Who am I? Why am I here? Let him know! Let him know what time it is! Let him know! It's
time to change. Sure we must change, but some values are timeless. God had put me here to
play basketball and to do my thing on the court and so that's why I'm gonna do my thing. I'm one
of the lucky people in the world. I found something I always wanted to do and I have enjoyed every
single minute of it. By dawn, waterfront homes were flooded, their basements ruined, signs twisted in
the fierce winds, power lines tugged violently on utility poles. It is announced from Buckingham
Palace that with regret the Prince and Princess of Wales have decided to separate. If I could
change everything, I would. If I could put my hand over a face, I would. So if you just want
large world music, I'm not your man. Hit the siren, Doug. Tune in for a shortcut through 1992. New Year's
Eve at 11 here on WBAI. Hey listen, I'm not so worried about my fear of re-election. I got things I
want to do to help people in this country and I think I'm gonna win the election too. It might
happen. Yeah, and monkeys might fly out of my butt.
And it's just about 10 o'clock. You know, Claude, I can't believe you leave that switch in that position. Okay, let's go back like this. Okay, it's WBAI New York, 10 o'clock, time for 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. It couldn't get much worse, but if they could they would.
Bum diddley bum for the best, expect the worst. I hope that's understood. Bum diddley bum.
And a good evening to one and all. This is Off the Hook. Emmanuel Goldstein here, talking about high tech and the various adventures and trouble it can get us into.
Oh, we've got a few stories to tell, things that have been unfolding today. And we have a special guest who is starting to fight back. In fact, fighting back, that's the theme for tonight. We're going to show you how to fight back and how you can maybe even win. Stay with us.
I'm the operator with my pocket calculator.
I'm the operator with my pocket calculator.
I'm the operator with my pocket calculator.
I'm the operator with my pocket calculator.
I am adding.
And subtracting.
I'm controlling.
I'm controlling.
And composing.
I'm the operator with my pocket calculator.
I'm the operator with my pocket calculator.
I am adding.
And subtracting.
I'm controlling.
And composing.
By pressing down the special key, it plays a little melody.
By pressing down the special key, it plays a little melody.
Well, we play lots of little melodies here and off the hook. And sometimes we tell about how phone freaks, computer hackers can play little melodies with various boxes and get all kinds of interesting results, sometimes get into a whole lot of trouble, depending on, well, I guess depending on how good a musician they really are.
Well, someone did a number on us, not really off the hook, but mostly 2600 Magazine, the hacker publication that comes out and talks about this kind of thing that we talk about on the radio.
But occasionally, somebody does something nasty to us.
I mean, we talk about how theoretically you can do all kinds of nasty things.
And, well, someone really taught us a lesson here.
Not very badly.
The phone bill is only $17.99.
But it made a point as to how easy it is to really do something.
And we haven't talked about this particular aspect of it.
Now, first of all, to drive home the point, imagine, if you will, getting your regular phone bill and seeing all these calls on it that you didn't make.
Well, it happens almost every phone bill that we get over at 2600, because in the kind of business we're in, a lot of people contact us, and a lot of people know the tricks, and some people aren't very scrupulous.
So we almost always get a couple of pages from these weird long-distance companies, long-distance companies like Integritel, long-distance companies like Operator Assistance Network.
And on these particular pages, sometimes there's many pages, the Integritel page for this month came to $24.14.
The Operator Assistance Network came to $7.09.
All calls we never made.
They were all collect calls.
Collect calls to an answering machine.
Now, if you've listened to this program over the past year or so, you'll know how it's possible, using poor software, to make a collect call to an answering machine, to a fax machine, to a modem, even to a ring or a busy signal, if it's really that bad.
Basically, they have software that says, press 1 to refuse this call.
Otherwise, stay on the line.
Now, the answering machine that we have is not intelligent enough to know to press 1 to refuse a collect call.
So, naturally, all these collect calls wind up being billed to it.
Now, it's, you know, something that you can get rather annoyed at.
But who do you get annoyed at?
Do you get annoyed at the person doing it?
Yeah, I guess you do.
But I'm more annoyed at the companies for allowing this kind of thing to continue, month after month.
And it's just, it keeps happening.
And every time it happens, you've got to make a call to these different companies all across the country and convince them that, no, you didn't call yourself collect, that your answering machine, in fact, picked up and your software is so bad that it can't tell the difference.
So, you almost expect that kind of thing.
But what comes as a surprise is when New York Telephone does basically the same thing.
And that's what happened this month.
Really a surprise.
Twelve phone calls.
Twelve phone calls from around the tri-state area.
Yes, Brooklyn, Queens, New York, those kind of places.
And what we're going to show you now is how easy it is and how virtually anybody can do this.
It's a crime how simple this is.
These are called third number calls.
Now, a third number call is not a calling card call.
Basically, what you're doing is you're billing the call that you're making to a third number without using a special calling card number or anything like that.
Basically, you're saying, I want to bill this to this phone number here.
And that's pretty much it.
Now, what do you think happens when you make a call like that?
They call up and they confirm and make sure that there's somebody on the other end to, you know, to accept the charges so that you don't just bill people without knowing about it.
Well, you're wrong.
They don't do that.
I always assumed they did that, but they do not.
And just so you know, just so that you can be absolutely 100% sure that we're telling the truth here, we're going to connect to something.
Who should I call?
What's a good number to call here?
Well, I'll tell you what.
Just to play it safe, I'll call a busy signal, a number that I know is busy.
And that way, even if it does go through, horror of horrors, we won't get billed for it.
At least, not yet anyway.
I'm sure in a couple of years they'll figure out a way to bill you for a busy signal.
But we're going to get our bland little dial tone here.
And let's see if we can bring it up.
There it is.
And with this dial tone, we're going to make an O plus call.
That's a call with O beginning it.
And dial a number.
And we're going to bill this to the very same number at the magazine that these swine that did this horrible thing to us this month billed it to.
New York telephone.
From a push-button telephone, press 1-1 for collect calls.
To charge this call to another number, enter the complete number now.
I'm just going to enter the phone number.
Just the 10-digit phone number.
And will we get a busy signal?
Yes, we will.
That, my friends, is how simple it is.
You simply give them the number.
And I could give them any number I want.
I could give them your number, and it would be billed to you.
Now, what is New York telephone's excuse for this?
Well, they say if you're calling from a pay phone, we'll verify it.
We'll call and we'll make sure somebody is there.
But if you're calling from a residence, there's no need to verify.
No need at all.
Their logic is that if somebody's making a fraudulent call from a residence,
they'll simply reverse the charges at some point and catch the person.
But in this particular case, it's going to be very hard,
because they're hopping around, going from business to business,
and I don't think they'll ever catch them.
But more importantly, it puts all the weight on the consumer.
The consumer has to do all the work.
They've got to call the phone company.
And that is something that can be a job in itself.
Listen to what happened when I tried calling the phone company before.
All right, I happen to have a recording of this particular encounter, as it were.
And you can hear for yourself just how frustrating it can be sometimes
just to get some satisfaction.
Listen carefully.
Thank you for calling the New York Telephone Resident Service Center.
Due to excessive volume, your call cannot be answered at this time.
Please try again later.
We appreciate your patience and apologize for any inconvenience.
Thank you for calling New York Telephone.
That is what happens when you call the business office.
You don't even get put on hold anymore.
You just get disconnected.
They say, sorry, we're too busy to deal with you.
Call back some other time.
I spent quite a lot of time today redialing over and over and over again
to try and get these people.
Now, I don't know if all of a sudden there are more people calling the phone company
or if New York Telephone has just suddenly decided that it's not that important to them anymore.
But I got angry enough so that I made a serious phone call.
I don't often make serious phone calls, but this time I did.
And I called the Public Service Commission in Albany.
And I'm going to give you their phone number.
I'm going to give you their phone number twice.
I'm going to give the phone number to those people that already have their pens and paper out
because they know we give valuable bits of information out on this program.
And I'll give it later, too, for those of you that are right now searching frantically
for the above-mentioned materials.
If you want to call locally, the regular phone number, which might be easier to get through to
for whatever reason, it's area code 518-474-5527.
I'm told the 800 number also works, so that number is 800-342-3377.
They're open from 830 to 430, Monday through Friday.
You will get somebody on there that actually is capable of understanding what the problem is.
And I explained the situation to this person.
Inside of an hour, I was receiving an apologetic phone call from a New York Telephone operator.
Also, not somebody that they just pulled off the street.
Somebody who knew what she was talking about and was quite concerned that I had ratted on them.
Well, I didn't feel guilty in the least.
But if you want to get something done and if you feel you're being wronged and not getting answers,
don't hesitate to call these people. That's what they're there for.
And also, I was able to talk to this person for quite some time.
This is the liaison that we need to report problems with, say, co-cuts or weird phones on the street.
If they're not accessing things they're supposed to be accessing, such as 950 numbers, 911,
other things, providing free directory assistance, this is where you report it.
Okay?
I'm going to give that number one more time now.
Area code 518-474-5527.
And the 800 number is 800-342-3377.
Now, another thing New York Telephone has been spreading around over the past couple of weeks
with their latest Hello newsletter.
This is an update to something that we first brought up here maybe about six months ago.
And that's the Star 69 call return feature, which apparently is something that you can't get around.
Well, according to the latest Hello bulletin,
you can prevent call ID and call return users from seeing or learning your telephone number.
This is how they say to do it.
You can use per call or all call restrict to prevent your number from appearing on a call ID device
or a call return user's local call detail or bill.
Now, what that implies, and the Public Service Commission person was equally baffled by this,
it appears that New York Telephone has done something to prevent certain numbers from showing up on bills.
So, in other words, if somebody calls you using Star 67,
which is basically how you block your call from being identified on a call ID box,
or if they already have all call restrict,
their number will not show up on your bill if you Star 69 them.
If you Star 69 them and you have local itemization,
or if you Star 69 them and they're out of your immediate area,
you'll get something to the effect of, and this has not been verified,
this is just what they're saying at the moment,
you'll get a number on your bill, area code, exchange, and then four X's.
They will not tell you the entire number.
Again, this is something that we have not yet verified.
It's just what they're saying here.
And I talked to the New York Telephone person today,
and they basically said we're still trying to get it to work.
So, that's something to be concerned with.
Now, some of you may have seen something in the newspaper today
about a girl who was kidnapped out on Long Island.
And basically, it caught my interest because of the circumstances involved.
And we've got fiber optic here to lend his expertise.
Basically, what we have is somebody out in Suffolk County
who had disappeared on Monday from an arcade, an indoor arcade.
And this person apparently phoned their house and left a message on an answering machine.
I'll read you the paragraph that deals with that.
Police who initially believed the girl had probably wandered off
began treating the case as a possible abduction after hearing a tape recording
left on the answering machine of the girl's godmother
at whose Bayshore home the girl was staying for a few days.
Now, the message was left on the answering machine.
She basically said, I've been kidnapped by a man with a knife, and oh my God, here he comes.
She screamed, sobbed onto the answering machine tape.
The message stopped abruptly.
And incidentally, this is also a girl that had a pager
because they initially were alerted to something being wrong when she didn't answer a page.
So this shows you how well integrated into the 90s we are at this point.
Now, the person who heard that was confined to a wheelchair,
and she could not pick up the phone fast enough.
All right, now, right away I see something here
where the person hears the message being left on the answering machine.
Now, Long Island is, I'd say, 90% cut over
so that these call return features are in place,
and call IDs in many places as well.
What I'm wondering, and what I'd like to know from FiberOptic,
if it's true, if it's possible,
couldn't they have simply hit star 69?
If they did not hit star 69, is that data still available?
Can they find out who called that phone and where they called from?
Well, on the one hand, well, they could have hit star 69 when it happened,
provided it was the most recent call.
They could have found out on their local itemization.
It would have been plain and simple to see where the number went to.
But I think even more simpler is, well, I shouldn't say simpler,
but just forgetting the fact of signaling system 7 and any of those features and stuff,
is the fact that everyone's automatic message accounting for every phone
is stored in a system or sent to a system
called the Automatic Message Accounting Recording Center.
And either tapes are generated at this system,
or the tapes are generated and sent directly to
what's called the Revenue Accounting Office,
the people that compile your phone bill.
Now, the Revenue Accounting Office has access to all the automatic message accounting tapes.
They're archived back numerous months.
And I think it would simply be a process of elimination,
however, maybe a costly one to pay employees to go through this.
But they would actually have to go through all the tapes
within a certain stretch of time, which if this happened fairly recently,
so of course it would be this month's tapes,
they could, using the process of elimination
and the time period between when the girl disappeared
and when the phone call happened,
they know that she's not in Indochina,
they know that she's somewhere in Suffolk,
and she can't be too far off, or maybe at the Nassau border.
There are only so many Revenue Accounting Offices to go to.
There really aren't that many.
Within such a small area that the search would be confined to.
Now, the relatively large amount of time would be consumed
by having to go through each and every tape.
Well, that's what I don't understand here,
because basically you have a company that processes little digits.
You make a phone call, it's a bunch of little digits going through.
Can they not just do a global search to see who called this particular number
within this particular time frame?
Yeah, I mean, it's perfectly feasible to do.
The thing is that this sort of search,
you have no idea how many, well, you probably do,
how many calls are actually stored on one of these tapes
over a certain stretch of time.
There's literally thousands upon thousands,
hundreds of thousands of calls would have to be searched through,
and that could take quite a sizable amount of time.
Well, I mean, with fast computers,
we can deal with millions of bits of information.
That's true, but on the other hand,
we're not dealing with the NSA's high tech
when it comes to the local phone company.
They're not going to be using a Cray supercomputer
to search through all these mounds of data.
Well, I mean, it just seems to me with all the
quote-unquote concern over obscene phone calls
and finding out who's calling you,
that the phone company should have in place a method
where if it's an emergency such as this,
they can quickly find out who it is.
I mean, they bill you, for God's sake.
They show you the numbers that you call,
so they have the information already.
They simply quickly get it.
I have several databases of my own
that I keep information on various things,
and I'm able to look.
I can look by phone number, I can look by address,
I can look by state, and I can do it very quickly,
and that's the whole point of having a database.
Well, besides the fact that they have the time index,
they said that the call happened at around 5.15
in the late afternoon,
so they can narrow it down by time,
and obviously they know what date it was.
So we're not talking about something
too far off in the realm of impossibility.
This is something that can be done.
Plus, by listening to the tape,
you can also determine pretty quickly
if it came from a pay phone, various sounds.
Yeah, you can determine a lot of things by the background,
and you could even determine whether it's a long-distance call
by how it sounds when the person hung up and got disconnected.
That's true, although not as easily as you could in the past.
You know, you can even get calls overseas these days
that sound like local calls.
Yeah, perhaps, but there are things that you could do
to where you could narrow down the possibilities greatly,
and even if you didn't,
knowing the date and time,
those are some pretty important criteria.
Yeah, those are good clues to have.
Yeah, to go and look it up,
albeit, I think,
I have some theories as to
perhaps why they're not really doing all they can.
If people knew that they could do all this,
and it is within the realm of their doing,
then the phone company would be expected to do it
whenever someone disappeared,
you know, for any reason whatsoever.
And, of course, there would be the investment of time
and investment of paying employees,
but you have to ask the phone company
how important is a human life to the phone company.
Well, you know, I can tell you from personal experience
that they do this kind of thing.
A few years ago, I was approached by an FBI agent
who said that my number showed up
as a number that called a Soviet citizen in New York City.
So, in other words, I had called somebody
who was under some sort of suspicion or not,
maybe was under suspicion later.
They were able to pull my number as a number
that called this particular person,
and they investigated me as a result of this.
I think it was their wording
that's a little bit more clandestine than it really is.
I mean, you know, being that you are Emanuel Goldstein,
it's not too far-fetched that the FBI
is keeping tabs on you anyway.
I suppose it's not that far-fetched, but...
And the fact that you called a certain person
that they may have known, for whatever reason,
was a Soviet citizen,
simply cross-referenced the two things.
I still believe, though, that it's very easy for them
to just see who calls a particular number.
I think it's pretty obvious that if it's the FBI doing this,
no matter how long the stretch of time is,
if it's important enough to them,
they're paid by the federal government.
And where does this money come from? The taxpayers.
So you're basically funding them to find out who you call.
That's an interesting way of looking at it.
Yeah, but I think it's the FBI's pull
that allows them to do that.
Unless the FBI actually steps into the investigation,
I wouldn't expect all too many things to happen magically.
They already have, because kidnapping is a federal offense.
But I just think it would be nice if people had a general understanding
of what the phone company is capable of doing,
and when you have that understanding,
then you know what it is that you can expect them to do.
If you know that it's easy for them to look through,
maybe write better software so they can do it even more easily,
then you don't have to go through a lot of hassle.
And the police probably don't know this either,
how easy it is to just look up a number and see.
I mean, we could be completely wrong here.
They could have done this all already
and just not reached a conclusion and are not telling us.
Or not given out the information, or the fact that they did it.
That's entirely possible.
But I just think for the benefit of people out there
that might be future kidnap victims or whatever,
that it's good to know what is possible and what is not possible and why.
Yeah.
All right, we have a special guest who's waiting on the phone,
so we're going to be getting to him in just a minute.
That is Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson Games.
Steve is fighting back.
He was raided by the Secret Service two years ago,
actually almost three years ago now,
and was very nearly put out of business because of it.
He came out with a board game that kind of told a story of its own
and filed suit against the Secret Service.
Recently, the trial date was announced.
We'll be talking to Steve Jackson in just a couple of minutes.
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I program my home computer
Be myself into the future
I program my home computer
Be myself into the future
Federal Judge Sam Sparks has set January 19th, 1993 for the beginning of trial in the case of Steve Jackson Games versus the U.S. Secret Service.
The trial will be held in Austin and is expected to last for three or four days.
The judge's decision brings to a close more than a year and a half of legal preparation as the plaintiff's attorneys have worked to prepare the case and bring it to trial.
Steve Jackson Games along with Steve Jackson as an individual and three individual users of the Steve Jackson Games PBS are asking for damages under the First and Fourth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which protects users of bulletin board systems, and the Privacy Protection Act, which protects publishers.
The lawsuit has been completely funded by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
We have Steve Jackson on the line. He joins us from his office in Austin, Texas. Steve, are you with us?
Yes.
Okay. Just for a little background, maybe we could tell the folks what happened back in 1990.
Well, briefly, it's a long story, so briefly, our offices were raided by agents of the United States Secret Service.
They thought, we now know, that they were tracking down some kind of international hacker conspiracy to destroy the 911 system.
There never was any such conspiracy. The evidence that they thought they had was totally bogus, but the Secret Service, not having a great deal of expertise in these things, took it very seriously.
They were encouraged to take it very seriously by security people for the telephone company.
The Secret Service agents and the Assistant U.S. Attorney involved just accepted uncritically everything that the phone company told them.
So when the phone company said, ah, wicked hackers, go out and raid them, the Secret Service uncritically did so.
They came into our offices. They took three computer systems, one of which was running our BBS at the time.
They took a laser printer, for some reason, lots and lots of floppy disks, lots of assorted small hardware.
But the physical things that they took were less important than the fact that they took a lot of unique and irreplaceable data, including the current drafts of the GURPS Cyberpunk game book, which we were a week or so away from releasing.
We were unable to get that back from them in timely fashion. As a matter of fact, we still don't have everything back on GURPS Cyberpunk.
So we had to rewrite a great deal of it. The book did come out. We worked from old drafts and got it out.
But the delay cost us a great deal of money, a great deal of stress.
The Secret Service essentially stonewalled on the case for months and months and months, hardly admitting that they existed, let alone that they had done anything, until the Electronic Frontier Foundation got into the act.
With the legal aid from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we were able to get some of our hardware back.
This case actually helped inspire the very existence of the EFF, correct?
Yes. This was just an outrageous enough event that it crystallized in several people's minds, most notably John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapoor.
They found out they were on the same wavelength, that they were unhappy about things like this, and fortunately it eventually turned out that this was actually a case with the potential of making good law, which was why they took it on.
You get a hundred outrageous government events for every one where you can actually prove specifically that they broke their own law. But this is one where we can't.
Tell us something about the case as it looks now.
Well, we are suing under the First Amendment, freedom of speech of the press and of association, the Fourth Amendment, freedom against unreasonable search and seizure, which this was, and like the news release said, under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which protects electronic mail, and under the Privacy Protection Act, which protects publishers.
The reason that we're going after them under the ECPA is that they confiscated our bulletin board, complete with all the electronic mail that was on it at the time.
They're now trying to argue that because they physically walked out of the building with the computer where this was stored, this was not an interception.
That if they'd been tapping the lines, that might have been an interception, but if they physically walk away with it, then no, they're permitted to do that.
We certainly hope that this case will shoot down that interpretation of the law.
Well, if you just simply substitute law enforcement people for other people that would be charged under ECPA, they're saying that they could not be charged if they just walk in and take a computer with stealing people's mail.
That's exactly what they're arguing.
Stealing a mail truck, then, is not stealing people's mail.
Oh, they would try to tell you that that was very different.
I'm not sure how they're going to back that up in front of the judge, but their briefs are rejecting any analogy between electronic mail and real mail when it comes to physically taking possession of it.
Now, initially the case was charging individual agents of the Secret Service as well as a couple other people as well.
Now, I understand that's been dropped. Why is that?
Because the government just a couple of weeks ago came up with another stall which involved only the individual defendants, and which would have delayed our trial date by a year or more.
The judge admonished them for coming up with this, but he had to let them do it.
And our response to that was to say, if it's a choice between letting the individual defendants off and getting our trial date a year sooner, we'll take the quicker trial date.
Who were the individuals that were named, and why would you name individuals as opposed to just the organizations they were working for?
Because from the information that we had at the time we filed the lawsuit, we thought that they were individually responsible.
The four individuals that were originally named were the two Secret Service agents who were in charge of the raid, the assistant US attorney who wound them up and let them go,
and the telephone company security man who, in their application for a search warrant, they said had given them some information which we knew to be false.
We let the security man off first because the more the case developed, the more it really began to appear that nothing in that warrant application could be relied on as true, including the statements that they attributed to the phone company man.
So we let him go. This was before the government agents were let out. We really didn't want to let them out. I personally didn't want to let them out because I feel that they should bear individual responsibility,
but tactically it was keep them in and wait another year or let them go and come to trial now. The government has already stalled off long enough on this.
Well, Judge Sparks is absolutely not part of any stall, though. I was very impressed by the fact that once we let the individual defendants out, he responded by setting a trial date, which just, boom, right around the corner.
Are you aware of any case in the past where the Secret Service has been sued?
No, I'm not, so that doesn't mean that it's never happened. I would be willing to bet that they have been sued, but probably not on any computer-related case because I think if that had happened, I would know.
What is it that you want out of the case? What would satisfy you?
We want to see some law made to keep this kind of thing from happening again. Specifically, I identify two things where we really, really need to specifically establish law.
One is to establish in so many words that a bulletin board system is protected under the First Amendment, that the things that a user posts are speech and are protected, that the bulletin board itself is a forum for public association and is protected,
and that the CISOP, or the sponsor of the bulletin board, also has First Amendment protections, and here they would be analogous to those of a print publisher, but not exactly the same because the medium is different.
But the fact that the medium is different does not invalidate the protection. The Founding Fathers had no idea about radio and television when they wrote the First Amendment, but you still have freedom of speech. It's the same thing.
The other legal point that needs to be made is under the Fourth Amendment, search and seizure. It's possible to seize information on a computer without depriving the rightful owner of that information.
Granted that if the government has the power to enforce the law at all, they must have the power to look at information on a computer when they're investigating a case, but there are ways that they can do it without stealing it from its rightful owner, and we need to establish that, yes, they have to follow this kind of procedure.
Uh-huh. Well, taking a computer system is so broad in action. You're taking so many bits of information that have absolutely nothing to do with what you're investigating. It's like seizing somebody's entire house and going through every single written piece of paper in it.
Yes.
And that parallel has yet to be made.
At the very least, putting a file cabinet on a dolly and going away with it.
Yeah, and not giving the person any backup whatsoever.
Boxing up someone's whole library and taking it out the door, and then refusing to return the books because some of them might have been stolen.
And, Steve, I'd like to ask you, is there any part of this lawsuit that addresses the extreme exaggeration of the Belcourt document, the $10 or $14 document that they valued at something like $80,000? Is that addressed at all?
Yes, it is. Part of what we are showing the judge is that the warrant application under which they invaded our office was...
What's a polite word to use? Was incomplete, incorrect, carelessly done, or just plain false.
That's pretty polite.
There were many things in that warrant application that were untrue and that they, as the legal term goes, knew or should have known was untrue.
The Secret Service agent was swearing that he had read proprietary notices that just were not on the document that he was talking about.
And the more things we can show the judge that were just palpably false in their warrant application, the better.
Now, this is a trial that's going before a judge, not a jury, correct?
Steve?
Yes, that's right.
And you expect the whole thing to take about three or four days?
That's what the lawyers tell me.
All right. It certainly will be an interesting case to watch.
Now, this whole bit of history is documented in the Bruce Sterling book, The Hacker Crackdown.
Do you feel that that book pretty much represents it accurately?
Well, it's certainly the best work I have seen from any journalist since this got started.
I've been amazed by some of the bad journalism that's taken place in this case.
A lot of it is some of your reporters apparently do all their research by reading each other's stories.
Steve, I have to ask, is somebody tapping your phone or is that just a noise from your office?
Oh, that's an office noise. I can probably get it shut up if it's coming over.
No, I was just wondering what it was. It just seemed like a suspicious sound. But no, go ahead.
I liked Bruce's book. I thought that he made it a more comprehensible story than anybody else has been able to.
Well, just wait till the movie.
Okay, our number is 212-279-3400. We have Steve Jackson on the line. Let's see who's out there. Good evening.
Yeah, hi. How does he ensure that the government doesn't just lie?
I mean, like, just say that things were on tapes that aren't really there. I mean, it's scary.
I mean, like, what does his attorney have if they took all the tapes? I'll hang up.
Okay, you want to answer that, Steve?
Well, I'm not clear what he's asking.
Well, I guess he doesn't know how much of your material was actually returned.
So what I think he's asking is how can you defend yourself if they still have bits of the evidence or lack of evidence?
Well, we have almost everything back as far as we know that they took from our offices.
And they're not trying to say at this point that anything that they got from our offices justified the raid in any way.
Not that you can justify a raid by what you got in it if the raid itself was illegal, but typically the government will try to do that.
So their argument that the raid was legal rests on the fact that they didn't do anything that they might have done here, but in their advanced preparations, and those were just no good.
Now, has there ever been a case that you're aware of, or do you think it's likely, where the government comes, takes your computers for a while, and then returns them complete with all the evidence that they want to put there?
In other words, it's very easy to tamper with something when you have it, especially a computer.
Yes, it's possible. And someone might be very vulnerable to an attack like that, especially if the government took the backups at the same time.
The depositions that we have gotten from the Secret Service people who worked on our computers suggest to me that they were not exceptionally careful in what they copied back and forth between the systems.
But again, they can't prove the legality of the raid by anything that they claimed to have found on the systems, and they're not claiming to have found anything on our systems anyway to justify the raid.
A lot of their position boils down to, Jackson, we were never after you. Why don't you just go away? And that's not the point.
Now, how much of the equipment have they returned, and did they return everything the way it should be returned?
The only major things that we never got back from them were one loose hard disk and the legal-sized paper tray to my laser printer.
And it's just as easy to believe that they lost those as anybody picked those items to deliberately walk off with.
Are they admitting that they lost them?
No, they're saying, we gave everything back. And that's all they say.
Was anything that they gave back damaged in any way?
Yes. Of the three computers they took, one was simply trashed when it was returned. Another one was damaged but was fixable.
Well, what do you think they did, throw it around or play catch with it?
Well, almost. No, it looked as though it had been destroyed by careless handling. Certainly there was nothing that you could point to and say, they did this on purpose.
It looked very much like the computer had just been stored and transported by people who had no idea how to store and transport a computer.
Okay, let's take another call. Good evening, you're on BAI.
Oh, yeah, Manuel. I was wondering, you often talk about the Secret Service in these things, and I just wanted to know what jurisdiction they have in things I thought they were just supposed to protect the President.
Good question. Let's answer that. The Secret Service, Steve, in your view, what's their job?
Well, the Secret Service does now, as of a few years ago, have concurrent authority along with the FBI to look into this kind of crime.
They kind of got into it sideways. They said, well, we're supposed to be doing counterfeiting, but there's not much counterfeiting to investigate anymore.
Wire fraud is kind of like counterfeiting, so why don't you let us investigate wire fraud?
And computer crime often involves wire fraud, so why don't you let us involve what they call computer crime?
That's a real connect-the-dots kind of thing, isn't it?
Right. You could extend that a long way. They haven't done it yet, but as John Perry Barlow puts it, they needed something else to do. Their business was going bad, and they needed more business.
So the fact is that the Secret Service does now have this authority. Most people don't know it. That's a question I always get, is why the Secret Service?
I thought they protected the President. But no, they do these other things, too, and they really want to expand their business.
Well, the Secret Service is actually part of the Treasury Department, not the Justice Department or anything like that.
That's right. These are the same guys who do your income tax.
Okay. Let's take another call. Good evening.
Yeah. Hi, Emanuel.
Yes.
It's an old friend of yours. It's Milo Phoneville.
Oh, how are you?
Good. How are you?
You're an old TAP person from way back.
Not so much TAP. I'm Milo Phoneville from Osuni in Crystal Palace.
Okay, yeah. I remember you had very informative posts. That must have been about ten years ago.
Oh, yeah. Well, I just wanted to say hello, and I enjoy the show. Very interesting topic this evening.
Well, you've seen the world of computer hackers change over the past decade.
Oh, quite a bit.
Does this kind of thing surprise you at all?
No. No. Your regular callers do scare me, though.
I didn't know we had any regular callers.
The fellow who suggests people call from Citibank.
Oh, yes. Okay. He's about the only quote-unquote regular caller we have.
Well...
We have not yet heard from him tonight, actually.
Right. Well, you know, considering I'm one of the older hackers, phone freaks, I should say,
I do want to discourage people from hacking and phone freaking.
They're playing for keeps now.
You mean the government is playing for keeps?
Indeed.
Why do you think that is?
Question. I don't know.
Okay. Well, so you're basically giving us a word of warning.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
We're glad to make it through.
Okay. Well, there are tough times to make it through.
But, you know, I don't think a lot of people are going to just stop because of a warning.
Because if it's any indication that the times that we both lived through,
everybody thought that these things would never apply to them.
And even if it did apply to them, a lot of people would have done it anyway.
A lot of people would have done it anyway because it was just so fascinating.
That's true.
Well, you know, back then it wasn't such a large population of us out there.
And suddenly, well, around the time of Crystal Palace and Al-Sunni and such,
suddenly it became ego trips and all the elite groups and stuff.
You just don't know who anybody is anymore.
Yeah. That adds to the whole horror of the whole thing.
It really does.
Okay. Well, listen, it's good hearing from you.
Great show. Keep up the good work. And good luck, Steve.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
Okay. Let's take another phone call.
Good evening.
Anybody there?
Okay. Let's move on to another call.
Good evening.
Hi.
Before you were talking about jurisdiction and how these people get to do what they do,
I think that the point has to be looked at.
You've got to go way back because as far as jurisdiction, I don't think there really is any.
As a matter of fact, I don't even think that any of the things that they're doing
are appropriate according to the Constitution whatsoever.
If you think about it, well, you really need to get a whole education on this.
There's a whole movement in the country that is understanding what's going on here,
and they're saying, wait a minute, we didn't bargain for this.
All this stuff is under a U.N. treaty.
It has nothing to do with the Constitution.
And as far as jurisdiction, as soon as you go into a courtroom, do yourself a favor.
Take a look at the flag that's hanging in the courtroom.
You'll think it's a United States flag, right?
There's stars and stripes.
It's got this gold fringe around it.
That's not a United States flag.
That's a military flag.
You're in a military tribunal.
That's a different story.
The gold makes it a military flag. I wasn't aware of this.
Yeah, the gold flag.
You know what you do?
If you ever have to appear in court or if anybody in the audience has to appear in court,
what they should do is ask the judge, why is there a military flag in your courtroom?
You know something?
He'll never answer it on the record, and he'll say, case dismissed,
or he'll try to get you to get away from that question.
He'll never answer it, and you'll get out of it.
They don't want you to know that you're dealing with a military tribunal.
We're under military rule right now.
So all this stuff going on with the seizures and forfeiture laws, all these things,
this has nothing to do with the Constitution.
This is U.N. treaties, and right now the U.N. treaties are on the same level as the Constitution,
and if we don't do something about it, we're talking about dictatorship.
I mean, that's what all this stuff seems like, doesn't it?
Well, the way you describe it, certainly.
Yeah, I mean, after all, they can come in, they can seize computers and software,
and they don't have to answer for it.
They don't have to do anything.
They just come and take, and who's there to stop them?
And you never get the stuff back.
There's something wrong that's not under the Constitution.
This all has to do with the U.N. treaties
and what the government is looking to do to basically take control.
Okay, well, thanks for your interpretation.
All right, let's take another phone call.
Good evening.
Anybody there?
It's interesting.
Every time I pick up this line, it's dead.
I don't know why that is.
Let's try this one.
Good evening.
Earlier you were saying something about blocking collect and third-party billing.
That's right, yes.
It's possible to arrange with the phone company to do that.
If you want a demonstration of that, I can show it to you.
Well, actually, I'm very glad that you brought that up
because, yes, that's something I forgot to mention,
and I suggest that everybody do this.
Call the phone company and say you don't want third-number billing applied to your line.
That will not take away collect billing.
You can still get collect calls if you want that.
They answer collect calls if you want to.
Or you can have it both blocked.
Right. Now you say you're going to demonstrate it for us?
If you want, I can demonstrate it for you.
Go ahead.
I'm going to put you on hold temporarily while I demonstrate it.
Okay. Sounds like fun.
Because I have another line here.
Okay.
Sounds like three-way or something like that.
Well, when he said temporarily, I wasn't quite sure what he had in mind.
Give him a few seconds here.
Okay, are we back?
No, that's Steve over there in Austin.
Hello, we're back.
Okay, we're back.
What are we hearing?
We're going to get a ring on the line.
All right, now you're going to hear the tone of your telephone.
I'll tell you what to dial.
Okay.
From a push-button telephone, press 1-1 for collect calls.
To charge this call to another number, enter the complete number now.
For person-to-person and other calls, press 0 for the operator.
You can dial telephone.
Okay, now I assume you're going to enter your phone number.
Oh, I can dial now you want.
I can make this collect.
Do whichever you want.
I think you waited too long.
You'll have to speak to the operator.
Now, we'll turn it down when you give your number out.
Good evening. Susan, may I help you?
I'll have to call back.
Sorry, operator.
All right, thank you.
We don't want a human.
Okay, we lost that call, though, when he did that.
But, well, hopefully next week I'll be able to demonstrate it
because today I asked them to take that off the line.
And we'll see if they ever get around to doing it.
Let's take another phone call.
Good evening.
Yes, good evening.
How are you doing?
I do have a question for you.
Okay.
Okay, you have the U.S. government going in and taking all these computers and stuff.
I wonder how they'd like it if the hackers went in and did the same thing to them.
Well, that's a parallel that's been brought up a few times.
Of course, you know, two wrongs don't make a right.
What do you think, Steve?
Well, it's interesting.
Some of the science fiction that these guys obviously believe
makes it clear that they're afraid that there are hackers out there
with damn near magical powers
who can just essentially take control of their systems away from them
just by pushing a couple of buttons.
And so in that sense, any bragging or posturing that feeds that fear doesn't help,
just makes it likely that some poor kid is going to get raided by government agents
who think he's an evil wizard.
I understand that, but you have to understand, this all started with war games, okay?
Then you had all these kids go out and buy Commodore 64s and go,
God, I am an elite hacker now.
That's not where it started, but that's certainly what turned hacking and cracking into a kid's pastime.
And brought it into mass culture as well.
That's where you got all these cool dudes who weren't around before.
Yeah, but don't you understand that real hackers don't really publicize themselves,
and all these little kiddies are the ones that brought all the attention.
Well, there's a lot of little kiddies out there that are pretty sophisticated as well,
and a lot of quote-unquote adult hackers that aren't so adult.
True, okay, I grant you that.
I just don't want to do any kind of generalization here, because it's good and bad on all fronts here.
There are a lot of people out there who have both a great deal of technical skill and...
Here's a good example, okay, DC Comics, okay?
Gotta make it fast, we only have 30 seconds.
Yeah, okay, well, DC Comics came out with this series called The Hacker Files,
and what had happened is the Secret Service or somebody had busted into this girl's apartment
in the middle of the night, and she shot one of them.
They were going to try her for shooting a cop or something,
but the thing is he never identified himself as a police officer or whatever.
Well, how were they able to prove that, seeing as how the cop was dead?
No, no, no, he survived or whatever.
Oh, he did, okay, I'm sorry, I was just assuming that.
And he admitted that he didn't ever identify himself.
That doesn't usually happen.
Yeah, well, you have somebody just bust into your door in the middle of the night, you know.
I don't know, the government thinks it can do anything.
Well, it can if we let it.
That's true.
We're going to have to leave it at that because we are out of time.
Steve, I want to thank you very much for being with us tonight
and wish you the best of luck on the case.
My pleasure.
It all starts January 19th, is that right?
Support, yeah, and it should be over shortly after that and we'll have an answer.
Okay, and is there anything people can do to help?
In this particular case, no, except, of course, to join and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation,
which is supporting the case.
Let me see if I can quickly lay my hands on contact information for the EFF.
Okay, they're in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
I don't have a number for them either, but if people call information, they can get that.
Here we go.
Okay, got it.
1552nd Street, Cambridge, MA 02141.
Phone is 617-864-1550.
Internet address is EFF at EFF.org.
Okay, and hopefully that will spur a lot of people to get involved.
Steve, again, thanks very much and good luck, and we'll be no doubt talking to you after the case.
Take care.
And that's just about all the time we have tonight on Off the Hook.
I want to thank everybody for calling in.
And remind you, we'll be back again next week, same time, 10 o'clock to 11 o'clock,
talking about the latest developments in the exciting world of hacking and high tech.
This is Emanuel Goldstein.
See you next week.
Stay tuned for the evening news, a rebroadcast of the evening news.
This is WBAI-New York.
Good evening.
In the news tonight,
Washington state wants to revive the age-old practice of hanging, but the ACLU objects.
Is justice in America blind when it deals with black males?
Kenyans give democracy a try, and in local news,
many children with lead poisoning may be overlooked by city clinics.
With these and other stories, I'm Laura Seidel with Verna Avery Brown in Washington,
and this is the news for Wednesday, December 30, 1992.
First, to Susan Carter with these headline stories.
President Bush was optimistic that the START II treaty between the U.S. and Russia will be signed this weekend.
I feel confident after talking to Larry Eagleburger,
representations having been made by his interlocutors there,
both their defense secretary and their foreign minister, that that will be approved.
Boris Yeltsin is quite confident of that.
He feels that it is a historic agreement, good for the whole world, as do I.
And I believe that our Congress will approve it.
The pact will require the destruction of thousands of long-range nuclear weapons over the next several years.
The signing summit will mark Bush's third major arms deal during his administration.
But first, Bush will bring in the new year with U.S. troops in Somalia.
President Bush has hired former Attorney General Griffin Bell
to represent him in the ongoing investigation of the Iran crisis.