Stay tuned for Off The Hook coming up, but before we do that, come on folks, you know
what I'm about to say at this point.
You know what I'm going to do, I'm just going to make a quick appeal to the listening
audience of what you just heard about the myriad of reasons why WBAI needs to be supported
because of the voices, the various voices out here, say what they want to say.
And sometimes people will like it, and sometimes people won't like it, but it has been said.
Okay.
I was saying plenty of things off the air, but I can't tell you because it was off the
air, but trust me, y'all wouldn't have liked it.
But with that said, 212-209-2950, we're going to give to WBAI.org online.
All right, enough of me dilly-dallying.
Stay tuned for Off The Hook coming up.
It is 7 p.m.
Due to the earthquake in the area you are calling, your call cannot be completed at
this time.
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078-T.
If you'd like to make a call, please hang up and try again.
If you need help, stay on the line and a hacker will assist you shortly.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving, now I've got me a cough.
We couldn't get much worse, but if they could, they would.
Von Diddley-Bohm put the best in spec, the worst.
I hope that's understood.
Von Diddley-Bohm!
I hope that's understood.
I hope that's understood.
And a very good evening to everybody.
The program is Off The Hook.
Emanuel Goldstein here with you on this Wednesday evening.
Joined tonight by Kyle.
I say joined tonight by Kyle.
Yes.
And by Alex over on Skype Land.
Good evening.
Apparently you're in an echo tube of some sort.
You know, I want to dive right into it.
Okay, first of all, I had nothing to do with it.
We're talking about all the leaked documents that are suddenly popping up everywhere
that show all kinds of Pentagon classified information.
I just would like to go around the room, rooms as it were,
so that we can right away eliminate any possibility of our connection.
So I already said I'm clean.
Kyle?
Yeah, I'm clean.
You sure about that?
You sound a little uncertain.
I haven't, no, this has nothing to do with me.
No, you're not clean?
Get me out of this.
I don't even know what's going on.
I'd make a good prosecutor.
Alex?
Not it.
Rob?
Gala?
Hmm.
Silence.
Okay.
All right.
I guess you do have the right.
Oh, they're not in this week.
Okay.
Could they be on a jet flying to Tahiti or something as we speak?
We'll talk about it afterwards.
Okay.
Well, the point is we don't know who did it.
But we do know that this is driving people crazy.
What do we know so far?
Well, these are classified documents which have not actually been authenticated by U.S. officials.
They're everything from briefing slides that map out Ukrainian military positions
to assessments of international support for Ukraine and other sensitive topics,
including under what circumstances Russian President Vladimir Putin might use nuclear weapons.
So that's a fun read for anybody.
We don't know how many documents were leaked.
Associated Press has viewed approximately 50 documents.
And some estimates put the total number in the hundreds.
Now, nobody knows where they came from.
They were somewhere in the web.
And where exactly and who had access at that point, we don't know.
We simply don't know.
Said Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin as he banked his fist on the table repeatedly.
We will continue to investigate and turn over every rock until we find the source of this and the extent of it.
There is a really good summation of this on a site called Bellingcat.com, based in the Netherlands.
From Discord to 4chan, the improbable journey of a U.S. intelligence leak.
In recent days, the U.S. Justice Department and Pentagon have been investigating an apparent online leak of sensitive documents,
including some that were marked top secret.
A portion of the documents, which have since been widely covered by the news media,
focused on Russia's invasion of Ukraine,
while others detailed analysis of potential U.K. policies on the South China Sea,
the activities of a Houthi figure in Yemen.
The existence of the documents was first reported by the New York Times,
after a number of Russian telegram channels shared five photographed files
related to the invasion of Ukraine on April 5th,
at least one of which has since been found by Bellingcat to be crudely edited.
Yeah.
Now these documents seemed to be dated in early March,
around the time they were first posted online on Discord,
which, in case you don't know, is a messaging platform popular with gamers.
Keep in mind that date. Early March is when they were posted.
Now, Bellingcat has seen evidence that some documents dated to January
could have been posted online even earlier,
although it's unclear exactly when.
Bellingcat also spoke to three members of the Discord community,
where the images have been posted,
who claim that many more documents have been shared across other Discord servers in recent months.
As the channels were deleted following the controversy generated by the leaked documents,
Bellingcat has not been able to confirm this particular claim.
But bizarrely, in case this isn't bizarre enough,
the Discord channels in which the documents dated from March were posted
were focused on the Minecraft computer game
and fandom for a Filipino YouTube celebrity.
They then spread to other sites, such as the image board 4chan,
before appearing on Telegram,
Twitter, and then major media publishers around the world afterwards took interest.
Some major media publishers are the last.
Minecraft had it first, then Telegram, then Twitter.
Russian presidential spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told CNN
that the documents showed the extent of US and NATO involvement in Ukraine,
yet one pro-Russian Telegram channel that has been providing updates on the conflict
wasn't convinced and said it was possible the documents could be Western disinformation.
None of the documents that Bellingcat, what we're reading from right now,
had seen were scanned.
None of the documents were scanned, they were all photographed.
You can see creases on the documents,
with items such as a hunter's scope box and some gorilla glue
visible in the background of those dated from early March.
This appears to indicate that at least some of the documents were photographed in the same location.
The content of the shared documents ranges widely,
with some topics including maps of hotspots in Ukraine,
such as Bakhmut and Kharkiv,
a delivery timetable for Western munitions to Ukraine,
as well as maps and catalogs of Ukrainian air defense assets,
including a calendar of ammunition expenditures.
A CIA Operations Center intelligence update marked Top Secret from March 2nd
is also included in the images,
while much of the information in these documents
had previously been publicly available through media reports.
While it has yet not been possible to uncover the original source of these apparent leaks,
it has been possible to trace the spread of the documents
over a variety of internet forums in recent months
before they were reported by pro-Russian telegram channels
and then major media outlets.
Fascinating story and fascinating accounts of all this.
In fact, one of the stories being related
has to do with somebody getting into an argument
on one of these, I believe, on one of the Discord channels
and then simply posting a bunch of classified information
to back up their argument and say,
look, this proves what I was saying.
And then the rest is history, I guess.
Alex, you know a thing or two about leaks,
about how the military handles these things
and what they must be going through right now.
What are your initial impressions of this?
This is such a fascinating story on, I think, just so many levels, too.
The idea of these documents being out there for about a month
before anybody really noticed them is just so strange, number one.
The idea that they're distributed through Discord is so strange, too.
I mean, ordinarily you would think
if somebody had a bucket of top-secret documents
that they wanted to get out into the wild,
they wouldn't just post them in some kind of random
or seemingly random Discord server, right?
You would probably send them over to WikiLeaks
if you wanted to get them published,
or the New York Times, AP, Reuters.
There are lots of other alternative outlets
where you could, and very securely as well, share information.
I mean, there are things.
You know, 2600 has a SecureDrop instance, right?
So it allows people to securely share documents with the magazine.
The New York Times has SecureDrop.
This is something that I believe our dear friend,
whose anniversary unfortunately just recently came up, Aaron Swartz,
was instrumental in putting together SecureDrop, right?
So it allows people with these types of documents
to share them securely with media organizations.
But yet whoever had these documents didn't do that.
Maybe they didn't trust the system.
Maybe they weren't technically sophisticated.
And for whatever reason, they ended up in a Discord channel
where gamers go and hang out.
Another option here, something we saw obviously with the 2016 election,
was passing documents of this type over to WikiLeaks.
And in more recent times, our dear friends over at Distributed Denial of Secrets
have become a major repository of leaked documents,
particularly with respect to Russia and the Ukraine war.
So I find it very, very odd that the source of these documents is in Discord.
The other thing that's interesting about Discord too is,
insofar as I can tell, it's a U.S. company.
So that means that the original documents, if they were shared with Discord,
once they've been processed by Discord,
once they're put out there for anybody to download and then they're downloaded,
they're going to lose all or I would say most of the metadata
that's associated with those documents.
It's going to be destroyed or disrupted in some way
by virtue of the processing of those images on the Discord servers.
But Discord, having received the original files themselves,
are going to be in possession of all of the metadata
if they still have those original files.
So the metadata associated with these original images
is very likely in the possession of Discord.
I can guarantee that as a San Francisco-based company,
they are very likely dealing with FBI and DOJ and search warrants,
all kinds of interesting things going on there
with respect to the investigation of the source of these leaks.
So I think a lot is going to shake out over the next few months.
I wouldn't expect anything to move extraordinarily quickly here,
at least with respect to information coming into the public domain.
But I do think over the next few months,
things are going to shake out as this investigation moves forward
and we learn a little bit more about the motivations
and the aspirations of these particular leaks.
So you're in traffic or you're in your office, aren't you?
Yeah. I mean, it's just Manhattan.
It's Manhattan.
It's the hazards of the city, yes.
Well, that's something.
Yeah, it's coming back to life.
Well, speaking of Discord, this is the part I was looking for before.
This happened on March 4th,
which was about a month before the Telegram and 4chan posts.
Ten documents were posted in a Discord server called Minecraft Earth Map.
I guess none of us were monitoring.
We should have been, but we weren't.
Minecraft is a popular computer game with millions of players around the world.
This is the interesting part.
After a brief spat with another person on the server
about Minecraft maps and the war in Ukraine,
one of the Discord users replied,
here, have some leaked documents attaching ten documents about Ukraine,
some of which bore the top secret markings.
Yeah, I think the nonchalant nature,
I mean, first of all, there is going to be a timeframe
to reassemble that kind of window from when these documents were created
and then when they were ultimately made public.
The thing that's really interesting in the leak in this platform,
particularly in being nonchalant in that way,
seems like it could be a form of subterfuge as well.
You don't know.
It may be deliberate that it's not on one of the formal organizations
that Alex had described.
That may be something that is deliberate.
The language just in that phrase,
here, have some leaked documents,
tells me it's possible it's been through a couple set of hands
because if you were leaking them just then,
would you describe them as already having been leaked?
Based on previous involvement in hacker adventures over the decades,
sometimes there's a trove of documents that everybody knows about
except the authorities,
so that when somebody finally is caught up to by the law
and they're all in a tizzy about,
oh my God, they had this, they had that,
people in the hacker community are like,
yeah, everyone had that.
The netcom files come to mind, all sorts of…
Curiosities.
Yeah, the things that people just kind of collect.
They might not even use it,
but it's just something that's floating around.
Apparently, this was floating around
and intelligence governments didn't know about it.
Now, this is kind of interesting too.
I like your opinion on this, Alex.
There was one image in common between the Telegram and 4chan post,
which was a map that showed a number of statistics
including the cumulative number of KIA,
that's killed in action,
soldiers on the Russian and Ukrainian sides
through the course of the war.
However, the numbers on these two sources differed,
with the first source, 4chan,
showing more Russian losses than Ukrainian,
and the second source, Donbass-Dvushka, the reverse.
A closer examination of the second image,
with the much higher Ukrainian killed in action numbers,
and that was posted on Telegram,
shows crude image manipulation.
As well as the later posting time and far blurrier resolution,
the numbers are out of alignment,
space between some numbers and letters is also too large
to be consistent with the font.
Therefore, it seems that either the Donbass-Dvushka Telegram account
or previous source posted by this account
altered the original image
to paint the Ukrainian losses as heavier
than in the original assessment.
It seems that there was a leaked document
and then somebody crudely tried to alter that leaked document
to make it seem more beneficial for the Russian side.
What do you think about that, Alex?
Well, it's not surprising at all.
I mean, I think this modification of the document itself
is kind of stupid and silly,
especially if you can't match the font right.
It seems very amateurish,
and so I think it's more of a red herring than anything else.
But what I think is very telling about this, though,
is that every single party involved with these leaks
seems to have their own theory about how they came about,
and they're spinning the information.
So, for instance, you have Ukraine coming out and saying,
well, we think Russia is behind this.
We think they stole the documents and they somehow got them out there.
And Russia is saying, well, this could be Western disinformation.
And they're also saying, and if they're legitimate,
then this indicates that we were right about the great extent
of NATO and U.S. involvement in the Ukraine war with Russia.
So they're meddling in these affairs,
even though Ukraine is not a NATO nation.
You know, NATO is really, really meddling here.
And the United States has come out and said,
well, we don't know where the hell these things came from.
So everybody's got their own take and their own version
and spin on the facts here.
But I think that that modification was obviously done by somebody
who was pro-Russia but also technically inept.
I mean, there are much better ways of doing this.
Or they just had a small monitor and they were in a hurry.
Well, it definitely points to amateurs
as far as trying to make something look better,
not really a professional at work here.
Well, but what is professional to my mind is the fact that we're dealing
with photographs of the documents themselves.
Because you think about how did Reality Winner get caught, right?
She printed a document from an official printer
and using some kind of dot-matching system,
they were able to identify that she was the source of this particular leak, right?
And there was some big controversy with that, right,
where she gave these documents over to the intercept,
the intercept then posted the documents without protecting their source.
And she was able to have been identified.
So it seems like these documents, to my mind,
if we're dealing with photographs of documents in some kind of bizarre setting
with a Hunter scope and Gorilla Glue in the background too,
I mean that's just also very odd.
But because we're dealing with photographs of documents,
it indicates to me that the person who had possession of these documents
might have actually printed them from an official government source.
Because if I were leaking documents, and I never have,
I used to have access to classified information.
I've never, ever removed classified information from any facility.
But you would imagine that today if someone were doing that,
they certainly would not want to have a high-resolution scan of that particular page
or they wouldn't want to have any kind of original files that came out of,
let's say, you know, a SCIF or anywhere in the intelligence community.
So taking a picture of the document itself
and degrading the resolution of it in some ways is a protective measure
to mask whoever printed it,
whoever was the source of the actual document itself.
Of course, there are dangers in taking a picture.
You could have geolocation data attached to the photograph.
Well, that's very easy to remove, though.
I mean, it's easy to turn it off when you're taking a picture,
and it's also really easy.
That's data called EXIF data that's associated with that image.
And it's very easy to manipulate that data
or to remove it from any particular file.
Yeah, the generations of those photos are going to be really interesting,
and not just location, geolocation,
but also what type of camera or what type of phone,
what type of network carrier, if any of that information
was somehow something you were able to surmise.
And then the geographic location, if you don't have exact coordinates,
you could narrow down a lot of that stuff
and then piece things together of other knowns.
And that's, I think, what nobody has a full picture of,
and it will take time,
is just getting what the facts of the situation are.
And then they're probably also scrambling to take some vacations
and move some people around,
because this is affecting a lot of the current activity.
And I think also the thought about piecing it together
will be about motivations.
What are the motivations at play?
As Alex kind of pointed out, the professional nature,
I think it's, I don't know, one way to describe it,
but it's the desirability of this information,
the tense moment and high importance in this particular environment.
There seems to be an agenda, and it seems to focus on Ukraine,
because that's all I've heard about are documents related to that.
And if there are other documents related to other things going on,
they haven't been given the same amount of attention.
So it seems that whoever did expose this
is doing it for some kind of a reason.
Now, why – and maybe, Alex, you can speak to this –
why they would store it on a Minecraft Discord chat for months,
is that just maybe a safe –
I guess it is a safe place, because nobody discovered it,
but is that something typical?
No. I think it's really strange. I think it's very strange.
I mean, I would presume that other people would have access
to that particular Discord chat, that channel, that server,
whatever the hell it was.
And so the fact that these things are hanging out there,
possibly just unnoticed, I think is really, really odd.
I mean, it's a bunch of 12-year-olds that play Minecraft, right?
I mean, I know adults play as well, but it's predominantly kids.
Is it possible that they didn't know what they had,
or could this be somebody who saw it in his dad's briefcase or something?
Well, maybe. I think there's any number of reasons
about how you could explain this.
I don't necessarily know.
But if we're thinking that this was some kind of intentional act,
then perhaps an explanation would be that whoever was behind this
uploaded these files to some random Discord server
where people aren't necessarily going to understand the import
or the significance of these files.
Then after a certain period of time has passed,
maybe they understand how Discord works
and how they discard log files or information about who uploaded what when.
After a certain period of time has passed
and they know that that information has been erased,
then all of a sudden that information is put back into the public domain
by another emissary of this particular information, another conduit.
At that point, they can then go back and say,
well, I found this on a Discord server.
And it checks out because there it is on this old Discord server.
But the metadata that would be associated with who uploaded this file
might be gone, might be erased.
So maybe somebody has some inside knowledge
about how Discord handles data retention.
I don't know. That's a theory.
I really have no idea.
But hiding in plain sight and allowing it to be sort of found eventually
buys time for someone
and is a way of keeping it so that it's available
and you can disassociate.
And I guess they're able to get an escape plan or something.
I mean, just basically distance themselves from the actual distribution method.
It's one hell of a story.
It's really something. It's interesting.
I don't know. Maybe I'll start playing Minecraft now finally
because I didn't know there were all kinds of hidden treasures like this
that you could find.
But let's predict.
Alex, do you think they're going to catch this person?
If so, what kind of a time frame and any hints as to what methods they might use?
Well, they're definitely going to be using search warrants, subpoenas, interviews,
trying to assess what was going on with Discord servers,
any kind of data that they have that would lead back to who these individuals were.
But the other aspect of this,
and I think this is also something that Bellingcat had covered,
which is that there seemed to have been way more documents out there
that were shared on a separate Discord server or something called this Thug Shaker Central
that used to be run by somebody by the name of Vaki.
So I guess the Thug Shaker Central server was originally named after its original founder,
one member of the server with the username Vaki.
And this guy, Vaki, apparently knows or claims to know the identity or the person
who was the original source of these leaked documents on the Discord servers,
and that there were many other documents, perhaps,
that were shared on this Thug Shaker Central server.
So all of this, I think, maybe it doesn't make sense because somebody who,
or maybe the parties behind this have created such a smokescreen here
that they don't want any of these dots to connect.
What I think here is you get this weird Thug Shaker Central thing,
which has like 20 people talking about racist tropes and memes
and sharing strange conservative things.
And oddly enough, they're also into Orthodox Christianity in this channel.
And then you combine that with Minecraft and then 4chan and Telegram.
So it becomes so obfuscated that the timeline itself doesn't make any sense.
Does any of it make sense, Alex?
The whole thing is so baffling sometimes.
What does make sense, though, is like what I said earlier,
the fact that we're dealing with photographs of the documents themselves.
That's what makes sense to me.
That's what makes me think that we're dealing with something that has authenticity here.
And I think the fact that the U.S. government is taking it so seriously
means that these documents were authentic
and that if you think about who would have had access to these particular types of documents,
you're probably talking about somebody who works in the intelligence community,
either a contractor or an employee,
because these documents were at the TS level, the top secret level,
and I think some of them were TSSCI level or sensitive compartmented information
and go up into higher levels.
I think some of it was signals intelligence.
And so I think we might be dealing with somebody who has a very high security clearance,
access to lots of documents in the intelligence community,
and that's a very wide range of people, too.
So I think back to the time that I had spent in the intelligence community
and I had TSSCI and there were things, big document repositories,
something where you could look at intelligence from lots of different sources and examine it,
and that was by design, right?
And so obviously what you're going to be doing if you're the U.S. government
is going to be tracking and tracing who touched any one of these documents,
who accessed them, when were they accessed,
and there's going to be data trails and audit trails associated with
who was accessing and touching and printing those documents.
Yeah, they have a different side of all of those documents and can, like you said,
authenticate and verify what was published when,
and that's kind of what I mean, that little bit of a time frame,
that narrow time frame from their publication,
which the investigation side of it will probably have ready access to all the details of
in whatever form is appropriate and so forth.
So that's all going to be something that is part of the picture,
the overall picture that they're going to be building
and that we're talking about and describing here.
Well, it'll be interesting to see how this is dealt with.
I understand it's already had an effect on Ukrainian plans for military action in the region.
If certain things are let out of the bag, well, obviously you have to change your plans
and there's quite a bit of that going on right now.
So it's going to be interesting the next couple of weeks, I think.
Alex, did you have something in closing?
Yeah, I think this has a very negative impact on the U.S. intelligence community
and in particular the sources that it has in Russia
because a lot of these documents indicate that we were able to identify early on
the moves that the Russian military were going to make
and then relay that information over to Ukraine.
That information coming out of the bag and being publicly known
and obviously now is known to Russia is going to have them hunting for whoever was relaying information,
whoever is the source of those leaks,
and they're going to take extra special precautions to make sure that
their future planning procedures do not involve any unnecessary persons.
It's going to be much, much harder, I think, to collect intelligence about Russia's moves.
So I see this as very much harming the United States and also providing an advantage to Russia.
Well, maybe look towards the Republicans.
Just kidding, or am I?
The most interesting account I was able to find about this, again,
comes from Bellingcat.com, from Discord to 4chan,
The Improbable Journey of a U.S. Intelligence Leak.
Worth reading.
Speaking of leaking intelligence or maybe just dropping intelligence,
ahead of President Joe Biden's speech today in Northern Ireland,
local police lost a document that detailed sensitive security information
related to the president's visit.
A local resident is believed to have found the document on a street in Belfast.
A local law enforcement official confirmed the authenticity of the paper
on the condition of anonymity.
Not sure why, but okay, fine.
The document contained names of Belfast police and postings,
but nothing related to the Secret Service's operations,
which oversees the president's security during foreign trips or its security plans.
So that's a bit of fun, losing a document on a street.
I mean, that's girl-fashioned incompetence, I guess.
Okay, turning it a little bit lighter,
I had an interesting conversation over the past week with Google Bard.
How's that going?
It's going okay.
We had a rough spot, but I think we patched it up and we've been on good terms.
For those who don't know,
Google Bard is yet another one of these artificial intelligence creatures
that you can have conversations with.
And since you use your Google account to talk to it, it remembers you.
I was asking it because sometimes I forget about the magazine that I edit.
I wanted to know how long we've been publishing,
and it told me.
It said 2600.
The Hacker Quarterly has been publishing since 1983.
Well, okay, I can tell you 1984 is when we started, but whatever.
I guess we were planning it in 1983.
That must be what you meant, right, Bard?
It was founded by a group of teenagers in New York City.
Yeah, we weren't teenagers.
We were in our 20s.
Yeah.
Who told you we were teenagers?
Including Emanuel Goldstein, who is still the magazine's editor-in-chief.
Okay, thank you for that.
The magazine is named after the 2600 Hz tone
that is used to access pay phones without inserting a coin.
Yeah, not quite right.
You're describing a red box.
2600 Hz was used with blue boxes.
It's a whole other thing.
No time to get into it right now.
Continuing, 2600 covers a wide range of topics related to hacking,
including security, privacy, technology, and culture.
It often features articles written by hackers themselves.
Who else is going to write them?
As well as interviews with security experts and other thought leaders.
Thought leaders?
That's some jargon.
That's a buzzword, if there ever was one.
I don't think I've ever heard that before.
Oh, yeah, we're all about our thought leaders here.
I want that on a business card.
Emanuel Goldstein, thought leader.
Thought leader.
Yeah.
The magazine has been influential in the hacker community,
and it has been credited with helping to popularize the term hacker.
Okay, a couple of things here.
I would hope that we're somewhat influential in the hacker community
being a hacker magazine coming out in this period of time,
but we had nothing to do with the popularization of the term hacker.
It's because the term existed that we became a hacker magazine.
What we have been doing is defending the term from ignoramai who misuse it
and refer to every instance of theft and crime as a hack.
That's not the case.
Okay, go ahead, Alex.
I think the plural of ignoramus is actually ignoramuses.
Well, you would know.
I think it's Greek as opposed to Latin.
I apologize for my ignorance on the phrase.
Ignoramus, or actually I think it comes from maybe the verb,
but I think, yeah, anyhow.
Can we just say dumbasses?
How about that?
Does that work?
We can say that.
All right.
Moving along.
In 2012, 2600 was the subject of a documentary film called 2600,
The Hacker Quarterly.
Wait.
The first I've heard of this.
That got greenlit?
No, seriously, Kyle.
The first I heard of it was through Google Bard.
So apparently there's a documentary film called 2600, The Hacker Quarterly.
The film was directed by Nadia Halgren,
and it explores the history of the magazine and the hacker community.
And we'll get back to this in a second,
but just finishing up about the magazine.
2600 is available in print and online.
The print edition is published quarterly,
and the online edition is updated regularly.
Okay, they're both quarterly because it's the same magazine.
And the final sentence here, another surprise,
the magazine is available in both English and Spanish.
Again, that's news to me because we don't translate it into Spanish,
so if somebody out there is doing it, please share it with us
because we'd love to have it available in Spanish as well.
Great idea, but thank you, Google Bard,
for your creative recounting of the facts here.
So I immediately asked Google Bard to tell me more about the film,
2600, The Hacker Quarterly,
and it was very eager to comply.
2600, The Hacker Quarterly is a 2012 documentary film
about the magazine 2600, The Hacker Quarterly,
and the hacker community.
The film was directed by Nadia Hallgren
and produced by Alex Gibney.
The film explores the history of 2600 from its founding in 1983.
Yeah, Google Bard's going to stick to that.
To the present day, it also interviews a number of people
associated with the magazine, including its editor-in-chief,
Emanuel Goldstein, and several prominent hackers.
The film was well-received by critics
who praised it for its insightful look into the hacker community.
It was also a commercial success,
grossing over $1 million at the box office.
You know, sometimes we just get so caught up in our lives
that we don't realize that there's a documentary film
carrying our name out there,
making money and getting high marks from critics.
My face is red with shame for not even knowing about this
11 years afterwards.
2600, The Hacker Quarterly is an important film
that provides a unique perspective on the hacker community.
It's a must-see for anyone interested in hacking technology
or the history of the Internet.
I would say it's a must-see for anyone
that puts out the damn magazine
and should know that there's a film with the same name.
Here are some reviews.
They actually have reviews.
A fascinating and thought-provoking look
into the world of hackers.
That's the New York Times.
A must-see for anyone interested in the history of the Internet.
That's the Washington Post.
A timely and important film that sheds light
on a misunderstood community.
That's the Los Angeles Times.
I looked up every single one of those quotes
and could not find them anywhere.
These are completely made up.
Google barred, made these up,
attributed them to newspapers
and is passing this off as fact.
Before we start freaking out about artificial intelligence
and how it's taking over the world,
there's a lot of lying going on here.
Unless I'm completely off the mark
and there is a film out there that
somehow was very popular that we never heard about
that carries our name.
This is the thing they describe as hallucinating.
It's almost as if you asked it
to write a story about a movie review
or write a movie review with those.
That's not what I asked.
You didn't at all.
In fact, it volunteered information.
I asked about the magazine.
It volunteered information about the film.
Then I asked about the film.
It gave me all these details.
It never said this is my imagination
or I'm on LSD right now.
It basically just related all this as if it were true.
I continued to ask more questions.
When was 2600 the Hacker Quarterly released?
Where did it play?
Came right back.
2600 the Hacker Quarterly was released in 2012.
It was first shown at the Tribeca Film Festival
on April 22nd, 2012.
It was then released in theaters on July 27th, 2012.
The film was also released on DVD and Blu-ray
on October 16th, 2012.
Just making updates.
The film played in a number of theaters
across the United States.
It also played in theaters in Canada, Europe, and Asia.
Here are some of the theaters where the film played.
United States, AMC Lowe's, Lincoln Square 13, New York City,
Arclight Hollywood, Los Angeles,
Alamo Draft House Cinema, Austin, Texas.
In Canada, Scotia Bank Theater in Toronto,
Cineplex Odeon Square One in Mississauga, Ontario.
In Europe, the Odeon Leicester Square in London,
Cinemaxx Berlin, Pathé by Grinnell in Paris.
In Asia, the Golden Village Grand in Singapore,
Cathay Cineplex in Hong Kong,
and Cinema Paradiso in Tokyo.
Okay, and just to kind of wrap this up here.
Who was featured in the documentary film
2600 The Hacker Quarterly?
Bard says the documentary film 2600 The Hacker Quarterly
featured a number of people associated with the magazine
2600 The Hacker Quarterly and the hacker community.
Some of the people featured in the film
include Emanuel Goldstein, the editor-in-chief of 2600,
Kevin Mitnick, a former hacker who was convicted of computer fraud
and sentenced to five years in prison,
John Draper, a former phone freak who was known as Captain Crunch,
Cory Doctorow, a science fiction author and blogger
who was a vocal advocate for digital rights,
Bruce Schneier, a security technologist and author
who is considered one of the world's leading experts
on computer security.
The film also features interviews with a number of other hackers,
including members of the Loft Heavy Hackers,
yeah, Loft Heavy Hackers, that's their new name,
and the cult of the dead cow.
And finally, what production company released the documentary
2600 The Hacker Quarterly?
The production company that released the documentary
was Jigsaw Productions.
It's a documentary film production company founded by Alex Gibney.
The company has produced a number of award-winning documentaries,
including Taxi to the Dark Side,
Enron, The Smartest Guys in the Room,
and Going Clear, Scientology, and The Prison of Belief.
These guys actually exist, and I'd be honored
to have a film made by them about us,
but I think they'd be as puzzled as we are right now
as to where this came from.
But the very last question I asked was,
where can I see the documentary 2600 The Hacker Quarterly?
And listeners, take note,
you can watch the documentary 2600 The Hacker Quarterly
on a number of different platforms,
including Amazon Prime Video, Google Play Movies and TV,
YouTube, and Vudu, whatever the hell that is.
And that's the story of our feature film documentary
that we are only just learning about right now.
Now, some people have said,
could they be mixing this up with Freedom Downtime,
the documentary film that you actually did make?
Yeah, but that came out in, what, 2000?
And that did not have any of the elements
that were described here,
other than a couple of the same people,
but certainly not the production team,
and certainly not the success with the box office
or the places it played.
So, Alex, what does this tell you
about artificial intelligence?
You know, it just wings it
whenever it doesn't have the facts?
I think the trick there is in the name, right?
It's artificial.
It's just making things up.
I mean, it's totally crazy, right?
Well, it's fictitious.
Fictitious intelligence, basically, is what it is.
Yeah.
I mean, look, I think it's obviously going to evolve,
and this issue with quotes and making things up
is going to have, I think,
stronger and clearer parameters around it,
because this seems to be one of the most common criticism
of these large-language, GPT-type AI systems.
But, yeah, I mean, look,
I think they're generally untrustworthy.
You can't expect them to go out
and pull fantastic citations for you
without any errors whatsoever.
I think that that's going to take some time,
but the utility in other areas,
I think, is beyond question.
You know, in kind of formulating and outlining thoughts
and arguments and, you know,
things like collecting information,
providing a narrative where you wouldn't otherwise have one,
it's really kind of fascinating.
Well, my question is,
if it's so fanciful in making stuff up like this,
and yet another feature that is described
is, like, creating a code
or putting the finishing touches
on some algorithm or function or math problem,
how do you check a math problem?
I mean, are people just going to trust this?
I mean, or is it getting it right all the time
just because it's math and it's going to always obey that?
I think math is relatively easy for a computer to get right.
Right, right, but if this is the system
that can't be trusted in certain scenarios with language,
but then you ask it something with natural language
about something scientific,
how do you trust it in the same breath?
What I'm thinking here is, you know,
all the kids thinking,
wow, I can write a term paper now with this thing,
all the professors and teachers
living in fear of people doing just that.
Well, here's an example of how what you get
is not necessarily correct in any sense,
and you'd better not rely on this
to write your paper for you
because it's just going to spin some tall tales
and you're going to be exposed for the fraud you are
if you try to pass it off as your own work.
Yeah, I think so,
but I think to Kyle's point,
I think people are just going to get more and more used to this.
I mean, even just the idea now of searching for information
and having to click through and piece together
bits and data points from five or six different websites
to try to understand a story or something,
almost seems antiquated in a sense, right?
Now we've gotten used to this technology being there
that's going to provide some kind of coherent narrative with structure
that answers any question that we had.
Now, prior to that, what did we do?
You quote-unquote Googled it.
This is how Google became a verb, right?
And now you go to Google, right,
and it just seems like a goddamn cesspit in a lot of ways to me
because you search for something,
you have half a page of sponsored ads,
and then you have a whole bunch of websites
that have obviously been using some kind of search engine optimization technique
to get there.
So that first page of search results isn't as grand and clean and useful.
But you know what, Alex?
You can tell that that's happening.
You can say, wow, this is an ad.
This person doesn't seem to know what they're talking about.
What does the next one say?
You can sort of weigh out what you trust and what you don't trust.
What I don't see is just pure fiction being taken as gospel
because you still have the ability to make the choice.
Here, though, it's presented as fact when it's completely fabricated.
I can't find this fabrication on Google.
I don't know where it drew it from.
Well, the fabrication aspect of it,
so I think that's its biggest problem.
It just tends to make things up.
I think we're going to have guardrails around that.
I think that's going to get better.
But right now, yeah, I wouldn't trust it, absolutely.
But look, I would guarantee that you'll probably get more accurate results
if you're searching for information from something like ChatGPT
than you would clicking on some of those sponsored ads that Google is providing you.
I mean some of them are also known to be malicious,
not necessarily to push out malware but to push you to false or fraudulent sites
where you might end up with a remote access fraud or credentials harvester
or something like that.
So I think when one system becomes untrustworthy,
another one is going to step into that particular void
and will exploit that lack of trust.
I think people should cook something that they get with a recipe
and find out if it's actually good.
That's the test.
And throw a cup of arsenic.
The machines have taste.
Who's going to lie about this?
Who knows who's going to lie about it regarding food?
Okay, final story for tonight involves National Public Radio,
our relatives on the FM dial.
NPR will no longer be posting fresh content to its 52 official Twitter feeds,
becoming the first major news organization to go silent on the social media platform.
In explaining his decision, NPR cited Twitter's decision to first label the network
as state-affiliated media, the same term it uses for propaganda outlets in Russia,
China, and other autocratic countries.
The decision by Twitter last week took the public radio network off guard.
When queried by NPR tech reporter Bobby Allen,
Twitter owner Elon Musk asked how NPR functioned.
Musk allowed that he might have gotten it wrong.
Twitter then revised its label on NPR's account to government-funded media.
The news organization says that is inaccurate and misleading
given that NPR is a private non-profit company with editorial independence
and it receives less than 1% of its $300 million annual budget
from the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
You know what, if you say NPR is government-funded,
you'd have to say WBAI is government-funded
because we get a small amount too from Corporation for Public Broadcasting,
or we have in the past,
and this is obviously some kind of agenda on the part of Elon Musk
to basically label, as the right wing has done,
label NPR and other non-commercial radio networks as leftist,
as having some kind of agenda, as being woke,
all these things that they love to harp on.
But in actuality, it's the same as it's always been.
You know, the one test you can run
to see if something is government-supported or government-funded.
Generally, they would support the government, wouldn't they?
So when Trump was in power, was NPR any different?
Or did they report pretty much the same way they report now?
If not, then it sounds like they're independent.
It sounds like, yeah, the money might come,
part of the money might come from the government,
but they are independent,
and it's a real disservice to label them this way.
Any thoughts, Alex?
You know, I want to know, how is the BBC labeled on Twitter?
BBC is going through something similar,
because I don't know what they're labeled as right now.
I think they're not labeled at the moment.
But I think they had the same label attached at one point.
And I don't think Elon Musk understood how BBC worked.
BBC works with a licensing fee.
Now, you can call that a tax,
but it's more publicly supported than government-supported.
They're independent of the government.
At least, most of it is.
There might be certain parts, like World Service.
I'm not exactly sure what the difference is.
But some have commercials, some don't have commercials.
But it's the public that funds it.
It's not controlled by the government.
The government doesn't tell them, you have to cover this story.
Although, they do cover things in a particular way,
thinking of the recent royal funeral,
they dressed in a particular way,
they reported the news in a particular style.
So you would have a better case, I think, with them.
But I still think you would be wrong
to label them as state-affiliated or government-sponsored,
or anything like that.
And they're not labeled that way.
I'm looking at it right now.
NPR does have that label on Twitter
as being government-funded media, but BBC is not.
It doesn't have any indication of government funding there.
And right after this story came out,
Elon Musk tweeted, defund NPR.
So I think you know where he's coming from.
Or he's trying to be clever, saying,
okay, well, if they're not funded by the government,
then defund them and see how they react to that.
But again, it's a very tiny amount.
The remark I made on Twitter a while ago was,
well, if you say that, I think it's 0.01% of their income
comes from a government grant,
you have to say that Fox News is funded by MyPillow,
because they certainly get more of a percentage of money from them
than NPR gets from the federal government.
Hey, we are out of time.
Boy, it flew by.
But we are going to continue the conversation
over on YouTube at 8 o'clock.
Just go to Channel 2600,
or click on the link at the 2600.com webpage,
and it'll take you right there.
You can call us.
You can participate in various ways,
or just listen to more such dialogue.
We will be back next week at 7 p.m. here on WBAI.
And you can write to us, OTH at 2600.com.
Good night, everyone.
See ya.
America is waiting for a message of some sort or another.
I'm taking it again, again, again.
Taking it again, again, again.
Taking it again, again, again.
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Taking it again, again, again.
Taking it again, again, again.
Taking it again, again, again.
Taking it again, again, again.
Taking it again, again, again.
Taking it again, again, again.
We ought to be mad at the government, not mad at the people.
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I mean, what are you gonna do?
America is waiting for a message of some sort or another.
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