commercial-free, as it has been since 1960.
We played a tape only a few minutes ago from 1972.
The station has been, and this is going to sound weird,
it's been the most consistent voice on the radio dial in New York City.
Now, you might think we're all crackpots and out of our minds,
doing all kinds of bizarre things on the radio.
But guess what? That is the kind of radio that survives.
Everything else is subject to the whims of the corporate executives,
and the marketplace, and record sales, and stock markets, and everything you can imagine
that has nothing to do with radio.
Every other station, pretty much, if you go down the frequency, has radically changed.
Gone to different owners, gone to different frequencies sometimes, changed their format,
and mostly without any regard to the actual people who listen to that station.
WBAI is different.
We have basically had our listeners involved from the start.
We've had a huge variety of programming.
I wish that there were tapes, like the kind Kyle and I have access to,
from all the years that WBAI has been on the air.
Imagine getting a real trio tape from the 60s.
Those kinds of things we could preserve, we could save,
so that people, and people do listen to these things online.
If you put it online, people will learn from it.
We put our old shows up, and people love listening to it.
We get letters, you know, you said this in February 1998, and I really disagree.
They want to have an argument about something that we said that long ago.
Here we just played a show from 43 years ago, or part of it anyway,
and it sounded like something that was still interesting to this day.
So I think WBAI will always be relevant.
The question is, can we afford to stay here on the air?
It's expensive, but that's where you come in.
212-209-2950, pledge whatever you can afford for whatever premium you wish.
But remember, the big premium is WBAI itself.
I mean, we should stress that it's not a coincidence that the listener-funded station
is the one that is the most consistent.
It's because we are not responsible to the whims of the commercial market.
If a surveillance company really wanted to give WBAI a lot of money
to get their pro-surveillance message on the air, we would say no.
We'd say no to anyone.
No, Mike, we wouldn't say no.
We'd shout no.
Okay.
I don't want to shout into the microphone, but if I was on the other side of the room,
I'd say it as loud as I could because that is the emphasis that we would use.
Right.
And the reason we're able to do that is because our listeners keep us on the air,
keep us in a studio, and if you want us to continue to be able to do that,
please join the people who are already calling 212-209-2950 and add your voice to that
and say no, we do not want commercial money to corrupt WBAI.
Don't say that when the person answers the phone because that's kind of rude.
Say hello.
How are you?
Whatever you have to say to get the conversation started.
And then just however much you want to pledge.
And then at some point work in, no, you don't want this kind of radio,
and I'm sure they will understand exactly what you mean.
Again, 212-209-2950 or the website give2wbai.org.
Yeah, it's much faster when you don't have to say the numeral two.
Give2wbai.org.
Wow.
And pledge for off-the-hook premiums as they remain, if there are any left.
Next week we will not be doing fundraising.
We'll be doing a regular show, I hope.
But 212-209-2950 is our phone number.
Now, Bernie, you're back.
Do you have a connection to London?
No, I'm going to put you on hold for one minute and then bring London in.
Another reason people should call and pledge 212-209-2950
is you might be able to afford to hire someone competent enough to hook up another phone line
or the Comrex device so we can have multiple people on the phone.
Bernie, you didn't get your Twinkie for lunch today, did you?
I just have this feeling that it hasn't been a great day.
Okay, you know what?
We're going to basically come back in one minute,
and then hopefully we'll have that connection to London.
You know we're on only until 8 o'clock, so we'll see if that happens.
I absolutely echo what Bernie's saying there,
and I think I'll just remind our listeners that this is a really critical time.
Now, more than ever, your contribution to WBAI really impacts our production value on-air
and our abilities behind the scenes.
We're kind of stretching and unfurling into a really exciting new space,
but with that comes a lot of construction, a lot of planning.
And can I just say there are many, many competent people here that can do just that.
They can do all kinds of things. They have done all kinds of things.
It's just a question of all the things that need to be done.
There is a wide variety, as anyone out there can probably imagine, with running a radio station.
And most of us aren't paid anything.
At all.
Just out of either insanity or love that we do these things.
It really is. It's a community effort.
And so one of those things is getting a working phone system
with the variety of lines and capabilities that we're so accustomed to.
Are we accustomed to it?
I mean, yeah, it's always been a struggle.
But the important thing is that when you do have those conversations, that they mean something.
All right, a minute has passed.
Bernie, do we have that London connection?
I don't hear anything. Bernie, are you there?
Maybe he's connecting us as we speak.
He said a minute.
I'm not questioning competency here, but they did say a minute.
It's been like two minutes.
Transatlantic phone calls were made many decades ago.
All right, well, we'll keep it up.
Bernie, are you there?
No, he's not there.
We have to do a show. We have to talk about things.
So let's go into another story, and we'll check back in with Bernie a little bit later.
I am interested to hear what Alex has to say.
And I'm sure Bernie's got some other thoughts on the Freedom Act and what's been going on.
Yeah, but we're pretty much at the home stretch of our program now.
So we'll have the rest of the year to talk about the Freedom Act.
Okay, this is a story that comes out of Florida, a place called Pasco County.
A teacher there has been suspended because he tried to stop cell phone use in his class.
Well, that's not really why he was suspended.
It's because of how he did that.
Basically, Fivay, or Fivay, I don't know how you say that word,
Fivay High School science teacher Dean Liptack said he'd had enough of students using cell phones in his class.
And he basically, what do you think he did?
He put a cell phone jammer in his classroom to keep kids from using the cell phone in his class.
Now, he's received a five-day suspension without pay.
He believed it was fine for him to use a jammer because it wasn't being done for malicious purposes.
He was trying to make sure students were focused.
But using jammers is illegal.
You know, this story, I'm sorry, it's on ABC.
And I'm just a grammar person sometimes.
Using jammers are illegal.
I mean, that's not right, is it, Mike?
Using jammers is illegal.
Jammers are illegal, but using jammers is illegal.
I'm not one for, you know, prescriptivist, but I don't think this is right in anyone's dialogue.
If I said that, I'd feel like an idiot.
So that's why I stumbled.
Anyway, using them can bring thousands of dollars in fines from the FCC and even jail time.
People have been jailed.
And, you know, I have one.
I have one of these.
It doesn't work anymore, but I had one.
And I used it.
I used it on trains.
I used it on buses.
And it made my life a lot better.
But people, listen to this reaction that we get from people in the community.
Pasco County School District Employee Relations Director.
This is the guy that probably suspended him without pay.
I don't think he understood the impact that this could have had on parents trying to reach students or public safety concerns or law enforcement.
I don't think he had any idea of that.
It was a situation with some pretty poor judgment.
You know, I went to school for many years.
And I didn't have a cell phone.
And when people needed to reach me, there were ways of reaching me.
You didn't have to have a cell phone.
You didn't have to constantly be connected.
What is so hard to understand about this?
There are ways of getting a hold of people.
You don't have to be completely tied to all the social networking and able to have your coordinates mapped 24 hours a day.
We need to change that attitude, I think.
I see head shaking.
Am I wrong?
What I like is that we hear just as many stories coming out of schools of schools not wanting children to have phones in class and making them leave them outside.
There was a story here in New York City a few months ago about how schools would make children leave their phones at, say, a local bodega or other business.
Or a business model actually popped up where vans would just park somewhere.
Kids would leave their phones with this van for a small fee and pick it up after school because they weren't allowed to bring them in the building.
And now we have a story where kids have their phones in the building and they're getting in trouble for blocking them using them.
I must be, you know, if Dora were more around, he'd say I'm like diverging into a different evolutionary street or something.
But why can't you just leave your damn phone at home?
You do really need to have your phone with you at all times.
I mean, if I forget my phone, it's not the end of the world.
I can still figure out how to get to the places I'm going to and meet the people I want to meet.
But it just seems like people are obsessed and they're using these things as crutches.
If phones aren't allowed in schools, that should be something that is, you know, observed.
The flappy bird is not going to flap itself.
I mean, I can imagine being a teacher and just having all these kids on their phones or knowing they're on their phones or getting answers to tests or talking to each other.
It makes things extremely just not conducive to learning.
What if the children brought a landline phone? Would you support that?
No, I wouldn't support that either. I wouldn't. I guess that surprises you.
But there are landlines in the school, hopefully, that if there is an emergency of some sort, somebody can make a phone call.
Well, you know, when I was in high school, we had to pass notes back and forth clandestinely.
And I'm afraid that today's generations aren't going to develop those note-passing skills like I had to.
Here's a challenge to anyone out there, whatever their age is, go a day without your phone.
Just put your phone, turn it off, put it away, see what your life is like.
I mean, yeah, there'll be some inconveniences, but I'll bet you'll survive.
There's a little initial separation anxiety.
A little bit.
It's okay, though. You get over it. You get a little, like, sweat, you know, and that anxiety kind of subsides.
Yeah, yeah.
Slowly.
It makes you a stronger person.
You let go.
Let's check in and see if Bernie's back yet. Bernie, are you there?
I'm here, and Alex from London is on the line as well.
Alex, wow. This is the phone call we've been waiting for for such a while.
How are you doing out there?
Well, I should say happy Thursday from London.
It is Thursday over here, and I'm telling you, somebody's going to make a lightbulb joke about this fiasco tonight, right?
How many hackers does it take to call London from New York kind of thing?
But things are going very, very well over here, and I appreciate being on this evening with you gentlemen.
It's always good to hear everyone's voice.
Can I go back? Could we step back for two seconds so I could maybe make a comment about the intelligence reform?
Would you mind?
Let's step back and go ahead and comment.
Well, you're not British yourself.
You used to be here in New York, and now you're over there, so it's not really the British perspective,
but you're tied into the overseas perspective more, I suppose.
Well, exactly.
What I find very interesting about this is the metadata that's being collected
and the program that has been proposed is very similar, almost exactly similar,
to what was implemented in the EU for a good period of time.
In 2006, there was a data retention directive from the European Union
that mandated that all telecommunications carriers essentially capture metadata,
the metadata about which Rob was just speaking a few minutes ago.
All of that had to be held for a period of between six and 24 months,
and then law enforcement or intelligence agencies, security forces, anything like that,
could go to a court and get a court order in the EU to access that data.
It sounds very, very similar to the program that is proposed in the United States.
Am I right?
Yeah. Let me just correct you there, Alex, first.
I know being over there in England, us Americans probably sound all the same to you now,
but that was Kyle speaking about that, not Rob.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Sorry about that.
Yes.
Basically the same program.
What's rather interesting about this is that last year in April,
the Court of Justice of the European Union actually declared that directive invalid
for violating fundamental human rights.
There was then a European Parliament opinion
that the blanket retention of unsuspicious persons' data
violates the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights,
and in that EU Charter is a fundamental right to privacy.
So we're basically implementing what appears to be a program
that has already been declared in violation of fundamental human rights in the EU.
And then to go back to another point that was made,
and maybe I'm getting it right now, but maybe Rob was talking about this,
about the value of metadata.
If you think about metadata as opposed to content,
it's much, much easier to surveil a massive amount of people through metadata
as opposed to listening to everyone's telephone calls.
There was actually a New York Review of Books article about this,
I think it was last year.
And Stuart Baker, I'm not sure if anyone's familiar with him,
but Stuart Baker was the NSA General Counsel.
I should say Stuart and I worked together in the same law firm
in private practice at Steptoe & Johnson in Washington for a number of years.
But he's on the record as saying that, quote,
metadata absolutely tells you everything about someone's life.
If you have enough metadata, you don't really need content.
And when this was quoted in the article back to General Michael Hayden,
the former director of the NSA and CIA,
he called Baker's comment absolutely correct
and raised him one more by asserting,
we kill people based on metadata.
Quite interesting.
So I guess, Alex, the question is,
are we just, you know, like a decade behind the EU
and this will get overturned here in a decade?
Or is this just a temporary setback
and we're going to be violating people's rights for decades to come?
And I guess we don't know the answer yet, of course, but that's the question.
Yeah, I think it's a good question.
I think it's a good question.
And speaking of which, I think, you know,
one of the reasons why I was calling was because yesterday
I actually heard the Director General for Cybersecurity for GCHQ,
his name's Kieran Martin, speak at InfoSec Europe 2015 here in London.
And one of the things that was quite interesting about his talk,
which was otherwise pretty anodyne and boring,
there really wasn't much content to it.
But the interesting thing is, you know,
he talked about money, power, and propaganda
as being the three things that motivate cybercrime.
But he didn't once in his entire speech, I have to say,
and I applaud him for this,
he didn't use the word hackers at all,
which is very, very unusual.
He didn't try to pin anything on hackers.
The closest he ever came to saying hacker was
he said the word hacktivist a couple times in the context of propaganda.
But I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised that we weren't vilified.
Well, what was the word hacktivist? Was that vilified?
Not particularly.
You know, no more than usual, but no less either, I would say.
Okay.
But it was quite interesting.
And other things happening in London today was besides,
and also relevant to Off the Hook,
there was a talk about this automated dependent surveillance broadcast system
of aircraft, which you guys have been talking about for the last couple of weeks.
And there was an individual,
Jill Greenwood, an aerospace engineering student and a pilot,
actually, with the Royal Navy,
who gave a talk about spoofing these broadcast messages,
which would then pop up on a pilot's radar alert system
and require them actually to divert the aircraft.
Quite suddenly, I think within a period of 2.5 seconds,
they would have a statutory requirement to divert the aircraft.
This hasn't been actually tested on the plane,
but I think it goes to a lot of what has been talked about
in Off the Hook for the last couple of days.
So a couple of pretty cool developments coming out of London here.
Okay.
Well, as always, good to hear your voice and your perspectives on things.
Bernie, did you have anything to add?
I just think it's really interesting that Americans,
that it's ironic that this is called the USA Freedom Act,
and it now proves that we have less freedom
than the Europeans have under protection of law.
So our law provides us with less freedom than a European law,
which is kind of ironic.
Yeah, that all has an inverse relationship.
We had the Patriot Act, which was not about patriotism at all.
We had the Freedom Act, which is not about freedom at all.
The nicer and sparklier and more jingoistic a name of one of these acts is,
I think, the more we should probably be afraid of it.
If they come up with the Free Bunnies and Kittens Act,
I think it's going to involve just shooting us all in the face or something.
Well, they can never use the word freedom again.
They can't use the word patriot again.
Oh, but they can.
Well, they'll use it, not just in the name of a bill.
That's the thing.
But that would be a brilliant tactic,
come up with a new acronym that Patriot could stand for.
Yeah, they're doing that more now than ever before.
Alex, any final words from you?
Yeah, I'd like to say I think that you were absolutely right to bring up Snowden before
because I think we have to think about Obama in the context of Snowden as well
because if Obama's owning this reform and lauding it as a victory now
and his acolytes are claiming that this is going to be a reform that's pivotal to his legacy,
then why hasn't, we have to ask,
why hasn't the administration reversed its opinion with regard to the prosecution of Snowden?
I think regardless of what you think about him personally,
about the wisdom of his disclosures,
it's hard to argue against the fact that he started this debate about privacy and surveillance,
that but for Snowden there wouldn't be any reform to buttress Obama's legacy.
If the ends justify the means in this context,
I think the administration really needs to rethink its position.
Well said.
I'm solidly with you on that, Alex.
I've been thinking that quite a bit in the last couple of days
as we've been processing some of the rhetoric and action on this.
Yeah.
Could I give a shout out to the 2600 crew here in London
that has been very, very hospitable to me over the last couple of days?
I'm happy to hear that.
I hear that you made contact with one of our friends, Zap, which is great to hear,
so please pass our greetings on to him as well.
And there are 2600 meetings coming up this Friday,
and I know there's construction over at Trocadero,
and I'm not sure if that affects the meetings at all.
I don't think so.
I think everything is going on as planned for this Friday.
Okay.
Great.
Well, have a good time in London.
Hey, can you drop that package off to Julian that we talked about?
Well, you know what?
We'll talk off the air.
All right.
We'll talk about that offline.
Yeah.
All right.
Good hearing from you again.
Great.
This is Julian Assange.
You're listening to WBAI New York.
Stay strong and keep listening.
Yeah, indeed.
I don't know how that happened.
Okay.
So down to our last few minutes.
Rob, once again, the premiums that we're offering?
For a pledge of at least $50,
you can get a painting from me to you of a luminary from the hacker world,
a figure from hacker history,
acrylic on canvas,
an actual physical painting for a pledge of at least $50.
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you can get the Teach Your Kids to Code book,
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Make sure you specify off the hook as the show you're donating in the name of.
And you'll become part of what's going on here and support our show
and support our station and keep the lights on.
Again, 212-209-2950 or give to WBAI.org.
And, Rob, I believe there are meetings this week.
Yes, indeed.
Actually, I'm traveling this weekend.
If you're going to be at the Washington, D.C. meeting,
I'm going to check that out.
So I hope to see you there.
And, yeah, everywhere else, 2600.com slash meetings.
Find one near you.
OTH at 2600.com is our email address.
See you next week.
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