Find that stillness, those moments, all the time.
Does the presence of nature have any particular value in the way you would see a context that is favorable to stillness?
And by nature I mean, when we're affecting nature, there isn't much wilderness left.
Mankind gets its hands everywhere.
But what I'm wondering is, in a world where we're very much surrounded by our own artifacts,
things are made, they're manufactured, they're altered by human beings,
that world is very much upon us, as opposed to, as you mentioned earlier, a walk outside in the woods, a brook, birds.
How can we achieve this stillness, even in a world of total artifact?
Yes, I think we can. I think we can.
So we don't want to get too romantic about nature?
No, no. And I think there's a great danger that we somehow romantically identify meditation with mountaintops and forests and all this stuff.
Well, those are the pictures you get from some of the Chinese Zen masters.
Well, of course, of course. And there's a reason for that.
Certainly there is a quality of stillness when one, and a quality of just the sheer sort of mystery and glory of life itself,
that we find, say, in a quiet field full of flowers or in a pine forest or on a mountaintop.
There is something enormously inspiring about that.
And I think that it's valuable that we do reconnect with that natural life.
But the danger then is to mistake, is to get confused and think, well, that's really, you know, where it's at.
And as soon as I get back into the city, then it's back to hell. That's wrong.
That the Buddha described, he said, all dharmas are, as it were, of the same taste.
All dharmas?
All phenomena.
Dharmas are phenomena?
In this context, yes. Dharmas are phenomena.
All phenomena have the same taste.
In other words, whether we are in an utterly artifact-driven sort of place,
like on top of a skyscraper in an office lit entirely by fluorescent lights and staring at a computer screen,
that is still, we're still encountering the same, you know, the same basically sense data that are impinging upon our experience.
And there's no reason why that could not be a context for enlightenment
any more than the rather classic romantic notion of sitting by a waterfall in a beautiful Chinese forest.
And that is where the dharma, the practice of spirituality or whatever,
really needs to be most finely honed and brought into the working place of people
and not romantically identified with something else.
Now, in the United States, we have a fundamental principle called the separation of church and state.
And this very much conditions the kind of education that the state can make available.
Do you see any problem with that?
It's a good question.
In England, we don't have that division, as you know.
And what that has led to recently in Britain is a reform of the Education Act,
in which by the age of 16, every child who leaves the state education system
must be familiar with the ideas of the six basic religions of Britain,
which now include Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, as well as Christianity and Judaism.
Now, there's something, I think, rather good about that.
It means that in the actual educational environment in the school system,
children are at least exposed to these other possibilities,
and they're not being exposed to exclusively a dominant religious tradition, say, as would be Christianity.
So there is a pluralism of religious awareness, spiritual awareness, entering into the state system.
But on the other hand, I must admit, I do rather admire the separation of church and state in America.
But I feel very ambivalent about it, really.
The thing for me, really, is the question as to whether Buddhism really is a religion,
or whether it has degraded into a religion.
The problem with the state approach in Britain, for example,
is that it assumes that Buddhism is of the same order as, say, Islam or Sikhism,
and that it is presented to children as being something that is some metaphysical belief system
that one can choose or not to choose,
and also something that is very much present in certain ethnic minority communities.
So it gives a rather distorted image of Buddhism.
And that is not necessarily a good thing.
So, I don't know.
I think that if we really question this,
we might find that Buddhism, and even perhaps some of the other movements that we call religions,
are actually much broader than that.
They are, as it were, cultural forms that have religious components.
And so what I'm arguing in my book at the moment, in fact,
is that Buddhism is perhaps more adequately seen as a culture that includes religion,
but is not reducible to it.
Now, what do you mean by religion in this context?
Because you're saying there's something about Buddhism which is religion and which isn't,
and then I was thinking, well, maybe the same could be said about Christianity.
Yes, indeed.
The religious element is that of, let's say, belief, primarily.
And I find myself often in interfaith dialogues, for example,
and I'm addressed in that context as a believer,
as somebody who presumably has a worldview that he or she can neither prove nor disprove,
that they accept on trust, that is given to them by some other authority.
Let's say, for example, the views about rebirth and karma in Buddhism,
or heaven and hell in Christianity.
And Buddhism in that sense is seen as a religion,
in the sense that I choose to believe things that I haven't experienced,
I do not know about, but I accept on trust.
Now, to that extent, I do not consider myself a religious person,
because I'm not prepared to take that kind of irrational step.
But the way religion, the way things have become religions,
I think can often be seen as a degradation of a spirit of inquiry.
The root of many of these great traditions,
we find not an insistence upon people believing certain things,
but rather an opening to people questioning their lives in a particular way.
It's the questions, I feel, that are more important, not the answers.
Aldous Huxley once said to me, after a speech he gave in San Francisco on the mind,
he'd spoken about how education was so deficient in the modern world,
and it was just going about it in the entirely wrong way,
and that another aspect of the human being had to be engaged
if education was really going to be useful.
And I scratched my head, I didn't know exactly what he was referring to.
And after the speech, as he walked out of the room,
I said, well, what are you talking about?
Is there something I can read?
And he referred me to Zen, I believe it's Zen Mind, Zen Bones,
the collection of koans and stories by Rapp?
Rapps, Paul Rapps.
Paul Rapps, I think it was.
This was 61, so it would have been that pocketbook.
So I want to bring that back in the context.
Even if you're studying religions as historical narratives,
that's not really what Huxley had in mind,
and I don't think it's what you have in mind.
There is a way to engage the person that fosters character
and that will actually come to terms with issues like fear and greed and envy
and such vices, and that's not a narrative.
That's something else.
If we're barred from going over the line from narrative into that something else,
where does that leave education?
I think in this sense, I feel education is once again very much about
reconnecting with the primary questions that we ask
rather than simply learning certain answers to those questions
that have been preserved in, say, the religions.
And the practice of both Buddhism and I think all the great religions really
is really about being aware of the very root question,
what does it mean to live?
What is it that a human life is for?
And if we reconnect with that question,
I think we reconnect with something very essential within ourselves.
And through meditation, for example,
we also open ourselves to the possibility of another response.
And it's that response that I'm interested in.
And that response is not something that can simply be dictated
by the traditional forms of religion,
but I think it's something that needs to be a response that comes from
the very individual nature of our concrete experience here and now.
So meditation can take us to a point in which we reconnect with that question
and it can open us to the possibilities of an imaginative and a creative response
that is one that addresses the needs of our times now.
Okay. We're going to have to take a break. We'll come back.
I want to push a little deeper into this question of how should young people be educated?
I mean, we're all young in the sense that we need further learning.
And if you're calling for meditation to come to terms with how should one live,
can we have an educational system that ignores that practice?
And what about all that?
We'll get into it when we come back.
I'm talking to Stephen Batchelor. This is We The People.
We'll be right back.
And you're tuned to listener-supported, commercial-free radio WBAI in New York, 99.5 FM.
Coming up at 8 p.m. in about 20 minutes or so, Off The Hook with Emanuel Goldstein,
followed by Housing Notebook, produced by Scott Somer.
City in Exile at 10 p.m.
Tonight on City in Exile, Hisu Koo and Andrea Clare speak with the editors of Concrete Jungle,
reconsidering nature in the city, some other subjects, some other guests,
as well as Poisoned Arts at 10.45.
If you're a late-night worker or an early-morning riser,
tune in to Night Drum with Brother Shine at 3.30 a.m.
Back to We The People with Jerry Brown.
You're back with We The People. This is Jerry Brown.
If you wish to get in touch or support We The People, our number is 800-426-1112.
We also have tapes of these shows, this one or those that have taken place before.
You can contact us by using the 800 number.
In the studio, Stephen Batchelor, the author of Buddhism Without Beliefs,
The Awakening of the West, and The Faith to Doubt is here,
and we're talking about really the basic stuff on what it is to live,
how we confront our ignorance, our hatred, and our desires.
A little more on this education business.
Because nothing really can be more important than the context of learning,
starting out at our most formative years,
and now you are in an educational setting for people in their 20s and above.
But before that, we're picking up a lot of conditioning.
So do you have any thoughts on how you would like to see that situation of learning show up and take place?
Well, I think one of the things that perhaps could be brought more into the school education system
is something akin to meditation.
I know there's a great reluctance amongst educators to even embrace that idea.
But remember, in America, you can have your own schools, you can have homeschooling.
So we're totally free here.
Right, okay.
So what is really up for question is how to design the setting for younger people.
And then, after we talk about that, of course, I'm going to want to know, what about us?
At 60 or 40, I don't think it's time to stop.
Well, I think there are two things that conventional state education, at least in Europe, does not offer children.
And that is the capacity to ask questions that do not have readily available answers.
In other words, let's say spiritual questions.
But outside a religious context, to get in touch with the very, to remain in touch with the mystery of life.
I mean, what's wonderful about small children is that they have this natural sense of wonder, this natural sense of awe.
And it almost seems that the education system is designed to get rid of that,
to get them into being nice, rational, clear-headed, ambitious consumers and professionals and so on.
I have a hunch that's what Huxley was talking about.
Could well have been.
And I know when I was a kid, I always had this funny feeling when I was at school,
that what really mattered to me was never talked about.
I had this funny feeling that my existence, I didn't use that language, of course,
but that my own life was never really addressed, that I was learning about things.
But I was never really given a language or a practice that would actually address that question.
Well, when I was in public school originally, I started out in public school,
and then in the fifth grade I went to a Catholic school.
But in those first years, I also had to go to catechism class once or twice a week.
And that was in the basement of a church.
And it was kind of a, I don't know, musty place, a little bit dark,
and they had these pictures of saints and stories from the Bible and Noah's Ark.
And I can still recall that this seemed to be about some kind of reality
or something that seemed very special and something that I wanted to know a lot more about.
And that's probably why ultimately I went and entered a seminary after I'd gotten out of high school.
But it's that there's a sense in which in the programmed order of standardization,
which is the school, that there's a lot, intuition, emotions, spiritual, whatever the words are,
we need to be pointing at something else.
How would you frame that, or how would you react to that?
Well, yeah, I have a very similar experience.
I was actually, my family was humanists, and they excluded me from all religious education as a child.
But the story that really hit me when I was about 14 or 15 was the story of Plato's cave.
And this came in one of these classes that was really just a one-off thing.
And that story really hit me.
And the, in other words, stories that really point to the very questions of life itself.
But it's all very well, I think, to bring in those questions,
but there also, I think, needs to be some kind of education in ways in which we can be with those questions
and allow those questions to be real for us.
Now, that's what you'd call practice.
Yeah, practice, meditation.
We don't even have to use the word meditation,
but cultivating a skill to be still and to be quiet rather than to be active and to be busy.
Our education system seems to be almost entirely designed towards being active, to being busy,
and to, as it were, achieving certain levels of acquisition of knowledge.
And to engaging only a part of yourself.
Only engaging, well, the intellect, effectively.
And there's not really what has recently been called the cultivation of an emotional intelligence
or a spiritual intelligence.
And that, I think, is really what is lacking.
Engaging the intellect, would you say that's a good...
No, I mean, I don't think it is, so I shouldn't even phrase the question that way.
That does not seem like a way to build character.
No, I don't think it does.
And particularly for people who are not, as it were, temperamentally intellectual.
For people who are, then I think that can be a very enriching and very valuable way.
But it more or less privileges a certain type of person, the intellectual.
Our system devalues people who are primarily relating to life through their feelings,
through their emotions, through their intuitions.
And those capacities are, as it were, subordinated entirely to the preeminence of intellect.
So, sitting with, living with, facing, confronting the questions of who am I,
what is it to be a human being,
those are certainly not going to show up in the increasingly standardized dispensing of complex data that schools represent.
No, and nor can they be assessed in any way that could be done through an exam system.
You can't, as it were, become an expert in that. You can't test it.
You don't think we could have national standards?
I don't think so.
Well, then, and yet, on the one hand, there's a call for national standards in this country, from all sides.
And on the other, there's a bemoaning about, essentially, bad character.
That's what crime is all about. That's what family values talk is all about.
There's a widespread sense that character is deficient.
There's a loss of good character, good habits.
And on the other hand, there seems to be a complete confusion about how to actually,
I don't know if the word is instill character, that has a kind of a Catholic ring to it, authoritarian ring,
or create a context where character can naturally evolve.
Well, could it be also that in emphasizing the intellect in the educational process,
we are, as it were, excluding character to some degree?
That if we could find a way of educating in which all aspects of the person were addressed and somehow nurtured,
then I think we would have the foundation for character.
But what is character, anyway? I mean, it's not something you can, as it were, program people with.
I think character emerges out of an experience of the fullness of one's life,
rather than feeling oneself boxed into some compartment,
and particularly if one, say, is not intellectually inclined,
then a very artificial compartment in terms of who one is,
that understandably will lead to some kind of rebellion, some kind of alienation from what is expected of you.
And that, I think it's a question of coming down to those very basic experiences we all have of being in a body,
being with emotions, being with feelings, being able to be still with that,
being able to accept what's going on, being able to acknowledge and just rejoice, in a way,
the fact that we are here at all, and that is mysterious.
Well, let's take up this basic question.
Being here, it's fragile. It's durable on one hand, but just to walk outside, you get hit by a car,
the wrong kind of a microbe, we're very sick.
So fear is not something that, well, of course I'm fearful.
Now, how do we get at fear?
Well, I think...
Are you promising that through meditation we're going to have, fear won't be such a big deal?
Possibly. Let's take, for example, the whole issue of death.
Now, this is something that is not addressed in the school system.
Everybody, all the kids presumably know they're going to die at some point.
But the whole reality of death, the acknowledgement that life entails death,
the fact that one's life is not just about the achievement of some kind of endless scale of success and ambition,
but is one that will ultimately and inevitably end in one's not being here at all.
Could we find ways in education to actually open children to that wholeness of life, which includes death?
That, I think, would already begin to touch on some of the very deepest anxieties that human beings experience,
both as children and as they grow older.
And yet there's no context, there's no structure in our system
whereby we can really educate people to be with those anxieties and to be with those fears
and to, as it were, really accept themselves in that totality.
And that, too, could have something to do with character, as it's called.
And that, I think, is a strength of, say, some of the religious traditions, Catholicism or whatever,
is that there is that much stronger sense of death.
There is that sense that this is not the only experience we'll ever have.
And that is so lost now.
Okay. Now, this is not the only experience we'll ever have.
So you're talking about life after death?
How do you deal with this issue of dying?
Well, I would not deal with it in terms of trying to construct some theory
of what it is that happens after death.
My own idea is, in fact, that by whatever theories we have as to what happens after death,
be it a theory of reincarnation or be it a theory of entering a Christian paradise
or be it a theory of everything simply stopping and there being nothing,
I think all of those are theories, all of those are conceptual devices
to deal with what is essentially mysterious.
And I think all those views, whether eternalistic or nihilistic,
are in some way a denial of death.
That death is the great mystery.
And by trying to contain it within any human theory,
we have, as it were, locked it into a category of the intellect.
And that may be consoling and it may be satisfying in some way,
but I wonder if it really does address the reality of death.
All right.
The ending of life.
Okay. So if we're not going to be consoled by some construct of what's in store for us,
how does one deal with the fear of death?
Because it's certainly a very real fear.
I think it has to do with learning to accept the unknown.
Learning to accept that our lives and our deaths are not things that we can predict,
are not things that we can have any kind of rational constraint over.
And once more, learning to simply be still with what is.
If we can learn to be accepting of the mystery of this moment,
which contains an extraordinary unknown,
that meditation, I don't want to keep harking back to meditation,
but whatever we call it, this capacity to be still and to be open with what is now
is already an acceptance of what is unknown.
As the mind becomes more still, as we begin to look more carefully,
just say, at the feelings in our own body,
we realize more and more that what we've taken for granted as familiar
is, in another sense, simultaneously profoundly unfamiliar.
The very fact that we are here, the very fact that we exist
is already utterly unfamiliar in a sense.
And that is already the unknown.
And Western education is so much about seeking to contain everything within the known
and to define everything as knowable.
And it's a flight from the challenge of life as mystery,
the challenge of life as unknown.
How about pain?
Now, you're talking now about the fear of death, the fear of the unknown.
Pain is very clear.
Yes.
It's not pleasant.
It can be excruciating.
Yes.
How do you deal with that?
Well, pain, too, is...
There is, of course, the sheer physicality of pain, which is unpleasant.
But I think there's also an enormous element that we, as it were, add on to that
by resisting it, by fearing it, by hating it.
The more that we, as it were, seek to distance ourselves from it, to deny it,
the more, in fact, paradoxically, that actually intensifies it.
So, again, I think an educational process that would actually address the issue of pain,
that would allow us to, as it were, be able to be with pain
rather than to encourage this instinctive aversion to it
or this instinctive idea that if there's pain, we can find some way to nullify it,
numb it, tranquilize it through drugs or whatever it is.
That very strategy, I think, is one that serves to make pain all that more unacceptable,
all that more deniable.
Didn't Buddha start with the experience that life is suffering?
The Buddha started with the experience...
Well, life is suffering is not something the Buddha himself actually said.
The first truth of the Buddha is there is anguish.
I prefer the word anguish to suffering.
Suffering is too broad.
It's an acknowledgement and an acceptance and an understanding that life is imperfect,
that we... the very fact of death, for example, is an indication of imperfection,
that that is where we begin, yes, with the acceptance and the acknowledgement of anguish.
That doesn't mean that we passively say, oh, well, it's too bad, it's the way things are.
But it's really a learning to be with anguish,
and that's, let's say, the existential anguish of existence,
as well as the fears and the pains that we go through in life,
to, as it were, enter into a more accepting and creative relationship with pain.
That is where we begin, yes.
Now, is this going to lead to some kind of activism,
or, as was often put in the books that I read about Buddhism in my earlier years,
just passivity, okay, get into one's own mind,
and people dying and starving and social injustice,
all that's okay because you're dealing with all these inner states of your own mind.
Well, that is, of course, a rather stereotype view of Buddhism that is still very prevalent.
But it comes very much from the ways in which Buddhism was negatively perceived
very much in the 19th century by both Christian missionaries and by Western rationalists.
If you look at this history of Buddhism,
there certainly have been periods in which Buddhism has fallen prey to introversion and so on,
but also periods in which Buddhism has been at the forefront of social and political change in Asia.
The question of anguish, really, then, is about starting with the immediate personal experience of that.
But as one's experience of anguish becomes, as it were, more accepted,
one begins to realize that it's not just my anguish,
that suffering, that pain is beyond the domain of me.
And there comes the compassion.
Exactly, yes.
Okay, and on that note, we're going to have to stop.
Stephen Batchelor, thank you very much.
Thank you, Jerry.
Author of Buddhism Without Beliefs, The Faith to Doubt, The Awakening of the West,
and Jim Bennett for engineering, thank you very much,
and Mo Irwin for producing.
Good night.
On August 16th, join us in a walk and demonstration through Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn,
a walk to honor our political prisoners and prisoners of war.
Mumia Abu-Jamal, Matulu Shakur, Bashir Hamid, Abdul-Haq, and many others fought for community control of schools.
They fought for safe streets.
They fought against drug dealers, and they fought against police brutality.
They struggled for the liberation of the black nation.
Participants will assemble at Fulton Park, located at Fulton Street and Stuyvesant Avenue, opposite Boys and Girls High School.
For more information, call 718-949-5153.
That's 718-949-5153.
Join us in a walk to honor our political prisoners of war.
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a non-profit community organization.
Building Bridges Union Summer Radio brings you news of struggles around the country this summer,
featuring the participation of AFL-CIO, Union Summer youth, and senior activists.
On August 11th, we'll report on the Cincinnati Temp Action Project, fighting for justice for temporary workers,
plus our interview with labor humorist Michael Moore, author of Downsize This, and producer of TV Nation.
So join Building Bridges for Union Summer Radio, Monday, August 11th, from 2 to 3 p.m.,
over WBAI, produced by Mimi Rosenberg and Ken Nash.
And the time is exactly 8 o'clock. You're listening to WBAI in New York.
Time once again for Off the Hook.
Yes, this is when the theme would normally be playing.
However, due to the excitement of the last couple of weeks, somehow we managed to lose it.
We don't know where it is. I think it's someplace in the station,
but a search of three different studios and a few people that I suspected of something has turned up nothing.
We're continuing the investigation. In the meantime, please, a moment of silence for the lost theme.
Right then. Okay, here we are. This is Emanuel Goldstein.
The program is Off the Hook, and this is our Post Beyond Hope, if that sounds weird enough for you.
Post Beyond Hope show where we talk about all the things that happened to us over the past weekend.
And hopefully you were involved in that, too, because, boy, it was fun. It really was.
Wow. I'm still kind of in awe of the whole thing.
But I think we got about 2,000 people into the Puck building over the entire weekend.
And most of them, vast majority of them, seemed to have a really good time.
And there were a lot of really fascinating lectures, seminars, panels of all sorts.
We managed to get, for the first time ever, Kevin Mitnick's lawyer speaking to a crowd,
telling the story about what happened with his case and where it's all going and what's happened in the past.
We also had Bernie S. and FiberOptic on the same stage, but separated by a partition because they're not allowed to actually speak to each other.
So it's kind of tricky doing that, but we managed to pull it off.
The two of them, we managed to tell their stories, very interesting stories, very interesting things going on there.
The TAP reunion took place on Saturday.
I think about 20, 25 people, which is about the right size that we should have for something like that,
went to Eddie's and talked about old times.
Cheshire Catalyst was there, and he was very happy with that whole thing.
Let's see, we had all kinds of other panels.
The panel on the MetroCard, which you might have seen on the front page of yesterday's New York Times.
Boy, I mean, I wasn't even expecting this kind of coverage.
We're on ABC News. Let me see that paper here.
Okay, the front page of the New York Times, Monday, August 11th.
What galls a hacker most? The MetroCard.
It was amazing, because the MetroCard panel was only an hour out of the whole thing.
We had about 24 hours of panels alone, because I ran from about 12 to 12.
Actually, a little more than that, because we had some things going on on Friday as well.
But the MetroCard was only about an hour, but that was what the media seemed to like the most.
I guess because it's local to New York, it affects all New Yorkers who ride the trains.
It was just kind of neat for them to watch us talk about this.
So that made the front page. It was a very interesting panel, too.
The most amazing thing to me, for the whole weekend, was the fact that Dith Prawn showed up to take the photographs of the MetroCard panel.
Now, if you don't know who Dith Prawn is, you have to watch The Killing Fields,
because that's the guy that made it through the whole Pol Pot horror and crawled out of the country
after seeing millions and millions of his fellow countrymen be murdered.
That's the guy that the film was about, a true hero.
And he's the one who shows up, camera in hand, working for The New York Times to take a picture of us.
It was very surreal.
That was, I guess, the mood of the whole thing.
What else do we have? We had a radio show, obviously.
I don't know how many people listened to the radio show that broadcast between 6.30 and 8.30.
I was very surprised by how flawlessly that went.
I mean, we had a piece of equipment known as a Zephyr unit that we were able to find.
These things are worth like $10,000, and we were able to find one at a place that rents them at a really, really low price, I might add.
We had one at the radio station, and we were able to link the two of them together over an ISDN line,
which we had installed down there at the Puck building, just for that purpose.
And it worked great. It sounded like we were right here in the studio, except for the 500 people,
so we kept laughing and applauding and things like that.
We had all kinds of neat people on there, including Major Hacking.
Yeah, Major John Hacking, out in the Hamptons, who runs a cookie company, makes Major Hacking cookies,
which were a big hit over the weekend.
That was fascinating. Fascinating.
A major in the Army, and makes cookies, and his last name is Hacking.
That's the kind of weekend it was, just full of weirdness.
And FiberOptic and Tom from England, who unfortunately had to go back to England,
joined us to talk about GSM phones, OmniPoint, things like that.
In fact, we're supposed to call Fiber on the phone right about now.
Let's see if we can reach him.
I should point out, though, I should point out, this was a weekend of nightmares concerning OmniPoint.
And I'm taking the gloves off.
A lot of other people are, too, because OmniPoint just continually lets us down in so many ways
when you're trying to either make a phone call, receive a phone call.
I would have to say, walking around the streets of little Italy and Soho and places like that,
mind you, not inside buildings, you don't expect the phones to work inside, I guess,
because the signal can't penetrate the brick.
But walking around the street, you'd get a phone call, you'd pick it up.
Sometimes you'd even see the number of the person calling you, but you couldn't hear them.
There's a whole section of St. Mark's that you can make calls, but you can't hear the person.
They can't hear you.
So it's a great way to prank people, but not a really good way to use a telephone.
It's very frustrating, considering that you wind up paying for each and every one of those calls, too.
But there was one thing, one thing that almost made the whole Mitnick thing not happen,
was the fact that Kevin Mitnick's lawyer was supposed to leave the phone number he was reachable at,
which was at a remote mountain cabin somewhere in California, because he was on vacation,
he was supposed to leave that on my phone number, which would forward to voicemail if I wasn't around
for whatever reason, or if I was standing in a particular location where I couldn't reach.
And lo and behold, Sunday came, and their voicemail system just went down, just was down.
Not available at all, you couldn't do anything with it, you couldn't access your messages.
So his message was sitting in there, and I couldn't get to it to find out what the phone number was.
Or at least, I thought his message was sitting there, turns out it wasn't, but it could have been,
and I was trying to find out what this number was.
Not knowing the status made things very, very difficult.
And then, of course, you try to call them, and it's that old 45-minute wait and hold.
But that's another thing. Let's see if we can reach Fiber.
And the reason I brought all this up was because we're trying to reach him over his OmniPoint phone,
which for one reason or another...
Uh-oh. That was my fault.
For one reason or another might be unreachable.
So...
Okay, now I have to mute these out.
Okay, here we go. FiberOptic.
Hopefully he'll be joining us soon.
It should go right...
It should be ringing him somewhere, wherever he is in the city.
Fiber?
Hello?
Fiber, are you there?
Speaking.
This is not Fiber. Please put Fiber on the radio, please.
Oh, Fiber passed the phone to me.
Well, you're not Fiber, so I don't know why he did that.
Please put Fiber on.
Okay. Hello?
Please put Fiber on. Stop the nonsense.
Which Fiber? We have FiberOptic here, we have Optic's Fiber, and Fruit and Fiber.
And FiberBrand.
And FiberBrand.
Nobody cuss. This is the radio. Hold on. Fiber?
Fiber?
Fiber.
Hi, this is Fiber.
Who's speaking?
Fiber, are you there?
This is Fiber. Yes, hi, how are you?
Okay, what's going on here? Who is actually here?
Oh, this is Fiber.
Uh-huh.
This is the original Fiber.
Uh-huh.
Okay, well, while you guys are getting your act together, I think we're going to talk in the studio some more with some of the people that were instrumental in making this thing happen.
Oh, unless you don't want to talk to the real Fiber.
There he is. Okay, okay. Fiber, where are you?
I'm in a car.
You're in a car?
Yeah, and we're driving away from a client, and we're going to get some dinner.
Okay, are you in the state or are you somewhere else?
We are in the Northeastern Corridor.
What in the world does that mean?
We're in the vicinity of New York.
Uh-huh.
But I can't specifically tell you where, for our job is covert.
Okay, no, we understand that, and those of us who follow the international headlines know that, you know, you guys have to keep your agendas to yourselves until the moment to strike or whatever.
However it works there, but tell us, let's keep our conversation focused on Beyond Hope, which took place this last weekend.
Now, you were there, were you not?
Yes, I was at Beyond Hope.
Okay, you remember all the things that happened, right?
Oh, yeah, I remember each and every one.
Okay, it was interesting, wasn't it?
It was different, it was fun?
Well, I don't know if it was different, but it was definitely fun.
Yeah, we have fun all the time.
It was different because I wasn't at the first one.
Right, that's true.
The first one, 1994, the Conquerors on Planet Earth conference.
Yeah, I was kind of incapacitated at the time.
You were in prison, yes.
Exactly.
And you actually managed to call us during that one, but this one you didn't have to call us because you were standing right there.
And you took part in the prisoner panel, in the GSM panel, in the radio show, of course, on Saturday night.
Right.
Was there anything else?
The press panel, to which there wasn't really any press.
There wasn't much press, no, there wasn't too much of that.
But how would you assess the crowd?
How would you assess the whole mood of the place?
Well, there was definitely a wide variety of people from various walks of life.
Uh-huh.
They seemed to be generally in good cheer.
They were.
This is a great crowd.
Yeah.
My heartiest of thanks go out to the people who showed up and really just expressed the true hacker spirit of curiosity and openness to things.
It was just really good to meet a lot of new people and see a lot of interesting faces.
Now, did you see all the press we got?
Yeah, there was.
Well, I haven't seen too much of it yet, but from what I've been hearing, there's been quite a bit.
Well, you saw the front page of the New York Times yesterday, didn't you?
Uh, yeah.
Unfortunately, I heard about that.
Why is it unfortunate that you heard about it?
I thought the one on the front page of the New York Times was the best.
You're starting to sound like Darth Vader, so I don't know.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Yeah, well, that's true.
You're sitting on the expressway in a car, so it's possible you might get cut off at any time.
Yes.
You know, being the nature of modern technology and such.
Being the nature of modern technology.
Yes, I can see that.
Well, no, you were saying you saw the headline or you heard about it?
I thought that the one that was on the front page of the Times was the derogatory one.
No, actually, I don't think it was.
It wasn't that derogatory.
I thought it actually captured quite a bit.
It was mostly about the MetroCard.
Right, okay.
Yeah, I haven't actually seen that.
The one I did see was the one that was in the Times Magazine.
Okay, there was that one, too, the Times Magazine.
Right.
Right.
But, yeah, there was that one.
There was also ABC News on television on Sunday had one.
I think he's gone.
Yeah, he's gone.
It's Omnipoint for you.
Oh, I just dropped my Omnipoint phone.
Yes, I have an Omnipoint phone, but, you know, it's not going to last much longer, I can tell you that,
because it's been so frustrating using these things.
Listen to these ones.
Hackers interface in New York.
Three-day conference wants to dispel myths.
It's a confusing time to be a hacker.
On the one hand, computer enthusiasts who thrill to breach security, bypass firewalls,
and break sophisticated encryption are portrayed as nefarious geniuses
who could bring down the nation's banking or military systems with a flick of the return key.
On the other, they're courted by corporations to share their knowledge.
They're favor-curried by a government who wants to know their secrets.
It's inevitably led to a bit of an image crisis.
The consultant criminal conundrum.
The organizers of this weekend's Beyond Hope address those issues and more
as the once shadowy leagues of hackers whose ranks grow every day go mainstream.
Now, how do we go mainstream?
I don't think we went mainstream.
More than 1,800 cyber rebels,
yes, that's you, rebel, cyber rebels,
gathered at downtown New York's airy, artsy, puck building.
It is airy, it is artsy, and it's the puck building, all right.
So I guess that's kind of okay.
To participate in three days of panels and discussions about the future.
Of three days of panels and discussions about the future.
I guess it prints twice when you have two pages.
Okay, well, they didn't talk about the panels.
They talked about the future of the 21st century hacker.
Panels include one on the public's perception of the culture.
Another was titled, Where Hackers and Criminals Collide.
A Sunday session expected to be popular,
and obviously after this article came out,
was called, Just Prisoners.
That's the one that Fiber was involved in.
In fact, let's not forget about Fiber.
Let's see if we can reach him again.
And, of course, one of the most interesting ones
was the social engineering panel.
We'll get to that in just a moment.
Hacking into anyone else's computers is illegal.
That's indisputable.
So a whole new lexicon is building around the activities
of these computer whizzes.
Hi, this is Mark. I'm not around.
I guess he's in that OmniPoint unfriendly land.
So we'll try again in about ten minutes, I suppose.
Breaking into a military computer isn't that at all.
It's exposing security flaws.
And enough with the term hacker already.
They're technology experts.
Hackers should not be a pejorative.
Appearing right now at this very moment
on another radio station.
We'll give you a hint as to what radio station it was.
They had a panel, too.
It was a radio station that had their own panel.
So if you can get them, then he's on there right now.
Competing with us. How do you like that?
Anyway, Pam went on to say,
we're portrayed as bad, evil.
We've been overhyped as scammers, thieves.
All we are is a bunch of people who are interested in technology,
who want to get our hands around it,
get into the middle of it.
But a prisoner panel member,
FiberOptic, well-known even by laypeople for his exploits,
has broken into AT&T's systems, among others.
He's a convicted criminal.
For the convention,
organizers freely adopted
the logo of the Bell telephone companies
for banners and T-shirts.
Hey, my phone's ringing.
I'm going to send this one away
because I don't want to talk to people right now.
Well, I do want to talk to people,
just not, you know, on my phone.
Said Finkel, the Big Bells did not seem to mind
the fact that we adopted their logos.
It's kind of symbolic of the unusually cooperative relationship
these days hackers have with their targets.
NYNEX hasn't complained.
Finkel said, they've given us free ISDN lines
to use during the conference.
It was a very nice gift.
They'd rather have hackers happy than unhappy.
And they know what's good for them.
Yes.
Okay, we also had Hacking the Big Apple.
Garth Brooks, a hacker.
That's what Emanuel Goldstein, editor-in-chief of 2600 Magazine,
would have you believe.
According to Goldstein, the Country Popsters free concert
held in New York's Central Park Thursday
was particularly the opening gig
for 2600's Beyond Hope Hacker Conference,
which kicks off at 6 p.m. tonight.
This obviously was written on Friday.
We thought the park would be good for him,
says a droll Goldstein.
A droll?
I don't like that description.
Deadpan aside,
Goldstein says he's expecting hackers, newbies,
feds, civilians, who knows,
maybe Garth himself to attend Beyond Hope
at the historic Puck Building.
This belated sequel to the 1994 Beyond Hope Conference,
which was not called Beyond Hope,
it was called Hope,
takes itself more seriously
than Las Vegas' annual DEFCON Hackers Conference.
I never said that either.
How much more seriously?
A lot more, apparently, I said.
Anyway, we are not a bunch of people running around
and wrecking things.
I don't recall saying that, although it's true.
We didn't wreck anything, and we were pretty well behaved.
Is Beyond Hope expecting DEFCON-like shenanigans,
such as passing counterfeit bills?
Hopefully not, says Net Weasel,
one of the conference organizers,
because most people
really respect 2600 and Emmanuel
and what he has done.
For the hacking community,
this is the real stuff.
Real stuff or not, Beyond Hope's homepage,
which bills the three-day conference
as a landmark conference for hackers
and for every citizen of the electronic age,
is a tad bombastic.
Oh, boy.
Still, judging by the weekend roster of events,
Beyond Hope could match its publicity.
Speakers include MSNBC columnist Brock Meeks,
cryptographer Bruce Schneier,
security expert Ira Winkler,
and Donald Randolph,
the attorney of imprisoned hacker Kevin Mitnick.
Panel topics range from the media's portrayal of hackers
to that legal and lucrative form
of corporate hacking known as tiger teaming.
And off the hook, 2600's radio show
will broadcast the conference live
to New Yorkers on Saturday night.
The conference also has a live link to HIP 97,
the Hacking in Progress conference
occurring simultaneously in the Netherlands.
Beyond Hope had already hacked HIP 97's webpage
by last night.
Netweasel says updates and pictures
will be posted on the conference's homepage
during the weekend. Goldstein says Beyond Hope
has received amazing support from hackers
as well as local businesses and New Yorkers.
A lot of people seem to have that hacking spirit,
he says, asking a lot of questions
and rebelling against the people,
telling them to be quiet.
That was, um...
What was this from?
They have a very badly designed...
This is from...
You can't tell either, can you?
No, that's from MSNBC.
This is MSNBC?
That's MSNBC.
I can barely read it.
Where does it even say MSNBC?
I don't see that anywhere.
Yeah, you're right, it's the site.com.
Joel Dean, I think he's the executive producer.
Yeah, Joel Dean wrote this.
Okay, well, they need to work on their artwork
just a little bit.
It's a tad bombastic, if you ask me.
Bombastic page? What do you think of that?
It was quite bombastic.
It was intended to be bombastic, so there you go.
You thought it was something we didn't want to do.
Well, we did it anyway.
A bunch of other things.
I guess possibly the best thing
for us to do is just
tell people there's a lot of articles about this
and then move on to some people
because
people is the most important thing here.
We have a lot of people to thank
and reminisce with.
If you were at Beyond Hope, give us a call.
212-279-3400
because we'd certainly
like to hear from you
and share your memories
as to what happened at Beyond Hope
and what were your favorite parts
and what were your
not-so-favorite parts
or anything else like that.
We also have a ton of people
to thank. As I look to my right, Isaac,
you did the video, did you not?
Yes, I did.
Those people that were in the audience
that could not see because of all the pillars
in that room, having the video
there with the person's face on it
was a really good touch.
There's a difference between a one-foot square as a face
and a 12x9 on the screen.
It made us look very Orwellian,
speaking down to the people.
It was good
for things like the prisoner panel
where one person would just sit there
for about 45 minutes without saying a single word
because the other person was talking
to the other person so they can't interject
and say other things.
That was very useful
for that as well.
What were some of the more fun aspects for you
and maybe some of the less fun aspects?
Pretty much 78 hours
without sleep.
That could go under fun or not fun
depending on your personal preference.
You lost Monday, right?
I lost Monday. I went to sleep Sunday morning.
Not Sunday morning. Sunday...
I guess you could call it Monday morning.
I have no idea what time it was.
I woke up Tuesday
and Monday just disappeared.
I'm trying to redo my whole theory
of the universe in order to account
for the loss of Monday.
I lost pretty much all of Monday too.
I slept for 14 hours.
That's a lot of sleep.
I think a lot of people did too
because
judging from the net
there was sort of this lull
where nobody really said anything
for all of Monday.
Then Tuesday all these messages started getting posted
and people started sending mail saying
that was fun, we've got to do that again sometime.
Everybody I guess was just either traveling
on Monday back to where they came from
or just sitting in a room
staring straight ahead
and trying to catch up.
When you put something like this together
it's trying
but it is fun too.
It's trying and fun.
I think I know where they all were.
Where were they?
They're on the Broadway Kmart trying to get some free stuff.
Let's talk about that
free stuff for a second.
For those of you who went to the social engineering panel
I didn't expect this to really work
this well. We did the social engineering panel
three years ago.
This year we did it as well.
I thought maybe we'd have
a couple of people talking about things
and maybe sharing some stories.
I wanted to make some
attempts on the telephone.
We basically tried some things and I think
nearly all of them worked really well.
The Kmart thing. Tell us about the Kmart thing.
How it came about.
I guess somebody wanted an example
of how we could do it
so somebody suggested that
Kmart's intercom was an extension on the phone.
Well, as you know
there are two Kmarts in New York City.
Only two and I think it might
stop at that.
We called one and
talked to one of the managers and
told him we were Bill from the other store
or something of that name
and told him we were having a problem with our
PA system.
We went on to say we needed the technical
number for tech support. He didn't know what it was
and I said we use 50.
What do you guys use?
I don't know if I should say what they use over the air.
You said it in front of 500 people.
He said
we use Function 631.
I said thanks a lot.
What is Function though?
How do you transfer to Function?
I think that basically means
inquiry.
I think Function means flash.
If you're on a call you can hit Function
and it flashes.
It's basically just a dial-in extension.
We called the Broadway Kmart
and called them up
and asked for the shoe department.
The Broadway one is the one downtown, right?
I think that's the one that YouTube played at.
They didn't play there. They had a press conference there.
A press conference there or something like that.
We called them up
and asked Lucy
if I was really interested to know
if the sandals were in.
I was marked from the other store.
I wanted to know if the shipment came in.
She said thanks a lot. Can you transfer me
to extension 631?
After that I said, attention Kmart
shoppers, everything in
aisle 4 is free.
Of course you all read about
the ensuing riot that followed that
and all the damage and injuries
and things like that.
It's fun.
It was an interesting thing.
I don't think too many people got hurt.
It just shows you how easy it is.
In the social engineering panel
we also tried to get information
from the phone company
AT&T about a certain
person with a funny sounding name.
We got to the point where they would have given us
anything we wanted except their computers were down
as they almost always are on Sunday.
We also called Blockbuster and got
all kinds of information about all kinds of people
with the same last name
thinking that this person might be related to me.
The person was happily giving us
everything we needed to know.
What movies they rented,
when they were in the store last,
how long they've had an account for,
where they live.
I probably could have gotten credit card information too
had we continued that.
What else did we do?
Let's see.
Corporate security.
Which one?
Microsoft.
I don't want to talk about that one.
We called the social engineering hotline of Ameritech.
I think we just demonstrated
how much fun things can be.
Where to draw the line
and where not to cross.
Had fun at the conference?
Had lots of fun at the conference.
It was pretty good.
You did just about everything too.
Yes.
I got to sleep today.
Congratulations.
Thank you.
It's nice to find out what sleep is
after something like that.
Yes.
You all caught up?
No, I'm not caught up.
I guess I'll get to do that again tomorrow.
One thing I got lots of questions about
was when are we going to do this again?
When are we going to have another conference?
I just don't want to answer that question now.
I don't want to even think about it.
I don't want to even talk about it.
Something else.
What kinds of things did you throw together for this?
I had to hunt down equipment mostly.
We found video equipment,
audio equipment.
There was nothing you couldn't find.
You found everything.
You found sound equipment, video.
You knew where everything was.
Yes, that's what I do best.
You should be a private eye like that private eye we had on.
Did you see him?
He finds people.
He found people. I find people too.
I find things.
That's what I do.
That's how I hack.
Actually, Patty is the one
that found the DNA evidence
that links Marv Albert to the...
We're not supposed to be talking about that.
Remember what the district attorney said to us.
He said not to mention it to the people.
But we don't have that many listeners
so we'll keep it quiet.
Zap.
You came all the way over here from England.
All the way from the UK.
Was it as you expected it to be?
Was it worse? Better?
I didn't know what to expect
but it was really, really good.
I came over with some of my buddies.
We all met up and we attended.
It was good.
I was really happy you guys were able to make it.
It really was.
It just added this flair to things
and this worldly aspect.
We had people from Argentina.
We had people from
other parts of Europe.
Asia show up.
It's too bad Cyber Junkie's not here
because he was a lot of fun.
But Gorf is here.
How are you doing?
You're from England as well.
What did you think of all this?
I thought it was amazing.
Really good. Good fun.
Especially the social engineering panel.
What we're going to try to do
is put everything
onto Real Audio
and send that over the net.
Hopefully people who weren't there
will be able to experience it.
Of course we'll have it on video too at some point.
I don't know exactly when that will be.
It took us three years to get our act together
on the last one.
Where do you guys go from here?
Are you going to do something like this in England now?
There's a much smaller
conference that's organized
or has been on for the last three years.
Hopefully we'll be able to
inject some stuff into that, some ideas
and get things going
on a bigger scale.
Speaking of overseas,
there was another conference
called Hacking in Progress
which supposedly went quite well.
Although one thing that didn't go so well
was our connection to them.
We had a couple of times
where we were able to see what was going on there.
What do we have here?
We have the HIP stories now.
Melting minds and passions
in the global bit stream.
2,000 hackers,
6 million BPS, 800,000 volts,
12 toilets.
They did theirs outside in a campground
so they had a few problems.
I think it rained pretty heavily on Sunday
which might explain why HIP
disappeared without a word.
We didn't know what happened.
We weren't able to broadcast their closing ceremonies
like we were supposed to.
Other than that, I think things went really well.
It was exciting and fun.
The network stayed up
virtually the whole time.
Not only that, the network actually worked.
For that, we have Marko to thank
who I think has been entered
into history as the only person
who has ever managed to keep a hacker network
going at a hacker conference in this country.
We've done it in Holland a few times.
In this country, in 1994,
we really didn't do it that great.
We had a 28-8 connection but it was down
for a long time.
We were able to connect our computers together
to each other.
That's one thing but to actually have
a fast connection going,
that's harder.
All right, let's take some phone calls.
212-279-3400.
We're talking about Beyond Hope.
If you were there, please give us a call
and tell us what was going on
in your experiences.
Good evening, you're on the air.
Yes, Emmanuel.
Wait a minute.
How did he do that?
Rebel was sitting right in front of me
and now he's gone.
He's on the phone and he's still first somehow.
And I was first at the conference.
You were the first person there?
No, no.
I mean in the...
You lined up on Tuesday night, didn't you?
On the WBAI thing.
That's because you were jumping around
and wouldn't sit down until you got on the air.
Yeah, helping Pam out,
jumping around with different things.
Yes, you did help us quite a bit.
I do want to say thank you for that.
So what was your favorite part of the conference?
My favorite part was the social engineering
and the WBAI broadcast
and the part where people kept...
Actually, the part
where I was on,
where I was on for a couple of minutes
Saturday night.
You like that part, huh?
Yeah, when I was doing my demonstrations
and I demonstrated, you know,
I liked the little animated
gif of me.
Animated, you know, little
homepage-like thing.
I don't know what you're talking about.
There's somebody who made, I forgot
the name of the person, but there's somebody who made
a, not a homepage,
but a little animated gif.
It's a little page that says Rebel Attack
and it has a picture of me, a little picture of my head
on an animated
gif and it really looks
good and they put that up on the screen
while I was talking
and I was telling people about, you know,
giving a bit of history about what I do
and stuff and I keep hearing laughing.
I look back up at the screen and I see this animated
gif of me and then
you know, all this stuff
and I liked it actually. It was very humorous.
Yeah, well humor I think was a very
important part of this.
Yeah, I mean, people liked the demonstrations.
People sort of, you know, hushed up
when I started picking up the phone and doing stuff.
Yeah, yeah.
People sort of rushed off the stage because
you had to do something else or whatever.
Yeah, we sort of rushed you off the stage there.
Sorry about that, but yeah, some things had to happen
and that was the moment they were happening.
I kept getting, you know, bombarded
by people. Hey, hey,
sign my 2600 book.
You know, where do I get the article of you?
Sign my shirt and, you know, it's like
autographing shirts, autographing 2600
magazines and answering
questions and people are like,
oh, I hope Emmanuel doesn't hate you
or whatever.
You know, I was going to check my,
I didn't want to check my email there because
of the helmet thing with the,
you know, they say not to check your email
with helmet. Well, you could be being
sniffed. Yeah, that's quite possible.
But, you know, I got back,
you know, I answered
all the emails and everybody just
kept on saying, you know, how much they liked what I had
to say. They wished that it wasn't
so short. You know,
a couple of elderly people even came to the
conference on Friday. You know, they
said that they recognized me from the radio and
stuff and, you know.
Uh-huh. Keep talking.
And, you know, it
really was good. And also,
you know, people just, you know,
I met a person from California that,
you know, said that they recognize
what I do and stuff and
met a lot of people that I,
you know,
didn't, you know,
lots of people asking questions,
lots of people,
you know.
It was a fun conference. It was fun,
yes. It was tons of fun.
You know, the ABC thing, you know,
I was interviewed by different journalists. I did
a big demonstration for... Were you on television?
Uh, you know, I don't know
because... If anybody knows if Rebel is on
television, please notify me immediately because I need
to know that. I just would like
to know quickly. Yeah, because
I did the, I talked to
ABC and
I talked to this Israeli
journalist for quite some time about... And I gave him
a big demonstration about phones.
Uh-huh. Yeah, well, that's what you're good at
is doing demonstrations on phones. Right.
And, let's see, I can't think
of what else to say because I'm being shaken
right now. Oh, you're being shaken.
Alright, well, listen, I'll let you get
mugged in peace there
and see what's
hopefully proper authorities will be contacted.
Thank you very much for calling Rebel. Thanks for being a part
of things.
Oh, boy. Uh, Mima's here.
How are you doing? I'm okay, thanks.
You're one of these people that just came up out of
nowhere. And I don't mean to say that your whole life
has been living in nowhere or anything like that,
but as far as we're concerned... That's usually what happens.
You just sort of popped up and
helped us with so many things.
Maybe you could describe... I didn't really plan that.
No. It just sort of happened. It just sort of happened.
Well, it was amazing how things...
How things... I like to shake it, not
stir it.
Tell us some of the things that you were involved in.
Registration was certainly one.
Yeah, I wound up running registration.
You like how that happened, huh?
Yeah. But it was really fun
and I got to work with a lot of good people
who I'd like to thank.
Okay, go ahead and thank them, because I'm going to leave out people
and then they're going to be mad at me, and that's just where I can say,
well, I was going to thank you, but then Meme jumped in
and thanked you for me, so
go ahead. You want me to thank individuals?
Yes, please. As many as possible. Well, first I'd like to thank Pam.
Definitely Pam. She really taught me a lot
in gym.
I'd like to point out Ronan and Baby Goat
for one, because they were there
through most of it, and Jesse and Josh.
Actually,
there are so many people that I'm going to forget.
Yeah, you see the problem here. You see the problem.
Definitely going to forget some people.
Also the people who are working merchandise, like Ben.
Yeah, Ben works merchandise
and
let's see, who else?
A lot of people work merchandise. I mean, I saw them all.
It's just I can't possibly name all of them, because
sometimes I don't know their names,
but there are just so many.
It's been the whole hour, I think.
But there are a lot of, I mean, Iggy,
for instance. We almost completely forgot Iggy. He did the
security. He was the guy walking around
keeping track of all the radios. It was one thing to be on a
radio saying where you were, but to keep track
of where all the radios were, that's hard.
And we were able to successfully do that.
And
plus, you know, I don't think
people felt like they were being watched,
like they were being, you know, their every movement
was being scrutinized by, you know,
I don't know, a rather
oppressive security
staff. And I think the reason for that was
because we had a pretty
cool person running things.
And I think that's the way to do it.
At the same time, though,
it was very effective. You know, we knew where everything
was at any time. I don't think anything got
stolen. Nothing
major, anyway.
What about Captain Crunch's raving ability?
Who wants to
talk about that?
Apparently somebody was raving with Captain Crunch.
Yeah, Captain Crunch showed up. John Draper was there.
I was amazed that he came
to our conference. He was at the rave. Okay.
But did he do something at the rave that's
worth talking about?
Well, I didn't go to the rave. There was a
rave on Saturday night.
It was put on by some people and
maybe some people on the phone went to that
and they could tell us what that was like.
But that was just one of many things that were going on in the city
that weekend. I think, you know, one other thing
that we were able to dispel with this whole conference
is the fact that New York City is a really cool place to be.
And we know that. You know, everybody
who listens here at least has the
opportunity to know that. But people, you know, coming from
Wisconsin and Iowa, they might think
they might think that
they might think that
it's a different kind of place.
You know, and you have to
have to kind of be careful
the images that you send out.
But I think everyone had a good time
in the city as well as at the conference.
Let's squeeze in another
phone call.
Good evening. You're on the air.
Hey there. Let me turn down my radio.
I've been trying for a few weeks to get
this question in. The Sony
CDMA. No, no, no. Are you talking about
Beyond Hope? No.
That's the only topic we're talking about tonight
because it's a very kind of special show.
You can call about that in a couple of weeks
or whenever you get through, but
we don't want to stray from the topic tonight.
Thanks anyway.
Good evening. You're on the air.
How you doing?
I was part of the other radio
station panel. What I wanted to say, I really
enjoyed the rest of what I had
heard at the conference. It was fantastic.
I hope
that you'll have it soon
accessible because I've been telling a lot of other people
about it.
I was looking at your website
today and nothing's
up yet.
We have a big thank you up there
now for everybody, but we'll be putting
up pictures real soon as soon as we
get them. We're starting to get them.
I didn't hear the social engineering.
I'm sorry I missed that.
I didn't hear the
I'll mention the station, Steal This Radio.
I didn't hear that panel and I wish I had because that's
the only one that didn't get recorded. It didn't?
No, it didn't because
they wanted to use
the camera to record the
logo instead so we couldn't record
them. I hope somebody out there got
an audio recording of it
or maybe even a video recording.
That would be kind of cool.
I hope so too.
I don't know if you were interested
but I was starting to tell you about
those Hacker Narcs. I was
kind of fascinated by that the night before
and I had put up
a note and I
faxed a couple of radio stations to try to
announce it to some of the
foreign people
that weren't necessarily familiar with
the
first language not being English in the
cybercafe scene over the weekend.
There were a lot of Narcs that had
various stories to try to bust hackers.
Oh really? Yeah, I was
starting to tell you that but you had a lot
going on.
In one case, a man
came in with a photo of a wife
and child, two separate photos
and this was at
one of the cybercafes about
2 in the morning on Friday night
and I was in there and he came right over to me and said
this was my wife, I can't find her
she has a cellular phone
and you must know
how to hack into that or surely
you must have some hacker friends that know how to
do that because then if I can find
that phone then I can trace her
and I said well as far as I know
that's not going to tell you any information
it's not going to give you the building where the phone is
and he was trying to convince me that
yes, his phone would
and if I only had some hacker
friends, couldn't I just give him
a hacker number?
People always think that we have this amazing ability
to get answers for everything
but you have to always wonder
what are the reasons for them asking
this in the first place and
might they have ulterior motives
so yeah, it's very wise to be suspicious
of such things, it's very wise to tell other people about it
as well
so overall though, you had fun at the conference
Oh, it was great, yeah
it was certainly the first one I've been to
I wouldn't have known, I wouldn't really have thought
too much about going to the whole thing
if it weren't for the radio presentation
I was really sorry that I missed a couple of things
on the first day
I hope we open up some eyes with the radio conference
and other ones as well
we try to be as diverse as possible
come from as many different angles as possible
that way people will be exposed to different thoughts
Oh, it was much more varied
than I even thought
so it was great, I really liked it a lot
Thanks for coming, thanks for being a part of it
Great, thank you
579-3400, we're talking about Beyond Hope
Good evening, you're on the air
Yes, hello
I just wanted to talk about the conference
I'm not a hacker
but I've met a lot of interesting people
and I learned a lot of interesting things
and I was afraid to go in the beginning
because I was afraid of being accepted
or whatever, but I attended
almost all the panels, I especially enjoyed
fiber optics, GSM panel
and just in general
the whole feeling of the whole conference
was very, very good
from what hackers are portrayed at
as in general by the media
it was totally opposite
I've met a lot of interesting people
and there's absolutely no problems
That's great, that's great to know that
because that's exactly what we wanted to happen
we wanted to have people come in from outside the community
and hear things direct from hackers
hear our perspective
and see some of the things
that we're able to teach
and it takes guts
to be able to walk in the door
to something that you're totally unfamiliar with
onto enemy territory
as it might be perceived
but I'm glad you came away with a positive experience
Yes, I don't know much about computers
but people were showing me things
teaching me things
and I was very surprised
and I just had a lot of fun
Well that's great, that's great
Thanks very much for coming and for calling
Thank you
212-279-3400
Good evening, you're on the air
Hello, Emmanuel
Yeah, how are you doing?
Good, thank you very much for a great event
Well, thank you for helping make it possible
and thanks to all the other people
that helped put it on
Yeah, it was great to meet everyone
Meme and Iggy and Rebel
and all you guys
that work alongside of you
This is Frank and I'm still here in Jersey
I managed to catch your program live for once
on the internet
and so I just want to thank you very much
and tell you it was a great honor and pleasure
to be there and to meet everyone
and to be part of it
Well, Frank, thanks for all your help
and for helping make this thing a success
I don't know how you're going to outdo yourself
That's a problem, yeah, that's a big problem
We don't know how we're going to do a better job this time
Hopefully technology will take care of that for you
Yeah, you know, that's one of the things that happened
in the three years since the last conference
is technology has expanded so much
In 1994, you know, it wasn't something to be laughed at
and now, of course, it is
and we had access to so much more
we've come in contact with so many people
that are able to hook things up
in a much better way
and keep things going
and I guess, you know, I guess technology
is growing us along with it
And I just want to, one brief thing
I just want to apologize to you
toward the end there on Sunday
I was so burnt out I started actually nodding
during the conference
No, that wasn't the problem
it was the snoring, it was the loud snoring that was the problem
that started to disturb some people
but other than that, no, things
towards the end, yeah, of course people started getting really frazzled
and, you know, it started to show
because, you know
you plan this thing for weeks
months even
and, you know, then you're up for 72 hours
and boy, it's just
it's great, but
you've got to come down from it at some point
I'm just glad that people are starting to
You did it
Thanks, we all did it
Hopefully you're going to do it again and we're all going to be there too
We support you all the way and we're going to be with you every step
Okay, thanks very much for being there
Thank you, Emmanuel
Take care
212-279-3400
Good evening, you're on the air
Yes, that's our digital delay system
You're on live, hello, are you there?
Hi Emmanuel
Hi, this is Lifetimer
Lifetimer? Yeah
Okay, my
perception on Hope
Blast
What can I say? Pam, you still own me
You own me
I am 0-0-0
2-5
I think
Okay
Mimi, my lady
I'm still enchanted by your beauty
and by your character
Ned Weasel, you're still a cyber god
but I'm sorry, but
Pam is still better
and
ask Wolfgame
ask Wolfgame about
why Pam is better
than Ned Weasel in engineering
What else?
I don't know
I need to sleep for the better part
Okay
What else?
I don't know
And a big shout out to Manos
Thanks to Manos
for being there
I mean, you want me to say something technical?
I don't know
Go ahead, say something technical
I mean, I've been trying to get on the show for a couple of weeks
and I tried to do
on web
on web TV, but anyway
that'll be another story, alright?
Okay, we'll talk about that tomorrow
Okay, bye-bye
212-279-3400
Good evening, you're on the air
Good evening, you're on the air
Hello, this is Howard
I was at the conference, I just wanted to say a couple things
what I noticed
I'm known as
sort of a gadget man
and I didn't know what to expect
I figured there'd be more than just computing there
so I thought I wouldn't be intimidated
but it was incredible who you got there
what they were talking about
and how friendly they were
I commented on that young lady that spoke earlier
about people who might have been
say, trying to lead on
to find out if they could
catch somebody doing something wrong
and I was kind of thinking
the kind of crowd that I saw there
that they were a little too sophisticated
to get entrapped, if you will
I wish I only shot in a few hours
Saturday and Sunday
I never got to meet you guys
because I kind of listened to your show
and thought if I could have hung around and seen you guys
and learned a few things, it would have been to my benefit
but I just could not believe
I was just inundated with information
and very friendly people
it was an excellent atmosphere
but it was very intense
and these were like
all-stars, you know, these were like
people that just knew what they were doing and having a good time
and they were really friendly about it
so I don't know how you could top it
but if you could do something even on that level again
it would be amazing
Well, we certainly would like to
Thanks for calling, thanks for coming
Okay, thank you
The thing is, everyone is saying to us
we hope you can do this again
but it wasn't us who did it, it was all of us
it was the people who came
not just the people who organized it
because you have
2,000 angry people that have bad attitudes
it doesn't matter how well you organize things
but you have 2,000 cool people
who are willing to share knowledge
and try different ways of doing things
and listen to different people
you know, that's what makes it work
that's really what makes it work
and that's what people come away with
and we also want to thank the people in the area
the people of the city
that just opened up their doors
to all the people down there
and were friendly to them
and showed them all kinds of neat places to go
neat things to do
Yes, Netweasel, what do you have?
Well, about the whole NARC situation
and the lady from Still This Radio
I hate to give away the secret
but she got most of our secrets from
Dionne Warwick's Psychic Friends Network
so we had a whole lease line
going right to the network there the whole time
so we couldn't figure something out
we just asked Dionne what was up
and you'd be surprised how fluent she is
in the flavors of eunuchs
Yeah, she's really a wizard
She is
I was very surprised at her knowledge of the MetroCard too
Actually, she's the only person known
to have pulled off
actually
a good cloning of the MetroCard
without getting caught, I was just amazed
Call the Psychic Friends Network and ask them about that
If you ask about it, they'll tell you
but if you don't ask about it, they're not going to volunteer the information
that's my understanding
And after tonight, they might not even tell you if you ask them
but you have to be very persistent
Alright, 212-279-3400
Good evening, you're on the air
Hi, Manuel
How you doing?
It's me, Ivo
You helped us quite a bit too
I'd like to say something about
the Huck broadcast
from the Pug building
The thing is, somebody was jamming us
and nobody could get
the signal inside the Pug building
but everywhere else you would get it
Yeah, there was some wise guy going around
jamming the transmission
but the thing is, the only people that were affected
were people walking around with Walkmans
listening inside the building
It's pretty easy to jam any signal
within, say, a building
There were people running around
thinking that it was jamming the whole city
and that just simply was not the case
because you can't really overpower
a 50,000 watt radio station that easily
Plus, on that CPM, my brother
started sleepwalking
He started sleepwalking?
Yeah, and everybody thought
he was on a bad-ass trip
because he was acting like a jerk
and he didn't remember it
and then
thanks me
Do you like what you're saying here?
Yeah
I like that
Hi to Pam
Meme
Cyber Weasel, everybody
and Captain Crunch
I know why he got gone
to Bien Hope
because I emailed him
I think in June
and asked him if he was going to go to Bien Hope
He said probably
because he's going to be in the area
low profile
and so
I guess that's that
I'd like to say hi to everybody
who met me there
and that's it
Thanks very much for the help
and we'll talk to you again soon
Okay, bye
I'd like to thank Doug and Ray
Yes, Doug and Ray
How can we forget them?
For all their radio help
Don't forget about Iggy
Oh, you didn't forget about Iggy
We talked about Iggy for about 25 minutes before
Oh, that's right
We had a big tribute to Iggy
with star-studded extravaganzas
I got the soundtrack
Thanks to Doug and Ray
Thanks to Cheshire Catalyst
for coming in and helping out as well
and putting on some really
a good discussion of low bandwidth access
as well for those people that don't have
the spiffiest technology
to play around with
And of course, Bernie S.
Really good to see him in New York
to hear his voice come out
over the radio
not on the phone
and that was a thrill for all of us
Okay, 212
279-3400
Let's see who else is out there
Good evening, you're on the air
Oh, no you're not, okay
Let's try this one
Good evening, you're on the air
Okay
Hey
Oh, there you are, okay
What's up, dude?
You know what was the most amazing thing to watch?
What was that?
Was this prom
Is this Chris?
Chris, you're supposed to be here in the studio
What are you doing on the phone?
I overslept
Everyone's sleeping now
We can't sleep, we have to keep going
Hustle, hustle, hustle
Chris, you're the person we were waiting for
Why?
Because we didn't want to leave you out
But Chris is the guy who ran the sound
Not really because
You ran the sound, you did it
You made everybody sound good
Actually, that was majorly Isaac, Doug
and one person who couldn't have been done without
is Patty
because she got all that gear
for so cheap
Big shout out to her
We're looking into how she did that
You don't know how she pulled this one off
But Chris, you're the guy who sat behind the board
with all those knobs
that nobody understands what they do
and kept setting them to the right settings
so that they do good things
not bad things
And you also played the music
in the main lecture room, which was really cool
I had some people throwing stuff to me
and giving me stuff to play
That was cool
So if you like the music in the lecture room
that was totally Chris
If you like the music in the network room
that was DHP
DHP guys rule
Those guys are incredible
They came out from Pittsburgh
which normally you don't have a positive view of Pittsburgh
but these guys make Pittsburgh look cool
Totally
I want to go visit now
I can't guarantee that it'll look good
but if you see them, it'll look great
I say we make a trek down there
and check it out
You've got to go all across Pennsylvania
I don't know what kind of horrible state that is
They brought machinery
of all sorts
The Hope.net machine
One person from Canada managed to get root on
or get very close to getting root on
I heard that guy was a genius
He was pretty smart
What was his handle again?
Ottawa
QX9
QX9
I heard that
People were watching what he was doing
They had to step away
because of the glow of light
as he was typing on the keyboard
It was just too intense
We had a lot of people like that there
We wanted to give him a clipper chip
to take home
but we realized that would be violating the law
to cross the border
We gave him something from a Cracker Jack box
and he seemed happy with that
Sent him on his way
Maybe he'll come back next time
Chris, we want to thank you very much
Thank you
Thank you
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Thank you
On August 16th, join us in a walk and demonstration through Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, a walk
to honor our political prisoners and prisoners of war.
Mumia Abu-Jamal, Matulu Shakur, Bashir Hamid, Abdul-Haq, and many others fought for community
control of schools.
They fought for safe streets, they fought against drug dealers, and they fought against
police brutality.
They struggled for the liberation of the black nation.
Participants will assemble at Fulton Park, located at Fulton Street and Stuyvesant Avenue,
opposite Boys and Girls High School.
For more information, call 718-949-5153.
That's 718-949-5153.
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