Okay, it seems like the problem has been fixed, so it is now five minutes past seven p.m.
Stay tuned for Off the Hook, coming up.
And it's time for Off the Hook.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving, now I can't make a call.
They cut me at my dress, but if they could they would.
I'll do them all for the best, it's better than worse.
I hope I don't die.
I'll do them all for the best, it's better than worse.
I'll do them all for the best, it's better than worse.
I'll do them all for the best, it's better than worse.
I'll do them all for the best, it's better than worse.
I'll do them all for the best, it's better than worse.
I'll do them all for the best, it's better than worse.
I'll do them all for the best, it's better than worse.
I'll do them all for the best, it's better than worse.
I'll do them all for the best, it's better than worse.
I'll do them all for the best, it's better than worse.
I'll do them all for the best, it's better than worse.
I'll do them all for the best, it's better than worse.
I'll do them all for the best, it's better than worse.
I'll do them all for the best, it's better than worse.
I'll do them all for the best, it's better than worse.
I'll do them all for the best, it's better than worse.
I'll do them all for the best, it's better than worse.
I'll do them all for the best, it's better than worse.
I'll do them all for the best, it's better than worse.
I'll do them all for the best, it's better than worse.
I'll do them all for the best, it's better than worse.
I'll do them all for the best, it's better than worse.
I'll do them all for the best, it's better than worse.
I'll do them all for the best, it's better than worse.
I'll do them all for the best, it's better than worse.
I'll do them all for the best, it's better than worse.
I'll do them all for the best, it's better than worse.
I'll do them all for the best, it's better than worse.
I'll do them all for the best, it's better than worse.
I'll do them all for the best, it's better than worse.
I'll do them all for the best, it's better than worse.
I'll do them all for the best, it's better than worse.
I'll do them all for the best, it's better than worse.
I'll do them all for the best, it's better than worse.
I'll do them all for the best, it's better than worse.
I'll do them all for the best, it's better than worse.
I'll do them all for the best, it's better than worse.
Yeah, and you know, I think you're simplifying it in a way that maybe could be considered an oversimplification, Emmanuel,
because I think this is more of a – there's historical issues here, I think there's issues of personal autonomy at issue,
but look, I want to preface my response here by saying I agree with you entirely that I think common sense and science should prevail.
But what we're talking about here is something I think that is much deeper and more philosophical and also a legal concept as well,
which is this issue of the autonomy that you have over your own body,
the right to your own body to determine what goes in and what goes on it and what comes out of it as well.
Can I treat you like you disagree because I want to jump on these points as you make them.
Okay, you want the right to your own body.
Okay, fine, but just keep it away from my body.
How about that?
You know, you can do whatever you want, but you don't have to expose other people to your foolishness.
Well, the issue I'm setting up here is that there is a tension between the rights we have over our own bodies,
our own personal autonomy, which is a matter of freedom, as opposed to the duty that we have to others,
the duty that we have to safeguard third parties.
Right. And this is not an easy issue.
And if you look at the history of vaccines in this country, they were forced upon a lot of immigrant populations.
One hundred years ago was not a pretty scene.
You know, vaccines one hundred years ago.
And I'm not saying at all that that's the scene that we have right now.
And like I said, I think common sense should prevail.
But I think historically to play the devil's advocate and we are talking about Republicans, Republican governors here.
So quite literally, I'm playing the devil's advocate here.
Nice. I think they are basing these types of objections on, I think, broader philosophical objections,
broader libertarian focused objections that don't necessarily take into account that duty to others.
They are focusing their argument entirely on personal autonomy.
Can I ask how that personal autonomy ties into undocumented people in this country?
Because they sure seem to want to find out everything they can about them.
Yeah. OK. Certainly. But I mean, look, these are these are difficult issues.
They really, really are here. But, you know, like Gila mentions as well,
you know, vaccines and requirements for vaccines have been in place for a very, very long time.
I can't send my son to public school in New York without proving that he has certain vaccines.
And so I think, you know, to a certain extent, there is already a form of vaccine passport in action.
But what I would be concerned about, just from a personal liberty standpoint,
would be having different social strata or sections of society based on who's vaccinated and who is not.
And so I think that certain things should be allowed to people who are vaccinated and who chose to get the vaccine,
like going to a music venue or a concert, a sporting event,
someplace where people congregate. But I think it would be dangerous if there were a vaccine passport
that determined whether or not somebody was eligible to go to an ER or to have certain basic services and rights
that would otherwise be given to vaccinated people as well.
Well, I don't I don't think that's what's been brought up.
I think it's basically to get in a store owner, for instance,
does he not have the right to say I'd rather not have people who are not vaccinated come into the store.
And, you know, without masks or whatever, I think someone should have the right to make that decision.
But just to get back to your your personal philosophy of Republicans about personal autonomy.
Why doesn't that apply to women's bodies? Right. With the right to abortion.
Why doesn't it apply to trans youth where they pass ridiculous laws to to to limit what they can and cannot do with their own bodies?
You know, it's so hypocritical. And I know you don't agree with what you're saying.
But but my God, it's just I wish I had somebody to disagree with violently because it really is something.
I know you have something to say. Go ahead. I do. I do.
I was thinking and I apologize if this is an overblown metaphor.
I just want to say that before I start. But I was thinking about another virus and the community response to said virus, say, 35 years ago.
There was you should pardon me for this reference, an episode of Designing Women that was entitled Killing All the Right People.
People were not willing to take precautions against HIV because they didn't think that their lives would let them get it.
But the right people were getting it. And if your belief is that this virus, which is disproportionately affecting people of lower income brackets,
people of color, immigrants, people who were incarcerated, if you think those people should be dying, you don't care.
And I think that is what is really inspiring a lot of people.
And if you're talking about Republican governors, Sarah Palin, a couple of weeks ago, said, I didn't think this is real.
And then I got it. And now I'm saying I'm sorry.
You're not striking again. What is I never thought I'd say this. But what does Sarah Palin say?
Sarah said she got COVID and Sarah Palin said you need to be wearing a mask and you need to get vaccinated.
So it's and if we're talking about Republican governors, it's this thing where people don't see it until it strikes home for them.
And that, I think, is an issue that we've seen in so many different areas, whether it's issues of rights or issues of mostly rights.
And that you until it applies to you specifically, you don't see the need for it.
And. Yes, I think I've started to repeat myself.
All right, well, I mean, again, another sentence I thought I'd never say, listen to what Sarah Palin says, because in that particular regard,
and Mitch McConnell said the same thing a couple of days ago, people need to get the vaccine.
And it is you know, I don't care who you listen to to get that advice, but you need to hear that advice.
And to all our listeners, we hope that you are doing everything you can to get the vaccine.
If you have not already, we have our extra overtime show that follows this on on YouTube at eight o'clock.
And what we're going to do today is anybody, any listener who wants to call us during that show and and ask us how to get a vaccine in their area.
We'll help them. We will help them get there.
If you're having trouble, talk to us and hopefully you'll feel better about your progress after that.
So we'll do our best because we've done fairly well getting the vaccine, finding Web sites and just hammering away until we get the desired results.
That's what hackers do. So I hope that people in the community, I know people in our community have been doing this.
I'm very, very proud of people who have been helping their relatives and neighbors to get appointments.
We have to continue doing that because it's still less than 20 percent of the country has been fully vaccinated.
And we need to get that number up over 70. It's going to take months.
And boy, do we want this to be over? I mean, I'd love to have a conference this year.
I'd love to be able to go back to twenty six hundred meetings and and to go to the radio station to walk around the city and travel all those things.
But we can't we can't even vaccinated. We can't do it yet until more people are fully protected.
Go ahead, Alex. Speaking of which, yesterday I saw something that they gave me a lot of heart and I hadn't seen this before.
It was really extraordinary. I live in the in the West Village in the city and I'm walking my dog.
And I saw this massive line of people going down 13th Street starting at or I'm sorry, starting on Seventh Avenue and going down 12th Street.
And I said, oh, my God, you know, this is a line of vaccinated people or people waiting for the vaccine route.
And I followed that line and that line went from, you know, the Lenox Hill Hospital.
That's that's right. Right over there, you know, used to be St.
Vincent's used to be a much larger hospital, but, you know, at least there's still something there.
But this line stretched from Seventh Avenue down 12th Street and then that's where 12th Street hits Greenwich Ave.
It went all the way up Greenwich and then wrapped around into 13th Street.
This was a line that it just never ended. And people kept joining it.
And it was incredible. And when you looked at the people who were on that line, they weren't octogenarians or septuagenarians.
These were young people. These were young people that were getting the vaccine and they were all waiting there socially distance.
It was a pretty extraordinary scene. And it gave me a lot of heart.
It gave me a lot of hope. And it makes me think that we're going to get out of this before we know it.
Now, this was yesterday, yesterday. Well, yesterday was the day that people 16 and above qualified in New York.
And what what your account tells me is that not only did they qualify, but they got appointments for the same day.
And that's incredible. Yeah, they very well may have, because a lot of these people, they were definitely in their 20s.
They were definitely in their 30s. It was it was really awesome to see it.
Wow. Well, we've all had our own experience. Now, Kyle, I know you you went to a drugstore to get your vaccine in the last week.
And that was a very different experience from what many of us went through with crowds of people.
There were only a handful of people in the drugstore, right? Yeah, it was totally different than I would what I imagine.
I didn't go in with you, but it was very different.
Just more like a small, small town kind of experience where one part of where normally like merchandise would be stocked.
They just remove the shelving and put in chairs and dividers and basically had about enough, maybe like eight to 10 people to do it once.
And it really filled up like those appointments were all those chairs were filled by the time my 15 minutes was up.
And then I went about my day, had my my card, of course, and was really not a big deal.
And similar side effects to like other vaccines or like an allergy shot or something where you have a sore arm.
Now, as of April 19th, everybody, every adult in the country will qualify.
So that no matter what state you're in, you'll be able to make an appointment for the vaccine.
And again, at eight o'clock, we can help people go through the process if they're having difficulty.
The important thing is, though, to take it seriously and make sure the people around you are taking it seriously.
And we can get through this. We can get through this thing.
Hopefully by summer, you know, we'll make steady progress because, you know,
even though we're all on the on the on the verge of being completely vaccinated and the two weeks have passed since our second shots,
because the vast majority of people still aren't at that stage and because there are variants out there and a lot of people doing stupid things,
a lot of elected officials doing stupid things, it's going to hang around longer.
And there's even a chance that a variant will come about that can get past the vaccine.
I think of the horror of that, all the work we've done for not if something like that were to happen.
That doesn't happen if you have herd immunity, if you have the majority of people, the vast majority of people who are protected against the virus.
Well, they that will prevent a variant from taking hold. So getting that vaccine is hugely important, hugely important.
And if you have concerns, talk to your doctor, talk to somebody in the medical profession.
Don't just listen to us. Talk to people who do this for a living. Talk to somebody at the pharmacy.
There are all kinds of people. If you have a relative who has a medical background, ask, ask your questions, get your questions answered.
Not on Facebook, not by just typing it into Google. Talk to people who know what they're talking about.
That is so important. All right. We have some some important things to pass along.
As you know, we are here on WBAI, non-commercial radio station.
And tonight, Wednesday, April 7th, is the last day to become a WBAI member and be eligible to vote in an upcoming referendum that is going to be very, very important.
We're not talking about the referendum. We're talking about becoming a member so that you can have a say in that referendum.
That is the important thing to to convey to people.
The other thing to convey, we have our old phone number back.
Yeah, we are. Our old pledge line is which you know what?
I don't have it in front of me, but I think I know what it is. Do you guys have it in front of you? Rob, you're nodding. You have it.
So you're going to guess. I don't want to guess. Just you have it in your head.
Yes. Then you tell the people what it is. That way, it's your fault if it's wrong.
OK, I will tell you that if you want to help us keep doing what we do and if you donate at least $25, you can become a BAI member.
That is a phone call to 212-209-2950.
That's right. 212-209-2950. Never thought I'd say that number again.
It's so good to have that number back. But that is the number to call to pledge.
If you pledge $25, as Rob said, you will become a voting member of WBAI and you can become a part of important decision-making processes.
We have some very, very important decisions ahead, ones that will affect the future of this radio station.
So if you want to say in that, you need to call before midnight.
After midnight, you can't be part of that.
You can still support the station, obviously, but you can't be a part of that particular decision.
212-209-2950 or the website, give2wbai.org. Go ahead, Rob.
Yes, and we should point out that you can always pledge and make a pledge, a promise to donate money later.
But in order to beat this deadline and become a member today, it has to be a donation that you have paid.
So you have to immediately pay it with a credit card on the web or on the phone.
212-209-2950, sometime today before midnight to be eligible to vote in this referendum.
Yes, but if you do it now, then you don't have to worry about how soon midnight is.
Just get it over with and use a credit card.
That way, you've completely paid up and you will have a say in the future of WBAI.
And if you haven't seen any communication about this, check your spam and make sure you're looking for some of the communications.
I just saw a notification about a membership renewal that I might be behind on.
Wow.
Yeah.
How about that?
Make sure, and there's a lot of links and information, so there's a huge effort.
We want to be a part of that.
We want our listeners to continue to be a part of this community radio station.
Well, I can't say enough about it, but it is such a big deal for you to be able to participate and be a part of this community
and this effort to keep Free Speech in New York alive and our technology and hacking show here alive
and full of new information and programming for everyone.
When this controversial issue comes up, which it will do,
we're happy to talk to people through our email, othat2600.com, about our opinions,
but we're not talking about that on the air, and that's just the way it is.
But you can be a part of the whole decision-making process, again, by joining the WBAI family,
and that takes a pledge of $25, and then you can vote.
Again, 212-209-2950, or the website givetowbai.org, the number two.
We're hoping to get 25 people to do this in this hour, which is certainly not inconceivable.
We've done things like that before, and people can make a difference.
That is how WBAI has survived since 1960, before most of us were around,
and we were able to get through some really, really difficult times
and provide alternative voices when they were most needed, and they certainly are needed now,
and we certainly find a lot of enthusiasm towards the things we talk about.
So again, one more time, 212-209-2950.
Please give that number a call now.
Try to get as many people as you can to call that number.
Pledge at least $25, and you will become a voting member of WBAI at a very, very pivotal time.
Okay.
Now, speaking of, I guess, ill-advised—well, this is—what we're talking about isn't ill-advised.
What we were talking about before is very ill-advised, people who are spreading misinformation.
You guys are familiar with some of the fundraising antics.
What WBAI does is really admirable, I think, as far as surviving 100% on listener donations.
No underwriting, no commercials, nothing like that.
But not everybody subscribes to the same philosophy.
Others believe in getting money however they can, and they have no shame.
They have absolutely no shame.
Now, if the last four years of racism, sexism, homophobia, nationalism, xenophobia, whatever,
if that hasn't gotten to you, if you haven't been turned off by the rhetoric that you have heard from 2016 to 2020,
before that and after that as well—well, this story just completely floored me.
It really did.
The Trump fundraising that took place for the supporters, the supporters of the Trump re-election campaign,
they were ripped off, consistently ripped off.
Making a single contribution, they were defaulted into making multiple contributions.
A $500 contribution, for instance, would turn into a $500 weekly contribution.
Yeah, and the reason this happened was because on their website was a little, little, tiny checkmark
that says, make this a weekly recurring donation.
And as the months went by last year, that became harder and harder to see.
There was all kinds of text.
For instance, President Trump, I debate Joe Biden on September 29th, and I need to know that I have your support.
Join the Trump cash blitz now.
All that text, and then a little tiny print below that, donate an additional $100 automatically on 9-29.
The checkbox is so tiny, I don't think I could even get a mouse to hover over it to uncheck it.
So many people were caught by this.
So many people were ripped off that actually the Trump campaign was a significant contributor
to credit card fraud in the past few months.
They were a measurable percentage, the President of the United States, committing credit card fraud in this particular manner.
There's a huge story in the New York Times about this with specific examples.
And, of course, a lot of the money had to be refunded.
It was a huge amount, unprecedented.
But it just makes me think of the snake oil salesman who rolls into town and sells you something,
rips everybody off and goes to the next town.
The preacher with the 800 pledge line and the 900 prayer line.
There's people that are just out for money that don't care about the people that support them.
And I know that even with this, even with this, there are people that will say, I still support him.
That's cult behavior.
You get abused, you get ripped off, but you still support the people that are doing it.
But it doesn't mean we have to ignore it.
This is clear-cut evidence of what bad people do when they're trying to raise money.
It's the opposite of what the people here are trying to do.
Because we're very open and sometimes that might come across as being somewhat inept.
And sometimes it doesn't look like we know what we're doing because we're scrambling so hard.
Well, we're sometimes building the ship as we're sailing here.
And it falls apart right after you build it.
And you have to rebuild it.
It gets stormy.
Ever since I first walked into WBAI, that has been the case where it's always something being rebuilt.
But never, never have we ever gone down a road like this with this kind of horrible, shameful behavior that the former president and his campaign displayed.
Any thoughts, Alex?
I know you've got something to say about this.
Oh, always, yeah.
And before I go on to my thoughts, I just want to read out our old telephone number one more time, 212-209-2950.
Please become a WBAI member today so that you can vote in this important and critical upcoming referendum.
I think it's absolutely important.
If you want to keep us on the air, you want to keep these programs going, you want to keep us talking about the scandalous things that Emmanuel just mentioned.
And I have to say, and I'm embarrassed to admit, I haven't read the article.
I'm not familiar with it, Emmanuel.
But I wanted to ask you, did it mention in any way the third-party fundraising platform that the Republicans use, which is known as WinRed?
Yes.
Yes, it did.
Extensively.
It did?
OK.
It is very, very detailed.
Well, that's very interesting to me.
I want to read that article.
The article is entitled How Trump Steered Supporters Into Unwitting Donations.
Right.
So WinRed, for our listeners' benefit, is essentially the fundraising platform through which the Republicans, for almost any political campaign, whether it's for a local seat,
whether it's for a, let's say, state senate or a federal senate or a federal house of representatives or the presidency of the United States, this is the platform through which they raise money.
So WinRed must have had something to do with the design of that particular feature.
And I imagine that WinRed will find itself staring down the wrong end of probably a class-action lawsuit from a whole bunch of people who refuse to continue to be part of the Trump cult and are rather angry about being fleeced on a monthly or weekly basis for, let's say, $500 or $1,000 or whatever that particular amount is.
And what would be really, really annoying to me is, let's say I was a Trump supporter.
I wanted to give what I could.
I gave what I could because I thought it was a one-time donation.
Now, all of a sudden, it's coming out all the time.
It might have caused overdraft fees.
It might have caused me to miss a mortgage payment.
This could have massive consequences for people that don't have large amounts of money at hand in their checking accounts.
And then the burden is shifted to these individuals to try to get their money back.
It's a crazy system, insane thing to do, and it's sort of a crash-and-burn method of fundraising.
It really indicates that you don't care one iota about the people from whom you're taking money.
This is not a long-term play in terms of winning friends and influencing people.
Go ahead, Gayle.
So I also want to echo what Alex said.
Please become or renew your BAI membership.
That phone number you've heard a gazillion times.
Give to WBAI.org.
I work in fundraising.
That is my job, and I would be fired if I tried to do something like this.
The other thing I found very interesting is one of the checkboxes, specifically on the WinRed site, I believe,
said, if you uncheck this box, we're going to tell Trump that you don't support him.
Oh, I didn't see that one.
There's a new article in Forbes I'll send to you.
Oh, my God.
Yeah, we're going to tell Trump you don't support him.
And then in teeny-tiny letters, it said, if you keep this box checked, it's a monthly donation.
Can I check that box even without supporting him at all?
Because I want him to know that I don't support him.
Right, you have to uncheck the box to let him know that you don't support him.
So I think the fact that we need to be as transparent as possible in fundraising,
let people know what we need their money for and where it's going to go,
and we thank them for it, and we take it from them once,
and all of those things are very possible if you give to WBAI through the Give to WBAI website
or on the phone, become a member at the $25 level.
Or I hasten to point out that you can become a BAI buddy, which is a recurring donation,
but you have to specify that.
You have to request that, and then you choose the amount that you donate over time.
And it's completely in your control.
There is nothing deceptive going on about it.
We appreciate it very much.
QAnon is interfering with you now.
But I know there's no pre-checked boxes when you go to that website for us.
We would never do such a thing.
But boy, that story just keeps getting worse and worse and sleazier and sleazier.
They have no shame. They have no shame.
And it's just pathetic to see how they treat their own supporters.
And I don't doubt that WinRed, is that the name of the company?
They probably work with other Republican candidates as well.
I wouldn't be surprised if that same tactic was being employed in their campaigns.
I would check if you supported any of those campaigns.
Gayla, do you know something about that?
WinRed works with the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
This is their clearinghouse.
It's their site. It's their thing.
So, yeah, if you've basically given to any Republican candidate in the 2020 election cycle,
you might want to check.
Although, I don't know.
Would you be listening to us right now? I don't know.
But word filters down. It does.
Oh, they could be hate listening and they like getting abused.
Hate listening. Yes, that's a thing.
That's a thing. People hate listen.
Okay, another story that I thought was quite interesting has to do with our good old friends at Facebook.
Details for more than 500 million Facebook accounts have been found available on a website for hackers.
We're hackers. We have websites.
I haven't found the website yet.
So if a listener has that, please let us know.
OTH at 2600.com.
We'd love to peruse it and see just what's in there.
The information, though, appears to be several years old,
but it's another example of the vast amount of info collected by the company and other social media sites
and the limits to how secure that information is.
Now, the interesting thing is the comment that Facebook had for this,
which reflects what the story has told us.
This is old data that was previously reported on in 2019.
We found and fixed this issue in August 2019.
Yeah, but you really didn't, did you?
Because the data is still out there, and our trust has been betrayed.
People put all kinds of private information into their Facebook accounts.
God knows why.
We try and advise people not to do that, but they do it anyway.
And then something like this happens, and all of their data is shared with the entire world.
And Facebook says, whoops, we left an account wide open.
We shouldn't have done that.
We won't do it again.
But then two years later, the same data shows up, and it's still your data.
It's still your name.
It's still your address.
It's still your phone number.
What are you supposed to do?
How are you supposed to recover from that?
You trusted these people to keep your data safe, and they let you down.
And again, just like Trump, you keep going back.
You keep giving them more.
You have to learn these lessons and keep your private data private,
because once you share it on these social media platforms,
it's only as safe as the weakest link in those companies,
and that's often a very, very weak link.
Alex?
Yeah, this is, I think, a particularly confusing type of issue for people as well.
And Facebook, I think, has exacerbated this confusion as well,
and I think at the outset we need to draw a distinction between a breach and a leak, right,
because this does not seem to be a data breach, right?
Somebody did not gain unauthorized access into Facebook's systems
and exfiltrate a bunch of data that they then concatenated and released,
put on these public forums for unscrupulous individuals to download.
Well, then how did the data get accessed?
This was through scraping.
So people had scraped together 533 million records by exploiting an error
in the contact syncing mechanisms that Facebook had with respect to telephone numbers
and, I think, a couple of other features.
And what was particularly confusing about this was that there were a couple other issues that Facebook had in 2019.
I believe there was also a consent order from the FTC that required them to notify the FTC
of any data breaches or any breaches of personal information.
But what's very concerning, not just to me, I think, to a lot of people,
probably a lot of attorneys general and information commissioners within the EU as well,
is that Facebook never made any notification in 2019 about this particular type of data scraping activity.
They were aware of it.
They corrected the flaw.
You can no longer do this.
They knew that this happened, but they refused to notify people.
And prior to us going on the air, Reuters had actually come out with an article,
maybe a half an hour before we went live, indicating that Facebook had no plans
on notifying the 533 million affected individuals.
That, to me, is unsurprising because if they now decided to notify them in 2021,
that seems to be a concession that they probably should have notified them in 2019.
And it seems like this was possibly part of a separate leak of data in 2019,
but there's different data sets and there's different countries involved in this,
so the whole thing is very confusing.
But at root, what we need to remember is that this is 533 million people
who have had their data exposed.
And this is a lot different from just having data in a phone book, right?
I mean, to play devil's advocate for a second, if we're talking about names and addresses,
remember the days when you could look in a phone book.
You can still look at a phone book, right, and find people's names and addresses
and telephone numbers.
But with the way in which this data is available to people en masse
in a concatenated and aggregated fashion, it will allow for lots of different types
of activities that we don't necessarily want to encourage that would have been impossible
to perform just on the basis of data that you would gather from a telephone book, right?
And I'm talking about this is going to be ripe for phishing scams, for cons.
We have to think about even debt collectors are going to be using this type of information
to try to collect debts.
I mean, there's all different types of malicious activity that this is going to encourage,
robocalling, telemarketing, all kinds of nefarious things.
And this is the type of data that's mostly static, very difficult to change.
Well, Alex, I may want to take issue with what you said about this not being a breach
because we're talking about a user's phone numbers, their Facebook IDs,
their full names, locations, birthdates, e-mail addresses.
Are you saying all that information was available to the public anyway before all this happened
and all you had to do was scrape it?
And is that what people intended when they put that information into their Facebook account?
Well, as I understand it, the position of Facebook is that if people intended that information to be public,
the dispersion of that information could not be considered to be a data breach.
I mean, there's a big difference between a breach and an incident, right?
A breach is when somebody accesses your system, gets inside without authorization and does something,
bypasses some kind of security control, gets access to data, something that this was not the case.
You did not have to breach any system.
You did not have to gain unauthorized access to Facebook.
You were using the normal functionality that Facebook allowed people to have.
They gave this access to the public.
But you were using it in a way that Facebook did not intend you to use it
and thereby it enabled this scraping activity.
Yeah, but Alex, if I'm a Facebook user, I don't by default have the right to look at every other Facebook user's info
because that's what friends are for.
Literally, that's what friends are for on Facebook.
And if I'm bypassing that, how is that not a breach?
How is that not a breach of their security if I'm able to leapfrog over that particular restriction
and get private info from people I'm not friends with?
Well, I wouldn't call that a breach at all.
I would completely disagree because you're using publicly available mechanisms that Facebook intended to be out there,
to be not behind any kind of barrier.
You didn't need a password to access this.
You didn't need to go through a VPN in order to access this particular type of data.
This was functionality about contact syncing that people had repurposed
to allow them to connect the dots on all of these various users, to scrape this data.
I think people might have assumed there was some kind of a password or some kind of a barrier
that would have protected their info from people they weren't friends with.
So just because there wasn't an actual password there, does that make it any better?
Probably not, but that's why they corrected this in 2019.
And so it just goes back, I think, to the issue of foreseeability.
When Facebook created this particular type of functionality, and this is probably what will play out in a course,
was it reasonably foreseeable that people would misuse it in this particular fashion?
Is this a known security vulnerability?
Is this a known form of abuse that somebody would have figured out or a reasonable person should have known about,
and that they allowed members of the public thereby to scrape all of this data, put it into this form,
and now it's out there, and you can't put the toothpaste back in the bottle?
Yeah, I also take issue with they fixed the problem.
No, the problem is that the data is out there.
It's like saying, okay, we fixed the building that was on fire after it burned down because the fire's out.
Yeah, but you still have a burned-down building.
You still have 500 million Facebook users whose private info is being shared amongst everybody in the world.
So the problem was not fixed.
Rob, go ahead.
We only have a minute.
Yeah, I mean, you can't really call it old data when it's things like your name, address, phone number, date of birth,
things which are very difficult to change.
But I do want to point out that the data that was leaked has been rolled into Have I Been Pwned,
which is a website we've spoken about before on this program where you can put in your e-mail address
or your phone number and check to see whether your information has leaked out in any number of data breaches,
including this one.
That's Have I Been Pwned.
That's the word owned with a P instead of the O.
So that's haveibeenpwned.com.
Go in and check all your e-mail addresses, phone numbers, everything, just on a regular basis.
All you have to do is give it your private info, and I'll tell you if that private info has been leaked anywhere.
No, it's a good site.
It does tell you, but I just feel a little weird saying, okay, I'm going to give you my e-mail address.
You tell me if it's secure or not, and then they have my e-mail address.
But that's how you find out.
There's no other way to do it right now.
Again, if somebody has info on this massive file that's floating around,
we'd sure like to see just what info is in there for scientific purposes, obviously.
Email us, othat2600.com.
Alex, did you have something else?
Yeah, I think that this is a massive issue.
It's going to be a big problem for Facebook going forward.
We already have the Irish Information Commissioner looking at this, I think, for the whole of the EU.
I'm sure that there's going to be many attorneys general in the United States,
possibly even congressional inquiries looking into this particular issue.
So I don't think that we have seen the last of it.
We should definitely follow it and see how it evolves because this is an incredible issue,
but it goes back, Emmanuel, to what you said.
You've got to be really careful about what you put out there
because it may end up in a giant database of 533 other million people
that enables all kinds of malicious activity.
It's a massive problem.
It absolutely is, and one that we're going to continue to be talking about.
Again, contribute to WBAI, 212-209-2950.
Write to us, othat2600.com, and tune in to Off the Hook Overtime
coming up in a few minutes on YouTube.
Follow the link on the main 2600.com page.
We'll see you next week. Good night.
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