And you're listening to Radio Station WBAI New York, where the time is just about 7 o'clock.
Time once again, for Off The Hook.
The time is just about 7 o'clock.
The time is just about 7 o'clock.
And a very good evening to everybody.
The program is Off The Hook.
Emmanuel Goldstein here with you on this Wednesday evening, joined tonight by Rob T. Firefly.
Good evening.
Alex.
Good evening.
And Kyle from Washington.
Hi there.
And we also have our special guest for tonight for our special two-hour fundraiser show, Steve Rombaum.
Steve, welcome.
Good evening.
Well, don't we have a lot to talk about in these two hours, as far as, well, Steve, of course, I think you don't even need an introduction.
But in case people don't know who you are, you're an infamous private investigator, expert on privacy issues, and a bit of a mischief maker at times, I think.
And someone who always is willing to share what he knows with people.
You have all the attributes of a true hacker.
In this venue, anyway.
And tonight you're going to be telling us, hopefully, some things that we need to know and maybe some things we didn't know.
And we're going to have some very interesting things.
And announcing some pretty exciting joint programs.
Yes.
Yes.
And we'll also have some excerpts from conferences where you've given some very valuable bits of wisdom to people throughout the world.
Information never disappears.
No, it doesn't.
It certainly doesn't.
So let me just start the discussion with you guys.
We haven't been on the air, actually, for three weeks.
This is our first show since early May.
And, well, a bunch of things have happened.
And not the least of which is increased surveillance of reporters that we've heard about in the news.
And that's something that affects us as hackers, as journalists, as basically people who are just interested in freedom of information.
And we're going to be discussing that as well.
But also, I mentioned this is a two-hour show.
It is a two-hour program.
We are here because we need to raise funds for the radio stations.
It's our spring fundraiser.
We haven't been on for the last three weeks because other shows have been pitching in our place and hopefully raising enough money to keep the place on the air so that we can continue talking about these sorts of things.
So we have some special items that we'll be getting into in just a little bit.
Oh, you know, I neglected to mention Bernie from Philadelphia.
Bernie, I'm sorry.
No problem.
This is Bernie.
And I'm actually not in Philadelphia, but I'm somewhere in Pennsylvania.
Okay.
Steve, can you find out exactly where Bernie is?
No, he's this good.
He'll know exactly where you are.
He'll pinpoint your location in the next couple of hours.
Well, if he knew my phone number here, I'm calling from the landline.
I'm sure he could figure it out in short order.
But somewhere in northeastern Pennsylvania.
We'll put it that way.
Okay.
We've got that much to go on.
So, Bernie, let me ask you first of all.
What do you make of the revelations that have been taking place in the past few weeks with
the Associated Press having reporters basically their phone records analyzed by government officials?
I'm not surprised at all.
I'm surprised that they did it legally, that it was done using a subpoena as opposed to
just getting the information, which is what's been going on for as long as telephones have
been around and pen registers have been around.
Government has always been looking at people's phone records, legally or otherwise.
This time, it was done using apparently legal means, although for dubious reasons.
And I'm really surprised that people are up in arms that the government would do this.
Like, they do it all the time.
This time, it just became publicized.
Well, even by government standards, Bernie, I mean, it was ridiculously overbroad.
They subpoenaed one reporter's father's telephone records.
They subpoenaed the records and the activity from a phone that was used by more than a
hundred reporters in the capital.
It was an amazing fishing expedition.
Isn't that what they call a roving wiretrap?
No, no.
A roving wiretrap is targeted at one guy following him everywhere he goes.
This was just basically a dragnet.
This was the electronic equivalent of, in the 1950s, you know, round up all the usual
suspects.
Here it was tap every telephone you can think of.
Well, it wasn't a tap, though, right?
No, excuse me.
That's exactly correct.
It was not a tap.
It was a records dump.
But it was also a little more insidious this time with the increases in technology.
It was not only the calls to and from a cell phone, but it was the location of that cell
phone at any moment.
And for those of you who don't keep up on this sort of thing, one of the techniques
now being used to hopefully, in the hope of finding these leakers, is what's known
as a tower dump, generically known as data valence.
One of the things that they're doing now is they're identifying a reporter who writes
a story with a source that they want to identify, and they grab all of the cell phones that
were near that reporter's cell phone for a period of time.
And if a potential source for the story pops up, then they have their new target of investigation.
In other words, if I write a story about...
If I'm a reporter for AP, and I write a story about a new prison in Brazil, and the FBI
determines that two weeks before, the commander of that prison was within 100 feet of me,
they know pretty much who my source is.
And he wouldn't have even had to been using her phone, correct?
That's correct.
Yeah.
That's correct.
Well, the phone would have had to have been on.
Right.
But there's a million other ways to do electronic tracking.
I'm amazed by the people who think that, for example...
And Emanuel and I were talking about this before the show.
We're going to be announcing something pretty dramatic, I guess, in the second hour of the show.
A program that we think is going to very much help these reporters in the future.
But there are just so many technical means and methods to identify everything and everyone now.
I love it when reporters say, well, I got a drop phone.
And they don't realize that that drop phone is spending the night in their house.
And that drop phone is walking down the street alongside their regular phone.
And that drop phone is out to dinner with their girlfriend.
How hard is it to determine whose drop phone that is?
And so on and so on and so on.
Most reporters have the right idea, but they don't have the technical expertise to be anonymous.
And we're going to do something about that.
And what particularly strikes me about this right now, aside of all the chilling effects upon journalism and protected speech and things like that,
is the fact that this information is being collected to begin with, all in some system beyond anyone's knowledge or control,
just waiting for somebody to dredge up the info out of it and hand it to someone in the manner that's been done here.
So it's journalists this time.
Who is it going to be next time?
Who is it often when it doesn't hit the headlines?
You know, and I think that these are two very interesting points that have been brought up,
because this last point about who's collecting the data, well, in the United States,
we're not entirely sure because there is no actual data retention obligation as such right now.
But coincidentally, in Europe since 2009, the EU passed the EU data retention directive,
which mandates that all communications providers actually store exactly the type of communications data that Steve has just discussed.
And I never thought about data balance in that situation, but I think that that's incredibly troubling from a privacy perspective,
because then you have communications carriers acting in a judicial capacity,
and those guys are then going to become the gatekeepers of this private information.
What do you think about that, Steve?
Well, I have to tell you, there's a reason why there isn't a mandate to collect this right now.
It's because it is being collected, and there's a really insidious thing that's taking place right now in the U.S.
Years and years of your phone calls, your emails, your smartphone usage,
and more important than that, your location detail every minute of the day is now being kept by AT&T and Verizon and Sprint and what have you.
And here's the bad part.
It is a private business record.
You don't own it.
If I am working for the FBI, and I want to know where you were last Thursday,
I can go to your carrier and I can say, tell me where he was last Thursday.
And they can say, sure.
They don't have to get a warrant, and you have nothing to say about it because it's technically not your information.
It's the carrier's information, and that applies across the board.
Let me tell you, when I run your Social Security number, and I find out every place you've used that Social Security number,
everything you've done with it, I'm getting it from a private business source.
If I want to know everywhere your car has been, meaning everywhere you've driven in the state of New York for the past six months,
those are private companies that are gathering and aggregating that automatic license plate reader information and selling it to the government.
Now, even, by the way, when Customs and Border Patrol shoots a picture of your license plate going and coming across the Canadian border or the Mexican border,
they turn it over to these private companies.
And they say, here, you aggregate this, you index it, and you just give it back to us.
So this goes beyond just E-ZPass, keeping track of where you've been.
Oh, E-ZPass is so last century.
Listen, without leaving my house, and I mean, this has been the basis of my talks at Every Hope,
but now it is so far exponentially beyond what we discussed even a year ago.
Without leaving my house, I know everywhere that you've been, everybody you've met with, everybody you've talked to,
everything you've purchased, every book you read, every movie you've watched, every time you've been paid.
You know, I had a conversation, I'll just say this very, very quickly, because we could go on like this for the whole show.
I had a conversation with somebody yesterday, a really smart young hacker, who is going to be rolling out ATMs for Bitcoin.
Oh, my God. Wow.
And I said, this is a game changer.
He says, oh, yeah, there's been a bunch of us discussing it.
There was apparently a Bitcoin conference, which I didn't even know about.
I'm sure two-thirds of the people there were from the IRS.
But, you know, they had this Bitcoin convention, and they're going to be rolling out ATMs.
Now, the big drawback to Bitcoin is how do you get your money in and how do you get your money out?
Well, there's going to be ATMs where you can go to an ATM, put in $5,000 worth of cash, and convert it to Bitcoins.
And then if you want later to cash out some of your Bitcoins, you go to the ATM, and you do whatever you need to do to authenticate, and it spits out $100 bills.
I told this guy, this is a brilliant idea, this is a game changer, and I want to be on your legal defense team when you're arrested.
Do you think something like this is going to be targeted by the powers that be because it is a game changer?
It has to be because, first of all, it kills know your customer.
The truth is it will, listen, I think Bitcoin is wonderful.
I'm all for anonymity.
But the fact of the matter is this will facilitate crimes.
This will facilitate drug dealing.
This will facilitate payment of kidnapping ransoms.
This will facilitate terrorism funding.
That's the downside.
But Steve, don't a lot of other activities, a lot of other available technologies and things assist all of those types of criminals like automobiles, computers, pens and pencils, paper?
You're being a little clever about it, but I think pens and pencils are actually probably less important to the terrorists than most things.
Well, if we lived in a society where there were no pens and pencils and suddenly they were introduced, I think we might see the same arguments against them in that they could facilitate crime.
Frankly, I think we should ban pens and pencils.
That's something we could pursue.
This could be the topic of our next show.
Has anyone here ever paid with anything with a Bitcoin?
Nobody.
I actually have.
You have?
I did it just to test the process.
And tell us what it was like.
It was annoying because the penetration is not enormous.
Look, Bitcoins are now at the point that PayPal was at about eight years ago when it was pissing everybody off and it was difficult to use and they were losing money and making the payments bad.
And then all of a sudden PayPal became the default for eBay and ultimately became owned by eBay.
And then PayPal and eBay swallowed up Skype.
And you had a communications method and you had a massive user base and you had stuff you could actually spend it on.
And you had the ability to say to people, I'll PayPal you.
Right now, I can't say, hey, Eric, I owe you a hundred bucks.
I'll Bitcoin you.
It's not at that point yet.
But once these ATMs are at and once there's a gigantic user base, frankly, the people that want to monitor your money are massively screwed.
Because this isn't just an alternative currency.
This is a P2P currency.
There's no centralized, there's no federal bank of Bitcoin.
Interesting.
Well, we are living in dramatic times where businesses are changing and entire cultures are changing.
Publishing, broadcasting, financial, it's all turning to something completely different.
I recommend that you do what I did, which is you get a house in the hill country of Texas where you barely have a cell signal.
You have dial-up speed Internet.
Nobody can find you.
And you live your nice, quiet life.
I've got most of those things.
But the Texas thing, OK, I'll add that.
But wow.
So, Stephen, any new projects that you've been involved in recently?
I have.
I have.
A couple of things you know about.
I am now the editor-in-chief.
I made up that title myself because they didn't give me a title.
I'm working with a project called the Intelligence and Investigative Library.
And we are rolling out ten books over the next 18 months.
The first one is going to be on a very famous spy ring, the Culper spy ring.
A whole lot of new information.
There are teams of probably some of the best investigators and researchers working on these books.
Really, really dramatic stuff.
We're putting out a book on Herbert Yardley, who was the writer of the only book ever seized and banned by the U.S.
And he founded what was known as the American Black Chamber, which became the NSA.
We've got another book coming out on the anti-fraud activities of P.T. Barnum, which is a remarkable book.
But more important than all of that, I think we should talk about the project that I and some of my colleagues are going to be doing with you and some of your colleagues.
For the past few minutes, we've been talking about all the problems the press has been having.
I just came back from a very large convention of private investigators in Florida called the Fally Conference.
And for the first time ever, you know, a big problem with private investigators is it's really easy for people to take cheap shots at private investigators.
They're keyhole peepers. They do all kinds of illegal things, which is substantially bull.
But the press has not until recently realized that private investigators and journalists are essentially the same animal, just with different licensing requirements.
And at this conference, for example, one of the keynote speakers was a highly regarded reporter from the Associated Press who stood up and said, P.I.s and journalists are separated at birth.
And I thought to myself, you know, the third triplet is hackers.
And what the listener doesn't know is that Emmanuel and I have been chatting about this and plotting and conspiring.
Maybe not the best word to use.
No, that's a good word. I like it.
Well, right. And I mean, this is to me very, very exciting.
And this is being announced for the first time. Glad I'm the guy who's doing it.
We are going to put together a joint event with the investigative community, the hacker community and the journalist community.
I've spoken to a bunch of journalists. I've spoken to probably some of the best cyber investigators in the country.
The people who who teach the FBI, who speak at the NSA, who speak at the CIA and instruct.
I reached out to our mutual friend Kevin and he's not opposed.
Some other people. And we are going to put together a you know, the care, the safe care and feeding of anonymous sources conference.
This is going to be a conference that's going to teach the press how to handle sources, how to communicate with sources, how to meet with sources, how to be anonymous, how to be untrackable.
You know, if you are a whistleblower right now, there is a target on your back.
And and it's a huge target. It's an enormous, visible, easily discoverable target.
If I want to know who's leaking a story to a particular reporter, there are dozens of new technical means that are available for me to find your identity.
And the average reporter, even though they're pretty darn smart, has no clue how dead privacy is dead.
They don't understand pervasive video surveillance with analytics and facial recognition.
They don't understand what cell phones can really do.
They don't understand how useless a drop phone is.
They don't understand that that using Tor is meaningless because every browser is now fingerprinted.
They don't understand things like forensic linguistics, where even if you post anonymously, I can run your post through a machine and figure out with a high, high degree of accuracy.
Who posted that anonymous post and and your group, Eric 2600 and my crew and some of the best journalists out there, many of whom have already signed on on board this.
We are going to have a joint event and it's not going to because this is so critical.
We've all agreed not to wait until the whole conference, which is a year from now.
We are going to do essentially a midwinter conference, a 2012 and a half conference.
And we're going to have a five or six hour event that we're going to pull together, maybe at a J school or maybe at a auditorium.
Well, we'll pick an appropriate venue.
We have to find a venue. That's the first order of business is to find a venue.
Right, right. I think this is going to be an amazing event and I think it's going to infuriate all the right people.
It's always been my dream to do that, and I hope that we succeed in that.
And of course, people want to be involved, right to us, right to Steve, right to all kinds of people, because I think, like you said, these communities will get together on this issue.
If you want to attend this conference, if you think you have something to contribute to it, please contact 2600.
If you can suggest a venue, ideally at an academic institution, we are going to reach out to the Columbia J School.
We're going to speak to John Jay, a couple of other schools where I've spoken and have some contacts.
We need a room of not less than 500 seats.
Yeah, we're looking to do this as cheaply as possible. If we can get a donation of a room that would make it even...
Well, ideally zero.
Yes, that's what we're shooting for. So if we can get things donated, then obviously there won't be any charge to get in.
And if we have to pay for something, then there'll be a minimum charge.
Well, there's going to be a minimal charge because we have to fly people in.
But none of the speakers are going to get paid.
This is definitely going to be a not-for-profit event.
I think that this is an incredibly critical and time-sensitive thing.
And I think if the hacker community and the investigative community can put their expertise at the disposal of investigative journalists,
I think that'll be a remarkable moment.
Bernie, any questions since you're hearing about this for the first time?
Well, I mean, this is the first time I'm hearing about it, and I'm really excited and pleased that this is happening
because I think that investigative journalists are some of the most important people in the country
as far as making people aware, making everyone aware of abuses by our government and corporations and what they're all doing,
which we would have no way of knowing otherwise without whistleblowers,
without reporters who are willing to stick their necks out and report the stories and name names.
We'd be in far worse shape than we are.
We're already in really bad shape, but it could be far worse if we didn't know what was going on at all.
Absolutely, and we're about getting the knowledge out.
And I hate to break in here, but we do have to do this to keep the knowledge flowing on this particular radio station,
which is an amazing place.
The fact that we're able to broadcast words like this and have been doing it since 1988 is nothing short of a miracle.
But that miracle happens because of support from listeners like you.
Now, what we're offering today, in conjunction with Steve's appearance here, is something really kind of in the spirit of it all.
A bit sneaky, a bit technological, and very educational.
For a pledge of $75, you will get what's known as the digital audio flash drive.
What that gives you is an 8-gig flash drive.
You can just plug it into your computer and surreptitiously record people for a number of hours.
We haven't quite figured out exactly how many. Estimates range from a dozen or so to over 100.
We're not entirely sure. We haven't actually used this ourselves, but it's pretty cool.
And in addition to that 8-gig flash drive, in keeping with the spirit of maintaining your anonymity when you want to speak to people,
or maybe you want to leak a story to the Associated Press and not get hauled into court for it,
we're also going to include a $10 spoof card.
What a spoof card is, it's a special service that allows you to change the phone number you're calling from.
You can also change your voice. You can sound like one of those kidnappers on late-night TV.
But we don't advise that, at least not the kidnapping part.
So you'll get that in addition to the digital audio flash drive for a pledge of $75.
For a pledge of $125, you get all that, plus you get all of Steve Rombaum's talks at every single HOPE conference that we recorded him at,
which is, I believe, everything from Beyond HOPE up until HOPE No. 9.
So that's 8 conferences, each one at least an hour, some of them up to 3 hours, a lot of DVDs.
And you'll learn so much, and you'll also see how Steve was on top of things way back in the 1990s and the early 2000s,
talking about things that are coming down the pike, that have since come down the pike,
and now we're waving at their tail section as they lead even more scary things into our midst.
The phone number is 516-620-3602 to take advantage of all these cool items that we're offering.
Again, the digital audio flash drive for a pledge of $75, and you get the $10 spoof card with that.
Or for $125, the digital audio flash drive plus DVD set.
So you'll get the ability to record people surreptitiously from your laptop,
or any other device that you can plug a USB thumb drive into.
You'll get the spoof card, which allows you to control where you call from,
and you'll get a whole bunch of DVDs where you'll learn all kinds of things about privacy,
and just how dead it really is, and ways you might be able to preserve your anonymity.
516-620-3602. We really need to have a strong show of support to keep this radio show going. Rob?
And indeed, if you can't give as much as it takes to get those gifts,
we still need any bit of help you can spare, any amount that you can donate.
And for those of you listening to us by means other than live audio,
whether you're listening to us on MP3s, podcasts, things like that,
you can always donate in the name of Off The Hook.
If you go to wbai.org and follow the links, we can't give you our special premiums,
but we can give you the most important one, which is this radio station.
Actually, I can modify it. Because of a new system we have here at WBAI,
where we have a set number of items, we can actually leave those available until those items are taken.
So if they're still available, yeah, we can do that now.
We had no way of doing that before, and now it's simply an entry in a computer field.
So we have a set number of these items, and if they're all taken during this two-hour period,
then they're all gone. But if, say, there are two or three left over,
and somebody calls in, the computer can be looked up, and they'll say,
yeah, we have one, and you can have that. Steve?
You should know that these USB concealed recording devices are actually a lot cooler than you described.
They do not have to be plugged into anything to record.
You can plug them into a USB drive, they will recharge the battery,
and then you can pull it out and just leave it laying on your desk or have it in your pocket.
And if, you know, your favorite miscreant is patting you down and says,
what's this in your pocket? Oh, it's just my USB drive. Don't worry about it.
We should point out that you should check with your, well, maybe not call them,
but look up on the web or something, your local, state, federal authorities.
Make sure that you're not breaking the law by recording people without their knowledge.
Speaking about reporters, there's a great site, if you Google in quotes,
Can We Tape?
It takes you to the Reporters Committee on Freedom and Privacy,
and they have every state's recording laws there.
And of course, laws vary in different countries as well,
and since we offer these things to people worldwide, it's always good to check.
You might be imprisoned or tortured for doing these things in your particular locale.
But again, the phone number is 516-620-3602.
Pledge of $75 for the special digital audio flash drive and spoof card,
or pledge of $125 for the flash drive, digital audio flash drive, spoof card, and DVD set.
516-620-3602. Yes, Bernie?
Oh, well.
I knew you wanted to say something.
No, I was on the edge of my seat here.
What Steve said was true, that these things are pretty cool.
When I was in China a couple years ago with Mitch Altman and friends,
I was looking for one of these things.
I knew they had to exist, and I went through this whole building that sold cool electronics things,
and I found one vendor that had this thing and had one left.
And I got it, and it looks like it's a regular thumb drive, just a USB flash drive.
But that night we were at a lounge on top of some big building in Beijing, all ten of us,
and I thought I'd have some fun, and I passed it around.
I turned it on to record, and I just passed it around.
I said, hey, this isn't just a flash drive.
Can you figure out what else it does?
And for the next probably at least ten minutes or so, this thing was passed around the circle.
Everybody was trying to figure out what it is, making comments.
Nobody. These are like some of the smartest hackers I know.
And none of them figured out what this thing is until I plugged it into my laptop
and started playing back all their guesses as high-bit rate WAV files,
and they were stunned.
They're like, holy crap, that is all in that little thing that's the size of a normal flash drive.
It looks like a regular flash drive.
You can hang it on your keychain.
Nobody would know what it is unless they were really good.
And there were some really good people looking at them.
So I encourage our listeners who enjoy listening to interesting audio on this station
and anywhere else and making your own interesting audio recordings
to call 516-620-3602 and as a thank you for pledging your support to WBAI of $75,
we will give you one of these digital audio flash drives.
Of course, many hours.
We'll give you a spoof card that will let you make $10 worth of phone calls,
and you can change the caller ID on the person's phone that you're receiving your calls.
If you're generous enough and able enough to pledge $125 in support,
you'll get all that plus nine DVDs, at least nine DVDs.
More than that, more than that.
At least, probably a dozen or more DVDs of Steve Rambam's fascinating talks.
And really, they're good to listen back to from the early days
because you can see how things have progressed with surveillance and privacy over the years.
And it's really tough to just sit and think of how far we've come
and how bad things have gotten unless you have that perspective.
Call 516-620-3602.
We appreciate your support for the station,
and we're willing to show it by offering you some great gifts.
Please call in and pledge what you can tonight.
We've got a lot of really, really cool tools,
and it's not just about having the equipment or the information.
It's about how you use it, whether you're a journalist or an investigator or a hacker.
We're here. We want to disseminate the information, get it out to you.
We're telling you about how to use this equipment.
And what Steve just announced tonight is basically that.
It's a workshop, a massive independent workshop we want to organize
to give people tools and resources so that they know how to use what's available.
It's great. We have a lot of new technologies that can be used
to counter some of these, I don't know, egregious privacy violations.
And what it's really about is not just having it,
but knowing how to use it and use it effectively.
And, yeah, it only happens, and we can only continue to tell you about this stuff
if you call in and pledge.
To bounce off that point, which I think is a fantastic point,
and also to bounce back to Steve's point about the protection of sources
and how important it is to protect sources of information,
I think you should think of WBAI as one of your sources.
We've been around for a very, very long time.
We've been providing you with information.
You need to really protect us.
And to protect this source, you need to pledge.
You need to call 516-620-3602 and support the station,
support this type of programming,
support places that also keep your voice on the air,
not only ours, but yours as well.
Absolutely. Again, 516-620-3602.
That might be a strange number to some people
because it's a different area of code than where we usually take pledges.
But what we get, we get an email when the pledge is actually put.
It's actually a more efficient system
because we immediately know how many people are pledging
after they send us an email, that is.
So what we'd like to see is a bunch of emails coming in
from the call center telling us how many people are out there
and whether we can thank you on the air and things like that.
It's a different system, but we're getting used to it.
516-620-3602. Again, $75.
You'll get the digital audio flash drive and the spoof card,
which is really a lot of fun to play with.
You can call people from the White House.
You can call people from their own house and say you're inside their house.
But you can also use it for...
People have used these...
I'm just thinking in a sneaky way.
But people have used...
Imagine a contractor comes to your house and does half the job
and then doesn't finish the job and he's avoiding your calls.
What happens if you call him from his own phone number,
from his home number to his cell phone?
Always picks up.
And that has been used so many times to get satisfaction
in bad business deals or to call from, say, an agency
that might be investigating him if they were actually calling him.
Things like that.
Ways you can use the system to your advantage.
It shouldn't just be used by others to hurt you.
You should be able to take control yourself.
And this is a means of doing that.
That one small item, which is included in both of these packages.
But if you add the DVD set into that,
if you add the ability to record people or happenings
at the drop of a hat, quite literally,
you really are well prepared if you use it.
You can use some judgment.
So the phone number is 516-620-3602.
Pledge of $75.
You get the flash drive that can record things for many hours.
And you also get the spliff card for $125.
You get all that plus a DVD set of at least a dozen DVDs
of Steve Rombaugh talking at various conferences
about privacy issues and ways that you can keep your privacy
somewhat secure.
But I imagine those ways probably get a little less every year.
Is that right, Steve?
Things don't work anymore.
You're sending out the DVDs with a little piece of tinfoil
that you can fold into an appropriately sized hat.
But if you know what's going on,
you're not going to be as susceptible.
You might make different choices in your everyday life.
And that's the important thing, the information.
The truth is that the countermeasures that are available
are just as good and just as robust
as the privacy-invading technologies themselves.
The reason that privacy is being invaded so effectively
is that people aren't educating themselves
as to what they can do to maintain their privacy,
maintain their anonymity.
And that's something that one of the very few entities
that has done any educational outreach has been 2600.
Yeah, actually, through the conferences
and actually before I ever went to Hope,
it was through listening to some of the audio.
And your talks in particular changed my life.
I mean, that information made me look at my choices.
Using these products,
these social media web 2.0 products,
it started looking really silly
because I had these talks, these words,
this information in my mind.
And I'm here today, a much different person
than I probably would have been
if this information hadn't been released,
if I hadn't been able to hear it.
And I've gone to almost every talk you've done at Hope since.
It changed your life.
So basically, your mother is not going to be calling me
and saying, it's all your fault, Steve.
All right, very good.
What I like to do is,
I want to thank the people who are calling in.
So far, people have called in,
but they don't want to be thanked on the air.
But I want to thank them anyway,
but I'm just not going to say their names.
How about that?
And you can join them, 516-620-3602.
I'd like to play something from the DVD set.
Now, Kyle, you were at this conference.
You were at Hope No. 6,
but you didn't go to this talk.
And the reason you didn't go to this talk
is because it didn't happen at the conference itself.
It happened a few months later
because, Steve, you kind of got sidetracked at the conference.
Want to tell us the quick story?
Well, I mean, it worked out really well.
As my friend Bob Kolakowski told me repeatedly,
if I could get arrested like this once every five years,
I'd be a billionaire.
This was the most remarkable publicity
I ever got in my life.
I had been doing an investigation
of somebody who turned out.
I didn't know this when I started.
Wouldn't have changed anything, but I didn't know.
This gentleman whose legal name
had been changed to Franz Josef von Habsburg-Lothringen,
and he was telling everyone
he was the crown prince of Austria.
He was what's known as an FBI high echelon informant.
He was also a busy little felon.
Not a good fella.
And when I discovered who he was
and I discovered that he was a former mental patient
and that he had been recruited by the FBI
right after his release from a mental institution
and a whole host of less than positive things
about this fella,
the FBI gave me a grand jury subpoena
for my investigative file.
And I refused
and went in front of a federal magistrate.
And the federal magistrate told the FBI,
your subpoena is quashed
and do not bother this investigator.
So essentially they waited
until this judge went on vacation.
They gave me another subpoena
and then they marched into the HOPE conference
as I was about to give a talk.
And by the way, that was a joint conference.
There were hundreds of investigators
and law enforcement or whatever there.
We had done a full day seminar before.
A raid team of FBI guys
wearing the blue jackets that say FBI
with heavy weapons and all of that
came in and pulled me out of there.
Why did they pick that particular time to do it?
That's what I always wanted.
Well, for very obvious reasons.
They wanted to embarrass me.
They wanted to intimidate the HACR conference.
You know, there's a book coming out
called The FBI, The Prince of Austria and Me.
It's going to be a main,
a large publishing house is putting it out
and a well-known author is writing it.
The story of this whole event.
And one of the things that you're going to find out is
every HOPE conference to remind me
or to, they think, remind me
that I need to behave and not bother the FBI,
they do something.
In 2006, they arrested me right before the HOPE conference.
Now, by the way,
four of those five FBI agents were either fired.
One is under criminal investigation right now.
The two prosecutors who authorized it were booted out.
You know, to say that I won hands down is ridiculous.
I mean, I was released less than 40 hours later
and that was that.
But before the 208 conference,
the same FBI agent that led the team that arrested me
in 2006 filed a complaint with the,
two days before the HOPE conference,
tried to get my license yanked.
That failed.
In 2010, they opened an investigation into me again
two days before the HOPE conference.
Not coincidences.
That failed.
No, I mean,
we are getting this book out before the 2014 conference.
And by the way,
you don't know this,
but this is another thing that Emanuel and I
have been conspiring about.
A Reader's Digest version of this book
is going to be submitted to 2600 magazine
before the HOPE conference
so everybody knows what's happening.
And it's going to say at the end of this article
and at the end of the book,
let's see what happens in 2014.
There's one guy left,
one FBI agent left,
who is, I guess,
the epitome of the sore loser.
And he's still out there, you know,
twisting in the wind,
trying to do something.
But,
what happened is,
because I was pulled off of the stage,
2600 decided,
and I have to tell you,
this was something that really
made me pretty emotional at the time.
Because,
for 2600 to tee up
and to so aggressively support me,
mind you, everybody else did too,
but 2600 really,
really led the league.
I mean, the investigative community,
not just the investigative community,
law enforcement agencies contacted me,
I mean, serving special agents came and said,
we'll testify for you.
The uproar about what the FBI did
was extraordinary.
I got about a thousand emails
in the first month.
Maybe two of them were,
you got what you deserved,
and 998, you know, what can we do?
But,
a sneaky little, you know,
could have been a KGB guy if he wanted to,
by the name of Arseny Lebedev,
which when he contacted me,
I was sure it was a fake name,
but it's not, that's actually someone's name.
He called me up and he said,
we are doing conference.
Yeah, I hate when he does that accent.
Yeah, yeah, it's like, you know,
first we get the moose and crazy squirrel.
Anyway, no, he has no accent at all,
I'm making that up,
but Arseny called me up and he says,
I'm working with Emmanuel and 2600
and we want you to do your talk.
We have the auditorium
at Stevens Institute of Technology.
And I said, well, okay, great.
And he says, look, it only holds 800 people.
And I said, excuse me?
I said, you know,
a classroom would be fine.
He says, no, no, you don't understand
how pissed everybody is.
And I want to tell you something.
This was, this was what,
like 60 days later, something like that?
It was October or November, I don't remember.
It was in the fall.
Whatever, it was a couple of months later
and I want to tell you something.
I went over, this is in beautiful Hoboken.
Hoboken is beautiful.
Well, if you say so.
Anyway, it's Jersey.
College in Hoboken, dial 1-516-620-3602
to support the radio station.
And for a donation of $125,
I will tell you why there are no volcanoes in New Jersey.
Oh, fair enough.
Or at the end of the show.
At any rate,
I walked into the room
and it was beyond standing room only.
There were steps leading up
into the back of the auditorium,
full, there were people,
there were rafters
that people were hanging from.
Yeah, we had to keep the fire commissioner away.
No, that's true.
That's true.
They actually threw out a fire guy
from the local college security there.
They're like, get out of here
and closed the door in front of them.
I mean, it was like 400 people
above maximum permitted occupancy.
And the dean of students was there
and he said, you know,
this is unbelievable.
Who are you?
What did you do?
I said, I'm like a notorious criminal.
Don't worry about it.
And by the way,
he later invited me to come
and speak at a venture capitalist meeting,
which was the funniest thing ever.
Well, you'll get this talk.
You'll also get the talk that Steve missed
where we announced what happened to him
at the Help No. 6 conference,
but you'll also get talks
from seven other conferences
and you'll get that
plus the digital audio flash drive
and the spliff cards.
Great deal.
516-620-3602.
Join the people who have called in.
I want to thank David from Glenwood, New Jersey
for his generous pledge
and Jane from New York
along with a bunch of anonymous people
that are calling in.
516-620-3602.
It's really a great way to show support
and to learn a lot, too.
Let's listen to an excerpt from 2006
that John Bond gave.
Okay, if we could have your attention.
Everybody here?
Good.
Welcome to the final talk
of the Hope Conference.
I want to thank you all
for braving the elements
to get here.
I want to thank Stevens
for allowing us to be here.
I want to thank Arseny
for arranging all of this
and making it possible.
Of course, the person to really thank
is the person who stuck through
a lot of hell in July
and came back to give the talk
that he wasn't able to give in July,
Steve Rambam.
Thank you.
As Eric pointed out,
this is quite a bit
of unfinished business.
Three months late,
but better late than never.
Where is Arseny, by the way?
Before I start,
I just very much want to thank Arseny
for setting this up.
I got an email from him
out of the blue.
He said, I understand that
no idea who he was,
didn't have any affiliation
with 2600 that I knew of.
He sent an email to me.
I think I was actually
in the Far East at the time.
It said something
along the lines of,
Arseny Lebedev,
and I would like you to come
to Stevens Institute of Technology
and give this speech.
We emailed back and forth.
First of all, I didn't believe
that somebody with the name
Arseny Lebedev existed.
Basically, he just kept saying,
come to Stevens on the 16th.
Everything will be fine.
Can you make it?
How big a room do you need?
I'm thinking, sure, Borat.
I'm going to fall for this.
I expected to come here
and find a guy
in a shiny gold thong
with a wrestling bear or something.
It's tomorrow.
That's tomorrow.
Come back after 12.
The fact that
this late in the game
with crappy weather
out of nowhere that we have
a standing room only crowd
is entirely due to Arseny.
Give him money.
Buy him food.
Do something.
Let me very quickly tell you
what we're doing here today.
This is normally part
of an eight-hour full-day course,
which is half a day
computer-aided investigation
and half a day foreign investigation.
The computer-aided investigation portion,
which we've modified
into a privacy seminar
for 2600,
is essentially designed
to teach investigators,
law enforcement,
people with a genuine need
to know how to track people down
and find things out about them,
how to do it before they go out in the field.
Computer-aided investigation
and database access
is now an essential part
of any investigator
or law enforcement officer's toolkit.
Then in the afternoon we move on
to the foreign investigation portion of it
where we cover
what to do if they have to go out of the country.
Over the years working with 2600,
we've put together a speech
and we've realized that privacy
is in fact the mirror image
of database investigation.
You can't talk about access
to people's personal information
or who can access it
without discussing what's out there
and who should be able to access it.
As part of the seminar
that I was supposed to give 90 days ago
and that I'm giving tonight,
we asked for a volunteer,
we asked for a victim,
somebody to call in or write in
and allow us to essentially invade his privacy,
find out everything we could about him.
We got a number of volunteers.
Most of them were people
who were either too young
or too nice
to have any sort of history.
Thank goodness a guy by the name
of Rick Dakin volunteered.
Now Rick is very active
in the online community.
He's also a writer.
He most recently wrote Geek Mafia.
He's a pretty remarkable guy
and there's a ton of stuff about Rick.
Rick is a very colorful guy
and not all of it is just simple
where does he live
and where does he work stuff,
as you'll see.
Because of Rick's cooperation,
we were able to put together a program,
which you'll see in a second,
that allows us to talk about
what's out there in private hands,
proprietary databases,
corporate databases,
credit bureaus,
non-governmental databases.
Let me just dismiss governmental databases today
by saying,
everything that you see us do here today,
the government has 50 times as much
and they have access to everything
that you're going to be seeing today.
We're not going to talk about
NCIC, FinCEN,
which is where all your financial history is,
TEX, TEX2,
any of the incarnations
of the databases used by
what used to be Treasury,
what's now Homeland Security,
that sort of thing.
We're not going to talk about that.
We're going to talk about stuff
that a skilled private investigator
or a governmental investigator
with access to private databases
can access.
What we're also not going to do today
is,
what I'm not going to do today
is have a point of view.
I'm going to lay this out for you
in as neutral a manner as possible.
Now, granted,
seven FBI agents in raid jackets
coming in the first time
I try to give this speech
has sort of skewed my opinion somewhat.
But still,
I am not
convinced that
on one hand,
all the databases need to be closed
or on the other hand,
all the databases need to be open
to the world.
I mean, there are legitimate reasons for access
and we're going to be talking about that.
As I say
in all the talks I give,
I'm not going to tell you what to think,
but I am going to try to tell you
what to think about.
Database collection
has been around forever,
since the days of the Bible.
People have been counted.
People have been pigeonholed.
People have been categorized.
Here's what's different
in the past 10 years.
First of all, computing power and speed.
I have now in my office
more data
and more data storage space
than the FBI computers
had 10 years ago.
Storage space,
you can go now to a store
and get a 750 gig drive
for what, about 300 bucks.
You can set up an array of computers
that will process whatever data
you gather so quickly
that 10 years ago
you would have had to use
literally a Cray supercomputer
to do the equivalent amount of computing.
Everything,
everything is now
in digital format.
Everything you do
when you fill out an application,
when you buy an item,
when you make a telephone call,
when you go through an easy pass lane
or use a metro card,
everything is already
in digital format,
which means taking it,
putting it in a database,
analyzing it and indexing it
never has to be touched by human hands.
You today,
not some third party typing
in front of a terminal,
you are contributing all the data about you.
OCR,
Optical Character Recognition,
even the old data,
the stuff that's on paper forms
20 years ago, 30 years ago,
is being OCR'd
at the speed of light
and it's being sucked into databases.
And why?
Because data is worth money.
You access a database,
you typically pay
a substantial flat rate
to access that database,
can be thousands of dollars a month,
or you pay per search.
And the more hits the user gets,
the more money the database provider gets
and the happier they are.
So they're going to keep sucking in info
so you'll pay for access to it.
People are also
willingly,
and we're going to talk about this
in great detail tonight,
people are also willingly
contributing enormous amounts
of personal data about themselves.
When I say personal,
I don't mean their address and phone number.
I mean ridiculously personal things.
You go to MySpace pages,
people talk about drug use,
sexual activity, religion,
sexual orientation, politics,
things they won't tell their own family.
Anybody who accesses
that page is going to be able
to determine immediately.
And by the way,
all of that data,
there are bots right now,
my bots, other people's bots,
running through MySpace,
running through Friendster,
running through Bebo and everything else,
sucking down that information
and categorizing it.
Friendster, Steve?
Well, I mean,
except for the mention
of MySpace and Friendster,
there's an excerpt from 2006
about how it still applies today.
It's still very much up to date.
But obviously,
you've given talks since then.
We're also including with this package
where you certainly give more information.
And if you call 516-620-3602,
pledge of $125,
you'll get all of those talks
plus the audio drive
that you can use
to surreptitiously record
your surroundings.
And you'll also get a spoof card
where you can not only block your number,
you can send a different number
so people think you're calling from someplace else
and you can disguise your voice
and make it more high-pitched or low-pitched
or just completely unidentifiable.
516-620-3602.
I want to thank Sasha from New York
for calling in and pledging.
There's other people, too,
that are calling in.
I have to keep track of the email account
that keeps updating.
But, wow,
we're all just riveted to the radio
and the talk.
That was a three-hour talk, wasn't it,
Steve, at Stevens Institute?
It actually had
an extended Q&A.
I think we were basically there
until security came in
and ran out 1,200 people.
Well, they had some questions, too.
They asked their questions
and then we all had to go home.
Yeah, their question was,
why are there more people here than you should?
And the answer was, get out.
Well, that's three DVDs right there
for that one talk.
And then, of course, there was the talk
that you missed at Hope No. 6
because you were being dragged away in cuffs.
Well, you weren't really being dragged away in cuffs,
but you were being led away against your wishes
and you weren't able to give that particular talk.
So that was rather entertaining
having to explain that to 1,000 people.
And we also have talks from Beyond Hope,
H2K, H2K2, The Fifth Hope,
The Last Hope, The Next Hope
and I don't even remember where I was at.
I can barely remember the conference.
I was called up and sat on a panel.
I have no memory of that.
We do have The First Hope, 1994.
We have a bunch of talks,
but we don't have you for some reason.
And there was some little Looney Tune
by the name of Mordechai that was there.
Mordechai Levy.
I remember him, yes.
When he saw me up there,
he went squealing out of there.
And ever since then,
there's been a deranged dislike of me.
Well, yeah, JDO, JDL,
one of those organizations.
I don't know.
There was a whole big thing going on.
WACKO, AUT.
There were articles in The Village Voice
and all kinds of newspapers.
Oh, what a banana.
Yeah, but we love them all.
But that was our first conference
and we had all kinds of people
showing up from all over the world
and we still do, but it was just amazing
that was our first one.
We kind of self-selected them out of the process.
Well, they've ripened a bit
and some of them have rotten a bit as well.
But there's always new bananas coming.
We probably shouldn't talk about
the attendees in that way,
but there are all kinds of amazing people
that we learn from.
99.9% of the people
that come to these conferences
are pretty remarkable,
unusually intelligent,
ferociously inquisitive people,
which frankly is why I show up
because I've got to tell you,
I walk out of a HOPE conference
and my IQ is temporarily for a few weeks
about 20 points higher
than it was when I walked in.
But I've got to tell you,
there are a few of these death stars,
these black holes,
that come in and try to suck
the life out of the conference
and I've got to tell you,
it really is self-policed to the point
where these people are usually gone
by the first night
because they are shunned.
It really does.
It's a beautiful thing.
It really does.
Trolls in meatspace are ejected also.
Absolutely.
And that's always been the way
with the HOPE conferences.
The audience, I think,
is the best audience
of any of the conferences.
I've said this before.
We've had some very controversial
panels and discussions,
but even people that we violently
disagree with,
in 2006,
mooned the FBI.
So that was an interesting moment.
I still have that image
burned into my retina.
It's actually on Wikipedia too
if you look up mooning, I think.
That made it to Wikipedia?
Really?
You know what else made it to Wikipedia?
Rombaum's second law.
You know how I talk about
Rombaum's first law
and Rombaum's second law?
Rombaum's second law
is still up there.
How about that?
In Wikipedia, Rombaum's second law.
I have to ask.
What's the first law?
You've got to attend the conference
or get one of the DVDs.
This is one of the two things
that we're holding out
for contributors,
this and why there's no volcanoes
in New Jersey.
Just not letting go of that.
And all this info and more
can be yours with the listening device,
666-620-3602.
Or if you're in the mysterious future,
go to WBAI.org
and some of these might be left over for you.
If anybody, if anybody,
now there's some bigger ticket items
and if anybody,
I'll throw this in as a premium,
if anybody purchases
any of these bigger ticket items
and uses the word volcano
as their middle name,
I will reveal over the air
why there are no volcanoes in New Jersey.
Well that certainly is irresistible
for calling in.
But we are going to get to the bigger items
because there are some bigger items
we want to mention.
But let me just recap once more.
For a pledge of $75,
you'll get the digital audio flash drive
that's 8, not 8 megabytes,
8 gigabytes of storage
and that allows you to store
a large number of hours of audio.
So you have this basically
USB thumb drive looking thing
that just looks innocent enough.
You can leave it on a table someplace.
You can leave it,
assuming you tell it to do that,
whatever happens around it.
So if you think people are,
say a board meeting are conspiring against you,
well you can just leave your laptop there
and come back, oh I left my laptop.
Actually you can't, that's wiretapping.
Theoretically you could
and you would be breaking the law, yes.
In the states where you can covertly
record without
notifying other parties,
it's called one party consent.
And you are that one party.
I tell my investigators,
I tell them here's the rule
and it's almost exactly what you mentioned.
If you go to a meeting
with a briefcase,
with a recorder inside
and there are 75 people in the room,
as long as you're there with that briefcase,
it's illegal recording
in the state of New York.
If you leave the room?
But if they say,
please go outside Steve while we discuss this
and you leave that briefcase there
while you go out of the room,
you're not willingly committing an offense
but they're forcing you to.
You have to say, wait, wait,
I have to take the briefcase,
there's a recorder in there.
I see, okay, interesting.
Law is so fascinating.
Isn't that, Alex, you're a lawyer
so you must be dashing.
You're a lawyer?
Yes, I am.
Isn't that amazing?
Get the forklift and get him out of here.
But Steve does describe it exactly correctly.
I think now if you had another buddy
and you could say-
The backup wiretap.
I'm not advocating lawlessness or anything.
I'm just trying to figure out how to accomplish it.
Absolutely.
Okay, so the phone number is 516-620-3602.
That could be you.
You could have that digital audio flash drive
that you can leave wherever you want
and record all kinds of things
and in addition you get the spoof card
which allows you to basically call up anybody,
enter a phone number
and on their caller ID device
they will see that phone number instead of yours
and they will send it to you for a pledge
of $75, 516-620-3602
for a pledge of $125.
You get all of that
plus over a dozen DVDs
with Steve Rombaum on them
over the years talking about privacy issues
and what technology is developing,
what governments are doing,
things like that, things you really need to know.
We just played 2006
and we learned a lot from that.
Imagine what you could learn
from listening to 2012
which is also included.
Hang on.
I have it written down here
that digital audio flash drive
plus DVD set is the $125
and the digital audio flash drive
by itself is the $75 level.
516-620-3602.
Now let's mention what we have,
a couple of interesting donations by Steve.
Let me preface this.
Yes, preface this.
One of the most amusing things this evening
is to watch these pledges come in
and seeing that about 50%
of them are from Mr.
or Mrs. Anonymous Anonymous.
I mean, obviously,
they're giving their real credit card
but it's astounding how many of these people
are from the very large
and well-regarded anonymous family.
We want to thank Scott from Brooklyn
who is not anonymous.
Thank you, Scott from Brooklyn.
However, this next batch
of pledges on my part
or this next batch of things
that you can pledge to obtain
because they are of an investigative nature,
you cannot be anonymous.
Yes.
I need to know
who essentially the client is.
I don't want, for example,
somebody to be hiring me
to locate somebody
that has a restraining order against them
or something like that.
And I will tell you,
we did this last year
and I will tell you
that as a warm-up,
for example,
we located somebody's girlfriend,
an old fella
who had gotten divorced
and he kept thinking about
his high school sweetheart,
a lost love from 42 years ago
and I found her for him.
Wow.
And, of course, she shot him.
No, I'm kidding.
I'm kidding, but I reunited them.
Bernie, who's on the line,
I found a radioactive person
with a picture of his face half-melted off.
He said,
can you find this person?
And little did I know
when I started the investigation
that this was somebody,
and this is not a joke, listeners,
who had built a nuclear reactor
in his backyard.
So, Bernie,
you've got to tell me these things.
Bernie, you need help finding somebody like that?
You think they'd be all over the news?
We're trying to get him to come,
also known as a nuclear,
radioactive Boy Scout.
I forgot about that.
He built the nuclear reactor
as his Eagle Scout project,
which I've got to tell you,
this is a weird frickin' country sometimes.
It is, and a weird community of people
that we have here.
And I want to thank Claude
from Chester, New Jersey
for his generous donation.
Thank you, Claude.
You're a good guy.
Yeah.
Now, what we're offering here now
is worth nearly $2,000 because...
$1,750.
Yeah, $1,750.
What do you generally charge per hour for your services?
Well, no, no, no.
Our stated rate is $2.50 an hour.
Our discounted rate,
and that's for people who have given us
more than one case,
is $1.75 an hour plus expenses.
Okay.
We're waiving the expenses within reason.
So it's really worth $2,500.
If I need to go to Botswana,
we're going to chat.
This is...
This will buy up to 10 hours of my time
for any legally permissible investigation.
It needs to be something that is not...
I'll tell you frankly,
it needs to be something
that is not outrageous or repulsive.
It needs to be something
that does not constitute harassment.
But, you know,
typically the 2,600 listeners and participants
are pretty darn smart
I think you can guess
what's an acceptable investigation
and what isn't.
If you are a victim of a fraud,
I'm happy to help you.
And I'll probably throw in a few extra hours
if you are a victim.
If you are looking for a missing person,
a birth child,
a birth parent,
I mean,
it would take the whole show to detail
what is a legitimate,
acceptable investigation.
You found war criminals
Yes, if you have a particular war criminal
you would like located,
feel free to make a pledge.
But I should point out,
if you are a war criminal,
Steve will not help you.
No, if you are a war criminal,
I'm happy to locate you for $500.
Right, okay, yeah, that's true.
As long as I don't have to go to Bosnia
or Rwanda or Guatemala.
I just want to point out
people are not going to get anything
remotely like this for that kind of cost
and probably they would have to spend
a lot of money.
I have to say personally,
you have saved my ass a few times.
Well, let's not admit that publicly.
Okay, but there are lots of things
that happen to everybody
and you need somebody like Steve
to step in and find out
what's really going on.
All kidding aside,
let me just say to the listener
because I really do want them
to understand they are getting
something of value and not a joke.
I've been an investigator,
I was president of a very sizable
investigative association,
highly regarded association.
I'm on the advisory board of others.
For those of you who know what this is,
I'm a CFE and a CPP
and a CSAR and a CFCS.
I actually do know what I'm doing
and I'm, you know,
not to be egotistical about it,
I'm in demand.
And you will be getting something
of considerably greater value
than the cost of your pledge.
And despite what you see on TV
where these things take months
and months and months,
I have to tell you most investigations
take about 10 hours.
We didn't pull that figure
out of thin air.
That is, look,
obviously if you have
a ridiculously complicated investigation,
call me separately from this.
But for the vast majority
of investigative activity out there,
this is more than enough
to close the case.
So it's a $500 pledge.
Phone number is 516-620-3602.
The way this works,
we only have four of these.
So once the four are taken,
we can't offer any more
because Steve does have to,
you know, pay his own bills.
And I have a life.
Absolutely.
If you have any questions
that you need,
then I believe, Steve,
you will contact them
or we will give you a way
of contacting Steve.
No, you will tell me,
as you did last time,
you will give me the list
of names of the people
who actually paid their pledge.
And those people
will be welcome to contact me.
Okay. 516...
And by the way,
everybody has something
they need to find out.
Some secret from the past
or somebody they're trying to locate
or just a mystery they're trying to clear up.
And Steve's the guy that can do that.
And in 10 hours,
there's quite a lot you can do.
I will add, four years ago,
I actually was asked
to help somebody disappear.
So if you would like to be unfound
and you're not a fugitive
from something,
this is probably a good investment
to take advantage of that
because they certainly will get
what they pay for and more.
They'll certainly learn
whatever it is they're trying to find out.
Yeah. 516-620-3602.
In addition to the 75 and 125 level
that we already are offering
with the audio thumb drives
and spoof cards
and DVD packages.
But this is really
the most amazing one, I think.
$500 pledge,
516-620-3602.
And there is something else
that we'll be offering in just a little while,
but it's only one
and it's even bigger than this.
But we'll get to that in just a moment.
I did want to talk more about
some of the developments going on
with technology and surveillance.
First of all,
we've been talking about the Boston Marathon bombing
quite a bit on this show
and how that has made people embrace
surveillance more and more.
And we were wondering,
where do you see that going?
You see more government surveillance?
You see more private surveillance?
More people just capturing everything on their phones?
Do you think it's a healthy thing
when people are asking governments
for more cameras and more ways
to track people down quickly in such situations?
You know,
what a perfect question.
You could not have
teed this up any better.
I want to tell you,
there's two things
that the Boston Marathon
tell any sensible person
with any technical knowledge.
Number one,
there is no amount
of surveillance technology
that will prevent a terrorist attack.
These guys were known.
They were on semi-watch lists.
You need to look at who these people were.
Their photos were in driver license databases.
In fact,
in the first driver's license database
in the country
to use biometric identifiers
and facial recognition,
Massachusetts,
their photos were in
U.S. government homeland security files.
Both of them had applied for citizenship
and submitted photos
and fingerprints, by the way.
Their photos were in
school databases.
Their photos were in
a hundred places on the Internet.
And by the way,
if you think that law enforcement agencies
don't suck down
both with consent
and without consent,
every photo that goes up on the net,
I have to tell you,
I know different.
And despite all of this
and all of the photos out there
and the photos that were put out there
because of the stupidity
that was briefly taking place on Reddit,
which forced the FBI
to release these photos,
these people were not identified.
So,
point number one,
nothing could have prevented this bombing.
Nothing.
Point number two,
there is nothing that the FBI
or the NYPD
have done
in the past
12 years since 9-11
that will stop
a terrorist.
Nothing.
Now, if it's a knuckle-headed terrorist,
like these poor schmoes
that go on the Internet and say,
I'd like to be a jihadi,
can anyone help me?
Those are all the people who are being arrested.
When you have people like the Tsarnaevs,
Tsarnaevs,
who go on the Internet themselves,
are actually
higher-level morons
in that they can
download the bombing manuals
and that keep things to themselves,
nothing can stop them.
Point number three,
facial recognition is bullshit.
Did you just hit the bleep button?
Okay.
Facial recognition is
not as it's claimed to be.
Not as robust as it's claimed to be.
Now, unfortunately,
the FBI is now running
all over the place with that
and saying, if only we had had a better
biometric database,
we could have identified these people sooner.
Okay, great.
So you would have known 12 hours sooner
who the bombers were.
How would that have helped?
The barn door was open,
the people were dead,
people's legs were blown off,
eight-year-old kids were
murdered.
It would not have helped.
If you properly
analyze this event,
you'll understand
that all of the things
that we are being told
are substantially false.
You know, and Steve,
to go back to your point,
one, that these things are not preventable,
I think let's not also forget
what happened in London recently
with the hacking to death of Lee Rigby
and those two
attackers.
They were also on watch lists,
government watch lists.
These Nigerians were being watched
and surveillance did not deter
or detect these lone wolves.
And I've actually seen some very interesting
and some cogent argumentation
coming from the British press
about why governments
should not overreact
to these incidents
and why they shouldn't overreach
when it comes to data acquisition
and when it comes to surveillance.
I mean, there's a lot of talk
about the fact that
lone wolf terrorist actions
are not preventable by surveillance.
And the government trying
to overreach right now
and trying to use these instances
as excuses to obtain
more surveillance powers
is absolutely unjust
because the government knows
that greater surveillance
will not deter
or detect a lone wolf attack.
So why do they need more powers
in the first place?
I mean, it's a very circular type
but very kind of cogent argument
at the same time.
And I thought it was very interesting
that this kind of argumentation
was coming from a paper
like the Financial Times.
I think it's very, very interesting
and I think it's something
we should learn from here in the States.
You know, there are two things.
There are two things
that make your point
even stronger.
First of all,
there are less than 10 co-conspirators.
This was actually an organized cell
and it still didn't help.
And second of all,
there is no country
in the world
with the exception of China
that deploys as much
surveillance equipment as London.
Five years ago
when they last released the count,
there were 4.2 million
what they call
fake cameras.
4.2 million.
I mean, this is
Ray Kelly's wet dream.
It really is.
I can say that, right?
Okay.
I think I got bleeped before
and I apologize to the listeners.
Hey, Steve.
Yeah, Bernie?
Yeah, I just want to ask you a quick question.
We grapple with this dilemma
frequently and off the hook
at least over the past few weeks.
How do you convince people
that government officials' arguments
that more electronic surveillance
will make them safer
is not true?
I mean, aside from the fact that
it's horrible and tragic
that Boston bombing was,
the number of people
that were hurt and killed in that
is probably the same number of people
that were hurt and killed
in every state of the union every day
in automobile accidents.
Risk assessment aside,
how do you convince people
that more electronic surveillance
will make them safer?
Well, look, first of all,
I'm not opposed to surveillance
of the right people.
I think they should surveil
the heck out of the right people.
But I don't think that they should
cast a net on every American.
And the best way you do that
is through education
and pointing out the obvious.
If you go to Times Square,
there is no more,
there is no location
in the United States
that has more cameras,
more surveillance of every kind,
including some stuff
that I know about
and I won't say on this show
because it would be,
it would be just wrong.
I'll tell you,
they even have
radiation detectors,
gas detectors,
things you would not believe there.
Every technology
that's deployed by the city
of New York is deployed
there first.
And one knucklehead
with a van was able
to pull up to Times Square
and set off a bomb.
Thank goodness he was
as incompetent
as the rest of most
of these terrorists
until the Tsarnaevs.
And the bomb fizzled
and a hot dog vendor
waved over a cop and said,
hey, officer, what's that smoke
coming from the van?
If that guy had known
how to make a detonator,
there would have been
hundreds of people dead.
That was a massive VBIED,
vehicle-borne
improvised explosive device,
a big, big, big bomb.
It would have shredded
Times Square.
It would have destroyed
tourism in New York
for a generation.
We would have had
checkpoints everywhere
in Manhattan,
which, frankly,
I think is pretty much
what we have now
with stop and frisk.
But
if you point out
to people
who genuinely want
to understand
that all of these things
that are deployed
in Times Square
were meaningless,
well, there you go.
Apropos of the carnage
you've just described, Steve,
I'd like to play
devil's advocate here
for a second.
I just became a parent,
as another aside.
Congratulations.
Congratulations.
Since the last time
you were on the radio, in fact,
you've become a parent.
It's a boy, girl.
It's a boy.
And as a matter of fact,
he's 12 days old
and he also made a pledge.
That pledge from Sasha
was from my son.
That was a different Sasha.
No, that was from my son.
Your son?
Indeed.
12 days old?
12 days old.
Well, that should tell.
That's pretty amazing.
Is this kid being grown
in a test tube?
He can already use computers?
All right, listeners,
you've heard it.
12-day-olds can pledge.
What's your excuse?
516-620-3633.
That's actually
the anti-terror hope.
I mean, these kids
being grown in test tubes
somewhere.
Congratulations.
Thank you.
Thank you, gentlemen.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
Thank you.
To go back to this carnage, though,
I mean, let me play devil's advocate
here for a second
because, you know,
sometimes surveillance of this sort
will actually help us.
It definitely can keep us safer
in certain respects.
I mean, sometimes
it's completely ineffective,
but intelligence agencies
and governments will argue
that they're able to thwart
large-scale terrorist attacks
at least once a year.
Whether or not that's accurate,
it remains to be seen.
I don't know the data underlying it,
but that's what I've heard.
But to go back to Bernie's point,
I mean,
I don't know the data underlying it,
but that's what I've heard.
But to go back to Bernie's point,
then,
how do we convince
these legislators
and these governments
that surveillance doesn't help?
I think that raises
another question, though.
How do we convince them
that it's harmful?
And as of now,
I think it's very, very difficult,
and I think it's a philosophical question.
How do we quantify the harm
that surveillance causes to society?
It's very, very difficult
to get into court.
It's very difficult
from a standing perspective.
It's subjective.
It's amorphous.
And going back to the 60s,
the late 60s
with the military monitoring
of dissident groups
post-Martin Luther King assassination,
it's been incredibly difficult
to convince the courts
that there is some justiciable harm
that would allow them to act.
Now, I think what Steve
and what we may have all stumbled upon here
with this reporter incident
could be that exact harm.
It really is.
It really is.
This is the tipping point,
and I've got to tell you,
the person who is going to do the most
for privacy this year
is going to be the same guy
who's done the most
for firearms ownership,
and that's President Obama.
There are now millions more guns
in citizens' hands,
and there's going to be
the same sort of backlash
when it comes to privacy.
And now, all of the people
who were basically sucking up to Obama
because they felt that
it was the right thing to do
and the patriotic thing to do
are realizing that this guy,
you know, imagine the scene
in the Mission Impossible movie
where the guy reaches
and peels off the Obama mask,
and there's Richard Nixon underneath.
I mean, that's what you've
pretty well got right now,
except Obama is smarter
and more competent
than Richard Nixon
when it comes to invading privacy.
I have to tell you that this event
that is going to be put together
by the Fraternal Order of Investigators
and by 2600
and by, I would be shocked
if it's any less than 20
well-known journalists,
television, and whatnot.
We've already got five huge guys
signed up, well, men and women.
I shouldn't say guys.
You don't mean massively obese people.
You mean people who are...
I mean significant journalists,
people who are household names.
I will tell you that this event...
First of all, the problem is education.
One reason why my talks are so popular
at 2600 is not because I'm Frank Sinatra.
It's because people are exposed
for the first time
to what is happening to them.
People don't know.
People don't understand.
And I think that this is really
educating people.
People don't realize,
oh my God, everywhere I am,
everywhere I drive,
everybody I talk to,
every place I eat dinner,
every book I read,
all of this is in a database
and I really, really have a permanent record?
If the FBI decides today I'm a bad guy,
they can see where I was sitting to dinner
two years ago?
Holy moly!
People don't realize this.
And I have to say, folks,
if you're listening to this
and you're shaking your head
and you're thinking,
oh man, what hyperbole,
this is ridiculous,
I'm not exaggerating
and I'm going to tell you
it is much worse than that.
If you've ever been to one of my
Privacy is Dead talks,
or if you're an investigator
or a law enforcement officer
and you've been to one of my
Privacy is Dead, Get Over It and Use It talks,
you know that if anything,
I'm dramatically understating the case.
And this is a really important event
that we're planning
and basically the discussion we're having
is we want to get the real expertise,
the heavy hitters,
people that know what they're talking about
that are out there in the community.
If you're a journalist,
if you're involved in the technology community,
if you're a security expert,
we want to reach out to you.
We want to see,
we want to get all these great minds together
and discuss it and open it up,
have the discussion
and talk about the tools
because it's great if one person knows how to use it.
It's great if one journalist is covering a story,
but we need to really just exponentially
open it up and have a lot of this discussion flourish
so that we can share and have tools
and a little bit of cross-pollination as it were.
And there's got to be a level playing field.
People have to know what's what.
People have to know what they're facing.
I mean, frankly,
the vast majority of Americans today
are the numb and the dumb when it comes to this.
They have no clue.
And I think that once people start becoming aware of this,
there's going to be a groundswell.
You know, about six weeks ago,
I was on Dateline
and we did a really ridiculous thing.
We got this undercover investigator,
a guy who works with me,
Ted Kavares,
and we dressed him up as a swami
and we called him the Great Kavares
and we put an earpiece in his ear.
And Dateline recruited people from the street
and between the time they were recruited in the street
and the time they got upstairs,
we had a whole war room of investigators,
six guys at computers,
and between the time they were recruited
and got upstairs,
we knew everything about them.
And he sat there and he said,
do you have a tattoo on your left buttock?
Do you work in lawn care?
Do you, you know,
is there a warrant out for you for failure to appear?
In one case there actually was.
You know, people were freaking out.
And then Natalie Morales would take the poor,
you know, victim, privacy victim,
and bring them into the war room and say,
this is how we did it.
And I want to tell you,
I must have gotten 200 phone calls after that
saying I had no idea.
It's amazing.
I was actually at a family event.
I was talking, as you do with family,
about what do you do?
What kinds of things are you interested in?
What's going on?
I hear this a lot.
I'm sure you guys have heard it as well.
But people often say,
well, you know,
I'm not that concerned because I'm not a big deal.
I'm small potatoes.
But it's this concept of being able to roll the tape back
on anybody, as you said,
two years ago, five years ago.
Hey, guess what?
It instructs behavior because now we're interested in you.
Now we think you're involved with whatever,
dissident organization.
Maybe they don't like what you're doing,
your business activities or your religious beliefs,
whatever it is.
Guess what?
We can roll it back.
We didn't have to be listening to you have a whole team
focused like we do now.
We've got it on tape, all that.
Not only that, let me tell you,
the opportunity for suppression of political thought is
enormous now.
I'm not a big fan of Occupy Wall Street.
I think some of them were very good,
very well-meaning people.
But the vast majority of them that I saw down there were
just goons.
And having said that, nevertheless,
I mean, you have a right to be a goon in this country.
If I wanted to know every single person there and the NYPD
wanted to know every single person there,
they just grabbed what's called a tower dump.
And they got every cell phone, every e-mail communication,
everything from everybody there.
And without photos and without arresting people and without
interviewing people, they knew 90% of the people there
after the first night.
Yeah, just looking at the picture of the data.
And that's why it's so key that people do what you do at your
talks, what we try to do on the show and at the station and at
Hope and 2600 and everything else.
And that's get this information out there from the people that
have it and from the people that know what they're talking about
to the people that need to know.
And in cases like this, it affects every single one of us,
no matter how small potatoes you may be.
These issues are out there, and they can affect you,
and you should know what's going on.
And keeping things like this going,
keeping the information out there is what we have to do.
So if you can help us keep this station on the air,
keep the show on the air, call 516-620-3602.
We've got some very nice gifts to give you in return for your
pledges, and go to WBAI.org to help out otherwise.
I want to thank a couple of Roberts.
I want to thank Robert from Jamaica,
Robert from Rumson, New Jersey, both for pledging support to this
radio station.
Yes.
And 516-620-3602.
And as you were saying, yes, the discussion needs to keep going.
All kinds of controversial things are talked about on this
particular station and all sorts of radio programs that are on
these airwaves.
It's vital to keep the place going.
We're offering a bunch of things.
By the way, Steve, people are calling for the 10 hours of your time,
which I'm not going to identify who they are because they asked not to
be identified.
But we want to thank those people.
Well, they are going to have to be identified at some point.
Well, to you so that you can work with them, obviously,
but we're not going to say their name on the air because we respect
their wishes.
516-620-3602, a pledge of $500.
You get 10 hours of Steve Rombaugh, his time.
Which may be nine and a half more hours than you actually want,
but nevertheless.
So, yeah.
And Steve knows of what he speaks,
and that's something that I think regardless of whether or not you agree
with some of the things you said.
And I take issue with some of the things you say,
and many people disagree with each other.
But you know what you're doing, and nobody can disagree with that.
Look, I could not be more politically different than the average person
that comes to a HOPE conference.
I am a right-wing, rah-rah, law enforcement type guy,
despite that unique interlude with the FBI.
I can tell you that half the people who came to me and were outraged were
other FBI agents, but that's another discussion.
You know, but the one thing or one of the main things that I have in common
with the 2600 crowd is these are people who think critically.
They are not knee-jerk followers of one political track or another.
They're people who look at a situation and analyze it and take it apart
down to the basic nuts and bolts, which, after all, is what hackers do.
They take it apart.
They see how the heck it works, and they put it back together.
And these are people who do it not just with computers,
but with the political system and with privacy and with everything else
that I'm interested in.
And I've got to tell you, I mean, I have people that have been working
with me now for the past 20, 25 years that I met at HOPE conferences
because they are inquisitive.
They are smart.
They are intellectually honest, I mean, despite the fact that they're,
you know, lefty morons.
But all of the other things, you know, pretty much overshadow that.
I should point out, though, that there are many right-wing hackers,
many hackers that I disagree with on various platforms.
And the things I say, the things we say here don't represent
the hacker community any more than anybody else, even the 2600 community.
There's a subreddit I'm going to start, right-wing hackers.
There's got to be one around here.
Anyone who is free-thinking and believes in certain values,
and I think that's something we do agree on are the basic values
and things that need to be preserved and defended.
You know, that's absolutely true.
And the truth is there's a component of everybody that shows up at 2600,
whether they're substantially right-wing or left-wing
or flying on no wing occasionally.
They are independent people who just want to be left the heck alone.
Mostly, yes.
And there is a huge, wonderful libertarian thread
that runs through that whole conference.
People who just want to be able to be inquisitive.
They want to be able to be smart.
They don't want to be, you know, put in jail for 10 years
because they revealed a zero-day exploit on an iPad,
which just happened yesterday, by the way.
We can all agree on that.
There are so many people that are put in jail for really ridiculous reasons.
I've got to tell you, there's a guy in jail right now
who I think is one of the most despicable creatures on the planet,
but what he's serving time in jail for is moronic.
Yes, yes.
You know, not a guy who I would invite to a bar mitzvah party,
but especially since he puts all this Nazi stuff out on the internet.
All right, let me just run down the premiums
and thank people for calling in, 516-620-3602.
Again, and you are listening to Off the Hook on WBAI New York.
If you're tuning in for the Personal Computer Show,
obviously it's not on this week.
We'll be on, I believe, next week.
Again, the number 516-620-3602.
You'll get 10 hours of privatized Steven Rombaum's time,
which is worth $2,500, non-discounted, absolutely,
and $1,750 discounted, but we're offering it for $500.
That's 10 hours, and boy, you can uncover quite a bit in 10 hours.
But there is one more, which I made a big mistake
by not suggesting you raffle it at $2,600.
We'll get to that, we'll get to that.
516-620-3602, assuming they're still around,
basically a pledge of $500 gets you 10 hours of Steven Rombaum's time
and he'll uncover whatever it is you need to have uncovered.
For a pledge of $75, you'll get the digital audio flash drive and spliff card.
What that means is you'll have a little USB device
that you can plug into your computer or not.
Either way, it will record hours of audio wherever you happen to leave it.
Just make sure you know what the law is as far as that goes in your particular locale.
That's a pledge of $75, 516-620-3602.
For $125, you get all that.
You get the digital audio flash drive, you get the spliff card,
and you get every talk that Steve Rombaum has given at the HOPE conferences
that we have records of, which amount to eight different conferences
and over a dozen hours easily.
That's for a pledge of $125, 516-620-3602.
Okay, so we have one more item that we want to offer to people,
and this one is the biggest one of all.
We only have one of them.
Yes, as Steve mentioned, we did want to offer this for $2,600,
but we decided to offer it for $2,500 because we're such nice guys.
You want to describe it?
First of all, the truth is we messed up.
We didn't think of offering it for $2,600.
We're not always thinking of our own name, unfortunately.
There's only one of these, so describe it in a way that will get that person.
This is actually a little bizarre, and we thought of this last minute,
but I have to tell you we saved the best, the coolest for last.
There is a book coming out on databases, on privacy, on investigation.
A significant component of it is going to be what happened at the HOPE talk.
You heard the tape earlier talking about Rick Dakin.
I had started a book called Stealing Your Own Identity with Rick.
I'm sure Rick is right now saving up money for a hitman to have me killed
because of how long it's taken so long to get this book out.
Rick, if you're listening, I will tell you that the book is coming out,
and all of this stuff that started in 2006 only ended about two weeks ago,
which you'll be reading about.
We basically squashed every attempt, and now it's my turn.
As part of that, we are coming out with the article in 2600 and the longer book.
Rick, if you're listening, I will be coming to you on my knees begging for your cooperation.
Well, maybe not on my knees, but you get the right idea.
We are updating this book,
and one of the things that I want to do is show today's frighteningly intrusive technologies.
I want to do that without bothering Rick.
What I think we, in a very clever moment of synergy, figured out is we need a new privacy victim.
For this pledge, you can be the privacy victim.
There is one requirement.
You have to have an actual life.
You can't be 18 years old.
No disrespect to the 18-year-olds out there.
You probably haven't done enough to be interesting.
That's in the eyes of the authorities and of credit unions and things like that.
We think you're interesting, but—
Well, we think you're interesting.
I'm sure you're a very nice guy.
I'm sure your girlfriend or boyfriend thinks you're interesting.
I'm sure your mom thinks you're interesting,
but not sufficient for our purpose.
We need content, not quality.
We also need quantity.
We're looking for somebody in their late 20s to early 40s, somewhere in there,
who is not the Unabomber, who has not been in a cabin in the woods in Montana.
You have to have had an online life and a digital life.
You have to have had a significant online life and digital life,
which means you have to be the average person with a Facebook page and Twitter
and maybe a blog and this and that and what have you.
You will need to sign a release, which says that I can perform a digital proctology exam on you.
And in return for that, you will be a chapter in the book.
You will be in a book.
This book will be distributed at Hope.
This book will be on Apple and Amazon and Barnes & Noble and everywhere else.
And I can tell you we have 17 books in this line already out.
So clearly we know what we're doing.
This is going to be a big deal.
We have an offer from an actual big-time publisher, which we don't know if we're going to take yet.
But you get to be a chapter in a book.
Not to mention the fact that you get to find out what the world knows about you.
So obviously the more interesting you are, the more interesting the chapter will be,
the better the book will be, and everybody benefits from all of that.
So if that's something that you feel you can do and you're interested in being a part of,
for a pledge of $2,500, you can be that person.
And it'll be definitely a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
It's called the Privacy Victim Challenge, 516-620-3602.
We've never offered a premium like this before.
And if anyone is out there, we'll take it.
I mean, I think it would be awesome if somebody actually did that.
If you want to be immortalized for all cyber posterity until the Martians come
and delete all the hard drives on Earth, well, I mean, there'll be print copies too.
So we'll just translate it into Martian and you'll be fine.
Yeah, and this is basically a demonstration of the state of the art of what is out there,
what anyone who's really intent on finding information out about you.
That's correct. It will not be just me.
It will be you will be signing all kinds of releases,
and we will be getting your criminal records from everywhere and every lawsuit
and every speeding ticket and every phone call and every location and everything.
We will get every digital bit and bite of your life.
So now should the person who takes this be trying to hide this information from you?
They're not giving you this information. You're going to find this information on your own.
Oh, no, no, no. Well, absolutely. We don't need anything.
I mean, we obviously need a piece of identification.
Give me your driver's license or whatever.
But overall, it'll be transparent to the victim.
They're not really going to feel anything.
They'll pledge, they'll be a part of it, but this is all going to be going on.
Well, they'll feel something after I give them a report, that's for sure.
Probably horrified or nauseous, but yes.
They shouldn't really be wanted in any states, right?
Because you would uncover that.
You know, that's actually not a joke.
If you're wanted, I have to turn you in.
That's not a joke.
Well, that's common sense.
I mean, I'm an investigator, and if there's a warrant out for you, I'm giving you up.
But if that's not the case, and you're the type of person,
you fit the description that Steve just laid out there,
and you're interested, and then maybe you had a little trepidation,
you're second-guessing yourself because maybe there's some things
you wouldn't want to be out there, you're perfect for this.
You know, the truth is, I mean, if you're kind of an interesting, nutty person,
I'll be a happy camper, believe me.
I mean, the more, you know, if there's, you know,
if you've got a topless photo at Cancun or you're Jell-O Biafran,
well, Jell-O, please don't call in.
Believe me, there's nothing left to discover about you.
Well, we have a lot of information on Jell-O.
Yeah, I mean, it would be like shooting Jell-O in a barrel.
Well, he doesn't have an online persona, per se.
Yeah, he does. He's just not the guy who's posted it.
Right, right. Yeah, interesting, isn't it?
So, okay, so we have only one of these, and if someone calls in,
they should call in in the next 15 minutes to 516-620-3602.
Again, $2,500, the Privacy Victim Challenge.
You will be a chapter in Steve Rombaum's book,
and he will uncover everything there is to uncover about you,
so be aware of that.
If you do pledge for this, we will get your name,
and Steve will be in touch.
And Steve will get everything else.
Right, and you don't have to tell him the secrets.
Obviously, he'll find out those secrets.
Just make sure that any secrets you have,
or you don't have a problem with being revealed
and included in that chapter.
You will see a drone above your driveway every day.
That's correct.
It's a unique thing.
What other station can offer you something like that?
But for this two-hour surveillance special,
I think it's apropos.
Dial 1-800-STALK-ME.
No, I'm kidding about that.
516-620-3602.
And we still have a few of the 10 hours
of private eye investigation premium that we're offering,
10 hours of Steve Rombaum's time for a pledge of $500.
10 hours of private eye investigation
is what you should ask for when you call 516-620-3602.
And, of course, we also have the 75 and 125 levels.
$75, you get digital audio flash drive,
and you get a spoof card,
which allows you to protect your privacy in various ways
and record people surreptitiously.
516-620-3602.
For a pledge of $125, you get the digital audio flash drive,
you get the spoof card,
and you get over a dozen DVDs of Steve Rombaum
giving talks at HOPE conferences.
That's for a pledge of $125.
516-620-3602.
Alex?
I think this is such an incredible premium.
It's pretty amazing.
I think, at once, it's very unique.
It's also somewhat terrifying and enlightening at the same time.
I mean, it's like an exorcism.
It's great we offer terrifying premiums.
It's fantastic.
I think it's wonderful.
And this, I think, raises an interesting question.
I'd like to ask Steve a question
because, you know, this is a surveillance show,
and I think that, viscerally,
we've all been operating under this assumption
that surveillance is bad,
and it has some kind of maybe...
Not always.
Well, exactly.
Not always.
Not always.
But the overall collection, total surveillance, would be bad.
Some data is not used for proper purposes.
Your second law, as you said, is that it will always be misused.
So there is unintentional but foreseeable consequences of surveillance.
And I think...
So let's go on that assumption that some surveillance is bad,
it is going to have some kind of adverse effect on our civil liberties,
on the free exercise of some of our civil liberties,
but doesn't the collection of this data and the conglomeration of it,
doesn't it allow you to do your job?
Isn't that what your job is predicated on?
You know, it's absolutely true.
I mean, this is...
I have schizophrenic moments when I speak at the HOPE conferences.
Look, if you are the average knucklehead out there
who is putting every moment, tweeting everything they do of significance,
and taking a photograph of every significant moment in your life
and uploading it to Instagram or Flickr,
and, you know, you are no longer using cash,
you're using PayPal and Visa,
and you're making all your calls, even your local phone calls on a cell phone,
because you don't have a landline.
I mean, as an investigator, thank you.
I mean, you're a wonderful person,
and thank you for giving me the ability to work smarter and cheaper
and basically in my underwear in the middle of the night.
But having said that, as an American, you're creeping me out, dude.
You know, I mean, that's the only way to put it.
Why, why, if you go and eat a slice of pizza, do you tweet about it?
Honest to God, my own mother doesn't care that I'm eating pizza.
Why do you assume people care about this stuff?
My theory is it's intense loneliness and just sort of an exhibitionist society we live in now.
We just want to be important and noticed.
Well, go down to the Hellfire Club and get spanked.
I mean, you know, I really don't know what to suggest to these people.
I mean, maybe we need to start having 2,600 meetups other than at the City Corps Center.
Meetings, not meetups.
Well, no, I meant of a social nature other than, you know, of a hacker nature.
Look, I hope that's not what it is.
I hope that there aren't millions of intensely lonely people out there.
First, I want to thank Jonas from Flanders, New Jersey, Donald from Northport, New York, for their generous pledges.
And there's so many people that don't want to be thanked.
They're smart.
The enormous anonymous family.
Yes.
We have given away two of the $500 pledges of your time.
Yeah, baby.
So that's 20 hours of your life, Steve, that are going to be given to you.
Well, I mean, I purposely, look, I think that, you know, this horrible lefty radio station is actually critically important.
And I have literally donated a week of my life to this.
I mean, 40 hours of work.
I think that's something we need to look at because a lot of times, and this is criticism I have for people that I agree with, we don't listen to people we disagree with.
We only listen to people that we, you know, say the same things.
Freedom of speech.
That's boring.
Freedom of speech, unless you're a Klan member or a Nazi, is important.
We need to have debates.
We need to have disagreement.
That's what's interesting dialogue.
That's how you progress and learn.
And you need to respect people that you disagree with.
And we can talk for hours about that kind of a thing.
But I wanted to ask you, in the moments we have left, Google Glass, what do you think of that?
Oh, my God.
Look, you know what?
It's, if it wasn't real, it would be a Saturday Night Live skit.
It really would be.
I mean, first of all, you know these things are going to be hacked to the point where, you know, you go into a bathroom to use the urinal and you've embarrassed 27 people.
I mean, it's ridiculous.
There are going to be moments where you don't realize you have this damn thing on and you're in some intimate moment or stupid moment or intensely personal moment and you've broadcast it to the world.
And I want to tell you, if there's one thing to learn about cyberspace, it's once a piece of data is out there, you can never get it back.
Never.
It's gone.
Absolutely.
And, you know, what bothers me about this, this embracing of technology blindly, is that, like you said, they're doing the job of people that want to keep track of you.
But it changes the whole landscape.
And we think this is normal.
We think it will be normal just to record everything in our line of vision.
We're going to be wearing these things not knowing it.
We're going to have contact lenses with Google Glass in them.
And just by default, everything will be recorded.
Our location will always be known.
Anonymity will be the enemy.
And by the way, we predicted this.
We actually showed a graphic of it at 2600 eight years ago.
Wow.
Google Glass, if you remember.
Well, you might get some residuals from this then.
Yeah, doubtful.
Doubtful.
But I'll say this.
I mean, didn't you want to smack Schmidt when he said, you have to fight for your privacy?
The chief executive officer of Google is saying, you have to fight for your privacy.
I mean, you look up hypocrisy in the dictionary and his picture is there.
All right.
We just got rid of another ten hours of your time.
And Mike wants to be thanked.
Mike from Union City, New Jersey, wants to be thanked.
Uh-oh, Union City.
I know what type of case is coming out of there.
I won't touch that.
I will find the body.
I will not exhume it.
Well, okay.
So thank you, Mike, for that generous pledge.
Thank you, Mike.
Thank you, Steve, for your donation.
All kidding aside.
And Mike, if you want to know privately why there are no volcanoes, I will tell you.
Yes.
Now, but getting back to Google Glass just for a moment.
It just makes me afraid because, well, people say that, oh, there won't be any advertising
because they say there won't be any advertising on it.
Do you think really in five years they'll be saying the same thing?
You know, things will change and we'll be used to this and it'll be the norm.
And I just I'm afraid of that society.
Look, I've got to believe that it's such an outrageous thing that they put it out there
so that they've moved the boundary so far out so that merely outrageous things are now acceptable
in lieu of these things that are absolutely insane.
I think they've put Google Glass out there so that we focus on something that is such an idiotic,
insane, outrageous thing that we're not going to pay attention to the merely destructive things they're doing.
All that said, though, it is pretty damn cool.
I'll say that.
It is cool.
But it's really not.
Technologically, it's really not.
It will be in five years when you're able to put on Google Glasses and wear them to a party.
And the person you don't remember, it's like, hey, it's been a year.
And then, you know, facial recognition pops up and it says, Joan, husband, David has two kids.
Dog name spot.
And you go, hey, Joan, how's your little dog spot?
And she goes, you do remember me.
It will be like that guy on Veep who whispers into the vice president's ear and says,
this person has this daughter and this dog.
Well, that's what we did.
That's what we did with the great Kavaris.
The only difference is you're not going to need a back room of five investigators in a war room.
You're going to have all of Google.
Wow.
This would help me, though, because like Brad Pitt, I think I've got face blindness
where I don't recognize people all the time and people think I'm being rude.
But really, I just don't have that ability.
And it would be nice to have something that says this is this person and this is who they are.
I want to publicly announce the first person who comes into my office or my home wearing Google Glass
will leave with a smashed Google Glass.
But, Steve, you won't know when they're wearing it in the future because it will be in their eye.
You see?
That's my fear.
If I have to run a drill bit into the eye of everyone who comes into my office, I will do it.
Believe me.
On that note, we must sign off because we are out of time.
But, boy, this two hours went so fast.
Thank you, everybody, who donated.
God bless you.
And we've done really, really well.
Thank you, everybody.
I think there's one 10-hour block left.
If there is, please call 516-620-3602.
And the $2,500 one will stay up there for two more weeks.
I don't think that one has been taken yet.
But, again, $2,500.
You'll be a chapter in Steve's book, and he will find out all kinds of things about you,
assuming that that's what you want.
516-620-3602, one 10-hour block of Steve Rombaum's time to help you with an investigation.
And, also, we have the 75 and 125 levels.
You'll get the audio recorder.
You'll get the spliff card.
You'll get the DVDs.
516-620-3602.
Write to us.
Our email address, othat2600.com.
And we'll be back next week with a one-hour program.
I want to thank everybody for listening in on this two-hour program.
Stay tuned for next week for The Personal Computer Show going back to this particular time.
And keep listening to WBAI for all kinds of interesting things in future hours.
This is Emmanuel for Off The Hook.
Have a good night.
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