These commentaries are produced by Noelle Hanrahan for Prison Radio.
You've been listening to Free Speech Radio News.
Today's newscast was produced by Monica Lopez and Taina Giese, technical production team
Antonio Ortiz and Puck Lowe, DC Editor Leanne Caldwell, Headlines Editor Anitra Grisales
and in Los Angeles, I'm Kelly Barnes.
And this is Radio Station WBAI New York, the time is 7 o'clock, time once again for Off
the Hook, Emmanuel Goldstein here with you on this Wednesday evening, where we have very
few people in the studio, but Redbird, you've taken all the microphones.
How many microphones are you talking through right now?
I've got four, how do I sound?
You sound just the same as you always do, you're talking through four different microphones.
It's kind of disappointing, but that's okay.
Yeah, why don't you move from one to the other while you talk, let's see if we can tell the
difference.
Good evening.
You sound like you...
Nah, it just sounds a little discombobulated.
And not Kevin on the other side of the room, down in Philadelphia, Bernie S.
Greetings from Philadelphia.
I heard some wave interference when you were speaking in those multiple microphones.
Now why don't you describe what that is to the uninitiated.
Oh, for the physics head, it's like there's different waveforms.
Here's the best analogy, if you throw two pebbles in a pond that are maybe 10 feet away
from each other, the ripples will interfere with each other and you'll see these lines.
And it's a really interesting effect, try it sometime, you can do it in a bathtub too.
Bernie, you're talking to us on a Sprint phone, how can you even make out the sound of our
voices?
By the way, this Sprint phone's battery may only have half an hour or so, so if I disappear,
forget it, I'm gone for the night, sorry.
And what, they don't recharge?
Well, it's an old phone, what can I say, I don't have a spare battery with me, I'm sorry.
Well, okay, as long as we've launched onto the topic of Sprint, might as well just hit
the ground running here.
What's this I'm hearing about the FCC pressuring Sprint Nextel, they did merge, Sprint Nextel,
to complete the, it's public safety rebanding on time, and if Sprint can't meet its June
deadline, the FCC has suggested the operator would have to turn over the spectrum in markets
where rebanding has not been completed.
What are they talking about?
Well, this all has to do with the Nextel, which was its own company for many years,
and happened to use frequencies in the 800 megahertz band that were shared with the public
service band, and they were used by law enforcement agencies, but it was like nearby frequencies.
But all the Nextel towers and those transmitters were causing a lot of interference to law
enforcement agencies, so after a lot of lawsuits and hemming and hawing, Nextel agreed to move
to other frequencies that they purchased after they were given some frequencies by the federal
government to move to that.
But they were dragging their heels, because they knew Sprint was going to buy them, and
then Sprint bought them, so it became Sprint Nextel, and then Sprint got saddled with this
whole thing of rebanding, or moving their frequencies to another part of the 800 megahertz
band.
Well, Sprint has had their hands full, because it's much more complicated than they thought,
and Nextel really stuck it to them, so they took the money and ran.
So it's looking like Sprint is not going to make the deadline, and the FCC is saying,
well, you've got to do this by this date next year.
I don't have the date in front of me, but it's sometime in the middle of next year.
And if Sprint doesn't move, the FCC said, all right, we can just take over those frequencies,
and your 20 million Nextel customers who came over from Nextel could be out of luck.
So that's going to be really interesting, if 20 million Sprint Nextel customers who
were formerly on Nextel just suddenly get shut off, because Sprint didn't do the transition
on time.
And what kind of recourse would they have?
Well, Sprint wouldn't have any recourse, because, oh, do you mean the customers, or Sprint?
No, the customers.
The customers would be, that would be a really good question.
I'm sure there's clauses in everybody's subscriber contract that says, Sprint does not guarantee
reliable service, whatever.
Sprint may have to tell those customers, all right, you've got to get another phone that
works on our 1900 megahertz frequencies, their PCS band.
So Sprint may have to give 20 million phones to these subscribers, and migrate their phone
number over.
Bernie?
Yeah, I'm here.
There's a big, loud bus going by.
Ah.
Well, by all means, let's hear the big, loud bus over the Sprint phone.
While we're talking to you in Philadelphia, I might bring up something else that is in
the news this week.
Last week, we talked about St. Louis, about how the plans for that city's city-wide Wi-Fi
network were sort of going down in flames.
Now apparently, three years after your mayor, Philadelphia Mayor John Street, announced
that Philadelphia would be the first major U.S. city to have its own network for wireless
Internet access, the project is nearly a year behind schedule and beset by cost overruns.
Technical problems restructuring at EarthLink, the Atlanta-based Internet service provider
that won the 10-year contract to set up and manage the network, slowed the process.
But the future grew much murkier on Friday with EarthLink's announcement that it is considering
strategic alternatives, in other words, a possible sale for its municipal Wi-Fi business.
Making significant further investments in this business would be inconsistent with our
objective of maximizing shareholder value, the chief executive of the company said.
Translation, there's no money in it for us and we want out.
And who's going to purchase that after?
I mean, it's-
A statement like that, yeah.
Right, exactly.
So Bernie, I hate to break this to you, but it looks like your Wi-Fi dreams in Philadelphia
might not be coming true.
It's a network I only use in the limited zones where it's free.
It's not a free network across the whole city.
It's only in certain sections of the city, like around certain parks and so forth.
But it doesn't exist yet.
No, it does exist.
It exists.
I've seen, I used, I knew, I know one of the network engineers for EarthLink Wireless
who set up the network, who built the network for Philadelphia Municipal Wi-Fi, and he was
laid off along with half the other employees of EarthLink Wireless a couple of, a few weeks
ago.
And he showed me a map he had, a secret map, where all the Wi-Fi hotspots are for this
network.
And there's thousands of them across the city.
It's a pretty wide network.
It's just not rolled out as thoroughly as EarthLink promised to.
And they're having trouble because they fired half of their employees and most of the engineers
about two months ago.
And now it looks like they're going to just bail and just sell the whole thing off and
leave cities like Philadelphia holding the bag.
It's a good network where it exists on those thousands of hotspots, but it's not everywhere
it was supposed to be yet.
I think I used it when I was down there at your apartment, yeah.
So it works.
Did you break it?
Did you do something to make them not want to invest more money into it?
No.
Well, apparently this is nothing new for EarthLink.
They pulled out of San Francisco's Wi-Fi project back in August.
And Chicago and Cincinnati abandoned their efforts about the same time.
And EarthLink has paid Houston, the city of Houston, $5 million for missing the starting
deadline for that city's Wi-Fi project.
I got to say, did these guys just figure out how it all works that you have to invest something
into the network to get it to start up?
It sounds like they're being hit by surprise all of a sudden.
Well, frankly, to give EarthLink some credit, it's really hard dealing with these municipal
governments, especially the Philadelphia's municipal government.
It's so poorly managed, these local governments in many cases, that for a company to deal
with them and smoothly to roll out a project like this is really hard.
I wouldn't want to do it.
But I'm sure there's some malfeasance on EarthLink's part as well.
But it's just tough all around.
I would not want to build a municipal Wi-Fi network unless I was king and had control
over everything.
Because the municipal governments really stick their nose in and screw it up.
Well, it's funny because I'm looking at a story that appeared on the net, and I see
nothing about problems with government.
I see just costs and higher expenses than they figured.
But there were specific prices quoted in that, right?
I think they wanted to move from what's – I mean, for actual ISP service to your house
that you pay for from $6.99 to like $20 or something.
Was that for that service?
Yeah.
EarthLink's Wi-Fi internet service was $6.95 a month last June.
And the regular price –
Well, that was a limited time offer.
Right.
$19.95 after six months.
So about $20.
But it doesn't even seem like it's worth it at that point because you can get DSL and
cable for that sort of price.
I mean, why would you rely on a wireless connection?
Well, because you can't walk around with a laptop outside in the park with –
But if it's in your house, I don't know.
I mean, reliability is really an important factor.
Well, it's a reliable fact that apparently Wi-Fi will not be citywide in Philadelphia
anytime soon.
See, here in New York, we don't make those kind of promises.
I don't think anybody's planning on making a Wi-Fi network all around the city.
Not all around, but there are some that exist in some of the parks that's nice to use.
Right.
But that's about it.
OK.
So the Wi-Fi dream is, again, not coming true just yet.
In the UK, speaking of dreams, there's a nightmare.
The Tax and Customs Service lost banking and personal data of – anyone want to guess?
Anyone who doesn't know want to guess how many people?
Go ahead, Kevin.
25 million.
Why do I get the feeling that you knew?
Because that's exactly how much it was, 25 million people.
It was a good guess.
Yeah, it was a good guess for somebody who read the story.
It's OK.
It's OK.
We like informed people.
Anyway, nearly half the country's population was affected by this.
Two computer disks disappeared in an internal mail service.
This was announced yesterday.
Paul Gray, the Revenue and Customs Chairman, is being blamed for the whole thing.
We'll be giving out his address later as well as his personal and mobile phone number.
I can't imagine that data is being transported that way anymore.
I mean –
And basically what happened was officials sent the disks to a government audit office.
The Treasury Chief, Alistair Darling, said the delivery was not being tracked and was
missing for three weeks before any alarm was raised.
These disks contained details on 7.25 million families in Britain that were claiming child
benefits, which is a tax-free monthly payment available to anyone with children or everyone
with children.
The figure represents almost half the families in Britain and the majority of the country's
children.
Britain's population is about 60 million.
Now, the information on the disks includes the names of parents and children, their addresses,
dates of birth, national insurance numbers, and banking details.
I don't think it can get any worse than this.
And you know it's all perfectly accurate too because they're all receiving – what
is it – payments from the individual.
So you know it's accurate data.
It would have to be.
It would have to be.
Is it safe to assume that the information is actually compromised and not just lost?
Well, even if it wasn't lost, it's missing for three weeks.
Who knows what could have happened to it in that period of time.
What I would like to know though is why these people – first of all, yeah, transporting
disks like that is kind of antiquated.
But even so, if they were transmitting it some other way, it sounds like they would
take as much care in protecting the data then.
In other words, why wasn't this data encrypted?
Of course.
If you lose a disk, you should not be losing the clear text data.
That doesn't make any sense to me.
A couple of years ago, you know, this stuff might have been more excusable.
It should never be excusable.
But it might have been more excusable.
But these days, disk encryption is such an easy thing to come by and set up and implement
on real life systems that it's just – it's totally ridiculous and absurd not to have
that implemented, especially for government databases that are this sensitive and have
all this personal information on half – almost half the country, right?
Or half the country's children, isn't it?
Yeah.
Half the country's – no, actually most of the country's children.
Half the population apparently is affected by this.
Okay.
What are the – one of the points that the – that that party, that government party
that was responsible for transporting that has been making very clear to the public – sorry
about that.
That sounds like a motorcycle there.
Yeah.
No, you actually could tell through this vocoder, huh?
Yeah.
Not bad.
They've been reassuring the public with great fanfare that we have no reason to believe
that this data has been misused or will be misused by anyone.
So you can rest assured.
They have no clue.
They don't even know where it is.
Yeah.
What reason do they need to suspect that it's been misused?
Being lost is one good indication that it's in the wrong hands.
I mean, they're just as sure that it's not being safely held somewhere.
I mean, they have no clue what's going on.
The other thing is it's turning into this big political thing where the opposing party
– I'm not familiar with the political system.
The other political party –
The Conservative Party.
The Conservative Party.
The Conservative Party as opposed to the Labour Party is pointing out that this represents
the incompetence of the whole Labour Party and that basically the whole Labour Party
should resign over this.
So it's becoming a really big political issue in Britain and it's quite amusing.
If you can find anywhere in the Labour Party doctrine or whatever it is that they carry
around with them that when we transport disks, make sure that they stay unencrypted and don't
track them if they go missing, I don't think that's anything that's unique to one party
or another.
I think that's just general incompetence that pervades the entire system.
It's a political grandstanding but it is amusing.
I think if you look around, look in your school, look in your office, look in your home, you'll
find yourself and people around you guilty of the same things.
It's just the scale on this particular instance is unbelievable.
But I think we all could use a good smacking around as far as learning about security and
encryption and how to prevent data from falling into the wrong hands.
Unbelievable.
All right.
So yeah, that's a bit of a shock and I think all of England is reeling from that.
Right.
Oh.
Yes, it's time once again for us to reach out across the Atlantic Ocean and engage with
another episode of While the Army Sleeps, where we call our friend Redhacked over in
the Finnish Army.
Can we get a dial tone, please?
Do we have a dial tone?
All right.
With this dial tone, we're going to dial a number and with any luck, this number will
ring and we'll hear the voice of our former co-host here on Off the Hook, Redhacked, who
is serving in the Finnish Army.
And the entire Finnish Army is asleep, so guys, don't talk too loud.
Maybe the music could be turned down just a little bit.
It's just finale.
Okay.
Do we have the phone ringing?
Bernie, you're still there, right?
I'm here.
All right.
Dial the number.
I don't hear any ringing.
I don't hear anything.
Usually you'd hear something at this point.
Maybe the Finnish phone company is just sleeping.
It's possible.
We are making a transatlantic call, so anything is possible when that happens.
But usually you get an error message of some sort.
Maybe Redhacked is on the phone already.
Is he there?
No?
Hmm.
I guess I'll have to try it again.
I kind of want to see what happens.
You don't have to play the music again, though.
No, the music has to be playing.
Oh, no.
Legally I'm supposed to, but this has never come up before, so I don't know if I...
Can you guys banter for a couple of minutes while I dial?
I think it's an FCC rule that you have to have military music playing when you're calling
a military.
Well, I can have it maybe just in the background a little bit, and you guys could banter that
way.
We have a little bit of both.
Well, I'm curious how you're calling him.
Does he have a cell phone?
He has a cell phone, but we're routing one of our numbers to him.
Okay.
But the thing is...
In the traditional sense.
Yeah.
You would definitely get a recording or a reorder or something at this point.
Your call is being connected.
Yeah, you'd get that nice woman saying that.
Maybe the service that routes it is not working.
Yeah, that's entirely possible.
It wouldn't be the first time that's happened.
Well, can you guys banter?
I can't say that Bernie can stay because I've got to put all the lines on hold to make another
call, and you never know what's going to happen.
But if you guys have enough, otherwise I have to play the music and not say anything, and
that's not going to sound good.
I like the music.
I like the music a lot, but...
Can you tell me what that music is?
That actually is from the soundtrack of Ben-Hur, but that's really not here nor there.
Well, if you play the music...
Okay, you know what?
Here's what we're going to do.
I've written a story here, and I'm going to hand it over to Redbird to talk about the
story.
First, I have to find the story.
Oh, we're prepared here, that's for sure.
I probably haven't even seen this story.
No, I showed it to you before, and now it's missing.
Oh, here it is.
Okay.
This has to do with someone who's being named the Hacker of the Year.
Hacker of the Year.
Well, this guy in Sweden.
His name is Dan Ergerstad, and apparently he gained access to...
Dial the phone.
Tell me about the story.
Well, I'm setting you up for it.
You're going to talk about it.
I'm just setting it up.
He gained access to all kinds of sensitive embassy and corporate email and all sorts
of other things, and basically he says this guy, this Swedish hacker who infiltrated a
global communications network carrying the often sensitive emails of scores of embassies
scattered throughout the world, taking him only minutes, using tools that are available
for free on the internet.
He says, having gained access to 1,000 high value email accounts, he posted 100 sets of
sensitive email logins and passwords on the internet.
He says he didn't break any laws.
We're going to have to discuss this.
How is this possible?
So the thing that...
I said the music has to play.
If the music is playing, I'm going to go grab a flag.
It's down a little bit low.
We said we were going to play the music a little bit.
Now you banter and I'm going to dial.
So basically what this guy did was set up a Tor exit node, and Tor is an onion routing
network, and it's free and supported by the EFF and everything.
And what you do is basically route all your traffic through this network, which encrypts
your packets layer by layer, and as it travels through the Tor network, each layer of encryption
is unwrapped by the next node until it finally reaches an exit node and makes it to its final
destination.
And the benefit of this is...
You know, this music is really bothering me.
The benefit of this is that when the traffic comes out, there's no indication of the originating
host, and so it's a really great way to maintain your anonymity on the internet.
And anybody can set up a Tor exit node, which is a really great feature because the more
people that...
Do you hear that?
That's a Finnish ring.
Let's just greet RedHacked and make sure that he's awake and we can continue with the story.
Oh, that's Bernie.
I thought that was...
No, I'm still here.
Yeah, it sounded like army noise in the background, but it's actually Philadelphia noise.
Yeah, you know, I don't think he's waking up.
You're hearing cafe noises here in Philadelphia.
It sounds like army noises to me.
Well, maybe somebody in the cafe...
Well, you know, okay, we have the evidence here that we tried, all right?
And that's the important thing.
So I'll continue.
While the army sleeps will not be presented tonight.
So I thank everybody for their patience.
What's the outro now?
What?
Come on.
I got to turn this off.
You finish reading the story.
Okay.
So...
Okay.
So the great thing about this network is that anyone can participate, anyone can set up
an exit node, and this is actually sort of a requirement for an open network like this
because without the exit nodes, there would be no purpose in the network.
So what this guy did was set up an exit node and open up a packet sniffer and just basically
look at all the traffic that's coming out of the end.
And the important thing to note here is that your traffic isn't actually encrypted at the
exit node.
Between the exit node and its final destination, it's in whatever format it was originally
sent or would normally be sent between your computer and the remote host.
So if you're using SSL, of course, it's encrypted.
Well, it was a grand finale.
All right, that's it.
We're done with this.
But...
But if you're using SMTP or POP3 or IMAP unencrypted...
But why is this not a violation of the law to...
Why would it be a violation?
Well...
To grab all this information?
I mean, first of all, okay, you sit in front of a cafe somewhere and you log on to their
wireless network and cops can throw you in jail for that.
How is this not a crime?
Because you're voluntarily routing all of your data through the Tor network.
Supposedly, you know what the risks are when you use this network, and it's really only
for anonymity.
It's not for...
So all these thousands of people voluntarily decided to have their data go through that
network?
Absolutely.
It doesn't happen accidentally.
The only crime I see here is him posting the 100 sensitive emails...
Well, that's what I...
Yeah, that's why...
I can't figure out how he got away with that.
Well, you know, I'm not going to give an opinion either way as to whether or not it was legal,
but he was routing that traffic through his network connection.
People knew that this was how this network works.
You route it through random exit nodes to maintain anonymity, and this is one of the
results.
If you're not using a protocol that's inherently encrypted, then all of your stuff is sent
in the clear text when it reaches the exit node, and there's nothing anybody can do about
that.
Go ahead, Bernie.
I was going to say, we don't know anything about Swedish law, or at least I don't, but
if it's anything like U.S. law, which it probably isn't, I hope, but U.S. law classifies...
Oh, there's a dog.
Dogs.
Yeah, we've all seen dogs before.
There's two dogs.
There's dogs in the cafe.
Oh, boy, will the world never get over this?
One of them is sitting on a chair.
It's nice.
In any case...
Well, he can speak on his issues later, but let's get over this.
What was I saying?
Well, we get distracted by the craziest things here.
The legal consequences of posting...
Let's talk about Swedish law and how it's nothing like, apparently, U.S. law allows
dogs to come into cafes.
They drink at the cafe.
The American law says that an email address and a password is considered what's called
an access device.
It's a legal term of art, access device, which means it's a means of account access.
Possession of that without permission is a felony in the United States.
I don't know if Sweden has a similar statute, but if it does, then this guy's in a lot of trouble.
If it doesn't, he may be off scot-free, and I hope he is off scot-free, because he tried.
He went out of his way to let people know about this discreetly, and nobody paid attention
to him, so he said the only way to get attention is to publish it.
I don't agree with how he handled it, but he certainly got attention.
The other thing that's really interesting is that it just points out that it makes people
more aware of the fact that government intelligence agencies are very likely to have set up
TOR exit nodes themselves, because anybody seeking anonymity would be a person of interest
by government intelligence agencies from around the world.
So my guess is a lot of these TOR exit nodes are operated and maintained by covert government
entities, and they're all sniffing this stuff anyway.
So if you don't use SSL or encrypt your data through a TOR exit node, you've got what's coming to you.
Say Sweden doesn't have a law that prosecutes you for doing this, but what if one of the other
embassies' countries does? What happens to him?
He did this in his country, so unless those other countries say that our laws apply in every
country in the world, like the United States does, then I guess he's okay.
Well, this is the equivalent of someone taking a slip of paper, handing it to someone else
and saying, you know, pass this to Eric and, you know, don't tell him it came from me.
There's nothing to prevent the other person from opening that slip of paper and seeing the content,
and once you've knowingly handed it to the other person, why is that a felony?
How could that possibly be a felony?
Well, it's a betrayal of trust, is it not?
No, it's not.
If you hand somebody a note and say give this to someone else and they open it and read it on the way,
you don't feel betrayed by that?
It is absolutely not a betrayal of trust.
This is how the network infrastructure is set up.
Well, I'm never handing you a note to pass to somebody else, I'll tell you that.
This is the infrastructure of the network.
It has nothing to do with trust.
It has to do with routing your packets.
If they're unencrypted packets, they're unencrypted packets.
Right.
You know, it's not.
Well, now, I'm wondering, though, the people that were doing this, that were engaging in this
tour of traffic, might some of them have been trying to hide their anonymity and be like some of the
agents that are supposedly watching other people as well?
Could law enforcement actually be caught up in this is what I'm wondering.
Apparently, he has access to email accounts from embassies and whatnot.
I mean it boggles my mind that they would route their traffic through a tour network.
I mean that's just bizarre but whatever.
I mean the tour network is relatively slow.
It's not really something that you want to be using in production all the time.
Every once in a while, if you want to do something anonymously, it's nice to have that ability.
But it's really not something that you would consider running real time all the time because it's slow.
It's not really that great of a network.
I mean the concept is wonderful but in practice, it's really slow.
Just for people that I know are asking this question out there, tell that dog to shut up down there, Bernie.
Sorry about that.
Dogs went to cafes.
They should behave themselves.
Somebody stopped petting him and now he's barking.
So you use this tour network for anonymity, correct?
Right.
So where are the passwords and account names coming from?
People are actually using their passwords and account names while trying to be anonymous?
Apparently, they're using all that.
Yeah, they're using their regular account information.
It's kind of dumb, isn't it?
It's silly.
You wouldn't normally want to do that.
You can have to pick one microphone.
You have four microphones.
Oh, you moved all those.
I moved them away, yeah.
All right.
So now you're the blue microphone.
That's all you're going to be.
Okay.
Blue microphone from now on.
I feel better.
All right.
Well, it's yet another interesting story.
But here's something that I like even better.
And I don't like it because of what these people are doing.
But I'm just amazed.
Wait, wait, wait.
First of all, we should clarify what he actually did.
This has been considered the hack of the year.
And this is not anything complicated to do.
Anybody could run a tour exit node.
Okay.
And anyone can run Ethereal.
What did he do?
All right.
Tell us.
That's basically what he did.
He set up a tour exit node, which is not difficult to do.
And anybody can do it.
And he ran a network sniffer on it.
And there's tons of network sniffers that are available.
So basically, he ran a service for people.
And they shouldn't have trusted him to keep their information out of his hands.
You shouldn't trust your own ISP to keep your information.
Of course.
Right.
But if your ISP disclosed all this information, they'd be liable for something, wouldn't they?
Probably not.
So if this guy isn't the hack of the year, who is?
We're going to get to that.
We still have a month to go.
But wait a minute.
ISPs disclose information all the time.
Yeah.
But they don't disclose your account and your password to other people and post them on websites, do they?
No, not to websites, but to governments and other entities that request it or subpoena it from them.
I mean it happens all the time.
Let me ask you one final question.
How would you describe his actions as sleazy?
It's sleazy, yeah.
Okay.
All right.
So Redbird condemns the Swedish hacker of the year for being sleazy.
No, but at the same time, I acknowledge that something like this was probably necessary
because apparently a whole lot of people were using the system without realizing that their clear text traffic is actually exiting an exit node in clear text.
I just thought people who use Tor had some conception of what it was they were doing.
It's not something that you can just turn on your computer and say, oh, I want to use this.
You have to sort of seek it out, don't you?
Yeah.
No.
It doesn't come as a default method of routing your packets by any means.
For those people who are interested in maybe anonymously reporting a dog, how would you start using Tor?
I believe the website is tor.eff.org.
Is that right?
That's right.
And it's easy to do.
If you're running a Linux distribution that has any sort of package management tools, it's included in almost every Linux distribution I've run across.
Otherwise, just go to tor.eff.org, and you'll find out how to use it.
And Tor means what exactly?
The Onion Router.
The Onion Router.
Okay.
Bernie, yes.
I just wanted to point out that two interesting things came out of this, and that is, one, I've got to give this guy some credit for not posting the content of any of the messages that went through.
These embassy communications and so forth.
So you're saying he's not sleazy?
Well, I'm saying that he's not as sleazy as he could have been.
In other words, he didn't post any of the content of the messages.
He didn't post any email messages that went through these various government embassies' email addresses and other, you know, and whoever else had used them.
Moderately sleazy, yes.
Oh, he's not as sleazy as he could have been.
Moderately, right.
It turns out that a lot of people were using these email accounts even beforehand.
He's not the only person that was sniffing this stuff.
Right.
I mean, people were apparently using the Tor network oblivious, because they're idiots, without encrypting their traffic, like through SSL or something.
And apparently a lot of people were using these email accounts of embassies and other email accounts without authorization anyway.
So a lot of this traffic that was sniffed might not have even been legitimate traffic.
It might have been interlopers who were using these email accounts.
So, I don't know.
I just think it—I think the good thing about all this is that it made the public a lot more aware of what Tor is and how to use it properly.
And I hope this guy doesn't go to jail for the rest of his life.
But by posting the username and password, it's the same as posting the content, because anyone can look at it now.
Well, it depends on the account and the nature of it, whether there's stuff on it.
We'll see.
But I'm sure—it looks like from—I haven't read any of this traffic.
I have heard that the content of a lot of this traffic indicated that it was not the intended users, that it was by people who shouldn't have been using those accounts in the first place.
Here's a great quote from the article.
If you analyze the traffic, it's just porn.
It's kind of sad.
Okay.
Who said this?
The Swedish guy?
Yeah, Egerstad.
Interesting.
Well, I guess it is a bit of a wake-up call.
So, hopefully, the word gets out somehow for people to use their brains when they try to be anonymous.
Okay.
Back to the story that I think is even better than this.
You hear about these guys?
They're a gang of swatters.
You've heard about this?
Swatters, you haven't?
Oh, this is amazing.
It's not amazing.
It's actually incredibly stupid, but it's just amazing that we live in times where people actually think of things like this.
Like fly swatters?
No.
If only.
If only.
Swatters are people who use caller ID spoofing to phone the police with fake hostage crises, sending armed cops bursting into the homes of innocent people.
Don't look at me like you've never done it.
Come on.
We've all done this at one point in our lives, sent SWAT teams into our neighbor's homes or our enemy's homes.
Come on.
Really?
It's a rite of passage, isn't it?
Yeah, of course.
Everybody does this at some point.
So this Ohio man has pleaded guilty to a federal conspiracy charge for being part of this gang.
He pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy on Friday.
The case seems to confirm that swatters are using simple caller ID spoofing to pull these hoaxes and not hacking into 911 at all.
This comes from an article by our friend Kevin Paulson over at Wired.
The court documents indicate that this guy was part of a remarkably sophisticated gang of old school phone freaks with serious access to at least one phone company's computers, which they used to get information on their targets.
But apparently you don't really need much more than caller ID spoofing.
The thing that gets me about that, though, I always assumed that emergency 911 used something else other than caller ID.
I always assumed it uses ANI.
That's what I assumed.
Yeah.
So I'm not sure how true that actually is.
Or maybe there are some phone companies that do use caller ID for their 911.
Either way, the description of high tech, sophisticated, blah, blah, blah, is not relevant.
These guys are obviously morons.
And, I mean, there's nothing to say other than they deserve whatever they get from this, in my opinion.
Well, he faces a maximum statutory sentence of five years in prison, a $250,000 fine, and restitution.
I'm not sure who restitution would be made out to.
But, basically, that's a whole lot less than what people like Kevin Mitnick were being faced with.
And when you consider what this is compared to what he did, it's so much worse.
I mean, I don't know how many of us had a SWAT team kick in their door in the middle of the night or something.
I did.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, was it a SWAT team, though?
Well, it was a Secret Service-led armed assault.
One Secret Service agent named Tom Barney, who's no longer with the Secret Service.
He resigned shortly after my case was over.
And five other police officers from the Haverford Township, Pennsylvania, and Delaware County Department.
And they all came creeping up the steps.
They busted in a house, told the owner to shut up, and crept up the steps and pointed six guns in my face at point-blank range.
So, it's not really a SWAT team, but it's almost like a SWAT team.
It's the same basic effect, yes.
But this also begs the question, and I know cops are under a lot of pressure, and I know that a lot of things happen quickly.
But isn't there some kind of procedure in place where you verify what somebody tells you over the telephone?
How can you do that?
Because there are always going to be cases where either the person can't talk or something's happening that doesn't allow the caller to give a lot of details.
And you've got to get someone over there.
Yeah, you've got to get somebody over there, but you don't have to necessarily kick in the door.
Maybe that's not—
It depends on the situation.
That may be the appropriate way to approach somebody.
But isn't there a way to verify that there is, in fact, a hostile situation going on, like thermal imaging or something?
I don't know.
There's got to be a way.
With all the technology today, rather than have people fake caller ID or fake ANI or whatever, and just—
You know, you could say you have a nuclear device, and God knows what would happen.
People would do all kinds of things.
They'd obliterate your house from space.
You don't need that.
The punishment for this sort of thing has to be severe because it's—
Not only are you causing—
Not only are you bogging down the 911 system and the police capacity to deal with emergencies, but you're violating people's personal rights and their privacy because you're reporting something that doesn't exist.
I've got to say, and you're putting people's lives at risk, too, because there are legions of examples of SWAT teams going to the wrong address, or police in general going to the wrong address.
They thought they were going to the right address, and they kill innocent people.
That's an extension of my point.
If they had the right information and they checked it first, then even though there was a hostage crisis, they at least would have gone to the right address.
I don't know where they're going to be able to verify it.
How do you verify?
You can't see through walls.
Actually, you can.
There's some technology that allows you to do that.
But the thing is I don't think kicking in the doors without asking questions first is really the best way to go unless it's—
There's no other choice.
I just think there's something else that needs to be looked at here.
I think there are too many situations that you can't make that statement with any certainty.
Well, somebody just calling up and saying they're holding hostages, does that mean that someone's going to kick in that door right away?
Is it as easy as ordering a pizza to somebody's house?
It shouldn't be that easy.
Wouldn't they try communicating with the hostage taker first?
Yeah.
I would think most hostage takers don't appreciate when SWAT teams come kicking in the front door pointing guns at them.
Usually, that gets them to do something that they said they were going to do in the first place.
Not if they're prepared and you're surprised.
I mean it's a psychological thing more than anything else.
But if you don't have time to react to that surprise—
I'm just saying I think negotiations are always a better way to go about it.
We've all seen Dog Day Afternoon.
We all know that these things can take a very long time.
You've all seen what?
Ah, boy.
I can't believe how young you are.
Generation Gap.
Yeah.
Okay.
I'll get you a copy of it.
Legitimately.
All right.
So that's—
Emanuel?
Yes.
There are ways of doing it, as you point out.
You can deliver pizzas to the hostage takers.
Everybody likes pizza.
Yes.
Because, yeah, that's what they did down in—what the FBI did in Waco.
They delivered pizzas to the people at the David Koresh plant.
Yes, right.
And these pizza boxes were bugged with radio transmitters and microphones
so they could listen to what was going on.
Now, they really didn't stop the police and the FBI from incinerating
dozens of women and children,
but there is a way to find out what's going on if you just give them pizza.
Okay.
Okay.
Well, interesting story, and it just goes to show that the criminal mind
knows no boundaries, apparently.
Oh!
I recognize that song.
Okay, so it must be time for us to talk about the Hotel Pennsylvania
and the fight to save them.
Maybe not.
Is it just my headphones that went out?
Oh, yes.
Look at this.
Pennsylvania 65,000!
Pennsylvania 65,000!
Okay, my apologies for that.
The headphones fell apart on my head,
and I had no way of hearing what was going on over here.
I'm sorry. This place is falling apart.
Yes, so it's time for us to talk about the efforts to save the hotel,
and apparently what's going to be happening this week,
starting on Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year,
there's going to be a rally outside the Hotel Pennsylvania
that's on 7th Avenue and 32nd Street from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m.
That's on the 23rd of November,
and basically it's a protest against Vornado
in an effort to keep them from tearing the hotel down.
So you can come down, get involved, speak your mind,
meet some other people that feel the same way,
and maybe brainstorm a little bit,
figure out a way to keep the hotel from being torn down.
There was this piece that ran in the New York Post last week
called Don't Save Midtown's Monster.
Yeah, unbelievable.
What?
I'll just read you a little bit of it so you get the gist of it.
The people at Community Board 5 want to landmark the Hotel Pennsylvania.
They're joking, right? If only.
The Hulk on 7th Avenue at 31st Street,
I'm sorry, I got the street wrong,
31st Street isn't architecturally
Pennsylvania 6-5-0-0-0
Actually, it's between 31st and 32nd,
isn't architecturally distinguished or even meaningful
as anyone who suffers its oppressive presence can attest.
It's one of the gloomiest structures between the Battery and the Bronx.
All right, this guy Steve Cuso goes on for a couple of pages about how much
Who is he?
He's just some columnist for the New York Post,
which tells you everything you need to know about him right there.
And I wrote a letter. I wrote a letter to the New York Post in reply to this.
Of course, they won't print it.
They won't even acknowledge receiving it.
I've tried to find out.
So I'll read it here, if that's okay with you guys.
It's okay with me.
It's quick.
In response to Steve Cuso's column of November 15th,
Don't Save Midtown's Monster,
it's truly sad to see such short-sightedness
combined with an inability to learn from our past mistakes.
It was just over 40 years ago
that the magnificent Pennsylvania Station,
designed by McKim, Mead & White,
was demolished in the interest of progress.
We still feel that pain today.
The Hotel Pennsylvania is not the grandest example
of McKim, Mead & White architecture.
Few are saying that it is.
That is not the point.
It deserves preservation
because of the history that has gone on inside its walls
and that which will continue to be made in the future.
Would Mr. Cuso want to replace Stonehenge with a shopping mall?
Or the Roman Coliseum with a new corporate name, Stadium?
Perhaps our own Liberty Bell could use a replacement
since the one on display has a big crack in it.
History isn't always the prettiest thing in sight.
And with every old building that gets torn down,
we lose a little bit more of it.
That is why we need to be especially careful
when deciding what really needs to be destroyed.
As for the Hotel Pennsylvania,
most of its 1,700 rooms are filled every night
with visitors to New York,
with a shortage of hotel rooms already,
let alone affordable ones,
whose interests are being served
by replacing all of this with Times Square Jr.,
Vornados, and Merrill Lynch's, obviously.
But the rest of us New Yorkers
will have lost something precious
if the Hotel Pennsylvania is torn down,
even those of us who think it's a monster.
So that's the letter they wouldn't print in the Post.
Or if they are going to print it,
they haven't gotten around to telling me about it yet
and it's been a week.
Emanuel?
Yes.
That's a really good letter.
Well, thank you.
I'm glad somebody got to hear it.
So again, if anybody wants to take part
in the protest and rally,
one of many, there'll be more.
I think December we're going to have some as well.
Hotel Pennsylvania,
between 31st and 32nd Street on 7th Avenue.
Be there between 9 and 11 a.m. on Friday,
the busiest day of the year,
busiest shopping day of the year.
And there'll be lots and lots of people, I think,
to talk about.
Black Friday.
Black Friday, they call it, yes.
There you go.
Yeah.
Our phone number is 212-209-2900.
I'd like to take some phone calls today.
Early?
Wow.
Yeah.
We never take enough phone calls.
And I know there are a lot of people out there
that always want to get through
and they never really get the chance.
So while I'm reading these couple of letters that we got,
let's load up those phone lines with phone calls.
212-209-2900.
This is off the hook.
I'm here with Red Bird, not Kevin.
Bernie S. down there in Philadelphia
with the dogs in the cafe.
Making all kinds of noise.
We tried to reach Finland and were unsuccessful.
Okay, here's a letter.
Dear Off The Hook, I just want to say
you guys have an awesome thing going on there.
I've been reading 2600 for a couple of years now
and listening to Off The Hook and Off The Wall
for about a year.
I recently started downloading old shows
and listening to them at work.
I usually get through about five or six shows a night.
Wow.
My hat's off to you.
I mean, that's more than...
I wouldn't want to listen to us for that long.
We could not, yeah.
We can't even be in the same room with each other
for that long a period of time.
My God, the mere idea.
Anyway, for whatever reason, I started with 1997
and it's crazy to look back
and see how far things have come in the past 10 years.
For instance, 1997 saw the first episode of 2600
streamed live through Real Audio.
Emanuel and Fiber ventured into the realm of OmniPoint GSM
and Radio Shack employees had no idea what DVDs were.
But you know what?
Many still don't.
But some things never change.
Now I download these shows directly onto my cell phone,
a Trio 700P from Sprint,
which I also use for word processing, email,
and pretty much everything else
you would have needed a computer for back then.
While I own two computers,
it's much easier to go to the library
the one or two times a month I need to use an actual PC
than it is to bother setting either of them up.
I only wish I had known about 2600 Magazine
and Off the Hook 10 years ago.
Keep up the good work, guys.
Well, it sounds like you're making up for lost time
in a big hurry.
So glad to have you aboard.
I don't agree with his statement
about setting up the computers.
I'm sorry, I read it first.
What?
I was just saying I don't agree with his statement
about going to the library instead of setting up computers,
but I like the rest of the letter.
Okay.
And Bernie, yes?
I was going to point out to that listener,
as he's probably aware,
he can get back issues of 2600
if he hasn't heard about it more recently.
That's true.
And you can pretend you're back in 1997 anytime you want.
I do it all the time.
Our website, www.2600.com,
find all the information there.
Hey, guys, Vornado has actually been around for a while,
Vornado being the people who want to tear down the hotel,
and a lot of other things, too.
My God, what they want to do.
I had no idea until I went to that hearing
that they want to completely refurbish
or just change that whole area.
I mean, there might be some good ideas in there,
maybe some changes to Penn Station are in order,
but these guys, they own everything.
Let me continue with the letter here.
I don't know if you remember
the old two guys discount department store chain,
but Vornado owned them at the time
they went out of business in late 1981.
Apparently, they made a fortune
on the old two guys' properties,
eventually becoming a giant in commercial real estate.
They currently own Monmouth Mall
in Edentown, New Jersey, among other things.
They own pretty much everything
around the Hotel Pennsylvania and Penn Station
and the post office and all that.
They're going to change that neighborhood entirely,
so people should take an interest.
It seems dangerous for one company
to have that much control over a neighborhood.
Yeah.
Aren't there movies made about this kind of thing
where one company turns evil and destroys things?
I don't know.
Dear OffTheHook, in your last show,
you talked about Hushmail
no longer being a secure email service.
I find this to be false.
Hushmail has always been secure,
but you must encrypt your emails,
such as if you send me a reply to this email
and it's not encrypted,
it will be in plain text on the server,
but if you encrypt this email,
it will be encrypted on the Hushmail server
and unreadable unless someone gets your password.
The deal with Hushmail being secure
is that it offers good features,
such as not being able to recover your password,
built-in encryption,
not displaying HTML in emails,
and many other random things.
Well, I agree with his technical comments
on the encryption of emails
and it being stored on their server,
but the one fundamental flaw
in Hushmail's implementation
is that your private key
is actually stored on their servers,
and you can't really trust that.
If you really want to be secure about using encryption,
you can't be storing your private keys
on other people's servers.
If Hushmail were to become compromised at some point
and their clients were to be rewritten
or modified to store your passphrase,
they would have full access
to all your previously encrypted PGP communications,
so it's not a good idea to store your private keys
on other people's servers,
regardless of what you're doing.
I mean...
Definitely not. Definitely not.
212-209-2900.
We still have a few open lines,
so get those phone calls in.
And finally, due off the hook,
I pledged $100 on the show a few weeks ago.
You were offering the kits
to be turned into brain machines.
I have yet to receive anything
and was a little concerned.
My contact info is provided below,
but we're not going to read that here.
Well, apparently you're new to the BAI way of doing things.
It takes a while.
It takes a few weeks,
sometimes even a couple of months
for you to get the material that you are getting
as our thank you for pledging to the show,
and we do want to thank everybody
who called in and pledged.
How long did it take us
before we even found out how many we needed to make?
Oh, it took a long time.
We only found out recently how many to make.
The studio is very difficult to...
It's very far away from the people that know the answers.
So we still have to build them, okay?
And that's something that's a monumental task.
It's part of our contribution to the station,
and boy, that's one heck of a contribution.
So we've got to build all these things,
so we will be doing that
and getting them out to everybody who pledged for them.
That is, unless you pledge for the unassembled version,
in which case we'll just send it straight out to you.
But in any event, it takes a few weeks at least
for us to get the information
and for the station to get it sent out.
Okay, 212-209-2900.
Let us take a couple of phone calls,
if nothing else in the studio falls apart.
Good evening. You're on Off the Hook.
Hello.
Hi, what's on your mind?
Hi, this is Rob T. Firefly. How's it going, guys?
How you doing?
Hello.
You're involved with the action on Friday, I believe.
Yes, indeed I am.
I'm calling mainly to encourage people to come along to that,
also to thank you for your letter.
And also I wanted to address that Tor issue.
Okay.
On a flash shot story regarding Tor today,
Nick Mathewson, who's one of the original developers
and one of the main guys at Tor,
said,
we're trying very hard to get out the message
that you should always use encrypted protocols over Tor
if you're doing anything even slightly sensitive.
Right now we do this in our documentation
and in a list of warnings on our download page,
but obviously this isn't good enough
since some of the commenters here seem to be surprised at finding it out,
so on and so forth.
So basically it all comes down to, as they say, RTFM.
Yes, we all know what that means.
Couldn't agree more.
We can't say it over the air.
But thanks for your call and thanks for your efforts.
Anything else we should tell people about Friday?
Come down.
We'll have some flyers and stuff for you,
and it should be fun.
If nothing else,
you just get to hang out in front of a cool building
for a couple hours and see the city go by.
That's what I was encouraging people to do a couple of weeks ago,
just stand there and just watch what happens.
It's really kind of a cool place just to take in the city.
If nothing else, it'll be interesting.
Yeah, and Friday is going to be crazy.
It's the busiest shopping day of the year.
Good people watching opportunity.
Yes, absolutely.
Can't make it.
I'll be shopping.
All right.
Well, when you see Redbird go by,
make sure he gets a flyer.
All right.
Thanks for your call.
212-209-2900.
Good evening.
You're a dial tone.
All right.
I'm going to go over here then.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Hello?
Yes.
You sound like a person.
Go ahead.
Okay.
What's on your mind?
Well, first of all,
I'm side-talking.
I want to say a quick three things.
First of all,
I will be one of the people on the rally at Friday.
I will appreciate anyone who comes down
and personally shakes their hand if they show up.
Two,
Emanuel,
wonderful written letter to the New York Post.
Thank you.
Very articulate and very to the point.
That must be why they didn't print it.
Yeah.
I'm sorry.
I can't resist.
It's the New York Post after all.
Right.
Well,
I've been reading the New York Post for a while,
so I actually know who Steve Kutso is,
and he judges the buildings around the area,
and I don't really like his opinion too much.
But the third quick thing is about the whole
phone freak calling the police.
Yes.
And the fact that that was just really dumb and cruel.
I've noticed a huge increase in just citizens
commonly overreacting and reporting stuff in
that shouldn't be reported in.
For instance,
in the U.K.,
I recently pulled an article on this U.K. man
who was in a pub for smoking,
and smoking's illegal there.
He forgot about it.
And the bartender didn't say anything,
just hit the button,
and eight SWAT members came out to deal with him.
SWAT members to deal with a smoker.
Oh, that's great.
Yeah,
and they had to realize that he was just a smoking offense,
and why would this guy-
Why didn't they just call the fire department
and have him put out?
I don't know.
But really,
you know,
commonly in Boston,
that's something that's been afraid of me,
is not so much of government doing this stuff,
but of people basically doing the government's job
of them spying themselves and just reporting people in.
It's madness.
Yeah,
it's incredible, too.
I notice this with a lot of people,
people who complain about how we're too much of a police state,
but, you know,
the slightest infraction by somebody that they don't like,
and they're calling 911 immediately.
And it's not even serious stuff.
I mean,
it's a result of the society since,
and I hate to use this phrase,
but literally since September 11th,
and all the campaigns like,
if you see something, say something.
I mean,
people are really reporting ridiculous things,
and it's not-
If you see something,
think about what you saw,
and then if it's of interest to anybody else,
say something to them.
But for God's sake,
let's get a hold of ourselves.
But yeah,
very good points.
Yeah.
It seems that the whole world is overreacting.
Meanwhile,
we are underreacting to very important things
that we could possibly prevent.
I don't quite get it,
but I'll be at the poll rally on Friday
at Side Pocket,
and I would appreciate anyone who shows up.
So thank you.
All right.
Thanks for your call.
And let's see if we can squeeze in a couple more.
212-209-2900.
And good evening.
You're-
You're not a dial tone.
You're a-
You're what's known as a fast busy,
sometimes a reorder.
But you're of no interest to us.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Speak up, please.
Yes, go ahead.
You sound-
Yeah.
You sound familiar.
Yeah.
Oh, yes.
And you sound way too loud, Rebel.
See, I panicked when you shouted.
I panicked, and I hit the kill button.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Oh, yes.
You had a piece on Google and Channel last week.
What do you think about the piece in the Post
about our Scotch eggs are getting stoned at BAI all the time,
the general manager there hitting on babes?
I don't think that's an appropriate conversation for the air.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Yes.
When I got a-
I'm so glad you called back, Rebel.
Or did you call back,
or did you call several times at the same time?
No.
When I get files from Verizon-
We all want to know how you do it.
Well, you get a DMS-100, and guess what?
What?
I don't know what star 03 is,
but when you dial star 03, it gives you a dial,
like another dial tone.
Uh-huh.
And when you dial on a coca,
I'm doing this on a coca,
dial star 0, and it gives you the Queens Fire Department.
This is unfortunate I did this.
Well, I hope you apologize when you reach them.
Yeah, I got a tricky phone system, bro.
Yeah.
Okay, I'll get right on it.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Another dial tone.
The dial tones keep calling us.
Let's see.
If we had a real phone system,
we wouldn't get the dial tones.
All right, good evening.
You're on off the hook.
All right, you know,
you just sort of disqualified yourself.
You're getting a workout pushing those buttons, man.
Well, the buttons don't even go in when you push them.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Go ahead.
You keep hitting on China,
but then BAI's leader is-
All right, you know,
the mentality level has just gone downhill.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Yeah, hi.
Please make it intelligent.
Okay, to protest them all,
they should have a band playing that song,
or a couple of musicians to bring some kind of press out.
That's a great idea.
Yeah.
Of course, they'd probably be arrested
for creating a disturbance
or making unauthorized sounds in the street,
but it is a great idea.
I have one other comment, please,
and don't take this as any kind of a front on anyone.
No, please.
More fronts, the better.
Go ahead.
But the point that disturbed me
is that the baby boomer generation
seems to want to destroy anything
that represented this city.
Uh-huh.
And I mean, I would love to know,
like, for example, lower Manhattan.
Right.
They're building tons of skyscrapers down there.
You remember the story of the Tower of Babel?
Uh-huh.
I mean, there's something wrong somewhere.
Yeah, you have to mix the new and the old,
and the new does not have to destroy the old.
And by the way,
a lot of these European architectures stink.
All right.
Later, bye-bye.
All right, that's going to have to be
the last word for tonight,
so thanks for that enlightened view there.
Hopefully you'll see people down
at the rally demonstration on Friday
in front of the Hotel Pennsylvania
between 31st and 32nd on 7th Avenue,
from 9 to 11, maybe beyond.
This is Off the Hook.
We'll be back again next week with more fun.
And the Personal Computer Show
continues here on WBAI.
For Off the Hook, Emmanuel Goldstein,
have a happy Thanksgiving
and whatever else you might happen to celebrate
in the week ahead.
See you next week.
Good night.
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