And that wraps up today's program. The newscast was produced by Katherine Komp.
Headlines editors are Nell Abram and Jess Burns. Washington, D.C. editor is Leanne Caldwell.
Our technical production team at KPFA and Berkeley includes Rose Katopci and Scott Pham.
You can visit us online at fsrn.org. You can send questions, comments or news tips to comments at fsrn.org.
Thanks for listening. In New York, I'm Dorian Marina.
And you're listening to Radio Station WBAI New York. It's 7 o'clock. Time for Off The Hook.
I cut myself while shaving. Now I can't make a cut.
We couldn't get much worse. But if they could, they would.
Bum-diddly-bum for the best, expect the worst. I hope that's understood. Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum for the best, expect the worst. I hope that's understood. Bum-diddly-bum!
And very good evening to everybody. The program is Off The Hook. Emmanuel Goldstein here with you on this Wednesday evening.
Joined tonight by Mike, Jim, Voltaire, Rob T. Firefly, Bernie S. down in Philadelphia.
Greetings from Philadelphia.
And special guest tonight, Nick Farr. How you doing?
Hey, how's it going, man?
Just wandering into town, eh?
Well, I'm sort of bouncing between New York and D.C. right now for work, so it's great to be up here.
I was listening to some older programs earlier, before HAR earlier this year, where you were organizing Hackers on a Plane,
and of course you're over there in Holland doing all kinds of interesting things. What projects are you up to now?
Well, I'm currently putting together another Hackers on a Plane over to Berlin.
Really? For the winter?
Yeah, for the winter. I know it's kind of last minute.
You've never done that before, have you?
Not to the Congress, no. The first one was to the 2007 CCC camp.
There was a sort of pre-Hackers on a Plane that Bernie was on to Vienna, and then immediately after that, Hackers on a Plane 2 to HAR.
And then, yeah, Hackers on a Plane 3, as soon as I get one more contract lined up, we'll be all set.
But we've got the housing taken care of, we've got the tickets taken care of, we've got everything else taken care of out there.
We just need to get the airlines to operate.
And I imagine fares for airlines are lower in the winter than in the summer, usually.
Well, it's a peak season for Berlin, actually.
Is it?
Yeah, because everybody likes to go to Berlin to party right around New Year's.
New Year's is probably Berlin's peak season. It's one of the most popular destinations in Europe for New Year's.
So that makes things a little bit complicated, even though we're coming in before and right after that holiday.
What geek number are you going to play off of? You've already done 1337 and Pi, I think.
And the only other one I can think of is 42. So what are you going to do until you reach the 42nd one?
I'm thinking about, if it works out, pricing it at $1,457.
Somebody got that joke.
I'm trying to get that joke.
Oh, yeah.
Your lead speak foo has not been used.
That's one language I definitely have not pursued, and I've been studying it for a while.
But anyway, that sounds great. Would it involve going to different cities or just pretty much Berlin?
No, just Berlin, based entirely in Berlin for the conference.
And where would people be staying? Do you have any idea?
People would be staying near Warschauer Strasse station at a really nice facility right there,
and it's only three S-Bahn stops away from Alexanderplatz, and it's walking distance from the sea base.
So that makes it really nice.
I'm really looking forward to going over there again this year.
I'm doing it almost every year now for the last decade, and Berlin just never bores me.
It's always a fun place to be, and I've spent the last few there for New Year's.
I used to go to Amsterdam for New Year's, and Berlin, I think, is also an amazing place to be.
But I imagine other European cities, too, will be a lot of fun on New Year's.
So it's too bad it only happens once a year.
I'd love to check out what's happening in other places as well.
No, of course.
Yes.
Hey, Emanuel.
You all right, Bernie?
I just want to say Nick really put together an awesome trip every time he does a Hackers on a Plane.
I had a fantastic time going to Vienna, then through Germany, then to Haar.
Nick does a fantastic job.
If people are interested in this trip you're putting together now, Nick, how would they get more information?
Right now, since it hasn't been posted to Hackersonaplane.info, but they can e-mail info at Hackersonaplane.info.
That's a lot of info there.
Info at Hackersonaplane.info.
Yes.
It's almost like a palindrome, but not quite.
Not exactly.
Almost.
I should try to work on that for next year.
It will be posted shortly.
I hope to have an update, everything finalized by next week.
What makes you do this?
I mean, tearing your hair out as far as...
I'm sorry.
You've just torn it all out.
I guess you have, but metaphorically, of course, it's a lot of work.
It's a lot of hassle organizing these things, and yet something drives you to just keep coming back and doing it every Hacker event.
Every time after I finish one of these, I say, I'm never doing this again.
I'm never doing it again.
It's not going to happen.
And then wonderful people like Bernie show up and say, I had such a great time.
When are you doing the next one?
And I feel like I can't let them down.
Do you know there are people who actually organize Hacker events for the sole purpose of seeing you organize Hackersonaplane to get to those Hacker events?
They don't really want to do the Hacker events.
They just want to see you go through all the trouble.
They want to see the chaos.
Yeah, they really do.
They want to see this whole Save Nick thing again.
The Hacker world is a messed up place.
The people are not.
We love it.
No, it's true.
It's our family.
All right.
Well, I hope it works out, but Hackersonaplane.info.
Are you involved in other projects as well?
Well, I'm actually up here.
I don't know if I can quite disclose this, but I'm helping MakerBot out.
You can just put redacted and whatever words you can't say.
Yeah, exactly.
We'll bleep it on the recordings.
No, up here helping MakerBot and just still working out.
What is a MakerBot?
You don't know what MakerBot is?
Well, I know what it is, but I'm asking for the listeners who don't know what it is.
It's the future.
Every time I'm asked to give my 42 points to him.
That's really vague, Nick.
Yeah, that's pretty vague.
Let's be a little more specific than that.
I'm setting it up.
I'm getting people excited.
Now they're pulling into the driveway listening.
Have you listened to this radio show?
Normally we consider the future is going to suck,
so why don't you tell us this awesome thing from the future?
Well, for those of you that are familiar with RepRap, MakerBot is—
You just introduced another word now you have to explain.
It's rapid prototyping.
It's printing three-dimensional objects, designing, printing, running,
and building things in your own home.
Didn't we see that at HAL 2001 a while ago with the 3D printers?
But this is the first, I'd say, consumer edition.
Granted, you still have to be pretty much a pretty dedicated hobbyist for it,
but the technology has come an incredibly long way
based purely on open source development methods.
And MakerBot's the first, I'd say, real viable commercial venture
into fabrication at home,
taking basically plastic like one takes toner from a regular laser printer
and printing real three-dimensional objects.
Made out of plastic, though.
Admittedly made out of plastic, but anything that you can make that's—
I can't say Earl Grey tea hot and expect this thing to print a cup of tea.
No, no, we're not quite there yet, but you can print the tea cup.
It can print you the cup.
A plastic cup? All right, that's a start.
I'm not sure if you could quite serve tea in it.
Earl Grey tea cold, then.
Well, with a little, but it's that future.
That's what Brie, Zach, and Adam are working on right now
is bringing that future to everybody.
Just like 25, 30 years ago with the desktop publishing revolution,
people printing out newsletters, documents, things like that.
The kind of printing that we take for granted was a really big, huge thing.
Printers cost $1,000.
The software was not quite as advanced as today,
but the guys at MakerBot are making that first step into a world
where we'll be able to print a lot of the things that we need
and a lot of the objects that we use in our homes in our homes,
just like we print paper today.
Will you be able to print something that has any kind of mechanical abilities,
or are they just pretty much stationary objects?
Well, no.
They're stationary objects that you can combine
into things that work together with a couple of extra parts.
That's the great thing about it is that it is a global phenomenon.
People around the world are developing new three-dimensional objects
and devices that are made from combining these three-dimensional objects
that you print out at home.
They're continually refining and improving everybody else's designs
all around the world.
If you have access to the Internet,
you can take part in this global rapid fabrication movement.
So what's the next thing we're going to see?
What are you specifically involved in helping to create now?
Well, I'm not.
Like I said, I'm just the accountant.
I'm helping people get through all of the necessary steps
they need to get to where they need to go.
Making sure they spend wisely.
Just helping them out.
It's a big operation.
It's incredibly in demand.
Every time they do a run, they sell out very, very quickly.
Just like anything that's big going into the future,
it's really hard to meet demand,
and sometimes you need help just going through the paperwork.
Do you think one day we'll be printing human organs for transplants?
I don't think we're actually not that far away from that right now.
Yeah, you laugh.
You scoff, Valter, but this is real.
I've read science fiction, and I know what's coming.
Well, no, I mean they're actually—
Emmanuel.
Yes, go ahead, Bernie.
Actually, that is being experimented with right now.
Last year down here at the Make Philly group,
there was a lecturer who was talking about just that,
that they're experimenting with printing human organs using stem cells.
Eventually, they'll be able to print a human heart,
or probably starting with parts of human hearts,
like a valve or something like that,
so they don't have to kill a pig or a dog or something like that
to put a valve in your heart.
Plus, it wouldn't be in a rejection thing.
It would be stem cells.
So it's coming.
Yeah.
See, Valter?
Yeah.
You'll think again before you scoff at one of my dreams for the future.
Well, it's amazingly cool.
How do people get involved in things like this
if someone out there is swooning at the thought of this kind of thing?
Well, the best websites to check out are obviously makerbot.com,
and a lot of the design and the collaboration going on there
is at thingiverse.com.
Thingiverse.
Thingiverse.
All the designs for a lot of the things that you can print out on your MakerBot
are at Thingiverse,
and they give great tutorials and great instructions there
on how to get involved in the movement,
design your own three-dimensional objects,
help improve the designs of the ones that are out there,
and take part.
Also, I recommend checking out your local hackerspace,
because I know I think MakerBot's biggest customers are hackerspaces.
Am I right?
Yeah.
They actually have a special discount for hackerspaces.
Zach actually came down and built a sort of middle bridge model RepRap
for HackDC that HackDC is playing with right now,
and hackerspaces all over are playing with their MakerBots
and building things and getting them assembled
and sharing their developments online.
And, of course, I guess hackerspaces I'm always involved in any time.
A hackerspace needs help or advice.
Still working on my Tuesday theory columns for hackerspaces.org,
which are a lot of fun.
And it's about organization.
It's about what I do.
I guess my value add is taking care of all the business-y things
that hackers maybe aren't so good at
because the rules are arcane.
They don't follow a certain sense of logic.
It's just a matter of experience.
And it's not something that's incredibly interesting.
You're not going to be able to participate in innovation of the law
from your desktop.
That reminds me.
Speaking of businesses, hackerspaces,
and things that hackers aren't particularly good at,
we just started to ship the Club Mate to people this week.
We figured out how to do it.
You were the test subject.
We sent you cases of the Club Mate,
which is the German beverage that we somehow wound up being the distributor of
in the United States after The Last Hope,
where we introduced it to a bunch of American hackers
and saw them rapidly get addicted.
So what we did was we sent cases down to you to see if they'd made it,
and they didn't make it.
They broke and smashed.
We had all kinds of trials and tribulations.
But eventually we found the right type of box
and the right type of way to ship it,
and it works fine now.
And this week if you go to clubmate.us, club-m-a-t-e.us.
Right, Mike?
Yes.
You could leave out the dash.
It's up to you.
It's up to you.
Awesome.
Wow.
Okay.
Yeah, you'll find all the information about the beverage there.
You can go to our website, www.2600.com,
and find out about that.
But it's really kind of cool to think that we're in the beverage distribution business now.
It's a lot of fun.
And just a testament to how weird this hacker world is,
printing things, printing human hearts and distributing beverages
and occasionally doing radio and printing magazines as well.
Occasionally, just to keep it.
Yeah, just to keep in touch with our roots.
There was a great article in the Creative Commons blog recently
how there was a music video made for the band Radiohead,
and the data that they used to animate this video
was all placed in the Creative Commons for free download.
So someone downloaded a 3D model of Tom York, the lead singer,
and cleaned that up a bit, loaded it into their 3D printer,
and now they have Tom York's head on their desk.
So, you know, it really is the future.
You too can have Tom York's head on your desk.
Now, can he sue them for that?
He can't because they –
That's intellectual property.
His head is his intellectual property.
But his model was given to Creative Commons.
His head's Creative Commons?
Oh, okay.
So that particular model of Tom York's head is free and clear.
I have a question.
Yes.
Why would you want Tom York's head on your desk?
Mike, if you have to ask that question, I can't explain it to you.
Clearly you've never seen his head, have you?
I've seen pictures of his head.
Really?
But you haven't seen it in 3D.
Yeah, I think that's the difference.
Must be.
All right.
Hey, we want to thank our listeners for supporting us over the last four weeks.
We had a very successful fundraiser.
Last week, in fact, we made $1,700, which I thought was incredible,
with Cory Doctorow and all that.
So thanks.
Thanks very much to everybody.
And this note, if you pledge during the summer fundraiser,
that was the one that took place in August, and you have not paid yet,
you need to do that by next week because we are going to start sending out
the premiums, and basically what we do is we look at the list,
and if you paid, you get something.
If you don't pay, you don't get something.
I mean, that's fair, right?
That's how it should work.
So after next week, well, if we've already looked at the list,
it might be hard for us to get back and look at the list again.
So if you have been delaying on paying for your August pledge,
this is pretty much notice that you've got to take care of that.
It's well past August at this point.
Yeah, it is well past August.
It really should have taken care of it.
And if you pay by credit card, obviously it's already taken care of.
So we'll be sending out the premiums probably in a couple of weeks now.
So, you see, we're all caught up.
We're getting there.
No problems.
Okay.
Now, speaking of problems, though, this is something I'd like people
to listen to, listen very carefully to this noise I'm about to play
because I think you might be a little startled by it
if you haven't been startled by it already.
It's a noise that is appearing in major cities throughout the United States,
maybe even throughout the world.
Yeah, it's a buzzing noise, but it's the noise that the police make in their cars.
This.
We're familiar with that noise, but there's something extra added to this.
Hear that?
That low pitch sound.
Now, you can't really appreciate the full bass of what you're hearing there
with the low pitch noise, but if you've been in New York City,
you've probably heard this over the last few weeks.
It really rattles your bones.
It's a very deep bass-type sound, and apparently this is being used by NYPD now
after what they call successful tests and other police departments
throughout the country because it gets the attention of inattentive drivers
who need to get out of the way.
Unfortunately, it also gets the attention of everybody else within range.
It's a horrible sound.
It really rattles your nerves.
Have you guys noticed this?
Nick?
Yeah, they've had this in D.C., actually, I think for the past 18 months.
Really?
Oh, it's incredibly powerful.
Why didn't you warn us?
We're just hearing it now here.
I just heard it a few weeks ago.
It's amazing how these things get imported into New York,
but no, it is an incredibly powerful sound.
I lived on a third-floor apartment on 16th Street,
and cop cars are coming up and down 16th Street at all hours of the night
with that huge attentive sound.
Granted, when you're driving on a city street at 50, 60 miles an hour
trying to get to a call, I can see how that would happen,
but I've had things fall off shelves based on how powerful these sirens are.
Bernie in Philadelphia, have you heard these?
I haven't heard that particular sound.
Have you seen any of the police vehicles with these mounted on them?
Are they mounted on the top of the vehicle?
You can't see them.
They're mounted on the bottom of the vehicle.
If you're up close to the cars that have them equipped,
you can automatically tell exactly where on the car it's coming from,
but it's mounted on the bottom.
It's specially tuned to reverberate in the pavement.
Is it a woofer?
No, it is a reasonably wide, short cone that I'm assuming creates a sound.
The thing is, in New York, I've noticed that these are being used constantly,
not just for severe emergencies.
I've seen it being used as honking a horn.
Cops use their siren to honk the horn to say,
okay, move, the light's green now,
but they've been using these deep bass noises to do that as well,
and they're very annoying and disturbing.
I think it's not something that's just going to be used on a very special occasion.
I think it's something that's going to be used all the time
unless people speak up about this.
I think it's a good reasoning behind it
that there are so many people that have headphones in their ears,
myself included,
that wouldn't be able to hear a loud siren,
so it kind of overrides the...
Wait, you mean people drive with headphones?
No, pedestrians, people walking...
I thought this was geared towards motorists, not pedestrians.
Why does a police car have to blow its siren at pedestrians?
Okay, well, what if the people have the radio turned up loud, like our listeners?
We also have this amazing sense known as sight
that oftentimes we can see cop cars approaching us,
so even if we have headphones on our ears while we're walking,
we can still see the cop car approaching.
Rob?
I'm not saying these aren't annoying as all hell,
but you know this city.
No one listens to the regular sirens anymore.
They haven't for years.
Well, maybe they should just spray the crowd with machine gun bullets too.
They'll get their attention.
I mean, where is this going to end?
It would be one thing if, as you said,
the police would use this in case of actually saving lives or something like that,
but in my experience the New York police think that they're always in a hurry
and that they're always saving lives,
even when they're going to be the 10th police officer to arrive at a traffic stop
or whatever it is they do with their time.
So if they could be trained to judiciously use these things,
then I suppose it would be a worthwhile investment,
but it's not going to happen.
I think you're being unfair though.
It's not just the New York police.
It's the Boston police, the Chicago police, the LAPD.
They all abuse their authority.
Of course.
Don't give all the credit to the NYPD.
I mean, they work hard for it.
I wouldn't dream of it.
Other police departments really deserve some shout-outs as far as that goes too.
But this is just, you know, if you want to look at tasers,
if you want to look at this technology,
if you want to look at anything that they give the police,
they spend incredible amounts of money testing, developing,
implementing this technology,
and they spend almost no money on training.
Right.
They just throw it out there, and so I don't see how we can—
I was annoyed to find out that there was a successful test of this.
I don't know where that successful test took place.
It happened in my neighborhood.
Whenever they test it in the East Village,
there's a bit of a reaction against it.
It's a horrible sound.
The police probably consider that a success.
People are mad at us.
That's right.
Maybe that is what they are after.
Hey, Nick.
Yes, Bernie.
You've apparently investigated this pretty thoroughly,
and you've taken a look at one of these low-frequency horns
on the bottom of a police car.
Is that right?
Yes.
I mean, I haven't gone and inspected and taken it apart underneath a police car.
No, no, no.
But, I mean, you took a look at it.
You know how big it is, that sort of thing.
Would activists who really hated the sound have a lot of trouble accessing the horn
and spraying some of that expanding and hardening foam,
like that stuff called Great Stuff?
You know, Bernie, I don't know.
Do you have, like, a storeroom of this hardening foam?
Because every week you seem to have another idea on how to use it.
The FBI actually uses this stuff to silence audible alarms in burglar alarm systems.
Yeah, well, they don't get shot by the cops when they try to do it.
I'd be very wary of messing with any kind of police equipment
with a hardening foam or any kind of foam or anything.
No, I was just asking, theoretically,
would someone be able to reach it under a police car that was parked and unattended?
I've actually seen it mounted three different ways.
If they're in two configurations, without getting too specific,
it would be very easy.
In the third configuration, you would actually have to get pretty far underneath the car to do it.
I think, Bernie, if you sprayed shaving cream at a cop car,
you would go to jail for a very long time.
I can only imagine what would happen with this crazy stuff you keep talking about.
Oh, I'm sure it would. I wouldn't do it.
I'm just speculating as to what would happen or would it be possible.
You would need a lot of this hardening foam, though.
I'd say you'd need at least half to three quarters of a cubic foot to get the job done.
I'm thinking more within-the-law type of ways of fighting this kind of thing.
I'm thinking more like legislation or picketing or shouting back.
How about a banana?
I don't really...
Or like a whole bunch of bananas.
What, do you mean sticking it in a tailpipe or something?
No, the banana peels. Put them next to the cops and they'll slip on them.
No, no, no. Just stick the bananas up inside the horn.
I thought potatoes were what you used for that.
That would work, too.
Listen, I think we might be delving into things that we're not really that expert in.
I think if we just get people aware of these things, these noises, so that people know what's going on
and maybe they'll prepare to fight them a little bit.
No, I think this is something that can be easily accomplished at the neighborhood level.
On a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis, just say...
I mean, I'm certain there are some neighborhoods that this technology serves no useful purpose,
especially in the village.
You don't see a cop car coming. The lights are going to bounce off of everything.
The village is not a huge, gigantic, wide avenue in the streets.
And the cop cars hopefully aren't going 50, 60 miles an hour in the village.
I saw one going 50 or 60 today in the village, actually.
Right. But I think that on a neighborhood level, I think neighborhood councils and organizations
can reach out to their police precincts and say,
Hey, please, can you not use these things at 3 o'clock in the morning?
Can you use them a little more judiciously?
It really disturbed me in the middle of the day as well.
When you're close to it, it's a very obnoxious and intrusive sound.
Now, OK, let's go to Vancouver.
Vancouver, as you know, as you may know, is in Canada.
And they have the winter...
British Columbia.
British Columbia, yes.
Well, there's Vancouver and Washington State, too.
We're not going to talk about that.
They have the 2010 Winter Olympics, which are coming up pretty soon, actually.
Vancouver police now have a new crowd control device
capable of emitting painfully loud blasts of sound just in time for the Olympics.
That's according to the CBC.
The medium range acoustic device called MRAD, M-R-A-D,
can use sound as a weapon.
We've played it, in fact.
We played what they used in Pittsburgh a few weeks ago.
Emitting piercing sounds at frequency levels that cross the human threshold of pain
and are potentially damaging to hearing.
Why do they need this for the Olympics?
Maybe it will make people go faster to get away from it.
Well, they're using it as a tactic to win.
Is that what you're saying?
It could be.
Anyway, it's primarily designed as a communications device.
It's clearly audible up to a kilometer away, say police.
A communications device.
That's interesting.
They say the device was first tested this summer as a public address system
during the celebration of light fireworks events in Vancouver.
If anybody was there, I'd like to know what they say
that needed to be heard a kilometer away.
That's really kind of weird.
They say, the police say,
they don't plan to use the device for anything more than communication.
The primary function we're using the device for
is its ability to communicate with very large groups
with respect to crowd control, evacuations, tactical situations
where we may need the loudspeaker portion of it.
Now, the device is a compact version of its predecessor,
the long-range acoustic device, known as L-RAD,
and that's capable of emitting a blast of directional sound
measuring an estimated 146 decibels at one meter away,
an estimated 99 decibels at 500 meters,
and of course sound above 120 to 140 decibels
is considered painful and damaging to human hearing.
These devices were originally designed for the American military
and was first used publicly in North America this past September,
as we mentioned, in Pittsburgh
as police tried to control anti-G20 demonstrators, all 17 of them.
The device has been used in military and civilian ship defense systems
to repel would-be pirates.
Of course, they are not effective against the growing number of deaf pirates
that are taking over ships.
Yeah, so what do you think, Bernie?
I think this is a disturbing trend,
and law enforcement is really trying to make us more and more afraid
and increase the amount of noise pollution,
and it's going to get out of hand.
Mark our words, you're going to hear this everywhere you go pretty soon.
Yeah, that's something to look forward to, Nick.
And in a larger sense, there's a lot of struggle going on in Vancouver right now
as police authorities are struggling to find the right balance
between law enforcement and civil rights,
and there's a lot of activism going on in Vancouver.
I think you're giving them a lot of credit
to say they're struggling to find the right balance.
Perhaps.
I think they're trying to crush all protest of the Olympics.
But who protests the Olympics?
I don't want to call it protest.
I would call it a terrorist act of the Olympics,
but I don't want to call it protesting.
Usually you protest global meetings of world leaders and things like that,
but the Olympics, really?
Yeah, there's a lot of issues with the land use.
There were protests for China, I know, for years.
No, no, no, the protest is not.
There's a lot of issues with the land use.
They're taking a lot of indigenous land to run the Olympics.
They're taking a lot of money that could be used.
This is specifically for Canada, you're saying?
I'm saying specifically in Vancouver.
Local Vancouver activists are having a lot of issues
with the way the Olympics are being run,
the way the Olympics are being used, as we discussed,
as an excuse to crush civil liberties, and on and on.
It also works the other way with protesters wanting to use the fact
that the entire world is looking at the Olympics
as a way to get their message out further than it normally would.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, we'll see if this sound device is used
and if it gets a global audience as well.
But boy, it seems like we're just being attacked on all levels now
with all kinds of devices that are out there to control crowds.
But they've been developing these kinds of weapons for years,
the sonic weapons, light weapons, directed energy weapons.
Yeah, but now they're ready.
They've finished developing them, they're using them.
And it's scary that these things that used to have
purely military applications are being customized
for civilian law enforcement.
Well, they always test things on the military,
and they test things on prisoners before they test them
or use them on the general public.
And we're seeing yet another example of that.
Okay, next time you're in an airport,
you might be watched by the authorities
when you don't realize you're being watched.
The Transportation Security Administration
has stationed specially trained behavior detection officers
at 161 U.S. airports.
That's more airports than Google is providing free Wi-Fi for.
You heard about that, huh?
And New York is not included.
But New York is included in this, you can bet.
The officers can be positioned anywhere
from the parking garage to the gate,
trying to spot passengers who show an unusual level
of nervousness or stress.
So if you're nervous,
you can't even show it in the parking lot now.
I don't know how they're going to know you're a passenger.
You could be dropping somebody off and you're nervous,
but maybe the person you're dropping off will be watched then
because he was with a nervous person earlier.
We're not looking for a type of person,
but at behaviors, said a spokeswoman for the TSA.
Now, this program started in 2003 at Boston's Logan Airport
and expanded from there.
In February of last year,
detection officers at Miami International Airport
noted that a passenger had suspicious travel documents
and was acting oddly.
When he was flagged for a secondary screening, he ran.
Yeah.
Local police and TSA officers chased the man
who ran out of the terminal
and jumped off a road onto a sidewalk two stories below.
He broke an arm and was arrested
on charges of resisting arrest, disorderly conduct,
and possessing several IDs.
Yeah, but you know what?
I don't know what other crime that was.
So they're spending how many millions and billions of dollars on this program
and that's the worst guy they've caught?
I think he was punished enough by jumping out a two-story building.
I mean, he sounds maybe not all there mentally, but...
I'd like to know what it was he was actually nervous about, why he ran.
I think if there was a crime, that's where it would be, right?
It sounds like he was just a coke addict or something that had a lot of IDs.
They're going to be catching him.
Is it a crime to run away from the cops if they're not guilty of something?
It is.
They're resisting arrest.
But what if they have instructed you to stop?
If you see a police officer, you turn around and run the other way
and they don't make any directions towards you, then it's not against the law.
But if they direct you to stop,
then you must at that point comply with the officer's order.
What if you can't hear them?
Or what if you misunderstand what they're saying?
Or you don't speak English?
There are all kinds of possibilities.
You can fight it in court, but then you have to go to court first.
I think what they're doing is just broadening the scope of people
they can randomly grab
because as anyone who's been to an airport knows,
you cannot go to an airport without looking a little stressed
or a little nervous, at least for a moment.
Well, now I'm going to be a lot more stressed.
If you're traveling during a peak time,
this is a building full of miserable, stressed, and nervous people.
How can you hold up in court and say,
I wasn't actually nervous, so they didn't have probable cause?
Now, of course, they're also on the airplanes as well.
Undisclosed. Go ahead, Nick.
Actually, I don't think they require probable cause in an airport
in most circumstances.
Right, right.
All right. Well, that makes it a lot easier, doesn't it?
On an undisclosed number of domestic and international flights,
federal air marshals work covertly to spot suspicious behavior.
If a passenger causes trouble,
air marshals can ask crew members to help subdue the person.
They can wait until the plane lands and call for backup,
or they can draw their weapons.
And I guess it's an easy way to find out who the air marshal is,
but it's a cause of disturbance to see who draws a weapon.
So, yeah, it's one way to do it.
And then what?
I don't know.
Then I guess the real terrorist act takes place.
Oh.
Yeah.
In December 2005,
air marshals fatally shot Rigoberto Alpizar,
44 years old, of Florida,
after he boarded an American Airlines flight from Miami to Orlando.
He said he had a bomb in his backpack.
When two air marshals confronted him,
he made a threatening move, prompting the marshals to fire.
As it turned out, he didn't have a bomb.
He had bipolar disorder.
But apparently, well, it's a tough case to argue.
They showed him.
They did. Yeah, they did.
They showed all of us, too.
Yes, brother.
I think that's what happened to the previous guy,
and they're not going to be catching terrorists under this.
They're just going to be catching not necessarily normal folks,
but people that are just, like, petty criminals are just insane.
Yeah.
And yet they're marketing this as fighting terrorism.
I don't really see how this relates,
what happened in that case relates to spotting people in parking lots
and things like that.
This guy said he had a bomb in his backpack,
or maybe he was confronted and then he said he had a bomb.
I don't know.
It doesn't take a whole lot of expert training
to find people who say they have a bomb in their backpack.
Yeah, exactly.
You don't need to look for behavior patterns or follow people.
So these are really the two worst cases.
Apparently, yeah.
We spent a lot of money on the TSA.
They should be able to find something interesting.
Yeah, considering the number of people around,
surprisingly little happens.
Yeah, occasionally somebody tries to get on an airplane with shampoo
or something like that.
But other than that, there's not many crimes taking place.
Okay.
We're happy to say a member of the Yes Men got in trouble
about the Chamber of Commerce a couple of weeks ago.
This was after being on our show.
Mid-October, the activists staged a press conference,
quote-unquote,
in which the Chamber of Commerce in Washington, D.C.,
ostensibly reversed its position
and promised to stop lobbying against strong climate change legislation,
a stance that has caused numerous chamber members
to leave the organization.
As has been widely reported,
before the press conference was even completed,
a real Chamber of Commerce representative rushed into the room
and revealed that the Chamber's position on climate change legislation
had not, in fact, changed.
Now, according to EFS senior staff attorney,
Corinne McSherry, who has also been on this program,
the action was a brilliant piece of political theater.
It had a serious purpose,
calling attention to the Chamber's political activities.
This is core political speech protected by the First Amendment,
and we're very pleased that Davis Wright Tremaine,
with its long, successful history of protecting free speech rights of Americans,
has joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation
in helping these activists battle a transparent attempt at
suicide, at censorship.
I'm sorry.
That's pretty much, yeah, it's political suicide.
So, basically,
the Chamber of Commerce has pulled out all the stops
in its efforts to silence the activists.
First, it sent an improper copyright takedown notice
to the S-Men's upstream provider,
demanding that a parody website posted in support of the action
be removed immediately,
and resulting in the temporary shutdown of not only the spoof site,
but hundreds of other sites hosted by May 1st slash PeopleLink.
And next, the Chamber filed suit against the activists in federal court,
claiming, among other things,
the activism infringed their trademarks.
Trademark rights do not encompass the right to silence criticism,
said EFS senior staff attorney Matt Zimmerman.
It's our hope that the Chamber will rethink its lawsuit
and take a position more consistent with its past support
of First Amendment rights.
So we wish all of them the best as they join forces.
It's good to see that happen.
Yes.
Yeah.
Go ahead, Nick.
What I don't understand is,
when will these organizations ever figure out that by suing
the people who perpetrated, you know, the hoax or the event,
that they're just drawing more and more and more attention to it?
Yes.
What is that called again, Rob?
That is the Streisand effect.
Streisand effect.
I love it so much.
Do you know about the Streisand effect?
I do.
Yes.
Speaking of the Streisand effect, Glenn Beck,
you heard about this story.
Isaac Island Hall has won a highly publicized case against Glenn Beck
over the domain name, can I say this on the air?
Yeah, okay.
Apologies to anybody who might be offended by this.
Glenn Beck raped and murdered our girl.
It's hard because it's all like in one word here.
Glenn Beck raped and murdered a young girl in 1990.com.
He did.
Yeah.
Well, he hasn't denied it.
As soon as he won the case, he did something surprising.
He offered the domain name to Glenn Beck for free.
In a letter, he explained that he had met his objectives with the domain name
and website and points out to Beck that bringing the case made things worse for him.
It bears observing that by bringing the WIPO complaint,
World Intellectual Property Organization,
you took what was merely one small critique meme in a sea of Internet memes
and turned it into a super meme.
Then in pressing forward by not withdrawing the complaint
and instead filing additional briefs,
you turned the super meme into an object lesson in First Amendment principles.
So explaining his reasoning for voluntarily handing over the domain,
Island Hall wrote,
I want to demonstrate to you that I had my lawyer fight this battle
only to help preserve the First Amendment.
Now that it is safe, at least from you for the time being,
I have no more use for the actual scrap of digital real estate you sought.
Brilliant, I think.
I think almost bigger news here is that WIPO rendered a sane decision.
They're usually very favorable to trademark holders
and against any sort of political criticism.
Maybe they're not big Glenn Beck fans.
Maybe.
It's possible. Rob?
There is another site that popped up today.
I can't remember the exact domain,
but the site contains just the WIPO decision on it
and the domain is something to the effect of
glennbeckislaughingstockoftheinternet.com.
So I think we all learned a valuable lesson here.
Oh, yes.
Internet activism, it's the best.
Okay, this is another important story,
but I want to give out our phone number
because we haven't been able to take listener phone calls in a while
and I'd like to be able to do that tonight
as a way of also thanking all the listeners for their support over the past month.
212-209-2900.
That's our telephone number if there's anything on your mind.
Interesting case here, again,
involving Electronic Frontier Foundation and Indymedia.
Apparently, there's been all kinds of skullduggery going on
in the law enforcement world.
Secrecy surrounds law enforcement's communications surveillance practices
like a dense fog.
Particularly shrouded in secrecy are government demands issued
under USC section 18,
wait, code 18,
18 USC section 2703 of the Stored Communications Act,
known as the SCA,
that seek subscriber information or other user records
from communications service providers
like internet service providers and phone companies, things like that.
When the government wants such data from one of these entities,
they can obtain a court order under the SCA
demanding the information from the provider
along with a gag order preventing the provider
from disclosing the existence of the government's demand.
More often, companies are simply served with subpoenas
issued directly by prosecutors without any court involvement.
These demands are rarely made public.
Now, on January 30th of this year,
Christina Clare of Philadelphia,
who's one of the system administrators of the server
that hosts the Indymedia.us site,
received in the mail a grand jury subpoena
from the Southern District of Indiana Federal Court.
The FBI had sent an email to Ms. Clare a couple of weeks earlier
asking where a subpoena directed at the Indymedia.us site
should be sent.
The people at EFF were ready and willing to evaluate the subpoena
as soon as it arrived, and according to them,
even we were surprised at what we saw.
Basically, to understand what the SCA is all about,
usually what happens with a grand jury subpoena,
it's used to get basic subscriber identifying information
about a particular target.
You get a user's name, perhaps, an IP address,
a physical address or payment details,
and certain types of telephone logs.
Any other records require a court order or a search warrant.
Now, with the Indymedia.us subpoena,
the government departed from the text of the law
and the Justice Department's own sample subpoena
that they provide for the public use.
By inserting this demand,
please provide the following information,
all IP traffic to and from www.indymedia.us
for a particular date, including IP addresses, times,
and any other identifying information.
In other words, the government was asking for the IP address
of every one of Indymedia.us's thousands of visitors on that date,
the IP address of every person who read any news story
on the entire site.
Not only did the request threaten every Indymedia.us visitor's
First Amendment rights to read the news anonymously,
particularly considering that the government
could easily obtain the name and address associated
with each IP address via subpoenas to the ISPs
that control those IP blocks,
it plainly violated the SCA's restrictions
on what types of data the government could obtain
using a subpoena.
The subpoena was also patently overbroad,
a clear phishing expedition.
There's no way that the identity of every Indymedia reader,
of every Indymedia story,
was relevant to the crime being investigated
by the grand jury in Indiana,
whatever that crime may be.
Now, the government added insult to injury
by also inserting the language onto the first page of the subpoena,
You are not to disclose the existence of this request
unless authorized by the assistant U.S. attorney.
Any such disclosure would impede the investigation being conducted
and thereby interfere with the enforcement of the law.
So what the problem here is,
the law doesn't require the recipient of a federal grand jury subpoena
to keep the subpoena secret,
which is why typically subpoenas often will request
but not require a recipient's silence.
There are certainly secrecy requirements
for participants in the grand jury,
like the jurors and the prosecutors,
but those requirements do not extend to witnesses.
Now, without any legal authority
to back up their purported gag demand,
the federal government ordered Ms. Clare
not to reveal the existence of the subpoena,
a subpoena that, as already described,
was patently overbroad and invalid under the SCA.
This is exactly the kind of unjustified demand of silence
that creates a fog around the government's
often overreaching surveillance activities.
How many other subpoena recipients
have remained silent over the years
in response to such bogus demands?
And how many of them violated their users' privacy
by handing over data that the government wasn't entitled to?
This is really scary. It really is.
And thank God the Indymedia folks went to the EFF
to get their help here.
Now, there have been some more developments in this case
over the past few days, right, Mike?
Well, one thing to note is that in this particular case,
Indymedia doesn't log its users' IP addresses,
which is an incredibly rare step,
but one that is very valuable
because it means that regardless of the legal situation,
Indymedia cannot give up its users' IP addresses,
and they and RiseUp.net are the only two websites,
the only two Internet entities I know
to protect their users' privacy in this way.
There's probably some more I don't know.
So that's one bit of encouraging news.
The other bit of encouraging news is that once Indymedia said,
hey, we've got some lawyers,
and they really, really want to fight you on this,
the federal government just backed down.
They went away.
They probably got the information from some other means.
But one thing in addition is that there's a special rule
in the Justice Department that says
if you are subpoenaing a media organization,
you must get the permission of the U.S. attorney general.
And they did not do this in this case.
Whatever attorney in Indiana
did not get the permission of the attorney general.
So they are going to hopefully get in trouble for this,
although I kind of doubt it.
This seems like another example of an overzealous district attorney
or a state attorney, the one from Indiana.
It's the same problem we run into with the hacker crackdown.
And every problem with people trying to create states of fear,
it's always people preying on,
or district attorneys preying on voters' fears
so that they get, I guess, political capital.
Yes, Nick?
Well, I see three things going on here.
One, there's nothing mentioned here
that's outside of the government's legally authorized power to do.
The problem is that they use the wrong tools for it.
For expediency, for whatever reasons.
There are things that are outside of the government's power
to do without a court order
that they did not seek a court order to attempt to do.
Just looking at the FISA courts,
there's things in here that they could have granted.
They have to have a specific reason for using a lot of these tools,
and I think they didn't have justification for that.
But combined with the failure to notify Washington, D.C.
about subpoenaing a media organization,
all the way up through overreaching
under a portion of the code that they couldn't overreach with,
and the fact that there are so many different ways to collect information
for many different reasons that are not applied correctly,
and that because people don't seek an attorney,
a standard system administrator gets a subpoena.
The subpoena tells them what to do.
If it's a malformed subpoena, the system administrator is not a lawyer.
They're not going to review it.
If they're a lawyer, they're going to get their job done,
according to what they think their job is supposed to be doing.
I think more worrying, actually,
than the lone system administrator case
is that huge Internet service providers with lawyers
often don't question these overbroad subpoenas.
That, I think, is the worrying part.
If AT&T gets a subpoena, and AT&T is not uniquely bad in this,
gets a letter from the assistant U.S. attorney in Indiana,
they're just going to do what it says,
even though they ought to know better.
Well, let's go ahead, Bernie.
This is particularly disturbing
because if you read what's on the EFF website,
they did a great write-up on it,
and I want to thank Mike for sending it all to our attention.
Go to EFF.org.
You can read up on this case,
where you can see the U.S. attorney's office
in the Southern District of Indiana,
which really, really being cute
and playing a lot of games with EFF legally,
like just being really coy and trying to have it both ways.
And there was clearly some very disingenuous actions
on the part of the U.S. attorney's office
in the Southern District of Illinois, or Indiana, rather.
So I encourage your listeners to go to EFF.org
and support EFF.org.
Without organizations like EFF,
there's nobody really that's going to take the initiative
and investigate these abuses of government authority.
This is really an egregious thing,
and we have no idea how many, perhaps hundreds or thousands,
of other overbroad and, frankly, illegal subpoenas
have been issued in this way
because of the secrecy surrounding the process.
I think the EFF is asking people to write to their legislators
and ask them to make this an open process
so that these various U.S. attorney's offices
can't do this with much secrecy,
so the process is supervised and has some kind of oversight,
because right now they can get away with whatever they want.
Okay, yeah, and that is definitely
a very scary and unfortunate thing.
We're about to take phone calls, 212-209-2900.
Let me just close off with what EFF described
as some closing lessons to this whole thing.
First lesson is for the average Internet user,
yes, your IP address can be and typically is logged
by the online services that you use,
and yes, the government can obtain those logs,
sometimes with only a subpoena issued directly by a prosecutor.
If you want to anonymize your IP address
to prevent the violation of your online privacy,
you can use anonymizing software such as Tor, T-O-R.
You can find out more about Tor and how it works
at www.torproject.org.
For online service providers,
the second lesson is straightforward,
and one that EFF has highlighted,
both in its best practices for online service providers
and its surveillance self-defense manual.
If you don't have it, they can't get it,
meaning when providers avoid keeping unnecessary Internet logs,
responding to subpoenas and other legal demands
for such information becomes very simple.
Sorry, but we don't keep those logs,
and so we don't have any information
that's responsive to the subpoena.
And the third lesson, again for providers,
is that they can and should seek legal advice
when they receive legal demands for information.
Without a lawyer's advice, providers may hand over data
that the government isn't legally entitled to,
or that the provider is legally forbidden from disclosing
and may be cowed into silence by bogus gag demands.
So I think everybody really did exactly
what they were supposed to do in this case,
and we're all the wiser for it.
Hopefully we'll keep an eye on overzealous prosecutors.
All right, 212-209-2900, let's take some quick phone calls.
Good evening, you're on Off the Hook.
Hi, I had a couple of questions,
or rather a comment and a question.
I thought that the siren that you described
should be kept for ambulances only and not for police cars.
That makes it really easy to decide
whether it's going to be used for something life or death
and whether one should respond to it
by getting out of the way or not.
Okay.
And my other question was,
I found out that a mysterious UPS package
had been returned to Sender that I hadn't gotten notices about,
and I wondered whether it might be my missing trip glasses.
Ah, I think I know who you are.
We don't ship UPS, we ship USPS.
So I don't know if that would be the case,
but we're trying everything we can to resolve that situation.
Okay.
Yeah, we sent you trip glasses and they made it into your building
and then they disappeared because the mailman left them
on top of your mailbox or something like that?
Yeah.
Yeah, this just illustrates the frustration
that we go through sometimes trying to send things to people.
We're looking into everything we possibly can
to see if we can get a replacement order
or a more secure way of getting them to you.
Okay, great.
All right?
Because I'm glad you're using the postal service
that doesn't do the sort of shenanigans UPS does,
where it's easier for them to skip steps and send things back.
Yeah, well, they all have their own version of shenanigans,
but it's our goal to avoid them all.
Thanks for calling, thanks for your support,
and let's take another phone call.
Good evening, you're on Off The Hook.
Hi, it's Sandra.
Is that corproject.org?
T-O-R, T as in...
Do you host some of those links someplace?
I don't always write fast or correctly.
I'm sorry, say again?
And I think it's scary when some people talk about
like a police state is normal,
and I think I should be able to read a publicly available website
or a book in a library if I want to,
and that it's only my business.
I'll listen off the air.
Didn't really say much that we're going to disagree with,
I don't think, right?
That's not really radical.
Nick, you have something to say?
Well, just if you're trying to look at something anonymously on the Internet,
the library is probably the last place that you want to go
because that's the first place that law enforcement will look at for patterns
and watch traffic,
and a lot of libraries, without even knowing it,
are providing a lot of information on their users to law enforcement.
And even books.
I mean, the authorities have come after librarians
to try and get a list of books that people have taken out.
A lot of national security letters have been issued.
On the other hand, librarians are really one of the few classes of people
who have stood up and tried to fight it,
and with some success.
You know why?
Because they read all the time
and they know something about the history of the country
and what's important and values and things like that.
If you read a lot, maybe you'll become one of those people too.
Voltaire?
I hate to sound like a library fanboy,
but librarians have also helped with other issues
like protecting freedom on the internet,
such as supporting the ability to listen to textbooks with audio,
with the whole Amazon Kindle,
being forced to disable text-to-speech functionality and stuff.
So librarians are good folks.
Yes, they are.
And if you're a librarian, write to us, othat2600.com,
or give us a call now, 209-2900.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Speak up, please.
Hey.
Yes, go ahead.
Yeah, how are you?
The extreme noise, that was used as early as 2003
during an anti-Iraq war demo.
You might recall that one of those demos
just went absolutely curfew-y and they blocked demonstrators.
We're not allowed to get to the site over on 1st Avenue.
They ended up blocking traffic on 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Avenues.
I do remember that, yes.
It was a rampage with horses, and it was really scary.
I was involved in it.
I wrote an article about it.
You can do a Google.
Look up the term extreme noise.
My byline, Daniel Forbes.
And you'll find that they could not get the crowd dispersed.
They ended up sending an ambulance through the crowd
with the loudest noise I've ever heard.
Wow.
It was a sonic weapon.
The whole thing came barreling through the crowd on 3rd Avenue
because what happened was people realized,
okay, if they won't let us get to the designated spot,
we can do a bit of good by tying up traffic over here on 3rd Avenue.
I published an article in the Progressive Review,
first-hand account of that.
Second thing, real quick, the Lyon Library,
public research institution in the city,
requires a special ID card to get anything.
It used to be you would go in and find out what you want,
fill out a little paper slip, and they'd give it to you.
Now you have to have a special library photo ID that tracks everything you ask for
and including your Internet research at the Lyon Library.
Wow.
That's scary.
Thanks for the update.
Voltaire?
I know the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library,
like the special reading rooms, do have similar policies.
Yeah.
It's starting to get to be something we're getting used to.
One more quick call, and good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Yes.
I just heard you talking about the IP addresses,
but I thought IP addresses were like randomly assigned
whenever you log on to the Internet.
No, no.
You might have the same IP address for many years
through your cable provider or DSL provider, Mike.
Even when they are randomly assigned when you log on,
your Internet provider will keep a log of whom they have assigned each IP address when,
and they will often give that log to law enforcement upon request.
Oh, I see.
Because that's actually why I never bothered to use Torb,
just because I thought that it was impossible really to individually track you that way.
But I guess they can, so thank you for letting me know.
Yes, yes.
Definitely modify your behavior habits.
Yes, Walter.
Just a quick tip.
If you're ever under a botnet attack or such,
it's a good idea to pull out your NAS router or whatever or NAT router
and leave it unplugged for like 30 seconds or so,
and you'll get a new IP address, but that won't protect you necessarily.
Okay.
So we are out of time.
I want to thank everybody for calling in.
Write to us, oth at 2600.com.
We'll see you next week.
Good night.
Good night.
Wow.
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