Some of those employed by the U.S. to provide security have been accused of crimes while
part of Saddam's government, as well as in atrocities, including ethnic cleansing and
the mass executions and the violence that has occurred since the U.S. invasion.
For FSRN, this is Hiba Dawood.
You've been listening to Free Speech Radio News.
From KPFK in Los Angeles, I'm Tondisizwe Shimirenda.
And this is radio station WBAI New York, where the time is 7 o'clock.
Time once again for Off the Hook.
The best expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
Bundled with milk.
Ha!
Ha!
And a very good evening to everybody.
The program is Off the Hook.
Emmanuel Goldstein here with you on this Wednesday evening, joined tonight by Mike.
Hi there.
Redbird.
Good evening.
Far side of the room is... I hear you fine.
Okay.
Yeah.
Do you want to say that again?
Good evening.
Yeah, we all hear you.
Okay.
And the other side of the room is not Kevin.
Hello.
And down in Philadelphia is Bernie S.
Greetings from Philadelphia.
You sound just great as usual, Bernie, with your polished connection there.
You know, next week I think will be my last... Let's see, February 18th will be my last...
I don't know what the closest Wednesday to February 18th, but that's when the analog cell phone service shuts off.
So I think sometime before then we should make one last ceremonial call via analog cellular just to...
We tried that a few weeks ago, but I can get closer to a tower so it sounds better.
All right. Well, we're certainly looking forward to yet another remnant of the past disappearing.
It'll be sad, but that's something we just have to face.
Of course, the talk around here is among our little circle of people is who's going to host the next Super Bowl party, which is on Sunday.
Do you think, Mike, it's your turn?
Yeah.
All right.
I don't think that just the amount of people in this room, which is four people, could fit into my apartment.
So it might have to be somewhere else.
No, you're assuming that all four would go anyway, but, you know, we're going to give it a shot.
That's true. If no one comes, then we could have it in my place.
Yeah. It's very important to us.
It's something that we all follow religiously and fight about and get into big arguments about.
See, that's the beauty of radio.
You can paint an image of any sort and people might believe it.
I do know what teams are playing next year, though.
Okay. I was going to ask if anybody knew what teams were playing.
But, yeah, it's pretty amazing, isn't it?
Yes.
Who's playing? Who's playing?
The Giants and the Patriots.
Okay, good. The undefeated Patriots, who went 17-0 throughout the regular season and won all the playoff games afterwards.
First time since the mid-'70s when the Miami Dolphins went 14-0 and proceeded to win the Super Bowl as well.
Well, the Giants are going to change that, damn it.
Has this radio station switched formats or something?
I don't understand why.
See, I'm just demonstrating why I sometimes know things that are wasting space in my head.
There's no reason in the world I should take an interest in that, yet somehow it's in there.
Somehow I know this.
I also know that they're the New York football Giants.
Does anybody know why they're called the New York football Giants?
Does anybody know?
Does anyone care?
No, seriously, I'm asking.
I have no idea.
Nobody here knows.
Bernie, do you know?
Well, I would assume there's another type of sport in which the team was named the Giants.
That's right. Very good.
See, this is using your brain.
And way back, before any of us were born, the New York Giants were also a baseball team.
Now they've moved to another city.
Does anybody know what city?
San Francisco.
See, we know sports.
We do know things about sports.
It's in our head for some reason.
Speak for yourself.
What I'd like to do, well, I'd just like to figure out a way to purge that part of our brain and fill it up with something a little bit more useful.
Who cares that there's a team in San Francisco called the Giants that used to be in New York?
I care now.
And play baseball.
Play baseball.
Things like that.
Okay.
Enough about that, really.
It's more important that we talk about something like today being International Delete Your MySpace Account Day.
Now, Mike, you found this, I believe.
Do you want to tell us something about this?
Yeah.
There's this guy called Simon Owens who has decreed today, the 30th of January, to be International Delete Your MySpace Account Day.
Is there a reason he decreed today?
Well, apparently about 10 days ago he decided that he had had enough of his MySpace account.
He didn't want it anymore.
He was like, if I wait 10 days, then maybe I can get some more people to cancel on the same day.
That's all the advance notice people got?
How much advance notice do you need to delete a MySpace account?
You've got all these friends you've got to notify.
This speaks to the power of, and I hate to say it, Mike, and I know you're not going to like this, but it speaks to the power of blogging.
That you can simply go online, any random schmo somewhere, and say, I decree 10 days from now is International Delete Your MySpace.
How do you say it?
International Delete Your MySpace Account Day.
Your MySpace Account Day.
Okay.
And people take it seriously.
Now, we are on the radio station here.
We're broadcasting off the top of the Empire State Building.
All right.
We're going to four different states.
We're on the internet.
We're in archives.
We have all sorts of people listen to us.
Can we decree something?
Can we decree anything?
We could.
All right.
Let's decree something.
By the end of the show, I think we should decree something, and we'll see in 10 days if that happens.
Because I don't think it's going to happen.
Well.
And then, what does that say?
It says that blogging is more powerful than full power radio stations.
Maybe this guy tapped into a nerve of something people want to do anyway.
Well, there's plenty of nerves we can tap into.
All right.
We could tap into the Facebook nerve, because I know a lot of people.
Facebook is actually useful if you go to school.
I will argue for that.
MySpace is not useful, and Facebook is useful.
Go ahead.
Present this argument.
I'd like to know.
I don't know that much about MySpace.
But, you know, I use Facebook for actually getting in touch with students.
Maybe, Redbird, if you took the time to educate yourself about MySpace, you'd realize that they're not the cult people think they are.
Oh, wait.
Wrong story.
Sorry.
But, no.
Seriously.
There are a lot of people who swear by MySpace, and a lot of people swear at it.
I'm sure there are people who will explain to you why it's useful.
I'm not one of them, so don't look at me.
Okay.
Does anybody here have a MySpace account?
I may have an account.
I mean, I don't.
What do you mean you may have an account?
Well, today is the day to delete it if you don't want to.
Well, I may delete that account.
So you did make a MySpace.
What were you thinking?
What were you thinking?
There was something I wanted to see.
What do you mean there was something you wanted to see?
I can see MySpace.com without making an account.
You can see other things?
But you can't see certain profiles.
Oh, so you were stalking somebody, and you needed to make a MySpace account in order to do that.
I'm just trying to understand.
Something like that.
All right.
No, okay.
Now it makes sense.
Now, there are certain things that this guy said about MySpace,
which is something that's designed to make us all sympathetic.
Do you want to go over some of them, Mike?
You're holding the same articles I'm holding, right?
Yeah.
Do you want me to read it instead?
No, I was just wondering if either of us had the full list.
No, it's not the full list.
We just have the excerpts.
We only have an hour.
If you experience any of these systems, Simon Owen says,
your account may be in need of deletion,
including you read yet another news account about how some child predator using MySpace
has abducted a little girl or that some hoax MySpace account has caused a teenager to commit suicide,
or if you're a girl who constantly gets marriage proposals from random men in the Middle East.
And another one is if you visit someone's MySpace profile only to have music start blasting out of your speakers,
and you get bonus points if this happens while you're at work.
Yes.
That's the one complaint I have about MySpace.
That and all the pages are so ugly.
They really are.
Why is that?
They're really ugly, I have to say.
But there's something really important that I don't think you guys mentioned that happened recently with MySpace.
And there was a flaw in basically the ability to obtain other people's private pictures,
pictures that they had marked private that they didn't want other people to see.
And someone set up a script to take advantage of this flaw on some number of MySpace accounts that was in the thousands
and posted this, I think it was like a 17-gig file onto the torrent tracker sites.
And now like thousands and thousands of pictures that people had marked private are now available for people to download.
Mercy me.
Wow.
I heard something similar.
Maybe I'm mixing up the two.
But I heard that on Facebook, you could tag people in photos, and they had no power to untag themselves, meaning that they could –
They changed that.
You can now untag yourself.
What was it that they were allowing to happen?
Well, basically, people – and I've seen this too.
People would post pictures of you in situations that you may not want other people to see.
And then they can tag your name on it so when people visit your profile, they can say, hey, view other pictures of this person,
and then you would show up in those pictures.
But now they have added the ability to untag yourself, but you still can't remove those pictures.
And if you do remove the pictures from Facebook, you can still get to them via the original URL for that image.
They never actually go away, but they're just not linked to it.
They're not – the image isn't linked from your account anymore.
I see why you say Facebook is useful.
Well.
You can find people in all sorts of embarrassing situations.
That's not why I think it's useful.
You can't find them drinking coffee or anything.
Yeah, all sorts of things like that.
Okay.
Bernie, you know, we didn't hear from you.
Do you have any of these accounts?
I do not have a Facebook or a MySpace account.
I have no friends.
I'm sorry.
You say you have no friends.
Well, obviously, I have no friends if I don't have either a Facebook or a MySpace account.
Well, don't be too hard on yourself.
It doesn't mean you don't have any.
I have no friends.
It doesn't mean you don't have any friends.
It just means that you're not cool.
Well, the trend in the modern terminology, you're not really a friend unless you're a friend on Facebook or MySpace.
That's what a lot of people say anyway.
Is there an anti-Facebook type of a system?
I don't mean like ass book or something.
Well, that's an idea too.
I was going to say that.
Think about that.
Well, the potential there is something we could talk about maybe after.
I'm sure it's already been thought up.
No, but what I mean is I mean something where you don't make friends.
You make enemies.
And you just list the people that you honestly cannot stand.
And they list the people they cannot stand.
You have sort of like an enemy's network of people who really want to kill each other.
Has anybody thought of that?
No.
You see?
Okay.
There's an idea.
Yes.
Someone has thought of it.
There was a – I think the gentleman's name – his last name was Bell.
And he wrote – actually, he wrote a paper on it called Assassination Politics.
You're not going to say he invented the phone company or something, are you?
No, no.
It was a really scary unholy alliance of sort of like a death pool, an online death pool,
combined with anonymous cash payments like with e-gold or something like that.
So that I suppose there was some government agent that got out of hand.
And a lot of people thought that this particular government agent, maybe from a federal law enforcement agency,
was really out of hand in their behavior, or maybe a group of them were.
Someone could place bets on the demise of these individuals.
And whoever guessed most closely to the date of the demise of these individuals
would collect the anonymous cash bonus that a lot of people had bet on.
And it was really scary.
And the feds totally freaked out about this and locked the guy up for –
well, ostensibly they locked him up for writing this thing,
but they found other stuff on his computer that they could really prosecute him for.
But what really irked them was that concept that he came up with.
Scary stuff.
Well, yeah, I'm not sure it's exactly what I was thinking of,
because I was thinking of an ongoing social network of people who don't like each other.
This is sort of an antisocial network.
Yeah, exactly.
This is kind of creepy too, but I don't know.
It could be made into that sort of thing,
although I'm sure it would get shut down very rapidly by the authorities.
And I'm not favoring such a thing, because I think death pools in general are very ghoulish.
But in any case, it could be sort of a combination of hate book, you could call it, or hate book.
Well, I don't know.
It's just one of many ideas that we come up with while we're sort of rampaging around news of the internet.
But it's not our decree.
We still need to come up with a decree, something to say is going to happen,
either 10 days from now or a year from now or something like that.
How about this July?
You want to decree the conference that we've already planned?
Okay, go ahead, decree that.
That's kind of lame, though.
No, you're wasting it on that.
Yeah, you're wasting it.
All right, all right.
But wait, who's in charge of decrees?
We only get one?
But as long as you brought it up, the last HOPE, our conference, Hackers on Planet Earth,
taking place in New York City on what, July?
18th through 20th?
18th, 19th, and 20th, taking place in New York City.
More details, really, more details are coming on www.hope.net.
We've just been very busy, but they are coming very soon, probably in the next week or so, I would say, I would hope.
No pun intended.
No pun intended, definitely not.
Okay, this is an interesting story that came our way as well.
Charter Communications, who are these people?
They're a cable TV operator.
They believe a software error during routine maintenance caused the company to delete the contents of 14,000 customer email accounts.
And the best part of the whole thing?
There's no way to retrieve the messages, photos, and other attachments that were erased from inboxes and archive folders across the country.
And this happened last Monday.
A spokeswoman for the St. Louis Space Company says we really are sincerely sorry for having had this happen
and do apologize to all those folks who were affected by the error.
They basically, they were having some kind of maintenance.
And during that maintenance, according to the spokesperson, we erroneously deleted active accounts along with inactive accounts.
It's never happened before.
They're taking steps to make sure it never happens again.
Now, I don't understand this, but anybody operating any sort of computer system has backups.
How could they not have backups for accounts, customer accounts, active or inactive?
I mean, it seems strange.
I agree that they wouldn't have a backup just in case of hardware failure, let alone operator error.
But what's interesting, at least from our perspective, is this is the precise kind of story that you would usually expect to say something along the lines of,
you know, hackers broke into our system and deleted 11,000 accounts.
I mean, this is like textbook.
They could have blamed the hackers.
They didn't do it this time.
Maybe they didn't blame the hackers because there was too much of a smoking gun to prove that they're the ones who did this.
It's really poor management.
Yeah, if they didn't know that they did this, I guarantee they would be blaming hackers
because when something happens you don't understand.
It's got to be hackers that did it.
Just like this.
This is happening uptown.
We heard about this story, too.
This actually was in the daily news.
Do you know there's a Bermuda Triangle?
It's a circle.
Yeah.
Well, I guess it's a five-block radius uptown, and apparently this is an area near the Empire State Building right here in Manhattan where vehicles mysteriously die.
Now, I don't know if hackers are responsible for this, but the thing is nobody knows what's causing it, in fact.
All roads appear to lead to the looming giant in our midst, according to the daily news, which is the Empire State Building.
According to Citywide Towing, a spokesperson for Citywide Towing, we get about 10 to 15 cars stuck near there every day.
You pull the car four or five blocks to the west or east, and the car starts right up.
The lights work, the horn works, everything, but it just won't start, says one driver.
Now, apparently this is something that's affecting those cars with remote keyless entry systems.
Anybody have a car like that?
Yes.
You have a car like that?
Most people have cars like that.
Remote keyless entry.
I mean, I use a car for every vehicle I ever drive.
Yeah, you have a remote with a button on it that unlocks your car.
Yeah.
No?
Okay.
Well, I also have a key that unlocks my car.
But your smart car has one, right?
Yeah, but it also has a key that can open the door.
That would be considered a remote keyless entry system if you can open it without the key, right?
I think I can stick the key in the door.
You can stick the key in the door, of course.
Well, can't these people stick their keys in their doors?
They should be able to stick their key.
Yeah, but sticking the key in the door won't help if the car won't start.
Yeah, that's the thing.
The car isn't starting, so I don't understand why.
But that has nothing to do with the entry system.
Apparently not.
But they say it's the remote keyless entry system that operates on specific wavelengths assigned by the FCC.
And that's apparently what's going all haywire here.
But is there some kind of remote system that starts the car as well that you don't need a key for?
There are systems like that.
It's not as common.
And even interference on that shouldn't really cause it not to start.
But, okay, so I don't believe that this has anything to do with not being able to start your car.
But there's a very powerful bunch of transmitters located at the top of the Empire State Building.
And it could overwhelm the front end of most radio receivers pretty easily if you're within that vicinity.
And we've noticed that even with relatively high-quality amateur radios.
It's pretty overwhelming.
Well, you know, I might drive this smart car up there and see if it goes haywire.
I've driven past there plenty of times.
Yeah, but you have to park your car apparently near there.
And then apparently you won't be able to get into it or you won't be able to start it or something like that.
But 10 to 15 a day is not everyone who parks in that neighborhood.
Well, have you tried to park in the street?
You can't really.
No, I've never tried to park in the street.
Right.
So the point is these are people who have parked on the street.
And since it's a commercial zone, I guess not many people get to do that.
But more than 10 to 15.
Probably at night.
In a day?
A whole day.
I don't know.
I don't know.
With remote keyless entry systems.
I don't even know what that is even after it's been explained.
All right.
Well, if you're driving around now, in fact, feel free to pull up to the Empire State Building and see what happens to your car.
Bermuda Triangle.
Maybe caused by hackers, maybe not.
Okay.
Here's something that I guess is advice, free advice that we might give out to people.
And that is not to laugh on the telephone if you're in jail awaiting sentencing.
That's right.
A judge sentenced a woman to nearly the maximum prison term for negligent homicide after hearing a recorded jail conversation in which she made light of the bicyclist she killed.
She could have gotten as few as four years behind bars, but Superior Court Judge Michael Cruikshank sentenced her to ten and a half years, one year shy of the maximum.
He found the telephone conversation between her and an unknown male friend a week after the bicyclist was killed to be breathtaking in its inhumanity.
And basically during that conversation, she was laughing it up about the person that she killed and expressing no remorse whatsoever.
But it goes to show that, yes, they do listen to those phone calls that are made inside jails and prisons.
And I guess a lot of people would probably be saying, yes, they should be listening because this is the kind of thing that can happen.
As someone who is inside, Bernie, do you think that's the way to go?
Well, yeah, they're obvious.
I have a sign that says all telephone conversations are monitored.
Use of these telephones constitutes consent to monitoring.
How did you get that sign?
Somebody gave it to me.
It just happened to come from someplace where I was a guest at one time.
But in any case, yes, they listen to all the calls, including the attorney client calls, because when you say you need to make an attorney call, they just say, well, there's the phone.
There's no provision in any places I toured where you can actually make a private call with your attorney.
So they may not be able to use the content of the conversation as evidence, but they can listen to it.
Frankly, they don't have the manpower or the woman power to listen to all the calls, but they are all recorded, and they can just go back and play them back when they want to and they have their target in mind.
I'm curious about this particular case, whether this woman's defense attorney, how strenuously they objected to this, because I'm not sure how admissible that would be as to her guilt.
It seems like a different issue whether she feels bad about it as opposed to whether she was guilty of it.
So I'd be interested in reading the case history.
I'm curious about when they record the phone calls, do they sort them by person?
In other words, are they stored on a computer where you can say, okay, let's call up this person's phone calls and see what they say over a period of time or maybe within this period of days?
It depends where you are.
Some of the prison phone systems, many of them are designed by companies like Locktel and MCI, and part of the deal is they provide logins of all these things.
In a lot of prisons, you're given an account number by which you have to enter your account number first, and then you dial the number that's on a pre-approved list of numbers you can call.
And then debits you have in your prison bank account are debited for the overpriced call, and it's usually several times the going rate.
In any case, that makes it very easy for them to play back all the calls by this person, because they know that this person who entered their account number first placed all these calls and when and all that.
So it's pretty easy to do in most of these places.
And you can bet that if they're doing this with prisoners now, the next target is the general population, maybe starting with suspicious people and cohorts of suspicious people, but eventually storing all of our conversations for our convenience and security.
I mean, they already store the conversations of suspicious people.
We talk about it on the air all the time.
But do they store them in a way that can be simply called up on a computer by all sorts of different people?
I mean, they might not be smart enough to implement such a database, but I'm sure they would like to.
And they will, guaranteed.
The resources are definitely there.
The NSA has just incredible disk storage capacities, and that could be done.
And the NSA has already been found to have co-opted various telecom companies like AT&T and Verizon, but not Quest to do such a thing.
Quest is the only one that said, no, not without a warrant.
So wait, you're actually saying that there's a decent phone company out there, Quest?
Yeah, well, they're not doing very well, and they kind of lost some federal contracts after they said no.
How about that?
So there goes to show why a lot of these companies sort of go along with these things.
They know they're not going to get shot down when they make a bid on the next huge federal telecom contract.
So I don't think it's a coincidence that Quest lost a lot of government business after they said, no, we're not going to do this without legal warrants.
Scary.
Yeah, it is.
Okay, moving on.
You might recall last May we discussed this a little bit.
There was a conflict between – a small conflict between the Soviets – not the Soviets, the Russians and Estonia.
And there was a whole big denial of service attack to certain governmental websites in Estonia that was blamed on Russia.
And politicians, businesses, they were all attacked over a period of several weeks.
Now, at the time, relations between Russia and Estonia were chillier than usual due in part to the Estonian government's plans to move a World War II-era memorial known as the Bronze Soldier away from the center of the city and into a cemetery.
The country's plan was controversial, and it led to protests that were often led by the country's ethnic Russian minority.
Now, when the cyberattacks occurred, Estonia claimed that Russia was either directly or indirectly involved, an allegation that the Russian government denied.
Well, as it turns out, almost a year later, the Russian government appears to have been telling the truth about its involvement or lack thereof in these attacks against Estonia.
InfoWorld reports that an Estonian youth has been arrested for the attacks, and current evidence suggests he was acting independently.
Prosecutors in Estonia have stated they have no other suspects.
Because the attacks were botnet-driven and launched from servers all over the globe, it's impossible to state definitively that only a single individual was involved.
The 20-year-old Estonian student launched the denial-of-service attacks from his own PC last year.
Although he's a native Estonian, he was angry over his government's plans to move the statue and launched the attack as a means of protesting the decision.
It's fascinating, though, that a single person was able to do all of this and get an entire country blamed.
It just goes to show how people jump to conclusions about things like this.
So one Estonian youth?
One Estonian youth.
It's real inspiration, I guess, to denial-of-service people all over the world.
On that subject, of course, we have to move on to something that's been in the news a bit, and that's this.
We talked about this last week a little bit.
There apparently is a war going on between—well, here's the thing that bothers me.
It's been reported widely in the media that these are hackers attacking the Church of Scientology website.
Now, last week we reported it, and this is how the story was reported.
The attack was launched by a user calling himself Anonymous on the website Project Chanology.
Now, obviously, it's not one user.
It's many users.
And this is a group of people known as Anonymous.
Not exactly the most brilliant name in the world, but we've talked about them before.
I have a decree for the mass media.
Oh, no, not a decree involving this.
When it says Anonymous on the internet, that could mean that just someone declined to provide any name,
not that they have chosen the handle of Anonymous.
Yeah, but in this particular case, it's this group that calls themselves Anonymous.
We've had this misreported before, so I don't know.
But here's a typical story.
This comes from PC World.
Hackers hit Scientology with online attack.
A group of hackers calling itself—is that even right, calling itself a group of hackers?
A group?
Yeah, I guess the group is calling itself.
I'm sorry.
Has hit the Church of Scientology's website with an online attack.
The attack was launched January 19th by Anonymous,
which is seeking media attention to help save people from Scientology by reversing the brainwashing.
Anonymous claims to have knocked the church's website offline with a distributed denial-of-service attack
in which many computers bombard the victim's server with requests,
overwhelming it with data in the hope of ultimately knocking the system offline.
True to its name, Anonymous does not disclose the true identities of its members.
Now, this is interesting because there have been all sorts of reports and stories about this.
Here's something from the National Post.
I believe this is the Canadian newspaper.
I guess it's a blog on National Post, you know, those powerful bloggers.
This guy says,
Last week I wrote a story on how an anonymous online group declared war on Scientology.
It became one of the more popular items on our site,
and I received responses from members of the online group.
Now, I'm not sure how you know you're a member of this group if you're anonymous,
but we'll get into that later.
Now, here are some comments I received from various people who claim to be part of this group.
We aren't an online group of hackers.
We are everyday people.
We are your students.
We are your teachers.
We are also even your janitors.
Why is that such a surprise that they'd even be janitors?
Now, in fact, in your office, or at least in your building, you probably have a member or two of Anonymous,
and I should point out Anonymous is capitalized.
A lot of people have tried to attack us while we have been focusing all our resources onto a single goal.
Our ISC servers have suffered a direct hit and thus forcing us to move onto a different network.
We have members in every major public organization.
This is how we get people's addresses and contact details.
So it's funny to see this, to see one giant group of people going after another giant group of people,
and at least in one case, this is according to Wired, anti-Scientology agitators,
and I guess that's probably a better word,
have repeatedly harassed and threatened violence against a 59-year-old PG and E worker and his wife
who were mistakenly flagged as pro-Scientology hackers.
John Lawson, who lives in Stockton, California, with his wife Julia,
began receiving threatening phone calls around 2 a.m. Saturday morning.
He didn't know why until this organization called Threat Level explained that a hacking group
calling itself The Goons, Goons spelled with zeros, not goons with the letter O,
posted his home address, phone number, and cell numbers, as well as Julia's social security number, online.
The obscene and threatening calls have continued through yesterday.
Now, these calls are just one small offshoot of an ongoing larger attack on the Church of Scientology
by a ragtag group of Internet troublemakers who call themselves Anonymous.
The group says it is targeting Scientology in part for its use of litigation to suppress
unflattering documents on the Internet.
And over the weekend, The Goons thought they had caught a hacker who had busted into a server
being used to help coordinate the online attacks and real-world protests against Scientology,
but Lawson says the callers have the wrong guy.
I don't even really know how to use a computer, he says.
And his phone keeps on ringing all the time.
Now, I've heard all kinds of things that there's wars between different groups now,
some fighting Scientology, some fighting themselves.
All these people are at least as crazy as the Scientologists.
That's the point I was going to bring up here.
It sounds to me, I mean, first of all, speaking of decrees,
how do you decree that a bunch of people, a bunch of anonymous people,
who I assume don't know each other, that are going to perform one action like this?
How do you do that? Does anybody have any theory?
Well, it could just be one person in Estonia with multiple identities.
You think it's that guy again?
It could be a different person in Estonia.
It's got a few people in the country.
It's quite possible, but I don't know.
We've reported on this before when they target a particular organization or a group of people,
and all of a sudden you literally have thousands of people calling numbers
and performing certain activities.
At least they're keeping themselves busy.
They are.
I find all of these people very unpleasant, so it doesn't bother me that much.
Well, do you think this is an effective tactic to launch against somebody you don't like?
I mean, I think Scientology is looking good because of this.
They're looking like victims.
Well, I think it's hard to see Scientologists as victims
considering all the information that's out there about their cult.
It's hard. No, I'll give you that.
But when somebody is silenced and unable to speak up, I don't know.
Even if they say horrible things, I kind of want to hear them dig themselves under.
From what I understand, the DDoSing was phase one of their operation.
Phase one, huh?
And it was only to get the attention of major media outlets.
And now that they are moving on to phase two, which is a large-scale PR war.
Uh-huh. Okay.
First of all, how do you get updates on something like this?
Every major news site is covering this, from Dig to—
But where are they getting their updates?
Who speaks for Anonymous?
Anyone.
So we can speak for Anonymous.
We could.
All right.
So major media, this is what we're going to do next.
We're going to target the Girl Scouts of America.
Wow, that's not me saying it. It's Anonymous.
Oh, wait.
And read their cookie stash.
Okay, there's something flawed with the way I'm doing this.
Okay, I'm going to go online later.
Well, no, I'm not going to tell you what I'm going to do later.
Yeah, okay.
But basically what you're saying is anyone can go online and say anything they want
and say they're part of this group.
This seems to me like that would never work.
How could that work?
You'll have all different people saying all different things.
Well, it looks like it's working.
Is it working?
Well, it's been censored off Dig and YouTube now.
Yeah, but I see Scientology in the news more than ever now.
So I don't know.
Is that the desired effect?
Well, isn't that the point?
Didn't they want to get attention?
Scientology likes to get attention, yes.
And it seems like they're giving it to them.
Well, every time we talk about Scientology,
we're talking about Anonymous.
So it seems like they're winning either way.
Okay.
Although I have to say, letting Scientology –
people have seen the Tom Cruise video.
Letting Scientology speak for itself is at least as effective of a tactic.
I mean, what I'd like to know, this is my question,
and maybe people who understand this can call us and explain it to me.
If you find yourself part of this group
and you disagree with what they're doing, all right, what happens then?
How does that work?
Do they take action against you for disagreeing with them
or for acting against the Anonymous people?
Yes.
I'm sorry, Bernie, go ahead.
This happened to me.
What, you're part of Anonymous?
No.
I thought you were talking about Scientology.
You're part of Scientology?
No.
Boy, this has been a day of revelation.
Okay, go ahead.
Tell us.
Oh, it's a long story.
I'll try to make it brief.
In a former life, I worked as an offset printer
in a company that did printing of, you know,
nice three-color glossy brochures and banks.
This is the part of the story that doesn't have to be described.
Well, anyhow, it was owned, the printing company was owned
by the owner of the local Scientology franchise,
which I didn't know until one night I had to print a bunch of flyers,
direct mail stuff about Scientology.
And I really wasn't sure what it was.
This was a long time ago.
I mean, I'd heard of it.
I didn't know exactly what it was.
I did some research in the library,
and I found out what a spooky it was.
And then the owner and his girlfriend really tried very hard
to get me to get involved with it.
They had, like, encyclopedias of Scientology dogma
at the printing company.
It was really spooky.
And I had to show up for my first paycheck.
I had to show up at the local franchise,
the Church Scientology.
It had a big cross on it.
And they wouldn't pay me.
I had to give them my paycheck right away.
I had to listen to this Delaware and Hubbard tape.
It was really crazy.
And then they put me in this room and really tried to,
like, convince me to put a hand on my knee,
try to convince me to join,
and try to find out how she got into it.
And it turned out they got her into it
when her boyfriend was killed in a car accident
and she was emotionally vulnerable.
And anyhow, I finally was able to get my paycheck
and get out of there, and then they fired me the next day.
Oh, actually, no, I told my guy who lived in the house
I was renting about how nasty these people were.
And when the Scientologists came to her door
and tried to recruit him, he said,
Oh, no, I'm not interested.
This guy across the hall, Ed,
told me all about you guys.
You're evil.
And then they really got mad at me.
So, yeah, they go after you.
Well, to get back to the original point
of dissent among the group,
you have to understand that Anonymous
is just a bunch of people on online forums.
And if you don't like what's going on, you don't post.
Well, what if you don't like what's going on,
and you do post, saying,
I don't like what's going on.
Can you do that?
Well, then probably the large majority
is going to be like, Oh, you're stupid.
Okay.
I guess.
I just wonder how the large majority
gets formed in the first place.
It seems like the core members of Anonymous
Ah, core members.
So there is an elite crust.
Well, the people who are actually partaking
in the attacks have moved on
from these original online forums to specific forums.
So it's only people who are part of this group.
Why is this necessary?
Why can't people not anonymously simply say,
I think this organization of people is terrible,
and this is why.
Why does it have to be like this,
an anonymous group of people taking them down?
Well, because for better or worse,
this is getting a lot more mass media attention
than if someone just wrote a blog entry saying,
I don't like Scientologists.
Well, no, but if you just let them do it themselves,
Scientology, the video gets out,
Tom Cruise acting all crazy, jumping up and down,
and that gets media attention,
and people look at it, and it's negative attention.
So, I mean, can you get better attention than that?
This is, I think it's a different kind of,
I mean, the crazy Tom Cruise stuff
has been getting attention for years now.
I mean, he hasn't just started doing this.
He's been crazy for a while.
Okay, let's not get him calling us now.
People are getting, you know,
they're getting used to that kind of stuff.
The thing is, I mean, it's fine with me if he's crazy
and speaking out for whatever he believes in,
but when it starts affecting innocent people,
that's when you got to say something.
Well, it always affects innocent people
when big celebrities kind of say all this crazy stuff.
You know, people look up to people like that,
and they think, wow,
this might actually be something worth considering,
and then they explore,
and then Scientology gets kind of the stronghold
in using all their crazy intimidation tactics
and stuff to get you to join.
Unlike any other organized religion ever.
Well, the Scientology, I mean, they're pretty intense.
I mean, you know.
All right, well.
I don't know.
I think it's best to have documented evidence
and people speaking about this
rather than having, well, it amounts to just
anonymous vandalism.
Like I said, it makes them look like victims,
and that's the one thing you don't want.
Well, one interesting thing that has come out of this
is the releasing of a lot of internal Scientology documents.
Oh, that's always fun.
And there's, I mean, one of them, Operation,
I can't remember, I think it might have been Snow White,
described how, snow something,
that back in the 60s,
Scientology partook in the largest
infiltration of the United States government to date.
Clambake.
Clambake?
Isn't that it?
It was one of them.
Okay.
But things like that,
and the killing of their own members
who spoke out against them,
just gigs and gigs of internal documents.
That sounds like the mob.
I mean, you know, no one's going around condemning the mob,
and they do that kind of thing all the time.
You know, organized crime.
What?
Yeah.
Okay, I'll tell you about that later.
Okay, this is something clever, though.
Some people have attacked them on a totally different front.
It's called Google bombing.
We know what Google bombing is.
Now, apparently, if you go to Google,
and you type dangerous cult into Google,
the very first hit is the Church of Scientology.
Now, who would like to explain how Google bombing works?
Nobody?
Apparently, I get to.
Okay.
Google bombing, if you take a phrase
that's not so common, maybe, on the Internet,
and you have a lot of people link with that phrase,
they put a link,
and the text of that link is, in this case, dangerous cult,
and the target of that link is, in this case, Scientology,
then eventually Google will notice
that a lot of people think that the website Scientology
and the phrase dangerous cult are related,
and so that's what will happen.
Okay, that sounds good.
One of the first cases where this was prominent
is if you search for miserable failure,
George Bush's biography would come up.
That still works, right?
Miserable failure gets George W. Bush?
I haven't tried it in years, but maybe.
That's the decree.
That's the decree we have to come up with for this hour.
We come up with two words,
and people Google bomb,
so that if you type in, what should the two words be?
How about awesome radio?
Yeah, because we do awesome radio,
so you type awesome radio into Google,
and you get us.
No?
Well, think of something better, okay?
Because I don't hear you guys coming up with anything.
Yeah, all right.
Our phone number, 209-2900,
if you have any comments
on some of the things you've heard
over the past 40 minutes or so.
Our email address, othat2600.com.
We get all kinds of mail,
some of it rather amazing
and some of it not so amazing.
Let's see.
Here's something from a listener.
This morning, I caught a cab to the airport
and noticed a sticker in the window
stating all passengers will be photographed.
Sure enough, there was a camera
slightly larger than a radar detector
pointed right at me,
mounted on the windshield.
Had I noticed it before the cab started the meter,
I would have gotten out
and waited for the next non-privacy-invading taxi.
This is the first time I've seen this.
It was in one of those small SUV cabs.
Actually, they're not so small.
They're big SUV cabs.
I wonder who has access to the recordings
and what purpose these cameras serve,
aside from the misguided illusion of safety
they are presumed to provide.
Thanks for any thoughts you may have on the matter.
I love the show.
Look forward to seeing you all at Hope.
Signed, Fernando.
And also, Fernando asks how Jim is doing.
Bernie, do you have the address for Jim?
I'm sorry, Bernie.
I had to...
I do have it.
Okay, good.
Let me change the subject for two seconds.
Okay.
As far as how Jim is doing,
last we heard he's still in the nursing home,
I believe, in Brooklyn recovering.
Yes.
He's at the Caton Park Nursing Home.
It's C-A-T-O-N.
And he is recovering slowly.
I corresponded with his sister, who's in Australia,
about a week or so ago.
And she came out to visit him after he had his stroke.
He's recovering slowly.
It's a slow process to recover from a stroke.
But slow improvement.
Too slow, but it's happening.
I'd like to give his address out in the air
so listeners who would like to brighten Jim's day can send him a letter.
Yes, please.
And that is the Caton, C-A-T-O-N, Park Nursing Home,
attention Jim Vichench, V-I-C-H-E-N-C-H,
at 1312 Caton Avenue, room 312B, as in Bravo,
in Brooklyn, New York, 11226.
Again, it's Caton Park Nursing Home,
attention Jim Vichench, 1312 Caton Avenue, room 312B,
in Brooklyn, New York, 11226.
He can read pretty well now.
He's having trouble writing,
so it's better that you write to him and not be too put out if he doesn't write back.
But he's learning to get his writing skills back.
Imagine that this happens to you,
where you suddenly can't communicate the way that you're used to.
You can't write, and you try speaking and the wrong words come out.
And it's very frustrating.
But inside, inside you're still there 100% or close to 100%.
Imagine that frustration, and that is what we believe Jim is going through right now.
So that's why contact and any sort of communication is of vital importance.
So please definitely write to Jim.
Those people who know Jim, feel free to visit him.
Every little bit helps.
All right, here's another letter.
Dear OffTheHook, my 83-year-old mother is a regular listener of your program.
Well, special hello to you.
She suggested I ask you about a problem we're having.
We were trying to set Skype up for her on her computer,
but we're only partially successful.
When we try to talk to her using Skype, she can hear us, but we can't hear her.
She also has VoIP phone service.
This is amazing.
I don't know many 83-year-olds who have computers, let alone VoIP and Skype.
But they're asking if VoIP phone service would interfere with Skype.
Signed, Dana.
This sounds like something we should be able to help them figure out.
It's unlikely that any other VoIP service would interfere with Skype,
but that specific problem sounds like it might be a misconfigured sound card.
And it's, you know, without looking at the computer,
it's not very easy to suggest a solution over the air.
Is there a service they could possibly make use of that can help troubleshoot this?
I don't know.
There's a test function built into Skype where you can make a test call,
and then you talk into your microphone, and then it plays it back to you.
But I assume they did that test and it's not working.
So they should check their microphone connection at the very least
and see if the microphone works with other applications.
And if it doesn't, then try another microphone or check your sound card settings.
Yeah, always try swapping things out
to see if something might be just faulty or not connected properly,
and you might find a solution that way.
Otherwise, maybe there's other people.
Maybe some of our friends also are computer people,
and they might be able to come over and help out as well.
But hats off to you for listening and for using Skype
and just staying ahead of everything.
Most people I know can't be bothered, so it's good to see this.
Dear OffTheHook, I use Wget, the program W-G-E-T, to download stuff.
Sometimes I use it to archive an entire site for when I travel as I am in the military.
Recently, after downloading a site, I noticed in their robots.txt file
that they threaten huge fines for using unauthorized crawling agents.
Can I be sued for downloading a site like that?
They did not ban the Wget agent from the site,
and Wget respects the directories banned in the robots.txt file by default.
I'm sorry, but I get a little paranoid, and I don't want to get sued.
Do you have any opinions from a justifiably paranoid dude?
It's interesting. Wget is a program that you use literally to grab a site,
all the subdirectories, everything that's publicly available.
Robots.txt is a text file that literally lists directories
that you aren't supposed to do that to.
Specifically, robots.txt is more designed for web search crawlers,
so I don't know if a single person using Wget would be considered a crawler.
Wget does respect the robots.txt file,
so if the website owner put in their robot.txt file either Wget go away
or everybody go away or whatever,
then Wget would listen to that.
So I would advise the site owner to, rather than making threats in English,
just tell the unwanted software in computer speak to go away,
but I don't know if anyone could be sued or not.
Well, maybe I just have a devious mind,
but it seems to me that if you have a file there
telling you what directories not to look in,
that that pretty much gives you the exact address of the directories
where the good stuff is.
You can make Wget not respect the robots.txt file if you wanted to,
and there's no reason why you couldn't manually just retrieve all those files.
Would he get sued or would he get prosecuted?
I don't know that a single person, I mean, I'm not a lawyer, don't take my advice,
but it doesn't seem like a single person could be considered a crawler
if you're not indexing it for a search engine or anything like that.
Except I don't think this legal threat was just aimed at a program,
I think it was aimed at people.
So the only way, I guess, is to find out and be the first and see what happens.
Of course anyone could be sued for anything.
That's true.
You just have to win.
We had the judge last week who said that, what was it,
that zone transfers are illegal?
Yeah.
In North Dakota.
In North Dakota, or who is?
Typing who is and getting information on a website, that can be illegal?
So anything, anything you can be sued for.
So yeah, if you want to be ultra-cautious, then don't do anything.
All right, let's take some phone calls.
212-209-2900, let's go over here.
Good evening, you're on Off The Hook.
Yes, I have a MySpace site.
You know, I'm not surprised, Rebel, I'm not surprised at all,
but thanks for letting us know that.
Another reason to avoid MySpace.
Good evening, you're on Off The Hook.
MySpace.com slash RichTheRebel.
You're on every single phone line again, aren't you?
This is why I do this.
People ask why I hang up on you.
This is why, because you call every line at once.
Good evening, you're on Off The Hook.
Recently, I had a virus or something, it disabled my task manager.
How can I get that back?
Sounds like a question for the personal computer people.
Oh, okay.
And they come on in about 10 minutes, so save that for them.
All right, let's move on.
Good evening, you're on Off The Hook.
Hey, Emmanuel.
How are you doing?
What's up?
Not much, where are you calling from?
Rockwell County, New York.
Let me take your speaker phone, because you'll probably hear a lot better.
All right, what's on your mind?
Two things.
Number one, I'm not so put out about the taxi cams,
just for the simple reason that I'm pretty sure that if you look it up,
that taxi drivers have the same type of dangerous job that cops do,
as far as the numbers of cabbies that die every year because of robberies.
So, yeah, I understand that they're reluctant.
I don't know if they're just using those files for whatever
or whether they're keeping them at all.
But, you know, I didn't get bent out of shape out of that.
About the Google bombing?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I've seen that used a lot of times.
As a matter of fact, on one blog I read, a woman plugged in,
seriously depressed chick, and her site came up.
Or seriously psychotic chick, and her thing came up, and she didn't know why.
But anyway, have a wonderful day, and talk to you soon.
Thanks for your call.
I kind of agree with his comment about the cab cameras.
I would be okay if it was a system such as like a one-hour loop or something,
where if something happened, if he got robbed or something,
he can freeze that loop and then have the past hour of footage.
Do you know what I mean?
Like it's not like you're continuously logging all of that video footage.
It's not practical.
But if you had an hour loop or something like that.
Well, then somebody who's robbing him would know that
and make him drive around for an hour until the tape looped.
Well, it's a determined end.
Maybe you can catch someone who consistently robs cabs.
I don't know.
The thing is if you convince yourself that everybody has to be monitored at all times
because of something that might either be done to them or something they might do,
then you pretty much justified constant surveillance.
I don't agree with that.
But that's the society we're starting to live in.
If the point of the camera is to catch criminals robbing them,
why have a sticker saying you're on camera?
Because that way it prevents the person from committing the crime in the first place.
You know what? I'm going to rob somebody else, not this guy.
What if they just break the camera and then rob the person?
Because presumably it's being stored someplace maybe not obvious to the person doing that.
And he wants to get out of there as quickly as possible.
The person in the letter sounded like he easily spotted the camera though.
Spotted the camera, but where is it being recorded?
Maybe in the trunk or something.
Then he has to open up the trunk.
Or maybe it's being transmitted someplace.
You never know.
If you just break the camera.
Listen, we can discuss this for hours
and theorize as to how best to rob a cab driver.
But the point is it's a deterrent by showing a camera in your face.
I don't know that it actually works that well as a deterrent.
Because I've actually been in stores that have been robbed well.
There were numerous signs stating specifically that there's surveillance cameras there.
Yeah, I can't understand why people rob stores where it's obvious they're being filmed.
Well, I think he was specifically very high on some kind of drug.
But that's also the sort of thing that would make you do that.
There's always that.
Just to remind the guys, we have only a few minutes left.
Come up with a decree.
Google bombing I think is the thing to come up with a decree for.
But maybe two words that describe us that are kind of common words.
So that not typing off the hook into Google and getting us.
Obviously that's going to result in it anyway.
Two words, right?
Think about it.
You guys are just giving me blank expressions.
Blank expressions.
There you go.
Type in blank expressions and get off the hook.
I think you guys just wrote it for us.
All right.
Mike, do you have anything better?
I have no further comments.
They rejected the two decrees I proposed.
Yeah, because they weren't really.
All right.
Never mind.
212-209-2900.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Yes.
You're calling on the better phone now.
No, it's not better.
It's not better.
Let's try this one.
This one might be better.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Hello.
Yes, this is better.
Yes, hi.
Watch on your mind.
I'm 82 and I also have the question about Skype.
Awesome.
I want to know how many octogenarians listen to this program.
Well, anyway, I just wanted to tell you that I'm looking for another phone company because
of what happened with Verizon and AT&T.
Have you got any suggestions?
Well, where are you located?
Vonage, for instance.
Okay.
You're just anywhere in the country, you mean?
Well, I'm in Manhattan.
Okay.
Well, for VoIP, there's Vonage.
There's Skype.
I don't have that many suggestions.
Yeah.
I mean, you can find a whole bunch just by searching for it online.
What would you put in the browser?
Home VoIP service perhaps, something like that?
Yeah, VoIP services or even just VoIP will get you a whole list of companies.
And look for consumer reviews.
Wait a minute.
V-L-I-P as in Victor –
No, no, no.
V-O.
Voice over IP.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
And that will get you a whole list of all different companies.
And then look for reviews.
Look for what people say about them, good reviews, bad reviews, and try one out.
Sounds good.
Here's a few.
V-E-I-P.com?
V-O-I-P.
Oh, V-O.
I finally got it.
Okay.
Got it.
Thank you.
All right.
Thanks for your call.
Okay.
And Bernie, you had suggestions too?
Well, I mean, I just did exactly what you suggested.
And there's bringing up residential voice over IP phone carriers such as Broadvoice,
Lingo, Packet 8.
That's some of them.
All right.
Hey, we have a full switchboard here.
Let's get some more calls.
And good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Hi.
I wonder if you could elucidate a telephone mystery.
Okay.
There are a couple of 800 numbers that you can call to call your Congress critters for
free.
Mm-hmm.
And obviously somebody's footing the bill, but I don't know who.
Ah.
And I thought if I knew who was footing the bill for these different numbers, then I could
choose the number of whatever organization I was least fond of to foot the bill.
Uh-huh.
If, say, if one's left wing and one's right wing or whatever.
Is there a way of finding out?
Well, one way I can think of off the top of my head, which is sort of cheating, is simply
typing the name of that person into a browser, then typing the word toll-free after that.
If the people want their constituents or their followers or whatever to call that particular
Congress person, odds are they've advertised it on a web page someplace, and those words
would show up.
Typing what name?
You could just search for the phone number itself that you're dialing.
That's true, too.
And see what website is telling you to use it.
That's a better idea, because, yeah, if a website is telling you to use that particular
phone number, odds are that's a website operated by those people.
You can, if you enter the area code in parentheses in the exchange, three digits, then a dash,
and the last four digits, and put that whole thing in quotation marks and Google that,
you will more than likely find out who is advertising it, and that's probably who is
behind it and who is costing money whenever you call that toll-free number.
Okay.
Let's take another call.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Hello.
I just want you to know that this is another pair of octogenarians that love and have
been listening for many, many, many years.
Awesome.
And we're waiting for the brain machine.
Okay.
Wow.
That's something.
Where are you calling from?
From Marinette, New York.
That's great.
We're at Freddy Say Hi.
You've got to let Freddy say hi.
Freddy Say Hi.
Hi there.
Listen to you every week.
It's great to know.
Great to know our signal is getting out there.
Any question or comment you have?
Yes.
Yes.
We'd like to know if we can send some goodies to Jim.
Yes.
Yes, I think so.
He accepts goodies and I visited his place and they have no problem with him receiving
packages.
Oh, wonderful.
Okay.
Because we bake...
He has no dietary restrictions that I know of.
Great.
Because we bake some mean breads.
Oh, wow.
I mean like sweet breads and rye breads and spice breads and fun breads.
You can send us things too, you know.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yeah.
You can send us things too, you know.
Can we?
Well, you know, we tried to bring them over but they've got all these guards downstairs
and I don't have a...
What do they call that of, an ID with a face on it.
Yeah.
Give the guard a piece of bread.
That'll keep him quiet for a while.
Oh, wow.
Right or a hug.
Uh-huh.
You have Jim's address, right?
Yes
Okay.
Thanks so much for listening and for calling
And we thank you so much for being there.
Big hugs to you all.
Bye-bye.
Okay.
Okay.
Take care.
That's really cool, I'm really impressed.
have a lot of octogenarians listening to this show and maybe next week we'll go
for 90 plus or people in the in the century. Let's take one more phone call.
Good evening. You are on Off The Hook.
Hi Emmanuel, I just have something to say about the Google bombing.
Okay, quickly. Go ahead.
I know that it'll work better if the keywords you use are actually appear on your site somewhere.
Oh, okay.
Because if you search for a dangerous cult you'll see that Scientology is number one but it
highlights the word dangerous because they have the text that says living in a dangerous
environment and that's highlighted in the Google search.
And they have the word cult on their website?
I think they do somewhere because I know I've read why they are not a cult on their site before.
Wow, okay. Well we just have to put the words blank expression on our site and then we'll be set.
Just to remind everybody this coming Friday is 2600 meetings.
That's right, 2600 meetings all around the world.
Check if there's a meeting in your area www.2600.com slash meetings.
And this is Emmanuel for Off The Hook.
We'll be back again next week with more fun and excitement.
Write to us OTH at 2600.com if you have goodies to send us.
WBAI 120 Wall Street, New York, New York 10005.
Five. Yeah, we got to split that up again.
We do.
All right, we'll see you next week. Good night.
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All righty, all righty, okay.
Hey, you know, you know what, Giuliani didn't make it.
I'm sure Hank is all upset about that.
Hank, yes, he's starting to tear now.