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And from WBAI in New York, it's 7 o'clock, time for Off the Hook.
Off the Hook, it's 7 o'clock, time for Off the Hook.
Off the Hook.
The program is Off the Hook.
Emmanuel Goldstein here with you on this hectic Wednesday night.
We have a whole lot of people here tonight.
Starting over on the left is Jim.
Hello.
And we've got there Arsene.
Hello.
Mike is joining us.
Hi.
Redbird.
Good evening.
The other side of the room is not Kevin.
Hello.
Down in Philadelphia, Bernie S.
Good evening from Philadelphia.
And we have a whole bunch of special guests.
Mitch Altman joins us fresh back from Europe.
Yep.
You're on your way to California, I guess, eventually.
Next week.
Okay.
Well, in New York this week, that's the important thing.
But we have all sorts of issues and people to talk to, and it's going to be a whole lot
of fun.
Why don't you stay with us?
Now, speaking of getting back from Europe, a bunch of us did that last week, and we're
still sort of getting over it.
And one of the things that we did, actually, one of the things I did, I was with not Kevin,
and I took all the forums.
You know, when they give you the forums to fill out when you go into the country.
I guess those of you who have never left the country might not know this, but when you
leave the country, you have to fill out forums if you want to get back in, to say, why did
you leave?
Or, well, maybe not that, but basically, who you are, where you live, are you bringing
in drugs or ammo or things like that?
But there are two forums, at least two forums.
They're in all different languages, for one thing.
But basically, there are forums for American citizens, and there are forums for aliens.
And only one of those is the ones you're supposed to lie on, right?
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure exactly how it works.
There's even more forums.
There's forums for aliens without visas, and forums for aliens on the visa waiver land.
Well, we were in an office in Toronto, or a processing center in Toronto, and instead
of getting the forums on the plane like you usually do, they just had them all lying on
a desk.
So I helped myself to all the different forums.
I got some in French, I got some in Chinese.
But basically, the green forum is the one you're not supposed to take if you're an American
citizen.
So I took that, and Jim is holding it now.
And there are some questions there that you might not ever see asked of yourself if you're
an American citizen.
But if you're an alien coming to this country, this is the kind of thing you better have
an answer for.
This is a forum that makes you go, huh?
This is I-94W, the Non-Immigrant Visa Waiver Arrival Departure Forum Instruction.
And the first side is pretty normal.
There's a number for the forum, so they don't get confused.
Every single forum has an individual number, and you have your name and your address and
the country of origin, the airline, the flight number, blah, blah, blah.
Simple bureaucratic stuff that you expect.
Let's get to the good stuff.
Yeah.
Well, I don't know if it's good, but on the back, it starts off with, do any of the following
apply to you?
Please check either yes or no.
And they have the normal stuff like, do you have a communicable disease, physical or mental
disorder?
Are you a drug abuser or addict?
OK, that makes sense.
Have you been convicted for moral turpitude, violation?
Moral turpitude?
That's pretty wide open.
In the old days, that could be anything from adultery to, I don't know, sleeping with a
person of a different race.
But we're beyond that, at least.
We don't even use the word turpitude in this country.
Oh, yeah, sure.
Pink thinner.
Anyway.
Yeah.
Well, let's hear some of these questions.
Then it starts getting really good.
Have you ever been or are you now involved in espionage or sabotage or in terrorist activities
or genocide?
Or between 1933 and 1945, were involved in any way in persecutions associated with Nazi
Germany or its allies?
So if you're with Pol Pot, that's OK.
But Nazi Germany, you got to check yes.
I don't know.
There was a separate item for genocide.
Have you ever been or are you now?
Doesn't Nazi Germany count as genocide?
Well, they want to make that explicit as opposed to genocide.
Well, maybe I am.
Maybe I'm not.
Maybe I was.
Maybe I was.
Oh, I was a Nazi.
Yeah.
Then I guess I have to say yes.
No, no, no.
Nazi is specific.
But genocide in general doesn't start enumerating thousands of genocides that have occurred
in the past.
Which one does the Pope check?
I'd just like to know who checks yes, because you have to be a really stupid terrorist.
No, I'm more worried.
You said this is in multiple foreign languages on other copies of this?
That's good, because I was thinking the way that it's worded, if you were persecuted
by the Nazis, you could conceivably check yes and have all sorts of trouble.
Oh, because you were involved in the Nazi rise.
Exactly.
Interesting.
I'll ask Eli Wiesel next time he comes into the country what he checks.
Actually, he's a citizen, so I guess he wouldn't even get that for him.
That's good for him.
Have you ever detained, retained, or withheld custody of a child from a U.S. citizen granted
custody of the child?
You know, that could be a legal question.
What happens if you've sued for divorce in multiple countries, and your country said
you have it, and the country of your spouse, who's a U.S. citizen, said the U.S. citizen
has it?
That could be problematic.
But the most, hmm, raising line in here is a paragraph entitled, Waiver of Rights, in
boldface type, I hereby waive any rights to review or appeal of a U.S. Customs and Border
Protection Officer's determination as to my admissibility, or to contest, other than
on the basis of an application for asylum, any action in deportation.
That sounds a little wide open.
I'd love to know if there's a border patrol agent who could explain this to us.
If you irk off the guy that you give this form to, and they say, you're denied, you
have no recourse.
Well, if you step on his foot, I mean, I can see very petty things suddenly escalating.
In all my time, I've never stepped on a border patrol agent's foot.
Well, you're a citizen, so.
It's hard to do.
They're in those booths.
Yeah, that would be hard to do.
If you're stepping on his foot, you're probably meant to do it, and maybe, you know.
Should be deported?
Yeah.
Well, that's kind of harsh, but interesting.
Interesting questions.
Yeah, but it waives your rights.
The only way you can oppose it is suddenly ask for asylum.
Now, speaking of irking off authority figures, I believe, Redbird, you had an incident today.
I didn't irk them.
Well, apparently you did, because you were on your way in here from New Jersey.
Why don't you just tell the story, what happened?
Well, every week I take the path in from Hoboken.
The path being what?
Port Authority, Trans-Hudson.
Okay, people might think there's actually a footpath from New Jersey, too.
It is a path.
A train takes the path.
I know it's technically a path, but it's really a train that you're getting on.
There is a footpath from New Jersey.
Yeah, but that's not what he took, and that's not what this is about.
So let's continue, as we only have one hour.
So anyway, this week in particular, I was carrying my bag of terror, which of course
had to be inspected.
Does it say bag of terror on the side?
No, no.
It was just a, you know.
When you say it had to be inspected, you mean they asked to inspect it, and you said, yeah,
okay.
Well, yeah, but, you know.
Okay, so Mike is going to get all over me for this, but.
Well, let me just ask, what's in your bag of terror?
Can I ask that?
Yeah, there were vegan cookies in there.
Cookies?
Yeah.
You're carrying cookies across interstate lines.
Should I have said that on the air?
Well, I'm just saying, you know, these guys are trained, and maybe that was in your eyes
that you had something like that, and that's why you got selected.
Okay, so basically.
Well, okay, so the cop asked me.
This is not MTA.
This is PATH.
This is Port Authority.
I believe they were the Port Authority police, yeah.
Okay, so they're searching now, too.
They are searching.
Oh, they have been searching for a while.
Okay.
Actually, I've just never been asked.
And do you know if you're allowed to walk away from them if they ask you to search?
I'd imagine so, but there's little recourse from my perspective, because I had to get
here and where else was I going to go?
Because you're taking the footpath.
Well, I could have swam, too.
They had kayaks, I think.
Well, okay, but regardless, you didn't swim or take the footpath, so you conceded to...
So I did, yeah.
And I didn't actually say a word.
All I did was put the bag on the table, and the cop was like, oh, man, rough life, huh,
you know?
It's going to take all but three seconds, and yadda, yadda, yadda, and he's mumbling
on and...
Sarcasm, huh?
Yeah, it was sarcasm.
Wow.
Did he mumble for more or less than three seconds?
I think it was more than three seconds, actually, so...
So more searches in the underground.
More searches, but yeah, they haven't stopped there.
But it was very easy for me to get in the path, because they have these new RFID cards,
which you can purchase.
All right, now, Arsene, I think you have an RFID card.
What's this all about?
Yeah, so, I mean, we were talking about the British ones last week, but yeah, you can
get an RFID card to take the path.
A couple weeks ago, they were free if you bought 20 rides, and now they cost $5 extra.
But of course, it's a little card with a Statue of Liberty, it says SmartLink.
Yeah, so you just tap on to the turnstile, and you get in.
And I tap twice, because usually the readers don't read it the first time, so you tap twice.
But they don't sell them in the vending machines yet.
I don't know how you're supposed to get them otherwise, but what's nice is if you register
with your name, address, and all this fun stuff, if you lose your card, they'll replace
it for $5, but at least they have a system.
If you register with your name, address, you can look up where you've been, and so can
anybody else.
I haven't gone to the website, but...
Yeah, they'll say, Arsene, we see that you come to Manhattan every Wednesday.
You know, you shouldn't lose your card.
Yeah, but for more info, you can go to the Port Authority site, which is panynj.com.
Is there any financial incentive for someone to do this, to get this card instead of the
normal fare?
I mean, I like it, because you can just keep refilling this card, not like the MetroCard,
which will bend and break.
But it's more inconvenient, because the MetroCard you can use on the subway.
Yeah, I don't know.
I just kind of...
You know, it has a little RFID, you know.
We may have a new reverse engineering project on our hands if we put it up.
Yeah, sounds that way.
Okay, well, that's the update from around here.
Getting on to some of the other things that have been going on in the world, you might
have seen this story.
This has been all over the place, and if you were at the chaos camp, maybe even met
the guy in person.
We were hanging out for quite some time, talking about this particular project before it got
released, and now it's out there.
It's about Wikipedia.
Yeah, Wikipedia.
Now, Wikipedia, of course, is the...
Source of all information.
It is.
It is, isn't it?
That's what people look up to prove their point in arguments, right, before they make
the change.
Especially if they're arguing about anime.
What has happened is that this guy has created a program known as Wikiscanner.
What Wikiscanner does, it allows users to track the source of computers that are used
to make changes to the popular internet encyclopedia.
So in other words, if we here at WBAI decide that we're going to change the biography of
President George W. Bush and insert the words jerk over and over again, they would know
that somebody at WBAI did that by running Wikiscanner.
As it turns out, somebody from the New York Times did just that.
And that's one of the examples being touted here as interesting things to reveal.
In addition, Diebold, the electronic voting people, were making some changes to critical
comments about their particular products and all sorts of other rather interesting things.
My favorite is Exxon correcting the Exxon Valdez article.
What did they correct it to say?
They lowered the amount of oil that they spilled and said that they immediately did wonderful
things in cleaning it up.
The program was developed by our friend Virgil Griffith of the Santa Fe Institute in New
Mexico.
He says he developed Wikiscanner to, and this is a quote, to create minor public relations
disasters for companies and organizations I dislike.
And to see what interesting organizations, which I am neutral towards, are up to.
Virgil joins us from London.
Virgil, you there?
Hey, Emmanuel.
How you doing?
Sounds like you're really possibly causing a lot of trouble with this thing.
Is this what you expected?
Yeah, no, I'm actually very pleased.
I mean, the harvest from this has just been fantastic.
I expected some good things, but crowdsourcing the finding of juicy edits has worked wonderfully
well.
I was initially planning on just keeping this all to myself, so I had a little basket of
evil that I could throw at any company anytime I pleased, and I could save it up for years.
But I quickly had this problem that the data set was just so huge that I could never possibly
go through it on my own.
So the idea to release it to the public has been great.
How hard was it to figure out, to correlate the IPs to the actual domains?
Like this is a .gov site, this is the New York Times, this is the CIA.
How'd you do all that?
Actually, I got the data for free.
I mean, there are several sources online where you can buy data like this.
And in my case, well, I got the data for free.
So I personally got the data from a company called ip2location.com, and their database
costs, I think it's called DB13 or DB12, and it costs $1,000 typically.
But I sent them an email and I said, hey, you know, I'm a student, and as such, I have
no money.
However, I promise if you just give it to me, I'll make your data very, very famous.
And they said, oh, well, okay.
So they just gave it to me.
I was like, wow, wasn't that nice?
So I'm, of course, very thankful to them.
And certainly without that data, it could have never been done.
Now, you've found a lot of very interesting changes.
I want to focus particularly on the one that DBALT was responsible for, something about
the hanging sheds.
They deleted a lot of commentary about that.
That's awesome.
Well, I don't know.
Honestly, like I mean, every day there's some new juicy edit in some industry that I don't
know much about.
But for DBALT, I know DBALT has deleted paragraphs and paragraphs of criticism of their company.
But I don't know anything particular about the hanging sheds.
Well, according to, I actually read this on the airplane on the way back in the Guardian.
And basically, they say the biggest culprit that the scanner claims to have discovered
is DBALT, a supplier of voting machines, which it says has made huge alterations to entries
about its involvement in the controversial hanging shed election in the US in 2000.
The company was criticized in the wake of the disputed results.
But edits made by its employees on Wikipedia have included the removal of 15 paragraphs
detailing the allegations.
Also, August 2003, Walden O'Dell, chief executive of DBALT, announced that he had been a top
fundraiser for George W. Bush.
That's according to the deleted text.
When assailed by critics for the conflict of interest, he vowed to lower his political
profile.
Basically, that was deleted.
But it was reversed, and the culprit was warned about vandalism.
A DBALT official did not comment.
Actually, all DBALT officials didn't comment.
Does this kind of thing surprise you?
Is this typical of the way corporate America handles Wikipedia?
Well, let's see.
Well, companies do spend a lot of time trying to control their public image.
I mean, we all know that.
And if they can control it relatively for free on Wikipedia just by editing it, well,
it's not really surprising that they would do that.
So I guess, no, not really.
It doesn't really surprise me.
It's something that is very nice.
If you actually look at a lot of the most egregious edits, they're actually usually
reverted by the Wikipedians fairly quickly, like the DBALT ones, for example.
And I actually think that even though this shows that there are PR people rattling the
gates, trying to get in, by and large, they're not being successful.
And I actually think that overall, it's like a moral story that Wikipedia is roughly
self-correcting.
And it's pretty good.
So you think this is actually good publicity for Wikipedia?
Oh, yes.
Well, Wikipedia certainly thinks so.
And I would probably say so.
I mean, yeah, yeah.
I mean, yes, I would say it's good publicity for Wikipedia.
Has there been any kind of response from any of the corporations or government agencies
that have been implicated in making changes?
Hell no.
No, there was something from the CIA.
And the CIA had a wonderful quote.
The CIA said something like, we cannot confirm or deny that any of this traffic came from
CIA computers or something like that.
Wow.
And there was another one.
Oh, I should have written this one down.
But there was another good one where, I don't think it was DBALT, but it was some other
company that basically said they denied the fact that it came from their network.
But it just happened to have their network's IP address.
Awesome.
But it's like, oh, okay, well, that's it.
It just had your IP address.
I understand now.
It didn't actually come from you, though.
One of the things that I've enjoyed reading in all the press coverage of this is almost
every organization that has covered this story has themselves been found that some of their
employees are editing Wikipedia.
And they always say this in a tiny little sentence at the end of the article.
But in much more verbose terms, they are glad to tell you about what their competitors
have done and, oh, the New York Times tells you all the evil things Fox News has done
and Fox News tells you all the things New York Times has done.
But it's really funny to see at the bottom, oh, yeah, we did it, too.
No, no, no.
The New York Times is actually very unusual in this respect.
Right in the middle of their article, they published their two juiciest edits.
And no one else has done that.
And really, my respect for the Times went up hugely.
They actually wrote in print that someone at the Times added jerk, jerk, jerk, jerk,
jerk, jerk, jerk, jerk to George Bush's page.
And then someone changed that Condoleezza Rice was a concert pianist to a concert penis.
And they actually wrote that.
That came from the New York Times.
I was amazed they actually wrote that.
Yeah.
And I think you were especially proud that you got the New York Times to even write the
word penis in a front-page article.
Was it a front-page article the New York Times ran?
It was a front-page article in the Times.
Well, congratulations on that.
That's pretty good.
Yeah, I know.
I was pleased.
They wanted to do a follow-up, and so I'll be talking to them.
But actually, by the way, I should go ahead and announce this here.
The German and Japanese wiki skin will be online within the next few days.
So those of you enjoying that.
Since this has been released, do you think that it's had sort of a quieting effect on
companies making changes from within their corporate offices?
Might they just move to an internet cafe to make whatever changes they feel like doing?
I would probably say that the company's peer office, they're still in a state of panic.
They're like, oh God, we look terrible.
And they're still kind of reeling from this.
I'd probably say eventually what they'll do, they'll probably either just ban the
editing of Wikipedia from their internal network, just to prevent this from ever happening again,
or they're going to have some sort of very strict policy or something like that.
Or if they want to get it where the scanner can't find them, they can always just make accounts.
Because if they make an account on Wikipedia, I can't find you, period.
Now I'm curious about the kind of data that you're able to get from the IP2 location services.
I know that most of the data that a lot of these companies get, maybe not all of them,
comes from actual user input themselves.
So for instance, if you're going to a web page from your home IP address and you're
filling out a form that says, I live in so-and-so town in whatever state, that data actually
gets sold along with your IP address to one of these companies somewhere along the line.
So what other information do you have about the actual IP addresses besides just their
location and companies that they're affiliated with?
Well, OK, we asked you two questions.
You're asking me, well, what does the data have and how are they making the data?
I think what the data has is actually on the website, IP2location.com.
If you want to know how they make it or how they get the data, I really don't know.
I mean, just by glancing at it and kind of checking it with some other sources,
it looks like they're using the ARIN and the RIPE data, which is just ARIN.net and RIPE.net.
That's sort of a baseline.
And then on top of that, they do reverse DNS for every IP address on the Internet.
And if that successfully resolves, then they use that data as well.
And if it doesn't resolve, then they just use whatever ARIN or RIPE says.
Now, I have been told that there's this little industry for getting data through nefarious means.
And you usually get this directly from the ISPs and stuff like that.
But I have no idea if IP2location does stuff like that or what companies do.
But I have been told that there are people who sell data like this that do engage in these practices.
Right. So it would be interesting that you can actually catch people doing these edits
if you combine the data with data that's been sold, knowingly having their information.
For instance, people who have filled out forms and whatnot online.
Well, we'll try it. I mean, I don't know. Does it work?
I mean, you can search the IP2location database right now from Wikiscanner.
I mean, go ahead.
In fact, we should give out the URL for Wikiscanner.
It's spelled W-I-K-I-S-C-A-N-N-E-R dot Virgil, V-I-R-G-I-L dot G-R.
That's a Greek domain, I believe, right?
Yes, it is.
Awesome. And you've been pretty unashamedly saying in all the media
that your goal is to have the name Virgil in the search engine of Google go way up
so that, I guess, number one would be you.
Yes, I know that. I'm currently winning it right now.
At this moment, I am at number... I broke the top ten about a week ago.
You were number six last I checked.
Yeah, yeah. I think I'm number five now.
Number five.
One, two, three, four. Yeah, I'm number five.
How can people help?
I'm very pleased.
How can people help move you up in the Google ranks?
They can link to Virgil dot G-R with the anchor Virgil.
And that's it. That's all you've got to do.
And if you do that, I will be immensely thankful.
And if you want a favor from me, I'll even probably give you a favor.
Okay. And we'll be happy, too, because it'll show the strength of off-the-hook listeners
by manipulating yet something else.
You're putting Google on top of Wikipedia.
Yeah.
Well, just to interject, I happen to be a fan of ancient poets and Gus Grissom,
so I'm not going to help you in that quest.
But more seriously, what about combining this with Wikipedia
and having this perhaps at the bottom of every Wikipedia page
so users of Wikipedia could see what was previously adjusted and by whom?
Jimbo Wales is actually talking about that right now,
and he's really into the idea.
I mean, I don't know actually when this would be done,
but I know there is definitely some interest in the Wikipedia community
of integrating something like a Wiki scanner into the main Wikipedia.
Yeah, I know.
The Wikipedians seem to be very good people,
and they're really into as much transparency as they can,
as they can manage.
So, yes, I think something like that will eventually exist.
But unfortunately, there's been lots of new enhancements to MediaWiki,
and it takes like a while for those to propagate,
for those to trickle down into the main Wikipedia.
Now, Virgil, I know we discussed this in the past,
this idea of yours to do the Wiki scanner,
and I was impressed at the time by the idea,
but I was also wondering how come no one else ever came up with this before?
Do you have any idea why you're the first?
I really don't know.
I mean, I can't really claim it was my idea,
because I just came up with the idea when I saw Wikipedia admins doing this manually,
trying to determine if congressmen were editing their Wikipedia entries
when they found out some of them were.
So they were like manually doing all the investigation for every IP address.
And I thought, well, that's kind of silly.
There's surely some way you could do it, like do it automated.
And that was kind of the beginning.
And then I got the IP to location data, and that was basically it.
Amazing.
To answer your question, no, I don't know why they didn't do this.
I mean, to me, I thought all this was pretty straightforward.
I mean, once you know all the data existed.
A lot of people don't know that you can just download all of Wikipedia in great big dumps.
So maybe that prevented a few people from doing it.
And the Wikipedia admins were too busy being admins than thinking about this.
Well, definitely you've changed history in a big way, I think.
And it remains to be seen just how this is going to play out.
But for those of you interested in playing with this, learning some information,
go to wikiscanner.virgil.gr.
And any final words, Virgil?
Not really.
I love the show.
Okay, well, best of luck.
I'm sure you have all sorts of other projects up your sleeve as well, right?
Oh, yes, I do.
And they are hilarity incarnate.
Okay, well, somehow that's very comforting to know.
Virgil, thanks for talking to us tonight from London.
And best of luck with the Wikiscanner and your future projects.
All right.
We'll see you again soon.
Sure thing.
Take care.
And that's Virgil Griffith talking to us about the Wikiscanner.
And, wow, that was an interesting bit of mischief that was released upon the world.
So joining us now in the studio, before we move on to our next telephone guest,
is Mitch Altman.
How are you doing?
Hey, I'm doing great.
You've caused a lot of trouble too at the CCC camp.
Everybody was walking around, or not walking around,
but sitting with these crazy glasses.
You want to just tell us a little bit about, we talked about it in prior shows,
but coming from the horse's mouth, so to say, what were you thinking?
What were you thinking with these glasses, the flashing red lights,
and the audio sounds, which I don't think we can play yet on the air,
but we're working on it.
And we tried to hypnotize some people in the last couple of weeks.
Are you plugging it in now?
I'm going to try to just be a bad demonstration here of the sound.
Okay.
And if you could describe the sound as it goes over the air.
Okay.
All right.
So the sound is beat frequencies,
which just really briefly you play one frequency and then an offset frequency,
and what you perceive is the difference, as well as the two frequencies,
and your brain is actively involved in creating that perception,
which makes it easier for your brain to synchronize to those frequencies.
And those frequencies are brainwave frequencies
because that's what I programmed into the microcontroller.
There are also blinking lights at those same frequencies.
If anyone is decent at meditating and I measured your brainwaves
while you went into a 10-minute meditation and out again,
that's what I programmed into the microcontroller.
And since it's playing these pulsing lights and sounds into your brain
through your eyes and ears,
you hopefully will synchronize to that and experience a 10-minute meditation.
One of the interesting aspects is that your visual cortex doesn't really know what to do
when it hears these frequencies or when it sees these frequencies externally.
It's used to them internally, so it does what it can and you hallucinate.
Now, obviously, you've tested this out yourself.
Can you describe some of the things that you might see
while you're under the influence of this thing?
Well, it's different for everyone,
and it's different every time an individual does it.
I usually see swirling patterns.
It draws from your past experience.
So I'm a very visually oriented person,
and I've been exposed to a lot of different art.
And through my life, more recently, I've been checking out a bunch of mandalas,
so I see these swirling mandala patterns, sometimes paisleys.
I'm into paisleys.
And other people, though, see something more representational like a heart
or some people even at the camp had visions,
and they were imagining all sorts of interesting things.
But most people see geometric shapes that change in all sorts of different colors,
which is really interesting because all that your eyes are actually seeing
is blinking red lights.
And you're seeing those even though your eyes are closed?
Yeah, yeah, you do this with your eyes closed
and hopefully spacing out and going into a really wonderful meditation.
Now, I think for all five days of the chaos camp in Germany,
you had people pretty much transfixed by these things,
but they built them for one thing.
It takes a bit of time to build them.
And now Kevin was one of the people who built one.
How long did it take you to build it?
It took me about six hours, but that's with helping other people.
Okay, you're sort of helping a lot of other people build things at the same time.
But all right, you put the thing together.
Yeah, I brought parts for people to build, about 50 of them,
and they all went in two and a half days.
I thought they would last the whole five days, but it was way popular.
People built them anywhere between three and a half and six hours
depending on how their skill level is or how into aesthetics they were.
And while that was going on, people kept coming by and seeing people blissed out
with blinking red lights in front of their eyes with these crazy-looking glasses,
and they're going, what the bleep is going on here?
And then they had to try it.
So it was pretty much a mob scene from the beginning to the end.
Yeah, and the more people built, the more people you would see all over camp
doing the same things.
What were some of the more unusual reactions,
more interesting reactions that you got from people?
Well, it's a really internal experience.
So if you look at someone there, well, I don't know.
I have a whole bunch of pictures on Flickr.com.
If you go to flickr.com slash photos slash Maltman23, those are my photos.
You'll see I think I have 93 photos of people wearing them,
and that's really the most interesting thing for me.
But do they describe it afterwards?
They say, my God, I saw this, or I understand now, or anything like that?
No great revelations, but I did hear lots of comments.
There were a handful of people that said that they really didn't like it,
but there were about 800 to 1,000.
There was a guy on the sweeping track who said, wow, this is great.
And if you look at the photos, almost all of them, people are smiling,
and with this very interesting smile too.
So you just have to check out the photos.
Speaking of people coming up to you and saying what the bleep is going on,
have you ever been worried about someone in law enforcement
walking up to you and saying that?
And especially in the United States, what kind of a reaction do you think,
parents of people might have, or congressmen,
or other types of people like that?
Well, you know, we do live in an interesting society
with all sorts of rights going away,
but the right to look inward and self-reflect really hasn't gone away yet.
Hang on, has it? No?
Okay, yeah, we still have that right, I'm told.
As of 730, we still have that right.
Yeah, and there are all sorts of ways that we can be distracted
from doing such things.
You know, television is certainly one of them,
working too much, downloading porn on the Internet.
We have so many different ways of doing it as well as recreational drugs,
but self-reflection is still legal in our country,
so I'm not really too concerned with what anyone else thinks.
I just want to give people an opportunity to have fun doing that.
Okay, well, you certainly did it in Germany.
In fact, I think probably you were the biggest source of fun at that whole camp,
certainly the biggest American source of fun.
Well, I certainly had a blast.
Yeah, it was really something, and of course I did it while I was on the air.
Arsenae, last week, did it in the studios.
Does anybody want to do it this week while we're talking to our next guests?
Yeah, it's just sitting right here, blinking red lights.
Jim, no?
I'm a Republican, I can't do it.
This does work for Republicans, doesn't it?
Republicans also have the ability to self-reflect, although it's rare.
Yeah, you might not like what you see, but that could be why they don't go for this.
If anybody just wants to, just reach for the glasses, turn them on,
and we'll comment on your changing state throughout the rest of the show.
Okay, moving on, the subject of electronic voting is something that we were discussing
a little bit earlier with Virgil and the changes that Diebold was making to their Wikipedia entry.
In addition, Diebold is facing a little bit of trouble.
They've been unable to sell their electronic voting subsidiary.
Yes, they're trying to sell it.
They've slashed their full-year revenue expectations
due to controversy surrounding e-voting security.
That's as of last Thursday.
Diebold has also established a new structure for its e-voting business,
allowing it to operate more independently,
and the e-voting business is changing its name.
Reagan, ready for this?
Premier Election Solutions.
And an independent board of directors will oversee the renamed subsidiary.
Independent from what exactly?
I don't know.
Rapidly evolving political uncertainties and controversies
surrounding state and jurisdiction purchases of electronic voting systems
have hampered Diebold's attempts to sell its e-voting business,
the company said in a press release.
Doesn't sound very good coming from Diebold.
That's what they want to be independent from.
Yeah, I would imagine so.
Well, joining us right now on the phone
is our friend Rob from Amsterdam.
Rob, are you there?
Hello there.
I'm embarrassed to say I've known you almost 20 years now
and I still can't pronounce your last name.
Would you like to say it once for the people listening?
Rob Gongrijp.
See, I can't do that. I just can't.
Rob has been very active.
Actually, he was in the United States.
This is how active he has been in the United States,
talking to various experts about electronic voting here
and trying to get some changes underway
and has been moderately successful.
Also joining us is the executive director of New Yorkers for Verified Voting,
Beau LeParry, who joins us from upstate New York.
Beau, are you with us?
Yes, I am. Thank you.
Great. And Beau is a retired software engineer.
He's developed software for both large and small companies
through a 20-year career.
And in 2003, he became concerned about the rush
to use touchscreen electronic voting machines in our elections
and began traveling, speaking, and organizing all over New York State.
Well, Beau, let's start with you.
Give us a sense of the history of your involvement and these machines.
Are we making progress?
Is the general mentality towards e-voting changing?
Well, I think we've definitely made progress in the sense of public awareness.
When I first started reading about electronic voting, which was back in 2002,
there was not a lot of knowledge about it.
It had already been moving fairly strongly into many states,
although, as I may get a chance to talk about later, not in New York yet,
but around the country they had made quite a bit of progress moving in.
There weren't that many people talking about that at the time,
and literally just a handful of people around the country and via the Internet
we were able to hook up.
But over the last few years, the awareness of the problems of electronic voting
and secret vote counting has really gotten a lot more attention,
and that's a good thing.
On the downside, generally around the country, the very officials,
the election officials who get to make the decisions about the type of equipment
generally still prefer electronic voting, perhaps for a perceived convenience factor.
It's a little hard to tell why.
So the advocacy movement has grown and is making a lot of progress,
but there's still quite a bit to go.
Now, Rob, you've been involved for a couple of years now
in the whole electronic voting scandal, I guess is a good way to say it.
That's brought you over here to the United States.
Do you want to tell us what kind of progress is being made in this country?
In the United States, you mean?
Well, there was the whole thing in 2000 with the hanging chads,
and since then they've been pushing these touchscreen voting machines
and also optical scan machines everywhere all over the United States.
And I think people are beginning to realize that that move has been over-hasted,
that quality issues have been terrible.
There's been all sorts of problems since.
And the scientific community for the past three, four years has been really active.
The computer security community has been really active
in trying to figure out what these machines were, how insecure they were.
Lots of information has come out.
And basically we're seeing sort of a dying process of this particular type of machine.
It's definitely not dead yet, but there's definitely a process
by which every time, every media event sort of stabs it further,
because obviously it's unacceptable.
You can't have a machine with secret software that's trade secret,
counting your votes and then producing some slip of paper that says who won.
That's just not an acceptable way.
That's an interesting question, Rob, because as of a couple of years ago,
it seemed like people were saying, yes, you can have that.
The media seemed to be embracing it,
and certainly the government didn't seem to have any objections.
Something changed, and now it seems like, as you're describing,
it's on a downward spiral.
But what is it that caused that to happen?
Well, the events in Sarasota County definitely didn't help,
and in Florida, where 18,000 votes were lost,
which made the wrong person be elected.
It's also the growth of an actual voting integrity movement here in the United States.
There are groups like New Yorkers for Verified Voting in every state in the country now.
So the word has really gotten out,
and citizens have been working very hard to organize and educate on this issue.
And as Rob said, in conjunction with many computer security specialists,
computer scientists who understand the issues with secret vote counting.
So there really is a, the awareness has grown very much.
And problems like the 18,000 votes in Florida have certainly helped get that awareness,
although one might argue that the media likes to report that briefly,
and then it kind of disappears from the mainstream media.
But out on the Internet, this has been very effective.
And slowly but surely, people are starting to get the message.
And we see things happening.
A big event in the voting integrity movement just a few weeks ago in California
where Secretary of State Deborah Bowen actually decertified three or four electronic voting machines
that have been being used in California because they did an investigation
and showed terrible security problems, real holes,
the kind of things that folks like Rob and myself and other people have been saying for years.
Now we're actually seeing states starting to do some investigation
and finding out, oh, goodness, these people are right.
These machines are really not secure in even a minimal way.
Now, personally, I think there is probably a way to benefit from electronic voting
in terms of very quickly getting results and fewer problems in counting them if it's done properly.
Now, do you think there's a model that companies like Diebold
and other companies that are obviously struggling right now can use
in terms of maybe implementing open source solutions and open hardware
and some kind of an audit model that may help the public be more comfortable with the technology
and ensure that there are no security vulnerabilities?
Whether the companies are willing to go to an open source model is a big question.
Thus far, they have not been and have fought very hard in court
to preserve their trade secret rights, and courts have generally ruled in their favor.
But ultimately, I think what these problems point to is we have to go to some type of solution
where there's an open source solution, at least an ability to review source code,
and obviously you have to have some kind of audit.
That's becoming clear that no matter what technology we're using,
even if it's hand-marked paper ballots and then an optical scanner to count those ballots,
we still need to audit the results.
A paper ballot system and a scanner is a lot of benefit, provides a lot of benefit,
because most voters are hand-marking the ballots directly.
We have no computer and no software intervening in the actual recording of the vote.
You can use an optical scanner to count those votes and get the quick results
that Americans seem to be dependent on nowadays, but without a proper auditing procedure,
you have to wonder about those results.
So we are going to really need to get to a place where we have auditing procedures,
open source models, but ultimately the real key, I believe, and many people have come to believe,
is the ultimate verifiable record of the vote.
Well, some of the arguments that I've heard in favor of touchscreen voting, for instance,
is the ease of accessibility for people who speak different languages, the handicapped, etc.
Do you have anything to say to people who think that that is the main reason
why electronic voting is the best way to go?
Well, accessibility must be provided, accessibility for disabled voters,
but that can be provided without going to a touchscreen voting machine solution for everyone.
There are devices, computers, that provide accessibility called ballot-marking devices.
What these things do is provide the accessibility features that disabled voters need,
either audio menu or sip-and-puff interfaces, touchscreens,
but rather than recording the vote electronically and secretly,
what these devices do is they take the input from the disabled voter
and they print or they mark a paper ballot.
So now we have produced a paper ballot that's marked and marked by some voters,
by disabled voters or voters that need minority language access.
They use this ballot-marking device.
So it's possible to limit where we apply the computer technology
to record the vote for accessibility without having to go the whole nine yards
and say, oh, we therefore have to have electronic equipment
that records the votes electronically for everybody.
Now, Rapp, I know that you've been involved in this issue
over in your home country of the Netherlands,
and I imagine that you've developed some familiarity with the way things are going in other countries.
Is there anybody getting it right at this point anywhere in the world?
Well, I think there's a lot of countries that just haven't gone to electronic voting at all.
Take a country like Germany, where we're still way over 90% of the population,
votes by hand-marking a paper ballot, which is then hand-counted.
And both Germany and Holland vote for either one or two candidates per election.
So you make either one or two marks, which isn't that hard to count.
It's not a U.S. election where you have tons of questions on the ballot
and there's all these races.
I could see the problem there.
I could see the need for at least electronically counting paper ballots.
I can see that being a real need.
In Holland, I think the main reason we still have electronic voting in Holland
is just because the municipal people doing the elections,
comparable to the county election people,
they just don't want to, what in their view is a move back to paper.
They just don't want it, but there's no good reason.
There are a few cities in Holland which still vote on paper, like my own city of Amsterdam.
They tried to move in a touchscreen voting system here,
and this was then decertified because of our activities.
And we're still voting on paper, and the sky is not coming down.
We just have the election results coming 90 minutes later.
Given that it takes 100 days to form a government here,
the 90 minutes, in my personal view, aren't all that significant.
Which direction do you think it's worth fighting in?
Do you think it's worth fighting to go back to hand counting and paper ballots,
or do you think it's worth trying to push for a more open electronic voting format,
given that you don't have to choose which direction to go to
when you're devoting your energy there,
for the ultimate sense of progress in terms of satisfying people,
satisfying the public and the government?
I'm not sure I optimize for the ultimate sense of progress.
I'm not sure electronic voting has brought that much progress,
and I'm not sure.
If everybody sort of saw what's really going on,
and if everybody really read the source code reports
from all but one of the major manufacturers in the United States,
because the California study that Deborah Bowen did,
they looked at everybody's source code except ES&S
because they didn't even give the source code.
So all their stuff was decertified promptly.
But if you look at those source code reports,
you would want hand-marked paper ballots tomorrow.
And anybody that reads those reports
knows that this is an industry that just will take a decade
if they will ever get it right,
and that their stuff is just not in a usable state right now.
And I don't see any problems with paper ballots
that remotely approximate the problems
in terms of being able to trust the election outcome
that the United States has today.
Do you see any problems with the current system that we have,
say, here in New York with the mechanical lever machines?
I haven't...
Go ahead.
Let me take that, Rob,
because the biggest problem with the mechanical lever machines
is they do not provide the accessibility
to disabled individuals that is now required by law.
So although New York State is still in a situation
where it's not clear when we're going to replace the lever machines
because we're trying to conduct a fairly thorough testing
of the electronic alternatives,
it is inevitable within the next few years,
either 2008, 2009, or probably no later than 2010,
at the outside that the lever machines will go away.
Now, there's a lot of people in New York that love their lever machines
and feel that that's an option that has been working,
and that argument can certainly be made,
but the fact remains we are going to have to,
because of the Help America to Vote Act requirements,
move to something that has more accessibility.
Paper ballots, though, is a way to do that, as Rob has said,
and using these ballot marking devices that I talked about.
Yeah, I just wanted to point out
these mechanical voting machines, they don't work either.
They fairly frequently lose votes,
and if you've ever tried to cast a write-in vote on one of these machines,
I don't know if you have, but it's very hard to figure out,
and the poll workers don't know how to help you.
That's exactly right, and you know,
although people tend not to think so much
because the lever machine is mechanical,
they don't worry so much,
but we have to realize with the lever machine,
we have the exact same problem that we do with the DRE
in that you have to trust the machine has recorded your vote correctly.
Right.
Now, with a mechanical machine that's not based on software,
a software floor won't affect every single machine,
but each individual lever machine can,
and very often, as you noted, does fail.
Sometimes the counters won't rotate.
Often they get stuck on 99 and they can't roll over to the three-digit 100.
So the lever machines present on a smaller scale
the problems of how does a voter know
his vote has been counted in the way he cast it.
Now, you guys mentioned that if you were able to see the data that you'd want,
I want to go back to paper ballots tomorrow.
What can you recommend for our listeners to check out
insofar as books, websites, movies,
anything that might educate them more on the issue?
I just saw a very interesting documentary,
there's a network called HDNet, high-definition television,
and they have a Dan Rather report
that's called The Trouble with Touchscreens.
If you put that in Google, The Trouble with Touchscreens,
that's a very nice documentary
because it also describes sort of the early days of the HAVA Act,
how that came about,
and it gives you a relatively nice overview
sort of focusing on ES&S,
the touchscreen machines made by ES&S.
But it's a very nice program.
Otherwise, the Sarasota County, Florida 13 debacle,
read everything about that that you can.
And the California study,
I think those are really good starting points
for anybody that is technically inclined
to really make your hair stand on end.
Bo, do you have any recommendations?
Yeah, absolutely.
And for those that would like to,
those are good suggestions for people
that want a little background in this.
But for those that want to begin to get active
and do what they can,
in your own state,
you should Google and look for verified voting
in the name of your state.
The name of some organization will pop up.
Here in New York State, New Yorkers for Verified Voting,
my organization is leading the battle for verified voting.
Our website is nyvv.org.
That's V as in vote.
There's some national sites that are very good.
One of them is verifiedvoting.org.
And they've got a lot of information up there,
background information,
as well as a map that can kind of give you status
of where all the individual states stand.
I do want to add, for the New York State listeners,
we still haven't made this determination.
We are ahead of the game,
although people claim we're behind.
New York has not yet committed to a system,
and there is still time to influence this decision.
And we still are in danger of,
even in spite of all this evidence that is now available,
in spite of what's happened in California,
in spite of states like Florida and New Mexico
deciding to abandon multimillion-dollar investments
in touchscreen voting machines,
New York State may still choose touchscreen voting machines.
We can still stop that in New York.
So anybody in New York State who wants to get involved in that,
this is the time.
The next six to eight months are going to be the key time
in New York State to try to get a system
based on paper ballots.
As Rob said, at this point in time,
that's the only thing that will work.
And again, that website is www.nyvv.org.
That's New York as in verified voting.
Let me just close off by asking you guys one last question.
Given all the controversy involving electronic voting,
obviously we see the risks.
Do you guys see it as something that simply is attributable
to incompetence, to not thinking things through,
or do you think there's malice behind this?
Do you think there are people actually sitting in dark rooms
figuring out ways to manipulate elections
and being very good at what they're doing?
Well, my answer is the former.
I don't really see some vast conspiracy behind all this,
but what I do see is a former software developer
who worked for some very big companies,
and what I see is a few small companies
that thought there was a big market in the election industry
and they cobbled together some stuff,
didn't even look at the basic requirements for security
or do a needs analysis, threw it over the wall,
and the Help America to Vote Act put $2 billion on the table
for them to sell this defective equipment.
I think it comes from incompetence
and a lack of seriousness about what the requirements for our vote are.
Our vote we should look at as mission-critical software.
We should treat voting software, if we're going to use it,
the way we treat software that runs a 747.
We don't do that, and the companies that are doing it
have just done a horrendous, horrendous job
of developing this software that does not do the job.
Okay, listen, I want to thank both of you,
and I think what you've just said indicates why everybody,
no matter what their slant in the political spectrum is,
everybody should be concerned and interested in what you guys are saying.
Bo Lipari and Rob from Amsterdam,
thanks so much for joining us and enlightening us tonight,
and hopefully we'll talk to you again soon.
Sure, thanks.
And that's going to do it for us here tonight on Off The Hook.
Stay tuned for the personal computer show next week.
I'm going to be in a rather different place.
I'll be in Malaysia,
but the guys here will be taking over in New York,
and it'll be an interesting program, to say the least.
Until next time, write to us, othat2600.com.
We'll see you later. Good night.
Off The Hook
All rights reserved.
Off The Hook, 2013.
All right. I love that. I love Philip Glass.
Wow.
All right. It's now 8 o'clock on WBAI New York 99.5 FM,
also broadcasting on the web at wbai.org.