To report the unanimous support of the unconstitutional suspension of a legally elected parliament
by the morally bankrupt leadership of the Western democracies, press 3.
For all of the above, press 4.
You have selected option 4, all of the above.
All of our unprincipled collaborators with Western business interests are busy right
now.
Please wait until the regime has had time to consolidate its power and try your call
again.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving, now I can't make a call.
It couldn't get much worse, but if they could, they would.
The show is off the hook, I'm Phil, and, Emanuel?
Are you out there, Emanuel?
Oh, Emanuel?
Well, Emanuel's out there somewhere, we're gonna find him.
Certainly, somewhere in the country, I don't think they let him out all the time.
Oh, Emanuel?
Where is Emanuel?
Emanuel?
Hello?
Are you there?
I'm here, can you hear me?
I can hear you.
What was that business, you couldn't hear me at all, huh?
I couldn't hear you for a second, but now you're loud and clear.
You know, somebody must have pressed the wrong button, or failed to press the right button,
or something like that, because it was frustrating, because I could hear you talking to me, and
I couldn't be heard.
So now I know what all listeners have to go through.
It wasn't any form of censorship?
No, well, it certainly felt that way, it felt like I was being oppressed, but I'm over it
now, and I'm willing to forgive and forget.
I'm out here in Los Angeles, which is about as far away as you can get while staying on
the mainland, and I've been doing some very interesting things over the last couple of
weeks.
Apologies for not being on last week.
WBAI had a last-minute emergency fundraiser, which went ahead in our place.
Sorry we couldn't announce that two weeks ago, because we didn't know about it.
We're back on schedule now, and things have been moving ahead with the Free Kevin campaign,
and our nationwide filmography, I guess you'd call it, where we're going around documenting
various thoughts, feelings, and opinions of people around the nation.
But first, let's talk about some things that are going on back home.
Great.
Well, a lot of people are probably watching the news, or listening to the radio, and hearing
a lot of interesting things about some big companies, some small companies, but here's
a pretty good one to start off with.
The BeltLinux strike.
Have you heard about that out there?
You know, I saw bits and pieces of it.
It's kind of hard when you're traveling cross-country.
Sometimes you don't know what's going on, and you turn on the radio, and you hear various
bits and pieces of the news.
So the BeltLinux strike, actually, that's not a big, major story.
You know, things like embassy bombings and stained dresses make for bigger news headlines.
But the BeltLinux thing is something that I just happened to see.
You know how they have that little ticker thing on CNN headline news?
I just happened to look at that at the right moment, and I saw, BeltLinux on strike!
Oh, boy, that's just great!
So, no, I didn't even know they were on the verge of going on strike.
So it came as a big surprise to me.
Yeah, what had happened was the workers got together, of course, that's what happens when
and they decided to go on strike.
And it's already over, believe it or not.
It's over today.
Those express strikes.
Yeah, I mean, just drive through, please, and take your benefits and your money.
But actually, this one wasn't over benefits and money.
It was more under, I guess, more of the concept of what the workers wanted as far as
ensures the members that they'll have work, that they're not going to be outsourced,
they're not going to have the contractors come in.
It's going to continue to be more jobs for more Americans.
And that was our major point.
And I'm certainly glad they did it.
I mean, I think, though, that instead of the workers striking, I think us as customers
should be the next ones to strike.
And, see, when you're out here, you're in New York, but I live in New Jersey.
And unfortunately, I can't get any other local phone coverage other than BeltLanic.
So I'd like to go on strike.
Well, how would you engineer such a strike?
Well, you know, I guess I could not pay my phone bill, but they'll turn it off.
But I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't think I can get 73,000 people together like the BeltLanic union did.
No, I don't think that many people would rally around to support your cause
unless they felt they had something to gain themselves.
Well, if BeltLanic, I guess, raised the rates to some absorbent fee like it was, you know,
$500 a month just to have local telephone coverage, I'm sure people would be upset.
But right now, I guess they're doing it so no one's noticing.
I really wish there was other companies that were allowed in my local area
that could compete and have different, you know, pricing schedules
and have different sort of service.
Because right now, the only telephone company I can get is BeltLanic.
You know, there's no doubt.
It's just BeltLanic, and that's it.
Well, you could do what a few people do and just have a cellular phone
and use that as your home phone as well.
I guess.
But, you know, I look at how many people in the state of New Jersey,
this is where it affects me,
and, you know, there's millions of subscribers that have no choice.
I don't know any other industry that can get away with this.
Yeah, I think it's 145, Daryl, 145.
You can ignore that as I think Daryl is somewhere else.
All right.
I'm in an office right now.
Oh, OK.
In case that hasn't become painfully clear.
I'm in an office.
As opposed to last time when I was standing at a pay phone somewhere in Oklahoma.
Actually, I was going to be standing at a pay phone somewhere in Los Angeles,
but I wound up being in someone's office,
so I decided to be in a more comfortable setting.
Rather than the 150 degree heat that we have here,
and a nice air-conditioned office is a little better.
Well, I'd rather hear Daryl than the large semis from last week.
Yeah.
That was not as soothing as the calm voice as the overhead announcer.
Definitely not.
Let's see what else is in the news.
You were at DEF CON, right?
Yes, I certainly was.
You heard the big fuss about Back Orifice.
Yeah.
I was there for the unveiling of Back Orifice by the cult of the dead cow.
A couple of days later, I was turning on CNN.
I'm always turning on CNN and just happening to catch things.
I caught them mentioning that this program was released by a group calling itself,
and then the anchor person got the weirdest look in her eyes.
The cult of the dead cow.
She'd never heard anything quite that sinister in her life.
It was released to quite a bit of fanfare.
I believe there was some press in the New York Times about this.
There's been lots of press out here.
I think it's great that these newscasters have to say,
cult of the dead cow, Back Orifice, all these things.
I think it's a blast to watch.
My favorite news anchors just have to cringe as they say the names of these programs and hackers.
Right.
If they're going to give us the attention,
we might as well make them feel as silly as possible when they do it.
Yeah.
I agree.
That's part of the rationale behind that.
Have you had a chance to play with this wonderful program?
I had it running on my home system.
I had a couple computers running in it.
I like it.
It's pretty interesting.
It certainly could be used as a remote administration tool,
so you can see what your users are doing or what you want them to do.
Or what you've done if you forget yourself.
Exactly.
You can look at the passwords.
You can look at anything that's cached into the system memory.
There's a Unix client that was released, let's see, August 9th.
If you have the Unix client, you control a Windows machine.
And also on August 10th, which I believe is today.
Is today August 10th?
No.
Today's August 11th.
Butt plugs.
Back Orifice server plug is new functionality for Back Orifice
brought to you by the people we've never heard of.
That was pretty good.
You want to hear a quick list of features, what you can do with Back Orifice?
Absolutely.
If anybody wants to download this and try it out,
it's at www.cultdeddcow.com.
Go and check it out.
Right now, I think they're up to about 40,000 downloads.
I'm going to quote from Cult of the Dead Cow's homepage.
Microsoft, of course, had something to say or not say about it.
And their statement was, hold on, let me get the Microsoft statement.
Let's see here.
They have a few statements.
I want to get the good one.
Well, I don't even have my Microsoft statement in front of me.
So anyways, oh, here it is.
This is not a tool we should take seriously
or our customers should take seriously.
That's from Edmund Month from Microsoft.
So we'll see how accurate that is.
A lot of people have always said that Windows 95 and Windows 98
that just came out has a lot of security flaws.
That, I think, is something we shouldn't take seriously.
Okay, some of the features.
System control.
You can create dialog boxes with the text of your choice,
lock up or reboot the machine.
That's without Windows doing it on its own.
The next thing is get detailed system information
including current user, CPU type, Windows version, memory usage,
amount to disk, screen saver password, password, cache by user,
file system control, process control, registry control,
network control, multimedia control, packet redirection,
application redirection, HTTP server, integrated packet sniffer,
and a plug-in interface.
That way you can write your own plug-ins
and execute the native code of your choice in BO's hidden process.
You can basically do anything to anybody running this machine.
The original reaction by Microsoft was that big deal.
It's a security hole if you install it on your own machine.
But the CDC's point is that because of other security holes
that Microsoft has had and ignored,
it's fairly trivial to install this on machines
that you do not have access to, that you're not supposed to have access to.
Once you do install this program,
you have complete run of the machine
and you can make people do all kinds of silly things.
Install dialog boxes that insult them,
or spy on their every keystroke, or whatever.
Whatever your fancy may be.
I think this is a really important issue.
Sometimes you have to kind of force things
to get people to do something.
That's kind of what is going on with the Kevin movement.
Sometimes you have to raise your voice and just say,
Enough already. We're not going to sit back anymore
and just let things happen and wait for you guys to get around to it.
We want you guys, Microsoft, to deal with this now.
We want you guys, the prison authorities,
to deal with this Kevin issue now.
Sometimes you have to be a little persistent and a little annoying.
It seems like until something directly affects stockholders
or large amounts of people, people don't want to listen.
Unless it affects them individually.
I did get a chance to install it.
It was pretty easy to install.
All you have to do is install the server and it's done.
It runs in the background.
You can't even see it in the task list
if you hit Control-Alt-Delete.
It runs every time you restart it.
A lot of neat things you can do with it.
If someone has a QuickCam or some type of camera device
attached to their system, you can take a picture of them.
Right there.
That's pretty cool.
Yeah, a lot of neat stuff.
Once again, the address for that is www.coltdeadcow.com.
They have the Unix source that just came out
so people could configure it and change it to their liking.
One of the other things that was mentioned about this,
I'm not sure if it was Microsoft that said this,
but basically they just gave an alert to their users
saying that if it's installed in a certain port,
you just have to look out for that.
That's the default port.
That's only the port that people use
if they don't change anything.
Actually, I have the Microsoft Security Bulletin
right in front of me.
What does it say?
It's Microsoft Security Bulletin MS98-010.
It says information on backwarfers program.
It doesn't have anything specific about the port.
It does basically say, though,
if the user is stupid enough to install it,
it's your own fault and you're not practicing
safe internet policies.
I don't know how I feel about that.
If you were able to stop certain types of traffic
on your own machine,
if you were able to view your own traffic
in Windows 95 or Windows 98,
which you currently can't without getting other software,
it wouldn't be a big deal.
You could stop all these types of things right away.
I think that's the point of this program.
You're running on the internet with Windows 95 or 98
and there's a lot of things going on without you knowing.
It's been said that you log on
and Microsoft gets your drive information
and your serial number
and they send it off to the mothership or whatever.
Well, this certainly makes it sound like it's possible.
If there's this many flaws in the programming as it is,
where someone can take control of your machine,
why isn't it that someone could just send out
all that information as well after you install it?
There's a new feature in 98 that automatically upgrades.
When you go to the site, it scans your hard drive
and sees what you need and what you have.
It certainly sounds like their ease of use
is our security issue.
But let me read down on here.
Truth about BackOrifice.
BackOrifice is not any exploit,
any security issue in Windows, Windows NT,
or the Microsoft BackOffice suite of products.
As far as demonstrating an inherent security vulnerability
in the Windows platform, this is simply not true.
BackOrifice could introduce security vulnerabilities
in the system on which it is installed,
but as with all software,
a user must make the choice to install it.
Anytime a user installs a software from an unknown
or untrusted source,
they risk compromising their system.
So it says...
But you see, Phil, here's the thing.
You don't always have control of your system.
If you work in an office environment,
all the time people are messing around
with various settings.
If you go to a Kinko's or something like that,
you can install anything you want.
You can simply download something from the net
and install it.
Imagine being able to look at everybody's password
that was typed in in a public terminal like this.
It's a very simple thing to say.
It's the user's fault.
But this is more than just that
because the user very often changes
at certain terminals.
One person is not always in control of the machine.
And it's a very definite security hole.
I think it's pretty scary
that one small program can control so much.
It's almost like an Achilles' heel or something
that, you know, one small program
and that's all you need to do
to control someone else's computer.
It's the nature of computing.
Something like that is possible.
Very often the thing that you think is least likely
is the thing that's most likely.
And if folks want to check out the Microsoft Bulletin,
they can go to http://www.microsoft.com
forward slash security
forward slash Bulletin
forward slash ms98-01.htm
What else is in the news this week?
Let's see.
Well, you've been out,
I guess you've been out for a while
so I don't know if you knew about all the mergers
that happened, right?
With Bell Atlantic and GTE
and AT&T and British Telecom.
You've heard about that?
All the one big company now?
I think that's next month.
It'll just be the company.
Okay, well, who is it this month?
Well, this month and last month
it was Bell Atlantic and GTE.
And Bell Atlantic agreed
to buy GTE for
$52.8 billion dollars
in stock.
I thought GTE was going to buy Bell Atlantic.
No, no, no. Actually, let's see.
The net profit for 1997
for Bell Atlantic was $2.5
and the net profit for 1997
for GTE was $2.8.
The sales for 1997
for GTE was $23.3 billion
and for 1997 it was $30.2.
So I think Bell Atlantic has a little bit more
in assets or stock
that they were able to bargain with.
And, let's see.
So this has been approved?
Yeah, this is fine.
Bell Atlantic and GTE now merging, that's definite?
Yeah, this is definitely done
and I believe the next one is going to be
British Telecom, AT&T.
They're at least done or they're talking about it.
Mostly me.
It's getting pretty scary. I worry about
these large companies. There's going to be
three and that's it.
I'm going to have the phone company and they're going
to do the internet and my cable, I'm sure.
This deregulation clearly
didn't work.
All the companies that we're supposed to be getting,
all the competition, everything's just
winding up into a big...
I guess it's not a monopoly.
It's damn close to a monopoly.
I think it's a monopoly.
You know how I feel about my local phone coverage
with Bell Atlantic. I think it's a monopoly.
I don't see why anybody else doesn't see the same thing.
Right, but I'm saying it with regards to long distance.
Yeah.
MCI, AT&T, Sprint, whatever.
They're the big three.
There should be a lot more competition.
Well, MCI was going to merge with
British Telecom but that didn't work out.
That's why AT&T and British Telecom.
So now it's going international.
It's just not American companies.
It's AT&T, British Telecom,
there are going to be one,
and GTE and Bell Atlantic.
This is just after that big
flurry it seemed with all the banks.
My bank can consolidate with every other bank.
Whatever it is, I still have to
pay ATM fees. I don't know how that works out.
Yeah, it's crazy. The consumer always
loses in the end.
The savings that these companies gain by merging
never seem to be passed along
to the consumer.
Certainly true.
We've been
wandering around the country out here
after we spoke last.
We made our way over to
Las Vegas. Unfortunately
we had a bit of a misadventure.
I didn't know this.
There were two Las Vegas's.
There's another Las Vegas. This is true.
There's another Las Vegas
in New Mexico.
What happened was
we were on the highway and we saw a sign
that said Las Vegas. Granted,
it was a small sign.
It did say Las Vegas
and there was an arrow pointing.
It didn't say Las Vegas, New Mexico,
Las Vegas. Not the Las Vegas you want to go to.
It said Las Vegas this way.
We went that way for quite a ways
and we pulled into town.
It's not as I remembered it.
It wasn't as big
and glittery. It seemed a lot
more laid back. I figured we were probably
in an adjunct to it.
Some sort of a suburb or something like that.
Suburbs of Vegas.
I was asking around
where's the strip.
I even asked
for the Plaza Hotel which is where Defcon
was being held.
Just to add insult to injury, they have a Plaza Hotel
there. They directed me to the
Plaza Hotel. Of course, when I went there
it turned out that they had never heard
of Defcon. When you have a couple
thousand hackers...
Daryl, 1-4-5.
Daryl, 1-4-5.
Where is Daryl?
I don't know.
They didn't know what I was talking about
in that hotel.
We wound up looking pretty foolish because
we were still a long ways away from the
other Las Vegas. We were a couple of states away
in fact. Was there gambling going on
in this other Las Vegas? No gambling at all.
You didn't notice any flashing lights?
Gambling is forbidden in that part of the state.
That part of the country actually.
We had to continue onwards.
Eventually we found the real Las Vegas
and it looked all familiar.
Bright lights and all that kind of thing.
Defcon was great. It was probably
the best Defcon ever.
I think over 2,000 people attended
this one.
Well behaved.
Attentive. A lot of good
speakers and panelists.
I have to say the
reaction to the whole Free Kevin movement
was really positive.
We were able to raise a lot of money for his
defense fund by
selling some of the bumper stickers.
We went to Kevin's grandmother after the conference
to present her with
the cash we raised.
She was overcome
with emotion to say the least
at seeing all the support that there was out there.
It was really great.
It was a very uplifting experience
seeing a lot of people there talking to
a lot of individuals who
really are thinking
straight and trying
to resolve some of these issues and get the word
out. From there we went
to California which is where we are
now. Last
Friday we went to the 2600 meeting in San Diego
which is a fairly new meeting.
It was great. It was really amazing.
I was expecting a handful of people
at this thing because it's only been around
a couple of months, at least listed a couple of months
in our magazine.
We had about 2,000 people.
What we ended up doing was just
having this impromptu round table discussion
about the whole Mitnick
issue.
People really had some good ideas, good suggestions,
devoted a lot of thought to this.
I thought it was really great
just to meet a whole lot of new people.
What we're doing now
is we're heading up to the
Bay Area in the next couple of days
and then wandering around some more
in various other states I guess
trying to find out what's going on.
We met up with the folks at New Image
which is a film company
that's related somewhat to
Miramax Venture and those all about the takedown film.
Boy, they
didn't want to see us at all.
They knew exactly who we were too.
We just decided to go there and spur
the moment to say,
hey guys, what's up with the film?
They didn't want to talk at all.
They really clammed up big time.
Did you have the camera with you?
We had the camera, yeah.
That's how they work.
That might have been it.
I wasn't expecting this kind of a reaction.
I was expecting them to be a little bit more
friendly about this.
Just to update people, the film Takedown
is in production right now in
Wilmington, North Carolina.
We're trying to get reports from there
as to how it's progressing.
Hopefully we'll
be able to speak to some of the people
there as well.
It's gone through a lot of
changes. A lot of changes over the weeks.
There's even
another change now.
Now get this, this is kind of
crazy, but the most recent revision,
this is not the one where
Kevin has
a credit card statement
of Tsutomu Shimomura, actually he's responsible
for a credit card statement for the $229,000
or something like that. It's a Victoria's Secret
I believe. They still have that
scene in there, but they added another
scene where
Shimomura and his girlfriend
are going to see a movie
and he sticks his ATM card
into an ATM machine
and it takes the
card and says on the screen
Free Kevin.
Well, that's not exactly the right
timeline. No, it's not exactly the right
timeline. It's not exactly the right intent
either. It's kind of like, you know,
they're taking
what we've been doing and using it for
themselves. It's so obvious
what they're doing here.
It's kind of funny, I laugh when I hear
about that, but
it really doesn't make
Kevin feel any better in prison there.
It's almost like they're taunting
him.
So
things are still going on.
I'm hoping people start
talking to each other and start
working this out in some kind
of a way where people
are benefited somehow.
Because, you know, Kevin is giving them a great
story, I think, by having gone
through this hell. And they should
consider that. They should consider that
that's what this is really all about.
A couple other things which are very
interesting. A few days ago
I was talking to Kevin as we were driving
into Los Angeles. He had just happened to
call and he
gave us directions, actually, because we were about to
go down the wrong highway. So he said, no, no,
keep on this highway, go this way.
So Kevin is there in prison for three and a half years,
hasn't been outside at all, but he's
directing us as to exactly where to go,
what to look out for. Like, you know, he's
reliving it himself. I mean, it's
pretty sad, actually, when you think about it.
And the spookiest part of it all
was when he was telling us to
go down this highway. And he said,
do you see a white
building on your left? And I said, yeah, I see it right there.
He said, well, that's where I am.
We had passed
right by the prison where he was.
It was just such a shocking thing to realize
that all this time he's been in that building
and we were just able to drive right
past it. The next
day, what we did was we went over there
with the camera crew and all that
to a gas station, which is
across the street from the
prison. Now, the funny thing
about this is that we weren't the only ones.
Other people come to that very same gas
station to look at the prison
and to wave at prisoners
who they can't really
see, but who say that they're able to see
them at a certain time.
The reason you can't see them is because the windows are
really, really narrow.
It's extremely difficult to make out anything.
People just sit there and wave and they're
content to do that. We tried
to work out a time with Kevin where we could
be there at a certain time
and he'd wave at us. Of course,
it's a prison. There are lots of little tiny
windows in this building. We had no idea where to
really look. We're staring
at the building like idiots,
trying to find this person
we haven't seen in years. We don't even know what he
looks like. It's across
the street, so even if we did know what he looked like,
he wouldn't really show up that well.
We were doing this for a long, long time
and looking at
all different windows. We hear
this noise, this tapping
noise. All of a sudden, we realized,
my God, that's Kevin. He's tapping on a
window somewhere. He's
tapping so loudly that
we can hear it across the street.
Once we realized
that, we started looking around and we
saw him. We finally saw
a hand. All we saw at first
was just a hand wrapping
against the window.
We were able to zoom in on
him a little bit to the point where we could actually
see part of his face.
It was really an emotional moment because
this is the first real contact he's
had with any of us. We've talked
on the phone lots of times, but
to actually be able to wave.
It's a simple thing, a very simple thing, just
to wave and be waved at back.
He can't see anybody,
only blood relatives,
which he doesn't have a lot of.
Not blood relatives, direct family members
like mother, father, sister, brother,
grandmother.
That amounts to, I think, three people.
And a lawyer.
And lawyers, he can see. Believe me,
that's the way he's lived for the last three and a half years.
It's hell. It really is hell.
We did that for a while.
This was such an amazing
moment that we stayed there for about a half hour
just waving.
Then the guards
across the street
obviously were perturbed by
this because they saw us with a camera.
They have some sort of a rule
with federal prisons.
I told you about this last time.
We went to Farber's former prison at
Schoolkill, Pennsylvania.
We filmed an awful lot of it. In fact, we filmed
all of it. And as we were leaving,
we got stopped by a very angry federal cop
who wanted us...
He didn't want us to have
done that. He said, that's very illegal.
Although, there was no sign anywhere that said
we weren't allowed to take pictures.
They just said that we had to submit to searches,
which we very well might have had to have done.
But he let us go.
Now, of course, the same regulation applies here.
And
so what that means is
you can't take pictures in prison.
I don't understand this as a regular
person in the free world.
There's this big white building in the middle of the city.
You cannot tell me that it's illegal to take
a picture of this building from other parts
of the city. I mean, this building
is not a military secret that was planted
here. It's part of the city.
It's part of the city.
I'm damned if I'm going to have somebody tell me
that we cannot take a picture of it
from across the street,
across town, from the air, whatever.
So we stayed there.
We stayed there filming the building.
Filming Kevin in the window.
We were able to get his hand or
part of his face.
Obviously, the guards were getting upset
by this, so they started motioning to us
saying, Hey, you over there.
This is from across the street.
And we're like, What?
They said, Come over here a second.
I said,
Well, no, wait a minute.
If we go over there, then we're on federal property.
And if we're on federal property, then we have to
submit to federal will and have
searched or be told that
we're not allowed to take pictures because we're on federal property,
which we didn't want to be in the first place.
I hope you didn't fall for it. They didn't taunt you with anything, did they?
No, they didn't.
They didn't try to goad us or anything like that.
They just said, Hey, come over here.
And we're like, No, you come over here.
They wouldn't do it. They wouldn't cross over the street
because I think they knew they had absolutely no power whatsoever
once they crossed the street.
So that went on for a while, and then they just
walked away.
They just walked into the parking garage, and we figured that
they'd get assaulted or something like that, but that never happened.
But what did happen,
later on that night, the entire
prison got locked down.
And it was because of us being across the street
that I guess it kind of
sent them into some sort of a panic
where they just had to
get everybody
in some sort of
an ultra-secure state.
And Kevin was
also warned very specifically,
because I guess they saw the connection
with Kevin,
that they'd throw him
in the hole if he had any more
unauthorized contact
with the outside world.
It's just such an amazing thing
that somebody would actually
think of waving at a window
as unauthorized
contact with the outside world.
It makes
me laugh, but it makes me cry
too, because it's just so crazy.
I mean, what exactly
is it they're afraid of?
Why keep this person
so long from the rest of the world
with no real
contact whatsoever?
It's really crazy.
So we
did that for a while,
and it was, I think, gratifying for everybody.
One other
bit of news we found out while
here, in fact, Kevin was the person who figured it out,
is that Agent Steele,
who read an article in 2600 a couple of
issues ago, is back in prison.
And we found this out, because
Kevin was given
a notice that he wasn't allowed
to be in a certain part of the prison, because
it was illegal
for him to have contact with somebody who was there.
There's only one person where that would be the case,
and that was Agent Steele, so he
deduced from that that Agent Steele was back in prison.
Justin Peterson is his real name.
We called up the prison
and verified that he is, in fact, in there,
probably for some sort of a probation violation,
but we don't know more
at this time.
That's interesting news.
Do you have any background information on Agent Steele
for the folks that don't know?
He was probably most famous
for winning that Porsche
in the radio contest
by hacking the phone system.
And he also
was most noted in the hacker community
as being what's known as a narc,
somebody who was actually working
for the federal government
and trying to entrap hackers.
In fact, Kevin
was one of the people that was targeted
by Agent Steele
at the behest of the federal government.
In fact, interesting thing,
this was written into the film.
The later versions of the film have
Justin Peterson, Agent Steele, at the very beginning
trying to entrap
Kevin Mitnick and his partner
Louis Depayne, and
they caught on to him.
Basically, the way the story goes is this.
There's this computer system called SAS
which
enables authorities to tap
phone lines at will. Any phone line
you can just tap immediately.
Agent Steele came to
these guys and said,
I know about SAS. Now, at this time,
Kevin and Louis did not know anything about
SAS, so they said, oh, that's
interesting, and then they went out
and found out even more about SAS
to the point where they pretty much
controlled the system. This is all
in the film, by the way.
Then,
the next meeting that they had, the next meeting
Agent Steele and Kevin and
Louis had,
they showed him that they knew even more
than he did about this SAS
system. His jaw drops
to the floor and he's totally stunned.
The next scene has him
calling up the FBI saying,
guys, I told them
about SAS, and I know I was supposed
to tell them about SAS, but I did it
so that I could get him interested, but I didn't expect
him to go this far
and actually learn
all about the system and know more than
I know.
The FBI guy on the other end of the phone
is incredulous, saying,
Justin, if you were Kevin
and you just learned about
SAS, whose phone do you
think he would tap first?
As Justin realizes
that everything he's saying is being
overheard, the FBI agent's
on the phone simply says, Justin, you are
an idiot.
I mean, that's
funny in itself right there.
And I'm not sure how
true or how accurate it is, but I just think
it's a better spirit to get things
started. So there has
been progress made. There are still some things that are
very wrong with the film. Oh, the other thing, the other big
bit of news, the garbage can scene
has been removed. The garbage
can scene is out of there.
From what I heard, from what I heard,
the latest version has
Shimomura chasing Kevin
down the alleyway.
Kevin turns around and just confronts
him and says, what? What do you want
from me? And then
they're close to a bar
and Kevin shouts
to one of the bouncers, this
guy stole my wallet. And then the bouncer
starts attacking Shimomura and Kevin escapes.
It's better.
It's slightly better. It's better.
And it's certainly a lot better than
having Kevin portrayed as a violent criminal.
So while I don't think
we're ever going to get 100% satisfaction, I do
think that we need to continue
making progress. Like the credit card thing
for instance is one thing that simply has to go.
Because Kevin was never involved in any
kind of credit card fraud. The implication that he was
is very offensive.
And there are lots of other things like
that. For instance, the main thing
is Kevin
hacking Shimomura's machine, which has
never been proven to have happened.
And which Kevin to this day denies.
Now if you watch a film
and even at the end of the film they have this
little trailer that says, or credits
that say, you know, Kevin maintains his
innocence to this day. You've just seen a film
where he wasn't being innocent.
So you're going to say, wow, he's lying.
And that's not
really fair because they're not showing the whole
story. Well the thing I worry about is
towards the later revisions
of the script that were coming out was this
super virus and this super
thing that was going to take down Wall Street
and NASA and
Air Force One. Is that still in there?
I think so and I think that's a Hollywood thing
that they're just never going to be able to get out of there.
That kind of thinking is a virus in itself
that just sort of permeates into scripts.
That's been done so many times.
Like you've said and I think a lot of people have said,
this story is so interesting. It's more of, you know,
they took away someone's human rights.
Someone, an American citizen.
And
it's a shame that that's such a good story
but it's being changed
into this war games
or this megavirus
alien something.
I thought that was going to be the next thing.
It's what they think the American public
is capable of understanding.
I happen to think the American public is capable of understanding
far more and far
more subtle things, far more interesting
things. And they have
the ability to simply
understand things a lot more than
they're given credit for.
Before we take phone calls, I wanted to ask you
because you said you saw Kevin's grandma.
How does she feel about this? Because obviously there's a
large age gap.
I was just curious, what's her take on this?
Does she have any idea of
why Kevin's in prison?
Absolutely. In fact,
Kevin's grandmother, I think,
puts this into words better than anybody
that I've met yet
and spoken to on the case.
She has a full understanding
of exactly what is involved
and of the horrible injustice
that's happening here.
I mean, she understands
the human aspect of this.
And that's something that a lot of people seem to
forget. They say, oh, this guy,
he ran from the feds,
he broke the law,
he deserves what he got. They don't take
into account all the things that
go into
this whole equation.
For instance, Kevin being locked up in solitary
confinement for eight months in 1989.
If that happens to you
and you find out
that the federal authorities
are after you because of a probation
violation a couple of days
before your probation ends and that they're
interested in putting you back in prison,
you're not likely to walk up to them and surrender.
You're likely to run because you don't want to be
put in solitary confinement again.
He was put in solitary confinement for no good reason,
simply because he was a hacker, simply because
he was somebody who might be
able to do something on a touch-tone phone that nobody
can understand. It's
insane. And Kevin's grandmother understands
that perfectly. I just wish people
in higher positions were
able to understand this.
She's very upset, obviously.
She told me a lot about
Kevin's background, about how
he grew up and things like that.
It's sad to
see how things are turning out.
It's sad to see all the ways
that Kevin has been wronged over the years.
I can't think of someone
better able to speak on this subject.
We did this yesterday.
We figured it would be kind of a cool thing
to hang a
Free Kevin banner on the
Hollywood sign.
It's really hard to get to.
I imagine they don't want to let a lot of people...
people there.
They put it up on a mountain to keep
people away from it, I guess.
That's the main reason it's up there.
It's hard to find the exact mountain it's on.
You see it, then you drive, and there's
all these little loopy roads.
I've driven around there before on the same mission.
It's hard. It's very difficult.
We were able to
find an entrance to what
looked like the right mountain, and we walked around for a
long, long time, getting a little bit
closer, but then there'd be these tremendous
mountains and valleys where we'd have to
go down again.
Pathways that just seemed to go in the wrong direction.
We wound
up just climbing through
the brush for a long, long time.
Real like
Grizzly Adams kind of stuff here.
Climbing through underbrush.
It wasn't until later I found out that's where the killer bees
are.
It's a good thing I found that out afterwards.
We wound
up climbing up sheer rock
and facing death,
but we made it to the letters.
The second L has cameras on it.
Probably traffic
cameras or something.
Not traffic cameras in the middle of the mountain.
These are cameras
to show people who have made
it that far to the letters.
We realized
that we were kind of on camera at that
point, so we had to move kind of fast.
We did it.
We wouldn't have to climb the letters, only because
it was frightfully dangerous to do that.
There are ladders, but they're higher
up, and you have to climb up
and do trapeze acts to get to the ladders.
Plus, the night was
falling, so what we did was we just stood in front of some of the letters
and held the banner as high as we could.
From what we
heard from the people that we
had arranged to take pictures of this,
it looked pretty good. We got the banner
up there.
The funny thing is, if we had gone a different way
on a different road, we wouldn't have had to go through the
mountain at all. We could have just taken a road to
the top of the hill and just climbed down
a few feet. Oh, that's no fun, though.
No, this was certainly something I
wouldn't trade for anything.
Well, I think it's time to take
some phone calls. It certainly is.
212-209-2900, unless they've moved
the studios again. No, that's it.
Okay, great.
The show is off the hook. Emmanuel Goldstein here
in Los Angeles, Phil back there in New York.
Oh, this time you're in California and I'm in New York.
Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.
Why is he there now? I haven't finished
talking yet. I don't know how exactly
he did that. Listen, I don't like when people pop
in. Rebel, I'm going to ask you to not
say anything for a second while I finish my
paragraph here. Oh, okay. You see that? Yeah, okay.
Alright, it's going to be a long paragraph.
Sorry about that.
You see,
holding the phone up to the radio is considered
talking. I don't have a switch phone, sorry. Go ahead.
Alright, so let's not do that again.
What was I saying? Oh, yeah, so I'm here in Los Angeles,
Phil is back in New York. Now,
interesting thing for the people listening in Los Angeles
because the show is brought to you in real audio
and people are able to
hear it around the world. We
will be at the
what's known as the Men's Chinese
Theater tonight. Now, that's
the theater with all the little footsteps,
footprints in front of it, where all the actors
stick their feet.
We're going to be there with a camera crew.
We're going to be handing out some flyers
about the Midnight Case and talking to people.
So if you want to meet up with us, we'll be there starting at
8 p.m. That's, of course, Pacific time.
The Men's Chinese Theater
on, I believe, Hollywood Boulevard in
Los Angeles. Now, on to
the phone calls, and I have a feeling our first
phone call is Rebel. Yeah.
Oh, what a surprise. You're in California
this time. Yeah, you know, hopefully
we can keep this up for a while where we're on separate
sides of the country. The show is broadcast
on Real Audio Live tonight, isn't it?
Yeah. Yes, it should be. I was wondering
how many people at a time can listen to
the show? I'm just curious. We've had a
couple of hundred at one time, so
we probably have one of the biggest
Real Audio broadcasts. I know that they have
different servers. How many people
per server can go on?
It depends on the size.
I don't have that information. Portia would be the person who
could answer that question for you, but he's
in Norway right now, so he can't even answer the question.
How do you do it? Do you hook up a radio
to a computer or something? Well, we have
people who
code for us, who listen
to the station, and then they send it out to
the servers.
That's pretty much the extent of my knowledge of it, and
if you really want more information,
send email to oth2600.com.
They could probably tell you more.
And I was also wondering, this new
carrier access code,
hello? That's what the new
carrier access code is called?
Okay.
You still there, Manuel? I'm still here.
Okay. I guess he hung up.
Phones are a little flaky. The new carrier access
code, hello,
is that what he said? Yeah.
Yeah, then he's gone. That's a mystery.
Alright, 212-209-2900
is our phone
number. Let's take another phone
call. Yeah, I was just
wondering about the new carrier access code.
Wait a minute. How did you do that?
What's going on here?
First of all, do you have control of all the phone lines in New York?
You hung up on me!
We did not hang up on you.
Yes, we did.
Somebody hung up on me. How many times
have you called into a studio?
I just called. I was about
to ask you a question, then you hung up on me, so
I just called back. And you just happened to get in
again. Right. You have about
20 lines. That's impossible.
20 lines? We had 10. Ask
your question. Alright. The new carrier
access code, you now have to dial
instead of 10 and then
288 or 222. 1010,
right. And then tweet it. Why is that?
Because they had to expand the number
of carriers in there.
There's all kinds of different companies around
the nation.
And the 10288,
that only allowed for a thousand
possibilities because everything is
10XXX. Right.
Now it's 1010XXX.
But the
second 10 is
actually, I think it's 101XXXX,
which opens
up to 10,000.
Oh.
It's a big, tremendous waste of time for me, too.
I mean, it's too many numbers to dial.
You know, you have to dial these numbers just to
get the carrier you want. Then you have to dial the phone number
on top of that.
It's not exactly consumer-friendly.
Have you played with many phones
in California? I haven't really had a chance
to do that. I've been kind of
walking around doing other things. I will say this.
I've been using the Sprint PCS
and the OmniPoint phone out here.
OmniPoint defaults
over to Pacific Bell Mobile.
Do they know, do the operators
know that it's a cellular phone?
We need to call the operator and have them dial numbers for you?
I don't do that.
Well, I like to do that, too. I know you like to do that, but
I like to just make regular phone calls. And do you know that Pacific Bell
puts third-number calls through without asking?
Local calls? They put local
calls through without asking. Third-number calls.
In other words, if you dial a zero, the area code and number
to make an operator-assisted third-number
call, it will put it through without
you know, without... Without verifying
with the person you're defrauding.
Just like AT&T. AT&T does the same thing.
Alright.
We're going to move on here.
Thanks for calling.
But to continue what I was saying here,
the OmniPoint phone
defaults over to Pacific Bell
Mobile, and Sprint PCS
has body service as well.
I've got to tell you, though,
I'm really more unhappy
out here with Sprint PCS than I was in New York.
I didn't know that was possible.
I didn't think it was possible either. And you know,
there's a whole entourage of people out here that feel the same way.
There is
a big problem with voicemail in that there is
no voicemail notification. There was a
problem a few days ago nationwide, according
to Sprint, where their entire voicemail system
crashed. And if you dial
star 2 or star 611,
which is their new number,
you would either get no answer or a busy
signal. And they
basically had no customer service for
the last week. I finally got through to somebody yesterday
who was very helpful. They tried to
help me out here and explain why
I'm not getting any message notification when I get
voicemail and why if my phone
is on and it rings, it doesn't go to voicemail.
It goes to a recording saying the
Sprint PCS customer you're trying to reach is not
available and doesn't take a message.
They say it's because my phone simply
needs to be reset. And they advise
that I power down my phone and
power it back up
with one little caveat, and that is that
I have to be in my home region to do this.
So they want me to go back to New York,
turn the phone off and on, and then head back out
here to see if it works.
And I'm just trying to book
the flights necessary to get this
done so that my voicemail
will work out here. Maybe I could just send the phone
over to New York, have somebody turn it off and on,
then send it back out here. It'd probably be more economical.
You could probably get a FedEx back and forth in
two days. 212-209-2900.
Let's take our next listener phone call.
Good evening. You're on off the hook.
Okay.
That was more interesting than the last one. I'll say that.
Good evening. You're on the air.
Speak up.
Okay.
All right. Go ahead.
Good evening. You're on the air.
Hello.
Hi. A legitimate caller.
Hi there.
Hello. Is this Emmanuel?
Yes. Go ahead.
Finally, Emmanuel. This is Kimberly. How are you?
How are you doing?
I'm doing pretty well. I've got a friend of yours on the line.
You have a friend of mine on the line?
Yeah. Can you hold just a second?
Hello?
Go ahead.
Kevin?
Just a second.
Okay.
Let's make another phone call.
I don't know what that was all about.
Only one of your friends was trying to get a hold of you.
Okay. We need to
not have that noise.
Are you still there? Yes, I'm still here.
Is Claude okay? He hasn't been incapacitated.
Claude is fine. The next caller
can talk now. Hello?
You were talking about a movie that was under production
and they kept changing around the scenes
and stuff. What movie was that?
The movie is called Takedown. I'm sorry if I didn't mention the title.
You probably did, but I came in
during the subject discussion.
Takedown is based on the book
by Satomo Shimomura
and John Markoff
which centers on the capture
of Kevin Mitnick back in 1995.
The story
as told by Shimomura
is extremely one-sided
and paints Kevin
in a very bad light. The film is based
on the book, except the film
made Kevin out to be even worse than the book.
That's what people started to object to
and that's when this whole movement really
picked up steam. The film has
gotten better. It's still got a long ways to
go, but it'll
get there. When is it going to be out?
I'm sorry? When is it going to be out?
Probably not for another year.
The interesting thing is
I don't know how they do this, but they have
a trial taking place already
and they have Kevin being found guilty.
Kevin hasn't had a trial as we all know
and it's not scheduled until January
1999 and probably it's going to be postponed
even more.
With all that in mind, how can they make a film
and say, yeah, he's found guilty and this is a
sentence he got? Shouldn't they wait
until the trial is over before
they finish the movie? I would
venture to guess that's a good thing to do
except that's not how Hollywood works.
Hollywood just wants to make
a quick buck and get out and not
pay attention to the facts. In this
particular case, there's a human being
at stake and this
person has to
be considered.
Kevin is somebody who's suffering in jail
and does not have the same freedoms
as people outside
who can negotiate movie contracts and
things like that. This is his
story. This is his name
being put out there and defamed
quite honestly. How is anybody going to
look at Kevin and say,
oh yeah, I believe what you say
after a film has come out that shows
things in completely the opposite way?
It's kind of like there was
three endings to Beetlejuice
but they only played one.
They played all three and then
the test audience chose which one
they liked the best. Well, I wish
they could play Kevin's
fate to a test
audience and we could pick which one we'd like.
I know which one I'd like.
They should put all endings out
on a laserdisc or something.
I was referring to real life.
No, it really happened.
It's just that they decided
why should a test audience
decide what I get to see?
The truth about Cats and Dogs
was changed because the audience didn't like it.
Ginny and Garofalo
is noticeably thinner at the end
because it's a new ending.
You're raising an important point
but what we're talking about here is
a real person in prison that we want to get
out of prison.
The film is just making things worse
because it's
just assuming that he's going to be found guilty
it's assuming that he did these things
which he's never actually proven he did
and it's taking advantage of somebody who can't
defend himself and that's why we're doing it.
I was also looking forward to
the animated hate but
they did these little test
random audiences and
they didn't like it and I've enjoyed
Mr. Bag's work for like
10 years or more and now
they're not going to do a show because this audience
didn't like it.
Maybe they should have made an audience of people who
like Mr. Bag
It's kind of like Michael J. Fox
was going to play Pong but that didn't happen.
Do you think it was because
somebody
decided for me that that wouldn't be a good movie?
All kinds of decisions
All kinds of decisions
are made for you.
I don't really like that.
I'd like to be able to change that.
That's a reality of marketing
and it doesn't just hold true for movies
it holds true for TV shows and for
songs on CDs
and what bands get contracts and which ones don't
and the only way to
get around this is to just do it yourself.
Just make your own music
put out your own magazines
do your own movies
That's the only way
Be independent. Don't be dependent on
these people who take advantage.
That's my advice.
We've got time for a couple more calls if we go through them quickly.
OK. 212-209-2900
Let's take our next phone call.
Good evening. You're on the air.
Thanks. A couple of questions. Do you know if it's
Calco in North Carolina?
Is it the studio?
It's in Wilmington, North Carolina. I don't know the exact
name of it. But get this.
Every time you make a film
you have to create a corporation.
That's just the way films are made.
You create a corporation. The corporation lasts as long
as production takes place and then it folds.
The name of this corporation is
Hacker Productions, Inc.
Let's make sure that the judge doesn't have
a hard time. Use that for what it's worth
and hopefully we'll find out
even more information. Also, I have this
from the European Parliament
about surveillance. I just wanted to mention
that what they're saying is that the CCITT-1
series interface
can take phones off the hook and listen to
conversations occurring near the phone.
Have you ever heard about that?
Sounds like a lot of paranoia to me, but I'd like to know more.
You know, you can send us the technical
specs if you find them.
I have an SGR newsletter number for it.
Which fax number
when you're back?
OK. The fax number over at 2600 is
area code 516-474-2677.
area code 516-474-2677.
And uh...
I sent you his phone number that time.
I don't know if you got it. What was it?
574?
474.
2677, area code 516. OK, thank you.
Thanks.
Want to take another call, Phil? Yeah, we've got time.
OK. Good evening. You're on
off the hook. Hello.
Yes, go ahead. Is this
off the hook? It's off the hook and you're on the air.
Go ahead. Is this a manual?
Yes, it is. Sorry for all
the questions. This is
Forbin. I just got a couple questions for you about
the whole
Kevin thing and
what your thoughts are on that. OK, go ahead.
And I was at DEF CON and
saw everything and probably I'm not
the most educated person on the
planet about this, but
it just seems to me that
the type of person that Kevin is
I don't understand
why this isn't more expected. I mean, it's obviously
intolerable and it's obviously wrong,
but the reality
of it is that the government
takes liberties with our rights every day
and, you know, Kevin
if I
were to go downstairs right now and walk out of my building
and punch a cop in the face, I know
I'm going to get beat. I just know it's not
right. Right. But
Kevin is a repeat offender.
A lot of people feel that if he
comes out, he'll do the exact same thing.
Well, now, let's talk about what this
exact same thing entails.
In this particular case,
we're talking about a minor
probation violation, if it even occurred
at all. What was
happening was this Agent Steele
character had been sent out to
get Kevin to commit a crime.
This seems to be pretty much established
fact at this point.
Kevin is somebody that the federal government
seems to really have an agenda with
where they want to see him
be the poster child
to send a message to the rest of the hackers
regardless of whether or not he's
done anything. And, you know, I have to
ask, you say he's a repeat offender.
Okay, what has he done? What is it exactly
that we're talking about? Well, we
agree that Kevin has been in prison before, right?
He's been in prison before, yes.
He was in prison back in 1989
for a period of, I believe it was
ten months, eight of which were spent
in solitary confinement. And that's got to affect you.
I mean, I hate to interrupt, but it looks
like we need to close
this show shortly, so if you have some, you know...
Okay, we've got to wind this up in like
30 seconds, so if you have any closing thoughts,
make it quick. Yeah, basically, I
just, with all the things that are going on
with, you know, things that, like the
Hong Kong wands and the Chinese
human rights issues and the
nuclear stuff that, you know, the hackers
are working on, everyone's really going for a
purpose, which is a new thing in hacking.
And it just seems like you, who, you know,
2600, who commands a lot of
voice in the hacker community,
is trying so hard on this
cause that sort of seems insignificant
next to all the other things
that are happening. Well, let me ask you something. What is
more significant than an individual
struggle against something far more
powerful than any of us can ever
imagine? This is somebody who's
suffering, someone who's being, you know, literally
tortured. Because he puts somebody in jail
three and a half years, I'm sorry, that's torture.
And there's just no good reason for it.
This is not a person who belongs in jail.
Even if he's guilty of everything people are
using him up, even if he's the most repeat
offender that ever existed, I'm sorry,
I just don't see it. And that's something, you know,
it's cruelty and we have to speak out against
it. I'd like to talk about this a lot
more. I wish you were the first caller, but I'm
afraid we're out of time. Alright.
Phil, thanks very much for
being there to keep things
under control. And thanks to Claude for also
keeping things going smoothly.
Alright, we'll be talking to you next week, right? We'll be, I don't know
where we're going to be next week, but it should be interesting.
And until then, well, you can write to us
at OTH at 2600.com
Until then, this is Emmanuel from
Los Angeles signing off. Look for us at
the Chinese Theater tonight at 8 o'clock.
Good luck.
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