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That's Saturday, 9 p.m. The Secret Museum of the Air.
9 p.m. Saturday. 9 p.m. Saturday.
And for those of you that don't know, that's gonna happen 9 p.m.
Saturday. It's 10 p.m. on Wednesday, and that means it's time for Off the Hook.
They're looking at much worse, but if they could, they would, on Diddley Bonk for the best, expect the worst, I hope that's understood, on Diddley Bonk!
And a good evening to one and all, the program is Off the Hook, this is Emanuel Goldstein,
and we're going to spend the next hour talking about the phone company, and
options, and questions, and all those things that pop into people's heads, things that, well, some people in charge might not want to pop into your head, but, you know, it happens anyway.
And it's been a fun-filled week for me, because this is the first week that I've ever had to play with Caller ID.
It just came to my particular area, actually, as we've said on this program, it's called Caller ID,
and it's quite a toy to play with, it's rather dangerous for some people, because it can be used against them in ways that perhaps they aren't aware of.
Let's look at this story, it came from the Associated Press.
A prisoner charged with rape who escaped from Ocean County Jail by tying sheets together and using them to climb down five floors was captured yesterday after a half-day search, authorities said.
John Bailey was captured when he called his mother-in-law, who lives in Berkeley, from a South Toms River phone booth.
That's according to Detective Richard Breitenbach.
Breitenbach and two other detectives were at the home of the mother-in-law, whom authorities declined to identify when Bailey called.
The mother-in-law had Caller ID, enabling officials to determine the suspect's location.
Well, that's a nice story about Caller ID, and I'm sure one that the phone company is going to use to...
Actually, that's not Berkeley, California, that's Berkeley, New Jersey.
That's something that the phone company is no doubt going to use as an excuse for enforcing Caller ID on everybody.
Well, I don't know. I don't know if it's such a good idea to have everybody constantly advertising who they are, where they are, what their name is.
I don't know. How do you feel? Is your number blocked? Can your number be blocked?
One thing I found out is that everybody that lives in the area that has the potential to have Caller ID has not blocked their number.
And the reason for that is pretty simple. It's not because they don't want to block their number.
Believe me, they reacted with some indignation when I picked up the phone and greeted them by name.
You know, it's, hello, Joe, why are you calling me?
Or, better yet, you look at your Caller ID device and you see that Joe called you at a certain time but didn't leave a message.
So, you call Joe back and say, Joe, what do you want?
Joe says, what are you talking about? I didn't want anything. What do you mean?
You called me before and you didn't leave a message.
He's like, well, you know, I don't know. I don't know.
You know, very embarrassed. Caught in the act. Caught in the act of calling the answering machine and not leaving a message.
You must be accountable for all of your actions. There's nothing you can hide anymore.
If you pick up the phone and think about calling me, it's going to register someplace.
But if you're not guilty, you've got nothing to hide.
So, we have this spirit of the 90s now where we must be accountable for everything we do and everything that we say and think and all that kind of thing.
I don't know. You know, people react in a bad way when you greet them by name when they call you.
They're kind of surprised sometimes, but after a while, it becomes rather a pain.
So, I ask these people, why didn't you block your number? Why didn't you ask the phone company for all-call blocking?
Well, they either didn't know about it or they didn't want to go to the trouble.
Which leads to a very important point. Why is it that people in New York have to go to a certain amount of trouble to block their numbers?
It doesn't really make a whole lot of sense unless you look at it from the phone company's point of view where they're trying to sell the service.
They're trying to make you believe that you need it.
And by doing that, well, the best tactic is to make it as difficult as possible for you not to get the service.
So, everybody will be sending their number unless they contact the phone company and tell them not to send the number.
Otherwise, you have to dial star 67 or 1167 if you have a rotary phone every time you want to call somebody.
Unless you block your number all the time. In which case, you would dial star 67 or 1167 to not block your number.
And if you lose track of which it is, it's going to be very difficult to figure it out. Extremely difficult.
I mean, how do you call somebody and know if your number is being transmitted unless you ask the person who happens to have a caller ID box if your number has been transmitted?
It's rather embarrassing, to say the least.
But I had a lot of fun. A lot of fun playing with this new toy.
I discovered that, as we reported last week, when we were talking about the phone smart features, call return and return call and all those kind of things.
For some reason, pay phones cannot be called back. You cannot star 69 a pay phone. At least not in the New York telephone area.
However, a pay phone will show up on caller ID.
So you'll see a phone number show up on caller ID, but you can't call it back. You can't star 69 it.
Yes, you can dial it yourself, but for some reason it's listed that way. I don't really know why that is.
And the other important thing about that is that you can't block a number from a pay phone.
I've tried dialing star 67 to block the number as I was calling from a pay phone. Star 67 simply will not work.
So it's impossible to block pay phone numbers. That's one of the things I learned.
And the most recent thing, which is probably the most scary thing, something that I think a lot of us ought to be aware of.
Somebody called an office that has an 800 number. Now picture this, an 800 number with New York telephone.
Fantastically expensive for one thing, but a lot of people do have that.
An 800 number with New York telephone that goes to a regular phone line.
Let's imagine that you have that in your house. You subscribe to New York telephone's 800 service.
And somebody calls that 800 number.
Well, guess what? Caller ID is now transmitted over the 800 number.
We're not talking about ANI, which is a completely different technology. We're talking about caller ID.
It will show up on your box or on their box if you call an 800 number.
Now that's something that kind of caught me by surprise.
Caller ID actually being transmitted over 800 numbers now.
So one more form of anonymity has been lost.
How many more to go? Well, 950s will still be anonymous. You can still call someone using a 950 access number.
And your number will not be transmitted. Who knows how long that will be?
You can still call through the operator. Your number will not be transmitted. Who knows how long that will be?
I do know that the area is getting larger and larger.
Where if you call somebody direct, your number will be transmitted.
One day, New Jersey will be able to call New York, probably sometime this year.
And numbers will be transmitted on caller ID devices.
One day, not too long from now, people in California will call us and we'll see their numbers.
Hey, maybe this is a good thing. Maybe this is something that the average consumer will see as the second coming of Christ or something.
I don't know. But I do have this uneasy feeling that we're not being asked.
We're not being consulted. It's just happening without us.
So folks, it's up to you to speak your mind. This is one place you can do it.
You can call us up and tell us how you feel about caller ID and whether you think it's good, whether you think it's bad,
whether you think it's something that we should have, something that we should have as a mandatory feature like New Jersey.
All right, let's get into an interesting news item.
And then we have an interesting news item of a totally different nature.
This is the humorous part of the show.
It doesn't last very long, so.
State police in Connecticut say they've caught the computer hacker who was fooling around with an electronic highway sign.
Two weeks ago, the sign on I-95 was reprogrammed to read, you all suck.
And earlier this week, drivers were greeted with a message that Connecticut Governor Lowell Weicker, quote, blows, unquote.
Police allege that Keith Blodgett is the sign hacker, but he says it was unintentional.
Blodgett contends that he was just futzing around with what he thought was a computer bulletin board system.
He says there was no password protection whatsoever to dial into the computer at the State Transportation Department.
Wish I could have gotten there first.
I would have said something a lot more clever than you all suck.
I would have said something, I don't know, Martians have landed.
What would you say if you had a highway sign at your disposal?
All right, we have the Clipper chip thing, which has just happened.
I don't know how many people have read the New York Times over the past week, or other newspapers and magazines,
but the Clinton administration has proposed a new form of encryption.
Now, I'm not going to get into a lot of technical detail because A, I haven't studied it up all that much,
and B, we really don't have time in this particular program to talk about it.
However, we will be talking about this certainly over the next couple of weeks.
But basically, what we're seeing here, and so far from what I understand, this is a proposal to help encrypt cellular phones,
but it also is supposed to be expanded to more than just that.
It's supposed to be expanded to all kinds of chips, all kinds of computer chips,
including the ones in cellular phones, but also possibly including ones in regular phones,
including ones in digital phone systems and computers.
Basically, we have an encryption standard with three separate keys.
You need all three to operate it.
The consumer will have one key in his sole possession, and the other two keys will be held by two entities.
These entities have not been announced, they have not been defined in any way,
but these are two entities that supposedly will be trustworthy.
And the way it will work is this.
If law enforcement decides that they want to tap your phone or read your data,
they will get a warrant, and they will contact these two outside entities,
and they will get the two pieces of the encryption of the key from those two entities,
and then they will take yours that you have, I don't know exactly how they're supposed to get that,
and they'll decrypt your phone calls or your messages or the eavesdrop.
Again, it's something that's kind of hard to explain, kind of hard to understand,
and hopefully over the next couple of weeks we will have that information.
What's unsettling about this, it's an interesting discussion,
but what's unsettling about this is just what the administration thinks they have the right to do.
Do they have the right to outlaw any other form of encryption?
Are we looking at some sort of mandatory system that people are going to have to use?
And are we talking about a society where you have to register your chips with the government?
You know, it kind of rubs me the wrong way.
So those are the questions we're going to be asking over the next couple of weeks,
and believe me, we are going to find some answers,
and we're going to see just what kind of ideas these people are coming up with.
Now, some people are hailing this as a solution to the digital telephony issue
where law enforcement claims it's a great problem to tap digital lines.
Well, other people are saying this is something that could spell the end of freedom of speech.
Certainly in the electronic age.
Again, we will be talking about that.
We welcome any comments later on in the program as far as that particular item, the Clipper chip.
It's going to be in the news quite a bit, certainly on this program quite a bit.
And we have one final bit of glorious news,
and then we will be getting into the main part of our program.
Remember the Belcour lawsuit threat from Belcour in New Jersey against 2600 Magazine?
This came last July, and it came as a result of an article that was printed in,
I believe, the winter 1990-91.
Actually, it might have been 91-92.
I'm not really sure on the date.
But it was basically a threat because of some internal information that was leaked to the magazine
concerning how operators might listen in to telephone calls
by using something called Busy Line Verification, BLV.
Belcour didn't like the fact that that was leaked.
2600 Magazine didn't like the fact that Belcour was threatening them.
And the whole big hullabaloo started as a result of that,
and the whole big hullabaloo started as a result of that.
And right now, it's kind of at an impasse.
2600 said they would continue to print this kind of material.
And Belcour said, well, if you do, oh boy, you're going to get yours if you do.
And that's sort of where it stands right now.
Well, we have a new situation now, brand new.
And this just happened a couple of days ago.
And this time, the threatening party is not Belcour, it's AT&T.
Very quickly, Belcour is the research arm of the Regional Bell Operating Companies.
Regional Bell Operating Companies being a product of the breakup of the phone system in 1984.
And our particular piece here in New York is 9X.
Bell Atlantic is the piece over in New Jersey.
And the subdivisions of those particular Bell Operating Companies are New York Telephone
and New Jersey Bell, respectively.
So basically, we have two different entities, because AT&T is the long distance company,
and that's it.
They used to be a lot more than that, but now they're just the long distance company.
Not to make them sound as if they're a small company, they certainly aren't,
and they have all kinds of other interests.
But for now, we will refer to them as just that.
Well, they sent a letter over to the magazine this week saying,
this is from R.A. Ryan, a trademark and copyright attorney.
I've been informed that the winter 9293 edition,
they seem to always like the winter editions,
of 2600 magazine includes material copied from AT&T's eastern area directory.
The material copied by you is proprietary to AT&T and subject to the protection of state
and federal law, including the copyright law of the United States.
AT&T will take immediate action to protect this proprietary information
and its copyrighted property in the event you persist with its publication.
Well, friends, what we are talking about here that AT&T is so upset about,
and you're really going to find this hard to believe, I think, I know I do.
We're talking about a list of AT&T offices.
In other words, where AT&T is located.
Something that could almost be considered a public service.
But AT&T is saying, printing where we have offices is proprietary information.
Now, I don't know where it was written that AT&T is surreptitiously planting offices
all over the place and that the revelation of where these offices are is some sort of a crime,
some sort of infringement of proprietary information.
But it goes to show you the insanity, the illogic that is at play here.
And how big companies like this feel they can intimidate smaller companies and individual
people by threatening lawsuits for each and every little thing.
So that's the latest.
That's the latest.
AT&T threatening to sue because 2600 has said where AT&T is.
Go figure.
And when you come back, let us know.
All right.
Imagine, if you will, an alternative.
An alternative to the phone company, the local phone company, that is.
Yes, you pick up your telephone here in New York, you get a dial tone from New York Telephone.
You pick up your telephone over in New Jersey, you get a dial tone from New Jersey Bell.
And we have SNAT in Connecticut and all kinds of other entities elsewhere.
And there really isn't much of a choice.
You know, you can choose your long distance company.
You can say AT&T and MCI and Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
But when it comes to local service, you're pretty much a slave.
You have to participate in the local company's rules and regulations.
Not so, however, in Berkeley, California, where there is an alternative.
And the alternative is starting to take off.
And maybe someday we'll have such an alternative here.
We have on the line with us George Gleason of People's Telecom, Berkeley, California.
George, you with us?
Yes, I am.
Hi.
Hi.
You want to describe for us what kind of alternative.
First of all, why would somebody want an alternative to your local phone company, Pacific Bell, I guess?
Well, for the same reason that they might want an alternative to anything else they buy in the
marketplace, which is that the alternative provides better service or that the cost is
more befitting their budget or that they're just in league with the spirit of what the
organization stands for, much the same way as you might choose to buy something from a company which
supports environmental causes or something like that.
And what particularly would be wrong with the phone company as it stands now?
What kind of services don't they offer?
Well, let's look at a few of the things that Pacific Bell doesn't offer.
First of all, you were talking about caller ID a little bit ago.
And what that really is is calling line identification.
So, for example, if you're at home and you have your phone set to block calls from numbers that
you don't recognize, what happens if your kid is out on the road and has an automobile breakdown
and has to call you from a pay phone?
Well, lo and behold, the call is blocked.
We all have a service called PLEASE, which stands for Private Line Enhanced Access Service.
And what that means is that you'll have a person identification instead of a call identification,
but using it will be voluntary.
So, in other words, if a person calls your line and finds the line is blocked,
they can dial their individual access code and their name will show up on the screen on your phone.
So that means that if your kid is broke down on the side of the road someplace,
they'll be able to get through to you no matter what phone they happen to be calling from.
That's something which the existing telephone system doesn't offer.
Another case in point is if you live in a cooperative household,
or you share a phone with other people for whatever reason,
or you have a family with kids that make long-distance calls,
you get your phone bill at the end of the month,
and it's listed by just the calls come in chronological order.
Wouldn't it be nice if you can get your calls broken out by the initials of the person who made them?
That's another type of service that we'll be able to offer that Pacific Bell doesn't.
So those are some specific examples.
There are other ones.
There's also a whole political side to this thing.
By the way, I might add, your line is cutting out from time to time here, right?
Your voice kind of fades.
So if I ask for a clarification, that's probably what it is.
That's okay.
What you're experiencing is the WBAI phone system,
which is different from any phone system in the world.
I think it selectively cuts out words it doesn't like.
But apart from that,
now, how would an individual person,
I mean, can individual people have this alternative,
or is this for larger customers?
How does it work?
Well, at first, it's going to end up being for larger customers
or places where there's a large concentration of lines in one very compact area.
So for instance, our minimum is about 100 lines.
That's the way it is right now.
Once the service becomes more ubiquitous,
every place our cable happens to go by,
houses will be able to sign up or businesses will be able to sign up.
It's kind of one of the unfortunate elements of the deregulation of local service
that the way it's going to be structured initially
favors these situations where you have large concentrations of lines.
And frankly, there's no way to get around that
because the economics of putting cable under the street
are such that there's really nothing else you can do
except get the larger customers at each end
and then fill it in as time goes by.
Is cable the only way to go?
Can you go perhaps by microwave?
Well, there's two problems with microwaves.
One is that I don't know how many people are familiar with the questions
about electromagnetic radiation and health.
But it seems to me that if we have a society
in which there's this huge proliferation of microwave transmitters,
as the air becomes more contaminated with electromagnetic noise, as it were,
you know, who knows what the long-term effects are going to be.
I'm not an alarmist on this count,
but I think that it's something that might want to be looked into.
But more specifically, in our case,
the cost of microwave transmission is sufficiently high
that you'd only use it as a link between nodes in the system.
It's not cost-effective to have a microwave transmitter
on top of your roof, at least not yet.
So tell us something about the history of your particular organization.
How long have you been around for?
People's Telecom is Berkeley's oldest interconnect contractor,
and by that I mean a telephone company that specializes in private phone systems.
So, for example, if you have an office
or if you have a large household or something like that,
and it could be as few as three telephones,
and it could be as many as 30,000,
we can come in and supply everything on your side of the network interface.
It's kind of as if you can hire any,
let's say PG&E or the electric company comes to the side of your building,
and then you hire the contractor of your choice
to provide the wiring and the appliances and all of that.
And, of course, if you want energy conservation built into that,
or if you want some other alternative,
you've got to find someone who specializes in that.
Well, this is what People's Telecom does for your telephones.
And, of course, we've got a commercial site called Integrated Signal.
If I haven't mentioned it already, I started this in 1984,
and it grew by reputation.
Right now we serve probably between a third and a half
of all the politically progressive and public interest
and public service groups in the Bay Area.
But what we're going to do now to get this new service launched,
which is what we're calling Community Dial Tone,
is to open up another division or another independent entity
which will be concerned primarily with these types of larger service offerings.
Now, as far as the Community Dial Tone project,
now, you'd think that with the breakup of the phone company and everything,
a lot of people would be rushing to offer competing services,
but we haven't seen this happen,
at least not in areas that I'm familiar with.
Why is that?
Well, in New York, you've actually got a few.
And I'm not certain if I've got the names memorized,
but I think one of them's called Teleport or something like that,
or New York Fiber, something to that effect.
And so, in fact, there are some, but they're serving huge clients.
So, for example, in New York,
you've got a concentration of those down on Wall Street.
I suspect that a lot of companies are making plans
to get back into this as soon as they get a chance,
and probably most of them are keeping it a great big secret.
We have inside information to the effect
that there are likely to be some additional ones coming in.
We are hoping to be the very first one in the Bay Area,
but that all really depends on us getting about $850,000
to put in the first installation.
We have a client that'll do 1,000 lines on a 10-year contract,
but the economics of this is such that we really need to get it financed.
But aside from that, let's see, back to your initial question,
how soon before this stuff comes in?
It may come in very quickly.
And one of the things we're concerned about
is that the large companies that have been involved in long distance in the past,
which are likely to get back into this,
are going to be interested in doing what,
in the industry, called cream skimming.
And that means going into the places
where the most profitable service can be found,
the big office towers, the condominium complexes,
the apartment complexes,
places where they can grab a few hundred or a few thousand lines all in one swoop.
And what happens then is that if you're off in less developed areas
or in your rural areas or perhaps in the inner cities
where people are not as well off economically,
you may be left in a digital backwater.
And as society moves more toward a footing
that's based on the information technology
being an integral part of daily life, civic life, and social life,
as well as perhaps how a lot of people get their jobs.
What I'm thinking of here is people who do clerical work
and that type of thing or engineers or whatnot.
If you're living in the digital ghetto,
you're going to be left behind.
And there's really a substantial political and social issue involved in that.
And it's something that we're hoping to address.
Once we've got ourselves established on this,
we'll be able to have a platform
from which to raise a lot of these issues in a really substantive way.
Because we can say, hey, we're not just dreaming about this.
We're actually doing it.
And, you know, where are the rest of you guys anyway?
Um, with regard to the biggies getting back in,
okay, one of the things that I've heard talked about,
and there may be some legal limitations on this,
but AT&T would be a logical contender to get back into local service.
If you think of what happened when they broke up the Bell system,
AT&T corporate took the most profitable parts of it for themselves
and left the local telephone companies
with the least profitable parts of the business.
So it's kind of like an unfriendly divorce
where one partner gets everything
and leaves the other partner with the kids but no child support.
Now, if AT&T wants to get back into this,
the local telephone companies on the inside
are probably going to be fuming mad about it,
but they're not going to say that to the public.
It's an example of the kinds of ways
in which the deregulation of the telephone industry in this country
has proceeded and tends to kind of produce self-contradictory results
or results that are not in accord with the public interest.
Now, give us an idea of a best-case scenario
for, say, an average person or an average business.
How can phone service be better, more exciting, more flexible
than what is offered by the regional Bell operating companies now?
Well, the best-case scenario is your phone does what you want it to do
and it doesn't cost an arm and a leg to do it.
So, for example, you would maintain unlimited local calling,
which means that you can make as many calls in your local area as you want
and there's no additional charge for that.
You might have additional features on your phone,
for example, something that tells you who's calling
if they want to identify themselves.
You might have a feature that lets you add more people
to a conference call for social reasons.
There's a whole new range of services coming in called ISDN.
And the industry, of course, for the last 10 years,
when this has actually been around for a long time,
it just hasn't been acted on,
people have joked that the initial stand for it still does nothing.
Actually, it's the Integrated Services Digital Network.
And what that will do, among other things,
is give you a digital phone,
which allows you to use your telephone for a voice conversation
at the same time as you're using your computer
to communicate something across town or across the world.
You might be working on something.
You might be telecommuting, for example,
and I actually want to get into this
a little bit more about telecommuting and its impact.
But, for example, you might have a job with a company
that's across town or across the world
and you're telecommuting to there,
so you're typing stuff on your computer
and it's connected to the mainframe.
This whole thing is happening at speeds of between 30
and 60 times as fast as your current modem allows you to do.
And at the same time as you're on the computer,
you can also be talking on the phone
and you can be sharing work on your computer
with someone at the other end
so that you could both be looking at the same screen,
moving your cursor around,
editing things, changing things, that type of stuff.
If you're a musician or an artist,
you might be able to send things back and forth
a lot more rapidly than we have now.
You might get, for example, digital jam sessions
over the phone where people hook their musical,
digital musical equipment, for example,
MIDI synthesizers and so forth.
You might have a situation where a recording artist
is making an album and wants to bring in a player
who's well-established on their instrument
but lives far away.
That player goes into a recording studio
on the East, let's say, on the East Coast
and the studio engineers on the West Coast pick it up
and they make their music together
just as if they were in the same room
and with really high fidelity.
You can also get conference-quality video,
but see, these are applications
that mostly affect business.
From the residential subscriber's point of view,
what people want is access, they want simplicity,
they want the cost to be affordable.
In the best-case scenario, telecommuting
is going to actually be an element
that helps families and neighborhoods
stick together more closely than before,
and here's how.
Right now, if you work at a job,
you go to an office,
and if the company goes out of business
or they move their operations to some slave state overseas
where they can pay two cents an hour,
you're out of a job and you probably have to move house.
The average family in this country
moves house every two and a half years,
and that does absolute hell to neighborhood stability
because when you have people coming and going,
they don't really care about where they are
and they don't care about what happens
when they leave it behind.
You won't vote for a school bond issue, for example,
if the taxes come due today,
but the high school's not gonna be improved
until five years down the line
when you and your kids are out of the neighborhood.
So that's a bad thing,
and in contrast to this,
if you're dealing with telecommuting, for example,
you could be plugged into an office
that's anywhere in the world,
and if that company goes out of business
or if you decide to change jobs for whatever reason,
instead of moving house and pulling up your family
and ripping apart your social ties,
you just simply change the settings on your modem program
on your computer,
and suddenly tomorrow you're connected to somewhere else,
but you're physically staying in the same place.
I think that's a good thing.
I come from a family where on my mom's side
there were four generations of the same family
on the same block in a small suburb in New Jersey,
and that was a really great thing,
and I really believe that when you look at the difference
between a stable neighborhood and an unstable one,
you can really tell the difference,
and if we can make that situation come about again
through high technology,
we're not gonna put the genie back in the bottle,
that's not possible,
but what we can do is we can move forward
and use these things in ways that enhance people's lives.
So the best scenario of all is the digital community
where there's really a strong level of interaction
between people face-to-face
and where they're able to use the new technologies
to enhance their life in certain ways
that are specifically under their control.
The worst case scenario,
which probably isn't going to happen quite this badly,
but certain elements of it probably will,
first of all, as competition comes in,
the telephone companies are gonna need
more sources of revenue.
So for example, with your caller ID,
what caller ID is really for is telemarketing.
You call a pizza place, you order a pizza,
they have your number,
they call you back to make sure it's really you,
okay, that's fine,
but what also happens is your number goes into a database
and all of a sudden you start getting junk mail
for pizza showing up at your doorstep,
or you call a supermarket and you do shopping by phone
and you enter your credit card number
and all of a sudden some database has your information
as to who you are and what you like to buy
and maybe next week you get a notice
from your health insurance company saying,
hey, you're eating too much red meat,
we're gonna cut you off, those kinds of things.
But what's probably also gonna happen along with this,
okay, so that's one example
of how they're managing to squeeze more money
out of the network
by basically making everything they can into a commodity.
I sort of wonder how long it's gonna be
before they start injecting commercials between the rings
when you're waiting for somebody to answer.
Well, in fact, somebody's got a patent for a device
that actually does that,
and they're saying that this is a way
they can offer low-cost phone service.
So presumably in the ghettos,
you're gonna see ads for booze and cigarettes
coming over to the homes of people
who can least afford that type of thing
and there's a lot of ethical questions involved.
What I'm most concerned about, though,
is the charging for local service.
Now, in New York right now, you make a local call,
you pay a message unit charge.
In California and in most of the rest of the world,
or rather most of the rest of the United States,
that's not the case.
You make your local calls, you've got a flat rate,
you pay, let's say, $12 a month,
and all the local calls you want are free.
That's very nice, and residential service
has always been done that way traditionally
because it doesn't have an impact on the system.
It's kind of like the way that bicycles impact city traffic.
They don't take up lanes on the street,
they just kind of get by and they don't cause problems.
Residential service involves such a small amount of usage
compared to the business traffic on the network
that traditionally it's gone through for free.
But as the telephone companies have to start
squeezing every penny they can
in order to compete effectively with each other,
what's going to happen is there'll be more and more pressure
for measured local service.
Now that, by and of itself, you say,
well, a few more dollars, it's no big deal.
But if you look at the statistics
and you see how people use the phone,
you find out that it's a bigger deal in fact.
And here's what I'm talking about.
In the early 80s, Southern New England Telephone
in Connecticut did something called
the Subscriber Line Usage Survey,
and they tried to measure through technical means
and surveys how people use their phones.
And what they found out was this.
Black families way below the poverty line
used the telephone 10 times as many minutes
of local calling as did white families
in the same income group.
And as you got closer and closer to middle class,
the difference between black and white families narrowed.
And when you got to middle class and above,
suddenly the white folks were using the phone
more than the black folks.
Now, I'm not going to presume, excuse me,
I'm not going to presume to psych out
why different people use the phone different ways.
But if you suddenly start charging for local calls,
what you're going to find out is that
the black families below the poverty line, for instance,
are going to have 10 times a higher phone bill.
And at the prevailing rates at the time,
what that came to was a telephone bill
of around $40 to $50 a month.
Certainly not something that a family in poverty can afford.
And so even though there may not be an intent to discriminate,
it's as if you had a health insurance system
that said, we're going to charge you more
if you're at risk for sickle cell.
That hits the black folks.
We're going to charge you more if you've got a risk for AIDS.
That hits the gay folks.
We're going to, well, it hits everybody nowadays.
We're going to charge you more if you have a risk
for Tay-Sachs disease.
Oh, now we've hit the Jews.
Gee whiz, how many more ethnic categories
can we bring in here?
So although there may not be a discriminatory intent,
there's a discriminatory impact.
And it's something that's going to affect people's social lives.
It's going to affect civic participation.
It used to be in the old days, for example, that, you know,
well, let me take it on a slightly different tack here.
If we start getting measured local service,
it's as if somebody installed a toll booth
on the road to the village square.
Suddenly the avenue through which many people
are going to be conducting political debates,
social interaction, and all these things
is going to be having a meter attached to it
that's constantly running.
And what that's going to do is create
a differential degree of access to the point
where some people are going to have all the access they want.
And a lot of people, perhaps the majority,
as the divide between the rich and the poor gets larger,
are going to have less and less access
because they simply can't afford it.
And I think that would be a national disgrace.
It certainly would.
And that's something that I'm very concerned about.
But George, one quick question.
I want to go to the telephones.
Why don't the phone companies simply provide service
that would be more useful to individual people,
like addressing the concerns that you've brought up?
What do they have against that?
Well, it's not that they have an intrinsic bias.
In some cases, they simply don't know
about concerns that are out there.
For example, you have a cooperative household.
The phone is listed in one person's name.
It would be much nicer if the household
could be listed by its house name,
because that's the name that everybody
in the neighborhood might know it by.
And as it were, if you're looking up someone's number,
maybe you don't know the name of the person
who that number is listed under.
But the telephone company sees that as a business,
and so they won't do that.
So some of it is just a matter of the fact
that their administration can't cope
with the social and cultural realities of our times.
And some of it is also a technical limitation.
For example, person ID that I described earlier,
or what we're calling please service,
that's something which they don't have the ability
to provide in their network right now.
I mean, in a way, they sort of do,
but they'd have to give people a lot more things
attached to that in order to make it work.
And those are things that they can charge a fee for.
And they really haven't identified the trend
because they're not as close to the grassroots with this.
A lot of the stuff that we'd like to do
isn't technically feasible right now
for the telephone companies, the way they're set up.
Some of it would require changes in their tariffs,
which involve going through a big state,
a big process with a state bureaucracy.
It's just a question of market demand.
I mean, General Motors didn't anticipate the need
for small economical automobiles,
but Toyota and Volkswagen and all the rest of them did.
And the result was not only a change in the market shares,
but then after a while, General Motors got hip to it.
And now the American car companies have caught up.
It's the same case with the telephones.
I think that probably after about 10 years,
we'll see that most of these services are fairly similar.
And some of the things that we're talking about now
that people might consider sort of idealistic
or advanced or far ahead in some way,
those things are going to be fairly standard on the network.
All right, we're talking with George Gleason
of People's Telecom, Berkeley, California,
providing an alternative to local telephone service
from the phone company.
Before we go to listener phone calls at 212-279-3400,
George, can you give out any kind of phone number
or way people can get ahold of you
to ask you any more questions
or provide information that might be helpful to you?
Sure, the number on my private line on my desk,
I don't want to bother my coworkers with this,
but my private line on my desk is area 510-644-8085.
And so if you like, you can leave a message for me
if I'm not in the office at the time
where you can talk to me if I am and we'll see.
One thing we'd really like to do
is encourage this thing to go on a larger scale.
If anybody in New York has a gut
to try to set up a franchise or a subsidiary of this,
we'd love to hear about it.
And by chance, if somebody's listening,
you can help us get contract financing
for those first thousand lines in Berkeley,
I'd be thrilled.
Anyway, that's an advertisement.
You're not supposed to take ads on the air right now, are you?
Well, it's a plea and we have plenty of pleas on the air.
But I guess the question that we're asking our listeners today
is what do you want from your phone service
that the phone company does not provide today?
If you had your own independent phone company,
what would you do differently?
And that's something that I think we might need to hear
at this point so that we can proceed.
Because, George, you're certainly in the position
where you can actually make something happen
if you're able to do this.
Yeah, if we're able to set this up,
basically it's going to respond to customer demand
to the point where the way we like to put it
is anything somebody wants, chances are,
there's a way we can do it.
For example, I got a request from someone.
They said, well, I make a conference call every day
at the same time to eight other people.
Can I do that?
And it's like, of course you can.
We can put one button on your phone, which calls.
Well, the way it has to work is one button
for each of those people,
but it adds them to the conference automatically.
Another thing is, hey, let's bring back
the local telephone operator, you know?
Because maybe a lot of these services are things
which could better be handled by a human being.
You don't want to sit there and wait and listen
and hold the line while each of the eight people
you're trying to connect with gets on the phone.
But, you know, if the operator's there
to do it for you, then great.
And then they'll call you back
when they've got them all there
and business proceeds more efficiently.
So the way we like to think of it
is anything anybody wants, chances are,
we can do it as long as we know what it is.
All right, let's take some phone calls.
212-279-3400 is our phone number.
Good evening, you're on Off The Hook.
Yes, hello, Emmanuel.
Yes, go ahead.
Great show, thank you again.
Recently, a few days ago, in fact,
I got a call from AT&T trying to convince me
to switch my long-distance service to AT&T.
So I was very happy to take the opportunity there
to explain to the AT&T salesperson
why the company I use, Working Assets Long Distance,
is far superior to AT&T.
And I got into detail about how Working Assets rates
are the same, but they provide socially responsible
practices like using recycled paper
and giving donations to worthy groups
that are progressive organizations,
and which I agree with politically,
and so forth and so on.
And that there's, you know,
same quality of service and that sort of thing.
Now, your guest you have on mentioned
that there's some political aspects to the company
that he's involved with there in Berkeley,
providing local service,
and I was wondering what those might be
and how they maybe might be similar,
or perhaps not, to the services
and the socially responsible aspects
of the Working Assets company,
Working Assets Long Distance.
George?
Hi, well, there's a few things, actually,
and thanks for your call.
First of all, we've always recycled our paper, too,
but more specifically, we, hello?
Still there?
Yeah, go ahead.
That was just a call dropping off.
Oh, going, okay.
One of the things we do is provide a 10% discount
on systems and installations to groups
that are serving the public interest.
We also do a lot of free consulting in that regard,
and over the years, we've provided other types
of communication support as well.
So, for example, when, oh, boy,
how can I do this without mentioning names?
Okay, when Operation Rescue was conducting
guerrilla actions against local family planning clinics,
we provided two-way radio equipment
to the groups that were operating
against Operation Rescue so that they could,
for example, set up locations they would be able to see
if Operation Rescue was coming,
and then move their counter-protests
into the appropriate location,
whether it was this family planning office or that one.
We've also done communication support
for Big Mountain Support Group,
where you know the situation there
with the Bureau of Land Management
or the Bureau of Indian Affairs
trying to take away land
that the Indians have held for centuries.
Believe in direct support for the things
that we feel are right in the world,
and we've stuck our necks out for that,
you know, for the last nine or so years.
As far as this whole project is concerned,
one of the things I hope to do with community dial tone
has to do with what I call the digital ghetto,
and I'll get to that in just a second,
but I had another slimy AT&T story,
if you want to hear a slimy AT&T story.
Oh, we love to hear slimy AT&T stories.
Go ahead.
Oh, your friend out there at the other end of the line
got a call from AT&T telemarketing long distance,
but here in California,
that had an interesting twist to it
because the people who they had making those calls
were convicted felons in the state penitentiary.
What do you think about the idea
of a convicted felon in the state penitentiary
having your customer database,
your credit information,
your phone number and your address
all spread out before them on a computer?
That really makes for high-pressure sales tactics now,
doesn't it?
Because if you don't sign up,
maybe one of his friends
is going to come visit you sometime later
and do some really high-pressure sales tactics,
you know, in addition to the fact
that AT&T is getting slave wages for that
because they only pay those people
like 50 cents a day or something.
Well, I mean, can you imagine,
I mean, people who wind up in prison,
you don't know why they're in prison.
I mean, a lot of people are in prison
for, you know, various reasons,
some good, some bad.
But imagine someone who is in prison
calling someone that he in some way victimized
saying, hey, remember me?
I work for AT&T.
The guy broke into my house
and helped me at knife point for a few hours
until the cops came.
Gee, this is great.
Because a lot of people do have victims
when they go to prison.
So there's a chance you might call one of them.
Yep, that's entirely possible.
And AT&T deserves to be faulted
on two levels for this.
One thing is, of course,
they're engaging in slave labor,
which is, you know,
the only real word for what happens
when you've got prisoners who are,
I mean, you can say, sure,
the prisoners deserve to earn more money
than they could mopping the floor in the jail.
But I mean, this is really,
this puts us on an equal footing
with the last great communist giant in the world,
namely the People's Republic of China,
where they have political prisoners
routinely engaged in labor
for things that are sold,
in fact, including sold into the United States.
That's not fair to the prisoners at all.
It's not fair to the prisoners
to make them slaves to a private company.
And it's not fair to the customers
who have to deal with that,
because, and the other thing is,
it drives down the cost of wages.
And eventually what happens
is it hits your job,
no matter what you are,
no matter what you do.
You know, the further the wages go down,
the closer it comes to the day
when you're going to find yourself
earning minimum wage
with your bachelor's degree
or your PhD or whatever it might be.
Now, where was it that this was happening?
This was going on in California.
And once it came to light,
AT&T, of course,
got all red in the face
and apologized
and they got all embarrassed and stuff.
But it's like, you know, come on,
you caught them with their hands in the cookie jar.
What more do you need?
Now, back to the digital ghetto for a second.
One of the things we want to do here,
you know, I referred to the idea
that as these high-tech services come online
in the more well-to-do areas
or in the places
where there are high concentrations of lines
or something like that,
that there's a risk
that the service may not be available
to people in the less densely populated areas
or places where people are less well-off
or something like that.
One of the things
that we'd very much like to do,
and I don't know when
we're going to have the economic means to do this,
is drop a thousand lines
into the inner city someplace,
let's say East Oakland or someplace
where you've got a predominantly minority,
predominantly very poor economically constituency,
and see what happens.
And we'd also like to get some company,
let's say Apple,
to donate a thousand free Macintoshes
so that each of these lines
also comes with a computer.
If you look at the history of innovation,
cultural innovation in this country,
you find a lot of it comes from minorities.
A lot of it comes from subcultures
which are relatively unknown.
For example, the two examples I'd like to point to,
one of them is videotape.
Originally, videotape recording
was developed to capture sporting events live
so that you could do instant replays
of the exciting moments.
And 30 years later,
along comes Rodney King
and the videotape that sparked
a whole new search for racial justice in this country.
It came out of the black disadvantaged areas.
The music synthesizer was originally developed
to create inexpensive backing tracks
for singing commercials on the radio.
And 30 years later,
right out of the same demographic groupings
comes rap music and hip-hop music,
which have really defined a generation's musical taste
and a whole culture that goes along with that.
So what we expect is going to happen
is that right now,
okay, this digital telephone technology
is like what we call technology-seeking applications.
Everybody knows it's good for a couple of things,
but we really don't know
how it's going to be used in daily life.
What we think is going to happen
is if you turn this loose in the inner cities,
the black teenagers are going to come out
with something that's just going to totally blow our minds.
And I have no clue what that's going to be right now,
but I think if we get a chance to do it,
we're going to find out.
And I agree we should have that chance.
I can't imagine the phone companies
giving the inner city that chance,
but with companies like People's Telecom,
perhaps it's a possibility.
Let's go to another telephone call.
Good evening, you're on Off The Hook.
Oh, hi, I'm very glad I got through.
Excellent show, as usual.
Thank you.
Before I forget,
some time back, a number of months back,
you gave a number on the air
that was a, I believe it was a 900 number,
that would do a reverse lookup,
given a 10-digit phone number,
would read back to you the customer name and address.
Well, actually, I don't think it was a computer.
I think that was a human,
but I don't have the number with me.
There are such services like that,
that do customer name and address,
and there are commercial services like that available now,
where you give them a phone number,
you give them an address,
and they'll tell you the person it's listed to,
if it's listed, that is.
What area are you in?
201, New Jersey.
201.
What I suggest you do,
you're looking for somebody in the 201 area?
No, I'm looking for some people out of state, mostly.
Out of state.
Probably the best thing to do
is to contact a couple of libraries in the area,
find out if they have what's known as the COLES directory,
C-O-L-E-S,
and lots of times the libraries will,
if they have those,
they'll look up the numbers for you,
or look up the addresses for you.
Okay, good.
It's just a reference source,
and it's a way of getting information that way.
Okay, good.
You had mentioned prisoners doing telemarketing.
That's something that I'd read about a year or so back,
that entire state prison systems,
I forget whether it was,
might have been Michigan,
might have been Wyoming,
that were having their entire prison system to get into this,
and marketing it to these mass program telemarketers
that call up selling everything from,
you know, magazine subscriptions to stocks and bonds,
and all these folks with these programs,
you know, the whole script on the screen right in front of them,
that they were going to,
that more and more states were going to probably get involved in this,
so it is a great slave labor kind of situation.
Well, if you think of it this way,
it costs $4,000 a year to send a student to school,
and it costs $24,000 a year to keep somebody in jail,
so you could cut the school funding by half,
and let your prison population rise a few times
before it ever got to the point
where it cost as much as keeping the kids in school.
Isn't that nice?
So, by the way,
that number you referred to in telephone company terminology,
they're things called ANI numbers,
automatic number identifiers.
Everybody in the industry knows that stuff,
but we don't like to give it out,
because we essentially use it on the job every day,
and if people are casually messing with it,
it makes our lives difficult,
because the telephone companies have to change it.
But there's another issue that brings up,
which is a sort of a,
pertains to the whole question of anonymity,
and it's like this.
Some years ago, I was involved in a case
where I had to testify against somebody,
where I voluntarily stepped forward,
because they were asking for technical information,
and when I found out what they were using it for,
what they wanted to do is they were a stalker,
and they were trying to track down this woman
who they had it in for,
and they were going to harass her.
So somebody had been to jail for blowing up somebody's car
in a similar case 10 years before,
and the more and more information
that's available in public databases,
the more easy it is to get at people,
the easier it's going to be for these stalkers,
who are really as wacko as it gets.
I mean, you think David Koresh was bad.
I mean, I don't know if this is even in the same category,
because it's only one victim at a time,
but still, there's lots more of these stalkers out there,
and people can use that information
for all kinds of nefarious purposes,
and there really should be some,
there should be a greater degree
to which people have control
over how their information is used and where it's available.
Well, okay, on that subject,
somebody called before mentioning
Working Assets Long Distance Company.
I'm a customer there also,
and I've got their Working Assets calling card.
The way that works is a little differently
than some of the other calling cards.
You have an 800 number you have to dial.
It's kind of like the older alternate calling cards.
You have to dial an 800 number first,
and you get a tone,
and then you have to dial the number you're calling,
and then you dial your credit card number.
So it sounds like a bad idea,
because it's an inordinate number of digits to dial,
but it occurred to me that it might be an advantage.
It already has proved an advantage
with some of the COCOT telephones,
because a lot of times you can get through to an 800 number,
and especially with a local call in the state,
it's often impossible to override their choice of vendor
using a calling card.
But it occurred to me this might also be a way
to defeat caller ID.
In New Jersey, we don't have the option
of not identifying ourselves when we make a call.
And I was wondering if you or if...
I came in late tonight.
I don't know if FiberOptic is there,
but if anybody there knows what the deal is,
could this be used to override caller ID?
Well, Fiber isn't here tonight, George.
Sure, I have an idea about this.
First of all, if they're using the 800 numbers for access,
chances are they're using slightly older technology
at the front end of their system.
And if that's the case,
then those caller ID numbers aren't going to be forwarded
out the backside of that system.
So yes, it would provide a certain degree
of enhanced privacy.
The thing is, though, that if the network develops,
there's nothing to stop them
for just reasons of wanting to modernize their equipment
for putting something in which does that.
So it's probably a good idea.
See, Working Assets is a very good organization.
In fact, we supply their local telephone equipment
for their financial services department
over here in San Francisco.
They're very good people.
And if you call them up and express that concern,
if you write them a letter and say,
hey, we're concerned about this,
that if you upgrade your technology,
we want to make sure
that this doesn't have end-to-end caller ID,
chances are they'll respond positively to it.
But I think you're right.
And that's just another case
of how a little inconvenience at the front end
adds up to a lot of privacy
or a lot of some other preservation of your rights
at a different part of the system.
So it's a question of people standing up
and saying what it is that they want
and the company's hopefully listening.
Thank you very much for your call.
We're going to go to another call
and see if we can fit in a couple more this hour.
Good evening.
You're on the radio.
Yeah, hi.
Yeah, on the call of ID,
you know, I feel about that,
that there's enough lack of spontaneity,
you know, and I told the telephone company,
well, but it's mainly,
I think it's a very big invasion of privacy, you know.
And I was very irate with the telephone company
and said, how come you don't try to,
you know, you don't get my permission.
And I think that this is a minimum thing
we should strive for.
Rather than you having to call in to block a number,
they should get your permission,
you know, if you want to participate in this.
Don't you think that's a little more rational?
I think this is much bigger than,
you know, a lot of the civil service,
civil liberties groups have indicated.
Well, I'm in total agreement with you, sir.
They should ask you because they are changing the rules.
And if they're going to change the rules,
they should get someone's permission.
George, what do you think of that?
Well, that's exactly why we're offering person ID
as a voluntary service instead.
So for example, if you want to identify yourself
to someone's phone, you type in an access code,
which they'll give you that corresponds to your name
and the name appears on the screen.
It's something you have control over.
But if you want to surprise them with a happy birthday call
or something like that,
then you don't have to type that in if you don't want to.
It's kind of like a beeper, isn't it?
Where you put in whatever you want.
Right, exactly.
The way a paging system works,
you can put in whatever you want.
The reason the telephone companies
aren't offering this right now,
or one reason is because people could use that
to create a sort of fraudulent call situation
where those codes actually stand for messages.
And so the code appears on your phone
before you pick up the receiver
and you know what the message is
and the call isn't charged and so forth.
But you can do that with caller ID.
And here's how.
You get two payphones side by side.
They send their caller ID to a person's screen
and you use the payphones as dot and dash and Morse code.
You call, you let it ring twice, you hang up,
you pick up the other phone, you call.
You know, you could do that if you wanted to.
It would be a huge waste of time.
But, you know...
Well, there's an easier way with automated collect calls.
You can get a good sentence out on the...
when you record your name to send the collect call.
Right, exactly.
And, you know, here's another thing also.
A lot of these alternative long-distance carriers
do their answer supervision by timeout.
So, in other words, if you let it ring
for more than 30 seconds, you get charged.
If somebody picks it up instantly
and your call is less than 30 seconds long,
you don't get charged.
That's sort of disappearing now.
But it's just...
Some of these things that people are complaining about
are basically unintended results of the technology.
But it's just the case that when you implement something
on a massive enough scale,
inevitably there's going to be some people caught in it
who feel hurt by it.
And that's one of the reasons why we feel
the local telephone service
ought to be locally controlled by local people.
It ought to respond to local needs
because then whatever the local market wants...
Now, for example, in Chinatown,
before they went into dial service,
the operators were fluent
in five different Chinese dialects.
And instead of taking calls by number,
they took calls by person's name.
So instead of asking, number, please,
they'd ask, with whom do you wish to speak?
And they knew the local cultural etiquette
and they knew how to interact with people in that community.
And the service was much more personal
than you can have with a dial phone
or with a, you know, anything like that.
All right, sir, thank you very much for your call.
Okay, thank you.
Let's go to another call.
Good evening, you're on Off The Hook.
Uh, hello, Mr. Goldstein?
Sorry?
Mr. Goldstein?
Uh, yes, go ahead.
I'd like to ask you a favor.
Okay.
And then I'll tell you.
Can I call you somewhere
or you can get my phone off the,
off the, whatever you call it,
to call me back?
It's something, it has nothing to do with phone.
Uh, no, wait, I'm not sure I know what you're asking.
Uh, can you give me your call or your phone somewhere
so I can reach you?
Or can I give you my telephone off the air?
Uh, well, the...
So you can call me anytime
because it's something very important I want from you.
No, no money, no telephone, no...
Okay, all right.
Well, now I think what we'll have to do...
Okay, I know you can help me because,
you know, these people, but I cannot reach them.
Okay, uh, probably the best thing to do
is for you to either call after the program
or if you can't get through after the program,
write in and we'll try to handle it that way
and leave information that way.
Okay, thanks very much.
Let's go to another phone call.
Good evening.
Yes, hi.
Manuel, as far as,
are you even slightly worried about that suit?
That possible suit?
Well, of course, anytime a multi-million dollar corporation
threatens to sue you,
it's something that you don't take lightly.
But at the same time,
you have to weigh the disadvantages of backing down.
If you do back down and you agree with them
that printing a list of office locations
is something that they can control,
then that means that you've lost a battle
and other people probably will follow in your footsteps
and be intimidated by that company.
So, you know, it's a question of balance.
It's a question of, well,
do you sacrifice something of yours
to make things a little bit more democratic for other people?
It's a risk.
Everything in life is a risk.
So, of course, we're worried.
As of now, do you plan on backing down?
Well, no, we never plan on backing down.
That's certainly...
I can't believe...
By the stretch...
No stretch of my imagination can I believe...
Let's say they even win.
How could they possibly collect any money?
Because as everyone knows,
they have to prove damages.
Right.
Even if a judge says,
yeah, you obtained this information illegally,
how can they win a penny?
By what stretch of the imagination
can someone claim that they suffered monetary damages
because you published where their offices are?
20 years down the road,
if some bomber bombs one of these offices,
are they going to say that
because you published where this office was,
they're holding you responsible?
Well, anything is possible.
But I think part of the intent is to intimidate,
not so much necessarily to win a case
or even to start a case,
but to intimidate somebody,
therefore controlling them.
And if you do actually take it to a case
draining your opponent dry,
just in defending themselves,
which sometimes is enough.
Take my advice,
in a case like this,
defend yourself.
If you're not going to back down
and they do take you to court,
don't spend a penny on a lawyer
because there's no way any court,
I believe,
unless it's fixed,
going to give them monetary...
ruling their favor and give them money.
Well, there's also the possibility of countersuing
because of intimidation tactics and things like that.
But that's something we're going to be discussing
over the next few weeks.
Listen, sir, thank you very much for your support
and your call.
We are out of time.
George, I want to give you one more opportunity
to give the name and address of People's Telecom.
So people who are interested
either in starting something here in New York
or just contacting you
and either offering advice
or getting answers to questions can do so.
Yes, first of all,
community dial tone service
is being offered by our commercial branch,
Integrated Signal to Switch Networks Division.
And so the phone number on my desk
is area 510-644-8085.
That's 510-644-8085.
Remember, you're calling the West Coast,
so there's a time difference.
And if I'm not in the office,
I'll certainly call you back.
I can also be reached online.
My online address is gg at well.sf.ca.us.
That's the well,
which is a bulletin board service in Sausalito.
That's really great.
And thanks a lot for your time.
Still there?
Yeah, George, actually the tape broke.
So I'm going to ask you to talk
for about another 15 seconds
while I splice it back together.
Okay, sure.
Well, you know, here's something
that everyone in New York can do.
Seriously, start thinking about this.
Start thinking about
where your local community is at
and what types of telecommunication services
you want.
Because even if community dial tone
never comes to New York,
if you organize among yourselves,
if you think about what you really want to have
and what types of access you want
and what types of services you want,
you can get together
and you can start lobbying for it.
You might be able to find
another interconnect contractor out there
that's public spirited
that might be able to help you put it in.
If you live in a cooperative apartment,
let's say a co-op building
that has a lot of units in it
or something like that,
or I guess in New York,
the real estate situation is pretty impossible.
But if you live in a place
where the management are responsive to this,
you might be able to organize
to run your own telephone company.
If you're students in a university,
you might be able to do the same thing
as a cooperative service.
You might be able to find a contractor
that's able to put it in on a long-term contract
so you don't have to come up with a large fortune
in order to install it at first.
Okay, George, George.
That type of thing, you know.
So it's basically a matter of just get organized
and stand up for what you want.
And sooner or later, you'll have it.
Okay, that's great.
We are out of time, though.
The tape is fixed,
so we are going to play it now.
Yes, there it is.
Off the hook.
We'll be back again next Wednesday night at 10 p.m.
Thanks so much for calling in and listening.
Thanks, George, for being our guest tonight.
And we'll be back again next week.
This is Emanuel Goldstein.
Have a good week.
She was a road rider.
Now my court is in session.
Will you please stand?
In the 60s,
the acknowledged king of ska or bluebeat was Prince Buster.
His records dominated the charts,
jukeboxes, and sound systems.
Wherever Prince Buster appeared,
whether in nightclubs, theaters, or concert halls,
sold-out signs were evident.
On Friday, April 30th, from midnight to 3 a.m.,
join the Midnight Ravers
as we deliver the message of Prince Buster
with an exclusive live interview.
We will discuss his 30-year career as a singer,
songwriter, producer, philosopher, and his genius.
This retrospective on the musical career
of one of the pioneers of ska, rocksteady, and reggae
comes just as his work is finding new critical acceptance
and popularity.
The message, Friday, April 30th, at midnight,
on listener-sponsored, non-commercial radio,
WBAI 99.5 FM on your dial.
The legendary...
Good evening.
In the news tonight,
hate crimes visit the high court.
Should racists receive longer sentences?
Inmates and negotiators come to terms in Lucasville
in a 10-day takeover.
Will Congress pull the plug on an AIDS hotline
aimed at changing sexual behavior?
And in New York,
one of the toughest clinic access bills in the country
is introduced into the city council.
With these and other stories,
I'm Laura Seidel in New York
with Verna Avery-Brown in Washington.
And this is the news for Wednesday, April 21st, 1993.
First to Verna Avery-Brown in Washington.
The prison siege in Lucasville, Ohio is over.
Bill Cohen has the story.
Five guards held hostage by 450 inmates
at the Lucasville prison since Easter Sunday
are to be freed.
A lawyer for the inmates has announced
that prisoners and corrections officials
have agreed on a 21-point settlement,
and that means the inmates will soon be giving up.
That surrender, the inmate lawyer is calling it an evacuation,
is being broadcast live on radio and television.
It's a protection the inmates had asked for,
believing they will be safer from retaliation
if cameras and microphones are trained on them.
Other than that, though,
the inmates don't seem to have won major concessions.
Prison officials have promised only to review
many of the inmates' concerns
on issues like better pay for inmate workers,
more phone calls, and better medical care.
And the rebel inmates won't be shielded from prosecution
for the seven prisoners and one guard they reportedly killed.
Amnesty is not part of the agreement.
For Pacifica Radio News, I'm Bill Cohen reporting.
Authorities have recovered 40 bodies
from the burned-down Davidian compound in Waco, Texas.
Justice Department spokesperson Carl Stern
disputes the contention of a cult survivor
that a federal vehicle caused the blaze
by overturning lanterns.
Stern contends a surveillance helicopter with a heat detector
saw the fire start up in three different parts
of the compound at the same time.
Secretary of State Warren Christopher today
announced the Middle East peace talks
will resume in Washington on April 27th.
Daoud Khattab in East Jerusalem
reports on the Palestinian reaction.
Palestinians are concerned that the peace talks
will only relieve the Israelis of international pressures on it
without having to make substantive concessions.
What is most worrisome to Palestinians
is that the Israelis will not carry out
many of the promises that it has made to Palestinians
via third parties.
The Israelis have promised to speed up the return
of Palestinians deported four months ago,
as well as to allow the Palestinians expelled
over the last 25 years to return.
It has also promised to participate in a joint committee
with Palestinians and international bodies
that will monitor human rights violations
in occupied territories.
All these promises will now be put to the test.
The PLO leadership has indicated
that it will give the Israelis a chance
to fulfill their promises.
For Pacifica Radio, this is Daoud Khattab
reporting from East Jerusalem.
Environmentalists are applauding President Clinton's announcement
that he will sign the biodiversity treaty,
something the previous administration refused to do
at last year's Rio summit.
Clinton also set a goal of reducing the emissions
of greenhouse gases to 1990 levels by the year 2000.
Among the other green ticket items,
Clinton announced today an executive order
that requires federal facilities to set a voluntary goal
of halving toxic pollutants by the year 2000.
Poor neighborhoods in our cities
suffer most often from toxic pollution.
Cleaning up the toxic waste will create new jobs
in these neighborhoods for those people
and make them safer places to live,
to work and to do business.
Clinton also pushed for his scaled back
$12 billion jobs bill,
something the White House says he'll continue to do
despite a successful Republican filibuster.
Today, the Senate Republicans held together
and prevented a vote on the measure.
Republican Bob Dole of Kansas says
all the spending must be matched by cuts.
If we're going to do anything on this floor,
we pay for it.
We pay for it.
Then we might be able to work out some package
that would satisfy the great majority of the American people,
if not the majority of our colleagues.
The U.S. envoy who went to Vietnam
to check out a Soviet document on American POWs
says there are factual problems with the document.
In the details,
we haven't found any of the facts to be accurate.
Now, there are other facts
about which we haven't yet dealt with.
The document is a Russian translation
of a Vietnamese general's briefing
and indicates that in 1972,
North Vietnam held three times as many American prisoners
as the Vietnamese said they held.
Following a White House meeting today,
General John Vesey told reporters
some of the items in the Russian document
are contrary to what is known
from America's own prisoners of war.
The Russian document maintains
American prisoners were separated by rank.
Vesey says that's wrong,
as are a number of other details.
If there were an additional 669 prisoners,
it seems logical that our people would have seen them.
They did not see them.
That our prisoners were separated
according to political progressivity
and released that way.
That is clearly not the case.
They were released chronologically
according to capture,
except for those that were seriously injured.
The number of colonels is wrong.
Vesey says he believes the Russian document is authentic.
It's just inaccurate.
Those are the stories topping the news.
The race for mayor of Los Angeles
has come down to a Ross Perot-style
conservative businessman
and a liberal city councilman.
The two were the top vote-getters
in a primary election,
largely overshadowed by the trial
of the Rodney King civil rights trial.
Frank Stoltz reports.
62-year-old Richard Reardon
and 41-year-old city councilman Michael Wu
are political opposites
with clearly different visions of Los Angeles.
Reardon, who captured 33% of the vote in the primary,
calls himself tough enough to turn L.A. around.
Wu, who garnered 24% of the vote,
describes himself as someone
who can bring people together
in a city with more than 140 ethnic,
racial and cultural peoples.
It was a theme he reiterated to supporters
at a victory party last night.
We have come together in an historic campaign
to reclaim the heart and soul of this city
from the chaotic forces of fear,
hopelessness, racial enmity and violence
which have threatened to tear our city apart.
Wu, the first Chinese-American
elected to the L.A. City Council,
was an anti-war activist in the 1960s.
He spent most of his life in government
and says he would use government
to serve poor people.
Reardon, on the other hand,
is a venture capitalist
who's emphasized strict fiscal responsibility
and an expanded police force.
Political consultant, Kerman Maddox.
Reardon is a Republican, he's a conservative,
he's been a supporter of Ronald Reagan,
George Bush, Pete Wilson.
Reardon's pumped $2 million of his own dollars
into his campaign,
prompting accusations he bought his place
in the runoff election.
But Reardon's conservative get-tough message
appealed to a lot of Angelenos,
frustrated and fearful
of an economically depressed city
getting more and more violent.
Interestingly, that frustration and fear
did not translate into a victory
for a ballot measure
which would have added a thousand police officers
to the LAPD.
The measure would have required
an increase in property taxes,
something voters were unwilling to go along with.
For Pacifica Network News,
I'm Frank Stoltz in Los Angeles.
An innovative project
aimed at changing the sexual behavior
of gay and bisexual men
to help them avoid contracting the HIV virus.
Is in political jeopardy.
Project Aries,
a government-funded telephone hotline,
is sinking fast in a sea of partisan politics.
George Howland reports.
Project Aries, would you hold please?
Project Aries, Leona, how can I help you?
In an ordinary-looking office building
in Seattle's University District,
an innovative research program
is underway to help gay and bisexual men
reduce their risk of getting AIDS.
University of Washington professor Roger Roffman
received a four-year,
two-million-dollar research grant
from the National Institutes of Health, or NIH,
to set up Project Aries.
There's a minority of gay and bisexual men
who are finding it difficult
to consistently be sexually safer.
Some of these individuals are very closeted
and some of them live in geographic areas
that are far removed
from communities that offer AIDS prevention programs.
Well, what Project Aries does is over,
tries to overcome these barriers
for reaching closeted people
and people in rural areas
by delivering AIDS prevention counseling
over the telephone.
Project Aries offers 14 weeks
of free, anonymous telephone counseling.
The participants use an 800 number
to call the program
from all across the U.S. and Canada.
Aries uses a group therapy approach
in which six clients and two counselors
hold a weekly conference call.
The program has a sex-positive,
gay-affirmative philosophy
and has counseled over 300 men.
But funding for its final year
is now in doubt.
The project's troubles began last September
when a conservative newspaper,
the New York Guardian,
ran an article about it.
Professor Roffman explains.
The article was pretty disappointing
because of its misinformation.
It was titled,
1-800-SODOMY,
and that was a pretty nasty swipe
at what we're doing.
After that article appeared,
we found ourselves getting lots and lots
of very angry telephone calls
from people who believed
that the government had no business
providing funds for this kind of project.
The article was reprinted in a newsletter
published by the right-wing Christian activist
Reverend Donald Wildman.
Angry constituents began calling Congress
and rallying the opposition to Aries.
Republican Representative Bob Dornan of California
is a leading critic of the program
He told me that,
quote,
Project Aries is a rip-off of taxpayers' money
for male homosexuals to get it on,
get it off,
and talk dirty on telephones.
By March 1993,
Texas Republican Representative Sam Johnson
was working to cut funding for Project Aries.
However, the congressman denies
that this is part of the nationwide backlash
against homosexuals.
His spokesman, Gordon Hensley,
says that Johnson viewed it
as a simple matter of wasteful federal spending.
Project Aries was essentially a duplicative program
and what he's looking for across the board,
whether it's domestic or defense spending,
are examples of what he deems wasteful programs.
Seattle's Democratic Representative Jim McDermott
defends Project Aries
and accuses Johnson of harboring an anti-gay agenda.
Well, I wouldn't expect him to admit
that he's a bigot,
but I think if you look at their budget,
his interests,
he's not afraid to spend federal money
on a super collider of $10 billion in the state of Texas.
He spends all his time on that
and is worried about a little $300,000 program
dealing with the major illness in this society.
Project Aries is slated to receive $339,000 in 1994
to complete its research.
Professor Rothman says that the money is a wise investment.
Since it costs $200,000 to treat one person
from the time of infection to the time of death,
the amount of money that the government
would ostensibly save
by eliminating our fourth year of funding
would be entirely offset
if we prevented simply two people
from becoming seropositive.
Last month, Representative Johnson
attached an amendment to the NIH reauthorization bill
which cut Aries funding for next year
and forbids any future grants to the program.
The measure passed 278 to 139.
The issue now goes to a joint conference committee
on NIH funding
before the House and Senate will vote on it again.
No one is making any predictions on the outcome.
However, it is clear that Aries funding is in jeopardy
due to attacks from both deficit hawks
and members of Congress who oppose gay rights.
Reporting from Seattle for Pacifica Network News,
I'm George Howland.
Wisconsin's hate crime law
made its way to the Supreme Court today.
What's dramatic about this case
is that an African-American was the perpetrator,
not the victim of the hate crime.
In the case of the state of Wisconsin versus Todd Mitchell,
Mitchell, who is black,
led an attack against a white male
after becoming angry
after watching the film Mississippi Burning,
a film about white Southern segregationists.
Pacifica's Don Rush was at the court this morning
and has a look at the case.
One October night back in 1989,
a young African-American named Todd Mitchell
had just returned from seeing the film Mississippi Burning.
Outside the Rambler apartments,
he and his friends were incensed
over a scene in which a Klansman
had beaten up a black youth as he prayed.
Suddenly, the 20-year-old Mitchell asked his friends
if they felt hyped up to move on some white people.
A moment later, he pointed to a young white boy
and shouted, go get him.
Nine of the young men crossed the street
and beat him unconscious.
Thus, the bigotry of the turbulent 1960s
reached across the years to produce the reaction
of these African-American youth.
Ron Walters, a professor at Howard University.
It was a wrong reaction to try to target whites
and beat them simply because they were white.
But the irony, of course, is that the movie
that sparked the emotion
was one of white violence against blacks.
And I think that this shows us
not only the power of the media to evoke these emotions,
but also the fact that the past
really is still very much with us.
Mitchell was ultimately convicted
and sentenced to two years in prison
for his role in the assault.
But another two years was added on
under Wisconsin's hate crime law.
So today, Lynn Edelman, Mitchell's attorney,
came before the Supreme Court to argue
that the law was a violation of the First Amendment.
He told the court what the Wisconsin legislature was after
was a suppression of ideas it does not like,
not just conduct,
when it approved the sentencing enhancement provision.
The enhancer, which is what this case is about,
not the underlying conduct,
punishes only motive, only bigotry.
See, that's how this statute works.
You just add on punishment
if you got a motive that the state doesn't like.
But Wisconsin Attorney General James Doyle fired back,
saying that the law was directed
against discriminatory conduct on the part of the defendant.
And he said it did not matter
what overall views Mitchell had about race relations.
In this case, we don't know whether the defendant
held racially biased views or not.
We do know, under the proof of the case,
that he picked out a victim
simply because of the victim's race,
and that's what makes it punishable under Wisconsin law.
But Washington Post colonist Nat Hintoff,
who opposes the law,
says there is no doubt that investigating motives
leads to McCarthy-era tactics on the part of the authorities.
The question is, when you defend yourself,
and you say to the district attorney, let's say,
I couldn't have done this because of race.
I've never been bigoted in my life.
I have a photograph of William Du Bois on my wall.
Then the prosecutor can investigate and subpoena
whatever books or magazines you have at home.
They can ask your friends and enemies
if you've ever said anything derogatory.
They can go in the local bar
and ask what kind of jokes you tell.
That's McCarthyism under the guise
of going against discrimination.
As arguments proceeded in the courtroom today,
State Attorney General Doyle moved into an area
that appeared to open up serious questions about his case.
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wondered
if a state legislature could pass a law
that would increase the penalty against draft card burners
who opposed government policy.
Doyle suggested the court would have to take
a very close look at such a law,
but did not disavow it as unconstitutional.
Attorney Edelman pounced on the comparison.
Under this statute, David O'Brien,
who was convicted of burning a draft card,
could have had an increased penalty of five years in jail
if he burned his draft card
because of his opposition to the Vietnam War.
After a long silence in the courtroom,
Justice Clarence Thomas weighed in
with a question of his own.
He wondered if the law applied to individuals
singling out victims of the same race,
and Edelman appeared to say that it could.
Outside the courthouse, State Attorney General Doyle
thought Justice Thomas' question was telling.
It doesn't matter whether somebody is racially biased or not.
A person of one race could select a person of the same race,
and if they have selected the person because of the race,
for example, a black person believing
that perhaps attacking another black person,
the case the police won't investigate it as thoroughly,
or they might escape detection,
would be subject to the Wisconsin crime.
If the court were to rule against Wisconsin,
State Attorney General Doyle says
it would put a host of anti-discrimination laws in doubt.
Don Rush, Pacifica Network News, Washington.
And you're listening to the news on WBAI in New York.
I'm Laura Seidel.
In health news, some 200 nurses at the Bronx-Lebanon hospital
spent their lunch hour on the picket line today
to protest what they say is a dangerous shortage of nurses at the hospital.
Jose Santiago was there and filed this report.
Sixteen patients?
One nurse!
Twenty patients?
One nurse!
Forty patients?
One nurse!
Forty patients?
One nurse!
Forty patients?
One nurse!
Voices of anger filled the streets
outside both divisions of the Bronx-Lebanon hospital today,
the Fulton division at Fulton Avenue and 169th Street,
and the newly built Main division at Mount Eden Avenue and the Grand Concourse.
According to the nurses,
hospital management is placing its patients at risk
by failing to replace nurses who have left their jobs.
The nurses say right now the two hospital divisions
are operating with as many as 100 fewer nurses
than required by state law.
Maria Fuentes is a nurse representative
with the New York State Nurses Association, the Nurses Union.
Patients are not getting the care
that they're supposed to be getting according to the law.
These nurses have been working here under the worst conditions.
They protest the assignments every day
saying that they are registered professional nurses,
that they are responsible for the patients for whom they care,
and therefore they cannot without protest accept the assignment.
They let management know every day about the working conditions here,
the hazardous conditions for the patients.
And everybody's turning their head and saying,
we're sorry, we can't do anything, our hands are tied.
And it's just gotten to a point that eventually
there will be a strike in this hospital
if management doesn't wake up and realize
that the registered professional nurses of this facility are the backbone.
Union officials say they successfully fought
the hospital's attempt to eliminate some 40 more nurses positions.
They have reported the situation to the state health department,
which oversees hospitals.
And the state is presently reviewing
whether the nurse vacancies at Bronx-Lebanon
pose a threat to hospital patients.
Barry Waldman is a spokesperson
for the New York State Nurses Association.
We have situations that put patients' lives in immediate danger.
We've got staffing situations that are abominable.
Where you've got no nurse in the recovery room
even while they're doing surgery in the operating room
and patients are coming out.
We've got three nurses in the emergency room
trying to care for 90 patients.
We've got nurses in the intensive care unit
where the most critically ill patients are.
And they have half of the minimal staffing levels demanded by the state.
I wouldn't want to be a patient here, frankly.
If I were bleeding from the carotid artery,
I'd tell the ambulance driver to keep going.
Hospital officials could not be reached for comment.
We attempted to speak with Errol Schneer,
vice president of public relations,
but our calls were not returned.
Like many other hospitals in the area, however,
Bronx-Lebanon is caught in a financial squeeze
caused by, among other things,
a reduction in reimbursements for services
on the part of the state.
Because hospitals are essential,
particularly in the low-income areas
like those served by Bronx-Lebanon,
the state often steps in
and keeps hospitals financially afloat.
The nurses' union concedes that
Bronx-Lebanon is struggling financially,
but union spokesperson Waldman questions the wisdom
behind some of the cost-saving measures
the hospital has taken.
Management decided to eliminate flex time
in the intensive care unit.
Almost all of the nurses in that unit quit,
and they now forced medical-surgical nurses
to go into the intensive care unit
and learn a very high-tech craft on the job.
And boy, that is a very dangerous situation.
We need the hospital to wake up and realize
that without nurses, you can't run a hospital.