Music
Well, maybe if I bait out the music, Off the Hook will magically appear at WBAI New York.
Anyone home?
You are listening to Radio Station WBAI, 99.5 FM, WBAI.
Music
And a very good evening to everybody. The program is Off the Hook. Emmanuel Goldstein here with you, joined tonight by Kyle.
What?
I'm introducing you, Kyle.
Oh.
Just say hello to the folks and get back to the mission that you're in the middle of.
Rob T. Firefly, are you there?
Good evening.
Okay. You couldn't hear me before? Is that how we got all off to the wrong foot here?
I don't think you can hear me. I can hear you. But you can hear me now.
We can hear you now.
All right. Gila, you're there too.
I am here too.
And we have Alex.
Somebody called my name?
Somewhere in the forest. You can hear me?
Yeah. Hey, there you are.
We're just confused. We're just confused and talking over each other because that's what we do normally.
All right. Fine.
Now, I mentioned Kyle's on a mission.
Kyle's on a mission to find an answer to a question he's been trying to find the answer to for the last couple of hours,
which is what time do we have to be off the air by?
Is it 755? Is it 759?
So if somebody at the station could maybe let us know that somehow or answer Kyle's phone calls, that would be nice too.
Okay. Here we are.
Our special DNC edition of Off the Hook because after this show, we're going into Pacifica coverage of the Democratic National Convention.
Have you guys been tuned into the DNC over the past couple of days?
We've definitely been aware of certain things that have been going on around the DNC and checking out the reactions and the highlights and the general sense.
Is there something that feels very familiar about watching a convention that's normally a big rollicking in-person event sort of doing a virtual thing instead?
Yeah. You know, I've heard all kinds of praise for this new way that the Democrats are doing things,
and it brought back memories of what we did a few weeks ago,
especially with regards to Michelle Obama's speech being given from inside a house instead of in a big arena with cheering people.
It was somehow better, somehow more intimate, somehow just something that spoke to you on a more personal basis.
So we've seen a mixture. We've seen a mixture just like what we went through of live presentations and prerecorded presentations,
and it could look like a telethon. It could look like a Zoom meeting with people that you have no idea who they are.
There's all sorts of ways to interpret the things that you're seeing on television.
It is different. It is unique, and I think we should embrace that.
We should embrace the differences and learn from them and maybe apply them when things get back to normal, assuming they do.
Absolutely. I mean, the only question I have is how they're going to handle the balloon drop later.
Yeah. Well, you know, Gila, there's not going to be a balloon drop, and that's a good thing, too, because there's not enough air to fill all the balloons.
We're running out of air. I read this somewhere that all these balloons are taking all valuable chemicals away from the planet,
and it must be air because that's what you put into balloons.
So people breathe shallowly, crisis times ahead.
But these virtual conventions are creating all kinds of potential security risks, or so I'm hearing.
I'm hearing that people are afraid of being Zoom bombed, but, you know, I don't think they really have to worry all that much.
I'm hearing about a key concern being distributed denial of service, where people basically flood all kinds of bogus traffic and prevent the message from getting out.
The reason I don't think that's an issue is because there isn't one source for any of this material.
It's coming from one place, coming from another place, and, yeah, it's being broadcast from a central location, as it always is,
and I'm pretty sure they're well-equipped to handle any kind of attack.
But you would have to know that at this particular time, this particular person is speaking from this connection.
It's possible. There could be all kinds of technical snafus. I live for technical snafus.
I hope we see something like that, other than the awkwardness of people waiting for applause that doesn't come,
or people who are supposed to be applauding on camera that don't realize they're on camera, just sitting there,
and then suddenly they realize it, and they start to clap just as the camera turns off.
You see that at soccer games. You see it all the time. It's imperfection, and I really like imperfection,
because that kind of defines who you are, and that's why we like BAI so much, because we're so imperfect here.
Alex, what in the world are you doing? You're walking throughout your house. I'm watching you on camera.
I was about to say goodnight to my son, too repetitiously.
You look like one of those hamsters that's running around on a ball, and I just was wondering what was going on there.
It looked kind of weird.
Yeah, but you've ruined the surprise now, the surprise element that I have.
What, for him or for me?
For him, yeah. Yeah, he's listening to the radio.
He's listening to the radio. How old is he?
He just turned two.
He just turned two, and he listens to Off the Hook.
Yeah.
Okay, well, a little late, but at least he's finally catching up.
Well, Alex, now you're still there in Pennsylvania, and I assume you've been keeping up with what's going on politically.
Any thoughts, any observations?
Yeah, I mean, I think I've always got thoughts and observations, some of them palatable, some of them not palatable, unpalatable.
But I think the whole DNC thing, going virtual, I find it a hell of a lot less thrilling and exciting, I think, than you do.
And that's because of, I think, the high standards that were set from Hope, quite frankly.
I think watching the DNC, to me, is frankly kind of boring as opposed to watching a hacker conference.
I felt that way, too. I think it was a little bit more bland and just too, I don't know, it's surreal in its own production.
These are politicians, they're not hackers. They're not as exciting.
So I don't know what you expect. They're going to be dull. They're going to be kind of mainstream.
The important thing is...
Guys, I have to interrupt us because I've just been informed by a listener via email that the show is not on the air.
Oh, great.
There's music playing on the air.
Wonderful.
I've just verified that on my radio here.
Well, then I guess I can start cursing up a storm because that's really what I feel like doing.
I swear, we have been trying to get a hold of the station for hours now.
The message says, you're not on air. They want you to call in to sync the audio.
To sync the audio.
Okay, Kyle, do you know what that means? Because I don't know what that means.
We're going to keep talking, though, as if we have an audience because sometimes I feel like we're just broadcasting into nothing.
And this is another example of that.
We're trying. We're trying to reach the station.
They don't pick up the phone, so I don't know what we're supposed to do.
I just got an email from the office.
An email. Okay, great.
Well, maybe we'll get a postcard, too, at some point.
That would be really handy.
And, of course, we will be off the air at a certain time, too.
We're trying to find out what time that is.
Not hard to convey these bits of information.
Very, very simple.
So, Alex, I believe you were in the middle of an important point that nobody can hear.
Yeah, for sure.
This will be on the archives, so I guess we'll hear it there.
But it's not on the radio, so it's not magical.
I mean, maybe it was a slightly important point.
I think an unimportant observation, perhaps, which was about the manner in which Biden had accepted the nomination.
It seemed, you know, it's just being in a classroom with a couple of balloons there.
I mean, you're accepting the nomination to run.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves, Alex.
Okay.
There's still a formidable opponent ahead, and I don't know.
I don't know.
And the Democrats, you know their track record.
Well, yeah, of course.
You never lose an opportunity to shoot themselves in the foot, for sure.
But, I mean, the fact that this should be a hugely celebrated event, and he was in this small room with a minor amount of balloons in it.
And it just looked so...
Hang on.
I'm sorry, Alex.
I hate to interrupt.
Hey, Rob, are we still off the air?
No, we're on the air.
We're on the air.
It's nice that somebody could tell me we're on the air.
You're texting.
Kyle, you are texting to somebody.
Why aren't you speaking on the telephone?
I don't understand this.
We don't communicate anymore.
This whole generation, this whole society, we don't know how to talk anymore.
We've been off the air for 10 minutes, and we're texting each other, and we don't know when we're on.
We don't know when we're off.
Okay, so now we're on.
I'm sorry, folks.
You have no idea what's going on.
Maybe you can catch it on the archive.
Go ahead.
Yeah, we need a better system.
We do, don't you think?
We've been doing this since April, and I think we need a better system.
Do we have an answer to my question yet, which I've been asking now for well over an hour and a half,
is what time I should be off the air so I can finish the outro by then?
55 after.
55.
Okay, that's all.
That didn't hurt.
I'm sorry, Alex.
Continue with the statement you were making.
I'm sorry nobody heard the song that you performed earlier.
Yes, I know.
Well, they can hear me singing in the rain some other time, I guess.
My point was just I felt like the nomination to become the Democratic presidential candidate for the presidency of the United States of America
should have come with greater fanfare than sitting in a Middle America classroom with a few balloons here and there.
It just seemed a little odd to me.
The whole thing just seems, frankly, a hokey, to be honest with you, and I think it's a little boring.
And for those listeners that had missed out on what we were talking about before, I think, Emanuel,
you had mentioned that they're politicians and they're supposed to be slightly boring.
Yes, hokey, and what was the other word you used?
I have no recollection.
Boring or something like that, yes.
These are politicians.
What do you expect?
You don't expect them to be that exciting, that controversial.
They should be.
I think that would definitely wake people up a little bit.
I think that we can expect this now, though, because part of the problem and the reason why we got to this damn mess that we're in right now
is because four years ago, people started seeing politics as an alternative form of entertainment.
And Donald Trump is a really great.
You said it.
You said it.
OK, we had a rule.
We had a rule house.
We weren't going to say that word.
And now you've gone and ruined everything.
You said the T word.
I know.
I think about what they're replacing as, I mean, a lot of the hokiness, I think, would probably be something people just basically have in the background
while they're physically next to their various delegates.
And, I mean, I've never been to one of these conventions, but there's all kinds of other, imagine, socializing and things and activities going on around this.
I mean, they're basically assembling the montage that would have been playing in the background that many people there probably wouldn't be consuming quite as much
as we're all taking in this one particular production in the virtual form.
Does that kind of make sense?
There is definitely a pared down, or I don't want to say watered down, but it's a narrow replacement for something that was a lot more kind of multi-layered as far as activities.
Yeah, I do.
And, you know, I think part of the problem that we're facing, or rather, I say we, I'm talking about Democrats.
Part of the problem that Democrats are facing, I shouldn't assume we're all Democrats here.
I apologize for that.
Is that Trump?
I said it again.
I said it two times, Alex.
One more time, you're out.
All right.
I don't make the rules.
That's true, yeah.
We'll just call the show that was formerly on WBAI Blank Watch or Beep Watch or something like that, right?
The one that used to precede us?
Yeah, so it was a good show.
Last year.
It was a good show.
I totally agree.
In any event, the problem with the current administration supporters is that they like this person who happens to be the President of the United States at the moment almost simply because he's not a politician.
And when you are running against a political opponent who is liked by the masses because he's not a politician, and you're running a politician against that non-politician.
At what point, Alex, though, do you say he's not a politician?
Because he's certainly acting like a politician in many ways, just a bit more extreme, a bit more insane perhaps.
But I don't know.
I think he qualifies as the establishment, as somebody who knows how to play the game.
Oh, absolutely he does.
He most certainly does, and he most certainly is a politician.
And he's great at spin.
Part of what I talked about two years ago at the HOPE Conference was how great that person is at spinning information and misinformation and detecting disinformation campaigns.
But people don't perceive him, the current POTUS that is, as a politician.
They look at his entire history in real estate, and he's been so good at the sleight of hand to convince the masses that he's a successful business person.
He's going to take that skill set that he learned from the private industry, slim down government, drain the swamp, build a wall.
Everybody else is going to pay for it, and America is going to be great again when it's anything but that.
When we're dealing with well over 100,000 deaths, that can be directly tied to incompetence in government in its response to the coronavirus and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Alex, it would be great if people would stop getting in the way.
If he would just be allowed – I'm sorry, I have to take the other side.
No one else is doing it.
If he would just be allowed to do the job that he promised to do, then with all this opposition, that's the problem.
Get rid of the opposition, and it'll be smooth sailing.
Maybe the next four years, we can try that out.
And then the four years after that, we'll get it perfected.
Well, we can perhaps say that democracy has failed us.
If we look at the 2016 election, and I'm saying this tongue-in-cheek, maybe it's time to try monarchy.
Monarchy, that's where you wind up.
That seems to be what you're espousing.
Well, no, I'm espousing dictatorship, actually.
That's what we're sampling right now is a little bit of dictatorship.
I don't know how monarchy would even get into it.
But I guess you could have the royal – oh, my God, that would be the royal family.
Wow.
Folks, we really, really need people to vote.
And speaking of voting, brings to mind the post office.
As you've all heard, the current administration has targeted pretty much everything at this point.
But now they've targeted the post office as somehow something that needs to be pared down or privatized or what have you,
and is a threat to democracy by allowing ballots to get through the mail.
We've seen cutbacks.
We've seen the ceasing of overtime.
We've seen all kinds of efficiency going down the drain so that if you mail your ballot now, it might get there in time.
But nobody is really sure.
And nobody really knows if the post office is up to the task because of all the cuts that have already happened.
Now, they say they're going to stop until after Election Day, which tells you that they know that this is a real threat to democracy.
But has the harm already been done?
Every time you see a mailbox, every time you see a postman, every time you see a post office or a mail truck, it's a reminder.
It's a reminder of the attack on democracy that is currently ongoing.
And I just don't see how, no matter how fervently you support the ruling party right now, you can actually say, this is right.
This is good.
This is something that we should continue doing is shutting down the post office and making it impossible for people to mail things on time.
It's getting really, really crazy.
I mean, the pandemic is crazy.
And I never thought we'd be in a situation like we are now with closing in on 200,000 deaths within a year.
But now looking at the post office under attack, how much more crazy can it possibly get?
And imagine if things don't go well in November and we're subjected to another four years of this.
Do you really think this country can survive that?
Or will it even be the same country after something like that?
In another four years, if Trump gets reelected, I'm sorry, I did it now.
If there is not a change in administration this Election Day, then what we will have is another four years of this individual.
But without whatever he's choking back to get himself elected.
So whatever gloves there are remaining, whatever shreds of glove fiber there might be still in place will be off.
And really, that chills me to the bone.
It's just like, Gillian, we have a mailbox not far from our home and we pass it all the time when we go on errands and whatnot.
And every time now we've passed it now, it's a matter of checking if it's still there.
Because there is footage of trucks full of mailboxes and workers dismantling ones that are there and just throwing them on the back of this truck.
And it's really terrifying.
One thing that people need to know is worst case scenario, you can take your absentee ballot physically to your local board of elections office.
And the information on where that is.
Where is that? Does anybody know where that is?
I don't know.
Nobody knows where that is.
And here's another question I have.
Those people who are diligently voting now, getting it over with quickly, your vote doesn't get counted until a particular date when they are allowed to start counting.
Where does your ballot live until then?
Where is that?
Does anybody know?
Who's in charge of that?
Yeah, a lot of questions that we don't have answers to.
Probably the elections board of whatever county or district.
So it's what, in somebody's locker or closet or where?
They probably have a storage facility of some sort that all the ballots are kept in and it's probably secured to a certain level.
How many of these are there in a particular county?
Who is guarding them?
You know, these are questions I have and I don't see them being addressed anywhere.
Okay, for what it's worth, my hometown, I'm still following a bunch of people that I knew when I was growing up on social media.
So I'm able to see a lot of stuff about what's going on with voting in my hometown.
And the board of elections in the county where I grew up posted on all their social media the various locations of the drop boxes with photos of each location and street addresses.
So that if you don't know where you're going, now you know.
And I thought that was a very interesting and proactive way for them to go about it and to say these are the eight locations in this county that you can go to to drop off your ballot anytime between now and November 3rd.
That's great.
And is that the county doing that?
Is the state doing that?
That was the county board of elections.
Okay.
So that's one county that seems to be doing a good job.
One county, but it's better than none.
And after that, they're kept in a mayonnaise jar in Funkin' Wagner's doorstep.
There's a number of states that are like that, too.
And I know in some of the mailings I've got as an absentee, there's a huge list of exactly that.
And those drop boxes are not just like a little mailbox.
They're usually like a one-ton iron box or built into some kind of building.
And they're clearly marked as specifically for mail or election mail only.
So you know exactly what to attack.
Well, you've got to be very determined to start pulling boxes like that and doing that unnoticed, I think, would be suspect.
Well, yeah, but just seeing what people are determined to do in order to disenfranchise voters,
it makes me worry if there's a period of time where ballots are being stored someplace and not supposed to be touched
and you might be able to figure out, like, okay, this is a liberal-leaning district.
This is not.
I'm going to be worried for some time until this is all over.
And I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Let me ask people here, though.
I know, Kyle, you still vote in Washington, and Washington is 100% mail-in ballots, correct?
Yeah, they switched in like 2000, somewhere along the lines, to be basically mail only, no in-person voting.
And it works very smoothly.
Yeah, it's a pretty mature system.
They've been doing it for a long time, and I've been absentee before that was required, so I didn't even really notice.
How about you, Alex?
Are you planning on mailing in this year or actually visiting your polling place?
I don't know yet.
And it's an interesting question because my name has changed somehow without my authorization in the voter registration database in New York.
You need somebody to change it back for you?
Yeah, that would be great.
We'll talk after the show.
Yeah, we'll work something out.
You mean your name changed.
What happened?
I'll tell you.
I mean, look, I can tell you in a short manner.
I went to vote last November, and I've been voting at the same polling place for the last 12 years, just about.
Actually, I guess it was 11 years in November.
But in any event, I show up there with my son, my oldest son, who was six years old at the time.
And actually, I had the dog with me.
I had Jimmy with me, and we went to the polling place like we usually do every November.
And they looked up my name.
I've had no problems there ever in the past, and they couldn't find my name.
And I thought, well, that was weird.
And thankfully, this past November wasn't extraordinarily busy.
So, in fact, there was almost nobody behind me.
So the very nice women at the polling place were wondering what happened and searching high and low for my name
and cross-referencing one book with another book and then another precinct book.
And in about 15 minutes, they figured out what had happened.
And it was that one character in my name in the voter registration database had changed.
And that's really weird to me because I never authorized any change.
I never put in any paperwork suggesting that my name had changed or did anything.
So let me try to understand this.
Can you tell us if it's a letter in your first name, last name?
Last name.
Okay, so I assume that meant that it got alphabetized differently.
No, it did not.
It was still alphabetized correctly, but there was a vowel that was changed to a consonant.
Interesting.
So why would something that's already in a database be changed?
Is it being OCRed a second time?
Is something strange happening?
It's being processed in some manner?
That's a good guess, and your guess is frankly as good as anybody's.
I mean, right now I have no idea.
But this got me thinking immediately along nefarious lines, which would be that let's say we know for a fact.
Let's start with this premise.
We know for a fact that state actors are interested in accessing voter registration databases and voter rolls
and that they've been quite interested in the voter rolls and voter registration databases for the last several years
and that we know that these databases are closely monitored and watched.
And so if a threat actor were to have access to a voter registration database,
deleting names from that database, as technical people, we understand that that would decrease the database size.
Decreasing the database size would alert others that something weird, something wonky is happening with the database.
However, if you did something to alter the names of the voters themselves by, let's say, changing a vowel to a consonant
in every third Democratic voter, that would cause absolute chaos when people showed up to vote at the polls.
So that's me adjusting my tinfoil hat.
Alex, has there ever been any instance of somebody getting access to the voter rolls, a state actor as you say?
I mean, obviously it's something that many state actors would love to be able to do,
but I think the extent of what we have seen is disinformation campaigns and just basically ways that people can be confused,
which is a pretty simple thing to do.
Have you ever heard of a case where someone is actually able to access a database and change something remotely?
I'm not entirely clear about whether or not that has been documented.
We know that there's certainly been access attempts.
And there have been, I think, plenty of attempts that have been thwarted.
But I don't know if we would necessarily know about attempts that have been successful.
Really successful attempts would be undetectable.
And so proving access like that, I think, is very, very difficult.
But I mean, look, this is all hypothetical to me, but it has created an enormous burden for me to even vote right now.
Because I've emailed the Department of Elections in New York several times.
Wait, this still hasn't been resolved?
It has not been resolved.
Well, what did you do last November when you discovered this?
I assume you started the process then.
I actually voted then because we figured out how my name was changed and I was able to vote.
Even though your name didn't match the name in their records?
That is correct.
That sounds like fraud. That sounds like voter fraud.
Yeah. However, it was cross-referenced with my license, with my address, all these types of things.
And it was an obvious change.
But, I mean, it raises the issue of if this was a really busy day at the polls, this took about 15 minutes of standing there
and cross-referencing book with various books and book with book with book, trying to figure out what the hell had happened.
So I still don't have an absentee ballot.
I still don't know if I'm even going to be allowed to vote in New York if I show up at the polling place
because I haven't been able to get my name changed because nobody ever gets back to me from the Department of Elections.
Well, I can tell you this, Alex.
You say you're not sure if you're going to show up in person or you're going to do absentee.
You're there in the Unabomber cabin now for the last six months or so.
You have a beard down to the ground.
I don't think you're showing up in person.
I think you're going to be asking for an absentee ballot.
So I don't know if that makes things easier for you, but I would definitely start looking into that now to make sure that you don't have a problem.
Perhaps, but you're operating on the assumption that we're going to stay here.
We have compelling interests in going back to New York, namely the start of the school year, and we've got kids.
So we want them to be back in school.
There's going to be an abbreviated schedule for them.
We're going to give it a shot, hope for the best.
We might be back here in November if things go haywire.
So it's not clear.
It might be a really abbreviated year, especially if people don't do this right.
And the school year, I don't know, if it goes any way like it's going down south, it's not going to last very long.
Let's hope it works, though.
Yeah, they're learning.
They're definitely going to learn, but it's about what exactly they're going to be learning this year.
Probably a lot about microbiology, pathology.
Yeah, they're learning a lot.
The list goes on.
Public health, prioritization, supply chains.
I know that's a big word.
Learning about lying, learning about good and bad and frightening people.
Selfishness, yes.
Yeah, all that.
Hey, so there was another report, a Republican report, actually, on the Russian role in the 2016 election and the hacking of the DNC back then.
Russian President Vladimir Putin directly ordered the hacking of the Democratic Party servers with the goal of leaking damaging information that would hurt then-candidate Hillary Clinton,
who you'll see tonight and hear tonight on WBAI, and provide a boost to President Trump's campaign.
That is the final report from the Senate Intelligence Committee's probe into Russian interference.
You might not have known this was still going on.
It's kind of a more detailed version of what Robert Mueller was supposed to come up with, and it was run by Republicans.
So it's really incredible to see the conclusions that they reached.
Now, this report is the fifth and final report of the committee.
It states that Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party with the purpose of harming the Clinton campaign,
which the Russian president has long denied, and our president has backed him up repeatedly.
The Russian effort was aided by WikiLeaks, which has also claimed that it was not the source of the hacked information.
WikiLeaks, and the report says this, likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence influence effort.
The committee found significant evidence to suggest that in the summer of 2016, WikiLeaks was knowingly collaborating with Russian government officials.
And while the report found no evidence of collusion between the president and the Russians, it did find that campaign staff attempted to benefit politically from the leaks.
Think about that. Yeah, they weren't actually going to Moscow and colluding, but they were attempting to benefit from the leaks that were being revealed.
Now, campaign staff sought advance notice about WikiLeaks releases, creating messaging strategies to promote and share the materials in anticipation of and following the release and encouraged further leaks.
And the report also found that several top members of the 2016 Trump campaign staff, I said it, I had to say it once, posed grave national security risk to the U.S. over their ties to Russia.
I'll say that again. That's a conclusion.
They posed grave national security risk to the U.S. over their ties to Russia, including Trump's former 2016 campaign chair, Paul Manafort, who was a grave counterintelligence threat.
I'll say that again. A grave counterintelligence threat due to his contacts with a Russian intelligence officer.
That is the conclusion from the Republican led report.
It's just simply unbelievable. I'm blown away by this.
And just by by seeing the conclusions that they reached now, Senator Marco Rubio, you might remember him.
He said, so we can say without any hesitation that the committee found absolutely no evidence that then candidate, you know, who or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election.
After hearing all of that, they still go to the party line of, OK, no collusion.
So everything's OK. They just said with the quotes that I read, grave counterintelligence threat.
I mean, these are very, very serious conclusions.
And I think the story might be getting glossed over a little bit because it's huge for a Republican led committee to come up with these kinds of conclusions and for the president's lackeys to simply defend him after this, after this damning evidence is released.
That is huge. That is really huge.
I mean, you focused on, I think, one key word there, which was grave quite a bit.
And this raises an issue, I think, that we've addressed at least two or three times before with respect to the administration's officials and especially campaign officials.
The people have made their way into the administration thereafter.
And all of these ties to Russia, especially if you look at somebody like Jared Kushner, if you were in a crony of the president or the president himself, it would be very, very difficult to obtain a security clearance to enable you to have access to classified information or even to work for the federal government.
Given how many ties to Russia and how many financial interests are intertwined with other countries, not even just Russia, but Russia in particular, is a huge problem from a security clearance processing standpoint.
I would venture to say that most of the people within the small orbit of Trump's inner circle would have been found ineligible to hold a security clearance if they were treated as any other ordinary person would have been treated in this country.
Yeah, correct. Absolutely.
Yeah, there are conflicts of interest in a business sense and definitely political entanglements and obligations.
And those sorts of things come up when you're interviewed or when you're going through any kind of clearance processes, I'm sure, Alex, and we've discussed on the show many times.
And getting confirmation through this, it's alarming. It's definitely substantive. I had no idea. I heard a little bit about this report coming out, but I didn't realize the depth of it until you guys covered it.
It's something. It really is an eye-opener.
But there are two roads of naivete that we can journey down. I don't want to go down either one of them.
One is to blame the Russians for everything and say that they're evil and are just out to completely destroy everything democratic.
And the other is to say that Russia had nothing at all to do with this and they're completely innocent.
Look, this is what foreign countries do to other foreign countries. We do it all the time.
We've done it for decades, for a long, long time, and Russia does too.
It's to be expected. We should be expecting these things.
It's not something to stay up at night and worry about if you take security precautions.
If you simply are expecting this sort of thing and you're not surprised when it happens, you won't have to have four years of investigations to prove it.
And definitely you do not want to try to make sense of it, any kind of logical sense of it, through a partisan lens.
That plays exactly into the kind of disruption that is a total cognitive dissonance between reality and what is being served up to disrupt the kind of unity that really should take precedence over this.
It's not just here either. The United Kingdom failed to take the threat of Russia's political interference seriously until the Kremlin orchestrated the hack of the Democratic National Committee in 2016.
That's according to a new report from the House of Commons Intelligence Committee that was revealed yesterday.
Yeah, a lot of reports are coming out.
That report suggests the UK's government ignored mounting indications of Russian disinformation and money laundering in its midst for years and has paid the price for it.
That heavily redacted report, it really is heavily redacted, eliminated all kinds of specifics to prevent Russia from gleaning additional insight into the workings of British intelligence services,
describes the UK's relationship with the United States as a crucial bulwark against Russian aggression.
I'm going to read you a quote here.
It's a redacted passage on the relationship between the two countries.
It hints at a significant caveat, but it's redacted, as I said.
It's clear that this partnership provides valuable capabilities that redacted to the UK and avoids the duplication of coverage through effective burden sharing.
However, there remains a question as to whether redacted.
This is important given the relative priority of work on Russia among the Five Eyes partnership.
So read from that what you will, but there's all kinds of things going on out there.
5G phone network.
Yeah, that's it, Kyle.
That's it.
No, I figured it out.
That's the last piece of the puzzle.
And the royal family.
I know.
Yeah.
Princess Diana.
Hey, we have other things to talk about.
This is kind of interesting.
Do you know that Notepad++?
Is that how you say it?
The new notepad?
It's got two pluses after it.
I'll use notepad.
Notepad++.
I didn't know there was such a thing.
Or is it double plus notepad?
Is that how you say it?
I don't know.
Anyway, it's been banned in China.
Yeah, they've banned the popular notepad replacement software called Notepad++.
Why would they ban a word processor?
Yeah, that's a good question.
Well, it's because of the developers' protests against the political unrest in Hong Kong and China's human rights violations.
The Notepad++ Twitter account states that this block is likely being done due to the release of their Stand with Hong Kong and Free Ogre editions,
which were named in this way to show the plight of those people.
I reject the idea that our given free speech rights are restrained by an authoritarian country.
Notepad++ stands with the people of Hong Kong.
Wow.
I don't know.
It's interesting that a word processor takes a stand like that.
I just wonder, is that really something that – how much can you really say?
I mean, what does GREP say about – what's their stand on human rights in China right now?
It's great.
I mean, we take these stands.
Are we blocked?
We should be blocked because we certainly condemn this kind of thing all over the place.
Yeah, we should absolutely make sure that we are or that we verify whether that is true or not and work harder one way or the other.
A really fascinating thing about the case of Notepad++ is it's a free open source program.
It's not like one organization or one company that makes a product that you can easily ban or otherwise.
This is something that people all over the world have the source code for, can get the source code for, can compile themselves.
How do you ban something free like this?
I mean, it doesn't seem bannable.
Yeah, it's a very good question.
And you have to wonder LS, the LS command to list files or DIR in DOS or double click.
All these things, can they all take stands against Chinese human rights violations?
And that would be like a totally next level abstraction of filtering.
You have your tiered internet and all on net neutrality and then now you're going to go into the general computer
and turn off things based on what attitudes different programs have.
That is a whole new kaleidoscope of messed up.
What if WordPad joins BDS?
That could happen.
And then you're going to have all sorts of complications.
Then it's on.
Yeah, it's on.
But I want to read you one other thing though.
This is from the QQ browser, which apparently is a Chinese browser.
Anybody use the QQ browser?
No, why would we?
We're not Chinese.
Basically, they have a variable called evil class, which apparently is a variable in other browsers as well.
It's a value of eight and value of eight means banned by the state.
That is what that value means.
The website you are currently visiting contains illegal information.
Please close the page.
Supposedly, 360 Chrome browser also has that variable.
Interesting things that you learn when totalitarian regimes clamp down using technology.
Talking about totalitarian regimes, just to briefly touch on something we were talking about earlier,
the site vote.nyc has a page linked right on the front page about absentee voting and all the different ways you can do that.
And from there also has a contact us page where you can see the location of each borough's local board of elections.
That information is out there on vote.nyc.
Awesome.
Getting back to China.
A couple weeks ago, we talked about TikTok and Trump's attempts to ban it.
We had a spirited debate, Alex, about whether or not TikTok is actually posing a threat to us
and whether people should use it or shouldn't use it.
I don't think people should use it, but I think they should have the right to use it.
And I understand that you basically are becoming more involved in different ways.
Do you want to tell us what's up?
Yeah, I am.
Two things.
Our vigorous debate a few weeks ago had inspired me to look further into this issue as well.
And what I found was really quite interesting and wound up being the subject of an opinion piece
that I wrote for the Philadelphia Enquirer about why the ban is rooted in fears and racism.
And what was extraordinarily interesting to me is that if you go back to the March report about TikTok,
snooping on clipboard data, cut and paste data from our phones, that report didn't single out TikTok.
It named about 50 other apps that are very commonly used by Americans all around the country
that did exactly the same thing.
And the reason that apps even have access to this data is to prevent repetitive spam posts from hitting their platforms.
So posting the same thing over and over and over again is a reason to look for duplications in the cut and paste data.
Well, when this report came out and there were a lot of media stories about TikTok,
it turns out TikTok stopped doing that pretty quickly.
But other applications have persisted in looking at and reviewing that clipboard data.
Apps like The New York Times and apps like The Wall Street Journal and apps like Fox News are all still named in that report
and has been updated to reflect those that have ceased that practice.
So that was part of reasons why I wrote this piece for the Philadelphia Enquirer.
Since then, some interesting things have happened.
You know, when we spoke a couple of weeks ago, this was a hypothetical ban.
And on August 6, 13 days ago, we'll just call him POTUS, had actually issued an executive order banning any transaction with TikTok in 45 days from that particular order.
Since then, my law firm and I have been retained by TikTok employees to contest the constitutionality on due process grounds of that particular executive order.
And this is different from TikTok itself as the client, because we're representing the employees.
This is an individual right as a third party affected by this particular executive order.
And the executive order is sort of interesting.
You know, national security considerations, about 175 million Americans having downloaded TikTok, you know, that it collects, quote unquote, vast swaths of data.
But when you look at what TikTok does, it's very, very similar in degree and kind to the kind of data that our domestic corporations collect, that Google collects, that Facebook collects, that The New York Times collects about this.
So if China really wanted to snoop on American citizens, the problem isn't with TikTok itself.
The problem is with surveillance capitalism.
And so we have been retained because this is putting into jeopardy the paychecks of TikTok employees.
After September 20th, it's unclear right now because the Department of Commerce has not clarified, the administration has not clarified whether this definition of transaction reaches TikTok employees themselves.
And that's a big problem for over 1,500 people, U.S. employees, who have to wonder whether or not they're going to be able to put food on the food on the table and shelter over their family's heads.
Well, it's interesting. I'm glad to see this.
This discussion is progressing in this particular way.
Our spirit of debate now you are basically defending TikTok employees.
And it's going to be interesting to see where that goes.
Yeah, it is. And the TikTok employees have started a GoFundMe page to help with the legal bills.
We've reached about half of our goal.
Hopefully, we can tweet that out after the show.
We think this is a really worthy cause that can affect a lot of people and a lot of families here.
And our lawsuit is going to be filed very shortly, hopefully before Labor Day, if not sooner.
Is there someplace people can get more information other than here?
Yeah, they can contact me directly, Alex, at Blackstone-Law.com.
I'm happy to answer and field any additional questions.
We'll tweet out the link to the GoFundMe page.
It's hard to give that particular URL.
It's a little complicated.
But if you just search for GoFundMe TikTok employees on Google, it'll come right up.
You can also check out the Philadelphia Inquirer piece that I wrote and was published about a week and a half ago.
All right. We are at the end of our time.
But stay tuned to WBAI because we are going to be presenting the Democratic National Convention, night number three, right on these airwaves.
We'll see you next week. Good night.
That ain't exactly.
The.
Through a crack in the wall.
Visionary.
Staggering.
Standard.
It's.
Dark.
From the brain.
Pattern.
The.
Seals.
To the U.S.A.
From the sorrow in the street.
The holy places where the races meet.
Homicidal bitch that goes down every kitchen to determine who will serve and who will eat.
From the wells of disappointment where the women kneel to pray for the grace of God in the desert here in the desert far away.
Democracy is.
To the U.S.A.
The.
Sail on, sail on, O my dear ship of steed To the shores of need, past the rivers of
greed, through the swaths of need Sail on, sail on, sail on, sail on
It's coming to America first, the cradle of the best and the worst
It's here they got the range and the machinery for change
And it's here they got the spiritual thirst
It's here the family's broken and it's here the lonely say
That the heart has got to open in a fundamental way
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
It's coming from the women and the men
Oh baby, we'll be making love again
We'll be going down so deep the ripples gonna weep
And the mountains gonna shout amen
It's coming like the tidal flood beneath the lunar sway
Imperial, mysterious and amorous array
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
Sail on, sail on, O my dear ship of steed
To the shores of need, past the rivers of greed, through the swaths of need
Sail on, sail on, sail on, sail on
I'm sentimental if you don't know what I mean
I love the country but I can't stand the scene
And I'm neither left or right, I'm just staying home tonight
Getting lost in that hopeless little screen
But I'm as stubborn as those garbage bags that time cannot decay
I've jumped but I'm still holding up this little wild bouquet
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
To the U.S.A.
To the U.S.A.