JusticeInFocus.org or 510-900-8340.
Truth and justice will prevail.
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.
Von Diddley Bonk for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood. Von Diddley Bonk!
Von Diddley Bonk!
Von Diddley Bonk!
Von Diddley Bonk!
Well, here we are at our brand new time.
Off the Hook is on the air at 8 o'clock.
And as uncoordinated as ever.
This is Emanuel, joined tonight by Kyle.
Hello, hackers.
Oh my god, and Rob T. Firefly.
Good evening.
Trying to enter the password so we can get Bernie.
And the password isn't working.
Now it is.
Now it's working, great. Just enough to make us look completely idiotic here.
Alright, so we have Bernie on the phone?
Yeah, we will momentarily.
Alright.
Yeah, so what's going on?
So the um...
Wow.
I think your headphones are too hot.
Very loud.
Turn your headphones down.
I think this is a dry run.
I think people will give us the benefit of the doubt.
Now just everybody take a breath.
Let's calm down.
This is completely our fault.
There's a lot of fault.
You have to use your fingers to point in certain ones you pick.
We have 45 minutes to set up.
The last show was on tape.
Okay, we have Bernie on the phone now?
Bernie, you there?
Greetings from Pennsylvania.
Oh, he sounds beautiful.
And of course there's no phone either.
That's a whole other story.
So we're talking to Bernie on what? Skype now?
Hang on, why isn't your microphone working?
We are on Skype.
But he probably called Skype from a regular phone.
No, no, actually you guys called out from Skype
There's something called Skype Out
which interfaces Skype to the phone network.
You can call any phone number.
That signature Skype clarity just isn't with us.
So definitely it's getting down-converted
as it enters the public phone system.
Yeah, the signature Skype clarity
is like talking to Mars
because there's such a delay.
That's true, and you know latency and delay
are big factors when you want to have a natural conversation
on a telecommunications platform.
Okay, rough landing.
Here we are, our new time slot.
Time zone might as well be.
Eight o'clock on Wednesdays
from this point forward.
I like it better actually.
It's more relaxed.
We've proven it can be done.
We can appear and start the show.
We barely proved that, but yes, you're right.
But it is a little later, I think.
And this is what I suggested earlier.
This is like the after meal hour, maybe.
That in-between
before everybody goes to sleep.
Who goes to sleep at this hour?
Really? People are preparing to go to sleep?
I guess so.
I know I had to prepare to be up this late.
You guys know usually I fall asleep
just immediately when the show ends.
Most people fall asleep at the beginning.
Hopefully if you're a new listener at this hour
you can integrate us into your evening
listening experience and you'll enjoy
all the things that we have to say
about technology and telephony.
This is the Personal Computer Show.
Stay tuned because once again
they're on our tails.
They come on at 9 o'clock.
Yes, they have been retained
and they're persevering
and continuing on
the great programming that they provide.
It's kind of like Daylight Savings Time
except we're jumping the gun
and moving everything ahead an hour
or behind an hour.
Something like that.
Anyway, in case you're unfamiliar
with technology, hacking,
individuality and controversy
and things like that.
Did I leave anything out?
I think you covered a lot of it.
That covers it in general.
Since we have no phones that means
we're going to try all the harder to take phone calls
and we're going to figure something out a little bit later on.
That's part of the reason why we had a rough start
this time because this board is a real challenge.
I was integrating our nest
of wires to
make that possible.
I'm ready to do that.
Emmanuel?
I have an update on the phone situation.
Please tell us.
Not on the actual phone lines
but on what's holding them up
which is $27,000
in back bills
of Verizon that have not been paid
by WBAI.
I'm continuing to work with our
general manager, Berthold Reimers
and Pacifica's national technical director
John Alma.
We are
in the process of obtaining
access to WBAI's
online account so we can
download PDFs of the
past so many months' bills
to find out
how the bills got so high.
Basically, as you may have heard from last week's show,
the
telephone
long distance international service
were all configured for Verizon
who charges the highest rates allowed
so like a single call to
South America was
like $150 or something.
Just ridiculous rates.
As soon as we get online access, we can do an analysis
of the bills and recommend
to Berthold Reimers,
WBAI's executive director,
or I'm sorry, executive general manager,
what is a good low
cost long distance international
service that we can use for the existing phone lines
and
then the bleeding will be stopped.
I'm hopeful WBAI can
pay the phone bill and then we can get the phone lines
reconnected and not have to bleed money.
On that subject, Bernie, is it
fair to expect WBAI to pay exorbitant
rates for what's essentially
a ripoff? $150 to call South America?
Come on.
I agree, but I'm sure Verizon will come back
and say, well, you chose
that and you agreed to these rates so
you're suckers.
Nobody in their right mind would choose that.
I speak from experience because
we're going through something similar
with the one phone line
that we got for the Hope conference that
took Verizon a month to
install. They sent us the
first bill for that phone line
before they even succeeded in getting
a dial tone.
Of course, we told them to disconnect
it immediately after the conference,
but they've been
ripping us off in all manner
of ways. For instance, they
signed us up for a long distance program
that we never asked for
where they charge you a minimum amount
if you don't use it. You have to pay
$50 for nothing. Never asked
for that and they never told us that.
This is their business model.
I think we have some standing
in contesting that.
Well, I certainly think
WBAI tried to contest it because it's like
$20,000, which probably would
have been closer to
$2,000 or $1,000
or something over the past several months.
The most important thing
is to get these phone lines hooked up again.
We'll be going
over the bills over the next week or so
and figure out what's going on and figure
out if any of our listeners have suggestions
as to alternate long distance
providers. These will have to be used with
a POTS phone line.
Voice over IP directly
is not going to... We don't have SIP
capability at the studios.
Just a regular phone line, alternate
long distance and international carriers.
Anybody
has suggestions? We'll be researching it ourselves
as well, but if our listeners want to get involved, they can help.
This is just giving me a huge
flashback to, say, 20 years ago when long distance
calls cost a lot and this
program in particular was talking a lot about
massive phone bills and
things to do. Would it help if I built another Redbox?
I mean, I'm a bit rusty, but...
We could have a phone line
a pay phone line
installed at the studio and then you
could just Redbox from it and then we wouldn't have to pay long distance
charges.
If only they would still work, so I hear.
It sounds like
the forensics, though, is the first
part, actually going through and
looking at what they were saying.
That's kind of where we're at with
our bill because it's
just absurd what they do.
In particular, I think it was
$0.10 in charges or $0.11 in
charges. It was under $0.25
total charges for long distance
bills, but it's a
minimum usage fee. Again,
Kyle, you dealt with them personally.
They never mentioned this. They never said it.
We asked specifically
because we had been hosed in the past by AT&T.
I remember, Bernie,
you were involved in this once and you called
your phone to test the line and
that one call to your cell phone, which was right
there, was something like $5
because we didn't have...
It was a 215 area code phone number.
It was considered long distance
by AT&T, long lines or whatever,
but the point is we didn't choose a plan
with them, so they penalized us and
charged us an exorbitant amount. So we asked
specifically, let's not do that this time. Can
we have a plan where, like
most people in this country, we only pay
a few pennies for phone calls
and yeah, they gave us that, but then they
gave us something else as well.
They just round up to the nearest $50, right?
Yeah, pretty much. And honestly, Bernie, the
exhibitor services number that
you had used in the past, they never answered that. I called
for like a month straight trying to get that. Oh, really?
When I set that up two years ago,
they would always answer the phone. No, that was garbage.
That was complete garbage.
No, it did not work. The other thing they did,
they came to the hotel
to put in a phone line.
Oh, the labor charge, yeah. Yeah.
Basically, they came to the hotel and
they were supposed to leave the hotel
when there was a dial tone and they
left and there was no dial. They didn't even check their
own work and they came
back again after we said, hey guys,
you might want to finish what you started
and they came back a second time.
Still, we're not able to figure it out.
Came back a third time,
they charged us a service
call for every single one of those
visits. Can you believe that?
This bill is just,
you know, we told them to cancel the service.
I bet they still have the service in there too.
I just bet they do.
It's insane. So, yeah, this is why
I think that we have some standing against Verizon
because of their business practices.
Yeah, and the labor charges,
we're still deciphering it.
What you're about to be doing for the station
is going through the forensic
part of it, looking at the bill, see what they're
trying to get away with.
I would suggest anybody going
through this, especially with BAI,
do make a lot of phone calls
to them, Bernie.
It's really an opportunity
to get a lot of it reduced.
There may be a lot more
possibility once you engage
in that and actually have the conversation.
Just be persistent and call back.
That's usually the best way to
find someone who's willing to help you out
and maybe
use whatever
power they have to
reduce it. Because they're usually flexible
if you present it in a sort of positive way
or like, oops, this was messed up
kind of way. But it's definitely
their fault. Or you're ripping us off
and we're going to go to the Public Service Commission. That's my
approach. Well, no, that's the other angle.
I think we all owe Bernie
a debt of gratitude for even
attempting to undertake this. And by all of us, I mean
all of the listeners to WBAI because
this affects the entire station.
Thanks for taking this on. You must be out of your mind.
It's fun.
It's fun. It is fun. That's true.
As we mentioned, we're hackers
and we do this kind of thing.
I can't believe even the labor charters in the hotel.
The hotel itself was willing.
They were running their own lines. They had their own people
that were talking about running lines.
It sounds like the Verizon guy just showed up and was like,
I guess I can
bill that out as my work.
But he's just there to check that they got
it from the frame in the bottom of the hotel
to the top. It's so crazy how
bureaucratic and
territorial
entities
work together or
don't and just pile
it on and
ultimately become more of
a hindrance than actually helpful.
I'm picking up some chatter from some
of our listeners who are asking
why in God's name in this day
and age. I hate questions that start
like that. Do you still
get a landline in the first place?
It's so much easier to do it a different
way.
You want to take this, Kyle? And then,
Bernie, maybe you can chime in as well.
My short answer is that
the feel
and the sound of it is
unique and there are
certain attributes and things you run
into of the public switch telephone
network that sort of become
cleaned away when you
use modern telephony systems
things like voice over IP or other
hosted services or your own
stuff. It becomes
a lot crisper as we've
heard on Skype.
But also it is
the fastest, most direct way
to access the public switch telephone
network which itself is
an old sort of legacy system
that we still have access
to and it's
entirely
different from
a production standpoint. What it sounds
like for us to make a call, getting
actual dial tone, not synthesized
dial tone, things like that. You just
can't replicate when you're on stage
doing something with social engineering
and it is as close to
where someone might be in the field.
If they were social engineering someone from a pay phone,
that pay phone is not necessarily Skype
or voice over IP yet.
It's very close to
what it would be like to use that network
in the field or from
wherever you may be
social engineering. Bernie, anything to add to that?
Emmanuel?
Bernie? Yeah, I'm sorry.
See, this is an example. You didn't have that
with the old phone system. In this particular
topic, there was a fascinating
talk at the 11th Hope
back in July
called
Sunset or Evolution of the
PSTN, meaning the Public Switch
Telephone Network by a great speaker,
Fred Goldstein. So if you go to
Hope.net and go to
schedule and find that talk, it's a
really interesting hour of
telephony
geekdom. You can hear from how the
old phone systems worked back in the day
to where things are going and
is really the Public Switch Telephone
Network evolving or sunsetting?
It's for you to decide after you hear
that talk. And you can
hear all the talks from the
most recent Hope conference, the 11th Hope.
Go to Hope.net and
go to where all the talks are listed under schedule
and click on the audio and you'll be able to hear everything.
And we've got videos
available too in various
means, methods
and things like that. Amazing
conference. We had a great time.
Learned a lot and met all kinds of
cool people. Okay,
so we have a few stories
that we want to focus on
tonight and
hopefully we'll take some phone calls in just a little bit.
Where should
we start? I like this story,
Rob, because you forwarded this to our list.
Apparently, we
all know Warner Brothers is very concerned
about piracy of its
movies and content of various
sorts. And
this is a story that comes from our friends over at
Torrent Freak. They say Warner Brothers
is vigorously trying to prevent pirated content
from showing up in search results,
but in doing so,
the movie studio has shot itself in
the foot. Recently, Warner
asked Google to take down several of its
own pages, claiming that they
are copyright infringing.
Yeah.
Now, the movie industry has gone head
to head with Google in recent years,
demanding tougher anti-piracy measures
from the search engine. According to Warner Brothers and other
major studios, Google makes it too easy for
its users to find pirated content.
Instead, they would prefer Google to remove
sites such as the Pirate Bay
from search results entirely.
Kind of, you know, Orwellian, I guess.
Rewriting. But also
idiotic. Very idiotic.
I mean, the domain still exists.
Uh-huh. But they just
make it so you can't find it.
Or you switch search engines.
But anyway, with help from its anti-piracy
partner known as...
How do you pronounce this? Vobile?
Yeah, I don't know. V-O-B-I-L-E?
They sound serious. Yeah.
Warner Brothers asked Google to censor several of
its own URLs from the search engine.
They have a screenshot taken from a DMCA
notice. It lists the official
Warner page of the 2008
Batman movie, The Dark Knight,
among various reported pirate links.
The apparent self-censorship
is not a one-off mistake either.
A few days earlier, a similar DMCA
takedown notice targeted Warner's website,
claiming that the official page
for the lucky one is infringing Warner's
copyrights. Of course, Warner only
hurts itself with these erroneous takedown
requests. Unfortunately, however,
WarnerBros.com is not the only
quote-unquote legitimate domain that's being targeted.
The same notices
also target a link to the Amazon
store, where users can rent
or buy a copy of The Dark Knight.
In addition, it targets a link to Batman Begins
in the Sky Cinema store, as well as the
film's official IMDb page.
Wow! In other words, Warner
is inadvertently trying to make it harder
for the public to find links to legitimate content,
which runs counter to their
intentions. Luckily for the
Hollywood studio, Google is there to
save the day. The search engines
spotted their mistakes and decided to take
no action for the Amazon Sky
and IMDb links. However,
the WarnerBros.com
URLs are still under investigation.
That's awesome!
But it goes to show that the left hand does
not know what the right hand is doing
with these huge corporations.
I think it would be great if
a really good script came across
some Warner Bros.
producer's desk
and for a film called
The Dark Knight,
it would be great if
a really good script came across
some Warner Bros.
producer's desk
and for a film called
The Dark Knight,
it would be great if
a really good script came across
for a film called
Pirate Bay.
They did this show, they did this whole movie
and they spent $100
to promote it and whatever.
Everybody trying to find it
couldn't because
they were blocked.
Wouldn't it be funny?
Maybe not pitch that to Warner Bros., but definitely pitch it and definitely make it.
Actually, they should
make it and then give it away.
I mean, get with
the times, you know?
That does
go to show how bonkers
the current media environment is where people are
trying to lock down the content that they want people to see.
There's an entity called NRK
which is a TV
network in Norway, I believe.
They were the first national TV
network to put DRM-free torrents
of their own material online
just for free.
They did this with an announcement that I have here
because it's such a great quote.
If you want control of your content, you need to lock it down in a vault and never show it to anyone.
We gave up control of our content
the day we started broadcasting.
Basically, they go on to say,
the only way to control your content is to be the best provider of it.
If people want it on YouTube, then you should publish it on YouTube
or in a system that gives the same experience.
If people want it on BitTorrent, then you should provide that.
If you do it right, people will come to your official publish point
and you'll end up with more control.
Very true.
They're the ones who seem to be doing it right
and not shooting themselves in the foot
or trying to label themselves as criminals
stealing their own content.
That's the distribution method.
It's interesting, too, because it's not always about the cost
of buying a DVD
or downloading something
because they react the same way for free
television programs that are available
to anybody with a TV antenna.
They come after you
if you download it from someplace
they don't want you to download it from.
It's all about control.
If you download it and then host it.
Even point to it.
You can be targeted by that.
It's something that they need to come to terms with.
They need to realize that
things have changed and that it's possible
to get material in all different ways.
What you said, Rob, about locking things
in a vault. That's what they do.
That's what a lot of these companies do.
There are movies and TV shows
and news archives that are in vaults
probably in New Jersey or California
and nobody can see them
because nobody has paid for the rights to them.
They would rather these things
deteriorate and eventually just
get destroyed in a fire or something
than to share them.
Who profits from that? Who benefits from that?
Absolutely nobody. It's corporate greed.
Well, they do if somebody ponies up.
Yeah, but they make it
really impossible for people to even do that
because how do you even know what's there?
There's no proxy reference
archive so that you can go through and find out
what they actually have, which is really important
if you have a collection of a lot of material.
I think this should be part of the whole rewriting of copyright
project.
When a work is made,
it should be mandated that that work has to be
available in one form or another.
One of my biggest
issues is the TV show
WKRP in Cincinnati.
Great show about a radio station, but
because somebody
didn't pay a huge amount for the music they
played in the show, what they've released
on DVD is completely different.
It's music that has
absolutely no reference
to the subject matter or it's
fake studio musicians
and it's not what the work was
originally. I maintain the work
as originally produced
has a right to be preserved
and shared.
If these guys can't figure out how
to make the maximum amount of money on it,
that's their problem. But the work should
never be punished
as a result of that. Once you make it,
it's done. It's out there.
One of the biggest enraging things about
the current media environment is there are things that are
deteriorating physically
that cannot even be licensed out,
even if you have the money, because nobody knows
who owns it. Just somebody owns it, going by
the numbers and the years that have gone by and
stuff, but nobody
can tell who owns it.
There are books that are
decaying, things that were printed once, maybe a hundred
years ago, or
films that are decaying and things like that.
No one can preserve the things because
no one's allowed to because they haven't paid
the mysterious owner of the material.
Yeah, which often times
they don't even own the material, like
Witness Splotchgate with us,
where they tried to
tell us that they owned a piece
of art that they didn't even own
just because they used it once.
So yeah, lots of times that's going to be completely inaccurate.
Our friend Jason Scott at the Internet Archive
knows this well. I mean, you can
go on there and find all kinds of old pieces
of software, computer games,
things like that, that
are emulated in your browser so you can play them
now. But the original discs these things
were on have long since decayed.
The only reason we have copies is
because they were ripped
by the wares scene back
then, which was people trading things
around without paying for them.
And that's the version that we still have, because
that's the version that was able to survive format
changes, that was able to survive just
in circulation until somebody could lock
it down, or not
lock it down, but rehost it in a manner
that's useful.
It's a huge example of, like, there are
images of computer chips that have long since
decayed, or that nobody has.
Just these things that would not be available
if people played by the rules.
And the rules are broken.
Absolutely.
Okay, another rule
that authorities would like to
get control over, we talked about search
engines, we talked about erasing
things from search engines.
There is this algorithm,
this new algorithm that's being developed called
eGlyph. It was announced back in
June by the Counter-Extremism
Project, CEP.
They're a New York-based
non-profit organization. Why can't they make a profit?
You'd think there'd be so much
money in extremism. They also sound
very serious. Well, they are. They track
extremist groups. eGlyph
uses so-called hashing
technology to assign a
unique fingerprint to images, videos,
and audio that have already been
flagged as extremist.
I don't know who gets to flag these things. Who flags
things as extremist?
They automatically remove any versions that
have been uploaded to a social network
of extremist material. It can
also automatically delete other versions
as soon as users attempt to upload
them. So imagine the spread
of ISIS propaganda online
being able to
be prevented and stopped. Facebook,
Twitter, Google, if they use
this eGlyph technology,
they can nip this
thing in the bud, and as soon as somebody
posts something,
it disappears. It never happens.
Now, Mark Wallace
is the CEO of this organization,
and he's a former ambassador to the
UN under President George W. Bush.
He describes
eGlyph as a game-changer.
Of course, he's the CEO, so he would describe it that way.
He believes the algorithm,
if adopted widely,
could help stem the spread
of terrorist propaganda and dissuade
political groups from posting
extremist content in the first place.
Listen to this. If an extremist group knows
that the moment they try to post a video
online, that it will be
immediately removed, and it won't have that
viral reach, perhaps it's no longer
compelling for them because they can no longer accomplish
their propaganda aims.
It's that simple, huh? You just have
to keep it from showing up on the net,
and they're going to say, you know what, guys? This terrorism
thing is not working for us. Let's try
something else. Let's have a
fake sale or just a petition.
Let's do that. Yeah, and come
on. This is the height of naivete.
If somebody does
something like this, if they make an extremist
video, and it doesn't take the first
time, if it's flagged or something,
they'll figure out a way around it.
There are so many ways to get around
these things, and there's always going to be more
ways to get around it than there are ways to
contain it. And also,
it's basically scattershot, and
you know how often people get
things flagged on YouTube as copyright
infringement that aren't.
You know how often things get flagged off
of Tumblr, SoundCloud, whatever
other services are out there that
use automatic algorithms like this
to identify what they think is copyright
infringing. And so
if we're going to apply
the same precision to
extremist terrorist
materials, then a lot of people are in
trouble because a lot of
non-extreme stuff is also
going to get caught in the crossfire.
But also, one of the things I really
like about extremist
material online is you can read
it, you can judge it honestly, you can see
how full of crap people are before you
decide they're the bad guys.
I'm not into censorship, I'm into
letting people just talk about what they're about
and show everyone how
stupid it is.
We're talking about extremism now.
That's always how it begins.
But if you can flag a video
for having extremist content,
you can flag all videos
of kittens falling off of chairs.
Now think about that. Think about that.
The motion is similar, you can
definitely detect it and
imagine a world where
if you post a video of a kitten falling off a chair
it's immediately prevented from
being seen by anybody.
That's not a world I want to live in.
Indeed it's not. Bernie, what do you think?
Bernie doesn't think anything, okay?
Did we lose him?
Why don't you check that with the magical technology
we have to replace our phone line?
I think there's a lot of parallels for photography
and a lot of what we've talked about. I don't want to get into
the whole kitty pics
discussion, but I think there are parallels.
When you start saying, okay, this type
of image isn't allowed, we're just gonna get
all flesh colors
off of the internet, you then
all of a sudden have a very
small internet.
And also, you take
a lot of other imagery
with what you deem
unfit for
your
quote-unquote decent community standards.
Yes, absolutely.
To me, as an artist,
that's a chilling effect
right there on expression.
I feel like it's the same
kind of scope creep. Very, very similar.
Rob, did you determine if Bernie is still with us?
The call is in progress still.
I'm here. I'm here. Did you wander away from the phone, Bernie?
I think there was a kinked
wire at my end. We were talking about
censorship, and is that the idea
of a world we want to live in?
You're right. As soon as
the powers that be,
the controller infrastructure,
builds systems
to crack any particular type
of content and shut it down,
you know it's a slippery slope.
It can be applied to anything, and it will be
applied to more things. You can bet your
bippy that after ISIS
videos are automatically
taken down by algorithms, it'll be the
next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing, and the next
thing, and then it'll be your content.
Dictators
of yore would
have gone crazy over having this much
power just to censor
information. But like you said,
there are always more ways around censorship
than there are to
have it, but I don't think people should
have to worry about this stuff and should be able
to... I think ideas, no
matter how bad they are, should be out in the public
marketplace. Like Rob says, everybody
should see how
awful and ludicrous some of this
terrorist stuff is.
It would give
itself a bigger black eye than if it was
censored. So that's how I think.
If the only thing
that people need
to get recruited into a terrorist organization
is to see a video made
by a terrorist organization,
the problem is
a lot deeper than the material
that's out there. You have to ask,
why are people so
easily convinced to join
up and be a part of these
things? That's something to address.
That's something I think we like to avoid.
You want to look at the roots and
what kinds of things are
creating circumstances for these things
to become popular.
I also am really critical of
these mediums, like
platforms regulating this
stuff, because when you really think about
it, ideas and stuff aren't going to be
kept back because it's not
easy or a platform is
inconvenient. When we actually do
operations in other countries,
we throw leaflets out. That's as
old school as it gets
for psychological
operations and so on.
There's plenty of ways this kind of
sentiment can get around.
I think it's really about unity and cohesion
against the
conditions that are creating the upset.
Here's another
form of wishful thinking
and control. House Minority Leader
Nancy Pelosi is urging GOP
leaders to renounce using
hacked Democratic emails as
campaign weapons ahead of November's elections.
In a letter sent on Tuesday
to Speaker Paul Ryan, Pelosi
said the infiltration of computer systems
within the Democratic National Committee
and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee,
hacking linked to
Russian intelligence,
marks an unprecedented assault on the
sanctity of our democratic
process. She called on Democrats
and Republicans to join forces and present
a united front in the face of
Russia's attempts to tamper with the will of the
American people. What a load of garbage
this is! My God! First of all, if something
is out there, something has been hacked,
I don't care who hacked it, it's out there
and we can't pretend. This is like, you know,
back in the day when
Wikileaks would publish something and
all US government employees were
forbidden from seeing it, even though the whole rest of the world
was able to see it. But nobody in the State
Department was permitted to.
It's ridiculous
and fanciful thinking
and I'm even overlooking
this crazy nationalism
that's somehow gotten injected into this where we're
blaming Russia. It doesn't matter.
And in fact, I do have something
on that from Vladimir Putin
who says something actually
on this subject that I found to be kind of
refreshing. He claimed
he doesn't know anything about the
thousands of Democratic National Committee emails
and documents that were
procured by an unknown hacker
and posted by Wikileaks earlier this year.
But the Russian president added
that
there's no need to distract the public's
attention from the
essence of the problem by raising some
minor issues connected with the search
for who did it. But I don't know anything about
it and on a state level, Russia
has never done this.
He said it's
a bit of a public service
to release this information and
I gotta say, I agree with that. I think it is a public
service to see what people
in the
public service are saying
and once that's out
there, we can judge them based
on what they're actually doing
and yeah, if you want to find out where the security holes are
I think that's really what the focus
should be on. Not so much who did
it, but how did it happen
and how do we prevent it from happening again?
But in the meantime, learn from what's been revealed
because you can't unreveal it.
Absolutely.
Like you said, it's funny
that I'm agreeing with something that Putin announced
but yeah, it is a public service and I guess
Putin, like a stop clock is right twice a day
every so often he says something that
is maybe applicable in the real
world, but yeah
and it's
a public service and it's just
ludicrous and double think
and all sorts of craziness to
think that if something's out there in the public sphere
people are just going to agree not to look at it
or to pretend it's not there, put their fingers in their ears
and go la la la.
Of course the DNC hack is
something completely different from the
Hillary Clinton emails that we can't
ever seem to hear
enough of. Another story
concerning that has to do with
hacking of
email that passed through
Hillary Clinton's server.
Hostile foreign actors successfully
and listen carefully, they successfully gained
access to several email
accounts Democratic presidential
nominee Hillary Clinton regularly contacted
on her unsecured email
server while she served
as Secretary of State.
So they're not saying
that anybody got
into her server
they're saying that
people she emailed from her
server, they got
hacked somehow. So it's got absolutely nothing
to do, maybe she was emailing
them on the server she was supposed to be using
maybe that's the server that was compromised.
What made her server insecure again?
I missed that. That's the thing, yeah, good
point there. Her unsecured
email server, unauthorized
perhaps, unsecured
well here's something they do say, which is kind of
interesting. I think she had more control arguably
but whatever. Yeah, you would think so. Clinton
email.com is her email
server. FBI investigators
found that the domain did not have an
SSL certificate, which
left it potentially vulnerable to compromise.
Okay, first of all
and correct me if I'm wrong, because I could be wrong.
I could be wrong on this, but an
SSL certificate is what you
use for secure web
browsing if you're connecting to a website
for the session. It's got nothing to do with
sending email from one machine
to another. That's not the
kind of encryption you should be
or you would be using in that particular
situation. Am I incorrect on that?
You're correct on that. Alright, so
it's kind of a misnomer to
say that because her website
didn't have an SSL certificate that her
email was potentially vulnerable to compromise.
That is what the FBI said. I'm not sure they
quite understand what it
is that is
actually going on here. But
the FBI investigation determined hundreds of emails
classified confidential
during the State Freedom of Information Act process
were sent or received by Clinton
on occasions while outside
the continental United States.
What I found interesting about that
was hearing the news stories about this
and how they were marked confidential by
putting a C inside of parentheses
and to me, that means copyright.
That doesn't mean confidential.
Confidential means confidential. I think
S in parentheses is a
e-signature. Is that what that means?
I don't know these things. I'd be as hot water as she is.
Yeah, I mean there are a couple
abbreviations that are
I know for e-signature I think that's
illegal. An S or
I don't know. There's a couple different
abbreviations. They have different purposes but
maybe she wasn't wearing her eyeglasses.
I don't know. The point is
this was not an issue
a year ago. Suddenly it's turned into an issue now
because people like
Benghazi, they just cannot let go of it
enough times and now we're talking about this
as if it is an actual scandal
when I don't really see it as an actual
scandal. Maybe she was
supposed to use some other method
but she was doing her job. She was
communicating the way she was supposed to communicate. There's no
smoking gun here about how
she was stealing money or anything like that
or ripping people off. All things that
Donald Trump is hiding
and he seems to be getting a free pass now.
This is a guy who has not released his
tax returns despite
every presidential candidate having done that
over the past however many decades
and somehow
that's just being swept under the rug.
How about we're talking about
information being
revealed and out there.
If that information is revealed and out
there, shouldn't that be shared as well
and shouldn't that be obtained one way or another?
Guccifer 3.0
if you're out there, this is what we
need. We need somebody to get in and get
these returns. Donald Trump is saying he can release
his tax returns immediately if he wanted to.
Doesn't want to. Doesn't want to share that information.
Doesn't want us to see what's in there
and wants to instead point the finger
at something that
maybe there is some impropriety.
Maybe there is. Sure. Why not?
I don't trust Hillary Clinton particularly
but compared to the things
he's up to, the things he's
not revealing and the things we're not talking
about, it's
really hard to even compare.
I consider
very many of the things that this guy
says to be extremist in my estimation
so could you imagine if we weren't
allowed to see any of this?
Imagine that.
I heard there's a lot of different copies of them
so I hope he's taking care of
how easy it is to get them.
What? His tax returns?
I'm pretty sure there's a lot of different
people that have access to it.
I want to know who does have access?
Who can get access? Any employee of the
IRS? Can any employee just call up something
and get this?
I mean, you know, we'll
probably won't be any bail
but we'll raise funds somehow
for your defense. They can't all
work for Trump. All I'm saying
is, if somebody were to do this,
if somebody were to do this, would this be
considered a crime? Obviously
in the authorities' eyes it would be but
morally, would that be a crime to get this
information that we're
entitled to? Certainly not to publish it.
I don't think publishing it would be an issue.
I think the
dirty work of actually
acquiring it or
being gifted this information
may be a different
story but I think that would be irrelevant after
it's published so who cares?
Bernie, what do you think?
Well,
I just don't think that
Donald Trump's tax returns are going to
yield any huge surprises.
I think we're going to realize he's a schemer
and that'll be that.
I think there should be complete
requirements that presidential
candidates release
all kinds of information
about themselves as a
mandatory thing. We need to know who we're
voting on and not just the two
big parties. I think all the parties
who have a presidential
candidate in the ring
should just show us who
these people are.
The rest of us are all getting doxxed
by credit rating agencies
and our information is being
bought and sold like so many baseball cards
so why not our presidential candidates
and other political candidates?
Especially if the guy says he has nothing
to hide, right?
Then if you release his
information then it's not against his
will apparently because he has nothing to hide.
Yeah, I know I'm
stretching it a bit but it's just annoying
to me to see what
people can get away with
and what they
can do.
That's something that
I'd like to see some movement on.
I'd like to see people challenging
a bit more. I just get this sense
that, especially in light of the polls
released yesterday that show this guy
ahead. I
sense this kind of resignation that
oh yeah, this is what we're going to get and it's
it doesn't really make a
difference. It makes a huge difference, folks. No matter how
much you dislike
the other candidate, you
cannot in any
scenario believe
that having somebody who's
completely unqualified in a position
like that would be
better in any sense.
My mind is boggled
by that. The acquiescing
and just allowing it to
occur and being, as you said,
resigned is pitiful
and really we are all quite powerful
and I think that's the misnomer. People
feel as though they do not have power
as individuals or collectively or
they cannot channel all of
that, which
isn't true. I think it's really about getting
organized and
really opening a lot of these
things wide open
and really weighing
what the cost and benefit
of this
political season is going to really be.
I think a lot of people have already determined where they
sit with that, but
it's time to really get serious
Individuals have power. Every
individual has power and
we all can contribute in one way or another.
I want to see what people are
able to do, able to
contribute, whether it's dissent, whether it's
disruption, whether it's revelation.
We have
to band together. Despite our
disagreements, despite our
mistrust
of one another,
we do have to see what the common
threat is.
Seeing the way the news has been going
over the past couple of weeks and the way
public opinion has been going, it's
scary. It's scary and I just wonder
where we would be in a year
if we didn't do something.
All right.
We're going to take phone calls.
Everything set up, Kyle?
Kyle is somehow able to wire this
board to take phone calls
and we hope it works. We'll see if it works.
Our special phone number for this program
only, for only this
show, is 331-223-
WBAI. That's
331-223-9224.
Don't call
that number after the show because it won't work.
It only reaches
radio waves while
off the hook is on the air because, well,
we're wizards with phones and wires
and things like that. It's not our first day.
No, it's not our first day. Absolutely not.
It's our first day at this time, but
we've been on the air since 1988.
Bernie,
anything you'd like to add before the
first call comes in?
No, I'm just really happy that
Kyle devised this
weird cell phone interface thing
for the mixing board there at the studio.
We can
take calls practically
on the other show, unfortunately,
but we're working on it so WBAI
can have real phone lines back. Thanks, Kyle.
We have a
phone call. Let's answer this phone call.
You know what?
I hit the button wrong on this stupid phone.
Just be careful you don't mute it.
There's nobody there.
That foiled us at one point.
If you touch things on smartphones the wrong way,
all kinds of horrible things happen.
I just bought something.
I'm sorry.
331-223-9224
331-223-WBAI
I'm sorry for the person.
I don't know if I hung up on you or transferred you someplace,
but please
call that number.
It's voicemail.
Don't leave a message. No one's going to listen to it.
Hang up and call back.
Let's take this phone call.
Good evening. You're on off the hook. Can you hear us?
Yes, I can.
Can you hear me? Yes, just speak up a little bit more.
Okay.
Hi.
I have to tell you guys
I love the idea of full disclosure
no matter who is trying to get
into the fight.
However,
I think you slant things
a bit towards Madam Hillary.
She had her hands
on the official wheel of government.
Whatever Trump said he did
as a private citizen.
Let me just stop you right there.
You could insert any
name, any name
of anybody pretty much in the
country, even the world,
and I would slant towards them
as opposed to Donald Trump.
This is not Hillary bias.
This is anti-Trump bias.
And I think...
That's questionable.
You want to say he's unprepared?
Fine. Our current president...
He's a menace. He's a racist.
No, he's completely unqualified.
The fact that anyone can even
believe that there's any chance
it won't be a complete catastrophe with him in office
is just astounding to me.
Well, allow me to
retort.
I don't see that.
You had Harry Truman who was
basically a haberdasher from Missouri.
He was a political hack
who became president and did just fine.
You had Kennedy
who was a novice
congressman who did just fine.
So you never know...
You're comparing Donald Trump to Kennedy
and to Truman.
Don't make that
jump. I'm talking about circumstance.
You're saying you don't know who Trump is?
You didn't know who these guys were either.
No, I know who he is.
It's not a question of circumstances.
It's a question of what he has said, what he has done,
his positions.
And you can look at any politician of the past,
whether they're experienced or not,
and they come from a realm of sanity.
Yeah, we do know where he comes from.
That's, I think, the unfortunate part, sir.
Honestly,
I think you're just reading the whole bunch into it.
And you have a visceral dislike for him,
and that's perfectly acceptable.
I understand that.
He has a visceral dislike.
And that's basically all I have to say.
I like the idea of full disclosure.
I think that's wonderful.
Whoever is up there.
Do you think his tax returns should be released?
Fair game.
Absolutely fair game.
On that point, we agree.
Thank you, guys.
Thanks a lot.
I'm getting increasingly impatient,
especially with people on the left
who are giving Trump a pass
and saying that, oh, Hillary's guilty of this.
You know, somebody on the air earlier today,
and we almost drove off the road.
It was so frustrating.
Yeah, you can point at Obama.
You can point at Clinton.
You can say all these things
about what they have done badly.
But do you really think
someone like Trump in power
would be doing better things?
We would certainly have much, much worse
things to complain about.
And also, think about,
it's about who that person brings in.
It's about the things that change
in the country over the course of four
or eight years.
And I dare say, Obama, with all his problems,
a lot has changed in eight years that is positive.
And we need to look at that
and ask ourselves, what would eight years
of someone like Trump do to us?
Yeah, I got to agree.
I'm not a big Hillary Clinton fan.
I'm not a Hillary Clinton fan at all.
But I think, you know,
out of the two choices we seem to have,
maybe the less completely terrible one.
Yeah, I think that says it
just about as well as it can be said.
Let's take another phone call.
Good evening. You're on off the hook. Go ahead.
Yes, hi. How are you?
Hi. What's on your mind?
Okay, I just wanted to say,
if you could, I'm so happy
that you're going to be tracing
the phone calls for WBAI.
And I wish that you would trace them
to the Times
and the producers who made those calls.
I don't know if that's exactly what we're doing.
So that we would know
who made those calls.
Because I know, for instance,
tonight Lister will be calling
London.
He was calling London all the time,
week after week. And then also,
I think the Irish, John McDonough
calls Ireland sometime.
It's an Irish show. Of course he's going to call
Ireland. Of course Lister's going to call London
and Jamaica and places like that.
But the thing is not to get ripped off
by the phone company when you do it.
Yeah, so it's definitely true that there was not an
accounting method set up in
advance of the system
that was, whether temporary or permanent,
it being set up here with long distance,
it was not actually set up to have
an accounting, a thorough accounting,
sorry, of all the different
producers that are making calls. And it would be a good
idea, especially for very large, very expensive
calls. But in this case, and I
think that our point is,
it's not necessarily the individual producer's
fault. They should have that resource, just
like they have a microphone to broadcast over
FM. The real problem
was the choice or lack
thereof that was made on what
company to provide that resource
to the producers. Yeah, and they had no
say in that. And it's really important
that we have that resource at our disposal
because that's how you have decent
radio production.
Thank you for that call. You know, I gotta speak
up now. There's, speaking
of radio production, they're making a radio
play down the hall. That's what you do at a radio station.
That's what you do at a radio, but there's this big sign
saying, quiet, we're making a radio
play. But the thing is, they're so loud
they're blowing whistles now. You can hear
whistles going out over the air because they're
making a radio play that they want us to be quiet
for. I thought we supported
whistleblowers on this show.
You know, once we get this phone thing
straightened out, maybe we can put up some soundproofing
and put our regular
board back in place. That would be so nice.
Yeah, it would be really nice, even if we picked
one of these rooms and made it an actual
broadcasting spaceship,
as it should be. But Bernie,
just to allay a producer's fears,
you're not going to be hunting down
people and showing up at their
door. No, that's way down on the list of
priorities. The main priority is
negotiate something for Verizon
so that BAI doesn't have to
pay $27,000 when it only should have probably
had to pay $2,000 or $1,000.
It's about being there. And
get the bill paid and then
get the phone lines back in the studio
so this community radio station
can actually accept input from the community,
from callers who call the
main phone lines at the studio. That's the goal.
This is a community radio station.
It should be open to the community's phone call.
I agree. And you know, in this day and age,
and I'm saying it now, if
you can make a phone call from your house
for 10 cents to London, you should not be paying
$5 from the radio station.
Okay, let's take another phone call. Good evening.
You're on Off the Hook. Go ahead.
Speak up.
I think they hung up.
I think they hung up. I'm sorry to hear that.
You know what I got out of the last call?
The idealism
with the left supporting
or not supporting Trump, is that equal
to the idealism of people who give him a pass
and say, you know what? He needs the chance.
I'm idealistic enough to
think it'll be just great.
I mean, I think those two idealisms,
that two
adversarial
sets of idealism, are not
equal. I agree.
We have a call from Bulgaria.
Greetings, folks.
Somehow I knew it would be
Bobson from Bulgaria. Hi, Bobson!
Hey, Bobson!
Well, it's been a while, because
you know, no phone
in the studio, and what have you.
No phones in the studio, you're in Bulgaria,
it's nighttime, and all
kinds of other reasons. I heard
there was a lot of development going on in Bulgaria
these days. Are there a lot of condos
going up? Condos? Yeah, do you guys
have theme parks and everything that are
infiltrating, Bobson?
I
don't know exactly what
you're talking about, but
oh well. I'll do some more research.
Yeah, welcome to the club.
New time slot is good
for people over there, as it's after
dinner time and so on. Yeah.
And I was thinking the new time slot is
what we in Europe
thought of as, let's go to bed
after off-the-hook time.
Yeah, it can't be good for you.
It can't because it's an hour later now.
What time is it in Bulgaria right now?
It's nearly 4am
by the daylight savings
measurement. Wow.
You'll be losing that soon, so it'll be
3, but then again, we'll lose it
too, so it'll go right back to 4.
Yeah, it's
3am-ish instead of 2am-ish
when the show starts.
Well, apart from complaining about
distance and time, is there anything
else that you'd like to add to the show
tonight before we have to sign off?
Well, I
am happy
to get the phones figured out
and I wish
you
good luck with the new time slot
and all that. Thank you.
It's been fun so far, and the personal computer
people have arrived at their new
late time slot of 9 o'clock,
so BAI moves a little later
into the evening.
Hey, Bobson. Okay, so what are they
filling the slots that
have been earlier in the day with?
Well, you'll have to tune in and find
out. I know we're
giving the gift of life to the
WBAI Evening News
at 6 o'clock, so there's that, and that's
good news. Bernie, I think you had a quick question
for Bobson, then we have to go. Yeah, Bobson,
have you been keeping in touch with
the hacker community here by
watching or listening to
the HOOP conference videos and audio
recordings?
I can barely understand a word
you're saying, Bernie, sorry. If someone
could repeat the question from the beginning.
Yeah, that's our new technology. Have you listened to
any talks online yet?
Did you stream or otherwise get to
see any part of HOOP?
Not yet,
because I've been traveling a bit
and yeah, it's
been kind of
jet lagged and all that.
Queue up something. Yeah, you can watch a couple while
you're opening your mail and everything. It's all there
waiting for you, and we're
not. We're leaving.
We'll be back again next week at our
new time slot at 8 o'clock. Personal Computer Show
is up next at their new time slot
of 9 o'clock. I expect
one of our listeners to forward us Donald
Trump's tax return, please.
Not much to ask, is it? OTH
at 2600.com. Have a good night.
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♪ We don't win, don't win, you might as well get it ♪
♪ Hey, hey, you better not get yourself lost tonight ♪
♪ I'm with you, hey, last night at the party ♪
♪ We don't win, don't win, you might as well get it ♪
♪ We don't win, don't win, you might as well get it ♪