This is WBAI, New York.
Serving the community since 1960.
How long shall they kill our prophets, while we stand aside and look?
Yes, some say it's just a part of it.
We've got to fulfill the book.
Won't you help to sing these songs of freedom?
This all I ever have, redemption songs.
All I ever have, redemption songs.
These songs of freedom, songs of freedom.
This all I ever have, redemption songs.
This all I ever have, redemption songs.
This all I ever have, redemption songs.
T minus 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
It's here.
Welcome, welcome to the new Country 99.5.
Nothing but good music.
Country music is back on in New York City.
I'm Kenny Chesney.
Hi, this is Shania Twain.
Hey y'all, I'm Kix Bruce.
I'm Ronnie Dunne.
And we're Bruce and Dunne.
New York's newest radio station.
Country 99.5.
So much fun.
Woo!
And now, 10,000 country hits commercial free.
Country 99.5.
Country 99.5.
♪
Her daddy gave her her first pony
And taught her to ride
She climbed high in that saddle
Fell I don't know how many times
He taught her a lesson that she learned
Maybe a little too well
Cowgirls don't cry
Ride baby, ride
Lessons of life are gonna show you in time
Soon enough you're gonna know why
It's gonna hurt every now and then
If you fall get back on up again
Cowgirls don't cry
She grew up, she got married
But it never was quite right
She wanted a house, a home and babies
He started coming home late at night
She didn't let him see it break her heart
She didn't let him see her fall apart
Cause cowgirls don't cry
Ride baby, ride
Lessons of life are gonna show you in time
Soon enough you're gonna know why
It's gonna hurt every now and then
If you fall get back on up again
Cowgirls don't cry
guitar solo
Phone rang early one morning
Her mama's voice, she'd been crying
Said it's your daddy, you need to come home
This is it, I think he's dying
She laid the phone down by his head
The last words that he said
Cowgirls don't cry
Ride baby, ride
Lessons of life show us all in time
Too soon gotta let you know why
If you fall get right back on
The good Lord calls everybody home
Cowgirls don't cry
guitar solo
Out with the old, in with the new
Country hits from Nashville to New York
Country 99.5
Where you're in the middle of a 10,000 song marathon
Keith Urban, Country 99.5
When I picked you up for our first date, baby
Were you pretty blue eyes that were driving me crazy
And the tiny little thought that was so amazing
As they were looking at me
I held open the card for you
Then you climbed inside
And slid on over to the other side
I thought in my own mind
Sweet thing, the moon is high and the night is young
Come on and meet me in my backyard
Under the cottonwood tree
It's a good thing, am I wishing?
Come on sweet thing, won't you climb on out of your window
While the world's sleeping
You know I need you and there's no way I'll be leaving
Until we're kissing on the porch swing
Oh, my little sweet thing
Yeah, I know I'm gonna see you first thing tomorrow
But I just couldn't wait so I had to borrow
Uncle Jake's Mustang, it's his favorite car
And so I can't stay long
Standing here feeling like a love struck wrong
Oh, all I wanna do is hold you close
And steal a little more time
Is that such a crime?
Sweet thing, the moon is high and the night is young
Come on and meet me in my backyard
Under the cottonwood tree
It's a good thing, am I wishing?
Come on sweet thing, won't you climb on out of your window
While the world's sleeping
You know I need you and there's no way I'll be leaving
Until we're kissing on the porch swing
Oh, my sweet thing
Oh, my sweet thing
Sweet thing, sweet thing, sweet thing, sweet thing
Oh, my sweet thing
The moon is high and the night is young
Come on and meet me in the backyard
Under the cottonwood tree
It's a good thing, tell me I'm not dreaming
Oh, sweet thing, won't you climb on out of your window
While the world's sleeping
You know I need you and there's no way I'll be leaving
Until we're kissing on the porch swing
Oh, my sweet thing
Oh, come on sweet thing
Sweet thing, sweet thing, sweet thing, sweet thing
Come on, let it out
Do, do, do, do, do
Do, do, do, do, do
Do, do, do, do, do
Do, do, do, do, do
Oh, my sweet thing
Do, do, do, do, do
Do, do, do, do, do
Hey, look!
You're in the middle of 10,000 country hits commercial free
On The New Country 99.5, New York City
Just got a little southern
He said, the way my blue eyes shine
Put those Georgia stars to shame that night
I said, that's a lie
Just a boy in a Chevy truck
It had a tendency of getting stuck
On back roads at night
And I was right there beside him
All summer long
And then the time we woke up to find that
Summer gone
But when you think summer gone
I hope you think my favorite song
The one we danced to all night long
The moon like a spotlight on my leg
When you think happiness
I hope you think that little black dress
Think of my head on your chest
And my old faded blue jeans
When you think tomorrow
I hope you think of me
September saw a month of tears
And thanking God that you weren't here
To see me like that
But in a box beneath my bed
Is a letter that you never read
From three summers back
It's hard not to find it all a little bittersweet
And looking back on all of that
It's nice to believe
When you think timber gone
I hope you think my favorite song
The one we danced to all night long
The moon like a spotlight on my leg
When you think happiness
I hope you think that little black dress
Think of my head on your chest
And my old faded blue jeans
When you think timber gone
I hope you think of me
And I'm back for the first time since then
I'm standing on your street
And there's a letter left on your doorstep
And the first thing that you read
Is when you think timber gone
I hope you think my favorite song
Someday you'll turn your radio on
I hope it takes you back to that place
When you think happiness
I hope you think that little black dress
Think of my head on your chest
And my old faded blue jeans
When you think timber gone
I hope you think of me
Oh, think of me
You said the way my blue eyes shine
Put those Georgia stars to shame that night
I said that's a lie
Country music is back on the air in New York City
On Country 99.5
We've rounded up 10,000 country hits
And we're playing them all in a row
Commercial free
Toby Keys
Just a girl born in Dixie
Washed in the blood and raised on the banks
Of the Mississippi mud
Always had a thing about
Falling in love with a bad boy
Yeah, they could see it all coming
But her daddy never dreamed
She'd grow up that fast
You know what I mean
The way a girl gets when she turns 17
Kind of crazy
She's a rebel child and a preacher's daughter
She was baptized in dirty water
Her mama cried the first time they caught her with me
They knew they couldn't stop her
She holds tight me and the Bible
On the back seat of my motorcycle
Left your daddy standing there
Preaching to the choir, you see
Gotta love her
You're being God's lover
She kissed her mama goodbye
Said, I'll be sure and phone you
She called her from a truck stop
In Tucson, Arizona
With amazing grace
We made California alive
And then my gypsy life
Started taking its toll
And the fast lane got empty
And out of control
And just like an angel
She saved my soul from the devil
You see, the rebel child and a preacher's daughter
She was baptized in dirty water
Her mama cried the first time they caught her with me
They knew they couldn't stop her
She holds tight me and the Bible
On the back seat of my motorcycle
Left your daddy standing there
Preaching to the choir, you see
Gotta love her
You're being God's lover
Now she holds tight to me and the Bible
On the back seat of my motorcycle
Left your daddy standing there
Preaching to the choir, you see
Gotta love her
Oh, being God's lover
God's lover
Oh, being God's lover
It's time. Really. Really.
For Off The Hook.
The telephone keeps ringing
So I ripped it off the wall
I cut myself while shaving
Now I can't make a call
We couldn't get much worse
But if they could, they would
Bum-diddly-bum for the best, expect the worst
I hope that's understood
Bum-diddly-bum
Howdy.
Howdy from Philadelphia.
Hello.
You can?
And I can't say I blame him.
I can't say I blame anybody who leaves out of frustration.
It's a very frustrating place.
But there are a lot of people here
that do a really, really good job with different programs.
I could list so many programs I listen to on this radio station
at one time or another
that just make me want to stay wherever I am
and not continue with what I'm supposed to be doing
because you're riveted.
You're riveted to the radio.
And I hope to some people this show is one of those.
There is no other place on the dial
in New York or any other city
where so many different voices could be heard
and so much interesting material covered
in the course of a single week.
But that's how it is, WBAI.
That's how it's been since 1960.
And we may be at the end.
Maybe radio is dying.
Maybe community radio is at the end of its rope.
Maybe we've just screwed it up so badly
that nobody wants to come back and listen to us.
Maybe we just don't know how to actually do it.
We've been doing it since 1960.
But what if it was not the case?
What if, in fact, we are able to pull this off?
We are able to rescue ourselves
from all the mismanagement and the Sandy-related things
and whatever other excuses we want to point to
for not being as strong,
not being as out there as we should be.
What if there is a way, a chance,
one chance in a hundred, one chance in a thousand,
maybe one chance in two,
maybe one chance in one if we all get together
and help out and remain here?
I see a lot of people.
You see this basically anywhere on the net.
People love to tear things down.
They love to tear people down after they build them up.
Same thing with the radio station
and, of course, with interpersonal conflicts of various sorts.
I see so much glee at the prospect of BAI failing
because then somebody can say,
Yeah, I told you so. This is what you get.
You screwed it up for everybody.
And you lose sight of the bigger picture.
Well, now you don't have the place either.
Now you don't have something to listen to.
You don't have a voice that is able to reach
so many people throughout the world and throughout history.
And is that really worth being right about something?
So there's that.
You see a lot of that out there.
You see a lot of people saying, Yeah, it's too late.
It can't be done.
Maybe if you had listened to me two years ago,
it could have been done, but now it can't be done.
I never believe that.
I never believe things can't be done.
You know, just the other day,
me, Kyle, Milo, we were wandering around.
Milo's here from Amsterdam visiting New York.
And I wanted to see a hackerspace.
I wanted to see Resistor over in Brooklyn.
And I got to say, I was so blown away
by what those guys have accomplished.
They have this amazing space right in the heart of Brooklyn.
And it's impossible.
You can't do that.
How do you get all this space literally blocks
a couple of blocks away from the Barclays Center,
which you would think would be the most impossible place
to have a space in the first place.
And they're doing the most amazing projects.
And yeah, you know, if you listen to the naysayers,
they would have told you well before anybody
wasted their time that no, don't even bother.
It's not possible.
You couldn't afford it.
You're not going to get the kind of support you need.
It's just, I'm not being negative.
I'm just being realistic.
How many times have I heard that?
Same thing with the Hope Conferences.
Yeah.
How can you have a Hope Conference?
How can you have a hacker conference
in the middle of New York City,
the most expensive city ever invented?
You know, it's not possible.
Don't even try.
But you know what?
And Milo, this is something that you should know.
Having gone to Dutch hacker camps and conferences,
that was the inspiration that I got that said,
you know what?
It is possible.
We're going to try and do this somehow.
And wouldn't you know, we did it.
We did it right in the middle of New York City
and we're doing it again.
In fact, next July, July 18th through 20th, I believe,
are the dates for Hope X, which is our 10th conference.
We'll have a lot more on that,
assuming we're still broadcasting here on 99.5
in the weeks ahead.
We'll have all kinds of talk about that.
So the important thing that I'd like to get out of all this
is that as long as we are broadcasting
and not broadcasting,
not that I have anything against country music,
but it's about as far away from the spectrum
of what we cover as possible,
and that's a good way to scare people.
As long as we are broadcasting alternative ideas and thoughts,
well, there's a chance.
And that's why if you call 516-620-3602,
that is our pledge number,
and pledge whatever you can afford
to keep this place going,
you may very well have another 53 years of WBAI
and improved WBAI.
Let me just say,
we can all discuss these issues in just a moment,
but I just wanted to give people
three premiums that we're offering tonight,
and I think they're sort of in the spirit of WBAI,
in the spirit of off the hook,
in the spirit of survival,
in the spirit of honesty and inconvenient truths.
We have the NSA thumb drive.
What that is is a compilation of all the publicly leaked NSA documents
from a certain Edward Snowden,
including the full video interview,
and you can get this without having to go to a website
and be tracked by who knows who.
That's for a pledge of only $75 to 516-620-3602.
You get it on a thumb drive,
and you simply plug it into your computer
or whatever device you wish,
and you can copy it to your heart's content.
You can read it, and nobody will know you're doing that.
You can also, for the same amount, for $75,
you can get a WikiLeaks thumb drive,
which is a compilation of documents and video,
which totals around 4 gigabytes,
and that was released by WikiLeaks ever since 2008.
It includes the Afghan war diary,
more than 70,000 Afghan war log entries,
the Iraq war logs,
which is more than 400,000 log entries from the Iraq war,
2,000 secret U.S. embassy cables, known as Cablegate,
two versions of the collateral murder video.
For a pledge of $125, you can get both.
You can get both the WikiLeaks thumb drive
and the NSA thumb drive.
So, what better way to keep WBAI alive
than through the NSA and a bunch of secrets
they don't want you to know?
516-620-3602.
Now, I'll open it up to anyone else
that has anything they wish to say about this place,
about what we've been doing, about the NSA,
about anything that's on your mind.
Rob, you look like you're pondering something there.
Well, I'm pondering a few things.
One of them is that you can either call
516-620-3602, or you can do it yourself
on the web at give2, that's the numeral 2, wbai.org.
That's the word give, the numeral 2,
the letters WBAI, and the .org.
And you can click around
and see what we have there for yourself.
The supplies will be updated there as they last,
and you can pick and choose
whether you're listening live now
or whether you're listening from the mysterious future
through MP3s and podcasts and things.
So, yeah, as of yet, as of this speaking,
it's not too late.
But the thing about community radio
is we're not just the people here,
we're not the people in this room,
we're not the people in this station.
Community radio, in the end,
only exists because of the community,
and that's you out there.
If you're listening to this, this includes you.
And you're the only thing
that has kept this station going for 53 years now,
almost 54.
So if you call 516-620-3602,
you can prove that such a crazy thing
can still continue to happen
in today's media environment, in today's society.
Or give the numeral 2, wbai.org.
All right.
Any word on how long you listened to this radio station?
Did you listen to it before off the hook
or maybe some other times you've listened to the station
besides when you're here?
I listen when I'm here, but, yeah,
I actually found the station
through being pointed toward off the hook
many, many years ago.
And, yeah, I would listen to off the hook,
and then I found myself continuing to listen
after you and the guys were no longer speaking
and there were other people.
And some of them were saying bizarre things,
some of them were saying wonderful things,
some of them were saying weird things,
but there was always something to catch my interest,
something to, excuse me,
something to just remind me
that things like this could still happen
on the public airwaves.
It wasn't just top 40 crap like everything else.
It wasn't people trying to tell me
what brand of soda to drink
or what brand of car to drive
in order to pay their bills.
It was somebody who was just kept online
and just kept on the air
by the fact that there were appreciative listeners
out there showing their support.
I've been asked, actually, to pass this along.
Apparently, there are a large number
of country music listeners now.
We need to just advise them that,
at least for the moment,
we will not be playing any more country music.
That was a joke, and we're not going back to it.
So all these people are listening to us
now expecting more country music.
94.7, they weren't country.
You said that.
They were religious,
and they didn't pay their bills,
and something happened,
and now they're country.
So it does happen.
It's not a fantasy.
But we're not.
We're still WBAI for now.
But again, how long depends on you, our listeners.
516.620.3602.
You don't have to get the NSA thumb drive.
You don't have to get the WikiLeaks thumb drive.
It's a really dandy thing to get,
but you can get all kinds of other things,
or you can just simply say,
you know what,
I just want to donate to the radio station
to keep it going.
And that's why I called 516.620.3602
and gave my Visa card, my MasterCard,
my American Express,
or I'm going to pay by check.
I promise.
I really will.
That's why.
That's the most important premium there is,
is the radio station itself.
And we also have the monthly BAI Buddy things
where you can pay a certain amount every month.
I think it's as low as what?
$10 a month.
So that's a lot better than when I first joined the station,
having something so low cost.
But it adds up.
It really adds up over the months
and over the amount of listeners and things like that.
So 516.620.3602, please call and support this place.
Kyle, looks like you have something.
Yeah, I mean, anything really helps the station.
If it's within your budget,
the BAI Buddy system is really, really good.
It sustains us.
It kind of keeps a consistent income coming along
and makes maybe our fund drives just a bit shorter
and our goals are a little bit more reasonable
and we don't have to sweat so much
when these drives come around.
But any contribution really, really matters.
And we're willing to take your call right now.
It's 516.620.3602.
And there's a whole lot of premiums,
things within this thumb drive package that we're offering.
And I did want to add,
we're also including the Spy Files series,
which is a WikiLeaks project
that I think was released a little bit after
we started doing the thumb drive thing.
So it really adds to this compilation
that we came up with from everything from 2008 to 2010.
They continue to do some more series.
They've got two releases in that Spy Files series.
We're going to include that as well.
You've done a lot of the work with the NSA files.
It wasn't easy tracking them down, was it?
And that, to me, doesn't make sense
because these things have been released.
They're out there,
but it's not something you can just snap your fingers
and get very easily.
Yeah, yeah.
We're doing the work for you
in the sense that we want to find and verify,
make sure we have the right files,
make sure we're not picking up packages,
compressed files that are maybe leaked
to be the wrong thing or be misleading.
We're going through.
We're going to verify this stuff.
We're going to have a couple people looking at it.
We're even getting some help from other organizations
that have a shared interest in this.
I believe the Krypton guys were really helpful
in giving us some lists.
And there's other people out there on the web
that have really done a fantastic job of compiling,
making some spreadsheets.
So we're going over that.
We're double-checking things.
We want to make sure what we actually include
on this thumb drive is verified
and as much of the information that was released
in light of these revelations on spying
and also other things that WikiLeaks has done in the past.
Well, it's great to just have everything in one place
to say that, okay, this is the thumb drive
that has all the leaked NSA documents
that have been made public,
and I'm going to keep that in a safe place in my house
in case something happens to all the rest of them
or people lose track of this or people forget.
Maybe you want to print it out
and drape your entire house with it.
Maybe you want to send it as gifts to people.
I don't know, wrapping paper.
There's all sorts of things you can do.
It's completely DRM-free.
You can make as many copies as you want.
It's yours for a pledge of $75 or $125 for all of it,
WikiLeaks and the Snowden files, 516-620-3602.
In fact, Edward Snowden doesn't even have
the Snowden files anymore,
according to what he's been saying lately.
He said that he's given it all to the journalists.
He gave it to them in Hong Kong,
and he did not bring any secret documents with him to Russia.
Maybe this is to placate the Obama administration
so they don't send a drone his way.
I don't know, but it does sort of up the ante
as far as making journalists into the real threat here
because now they're the ones that have all the information.
They're the ones deciding what to release
and what not to release,
so it's a bit of a game-changer
as far as how this is all playing out.
This story, ever since the whole WikiLeaks thing began,
we have been following it.
We have been keeping all kinds of updates,
not just us, but a lot of different programs here on WBAI
because this is exactly the kind of content
that we've been intrigued by over the years.
You can be a part of that, 516-620-3602.
Bernie, I know you have something to add to this.
The analogy of lifting up a rock
to see what worms and bugs are underneath
comes to mind when a whistleblower
such as Ed Snowden releases troves of classified documents
that we, the people of the United States,
would never get a chance to see what our government is doing
were it not for patriots like him.
WBAI is really going out on a limb here,
allowing us to offer these documents.
This is not something any other radio station is going to do.
It's offering these documents to anyone who supports the station.
WBAI also strikes me as being way ahead of the curve
for more than 50 years
as an embracer of the crowdfunding model,
which has only become popular on the Internet recently, crowdfunding.
But this is a perfect example of a community,
the hacker community,
and anyone else who's curious about the world of hacking,
phone stuff and security and surveillance
and all the things we talk about on Off The Hook.
People who want to know about this
and pick up little tidbits that we pick up along the way
and share it and comment on it
are the kind of people that really need to crowdfund this radio station
because it's not going to exist on its own.
We don't play commercials.
We don't even accept corporate funding.
No underwriters.
You can listen to public radio stations, which have corporate underwriters,
but WBAI is not a public radio station.
It's a listener-supported station.
And that's why everyone listening,
if you want the station to stay as it is
without going to some other organization,
it's really critical that you call tonight, 516-620-3602.
Our thank-you gift is a trove of amazing documents
that you're not going to get anywhere else
and you can't find in any single place except this way, 516-620-3602.
I just want to add, Bernie,
this is one of the best ways to get this information anonymously
if you're worried about your provider upstream, anything like that.
If you'd like to get this stuff,
it's not really that we're going out of our way to make this anonymous.
It's that you're supporting a station
and your thank-you gift is a lot of information on this thumb drive.
And as we said, there's a lot of good reporting,
there's a lot of big institutions, corporate media.
This is really getting out there as far as the story goes.
But when you have this information in the hands of journalists
and maybe it's covered in a report,
sometimes people say, well, they have an agenda,
they're an institution, maybe they don't trust a source like that.
The important thing is this information should be in the hands of people,
in the hands of smart people
and widely distributed and evaluated by smart people
that are curious, that are independent,
that maybe have their own perspective
or have some interesting things as a basis
for why this stuff may be controversial
in the sense that maybe there's some inaccuracies.
We need people to go through it.
We need people to process the information that's been released
and start talking about it so that everybody knows.
So when you go trick-or-treating as Edward Snowden,
the people at the door, they get who you are.
If you're sitting around this month at Canadian Thanksgiving,
people are talking about it.
Granny's wondering about her traffic on her apps and on the web.
Or next month for American Thanksgiving,
we can all sit around and have an intelligent discussion
and all basically be reading the same stuff
and be on the same page with the story.
If you go trick-or-treating dressed as Edward Snowden,
do you think people might give you some leaks from their company,
if they're a government worker or something like that?
Maybe that could be a thing, like Halloween has become a thing.
Maybe if you go around with a Snowden mask on,
that means you're basically asking for some information,
some insider information.
Doesn't Snowden already have all the information?
I know he destroyed his copies, he says,
but maybe if you go around as Assange or Glenn Greenwald,
they'd be more likely to give you information.
Yeah, but nobody knows what Glenn Greenwald looks like.
I've seen pictures.
I've seen pictures too, but it's Snowden.
His picture is everywhere.
And Julian Assange too, yes.
I guess that is one way to get more information.
But the thing is, it's got people thinking differently.
And as Kyle was saying,
more eyes on these things is what really makes it an incredibly powerful tool.
There's so much information being released.
We can't all figure it out immediately.
The journalists can't figure it all out immediately.
But somebody, maybe one of you, a listener out there,
will see a document and say, wait a minute,
that's what this is talking about.
This is making reference to this particular program
or this particular bit of technology.
Or maybe they're lying here, and I know why they're lying,
because I have knowledge in this particular field,
and I know that's not possible.
And maybe nobody else has either read that particular document
or read it that closely to know this,
and your eyes could be incredibly valuable
to lend some new insight onto this.
And it's not going to stop.
This story just continues and continues and continues.
And what really we want to get behind is the spin
and the accuracy of what we're really looking at.
And that way, when people try to spin it in different ways,
maybe discredit institutions or writers,
people that are really passionate and working on this stuff,
it is glaringly obvious that they're trying to sweep it kind of under the rug,
make us not be so concerned about it.
And that stuff will look more and more obvious as a tactic
when the vast preponderance of people are aware
and talking about it and concerned,
talking to their people at work, people at home, everywhere,
and really being in action as far as a conversation
with people in government and people everywhere.
That is strength.
So again, we're offering the WikiLeaks and NSA thumb drive package
if you want everything.
Pledge $125 to 516-620-3602.
What you'll get is a thumb drive, maybe two thumb drives,
I'm not sure if they'll fit on one, with all this information on it.
And what that will give you is unending hours of document reading
of the things that have been made public by Edward Snowden
and shared with the world by journalists throughout the entire planet.
But you won't have to track them down on various news sites
and figure out who has what where.
You'll have them all in one place,
and nobody will know when you're reading them and when you're not.
Actually, unless they have really sophisticated spying techniques
aimed at you, they probably won't know that you've plugged
a thumb drive into your computer and are copying files over
to your hard drive or simply looking at them from there.
If you just want the WikiLeaks thumb drive, that's a pledge of $75.
If you just want the NSA thumb drive, that's again a pledge of $75.
But the number to call is 516-620-3602.
We're on for two hours tonight here on Off The Hook,
special fundraising edition, so that we can help keep WBAI on the air.
And those of you who are expecting country music to come back,
it's not coming back tonight, but you can still play a part in this.
Maybe this is something.
There's no reason why people who like country music
don't also like leaked documents and alternative thoughts
and different ideas, different music, all kinds of things.
Stick with us, 516-620-3602.
Bernie first, then Mike.
I just want to say, this NSA scandal thing keeps growing.
Just today, and this is an amusing story,
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, basically the president of Germany
for Americans to find an analogy, she called President Obama today
and demanded immediate clarification on why her cell phone was being listened to
by the U.S. Congress, and she wanted to stop.
So this is great stuff.
It's like, you're listening to my phone calls, President Obama.
But this conversation would not be happening,
not for people who have been involved in the hacker world, such as Ed Snowden,
who we are sharing his leaks here on this station.
We wouldn't be having this conversation.
The whole world is talking about this now,
and you're not going to hear any more about it on any other radio station
or any other radio show than off the hook.
If you want to support learning about this stuff and how it affects you,
and believe me, it does affect you, call 516-620-3602.
You will get a thank-you gift of lots of documents
that you would not find anywhere else or many other radio stations,
and you'd support a station that is brave enough to stand up and talk about this stuff.
Yeah, I mean, I saw that story as well, Bernie,
and it's interesting that Obama said he is not currently spying on Angela Merkel
and will not spy on Angela Merkel.
He neglected the past tense in that sentence,
which, you know, there's only three tenses in English.
He forgot one of them.
I wonder if that's on purpose or not.
But, you know, more fundamentally, I don't really care about Angela Merkel's privacy.
If governments want to spy on each other, that's fine with me.
What really worries me here is that the governments are spying on normal people like us,
and so there was a very short press release that the White House put out,
and the last sentence of the press release,
which was maybe only five sentences long in total,
that Obama and Merkel discussed ways that the NSA
and the German intelligence services can cooperate more fully in the future,
and that is what worries me, folks.
That is what worries me.
I don't, you know, I wish the NSA would spend its time spying on Angela Merkel
so they would stop spying on the rest of us.
That, you know, I don't know what's going on.
The thing is spying is addictive.
Once you start spying on one entity, you want to spy on more.
I just want to keep getting more and more information.
I don't know from experience, but I imagine that's how it is.
It's like some kind of a drug that they're on.
This story that I just saw a little while ago,
the National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists
from personal email and instant messaging accounts around the world.
They're in AIM, for God's sake.
Many of them belonging to Americans.
That's according to senior intelligence officials
and top-secret documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
which has not been disclosed before, intercepts email address books and buddy lists.
Buddy lists, yes.
Not BAI buddy lists, but AIM buddy lists, things like that.
They get that from instant messaging services as they move across global data links.
Now, online services often transmit those contacts when the user logs on,
composes a message, or synchronizes a computer or mobile device
with information stored on a remote server.
So the more smartphone devices you have that sync into your computer,
the more data is being transferred to that device,
and they're right there intercepting it all.
You wouldn't think, just signing on to AIM,
that anything other than your messages might be open to scrutiny.
But no, your entire buddy list, they'll get that as well.
And through email, they'll get your contact list.
They'll get all sorts of things.
Your history, your browsing history, they can get it all.
And they want it all, that's for sure.
Now, rather than targeting individual users,
the NSA is gathering contact lists in large numbers
that amount to a sizable fraction of the world's email and instant messaging accounts.
Now, analysis of that data enables the agency to search for hidden connections
and to map relationships within a much smaller universe of foreign intelligence targets.
During a single day last year, get ready for this,
the NSA's Special Source Operations Branch collected 444,743 email address books from Yahoo.
That's in one day.
Half a million email address books from Yahoo.
105,068 from Hotmail.
82,857 from Facebook.
33,697 from Gmail.
And 22,881 from unspecified other providers.
That's according to an internal NSA PowerPoint presentation
that you can now pledge for and analyze yourself.
Those figures described as a typical daily intake in a document
correspond to a rate of more than 250 million a year.
How long before they get every email address?
Now, these numbers are interesting.
Half a million from Yahoo.
I'm not really sure why they have such a high number.
Maybe it's just a lot easier to get in there.
But only 33,000 from Gmail.
We might be tempted to say, yeah, Gmail is doing pretty good, only 33,000.
33,000 in one day, that's not insignificant.
It's just incredible that people are doing, that companies are doing so much more than that.
But, wow, that's a lot.
Mike?
I mean, I'll tell you why Yahoo is so easy to get is because by default,
if you go to Yahoo.com and you click on the mail thing,
your connection between your computer and Yahoo's computers will not be encrypted.
I think you can do it if you're smart about it and you click the right button.
But so anyone who is a large, powerful entity that can spy on the entire Internet backbone,
which is not most people, but it's a very good description of the NSA,
can just read everything that goes between your computer and Yahoo's.
The thing about this is that you don't have to be overseas.
It just might happen one day that your computer decides to talk to Yahoo's
or Google's European data center because whatever, things happen,
and then the NSA has your data.
And they love this kind of address book data.
They like it more than the actual contents of your communications
because it can be analyzed automatically.
For the government to know what you're saying, they actually have to have some people read it,
and they have a lot of people, but they only have finitely many.
But they can just slurp up all the address books, know who everyone everywhere is talking to,
and that is what they aim to do, and that is what this document shows they're doing.
And that's how they find more usernames, more e-mail addresses,
because we lead them to these e-mail addresses, to these IDs.
And, yeah, I agree.
It's a lot more interesting to somebody spying to see who you talk to
than to see all the details of every single trivial conversation you have.
That's kind of dull and boring, and it will drive you crazy after a while,
but basically drawing one of those maps that connects people to other people
and you see who is conspiring with whom, that is where the real value lies.
That is what they are doing.
That's what they're trying to find out.
Well, I'm interested, though, what you were saying about Yahoo and it's not encrypted.
Okay, that makes sense.
It's very easy.
Gmail is encrypted as far as I know.
They have HTTPS instead of most.
Yeah, most of the time.
Okay, but now 33,000 e-mail addresses a day tells me that something else is going on then.
Have they broken the encryption?
Is Gmail just handing them over?
I don't know.
Those are possibilities.
I believe sometimes the case that Gmail is unencrypted if you do something,
if you have an old computer or if you have a new computer or the phase of the moon is wrong.
I think it is possible to access Gmail unencrypted.
But as we've said so many times on this program before,
these companies are not going to go to bat for you.
Gmail is sort of interested in helping you avoid criminals of the small time variety,
but they are not interested in helping you keep your secrets safe from the NSA.
Yahoo is totally uninterested.
And all these corporate providers, Yahoo and Gmail, a lot of the data the NSA gets is from them
because those are the companies that have so much data.
But none of these corporate providers have your best interests at heart.
Absolutely not.
And this sentence from the Washington Post article that I've been quoting from,
taken together, this data would enable the NSA, if permitted, to draw detailed maps of a person's life,
as told by personal, professional, political, and religious connections.
The picture can also be misleading, creating false associations with ex-spouses
or people with whom an account holder has had no contact in many years.
So it's not even accurate, but it is pretty all-encompassing.
We can't stop it.
I mean, we can't stop it in this room.
We can talk about it, and hopefully people will stop it.
In the next hour, we'll be talking to people who are trying to stop it.
But what you can do is become aware of it and become part of the overseers.
That's what we're becoming, the overseers of the NSA, looking at what it is they're doing
and saying, this is not right.
This is an abuse of our privacy.
And by calling 516-620-3602 and pledging either $75 or $125,
you can get these NSA documents and see for yourself just what it is they're up to.
And where else can you do that?
516-620-3602. Kyle?
Well, and the real crux of this is attitudes need to change.
I mean, we want you to have this information.
We want you to be a part of the conversation.
And this has been covered on a lot of shows on WBAI and a lot of media outlets
in the U.S. and around the world.
And really, if you've got the information, if you know the story,
if you're up on kind of the details of it and you've kind of perused,
looked at some of the files yourselves, maybe you're a teacher,
maybe you're in a corporation that handles some of this data,
you can have a really intelligent conversation with people around you
and start to be a part of the conversation that's going to change the attitudes,
the attitudes of users, the attitudes of people at these companies
so that they don't feel like they're at the mercy of the government
or that they must do everything the government requests because they're the government
or whatever the rationale is.
It needs to be that people value privacy on the Internet,
just like you would expect privacy in, I don't know, a restroom, in a locker room,
in your own home, in your medical histories.
All of those things really, they should transfer to the Internet.
The Internet, yes, it's a public tool.
There's a lot of it that is open and out there unencrypted or otherwise,
but it is not there to just be exploited and then saved in perpetuity
for administrations to come in and change and use this stuff in a myriad of ways.
They can't really just force these companies to hand over this stuff
or use their power with access to providers to create tools
because that's what they're doing.
They're creating tools so that they can look at different, quote, hot spots.
We saw some of that in the slides.
But they can point to these networks of people that are communicating
and start watching you with more scrutiny.
And that could then affect you.
That could translate to actual surveillance like in your community
or other modes that are not online.
And again, I just want to reiterate, the attitude's got to change.
And having this information and listening and supporting the station
and allowing this conversation to continue is what empowers those attitudes to shift.
Hey, here's something a little fun.
If you go to givethenumeral2wbai.org
and you click on the Science and Technology category, which is where we fit in,
you can see not only these great NSA and WikiLeaks premiums that we've been talking about,
but maybe you're not interested in those.
Maybe you don't want a USB thumb drive.
Maybe you don't like the USB plugs because you never know if they go in upside down or right side up or whatever.
Maybe they're aggravating.
We still got a very small amount of the T-shirts that we offered recently.
We have the Off the Hook T-shirt designed by myself
and available in very small numbers for a pledge of $50.
Or we've got the Historic Hacker T-shirt,
which is a black-on-white T-shirt with lots of news articles and things
about things that were happening in hacker history in 1997 when this shirt came out.
So a 16-year-old shirt, still brand new condition,
new old stock discovered in the back of our warehouse,
and you could have that for a pledge of $50.
And there are very few of these left.
They might not last as long as we're on the air tonight.
How much are those again?
They are for a pledge of $50.
You can get either T-shirt, either the Historic Hacker T-shirt or the Off the Hook T-shirt.
These have both been out of print for a very long time.
They won't be made again, and this is your last chance to get hold of them.
I'm actually surprised there are some of those left,
because I know we had those a few weeks ago,
and we have a very finite number, so there must only be a handful left.
I'll tell you a secret.
The shirt I designed myself, even I didn't have one anymore,
so I pledged again to get another one of these while they last.
So you put in all the work to make the shirt,
and then you pledged to get the shirt.
That's the kind of dedication.
I didn't pledge to get the shirt.
I pledged to get this radio station.
The shirt is a nice little bonus.
All right.
516-620-3602.
I want to thank the people who are calling in now.
We're getting a good response, which is awesome.
And I want to thank all the people who called in two weeks ago.
We had a great response two weeks ago.
The thing is, this radio station will remain as long as people believe in it.
It's kind of like, I guess, Peter Pan or something like that.
There must be a parallel there somewhere.
As long as you believe, we can do these things.
But when people stop believing, then it goes away.
That is true.
It's just economics.
You can't pay the bills.
They're not going to pay themselves.
Now, what we've done, we've taken all kinds of action, a lot of it unpleasant.
A lot of people got laid off.
We had to move out of our Wall Street offices,
which were not luxurious by any means, but they were way too expensive.
We're looking at the future.
We're looking at a new location in Brooklyn.
In fact, we walked by the building a couple of days ago when we went out to see NYC Resistor.
We saw the building that BAI is looking at, again, very close to the Barclays Center,
something that is impossible.
But, hey, people are working on it.
And that could be the future, having BAI right there, centrally located,
Main Street, Brooklyn, practically.
It all depends on if we have listener support,
if we have programmers who will continue to do good radio,
516-620-3602, join the family and become a part of that.
Bernie, did you have anything?
Yeah, I just wanted to reiterate that this station is not going to stay on the air as you know it
unless, in the next couple, three weeks, enough money is raised to keep it solvent.
I know you've heard lots of, everybody listening has heard probably different horror stories
and like, well, if you don't pledge, we're going to go off the air.
The radio station has already released a request for proposals from other nonprofit organizations
to lease WBAI, and that is a fact, to lease it out to another entity.
And it seems doubtful to me that all the shows that you're listening to on this station are going to stay,
or even if any of them are going to stay, if that happens.
So that's why it's really important for people to support this station right now, not at the next fundraiser.
It may be too late.
Please call 516-620-3602.
Our thank you gift to you is a pile of classified documents from the NSA or Wikileaks,
your choice, or both if you want.
But it's important that you support this station.
The main thing is crowdfunding of WBAI is the only thing that's going to keep it on the air as you know it.
516-620-3602.
And it was really interesting going down and seeing this building in Brooklyn by the Barclays Center,
and I kicked the wall.
You kicked the wall?
Well, like kicking the tires.
I gave it a good kick.
It's a solid building.
Did you expect it to tip over?
No, I was just checking.
I wanted to make sure, you know.
You got to kick the tires, so to speak.
And that's exciting.
And the interesting thing is that the station is sensitive.
We are very sensitive to what is going on, to the flow of contributions.
The support needs to be in real time, needs to be an active process.
That's why we appeal this way.
We don't have long-term contracts.
And that's why we get to say this stuff.
That's why we get to give these kinds of premiums out.
We get to talk about the issues.
We can talk about anything we want.
We don't have contracts that are being kind of waved in front of us that say,
oh, you know, we're going to pull this sponsorship.
Nor do we have contracts that are like years long that, you know,
programming changes, they'll try anything that works because, you know,
the funding is just always going to be there because of some car company,
as Rob was talking about earlier.
And that's the beauty of this.
We are in flux.
Yes, we're in flux right now.
Things could go one way or the other.
But that is the sensitivity of the station.
And you get to be a part of that by calling 516-620-3602.
Any amount.
Please call and contribute.
All right.
We are about to move into our second hour.
So that means we're going to take a very quick break.
And we'll be back with a couple of special guests.
But that doesn't mean you have to not be a part of the radio station.
You can still call 516-620-3602.
In fact, that might be a good time to call because you won't be missing any of the program.
And we also have a couple of special announcements.
There's going to be a report to the listener tomorrow night,
which is very important for people who are concerned about the future of the radio station.
What Bernie was talking about as far as leasing the station,
that's something that is definitely a possibility.
And what that means is that the station is looking into
and Pacifica is looking into all possibilities.
If we can't make ends meet, what do we do?
How do we keep the license?
Instead of selling the station for however many tens of millions of dollars
you could get for that kind of a license in New York City,
holding on to it one way or another,
a worst-case scenario perhaps in many people's eyes,
or maybe the only way to save the frequency from turning into country 99.5 or whatever.
There's all kinds of formats that this place could become.
But right now, we're WBAI New York, listener-supported radio.
And we will continue to be that as long as people continue to call 516-620-3602.
This is Off The Hook.
If you're tuning in for The Personal Computer Show, they will be back next week.
But we're on for another hour after these announcements.
This is Summer Reese, Interim Executive Director
and Chair of the Board of Pacifica Foundation Radio.
I will be discussing the future of WBAI live,
Thursday, October 24, 2013 at 6 p.m., following the Tom Hartman Show.
Please tune in to learn more about the options the Board of Directors may be considering
and the plans to ensure this important radio station's future
and how you can be a part of that.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Honorable Rudolph Giuliani.
Welcome to the capital of the world.
WBAI invites its listeners and staff to a special election week showing
of the award-winning film, Giuliani Time.
And we will require them to work in exchange for shelter.
It's a full frontal assault on the civic deification of Rudolph Giuliani,
says the New York Times.
But I took a city of dependency and made it into a city of workers.
That's on Tuesday, October 29, at Theater 80 on St. Mark's Place
near First Avenue in the East Village.
Doors open at 6 p.m.
Following the film, panelists, including Green Party mayoral candidate
Tony Gronowitz and the tax Wall Street Party candidate Randy Credico,
will be discussing the Giuliani-Bloomberg legacy and the future of New York City.
All proceeds go to benefit WBAI.
So please call 516-620-3602 and pledge just $25,
and that will be your ticket to this great film showing and panel to benefit WBAI.
On Thursday, November 14, Pete Seeger will be performing a WBAI fundraiser
at the Cutting Room on East 32nd Street.
Joining Pete Seeger, the multi-talented musician David Amram,
The Last Internationale, and me, T. Oaks and Ghost Horse,
host of First Voices Indigenous Radio here on WBAI.
And I know your caring about WBAI will ensure that it will be here for another 53 years.
Yes, I am challenging you to walk your talk at this once-in-a-lifetime musical
lineup of Pete Seeger, David Amram, The Last Internationale,
myself, and a surprise guest or two.
Tickets are available online at thecuttingroomnyc.com
or call the Cutting Room at 212-691-1900
and tell them WBAI sent you.
Join us in supporting you and WBAI.
And you are listening to WBAI New York,
where it's a little bit after 8 o'clock.
We're in the second hour of Off the Hook,
and we'll be speaking with a couple of people we're trying to reach, actually,
on the phone right now as we speak.
But while we do that, while we try to reach these people,
I'd like you to hear something that is circulating throughout the Internet right now
concerning the mass surveillance, what we are fighting against,
what this is all about.
Listen to this, and we'll be back in just a moment.
Revelations that have emerged in the past few months
from whistleblower Edward Snowden and others
have painted a disturbing picture of widespread,
suspicionless surveillance of American citizens.
We got a wake-up call just recently.
NSA snooping includes the interception and collection
of call detail records and Internet traffic,
including audio, video, photographs, documents, chat logs, and emails.
Every American is at risk for getting caught up in the NSA dragnet.
Including average citizens not suspected of a crime.
We have also learned of the large-scale collaboration with telecom giants,
Internet companies, and service providers.
Some concerned email providers have chosen to shut their doors
rather than cave to government subpoenas to hand over their users' data.
We've been misled.
Does the NSA collect any type of data at all
on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?
No, sir.
We've seen this story before.
We've had too much secrecy in this country.
It has corrupted the government.
And we decided it was wrong.
It was wrong then, and it's wrong now.
This is a fearful situation, the American people.
One of the basic rights is the right to privacy.
Unrestrained, illegal, secret intimidation and harassment
of the essential ability of Americans to participate freely
in American political life shall never happen again.
Nixon's crimes predated widespread Internet use by decades.
The tools for surveillance have never been more powerful,
and the threat to our civil liberties has never been greater.
Edward Snowden was not the first.
I represent six NSA whistleblowers who are being charged with espionage
for telling the truth.
We truly, as a nation, are at a crossroads.
I became aware that was sweeping up everybody's data indiscriminately.
What I was eyewitness to was the subversion of the Constitution.
And that was when the hair on the back of my neck went up.
And so I became a whistleblower.
This is our information.
This is our information.
This is our information.
This is our information.
It is the digital archive of our lives.
Texts of our chats with our families.
It's the backbone of everything that we care for,
our humanitarian causes and things that we fight for.
It is everything you use the Internet for.
History tells us we need to watch the watchers.
And in a surveillance state, democracy itself is dead.
It makes a mockery of our system of government,
which is based on the notion of independent branches of government,
including a fourth estate, the press.
A free society should not have secret laws.
It doesn't have to present this false tradeoff between security or privacy.
We need to bring NSA activity from the shadows into the light of day.
We need to end mass, suspicionless surveillance.
And that was from a public service announcement featuring all kinds of luminaries,
including Daniel...
I put 100,000...
I'm sorry.
Our CD player malfunctioned.
Including such luminaries as Daniel Ellsberg, Phil Donahue,
Representative John Conyers, Jr., David Siegel, Maggie Gyllenhaal,
Oliver Stone, John Kuzak, Will Wheaton,
Mark Ruffin, and many others.
And it's all about awareness.
It's all about getting the word out
and letting people know what's going on.
It's about what's happening this weekend.
All kinds of interesting things.
We're still trying to reach a couple of people,
but let me continue doing that while I'm here.
I'm going to stop sharing my screen.
I'm going to stop sharing my screen.
I'm going to stop sharing my screen.
I'm going to stop sharing my screen.
I'm going to stop sharing my screen.
I'm going to stop sharing my screen.
Let me continue doing that while you guys chat about this a bit.
So I just saw this video today,
and it's really about cohesion,
bringing people together and having a discussion
about what's important, like drawing all this together
and really having that dialogue
and getting some mass behind the movement and the discussion
and really propelling it into where it's got to go
as far as what I was saying a little bit earlier
as far as attitudes and really then affecting policy,
affecting how these organizations,
how governments behave,
and that way we can kind of take back our right to privacy
in the digital realm just as we have in other realms.
Yeah, and where can people find this video
if they want to check it out for themselves or share it around?
It's called stopwatching.us,
and I think the slogan is stop watching us.
Indeed, and that's also a website
we'll be talking more about in just a few moments.
But for now, if you call 516-620-3602,
you can get hold of not only the Wikileaks USB sticks,
the NSA USB stick,
you can get either of those for a pledge of $75,
or you can get some rare out-of-print T-shirts
for a pledge of $50,
or the off-the-hook T-shirt,
and all of those you can get if you call 516-620-3602
or if you go to givethenumeral2wbai.org
and click on the science and technology category
to find us and our premiums.
And this is the kind of stuff we talk about.
It's off the hook.
We talk about telephony, surveillance, computers, privacy,
all the kinds of modern things
that are popping up in your life,
the things that you depend on,
the things you use all the time,
that we trust with information.
These things are becoming so normalized.
Our families are contacting us.
We're using all these different mediums,
and we want to know how it works.
We want to know the infrastructure behind it,
what's really at risk,
where are the vulnerabilities,
how do these systems work,
so that people know that there are multiple sides to it.
It's not as pretty and polished
as a lot of these software and interfaces appear.
There's serious, I don't know,
design and engineering behind it that has its limitations
and that opens up other possibilities.
And we've been talking about this now for 25 years
on this program and on this station for over twice that,
and you're the only thing that can keep us going.
516-620-3602 or give the numeral to wbai.org.
Now, if you're interested in what we just played
as far as the various voices that were heard
and what they're talking about,
you want to take action, more action,
in addition to pledging to the radio station
and listening to the radio station
and spreading the word yourself,
visit the website rally.stopwatching.us,
which is an awesome site.
Basically, you can see the PSA there as well.
You can see the film short
as far as all these voices speaking out against this.
The rally takes place this Saturday, October 26,
in Washington, D.C., beginning at noon.
We'll have more information on that in just a moment,
but joining us right now on the phone
is the guy who put this together, Brian Knappenberger.
Brian, are you there?
Yep, I'm here.
Okay, and also joining us is EFF's activism director,
Rainey Reitman.
Am I pronouncing that correctly?
That's right, it's Rainey Reitman.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you for doing what you do.
Brian, let me start with you.
Tell us something about how this got put together.
Well, it started for me.
I was at the Personal Democracy Forum, you know,
a few months ago when the Snowden revelations kind of hit,
and a group of people who were concerned about it,
which actually may be from Supreme Press
and people from EFF,
and others kind of had a dinner and said,
well, what are they going to do about it?
And I sort of was at the dinner watching,
you know, the Stop Watching Us Coalition
basically start to materialize.
And so I was just kind of part of it the whole time,
contributing where I could, and then I just realized,
you know, I'm a filmmaker.
I've made films about, you know, hackers and the hacker community,
this kind of territory of information,
and had some of the same concerns about surveillance,
so I just kind of offered those skills where I could,
and Rainey was a huge early kind of force in this,
so we just started discussing what can we do,
and kind of went from there.
Rainey, how about your involvement in this project,
in the rally on Saturday?
Well, I would say with this project,
it was very much a support role for Brian Knappenberger.
I mean, he's an amazing filmmaker,
and so, you know, my role was very much,
what do I need to give him as far as resources go
so that this can be a huge success?
And we wanted to make it possible,
to make this into the mainstream issue
that it's certainly becoming,
where it's not just a handful of security professionals
who are deeply concerned about this.
It's not just hackers and people just in San Francisco.
It's something that everybody in the United States,
and frankly, everybody worldwide,
is deeply concerned about,
and Brian manages to use film and interviews
to make that possible, which is truly extraordinary.
He was a dream to work with.
As far as the rally goes,
in addition to helping produce this video,
and EFF was very happy to produce the video,
we also have been instrumental in throwing
not only a rally on Saturday,
which everyone who's listening to you should come to,
but also a lobby day,
which we paired up with public knowledge,
and that's going to be on Friday.
We have over 100 individuals
who are going to meet with their members of Congress
to talk to them directly about the problems
with mass unconstitutional surveillance by the NSA.
Brian, let me ask you,
as far as reaching out to all these people,
including Daniel Ellsberg and Oliver Stone,
all these people that have gone on film
to say this is wrong, we're concerned about this,
you should be, too.
Was that very difficult?
Yeah, I mean, we should mention
we have a kind of third partner here,
which is a guy named Logan Price,
who did another video, the Bradley Manning video.
I don't know if you remember that.
I am Bradley Manning.
And he helped us with some of that, too.
One, I think, key moment was the EFF was having
what they call the Pioneer Awards in San Francisco,
and I started looking at who was, you know,
going to attend the Pioneer Awards,
and it was a lot of the kind of whistleblowers.
It was Thomas Drake, it was Kurt Weavey,
it was Mark Klein, and Daniel Ellsberg.
So I sort of was just kind of like,
that's when, you know, my eyes popped open,
and Rainey, I think, too, and we said,
this is kind of the soul of the piece,
maybe even more than the celebrity impulse.
And so we just kind of rushed
to get those people on camera as soon as we could.
Once you got some of the individuals for the video,
were you surprised at some of the reactions
with the organizations that got on board with you?
Not at all. Rainey, what do you...
It was really amazing to me
how many different organizations are listed here,
and I was just wondering,
have you been a bit surprised, or is it...
Well, I have been, personally.
I'd love to hear what Rainey says,
but I've just been amazed.
I mean, as a filmmaker, you know,
I come from a kind of, you know,
investigative reporter kind of perspective,
and not as much of a kind of activist perspective.
So I, to answer your question, I would say yes,
I was surprised at how many,
and how broad kind of a number of people
and organizations that got on board with this early.
But I give a lot of credit for that to Rainey and Josh
and those early kind of people
that were pushing this forward.
Rainey, I believe you're in a taxi right now in Chicago.
Is that correct?
Yeah, I think she might be paying the fare.
Oh, she's giving...
Well, it's, yeah, it's basically,
you guys are both speaking to us on cell phones,
so it's, basically, we're all doing what we can
as far as getting the word out.
And you're out there in California,
and what Kyle was mentioning just now
about the various organizations that were involved,
of course, Electronic Frontier Foundation
at the forefront of this,
but also I'm seeing Mozilla,
I'm seeing Ben and Jerry's,
I'm seeing Rackspace and Reddit,
and, of course, the ACLU,
so many different organizations,
and, of course, so many people as well.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
I mean, I think the Atlantic called it,
I probably get this wrong,
but it's like one of the most diverse coalitions,
you know, in history or something.
They used some really...
I said something like that.
It really, truly is,
and I'm amazed because, I mean,
it sort of started at a kind of a dinner,
and so people...
I think the cause resonated so deeply
with so many people,
it just kind of struck a nerve.
Lots of people decided they wanted to be a part of it,
and they liked the approach, I think,
that they struck early on,
and you're right, it's really notable
if you go to the stopwatching.us website.
Yeah.
Hey, it's Rainey.
So I actually recruited a lot of the groups
that joined the coalition,
and if anything,
I was not surprised by the uptake this got.
When it comes to something like NSA surveillance,
it's actually affecting a whole swath of people,
and especially political organizers,
or even people who don't necessarily
consider themselves political organizers
but realize that they haven't done anything wrong,
and, I mean, this is something
that's affecting the communications of everyone.
It's affecting the communications of my mother.
It's affecting the communications
of all sorts of people,
so I've actually been very heartened
by how many people have joined forces on this,
and I think one of the most exciting things
is the great left-right coalition we managed to build.
That is so, so true,
and Brian, I'm just so impressed
with the way it was put together,
and it was incredibly compelling
to see the emotion, as you said,
and how much people really cared
and appealed to the viewer,
and I just, I was,
I love the seriousness that was conveyed,
and that this project is sort of communicating,
and it seems like it just,
it appeared when I started seeing
some of the listings of the organizations,
I was like, wow, that's it.
I mean, that is what people can get around.
Yeah, yeah, I think in some ways,
I felt like, you know,
with that group,
we're working with so many talented people,
and Manny is so good,
and then we have so many people
that are so good with policy and everything,
and I sort of felt like, well, you know,
what I can bring is that, you know,
that emotional aspect, for lack of a better
kind of way of putting it,
you know, this is an emotional issue.
This is the way you communicate.
This affects every part of your life
and everything you care about,
so I guess my mission was kind of set out
to try to pack a punch, you know, with it
that went beyond the kind of policy stuff.
And Rainey, I just want to know,
actually, that noise was Rainey disconnecting.
I'm going to try to get her back,
so you guys just continue along here.
I don't know if you know, Brian,
but if you could tell us a little more
about this rally that people should go to
this Saturday.
I have to say, when I first heard about this,
I was like, this isn't going to work.
There's a dozen rallies a day in Washington,
and this one's on a Saturday
when no one's going to be paying attention,
but then I kept hearing about it,
and more and more people were telling me about it,
and more and more people were telling me
they were going to go.
I know you have buses organized
for people who are here in New York
who want to go to Washington this weekend.
So I think this is going to be a really big event,
and I think it really has the potential
to make something of a difference.
I don't know if you can tell us
a little more about it.
Yeah, actually, you know,
I admit I don't know as much about it.
Certainly, Rainey has been just like an engine on that,
just a huge force on that.
So she'd be great at talking about that.
I do know they have the lobby march
and lots of incredible speakers.
I think that's all you can sort of see on the website.
People like Thomas Drake will be speaking.
Other people like Dan Choi,
you know, the activist and Iraq War veteran,
people like that from a kind of broad range
sort of political spectrum
that are going to get up and talk.
So, yeah, Rainey knows more
of the specifics on that than I do.
But, again, I think it's really...
I think we have Rainey back.
Yes, we do.
So we were just talking a bit about this rally on Saturday,
and the website is rally.stopwatching.us,
and I'm on it, and I'm just looking at this
really lengthy and broad list of speakers
that you've arranged.
But maybe you can tell us a little more about it.
Sure.
So the big news today
is that we just got Representative Amash
signed on as a speaker,
and so he's going to be there
actually accepting the petitions
from the 570,000-plus individuals
who have signed in opposition to mass surveillance.
We're going to be delivering these petitions to him.
And, in addition, we have all sorts of different folks.
We have everyone from, like, LGBT advocates...
I think we're losing you a little bit, Rainey.
Are you in a tunnel or something?
Okay.
I don't know what's up with that connection, but...
We wanted to have landlines, but it's just...
We've been thwarted at every step
with connecting with landlines.
It's harder to get one of those in a cab.
It is hard to get that in a cab, and, yeah.
But I think she's getting back into range now.
Rainey, are you back?
Yes, I am.
I just walked into my hotel room, so I am here.
Okay, great.
So, just if you could repeat
the last two sentences you were saying.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, I was just saying
that we have a whole variety of figures
from sort of whole different walks of life,
and that what we really prioritized was diversity,
so, like, it's not just traditional civil liberties advocates
that have worked in this space for years.
It's all sorts of different folks
from different types of organizations.
I'm particularly excited
because Bruce Schneier is going to be speaking,
and I'm a very big fan of his.
I'm also going to be speaking,
and we'll have Thomas Drake,
who's an NSA whistleblower,
and he's going to be speaking
about sort of his experiences as an NSA whistleblower,
so that will be really, really exciting.
It starts at noon.
It's at 3 a.m.
Oh, boy.
Oh, boy.
They're trying to block this information now.
As soon as you started giving information
about where and when,
that's when it started to be hard to hear you.
You want to try again?
Wow.
Okay.
We just lost her again.
We're going to try to get that back.
Brian, do you have that information?
Not nearly at that level.
She was just...
While we try to get her back,
perhaps you could tell us something
about your other projects,
including the We Are Legion film
and the project that you're currently involved in,
involving Aaron Schwartz.
Sure.
Yeah, We Are Legion,
the story of the hacktivists,
basically is a kind of exploration of anonymous,
activist collective anonymous,
and where they came from,
kind of historical perspective,
and following them through the year,
the summer of lulls, basically,
although I certainly didn't know
kind of a year of unprecedented hacktivist activity
when I started.
You know, I became aware of them
around this sort of Scientology period,
when they started protesting church Scientology,
which was a pretty dramatic protest in Los Angeles,
where I live.
But I started making the film
when they attacked MasterCard news and PayPal,
when those companies cut off financial services
to WikiLeaks.
It seemed to me that they were evolving
and some interesting things were happening.
So that's when actually I started making the film about them.
So that film came out last year.
You can still get it on iTunes or on our website
or any of the various pirated options.
Do you encourage people to pirate it?
Yeah, I don't, we don't, yeah.
It was one of the,
I think it was one of the most pirated films of the year,
last year or something.
Congratulations.
Thank you.
The important thing is getting the information out there, absolutely.
And how about the Aaron Schwartz film?
I believe you crowdfunded that?
Yeah, so basically that's what I'm really in the middle of now.
I've basically taken the last couple of weeks
to kind of focus on this PSA about the NSA surveillance.
But really we're just, we're in the thick of that now.
We're, I was at a conference
talking about hackers and activism in New York
about a week after Aaron took his own life.
And I was with a lot of people that knew him.
And so I didn't really film it,
more because that's kind of what I do,
with not really thinking I was making a film.
And then I realized that it,
I just felt it was a very, very important story.
I think it's a really important story.
And I just kept going deeper and deeper.
And then we decided to do a Kickstarter,
which was really successful.
And so now we're basically moving into editing
and going through all the material
and making some progress on it.
Fantastic, yeah.
And it's so true,
with the amount of things going on in this realm,
it seems like there's multiple stories to tell.
And it doesn't shock me that that was the case,
taking a little bit of break for this.
But it's just amazing work.
And I really wanted to acknowledge you
for just how compelling this one is
and what it's going to support as far as this rally
and getting a lot of these organizations together
and talking and have something they can get around
and focus that energy towards.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, thank you very much, yeah.
I mean, I really hope that we can make an impact
and kind of move this forward a little bit.
Okay, we have gotten Rainey back.
She's standing on a balcony,
leaning over the edge so that she gets the best reception.
Oh, no.
Did we have a question for Rainey we were asking
about the demonstration?
I want to say I'm really impressed, Rainey,
with the diversity of the coalition.
We just lost her again.
I don't know why she had that kind of reception there.
I'm just going to say this,
and then she probably has heard it from other people already.
So I'm really impressed with the diversity of the coalition
that's been put together.
I mean, I'm on the website of this representative,
Justin Amash, who is really taking the lead
on the surveillance issue,
but I disagree with him on a lot of other issues.
If you go to his website,
the first post is him voting to reduce the difficulty
of getting mining permits to make it easier,
I would argue, to destroy the environment.
But on this issue, he's great.
And what's great about this rally is that people
from all different parts of the political spectrum
are coming together to focus on opposing
the sort of surveillance state that has been building.
And I think it's great to work together on issues like this
where we can agree because there are so many people
from across the spectrum who disagree.
Everyone with power who's trying to hold on to that power
is someone we disagree with on this issue.
So where we can agree, where we can find 100 organizations
and 30 individuals and this, that, and the other
who agree on this very, very important issue,
I think it's amazing that this coalition
has been put together.
I totally concur with that.
I mean, you know, lots of these sort of political movements
have tossed out the word partisan, partisanship,
or they're nonpartisan, but this really is.
I mean, it's people from all over the political spectrum
and from all different kind of walks of life
who are really concerned about those kinds of issues.
Yeah, and I'm just looking at the list of individuals
that are lined up for this,
and there are some really great names on here.
Tim Berners-Lee, who basically invented the World Wide Web,
Danny Ellsberg, Glenn Greenwald,
Cheney Jardin from Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow as well,
Will Wheaton from Star Trek is there, Anil Dash.
All these people are coming.
Yeah.
No, not all these people are coming.
These are the supporters.
Oh, I see.
These are supporters who have got a hand in making this happen.
Brigitte Schansdottir, another friend of ours,
Eben Moglen, Mark Ruffalo, Ai Weiwei,
the Chinese dissident and artist,
and so many more people like this
who feel it's important for something like this to happen
and who have signed on to help make it happen.
Okay, we have Rainey back before a cloud passes over the transmitter.
I thought we'd want to get her in on this conversation.
Can you tell us something about when people show up at noon in Washington, D.C.?
First of all, where in Washington, D.C.?
We're going to be meeting at Columbus Circle.
It's right next to Union Station.
Okay, and from there, what happens?
For there, we're going to have a pre-rally.
It's about 30 minutes long.
We're going to have speakers and some music,
and we're going to have everybody get organized.
One of the things that we have at this rally,
which I'm extremely excited about,
is artwork by the rather famous rally artist David Solnit,
who has been spending the last few weeks
designing very large pieces of artwork,
including a 50-foot-long version of the First Amendment
and a 50-foot-long version of the Fourth Amendment.
And so we're going to organize all this artwork
and get volunteers to hold it up,
and then we're going to march to the Capitol reflecting pool
where the main rally is going to take place
starting at about 1230, 1245.
So that's the main role of the pre-rally.
Uh-oh.
The main role of...
Communications are so difficult sometimes.
I wish I could help there.
She knows the details.
Yeah, that's why I wanted to...
There she goes again.
I wanted to get it done nice and quickly.
The thing is, she's in a place with a landline,
but she can't find an instrument that works
or that has a phone number on it or something like that.
We're going to try one more time.
Guys, please continue.
Also, let me give out the pledge number, 516-620-3602.
And pretty much on topic
with what we've been talking about tonight,
you can be a part of this by obtaining yourself
the NSA documents, the leaked NSA documents
that have been made public so far.
We are offering those on a thumb drive
for a pledge of $75 to 516-620-3602.
We've had a good response so far,
and we need to continue that good response
until the top of the hour,
which is how long we're on the air for.
You can also get the WikiLeaks thumb drive,
which is material from 2008 onwards,
for a pledge of $75.
Or you can get both the WikiLeaks
and the NSA thumb drives,
the package, for a pledge of $125,
516-620-3602.
You guys, Kyle and Rob and Mike, Bernie,
maybe you can talk about this a little bit more
so we can try one more time to reach Rennie.
Go ahead, Bernie.
Those are some of the coolest pledge drive gifs
I've ever heard.
They are. They're pretty daring.
I do want to say what our guests are doing.
I can't hear either of them, by the way, Emmanuel,
but I get the gist of what they're saying.
What they're trying to accomplish
is the same thing we're trying to accomplish,
and make people more aware
of these outrageous actions of our own government
performing all kinds of warrantless surveillance
on our communications.
And not just the communication content,
but maybe even more importantly to them,
the so-called metadata,
like who's communicating with whom,
when, from where, how often.
That really builds a profile for all of us
in government databases
about what people are doing.
And it's not necessarily something I'm comfortable with.
But as our regular guest, Alex,
who's an attorney, has pointed out,
the only way we're going to be able to change this
is through political pressure.
And the only kind of political pressure that matters
to those in Washington
is mass dissent from this,
mass opposition.
And what our guests are doing tonight
is an effort in that,
in rallying nationwide or even worldwide support
for curtailment of these outrageous actions
by our government,
surveillance actions by our government.
And that's what we're trying to do here at WBAI.
We've always tried to do that sort of thing at WBAI.
But it's especially important
that people try to support WBAI's efforts in that respect tonight,
because the station may not be around much longer if they don't.
So we're asking our listeners,
if you want to support the conduct of political efforts,
and we're not really a political station,
we're not a political show per se,
but we're in favor of mass opposition
to these kinds of outrageous surveillance tactics.
516-620-3602.
Our thank-you gift, besides this show and this station to you,
is a vast repository of classified documents from the NSA
that we're painstakingly collecting
through the courtesy of Edward Snowden
and some news media organizations.
So please, call 516-620-3602.
Support this sort of public effort to oppose these actions.
And we're here to...
I just want to add to what you said, Bernie.
We're here to encourage you to know
and to believe that complacency and apathy isn't okay.
If this stuff goes unchecked, if we just don't care,
if we don't share and tell people in our communities
and our governments about this,
it becomes the norm. It becomes okay.
It's just another day giving away our information.
And we really want people to be outraged.
We want people to know what this means.
What are the ramifications?
These systems are being built, and it is ongoing.
This is an active process,
and you can be a part of that action,
not only with this rally and supporting some of these projects
and maybe creating some of your own media,
but you can support free speech
and support really getting the message out
and really changing the way attitudes are created
in our communities so that people don't just say,
well, I don't have anything to hide,
or they don't just become okay with this kind of behavior
from governments and corporations.
And we have Rainey back for however brief a time we have
before the cell service cuts out.
Rainey, first, let me just say thanks for everything
that you're doing as basically the activism director
over at EFF.
That must be a challenge.
Well, not really challenging as far as getting support
because everybody's just so incensed and angry today,
but there is so much to focus on.
It must be really hard to figure out
where to apply all the efforts.
Yeah, I agree.
I think that often it can feel intimidating.
I mean, we're basically taking on the United States government
and just to figure out, okay, where are the pressure points
where we can really make a difference,
and, you know, how can we, I mean,
we're a relatively small organization, EFF, of 45 people,
which is, you know, big, but it's not big
compared to the U.S. government.
So making sure that we actually effectively use our skills
and the voices of our members to make a difference
is one of the challenges I face kind of every day.
But I've always been just so inspired by the people around me,
people like Brian, people like other coalition members,
people honestly like regular EFF members
who are willing to just do whatever it takes
to succeed in ending mass suspicionless surveillance.
So it's work that I feel very honored to do.
Rainy, I just wanted to acknowledge you while I've got you.
I'm really impressed and thankful for the great footwork you've done
in organizing this stuff and being here with us today
to communicate it to people.
And my question, I just want to know,
with this long list of organizations that are involved,
can people still get involved?
Maybe an organization or people here in New York City,
around the world, can they get involved?
Can they contact you?
If you contact me, we also have buses coming in from New York.
So I would say one thing to do is go to the Stop Watching Us site
and click on the Rally stuff.
In the upper right-hand corner we have a thing called Getting There.
Click on that and you'll find that we have buses of people
coming down from New York.
So that's a great way to get involved.
I need volunteers to help with the artwork on Saturday morning.
So if you can get to the event about an hour early
or even an hour and a half early, show up at 1030,
then you can help us organize some of the artwork
that will be on display.
And above all, please consider becoming an EFF member
because after this weekend, the fight doesn't end.
This is just the beginning.
And we're going to need a lot of support if we want to
really enact significant change in Congress this year.
Absolutely.
And please, go to EFF.org to join with those good folk
and become a part of this and so much more.
And Rainey, I understand also that if people can't make it to the rally,
there are satellite rallies?
That's right.
So we're going to have live streaming of the entire event.
And so if you absolutely can't get there and you should come,
and you can definitely tell all your friends about it,
then go to stopwatching.us and then click on where it says RSVP.
Click something like can't be there in person or be remotely.
And there are going to be viewing parties in cities all over,
honestly, all over the world.
There's going to be live streaming to MoseFest in London.
And we have a whole bunch of different people that are organizing
viewing parties.
And you can definitely watch online, tweet about it, share about it,
get the word out there.
We want to make a huge splash with this event.
All right, Rainey, again, thank you so much.
And we don't want to just arrive in Chicago, go have fun,
and hopefully we'll see you this weekend and talk to you in the future
about how all this went and many more such actions I imagine
will be taking place.
Yes, thank you.
All right.
And that was Rainey Raittman from EFF.
We lose that phone line.
Okay.
We still have Brian Knappenberger with us.
Brian, are you still there?
I'm still here.
Okay.
Your cell phone coverage has remained pretty steady, so that's good.
Yes.
I'm staying still.
Uh-huh.
So have you told us everything about the – I wasn't here for this part –
about the new project, the Aaron Schwartz project?
Yes.
I think sort of with that, we're in the middle of it now.
And just sorting through, I think, is just a very big story.
We're part of his life.
I'm sure your listeners are probably more aware than most about the kind of
details, but certainly his early life, his work with RSS,
Facebook Internet Protocol, Creative Commons, co-founding of Reddit,
which is currently the most popular news website in the world,
but also the work in social justice and all that.
It's a story that definitely needs to be told.
Now, when you originally came up with the idea for this,
you went for crowdfunding of the project.
And were you surprised by the incredible response you got?
I was.
It was the first time I had done Kickstarter or any sort of crowdfunding
for a film.
And it was really amazing.
I mean, it's a lot of work.
You put a lot of work into it, but it's a great thing in that it just puts
you directly in contact with people that care about the film at a really
early stage in the process,
which is, there's just no other way of making films that's even like that,
where you're almost kind of engaging in a dialogue with your audience right
off the bat.
Before the film is even made, you're engaging in a dialogue with the audience.
That's amazing.
Yeah, yeah. It's great.
And I think ultimately, I mean, look, it's great to also earn,
we earned still what we think is about half the budget for the final in
one go, which was incredible.
But I think actually one of the most valuable parts of it is that,
actually,
just already having the kind of community of people that are involved in
the film.
Now, the film before this, the We Are Legion film,
that was not Kickstarted?
No.
I basically just funded it myself.
I hope we didn't lose him.
Brian, you're doing so well.
Are you there, Brian?
Yeah, yeah. Do you have me?
I'm here.
Yeah, Bernie's there.
Bernie's been here throughout.
Can you hear me?
Yes, we hear you now.
Okay, good.
So you're talking about the first film?
That film, I just kind of started and hung on for dear life for the year,
just filming and exploring anonymous as things developed.
But that film wasn't Kickstarted or anything.
We tried to find some interesting ways.
Filmmaking is in a place where there are lots of new possibilities
for connecting with audiences.
We sold the film directly from our own website, DRM Free,
and lots of people took us up on that.
So we're exploring lots of different tools.
And Kickstarter is now, I think, one of those tools.
Kickstarter is a pretty amazing thing for a filmmaker to have.
Well, for one thing, you don't have to worry about the backers telling you,
okay, don't focus on this, focus on this instead.
Studios being paranoid about controversial subject matter.
You can basically do what people actually want to see.
Exactly.
No, I mean, I think that is kind of the holy grail,
just independent journalism.
That's what we all hope for.
And so that's another one of the great aspects of Kickstarter.
Can you tell us, I haven't seen the film, I intend to,
how does one make a film about anonymous?
Yeah, I mean, I started by talking to people.
You guys know Biela Coleman, people that sort of investigate.
I talked to a lot of people who had kind of investigated
anonymous, other journalists, people that I knew,
and Biela Coleman is actually an anthropologist.
And so I started kind of learning about them and going through their history
and learning about various attacks and raids and their evolution.
And then I just kind of hung out in IRC where they hung out
and sort of got to know people slowly but surely.
And then I would, in the film we have a range of people in the film
who appear in various sort of states of anonymity, I guess.
Some of them are on Skype chats where their identity is fully concealed,
where I don't see their face, their voice is distorted, all of that.
But we also talk to people who had just gotten out of prison.
One young man had just gotten out of prison for attacks,
a denial of service attack that he conducted
against the Church of Scientology.
So, you know, there's no reason for him to,
in telling his story, to conceal his identity.
So it was that whole kind of range of participants in anonymous.
Including, by the way, people in New York
who aren't as concerned about hiding their identity.
Interesting.
I'm sorry for that noise.
That's what happens when we have inferior phone systems.
Brian, you still there?
Yes.
Okay. That's on our end.
All right. So let me just, in closing, ask,
is there a way people can obtain this film?
And can people still help with funding for the Aaron Schwartz Project?
Yeah. So you can go, if you want to support the film,
you can go straight to our website, www.wearelegiondocumentary.com.
Just click, kind of midway down the page, click code,
and we have what we think is a really great system
that will deliver a DRM-free version to you.
People have been really happy with that.
And the Aaron Schwartz thing, we're working on a website,
and we're talking about putting what they're calling a slackerbacker site on it,
so people who still want to donate can come in and donate to our,
essentially now we're in our post-production process.
We're hoping that the film is, we're being pretty aggressive about it,
so we're hoping that the film has a kind of 2014 release.
Yes. Okay. I saw that on the Kickstarter.
You're shooting for March. Hopefully it will be somewhere close to that.
But please continue doing what you're doing.
It's a very valuable service.
And the film, the PSA that just has been making the rounds on the Internet
can be seen at stopwatching.us, and that was made in conjunction with EFF.
In anticipation of Saturday's rally in Washington, D.C.,
go to that website also for information on how to participate in that.
Brian Knappenberger, thank you so much again for being part of the show
and for doing what you do, and hopefully we'll talk to you again soon.
Thanks a lot for having me. Have me back any time.
All right. Take care.
When we finish the film, we'll come back and talk to you.
That would be awesome. That would be awesome. Thank you very much.
And you're listening to Off the Hook here in our special time slot,
two-hour program, the last few minutes of the two-hour program here on WBAI New York.
And we are asking for your support, 516-620-3602.
Who would like to give the details as to what we're offering tonight one last time?
Oh, come on. Wake up. Wake up.
Rob, okay, go ahead.
Okay. So we are offering for a pledge of $75,
you can get either the Wikileaks USB drive with all files released by Wikileaks,
or you can get the NSA USB drive with the files released by Edward Snowden,
either of those for a pledge of $75.
Or for a pledge of $50, you can still get, while they last, if indeed there are still any,
you can get the rare out-of-print T-shirts, the Hacker History T-shirt,
or the black Off the Hook T-shirt designed by myself.
Either of those can be yours for a pledge of $50.
Or you can be a BAI buddy and pledge automatically $10 a month
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So if you go to give, the numeral 2, WBAI.org,
or if you call 516-620-3602,
you can help keep us alive because you're the only thing that ever has.
That's right. Bernie, are you there?
I'm here.
You know, it's incredible.
You were part of that conversation, but you couldn't hear the other people on the phone.
This is the kind of dedication that we're talking about here.
Somehow we're able to make these things happen.
How did you pull that off?
Well, I could hear the occasional sporadic phoneme,
but we kind of know the wavelength we're on here.
And I could hear what Mike and some other folks were saying from the studio
in response to what our guests were saying.
And it's fascinating, as Mike said,
that such a broad coalition of support was garnered in relatively short order by the folks at EFF.
This is really an amazing coalition,
and it's the kind of thing that is necessary to raise the political awareness throughout this country
about what our government is really doing to us instead of for us,
which is what they should be doing things for us, not to us.
So without people being aware of what our government is doing to us through mediums such as WBAI,
things are only going to get worse,
and we're going to wake up pretty soon and find that we're living pretty much in a police surveillance state
if it's not there already.
So if you're really concerned about this
and concerned about independent media outlets like WBAI and there are very few like them,
please try to support this station.
Give whatever you can by calling 516-620-3602.
This station really isn't going to be around much longer in its current form if people don't support it.
It's a listener-supported station.
There is no commercials, no corporate underwriting.
We won't accept that because then we would sort of have to answer to those corporations.
So please call 516-620-3602.
We have some great thank-you gifts,
but most importantly, support this station, support this medium for learning more about what's happening.
And on the subject of those thank-you gifts, we are offering the NSA thumb drive.
That's all of the NSA documents that have been released and are spread all throughout the Internet
but not really in one centralized place until this little thumb drive arrives on your doorstep,
and you can simply copy all the files from that onto your computer or wherever you wish
and share them with as many people as you want.
That's for a pledge of $75, 516-620-3602.
If you feel strongly about Wikileaks, you can get a good amount of their material,
most of their material from 2008 onwards, including 400,000 log entries from the Iraq war,
70,000 Afghan war log entries, the U.S. embassy cables known as Cablegate,
the collateral murder video, which is a horrible thing to be promoting, but people do need to see that.
And we're also going to include the most recent stuff from Wikileaks, the Spy Files series.
There's two releases from there we're going to include.
Sounds intriguing. Sounds exciting.
That's a pledge of $75. If you want everything, you want the whole package,
Wikileaks plus the NSA files, pledge $125, 516-620-3602.
We're in the last few minutes, but we're getting a pretty good response.
I'm watching some emails coming in here, but we can always do with more,
and the stronger we are, the more we can count on BAI being here to provide these kinds of conversations.
If you've been listening even for a fraction of an hour, and we've been on for two hours tonight,
think about where you could have heard a conversation like that on the radio anywhere else.
Sure, you can hear conversations like that in a bar, in your living room,
and where people feel they can talk freely.
Here on 99.5 FM in New York City, we can talk freely about these controversial issues.
The reason is pretty much what Brian was saying about crowdfunding his film,
because we're in direct communication with you, the listener, and you're the people who sponsor us.
You're the ones that we answer to.
Not Exxon, not Verizon, not Microsoft, none of that, and they can't scare us.
They can't scare us because we have people power, and you're the people.
516-620-3602. Rob, we also have those off-the-hook t-shirts, I believe?
Yes, indeed. For a pledge of $50, you can get either the off-the-hook t-shirt,
which I designed quite a while ago and has been out of print for a while,
or you can get the Hacker History t-shirt, which was made in 1997
and not seen, hide in our hair since then until we found a very small amount in our warehouse
and decided to offer them to you, these rarities.
That was a surprise. We really were kind of shocked when we found those.
Either one of those can be yours for a pledge of $50 to 516-620-3602
or give the numeral to WBAI.org while they last. There are very few left.
I believe they are in certain sizes only. I don't remember which ones are in which sizes,
but basically that's all we have left.
Yes, so if you check the website or if you're speaking to someone over the phone,
they'll be able to tell you the sizes that we have available.
Yes, and I wish we could do more as far as that goes, but that's how it works.
Everything that we offer here on this radio show is donated.
It doesn't cost the station anything, and hopefully that is how it'll work in the future
with every show here because the station really needs to be the thing that's supported
more than anything else.
We've been doing all kinds of dramatic cost cuttings and planning for the future,
but we only get there if we have the listener's support, and that's where you come in.
Of course, any of those pledge levels also gets you the all-important membership in the station.
You gain a voice, and if you think we're not doing it right, tell us how to do it right
because that's the way that you become part of what goes on here by showing your support
and becoming part of the WBAI family and making yourself heard,
telling them that you support this program, that you support this radio station,
that you think that it's important that we're able to do this and we're able to keep doing this.
Guess what? We're out of time. You're not out of time yet, listeners.
You can still call in. 516-620-3602.
These packages will be available for a little bit longer.
If you call that number, 516-620-3602.
If you're listening later, go to give2wbai.org and see if you can find them there.
They probably will be there.
516-620-3602. Pledge for the NSA package. Pledge for the WikiLeaks package.
Pledge for the t-shirts. Pledge for everything.
Pledge for the radio station above all else.
We'll be back next week, I believe, with a one-hour show
and hopefully updating people on the latest happenings,
maybe talking about the demonstration a little bit
and other goings-on in the hacker world because there's always something happening.
Again, one more time, 516-620-3602 is our pledge line.
I want to thank Brian Knappenberger and Rainey Reitman for being a part of the radio show tonight
and for doing all the things that they do because that's what it's really all about.
I'm glad we can give them a voice and hope we're able to do that in the future.
Please help make that possible.
516-620-3602.
Write to us, oth at 2600.com.
This is Emanuel for Off The Hook. See you next time.
So the NSA could spy on it and try to keep an eye on it.
Or maybe call the FBI.
Sir, we have a report that a man was typing in Arabic.
And we pulled it up and he said he was from Syria.
And he said there was going to be a jihad in America
with some high-value targets.
Some very high-value targets.
But when we checked it out, it was just 100 million pictures of a butthole.
The admiral nodded and said,
This means something. This is important.
We need to save this.
We need to save these buttholes.
Get some extra hard drives.
Get a USB stick.
We got some work to do.
We gotta save all these buttholes.
I put 100,000 pictures of my ass on the internet.
So the NSA could spy on it and try to keep an eye on it.
Maybe call the FBI on it.
I put 100,000 pictures of my ass on the internet.
So the NSA could spy on it and try to keep an eye on it.
Or maybe call the FBI.
Deep in Fort Meade in a rectangular building covered in glass,
a military man asks you a question.
How many countries are we at war with right now?
You start to count on your fingers.
You start to name the countries.
But he laughs and says you're gonna need more hands.
A young man just given top-secret clearance is seated at a computer
labeled top-secret clearance and he types his password in.
His screen begins to fill with asses and assholes.
More and more asses, more and more assholes.
So he calls the supervisor.
And his supervisor says that's what we do here.
Those might be terrorist assholes.
I put 100,000 pictures of my ass on the internet.
So the NSA could spy on it and try to keep an eye on it.
Maybe call the FBI on it.
I put 100,000 pictures of my ass on the internet.
So the NSA could spy on it and try to keep an eye on it.
Maybe call the FBI.
I sent a sext of my testicles.
Sent a text rectum to the admiral.
Then I flexed rectal in a urinal.
Paparazzi flash at the funeral.
Nobody died when Clinton lied.
But he never got to see my balls online.
George Bush never got to see my brown eye.
Perineum with a brown line.
I put 100,000 pictures of my ass on the internet.
So the NSA could spy on it and try to keep an eye on it.
Maybe call the FBI on it.
I put 100,000 pictures of my ass on the internet.
So the NSA could spy on it and try to keep an eye on it.