Our technical production team at KPFA and Berklee 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 Doran Marina.
And you're listening to Radio Station WBAI New York. Time is just about 7 o'clock.
Once again, it's time for Off The Hook.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving, now I can't make a call.
We couldn't get much worse, but if they could, they would.
Bundle it up for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood. Bundle it up.
Okay, you know, I don't know what's going on with the...
I think it's the curse of the CD players this week on every radio station I'm involved with.
Interesting little remix there, but you know what? It's not working for me.
Good evening. The program is Off The Hook. Emmanuel Goldstein here with you, joined by Mike.
That's not a remix. That's the CD player being broken. It's very different.
It's so weird.
Or the CD.
That voice there is Red Hat.
And we got Voltaire.
Here's my voice.
And Jim.
Hi.
Down in Philadelphia is Bernie S.
Greetings from Philadelphia.
And joining us in the studio, far away from the microphone, is Bicycle Mark, coming from Amsterdam.
Hello.
I'm turning this down. It's so annoying. I don't know what's going on. Really weird.
Okay. Yes, so welcome to another exciting edition of Off The Hook.
Anything exciting? Oh, Bicycle Mark, why don't you step up and say hi?
Because we haven't heard from you in a while.
Hello.
So you're back in the United States, but not for long, I believe.
Well, no. I took a longer period away from Amsterdam, so I'm here for a whopping three weeks.
Oh, that's good.
Yeah. It gives you a better feel of the country, rather than just parachute in for a week.
Anything new that we need to know about in Europe?
Over in Europe, I've been following, you know, I'm always following a lot of issues,
including relaxation of the rules on advertising for prescription drugs and things like that.
That's coming.
Yeah, lots of exciting things and not so exciting things sometimes.
Did you hear about the hackerspace in Sweden that was raided?
No.
Yeah, the hackerspace in Malmö, Sweden, was raided by the police,
and there's a whole big thing on their website, which I'm going to give out the website.
It's going to be kind of hard to say, so I'm just going to spell it.
It's F-O-R-S-K-N-I-N-G-S-A-V-D-DOT-S-E.
What?
Yeah, and if you go there.
How could I go there?
If you go to that website, you'll see a story about this.
All you have to do is type in the letters.
It's very simple.
Well, you should pronounce it.
It's probably a word.
Well, it's a word in Swedish, which I don't know.
Do you want to try pronouncing it here?
I'll give it to you.
You pronounce that word, wise guy.
It's way too long a word.
It's all one word.
All those letters you said, it's all one word.
I know it's all one word, but it's also if you spell out the letters.
If I say the word, then invariably someone's going to ask me to spell it.
So what's the point of saying the word?
All right, why don't we move to the important business?
Yeah, well, the important business is that they were raided by the police,
and nobody really knows why.
So there's a hacker space in Malmo, which is in Sweden.
Yeah, and they took all kinds of things.
I don't have a list of all the things they took, but I saw it.
It was, I think, satellite equipment and all kinds of other stuff.
Do you know what they took?
Well, not exactly, but the background story I think is important is that
it was part of a larger media space, and the group that they were associated with
was having a music, I guess a concert,
and the police were claiming that they might be serving alcohol without a license.
Yeah, there was a suspicion that they were serving underage.
First of all, in Sweden, the drinking age is like 12.
Yeah, but they're very actually strict about alcohol in Sweden
because they have a lot of boring winter with nothing to do but drink and then drive,
and they have a lot of car accidents as a result.
I can vouch that their alcohol rules are pretty strict.
Well, you're from Finland.
Well, no, I know, but they keep relaxing the rules there.
But I tried to purchase some whiskey online,
and the three countries they wouldn't ship to were the U.S., Canada, and Sweden.
Interesting.
I just don't understand.
What does seizing computers and hard drives have to do with underage drinking?
Well, they like to seize everything when they seize things,
and they have these little raids,
as that goes for any country.
And unfortunately, they probably won't get their stuff back.
In Sweden, I understand that that's the tradition, not to give the stuff back.
That's definitely the tradition in the U.S.
I don't know about other countries.
Bicycle Mark, do you know anything about police brutality and stuff like that?
Well, not brutality so much as opportunism.
You go in for one thing, and you find another crime while you're in there.
Is it universal, or is it just a problem in the U.S. and Sweden?
No, I think it's getting fairly universal.
I know in the U.K. that can definitely happen.
Yeah, but the U.K. is like U.S. times negative 2.
The thing is, there are hackerspaces popping up everywhere,
and this thing is going to be a possible threat to all of them at some point
because people don't know what's going on inside them.
They're suspicious.
Even though they're open to everybody, the authorities are suspicious of these things.
We're familiar with this.
We've seen it before over the years.
So now we have addresses that the authorities might be lured to,
and it's something we should keep an eye on.
So if you want to help out, I suggest going to the website.
I'm sure there's all kinds of suggestions there on what people can do to help.
Again, the website F-O-R-S-K-N-I-N-G-S-A-V-D dot S-E, dot S-E, of course, being Sweden.
Bernie, any thoughts on this?
Well, I just hope this is not the beginning of a trend
because, as you said, there are literally many hundreds and hundreds of hackerspaces around the world now,
and they're easy targets for police.
I mean, obviously, if it's a den of hackers,
there must be evil, illegal stuff going on, which is what the police may think,
and we'll use whatever very narrow, not narrow,
but a very rather broad excuse to raid them and go on fishing expeditions.
So I'm hoping these people in Sweden get all their computers and other equipment back,
but they're not optimistic about that.
Yeah, but as Emanuel said, a lot of these hackerspaces are open to the public in general and even to the media.
I mean, I've seen plenty of write-ups about hackerspaces in the U.S., Noisebridge and NYC Resistor,
and they're all positive, and they let reporters come in all the time and interview them and see what's going on.
So I don't know that, because they're not necessarily a black box where mysterious things are happening,
I don't know that there's the same kind of allure to authorities
to look at them as a potential place where things that are illegal are going on.
But you never know, but I think that in the case of hackerspaces,
it kind of brings everything to the surface and makes it public.
All right, well, we'll be keeping an eye on that, obviously, and letting people know if there's any changes.
Now, here's something we discussed a little bit last week, and there's been an update to it.
Apparently, Google has blinked. Anybody care to go into detail as to what exactly that means?
Go ahead, Daret.
Google is going to limit the amount of controlled content, like news, like Murdoch's websites and whatnot, that you can see.
Newspaper publishers will now be able to set a limit on the number of free news articles people can read through Google.
This concession follows claims from some media companies that the search engine is profiting from online news pages.
Basically, users who click on more than five articles in a day may be routed to payment or registration pages.
Very interesting, yeah.
Now, I know media tycoon Rupert Murdoch is very much behind that kind of a deal.
He's accused firms such as Google of profiting from journalism by generating advertising revenue
by linking readers to newspaper articles.
Some readers have discovered they can avoid paying subscription fees to newspaper websites by calling up their pages via Google.
I have to try and see the other side here and wonder,
okay, Google is making money from these people reading stories by searching on Google and then going there
because they have those little advertisements and various things like that.
How do you counter that?
They're taking away revenue from newspapers.
Any ideas?
Well, at the same time, they're also directing traffic to the newspaper.
Most times when I'm looking for news, for example, I might search Google News and I'll find something.
I suppose I could read it in line or look at a cached copy or something like that,
but I generally click through to the article itself and just look at it on the newspaper's website.
I think the problem is that these companies are going out.
The old media isn't working anymore.
They can't raise the kind of money they used to in the same ways.
They don't have this one set of eyes looking upon them as they used to,
and so they're struggling and they're trying to figure out what works,
and unfortunately, maybe nothing works.
Why do newspapers have websites?
I mean, why not just simply if they're losing all this money, every newspaper just stop having a website,
and then where are we going to go to get our news?
We'll have to go out and buy a newspaper like the old days, right?
Well, you have news sources that aren't newspapers.
You have news companies that aren't newspapers.
Right, but they won't carry the same weight as the New York Times.
The Sunday Times weighs like a pound.
It's very weighty.
Yeah, well, that's true.
But they have to have it, and it's just part of being part of the competition,
and a lot of people, I mean, I haven't bought a newspaper in a long time, a very long time,
and if I did buy it, it was because there was something specific in that newspaper I wanted,
perhaps an article that I really wanted to have a copy of or something,
but a lot of people in my generation don't buy newspapers, don't subscribe to newspapers,
and so they're suffering as a result.
And they don't subscribe online either.
Right.
So what will it take to get you to fork over some cash to the journalists and newspapers?
It might just be a dying industry.
That specific industry might be going out.
And being replaced by what, bloggers?
Not necessarily bloggers.
I mean, that kind of scares me.
I mean, I think the newspaper, you find local news in general in newspapers,
and that is pretty much the only thing they have going for them.
Now, how do you make a profit off that?
I don't know.
That's what has to be figured out.
I'm not sure if this actually, though, solves their business model problem for making profit online
because people who are looking for this content,
lots of people say that people are willing to look for it for free
and they really don't want to pay and they're not going to pay if they don't want to.
So if people realize that Google is redirecting them somehow,
what happens if people simply say, okay, I will look for another search engine?
Or look for a new site that doesn't require me to register.
Well, this way Google remains the search engine that everybody uses.
I still don't understand what Google has to do with any of this.
It seems to me that it's the newspapers that are changing their policy.
It's not the search engine.
Well, Google News is what's – yeah, they're the ones enforcing it.
What do you mean – but they're not collecting the money.
No, they're saying you've already looked at five stories.
No, no, it's the newspaper that says it.
I thought it was going – I thought it was Google that made the change.
No, Google is allowing the newspapers to say it,
but it's still the newspapers that are setting the policy.
Google is allowing them to make any sense.
How does Google allow them to set their own policy?
Because what the media sites want is they want Google to direct traffic to them.
And Google had a policy where if the page that the search engine sees
is not the same as the page that the user sees,
then they won't send users there anymore.
So now they're relaxing that policy.
But it's still not Google charging anyone.
No, Google is not charging.
But they're not going to be directing you to a free page.
They'll direct you to a registration page run by that newspaper.
No, the newspaper sends you.
Anyway, I eagerly await Rupert Murdoch taking himself out of search results
and becoming even more irrelevant.
I think that will be great for the world.
Yeah, I think maybe he realizes that that's exactly what would happen if he did that.
So now there's –
I want him to do it.
Why are all these people trying to stop him?
Why would Google agree to this then?
Why would they change their minds?
I mean, I don't actually know exactly what they're changing.
But what Mike says is true.
Basically, all they're doing is instead of removing a registration page,
something that has become paid content, as a link that they link to,
they're just going to pass the user through to that.
And so then if I've looked at five articles on some newspaper's website in a day
and then the fifth one I can't look at anymore,
then I'll get their registration page instead of not seeing that in the results.
Right.
But what if you flush your cash and start over again?
I'm sure there are ways around these things.
Well, that's what we're here to talk about.
How are people going to get around this?
Well, it depends on the specific newspaper site's implementation.
Look, we use Tor.
We use all kinds of ways of redirecting.
Sure.
Yeah, that's something I noticed is that literally on the first day that I found out about
that this broke the news, I had several people telling me,
oh, well, I'm going to try doing this or that to get around it.
Like I heard someone saying,
it's kind of like putting a turnstile in the middle of an open train station.
How many people are going to use it?
How many people are just going to walk around it?
I'm not sure if this is really going to do much in the long run.
I guess we'll have to wait and see.
Yes, you're looking at a newspaper, Michael.
There's a copy of Rupert Murdoch's newspaper in the studio.
The New York Post.
I don't want to say the name.
One thing we didn't mention last week,
which we should have mentioned,
Rupert Murdoch and the connection to Fox News as well.
We talked about the New York Post, but we didn't say Fox News.
That's a very big connection.
I'm just saying that he believes that people want to pay for this content on the Internet
when they could get other content for free.
They believe that his content, which has great big headlines,
Little Orphan Anthony, I don't know what that means.
His content is so valuable that people will pay for it
in lieu of getting other content for free,
and I think he's wrong, and I want him to try it and stop talking already.
Well, we live in interesting times, I think,
and we'll certainly find out what's next for Rupert Murdoch,
and he's not the only one, though.
A lot of newspapers are crying foul over what's going on.
Well, all right.
I wish them luck.
Okay.
Other major stories that are happening.
This whole thing with the computer hacker
that is accused of engineering the biggest computer hack of a military system ever,
Gary McKinnon.
He is basically at serious risk of being extradited to the United States.
In fact, I believe they've said that he's lost all his appeals from the U.K.,
and I think a lot of people in the U.K. opposed this,
opposed sending him to the United States for prosecution.
Basically, do we know what he actually did?
He was accused, I know, in 2002 of hacking into just under 100 American military
and NASA computers and causing damage that they say is, I think, what, $700,000
or something like that?
Didn't he also whistle into a pay phone and start a nuclear war?
No, that's a movie.
That's not real life.
Bernie, I think you might know something about this.
He was alleged to have hacked into numerous computers at the Pentagon
and elsewhere in the military looking for information about UFOs
because he was convinced that they were hiding information about UFOs,
and he found, among other things, a bunch of Cisco routers that the military maintained
that they had default passwords on,
and he was very easily able to access their networks by just going right through the,
I don't know if he changed the passwords on the routers,
but he used default passwords that had not been changed.
Anyhow, he advised various of his administrators about these insecurities
and even provided his e-mail address to them, trying to help them, apparently,
and now they're coming at him with the full force of the United States government
trying to extradite him from, apparently, it looks like they're going to extradite him from the U.K.,
and he's looking at spending decades in prison in the U.S.,
and this guy is clearly not a threat to the United States,
so I really question why the U.S. government is trying to prosecute him.
Well, why would you say he's clearly not a threat to the United States?
Well, because he pointed out to the government where the security vulnerabilities were,
and he didn't, according to all reports, he didn't really damage anything.
He bypassed already poor security.
If anything, he did a favor to the military by saying,
hey, you've got all these open routers, and you should really secure your systems,
but apparently the government would rather say that he's to blame for the poor security in the first place
rather than just fixing their problems and getting on with their lives.
Well, an interesting quote here from one of Britain's most eminent human rights lawyers,
Geoffrey Robertson, who said,
to send a British citizen to the U.S. without any right to bail to face 10 years in prison for a crime
for which he would be unlikely to receive any custodial sentence if tried here
amounts to cruel and unusual punishment in breach of our 1689 Bill of Rights.
The Home Secretary should not hide behind the weasel words of the European Convention
when he should be following the law laid down by our own historic Bill of Rights.
Them's fighting words.
And I think a lot of people in England and the UK agree with this.
I think it would be great if the UK started to respect the rights of its citizens.
Well, maybe this is a start if they actually stand up for him.
But, yeah, it's kind of scary to see this sort of thing happen.
And this case has been going on for quite some time.
I think the worst thing, especially the most insulting to the system of laws and justice,
is that he's being basically the amount of jail time he faces
based on how much damage you do in terms of monetary damage.
And they're saying that every router that he went into
and just entered the blank default password,
they're basically charging him with destroying each and every piece of equipment that he went through.
Of course, yeah. This is standard practice for them to do this.
But the thing is it exposes a bit of hypocrisy.
It's not easy to do that, obviously.
A bit of hypocrisy with U.S. policy.
Remember a little place known as Bhopal where I believe the executive of Union Carbide escaped,
left the country and came to the United States.
And, of course, the people of India and the courts wanted him to return there to face trial.
He was actually there and refused to do that.
Now, in this case, we want some hacker that got into a system he wasn't supposed to get into.
Has he even been to the United States ever?
Has he ever come to this country to be basically extradited here and to face trial?
It doesn't make sense. It really doesn't.
No matter what you believe he faces.
Yeah. It kind of sounds like shooting the messenger.
In this case, White Hat sort of it seems.
He found some security flaws and he told them about it.
And now they're punishing him for their mistake.
Well, I mean, every country has a long tradition of protecting powerful people who live within it.
You can look at the U.S. government's defense of the CIA agents who are being charged in Italy with kidnapping and so on.
It's nothing new.
I'm sure if this McKinnon guy were important enough, Britain would be protecting him.
Go ahead.
Some tiny silver lining, if there is one, is that we're actually hearing about this case and that there is at least one or more people,
lawyers trying to argue as opposed to him vanishing and appearing in a camp somewhere in, say, Guantanamo.
Well, he's white. The U.S. doesn't do that to white people.
OK. They're not going to do that to him.
So let's not exaggerate.
What they are going to do is put him in some kind of prison somewhere in our country and leave him there for a long time.
And for what exactly?
Well, like he mentioned about the amount of media attention coming towards it,
this could potentially turn into a PR problem for the United States government.
Extraditing somebody, as far as I know, the first person to be extradited for a hacking crime,
who also so happens to have Asperger's and anyone who seems to hear about this seems to think it's bad.
I'm not sure how this will look if this starts to gain any media attention in the United States.
Now, speaking of blaming the messenger, we've all heard the story about the couple who crashed the White House dinner last week.
Oh, my God. It's incredible.
Now, what I think is amazing here is, in case you didn't hear about this, this couple...
We really have to talk about this. I've heard nothing else.
I think you'll see the relation here.
Basically, they just managed to get into this dinner that apparently they weren't invited to,
although they're saying now that they were invited to it.
And I've been watching the media coverage of this,
and there has been talk and question of whether or not they are going to be charged with a crime.
Now, this is very similar to something that hackers do,
is basically get into places they're not supposed to get into and sort of bask in the glory for a little bit.
Let's assume for the moment that these people had absolutely no right to be there whatsoever.
Does anyone in this room think that they did anything wrong by trying to get into the building,
by obviously not smuggling in weapons?
There's no indication they didn't go through the normal security of metal detectors and things like that.
Should they be prosecuted?
I think they're just stupid.
You think they're stupid?
Well, if they lied their way in, then they were breaking laws, whether or not...
What's stupid about it?
Okay, obviously there's likely to be laws to protect the president,
and whether or not they looked them up, they should have been aware that,
okay, well, maybe this is not such a great idea.
There's no law protecting the president against uninvited guests.
But there's laws about lying to federal officers and things like that,
and so they broke these laws.
So should they be prosecuted for breaking those laws if they lied their way in?
The laws are on the books.
Why is it such a crime to lie to a federal officer?
I mean, come on.
They're not gods.
They're just basically people working for us.
And, you know, if you just say something that's not...
It depends on the gravity of what it is you're saying that's not true.
Well, the point of the matter is that there's a law, and they broke it.
In the case of Gary McKinnon,
well, they want to bring him here to charge him with causing damage.
That's one thing.
Okay, they came up with an arbitrary number.
They want to put him in jail for some number they made up.
But if there's a law that says,
if you do this, you're in violation of the law,
and they're guilty of it, then they're guilty of that.
I'm sure you can find a law that they're in violation of.
You can find a law anyways in violation of.
But what exactly did they do?
They went to a place, and they were able to get past security.
And I don't know if they even lied.
They just basically were in line, and nobody checked.
Maybe it was that simple.
What they did was they revealed a gaping hole in security.
And I think that's a service.
And that's similar to what a lot of hackers do.
They reveal security holes, and they get in trouble for that.
So I see a lot of interesting parallels here.
Voltaire?
The only thing they're guilty of is apologizing for doing this.
Yeah, I wouldn't apologize.
I wouldn't do that.
You know?
And I think it's...
I mean, does anybody here,
if you had the opportunity to go to the White House
and get your picture taken next to the president
just by, you know, walking past or standing in a line,
wouldn't we at least try?
I think they failed, though.
Did you see the menu?
The menu looked really good, and they didn't get any food.
By the way, they did try to get into Hope, and we caught them.
That's what I was looking forward to.
No, our system is much better.
They've been doing this for a long time.
But if these individuals had a camera with them, say,
and they appeared at Hope,
I would happily attend the talk and watch the video of them getting in.
Actually, that's a good promotional thing.
I have a picture of them next to some other people.
Yeah.
Bernie, what do you think of this?
What do you think should happen to them?
Well, I don't think they should be prosecuted at all,
but the fact of the matter is there are laws in every state
against unsworn falsification to authorities,
and there are federal laws against lying to federal officers.
I can't imagine that they got in without lying to somebody
because I'm sure they had to provide some sort of evidence that they were invited.
I don't know.
I'm just speculating that they probably had to tell a fib to get in.
Yeah, a fib.
Is a fib the same as a lie?
Well, if it's not true information, then under federal law, it's falsifying.
I once said to an FBI agent,
Have a nice day.
I didn't mean it.
All right?
So how much trouble am I in?
Can we get a law passed that it is illegal for federal officials to lie to us?
Yeah, how about that?
I think that would be way more useful.
How about that?
That would be nice.
It would stop something that's way more common.
Yeah.
You know, when that balloon kid was supposedly in the air,
the charge I kept hearing was trying to influence a public official or something like that.
How are you trying to influence a public official
by saying that your kid's in a balloon when he's not in it?
And why is that the crime they latch on to?
Well, the state in that case would be wasting a lot of resources chasing a balloon for a child that's not really in danger.
Yeah, well, that sounds like that should be the crime, not trying to influence some official.
They also shut down the entire Denver airport.
Sorry?
They end up shutting down Denver airport.
Yeah, okay.
That sounds like another crime.
It's kind of silly, the things that they latch on to, though.
That's probably a lot more damage than any breaking into Cisco networks did.
Yes, Bernie?
I've always thought it's ironic that what Mike just pointed out,
that we need a law to prevent or a law to criminalize federal officers lying to regular citizens.
In fact, and I had to research the law on this years ago,
federal officers are not only permitted to, but are encouraged to.
The federal law enforcement officers, anyway,
are actually encouraged to lie to defendants in order to get them to say things.
Like saying, for instance, if you're arrested with a co-defendant,
federal officers are encouraged to use techniques like saying,
hey, this other guy confessed everything and said that you were involved.
That kind of stuff happens all the time,
and it's encouraged procedure by law enforcement officers.
Yet, if you tell a lie to them, it's a felony.
Just another case of hypocrisy.
Yeah, very much so.
This is why if you're ever arrested, you shouldn't say anything without a lawyer.
Yeah, that's probably very true.
All right.
Now, speaking about federal and contradictions, hypocrisy, things like that,
here's this kind of shocking story about surveillance and Sprint.
Sprint received over 8 million requests for its customers' information in the past 13 months.
That doesn't count requests for basic identification and billing information,
or wiretapping requests, or requests to monitor who's calling whom,
or even requests for less precise location data
based on which cell phone towers the cell phone was in contact with.
This is GPS information,
and that's not including legal requests from civil litigants
or from foreign intelligence investigators.
That's just law enforcement,
and that's not counting the few other major cell phone carriers
like AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile.
That is just Sprint.
This story is being read from the EFF website.
Basically, we have a real scandal here.
Does anybody want to talk about why this is a scandal?
Go ahead.
Okay, you chickened out.
All right.
I think that it's a little misleading to say 8 million all the time.
We don't know 8 million watts.
If they said they got 8 megabytes of data,
we'd want to know what the data is,
but instead they just said 8 million, and we're, I mean.
The 8 million requests for individual GPS locations from cell phone users.
But is that one guy 8 million times or 8 million people one time?
It's very different.
Yeah.
Well, basically, this all comes from a conference,
a closed-door conference called ISS World.
ISS stands for Intelligence Support Systems
for Lawful Interception, Criminal Investigations,
and Intelligence Gathering.
That's more than ISS, but I don't know.
It's where law enforcement and intelligence agencies
consult with telco representatives
and surveillance equipment manufacturers
about the state of electronic surveillance technology and practice.
Now, this guy, a computer security researcher named Chris Soikhoian,
I'm sorry for mangling your name there.
He's a computer security researcher, a journalist,
a technical consultant for the FTC's Privacy Protection Office.
He went in there with a tape recorder,
went to the conference looking for information
about the scope of the government's surveillance practices in the U.S.,
and what he uncovered, as he has reported on his blog,
is more shocking and frightening than anyone could have ever expected.
These are the words of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
At the ISS conference, Soikhoian taped astonishing comments
by Paul Taylor, Sprint's manager of electronic surveillance.
What a great title.
In complaining about the volume of requests
that Sprint receives from law enforcement,
Taylor noted a shocking number of requests
that Sprint had received in the past year
for a precise GPS location data
revealing the location and movements of Sprint's customers,
and that number being 8 million.
That's incredible.
They say it would have been a shocking number
even if it had included every single legal request,
every single carrier for every single type of customer information.
That Sprint alone received 8 million requests
just from law enforcement only for GPS data
is absolutely mind-boggling.
EFF has long warned that cell phone tracking
poses a threat to locational privacy,
and EFF has been fighting in the courts for years
to ensure that the government only tracks a cell phone's location
when it has a search warrant based on probable cause.
EFF has also complained before
that a dangerous level of secrecy
surrounds law enforcement's communications
surveillance practices like a dense fog,
and that without stronger laws requiring detailed reporting
about how the government is using its surveillance powers,
the lack of accountability when it comes to the government's access to information
through third-party phone and internet service providers
will necessarily breed abuse.
But we never expected huge numbers to be lurking in that fog.
So basically what we're saying is that it's nice and all
that you have that map on your phone
unless you see where you are and where the nearest restaurant or bar is,
but everybody else knows it too, whether or not you want them to.
Yeah, it seems that way.
Bernie, any comments from you on this?
Are you shocked?
Well, in a sort of Casablanca movie kind of way,
I'm shocked, shocked that the government is doing this sort of thing.
The story that's untold here is that
these surveillance capabilities represent
a significant profit center for telephone carriers,
not just Sprint.
I've looked at price lists of what these carriers charge
law enforcement agencies to set up a wiretap
or just a GPS ping request, which is what we're talking about now,
and they make a nice chunk of change offering these services.
I think we demonstrated last year the Sprint system
for law enforcement officers just to make a phone call
to find out where somebody is.
We might even demonstrate that later,
but what they've done since Sprint
is provided a very easy web interface.
Sprint has prescribed it as easy and relatively inexpensive
for a law enforcement officer to go online.
I wish I had the URL, but we'll find that,
and just find where anybody is,
and apparently this is done without any judicial oversight.
This is just something police can do.
We don't know for sure whether these were subpoenas
or just done without any kind of official request
other than just police having access to this website,
but 8,000 separate requests.
Now, it doesn't necessarily mean 8,000.
Sprint is denying it was 8,000 different customers,
or 8 million.
Sprint is denying it was 8 million different customers
that were surveilled.
They're sort of denying it.
Do they even have 8 million customers?
I think they do.
That's a large number.
I'm not asking that facetiously.
About 50 million.
50 million, oh, wow, okay.
I think it's just dropped a little bit.
One investigation of someone tracking their whereabouts
could be several hundred different ping requests
or even thousands if it's a long investigation,
but still, there's 8 million location requests.
It's just a mind-blowing number,
and that's just Sprint PCS.
That's not counting T-Mobile, AT&T,
and the other wireless carriers.
This is, you know, who knows what other evils
lurk under the fog of surveillance.
So just bear in mind, carriers are making
a large amount of money providing these services
to law enforcement.
So, you know, they're not the innocent victims in all this.
So is this what happens when breaching people's security
becomes a profitable business?
Bicycle mark.
I don't know.
Did you guys stop me if you've already talked about
the plan in the Netherlands to track people's driving?
I don't know if we've talked about it.
We've talked about similar things.
I don't know about specifically in the Netherlands.
Right, they do.
A lot of people drive.
And in fact, they're concerned both for carbon emissions
and traffic.
And so the plan that has been approved,
I don't know how far it's going to go from now.
Well, it's supposed to go into effect in two years,
and they're going to eliminate auto taxes,
taxes on your car yearly.
And instead, there'll be a GPS tracking system.
Sorry if that's not the right term,
but that's what they use in the press there.
And it'll track how far you travel,
and you'll pay $0.06, as high as $0.06,
maybe lower in the beginning.
But eventually, it'll come to $0.06 per kilometer.
And if you drive into a high-traffic area,
there'll be a surcharge on top of that.
And let's see, high-traffic area.
Yeah, and that's the plan so far.
And of course, the concern among the opposition is,
who is this company that is going to be keeping track
of these details of where you go in the country?
And that's still, you know, they're defending.
And it's being done for a greener Earth,
so it's okay to hand over your information.
And then there's the, besides that,
the privacy issue is also,
I believe that people will still drive like crazy
and just pay more and go,
oh, I'm very unhappy, I'm paying more.
But they'll keep driving.
All right, Voltaire.
We have the same problem in New York.
They were suggesting it.
I don't think any of us are opposed to, like,
programs that will, like, tax people more
for driving more.
The only problem is the privacy issues behind it.
I think that there is a way to do this
without having, without violating people's privacy.
Well, tell Bloomberg what is that way.
How do you not have cameras or ways of tracking automobiles?
No, if they have strict policies
about deleting their logs after, like, one day
or something like that,
like what RiseUp.net did with deleting their logs.
Okay, so maybe we're going to have RiseUp.net
or IMC or somebody like that run the system.
I might actually believe that they're going to delete
the information.
That sounds like a great idea, actually.
It is a good idea, actually.
Why not?
If they weren't actually keeping track
of the high-traffic regions,
then you wouldn't actually need a GPS unit.
An odometer would suffice because you could just,
you know, measure how much the wheels have turned.
Another thing that one could, in theory, do is,
you know, if the thing was programmed that,
okay, well, these are the high-traffic regions,
and within these points, you know, up the meter,
but it's all within the thing.
It doesn't actually record anything.
It just, you know, keeps track of when you're
in different areas internally
and then charges based on that.
That would be a solution to that.
I don't think it's a great idea in the first place,
but these would be ways where you could kind of
lower the privacy concerns.
You would probably never see some sort of system
that internally records and just simply reports
how much you've driven as well as high-price regions,
mainly because it's inside your car,
and that opens up a door of people messing
with their own cars to spend little or nothing.
Oh, they'll make that a crime, then,
to mess with your own car.
They've already tried to do that.
Why would they have to concern themselves
with that security precaution when they could
simply run the system from their side?
Keep in mind, behind all of these new forms
of technology and new laws are governments
that really, really want to keep track
of what their citizens are doing at all times,
so any possibility they can get that,
they're going to grab.
You know this.
Not just governments, but corporations
that are trying to get you marketing information.
Uh-huh.
Well, yeah, the all-valuable marketing information.
In my opinion, the more important thing
about making sure your privacy isn't breached
is very simply having strict regulations
and accountability, you know, openness,
where people can see what's going on
inside these companies or agencies.
I suspect it's simply that they're more honest,
but if you look at the official numbers,
the Netherlands actually has the highest number
of wiretaps, not per capita, but in total
of any country in the world.
So it doesn't surprise me that they are looking
for more and more ways to look at the people
in their country.
All right.
You know, we want to demonstrate this
because going back to the story that started
all this, the Sprint 8 million GPS request
or whatever it's called.
There is a phone number, and if you would like,
if you're a member of law enforcement,
or not, you want to request information.
I'm not sure.
Bernie, does this include GPS information?
Yes.
Actually, you'll hear from the menu
when you call this.
There's a very nice electronic surveillance menu
for cops when they call this.
And one of the menu options is a GPS ping request,
which will tell the officer specifically
where a particular mobile phone is located.
Okay.
So I'm just wondering if maybe it's a bunch
of hackers doing this that have resulted
in 8 million requests, and maybe law enforcement
isn't that interested?
Well, no.
I'm sure Sprint...
You don't think?
Whatever.
I don't think Sprint really cares,
as long as they make money out of it.
The thing that annoys me is that the profit
is driving these surveillance tools.
Sprint noted at this conference where they
were recorded saying that in the past year
there were 8 million location requests
for cell phones by law enforcement.
That's a lot more than previously
when they just had this voice-based system.
And Sprint makes money in every one of these.
So because Sprint rolled out this new tool
that has become very, very popular
with cops to use, they're making in more profit.
Yeah, but it's an 800 number.
Oops, I shouldn't have said that.
Okay, so now you know three of the digits.
Let me try it.
Yeah.
Go ahead, Redhack.
Is this like a self-serving system
where basically you can call in and get
a customer's IMSI, and then you use that
and plug it in to get their GPS?
Or do they have to actually call Sprint first
and say, I need this customer's information,
and then once they have their ID number
or whatever it is, they can plug it into the system?
Do we know?
The web-based system doesn't involve humans.
According to Sprint, the web-based system
does not require human interaction by Sprint.
So they type in a customer's name
and they can get all the information they need.
I imagine they need some kind of a code
or something like that.
Yeah, they need more information
about the phone number, that sort of thing.
Well, let's just set up an account.
We can start our own law enforcement agency
and just check up on people.
Anyway, let's demonstrate the thing.
Okay, I accidentally gave out the area code.
I wasn't supposed to.
I don't want to give out the phone number
over the air, so basically we're just going
to demonstrate it over the air.
And can we get a dial tone?
Okay, there's a dial tone.
I'm going to call the number.
And there we go.
People can't read these tones, can they?
What do you mean, yes, they can?
All right, we have to delete that, obviously.
Keep that from going over the air.
Thank you for calling Sprint Nextel Corporate Security.
Please note our menu options have changed.
Listen to all of the options before making your selection.
You bet.
For life or death situations,
including 911 assistance, press 1.
If you are a Sprint Nextel customer, press 2.
For subpoena compliance, press 3.
For electronic surveillance, press 4.
For a trial appearance, press 5.
For identity fraud, stolen phone, press 6.
To report internal security issues, press 7.
To report a Sprint building alarm, press 8.
To repeat this menu, press the pound key.
Bernie, which one is it?
I think it's electronic surveillance, option 4.
For GPS ping requests, press 1.
To check the status of your request, press 2.
For T50 classified program support only, press 3.
For all other law enforcement requests, press 4.
To repeat this menu, press star.
Let's try 1.
To return to the main menu, press the pound key.
Let's see what we're asked for.
Please hold while we connect your call.
Now this is where the human interaction takes place.
Oh, I thought there was no human interaction.
No, there isn't for the new web system
that they used in the past year to get 8 million requests.
What happened?
Thank you for calling Sprint.
For quality and training purposes,
your call may be monitored and or recorded.
Somebody...
What are we going to ask for?
Sprint Nextel, this is Joy.
How can I help you?
Yes, hi, I was wondering,
what kind of a code would I have to enter
in order to be able to do some GPS pinging?
What kind of a code would you have to enter?
Yeah, and how do I apply for that?
Well, first you have to be a law enforcement agency.
Okay, I can do that.
You can do that?
Yeah.
Well, I have sort of a flexible position,
yeah, in a closed community.
Is there a website perhaps where I could apply?
I just want to know how to get started
with the whole procedure.
No, I mean, you have to have a legal need
to have something specific.
Okay, and how do I demonstrate that legal need?
Well, you have to have a court order.
Okay.
You have to go to a judge and prove to a judge
that you have a need to.
So I'd get the court order,
and I'm just trying to figure out
when I would call the number,
I'd enter the GPS pinging selection.
I'd have to enter something from the court order?
Well, no, you'd have to provide the court order
to Sprint.
I mean, do you have...
Right, but how do I do that on the toll-free number?
On the toll-free number?
The number I just called, yes.
Okay, this is a number to get information.
Okay.
Okay, so what agency are you with?
Well, actually, I'm afraid that's not something
I can reveal right now.
I have to check with my supervisor first.
But I was just calling to get information, actually.
I don't actually have anybody yet that we need to ping.
I see.
But that could happen.
But I just needed to know if there was a procedure
that we need to go through with Sprint.
Well, if you're a law enforcement agency,
then that's given to you,
but I can't provide you any information
without knowing what law enforcement agency you're with.
I understand that, yes.
It's a dilemma.
We're fairly new, but we're just trying to make contact
with all the phone companies and figure out exactly
what procedures we have to go through.
And I think Sprint is the only one with a toll-free number
that makes this easy.
A toll-free number?
You mean the number that you called?
Yes.
Yeah, that's just a number to our offices.
Uh-huh.
Right, has a lot of choices.
Okay, well, listen, where are your offices, by the way?
We're at the headquarters in Overland Park, Kansas.
Oh, okay.
I've seen that.
All right, well, I want to thank you very much
for being so helpful.
You're welcome.
All right, have a good night.
Thank you, you too.
All right, I didn't want to put her on the spot any longer.
Redhack, what do you have to say about that?
I think it's interesting because she sounded,
I mean, she didn't tell us much.
She sounded perplexed.
I think somebody was messaging her saying,
hey, you know what, you're on the radio right now.
Either she was perplexed or maybe they do actually do
some sort of training for these kinds of representatives.
If she is delegated as somebody who's supposed to take
law enforcement requests,
no one's ever asked questions like that to her before.
Well, no, but they may have social engineering training.
This happens with certain support positions these days.
That's a good number to call during the social engineering
panel at HOPE because I think, yeah,
we might be getting something.
She wasn't ready to give us any information,
even for innocuous questions like, you know.
I mean, she seemed very hesitant to talk to us at all.
Yeah, I noticed that.
And there may be some level of training that she was provided,
which makes sense for, you know,
if she's in the position to answer these.
Bernie, what do you think about that?
You think I should have pressed for some other line of information?
I think you probably went as far as you could without getting
yourself into trouble.
Well, I was trying to be coy, you know.
I was trying to just find out what they were willing to give out.
And it didn't seem like they were going to give out very much.
But I'm still curious.
How do you actually, you know, you get a court order.
Okay, what information do you enter over the telephone
to get this information from them?
As I said before, the phone-based system that's been in place
for at least a couple of years,
you have to deal with a live person like her to give them the information.
But the new web-based system that Sprint described at this conference,
which you can read about online on the ESS website,
there's no human interaction on Sprint.
But do we have the URL for that?
No, we don't, but we might try to find that.
Oh, I should have asked for the URL.
Maybe I could have gotten that from her, you know.
You can always call back another time.
What if the investigation is a sealed or secret investigation,
then does Sprint have access to some sort of information that they shouldn't,
or is it just good enough to be able to somehow say that
I'm a part of this law enforcement agency?
Because it may not be something that's public information
that they're investigating someone.
So then how do they verify that, yes, in fact,
this person is under investigation?
Yeah, so what happens if somebody calls up
and they just simply say they're from some police department,
some local police department of some local little town
in some Midwestern state?
How would they verify?
So we don't know the answer to these questions for Sprint,
but we have seen guides.
They were recently found by the same guy
who got the 8 million number
for some of the large internet companies,
Yahoo and Facebook and MySpace among them,
where they do, in fact, describe exactly the procedure.
And it seems mostly to be based by fax machine.
So if you were willing to take the risk of forging
a law enforcement letterhead,
which I don't recommend doing because if you get caught,
you'll get in a lot of trouble.
Or if you actually are law enforcement,
and lots of law enforcement people listen to us all the time,
this is how you do it.
You send it on your letterhead.
And Yahoo is pretty cheap.
They're the only ones of the three to have their price list
in the same document, and it only costs about $10
to find out who someone is based on their Yahoo ID
if you are law enforcement.
I know that they didn't have 8 million conversations
like I just had over the last however many months
to get the number.
So obviously they're using much more efficient methods.
Well, this would be where the web-based thing comes in.
If you don't have to actually interact with somebody,
then you could be sitting there and clicking up whoever.
I'd like that.
I'd like to sit there and click and GPS ping
to my heart's content,
as I'm sure many people in law enforcement
are currently enjoying.
So if you have the information, please share it with us.
We're going to take phone calls.
212-209-2900.
We only have a few minutes left.
We have so much to talk about this evening,
all kinds of interesting stories that have been popping up.
They're enforcing a new cell phone ban
down there in Philadelphia, Bernie.
You know about this?
Yeah, just this week.
It is now a primary offense.
You can be stopped by a cop
if they see you using a handheld phone
while driving a motor vehicle or a bicycle.
Yes.
Or a skateboard.
A skateboard?
They left out unicycles and inline skates.
No, they said skates.
They said skates, scooter, skateboard, and bicycle.
Really?
What about unicycles?
I mean, seriously.
I'm sure they could stop you if you're on a unicycle.
They don't say motorcycle either,
but I'm sure they can do that as well.
You don't need your hands to operate a unicycle.
That's right.
That's a good point.
Yeah, but you do need to concentrate.
I think if you're texting,
I see people bicycling and texting.
That's insane.
You don't need your hands.
Bicycle Mark, have you ever done that?
I regularly do that.
You text while you bike.
I know exactly the stretch of,
now I live in Amsterdam,
but I know exactly the stretches
where nothing is going to jump in my way
and I can write at least a sentence.
I can say the same thing in my car
and I get chastised for saying that.
I do the exact same thing.
You text while you bike?
Only I do not memorize the landscape.
I just simply wing it.
Yeah.
You know, unicycles don't require hands to operate,
but neither do inline skates or skateboards,
so I don't think that's the...
I mean, the argument, right,
is that the person operating the moving vehicle
is distracted, right?
So making it something handheld or not handheld
doesn't change the distraction.
So if you're using a hands-free set
and talking and talking and talking,
it's not going to make you any more aware of the road
or the person that just walked in front of your car.
Well, there is a difference
if you're looking down at your phone in your little hand
versus looking up straight ahead
and just using hands-free
that's, you know, with some sort of earbud.
But study after study has shown that there is, in fact,
no safety advantage to using a hands-free device.
The only people who benefit from these laws
are the manufacturers of hands-free devices.
If they really wanted to benefit public safety,
they would ban use of telecommunications devices
while driving.
Why all the banning?
Why not just simply some common sense?
People don't have common sense.
Have you ever been on the street in New York City?
Why is it that people don't have common sense?
You know, it's like we don't know what to do
unless someone tells us not to do it.
You know, it's a ridiculous nanny state
that we're making here.
It also seems like a bit of a futile battle
because if using hands-free
versus, you know, non-hands-free communication,
then that makes it sound as if
talking at all on a phone, no matter what, is dangerous.
So then having a conversation with somebody in a car
is just dangerous.
How are you going to ban that?
Yeah, having an argument in a car
or, you know, talking to somebody you're skating next to.
Again, I'll phone number 202-209-2900
if you have anything to say,
anything to add to this discourse that we've been having.
Bicycle Mark.
I pay attention to what happens in Philadelphia
with biking news,
just in case I ever have to move back to this country.
And not too long ago,
they were talking about banning
not only, of course, the use of mobile phones
while you're on the bike,
but also listening to anything with headphones,
which I have to say is like my religion.
And to take that away,
making me have to listen to the cityscape.
Yeah, and it's not hard to make that step in logic.
Well, if this is going to be distracting
and that's going to be distracting,
then we have to do this.
And before you know it,
it's an incredible maze of regulations.
And any good cyclist, I think,
can balance the volume of what they're listening to,
in my case, you know,
programming of educational kind
with the sounds of the landscape,
so I can still hear horns.
I don't know if they would like the result of that
for people like me
because I would simply just start using speakers then
and then my music would start bleeding out
to the rest of the world.
And there are people in the city that do that.
And that's incredibly obnoxious.
People in the country do that.
But, you know,
it comes down to a person's common sense, then.
And I agree with Bicycle Mark.
I can't use my headphones while driving
or biking
because they specifically came with a warning
not to use them while biking
because they block all the sound out.
But you could, you know, in theory,
with most headphones,
be able to balance being able to hear loud noises.
Okay, our number is 22209-2900
and our phone lines are wide open.
I'm going to press this button now
and I know I'm going to miss the call.
Yes, hello?
Yeah, it's on your mind.
Talking about people that wear headphones,
I don't know whether the guy had, like,
the headphones for a phone
or had it for music,
but I was waiting for a city bus
and this guy
almost stepped out in front of the bus.
I yelled, get out of the way.
He couldn't even hear me.
It's just lucky he turned the right way.
The bus was coming.
He would have been a speed bump.
Yeah.
That's how bad this story is.
Yeah, that's true.
Now, is there a way to fix that to make a law
or just to teach people to be smart?
There's just nudniks running around
that have no brains.
I've seen,
I saw a woman driving
and eating a sandwich
and talking on the cell phone at the same time.
So do you ban the sandwich?
Do you ban the cell phone?
Which do you ban?
They're both dangerous.
I'm telling you,
it's an epidemic.
It sure is.
It is an epidemic.
All right.
Thanks for your call.
Yeah.
Thanks for listening, sir.
All right.
Take care.
Mike.
The obvious answer is, of course, the automobile.
You ban the automobile
so you have somebody walking down the street
eating a sandwich and talking on the phone.
That's dangerous, too.
I think that's fine.
All right.
As long as the sandwich doesn't have trans fats,
it's fine.
All right.
You know, this is getting ridiculous.
He's taking the phone call.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Hi there.
Hi.
What's on your mind?
I was going to tell you
how the Google redirect thing works.
Go ahead.
What they're doing,
at Google's end,
it's unchanged.
At the target end,
they simply have a database
and they look back to see
the originator's IP address.
And if you accumulate
more than N of those
in some period,
then they just put up
a different page
and send that back to you.
So it sounds like something
the newspaper
is entirely in control of.
Absolutely.
So I don't understand
why this story
is being spouted
as something
that Google is changing.
I don't know.
I don't know.
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I don't know.
Y'all got unbelievable answers.
And, uh, we'll be back again next week.
OTH at 2600.com is our email address.
Until then, have a good night.
Stay free.
Stay awake.
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construct a community, increase capacity, improve opportunity, worldwide enhancement,
no exceptions, a hundred dollar laptop exceeding projections,
millions of children are born every year, how can we accommodate, it doesn't seem clear,
management oversight a must to achieve it, what about the hardware and software that's
needed, an LCD you can read me through, and an AMD certified CPU, we can do it all, you
and me prove, add 3 more ports, hit a USB 2, plus I'm on a diet for lower energy, got
an SD slot, and some flash memory, keyboard, touchpad, now they gon' feel us, microphone,
camera, and stereo speakers, still need an OS, let the best choose, bring on the herd
with Tux to the rescue, put it all together, see that it's worth it, the box is complete,
the packaging's perfect,
now I see criticism with creativity, they dispute intention, doubt feasibility, they
laughed at the crank that gave the power level, cool, we improved and added a foot pedal,
now we're picking up speed, moving overnight, 2006 saw the first prototypes, the critics
are scared so they hate what they fear, 10 million units by the fourth quarter here,
that's 10 million children in one year of movement, talk about proof, that's what I
call improvement, we're not finished, it's the start of a trend, the technology provided
means to an end, every night, day, morning, and afternoon, the world owes MIT a huge debt
of gratitude, thanks to the engineers holding down the fort, and every other company who
showed their support.