Off the hook, coming up.
And you are listening to radio station WBAI New York. It's seven o'clock time for Off the Hook.
So I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving.
Now I can't make a call.
They cut me at my dress.
But if they could, they would.
I'll do them all for the best and save the worst.
I hope that's understood.
One day we'll know.
Off the hook.
Off the hook.
And a very good evening to everybody.
The program is Off the Hook.
Emanuel Goldstein here with you.
Joined tonight by Kyle.
Yes, I'm here.
And we're getting no levels. Why is that?
Make sure that this is undone.
So I'm right here. Sorry about that.
Well, you're fine. Where am I?
I'm sorry. Where are you?
There I am. Okay.
You set a level for me and it was way too low.
Okay.
And let's bring in our Skype friends.
Okay. Rob, are you there?
No?
Good evening.
Okay. Are you on delay?
Yes.
They seem to be delayed somewhat.
No?
I'm responding, Rob.
Dila, are you there?
Can you hear me?
Yes.
Can you hear me now?
You responded much faster than Rob did.
He was probably unmuting himself.
Unmuting himself.
As a courteous...
It's a press of a button, Kyle. That's all it is.
It doesn't take five seconds.
Alex, are you there?
I am indeed.
Another long delay. Another long delay.
What's up with the delays?
I'm impatient. I want to get things done.
There's a lot of grievance coming from your direction today.
Okay. Let's do this, folks.
I'm going to count down.
All right. I'm going to go three, two, one.
I'm talking to Rob, Dila, and Alex.
I want you all to say one the same time you expect me to say one.
Okay?
Here we go.
Three, two, one.
One.
Do you see the delay?
That's a long delay.
That's going to make it hard to communicate.
Why do we have a delay all of a sudden?
Huh.
All right, Skype.
Thank you for that.
Well, here we are.
Another edition of Off the Hook where we explore technology
and sometimes have a little bit of fun with it.
What have you guys been up to this week?
Anything noteworthy?
Yeah.
Sorry to jump in like that.
I took the subway for the first time in six months.
Wow.
You know, I haven't taken the subway since March.
Yeah.
So how is it?
I hadn't.
It's very strange because there's a feeling of like being inside a time capsule
because none of the ads, none of the posters have changed,
so it's all for movies that are opening in February.
And mask compliance was better than I thought it was going to be.
I was very pleasantly surprised by that.
The only person I really saw on the train who didn't have a mask on was a baby.
I was willing to let that slide.
That baby might have to pay $50.
I was back in my physical office for the first time since March,
and that was incredibly strange.
And, you know, the people at the Starbucks where I get my coffee recognized me
and remembered me, and that was oddly heartwarming.
They've been there the whole time waiting for you to come back.
Pretty much, yeah, yeah.
It was honestly better than I thought it was going to be.
I was really worried beforehand.
I've done it twice since then.
It's all good.
So that's the big excitement in my life since last year.
Well, it's interesting what you bring up here as far as seeing the compliance.
We were talking about this on the other show yesterday,
how we went to a college campus we're familiar with.
We've been driving around, Kyle and I.
And when you see people that are wearing masks,
when you go into a place where everybody is following the guidelines,
you leave with a sense of pride.
You leave with a sense of community, like everybody is looking out for each other.
And I think that's a wonderful thing.
And the numbers that we have in New York right now prove that this is a good thing,
that it works.
So I just hope that the rest of the country sees this
and they also try and get through this together as a community
because we are all in this together.
This is not something we can take sides on.
This is science, and we can't debate it.
We have to figure out how to get through it.
Alex, anything unusual or different?
Do you always have some adventure that's taken place in your life?
Yeah, no doubt.
It's been an extraordinarily busy week.
And I'm sort of exhausted, to be honest with you,
because we had a lot of movement and an amazingly big win
in our lawsuit for TikTok employees that we filed a couple of weeks ago.
The things that really came to a head at the end of last week,
I would say almost immediately after our show last week, actually,
we had a very aggressive briefing schedule on the temporary restraining order
that we sought against the Trump administration for the banishment of TikTok
and its effect on TikTok employees in that it would not allow TikTok
to pay their wages and salaries.
And coming to work could be considered a federal crime,
a conspiracy to avoid the effect of the executive order.
So we filed this lawsuit.
There was a lot of haranguing going back and forth between us and TikTok
and the Department of Justice.
On Saturday, we received the opposition of the Department of Justice
on Thursday evening, our time, around 8 p.m.,
and we had until 5 p.m. on Saturday, Pacific time, so 8 p.m., again, our time,
to file our opposition papers against the Department of Justice.
And that's not a long time.
And they hit back at us very hard.
It was a good brief.
I think our reply brief was even better.
And we heard from the Department of Justice on Monday,
because oral argument in front of the federal judge who could have issued
a restraining order against the Trump administration
was scheduled for Tuesday morning.
And on Monday afternoon, we got an email from the lawyers
representing the United States government basically conceding
every single thing we were asking for on behalf of the TikTok employees.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
You got the Trump administration to concede?
Yes, we did.
And nobody believes it.
I totally agree.
In fact, when we spoke with other lawyers conferencing this matter
and strategizing, they told us that getting a letter like this
was going to be damn near impossible from the Department of Justice
because this is so political and because this is going to be handled out of
main justice, which is essentially at the direction of Bill Barr.
I mean, look, the timing of this is really fascinating too
because they could have come out at the beginning of our lawsuit
when we filed our complaint and said we're not going to do the things
that you think we're going to do with this executive order
and we're not going to prevent you from getting paid
or your employees from getting paid.
We're not going to interpret the executive order in this way whatsoever.
But instead, they waited until we filed our papers for a restraining order.
They filed an opposition.
We filed a reply.
This is not an insignificant amount of work.
This is a huge amount of work.
And then at the 11th hour, literally on the eve,
before the judge is going to hear oral argument about this,
they were afraid they were going to lose, so they conceded.
That's the long and the short of it.
That's what happened.
We got every single thing that we were arguing for for TikTok employees.
They are going to get paid.
They're not going to lose their benefits.
And the government conceded that it is not going to be a
quote-unquote conspiracy for them to try to get paid and continue to go to work.
So these are all really, really good things.
We think it's a tremendous result here.
And we're not going to finish the fight.
We don't think that our job is done.
Our lawsuit can still proceed,
and we would like to reach the larger and broader issue of whether what
Trump did by singling out one application, TikTok in this manner,
without a proper evidentiary foundation for a national security threat,
is in fact constitutional.
So we're still moving forward,
and we also want to address the issue of immigrants, H-1B visa holders,
who may be ejected from the country or are having their visas slowed down,
grinding to a halt, essentially,
preventing them from coming into this country and working for TikTok.
So our work is substantially finished, but certainly not done.
Wow. Okay.
Well, you know, when I asked if people had an interesting week,
I was going to say I vacuumed, and I thought that was going to be the extent of it.
But you're saving democracy and really helping with some major,
important issues that I think a lot of people will feel the benefits of.
Now, TikTok, of course, is still in the news.
I know they turned down an offer from Microsoft.
Who is it now that's working with them?
Is it Oracle or somebody?
Did I get that right?
That's right.
Yeah, Oracle seems to be the latest player here.
But the interesting thing here is that we are viewing what's happening with TikTok
only through the lens of the United States press.
When you look at what's been going on in China,
and you look at the other side of this,
this is a deal that appears to be very far from done.
Number one was a week and a half ago,
China came out with essentially export restrictions,
saying that if there is technology, sophisticated technology,
in particular algorithms, social media algorithms,
that belong to a Chinese company,
they cannot be exported outside of China without their approval.
The same thing that we do with our U.S. companies and technology
that could be considered, let's say, a national security threat
if it were to fall into the hands of a foreign adversary.
So China is doing the same stuff that we do to us,
which means that any deal for the sale of TikTok through ByteDance,
the parent Chinese company,
would have to have the approval of the Chinese government.
And the Chinese press has been pretty clear in saying that
Microsoft is certainly off the table,
but Oracle is certainly not in when it comes to being a bona fide purchaser just yet.
So I think we have to look at this from the lens of the East and the West.
And when you see that, there is certainly a lot of haze still on the horizon in this picture.
But also going back to what you said, Emmanuel, about it's been a busy week.
I'm exhausted, I have to say.
And it's not just me.
I really want to give a shout out to my partners,
John Lovey and Justin Perry, who were really spearheading litigation efforts here
and did a huge amount of the writing and the research on this.
So it's been a dream team.
Plus, we've been working a lot with Mike Godwin,
who was actually the first lawyer, I believe, at the EFFs.
And the EFF file dynamic is briefed in our case.
And our client is a pretty awesome lawyer
who's also a technical person on the security side for TikTok in the United States, too.
So it's been an all-star team, not just me.
I'm glad to see you landed on the right side of this issue,
because you really are working with good people.
And I think you're going to win.
I think you really are fighting for democracy here and fairness for workers.
And like you said, the fight's not over.
It's going to be going on for a while.
So this ought to be really interesting.
Yeah, absolutely.
Everyone, please stay tuned.
We're just gearing up.
We had some fun today.
We released the summer issue of 2600 Magazine in PDF format.
Now, yeah, it's September, what, 16th now?
Yeah, we're a bit late.
We're a bit late.
And, of course, the pandemic had a lot to do with that.
Our printer literally had trouble getting paper.
The distribution system was completely messed up on many, many levels.
Stores were closing.
We had no place to ship our magazine.
And we honestly did not know we'd make it through the year.
Fortunately, the community came through and really helped us out
so that we were able to put out this issue, albeit late.
But it is out, and we will catch up, and we will get back on schedule.
It will take a while, but we will do it.
Today, though, we put out the PDF.
And the reason we did that first was because the paper edition is still in the process of being sent,
and it's taking longer.
We tried to speed it up as much as possible.
There are things we don't have control over.
So rather than delay everything, we had the Kindle and Nook editions come out on Friday.
The PDF version came out today,
and we're hoping the printed edition will be shipping later this week
or very early next week at the latest.
But the interesting thing that happened today, we released the PDF,
and many people got their first glimpse of the cover of the summer edition.
And I wasn't expecting this.
I wasn't expecting this kind of a reaction,
but a number of people took great offense and said they were going to cancel their subscriptions
and they wanted nothing more to do with us.
And wow.
Of course, that led to a reverse backlash from people who supported what we were doing, what we were saying.
And really, I did not think this was going to be so controversial.
It's basically a figure of somebody wearing an anonymous mask and a face covering,
and they're raising their fist in the air, and they have a police shield,
and they have a sticker that says 8 colon 46.
I think we all know what that means.
The amount of time George Floyd had his neck being held down by a cop.
And a sticker for Hope 2020.
And there's also, if you look in the background, it's kind of on a beach.
You see kind of an illusion of the Planet of the Apes,
where a statue of Lincoln is just kind of sitting there.
Now, someone enlighten me.
What is controversial about that?
We're talking about somebody kneeling, basically somebody with a police shield.
So ostensibly, this could be a cop.
Somebody kneeling, raising their fist, standing for justice, and calling attention to injustice.
Now, when did we ever shy away from doing something like this?
And how is it people in our community find this offensive?
Anyone?
I have zero explanation.
The imagery itself, I'll note the anonymous mask is wearing a mask.
It's a mask with a mask on.
So it's safe, and there's no other people around.
So this is a physically distant character.
But beyond that, it's a statement, yeah.
It's artistic.
It has some elements that tell a story and share what is really going on.
There's something that is really all around us that's been taking place over the past couple of months.
These are kind of normal ways for us to be creative and really present the latest issues.
So that was kind of the spirit of it, and I think it's a beautiful cover.
It's kind of unusual that it was controversial.
I'm very happy with it, and we have some really terrific covers.
But again, it's just the cover.
It's not even the contents of what's inside the magazine.
People who are outraged by this have not even read the inside of the magazine.
So I honestly don't get it, unless they simply are opposed to Black Lives Matter altogether,
in which case I get it, and it's sad.
But we certainly are not going to back down or avoid certain topics.
This is something that we all have to confront.
We all have to say something about.
And if we can't even do that, boy, we're definitely not going to make any progress.
Rob?
One thing that I'm always kind of entertained by is the shouts every so often that,
I can't believe 2600 is getting political now.
For those unfamiliar, I think it's pretty fair to say that 2600 has always been a political item.
I saw a tweet somebody posted earlier that said we were born political, and that's true.
We were born political.
Well, and certainly not shied away from politics and various perspectives and the conflicts therein.
But this is not politics.
This is justice.
This is human rights.
There should be nothing controversial about this.
Especially, yeah.
Black Lives Matter.
I mean, how is it hard for people to say that?
I think that's the whole point, is that there are people who cannot say that
or who have to put a big asterisk next to it and say, yeah, they matter, but.
No, there's no but.
There's no but.
That's the statement.
That is the statement.
And the funny thing is, that statement wasn't even spelled out on the front cover.
It was simply implied, but even that was too much for some people.
Speaking of Twitter, we are accepting hashtag input, I guess is the way to phrase it.
If you hashtag off the hook and send it to Twitter, in theory at least we'll see it,
and then we can answer any question you have or perhaps read a statement
if it's something that fits in with what we're talking about.
Hashtag off the hook on Twitter.
Send a message and attach that, and we'll see if it works.
Go ahead, Rob.
Yes.
The best way to get at us on Twitter is to at us, so at sign Hacker Radio Show on Twitter.
I can monitor the hashtag as well.
That just might not be as responsive at the moment.
Well, we told people the hashtag, so we have to monitor that.
You can't introduce a whole other name now.
You can do that too, but as long as you have the hashtag off the hook,
that's what we tweeted about earlier.
Go ahead, Alex.
I'm sort of intrigued by this controversy surrounding the big cover of the magazine as well
because it just seems to me that a lot of people will accuse one another of being political
when they perceive the other person's politics as not matching their own.
The point of this, I feel like even though we've been, as Rob rightly pointed out,
political in various spheres, we've been political about the issues.
We've been political about justice.
We've been political about immigration.
Not necessarily political about promoting the ideals of the Democratic Party
as opposed to the ideals of the Republican Party.
If you listen to the show going back to the 90s, you will hear Emanuel railing against
Attorney General Janet Reno and President Clinton, and we've given hell to Obama,
though he deserved it too.
I think for us, it is always about the issues.
It's about the effect of the laws, it's about the effect of politicians' words,
regardless of where you stand on the political aisle.
If you're on the left, you may be in more agreement with the types of things that we say
on this radio or in the magazine than you are if you're on the right.
But that does not mean by any stretch of the imagination, and I speak for myself
and I think for the rest of us here, that we would never not agree with somebody
on the right simply because they're on the right.
Minimum of 10 minutes, I will be fiercely disagreeing with somebody on the left
about something.
That's just the nature of it all.
I look forward to that.
But the thing is, when we talk about things like this, it's always relevant to our community,
to the hacking community, to technology, and this is no exception.
The technological world is certainly caught up in all of this,
and we're saying that in the cover, the anonymous mask and the reference to Hope and all that.
So many talks at the Hope Conference were about social justice.
It's become more or less our theme, and we are not shying away from that.
We never will.
I'm happy to say the vast majority of people get that,
but it is disturbing to see that people who were readers of us find that unacceptable.
It's kind of a microcosm, I guess, of the country where people you think you knew
suddenly are saying things that you just can't accept.
It doesn't make sense, and it's not fair.
Anyway, we're always open to dialogue.
We always try and treat people well, and I hope that continues.
I hope we do a better job of that over the next few weeks, certainly,
and into next year we will certainly see what happens.
Go ahead, Rob.
I've often said to people, because I consider myself a hacker, that term describes me.
I also consider myself an activist.
That term describes me.
I didn't become a hacker because I was an activist.
I became an activist because looking at the world with what I feel is my hacker mindset
and my ways of looking at things and seeing how they can be improved
and if the rules governing the system can be circumvented or changed in a constructive way,
that's part of being a hacker, but it's also part of the way that sees how things are
and how we could possibly make them better.
It turns out when you turn that mindset toward society in general,
it tends to make one an activist, I guess.
The term fits.
All right.
I don't know if this Twitter thing is working
because I'm not seeing anything coming across on the hashtag.
Last time we did this, we didn't see things until after the show.
Again, hashtag, off the hook, one word, see if it works.
We can at least just send a test or something.
But, yeah, it's another way of feeding back to us our email address, othat2600.com.
We have a couple of letters.
We'll get to those in a bit.
But I wanted to also mention some of the things that have been going on.
This is really a fascinating story.
There's a viral phishing scheme that's targeting people across the country with scammy text messages.
Nothing new there, but these ones are claiming to be from the United States Postal Service.
And get this, QAnon conspiracy theorists have jumped into the fray,
falsely claiming that these scammy text messages, ostensibly from USPS, are tied to human trafficking.
Yeah.
Now, there's no evidence, no evidence, of course, to suggest any of this is true.
The rumor spread on, guess what, Facebook and Instagram,
echoing the Wayfair conspiracy theory that went viral earlier this summer.
And unlike the Wayfair conspiracy, however, the USPS myth is obfuscating a real phishing threat.
It gets really kind of complicated here.
Basically, the scam involves text messages that claim to have information about a USPS delivery.
And to find out more, people have to click on a link.
Now, on Twitter, security researcher Eric Allison said the link goes to the domain m9sxv.info,
which then redirects to jtuzd.rdtk.io.
And, of course, many of us use jtuzd.rdtk.io.
Don't you, Kyle? You look baffled.
Jtuzd.rdtk.io.
I can't say it.
Yeah, that site.
Obviously, if you go to a site that looks like that, there's something weird going on.
And the goal, he theorized, was to steal people's credentials, as it always seems to be.
Now, at a moment when USPS is facing a very real crisis in the form of budget cuts from the Trump administration,
this kind of a rumor about them being involved in human trafficking is about the last thing the country needs.
It saps support from a beleaguered agency and makes it difficult for those tasked with stopping human trafficking to do their jobs.
But there is a bright spot, and it's that this rumor from QAnon might actually stop people from clicking on the link.
So they won't click on the link from the scammy text message from the Postal Service,
which is trafficking human beings and preventing a phishing scam.
It's so complicated and convoluted and crazy.
Wait, is that like conspiracy theories as emergency alert?
Well, yeah, but for the wrong reasons.
I'm sure that's not what they're trying to do.
Wow.
But thanks to The Verge for this story.
Were you guys able to keep up out there in Skype land?
Oh, yeah, it all makes perfect sense to me.
In this day and age, it does.
It really does.
But social media, I think the theme is that social media is poison, and it's really demonstrating that.
Alex, you had something?
Yeah, I mean, I think the fact that these could be so quickly and easily amplified by social media platforms,
it just illustrates a very big glaring problem that we've known about for the last four years.
And as we head into a presidential election less than 50 days away here,
we've got this gigantic problem when it comes to misinformation and platforms not really able to handle or address or tackle this issue head-on whatsoever.
This is such a crazy out-there conspiracy theory.
But it doesn't surprise me in the least, either, because these things also, they look real.
They look believable.
They're well-crafted.
We've actually had several clients contact us about these SMS text messages that they received,
and a lot of them do look believable.
We actually also started tracking or trying to track some of the domains that were used in these particular types of scams.
And if you take a look at, you know, one of them I think you mentioned was M9SXV.info.
Oh, my God.
Of course, yeah, that one.
We're all familiar with that.
Yes.
That's my home page.
Yeah, there you go.
So what these guys are doing is pretty smart, too.
I mean, they generally will always start with M and then a number, and then something, you know, and then usually S, right?
The last two numbers change.
They make it kind of difficult because they do hop around a little bit in terms of this format.
Wait, you're saying there's an actual rhyme or reason to the random numbers and letters?
Yeah.
Yeah, well, it makes it difficult to track because there's so much noise in the DNS when it comes to those letters
and the way that they're formatting this and the way that they're changing them.
It is very tough to track and get a handle on these domains when they come out.
But especially, and here's the interesting thing about these scams,
they are always operating on the same day of the domain name registration.
So if you take a look at M9SXV, as in SierraXrayVictor.info, that was registered on the 15th of September.
And it's always using Namecheap as a registrar.
And then very shortly thereafter, it was activated for use in these SMS phishing scams, the smishing scams, as we call them.
Another one that was used and was active on September 7th was M5SMZ.info.
That's SierraMaryZulu.info.
And again, not surprisingly, that was also registered the same day of September 7th with Namecheap.
So they're making these really quickly and activating them very quickly.
So it's M followed by a number followed by three letters.info.
That seems to be the format.
Yeah, but here's the other interesting thing, too, that I noticed.
I took a look inside the .info zone file for the TLD, which includes all of the domains in .info.
You can still look these up by performing a whois.
If you go down your command line in Terminal, for those of us that are not command line adept here,
whois will tell you who owns a particular domain when it was registered, when it expires.
But it doesn't.
Most of the time, people hide behind anonymity, and you can't tell who owns them.
You used to be able to.
Privacy.
That's true.
You used to be able to get much more information about who actually owns it, who's the actual owner.
That's because they changed the standard, right?
Yeah, they did, quite a bit, with GDPR.
And they were masking quite a few different aspects of whois.
But one of the aspects of whois that is not masked and has never been masked is the registrar and the creation date.
This is not information that relates to people or personally identifying information.
So you can always take a look at that.
All of these have namesheets as a registrar.
All of these are registered the same day.
So you can't mask that type of information.
And we're actively looking out for these.
I will say, though, but to go back to the original point, these domains don't appear to be located in the zone file for the .info TLD any longer.
Which means that, you know, it seems to me like this has been pervasive and active enough for law enforcement, probably federal law enforcement, to get involved with the Internet Registry and make sure that these are removed on an expedited basis.
It doesn't prevent them from being added on a daily basis.
But when these are activated, I think there's a lot of swift action behind the scenes to get these domains taken down.
So when they're taken down, you're saying they no longer exist on the registrar.
They don't still have their expiration date.
They're just wiped out completely.
No, they do.
You can still look them up in the whois.
But the actual domains in the zone file, which would then have a name server associated with it, and the name server will tell you where the IP address is, that seems to be gone.
So those entries are gone, and they're gone really quickly.
I have not been able to find them in the .info zone file, which contains all of the domains that are located in the .info top-level domain.
You're able to detect this by the predictable behavior.
They register through the same registrar, and they're active within a day.
What if they simply randomized the registrar they used and waited a couple of days before they started doing anything?
That would make it more difficult.
I'm sorry for giving that tip out to them, but they're going to figure it out on their own.
Yeah, that's right.
But even monitoring for these types of registrations on a daily basis are very, very tricky, because you're going to get a hell of a lot of false positives when it comes to M-whatever in the DNS.
There's just so much activity on that front.
But why M?
Is there a reason why they only begin with M?
You would have to ask them, Emanuel.
I don't know.
I'm asking them now.
They could listen to the radio show.
Please write to us, LTH at 2600.com, and answer.
Let us know why.
Maybe it's a program that they haven't figured out how to move to the next letter.
Also, if you're interested in remaining anonymous, go to 2600.com slash SecureDrop for information on how to contact us anonymously.
Also, if you want to leak something to us, such as, I don't know, tax returns of various people or memos or even videos, audio, all kinds of things, it's all possible.
You can submit articles, too.
Yeah, absolutely.
And you can communicate with us without us knowing who you are.
2600.com slash SecureDrop.
All the instructions are there.
You'll need the Tor browser when you actually submit your material.
But SecureDrop is an amazing way to transfer information securely, and it's been used by media outlets throughout the world for a number of years, introduced at Hope, by the way, and we're just so proud to be a part of that.
Yeah, one of the best tools for that around, so definitely take advantage of that if you're trying to get important stuff to us.
I want to thank Miguel who writes to us using the hashtag OffTheHook.
I'm listening, but I still don't have a question.
Okay, thank you, Miguel.
That's all we ask, that somebody would just at least try the hashtag out and see if it works, and it does work.
So now we can say that if people want to ask a question, they can, and if they don't, then it's their choice.
Slash, I'm sorry, hashtag, that's the pound sign in case you don't know it, above the three on most keyboards, OffTheHook, one word, and just type your question and include that, and it'll somehow get to us.
Somebody was raising their hand.
Go ahead.
Oh, no, sorry.
I was signaling to my wife.
I wasn't raising my hand.
Well, you can't signal to your wife while you're on the radio because you're signaling to us.
It's hand signals are how we communicate.
Yeah, I thought you said, I'm not your wife.
I'm here.
You can pass notes to her.
Yeah.
Do you want me to address this question that we got from Twitter?
Yeah, why don't you get that one?
What question?
There's no question.
There's one more.
Why don't you speak to that?
How come I don't see it?
I don't know.
Rob told me on another communication platform, but go ahead, Alex.
Rob, why don't I see this?
How am I being excluded from this?
He's using Skype chat.
You've got to switch.
I'm sorry, what?
I'm monitoring the hashtag off the hook that you gave.
And in addition to it being used in a couple of unrelated contexts, because that phrase does exist elsewhere,
there has been a question submitted to us.
Indeed.
And I don't see it.
That's weird.
So that just proves that Twitter doesn't work, because if you can see it and I can't, that's weird.
Okay, go ahead.
What's the question?
Okay, I'll read the question.
Twitter question.
I seem to be out of the loop, but why are you backing TikTok?
They have a history of privacy censorship and anti-LGBT actions.
And, look, I very much welcome a question like this.
And I think a lot of this comes from misconceptions of not only TikTok, but also our own U.S. companies here.
And the criticism that's been levied at TikTok is, number one, not the U.S. operation of TikTok, which is TikTok U.S.,
but it relates to how these platforms operate in China, namely censoring anti-governmental statements
or censoring things about Uyghurs has been a lot of criticism that's been levied over at TikTok.
What's important to note here, too, is that it's not just TikTok that is operating, and I wouldn't even say it's TikTok,
because TikTok doesn't actually operate in China.
There's a different type of platform that operates specifically in China.
TikTok itself is for the rest of the world.
There's something very specific that operates in China.
Okay, whoever has the Mac, please knock it off.
Thank you.
I know.
Sorry about that.
That was me.
It's just things never stop here.
But the point that I want to make here, and I think this is a really important point because, you know,
and perhaps to an extent I was guilty of this as well, you know, when you associate TikTok, especially with China,
there's a lot of anti-Chinese sentiment that goes along with those types of feelings that you have.
And any company, Google, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, anybody who's doing business in China has to comply with all the local applicable Chinese rules.
If you're doing business in Indonesia, it becomes very difficult for you to allow anything on your platform that criticizes the king and the monarchy.
So all of these weird wrinkles and local rules that go along with doing business in a global sense can be levied as criticisms at any one of these companies,
whether it's Google, whether it's Facebook, Instagram, Viber, Signal, whatever it is.
You know, everybody has to engage in this type of behavior if they want access to the Chinese market.
Otherwise, they will be kicked out.
And to an extent, you know, Google was on the short end of the stick when it came to China for quite a while,
and they moved a bunch of operations over to Hong Kong.
So I think that this is a thorny issue, not just for ByteDance, which is, you know, the parent company of TikTok,
and DouYan is the version of the platform that operates in China.
But I think these are questions that we need to be asking not only of TikTok, because it originates in China,
but of every single major platform that's out there.
You know, what are you doing? What are they doing?
Just because they are homegrown American companies doesn't mean that they're embodying homegrown American ideals once they leave our borders.
And it's a really alluring and substantial market.
So those companies are absolutely calculating it, and to wholly avoid it over principles is probably a disservice to shareholders' expectations.
And so they're going to have to make some sort of concessions.
I think also part of why this is a big deal for me is that outside of TikTok,
just the very idea that the president has the power to stand up and say,
this app should be banned or this private business shouldn't operate.
Like, if they're doing something wrong, there are ways and processes to investigate them, punish them for that, whatever.
But if we're living in this sort of environment where one person can just stand up and say, that should be banned and then it's banned, like, that's dangerous.
And so I think if TikTok were left to twitch in the wind when the president did that,
like that would set a very dangerous precedent for other apps that maybe aren't guilty of things, but just the president doesn't like.
Right, right. And like you said, bad precedent, bad precedent, all that kind of thing.
And I think many times we see social media as the root of the problem, and in many cases I think it is.
Look at all the issues that Facebook causes with misinformation.
I have an example for you here. We have the fires burning out west.
In fact, you guys enjoy the smoke? It's now here.
Alex, you're in Pennsylvania, right?
I am indeed.
Did you get any smoke in the air?
You know, it's hard to determine whether or not we're seeing something.
We must be able to see something. It has been a little bit hazy.
Hazy, that's the smoke. That is the smoke. If you're getting haze, that is the smoke.
And we're getting it here in New York.
Can you smell the smoke? Because I do smell a lot of smoke when I go outside, but people are generally starting fires now.
I mean, inside their house and fireplaces, not sort of self-arson type stuff,
but it's that time of year where people are lighting up logs in their fireplace, so it's hard for me to distinguish.
But if you remember back in the winter, when we were still in the studio,
we were talking about social media platforms spreading misinformation about the wildfires in Australia.
Right, right.
And that seemed like it was a proving ground for what's happening now.
I mean, it's a happy coincidence for the disinformation players, I guess,
that the seasons are reversed and they can use Australia essentially as a proving ground.
But, you know, we're seeing the same thing now.
Basically, what's happening with Facebook concerning these fires is that people are frequently posting about forming patrols to look for looters, or worse, Antifa.
Yeah, they're the latest boogeymen, which according to this article from NPR, they're a loosely defined leftist group.
That is a frequent focus of far-right conspiracy theorists, who are a lot better organized, I can tell you that.
One person speculated in a private Facebook group,
Has anyone seen or heard of three guys with hoodies throwing bottles of gasoline in the boring golf course?
Boring being a town in Oregon.
I don't know if it's true, so I'm asking here if anyone knows.
Isn't that great?
Facebook, you can just come up with a wild scenario and say,
Has anyone heard of this?
I don't know if it's true.
Just asking.
And it becomes true because you said that.
Now, it's happened in recent months in response to protests for racial justice.
Vigilante groups have turned out in various communities to ward off unsubstantiated threats from anti-fascist protesters.
One such patrol, a group of armed men,
stopped an Oregon public broadcasting reporter in the Clackamas County community of Malala on Thursday,
and told him to leave immediately.
Yeah, that's not a Facebook post.
That actually happened, because you have a reporter that can document it.
Law enforcement officials said they have seen no evidence of Antifa or any other vigilante groups starting fires.
Okay, first of all, let me correct you, NPR.
Antifa is not a vigilante group.
Antifa is a concept.
It's not an organized group of people like these militia goons that are going around with guns intimidating people.
It's very, very different.
The Douglas County Sheriff's Office in Southern Oregon took to Facebook this week
to knock down rumors about six Antifa members being arrested for setting fires.
Here's the post.
This is not true, all caps.
Unfortunately, people are spreading this rumor, and it is causing problems.
Rumors spread, just like wildfire,
and now our 911 dispatchers and professional staff are being overrun with the quest for information and inquiries on an untrue rumor.
Ashland Police Chief Tiga O'Meara said investigations involve not only the setting of the fire,
but also the death of someone immediately after the fire, so there is an investigation going on.
It's a criminal investigation.
It's ongoing, but there's no connection between his investigation and any political organization or social justice group or movement.
In no way does it point towards any political group, including anybody associated with Antifa.
Any rumors suggesting that it is pointed toward Antifa are entirely fabricated.
There's no reason to believe that this is politically motivated.
Here's why I have to disagree.
While you're saying that there's no indication that the fires are politically motivated,
these posts most definitely are politically motivated,
because they are being posted by people that know what they're doing,
and that are trying to demonize those people they disagree with,
and have them hunted down like animals.
So it's very definitely some political action of a very low class that's going on here.
Go ahead, Rob.
Rob, you're muted.
Rob, I'm muted.
Okay, I don't think he knows he's muted.
Can you hear me?
Yes.
Okay.
Sorry about that.
You're not muted now.
We actually just got an interesting comment on the hashtag OffTheHook on Twitter.
Someone called Moss writes,
the last time I remember getting air quality warnings in New Jersey from issues in the Pacific Northwest
was the Mount St. Helens eruption.
Totally, yeah.
That was 1980, I believe, so wow.
That is something.
The air quality was dangerous for everybody.
We were watching Seattle News.
They were commenting on how nice the sunsets look now because of the smoke.
I guess you have to look for the silver lining in all the clouds that surround you.
What are we going to do about Facebook and Twitter and all these social media outlets that basically
Twitter is labeling Trump's falsehoods as manipulated media.
He just posted something or retweeted a video with music that appeared to show Joe Biden dancing to F the Police.
Yeah, the anti-police anthem.
Obviously, that's not true, but people don't know it.
Twitter posts something that says manipulated media, but it doesn't really do anything.
It's a little tiny button and you can still watch it and it still can be retweeted.
They've done this in the past, and even if they are able to remove something after a long fight,
it's been seen by millions of people.
These actions are harmful.
I mean, freedom of speech is something we all need to defend, but is this freedom of speech
or is this instigating all kinds of riots and hate speech and God knows what else?
How do we fight back against it?
Alex?
Yeah, sure.
This is a really difficult question.
One, I think that the social media companies and all of the platforms themselves are woefully
inequipped to deal with because we are asking them to do something that, number one,
undermines their own business model.
This is a very real reason why Facebook has fought so hardly against doing any kind of fact-checking
when it came to political advertisements because they're in the business of selling political advertisements.
The more ads that they cannot sell, the less money they make.
They should really go to show everybody who's on these damn platforms, including myself,
that the real reason they exist is to make money and to commoditize you.
So, in effect, we're sacrificing our democracy so they can make money.
That's what it really boils down to.
Yeah.
Democracy, Emmanuel, let's get straight here, is merely the collateral damage here
in a money-making, hand-over-fist enterprise like Facebook.
I would say, I would just interject, it's not money-making in a vacuum purely for profit.
Consider how much of that is stock buyback or reinvestment to further their power and domination
to acquire other companies that happened with Instagram, that happened with WhatsApp.
That is not an innocent take that just goes to a bunch of pensions and shareholders' coffers.
We've been through this before.
Us in the hacker community, we've seen this before.
In the 1990s, we had something called IRC.
We were all on it.
And on IRC, people just spouted forth with whatever it is they wanted to say,
and a lot of it was really, really stupid.
But at the end of the day, you could always say, you know what?
It's only IRC.
I'm going to walk away from it.
I'm not going to take it seriously.
And everybody understood that.
We don't understand it now with these social media outlets,
which are basically an extension of those early days of IRC.
Everybody, your grandmother's on there, your uncle's on there,
and they're all taking it seriously.
So you have these Internet trolls, and now you can no longer walk away from them
because they're running a damn government.
So how do you defend against that?
Yeah.
I mean, that gets to exactly, I think, the second point that I want to make here,
which is that these platforms, in their defense,
and to present the other side of the story here,
we are asking them to do something that is extraordinarily difficult,
which is to regulate speech.
I mean, our courts have been trying to figure out what are the various contours
of speech and statements that go beyond the protections of the First Amendment.
What are fighting words?
What is commercial speech?
What is free speech?
What is political speech, religious speech?
All of this is extraordinarily difficult,
even for trained jurists to try to figure out.
What we're asking of the social media platforms,
because there is so much information being funneled through there,
literally petabytes of information going through their networks every single day,
is to look at this, figure out in a very quick manner,
using algorithms based on who knows how many ridiculous types of conditional
if-then statements, and identify misinformation by making quasi-judicial
determinations about the value and the semantic propositions included in speech.
This is insanely difficult stuff to do,
and when you're trying to do it at scale around the world, it just doesn't work.
And when you have people that are not trained lawyers or jurists,
and they're just on your trust and abuse team trying to make these
determinations on the fly, it's super, super difficult.
So I think we're in a bit of a pickle here, and I think, however, just before Hope,
and this is part of what I included in my whole presentation,
is that we did see some lawmakers reaching out to platforms and asking what it is
they are doing on their own platforms to combat misinformation.
I could see combating misinformation being embodied in some kind of legal requirement
and itself becoming a compliance issue, just like handling personally identifying
information is.
I think that's where we're headed, and I think we're headed towards some form
of content platform or mediator liability here for failing to regulate in some
reasonable manner hate speech or misinformation, or let's say you turn a blind eye
to something like that.
There's got to be some kind of liability there for these platforms,
because to do nothing at this point when we know what the consequences are
is nothing short of negligence.
Yeah.
Well, I grow faint when you say liability because I think of legal courtrooms
and things like that, but I think common sense, that's what we really need
to practice now and not take things that we see on social media as if it's the same thing
as the actual news, as the actual truth that we know with our own eyes,
and just assume that you're being lied to, just like you should always assume
you're being lied to when somebody tells you something.
Investigate on your own.
Find out the facts, and we're just not doing enough of that.
Hey, we're pretty much out of time.
Any closing remarks from anybody before we sign off for the night?
Just keep reexamining the sources of the information you get, whether it's social media
or whether it's your ornery relatives over a holiday dinner table.
It's always worth digging deep and finding out the actual data behind the stories
that you're slinging around.
Go ahead, Alex, quickly.
Do wear a mask.
Trust us when we say that.
Yes.
Kyle?
Definitely just wanted to say support community radio and stations like WBAI,
and hack.
Get out there and build stuff, break stuff, mix it up, and share what you learn.
And vote science.
Good night.
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The biggest gun we've got is called a ballot box.
If you don't like who's in there, vote him out.
If you don't like who's in there, vote him out.
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