♪
And you're listening to radio station WBAI New York, the time is 7 o'clock, 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 cough.
We couldn't get much worse, but if we could we would.
Bundledly Bum for the best expect the worst.
I hope that's understood Bundledly Bum for the best expect the worst.
Remember it's for the best.
The same old story as always.
Bum, diddly bum, bu-dum, bu-dum, bum-dum, bu-dum, bum.
Bum, diddly bum, bu-dum, bu-dum.
Bum, diddly bum, bu-dum, bu-dum, bum-dum, bum.
Bum, diddly bum, bu-dum, bu-dum, bum-dum, bum.
I cut myself while shaving
Now I can't make a cough
We couldn't get much worse
But if they could, they would
Bum-diddly-bum for the best
Expect the worst
I hope that's understood
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
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Bum-diddly-bum!
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Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
Bum-diddly-bum!
And good evening everybody, the program is Off The Hook.
Emmanuel Goldstein here with you on this Wednesday evening, joined by Mike.
Hello.
Redhect.
Hello.
Dotret.
Hello.
Rob T. Firefly.
Good evening.
And Jim.
Ah.
Bernie Astown, Philadelphia.
Greetings from Philadelphia.
Well, we've been busy this week.
A lot of things have been happening and formulating and planning stages and things like that.
Where do we start?
Well, okay, let's start with an announcement, an important announcement I just got in the mail.
The Third Annual Family Office Wealth Management Forum is holding their conference entitled
Where Do We Go From Here?
Finding the Right Path for Affluent Families Amid Ongoing Uncertainty.
Can I have that brochure?
Well, you're just going to rip it in pieces.
No, no, I'm just going to throw it out all in one piece.
No, I think it's amazing that somehow I got onto the mailing list for some organization
that's worried about what affluent families are going to do in these uncertain times.
And they're all going to gather.
They're all going to be gathering together at, hang on, I'll get the exact day and time and place.
And that's where you'll know that all these rich people will be gathered together
worrying about how to spend their money in the future.
Yeah, it's at the Ritz-Carlton.
Oh, that's a surprise, isn't it?
May 10th through 11th in Greensboro, Georgia.
So if you're part of a...
Listen, people send me these things.
I don't know why they send them to me, but I'm going to announce them.
It's part of a public service here.
If you want to see a bunch of worried rich people, go to Greensboro, Georgia,
Ritz-Carlton Hotel, May 10th and 11th.
And I'll be talking about finding the right path for affluent families.
How do you know this is really for affluent people
and they're not just sending it to people that want or think that they are affluent?
Well, because of the admission price.
You have to be pretty affluent to afford that.
That's for sure.
Are you sure it doesn't actually say affluent families?
I'm not big with the words there.
It seems like something that really wasn't meant for me, but I got it anyway,
which is what happens most of the time.
There's a much better, more interesting conference
in a much more interesting city this summer.
Do tell.
What conference might you be referring to, Mike?
I'm referring to the Hackers on Planet Earth conference.
You know, being a hacker and being on Planet Earth, this concerns me.
Tell me what you know about this event and how I might attend.
It's July 13th through 15th of this year at the Hotel Pennsylvania in Midtown.
Okay, all right.
Hope.net is the website.
Hope.net, and that's where you can find all kinds of information.
I understand that the people at the HOPE conference
have already been confirming a whole bunch of talks,
and some of them really are pretty interesting.
Exploiting Zigbee and the Internet of Things,
according to Travis Goodspeed, one of our expert speakers
who will be talking about that particular bit of technology.
We have a bunch of people from Electronic Frontier Foundation
presenting all sorts of interesting panel discussions and talks
and question-and-answer sessions.
In fact, we'll be speaking with one of them very soon
here on these very airwaves.
How about this, explosive steganography?
That just sounds like an hour wouldn't cover it,
but who wants to explain what steganography is in the first place?
Rob?
Well, contrary to popular belief, it is not the dinosaur with plates on its back.
What steganography is is hiding data in files
which would not otherwise be thought to contain such data,
such as you can hide text in an image file and things like that.
Okay, and I don't know what explosive steganography is,
but that's bound to be something controversial and interesting.
You're hiding data in other data.
No, I'm not.
Oh, oh, oh.
And at times it's not so simple as just,
oh, well, I'm putting some extra bytes in this file.
You might modify, say, an image.
You may tweak the pixel values a little bit,
and if you know that it's hidden in a certain way in that image file,
to anyone else seeing the image,
they would think it was just a regular image file,
but you'd be able to extract the hidden data from it.
Wow.
So basically what we have at these conferences,
we have over 100 talks,
and I think just over a dozen of them have been confirmed so far,
but we have more coming in every day,
and it's not too late if you have something in the world of technology
or freedom of speech or just inventiveness or whatever.
Submit it to speakers at hope.net.
Write a paragraph or two about what it is you want to speak about
and then write a paragraph about yourself, who you are, what you've done,
and don't be intimidated.
Basically we're open to anything from anybody
and everything gets equal attention.
Maybe some tips for people.
Don't submit the same thing you've submitted to other conferences
or have already done because that's a no-no.
We don't like that.
We don't want to duplicate what other people have done, right?
Yeah, don't bore us.
And if you've already given a talk at Hope,
don't submit the same talk two years later because we're on to that.
We check our own conference to see if that talk has been given before,
and if it has, why would anybody go to the talk
or just look at the video instead?
Can I spill a speaker committee secret?
Someone submitted word for word the same abstract
that they submitted two years ago.
Yeah, that's something, isn't it?
Don't do that.
It sort of tells us that maybe you won't put that much work into your actual talk
if you can't put that much work into changing the words around a little bit.
Now, on a positive note,
the simple fact that Mike is able to say that what someone submitted
is word for word the same as what someone submitted two years ago
does say that we do try to read all the submissions.
So submit.
Absolutely.
We have the Yes Men giving one of our keynote addresses.
That's going to be a lot of fun and pretty damn interesting.
We have Jason Scott,
his strange and wonderful digital history voyage there
that we'll be presenting as well.
Jason Scott, he's been on the program.
He's part of archive.org and textfiles.com.
Basically, if something happened on the internet,
he'll find out about it at some point and archive it.
So a fascinating person to speak to, and it'll be a great talk.
So many more, and so many more to come too.
Keep checking www.hope.net to see just what it is that we're up to,
what that's coming up next.
Yes, indeed.
And like we all said, please do not hesitate.
If you have something interesting but you think maybe it's of interest,
maybe it's not, it could not hurt to submit it
because the worst that we could do is not agree to it.
But we've found some of our best panels from people
who didn't think that it would be anything that would be of interest to us.
Basically, everything's of interest to us.
That's true.
That is.
We're always watching what's going on.
Now, we're going to get back to this.
We're going to talk a lot more about HOPE in the very near future on this program.
But there are a couple of other things that we feel we need to point out.
The new issue of 2600 just came out, the spring issue, spring 2012,
for those who are not paying attention, just released in paper.
It's a paper version.
We have the Kindle version.
I guess I shouldn't smash my Kindle on the –
well, that came out too, and the Nook and all kinds of other things as well.
And this is something that we also just did this week,
which I think is exciting and fun and fascinating.
We've been releasing the annual compendiums of the Hacker Quarterly as volumes.
We started about a year and a half ago with volume 26, meaning it was our 26th year,
and we basically put the entire year into a book form,
moved all the letters into one section,
moved all the articles into a different section, things like that.
Payphone has a middle page spread.
And that was actually pretty successful.
There's a lot of interest in that.
It's available in non-DRM PDF format, Kindle, Nook, EPUB, you name it.
We did the same thing with volume 27, but what we just did this week was release volume 1.
Volume 1 is from 1984, the year 1984, not the book 1984.
It was the first year that we started.
And I just downloaded it right now to my Kindle.
And I was outside.
I almost missed the show because I was outside reading some of the articles from 1984.
Now, of course, I've seen these already.
And, in fact, putting this together, I've got to say, major pain in the ass
because it's not just scanning things and basically putting them up online.
You've got to make sure that the scan is correct, and a lot of times it's not.
A lot of things that you might have seen on the net, it doesn't do it justice.
So we basically proofread every single word, made sure that everything is exactly as it was presented.
If something was a typo originally, it stays a typo now.
Of course, converting data and charts and things like that, that takes a lot of time as well.
And I think what we wound up with was this document from 1984, which still stands today.
Now, here's a piece, The Constitution of a Hacker.
You've all heard The Hacker Manifesto.
That's been said many times.
Here's another version that came out in 1984 you might not have heard nearly as much about.
And you guys tell me if this stands the test of time, if the things that are said in this piece actually make sense today.
With every generation of humans, there are certain types of individuals that emerge.
There are, always have been, always will be leaders, followers, general nuisances, et cetera.
And then there are folks who like to play with things and figure out how they work.
Before technology came along, there really wasn't all that much for these people to play around with.
And certainly there was no way for them to pool their resources except through face-to-face communications.
With telephones, of course, all aspects of human life changed.
Here was a toy that anyone could play with and get virtually unlimited results.
But, of course, most people didn't and don't see it that way.
Phones are phones and nothing more.
You're not supposed to have fun with them.
Yet certain adventuresome types insisted on having fun with their phones anyway.
They did all kinds of things they weren't supposed to do, like figure out the way phones work and interconnect.
For the first time, these technological enthusiasts posed a threat, in quotes, to technology by reaching out and touching it,
rather than simply using it without asking any questions.
Today, there are lots of people still having fun with their phones and making all kinds of technological advancements of their own.
But the real focus at the moment is on the newest threat, people who like to experiment and have fun with computers.
1984, yeah.
Not the kind of fun they're supposed to be having with Pac-Man and Mr. Do.
You know Mr. Do? Yeah.
But unauthorized fun with other people's computers.
Now, why do they do this?
What do these people possibly have to gain by breaking into computer systems and seeing things that don't really concern them,
or that is of no possible use to them?
In the great majority of cases, computer hackers don't gain anything material or financial from their exploration.
Add to that the high risk of getting caught, and it becomes very hard for the average citizen to understand what motivates these people.
Many computer hobbyists, in fact, are resentful of hackers, considering them immature and troublesome.
Quite a few computer bulletin boards prohibit certain topics from being discussed, and when they do, hacking is almost always one of them.
There is some justification behind this, since the image of all computer users can be adversely affected by what the hackers do.
There are also the legal people who insist on telling everyone that breaking into a computer by phone is just like physically breaking into a house or office.
Fortunately, that logic seems to be shared by very few people.
In spite of all the threats and criticism, though, the hackers are not cleaning up their act, in quotes,
and public opinion, particularly among the young, seems to be in their favor, mostly as a result of media coverage.
There's even a weekly TV program about hackers called The Whiz Kids.
Each week, this group of amazing kids has a new adventure.
The scripts are a bit moronic, but interesting nonetheless.
In one episode, the kids, only one of which is a true hacker, found out about an evil person who happens to be stealing social security checks.
They discover this by casually logging into his bank account.
To teach them a lesson, they break into another computer and enter his name as being deceased.
In each program, these kids break into at least one new computer, but do they ever get into trouble?
Of course not.
First of all, they're only children.
And second, they're entering these computers for good reasons, even if they are unauthorized.
Now, what kind of message is this program conveying?
Apparently, it's okay to invade other people's privacy if your intentions are ultimately good.
It sounds like something Reagan would get a kick out of.
A genuine hacker breaks into computers for the challenge.
He's not out to save the world, nor to destroy it.
He is not out to make a profit out of what he's doing.
Therefore, it's not fair to categorize him as a criminal, and it's just as wrong to say he's some sort of a savior.
Technological enthusiasts operate with the same motivation that a good mountain climber has.
Regardless of what may happen to him, a computer hacker will always be interested in playing with computers.
It's in his nature, and any laws that are created to eliminate hacking simply won't work because of these facts.
There will always be people who want to experiment with things, and this urge cannot be stifled.
Did hacking come to a grinding halt because of the 414 scandal?
That was a case involving some kids in Milwaukee, 414 area code, back in 1983, I believe.
Or because of the telemail raids, which occurred also in 1983.
No, judging from the proliferation of computer bulletin boards where hacking is discussed, it's getting bigger than ever.
The realistic way for the owners of large computer systems to look at this is to regard hackers as necessary security checks.
That's right, necessary, because if the hackers weren't the ones to break in, who would be?
Let's assume that hackers had never even tried to break into the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center computer, which was a big scandal back then.
Someone else would have, because the system was practically wide open.
And maybe they would have had a reason to get into the system to do various nasty things.
But now, because of what the hackers did, the Sloan Kettering system is more secure.
One could almost say that a person with hacking abilities has an obligation to try and get into as many different systems as he can.
Let's get nationalistic for a moment.
If you have the number for a top-secret government computer in Fort George Meade, Maryland, odds are that the Albanians have it also.
Yeah, it was a different time back then.
Now, would it be better for them to break into the system and find out all kinds of nice things,
or for you to break in and be discovered, forcing the system to become more protected?
And if you do break in, don't you deserve a note of thanks for waking them up?
Keep in mind, though, that a computer hacker is under no obligation to turn himself in or warn operators that their system is easily penetrable.
It's the job of the sysops to notice when their computers are being tampered with.
And if they don't detect you, then that's a second security lapse for them.
This is a pragmatic view, however shocking it may seem.
In closing, we should point out to the hackers themselves that there is no need to worry or fret if their methods or secrets are eventually discovered.
This is only the beginning.
Our world is turning into a technological playground.
That's an article from Volume 1 of 2600, which just came out on the Kindle and on our website as well in PDF format.
It speaks to what the thought was back then, what the philosophy was about hackers.
A lot hasn't changed.
That suspicion is still there.
We're asking a lot of the same questions.
I do think that we've become a bit more reactionary against what hackers do.
In that article, it's mentioned that not many people buy into the house analogy.
I think a lot more people do buy into that now, unfortunately.
But it's still interesting to read this kind of thing.
Yeah, I'd say that.
I'd say another interesting, probably dated thing now is the show about hackers being replaced by a show on, I think it's on PBS.
Cyberchase?
Yeah, the villain, his name is Hacker.
Very true.
Yeah, that's a hell of an interesting piece of history.
It's funny how, in one sense, if you just change the details that date it, like Albanians, if you update those, it could have been written today.
But on the other sense, this was a time when hackers were basically talking to one another.
And the zeitgeist and the mainstream were just starting to get ripples of what was going on and obviously be afraid of it.
But today, everyone on the street has their own idea of what a hacker is and are aware that there's all this going on.
And so we're not just talking to each other anymore.
We have to deal with our image in the entire world, basically.
There was one thing at the end, a reference to people shouldn't be worried about methods being released and secrets getting out.
There was a lot of backlash back then about putting out a magazine about hacking in the first place.
People thought that some people in the hacker community, which was a lot smaller then, thought that publishing information would be detrimental because, well, they wouldn't be able to play with the computers themselves anymore because people wouldn't know about it.
But our feeling was that if the word is out there, the word is out there.
And by spreading it around and bringing more people into the fold, we come up with better systems.
We come up with more toys to play with.
And I think that's been more or less borne out.
I think one of the major differences, though, between then and now is the fact that a lot – there has been this proliferation of technology and everybody has a computer and everybody has some smart device and all that.
And back then, if you listened to it, he was talking about dialing into machines.
And really, if you were exploring systems, you were exploring generally the systems of corporations and government agencies and the like that had modems that connected their computers to a telephone line.
And nowadays, everyone's computer is connected to this gigantic network.
So it makes it a lot more relatable to people because it's their own thing and not just some mainframe somewhere.
Yeah.
And there's also an element I remember.
Back in the days of my phone-freaking career, such as it was, I remember explaining it to people and they would – the response was usually, well, why would you try and explore the phone?
The phone is just a thing that's there.
You turn it on and it goes like the plumbing.
Exactly.
But computers, that was something new and exciting.
And nowadays, we're in this generation where computers are just something that are there and the internet is just there.
It's sad.
It really is.
I remember with every bit of technology that came out, whether it be touch-tone phones or beepers or computers, there are always people that was tied to their job and it was something unpleasant.
And for people like us, it was a toy.
It was something to play with.
And whenever we did something on it, it was fun.
And a lot of people just couldn't understand that.
Now, Bernie, this must bring back a lot of memories for you as well.
Oh, it does.
My first volume of 2600 was seized by the Secret Service back in the 90s.
Well, now you can replace it with a Kindle version.
See?
I can replace it.
That's right.
I'm curious.
With successive issues of 2600, people would read it and submit their own articles.
But just really briefly, how did you get people to submit articles for the very first issue?
Oh, that's a good question.
How did we get people to even get the first issue?
What we did was we contacted a number of hacker bulletin boards or phone freak bulletin boards.
Freaking was more popular than hacking back then.
Freaking playing with telephones and computers were starting to gain a foothold.
And basically, we would call up these various computer bulletin boards in different parts of the country.
There was no internet to speak of.
You would have to make a long-distance phone call, wait for a busy signal to go away because they only had one phone line.
It was a 300 baud.
Eventually, you'd get connected.
And when you did, you'd post something.
And what we did was we posted a little advertisement or just a message saying,
Hey, we're putting out this hacker newsletter in January 1984.
If you want a free copy, just send us a self-addressed stamped envelope to this address.
A bunch of people did that.
And those are the people who got the first issue.
And then word spread from there.
And people started to renew after a year.
And it just kept growing out of control.
It was really interesting.
But that's how we got the word out, just by letting people know that they could get a free issue if they send us an envelope.
Now, I imagine physical copies of the first year of 2600 have probably been hard to get for quite a while.
Well, we have copies of copies.
But no, the originals were folded in three and had holes punched in the side.
What we've done with the PDF and the Kindle, we've recreated all the covers and explained them all, too.
Because we didn't really have covers back then.
It was a newsletter format, three sheets of paper for a loose-leaf folder.
Every single masthead was a little bit different and had hidden text in it.
And that's all explained, which we've never done before.
And it was a great trip down memory lane.
But, boy, did it take a long time to do all this.
It took months, literally, to get all the text right, to get everything to flow properly, to do the research.
So, yeah, you can scan these things and just stick them up online.
That's one way of doing it.
But you're not getting the full flavor of it all.
Anyway, we can talk about this for a long time.
I just wanted to share that with people.
Here's something else, though, going in the other direction, moving into the future.
Something that I want to share with people.
I have seen it.
I've seen it, folks.
I've seen how it's all going to turn out.
And, boy, it's not a good picture.
It's not a good picture.
Unless this is some big April Fool's joke, I don't think it is.
We know Google's been up to a lot of things.
But, boy, what they've been up to recently, what they're coming up with, if this is to be believed,
is something that is going to change everything.
You see people walking around now talking on their phones and constantly four-squaring and things like that.
Get ready for a change.
Get ready for people to be walking around all the time hooked into the net.
I'm going to play you a video that showed up on YouTube, and I'll try to explain what's going on.
All right, this guy's waking up now.
All these icons are showing up.
He's pouring coffee.
Just got a note saying, see Jess tonight, 6.30 p.m.
And there he is in the East Village.
Now he's eating a ham and cheese sandwich.
He's getting a message from somebody saying, want to meet up today?
Meet me in front of Strand Books at 2.
Hmm.
This is all showing up in his line of vision.
Subway station.
Oh, man, really?
It said, number six subway service suspended, so he didn't go in.
Hey there, guy. Hey there, little guy.
Sweet.
Now he's looking at a concert poster.
Now he's in the bookstore.
No human interaction, none needed.
Paul is sharing his location.
He's 402 feet away.
He's actually speaking to a human now.
Oh, there's the mud truck.
Look at that.
OK, he just told his friend to wait a second while he's, like, checking into Foursquare.
He's saying he's at the mud truck.
That's about all the human interaction I'll have today.
Cool.
Take a photo of this.
Share it to my circles.
Oh, I'm running late.
Music, stop.
Yeah, I guess he was listening to music the whole time, too.
Jessica wants to talk to you.
Hi, what's up?
Hey.
Hey.
You want to see something cool?
You can see her, too.
Yeah, sure.
Now he's sharing the view of the city with her.
OK, here goes.
That's beautiful.
No, it's not beautiful because basically you're walking around with this pair of glasses on
and sharing this with everybody and not interacting with anyone around you.
Now, I notice, Mike, you had your hand on your head the whole time.
Did I get punked here?
Is this for real?
Does Strand have a music section?
You know, it doesn't matter.
That's not the point of this thing.
It's a very important question.
This is a look at the future.
It's called Google Glass, I think.
There's a book section in the music book.
Again, that's not the point.
I have a second question.
Yeah.
Do you really want the world's largest advertising company to be able to insert text in between you and the entire universe?
No, obviously not, but that's what we're moving towards right now.
And people are going to be walking around with these glasses on, and they'll be seeing all this as they're walking.
You won't even know what they're communicating with the internet anymore.
And, you know, contact lenses are coming after this, so it'll just be implanted into you all the time.
I'm not making this up.
This is real.
I hate to burst your bubble, but people have been envisioning this for over the past two decades.
Yeah, I know.
Science fiction writers have been doing it for centuries, but here it is.
It's at our throats right now.
I'm sure you've heard of the whole idea of people wearing headset computers for years,
and the idea behind some of these things and trying to incorporate it into everyday life is having augmented reality.
But it's in their line of vision all the time as they're walking.
That's the whole point of augmented reality.
They're seeing icons.
They're seeing temperatures.
They're seeing all of this in front of them all the time.
I remember at Linux World, I think in 2001 or 2002, I met a guy who had a heads-up display
and a little handheld keyboard that he only needed one hand to type on.
And everybody pointed at him as some kind of object of...
I'm just saying that it's not.
This kind of stuff has existed.
Yeah, but this is going to be the mainstream.
This is what people are going to be doing now.
You think it's bad enough with smartphones, with everybody constantly staring at the things.
They don't have to stare at them because that's always going to be in their line of vision.
They'll have to stare at you to get out of that world.
Well, on the plus side, you won't have to damage your neck or whatever looking down at your phones all the time.
But I don't know.
I think maybe this would just hopefully at some point encourage people to have more open operating systems for their devices
as opposed to how the phones have worked for so long.
Let me tell you what's not going to happen.
You don't have to have advertisements all the time in your line of view.
I can hardly wait until one of these gets hacked and some horrible thing happens to somebody.
Oh, I know.
I'll put it out there right now.
I'm going to put the idea in people's heads.
You know when you're watching that video, something on YouTube, whatever it is, a serene image,
and then all of a sudden out of nowhere...
They get Rick Rolled?
It just pops up in your...
How much can I pay you to never make that noise again?
But the point is this happens in these videos.
Now, I would love if something like that were to happen on, say, one of these headsets.
You're just walking, walking, and then this thing just pops up in your face.
Eva Galperin joins us from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
She's been patiently waiting for a half hour to say a word here.
Eva, welcome to the show.
Hi.
What do you think about all this technological advancement?
And I put advancement in quotes.
Well, you know, as usual, technology is a double-edged sword.
On one hand, we get to do all kinds of really nifty things.
I myself have been a lifelong reader of science fiction,
and I've always been into this idea of augmented reality.
But at the same time, we need to keep in mind the sort of changes that, say,
cell phones have made to our environment
and that social networking have made to our environment.
We leave so much more data about ourselves online now.
We essentially keep a tracking device in our pocket all day long,
and there are some consequences to that,
including surveillance consequences
and consequences regarding search by police departments and the FBI
and sometimes in authoritarian regimes,
governments that are not particularly held down by the rule of law.
So, again, it's good news and bad news.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, it's good news in that what we were talking about before,
it's a toy to play with,
but it's bad news in that this is going to run people's lives.
They're not going to know how to exist without seeing all this information in front of them all the time,
not just when they're online or staring at their phone.
And I think it's going to take away from interpersonal communication.
I've already seen that.
Hanging out with groups of people, most of them are looking at their phone.
They're not looking at the people they're with,
and they're talking to other people or computers that, you know,
telling them where they are at this particular point in time.
And I don't know.
I just see a loss here.
I see something that we're forgetting about.
I'm going to take Eva's side on this and say it is a double-edged sword
because on the one hand, that does happen in a number of cases,
and plenty of people complain about that.
But on the other hand, it also makes interpersonal interactions easier.
I mean, think about it.
Before the days of cell phones, you never could just say,
okay, I'm going to meet, you know, whoever,
or just go out and find people and use your phone to coordinate.
Yeah, you could.
I met people all the time.
It's so much easier now to coordinate meeting up and all those sorts of things.
With cell phones.
To coordinate meeting up and ignoring each other.
Yeah, pretty much.
That's always the fun part.
And just to learn all this nonsense that you really don't need to know about
in the first place, here's the thing.
Safety issues, all right?
We're all upset about people texting and driving.
How are you going to prevent this,
people having this in their field of vision all the time
where they're not paying attention to what's ahead of them?
They can't see everything like they can see without it.
You won't be able to even tell when somebody has this on, you know?
All right.
Eva, any thoughts on that?
Well, I think that the idea behind these glasses,
and they haven't been manufactured, they don't exist at this time,
is that they would not necessarily block your field of vision.
That you're augmenting reality rather than completely replacing it.
So it may turn out to be a problem with driving,
and then one would expect that you'd get the same sort of legislative response
that we've seen with texting and cell phones.
Yeah.
I mean, my only concern there is that you can see when someone's on a cell phone.
You can't see when they have contact lenses in there
telling them the latest stock quotes.
No, you can't.
They have the thing in their ear,
and they're just walking down the street talking into space,
and apparently someone else is hearing them.
It's going to be like that.
It's true that you can't necessarily tell when someone is driving and texting.
I've definitely confused crazy people with stockbrokers.
Well, they're not necessarily different types of people either.
Anyway, Eva, let's talk about more what you guys are up to
at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
First of all, some rather exciting news.
We've paired up with EFF in doing a promotion
with the upcoming Hackers on Planet Earth conference in July here in New York City.
What that means is for every ticket sold during the month of April,
we'll be donating 10% of that to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
So that means if you support what EFF stands for,
there are many stands against all kinds of oppression
and horrible legislation coming down from D.C. and other places around the world.
This is a great way to support them and come to a terrific conference too
where you'll see a bunch of EFF people giving presentations and seminars
on all of these topics.
All the information is at www.hope.net,
but throughout the month of April, if you buy a ticket,
10% of that goes to EFF.
I think it's a win-win for everybody
because I think we'll be reaching a lot of people
that we might not have reached ordinarily,
and we're supporting what you guys do,
which really, when you stand back and look at it, it's incredible.
Over the years, how much you guys have been around,
standing up in always the right place,
and just being there for people who had no voice otherwise.
Well, we try.
But in order to do this, we absolutely need the support of our membership,
and certainly it helps if people who are going to Hope
and who are planning to buy tickets anyway
should purchase them in the month of April
in order to help support the work that EFF does.
Now, tell us something about,
what would you say is one of the more important cases
that you've got your eye on right now?
And if you look at your site, EFF.org,
you'll see there are so many cases.
It's just too many to even keep track of,
but somehow you guys do that.
But what's one of them, if you had to pick,
that you'd like to discuss here?
Well, I think I can talk about some of our cases fairly quickly,
but I have to offer the caveat that I am not an attorney,
and so I'm extremely limited in what I can say about our cases.
Your title, in fact, is EFF Activist, which I think is great.
I am an activist. I'm a professional troublemaker.
How many organizations out there have bona fide activists on staff
that are free to talk about this kind of thing?
I think that's really essential in this day and age
where so many different parts of our culture are coming together,
and we're all fighting the same battles.
So, yeah, it's all about maintaining privacy
and honoring freedom of speech
and basically sharing information, that kind of thing.
So what's one of the cases?
Right now, we're doing a couple of different things.
We have an action alert right up for people to oppose CISPA
or the Rogers Cybersecurity Bill.
That's one I don't know.
ACTA I know, and PIPA and SOPA. What's this one?
There are actually a bunch of cybersecurity bills
which are making their way through the House and Congress right now,
but by far the worst of them is CISPA,
which is sponsored by Representative Rogers
and is usually just called the Rogers Bill.
How do you spell that?
It includes essentially a cybersecurity exemption
for companies to share any information that they have
with the government or with each other
just as long as they could justify it as being in the name of cybersecurity.
And that's not very hard for them to do that, I imagine.
They can just say, yeah, we think that's the case, right?
Absolutely. There are no checks and balances.
There's no definition for what constitutes cybersecurity justification.
They're essentially granted immunity from prosecution
even if they break privacy laws when they share this information.
It's actually extremely distressing, and people should get out right now
and contact their representative about it.
Eva, how do you spell CISPA, and what does it stand for?
C-I-S-P-A.
And do you know what that stands for?
Yes. It is the—one moment.
There are so many acronyms.
These things have changed many, many times.
It's the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011.
They spend a lot of time making clever little acronyms, don't they?
Yes, they do.
Usually I've found these acronyms, the words for the acronyms,
usually describe the opposite of what the bills really do.
Yeah, like Patriot Act, for instance.
Well, Patriot Act and the Protection Act in this case.
Who is it protecting exactly?
As far as we can tell, it protects corporations,
and it allows them to share with the U.S. government.
So it's a lose-all-around for people in the United States,
especially people who are concerned about their privacy and civil liberties.
It's certainly not protecting anybody's privacy, this act.
That much is certain.
Now, Eva, the thing that's really weird to me about hearing about this
is that these companies already enjoy almost total immunity
from any sort of comeuppance for giving people's data away.
I know that the EFF has been involved in this lawsuit against AT&T
for providing all this data to the National Security Agency,
and I don't remember how the case is going,
but basically AT&T has near-total immunity,
but apparently that's not good enough.
They want total immunity?
Yes, the immunity that AT&T was granted
in regards to the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program
is actually rather narrow.
It was part of the FISA Amendments Act a few years ago.
Basically back in 2003,
the NSA started this warrantless wiretapping program
where they started going around to telcos and saying,
hey, we'd like to install these secret rooms in your telcos
where we will suck up all of the data that goes through the telco
and analyze it without a warrant.
Nearly all of the telcos said, sure, come on in.
One of those companies was AT&T,
and a very brave whistleblower named Mark Klein came in from AT&T
in I think it was either 2005 or 2006
and gave us the story of how he helped to install the hardware in the secret room
and gave us the plans for the hardware,
the nearest devices that were in the secret room.
That was the basis of our lawsuit against AT&T,
which is HEPTING versus AT&T, which we filed in 2006,
and also the basis of our case against the government,
which is JUUL versus I think the NSA.
The telcos then turned right around and went to Washington, D.C.,
and they got out their lobbyists.
They said, hey, we're being sued.
We're absolutely terrified that we're going to lose this lawsuit.
So what we're going to do is we're going to use our money to buy ourselves a law,
a section of the FISA Amendments Act,
which grants the telco companies retroactive immunity
for anything that they might have done in cooperation with the NSA
in regards to its wiretapping program.
So our case was good.
Our case was so good that they had to go and write a law
getting themselves retroactive immunity in order to avoid getting nailed for it.
So the crazy thing, Eva, is that we live in a world
where that can be described as a relatively narrow immunity.
Absolutely.
What we're talking about with FISPA is a far, far broader immunity,
an immunity from nearly any kind of sharing,
not just specifically sharing of data with the NSA.
Wow.
Okay, how can people get involved in this fight?
What would you recommend?
Well, I recommend that they go to our website, www.eff.org,
and they take our Action Alert,
and let Congress know that we're not going to let them use cybersecurity fears
to erode digital civil liberties.
We're speaking with Eva Galperin from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Our front lines are open if you have any questions or comments, 212-209-2900.
Eva, you're giving a talk at the Hackers on Planet Earth Conference as well.
Do you want to tell us something about that?
Yes, I am.
I am giving a talk about NIMWars and anonymity and pseudonymity online.
What was that first word you used, NIMWars?
NIMWars.
What's that?
NIMWars is a term that's usually used to describe the sort of kerfuffle
over Google Plus's decision to insist on a real name policy
when they started their social network.
And they basically are enforcing or have been enforcing that,
where if you don't use a real name, they take away your account?
They started out doing that.
They have actually changed their policy
so that it's considerably more complicated than that right now.
But Facebook still has a very strict real name policy.
And usually NIMWars is now used to describe a much broader sort of war
on pseudonyms online.
So now your talk is going to be focusing on that trend
and, I assume, ways to fight it?
Yes.
I imagine that most of the people listening to this show are hackers
or people who have been involved in technology from a very early age,
and I remember a time when you came to a forum or a BBS or something,
the very first thing that you did was you chose your handle.
You didn't leave your real name on these things.
And pseudonyms have been standard on the internet.
They have been the norm on the internet for decades,
and it's really only recently that we've started seeing companies come in
and insist on real names.
So we're going to be talking about that trend.
Interesting.
By the way, you'd be surprised how many of our listeners
are technology experts or technophobes, in fact,
because, well, we are a radio station in the middle of New York City
and all kinds of people listen that can't even get their phone to work properly
because they always call us to ask us how to do it.
So I like to think that we reach all kinds of people
and help them get through all this because there's so much going on.
I'm sure that all kinds of people can think of reasons
why you would not necessarily want your real name
next to everything that you do on the internet.
Absolutely.
It's not the kind of world where we'd have nothing to hide,
and if we do have something to hide, we're guilty.
I think we still live in a world where anonymity serves a very important purpose
in our day-to-day lives.
Go ahead, .red, then we'll take phone calls at 212-209-2900.
I think it basically just comes down to do you want people to force you
to what information you must tell them about yourselves
versus you deciding who deserves to know what about you
and how intimate that really is.
All right.
Mike, I'm going to let you pick the phone lines
because the phone is too far away from me.
So you pick the phone line, and we'll say good evening.
You're on off the hook.
I'm just wondering, this vision of the future,
it sounds as if it costs a lot of money.
Are poor people exempt?
What vision of the future are you talking about?
Where the person is hooked up constantly.
Oh, okay, the glasses.
People want this, I think.
I don't know.
Do you think Google is going to have something, maybe a basic,
what do they call that when the phone company gives you?
Lifeline service.
Lifeline glasses so that you can be hooked into the net all the time.
Maybe you just get the temperature and you don't get the forecast.
Look, I don't know any secrets,
but I would guess that Google would have to evaluate
what it thinks the poor people are worth marketing to
so that it can get enough money to cover the cost of the service.
Well, I think we've all seen what happens
is these things start out first as a luxury item, as cell phones were,
and then they slowly become very common.
Same thing for smartphones, and before you know it,
there's prepaid versions of all of them.
I remember one time being in a park in Greenwich Village
where I won't say that they, no, not in the park.
It was outside one of the parks,
and some people who were sitting in were begging.
One of them got up and left the group
because they forgot their phone in a nearby park.
I thought to myself, oh, wow.
So I found that very interesting.
The point is, you know, eventually everyone has a door.
You know, poor people will be exempt to some degree.
I missed that.
What was interesting about that?
That someone begging had left their cell phone in a park.
What?
That people who, okay, you know what?
We don't have time to get into this,
but I might pick another line.
Good evening.
You're on Off the Hook.
Speak up, please.
Hey, how's it going?
Hi, what's on your mind?
A couple things.
In 1974, we were shown a movie about nuclear power
in my public school,
and they had a short little piece
by one of the technology companies
saying that they were going to plant a device
behind people's ear,
and you could think your friends
and communicate with them instantly.
So this kind of communication ideas
have been around for a really long time.
It kind of technologically induced schizophrenia
in that instance,
but maybe that's an apt metaphor.
The other thing I want to say is I am not a technophile.
I do love the Internet,
and sometimes it is crack,
but I think if you look into the cracking of the Mayan code,
because you guys are code guys,
it was about books
and the actual bibliophile method of a bound book.
I think you guys got to lose the Kindle, man,
because it's just making e-waste,
and that's that.
Okay.
Point taken there.
Any comments from our on-the-phone people?
No? Okay.
I wanted to ask you if you know anything.
I know the EFF has been involved in this Mega Upload case.
Have you been part of that?
Yes.
Yes, we have been involved in the Mega Upload case.
Mega Upload is the case involving New Zealand,
Kim.com, that guy?
Yes.
Okay.
We are representing a Mega Upload user
who would like his files back.
All right.
So to catch our listeners up,
Mega Upload was basically a...
How would you describe the site, Micah?
A file locker.
A file locker where people can put files,
and they were accused of harboring all kinds of pirated content.
So what happened was the U.S. authorities
managed to move into New Zealand and get it taken down,
get the people who ran it arrested,
and there was a lot of legitimate data on there
that is no longer accessible.
So users want their data back.
And I believe they've also thrown something else into the mix now,
saying that, well, we can't give it back
because there might be child pornography on there too,
which seems to be the catch-all phrase
whenever they want to get their way.
They just insert child pornography into it.
Eva, what's your take on that?
It is certainly not unusual to hear the government drag its feet
by saying something like, think of the children,
especially because the U.S. laws about child pornography
are particularly strict.
It is illegal to be in possession of child pornography,
especially knowing possession.
So the government has to go through all of these sort of extra contortions
in order to not know what is on these files.
And the definition, I believe, is being broadened too
to include all kinds of things that don't even involve real people.
Yes.
There has been a lot of talk about broadening the definition of child pornography
to include images of child pornography
that were not actually made using children or sometimes even people.
Yeah, and the reason I think people are always so quick
to take the child pornography card is it's a very hot-button issue
that you can't walk up to anyone on the street and say,
child pornography, and they'll go, what?
That's terrible. That's horrible.
And so it's an instant way to get anyone on your side pretty much
who doesn't know what you're trying to do by saying the card.
Let's try that later on the bus and see what people say
when we just walk up to them and say child pornography.
All right, shall we take another phone call?
All right, good evening. You're on Off The Hook.
Yes, it sounds like the only chance any of us have for any privacy
is to encrypt our communications.
How long before they make that illegal, too?
Yeah, good question. Eva, any insight on that?
Well, actually, there has been a lot of back and forth
about encrypted communications over the years.
And in the late early 90s, late 80s, early 90s,
you saw the crypto wars sort of play out in the United States
where in the U.S. they did try to make cryptography illegal.
So how did that turn out?
Well, we can communicate over OTR.
I can PGP encrypt my email, so I'm going to go with it turned out all right.
But how did it get there?
What kind of battle had to be waged for us to get to that stage?
There was an extensive legal battle, which EFF was involved in.
And we did help to win the crypto wars.
So strong crypto is currently all right in the United States.
That is a battle that we have won.
It used to be illegal to export strong cryptography outside of the United States.
And I remember it was funny.
You would go to download, say, PGP or something,
and it would say that if you're outside of the United States, don't download this.
It was something like that because it was illegal.
There was PGPI for international and all that.
Which I guess had a lower, a smaller key size or something like that.
But Eva, do you think this is going to stay this way
or will it be under threat again in a couple of years?
Well, I think that the most imminent threat
comes from a facility which is described by James Bamford in a recent Wired article.
He describes a facility which the NSA is currently building in Utah,
which his reason to believe is going to be an enormous data center
which the NSA is going to use to break cryptographic communication.
I heard about that.
It's going to be massive, all kinds of servers and ways of surveillance,
monitoring people there in the middle of Utah.
And that's the same James Bamford who wrote The Puzzle Palace, all about the NSA, correct?
Yes.
Wow.
And The Shadow Factory and all kinds of other really excellent histories of the NSA.
I think he's a fairly reliable source.
At least the things we have going for us are the fact that there are published cryptographic protocols
that have been examined by cryptographers in general and are agreed upon as secure.
And if you use a large enough key size and the algorithm you use has been implemented correctly
and is a trusted algorithm, then hopefully the NSA won't be able to do much to break it,
at least until computers become more powerful
or the mathematical things that are cryptography are based on fall apart.
And certainly ephemeral keys would be helpful.
Right.
But of course any sort of security measure is only safe until it isn't anymore.
Exactly.
And that happens with everything.
All right.
Let's take another phone call.
Good evening.
You're on Off The Hook.
Speak up, please.
Yeah.
Hi.
What about the Technion thing they're supposed to build?
They've been downgraded by a rating company for the $2 billion plus technical school with Cornell and Israel.
And I was wondering what you guys thought about that.
Does anybody know anything about this?
It's more, I think, of a real estate and financial deal than a technical deal.
I don't know a lot about it.
It's called Technion.
That's the university.
Yeah.
It's an Israeli university.
And I guess they're trying to build something in New York.
You know more about it than I do, it sounds like.
Well, it sounds like it's similar to that Utah thing.
Both of them sound like insane old projects.
Well, there's no shortage of those these days.
But we'll keep listening for that one.
Let's take another phone call.
And good evening.
You're on Off The Hook.
Hello?
Yes, go ahead.
I'd just like to talk to these tech guys, man.
You're on the air.
You're talking to them.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
I was wondering what is happening for the Israeli-impaired people.
I'm sorry.
You know, I just got to step in here.
What has happened to the quality of phone calls these days?
And not the content.
I'm sure the content is, I don't understand anything.
The audio quality is just so horrible these days.
Are these glasses going to make that better, I hope?
Unlikely.
That's my wish.
That's my wish.
Carlo, are you still there?
Do you want to just try to phrase that and maybe talk slower?
No?
All right.
Let's take another phone call.
I'm sorry.
I don't mean to be dismissive.
But, really, it's so hard to understand people on the phone these days.
Landlines, man.
Landlines.
It's hard to answer a question that we can't understand.
Exactly.
Yeah.
It sounds like people are on different planets.
Well, you know what?
We're running short on time.
Eva, I wanted to give you the last word here.
Of course, we mentioned before that 10% of all sales to the HOPE Conference this summer
go to EFF, if the tickets are bought in April.
And, of course, there are some people maybe that can't make it to the HOPE Conference
that want to donate to EFF anyway.
So, how would they do that?
They should go to our website, which is at www.eff.org.
That's E-F-F dot O-R-G-E.
And I can't emphasize strongly enough, no matter how you do it, that it's important
to support organizations like EFF.
Because, boy, you know what?
If they weren't around, we would be so screwed on so many levels.
I hope you guys realize that out there and never give up what you're doing.
Well, thank you so much.
We really appreciate your support.
And we look forward to seeing you in New York this summer.
All right.
Definitely.
And all kinds of cool talks on the way there.
www.hope.net for information on that.
www.2600.com for information on all the other things we were talking about tonight.
And our email address, othat2600.com.
So, we look forward to hearing from you.
Until next week, I'm Emanuel Goldstein for Off The Hook.
Have a good night.
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C is for cuckoo, that's good enough for me
Man, what nerd kid
Man, what nerd kid
C is for cuckoo, that's good enough for me
Guess what?
Copyright infringement in the kitchen
Copyright infringement by the new refrigerator
Copyright infringement
Right over by my club soda bottle
Copyright infringement inside the club soda bottle
Back out again
I'm back, what else?
Guess what?
What?
Okay, I'm recording now
I'm going to set the phone down and just start doing it
Doing it, doing it, doing it, doing it
Can you hear me now?
Yes sir
Okay, now, when you
In order that I can play this back
I have to pick up the phone because the cassette deck is the amplifier that I'm sending the phone on
So, bear with me
So, when you're recording, you can't hear me?
I'm recording now, it's when I transition from recording to play that I have to pick up the phone
Alright, I'm just going to be recording now
I don't think so very much
Damn, I hear the rototiller
You hear that?
You're right, I'm hearing the rototiller live
A live rototiller
Do you hear it on the phone?
No
I have a humming sound
Don't get up, don't open the window
Don't get up, don't open the window
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Don't do anything
Would they prefer anything?
I don't want you to open the window
Oh my god, they look right at me, they're glaring at me
It's not the rototiller
It's a blower
An electric blower
Now it comes out
Can I do it now? Can I do it now? Alright
Would they prefer anything?
Cookie, cookie, cookie starts with C
I'm over by the microwave oven now