Our technical production team at KPFA in Berkeley includes Eric Klein and Antonio Ortiz.
You can listen to this newscast in its entirety at fsrn.org.
We also welcome your comments, questions, and story ideas.
Just e-mail us at comments at fsrn.org.
From KPFK in L.A., I'm Aura Bogado.
Just e-mail us at comments at fsrn.org.
From KPFK in L.A., I'm Aura Bogado.
And you're listening to radio station WBAI New York.
The time is exactly 7 o'clock.
Once again, time 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 cough
We couldn't get much worse
But if they could, they would
Bum-diddly-bum for the best, expect the worst
I hope that's understood
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
And good evening to everybody
The program is off the hook
Emmanuel is here with you for the next hour or so
as we talk about the latest developments in technology, privacy
and all the other things going on
We are joined today by Mike.
Hello.
And, oh, Lynn, you're here, visiting from Atlanta, right?
Hello.
And Redbird.
Good evening.
Arseny.
Hello.
Jim.
Arg.
And Kevin, number two.
Hello.
And Bernie S, down there in Philadelphia.
Bernie S, number one.
We have a lot of people here today.
His name tag says Robert.
What?
Kevin's name tag says Robert.
Yeah, well, that's to confuse the people downstairs.
OK.
OK, so we have some interesting things
that have been going on this past week,
including the White House has been uploading
anti-drug videos to YouTube.
Yeah, that's apparently their way of reaching out
to the youth of America.
They don't have anything else to do?
Well, it took them a few months to figure out how to do it.
They're distributing government-produced anti-drug
videos on YouTube, the trendy internet service that
already features clips of wacky drug-induced behavior
and step-by-step instructions for growing marijuana plants.
You know, if you've seen some of the videos that are on YouTube,
it's self-sufficient for the anti-drug message.
I guess it is in some way.
I have no problem with this.
I think, I mean, look at all those classic films
where they've deconstructed educational videos and such
over the years.
YouTube is the perfect venue for any sort
of educational, campy educational film.
Well, Michael Bujaga has a problem with it.
Who is he?
He is, he's an author and director of the journalism
school at Iowa State University.
Like, like, like he ever affected my life before.
He has, well, he's affecting it now because I'm telling you
he has a big problem with this.
And he says it's the wrong forum and the wrong target.
And he says it's misdirected because online video services
don't afford serious consideration to weighty topics.
Weighty topics.
That's true.
The whole point of YouTube is that it's an open forum.
How could you say it's not the right forum?
You can put whatever you want on it.
That's true.
That's true.
But it should be interesting to see the White House.
Well, it's like the guy, it's like if the White House
made a MySpace that says, hey kids, don't do drugs
or like, hey kids, don't be terrorists.
No, they haven't.
They probably have.
I mean, they probably do.
You can look it up and maybe, maybe someone will make one
for the government.
Now, Bernie Einstein, you spent some time hanging out
with the government this week.
Yeah.
Believe it or not, I had breakfast with the director
of the Department of Homeland Security.
Really?
Where'd you guys go?
Waffle House?
You know, there's no Waffle House in Philadelphia,
but I would have, but you can't get butter
at Waffle House.
Well, there's that, but well, there's plenty of good places
to go in Philadelphia.
I hope you showed him a good time.
I wanted to butter him up, and I couldn't
if I went to Waffle House.
So seriously, what exactly is going on here?
Well, he made a nearly surprise visit to a gathering
of the World Affairs Council, of which I'm a member here
in Philadelphia.
We sort of gather to discuss matters of importance
to the nation and the world and, you know, whatever.
And it sounds more important than it is.
So just about a couple of days before,
I think about two weeks ago, no, that was last week?
Yes.
Last week, there was an announcement that he was gonna
be in town, and he agreed to speak to our group
of about 100 people who showed up.
And he was there, and it was really strange.
Just sitting a few feet away from a guy you see
on television standing next to the president,
talking about homeland security.
And I got to hear his speech,
which was mostly canned, pre-midterm election,
terrorist fear-mongering, in my opinion.
But it was interesting hearing him reply to questions
that were not scripted, which, you know,
usually they are in television or the radio.
Now, let's ask you a question.
Anybody could have done this?
Anybody could have showed up at this thing.
It wasn't close to members of the World Affairs Council,
but it was not publicized, either.
You had to have been invited by email,
or at least advised by someone else.
I invited a couple of friends to come,
but they couldn't make it,
because it was during business hours.
But I headed up there anyway.
But by what tremendous governmental oversight
were you invited?
Well, it wasn't the government that invited me.
The World Affairs Council invited me,
and I'm a member of the World Affairs Council.
How did you become a member of the World Affairs,
you think you know somebody, the World Affairs Council?
I don't even know what that is.
Like I said, it sounds a lot more important than it is.
But, you know, it's just people who are concerned
about the world and the nation and things like that.
Well, that's me.
I'm concerned.
I think we all are.
How do we join?
I think there's a branch in New York,
the World Affairs Council.
So look it up.
It's really an interesting group.
They have some amazing speakers
that you would never have access to otherwise.
And I had to have a,
I got a chance to have a face-to-face conversation
with the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
This is a cabinet-level appointee.
He sits at a table with the President on a regular basis.
I mean, this is an interesting situation
where somebody like me could actually have a conversation
with someone like that.
Face-to-face, how close to his face did you get
and how loud did you talk?
I was about 15 feet away.
Everybody, he heard me and everybody else heard me
and I got a chance to ask him a specific question.
So what did he ask?
Well, the first, there were only like four or five people
that got to ask questions.
I was the last one.
The first, all the questions except mine
were the kind of like questions like,
if I was a terrorist, I would try this.
What are you doing to prevent that kind of thing?
But I didn't want to be just like a Me Too kind of person.
So I brought up an advisory
that the Department of Homeland Security
released about a month ago.
And it was the first time to my knowledge
where the department released an advisory
urging IT directors to install a specific patch,
a specific piece of software.
MSO 6040, right?
Yeah, exactly.
The department advised that a specific piece of software
should be installed on computers
in order to boost the security
of the nation's infrastructure.
And this was a patch that Microsoft released to,
I believe it was Internet Explorer patch.
So I applied the patch
and then it came out a few days later
that that patch had a serious problem with it
that could, in some situations,
corrupt data files on your computer.
And so I checked the department site again
and after this bug to the patch
had been discovered and widely reported,
the department was still urging people
to install the original patch.
In other words, the link they provided
pointed to the old patch that had serious bugs on it.
So anyhow, I brought this up,
not that I expected an informed answer from the secretary
because he probably didn't get involved in this minutiae,
but I said, I asked him,
with your department of 185,000 people,
what is your department doing to better vet its advisories
specifically when it advises people
to install a specific piece of code
from a particular manufacturer
rather than just relying upon a particular vendor
like Microsoft Word on this being a good solution
to a problem?
And he wasn't aware of it
and he said that he trusted his department
to better vet things in the future and so forth.
But it was interesting,
a lot of people in the room, in the IT world,
were aware of the situation and were sort of snickering
and the secretary heard this and it was clear to him
that other people were aware
that this was an embarrassing situation with the department
and he sort of stuttered
and it was really an interesting situation.
You made the director of Homeland Security stutter?
He sort of paused and he realized that people realized
that this was a problem that he wasn't aware of.
To be fair, it requires no effort at all
to make the president stutter.
Well, yeah, but come on, he's not an expert in anything.
He stuttered about a particular issue that I brought up.
Anyhow, I hightailed it out of there afterwards.
Bernie, I think that you got somebody in big, big,
big trouble at the Department of Homeland Security
somewhere.
Yeah, probably. I hope so.
And they stopped taking questions right after that, huh?
Well, I think it was gonna be the last one anyway.
But on my way out, I was able to check out,
there was this caravan of special government vehicles
out in front of the Union League,
this building where this meeting was held.
And there were five of these big Ford Explorers
with tinted-out windows and special antennas on them.
And they were there waiting in case something hit the fan,
he would be able to run out and jump in the car
and take off and tend to Homeland Security things.
They all had Pennsylvania license plates on them.
And I contacted a friend of mine
who's got law enforcement contacts.
And he said that this department typically uses plates,
they have spare plates they use
depending on which state they're in.
And they just put those state's plates on there.
So no matter where he goes, these same vehicles
will put plates for that state on them,
which I thought was kind of interesting.
That's interesting.
And that's sort of contrary to what I've been seeing
with federal plates,
which now have labels of the agency on the actual plate.
So instead of just saying U.S. government,
you know what division of the U.S. government it is.
Well, you can typically tell too, if they don't say that,
if these were not federal plates,
these were like normal looking plates.
So they were sort of designed to be kind of undercover.
But you can always tell a U.S. government plate,
the first character, for instance, if it's a J,
you know it's the Department of Justice.
So these are things you can usually tell
from the first letter,
what department of federal government it's registered to.
In a lot of cases, it's the GSA,
the General Services Administration.
It's like a big motor pool.
But if you see like a white van,
like I saw parked in front of my apartment a few years ago
with tinted out windows,
that starts, a license plate that starts with a J,
you know it's the Department of Justice.
Interesting.
Do they have a T for the Torture Department now
and whatever else they're running?
Oh, that's probably Treasury.
Oh, okay.
That sort of fits together.
But you're talking about weird vehicles.
We have a plethora of weird vehicles around the city now
because of the whole UN thing.
Every single president in the world
and prime minister is in town apparently, including Bush.
And even prime ministers who aren't prime ministers.
Yeah, because coups take place sometimes
when prime ministers leave the country.
And of course, that's what happened
to the prime minister of Canada.
So did I misread that?
I was theorizing yesterday how to do a coup
in the United States and how to do it right,
you know, and where do you get Bush to go
and who is it that actually surrounds the buildings?
It's worth thinking about.
These people are saying that it's not Canada,
like there's more than one foreign country?
Is that how it works?
Yeah.
That's weird.
Yeah, there are many countries out there.
But any event, have any of you guys
been wandering around the city
seeing some of the motorcades
and weird vehicles that are out there?
And all of eastern Manhattan is closed off
because they have to get around.
I think Bush is in the Waldorf Astoria holding court.
Somebody delayed my flight inbound
because the pilot came on and said
that we were being delayed due to a VIP departure
out of JFK.
Yeah, that's probably the Thai prime minister
hightailing it back.
He's in London now, I think, but.
There's actually a lot of like TFRs
and like temporary flight restrictions
and stuff like that going on.
Yeah.
I mean, you have the president of Iran,
you have, you know, Hugo Chavez is here.
It's really, it's a who's who of.
Do you think the president of Iran
did a little shopping while he was in town?
I don't know.
Or do you think that we kind of,
you have a visa to go to the UN and turn around and leave.
We could run into them after the show.
You know, they'll be touring Manhattan.
Who knows?
He's been wearing the same style of clothes
every time I've seen him on TV.
So I don't think he went shopping.
Okay.
Speaking of governmental things,
Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez said yesterday,
Congress should require internet providers
to preserve customer records,
asserting that prosecutors need them to fight.
Oh, I know.
Child pornography.
Child pornography.
Correct.
Yeah, of course.
That's what this is all about.
Nothing else.
That's the only thing that they need to do this for.
Gonzalez and FBI Director Robert Mueller
have met with several internet providers,
including Time Warner's AOL, Comcast,
Google, Microsoft, and Verizon.
Law enforcement officials have indicated to the companies
they must retain customer records,
possibly for two years.
And that's kind of foreboding in some ways.
Now, here's the thing.
Just a few weeks ago,
we reported on what happens when this data gets retained,
and that is that the data gets out.
People's private data gets leaked.
There was the whole thing with AOL search data.
Can you imagine if everyone was required to keep this data,
how much of it would be leaked?
Well, now, when we say this data,
what exactly are we talking about?
What kind of data are they keeping?
Apparently, it's gonna be sort of what websites you visit,
who visits which websites,
the from and to lines of emails and stuff like that.
Wow, that's a lot of information.
It is, yeah.
And is it normal for any internet service provider
to keep that information?
What websites you visit, who you send mail to?
I mean, sometimes I might keep mail server logs
for a few days,
just to be able to diagnose problems with the system.
There might be a reason to keep web visits,
although I can't think of one for similar reasons.
But two years is really no need.
Now, can they go beyond just the website
and the particular file you looked at on the website,
particular picture, particular things you've downloaded?
Can they do all that?
Well, it's hard to say, of course,
because the bill hasn't been written yet,
much less passed, but...
Not so far as what ISPs do right now.
Oh, yeah, sure.
They're able to do that.
If an ISP wanted to,
it could keep the actual data that's transferred,
not merely the headers.
Well, assuming it's not encrypted.
If you're using SSH or any other sort of encrypted program
to communicate, they won't be able to see that,
but they will be able to see various other things,
and that's kind of scary.
Yeah.
And this is, of course, happening in Europe already,
data retention.
So it might come to the United States.
This is the one thing that our legal situation was better,
and it might change.
Now, in Europe, what's the deal?
How long are they keeping things for there,
and what kinds of things?
I don't know off the top of my head
the exact details of the program,
but it's a similar program.
To the one being proposed here.
Wow.
So, okay, how do we protect against this kind of thing?
Bernie, do you have an idea?
Well, I would like to say
that we could do something to prevent this.
We can write our legislators and complain about this,
but if it happens,
or it might be more likely when it happens,
most Western countries have an agreement with each other
that they will be exchanging this information.
For instance, one EU country now can,
if they're part of the EU and part of this agreement,
can access another country's ISP logs.
And if US joins this,
it's gonna be even more interesting
because your internet breadcrumbs,
or to put it in layman's terms,
will be easily accessible by people in other countries
that don't even have to follow US privacy laws.
It's really a weird situation.
Yeah, it certainly is.
There's mitigating factors that you can use
for the actual data that you're transferring.
Like you can use encryption and stuff like that.
But when it comes to covering the tracks
of who you're actually talking to,
like if I wanted to send you a message,
it gets much more difficult.
And you can use networks like Tor and stuff like that.
But at this point,
they're not really fast enough to be practical.
And it really depends on a lot of cooperation
between people participating in projects like that.
And because of spammers and things,
they're seen as a negative thing.
A lot of times, all the IP addresses in the Tor network
are blocked from certain services.
And so it gets to be a very difficult thing
to cover who you're actually talking to,
especially if everybody's logging
and all these logs are accessible
from different departments.
But guys, it's to fight child pornography.
I mean, isn't it worth it for that?
Yeah, but here's the thing.
If you're into child pornography,
are you not gonna go sit in front of somebody's house
with an open access point?
Are you not gonna go to a T-Mobile hotspot?
Are you not gonna go somewhere to a hotel
and access the internet for free?
And they're never gonna know where you are, who you are.
You spoof your Mac address.
I mean, that's not even that big a thing.
These people are not the brightest bulbs in the tree.
You know, we're talking about priests
sitting in their offices and churches
surfing child porn sites and wondering why they get caught.
Or executives having a stash of hard drive space
just dedicated to nothing else.
And wow, I didn't think you would be able to see that.
But of course we know it's really not
for child pornography.
Yeah, that's the suspicion
that maybe this is just getting the foot in the door.
If this bill does pass and you use encryption
and try and cover your tracks,
wouldn't that just draw that much more attention to you?
That would make you guilty.
If you have nothing to hide, what are you hiding?
Well, yeah, but a lot of people use a VPN encryption
for work, so it really wouldn't pop up
as being that incredibly unusual.
I mean, I guess if you were VPNing to a service provider,
then it might pop up a little bit more as being unusual.
But, you know, I mean, so many people use encryption
to get into their corporate network.
Well, I mean, let's look at one of the concerns
that one of our listeners brought up a couple of weeks ago.
And that was the Lebanese television station, Al Manar.
He was concerned that if I connect to Al Manar
and start watching their video,
which is banned in our country,
would I be put on some kind of a list?
It seems to me like it's very easy to do that.
And this is something that becomes more difficult
with, I mentioned, networks like Tor and stuff.
You really can't use Tor for that, for instance,
one of these anonymizing networks,
just because of the latency.
And it's just impossible to stream video.
And it's actually unfair to other users of that network
to do so because of the amount of bandwidth that you're using
and jumping across multiple nodes with.
I mean, if everybody starts using encryption,
wouldn't that give them an excuse
to start breaking the encryption?
Oh, I think that's high on their list
because I understand child pornographers
use encryption too, so.
No, couldn't be.
So now encryption is bad and that has to be defeated.
One of the interesting things about this bill
is that what they're saying
is that it will require a warrant to get this data
and it will only be revealed
in the instances of actual suspicion of a crime
and all this stuff.
Until Bush decides it does need a warrant.
Exactly.
I'm not sure, they have no credibility anymore,
the government, when they claim
they're gonna respect our privacy.
So the only control that we have
is to sort of make the data not collected
in the first place.
Of course.
That's what they're trying to change.
Will that stop them from doing it anyway,
even if we do succeed in making it illegal?
They can have secret agreements with these companies.
I wonder if users themselves can request
logs of their own data going back two years.
Like if I call my credit card company,
I can ask them for all the credit card transactions
that they have.
Well, certainly if you work for those companies,
I'll bet you get it pretty easy.
Well, no, I mean, it would make sense
that they would be able to give you logs
of your own data of everything that you went to.
It would make sense technically,
but it wouldn't make sense on a PR basis
because then you would know what it is
that they're saving about you.
I mean, try getting an ATM camera shot of you
to prove that you took out money.
It's very difficult to do these things.
They don't want you to have access
to what they have access to.
All right, speaking of protecting children,
a man suspected of kidnapping a 14-year-old girl
and keeping her in an underground bunker
was charged Sunday with, well, all kinds of crimes
I don't wanna get into here,
but the interesting part about this story
as far as we're concerned is that she was rescued
because she sent a text message from the guy's phone.
She got to his phone apparently and sent a text message.
And what happened after that was investigators
used cell towers to determine the general location
of the phone and deputies began the search on Friday night.
And it's interesting.
Bernie, do you think there's something different here?
Well, we've always been told by law enforcement
that the whole reason for this cell phone tracking
is in 911 cases where you dial 911 from your cell phone
and you're locked in the trunk of a car or something
and you call and they'll know where you are
and they can rescue you on a situation.
Well, this is the first incident I'm aware of
where their cover was blown.
The law enforcement cover was blown on that
where we have a situation where
just a text message was sent.
Then after that, there wasn't even an active phone
as far as making calls go.
And they were able to look back in the logs,
find out what phone had sent the message
and then track down the location of that phone.
Now, I'm really glad this girl was found
and this is a great story from a standpoint
of she was rescued, it's great.
But it shows the dishonesty that we've experienced before
where law enforcement says the only reason I do this
is to help find emergency callers or 911 callers.
And here it demonstrates that they have the ability
to track phones without the phone even being used
in real time to make the call.
I'm not sure I totally agree with this
because what I understand happened was
the girl sent a text message from the guy's phone
and in so doing transmitted his phone number
and all that law enforcement did at that point
was simply look for that phone number,
triangulate the signal,
see where that phone actually was at that moment.
That's fine, I don't have a problem
with what they did in this case
but it's not ever been sort of advertised
by law enforcement is that's one of their capabilities
even though we kind of knew it was their capability.
It's just interesting to know that,
and we should all know that law enforcement
can track the location of a phone at all times
even if you're not on the phone at the time.
And most people don't think that,
most people think they can only be tracked
while they're using their phone.
If your phone is on at all,
they can determine the location of your phone
and ostensibly you.
The bombers last year in London
when one of them escaped to I think Italy,
his phone was found the second he turned it on.
He wasn't using it, he just turned it on,
put a SIM card in a different phone actually
and that was enough to catch him right there.
So is this really anything new?
It's not new.
The Amet St. Guillaume murder the other year
where the bouncer took this drunk girl
to the boondocks of Brooklyn,
never used his telephone.
They find her body at a given location
and then they look at the nearby cell tower's records
and discover whose phones were there
at the approximate time the body was dumped.
It's only this one guy who happens to be the bouncer
at the bar where she was last seen alive.
And these were just pings from the phone?
He wasn't making a phone call?
No, he didn't make a phone call,
just pings from the phone.
What's important here is to note
that your cell phone is constantly associating itself
with the nearby towers
and that every single place that you go,
every place that you go with your cell phone on,
all that information is logged
and depending on the provider,
they may retain it for longer than other providers,
but it's never clear how long they actually do that.
So for however long the provider decides
to keep their logs for,
you can be traced at every single place
that you've been with your cell phone on
and most people keep their cell phone on them all the time
and the cell phone's always on
and it's always associating with the nearby towers.
So, and your provider, your cell phone provider
can track you back however far back their logs go
and see every single place that you've been
when your cell phone's on.
Now I imagine any company that keeps logs
just has sort of this instinct to keep them forever.
And disk space is cheap,
so it's quite possible you can just store it
in a tape someplace and put it in a vault
and if you ever needed to,
you could find out what phones were answering
at a certain time in a certain location.
So our advice, I guess,
to those people considering serious crimes
is basically turn your phone off.
But then keep in mind that that action in itself,
all of a sudden your phone is unreachable,
that could be suspicious.
Maybe you should leave it on but at home.
Maybe you should get a special phone
just for the crime and use that.
Or maybe you just don't need phones anymore, you know?
Now I have a question.
This bunker, was it in the guy's house
or was it somewhere else?
It's one of these lunatics that has bunkers in their homes.
Why don't they just get the phone number
or look up the customer's address
and then go there without all this fancy doodads?
You know, I never even thought of that.
I never thought of that.
Of course, it was in his home.
The guy dug out five bunkers underground,
sort of like World War I trench warfare bunkers,
five of them starting underneath his trailer.
Why am I surprised?
Starting underneath his trailer and going into the woods.
Five bunkers that were connected.
So of course the fifth one was far away
and had no connection to his house
except for the tunnel in between.
You know, even law enforcement,
I think, could figure that out.
Yeah, they did.
Tunnels between bunkers.
All right, speaking of phone fun,
we got lots and lots of mail about,
did you have something, Kevin?
No.
Oh, okay, you're flailing about.
It was fun.
We had lots and lots of mail
about the various text-to-landline services.
And we discovered one last week after the show.
And what we're talking about basically is
when you have a cell phone and you send a text message
and you send it to a landline, what happens?
And over the past few weeks,
we've learned that most of the world
seems to have a system in place for this.
So you can send a text message to someone at their home
and they actually get a voice reading them a message.
Or if they have a special type of phone,
they see a text message.
We discovered that a couple of companies
do something like that here.
What company was it we were talking about last week?
Last week we had Sprint.
With Sprint.
Sprint does that.
We didn't have very much luck doing it ourselves,
but a lot of our listeners did have luck.
We discovered after the show that Verizon does this too.
Text-to-landline, it enables subscribers
to send text messages converted to voice messages
to most phone numbers in the US.
But we discovered a rather interesting caveat
about all this.
If the intended recipient does not receive my text message,
what does it mean?
And their answer to that is when a message is sent
to a landline number,
a number of conditions may preclude delivery.
The landline number is protected
from receiving prerecorded messages.
I didn't know about that protection.
I know not receiving telemarketing calls is one thing,
but prerecorded messages, that's kind of strange.
Or get this, the number is not white pages publicly listed.
In this case, you'll get a message saying,
sorry, a message to this particular number
could not be delivered as this number
does not accept text-to-landline messages.
What's weird about this is why do they assume
that if it's unlisted,
that it shouldn't be accepting text messages?
It's very weird.
It's very strange.
And that also means that Verizon,
every time you send a text message to a landline,
is doing this really quick lookup
to make sure that there's actually somebody
associated with that number who's publicly listed.
And if not, they reject it based on that.
And I was just gonna ask,
who has access to these databases?
I mean, is every company doing this
or is this a Verizon specific policy?
Verizon is the former New York telephone.
I understand that.
But Sprint, for instance, do they have a policy like this?
I don't think so.
I don't think they would have access to the same data.
We need to experiment and be agitators on this.
We must know someone who has an unregistered phone number.
We attempt to send this person text messages.
When they don't receive them,
we then have him advocate, have him call up,
I presume he's a Verizon customer or she,
call up and say, hey, my friend sent me text messages.
I didn't get them.
I want them.
I think this is a-
Yeah, but then they'll just say,
well, list your phone number, you big dummy.
Well, then you sue.
Well, sue based on what?
This is a great idea, but what's the pressure?
They're denying you a service
because you wanna be private.
What other service does the phone company deny you
because you want your number unlisted?
You still get the phone book.
They still send you the phone book without your name in it.
Exactly.
They're denying one service arbitrarily.
Here's who else they deny the service to.
Text to landline messages can only be delivered
to phone book listed landline numbers.
Messages will not be delivered to, ready,
convalescent centers, emergency operators.
Okay, I guess-
That seems like a place you might wanna send a message.
I wanna send a text message to 911.
It seems like a rather bizarre way to do it.
The person in the bunker might've wanted to do that.
Medical facilities, facsimile machines.
Okay, how do they know?
I guess when it picks up, something gets triggered
and it doesn't send it or it doesn't try to send it.
But didn't we hear about a service that could do that?
Allegedly, Sprint can send to fax machines,
but we didn't get a chance to test that.
Unlisted numbers, numbers outside the 50 US states,
which means not Canada, and other prohibited destinations.
Who knows?
The fax thing.
Aren't there phone-to-fax services
where you can text to a computer,
a website or something, and it goes to a fax?
There used to be, at least several years ago.
Yeah, well, it's confusing,
and I think that's why people don't know what's going on,
because of all these different companies
doing it in different ways.
But I was kind of surprised to find out about that.
Is this something you have to pay extra for?
You have to pay $0.25 for everyone that goes through.
I know that much.
So if I send a text message off my Verizon phone
to somewhere, to a landline, it would work?
It should.
If it's a listed and not a convalescent center
or something like that, yeah, it should go through.
What about cuss words?
I think, well, try it.
Go crazy, try.
I think cuss words will work.
Should I call VAI?
No, don't do that.
The crummy thing is that it's not so easy to tell
what numbers are landlines
and what numbers are cell phone numbers now.
So you're being charged based on
whether it's a landline or a cell phone,
and it's not so clear.
So you might be charged $0.25 for one text message
and nothing for another one.
Bernie.
Yes, I have one caveat about this.
If you happen to be a Sprint customer,
a Sprint PCS customer, and you have an older phone,
I have what's called a 2G phone instead of a 3G phone,
second generation versus third generation phone.
It's about, I don't know, about eight years old,
seven, eight years old.
They won't let you use this service.
It's strange.
I can send SMS messages
to other SMS-capable phone numbers,
but I can't send SMS to messages to landlines.
And Sprint has not been able to explain to me
why this doesn't work,
and why there's this strange conflict,
why I can send them to any SMS-capable phone,
but I can't send them to landlines.
Tell them if they can't answer your question,
maybe you'll ask the director of Homeland Security.
Maybe he'll answer the question.
It's a network issue.
It has nothing to do with the handset itself.
So I'm just wondering why they're discriminating against me
as being a classic phone owner, but they are.
Kevin.
I'm still missing the whole point
of sending a text message to a landline.
I mean, isn't it cheaper just to call the number?
I'm missing the whole point
of text messages in the first place.
They were fun at first, but now-
You use them more than anyone.
No, I don't, actually.
They're annoying.
What if you're trapped in a bunker
with some guy who wants to molest you,
and you don't want to wake him up,
so you send a text message to someone like your mother.
You can't message the emergency operator.
You send it to your mother.
Hi, mom.
I'm in a bunker.
Yeah, that must be a great message
to get with a digitized computer voice.
Okay, so why aren't you handing me a phone?
Okay, I don't know what you want me to do.
Read it.
Okay, why would I read that?
You're giving out secret numbers
when I'm supposed to give out.
Well, it says it's a landline.
Okay, whatever.
All right.
Let's talk about this after the show.
I don't know what you're trying to do.
We have this update on the Steve Rambam situation.
New York private investigator,
who was the inspiration for Kinky Friedman's mystery novels,
appeared in a federal court in California
on charges of trying to intimidate a government informant
by impersonating an FBI agent.
And he was on our show,
and he was almost at our conference.
In an initial court appearance last Wednesday,
Steve Rambam, who is a fictional alter ego, Rambam,
appears in Friedman novels,
such as the Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover,
was released on $25,000 bond
and scheduled to be arraigned on October 23rd.
He was charged with impersonating a federal officer
in an attempt to intimidate the family
of a confidential government informant
in Rosemead, California on April 21st,
according to court documents.
And according to an affidavit filed by the FBI,
Rambam flashed what appeared to be
an official government identification to the family
and later introduced himself as an FBI agent.
According to his attorney, Jeff Rutherford,
Steve Rambam is absolutely not guilty.
He will fight this charge at every stage
and intends to be exonerated.
He and the FBI have, Kinky Friedman said,
he and the FBI have not been on good terms for many years.
They play a cat and mouse game,
but he will win this case.
He's a good guy who works very unconventionally,
sometimes on both sides of the law.
Not sure what he means by that exactly.
That's not the sort of thing you wanna say
about someone who's just been charged with a crime.
Works on both sides of the law.
That's something.
But here's the thing that really gets me about this story.
And of course, Steve will be up here again,
I'm sure, to talk about this.
But Steve Rambam was arrested July 24th
at a hotel in New York as he was about to give a lecture
at a computer hacking conference.
There was our conference, the Hope No. 6 conference.
The FBI handcuffed him and led him away
in front of a stunned audience.
There was no stunned audience.
They did it on a different floor with much fewer people.
We didn't know about it till after it happened.
But somehow, somebody wrote stunned audience
when this first happened,
and that's become part of history now.
The audience was stunned
when they found out about it later.
Yeah, but he wasn't led away in front of the stunned audience.
They just have to use the word stunned in there somewhere.
I was stunned.
I was more shocked than stunned.
Maybe you should tell them they should get their facts straight.
I was odd.
It's the Associated Press.
They know more about it than I do now.
It's the word of gospel.
Okay, so that's the latest on that,
and we'll keep you updated, of course, as we learn more.
Just a quick note about the Rambam talk.
I don't want to give any specific details
to get people's hopes up, but tentatively,
it will happen in the middle of October.
Okay, this is the panel that was not able to proceed normally
because he was taken away in handcuffs in front
of a stunned couple of people, and we're going to try
and set that up for another place
in the New York metro area for free so people can see that.
Right.
Okay, good.
We have some bits of email.
Of course, you can write to us, othat2600.com,
or you can send us regular snail mail at Off the Hook,
Care of WBAI, 120 Wall Street, 10th Floor, New York.
New York.
1-0-0-0-5.
That's what happens when you daydream.
Here's some mail that we've gotten over the past week.
I'm writing this as one of the callers was talking
about transmitting a message on a certain frequency
to get anyone listening to any radio station
to hear what they have to say.
It reminded me of this thing that happened
to me about a year ago.
Maybe you'd be interested in hearing about it.
I was on my way to work one day listening to a CD I had
in my CD player in my car.
All of a sudden, from my speakers came someone talking.
I had no idea what they were saying as it wasn't that clear,
but it also didn't last that long.
As it ended and my music resumed, I noticed a black van
with a large antenna on it zoomed by me.
Could it have originated from the van,
possibly with some random college kids playing a joke
on everyone in the highway?
If so, how would that have been accomplished
and with what technology?
Does anybody care to answer this?
Yes. Go ahead.
Oh, yes. It was coming from the black van.
And two, it was probably not college kids playing a prank.
It was probably, almost certainly,
one of these illegal TV operators
with a really high power dirty amplifier
when it's really poorly designed and emits all kinds
of spurious emissions that are likely to work their way
into any kind of audio circuit that's near them,
like a CD player or a radio
or any kind of stereo audio consumer.
Even an iPod, it could probably invade
and just get into the audio circuit.
These illegal TV amplifiers
that amplify a five watt signal to hundreds of watts
are so poorly designed sometimes because they're illegal.
They emit all kinds of RF noise and spurious emissions
and they're likely to be picked up by anything,
including posters.
My favorite story of this happening
is when these amplifiers were more popular
back in the 70s and early 80s.
Truckers going by churches would be using these amplifiers
and transmitting hundreds of illegally powered signals
and to be picked up by church PA systems.
So some of these off-caller truckers' comments
would be broadcast to the congregation of churches
if they were driving by.
And it caused a lot of consternation
and people didn't know where these voices were coming
from some far away, heavenly, it was just a weird thing.
Anyway, I wanna differentiate this
from what we were talking about last week,
which was the IF stuff, transmitting on the IF frequency.
Now, what Bernie's referring to
is these incredibly high power transmitters
that are actually interfering with the audio stage.
And this doesn't require you to be listening
to the radio for this to work.
It just literally overloads the audio stage
and the AM modulation is rectified
and yada yada you hear over the speakers
or over the headphones or whatever.
And what we were referring to last week,
which we got some feedback on as well,
was transmitting on the frequency that the radio's IF uses.
And I'll explain what the IF is.
I think that's why you're raising your hand.
So all the circuitry that's in your radio,
any commercial radio receiver, I'm sorry,
works at an IF frequency.
So basically you take all the circuitry
and you design it to work really well
around this one frequency,
which is the intermediate frequency.
And a separate stage closer to the front end of the radio
takes the frequency that you wanna listen to.
So for instance, BAI would be 99.5,
mixes that with another frequency
and basically down converts it to the IF frequency
so that it works within the constraints
of the circuitry that you designed
to work at the IF frequency.
So hopefully that's a decent explanation.
But basically you can really mess things up by-
To clarify what's going on.
So anyway, so there's really no filtering
at the IF frequency.
There's filtering to prevent image frequencies
and all this other stuff from mixing in as well.
But you can't filter out the IF frequency
because that's where your signal is
and that's the signal that you're trying to demodulate.
So what we were playing with
is transmitting at the IF frequency.
And we got some feedback from film crews.
Thought you might be interested in knowing
that I tried the 10.8 megahertz experiment
and it did not work for me.
I have an HF transceiver
that can output nicely on 10.8 megahertz.
I've tested with several conventional FM radios
that were here in the house,
tuned up and down the FM band with no luck whatsoever.
I even tested reception with a real cheap radio figuring
and had really poor filters, but still nothing at all.
Even in between stations where there was nothing but static.
I've tried pushing out an audible test carrier
on both wide and narrow bandwidth at that same frequency.
I've also checked my output from the HF rig
with another receiver that was tuned to 10.8 megahertz
to make sure I was indeed getting out and I was.
And actually a couple of hours before he emailed,
I was playing with the same thing.
And my setup was actually using a ham radio
and I was transmitting on 10.8 megahertz as well,
using only five watts in a very inefficient antenna.
I was pretty confident
that I wasn't going to be interfering with anyone.
And so I was pushing five watts
into this relatively inefficient antenna
that I had tuned up for that frequency
and tuning around on the transmitter,
I was actually able to overload the signal
of another ham radio rig
that I had tuned to the FM broadcast band
and also on my iRiver and another FM receiver
that I was using.
And interestingly enough,
the IF frequencies aren't always the same.
So it's not always 10.8 megahertz.
I had one radio that was on 10.8.
I had another one that was on 10.51,
which is kind of strange.
And another one that was on 10.7.
So it's not so straightforward.
And I responded to him mentioning that
and he tried the same thing and it worked.
So it's definitely possible.
The sort of range that I got with five watts
was only a couple of feet away from the transmitter.
But I'd assume that if you pushed 50 to 100 watts
or something into a resonant antenna,
you could probably get pretty far.
Stuck it on top of an apartment building.
Stuck it somewhere, yeah.
But keep in mind that you're subject
to any prosecution for doing this
because it's not a legal transmission.
For talking about it, you're not though.
And we're trying to learn how the whole thing works.
And we are at a radio station,
so it's not really to our advantage
for people who know how to do this.
So I think it's of interest to spread the knowledge.
Emanuel, briefly?
Very briefly.
I just wanted to mention that I did some research on this
and there are two commercial systems
that are sold to military agencies,
specifically Special Forces, PSYOPs teams.
They're specifically designed to transmit radio signals
on IF frequencies around 10.8 megahertz.
So these are designed for US military
to go in a particular theater of operation,
typically I guess a metropolitan area,
and they can actually transmit
so that all FM radios in the town
will be picking up the propaganda or message
like, oh, now we are in control,
or whatever they wanna say.
Well, is this perhaps what the Midtown Tunnel uses
to tell you about construction going on
on the weekend or something?
I looked into this, actually,
and if you tune around in the tunnels,
you'll notice that there's actually no transmission
occurring when you're tuned to, for instance,
a station that's not a local New York station.
So what they seem to be doing
is taking their repeater circuitry,
because the tunnels have repeaters
for the FM stations that are broadcast locally,
and just overriding that signal.
They're not actually broadcasting at the IF.
So usually they just simulcast the signal somehow,
and then when they wanna say something on top of it,
both AM and FM, they simply just blast through
with their message.
I was gonna say that we also had a similar problem
with this with ham radios in Atlanta
on the 220 megahertz band.
And there was a certain country station,
and I think it was a Ford,
it might have been Chevy, factory radio,
and they were tuned to this one certain country station,
then they would come out on our ham radio.
But then when you get 15 or 20 feet away from them,
it would go away.
And it was the same thing.
It's the mix of the IF feeding back into the antenna
and all these other things are going on.
And just the wonderful world of radio frequencies,
I mean, you might not even be able to tell
exactly how it's getting in there.
I mean, it might be in the audio circuitry,
it could be in the IF,
or it could just be a really poorly designed circuit
that's just hearing everything that it hears.
I mean, there's a lot of stages
where potentially you can get a lot of interference.
So it's pretty interesting anyway,
when you want to make it work to your advantage.
It's kind of interesting that most hams
spend a lot of time trying to keep
from causing interference.
Well, we're not trying to interfere,
we're just trying to explain what can pop.
Well, the best way to keep from interfering with things
is to understand how it works.
Yes.
That's what we're all about here.
I mean, it all comes down to better shielding
of the innards of your radio and television equipment
is really part of the problem.
I mean, the degradation and the quality
to make it one third of a cent cheaper product.
One third of a cent cheaper?
Yeah.
It adds up.
212-209-2900 is our telephone number.
This is a story from the UK,
but other things that are talking that maybe shouldn't be.
Okay, but let me finish my sentence.
If people would like to call us and be on the air,
212-209-2900, go ahead.
There's a closed circuit television cameras
in this place called the Middlesbrough Town Center,
which are talking.
Seven cameras have a facility which allows operators
to bark orders at those involved in antisocial behavior.
This is nothing new.
We talked about this 10 years ago.
Well, I did anyway.
There's a camera at Piccadilly Circus, all right?
If you stand up on a statue with a fountain,
a voice will bark out at you telling you not to do that
from a camera.
Why would they do that?
Because they don't want you jumping up on fountains.
This is terrible technology, is the point I was getting at.
And in England, they've had this.
This is England, right?
It was reported as news by BBC.
It says BBC News, not BBC's Stuff They Do All The Time.
Oh, well.
Oh.
And it's stuff they do all the time in England.
Look, the whole Teletubby culture.
It's loudspeakers coming up out of the ground
talking to you.
That's what England is all about these days.
Okay.
Shall we take a couple of phone calls?
Let me read one or two more letters.
On the recent episode of Off the Hook,
what was the name and artist of the song
you closed the show with?
Someone saying it was David Bowie.
That was last week.
Yes, that was a song called Battle for Britain
from the album called Earthling.
We get a lot of people writing in asking us
various pieces we played.
In fact, here's one that's interesting.
I've been listening to some old shows
and on your February 2nd, 1999 episode,
about eight minutes and 40 seconds in,
some ominous sounding music started
and played for several minutes.
Can you tell me what it was?
Signed, Brett.
Well, that's a tall order, Brett,
but we're gonna try it.
We're gonna try it because we have access
to the internet right here.
And what I can do is I can go online
and I can find that show.
What'd you say it was?
February 2nd, 1999.
All right, I'm clicking on February.
I've submitted my request and the machine is hanging.
Okay, you know what?
We're gonna get back to you on this
because we can't seem to connect for some reason.
Look, it's just sitting there.
It's not my fault.
I clicked the right button and everything.
The point is that you can access the old shows
on the internet and...
Yeah.
Yeah, obviously you can access it,
but if someone can get to that
and let us know what we played,
we'd sure like to know.
All right, 202-209-2900.
Good evening, you're on the air.
Speak up, please.
Hello?
Yes, go ahead.
Just a couple of things.
I've been a listener for a long time
and I don't usually get to listen to the shows live,
so that was nice.
Also, I wanted to comment,
is it permissible to, I guess, redistribute,
would be the correct word,
the videos from Hope?
Sure, yeah.
Just don't sell them.
Say over file sharing network.
Yeah, if you can stick them on a file sharing network.
We see we can't do that.
We can't even put the high bandwidth versions
of the audio up
because we just don't have enough bandwidth.
But yeah, anything from the conference
is certainly something that we'd like to get out there,
both video and audio.
But yeah, put it up on a file sharing network
so people can download it.
But also, if you want to have the actual DVDs,
please buy them as well
because that's what makes it all possible.
If nobody buys them,
then we can't continue having conferences and things.
But yeah, you are encouraged to spread it around.
Right, I do have the actual DVDs.
What I was asking about was redistributing them
on a file sharing network.
Yeah, I don't see any problem with that.
Great.
All right, thanks for your call.
And again, I should point out
the Hope videos are all available
in record time.
We got them all completely finished.
And also, the leftover Hope number six T-shirts
have finally been found in boxes
and we are offering them for people too.
If you want information on that,
go to store.2600.com
and just look around for T-shirts and videos
and things like that,
and you'll find all kinds of fun things.
Okay, let's see if we can squeeze in one or two more.
Good evening, you're on the air.
Hello?
Yeah, speak up.
Yeah, I got a quick question
concerning accessing a corporate network remotely.
Okay.
If I'm using, I'm actually using cable
to connect to a corporate network,
but I have an additional PC
that I'm sometimes surfing with simultaneously.
Is there any way for them to see the traffic?
Well, are you using the same PC that you're connected to
that you use the VPN on?
They're two different PCs.
Okay.
One is connected through the VPN
and then there's another one
that's just connected up to the cable network,
but they both access via that common.
Right, then the short answer is no.
If you're using the same machine
that you have the VPN connection on,
generally speaking, it'll change your internet gateway
so that all your traffic goes through your corporate network.
And so any web browsing that you would do on that machine
would be loggable and viewable by the IT staff
at whatever company you work for.
But if you're using a different machine
on the same connection, I wouldn't worry about it.
Okay.
All right.
Thanks for your call.
Let's go up here.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Hello?
Yes, go ahead.
Yes, I wanted to ask you what you think
about the RFID chip that they're putting in passports now?
Well, we've talked about the RFID technology
coming to passports around us over the last few weeks.
They're now issuing them, right?
Yeah, I don't know.
I have to renew my passport
so maybe I'll get my hands on one soon.
Yeah, well, do you have one caller?
I don't have one yet, but I have to renew my passport
and I'm getting a little anxious
about having this thing in there.
Well, you can shield your passport.
And what a lot of people are doing
is simply using aluminum foil to store it.
If you have to carry it around,
there are people who make wallets, for instance,
that have shielding built in,
but you can't read it really much further
than a couple of feet away.
And then with the shielding,
it becomes much, much shorter than that.
So if you can shield it, that's your best bet.
Does that address all your concerns about this?
No.
With a passport, you can't be closing it
and opening it with aluminum foil all the time.
They're asking you for your passport all the time.
So it's going to have to be pretty much out in the open
there until you board the plane.
I'm just wondering, because you can easily break it,
you can easily break that circuit
by putting your passport in the microwave for a second.
I was wondering what would happen.
So I encourage anyone to break their RFID passports.
I think they're considering making that a crime.
Well, what if you do it by mistake?
I think it's the same as,
I think they consider it the same
as making a modification to your passport,
which would already be a crime.
I think that if you're that concerned about it,
the thing to do would be to search on the web
for RFID shielding passport wallet
or something like that and get one.
But like the caller said,
you do have to have this thing freely available,
not wrapped up in aluminum foil
when you're going through international airports.
At that moment where you do present it
to a passport officer,
people around you can still read it, right?
In a certain range.
Yeah, but I mean, yeah,
but somebody also could read what the contents are
that you're showing to the passport officer.
Well, they'd have to stick their face
over your shoulder to do it, though.
Yeah, well, there's a point where it becomes impractical
and people can start using high-resolution cameras
and take a picture, for instance,
and then analyze it later.
And it's the same thing as having an RFID reader
and all the same information is available.
So at some point, yeah,
you have to take the RFID passport out of your wallet,
but yeah.
It just seems like a disturbing step
because you know they're gonna improve the range
at some point and there's gonna be more data stored
and it's just gonna be a slippery slope
all the way down this hill until we're all drowning.
No, I agree.
And the technology isn't necessary
for what they wanna use it for anyway.
And conventionally, like I've mentioned before on shows,
what they do is they read it with the readers
that can read the magnetic ink
that's printed on the bottom of your passport.
And this is just something that they think will speed it up,
but they have to look at it anyway.
I saw something in a recent news article.
I forget where it was exactly,
but it had to do with the government's desire
to process lots of people very quickly.
And I think, Bernie, I think you might have raised the point
as to why do they need to process so many people so quickly?
What are they really planning here?
Whenever I hear a government agency saying
they need to electronically process more people
a lot faster, that concerns me.
Yeah.
I mean, anyone who's entered the country
knows that the time-consuming step
is not the swiping of the passport through the machine
to get the data.
It's the silly interrogation that follows.
I think you're gonna see them with a RFID reader
when you exit the airplane at the door.
And then they're gonna say,
oh, we have Mr. Goldstein exiting the airplane today.
Maybe we should be ready for him when we get down there.
Or pull him aside on the way and surprise you
or something like that.
I mean, that's the type of thing that I think they're after.
Yeah, but you see, when this is hailed as a great success,
which it inevitably will be by the people that created it,
don't you think they're going to want to expand it
and put it on driver's licenses and put it on credit cards
and put it on your house keys and whatever else
they can figure out where to put RFID tags and technology?
It's already on keys.
It's already in credit cards.
So we're already there is what I'm trying to say.
It's not on credit cards to that extent though.
I mean-
You know, I mean, most of the credit cards
that you can get these days have RFID chips in them,
or at least it's an option.
And-
I gotta tell you, I'm not impressed with that technology.
I have one of those.
I have one of the blink ones, they call it.
And it works at 7-Eleven.
And I'm always trying to use it at 7-Eleven.
And the guy insists on taking my card and swiping it,
which defeats the whole purpose of it
because the thing doesn't recognize it right away.
MTA is doing something with, I believe, Citibank.
We tried this actually,
where you can use your RFID technology
from a Citibank card and get a MetroCard
or get on the train that way.
But the question is, what about your,
what about the transfer?
How do you get a transfer?
Nobody seems to have an answer for that.
There's an interesting thing about the RFID
is most of them work on part 15 frequencies,
which means that you could legally transmit there
and interfere with it at a certain level.
All right, we're gonna have to leave it at that,
unfortunately.
Ah, all kinds of things to talk about,
all kinds of things to think about.
Write to us, othat2600.com.
We'll be back again next week with another exciting edition.
Stay tuned for the Personal Computer Show.
Good night.
♪♪♪
♪♪♪
♪♪♪
♪ It looks like an accident ♪
♪ Caused by the government ♪
♪ Good people with good intent ♪
♪ Paving the highway down ♪
It seeps into the water, where the bad side is burning
And it's not where they lead us, it's in the act of the turning
The way things are geared here, the way it's all dreamed
The names are named, now they're all naming names
They're putting on human faces, there is no alternative
Carved in stone, an hour on nothing
Is what I'm trained to believe in
But I can still dream of things, that have never been
But someday we'll be
Someday we'll be
Someday we'll be
It looks like an accident, caused by the government
Good people with good intent, paving the highway down
The way things are geared here, the way it's all dreamed
The names are named, now they're all naming names
They're putting on human faces, say there is no alternative
Turned to stone, an hour on nothing
Is what I'm trained to believe in
But I can still dream of things, that have never been
But someday we'll be
I.F. Stone taught journalists to doubt government propaganda
To dig for facts in documents
And to find whistleblowers who told the truth
This will be MacPherson's only public appearance in New York City
The event is free and will take place at the New York Society for Ethical Culture
2 West 64th Street and Central Park West
A book signing will follow the event
That's Wednesday, September 20th
Doors open at 6pm, no reservations required
For further information call
Hello we are Kinky, you are listening to WBAI