And the time is 7 o'clock, you're listening to Radio Station W, BAI New York, and that
means it's time for Off The Hook.
And the time is 7 o'clock, you're listening to Radio Station W, BAI, and that means it's time for Off The Hook.
And the time is 7 o'clock, you're listening to Radio Station W, BAI, and that means it's time for Off The Hook.
And good evening to everybody, the program is Off The Hook.
I'm Andy Goldstein here with you, joined tonight by Mike.
Good evening.
And over there is Redhack, I believe.
Hello.
That's Rob T. Firefly.
Good evening.
Over there is Jim.
Hi.
And down to the south a little bit, Bernie S.
Greetings from Philadelphia.
And joining us in the studio tonight, a very esteemed special guest, Mitch Altman.
Hello.
Now, you're just back from, or on your way to, what exactly?
You're always moving someplace.
Yeah, I get to move around a lot.
I'm coming back slowly home from Berlin, where I was there for Chaos Congress.
No, wait.
The Chaos Communication Congress ended on the 30th of December.
It's now, what, the 11th of January?
You're just getting back now?
Berlin's a great place.
Oh, I know that.
Yeah.
So, you know, there are all these hacker spaces and all these geek meetups, and, yeah, there's just a lot of stuff happening, and I'm really glad I got to spend some time there.
Well, you sure did.
But what kinds of things did you see?
What did you do?
Anything?
Well, of course I had to do another workshop in Berlin, an ISP and hacker space there.
Now, Mitch, you say you had to.
Like, you hate doing this.
I don't believe you.
Yeah.
No, no, no.
I had to.
I didn't buy that either.
It was burning within me, and I was asked to do it, so I said yes.
And, you know, and then I went to an all-night hackathon at C-Base, which was called Break Fast, where you're supposed to break something and then you get to eat breakfast.
What, you just have to break something?
Because I could do that very easily.
Oh, yeah, you could do it.
That's what it's all about.
I think I might have done it right here tonight, actually.
Yeah, I brought a whole bunch of stuff to play with, but unfortunately I had to leave because they smoked cigarettes.
It was a cloud of smoke, and I couldn't breathe.
Well, they are still German, you know.
It's still Germany.
Yeah.
I see you have a 28C3 t-shirt there.
Proudly sporting.
I hope you brought me one.
Behind enemy lines?
That was the theme this year.
That was the theme.
And, yeah, so, you know, they have a theme every year, but not many people really stick to it in all the talks or whatever.
But I didn't go to many talks this year, but the one I did go to was by Cory Doctorow, and he was really fantastic.
You know, we keep trying to get him to come to Hope.
Yeah, Cory, come on.
There's always some reason why he doesn't come.
Now he's coming to Chaos Camp.
I understand he's even going to DEFCON this year, but we're trying to get him to come to Hope.
He usually lands on his birthday.
Well, it can't always because, you know, the dates of Hope change from year to year, so it can't always be his birthday.
So if, you know, we're going to try doing it in a different month and see if he uses that excuse again.
But maybe a petition is in order or something or some kind of, you know, what do you do in court?
We force somebody to do something.
He could probably file some court papers to move his birthday to a month when we would never have Hope.
Or change his name maybe so that it's not his birthday anymore or something like that.
It seems easy enough to me.
Change the name of the month, change the number of days in the month.
We'll figure something out.
We're hackers after all.
Okay, but speaking of Hope, which I've definitely moved the conversation towards,
tomorrow at noon the pre-registration officially opens for Hope number nine.
And, yes, the horses are on the track at that point.
And that's going to be a lot of fun because it's on.
It really is on.
A lot of people have gotten the pre-registration tickets.
Well, a few, not a lot I would guess.
We filled that up pretty quickly.
But now it's general admission.
Still less than you'll pay at the door.
Go to Hope.net for more information on that or Hope number nine.net.
Either one of those will work.
Or 2600.com.
This weekend we're going to have something rather fun happening.
You might recall in November we released the videos for the first Hope in 1994.
In December we released the videos online for Beyond Hope in 1997.
Well, this weekend, guess what?
We're going to be releasing the videos from H2K from the year 2000 starting on Friday morning
because this conference was the first one that went three days.
It starts at 10 a.m. and it will be running until Sunday evening.
And hour by hour, just like we've done the last two conferences,
we'll be releasing them online and you can simply click on a couple of buttons
and watch the video in the comfort of your own home.
And if you want DVD quality, well, there are buttons to hit to get that too.
Emmanuel.
Yes.
It doesn't seem like it was that long ago.
It really doesn't.
No, it really doesn't.
I mean, true, it was pre-9-11 and that seemed like a different age altogether.
But no, it doesn't seem that long ago.
Mitch, was this before you started going to conferences?
It was before I started going to conferences.
But there's a lot of it that's very similar because, you know, the world ended on January 1st, 2000.
I was there, yeah.
Yeah.
And the world ended at the Maker Faire May 18th, this past year.
Oh, did it?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
There were big billboards proclaiming it.
Oh, because of the guy, yeah.
That guy Camp, is that his name?
Yeah.
Camping, Camping.
Camping, yeah.
From your part of the world.
Yeah, Oakland.
And we had a big celebration at the Maker Faire when the world was supposed to end.
By the way, by the way, this is of interest and related to that.
His radio station here in the New York area, WFME, I believe, 94.7, it's for sale.
Apparently when you predict the end of the world and it doesn't happen, it costs a lot of money.
And now they're looking to unload that station.
You can get it here.
So if anyone out there is cool and wants to buy a radio station and do something different with it, I understand that one is for sale.
I got 20 bucks.
Is that enough?
I don't think that's going to be enough.
I got 20.
I can kick you.
But let's just use this as a barometer to show people that radio stations like WBAI are few and far between.
Here we have a station.
It's religious now, and it's an opportunity for it to be something different.
And what do you want to bet is just going to be the same old crap that we hear everywhere else in, say, a year?
Let's just keep an eye on it, 94.7.
Let's see what happens.
We could start.
I'm sorry?
We could start a religion based around free and open airwaves and raise a lot of money that way.
I mean, that's a great way to raise money, right?
Buy a radio station.
You're trying to deftly move the conversation over to starting religions, which, okay, it's not so deft because I have to find that story first.
Well, we can say that this takes place in Sweden where all kinds of stories like this tend to take place.
That's the assumption that it's taking place in Sweden, of course.
Yeah, where is that story?
Well, yeah, okay, so Sweden, which is a country in the northern part of Scandinavia, which is a region of Europe which gets a lot of snow this time of year.
It's in the middle of Scandinavia, really.
Okay, it's in the middle if you want to be technical about it.
It's all northern.
It's north of Denmark.
They speak Swedish there.
Okay, and here's a story.
Yes.
They also speak English.
The Church of—I can't read this.
Kopimi.
Here, you read that.
It's too damn small.
Kopimi, but it's spelled funny.
Sometimes you print stories out and they print in microscopic print and you just can't read them.
So the Church of Kopimiism, whose principal tenant—
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
What word did you just say?
Church of what?
Kopimiism.
Kopimiism, that's a word?
K-O-P-I-M-I-S-M.
You can call your religion whatever you want.
Well, yeah, it would be nice if you could understand what the word means.
Well, it's a church whose principal tenant is the right to file share, and it's been formally recognized as a religious organization in Sweden, whatever that means.
All right.
Well, that's great, and I guess you get all kinds of benefits from that.
And I'm going to ask Bernie about this.
Apparently, this is not the first time this particular issue has been religionified, or whatever the word is for that.
Well, I don't know about that particular issue, but back in 2009 at PlumberCon in Austria, which is a great, great hacker conference—
And a great country, too.
It was all around great, right near MetaLab, which is an awesome hacker space, MetaLab.
There was the Church of Security, which is another church.
Now, tell us about that, because that really sounds interesting, the Church of Security.
Well, it's very good.
They handed out buttons and everything.
I have one on my backpack.
The Church of Security—I mean, I'm not really up on all of their religious dogma, but it seems to have some opposing tenets with the Church of Kopimiism.
Church of Security would like to secure things and make them private, whereas the Church of Kopimiism means that sharing information is a sacrament.
So I would like to see a theological debate between the high priests of these religions.
I'd like to see maybe a crusade or something.
I mean, it's been a while, and it's kind of emphatic when you really believe in something.
You know, crusades, I'm not really into them.
No?
There's too much death, and then at the end you have to really believe things that aren't true to make the death worth it.
You've got to have death if you're going to have religion.
You can't have one without the other.
Why do you think every church has so many cemeteries?
Come on.
They're tied together.
That's a good question.
Yeah.
Go to an atheist building, wherever they are.
Do you find any tombstones there?
I don't think so.
The ethical culture people might.
I'm not sure.
Really?
I don't know.
We're going to get so many letters.
We're trying.
We don't get enough.
We don't get enough.
Are there atheist graveyards?
I don't know of any particular ones.
There are a few.
There are always crosses and stars and things like that.
It's not really an organization, right, per se.
It's just a...
I just never thought of that before.
You know, it's like trying to herd cats, trying to get atheists to all agree to one thing,
because the whole point is that you don't believe in anything.
Well, it could be an interesting cemetery, wouldn't it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right, anyway.
So, anything else you'd like to tell us about these two opposing churches, Bernie?
Well, I'm not a theologist, but I would like to learn more about them.
And, you know, just the fact that a state, you know, a government, a country,
legally recognizes sort of a hacker tenant as an official religion, I think is noteworthy.
Well, I think we should invite both of these churches to HOPE,
which is taking place July 13, 14, and 15,
and maybe on the morning of the 15th, which is a Sunday,
we can have services in each of these churches.
You really think this guy can get a visa to the U.S.?
Why not?
What, religious oppression?
Is that what we do here now?
So, the one thing I like about the U.S. is that we don't officially recognize religions,
which is kind of nice.
So, I guess there's no chance for official recognition here.
But it says their sacred symbols are CTRL-C and CTRL-V,
which are, of course, the keyboard shortcuts for copy and paste.
What about SHIFT-INSERT? Is that also accepted?
Maybe there's a heretic sect that holds that. I don't know.
Well, that's my interpretation is SHIFT-INSERT, because I just find that easier to hit.
And I don't like using the CTRL key except when I need to.
Sounds like you should create your own branch of the religion.
I don't want to split off, but I will if I have to.
Well, you know, if you feel that strongly about it.
All right. And I also, as long as we're on the subject,
I also prefer to use the mouse to copy, you know,
to scroll down and copy rather than hit CTRL-C,
because CTRL-C can also do other things to programs, like interrupt them.
And I'd hate to see those things mixed up.
You know what I mean, right, Mitch?
I totally know what you mean.
But I kind of like the idea.
Well, I don't know what the laws are like in Sweden.
In the U.S., if there's an official religion,
then they're officially allowed to break laws that other people can't break,
because it's not breaking the law because it's sanctioned by the religion.
I agree.
Yeah, it only happens sometimes.
It depends on the law.
If you don't bring your kid to a doctor,
you can still get in trouble for that even if you believe in it, right?
Oh, yeah, Christian scientists can get brought to trial for that.
Right.
But there are churches that claim that certain psychedelics are sacred
and they're allowed to do them.
Coyote.
Yeah, and if there was a church,
a branch of this church in the United States,
would that mean that they would be allowed to break copyright law?
I can answer the question for Sweden.
The answer is no.
But copying files is almost legal in Sweden anyway.
Well, now, of course, Sweden also has the Pirate Party,
which is something that we're coming to terms with here.
I believe there's a Pirate Party USA.
Yeah, but we don't really have third parties in the USA.
I would like to have Hackers on Planet Earth
be sort of a forum for all these emerging groups
that have not yet found their place here in the States.
The Church of Copymism, the Church of Security, the Pirate Party.
If there's anyone else you think we should invite, email us,
oth2600.com.
This is a great opportunity for us to meet all kinds of people
from around the planet that have different views on these issues
that affect all of us.
Yeah, you know, I've always found hope a profoundly spiritual experience.
It is.
And it's nice to sort of codify that now.
Yeah, so I find myself praying to the gods at least once over the weekend
that please let this just go without a hitch or something like that.
Okay, interesting news.
I don't know if people know about this.
Maybe if you're listening to 5 O'Clock Shadow this afternoon,
with Robert Knight, you might have heard it.
But Zuccotti Park is back.
Well, back a little bit.
They took down the barricades, the metal barricades.
Apparently they needed to surround somebody else with them.
So they're not there anymore.
I just went by Zuccotti, and there's people there.
There are mic checks going on.
There's people playing music, handing out leaflets.
They're not camping, but they're there, and the spirit is back.
And since it's springtime, apparently we're not going to have winter this year,
a lot of people are there, and it's a good feeling.
And, of course, if you walk through the, I believe it's the Deutsche Bank building
on Wall Street with the public plaza, there are meetings going on inside there,
and apparently that's been going on for a while as well.
So don't believe what you read in the media about all of this being dead or finished.
It's not.
It's very much alive, and when the weather starts getting better,
it's probably going to get even more alive.
But it's alive right now, right now at this very moment.
Are the drummers back?
I didn't see any drummers.
Oh, wow.
You don't like drummers.
Well, not these drummers.
What's wrong with these drummers?
In the wrong church or something?
Yeah, too much, too much.
Well, you know, if you're going to start beating a drum, you need to beat it loudly.
That's my view.
Bass and drum, very important that they be throbbing,
and you have to hear it at least three blocks away.
Otherwise, what's the point?
What religion is this that you belong to now?
This is just my own personal view.
Okay, so I just wanted to let people know about that
because that's something I just noticed.
Now something you might notice, if you look up in the skies,
you might see drones up there.
Yes, drones watching you.
And the Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed suit
against the Federal Aviation Administration
seeking information on drone flights in the United States.
Now the FAA is the sole entity within the federal government
capable of authorizing domestic drone flights,
and for too long now has failed to release specific and detailed information
on who is authorized to fly drones within U.S. borders.
This comes from the EFF.org website.
Up until a few years ago,
most Americans didn't know much about drones or unmanned aircraft.
There are these, in case you don't know,
these devices that we use to kill Pakistanis
and various other people.
We're Americans.
Well, so far, they're just used to kill people in certain countries.
How big is a drone? Does anyone know?
I've never seen one.
Well, they can be just a medium.
I'm sorry, what's that, Bernie?
They vary in size.
But the ones that kill people, how big are they?
They have to be bigger because they have to carry a bomb,
so you need big wingspans.
So fortunately, it's a small drone flying over you.
They can't drop bombs.
Okay, all right.
What's the smallest one that could kill me?
Why do you care so much about what kind can kill you?
Well, if it flew into your head,
then I guess it could be a small one.
Well, that kills the drone, too.
You mean the kind that dropped bombs?
It would probably have to be the size of not much smaller
than a small single-engine aircraft,
one pilot, like a Piper Cub,
or something really small like that.
Not much smaller than that to carry bombs and shoot people.
But that's a horrible concept
that something like that be flying over anybody's head.
Yeah, well, all kinds of unmanned craft
have been up there for a while.
According to this release,
the U.S. military has been using drones
in its various wars and conflicts around the world
for more than 15 years,
using the Predator drone for the first time in Bosnia in 1995,
the Global Hawk drone in Afghanistan in 2001.
I believe that we were using drones back in the Vietnam War, too,
just to get aerial surveillance.
Correct me if I'm wrong on that.
I know Israel's been using drones forever.
So they've been up there.
It was only a matter of time
before they started using them here against us
to spy on Americans to see what we're up to.
We've talked about it on this program
when we had people on from Occupy Wall Street.
We were talking about putting the robocopters up
so that we can see what people or what police are doing
and report back on that.
Those are really kind of neat devices.
Mitch, have you worked with those robocopters?
I haven't worked with them directly,
but that was one of the things I saw
at my first hacker conference in Berlin,
which made me go back again and again and again.
And they're really amazing.
The videos you can just search for online
and see what the police are blocking you from seeing
by having a row of riot gear.
The little microcopter goes up with a video camera
and you can see them tear-gassing people.
But at Noisebridge,
there are people working on microcopters for this purpose.
That's the hacker space in the Bay Area?
Yeah, the one that I helped co-found in San Francisco.
And people at Noisebridge then put out the word,
and there are hacker spaces all around the world
working on this now for OWS.
Well, that'd be interesting.
You can do all kinds of interesting things with that.
Are there safety concerns with having these devices
just going up into the air?
Well, that was what I was wondering.
If there's going to be now a ruling
to stop these drones that hurt people,
is that same ruling going to stop the Occupy people
or anyone from sending up ones
so that we as people can see what police that we pay for
are doing against individuals?
But according to what I know
with the space programs that go on at Noisebridge
and other places,
if something weighs less than 4 pounds,
you technically don't need approval from the FAA.
Well, otherwise, birds would need approval too
because they're always in that particular space.
How high up do they go?
I'm not sure how high.
I think it would be really limited
by the radio communications
rather than by the propulsion
because it's just by fans.
Computer fans can get pretty powerful.
Well, it would be interesting.
Maybe we could launch one at Hope.
That would be kind of cool.
That would be way cool.
There's all kinds of talk now about doing things in space.
We were talking about that at the camp over the summer,
and I know that was talked about at the Congress as well.
In just 22 and a half years,
we have to put a hacker on the moon
according to the predictions there.
I have a list I'd like to put on the moon.
I'm not sure if that's something that they're looking for.
Well, that could help.
Yeah, a few from Mars too.
But there have been these microcopters at Hope,
but only indoors because Hope is usually indoors.
Usually, yes,
but there's no reason why we can't expand it
to the rest of the city as well
and start launching things.
That sounds really ominous,
but no, it doesn't have to be.
It doesn't have to be.
Imagine putting one of your TV begons on a robocopter
and basically just going throughout the city
turning off TVs in people's windows
and things like that.
That would be fun.
I must admit the first thing I thought of
was a fantasy of having one go up and down skyscrapers
and taking just a small visit to each window.
Wow.
Okay, that could be.
Or just going amok inside a mall or something,
going to one of those stores
with a thousand TV sets on the wall
and just sort of visiting and then leaving.
Or CES in Las Vegas, which just happened.
There's probably like 10,000 big screen TVs
per square inch there.
Okay, I don't know how we got into the TV begons exactly,
but let's go back to the drones.
The drones are being used domestically
for non-military purposes,
raising significant privacy concerns.
For example, this past December,
U.S. Customs and Border Protection
purchased its ninth drone.
It uses these drones inside the United States
to patrol the U.S. borders,
which most would argue is within its agency mandate,
but it also uses them to aid state and local police
for routine law enforcement purposes.
In fact, the Los Angeles Times reported in December
that the organization used one of its predators
to roust out cattle rustlers in North Dakota.
Yeah, the Times quoted local police as saying
they have used two unarmed predators
based at Grand Forks Air Force Base
to fly at least two dozen surveillance flights since June.
State and local police are also using their own drones
for routine law enforcement activities,
from catching drug dealers to finding missing persons.
Some within law enforcement have even proposed
using drones to record traffic violations.
Actually, now I've seen the signs on highways
that say speed controlled by aircraft.
I've seen that, so is this really anything new?
Probably not.
I've traveled around the U.S. a great deal
back when I had a vehicle, a VW van, for 12 years,
and I saw that sign, and quite often
I would see airplanes flying over that were,
you know, that's what they were doing.
Bernie, did you have something on this?
Well, yeah, literally for decades,
at least in Pennsylvania,
Pennsylvania State Police had been flying long stretches
of the Pennsylvania Turnpike
in coordination with ground vehicles,
you know, police cars on the ground
and communicating by radio,
and they would use a stopwatch.
They would time people who would go from, you know,
from one line painted across the road to another one,
and then they would radio ahead and say,
oh, this guy's speeding.
Pull over the old New York telephone van
or whatever they saw.
Of course, I don't know if the 2600 van
goes past the speed limit.
It's so old.
Well, actually, I did get pulled over for speeding once,
so it was a school zone.
It was nighttime, okay?
There were no school kids out, but whatever.
But I don't think they do that very often.
I think they leave the signs up to sort of intimidate people,
but I don't think, I think it's way,
it's just not cost-effective to launch aircraft,
at least manned aircraft to do that,
but with drones, you know,
as these things get lower, you know, less expensive,
I really fear our sky's filled with these things
surveilling everything we do.
It's not really far-fetched.
It could happen.
I'm looking forward to Google drones.
I'm sure they'll be up there mapping things out
and telling us where we are and things like that.
I mean, corporations can easily do this
as well as military, right?
Yep.
Hmm, interesting.
All right, well, we have to keep an eye on these things,
and good luck to EFF with pursuing information from the FAA.
You have to file these lawsuits.
In fact, the only reason Zuccotti Park is open right now
is because the ACLU filed a lawsuit
to get those barriers taken down, and they succeeded.
Yeah, they didn't even win the lawsuit yet,
but they're the ACLU, and for some reason,
the New York Police Department listened to them.
The threat of a lawsuit, the threat of yet another lawsuit.
So, yeah, sometimes you have to do these things.
Okay, and speaking of international intrigue
in the skies and angry people firing things at other people,
hackers who attack Israel, all right?
And I know there's a large number of you out there,
so please listen.
Hackers who attack Israel need to know
they will be attacked back.
That's according to Israel's deputy foreign minister,
Danny Ayalon.
Great name for a foreign minister, Danny.
I don't know, to somehow...
I would say Daniel, you know?
It's a foreign minister, for God's sake, Danny.
Anyway, he said this on Saturday.
Following a cyber attack on Israeli credit card holders
earlier in the week,
whoever harms Israel's cyberspace
is not immune from retaliation,
he told a meeting at a community center
in the southern city of Beersheba.
I'm not quite sure why he told them that,
but an aide to Ayalon told the Boston Herald
that Israel views cyber attacks as acts of terrorism.
And viewing it like that,
I guess they can do anything in response
to an act of terrorism, right?
Immanuel?
Yes?
How soon do you think it'll be
before the Mossad takes out a hacker
by attaching a magnetic bomb to their car,
like apparently did in Iran the other day
with a nuclear scientist?
Yeah, I heard about that.
Somebody on a motorcycle went up to this guy's car
and attached a magnetic bomb to it
and then apparently drove away and it went off.
And of course, obviously,
that's not something that the Iranian authorities
would do to one of their own nuclear scientists,
so somebody who's anti-Iranian nuclear advancement
was behind that.
So it could very well be the Mossad.
And they're denying it too,
which they usually do when they do something.
Anyway, these comments came
after an anti-Israeli activist
revealed credit card details and other information
on thousands of Israelis,
15,000 last Tuesday and another 11,000 on Thursday.
The hacker identified himself as Oksumar,
wrote he was a member of the hacker group Anonymous,
uh-oh,
initially claimed 400,000 Israelis were affected.
So does this mean then
that the Israelis are going to classify Anonymous
as a terrorist organization
and take all kinds of actions
like lobbing missiles at them
and doing all kinds of things from drones
and various other tactics
because these are terrorists.
We have to deal with terrorists
in the ways that we do that.
Cyber attacks, after all,
you post them as credit card numbers.
It's the exact same thing as blowing up a cafe.
I'm sure we can all agree to that.
The details exposed included the credit card numbers,
names, addresses, telephone numbers,
and identity numbers.
An Israeli student, meanwhile,
claimed to have uncovered the identity of Oksumar
and said he was not from Saudi Arabia,
as had been claimed,
but was a teenager living in Mexico
but who hailed originally from the United Arab Emirates.
Boy, you know,
let's get every country involved here.
The student said he was able to make the trace
after Oksumar used a particular email address
to conduct interviews with Israeli media.
Well, that's pretty damning right there.
If he used a particular email address,
must be that person.
Anyway, that's an interesting chain of events there.
You piss off Israel
and who knows what will happen to you.
Also, this involving Israel as well,
imagine you're a human rights activist
working for an NGO in Sri Lanka.
After a hard day's work in a humid office building,
you walk into your apartment,
fire up your laptop,
and fire off the following tweet.
Congratulations, you're now a terrorist.
It sounds like the plot of an action movie,
but according to a controversial 2010 ruling
by the U.S. Supreme Court,
NGOs and those who work on their behalf
could be held criminally and civilly liable
for providing nonviolent material support
to designated terrorist groups.
That's right.
In Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project,
you know, that's a horrible case
to be on the other side of.
Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project.
The court extended the Patriot Act's prohibition
on material support to terrorist groups
to include expert advice, assistance, and personnel.
Under the contentious 6-3 decision,
aiding and abetting the enemy
could be as innocent as providing antibiotics to refugees
or something like sending out a tweet.
The decision already has its shares of detractors.
Former President Jimmy Carter and Noam Chomsky
have also come out against it,
warning that the decision could hamper
the work of NGOs around the world,
endanger the lives of civilians in war-torn areas,
including women and children.
Is promoting social justice in Sri Lanka
the same as shouting fire in a crowded theater,
and one that presumably is not on fire?
They say yes.
Now, it's interesting.
I'm trying to get my head around this as well.
I think we covered this case when it happened.
Yeah.
Holder being, of course, the attorney general
appointed by President Obama.
And, yeah, it's a really frightening decision
that anything you say,
you don't even necessarily have to be in contact
with one of these designated terrorist organizations,
but if you say something that helps them,
then you can get in trouble.
Now, I said this had to do with Israel.
It actually has more to do with the United States,
because a particular group, Shirat Hadin,
is using this decision to sue social media giants
such as Twitter,
accusing them of violating, get this,
U.S. anti-terror laws
by hosting the accounts of Hezbollah,
al-Shabaab, other terrorist groups.
And in a recent interview with the Jerusalem Post,
they claim that unless the accounts are deleted,
the California-based tech company could face fines,
even indictments,
maybe even some missiles.
Who knows?
Because, again, you piss off Israel,
and that's the kind of thing that could happen.
So, it's getting really kind of weird.
And how do you verify that a particular Twitter account
belongs to Hezbollah anyway?
You know?
They probably have a press contact, Hezbollah,
that you could call up and ask.
But, yeah, the crazy thing about this law
is it doesn't actually have to be owned
by anyone who is on the official list of Hezbollah,
you know, whatever.
I'm sure they keep detailed records
of those sorts of things.
But if the account is supporting
or deemed to be supporting the actions of an entity
that the U.S. government deems to be terrorist,
then, according to this legal theory,
it could be illegal.
And that's really crazy
that a tech company would have to determine in advance
what accounts fall under this vague law.
We seem to have a theme in 2012 so far
of just getting more and more control over things
and having to account for every little detail.
And it really sort of flies in the face of everything
that the net has been about
or has supposedly been about from its inception.
And, of course, we've been fighting battles
ever since it became commercialized
and overseen by government forces.
Here's something else.
This has to do with our good friends
who are trying to put out SOPA.
Remember SOPA?
Yeah, well, first of all,
there's going to be a hearing next week, I believe.
I'm trying to find the details.
I think I've got them someplace.
Does anybody have the details with them?
There's going to be a hearing a week from today,
I believe in D.C.
January 18th.
I'm sorry, go ahead.
January 18th.
That's a week from today, right?
That's right.
Okay, do you have the details, Bernie,
as to where it is?
Yeah.
Republican Congressman Darrell Issa,
he called a hearing that's going to bring
tech industry representatives to Washington
to really talk about how this Stop Online Piracy Act
could effectively break the Internet.
As we discussed on the show a couple, three weeks ago,
there were hearings about this legislation
where tech industry representatives,
aside from like one person from Google,
were not really allowed to comment
or their comments were just like summarily dismissed
as like they didn't mean anything.
And we're really talking about it from very serious abilities.
Maybe Mike has some more technical details,
but it affects the domain name system, DNS,
and it really puts in private hands
the ability to shut down any website
that might have content that that company doesn't like
or says might infringe on their copyrights.
Do you have anything more on that, Mike?
So I'm glad to hear that people who actually understand
how the Internet works will be talking to Congress,
not that I'm much of a believer that Congress will listen.
But it's still not quite right.
I want Congress to be told,
this bill doesn't just prevent me from making a profit.
This bill prevents me from speaking my mind
in the public forum of the 21st century.
And that should be reason enough for Congress to reject this bill.
And they're not even listening to that argument,
and that really concerns me.
It's First Amendment stuff.
Yeah, well, I was talking to, I guess I won't name names,
a very well-known American security expert in Berlin
after Congress, and he was brought in
to an emergency phone call set up by Google
with the ex-head of the NSA,
whose name I can't recall at the moment.
It's a secret.
I don't think he's keeping his name a secret,
but I'm bad with names.
And anyways, this guy is actually,
according to this well-known American security expert,
actually understands security.
And this does indeed break the ability
for the Internet to be secure,
and this ex-head of the NSA is very concerned
that even though it allows the government
to snoop, et cetera,
it makes it so that the government
will no longer have security,
and corporations will no longer have security.
And this might be the thing that could stop SOPA.
Incidentally, the same person said that
in his experience with lobbying in D.C.,
if you say anything about civil liberties,
or if you bring up anything about the Constitution,
you're immediately discounted,
and anything you say after that
is not as valid as it might have been before.
I'm well aware of this effect,
but it doesn't make it stop bothering me.
No, it bothers me a great deal.
But it is interesting that we can take,
we collectively, including the ex-head of the NSA,
can take this tack that on security grounds alone,
SOPA is very bad.
All right, this comes from our friends
over at Torrent Freak.
In a leaked letter sent to Spain's outgoing president,
the U.S. ambassador to the country warned
that as punishment for not passing
a SOPA-style file-sharing site blocking...
Let me read that again.
A SOPA-style file-sharing site blocking law.
Wow.
Spain risks being put on a United States trade blacklist.
Inclusion would have left Spain
open to a range of retaliatory options,
but already the U.S. was working
with the incoming government to reach its goals.
United States government interference
in Spain's intellectual property laws
had long been suspected,
but it was revelations from WikiLeaks
that finally confirmed the depth of its involvement.
More than 100 leaked cables showed
that the U.S. had helped draft
new Spanish copyright legislation
and had heavily influenced decisions
of both the government and opposition.
So it's not just here that the U.S. is pushing this.
It's in countries all over the world,
and if it doesn't work here,
we're going to try and make it work somewhere else
and then bring it back here.
That's how our government works.
It's this really clever tactic
that the copyright industry uses
where they get some terrible law passed in country A,
and then they say to country B,
hey, look, we've got to harmonize our laws with country A.
But what they do is they just make the law
slightly more repressive than it was in country A,
and then the first country has to go back
and harmonize with the second country,
and it's just this mad dash
to the most repressive copyright laws possible.
And it's clever.
I admire their cleverness,
but it's really disturbing in all other respects.
All right.
Any other words on SOPA, Rob?
No?
No.
Okay, I thought you were waving.
No.
All right.
Bernie, anything else you want to share with people?
I just want to say I also find it disturbing
that our government is apparently,
our State Department is apparently bought and paid for
by the intellectual copyright industry,
intellectual property industry,
and is really using egregious strong-arm tactics
against other countries like Spain
to force them to enact legislation
like that we have in this country.
And it's really, you know,
if organizations like WikiLeaks and Cryptum
and other organizations that publish, you know,
weak back-channel communications
about what our government is really doing around the world,
we wouldn't even know about this.
Yeah.
I would like to ask if we have any listeners in Spain,
which I think we may.
Tell us what it's like there
and how the reaction to this is going on,
because I know if I were a citizen of a country
and another country was found to be dictating my laws,
I would be rather pissed.
All right.
Our phone number, by the way, is 212-209-2900.
We'll be taking phone calls in just a couple of minutes.
And, of course, if you're outside the country,
our country code has won
because we grabbed it before anybody else got it.
I just want to say that as terrible
as the U.S. government's involvement in all this is
and the U.S. copyright industry's involvement,
still they're talking to people in Spain
and the people in Spain are saying,
yeah, okay,
and they certainly deserve some of the blame here.
Yes, absolutely.
Speaking of SOPA,
there's a web-based civic action site
they're providing a way for people
who are irate about the Stop Online Piracy Act
to voice their opinions in a very literal way.
Reverse Robocall is a site set up by Sean Dakin
and Aaron Titus.
They allow users to record a message through the site
and perform their own robocalls to politicians and lobbyists.
For a fee of $10,
Reverse Robocall will let you record a message
that will be delivered as a phone call
to the offices of the co-sponsors of SOPA
and each of the associations and lobbying groups
that have backed the bill in Congress,
88 of them in all.
You can customize the phone number that will appear
and call their ID for the call
in order to avoid being blocked by systems
that reject calls without them.
And if you choose,
you can let others listen in on your message on the site
and rate your effort.
Seems to me you can probably do this
for a lot less than $10.
You can probably do it yourself, right, Mitch?
Yeah, as far as I know,
if you have a plan on your phone or your cell phone,
you can make a call for no additional charge at all.
Yeah, but it's good that people are getting out there,
but I guess people are going to try and make money off this.
I mean, the brilliant thing about this site
is that it reverses the normal pattern,
which is that the politicians call you at home
and tell you to vote for them
without ever expending any of their actual human time.
Well, that's okay.
But the advantage of being a human being
is that you probably actually do have five minutes
to actually make the phone call yourself
and talk to the person on the other end.
Right.
And I would advise using those five minutes.
Now, my question, Bernie,
maybe you know the answer to this.
I know that you can add yourself to the do not call list
as many times as you want,
but it doesn't get you out of getting those stupid political ads
that are relentless in calling you and saying,
vote for me, et cetera, et cetera.
Well, does that same contract work in the other way?
Can you relentlessly call politicians and say,
pay attention to me?
I'm one of your subjects here.
The do not call laws exempt political phone calls.
So it doesn't specify whether they have to be
from political candidates.
So I would say that you're exempt if you use the service
or personally call anyone.
I mean, I guess it wouldn't even apply if you're calling in person
because the do not call list really, I think,
well, no, it would apply.
So basically, you're exempt if it's political speech.
If you're calling anybody who's on the do not call list,
you're still allowed to call them for political reasons.
Okay, good to know.
Also, one more SOPA item in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act
and the Protect IP Act,
a nefarious act that tries to censor the internet world,
or actually the internet without actually showing much understanding
of said internet in the first place.
It comes from a site known as Geek System.
Reddit, one of the most popular social news aggregation sites currently
on the very same internet, will black itself out next week.
Redditors, yes, Redditors may not know what to do with themselves,
but on January 18th, which is a week from today,
from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Eastern Time,
Reddit will be blacked out in protest.
Instead of the normal Reddit feed,
the site will display a simple message
regarding how the SOPA and PIPA legislation
would shut down sites like Reddit itself.
So that's something I guess a lot of entities are getting involved with this.
It's good to see.
Yeah, there's a lot of people putting black banners on their sites
and pop-ups and all kinds of things.
Okay, go ahead, Rob.
Yeah, and that's going to be key to making any sort of headway
with this issue at all, because people like us know what's what.
People like most of our listeners, I think,
have a pretty good idea of what's what,
but it's about telling everybody else.
It's about telling the general public and getting them on your side
and explaining to them directly what effect this would have on them.
Okay, there's one more story that I'd really like to just focus on,
and then we'll take some phone calls.
212-209-2900.
And that's our friends, all of whom have been on the show at one point,
talking about Birgitta Jansdottir, Jacob Appelbaum, Rob Honcreep.
They have all lost a case, lost an appeal,
concerning the government, our government,
trying to obtain their Twitter records.
This is all in connection to their support of the Wikileaks site.
Now, I haven't had much time to go through this court documents.
It's three pages long, but it just seems like the court is rejecting their concerns.
Does anybody have a chance to look at this more carefully?
No?
Yeah, so I don't know the details of this, what you have in your hands,
but I do know that the only reason we know about Google
and Jake Appelbaum's Internet service provider
being forced to hand over information about his email headers to the government
is because it was leaked to the Wall Street Journal.
And it was a gag rule, so no one would have known.
These entities were forced to give over the information.
They were also forced to be unable to tell Jake that it even happened,
which is very disturbing.
Jake's ISP, Sonic, was nice enough to actually try and fight the court
or spent a good deal of their own money on lawyers unsuccessfully,
but at least they tried.
Companies like Google did not even try.
Well, Twitter tried too, right?
Twitter tried, yes.
Yeah, and I think that's how we learned about this in the first place, about a year ago.
This new news pertains specifically to Federal Magistrate Judge Buchanan's
December 14, 2010 order directing Twitter to disclose records,
you know, their records of these four people that we mentioned
who are in support of WikiLeaks.
Three people. I don't know who the fourth person is.
It says there were four individuals.
Jacob, Brigitte, and Rob. Who's the fourth?
Is it one of us?
Maybe that person is secret.
Okay.
I mean, it's probably Julian. I'm sure he's in there somewhere too.
That could well be the case.
In any case, it would take too long to cover this on the air,
but you can look up, just e-mail us at OTH at 2600.com,
and we will send you the decision.
Basically, a federal judge ruled that there are appeals saying
that we should have our privacy,
that our Twitter records should not be exposed to the federal government,
was invalid.
Okay. And one final story, then we'll take some phone calls.
212-209-2900.
This week, tomorrow, the long-awaited opening of a new realm of web addresses
in which just about any word, such as .furniture or .arcticvacations,
can serve as a domain name.
.hackers, I guess, can be a top-level domain now.
To some, that spells opportunity.
Beginning tomorrow, the organization that oversees the Internet,
that would be ICANN, I believe,
will start accepting applications to manage new top-level domains,
names that appear at the end of website addresses like .com and .net.
It will be the first time in more than a decade that anyone can apply
for the rights to control a slice of the broader web marketplace,
as opposed to just domains for specific types of Internet users.
Only a few options, such as .jobs for sites catering to job seekers,
have been available more recently.
Now, of course, not just anybody can do this.
You have to basically be prepared to act as a registrar.
The fee is kind of hefty.
I'm looking for the actual number here, but I think it's something like $185,000 application fee.
I'm pretty sure none of us have that lying around.
That doesn't even guarantee that you get the top-level domain.
I think that's the application fee.
Well, do you get your money back if you don't?
No, you don't.
How do I run an organization like that where I can collect a $185,000 fee
and not even give something to somebody?
I would like to know, actually, how ICANN continues to be in charge
and what they're going to do with all this money.
Because, Mike, they have a positive attitude.
ICANN, not I can't, which seems to be your attitude.
All right, let's take some phone calls.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Speak up, please.
Yes.
Hi.
Annoying Buzz is gone.
It's gone, yes.
Great signal.
Yes.
Please don't replace it with anything more annoying.
What's on your mind?
I wanted to talk more about the possibility of these Twitter users
who are classified as terrorists actually coming up against this new defense authorization
where people can be held without trial or anything.
Oh, there's all kinds of combinations that can be used now.
The Patriot Act, that new defense thing, classifying people as terrorists.
Yes.
I mean, let's be clear.
The people in question here are people like Hezbollah
who the U.S. government already doesn't like.
It's just a question of what new powers the U.S. government might get
to block anyone in the United States, whoever repeats anything they might have said.
But then who becomes an enemy of Israel if you express an opinion, you know,
disagreeing with something like these embargoes of ships they bring in, et cetera, to coming to Gaza?
I think we all start off by default as enemies of Israel, and we have to prove that we're not.
Otherwise, we could have a missile lobbed at us.
That's just the way I look at things and how I get through the day.
All right.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Speak up.
Hello.
Hi.
What's on your mind?
May I attack quickly?
All right.
You mentioned a top-level domain job, and it occurs to me.
You know, I've been concerned about what the job, you know,
everybody's misty-eyed about Steve Jobs these days.
It brings to my mind Apple.
Uh-huh.
That, you know, the company Foxcom or something like that in China.
And it's like apparently everything physical that comes out of that company
is going through this hellish operation.
And I'm just wondering, like, does Apple, Macintosh, whatever you call it,
have to basically be blacklisted by decent people because of what they're doing to their workforce?
So let's be clear that, like, all consumer electronics are made in factories like the ones that Foxconn runs.
But if you'd like to know more about substantially all.
Mitch disagrees with you on that.
But let me finish my thought, which is that the radio program This American Life
this past weekend did a very nice piece on the conditions in these factories,
and you should give it a listen.
Yeah.
So, you know, it's definitely not the case that all places are as bad as Foxconn.
You can, as an individual, go to places and interview them and check out their conditions.
Some are actually quite good.
Some are quite bad.
And you've done that in China, right?
I go there every year, and before I even chose one to manufacture TVgon,
I went there and interviewed them.
Some that said they were good were not.
And the difference in price per unit between a place that's a black hole of despair
and one that treats their employees well and pays them well
and even gives them their own chef for what they want to eat for lunch is $0.25.
$0.25 between the difference of making the world an incredibly wretched place for so many people
and actually doing something right.
And also let's be clear that Foxconn doesn't work solely with Apple.
They work with a number of companies.
Microsoft uses them to manufacture their gaming consoles,
and I'm sure there are other major companies that work with them too.
So it's not just limited to Apple.
No, they're just a bad, egregious example.
But please research.
But as bad as Apple is, and it pains me to really say anything nice about the company,
I don't think they're that much worse than any of the other consumer electronics companies.
Very few of these companies care about the people who make their products.
Yeah, which is very unfortunate because we can.
And, you know, the difference between a quarter per unit, I mean, what is –
but when a corporation exists for maximizing their profits every quarter, what can you do?
You know, this brings up very – what Mike said rings true because there's an incredible film,
I think you all should see if you haven't seen it already, called Blood in the Mobile.
It's all about how mobile phones are made
and how people in Africa are victimized to gain the minerals necessary
that are used in the production of electronics.
And basically Nokia is targeted in this particular film
because that happens to be the phone company of the filmmaker.
And he wants to find out from his phone company.
He considers it his phone company as many of us consider the phone company we use to be our phone company.
He wanted to get some kind of statement from them.
Now, other companies are just as bad.
So, yes, just like Microsoft might be just as bad as Apple, they don't really care.
And that's, I think, what comes out in this film.
I really recommend it.
It's made by a Danish documentary maker.
I saw it at the Hampton Film Festival this fall and hopefully we can show it at Hope as well.
Also on the subject of Steve Jobs, this is a story Jim handed to us right before the show.
Apparently there's a Steve Jobs action figure that's out now.
Wow, this really looks realistic.
Where, Emmanuel, is this action figure manufactured?
I don't know if it tells you where, but probably somewhere where people are victimized.
I'm sure it's a 12-inch tall action figure.
It's remarkably realistic, except for the hands.
They look kind of creepy.
It's a plastic tribute to the late Apple co-founder.
It comes equipped with Steve Jobs' trademark turtleneck and jeans
and will be available in February for about $100.
But act fast.
Not only are Apple cultists likely to snap these up like the latest iPhone
and turn them into rare collector's items,
the Hong Kong company, OK, I guess that tells you,
that makes the dollar reportedly doesn't have permission from Steve Jobs' estate
to license his name or image.
So it's going to be a spirited debate in court, I would imagine.
Yeah, I don't think it's really worth buying anyway
because there'll probably just be a better version of the action figure coming out next year.
Yeah, this will be obsolete in no time.
There's one other story that I'd like to mention really quick if I could.
I just got wind of this right before the show.
There was a guy called Chris Fenton from NYC Resistor, the local hackerspace,
and he has got hold of a backup disk for the Cray operating system
for the old Cray supercomputers,
and this operating system was thought lost a days back to the 70s.
And he built himself a homebrewed disk reader to make a copy of the disk,
and now our friend Jason Scott and the Internet Archive are hosting a copy.
And what he needs, he needs the help of anyone out there,
and I'm sure there are a bunch of you out there who could take a look at this disk image,
reverse engineer it, and actually get to the files of this ancient operating system.
And so if you can help with this, go to nycresistor.com
and look for the post date of January 9th.
The end goal of this is that he has a one-tenth scale equivalent version of the Cray itself,
you know, hardware equivalent.
So if they could get the disk image, the files off the disk image,
he could actually run the system again, which that was the whole point.
He had built this scale replica but didn't have software.
Now he has the image of the software, but still it's not – he can't run it yet.
Complete with the bench?
Yeah.
It's got the bench.
All right. We'll show the picture around.
We're going to take one more phone call in the time that we have left.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Hello?
Hi. What's on your mind?
Oh, hi.
Yeah.
My question is I like, you know, that you report on what has gone on down at Liberty Square,
and I'm wondering if, you know, the people, the hackers have any information
on the micing of the park itself, you know, to pick up conversation.
Someone told me, in fact, that they thought that the police had done that,
and I just wanted to know if anybody on your show can comment about that kind of technology
and how it can be detected and revealed.
The thing I'd love to say about that, I don't know in particular if it's being miced or not,
but I love the fact that people are worried about the police seeing and hearing what goes on at Zuccotti
because, in general, the protesters are there to be seen and heard.
Right.
So, you know, nobody's keeping any secrets, I think, in this public park.
I think they want people to hear what they're saying.
Yeah. If you're in a public park or public area, you're going to be seen, you're going to be heard,
and you should be seen and heard.
All right, that's going to just about do it.
As the personal computer people come in here, we're out of time.
Write to us, OTH at 2600.com.
Remember, Hope No. 9 tickets go on sale tomorrow, starting at noon,
and we'll have more information on that, hope.net.
We'll see you next week. Have a good night.
Stamp your feet and clap your hands
We're the slaves of freedom
Somewhere there's a promised land
We're the slaves of freedom
Where we can do what we like
We're the slaves of freedom
Where no one gets off their bike
We're the slaves of freedom
Freedom is the handle on the bucket of the soul
The image of illusion in the goldfish of your boat
The shampoo of perfection in the bathroom of your dreams
Freedom is the universe and everything it seems
Oh, yeah
We all live until we die
We're the slaves of freedom
There's no sense in wondering why
We're the slaves of freedom
So pick up your heavy load
We're the slaves of freedom
And keep on truckin' down the road
We're the slaves of freedom
The man is perfect sense
The man is perfect sense
No responsibility for any articles of clothing or accessory
Such as handbags or umbrellas or books on self-defense
Or things left unattended in the ladies or the gents
Oh, yeah
We are in a fond mood
We're the slaves of freedom
Let's do something really rude
We're the slaves of freedom
We can all be wilder
We're the slaves of freedom
So let's take out our guns
We're the slaves of freedom
We're the slaves of freedom
So let's take out our tongues and swerve
We're the slaves of freedom
Freedom is the handle on the bucket of your soul
The backbone of ambition in the goldfish of your boat
The pedestal of purpose in the bathroom of your dreams
Freedom is the universe and everything it seems
Oh, yeah
We're the slaves of freedom
We're the slaves of freedom