We will be assessing the state of the programming at WBAI, and all your opinions are welcome.
Again, the WBAI Community Advisory Board will be holding an open meeting for all to express
their opinions on WBAI programming.
It will be held on Monday, June 10th at 6 p.m. at 60 Wall Street between Pearl and William
Street in Lower Manhattan.
All are welcome.
And you are listening to WBAI New York, the station where everybody has an opinion about
what we should be doing next.
Well, coming up next is the program Off the Hook.
Off the Hook.
Off the Hook.
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 Mike.
Hello.
Kyle.
Good evening.
Bernie S.
Greetings from Pennsylvania.
And joining us from the Netherlands, our friend GMC.
Hello.
Greetings from the Netherlands.
And we're going to have some exciting things to talk about coming from your neck of the
woods throughout this whole hour, this being the last hour of our fundraiser, our spring
fundraiser, which takes place every spring here on WBAI, especially an important one
though, because we're in these transitional periods and some exciting things are on the
horizon.
It's going to be very interesting.
But first, let's take a quick look at some of the things that have been going on over
the past seven days or so.
The Bradley Manning trial has started.
You guys been following this?
It's riveting reading.
I did a little of the reading.
Our former, I don't want to say friend, former person we know, Adrian Lamo, testified yesterday.
Well, I mean, maybe he was a friend of yours at some point until he turned Bradley Manning
in and then he became your former friend.
That could be.
Could be.
Nothing to be ashamed of.
Some people would still say he's a friend and some people don't even know him.
But yes.
I put myself mostly in the don't know him category.
Okay.
Well, yes, he took the stand yesterday.
Now, I'm a little confused here because, well, I'll read what it says in this particular
news story, which I got off of NBC.
A former computer hacker who turned private first class Bradley Manning into federal authorities
for the alleged leak of classified documents testified Tuesday that the young army analyst
never indicated that he wanted to help the enemy.
And that's pretty much the backbone of the case against him, that he was out to help
the enemy.
Now, here you have the guy who turned him in saying that there was no indication that
he wanted to help the enemy.
So what side is Adrian Lamo testifying on?
Or does it maybe not get defined that way?
I mean, the whole case is really bizarre because Manning has already admitted to doing all
the things he's accused of doing.
It's just an argument about what those things mean.
So I don't know what Lamo was supposed to testify about.
He can't read people's minds, I don't think.
Yeah, but he can read his own chat logs, and I think that's what he's basing it on.
Basically, that's what happened is someone read the chat logs to him, and he was like,
yes, that's what the chat logs say over and over again.
Right, right.
Now, Bernie, what's your feeling on this?
Well, I'm a little confused because an article in the New York Times said that it was either
a current or former Army Criminal Investigation Division forensic computer analyst, Mark Johnson,
who testified that he had not found any material suggesting that Bradley Manning hated America,
sympathized with terrorists, or had received any unusual money transfers.
However, I guess it's possible that Adrian Lamo may have testified to the same facts.
But I just wanted to make it clear.
It's unclear to me, at least in the mainstream media reporting, as to who actually said that.
Well, more than one person said similar things.
There have been a number of witnesses and only one set of facts.
I think many people will say that Bradley Manning didn't intend to help the enemy.
I'll put it this way.
If there was evidence that Manning was in touch with the enemy, whoever the enemy is supposed to be in this case,
we would have heard it by now.
So I'm pretty sure that no evidence is going to come out that Manning was in touch with al-Qaeda
or the Iraqi people or whoever.
The government is trying to demonstrate that WikiLeaks and the American public and the public at large are the enemy.
And I don't know how they're going to do that, but it's going to be difficult to do.
I hope it's difficult.
We're the enemy. We're the enemy here.
Apparently.
I'll wear that if that's how we're going to be defined.
Yeah, I think it's a little confusing who exactly they're defining as the enemy in this particular case.
Also, I think maybe, I don't know, I haven't read too much about it,
but maybe the emphasis on it is some sort of attempt by Adrian to clarify why he did what he did and his involvement in it.
Because a lot of people were very upset.
There was a pretty stern reaction from current and present hackers and him identifying as a former hacker.
Maybe he wants to really emphasize that and be clear that it was very certain specific things that he disagreed with about it.
I mean, I read his testimony and a huge thanks to this group, the Freedom of the Press Foundation,
which is providing, as a public service, their own stenographers to go to the trial because the government won't release transcripts.
So this group, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, is sending stenographers in so you can read what's going on because recordings are also forbidden.
This whole thing makes no sense, by the way.
Go ahead.
But you can read the transcript and it's very dry.
There's not a lot of information.
Well, it's a lot more fun if you hand out sheets and get people to act like we do sometimes here on Off the Hook.
And, yeah, there are some really incredible things being thrown around.
But one of the more poignant things I saw or read was how Bradley Manning's lawyer described him as young, naive, but good intentioned.
And I think that's really what it comes down to is that you see this guy who witnessed, along with so many other people, real carnage in the form of the video of the slaying of the journalist and the civilians and released that.
That's the most important thing.
First of all, how is their trial going, by the way?
Does anybody know how to trial the helicopter pilots?
That's what they were, who fired on the crowd of people and killed innocent unarmed civilians.
Are they being found guilty of anything?
Do we even know their names?
No.
I think their names may be a matter of the public record.
But as far as I'm aware, there's been no trial.
Well, everybody knows the name of the guy who made that video public.
And I just don't see how anyone can say, regardless of how patriotic you are, how anyone can say not releasing that video went against anything that we stand for.
If that's the case, if releasing the truth and showing how people can become cold-blooded killers in our military and have a successful cover-up, if you think releasing that information is harmful to our regime, then I think our regime is harmful to a lot more than just Bradley Manning.
I think also that he may have seen other things.
That was the one thing that got released or might have been a part of a couple of things that he actually leaked.
But we know that he had access to a system that was basically built for sharing information amongst military personnel.
Supernet.
Supernet, yeah.
And he may have had access to millions of things, of which there were many videos.
And he may have watched several that were, as far as the military is concerned, legitimate and not definitely enemy combatants or whatever they say.
My understanding from reading the transcript is that he had access to a lot more, a lot more material that he did not release because that was of a higher classification.
And the material that he did release was available literally to millions of people and was not at the level of classification that was deemed harmful to our regime.
But still disturbing and probably had a psychological impact and probably instructed his actions to some degree or at least made him resolute.
And it just was the case of the Reuters journalists being gunned down that corresponded with this family trying to get more information from the military and basically were stonewalled because of the protections the military has and the ability for them to more or less keep things classified.
If I found myself in a situation where I needed to know the truth about something, something controversial and horrible, I would trust Bradley Manning infinitely more than I would trust those helicopter pilots or anyone else who's trying to cover all this up.
And we're supposed to be about the truth.
We're supposed to be about openness.
And clearly we're not.
And I'm not hearing anything about all the things that were uncovered as a result of – all the positive things that were uncovered as a result of these releases.
And it's just – it's really distressing to see him portrayed in the mass media as enemy of the state number one and all kinds of things like that.
Do you know there are even – this is really kind of crazy.
There are – there's a coloring book.
I saw this in the New York Post of all places.
They basically have terrorist trading cards.
And to their credit, they have the Arizona gunman, that lunatic, and the Beltway sniper and people like that in it along with various al-Qaeda operatives.
But do you know they also have Julian Assange listed as one of the terrorists.
I mean that is just insane that people who release information are looked upon by these people as terrorists, people who just release information.
Another thing that came out of the opening statements for the prosecution was that there are chat logs between Bradley Manning and Julian Assange that are very clearly marked according to them.
Have we heard that before?
I don't think I've heard that before.
Bernie, do you know anything about that?
No, this is news to me.
This is allegedly something that was discovered in Bradley Manning's hard drives.
But I'm wondering if – it sounds doubtful the government will release that information because they're not even releasing the most basic information about the trial proceedings.
But it would be interesting.
Now I have a question about the transcription.
First of all, you can look at the transcription because of our friends at Freedom of the Press Foundation.
You can read what's been going on the last several days by going to the website PressFreedomFoundation.org.
PressFreedomFoundation.org has transcripts.
Now from what I was hearing – I'm going to read what they say on their site because that might explain it a little bit.
The U.S. military has refused to release transcripts of Bradley Manning's trial.
In addition, they've denied press passes to 270 out of the 350 media organizations – organizations, not even people, but media organizations that applied.
270 out of 350 were denied.
Without public transcripts or a press pass, it's virtually impossible for media organizations to accurately cover the trial and for the public to know what the government is doing in its name.
And needless to say, they're not allowing anyone to record it.
In response, Freedom of the Press Foundation has crowdsourced funding to place a professional stenographer in the media room covering the trial.
We will post full transcripts shortly after each day's proceedings end.
The morning session will be posted by 7 p.m. the same evening.
The afternoon session will be posted by 9 a.m. the next morning.
And those transcripts will be released under Creative Commons.
Transcriptions, depending on how long the trial lasts, will cost between $50,000 and $120,000.
And they are very much in need of your support to keep that valuable service going.
It's incredible that people have to pay to get a transcript of a trial.
Yes, it's a military trial.
But, I mean, the fact that the people supporting Bradley Manning want openness in the trial and the people who want to put him away don't want anybody to see what's going on, that speaks volumes, doesn't it?
Yeah, I think it says a lot about the callousness or cold attitude of our judicial system a little bit.
I mean, you can't bring into the impact the virtuous things that have come out of a lot of the leaks and stuff like that because it's just very objective, especially it being a military court.
I mean, regular court, I think, as is, is problematic in that sense.
But this is even more like just this rigid and kind of cold ability for them to keep people out and keep information very controlled.
And this very rigid process is, I don't know, it's not very helpful for people that are interested in getting the word out and telling the story.
I know a number of us are considering going down there and witnessing either some kind of video link of the trial, perhaps, if they have such a thing down there.
I've heard that they do.
Or talking to some of the people that are gathering down in Fort Meade, Maryland, which, Kyle, we have a history with those guys.
Yeah, I've been there.
Yes, and they'll remember us.
But if you're one of our listeners and you've been there or you know people who have gone there, please write to us.
Tell us what it's like, your experiences, what you've heard, othat2600.com.
I'd certainly like to learn more about it.
Bernie, you fancy a trip down to Fort Meade someday?
I've been to Fort Meade on more than one occasion, but not in a military courtroom, fortunately.
I don't think we're going to get anywhere near that courtroom.
I'm amazed if there is such a video feed, why aren't they making it available on the Internet?
That would certainly make sense.
Well, what I heard, and this is something that the judge says in the opening statements, is that they have some kind of a trailer facility that is linked to the courtroom.
And there's another room that has seats for 50 people, something like that.
And there's a press area.
So something's going on down there.
And I'd like to be able to see it firsthand.
All the lawyers and the judge seem to agree that there's plenty of room for everyone who wants to come, including Manning's attorney, David Coombs.
But I'm not exactly sure how true, you know, how much what they believe is actually what's happening.
Well, that's why we have to go down there and assess the truth.
Now, I'd like to turn it over to GMC.
Being over in Europe, is this story being reported at all over there?
Yeah, absolutely.
And I was kind of amazed about that because it was all over the news, even with long background stories on Manning and on the whole case.
And it was even, well, kind of well-balanced as well, which surprised me a lot because that's not normally what official news outlets do, right?
Yeah, so that was pretty amazing.
And actually, my personal thoughts about this, if you know about these atrocities going on, actually, isn't it a crime to not tell people about that?
That's a good question.
Bernie, do you know anything about that?
Is it a crime not to reveal information if you're in the military?
Well, there's significant differences between the U.S. judicial system and the Universal Code of Military Justice that the United States military goes by.
So I'm not quite sure that atrocities there are.
I think you have to report them to the chain of command, but I don't think you can report them necessarily to the public.
And that may be what's being argued here.
Interesting. Well, it's certainly an historic trial, and we recommend people pay attention and get the story out.
And if at all possible, try and attend or just show your face.
Just get some support out there because it's something that I think will define freedom of speech, freedom of the press, getting information out, leaking information.
All these things will be defined by what happens in this particular case.
And I'm afraid. I'm afraid of what will happen to him.
I mean, he's not facing the death penalties puzzle anymore.
That's off the table, but he will probably wind up getting the same penalty as that guy who went nuts and killed all the people in Afghanistan while being a part of the military.
I believe he pled guilty today, and I don't think he's going to get the death penalty.
He'll get probably exactly the same thing as Bradley Manning, and you could not see a more of a contrasting set of cases involving military personnel.
You think Manning will only get as much as this guy?
Well, how many life sentences can they hand out?
This guy actually got a life sentence?
Well, I read today that he is not going to get the death penalty.
So obviously his life and Bradley Manning's life will run concurrently.
I think it's really exciting that this is going on and we have transcripts of it.
And I don't know. I just hope that people get the word out, talk about it, get some discussion going, because it's easy to grow weary of cases like this or just because you're removed from it.
And you can have that separation from your armchair and be philosophical about it and say it's one way or the other.
And it's especially compounded by the fact that there's no real outlet for information and new developments, but it's still ongoing.
And this is really interesting stuff that we're hearing, and it's a really neat way to actually get transcripts.
I think it's great that they're doing that.
Bernie, did you have a final comment on this?
I just wanted to mention that I think what the United States government is trying to do here, and the president himself has already stated that Bradley Manning is guilty.
He publicly stated that.
Wait, wait, wait. Who stated this?
Who stated this?
The president. This is like, oh, it was a year or two ago. Remember, he publicly stated in some, he was cornered in some event and somebody was asking, Bradley Manning, a supporter asked him about Bradley Manning's case and why is he being treated this way, that sort of thing.
President Obama just stated that Bradley Manning was guilty for leaking all this, dumping, as the president said, dumping all this information.
So clearly this is not going to be a fair trial when you have the commander-in-chief who orders around everybody at that military court of justice.
How this is going to proceed fairly is beyond me, but I think what our government is trying to do is to create a really strong chilling effect against anybody, make anybody feel very afraid who works in our military or is a civilian contractor to share any information of wrongdoing by our government.
Because if somebody's going to get life in prison or decade, most of their life in prison for doing that, it's really going to make people think twice.
Well, you know, I'd like to just test the military, test the people in the military out a little bit.
Okay, you know, you might be afraid to leak information like Bradley did. You might be afraid to actually put your neck on the line like he did.
But maybe you have enough guts to speak up and say you don't think he should be in prison or you don't think he should be punished as severely as they want to punish him or even at all.
Are you able to do that? Do you have enough freedom where you are now where you can stand up and say that? That's not a crime. That's expressing an opinion.
Curious how many people in the military can freely say that.
You weren't even allowed to remember the government even even pulled all the all the files off that were that were available on Wikileaks site and in New York Times website.
The government blocked access to all that on their own military and and and civilian government networks.
So that no government employees would have access to this.
Right.
For lawyers and stuff. It was ludicrous.
What that meant was that civilians had access to more information in the military.
Right.
And you have to wonder what the logic was behind that move.
So the government was threatening that any State Department official or whoever who read this stuff on the Wikileaks website would be fired.
And I really wanted to like go down to Washington and just like wheat paste this stuff outside the State Department headquarters so that people would would read it on their way out and see if there was no one working there the next day.
But but I never got around to it.
All right. Well this trial is expected to last a couple of months.
So it's going to be rather interesting.
And if you read the transcripts every day I think you'll you'll be intrigued and you'll at least know what's being said.
And I'm sure there'll be all kinds of allusions to things.
They were they they spent a lot of time talking about the program WGET the other day.
And that was it.
I didn't know WGET wasn't allowed to be on any military computer.
Yeah.
They're afraid of that.
If I want to talk about it I know Kyle you've worked with WGET.
It's your friend isn't it.
Really.
You can't use WGET.
How do you think you get a lot of documents quickly off a Web site.
Well I know it's a great program but you can't use it in the military.
You can't even have it on your machine.
They're going to haul the authors of that program before a military tribunal next.
For people in the audience I know WGET is a very small computer program that just like download stuff from the Internet and saves it to your computer.
And it's it's relatively easy to to script it and make it do what you want without a lot of button clicking and all this stuff.
But it doesn't it doesn't do anything very you know really.
It's not it's not like some sniffer like some spyware or something like that.
It's just an application a tool that you would use to get information from a site in a very really verbose or however particular manner you want.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean it's just like a Web browser without the browser part.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Well think about that.
If you use WGET to get these files does that mean he just pulled it off a Web server.
Yeah probably.
So all of this information was already on a Web site.
Not a Web site that the public could access.
But it was on a Web site and everybody can always access a Web site at some point.
All somebody has to do is make one mistake and all of a sudden you can access this Web site.
I don't know.
The military is.
Military networks.
Reasonably good at keeping out people who shouldn't be there.
I don't want to say they're perfect at it but they're reasonably good.
They're reasonably good.
But the point is it's already there in the right format.
It's not like you had to dig it out of some archive someplace and copy it and play it.
All you do is WGET.
It's ridiculously easy.
Exactly.
It really is.
And it's literally someone could have just as easily even more easily made a mistake and opened up access to the world or to parts of the government that weren't supposed to have access to.
And you would have had the same leak just by an error.
So that's something to take into consideration.
I think that it already was on Web sites accessible by I believe millions of people.
That's what I believe I saw in the opening transcripts.
And that's a lot of people that are being trusted not to tell anybody else.
And I don't think it was information that was that sensitive.
Again, this is just to send a message.
Mike?
I mean, I know we have to move on.
But honestly, like, shame on the other millions of people who haven't leaked this stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah, really.
And do you have copies of more?
That maybe didn't get out.
If more people did that, think about it.
If more people did what Bradley did, this wouldn't be a huge case because the government would realize that it's something.
It's a formidable opponent to deal with, opponent to their restrictive actions and controlling information that really we have every right to know about.
All right.
Yes.
But we do have to move on because, as we mentioned earlier, this is the last of our fundraising programs.
And we do have a lot of business to take care of.
I want to thank people who called in last week.
We did incredibly well.
We've raised well over $4,200 with the Steve Rambam special.
Today, however, we are talking about something completely different.
And that is something that our friend GMC is heavily involved with.
It's the Hacker Event of the Year.
It's another Dutch hacker camp.
These only happen once every four years.
And this one is called OHM, O-H-M.
And that stands for what, GMC?
Well, first of all, OHM is, of course, the unit.
If people know something about electronics, it's a unit of resistance.
And it also stands for Observe, Hack, and Make, which is basically the three characteristics that make a good hacker, so to say.
A hacker is someone who observes things, then decides that, well, maybe there's ways to improve things.
So he starts to hack and make it better.
And that's basically what it stands for.
I'm embarrassed to say that the resistance thing, I missed that.
I totally missed that.
Wow, that's brilliant.
That's really, really good.
I like that a lot.
We actually first had the name, and then we came up with the acronym.
But that's how these things go.
Yeah, I don't know.
It's one of the four yearly Dutch hacker camps, as you mentioned.
It's happening only every four years.
It's been going on since 1989, I think.
Well, okay.
I can step in here, and I can say that the Galactic Hacker Party, although not a camp, took place in 1989 at the Paradiso in Amsterdam.
That was my first ever experience overseas, and it was amazing.
Met so many cool people there.
The actual first Dutch hacker camp, and I mean massive Dutch hacker camp.
There have been lots of smaller ones.
That took place in 1993, and that was called Hacking at the End of the Universe, HEU.
What I'm going to do now is go around the room and ask people to fill in the remaining Dutch hacker camps, beginning with 1997.
Mike?
I don't know.
Oh, wow.
You see, this is what happens, folks.
You don't spread the information around.
Kyle, you want to give it a shot?
No?
Bernie?
There was Hal.
No.
Well, don't give out the ones that we haven't gotten to yet.
All right.
Obviously, that wasn't the next one.
I'll give you guys a hint.
It took place the same exact time as Beyond Hope in 1997.
I didn't go to that either.
But you knew it existed.
I'm sorry, Bernie.
Go ahead.
We were even connected.
We had a connection between those two.
We were even connected, and we can't remember the name of the conference we were at.
No cheating, Kyle.
I thought you were looking at the phone.
It starts with H.
It starts with H.
Okay, that's great.
That's not much of a hint.
Hacking at the End of the Universe.
Hacking at the End of the Universe.
That was 1993, Hacking at the End of the Universe, HEU.
Yeah, he said that.
Yes.
All right, GMC, I think it's going to fall to you.
I think he's going to have to help us.
It's hacking in progress.
That's right.
Hip.
I guess we're just not hip enough to know that.
At all.
You see, folks, we're honest about this.
If we don't know something, we'll admit it.
I didn't get the resistance thing, and no one seems to know the name of the second Dutch hacker camp.
Okay, so let's go to 2001.
Bernie, you already leaked that, so you might as well say it again.
That was Hal.
All right.
Who wants to tackle 2005?
What the heck?
Excuse me?
No, that was the wrong date.
No, that's correct.
That's correct.
What the heck?
I thought you were saying something to me.
Oh, no, no, no.
That was a name.
It was what the heck.
Because you were scowling when you said that.
Like, what the heck, but what the hack, yeah.
What the hack, correct.
All right, Mike, I'm going to give you a softball here.
In 2009, what was that?
That was Har.
Har.
And what did Har stand for?
Hacking at random.
All right.
And that brings us up to 2013, which is OM.
Now, GMC, when is OM?
What are the dates?
It's July 31st until August 4th, which is kind of a departure from the camps before,
because that was always four days.
We decided it was too short.
We just added another day.
And actually, it's still not enough time to fit in all of the program.
It's amazing the number of awesome lectures that we received in the submission system.
I heard a number before that I could not believe.
Do you want to throw that number out again, how many lectures there are going to be?
There's like about 180 lectures and six workshops at the site and film screenings,
art installations, all kinds of things going on, especially, well, as we said,
the first seed of these camps was in 89.
You can imagine that many of the hackers of then now have a lot of kids.
So, naturally, we also want to train or educate the next generation of hackers,
which has come forward from the hackers from 89, et cetera.
So there's a lot of content, especially for kids, making kids curious about computers,
about what is inside electronics, you name it.
Well, now, it's still possible to register and to go to the conference.
The website is ohm2013.org?
Exactly, yeah, ohm2013.org.
All right, and it's possible for people in the United States or anywhere in the world
to register using credit cards?
Absolutely, yeah. There's credit card payments.
We even offer Bitcoin payments.
So, yeah, that's another option.
Great, and I believe the prices are going to go up on June 15th.
So folks who want to do this should do it soon.
And it's not as hard as you might think to make plans to do this,
to find some cheap airfare.
It'll change your life, and I think we can all speak to that.
Everyone in this room, and Bernie too, has been to at least one of these conferences,
and they're just incredible.
I noticed, GMC, that you posted just the other day directions for getting there.
It's really easy. You fly to the Amsterdam airport,
which has flights from basically everywhere in the world,
and then you take two trains, and then a van will meet you and take you.
It's always so easy.
Absolutely, yeah. It's only 30, 40 minutes driving above Amsterdam,
so it's really easy to get there.
Very cool. So we encourage people to do that.
Now, Mike, you're going to be there?
Yeah.
And Carl, you're going to be there?
Oh, definitely.
I'm going to be there. Bernie, are you going to be there?
I'm planning to be there, yeah.
All right. Awesome. So we're all going to be there. That's really cool.
And, of course, GMC, I imagine you're not going to miss this.
You even talk of a 2600 village.
Well, you know what? We're going to get into that in a second,
but I wanted to give folks what we're giving away here tonight for supporting the radio station.
We mentioned, GMC mentioned, that there are so many talks being given,
more talks than I've ever heard of at a hacker conference,
and what we are offering tonight is at least 100 DVDs filled with those talks.
So if you can't make it to OM this year, and even if you do make it,
there's no way you can see that many talks,
for a pledge of $125 to 516-620-3602, you can get the OM DVD collection.
That's what you ask for, for the person who picks up the phone.
OHM, OM DVD collection.
You'll get at least 100 DVDs filled with the talks from the OM conference,
and these are things that are going to be priceless.
They're going to be amazing talks, 516-620-3602.
Now, we often, on this radio program, give away large sets of DVDs,
but I think this might be a record for us, 100 DVDs.
Yeah, well, no, we've given away 100 before,
but it looks like we might go a little bit above 100 on this one.
It's going to be really incredible.
It's going to be one heavy package there.
I'm only offering that tonight, only during this hour, in fact.
So your support, though, your support is what keeps the radio station going,
keeps us on the air so we can talk about these things.
We just spent almost a half hour talking about Bradley Manning,
even though we're doing a fundraising program, but it's important.
We have to do that, and we need your support in order to be able to continue to do that,
to keep the transmitter bill paid, to keep the rent paid, all of that.
516-620-3602, we have another level as well.
If you pledge $75, you can get an exclusive Ohm T-shirt
that obviously most people will have to get from the conference itself,
but you can get it simply sent to you by calling 516-620-3602 and pledging $75.
It's as simple as that.
And I imagine, GMC, you can't really tell us what the design on the Ohm shirts is like at this early stage, can you?
Well, actually, I know what it will be like.
I'm not going to give it away, I think, because then I will get into a fight with my fellow organizers.
But it's just being finished as we speak.
I think it's going to the printer tomorrow, and I can just say it's a nice one.
It's by the same people who designed the shirt in 2009, which is, I think, a really beautiful shirt.
So that's going to work out just beautifully.
I was just wearing that shirt the other day, in fact, and people still stop me on the street and say,
What was that?
I'm sure it's fair to say, GMC, that this shirt will be very fashionable, suitable for any occasion.
Absolutely, yeah.
One caveat, though, because there are just too many things to coordinate around here.
We can only offer the shirt in one size, XL, which, you know, European XLs run smaller than American XLs.
So if you're not that big, XL should fit you just fine.
But all the different sizes and things, it would just get too much pandemonium.
So if odds are XL will fit you.
If not, odds are you know somebody who it will fit.
The idea is to support the radio station and get a little gift in return.
The number to call, 516-620-3602.
GMC, what are some of the talk highlights that you can tell us about?
Well, one of my personal favorites is called the Spooks Panel.
And it's basically going to be a panel.
It also reverberates on what we were talking about earlier, I think, of a few ex-spooks, so to say.
So people who worked for the three-letter agencies.
It consists of Ray McGovern, who used to be with the CIA, I think, way, way back.
Colleen Rawley from the FBI, ex-FBI.
Thomas Drake, who used to work for the NSA.
And Annie Mahon, she's ex-MI5.
And she especially has, well, all of them, but has a really hard time because she was appalled by all the, well, again,
atrocities that she saw her colleagues commit crimes.
They committed all in the name of the safety of the country.
So she decided to quit and basically then had to fear for her own life because her own colleagues then were after her.
These are really scary stories, and it's confronting, but it's really important that these stories are being told as well
because these are people who have worked in these agencies and have seen the sometimes, well, bordering,
just going over that line, unethical ways that these agencies actually operate.
So that is one important panel, I think, that will draw a huge crowd.
Jim, see all these spooks, they're not on duty, right?
They aren't working for those.
They have renounced their faith, so to say.
They are not working for these agencies anymore.
They are actively advocating against these agencies and what they stand for and their methods.
Well, then the issue of drones comes into play because these people might be the enemies of some very powerful individuals
and powerful governments.
We've got to get some drone jamming software going so that they're not targeted during the camp.
Well, actually, these drones are usually controlled by Wi-Fi, and we have a whole Wi-Fi network that will no doubt jam all these signals.
Now, it's a thing you say.
I mean, for the same reason, you cannot really put all these people in the same flight to Amsterdam
because it might be too convenient for some accident to happen.
That's a real concern here.
It's a real concern that something like that could be on the agenda.
It is, actually, yeah, because these people are talking openly about what they've seen inside these agencies.
And just as you saw with Bradley Manning, it's not something the government wants you to know, actually,
what is happening.
They want to keep it a secret.
And if the secrets are especially dirty, the methods of keeping things a secret also get increasingly dirty.
Yeah, I mean, storytelling motivates people.
It moves them to action.
And if you can tell a compelling story and you have experience, who knows what the rest of the people,
the people that fund a lot of these agencies, I'm talking about you and me and everybody who's a member of whatever nation,
it's on us to oversee it.
We start hearing these stories, and perhaps we think a little differently when we get to vote or whatever it is we do politically.
Well, I happen to think that that panel alone would be worth a $125 pledge to get a copy of.
But we're offering you around 100 DVDs with all of this material from the OMCAMP coming up in late July, early August.
You just have to call 516-620-3602 within the next 20 minutes, and you'll get that delivered to you.
Pledge $125, you'll get at least 100 DVDs of talks from the OMCAMP.
Now, GMC, any other talks that spring to mind?
Yeah, so this is one of the more political-motivated talks, I think.
We have another panel that is sort of related.
It's basically about what kind of decisions people make to either work for the state or be against the state, especially hackers.
There's like a whole group of people who actually say if you do any work for a government, you are not a hacker.
And on the other side, there are people, I mean, all of academia in the Netherlands is basically government-funded.
So does that mean you can't be a hacker if you work for a university?
You can imagine this is quite an interesting and sometimes something that people are struggling with.
So that's actually Mitch Altman is going to be on that panel, as well as Jillian C. York and Vinay Gupta,
who you may know also from the Hexayurt Project, which is also something that will be going on on this event.
The Hexayurt is basically a cheap temporary structure that is very strong and that can be built really easily in, for example, disaster areas.
And the plan is actually to build a few of these at the camp.
One of these will actually be a cold room so that we can keep things cold for another village, which is the food hacking village, for example.
We're going to do all kinds of interesting stuff with recipes and molecular cooking.
And we use this as a way to keep their ingredients cold.
That's really cool. That's amazing.
So people are actually going to be putting like your kits together to use for different purposes.
And it sounds like you have a refrigerated yurt.
Yep, exactly.
That's amazing.
That also goes into the more technical realm.
One talk that stood out to me especially is from this guy who's been hacking on his hard drive and he put Linux on it.
Now you say, okay, anyone can install Linux on a hard disk.
But he is actually running it on the controller that's on his hard disk.
Whoa.
Okay, that's interesting.
So just in memory, it's like demo, but it's an OS.
Yep.
You will meet the most amazing people ever.
If you come to OM in late July, early August in Holland, Netherlands, you will meet people that will astound you and make incredible connections.
So I can't urge people enough to attend this.
It really is.
When I called it the hacker event of the year, I meant it.
It really is going to be something that you take with you for the rest of your life.
Details, ohm2013.org, om2013.org to find out more information about that.
I want to thank – you know what?
We have this little forum and people are asked when they call in if they want to be thanked on the air.
And in this particular case, it didn't say yes or no.
So I'm just going to give the first initial of this person in case they don't want to be named.
And thank you, D, from Northport, New York, for your contribution and for the other people calling in.
The phone number, 516-620-3602.
Again, for $125, you will get at least 100 DVDs from the OM camp taking place this summer.
You'll have some incredible talks to go through.
And, GMC, I believe you had a keynote speaker at HAR that turned out to be a bit famous after the speech, correct?
Yes, yes, exactly.
The first talk at HAR 2009 was actually by Julio de Sancts who presented his platform Wikileaks there.
So you'll never know what could be debuted at OM, what kinds of things you'll hear about for the first time.
So it's history.
It's real history.
If you can't make it in person, the DVDs are the best way to just get a piece of it and feel like you were there.
Also, the shirts.
For a $75 pledge, you'll get an OM t-shirt size XL, 516-620-3602.
We only have about 15 minutes left.
So we need to bring in as many calls as possible.
And, again, this is the last week of the fundraiser.
You won't be hearing us pleading for money beyond this because hopefully we'll have made our goals by then and we can continue talking about the Bradley Manning case and all the other events happening in the hacker world.
There are so many things going on and so many things that will be discussed at the conference.
Now, we mentioned, GMC, you mentioned the 2600 Village.
And, yes, you're right.
There is going to be a 2600 Village being constructed inside the OM campground.
And I know, Kyle, you've been very involved in that.
Anything you want to give out to the public as far as what might be there?
Yeah, well, we're going to have a small campsite.
It's actually very common for people to start their own villages.
And anyone who's attending can start a village or, like, sign up to be a part of a village.
And I really like going and camping and volunteering, getting involved, meeting different people.
But we've never actually had some kind of, like, official place to have, like, 2600 people.
I know there's people all over the world that know about the magazine.
And I thought it would be a really cool idea to participate and have a bit of a village of our own.
Maybe host a little, I don't know, events, small workshops.
We're still planning it and kind of really open to it just like I'm sure a lot of other people are.
So you can check out the OHM site and look for the 2600 Village and go ahead and edit it.
Suggest some things.
As long as it's constructive, I'm sure we can coordinate it and make things happen.
I know that I'm going to be bringing a lot of addressable RGB LEDs and, like, fun stuff to play with and decorate.
And so I encourage other people, if they want to hang out with 2600 folks or camp with us, come by and visit.
Say hi or sign up and put some ideas up there.
There's a lot of really, really neat camps.
If you go to the OHM 2013 site and check it out, just peruse that and look at the different things people are planning on putting together.
And that's just an adjunct to all the other stuff that's going on, the speaking tracks, the lounges.
If you look at some of the maps and stuff, there's just amazing things that people are planning.
I was even looking at one area in the gaming tent.
Someone wanted to put together a vintage Cray bench machine.
I think it's a Cray-1.
And someone wanted to create a model of that and have that as an art installation or someplace someone could hang out.
So it's all kinds of things.
Bring your ideas and come share with people.
I think it will be really fun for us to have our central location and host and hang out with other people.
The amazing thing is that it is open to anybody to modify however they wish.
If you want to add something to the 2600 Village or any village that you feel like you want to be a part of at OHM,
all you have to do is sign in on the wiki and modify it.
We could use some ASCII art.
That would be kind of nice to have, don't you think, on that particular page?
Yeah, we don't have a 2600 logo because there's so many different ones we've tried over the years.
I think we'll come up with something.
I saw some really good ASCII art and just funny, silly stuff.
That's what it is.
It's made of.
Make of what you want.
We're going to give it a try and participate as much as possible.
It really is a village.
It's incredible to see this happen.
If you show up early, and JMC, I assume you want people to show up a little bit early to help out with the building?
That would be nice.
Not too many people, though.
We said the same in 2009.
Come early.
Help us with build-up.
People were so amazingly enthusiastic.
They showed up by the hundreds, which was a bit too much to deal with when there was nothing on the terrain yet.
We were a bit more cautious in saying, come over.
If you want to help, sure, contact us.
You'll find the organization email address on our site.
Let us know you want to come early, like maybe a week before or a few days before,
so that we can check if we are already having enough people to help out, or that you are welcome.
Are you looking for particular skills?
Basically, there's a lot to build up.
There's a lot of heavy electronic cables, electric cables to be run, tents to be built up,
cables to be hooked up.
A whole network has to be rolled out.
But there's also stuff like going to the shop and buy all the stuff we forgot to take with us,
all the little things.
Right.
People to drive the shuttle buses.
You name it.
And decorations, too.
That's always really fun.
I might be up for driving the shuttle bus.
That could be fun.
Oh, you're going to drive the bus?
Well, I mean, each of the different teams, you can see on the wiki, they have a lot of contact info.
I think it's really good to be in touch and communicate and talk to whomever is organizing something
you might be particularly interested in.
Send them a little hello and just try to coordinate as much as possible.
It's a lot of physical putting the puzzle pieces together, but it really goes smoothly.
You really can meet a lot of interesting people, and they get to meet you,
and you really get integrated and settled in.
It makes for just this amazing experience.
I encourage people to call and go to the event themselves.
Yes.
I want to thank Thomas from the Bronx, Lauren from Orange, New Jersey, Patrick from South Richmond, New York.
I want to thank the anonymous people who are calling in and supporting the station
and invite the remaining listeners out there, of which I know there are many, to call 516-620-3602.
A pledge of $125 will get you 100 DVDs or more filled with content from the conference we're speaking about,
which will take place in late July and early August in the Netherlands on a campground.
Boy, will it be amazing, historic, a lot of interesting talks.
516-620-3602.
Where else can you get that many DVDs for that kind of a donation?
It's simply incredible.
In fact, you can't buy that many DVDs without the donation.
It's that good a deal.
$75 pledge, you'll get a T-shirt from the conference, and that's definitely going to be a collector's item.
516-620-3602.
Now, JMC, if you could tell us something about the actual site itself.
We were talking about villages, and it's an incredible thing at all these camps how you start off with basically wilderness.
You're in a field or you're in a forest or you're someplace out in nature,
and then all these hackers show up and they start constructing buildings and tents and infrastructure,
electric and Internet and plumbing and all sorts of things like that.
And I expect that will happen this time.
But can you tell us something about, well, what does the site look like right now, for instance?
Well, I will be there tomorrow.
Last time I checked, it was dry, which is good.
It's just it used to be like a tent 100 years ago.
It used to be the bottom of the sea, actually.
At some point, we apparently pumped all the water out of it, and it's now dry land.
It used to be farmland, but it's being converted,
and we are actually going to be the first to use it as such, to dedicate it to event terrain.
But because we are the first, there is basically not much there.
I mean, there's no sewage, no power, no water.
We have to bring it in all ourselves.
What it looks like now, it's just grass and empty.
It stretches out.
There's some sheep maybe on one of the fields.
But that's it. It's empty and flat.
There are some canals, too, I believe, right?
Absolutely, yeah.
And a bit south of the terrain is actually a big lake,
which is in existence because, well, for construction works, they took out all the sand,
and it leaves a big lake-like contraption.
And actually, people are planning to come to Oum by boat.
So that's because, well, the canals are hooked up to other canals,
and basically from lots of places in the Netherlands, even Germany, you can just sail in.
Wow.
And we were looking before at Google Earth at the site, and it's simply incredible.
It's not far from the beach, for one thing, but we were kind of plotting some routes on bicycles
that we can visit the beach, which is only a few miles away.
But we saw one thing which was really incredible.
I don't know if you're familiar with this, GMC, but if you look at the neighborhood,
there is this strange structure of land.
It's a complete square, and it seems to be some kind of a housing development or community.
Perhaps it was reclaimed from the sea.
But the island is a complete square, and there are little houses that jut out.
They're teardrop outlets on this square where there's a single house.
It's kind of like a cul-de-sac except it's for one house.
Did you see that yourself?
I saw it, yeah.
It's hard to miss if you're browsing around on the satellite pictures.
It's purely artificial.
It's indeed quite recent, and it's built for a specific audience, I guess.
It sort of looks like a microchip.
Yeah, it really does.
SMD, you know, it's got little pads.
It's funny.
Yeah, that's the kind of thing that you'll discover all these amazing little nuances
in Dutch society when you're out there as well.
It's simply incredible and a lot of fun.
I do encourage people to check out the site online and learn something about it.
GMC, any final words that you'd like to get out to our listeners,
because we're about to sign off?
Yeah, well, everyone come to home.
If you can't, donate to the station, because I just want to say I'm just so jealous
that you have this actually free radio in America,
because in the Netherlands you're either a state radio or you're a commercial radio.
There's nothing in between, no independent radio.
You can do shows like Off the Hook, and that's really important.
Absolutely, and I hope that gets passed down to our listeners
who realize the importance of this place and keeping this place alive, vibrant, relevant.
That's what it's all about.
That's what it's always been all about.
Dimitrios from Port Jefferson Station for calling in.
Thank you so much for your support.
And the other people who want to remain anonymous, we respect that,
and we respect your support and your listenership.
We hope to be doing this for many, many years in the future.
It's so important what the hackers of the world do and what creative people do.
See you at home.
Yeah, absolutely.
Thank you, GMC, for putting this together, for all your hard work, and we hope to see you soon.
I'm looking forward to it.
All right.
Once again, that phone call, that phone number, rather, is 516-620-3602.
Pledge of $125 will get you 100-plus DVDs from the hacker event of the year,
the Ohm Hacker Campground from the Netherlands, taking place starting July 31st.
More information on that, ohm2013.org.
And, yes, we do encourage people to travel from wherever it is they happen to be to be a part of that.
But please also call 516-620-3602 and support the radio station,
especially if you're saying to yourself, wow, that was pretty cool and I want to go.
Well, you heard about it here.
Think about all the places that you wouldn't have heard about it, 516-620-3602.
$75 pledge, you can get an Ohm t-shirt, which I guarantee you'll be the only person in your neighborhood to have one.
516-620-3602.
What if you live in my neighborhood?
Well, okay, but when you're not in your neighborhood and I'm in your neighborhood and I have the shirt,
it's unlikely two people will have that.
Unless they pirate it and start making their own.
No, they wouldn't do that, would they?
Who knows?
516-620-3602 and our email address, othat2600.com.
We'll see you next week.
Good night.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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