And the previous program was Economic Update with Richard Wolff, heard Wednesdays at 6.30pm right after the WBAI Evening News.
Now stay tuned for Off the Hook, WBAI New York, WBAI.org. It's 7pm.
We're sorry, the number you have reached, 99.5 WBAI, is now off the hook.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall. I cut myself while shaving, now I gotta make a call.
We're turning it much worse, but if they could they would.
Wonderly bound for the best, expect the worst. I hope that's understood. Wonderly bound.
Wonderly bound.
Wonderly bound.
And a very good evening to everybody. The program is Off the Hook. Emanuel Goldstein here with you, joined tonight by Kyle.
Yeah, I'm over here.
Wow. The miracles that you work to get us on the air. We have, in Skypland over there, we have Rob T. Firefly.
Good evening.
We have Gila.
Good evening.
And we have Alex.
Hello, everyone.
And do we have our guest yet, or is our guest coming later?
We do indeed.
We do indeed. Okay, because there's no video. We have Emma Best from Distributed Denial of Secrets. Is that correct?
Yep.
Okay. That verification is all I need. Okay, let's launch into some of the developments. We're going to get to Emma in a minute.
But there are so many interesting things going on concerning this war, this invasion, this mass casualty event, this genocide.
All the words that we can use that we can't use in Russia, if we even tried to say this over the air in Russia, they'd come for us very quickly.
Okay, so this is something that I think is fascinating. And I'm curious what you folks think about this.
Meta, our friends over at Meta, it used to be just Facebook, but now it's Meta platforms.
They've decided to allow Facebook and Instagram users in some countries to call for violence against Russians and Russian soldiers in the context of the Ukraine invasion.
That's according to internal emails that Reuters revealed on Thursday.
It's a temporary change to its hate speech policy.
Always interesting when the hate speech policy changes.
Now, they're also temporarily allowing some posts that call for death to Russian President Vladimir Putin or Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.
That's according to internal emails to its content moderators.
Here's a quote from a Meta spokesperson.
As a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we have temporarily made allowances for forms of political expression that would normally violate our rules, like violent speech, such as, they give examples, death to the Russian invaders.
We still won't allow credible calls for violence against Russian civilians.
The calls for the leaders' deaths will be allowed unless they contain other targets or have two indicators of credibility.
They're allowed one, but you can't have two, like the location or method.
So, in other words, if you were to say, boy, we should kill Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin, that would be allowed because that's one credible indication of credibility.
He is in the Kremlin.
But if you were to add something to that, saying, what would be another thing?
Because location, time?
I think, yeah, at 8, 10.
Okay, but how is that credibility?
That's just a choice, you know?
I'm not really sure.
I'm a little confused.
I think that makes it more urgent.
Meta, we need a little bit more guidance here.
Now, citing the writer's story, Russia's embassy in the United States demanded that Washington stop the extremist activities of Meta.
Good luck with that.
Users of Facebook and Instagram did not give the owners of these platforms the right to determine the criteria of truth and pit nations against each other.
I can't really argue with that.
No, we didn't give them the right to pit nations against each other, but that's where we are right now.
The temporary policy changes on calls for violence to Russian soldiers apply to the following countries, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, and Ukraine.
I guess we still can't do it from here.
In the email recently sent to moderators, Meta highlighted that this was a change in its hate speech policy, as we mentioned.
We're issuing a spirit of the policy allowance to allow T1 violent speech.
T1 violent speech.
Am I supposed to know what that means?
That would otherwise be removed under the hate speech policy when A, targeting Russian soldiers except prisoners of war, or B, targeting Russians when it's clear that the context is the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
That is, content mentions the invasion, self-defense, et cetera.
We are doing this because we have observed that in this specific context, Russian soldiers is being used as a proxy for the Russian military.
The hate speech policy continues to prohibit violence on Russians.
Many major social media platforms have announced new content restrictions around the conflict, including blocking Russian state media, RT, and Sputnik in the European Union, and have demonstrated carve-outs in some of their policies during the wars.
It should be noted also that we've been talking about RT and the various lies that they've been spreading, but also how fascinating it is to see what they're saying.
And each week, it's harder to get them.
Last week, you could get them on YouTube.
No more.
You have to go to RT.com and go through that whole thing where you get checked out to make sure you're not trying to attack them.
And then you can witness the absurdity that they say to a never-diminishing group of people.
Emails also show that MEDA would allow praise of the right-wing Azov battalion, which is normally prohibited.
Apparently, they're a right-wing supremacist group of one sort or another.
The MEDA spokesperson previously said the company was for the time being making a narrow exception for praise of these people in the context of defending Ukraine or their role as part of the Ukraine National Guard.
But that's it.
That's it.
I can't say any more beyond that because once they do, it starts getting ugly.
I don't know, folks.
What do you think of this?
Is this healthy?
Is this disturbing?
Is this something to be expected?
Who first?
It's really fascinating to see how the goalposts are redefined because ostensibly, some place like Facebook, MEDA, whatever, would say, okay, let's have rules against being a terrible person.
And calling for the deaths of people is generally frowned upon, I think, in polite society.
But now that we have bad guys and good guys in a situation, the rules change, of course.
And I'm not sure whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.
It's just a very interesting thing.
It reminds me of going back to the Cold War of the 80s in which I grew up and in which it was acceptable to have certain nationalities as the bad guys on films or TV shows or whatever.
Alex, go ahead.
Yeah.
Building on that, too, I think Facebook, MEDA, has such a checkered past when it comes to hate speech online.
If you look at – actually, coincidentally, the article in the recent issue of 2600 that I published in Artificial Interruption talks a lot about what happened in Myanmar and hate speech that was propelled by Facebook's algorithms there that led to physical violence against the Rohingyas.
And so with this checkered past, I think it's particularly dangerous for Facebook to start changing up its policies on an ad hoc basis whenever geopolitical winds change.
It seems to me like it would be better to have a consistent policy applied across the board with respect to violence.
Now, the other thing that goes hand in hand with these types of posts that can be vitriolic and can gather a lot of attention, some support, some detractors, I mean in a sense you have to think about this as benefiting Facebook.
Because the more vitriolic the posts, the more likely there are to be additional eyeballs on those particular posts.
And the more eyeballs, the more engagement, the more engagement, the more data, the more data, the more advertisement.
And we're back to 2016. Yeah. We've all experienced that.
Aguila, did you have something?
I do.
I guess my other question is when this policy gets changed back, if this policy gets changed back, are they going to require people to then delete what they had written?
Or is this going to be another case of when the moderators look the other way about hate speech, which happens a lot, certain types of hate speech tend not to rise to the level of tend not to be considered the level of actionable.
And I'm also concerned that, not concerned, but I guess my question is if this becomes acceptable discourse for now, is that a switch that's going to be that easily turned off?
Good point. Good point.
Kyle, anything?
Yeah, it's unusual and really specific.
It speaks to something that I guess is acute going on on the platform and also something they want to point out.
Specifically, it seems like of all the varieties of things they moderate, this specific one got a lot more attention in the moment.
I just wonder if it's right to expect people to hold back when they're being attacked in any situation.
Why just in this situation?
Why not say the Palestinian issue?
People can say death to Israeli soldiers who are massacring them on the West Bank or something.
That's something that Facebook would clamp down on, but not this.
This is something that is, I think, understandable.
We're all angry.
We all want to express ourselves and do something.
And I can certainly understand people seeing their homes and villages destroyed using rather emphatic language.
And Facebook should not be there to tell them they can't talk like that.
When people are being oppressed in any way, you have to expect this sort of reaction.
But then there's a line that you have to worry about because if you allow calls to violence in one situation, somebody is going to test that and say,
well, I'm going to say calls to violence in this situation when they're not in nearly the same kind of desperate straits that we're talking about here.
And at the end of the day, it's not like people are very quick to shout free speech.
But, of course, MEDA is a private company.
And at the end of the day, they get to decide what it is they want to host on their machines and let people do in their little walled gardens.
But it's interesting to see, like, are the things that they're allowing to stay to then be taken as, I don't know,
does MEDA approve of calls for violence against the Russian soldiers or praising the Ukrainian freedom fighters who are fighting back against the invasion by hosting the material?
Well, I think their position would have to be that they don't approve anything that's said on their platform.
They're simply hosting that particular conversation or discourse.
That's what I would imagine.
Alex, does that seem like something they would say legally?
Yeah, of course.
And that's how they would get their Section 230 immunity, the fact that they are just hosting the content.
It's going through their network, going through their services without much editorial control on their part.
The more editorial control they exert over the platform in these types of instances, I think the less likely they can be considered a communication service provider where information is just flowing through their network.
All right, moving on.
There are all kinds of fronts in this war right now, and the digital front is the one that we're particularly interested in tonight.
Now, you may have heard of the loosely knit group Anonymous.
Well, they've been busy.
They've been extremely busy.
Their affiliate groups have sent 7 million text messages to Russian citizens about the war in Ukraine, 7 million.
While another group has hacked more than 400 security cameras in the country with anti-war messages.
These guys are great.
Anonymous hacktivists are claiming to have hacked into hundreds of public surveillance cameras installed across Russia to post messages against the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and in support of Ukraine.
It's worth noting that the hacktivists originally announced the hack on March 7th.
However, at the time this article came out on hackread.com, most targeted cameras were still compromised and displaying content left by the group.
Now, according to Anonymous, they've compromised more than 400 security cameras in Russia, displayed anti-propaganda messages.
The hacktivist collective has also compiled live feeds from more than 100 Russian CCTV cameras and posted them on their newly launched website, which unfortunately I don't have the URL for.
They left that out of the article.
But they say the point of this leak is solely to spread information to the Russian people and potentially, although unlikely, use these cameras for recon.
Since most of these cameras are in deep Russia and some near the border cities of Ukraine, this is mainly a large anti-propaganda movement.
We are, however, working on cameras in Belarus, Ukraine, and closer to the Ukraine conflict in Russia that will be used entirely for recon for the Ukrainian military.
That dump will come next.
Anonymous has categorized the hacked cameras into these labels.
Businesses, outdoor, indoor, restaurants, offices, schools, and security offices, which explains the extensiveness of hacking.
In most cases, Anonymous superimposed English text messages over live feeds such as the following.
Putin is killing children.
352 Ukraine civilians dead.
Russians lied to 200rf.com.
Slava, Ukraine hacked by Anonymous.
The 200rf.com website is set up by Ukrainian Internal Affairs Ministry to allow Russian relatives to identify Russian soldiers either captured or killed during the war.
In another incident, Squad 303, a newly formed digital army comprising Anonymous Associated Programmers, sent out over 7 million SMS messages to cell phone numbers all across Russia.
They created a tool called 1920.in to allow non-technical individuals to contribute to OpRussia, which is dubbed the world's largest cyber operation to date.
This campaign aimed to inform the Russian public about the war in Ukraine.
Within 48 hours, the group sent out 2 million text messages, and by Tuesday, the SMS count had reached 5 million.
In a video, Squad 303 stated they are trying to help Ukraine.
We have a message for the citizens of the free world.
The Legion is calling you.
Ukraine needs you.
You are the largest army in the history of the world.
You don't need any weapons or ammunition.
Your weapons are smartphones, and your ammo is messages sent to Russian citizens.
Signed, Anonymous.
Squad 303.
I don't know.
I'm not sure what you guys think about this, but to me, these folks are heroes because they're getting the word out.
They're basically driving nails into the invaders, people that are doing horrible things.
Like, for instance, today, bombing a bomb shelter, a theater in Ukraine, killing untold numbers of people.
And while not everybody can get out there and fight, everybody can do something.
And this, this is something.
Thoughts?
Absolutely.
It's, you know, we've said time and again on this program that the perfect antidote to bad information is good information,
and getting that good information out there is something that I think most, if not all, of the hacker community would agree is essential,
not just in this situation, but in general.
And the people who are working to make that happen in an environment that is very currently hostile to that sort of thing
you can't say enough good things about them, I think.
Yeah, it's like simple, direct, coordinated, and very widely distributed.
And that direct communication, not unlike nuisance calls or messages, is personal.
It's going right to people.
I really like the idea of those overlays on surveillance systems and just novel ways to get a simple message across.
Go ahead, Alex.
I will take my usual role here as devil's advocate in many ways, of course.
But I think the intention behind all of this is laudable.
And I think the reason for doing this is also worth examining in that Russia has really isolated its citizenry from the truth.
And, you know, not only have they cut off Facebook but limited TikTok,
all of the major social media platforms are not actively engaging with Russian citizens at the moment.
News stations have been closed down.
Foreign news is difficult to acquire.
And Putin has, since way before the outset of this war, been spewing misinformation about the reasoning behind the invasion,
as well as what's actually happening on the ground.
And New York Times reporting from the last few days has indicated very clearly that many people in Russia do not believe that Russia is targeting civilians
and believes that any of the information that's coming from Ukraine is, in fact, false.
They believe their government.
They believe and trust their government.
And there are many, many people who do not.
But there are, on the other hand, many, many people who do.
So the fact that you have to resort to this type of illicit behavior to get the truth out to people in Russia, that is extraordinarily problematic.
Now, with respect to the intention behind the loosely knit group Anonymous and whoever is doing this, I think it's a laudable intention.
But sometimes even the most well-intentioned of activities can have unintentional but foreseeable consequences.
And one of those foreseeable consequences, to my mind, could be the escalation of this war, dragging in other countries
and giving Russia a pretextual reason to blame perhaps the United Kingdom or the United States,
depending upon wherever these loosely knit group members of Anonymous are located.
If there's any kind of attribution that the Russians can do and can point to, they might claim that that's an act of war.
I'm not sure Russia would want to do that because then it could drag in native nations.
But the point being here is that I think even the most well-intentioned actions here can spill over and have unintentional consequences.
And when we're talking about conflicts between nuclear powers, that's dangerous.
Well, you know, I counter that by saying that not doing something also has consequences.
And in this particular case, sending millions of text messages, I'm not sure anybody would consider that an act of war.
Hacking security cameras, not really something I would consider akin to an invasion.
I think we have to use our imagination and come up with ways to actually reach out to people.
That's the strongest thing, the strongest weapon that I think we as individuals have.
Now, you know, we have a perception. We have a perception of what things are like in Russia right now.
And I guarantee you it's not accurate.
We assume everybody is just basically toeing the line and that the country is in misery and just a horrible, oppressive place.
It's actually quite lively. It's actually got a very strong counter establishment movement.
I suggest going to YouTube, watching videos from an organization called 1420, their production company.
They go around asking people questions, going around asking people questions about this and being very careful because, you know, you can't say the word war.
You can't talk about the invasion, but they do it anyway.
They figure out a way to do that.
And you just get a sense that, boy, the people there, they know what's going on and they are fighting back in their own way.
It's not a hopeless situation.
And if this war is to be won, it's through the common person, the person on the street, people like us, people who just use their imagination to come up with a different way of just tearing down the machine a little bit more.
In addition, of course, to all the brave people fighting and dying to protect their land.
But, you know, I think caution.
I think that's something that it's there's too much of it right now.
And, yeah, I agree.
We shouldn't do anything that would spark a greater conflict beyond these borders.
But at the same time, I think being too cautious also carries some very serious hazards.
Yeah.
And in this case, the examples are really quite harmless.
The cameras themselves, you can still see the picture.
And if it's a vulnerability, of course, it would alert someone that they need to change something or reconfigure something on that particular NVR camera system they're running.
And a text message.
I mean, is it illegal to get a text message?
I mean, send a text or send one.
Yeah.
I mean, it's I think escalation on, you know, the terms of on military terms when you are just having direct person to person communication is equivalent of like that video of doing interviews that we were talking about.
You're just having a conversation as though you were passing someone on the street.
You're going to disagree.
You might have different perspectives.
And the important part is sharing and finding any way when there are less and less.
And, you know, while there are people buying into this over there, I feel the same way as I do about people in this country who buy into Trump's nonsense.
They are not the enemy.
They're misguided.
The enemy are the people that know what they're doing and that are leading people into a bad place.
And the people of Russia, they're certainly not the enemy.
They are people that need to be reached.
And I think anything we can do to reach out to them is hugely important.
Go ahead, Alex.
Yeah.
To Kyle's point, though, about, you know, is it illegal to receive a text message?
And unfortunately, though, going back to the unintentional consequences here, I think in Russia at this point it very well could be.
If you've seen the videos that have been circulating around Twitter of people having their phone searched by the Russian police, you know,
that having some kind of illicit text message on there or images of civilian casualties in Ukraine
or even having perhaps some traces or vestiges of the fact that you were navigating to certain websites
or have certain links in your browsing history that they might have clicked on from these anonymous text messages,
that could be enough, I think, for somebody to get in trouble.
Okay.
So someone's going to get in trouble for investigating more.
This is going to happen, Alex.
People are going to get in trouble, and they're going to have encounters that are not pleasant.
It's essential if we're going to get past this and if justice is to prevail.
Well, I'm not condemning the action.
Just to be clear here, I'm merely presenting a counterpoint and the unintentional consequences of some of those actions.
And I think some of them could have real-life physical consequences for people in Russia.
I mean, it's a scary situation.
This is exactly the situation that Putin wanted to create, which is this alternate world,
this alternate reality in Russia where he's not the bad guy, he's the good guy.
They're denazifying Ukraine, and nobody can say a word about it the other way around.
It's a crazy totalitarian situation that they have right now.
Except, Alex, they are.
They're figuring out ways to do it.
Somebody went on television the other day with a sign and got to millions of people that way.
People are figuring out ways to do this anyway, and we have to encourage that.
And they're not acting out of fear, right?
They're not being quiet in silence and fear and this obeying new and absurd rules just for the convenience of some invasion.
Joe Biden called Putin a war criminal today, and I think that's a pretty strong statement right there.
And text messages from the rest of us, I don't think it's going to really cause that much of a ruckus on the upper echelons,
but it certainly could open up some eyes.
Go ahead, Alex, and then we're going to move on.
Sure.
One counterpoint to that, which is I think the people who have been actively opposing the Russian government
and publicly doing so are extraordinarily brave.
They're to be commended, and I think they should be certainly encouraged.
And if there was a way to foment more of that revolution, I think we should certainly try to engage in it.
My problem with it, though, is that the people that have done this, the people that show up for the protests,
the woman, the extraordinarily courageous woman who went on Russian TV with the anti-war sign
and talked about it beforehand, who's I think since disappeared, that was her own choice.
That was a choice that she had made.
She actively set her mind to do something and then did it.
And I think depositing potentially contraband information on the phones of millions of people
who may not have made that choice for themselves, that's what I would take some issue with.
I think it could have some dangerous ramifications.
Let me just say from the reports I've seen, that woman has been released, and she's not being held in a gulag somewhere.
That's what I mean by what we are told, the images that we have aren't necessarily accurate.
Yes, people are being arrested in mass numbers, but a lot of them are going back out onto the streets and not being dissuaded.
And, you know, this is something that I think is going to spread higher and higher in the government, in the military.
Ukraine is a neighboring land of Russia.
A lot of people have relatives there.
A lot of people have been there, and they do not want to destroy this place.
The people of Russia, for the most part, simply don't want to do that.
And when it becomes clear that's what's happening, I think you're going to see more of a reaction.
But for that to happen, you have to communicate.
You have to get the word out.
Okay, let me just move on to one more thing, and we'll get to Emma.
The Ukrainian Anonymous hacker group hacked into Roskomnadzor, the Russian federal agency that's responsible for monitoring and censoring media.
If you're going to hack into anything, hack into that.
They released 360,000 files.
They announced this last Thursday.
This is what they said.
YourAnonTV is the Twitter account.
Just in, Anonymous has successfully breached and leaked the database of Roskomnadzor.
I'm sorry for pronouncing that horribly.
The Russian federal executive agency responsible for monitoring, controlling, and censoring Russian mass media, releasing to the public over 360,000 files.
Among the censored documents, some of which are dated as late as March 5th, are ones that show Moscow censored anything that referred to the war as a Russian invasion of Ukraine.
They blocked Russian use of Facebook after it flagged Russian articles as factually inaccurate.
They're also threatening to block Russian Wikipedia for including an article on the Russian invasion.
That's the Roskomnadzor agency.
It's just incredible how much can be done with intelligent people that are determined to infiltrate these organizations and expose all sorts of things.
Mass numbers can do incredible things.
With that, I think that's a good point.
I'd like to introduce Emma Best from Distributed Denial of Secrets.
Welcome to Off the Hook.
Thank you.
Quick note.
It was not a Ukrainian anonymous group.
It was just anonymous.
The account you mentioned had nothing to do with the hack or the release.
It was released first by Distributed Denial of Secrets.
Most of what they said was found in the leak is just recent background information, which we cited in the wiki entry and linked to various articles about it.
Unfortunately, a lot of the reporting just made up that it was a Ukrainian anonymous account, and that's been going around.
Jerusalem Post got that wrong and a few other places.
That's the article I read, the Jerusalem Post.
That was the one I was reading.
Okay, I'm glad you're here to correct that.
Yeah, we tried to get them to correct it, and they didn't.
A few other places were better, but yeah.
Yeah, it's actually a two-part release.
The 360-some-thousand files was the main part of the release.
There's also several hundred gigabytes of databases, which are in a proprietary format, which so far we've not had any luck extracting the data from.
But we decided to go ahead and make them available to people in case anyone else has better luck.
One reason we did that when we did was because of the Internet difficulties and shut off with Russia.
We wanted to maximize the chance of it getting into Russian hands before that got increasingly difficult.
Yeah.
What kind of a reaction have you gotten so far to these releases?
A lot of people are interested.
Several thousand people have downloaded, at least, just from the servers that we're running for them.
Obviously, we have no idea how many people have retrieved the data in total.
It's unfortunate in that right now we're at a point in time where there's a huge amount of demand for Russian speakers.
Very few are available because so many of them live and work in Russia.
A lot of the partners that we would usually work with on this simply aren't reachable right now, and that makes it more difficult.
There are a number of outlets that are starting to work on it, and we've been making our way through it slowly.
But we have some other things that keep coming in.
But there's a lot in here that is just interesting from a purely administrative point of view,
showing literally just how the agency functions on a day-to-day basis,
which is something that I don't think the Russian people have ever seen before.
When you go through, there's all these entries for things where they're interacting with the local ISPs,
the radio stations, every single means of communication.
There's documents where they seem to be registering social and religious groups.
Just hands-in-everything postal inspection, where they're apparently inspecting and going through people's mail to different degrees.
And the extent of it is just fascinating.
It's very slow-going because of the translation issues.
But the depth of the data is just incredible.
I'll say a couple of points.
Now, I happen to know that many people listening to us right now in the New York area speak Russian.
If you need help with people who use their native language, is there a way they can participate in this?
And the second question is, how do people see this? Where do they go to get it?
The best way to get it is to just go to DDoSSecrets.com.
And it is the first entry under New and Updated Releases.
You can download it with any Torrent client.
You'll see the sidebar over on the side.
You just need the file link, and that'll get you started.
And anyone who wants to help or is able to help with translation or finding things that are interesting, please reach out to us through email.
Press at DDoSSecrets.com.
Yeah, it's absolutely just a fascinating trove.
And there's so many things that look interesting with the machine translation, but you can never fully be sure of exactly what it means or whether or not it's a faithful translation, especially with abbreviations.
Yes, and just all kinds of different variations, regionalisms, and things like that.
Alex, did you have something?
Yeah, I mean, just echoing Emma's comments here, too.
I mean, the demand for Russian speakers is really, I think, incredible at this moment, given how many leaks there have been.
It was a Ukrainian security researcher that we talked about last week that released a massive amount of data on the ransomware group that's associated with Russia, known as Conti.
A lot of the chat logs between the operators of Conti were in Russian.
And, yeah, there's only so much that you can do from taking a phrase or a piece of text from Google Translate and then grepping through files here.
Emma, can you talk a little bit about the volume here?
I mean, I believe it's around 830 gigabytes of data, which is just absolutely a massive amount of data.
Do you have any idea how many individual files are included in that or documents?
So, it's 820 gigabytes between both halves of the release.
It is just over 360,000 files.
Wow.
The file section of the release totals 526.9 gigabytes, and the databases are 290.6 gigabytes.
The databases seem to be for legal research and handling HR procedures based off of the software that goes with the databases.
But we obviously can't be 100% positive until we find a way to actually access that data.
And, unfortunately, because of the new Iron Curtain, the companies aren't talking to anyone from the U.S. right now.
Yeah.
And to that point, too, Ayo, do you have any idea about the date of this type of data?
How far does it go back, and how recent is it?
It's at least as recent as March 5th.
It goes back several years.
Let me see if I can switch to the right desktop.
Sorry, I have…
No, while you're doing that, I'll just comment and say that the fact that it goes from March 5th and back several years,
that's going to give anybody who's interested in Russian censorship, I think, a real inside look at how that machine works,
how that operates, and who are the people running this operation.
Yeah.
Incredible.
Yeah.
For those people who might be looking at the site and have no idea how to use Tor,
does anybody want to give a quick how-to so that they can get started?
I would just suggest running the Tor browser, downloading that somewhere.
But does anyone have any pointers?
Really?
None of you?
Can you explain how to use Torrents?
Torrents are a very widespread thing, and there are lots of easy guides out there for you to get started with whatever platform you're using.
Just search for Torrent Client in your operating system or device of choice, and you will be sent merrily on your way.
The basic concept is that the entire crowd of people who have copies of a file are sharing bits and pieces of their copies with you,
so you can download from many people, share your chunks of the download with other people who want it,
and that is peer-to-peer file sharing for you.
And it's not illegal.
It's perfectly fine, and it's safe.
Yeah.
And I was actually right.
It does go back to at least 2011.
I found one of the annual folders with stuff from 2011 through 2019, and other things, other parts of the data I know go up through at least March 5th.
Incredible.
Now, Emma, I know that you've had issues with organizations like Twitter, for instance, that don't allow people to link to your site.
Is this something that is just we're going to have to accept?
Is this something that's particularly unusual, and do you know why they do this?
Apparently it is Twitter's final decision.
We worked with a group that helps specialize in this sort of thing, and they talked to Twitter a bunch for us and advocated for us,
and Twitter made it clear that it is their final decision that the DDoS URL will remain banned, the DDoS account will remain banned,
and the reason is that, according to them, we directly collaborate with hackers.
Well, so do we.
And they don't ban our site.
I mean, it's insane.
If you type DDoSSecrets.com in Twitter in a message, a private message, a post, it just will not go through.
I mean, that's kind of incredible.
And I don't understand why – okay, so the DNC emails, the Podesta emails, the hacking team emails, the Intolerance Network, those are all admittedly hacked.
And you can link to all of those.
And I'm not saying they shouldn't be able to link to them, but what is the difference, Twitter?
And they can never give a response to that.
And I imagine you can also link to hate groups and all kinds of vile organizations out there.
They just say, we're not endorsing this, this is just speech.
But for some reason, in your case, it's different.
Yeah, no, I found a website that has a dedicated Twitter account, and they link right to their website.
That is literally like –
Rob?
Yeah, well, it's very interesting.
We were – listeners may remember a couple of weeks ago we were playing with trying to tweet DDoSSecrets.com live on the air.
And it just doesn't happen.
And tying back to what I was saying about Facebook deciding what they want in their walled garden, obviously Twitter gets to decide what goes on Twitter too.
But I'm very interested in thinking about what Twitter is saying by banning the DDoSSecrets URL.
Obviously, they've been to the site.
They know what's there.
And they are saying very loudly, we do not approve of this.
So I think that does amount to a statement by the company Twitter about their feelings about this particular resource.
But they can't block us saying it over the radio.
So if I were to spell out DDoSSecrets.com, you could all go to that website.
You could all go back through the recording of the show and listen to it as many times as you want until you spell it right.
You could also space it out.
You could have a space between each letter.
Or you could spell it backwards.
Or you can go up and down.
There's all kinds of ways you can do it.
Or you can even have another website that just does nothing but forward to that website.
So there's all sorts of ways to defeat it.
It's silly.
But it's just another hurdle that makes it hard to share this information.
And in this particular case, this information is invaluable and something that should be shared amongst everybody.
Emma, have you gotten much in the way of a negative response for this latest release?
Emma, are you there?
Have we lost her?
I think we lost her for a moment and she logged back in.
But I don't believe we can hear her.
So there might be a technical glitch on her end or on the Internet.
Okay.
I'm not sure who is responsible right now.
Kyle or is it you that's supposed to reconnect?
Because we really would like to hear more.
I will do it again.
Okay.
Alex, I guess this is an opportunity for you to give us some of your input on this.
Well, look, I think it's a fascinating bunch of documents here.
And to call it a bunch of documents obviously is an understatement when we're talking about hundreds of thousands of documents
going back 11 years.
And I really think that the implications of this are going to be shaking out over the next couple of years.
It's going to take a long, long time to go through this.
And I think the insight into the apparatus of the Russian state's censorship machine is going to be really fascinating to learn about.
And I worry to some extent that a lot of the release of this data may have names or phone numbers or something like that in it.
But I think going back 10 years, the PII or the personally identifying information in this is likely to be stale.
It might be very difficult to mine.
I think this is also the type of thing that's just very, very difficult to curate for exactly the reasons that Emma had mentioned,
that Russian speakers are in short supply at the moment and very, very high demand.
But nonetheless, I think that journalists are going to be combing through this for some time to come now.
And I think that the Russian government is really going to have its hands full when its people learn about the different subjects
and the different objects that they have been censoring for the last 11 years.
I mean, this could be the straw that breaks the camel's back with respect to the Russian citizens' toleration of the regime in power right now.
I mean, if this data shakes out in its entirety and people learn what has been denied to them over the last 11 years in terms of the truth,
that could make them very, very angry.
We might have made somebody very, very angry.
We can't reach Emma.
She's been basically cut off from our connection.
Is that true, Kyle?
I'm back now.
I'm sorry about that.
It was just a little faint.
Great to hear you.
All right.
So were you in the middle of saying something or did we have a question?
Anyone?
I had been talking about the Twitter situation.
I don't know at what point I got cut off, though, and lost you all.
Well, since we only have a couple of minutes on the on-air portion, you're welcome to join us on overtime at 8 o'clock.
I guess now is a good time to let people know how they can help.
In addition to Russian speakers, people who want to support what DDoS Secrets does, how can they participate?
We are poor at organizing volunteers, to be honest.
If people want to donate, we are a 501C3, and we are always cash poor.
There's a donate link on the front page.
Otherwise, spread the word.
Tell people about the data.
Tell them that it exists.
That makes all the difference.
I know people that know that there's information to be found, the more people can use it.
One of the things that we were asking while you were away was have you gotten any kind of negative feedback towards this latest release?
The Russian release? No.
Are you expecting any?
In due time.
This is courageous to be doing things like this.
We're seeing such examples of courage all throughout the world.
There's no reason why people here in the tri-state area or in the states can't also participate.
Do you have any closing words maybe of inspiration to people out there that feel like there's nothing they can do?
There's always something that we can do.
You just have to start by doing something.
It builds from there.
Maybe the first thing people can do is venture over to the website, DDoSSecrets.com, and check out some of what is on there already.
Hopefully that will grow, and hopefully there will be many more people inspired to do things similar to what you folks over there are doing.
Emma, thank you so much for joining us on tonight's Off the Hook.
I hope you can join us in overtime on YouTube afterwards on Channel 2600.
But regardless, please continue doing what you do, and know that it does make a difference,
and that people throughout the world are benefiting from this incredible exchange of information.
Thank you for having me.
All right, we're going to go out with what else? Some Ukrainian music.
Join us overtime, 8 o'clock, Channel 2600 on YouTube, or click on the link that's on the top of 2600.com.
We'll be back here on WVAI next week at 7 o'clock.
Please stay tuned to 99.5 FM for all kinds of insightful and controversial programming.
And we'll see you in a few minutes over on YouTube. Good night.
I'm a Cossack from Zopot,
When I see a Cossack with a yellow hat,
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I can't show him everything,
He looks at me like I'm a young man.
I'm a Cossack from Zopot,
I tell him everything,
I'm a Cossack from Zopot,
When I see a Cossack with a yellow hat,
He looks at me like I'm a young man.
I can't show him everything,
He looks at me like I'm a young man.
I'm a Cossack from Zopot,
I tell him everything,
He looks at me like I'm a young man.
I'm a Cossack from Zopot,
I tell him everything,
I'm a Cossack from Zopot,
When I see a Cossack with a yellow hat,
He looks at me like I'm a young man.
I can't show him everything,
He looks at me like I'm a young man.
I can't show him everything,
He looks at me like I'm a young man.
I'm a Cossack from Zopot,
I tell him everything,
He looks at me like I'm a young man.
I'm a Cossack from Zopot,
I tell him everything,
He looks at me like I'm a young man.
I'm a Cossack from Zopot,
I tell him everything,
I'm a Cossack from Zopot,
When I see a Cossack with a yellow hat,
He looks at me like I'm a young man.
I'm a Cossack from Zopot,
I tell him everything,
He looks at me like I'm a young man.
I'm a Cossack from Zopot,
I tell him everything,
He looks at me like I'm a young man.
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