We know that holding this money violates the First Amendment and it constitutes, really it constitutes an attack on the Cuban Five.
We believe that this policy infringes upon not only our free speech rights, but the free speech rights of all other organizations which seek to educate the American public about Cuba.
For Free Speech Radio News, I'm Gail Walker.
Free Speech Radio News is produced at Pacifica Stations WBAI in New York, KPFA in Berkeley, and KPFK in Los Angeles, and Community Radio Station WMNF in Tampa, Florida.
Producers are Cata Mesta, Simba Russo, and Monica Lopez.
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And if you want to hear the rest of these names, I'm sorry, we just can't play well into the hour here.
It's two minutes after seven o'clock, time late again for Off The Hook.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving, now I can't make a call.
We couldn't get much worse, but if we could we would.
Bon Diddley Bon for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
Bon Diddley Bon.
Let's go.
And a good evening to everybody.
The program is Off The Hook.
Emmanuel Goldstein here with you at this Tuesday, Wednesday night rather from seven to eight
where we present the latest in high technology and happenings all around the world of the internet
and various other venues.
And good evening everybody.
Jeff's not here this week, but Redhack is and Mike is and Jim is.
And guys have some interesting news to tell us about.
And Bernie, of course, from Philadelphia.
How are you doing?
Oh, good evening.
It's been, I guess, a week of legal challenges and various milestones of sorts,
which we're going to outline.
It's always something, always one thing or another.
But this week was kind of, there's some humorous ones as well,
but some serious ones in addition to that as always.
Let's see.
Yesterday was Gray Tuesday, of course.
Mike, tell us about Gray Tuesday because we were talking about it before.
Gray Tuesday was yesterday.
This guy called DJ Danger Mouse produced something called the Gray Album,
which is a mix-up of the Beatles' White Album and Jay-Z's Black Album.
And EMI, which owns the copyrights to the Beatles' White Album,
was none too pleased about the existence of this disc.
They got the DJ himself to stop distributing the album,
which, of course, caused the people on the internet to just start distributing the album.
Way more people have now heard this thing than if EMI had just kept its mouth shut.
Oh, what? Is that it? Is that it?
It's appeared out of nowhere.
Are we allowed to play this?
No.
Well, is it illegal music?
Jim, what do you think? You're the legal expert for the day.
I have no idea what we're playing.
But if it was this, I think if we knew it—
I have nothing to do with this. It's just—
Okay. Well, this guy's in charge apparently.
But I hear Beatles sampling in the background.
That's definitely not the Beatles.
In the background, I hear Beatles sampling.
It's the song Long, Long, Long, I think, from the White Album.
The end of Side 3.
I think that's the name of the song.
George Harrison piece.
I have no knowledge of that album.
At least not now.
In any event, I believe the way it works is
the Beatles, or whoever is in charge of the Beatles' music, which I think is Michael Jackson right now,
It's not Michael Jackson.
It's not Michael Jackson?
Michael Jackson apparently owns some right to the Beatles' music,
and this other company owns a different right.
Okay, well, the point is they don't let anybody do anything with their music.
People can't use it for sampling or anything like that.
So no matter how much money was paid to them,
they never could have done what they did here.
That's right.
Okay, so the issue then is that this music should never have been created.
According to EMI, this music that we're hearing right now should not exist,
or at least not be distributed.
But it does exist.
Obviously, it was made.
Somebody created it.
And thanks, of course, to some of the copyright extension acts that have been passed,
this music will never become legal to create.
But the thing is, it's already there.
It's created.
It's music.
How can music be illegal?
The same way a sound of coins going into a pay phone, that sound could be illegal.
That's true, too.
Or how little girls singing around a campfire could be sued for copyright infringement
and have to pay royalties.
Well, it's just so much fun to sue little girls singing around a campfire.
I enjoy it.
Maybe I'm just not cool, but to me it sounds like two records playing at the same time.
Now, there is some good stuff in here.
I've listened to the album.
We can't play most of it on the air.
Yeah, most of it, unfortunately, because of other FCC regulations
and various ministers that drive around in their cars
listening to us for some reason and getting offended.
Hang on, we're down to ten seconds of this.
Yeah, it's not bad.
It's not bad.
But the thing is, yesterday there was a demonstration online, Gray Tuesday.
What happened?
Several, many, many websites, I don't know how many,
shut down for the day or turned themselves gray for the day
and offered copies of this album in mp3 format.
So anyone who wanted could just come and listen to it.
And I believe a lot of those sites were served with cease and desist letters
before they even began, right?
That's right.
EMI went on GrayTuesday.org,
it's kind of coordinating this thing,
which is a project of a group called Downhill Battle.
They had a list of sites where this album was going to appear yesterday.
And I guess EMI went to this site and got the list
and started sending out cease and desist letters.
Can't say I'm surprised.
I mean, that's sort of what I would expect them to do.
But the thing I have, I mean, I can sort of see why they would step in
and say, you know, you're not allowed to sell this music,
you're not allowed to make money off of someone else's work,
but to simply create something.
Like right now, we're playing this music, but we're talking over it too.
So we're making a unique blend of the two things, voices plus music.
We're allowed to do that.
That's how it all works.
You can do whatever you want with CDs that you have.
You can mix music and merge and make segues and things like that.
In a sense, what these people have done is
they've made a unique blend of different sounds.
And that in itself,
I don't see how anybody could say that is illegal.
I don't see how anybody could say distributing it and sharing it is illegal.
Selling it, that's a little iffy because you're making a profit off of it.
But, you know, to say that radio stations aren't allowed to play it,
that's ridiculous.
Well, the argument given is often that
by doing this slightly different than the original,
you are lessening the value of the original music or song as it was created.
In other words, if I decide to sing the lyrics of the Star Spangled Banner
to the music of Heaven Knows What,
something by Madonna, something by Britney Spears,
something by Coldplay or P.O.D.
Yeah, but if I saw you singing the Star Spangled Banner walking down the street,
you'd be lessening the value of it.
Well, that's true too, but that's how I'm getting at it.
I didn't mean that in a bad way.
I'm just saying, you know, it's open to interpretation.
But what I'm saying is, whatever music I use,
it may improve the Star Spangled Banner as a song,
but it lessens the value of the original song whose music I'm expropriating.
Delusion is the legal term.
Thank you.
Well, some would say that it actually increases the value
because it's drawing more attention to it.
People are now wondering about this White Album that they never heard of before.
It's really, you know, once it's out there, it's out there.
And people can do all kinds of things with it.
Jonathan Zittrain from Harvard Law School says that
copyright law was written with a particular form of industry in mind
and that the flourishing of information technology
gives amateurs and home recording artists powerful tools
to build and share interesting, transformative, and socially valuable art
drawn from pieces of popular culture.
There's no place to plug such an important cultural sea change
into the current legal regime.
That's true. That's true.
And I think that's one of the reasons why it's going to be very easy, actually,
to clamp down on people for doing things like this.
But in the end, you know, they may win a battle.
They're not going to win the war because technology has changed everything
as far as the way music gets out and is distributed.
And they're going to have to change with that
or eventually they will be left behind
and music will just take on a whole different form,
different way of being made and manufactured and shared.
All right.
More legal stuff because there's always legal things going on.
Hollywood has won a DVD copying suit.
I don't know if you guys recall a few years ago
there was a DVD case in the courts.
I seem to remember it for some reason.
Who won that one? Hollywood?
Yeah, Hollywood won that one, too, and the people rejoiced.
A federal court has ruled that privately held 321 studios
must stop making software that allows users to copy DVDs,
handing Hollywood's major movie studios a victory
in their ongoing battle against copyright piracy.
Basically, at stake in the legal battle between 321 and Hollywood,
studios were potentially billions of dollars in lost revenue,
according to Hollywood, that is,
if DVD copying software such as 321's DVD Copy Plus
and DVDX Copy were allowed to be sold.
That's according to the studio's argument.
Interesting. I went to their website
and they have a bit of a reaction to this.
Hollywood critics have long said CSS simply controls access to DVDs
and that it's not a direct copy protection mechanism,
and 321 has argued that since consumers who buy a DVD
have the right to access their own movie,
it would not be illegal to help them access it
by using 321's software.
The judge disagreed, saying CSS was plainly a way
to protect copyright holders' rights
as envisioned in copyright law.
She said blocking people from making perfect digital copies
of their DVDs did not unconstitutionally hamper
free speech or fair use rights.
People were free to make copies of movies
in other non-digital ways
that would give them access to the same content.
This sounds very familiar, doesn't it?
So basically I can tape it on my VCR
if I want a copy of my DVD that I bought.
That's pretty much what they're telling you.
But you can't because of macro vision.
Well, yeah.
No, if you hold a camera up in front of a TV set,
macro vision doesn't kick in then.
No, no.
Yeah, that's what they want you to do.
But then you're not really, I mean,
it's not really a copy, is it?
It's just sort of, it's a copy of the, never mind.
Yeah, it's, anyway, if you go to 321software.com,
you'll see their reaction to this,
and obviously they can't give out the site any,
they can't give out the program anymore.
Did it create digital versions of,
or, you know, like a file that was a,
say, an MPEG-1 file or something,
or did it copy the DVD, you know, completely?
I was too scared to use it.
So I don't know exactly what it did.
If someone out there actually was using this software,
they can call us.
It did make a full copy of the DVD.
Was it a bit-for-bit transfer?
Is that...
Can you turn down the music that's going to my phone?
How about this, I'll turn the music off there.
Now I can hear you.
Okay, sorry about that.
Sorry.
Yeah.
It would, because of the two-layer DVDs
that the motion picture studios sell,
and they store about, what, nine gigabytes or something,
you couldn't put the entire movie on a single DVD-R
that you would use on your home computer DVD burner.
Right.
So you would typically,
it would copy onto two separate disks,
and it would sort of parse out, logically parse out,
you know, what parts of the original DVD
onto your first blank DVD-R and then your second DVD-R.
But it would make an MPEG-2 copy,
just like the original,
as much as you could with the different media formats.
Okay, well, that's the, where that stands.
So I guess we'll move on to other legal issues.
And this is kind of a funny one, actually.
A New Jersey mother has turned the tables
on the Recording Industry Association of America
by suing the major labels for racketeering.
Michelle Shemeka received a notice from the RIAA in December
after her child used the Kazaa Networks for a school project.
She has countersued labels Sony, Universal, and Motown
by claiming that the demands for reimbursement
of $150,000 per infringement
falls foul of the 1970 Organized Crime and Control Act,
better known as the RICO statute,
under Title IX of the Act,
racketeer-influenced and corrupt organization statute.
Now, nobody really thinks this is going to fly,
but it is kind of funny.
Her attorney says they're banding together to extort money,
telling people they're guilty
and they will have to pay big bucks
to defend their cases if they don't pony up now
is fundamentally not fair.
According to The Register, Register.com,
tampering with music, price-fixing,
posing as police officers,
wasting U.S. Navy time, and frightening children
are not in the list, alas.
In RICO cases, the threat or use of physical violence
has to be explicit.
Legal experts say the case has little chance
of reaching a jury trial.
But, you know, at least somebody's trying.
At least somebody's fighting back in some way,
making people think about it.
RICO was used against the Randall Terry
anti-abortion choice group.
What was the name? I forget the name of the group.
Operation Rescue.
Thank you. Operation Rescue.
Was successfully used against that group many years ago.
But there was a violent nexus there
that may or may not exist with the Motion Picture Studios.
Although a lot of people feel physically threatened by them.
Even Carl, I believe, probably felt physically threatened
when those two process servers showed up at the door there
from the MPAA, don't you think?
Yeah, I suppose.
You know, some of our people have met them face-to-face
and it wasn't a pleasant experience at all.
But moving on.
Another music-related story.
Music fans have found a low-tech way
to hack a promotion sponsored by Pepsi.
You guys heard about this?
Oh, great.
You know about this, Jim?
Oh, yeah.
Basically, they're promoting something along with Apple
where you can download a single track.
Oh, boy.
You can download a single track if you buy a Pepsi
and inside the bottle cap or something
is something saying that you have the right to do this
because you won a contest.
Apparently, you can tip a specially marked Pepsi bottle
and by peering under the cap,
it's possible to see whether the cap says try again
or bears a winning 10-digit redemption code.
That's according to a site called www.macmerc.com.
M-A-C-M-E-R-C dot com.
This is nothing new.
I know people have been tipping bottles over
what it says under the cap for quite some time.
I guess it's newsworthy because, well,
it's just another way to defeat the record industry, I suppose.
I don't know, though.
Is the unique code, the winning 10-digit redemption code,
can that only be used once?
If so, then all they're doing is keeping the person
who legitimately wins the contest from actually, you know,
getting anything and then they get mad.
You can't actually read the code.
You can't actually read the code, but you buy the bottle.
Okay, I see what you mean.
Well, you can see if it says winner inside the cap,
inside the yellow cap.
You can see if it says winner, and if it does,
then you buy the bottle and you know that it's a winner
and you get the code.
But you know what, Bernie?
You're still buying a Pepsi.
Sure.
So, I mean, they're getting something out of you
no matter what.
Absolutely.
And I don't think you would have bought a Pepsi to start with.
Not me.
I mean, who buys Pepsi?
Come on.
Yes, Redhack.
No, I was saying I buy Pepsi occasionally.
It's sweeter than Coke.
Yeah.
We had a story last week about the co-location site
that was raided by the FBI because of some IRC activity
and hundreds of sites were taken down.
I went to their website before the show
and looked at the update.
First of all, they're back online.
Their main site, CIThosting.com is back up
and they have advertisements.
But, you know, I thought the advertisements
were kind of interesting.
I went to some of these testimonies
that people have posted on their website.
We have worked with CIT through some of the largest
denial-of-service attacks the FBI has ever witnessed
and CIT's evolving state-of-the-art technology
has kept boxed art in operation
where many other services have failed.
This person says,
we were hosted by the biggest hosting companies in the world
and due to the large distributed denial-of-service,
no one from Akamai, SpeedAura, and Rackspace
could keep our site up, naming the competition.
CIT did the job.
We have never been down since.
This is by far the best business decision
our company has made.
And one other person says,
we thought our business was finished.
No hosting company would accept hosting our website
because of the gigabyte DDoS attacks we were getting
and CIT saved us.
So, you know, you sort of get the feeling
that these guys were hosting very unpopular people
to start with, probably spammers or, you know,
porn people or whatnot.
Well, people with unpopular opinions.
People with unpopular opinions, precisely.
So, they were a target.
And, you know, I've talked to a bunch of people
about this in the last week
and they were actually happy.
Thank God those guys are gone.
Nothing but trouble from them.
But that's precisely the kinds of people
that you have to watch out for,
to have the FBI come in and take every single machine
that was in their space.
And that's, of course, if we believe what they say
because the FBI,
I don't think we were able to get any comment from them,
were we?
Neither the FBI nor CIT would return my phone calls.
Yeah, so that's got to tell you something right there,
especially CIT.
But still, you know, it's something that you have
to be very concerned about
and you have to follow up and watch.
Now, according to their website,
they say we have restored service
at their Chicago data centers.
We were in the same facilities as MSN
and many Fortune 500 companies.
I'm sure they're thrilled about that.
The facility has multi-OC-192 connections to the backbone.
The FBI has begun returning equipment to CIT,
which is being shipped to our new facilities.
At this time, CIT will continue to provide
dedicated DDOS-protected web hosting only.
So, they weren't an ISP?
Like the original article said.
Yeah, I don't know if they were an ISP,
but they did run an IRC network
and it says here the IRC network will remain down
until further notice.
From what I could gather,
they rented out servers,
which a lot of companies would then put up IRC networks
or shell hosts or that sort of thing.
Yeah.
That's just a chilling effect, I think it is,
when things like this happen.
So, if you know of anything like that
or know of anything going on,
that's of interest to us or our listeners,
write to us, othat2600.com.
And of course, you can also call us,
212-209-2900.
That's our phone number for listeners.
Bernie, you have an interesting story, I believe.
Oh, yeah.
There's been some increasing progress
on Bluetooth hacking,
also called bluejacking.
And some folks in the UK
have discovered some curious security flaws
in some of the Bluetooth-enabled cell phones,
principally Nokia,
but there's other manufacturers as well that are vulnerable.
Some of the Nokia phone models
are the 6310i,
the 8910,
and the 8910i.
Now, they may be UK models, I'm not sure,
but there's probably a US equivalent.
They're basically the same firmware
you should look out for.
Basically, what the security bugs allow
is another user,
or not another user,
but someone with the right equipment and know-how
that was in close proximity of your phone,
maybe within 10 to 20 feet of your phone,
could pull all the data out of your phone,
download, dump all the data out of it,
including your phone book,
all your contact numbers.
I, for instance,
store personal information in my phone,
like account numbers and things like that
that I can't remember off the top of my head.
It's amazing how much can be stored in a phone these days.
You can store someone's home number,
their cell number,
their email address,
their website,
comments about them,
all kinds of things.
God forbid you lose that phone.
So, that information can be extracted from your phone
without your knowledge,
just by somebody following you for a moment.
So, that's something I look forward to,
and just coincidentally,
the same week,
one of the magazines I've subscribed to
is Law Enforcement Technology News,
and there's a company
that just introduced a new product.
It's a wireless Bluetooth headset,
your piece of microphone
that fits inside a police officer's motorcycle helmet,
and the other part of it plugs into the two-way radio.
So, for those encrypted radio systems
like we have here in Philadelphia
that the police use
and prevent citizens who are paying for the police
to do their job
who can't listen to the police with their scanners anymore,
if you were following a police officer using one of these
and had the right equipment,
you could hear everything they were saying or hearing.
So, Bluetooth.
Look out.
We certainly will.
Yes, go ahead.
Did you hear about the RFID blocker?
I don't remember.
I don't remember.
I believe it was a government organization
that came up with it.
It's a bag that you can put something
that has an RFID tag in it,
and it'll generate a radio signal
that's interpreted by the reader as garbage,
and so it won't actually detect the RFID tag.
But at the same time,
whichever government agency released it,
they said,
but it can't be used to steal things
and fool theft detection systems.
That's what I was wondering right away.
Why wouldn't it be able to be used to steal theft?
Exactly, yeah.
Maloney.
And what purpose do they make things like that for?
I'm not sure.
I could look it up if the computer works.
Wouldn't aluminum foil be sufficient to do this?
Or am I just, you know...
Wrapped around your head?
You know...
Yeah.
No, you could shield an RFID chip.
One layer of tin foil might not be enough,
but interestingly,
there was a,
I don't know anybody who's listening
who's watched 60 Minutes this last Sunday evening,
but there was a piece about shoplifting rings,
and it showed how they make these,
they use these booster bags,
these shoplifter rings,
that are like shopping bags lined with aluminum foil tape.
And they put the expensive clothing articles in the bag
that have these security tags,
which operate much in the same way that RFID tags do
on radio technology.
And the bags prevent the alarms from going off
when they're walking out with the merchandise.
So, not from a stealing standpoint,
I think people might want to use this
just to protect their privacy.
Like, say, if they wrap their books,
it might have an RFID tag embedded in the spine of the book.
They could just keep their books,
line your book bag with tin foil
to keep people from knowing what books you read.
I don't know.
Red Hat, it's returned from the computer.
What have you learned?
Well, basically, it was created by the RSA.
I didn't read what that stood for,
but to block, so that pharmaceutical drugs
marked with RFID tags, nobody could track them.
They were a bag so that people could put them in the bag,
and their drugs couldn't be tracked
after they were taken out there.
I see.
Something like that.
Okay, it's RSA Security, Inc.
There you go.
And they're unveiling their finished version
of their RFID blocker tag,
according to this news story on eweek.com.
RSA is a well-known company.
Now, we also have a story out of Pennsylvania.
Bernie, I think you forwarded to us about phone tapping.
County sheriffs and their deputies in Pennsylvania
do not have the same arrest powers
as municipal and state police,
according to the state commonwealth court.
Modern sheriffs are primarily charged
with court-related functions
rather than peacekeeping duties.
The order resolves a dispute caused
when the state police challenged sheriff's deputies
from Warren, Mercer, Bradford, and Cumberland counties
who wanted to be trained and certified
to conduct wiretap surveillance.
What's the significance of this, Bernie?
Besides the fact that I went to high school
in Bradford County,
I don't know if anybody's ever actually met a sheriff,
but they're typically not full police officers.
They're deputized to make arrests,
but they don't have full investigative powers.
But what sheriffs in these counties
were trying to accomplish
were to get training to perform wiretaps,
which really isn't their job.
They just want to jump on the bandwagon.
Everybody's doing wiretaps.
They figure, why not us?
Sure. I mean, it's a power thing.
It's a prestige.
It's an ego thing,
like being able to wiretap and listen to other people.
I think that's a big law enforcement high, frankly.
And they wanted in on the fun.
And the state police are like,
no, no, that's our turf.
You can't do that.
Only we can do that.
So there was this fight in Pennsylvania court
and a judge ruled that they do not have the ability to wiretap.
They shouldn't have the ability to wiretap legally.
I'm sure they do it illegally, but that's another story.
But the new news after that article came out,
the sheriffs are now appealing that decision.
So we'll have to follow that and see where it goes.
Interesting.
Meanwhile, we talked about some of these things in the past,
and they seem to just keep resurfacing.
Sounds familiar.
Despite an outcry over privacy implications,
the government is pressing ahead with research to create powerful tools
to mine millions of public and private records
for information about terrorists and anything else.
Congress eliminated a Pentagon office
that had been developing this terrorist tracking technology
because of fears it might ensnare innocent Americans.
Right?
Story ends.
That's it.
No problems.
Nope.
Still, some projects from retired Admiral John Poindexter's
total information awareness effort
transferred to U.S. intelligence offices,
congressional, federal, and research officials
told the Associated Press.
In addition, Congress left undisturbed
a separate but similar $64 million research program
run by a little-known office
called the Advanced Research and Development Activity, or ARDA,
that has used some of the same researchers as Poindexter's program.
The whole congressional action looks like a shell game,
said Steve Aftergood.
What a cool name, Aftergood.
I like that.
Underworld or something.
Of the Federation of American Scientists,
which tracks work by U.S. intelligence agencies,
there may be enough of a difference for them to claim
TIA was terminated, while for all practical purposes
the identical work is continuing.
I'm shocked.
Can I ask any listener who's at all surprised
to please e-mail us?
I want to meet such a person.
Well, there might be new listeners on their way to Z100 or something
that stopped by, and they can't believe
what they're hearing on the radio right now.
I want to hear from them.
Yeah.
Well, you know, what we speak is the truth.
We're reading news stories here and reacting.
We'd like to hear your reactions and your questions
and things like that.
Yeah, you can write to us, OTH at 2600.com.
If you don't have access to the Internet,
and more people don't have access to the Internet every day
because they're fed up with it,
you can write to us using a new system that we have
where you can drop things in these boxes on the street
and it actually gets brought to us.
WBAI.
Write to off-the-hook care, WBAI, 120 Wall Street, New York, New York.
Jim?
10005.
FCC regulations require that you read the zip code.
Now, we had a letter, something that you were interested in, Jim,
the site that was tracking police officers,
undercover police officers, on the net.
Now, this was reported on Channel 4, I believe, or Channel 5.
Channel 5, Fox.
And they basically said this site exists,
and they didn't say anything about the site.
They just were outraged that the site existed in the first place.
They said a few things about the site.
They said it was a German site, and they weren't going to give the URL.
But we're not Fox News.
And we also have listeners, and some of them went out and did some research
and sent us the URL, and we are going to say the URL over the air now.
Well, no, we're going to thank that listener first,
and we're going to now say the URL,
which, believe it or not, is not German, but in the Caicos Islands.
First of all, we shouldn't thank the listener by name,
or he won't live the night.
Oh, we didn't thank him by name.
Okay, well, thanks to the listener anonymously.
Yes, thank you, anonymous listener.
The site is ajm.cc.
That's a short site, ajm.cc?
Hey, supposedly, according to the meta tags on the site,
this is where it gets real interesting.
I'd like to thank a few of our crack assistant associate staff here for help on this.
According to the meta tags, it's a guy named Alan J. Munn, M-U-N-N.
And we're going to reveal a little about Mr. Munn,
because, hey, he reveals a little bit about people he says are undercover cops.
This is the person that runs the site, you're saying?
Allegedly.
If you do a whois, you come up with his name,
you come up with, fascinatingly, a German address,
and you come up with a phone number that's in Forest Hills.
Interesting, very interesting.
Of course, you realize that anybody could put any information that they want in these sites.
Oh, sure.
And it's not necessarily true that this is the person behind it.
We've done it ourselves.
That's very interesting.
But on the site, looking at the site right now,
it's basically a list of links, links to one of our favorite sites, Cryptome.
And Cryptome is the one that has the home address and map
to the homes of U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and CIA Director George Tenet,
among many other interesting bits of information.
Fox made great hay with that.
They didn't mention that it was courtesy of Cryptome.
They made it sound like it's some, you know, German terrorist.
Yeah, well, they basically, I guess, they don't understand the concept of links,
so they were looking at the site thinking it was all in one centralized database someplace.
It gets even better and more ridiculous right after that,
where they have five or six pages of links for the candidates for the election of 2003
in the five boroughs of New York, the five counties.
Now, that's a matter of public information,
and, in fact, it's generally listed in the newspapers about two weeks before the elections.
You get everyone's address and zip code.
Interesting.
It also says at the bottom of this,
this website, first under the name palladium.net, now under the name ajm.cc,
has harmlessly provided information over the web for years.
This website does not cause violence.
Does it actually have the undercover police officers' addresses?
I believe it does.
I believe it does have some cops on there.
It has a pile of names.
I took a look at a couple of pages,
and it was pretty much the sort of stuff you can find by reading the newspapers.
For example, that cop that apparently, I'm going to say apparently,
shot a kid on the roof the other day.
His last name is Neary, N-E-R-I,
and all the newspapers said he lived in Wantoff.
Well, you start doing a search of Wantoff for the last name,
and you get an address, and that's what this guy seems to have done.
A lot of these addresses of police are given with caveats saying,
it may be.
And Fox, of course, once again, in their tabloidistic style,
makes it sound like it's a list of hits for terrorists.
Well, of course, Fox will do the same thing
if you're accused of a crime that they don't approve of.
They'll follow you to your place of work, to your home.
They'll show the number on your house as they're asking you for a comment
before you were ever convicted of anything.
Or maybe even charged.
Leo, you have something to say?
Every time I watch the Fox News segments
where they just show people who are accused of credit card fraud,
they always run up to the person and say,
how does it feel to be supporting terrorists?
I mean, every single time.
And it's the funniest thing in the world to see.
Yeah, well, you know, the only times I ever watch that newscast
is when I leave the TV on because I was watching something else.
Just to reiterate, if you're interested, it's ajm.cc.
All right, I think we've said that enough times now.
You could ask that same supporting terrorism question
standing around at a gas station, I guess, too.
Or any place else.
By the way, on the subject of undercover police officers
and checking out who they are, or meeting them anyway, covertly,
I've noticed as I get on the subway every morning here in Philadelphia
that the both uniformed and undercover police officers get free rides.
And all they have to do is show their badge to the toll booth collector
or fare collector.
And so it's great fun when I get on the subway
seeing these guys who are pretty obviously undercover cops anyway
just by, if you look at their haircuts and their choice of clothing,
but not always so obvious, but they whip out their badge and show it.
That's the stupidest thing.
I mean, if they're trying to be undercover,
why don't they get a special card so they can go through
without being detected as a cop?
I agree with you completely.
It's just stupidity.
So every morning I see 15 to 20 undercover Philadelphia police officers.
And I could easily take their picture.
I haven't bothered to.
But it's just ludicrous.
I actually called SEPTA, the Southeast Pennsylvania Transit Authority, about this.
Because I was wondering how they get to ride free in the first place.
Why don't everybody else have to go to work?
These are people who are not on duty yet.
They're going to work before they're officially on duty.
And they get to ride free.
So I asked SEPTA about that.
They said, well, yeah, that was put into the contract
that uniformed officers and undercover officers showing a badge
could ride for free.
And they said, well, they said it was because they were working.
I said, well, sometimes they're on their way to work or from work,
and we're not working.
You know, Bernie, do you have a FOX station down there?
I don't know.
Philadelphia.
Yeah, yeah, they would probably jump on that.
You think?
You think?
Okay, well, yeah, I think you should contact them.
That sounds like a scandal type of story,
because hackers could get that information.
That's true.
And I'm sure they would want to point that threat out.
The best part with the SEPTA told me that,
how do you know if they're actually on duty or not,
or whether they should really ride for free if they're actually on duty?
And SEPTA said, well, we could never really know
if they were showing their badge to get a free ride
or whether they're really on duty.
In other words, they were saying they can't trust the police, to be honest,
about whether they should ride free or not on duty.
And I'm sure they're not going to challenge them.
That would be something.
No, no, can't do that.
I hate to just knee-jerk defend the police,
but in this case, maybe it's the same theory that they have in New York,
that a police officer is always on duty, even when he's going to work.
If he comes across a crime, he's supposed to prevent it.
That's the general sentiment.
That's why they carry their guns when they're off duty.
Exactly.
But the point is, if you're trying to be undercover,
you don't flash your badge to get into free on the subway.
You figure some other way.
But that's a little different than Bernie's complaint when he called SEPTA.
True.
There's always that possibility.
I mean, people could manufacture fake badges and be ripping off SEPTA en masse.
I've seen that done.
Yeah, so you have to be careful.
We're looking out for mass transit here.
How do they do it in New York?
Same thing, although generally they're issued a MetroCard.
But, yeah, you can flash your pass and you'll get buzzed in.
You're still supposed to allow that.
Your pass or your badge?
Your badge.
Ah.
And, yes, people, it's fascinating, the non-police that have badges,
sanitation, building inspectors, health inspectors,
and they look very similar to, like, the inspector level or captain level
or lieutenant level of police.
And, of course, they do it from 30 feet away and it looks identical,
and so the clerk in the booth isn't about to bother saying,
hey, officer, could you let me see that up close?
No, he'll just buzz the gate.
And so you have all these, you know, health inspectors going in,
and when all hell breaks loose and nothing gets defended, you wonder why.
Just a theory.
I'm wondering why exactly the police are entitled to free transit anyway.
I mean, any other industry, government or not, has to pay.
Does the guy driving the train pay?
All right, fair enough.
I mean, if they're considered part of the system, you know,
they probably should, you know, get through that kind of a thing.
But I don't think the
All SEPTA employees get to ride free.
Yeah, and the theory on that is that it's too difficult to decide when they're on duty
and when they're not and to differentiate between, and if they're on duty,
crossing in and out.
In other words, you can't trust them to be honest about whether they're working right now.
No, no, no.
It's too much bookkeeping to go through.
It's like charging for per-page downloads, all right?
You can't do that because it's simply too much bookkeeping.
If you have one guy who's, like, sweeping up every station,
he's on one side of the turnstiles for ten minutes,
and then he's sweeping up on the other side of the turnstiles,
it's too much bookkeeping.
This is a side point.
We're talking about the police, not the transit.
This is a side really far away from the main track here.
Let's just ignore it.
Let's get back to what we're talking about here, and that's letters from our listeners.
You can write to us, oth2600.com.
We're taking phone calls in just about a minute.
This person writes in, and we get a lot of letters like this.
He's writing to us from Italy, and he wants us to help him.
I am an activist in fights against vivisection, tortures, and cosmetics tested on animals.
I'm a volunteer in all sorts of actions for animal liberation.
We know these websites like lethalpressure.com.
There are no legal ways to stop them.
I know my question sounds weird, but can you help us to destroy this website?
Well, I don't know how many times I have to point out to people that we don't exist to destroy websites.
People think that because we're a hacker show and run a hacker site and a hacker magazine
that we can control who gets on the Internet and take people off who are unpopular.
You bring more publicity to people like this by publicizing what they do.
I just read their name out over the air.
Basically, the Internet is filled with all kinds of unsavory people,
all kinds of horrible images and things like that.
I guess the solution is not to publicize them, not to endorse them by getting more people to visit their sites.
And if they start becoming popular, then you got to look at society as a whole and see what the problem is.
And if you catch people doing those things that are on those sites, well, then that's another issue entirely.
Anybody disagree?
No? Okay.
All right.
We're not talking about the MTA anymore.
You're passing me notes about the MTA now.
This person just received a phone bill of $800 plus.
The local access numbers in my computer were changed to a long-distance number.
We have two grandchildren living with us, and I think they may have been responsible for this change
as I am very aware of the long-distance numbers in my area.
What is the best approach with the phone company in dealing with this problem?
Well, I think you got to approach your grandkids first and work out a payment plan.
No, it's not necessarily your grandkids.
Okay, go ahead.
Lots of cases.
In fact, I was just reading the other day, the mob was responsible in a lot of cases.
How does the mob get into your computer and change the phone numbers?
I'm glad you asked.
There were a number of sites, mostly porn, but some gambling and others,
where you would access it and it would say,
download here for a free trial or download here for software necessary to view this.
And what you would get is software that would essentially reprogram your modem
to dial various numbers that charged a heck of a lot more.
But this is the number that connects to their internet service provider.
So apparently...
Is it?
That's what they said.
That's not exactly what I heard.
The local access numbers in my computer.
I don't know.
Okay, I'm not sure what the local...
The point is, what this person wants to know is, do they have to pay the 800 bucks?
Well, it's kind of a touchy situation.
You can call your phone company and say that these numbers were dialed without your knowledge.
I don't know.
It's a long distance company.
You're probably going to be dealing with a different company than your local company.
They might give you a credit, a one-time credit,
especially if you say that you won't remain a customer of theirs if they don't.
They might split it in half or something like that.
But you really need to protect your computer a little bit.
This is pretty common.
It is.
If you're trying to log on to a local ISP through a modem dial-up
and you look on their website or something to find out what their local dial-up numbers are,
just because it's in the same area code as you doesn't necessarily mean it's a local call.
Or even if it's in the same city as you, it's not a local call.
If you have the wrong kind of calling plan, even a local call could cost you money.
Well, I mean, it depends.
A few years ago I worked with somebody who foolishly just put a 215 area code number
because he was here in Philadelphia with a 215 area code
and programmed that into his dial-up networking.
And after a month, when we got the phone bill, he ran up about $1,100
because he was connected all day long.
He ran up $1,100 in toll calls that were still within the same area code.
And so this is not impossible to do, even by somebody who, you know.
If it's something like that, you can generally get sympathy from the phone company
because they see that, you know, you paid this amount of money
for what's really not a long-distance call to start with.
It's a touch-and-go thing, so I wish those people luck.
All right, Redhack, you pass this note to me.
I'm going to just read this one thing, and then we're going to be done with this.
MTA employees are issued unlimited MetroCards,
which are only supposed to be used to go to work and back, and also for the job.
Okay, fine. And same thing with school passes, too.
You're not supposed to use those during school hours, right?
I didn't write the note.
Oh, you didn't write the note? Well, it looked like you handed it to me.
MTA employees are allowed to use their unlimited MetroCards
as much as they want on their days off.
Really? Okay, you should know, being an ex-MTA employee.
One thing, though, that I came up with an idea the other day
that I think would be a good thing to implement.
It's kind of a merging between phone companies and the MTA.
Ready? Unlimited nights and weekends as a pass.
Wouldn't that be cool?
It encourages people to ride the subway late at night,
and you pay maybe a monthly, maybe even a yearly contract type of a thing,
and you ride unlimited as much as you want nights and weekends.
That is, I think, your first truly, extremely brilliant idea.
Yeah. All right. I'll get another bottle of what I had the other day,
and maybe I'll come up with more.
Good evening. You're on the air.
Hi there. Good evening.
This is Gene down here in Philadelphia. I work for SEPTA.
Uh-oh.
No, nothing like that.
One of the worst companies I've ever worked for.
Wow.
And that's the truth.
I'd like to direct this to Bernie.
Matter of fact, Bernie, I'm just wondering,
if I give you my phone number, would you get in touch with me?
You really want to read it over the air?
Why don't you e-mail it to me?
Yeah. E-mail it.
E-mail it to me.
No, I don't.
Bernie, go ahead.
I don't really have a computer yet.
Hmm. How can we do this?
Because you're on the radio now.
You know what? Okay, if I turn down—
That's all right. Anybody can call me. It doesn't really matter.
Well, if I turn down the speaker here, you can give your number to Bernie.
I'm going to give you 15 seconds to do that.
Unfortunately, they're going to hear me at the same time,
so I'll try to talk quietly.
Hopefully, they're talking right now and giving out the phone number.
I'll give them an extra 5 seconds just so that they can actually do this.
It'll be an interesting experiment to see if they actually give that information out.
Mike, you had something to say?
I was going to say that he could just write us a letter,
and we could call Bernie with the information.
People don't write letters when they say they're going to write letters.
They never do.
All right. Guys, did you do this okay?
I didn't say the number.
You didn't say the number.
I gave it. I gave it.
Okay, the audio didn't get to me.
You're using a Sprint phone, Bernie.
I've heard everything else you've said.
Okay, you want to try one more time? We'll give you 10 seconds.
All right.
All right, go ahead.
I'm going to be silent for 5 seconds.
Okay, that's enough time to give out the phone number.
If they didn't get it that time, too bad.
Guys, did you get the phone number?
I think your board was incorrectly adjusted.
It's not the board. You guys are hooked together.
You should be able to hear each other.
I heard nothing.
All right.
I didn't hear him.
All right.
Anyway, I want to just e-mail it to me, and then I'll call you.
Do you want to give out your phone number over the air?
Yeah, go ahead.
All right, fine.
215-288-8594.
And what's your first name?
Gene.
You're going to be hearing from Rebel probably in about 10 seconds.
It doesn't matter.
All right.
There's a few things you should know for the end later.
I've heard them on the air.
All right, thanks.
Is there anything you want to tell us about SEPTA?
Probably a whole lot, but I don't have the agenda made up.
But is what I said effectively true about how the police can ride free even when they're off duty?
Yeah, yeah.
It's kind of an ongoing thing.
It's a camaraderie type situation.
Well, don't you think it's silly that they blow their cover every time they get a free ride?
Oh, hey, you know, I mean, you could sit down.
You could sit anywhere in Philadelphia and just monitor the faces going by and pick them up.
You know, you can stand at the main building and see them coming out.
Like you said, they kind of dress all the same, you know.
And I think they all copy.
I think they all.
I always wondered about cops in general.
They seem like they're nice people when they first get into the service.
You know, brand new recruits and all that.
And they're always kind of apologetic, and they always like to explain things to people.
But as they get older, do you ever notice a change in the timbre of their voice and everything?
It's like they want to take over.
They get very jaded.
Huh?
They get very jaded.
Yeah, and if you try to take them on to try to explain something to them, which just happened with me just lately, I was assaulted.
And they didn't even take down the information.
And then when I started to ask them questions, they go on the defense every time.
And I can't stand that.
A lot of people don't like it either.
This is why, gee, the population in this city was over 3 million back in 1940, 1950.
Now we're below 1.5 million.
People are leaving the city because of how they're treated.
And I can't blame them because once my tour of duty is with SEPTA, you know, gone, I'm out of here as well.
Because I've seen better places than this city.
Well, Gene, I'll give you a call.
Okay, thank you.
Around 9 o'clock or so, okay?
Okay.
Okay, thank you, Bernie.
Thanks for calling.
All right, bye-bye.
Interesting.
Get a call from a SEPTA employee just like that.
See if there's any other Mass Transit Authority people working out there in different cities.
We should rename this the Mass Transit Show, you know?
All right, let's take another phone call.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Hello.
I have kind of a two-part question.
Okay.
One is about hosting and the other one is about ISP.
I'm curious about any recommendations about where to host a website and email
and what an optimal naming scheme would be to avoid spam.
And then the other part is let's say I get an ISP and I have broadband,
but I want to dial up worldwide when I'm traveling.
Do you have any recommendations on that?
Well...
Don't use CIT hosting.
Yeah, that's one thing, probably.
I don't know.
I'm wondering if this is more of a question for the personal computer people.
What do you think?
Come on right after us.
They might be better suited to answer those kinds of questions.
Okay.
Do you want to give them a try?
Sure.
All right.
Give them a try.
In about half an hour or so, I'm sure they'll be taking phone calls.
Call for the next show.
Yeah.
All right, thanks.
All right.
Bye.
I mean, we could theorize on this, but we'll be arguing for ten minutes.
All right, take another one.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Good evening.
How are you doing?
I wrote a letter, which I'm planning on sending to the station,
regarding your show running late.
Would you like to hear what I wrote?
Okay, go ahead.
Dear sirs, I'm a regular listener of Off the Hook,
which is played on your show every Wednesday,
unless it has been preempted for some pathetic commie propaganda,
or your staff is vainly rattling a cup for more friends
from your apathetic listeners.
All too frequently, this fine show starts late to the brain-dead Pacifica staff
reading stories directly from the AP Wire
or reading press releases from rinky-dink fringe groups.
I've grown weary of listening to the annoying nasal voice
of the Pacifica announcer after 7 p.m.
Please have them pull their collected heads out of their cellulite-ridden asses
so that OTH is not delayed.
Thank you in advance.
Okay, well, one comment I have to make on that is you say that
thank you for carrying this on your show.
You should have said thank you for carrying this on your station.
Ah, I will make that correction.
That's the only correction I've got for you as far as that goes.
Actually, I could go on a lot longer about this.
I'm sure this letter is going to fix all the problems
and really ingratiate ourselves with it.
I can see the week coming when the cops rush in one entrance
and the Pacifica staff rush in the other.
Good evening. You're on the air.
Go ahead.
Oh, hi.
Please turn down your radio or computer, whatever it is.
Yes, I know. I was supposed to be ready to do that.
What's on your mind?
I wanted to say that I am in agreement about the Foonet thing.
I, too, was looking for information after your show last week
and followed a lot of the IRC logs and was very disturbed
by the attitude about, oh, we're glad that they're gone.
I was impressed by, is it Jim who's on with you,
when he said that's like government seizing printing presses.
Oh, thank you.
That affected me very deeply because I, myself,
had gone on this anti-spam tirade with these email blockers
and everything because of that latest virus thing.
All of a sudden, I said, what am I doing?
I went to John Gilmore's website and I went, oh, gosh,
this is really refreshing.
I just turned it all off.
I had 2,000 emails in one day during the primary election
here in New Hampshire, and that just drove me insane.
Which website of John Gilmore's did you go to?
The one that links from the CCC web page
where he has the picture that says Homeland Security.
Okay.
So I followed that link to his website.
It just sort of brought me back to reality.
I think it's really important.
I don't know what's going on with them either.
I haven't tried again this week to find out more information about it
because I wanted to write an article for Indymedia about it.
I expected that you would have had something up on the website by now.
And so then I thought, well, I don't really know enough about this issue
to even follow it because I looked at all this attitude that was there.
We're glad they're gone. We're glad they're gone.
And it's important.
It's just like you have to stand up for pornographers.
You know, no matter what you think, because of free speech.
Well, the first people they always come for are the ones with unpopular views.
Exactly.
And then the president is established because they were able to get away with those people.
Then they get away with it again for people with more popular views.
Exactly. But what surprised me is that there was so little about it on the Internet.
So little about that seizure.
And then what disturbs me too is the report that Amy Goodman had on the air today
It says a group of scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates,
last week signed a petition condemning the White House for deliberately...
No, no. Is that the one?
The one about that publishers are forbidden to edit articles from embargoed countries.
The U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control
recently declared that American publishers cannot edit works authored by nations
under trade embargoes, which include Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Libya...
Oh, now wait just one minute. You've got to be kidding me.
No, I'm not kidding. It was on Amy Goodman this morning.
It had come out yesterday.
This group of scientists, American Chemical Society, is bringing suit against the government.
Being the editor of a magazine, I think I might just pull a story from one of those places and edit it.
Exactly. That's what this guy is doing.
I mean, I think about Indy Media.
I don't think about English Al Jazeera, Nat. I don't know where they're situated.
Al Jazeera is in Qatar, and they're not a terrorist country.
The English side is in Qatar? I mean, they're not associated here at all?
Maybe their thoughts are condemned by our administration, but not the actual country.
Well, I understand that they are. It's ridiculous.
Now it's like the monopoly thing happening with that new thing that the U.S. government,
that media company that's trying to put them out of business in the Middle East.
But this thing disturbs me greatly.
Where can we find out more about that?
Find out at Democracy Now. We ran a story this morning.
Okay. I have to listen to the station more, apparently.
Yeah, apparently.
All right. Thanks very much for the info.
Thank you for everything.
All right.
Good night.
Glad there are listeners like you out there.
The office, she said, in charge of this, the Office of Foreign Assets Control,
just the fact that our government has such an office to control the rest of the world,
and they call it that, is kind of, I don't know what.
Yeah. Hey, we're pretty much out of time.
So any final comments from anybody on any issues?
Bernie? Anything?
I'm all full tonight.
Okay. Well, we'll see you next week, I guess, along with the rest of the Off The Hook staff.
Again, write to us, oth at 2600.com.
And I guess we'll, you know, I was warned not to use a CD player.
Hear that skipping noise?
Hang on. I'm going to take the time to put this in one,
because people deserve to hear music that sounds fairly okay.
Jim, you have something to say to fill the time?
Well, don't forget that the Fifth Hope, this July.
That's right. That's right.
Soon to have a website.
We'll show you exactly what you have to do in order to get in and become part of it.
So, yes.
Doesn't that sound much better?
All right. We'll see you next week. Good night.
I've been stumbling for a little too long
I don't know what I'm doing anymore
But all of my whispered confessions
The truth are slipping away
With every echo of your reposition
My personal ignorance
Is now public knowledge
Some magical ending that was supposed to happen
Something left out of this story
Absence taking shape before me
I'm always walking into things
Then trying to get away
Cause I know if I start I will never stop
There's a note that rings
Tied by the wind
Out in the light
There's a note that rings
Out in the light
Tied by the wind
My hand around yours
Fumbling for a minute or two
I don't know what I'm doing anymore
Upon my whispered confession
The truth of it slipping away
With every echo of your reposition
There's a note that rings
Tied by the wind
Out in the light
There's a note that rings