held under security certificates in Canada, all of them Muslim or Arab. One of them, Mohamed
Harkat, has just been granted bail conditions similar to Shirkawi's and is expected to return
home to Ottawa in days.
Mohamed Harkat, recently transferred to a special facility dubbed Guantanamo North near
Kingston, Ontario, are on a hunger strike which began three weeks ago. Mona Elfouly,
the wife of security certificate detainee Mohamed Mahjoub, explains the toll that her
husband's action has taken on her family.
And you're listening to Radio Station WBAI. The news will be repeated tonight at 11 o'clock.
So if you want to hear the rest, please tune in then. It's time now for Off The Hook.
I hope that's understood.
And a very good evening to everybody. The program is Off The Hook. Emmanuel Goldstein
here with you on this Wednesday evening. We're joined tonight by Jim.
Happy Flag Day.
Is it Flag Day?
It is.
Okay, the flag of your choice, I guess. Mike.
I don't really care for flags.
Okay, well then this is not the day for you. Redbird.
Good evening.
Walter.
Hi.
Arseny.
Hi.
And Redhacked.
Hello.
Here in the studio. Bernie S. joins us from down in Philadelphia.
No flags for me.
Okay, well I guess it's not as much of a holiday as it used to be. But we're here as we are
every Wednesday night talking about high technology and the various changes and things that have
been taking place in the world of computers, telephones, freedom of speech, loss of freedom
of speech, that kind of thing. We'll also be talking a little bit about the upcoming
Hope Conference coming up in just over a month's time, July 21st, 22nd, and 23rd. We actually
were over at the hotel a little bit earlier today and wandering around, checking out some
of the spaces. They had a big party over there too for the clients. We're clients apparently.
And for all the clients. All these people are going over there now and getting completely
smashed and we couldn't do it because we had to be on the air.
You know, the sacrifices that you make.
I make so many sacrifices. Everything happens on Wednesday night. You know that. Everything
happens.
Only some things.
Well, this show is one of the things that happens and hopefully that's an attraction.
One of the better things, some people say.
I like to think so. I do. Okay, I have some good news that I'd like to read to people
and maybe we can celebrate together. Congratulations to the members of the House of Representatives
who voted down net neutrality regulations the other day. Despite a considerable volume
of misleading rhetoric from proponents of neutrality legislation, House members were
able to see the provisions for what they were, a regulatory power grab that would have made
the disastrous error of putting the federal government in charge of managing Internet
traffic. A new neutrality regime would have restricted consumer choice, which while dramatically
reducing the financial incentives of telecommunications companies to make the massive investments
needed to upgrade and expand the nation's IT infrastructure.
Hold on, hold on. Let me celebrate a little bit.
A market in which Internet service providers aren't allowed to prioritize the content traveling
over their networks is one with less innovation and fewer benefits for everyone involved.
But, yeah.
Now, hold on, hold on. Despite the defeat in the House, which was a milestone for those
of us interested in competition and freedom, yes, there are still multiple net neutrality
proposals currently under consideration in the Senate. With any luck, the resounding
defeat of the recent neutrality legislation will send the correct signal to senators that
this is a losing issue, both economically and politically. Now, does somebody have something
that they wish to say against Jim?
My head is about to explode because, you know, I am a capitalist and I have to actually go
against what seems to be the capitalist thrust here. Wait a moment. Aren't we for net neutrality?
Aren't we for keeping the ISPs and the telecoms from saying, well, you know, Google pays us
a billion a year and you pay us a buck fifty. No one will be able to get you. I mean, aren't
we against that?
I guess, Jim, you just have to sort of define who we is.
We is?
We are.
We is are.
Oh, okay.
I've lost. I'm sorry. Somebody help.
No, I think that's exactly what happened. Is there any indication of how much it lost
by?
By a lot. I mean, this is something that happened a few days ago. Actually, RedHack, you've
got the...
Well, I mean, basically you've got a bunch of people who don't really understand the
concept, I think, voting on it. I think that's really the basis of it.
That's called the House of Representatives by default, yes.
I don't think that's correct. I think that people precisely do understand the issue.
And the issue is that the telecommunications firms and who's the press released by? The
Competitive Enterprise Institute?
I didn't believe I was reading this from my own heart. This was, yeah, the Competitive
Enterprise Institute, www.cei.org. It might as well be ceo.org.
All these people have so many lobbyists and so much money that I think they've made it
perfectly clear what their position is, and I think the representatives are fully aware
that they're voting in line with the corporate interests, and that's what they want to do.
They understand that.
They don't care what will benefit the public. They care what will benefit the corporations,
and they've very competently done exactly, I think, what they set out to do.
They understand that aspect of it. Do you think they really understand the technical
aspects of what net neutrality really is and what it really means? Because I think that
goes well over the heads of most people in the House.
I think Marty Meehan does.
Is that the group that had that neat little flash animation that basically made it look
like a public group? There was this website about net neutrality.
Well, they were a non-profit, non-partisan, public policy group dedicated to the
principles of free enterprise and limited government.
Right. Backed by the telecom companies, I'm sure.
Yes.
I think it's the same. It had this nice little flash animation that basically told you
why these people who were pushing net neutrality were evil.
Well, maybe for the benefit of listeners, we should explain just what net neutrality
actually is, just so that people don't panic. I was only reading this. I don't believe
what I was reading. I was just trying to get into the part. It's a very bad thing to
defeat net neutrality, I think. Bernie, do you have more information on what it's
all about?
Coming from the neutrality regime myself, I think net neutrality is a very good idea.
I don't want large corporations dictating what information I have access to. If I pay
for internet access, I want access to the whole internet, not just the part the corporations
want me to get access to.
From a technical perspective, it's like quality of service controls at the ISP level
that are defined by how much the ISPs are being paid by corporate entities who want
to prioritize their traffic over other traffic.
How do you confront somebody who says that this is all about competition and what the
market will bear?
It's not about competition if you have corporations who already have the funding
for this sort of thing. For example, a lot of innovation occurs in startup companies
who just would not have the funding to pay for this. It's silly anyway. The internet
is totally founded on principles that are against this.
That was ages ago. We've grown out of that, haven't we? Now we're into the might
makes right mentality. I saw this being reported on many, many different outlets. Almost
without fail, they were saying, this is a victory for the consumer. They sort of tied
it into, now you can watch cable TV over your phone line, that whole thing that has been
going on for how many years now. Somehow, this has been equated with giving you more
freedom in that particular way.
I don't think we've quite given a straight answer as to what net neutrality is yet.
Basically, it's the websites that want their content delivered faster with better
service would pay the ISPs or the telecom companies money so that their content would
be delivered quicker. Say Google would give them a million dollars or more than that
to have their content delivered in a better fashion than Joe has his own company.
You've described precisely the opposite of net neutrality.
It's not having that.
Oh, sorry. Yeah, not having that. Right. That's what they want.
Yeah, that's an important point.
Sorry about that.
Yeah. It's been presented as a sort of a fairness issue. If you have a hot website
that a billion people hit, you should pay more. Well, the point of the fact is that
if you have a hot website that a billion people hit, you do pay more.
Anybody who's been in charge of a website, had it hosted somewhere, knows that if you
get a lot of traffic, you do have to pay for it. The hosting service will insist on it.
They'll bill you on bits per day, bits per hour or whatever.
Well, I actually have a couple of things to say, but what Jim is saying is kind of wrong
because even if your site gets a million hits, your site will actually run better
than someone else's site, even if that other site also gets a million hits.
Because if you pay this extra fee, your content will be delivered much faster
than this other site, even if they're getting a million hits.
But we sort of have this now, before this bill was passed.
I have a website and I run it on a pretty cheap host, $7 a month.
It doesn't run as fast as if I paid more money, just because I guess these servers aren't that good.
But I mean, on the other hand, this might not really have that big an effect on competition
because even these startup companies, they just get venture capital funding,
and that's like millions of dollars, and then they can just pay this extra fee
to get their content delivered a million times faster or whatever.
So, I don't think it's just... ISPs are just going to make a lot of money.
I think you skewed a little bit from the point,
which was that you would have to pay every individual ISP that's providing the content,
which would be, for example, Verizon, maybe Cablevision, maybe Time Warner.
They would all be separately paid for prioritizing traffic.
So, it's not one central fee that you're paying, I don't think, right?
I'm sure they would come up with a clearinghouse because otherwise it would be totally unworkable.
You forget also that the goal of these corporations is to reduce the number of ISPs
such that paying every ISP means writing five checks.
It won't be that big a deal.
And that's what's going to happen.
The phone company and the cable company, despite all their talk of competition,
they really want competition between the phone company and the cable company,
not between anyone else.
The more important point is one that no one's noticed,
that if they start demanding payment legally, they can say,
well, you know, we're not going to take your payment because somewhere on your site
you have the lesbian freedom group of Girl Scout Troop 45, okay?
We can't accept your money.
Once you have that, you have censorship, okay?
And this is a thinly disguised opening into the whole hell of censorship.
Absolutely.
Bernie, yes.
I was just going to say, it was almost precisely 10 years ago today
that we were hearing much in the media about the Telecommunications Act of 1996
that was going to increase competition and lower your cable bill
and all these other great things.
Well, precisely the opposite happened,
and these corporate spin doctors are really turning upside down the logic
of the argument behind net neutrality as they did with the Telecommunications Act of 1996,
which allowed nearly unlimited ownership of TV and radio stations
compared to the limited, you know, the corporations could only own,
one company could only own so many radio and TV stations in each market.
Well, now we know what has happened in the past 10 years
with the media consolidation becoming so, so much greater
with so many large companies owning so much more of,
controlling so much more of the content that each of us hear.
Now, this is similar to what's going on now,
both from a spin standpoint and from corporations dictating
what content we're going to be able to access.
We should also mention a couple of the other features,
so-called features of this law called COPE,
which did pass the House but not yet the Senate.
They include drastic cuts to public access funding.
They include the elimination of provisions against redlining
so that telecommunications firms will be able to do perverse things
like charge their poorer customers more than their wealthier customers.
And all this stuff just sort of passed without really all that much objection.
I saw at least one written summary of what this actually means in a newspaper
and they were kind of giving a scenario in the future
where everybody is using connectivity in some way.
Little Jimmy is playing a video game in his room.
Mom and Dad are watching a movie over the internet in the living room.
Susie is using voiceover IP to report a burglar breaking into her room.
And all of a sudden everything gets disconnected.
Why? Because the new Britney Spears album just got released on the internet
and everybody is going to get it at once
and all the connectivity has somehow disappeared
because of all this massive rush of traffic to one location.
Net neutrality though, the loss of net neutrality,
will keep that from happening because certain things will be prioritized
such as 9-1-1 and important things that you want to keep up
despite the fact that something else might be more popular.
I'm reading this and I'm realizing most people are going to buy this.
Most people are going to think that this is actually protecting them
from something when in actuality it's bringing them into something really bad.
Emmanuel, you bring up an interesting point
and that is government websites and government services like 9-1-1,
like the girl calling to report a burglar in her house over a voiceover IP phone line.
What is the government going to do?
I would predict that if net neutrality is defeated
and corporations are allowed to dictate the priority of the content you receive
that they route to you,
what is the government going to do when they want to get their message out?
Are they going to say, no, this only applies to commercial sites.
The government sites must have first priority.
It's going to have to happen with voiceover IP for 9-1-1 services.
We know that's going to be dictated.
What's going to happen with government information sources?
They're certainly not going to want to take a backseat.
Right now they have an equal seat with everyone else.
This opens up so many cans of worms that it's hard to go into them all.
I don't think it's going to be very hard for the government to just insert something saying,
yeah, we get priority over everything,
and I don't think anyone's really going to argue with that,
certainly not the massive corporations that have just gotten a big favor from them.
I don't want government to have a priority access to delivering content to me
over the content that I would like to receive.
Bernie, what made you think this was about what you want?
Clearly it's not.
There is one small opportunity here.
If government is given priority across the board,
we should go somewhere and form a little city, incorporate.
That sounds like a fun thing to do.
The unfortunate thing about this also is because of the concentration of so many servers
and infrastructure in the United States, this isn't just going to affect us.
This affects everybody.
This is going to affect the whole world, the whole Internet.
Which must be not sitting well with most of the world as usual.
That's nothing new.
Okay, so now I see most people as not really caring.
Obviously most people really don't because they don't about most things.
But how should we convince people, say, just living a normal life,
whatever that might be, that this is going to affect them?
Not someone who has no money at all, who wants to run a website
and compete with some other entity and get people to connect to it.
The average person who doesn't have to really struggle that much,
is this going to affect them in a bad way?
I take it from the silence that it's not.
It's unfortunate that these issues sometimes are not easily explainable in a sound bite.
Therefore, this is where corporations tend to rule in situations where it's not a simple explanation
that you can do in five words or less.
That people realize really what's in their best interest.
And really we need to make people aware of the fact they should call their senators,
because this is not passed through the Senate yet.
The House has already passed it.
People should call their senators.
There's only two senators in every state.
People should be able to find out who their senators are,
call them or write to them and say,
listen, we really need net neutrality.
I don't want corporations deciding the priority of the content that I consume.
I think Arsene, you're going to try for five words.
Okay, I'm going to try.
It's not going to be five words, but I'm going to try.
I'm thinking that a lot of people use things like BitTorrent,
because it takes up like 30% of internet traffic nowadays.
And potentially, ISPs could just put these BitTorrent servers down in the lower somewhere
and put the corporate servers, give them higher priority.
So potentially, like piracy would really get pushed down.
Wait, you're using that as a good example.
But that's what common people use the internet for, don't you think?
Okay, you're appealing to pirates. All right, fine.
Well, I'm appealing to people that like to listen to the music before they buy it.
Most people are not going to use defensive piracy, though,
as a legitimate reason to preserve something.
I'm saying when you try to explain this to laymen.
Yeah, okay.
Currently, the way it works is that all information is basically freely—
Sorry. All information is weighted the same.
Yeah.
So whether it's your write-up on something that you think is important, your views,
or it's some corporate website proclaiming their views,
it all gets—if somebody wants it, they can get it in the same fashion
and the same kind of time and speed, and everyone can get access to it.
So without net neutrality, this would kind of be more controlled.
So you say, well, it might slow down how fast you get the information.
It could also cut it off completely.
They might decide, well, we don't like that viewpoint because that website's against our company.
So let's not let it through or let it go to crawl.
Or could it also—
Very, very small trickle.
Could it also affect people in a particular country?
Let's say two countries have a spat or governments disagree on something,
and all of a sudden we say, oh, well, you know, this country is not paying an extra fee,
so we're going to put them at the lowest possible priority.
All of a sudden the citizens of those two countries cannot communicate at all
because the net traffic is not being routed.
You can easily extend the BitTorrent example to, you know,
common legal uses of peer-to-peer sharing software.
For example, a lot of our listeners, I'm sure, use open source software.
And so let's say the latest, you know, such and such Linux distribution is out
and you want to download the ISO or something, you know,
which could be a 500-meg file, which could be a 2-gig file, you know,
and you want to have that the same day it comes out.
Well, it might go from taking a couple of hours to download
to taking a week or two weeks to download
because that traffic is obviously not in corporate interest
and nobody is paying to prioritize that.
So that could go down, you know.
Any downloads where people are expecting, you know, free open source software,
that's, I'm sure, going to be at the low end of the priority list.
Let's just look at something.
Obviously this could never happen in this country.
But in one of those other countries where freedom of speech is under attack,
there could be a situation.
Hey, wait.
Quiet, Mike.
There could be a situation where you're criticizing the government
and basically the government is able to cut off everybody
who they put on a particular list or everybody from a particular region
or something like that,
and all of a sudden they are not able to communicate via the internet.
Or if they are, it's extremely slowly.
Basically just strangling any kind of opposition.
The instruments to do this are being laid out for you with this loss of net neutrality.
Now, okay, it might not affect you and your perceived notions
of what the U.S. is going towards,
but it will affect many, many people throughout the world.
And it seems like the way that customers receive, you know,
telephony services and other services,
they're all being routed now through, you know, the internet.
It's all becoming IP traffic.
It's no longer becoming landlines that are directly connected.
I mean it's not merely theoretical that other countries would select
what traffic goes through and what doesn't based on their political preferences.
I mean it happens in the most populous country on earth.
One of the heretofore nice things about the United States
is that it hasn't been happening here.
Right.
Okay.
We'd like your opinions on this.
And call us in just a little bit.
We'll be taking phone calls.
The phone number for later is 212-209-2900.
Here's another interesting story.
The creators of an anti-war website,
West Point Grads Against the War,
are facing off with the U.S. Military Academy at West Point
after the academy claimed the site violated trademark laws.
That's right.
The site was founded by Jim Ryan, Bill Cross, and Joe Walshick
after the three 1962 graduates became troubled by how President Bush
was handling the war in Iraq.
We three founding fathers became increasingly concerned
with the continuing lies of the Bush administration
and the continuing pattern of escalating behavior with Iran and Iraq, Ryan said.
John Ward, a trademark attorney working on the case for the website,
said that Ryan received a letter from Lori Dougherty,
an attorney for the Military Academy in April,
stating that the term West Point needed to be taken off the site.
She said, they're using the name without permission,
it's unlawful use, they're creating confusion,
and they have to stop using the name
because they're violating federal trademark laws.
It's amazing.
They claim, Lieutenant Colonel Kent Casella,
who's an academy spokesperson, says,
it was never about the content.
There are folks out there who are trying to make it a political issue.
No, we would have sent the exact same letter
to the website West Point Grads for the war.
She added, the academy works hard to protect the First Amendment.
And here we go.
That's what we teach here.
In fact, all of us wearing the uniform hold our hand up
and swear to defend that right to the death if necessary.
And by criticizing us, you might as well be a godless communist
because obviously you don't subscribe to that theory.
After some correspondence between lawyers from both sides,
West Point proposed a settlement that Ryan and his co-creators rejected.
The terms of the settlement were that the site's creators
would obtain a written license agreement with the academy
and would also have to place a disclaimer on the site saying
it was not affiliated with West Point.
The purpose of the disclaimer is to prevent confusion by the public
because West Point's argument is that the site is causing confusion.
People will see the use of the term West Point and say,
well, you must be associated with the school.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
That a school of military cadets is going to be against the war.
That makes all the sense in the world.
He says, the lawyer says,
our client said they did not want to put up a disclaimer
because there's no possibility that someone would be confused on this point.
But mostly, the site's creators have the right to call themselves
West Point graduates because they are West Point graduates.
That's really where this whole thing should have ended.
The academy also said on television when this story broke
that they trademarked the name about three or four years ago
and that the only way you could use West Point something,
like West Point Cleaners, West Point Grocery,
was if you were in a place where geographically the town or the area
or some geographical feature was called West Point.
But if you're a human being and you're a West Point graduate,
you're not a trademarkable location.
No, I agree with that.
But there's yet another subtler way around this copyright issue.
Have three other websites, East Point graduates,
North Point graduates, and South Point graduates.
You are going so well there for a second.
People pointing north, people pointing east,
people pointing south, and people pointing west.
So you just want to abandon the original defense,
which is perfectly sound in and of itself, that they are West Point graduates.
If that one fails, you have something to fall back on.
This is the common mistake that a lot of people that are on this radio show
have made before, which was the thinking that if you can only trap the law
in a logical inconsistency, then suddenly you win.
But it doesn't actually work that way.
No, no, it doesn't, because they just rewrite the law if they have to,
and you lose anyway, and then you lose your original point.
Well, with net neutrality not passing,
eventually they won't have to worry about copyrighted trademark infringement here.
You know, one thing they didn't give here was a URL for the website.
It's westpointgradsagainstthewar, but obviously that's not the website,
unless that's .com or something.
I don't know.
Maybe somebody can tell us what it is.
I'd sure like to know.
But, boy, yeah, those kind of fights are still going on.
Okay, we mentioned our email address, othat2600.com,
and, of course, we appreciate people writing in to us
and sending us all kinds of correspondence,
and we'd like you to do the same.
You can also send us paper mail.
Is everybody here?
Okay, good.
Paper mail and the address to send us paper mail through the U.S. mail is
Bernie, you ready?
Okay, I don't know.
I can get in on this if you want me to.
You should get in on this, actually,
but let's see if we can get through it ourselves first.
It's off the hook, care of WBAI, 120 Wall Street.
New York, New York.
No, you jumped the gun.
It's my fault now.
You jumped the gun, and you were so new to the part, too.
I'm going to just start again because we haven't done this in a while.
Off the hook, care of WBAI, 120 Wall Street.
Tenth floor, New York, New York.
1-0-0-0-5.
Did I give you both New Yorks or just one New York?
I think I gave you just one New York.
I think it was supposed to flow smoothly.
Because I don't have a part.
I don't have a part after I say 120 Wall Street.
I think you should give each person one syllable,
and we can just go around the room.
You have plenty of parts.
Yeah, but I wrote it.
I think instead we should do it in harmony.
That way we can do all the lyrics.
We can't even do it in order.
We can each do all the lyrics in different parts.
All right, so now we're going to read some of the letters.
O-T-H at 2600.com.
Oh, by the way, speaking of U.S. mail.
You know, we don't get any mail anymore.
What do you mean we don't get any mail anymore?
I just looked in the mailbox.
There was no mail there.
Really?
There was a thing there.
This is probably people are confused by all the chaos.
Well, send mail, and we can test it that way.
All right.
But speaking of U.S. mail, guess what has started to arrive?
My postcards from Cuba finally are making their way to people's hands.
They checked for microfiche.
One person has gotten theirs.
My aunt got hers.
So I don't know if anybody else did.
I sent a lot.
So it's one time I sent a lot of postcards.
And it was over a month ago from a country that's 80 miles away.
And the weird thing is the one that showed up didn't have any postmarks on it.
It was like somebody just brought it to her.
The swimmer got washed away.
Who knows?
Who knows?
Okay, here's a letter from a listener.
This comes from Gary.
In the old days, this is in response to the person with the ringer problems on their old telephone.
In the old days, telcos could detect the amount of phones on the line by detecting the ringers.
Since bell charged per phone, one would simply disconnect the ringer,
and the phone company couldn't tell.
You might want to check to see if the ringer is connected.
On some phones, the ringer was connected to green and yellow.
A jumper from yellow to red was required to place the bell across the line.
Another possibility is how many phones are across the phone line.
Since the phone company ringing current is very small,
too many ringers could cause overloading and prevent the ringers from ringing.
Good suggestions here.
So hopefully that person will have their phone ringing before they know it.
Or maybe it's just broken.
Maybe it's broken too.
Bernie, yes?
I've got to say that if you look on any phone, any FCC-approved telephone,
you'll see a rating.
It'll say how many Rs.
It's an R rating for your phone.
R-rated phones.
My goodness.
All phones are R-rated.
And typically they're like 0.something, 0.some digit R.
And the R is the value of one R is one electromechanical ringer
in the old Series 500 phone sets that we played on during the pledge drive.
So if your phone is a 0.1 R, that means it only consumes one-tenth
the amount of electrical current than an electromechanical ringer in an old phone.
So it's just interesting.
Take a look at your phone sometime, any landline phone,
and you'll see on the FCC notice the ringer rating,
and you'll know how much current it consumes compared to an electromechanical ringer.
Is this on new phones as well or just the old phones?
All phones.
All phones.
It came out since it was legal to connect your own phone equipment to the network,
which I think was like 1984 and 1985.
Okay.
You mentioned on your show that legislation is in the works to require ISPs
to monitor their customers' traffic.
It is imperative that you tell your listeners about Tor, the Onion Router.
It is an online network where you route each other's traffic,
such that connections you make cannot be traced.
Specifically, it uses SOCKS to tunnel TCP connections through three other Tor nodes
and onto the Internet from a location other than that of the original user.
If Alice connects to 2600.com through Tor,
her connection bounces through two other nodes,
and then Bob, who bridges it onto the non-Tor Internet.
When it reaches 2600.com, 2600 server logs will have an entry for Bob accessing 2600.com,
but we'll have no idea who Alice is, what her IP is, FQDN, or anything else.
Tor is a free download from tor.eff.org and runs on Linux, Windows,
and I think even Mac is supported now too.
I run two Tor nodes, one for participating in the network as a server only
and one for using the Tor network for my outgoing web traffic,
and you can read a lot more at tor.eff.org.
Yes, Redbird.
It's actually a really nice concept, and it works, and I use it, and yada, yada, yada.
Things are going in the right direction, but it's really latent.
The latency is really, really high, and it makes browsing the web relatively painful,
but it is really good for anonymity.
It's also being used in an abusive way on IRC networks. I know that.
Well, a lot of IRC networks are now blocking Tor nodes.
Why is it? If Tor is so great in the answer to all these problems, why are people blocking it?
Because you get people who want to do silly things on wherever they're connecting to,
and so they use Tor for that.
Unfortunately, it taints the whole network.
Basically, any Tor node gets blocked as a result of that,
and, yeah, that sure does taint the network.
You can't even have a chance to prove that you're not an idiot
because if you're coming from a Tor network, a Tor client, then you must be bad, apparently.
Workarounds for these proposed repressive laws are good,
but it would be even better if we don't get the repressive laws.
Absolutely.
And, unfortunately, Tor isn't really useful for traffic that needs to be there on time,
like streaming media and VOIP and stuff like that.
Yeah.
Okay, and we had a lot of mail about the numbers, obviously,
the mysterious numbers that we...
Another phone number showed up in the last week.
Did you guys hear about this one?
Bernie, did you hear about this one?
Is this the one in Chicago?
No, this is...
As you predicted?
No, actually, everybody was wrong, apparently.
It was supposed to be in Boston, 617, but it showed up, actually, in 678,
which I believe is Georgia?
And it was weird because it showed up in the Craigslist personals for that section as well,
but the actual personal ad was a little bit different this time.
It still greeted the person the same way.
What is it?
Mein Freunden?
Mein Freunden.
Yeah.
It basically said,
I hear the weather in the south is very nice this time of year.
Please call me.
And, you know, that kind of phrase is a little bit too well phrased, I think,
for it to be the same kind of phrase as the other ones,
which is please call me or it's been so long since I've spoken to you.
So it seems to me that that's either a fake or the person knows that everybody is following.
It's a fake fake number station.
Yeah.
So, yeah, another one showed up.
This one was shorter.
I don't think it's still up, but if you go to...
What's that site?
Homelandstupidity.us, I think that's the one, right?
They have all the number stations.
I'm still working on my own fake.
I'm making progress, but it's not launched yet.
Not number stations, number numbers, number phone numbers, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
What we're talking about, we're talking about now three instances where this weird phone number has popped up,
you call it, and you hear some disembodied voice reading out numbers in series,
and we're trying to figure out what it means.
This listener says,
It reminds me of the VIC cipher once used by the Soviet Union because of its delivery and given information.
VIC is delivered in five-digit groupings.
The messages may be encrypted using mod 10 chain addition, straddling checkerboard, and some transpositions.
It's really wacky and almost impractical for pen and paper,
but a defected, not defected, not defective,
defected spy named Rhino Heihannan did confirm its use to the U.S.
You need a few things to decipher such a message.
One, the date of the message.
Two, a five-digit indicator group.
Three, a small personal number used to figure the transpositions.
Four, the first 20 letters of the beginning or chorus of a populist song.
One thing to consider may be the phone numbers themselves.
Of course, these could be a one-time pad or an impossible joke.
The fact that a short number is at the end of the message could be the personal number or some other hint.
The indicator group used to create the key usually involves the last digit of the date,
so the indicator group could be the sixth to last.
It just goes on and on with all these possibilities.
I think, actually, since this latest one was, I think, group 134, which was not an area code at all,
that the hint could be in that first segment that's spoken.
It always says a group number.
We used to think it was the next area code.
The first one was group 415.
The next one was group 617.
This one's group 134.
So maybe you apply that number somehow to the numbers that follow.
That's a possibility.
There's lots of possible algorithms, and it's hard to.
Yeah, but the thing that's weird about this, and the thing that leads me to believe that it is solvable,
is the fact that it's not like the stations that actually aired these numbers over shortwave
where they literally would be any number.
Here, every third number is a zero almost every single time,
except for a couple instances where it's a one.
On a new number as well?
Yeah.
So that tells me, and it's all divisible by three,
so that tells me that these are three-digit numbers of some sort that indicate something.
We've lost Bernie.
Bernie's gone.
Wait, every third letter without exception?
Every third number is a zero or a one, and only a couple of ones.
So that tells me that it's a two-digit number for all intents and purposes,
occasionally a three-digit number.
We just have to figure out what those numbers mean.
Which at first thought would maybe lead you to believe it's some kind of translation thing
and it falls within the ASCII character range or something like that,
but it's nothing obvious like that.
It's nothing obvious.
I've even written down some of the numbers and seen what follows them
to see if there's any kind of indication, like Q would always be followed by a U or something like that,
and there's nothing really substantive that shows up every time.
That's why I think that special number that's spoken at the beginning,
group 617, group 134, whatever,
I think that is the key to what you're supposed to do with the numbers.
Okay, maybe you could try Bernie again.
I'm sure he wants to continue talking to us.
I don't think he hung up in a huff.
Let's read this new letter here.
Dear Off the Hook,
First, I want to let you guys know that I love the show.
I live in Rhode Island, so the only way I can hear it is through the Internet.
That's actually not true.
If you knock off a couple of other radio stations along the way,
you could probably pick up our signal in Rhode Island.
There's one in Boston, country station in Boston at 99.5.
Get rid of them, you might hear us.
I'm just saying, you know, just putting it out there.
Anyway, I have an interesting article that I looked up
after I heard something similar on my local news station.
Texas is planning a $5 million program
that will install night vision enabled net cameras along the border
and will allow anyone with an Internet connection to monitor these cameras
and they will also have contact information
where the lawyers can call to report people crossing illegally into the U.S.
Unbelievable.
Keep up the work on the show.
I look forward to meeting you at Hope No. 6 in July.
But yeah, we're all turning into little big brothers here
because we can all watch each other and see if anybody's up to no good and report it.
It's like 1984.
It is.
What's different than 1984?
It's scarier.
They could combine it with that technology we heard about a year ago
and attach guns to it so you could actually shoot.
I'm amazed that somebody else here has come up with a responsible idea.
Wait, so they're admitting that there's too much to watch.
They don't have the resources to watch it, so they want us to watch it.
Well, they want to put us into the mentality of, yeah, this is a threat.
This is a danger.
We have to report all these people that have been doing this for so long.
And, you know, is this really the thing that we have to focus on more than anything?
I mean, yeah, if you're a hateful nationalist, I suppose it is.
But for the rest of us, there are other far more important things
like, you know, wars and plagues and pestilence and certain really nasty people.
But never mind.
Bernie, are you back?
I am.
Sprint just summarily dumped me, as it often does.
Sorry about that.
Well, maybe you didn't pay them a fee to keep your packets in order.
I didn't pay them the extra fee for prioritizing my packet
as opposed to the net neutrality model where all packets are treated equally.
We're going to be listening to the archives in like five years and crying over our jokes about this.
We better download them because we might not be able to access them then if we don't pay the fee.
Bernie, are you ready to watch for Mexicans on the Internet and report them when you see them?
No.
You know, it's not my job.
And, you know, I think it's just really silly.
And as Redberg pointed out, what, is the government admitting that it can't watch the borders?
I mean, the government needs to decide whether it wants to watch the borders or not
and whether it wants to enforce what borders should mean.
And if they don't want to do that, then, you know, don't make me do that unless you're going to pay me to do it.
And, frankly, I'd rather have another job anyway.
I saw a very patriotic story on the news a few weeks ago.
Are you putting patriotic in quotes or how you?
Go ahead.
Sure.
About this group that was going out and there was a gap in the fence at the border.
So they were going to put one in themselves.
Put a fence in?
Put a fence in.
Okay.
To connect parts of the or to actually didn't connect either end of the gap, but they made it a little more wall just to make sure.
How do they know exactly where the border is?
They just assume it's the point between?
It's along a line of latitude.
Okay.
How about this?
How about.
Most of the way.
All right.
Since we can't help the Mexicans any other way, how about we give them a little bit of land?
We see a point like that and we just sort of make the fence go up and over a little bit.
And everybody's going to assume, yeah, that's Mexico because the fence goes up and there's this extra acre of land that for some reason, there must be some kind of border dispute from 100 years ago, was given to them.
And if you build the fence and you build it a little bit off, you're giving Mexico more land.
Think about it.
The fence wasn't very good either, but it made them feel like they were doing something for their country.
Yeah.
There's a lot more they could be doing.
Once they take an acre, what's to stop them?
I won't continue.
Yeah.
Might as well.
Might as well just go on.
It's for the best.
Okay.
What else?
Greetings.
I'm a new listener of Off the Hook.
I've been listening to the past broadcasts on my iPod everywhere, at the gym, at home, at work, while driving.
Be careful while driving.
That's all good.
Because sometimes we say things that make people swerve off the road.
Every Wednesday, I hear through reports on the way home from the news station about people who have swerved because they heard something.
And it's always between 7 and 8.
And I feel guilty.
What can we do?
It's not true.
You do not feel guilty in the slightest.
I'm trying to give a persona of caring here.
I find many topics covered intriguing.
I wish to give a few brief comments on some things, if I may.
I think it's very important that Off the Hook continues to archive and reference past recordings, past broadcasts.
More people need to do this to see how our rights and liberties have been threatened in the past and how we have defeated them and can do it again.
You brought up the phenomenon that people are not screaming and yelling about the NSA wiretapping and other such losses of liberty.
They have become complacent.
And instead of becoming active in fighting this atrocity, they are, in a way, giving the government the green light to walk all over us.
Amen.
On the topic of E-ZPass, the reason the speed limit is 15 miles per hour, at least here in Massachusetts, is for the safety of the toll plaza staff.
Our plazas are 30-plus years old.
And depending on the configuration of the lanes, employees sometimes have to walk across traffic and across a fast lane or E-ZPass lane.
I say build bridges.
Then they don't have to worry about that.
On the topic of driver's license barcode scanning, I once had my ID scanned at a liquor store and got the same response.
Scanning is a validation method.
This can be circumvented by using a passport in which stores have no way to scan the numbers at the bottom or befriend the owner of another store.
On the topic of RFID, more people should be concerned about this new spying method.
When the story broke last year that a company began implanting chips into employees for purposes of ID, I was horrified.
What will be next?
Big Brother is reaching his arms ever so much further, and we seem to be blind to it.
I recently came across a very interesting site that talked about RFIDs being implanted in U.S. currency.
I don't know if you have covered this in the past, but the site suggested if you were to microwave a $20 bill,
Jefferson's right eye will explode where the RFID is located.
We've covered that.
It's actually not true, is it?
Did you microwave a bill for a long period of time?
I think, Bernie, you did this, right?
Yes, I experimented.
By the way, Jefferson is not even on a $20 bill.
Well, maybe you'll find him.
You'll see where it exploded, and then you'll say, oh, there's Jefferson.
He's a little tiny person in the background.
I actually put some 20s in a microwave, and nothing unusual happened.
It was just they just sort of got hot.
So it's a bogus, one of these Internet urban myths kind of thing.
Well, maybe your microwave—
Did you put the match under his eye?
Yeah, your microwave might not be all it could be.
It's bogus.
This listener has not been listening to all the episodes of Off the Hook because he would also know that I had listened.
If he had listened, he'd known that I had tried using a passport at a liquor store here in Philadelphia
and got away with it, and they didn't know how to scan it, and therefore my identity was in the computer.
So this is old news.
He should be listening more often to the archives.
You really expect people to listen to every single show before they even write a letter?
We've been on the air since 1988, for God's sake.
They can buy the CD set, the DVD set, the audio set.
Okay, not a fundraiser.
This is your summer project.
Listen to all the shows.
They still cannot download them into their heads and memorize everything that's said.
Bernie, not even I have listened to every episode.
In New York, scanning licenses are anonymous as far as I understand because there are two barcodes,
one with your age and one with all the information, presumably for law enforcement.
I wouldn't know.
My license is one of the older ones.
No, that has it, too.
Does it really?
You have the 2D barcode at the bottom, and then you have one at the top that is just a regular.
If there was a camera here, the audience would see us all digging in our pockets.
It's horrendous.
Oh, yes, there are two barcodes, a 3D, as it's so-called.
2D.
Oh, a 2D and a 1D?
The one at the top is a 1D?
All right, well, let's all go bar hopping after the show, and we can ask all the answers.
One quick interjection about RFIDs.
The FDA is going to impose a rule putting RFIDs on all drug bottles and containers to guard against counterfeiting.
Interesting.
And people have RFID readers at what?
No, this is to make sure that you don't have counterfeit drugs sold under the counter, so to speak, to your pharmacist.
He's buying them cheaply.
He doesn't know if they're any good or even real, and some counterfeiter is making a fortune selling what looks like Viagra but isn't.
Couldn't you just cut the RFID chip out of one bottle and attach it somewhere on the other?
I don't know.
Or just take the Viagra.
We have this bit of mail from The Clone up in Canada.
It tells us that Verizon has launched a new service called Chaperone Tracking Service for LG Migo phones.
This service uses GPS and is used for parents to apparently track their kids or governments to track innocent people.
They've started that in New York as well.
It was just on the news the other day.
That's pretty scary.
So I guess what we should do is get one of these phones and see if we can track.
We can put one of our people up publicly, and you all can track them.
Why don't you give it to me?
I'm the only person here without a cell phone.
Okay?
Chip in.
Give me the phone.
Give me all the time because, face it, I'm the most hated person on the show apparently.
And if you'd like to know if Jim is approaching you, then this is one easy way to be able to tell that.
Another story about Verizon, Verizon offers an unlimited data plan where you can plug their PC card into your computer
and get the internet anywhere that they have service, you know, unlimited.
But it turns out that the service is not unlimited.
To no one who listens regularly is surprised.
They canceled the service of a coworker of mine because he was using their unlimited plan too much.
That's great.
I hope there's a letter attached to that.
Oh, there's a letter.
Good.
I want to see that.
Okay.
Our phone number, 212-209-2900.
Please give us a call.
This one last letter.
I just finished listening to your May 3rd show and your discussion about magnetometers.
Magnetometers?
Magnetometers.
Oh, the letters are mixed up.
Magnetometers, that's it.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Magnetometers.
Well, I typed in .org and I got a website called .com.
Okay.
All right.
That's all the same.
Yeah.
It gave me a pre-printed letter and it linked me to both my senators and Hillary Rodham
Clinton wrote me back yesterday saying she is for net neutrality, but I never got anything
back from the other senator who I can't remember the name.
That's interesting because Schumer has an automated response.
I wrote him on a different issue from a different site and got his automated response, which
admitted it was automated.
Maybe you broke it.
Oh.
You probably want to personalize the letter slightly, right?
I did.
Okay.
You can see a little bucket to type in something that you'd like to say and it gives you, I
think, a little hint what to say, but I just want to let people know that they should let
people know for the upcoming Senate vote how they stand.
And let's let everybody know who supports it and who doesn't.
That's interesting news.
I didn't think that Hillary Clinton would support it, but that's a revelation to me.
She says she does.
Okay.
All right.
Well, that's significant.
Thanks for the information.
Thanks a lot.
It's particularly important to call your senator or write if your senator is on the Commerce
Committee, which is where this bill lies.
Neither of the New York senators are, but some of the surrounding ones maybe.
But they go out drinking with them and who knows what they could do.
Anything could happen.
202-209-2900.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Speak up.
Oh.
Good evening.
That was a very annoying click there.
I'm sorry.
Good evening, gentlemen.
How are you?
Hello.
I'm another cologne trooper from the Empire.
Where are you calling from?
New Jersey.
Okay, then.
What's on your mind?
Well, I used to serve in the Republic.
Now I serve in the Empire.
Okay.
Well, tell us-
That REN was the ringer equivalency number.
Uh-huh.
That compared the, as we were saying, the mechanical ringer, what percentage of current
that would draw as compared to the mechanical ringer as compared to the electronic one.
Okay.
That was our whole subject.
One other thing I want to mention.
Mexico.
Yes.
All the people that are trying to sneak over here.
Yes.
One question no one's ever said on the news is, why is everyone trying to leave Mexico?
What's going on down there?
More importantly, why is everyone trying to come here?
Don't they read the news?
Exactly.
They should be going back to Mexico.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Do you know why?
I don't know.
Do you know what I don't know?
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I mean... Exactly, you should be going back to Mexico.
I don't know. I don't know. Maybe they're trying to get to Canada and we should just help them.
We're a safety valve for Mexico. Mexico has a relatively oppressive government and always has,
independent of which party's in power, a bad economy and essentially, rather than have the revolutions
that it's had for a hundred years, they let the people come here so they don't have the discontent
that they otherwise would. Plus a lot of them cut our grass and clean our houses.
I'm just... I'm saying from the Mexican government's point of view.
There's something fundamentally wrong with the Mexican government down there.
That never comes up. They never mention that there might be a problem with the government anywhere.
No. Fascinatingly, the Mexican government took a full page ad a couple weeks before all this started
hitting the fan, in which they said they wouldn't do anything to help unless we agreed to take
anybody who wanted to come, plus their families.
Okay. Well, I don't think we really have time to get into the whole immigration issue.
Sir, is there any other question that you have before we go on to another phone call?
I just want to say I love listening to you guys. My daughter's an off-the-hook t-shirt.
Oh, really? Cool.
Thank you.
All right. Thanks for calling. Of course, you only get an off-the-hook t-shirt by donating to the show.
So, thanks very much for that.
And paying your pledge.
Oh, of course. Paying the pledge, too. 212-209-2900. And speaking of donations,
we're happy to announce that we are solidifying a deal to get massive amounts of bandwidth at the
upcoming HOPE Conference this July. We're talking about something on the order of an OC3, which is
basically about, I think, 30 times what we had last time. Thing is, it's going a little bit above
our budget, and we need to raise some cash to make this happen. But the amount we have to raise is a
fraction of what it should cost. So, we're hoping people can help us achieve this so that we don't
take too much of a bath in this whole thing. If you go to our website, www.2600.com, you will see a
little button there asking people to donate whatever they can. And, of course, you will be
listed in our conference program, which will be distributed at the conference this July and saved
by people for many, many years. All right. Let's take a phone call over here. 212-209-2900. Good
evening. You're on the air.
Yeah. Hi. How are you doing?
Good. How are you?
Doing good. Listen, I'm passing through town, actually. I just happened to pick up your show.
And regarding the cell phones, I don't know if you're aware of it or not, but, I mean,
GPS is pretty much available on most of your brand-new cell phones. And there are servers
you can get. I know NexTel, and I'm pretty sure Verizon offers the same service, where you can
actually get a disk and download it to your computer. And you can pick out the phones that
you want to trace. And at any time, you can pull that phone up, and you know where that phone is.
Well, I know some companies are offering that.
Yeah.
Sorry.
Usually, you have to turn it on on the phone. Or at least I know with my phone,
they have it set up so that if you make a 911 call, it'll give them your location. But
if you want to have active kind of monitoring, you have to turn it on on the phone.
Right. Yeah. I'm not sure exactly how it works. I know I've got it on our phones.
Caller, with this provision, does the person have to do anything to the phone?
Do you have to give permission?
No. Because, well, like in our case, they're company phones.
Oh, I see.
So when the company issues a phone to an employee, it's already listed in the computer. So they can,
it's just a way for us to track. I'm a truck driver. I own a trucking company. And it's a
way for us to track our drivers. So if I call my driver, and I say, you're supposed to be in New
York City. And I call him up, and I say, where are you? He says, well, I'm on the Jersey Turnpike,
and I pull up his phone that tells me he's in Delaware, and I know he's not doing his job.
Well, he could have lost his phone and too embarrassed to tell you they lost the phone.
Well, he wouldn't be talking to me.
That's true. You're pretty sharp there. Okay. All right. Listen, thanks for calling.
Yeah. You guys have a great evening.
All right. Take care. I wonder if he's driving one of those trucks right now. That'd be kind of cool.
Well, he should be pulled over. You're not supposed to talk on the phone if you're...
If you can do it safely, and truck drivers can do almost anything safely.
We're pretty much out of time. So sorry to those folks we didn't get to, but we're back again next
week taking more phone calls. Any last announcements? Arsena, I know you have something to say.
Yeah. Well, we're going through the final organizational process for the video room
and the movie room for Hope. So if there's any more suggestions for maybe videos, clips,
documentaries, just shoot me an email, arse at 2600.com. And we've gotten some responses,
but it'd be great to have more. Okay. And address one more time.
Arse at 2600.com. Okay. Well, thank you everybody for calling in and for writing in. We'll see you
again next week. Until then, stay tuned. Send us new stories. If you hear of anything, stay awake,
talk to people around you. Don't give up. It's not that hopeless. See you next week.
We're the slaves of freedom. Where we can do what we like. We're the slaves of freedom.
Where no one gets off their bike. We're the slaves of freedom. Freedom is the handle on the bucket
of your soul. The image of delusion in the goldfish of your boat. The shampoo of perfection in the
bathroom of your dreams. Freedom is the universe and everything it seems. Oh, yeah.
We all live until we die. We're the slaves of freedom. There's no sense in wondering why.
We're the slaves of freedom. So pick up your heavy load. We're the slaves of freedom. And
keep on trucking down the road. We're the slaves of freedom. No man is bound except for responsibility
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or things left unattended in the ladies or the gents. Oh, yeah.
We are in a fun mood. We're the slaves of freedom. Let's do something really rude. We're the slaves of freedom.
We can't all be whiter. We're the slaves of freedom. So let's stick out our tongues and swerve. We're the slaves of freedom.
Freedom is the handle on the bucket of your soul. The backbone of ambition in the goldfish of your
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We're all here. Hey, today is June 15, 2006 and this is