[00:00.000 --> 00:01.720]  Just keep answering yes.
[00:03.360 --> 00:08.500]  We also have John Henry with the Institute for Applied Autonomy.
[00:09.540 --> 00:13.860]  And they're also going to be discussing the CAE, which is the Critical Art Ensemble.
[00:14.340 --> 00:19.020]  Those folks would have loved to be here, but they've been accused of bioterrorism and can't speak publicly.
[00:20.240 --> 00:21.740]  So, John Henry.
[00:28.440 --> 00:29.440]  Great, thanks a lot.
[00:29.660 --> 00:34.140]  We were here a couple hopes ago, and we're really glad to be back.
[00:34.620 --> 00:41.480]  So, you've got three talks in an hour, so we're going to go kind of fast, because we really want to leave enough room for good questions at the end.
[00:42.400 --> 00:46.680]  But all this stuff is on websites, so it can be perused at your leisure.
[00:47.560 --> 00:59.140]  So, the Institute for Applied Autonomy is a collective of engineers, activists, and artists who sort of operate in the opposite way that a group like DARPA operates, right?
[00:59.280 --> 01:05.080]  So, we're sort of founded in response to the militarization of technological research.
[01:05.820 --> 01:13.720]  And this sort of happened, because we're looking at the state of activism, and it was increasingly looking a lot like this, right?
[01:13.800 --> 01:22.700]  Where you had kind of a massive amount of technology on one side that was kind of coming directly from the battlefield to the streets.
[01:23.560 --> 01:30.740]  And then, in the academic environment, you had the technologies being developed by basically the same kinds of activists.
[01:30.920 --> 01:39.740]  So, you had, like, kind of young people with really great ideas sort of being cordoned off into military development, and then those technologies being reapplied back to them in the street.
[01:40.020 --> 01:42.780]  So, we decided to operate in the opposite direction.
[01:44.060 --> 01:51.760]  So, DARPA, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, they get about $3 billion a year to develop new military technologies.
[01:51.960 --> 01:52.940]  You may have heard of some of them.
[01:53.480 --> 01:54.480]  The Internet, for instance.
[01:56.260 --> 02:01.280]  So, we got interested in how these things get developed.
[02:02.120 --> 02:05.000]  You know, what sort of conversations are going on driving them.
[02:05.300 --> 02:07.380]  So, we decided to go kind of into the belly of it.
[02:08.040 --> 02:19.600]  DARPA Tech, their annual symposium, you can sort of buy admission into this and kind of be amongst the various funders and military personnel and whatnot.
[02:20.280 --> 02:29.260]  But, as many of you know, once you get one foot in the door, it's very easy to get more feet in the door if you have, you know, Photoshop and a decent printer.
[02:32.240 --> 02:40.320]  So, one of the things we learned when we got there was that there was kind of these two major belief systems that everything was relying on.
[02:40.320 --> 02:42.760]  One was that we need to get rid of the people.
[02:44.090 --> 02:47.780]  They're the weak link in combat systems, the fleshy beings that need to sleep.
[02:48.840 --> 02:54.800]  And on the other side, we need to replace as many of the remaining fleshy beings with robots.
[02:56.660 --> 03:09.080]  So, they're sort of driving for, you know, like a few people in the field controlling many autonomous robots that are largely making decisions on their own and just radioing back to find out exactly which targets they should be addressing.
[03:09.360 --> 03:10.960]  Or servicing, as they say.
[03:13.600 --> 03:20.900]  So, one of our first initiatives was to appropriate their ideas on mobile robotics and apply them to the street.
[03:20.900 --> 03:22.640]  We call this contestational robotics.
[03:23.600 --> 03:32.800]  One of these robots is called the robotic graffiti writer and addresses this problem of graffiti writing becoming an increasingly dangerous political act.
[03:32.920 --> 03:37.960]  People actually serving long prison sentences for writing graffiti in the streets.
[03:38.220 --> 03:46.560]  So, we developed a mobile platform that operates at high speed and is easily reprogrammable with whatever you want as far as your content is concerned.
[03:46.560 --> 03:55.920]  We use a hacked calculator in order to be the keypad that interfaces with it and you have like a remote red button that functions as the print button.
[03:57.340 --> 04:02.860]  One of the first lessons we learned with a graffiti writer was going to our nation's capital.
[04:03.080 --> 04:05.500]  This is about five or six years ago.
[04:09.060 --> 04:17.040]  Since it was the first time we were going to use the robot, we kind of wanted to make sure we got something in good before it got taken away.
[04:18.000 --> 04:26.560]  So, we went to the capital and we kind of bungled our way around for a while and kind of eventually did get the attention of security which we didn't intend to do.
[04:26.560 --> 04:33.480]  But, we got caught sort of red handed in the act of writing the message voting is futile on the steps of the capital building.
[04:34.580 --> 04:38.400]  Now, we pretty much expected that the gig was up and this is the end of it.
[04:39.580 --> 04:48.740]  But, we learned that because we had this shiny piece of technology, the cop basically didn't know how to deal with this and kind of sent us on our way.
[04:48.740 --> 04:56.760]  And kind of from that day on out, we stopped being afraid of cops and we started just kind of doing it as publicly as we possibly could.
[04:57.800 --> 05:06.960]  In broad daylight, we would get other people involved, other people writing graffiti who, you know, otherwise would never do it.
[05:07.700 --> 05:16.820]  We commandeered a live television broadcast and, you know, had a web address of an Austrian dissident group spray painted on the screen for about an hour and a half.
[05:19.460 --> 05:23.680]  So, we took that design and decided to inflate it.
[05:24.280 --> 05:29.700]  And we built a large trailer that could print text that's about six feet tall.
[05:30.940 --> 05:43.960]  And with what we learned from our previous experience, we knew that, again, as long as it looks really slick, as long as it looks institutional, as long as it doesn't look like a bunch of activists, you can get away with anything.
[05:43.960 --> 05:56.580]  So, we went to the DARPA Grand Challenge, which was a race of kind of military robots across the desert, just to sort of introduce some kind of dissident voice into that space.
[05:57.120 --> 05:59.260]  This is basically what the machine looked like.
[05:59.460 --> 06:05.200]  Here we are in the inner circle of the DARPA Grand Challenge as we pulled up to the gate.
[06:05.780 --> 06:07.020]  You know, we looked like them.
[06:07.220 --> 06:08.560]  We looked like one of them.
[06:08.840 --> 06:09.860]  And it worked.
[06:09.980 --> 06:10.660]  They waved us through.
[06:13.920 --> 06:18.960]  So, to make a long story short, this is about the finish line of the DARPA Grand Challenge.
[06:19.140 --> 06:21.640]  Here we are sort of priming up the robot.
[06:22.740 --> 06:28.040]  And the message we chose specifically for this audience, because we thought that they would get it.
[06:28.200 --> 06:35.660]  These are, you know, largely engineers who don't necessarily have, like, the same political beliefs as their funders do, as many of you know.
[06:36.420 --> 06:42.180]  So, the message was, Asimov quote, reduced, a robot must not kill the first law of robots.
[06:43.840 --> 06:48.580]  It was something that we thought that they would understand and relate to.
[06:50.260 --> 06:55.780]  Later research by the Institute for Applied Autonomy relates more specifically to surveillance in public spaces.
[06:57.560 --> 07:00.500]  Specifically, CCTV, video surveillance of public spaces.
[07:01.980 --> 07:09.620]  This surveillance camera of the old variety, these are the scarecrow type surveillance cameras that doesn't even really matter whether or not they work.
[07:09.760 --> 07:14.300]  They're supposed to psychologically have an impact on you so that you behave yourself whenever you see them.
[07:15.420 --> 07:19.500]  These are kind of a newer breed of surveillance cameras that tend to blend into the environment.
[07:19.860 --> 07:25.520]  Here, the idea is, of course, you're to assume that you're always under surveillance and will always behave yourself.
[07:26.440 --> 07:36.280]  So, we developed a program called IC, which basically we plotted these out on a map and provided that data in kind of a dynamic fashion on the web.
[07:36.440 --> 07:37.460]  And I have a short video.
[07:37.660 --> 07:39.680]  This will be the end of the IAA part of the talk.
[07:40.860 --> 07:45.900]  And there is audio with this video and hopefully it will all work.
[07:47.120 --> 07:56.160]  Our website is www.appliedautonomy.com And all these videos and research papers and stuff are up there.
[08:03.480 --> 08:04.560]  Will it work?
[08:04.880 --> 08:06.180]  Thinking, thinking, thinking.
[08:21.920 --> 08:23.640]  This is a surveillance company.
[08:23.760 --> 08:25.460]  This is what they said in response to this project.
[08:27.800 --> 08:33.180]  Closed-circuit television or CCTV surveillance of public space is on the rise.
[08:33.460 --> 08:42.720]  Using cameras installed on buildings, ATM machines, and traffic lights, police officers and private security guards monitor our every move.
[08:43.020 --> 08:48.740]  A 1998 survey documented over 2,400 cameras in New York City's public places.
[08:49.080 --> 08:53.440]  Since then, the number has continued to skyrocket with more cameras on the way.
[08:53.440 --> 08:58.460]  It has become virtually impossible to avoid CCTV's prying eyes.
[08:58.700 --> 09:00.200]  Until now.
[09:00.540 --> 09:13.800]  Utilizing advanced artificial intelligence technology, the Institute for Applied Autonomy has developed IC, an inverse surveillance system that helps people track and avoid CCTV cameras.
[09:14.240 --> 09:20.660]  Visitors to the IC website are presented with a map of New York City, highlighting surveillance camera locations.
[09:21.240 --> 09:31.180]  Predictably enough, the majority are in areas of great economic value, such as Midtown and the Financial District, even though street crime is more prevalent in low-income neighborhoods.
[09:31.740 --> 09:43.040]  Users click the map to indicate a current location and a desired destination, and IC's route planning algorithm provides a path of least surveillance, avoiding as many cameras as possible.
[09:43.300 --> 09:45.720]  This map may be printed out for later use.
[09:45.720 --> 09:52.540]  Since its launching in October of 2001, IC has produced well over 100,000 unique maps.
[09:52.860 --> 10:04.620]  In addition, IC has provoked public debate over CCTV use in such publications as Wired Magazine and the London Financial Times, and on websites including Slashdot and Fox News.
[10:05.020 --> 10:09.780]  IC is also featured on Yahoo's Travel and Transportation Guide to New York City.
[10:09.780 --> 10:18.980]  The Institute for Applied Autonomy is currently working to expand IC to cover additional cities and to make IC available to wireless devices.
[10:19.360 --> 10:25.780]  As the use of CCTV surveillance continues to grow, so does the need for this valuable service.
[10:26.160 --> 10:26.820]  IC.
[10:27.280 --> 10:28.920]  Now more than ever.
[10:37.920 --> 10:38.480]  Thanks.
[10:38.740 --> 10:42.320]  And next up are good friends of the S-Men.
[10:48.060 --> 10:48.620]  Hello.
[10:49.040 --> 10:49.520]  I'm Mike.
[10:49.700 --> 10:50.220]  This is Andy.
[10:50.380 --> 11:00.540]  And I think John Henry here said that the Institute for Applied Autonomy is a kind of collaboration between activists and artists and engineers.
[11:00.540 --> 11:09.820]  And we're a bit like that, except I would say that we're more of a collaboration between activists, social engineers, and idiots.
[11:10.380 --> 11:14.200]  And we all play different roles at different times.
[11:17.080 --> 11:23.000]  Really, it's exciting to be here in a crowd that has a word that describes what we do.
[11:23.000 --> 11:24.940]  Or a few words, social engineering.
[11:27.360 --> 11:30.240]  We social engineer with activists ends.
[11:30.660 --> 11:32.820]  And we don't actually have any particular...
[11:33.860 --> 11:39.080]  We don't have goals in mind when we start, but we usually figure out our way as we go along.
[11:40.060 --> 11:46.180]  We're going to show you a brief video clip that explains how we sort of stumbled into this trade.
[11:46.600 --> 11:51.560]  If you can play the video and bring down the lights, that would be great.
[12:46.080 --> 12:48.040]  Now, we all know what democracy is.
[12:48.240 --> 12:55.560]  It's the participation of the greatest number of consumers possible in the direct functioning of the government and of the economy.
[12:56.420 --> 13:02.400]  It follows almost necessarily that free trade is the other side of the democracy coin.
[13:03.000 --> 13:08.760]  And so, consumerism is the ultimate form of democracy and citizenry in the modern world.
[13:23.700 --> 13:26.860]  It's not a very controversial speech.
[13:27.100 --> 13:36.120]  I suspect he wasn't pied simply because he had said something outrageous, more that he is a spokesperson of the WTO and he is available.
[13:41.920 --> 14:03.100]  The wonderful world of global trade, a high-flying playground for multinational corporations, an exciting field of endeavor for many a top-flight lawyer, and an important challenge to agencies like the World Trade Organization, which work hard to ensure global freedom for corporate commerce.
[14:03.100 --> 14:06.700]  I represent it basically anywhere that it means to be represented.
[14:07.360 --> 14:12.740]  Yeah, and I have to ask somebody to speak about broad policy matters.
[14:13.560 --> 14:20.380]  But wait a second, does this guy really look like he should be representing the WTO?
[14:41.270 --> 14:46.630]  So, we have this group called the Yes Men, and we run this website called GATT.org, G-A-T-T.
[14:46.630 --> 14:49.070]  That's the old initials of the WTO.
[14:50.470 --> 15:00.830]  And sometimes people think that we're the WTO, and they come to GATT.org, and the largest message is intended for, say, the Director General of the WTO, Mike Moore.
[15:01.010 --> 15:07.330]  Dear Mr. Moore, I am Professor Dennis Campbell, Director, Center for International Legal Studies.
[15:07.330 --> 15:12.510]  The CILS is hosting a conference on international services in Salzburg.
[15:13.570 --> 15:18.470]  Would you be interested in serving as a speaker at the session on international trade?
[15:20.170 --> 15:23.790]  So, we got this invitation, and we are faced with an ethical dilemma.
[15:24.310 --> 15:29.090]  The honorable, the ethical thing to do, of course, is to accept and do our best.
[15:31.030 --> 15:37.890]  Dear Mr. Campbell, thank you very much for your kind invitation.
[15:38.630 --> 15:47.330]  I may not be able to attend personally, but I'd very much like to send a substitute.
[15:47.330 --> 15:47.490]  Thank you.
[15:48.930 --> 15:52.090]  Well, how could we look like Mike Moore?
[15:52.350 --> 15:54.590]  So, we'll have to send somebody else.
[15:54.730 --> 15:55.370]  Who could it be?
[15:56.350 --> 16:02.490]  Dear Professor Campbell, we have confirmed with the speaker, one Dr. Andreas Liefelmauer.
[16:03.630 --> 16:05.330]  Here is his fax number.
[16:05.930 --> 16:07.890]  We are going to Salzburg.
[16:27.270 --> 16:29.450]  So, here we are, the sound of music.
[16:29.670 --> 16:31.710]  You know, we arrive in Salzburg.
[16:31.850 --> 16:33.050]  We have no idea what's going to happen.
[16:33.230 --> 16:34.470]  We're sure they're going to catch us.
[16:34.650 --> 16:40.050]  They're going to immediately see, oh, this is clearly not a Dr. Andreas Liefelmauer.
[16:40.310 --> 16:42.230]  But we decide to go ahead with it anyways.
[16:42.230 --> 16:46.550]  Walk straight in the door, and sure enough, we're on the roster.
[16:46.710 --> 16:49.170]  Dr. Andreas Liefelmauer is on the roster.
[16:49.430 --> 16:51.130]  The whole thing turns out to be real.
[16:51.710 --> 16:55.250]  We don't know what to do, but we walk in, and we do it.
[16:55.350 --> 17:00.370]  We basically speak to them about a bunch of international trade matters.
[17:02.050 --> 17:02.710]  Thank you.
[17:02.850 --> 17:04.150]  Thank you very much.
[17:04.150 --> 17:05.670]  Thank you very much.
[17:05.670 --> 17:07.770]  You may never get at all of a special exertions from you.
[17:07.850 --> 17:09.750]  They never received a message from you.
[17:10.250 --> 17:11.430]  Oh, that's Blondos.
[17:12.010 --> 17:12.050]  Hello.
[17:13.210 --> 17:14.070]  Hello, hi.
[17:14.390 --> 17:15.290]  I'm Bill Mock.
[17:15.530 --> 17:18.230]  I need to get information about you.
[17:18.350 --> 17:18.910]  I need moderator.
[17:19.250 --> 17:19.490]  I don't know.
[17:20.290 --> 17:21.230]  I'm so good.
[17:21.610 --> 17:22.450]  Let me stop.
[17:22.810 --> 17:26.150]  Do you have uh, notes?
[17:26.150 --> 17:27.630]  Just a short summary of the file.
[17:28.290 --> 17:30.710]  Not a lot, but I could write one down for you quickly.
[17:31.130 --> 17:32.130]  Okay, that would be very wonderful.
[17:32.270 --> 17:35.970]  Just to let you know who I am, I'm a professor of law at John Marshall Law School in Chicago.
[17:36.190 --> 17:36.430]  I see.
[17:36.610 --> 17:36.970]  Yes.
[17:37.130 --> 17:38.610]  I've been there for 18 years.
[17:39.310 --> 17:41.290]  I founded the International Business Law Center.
[17:41.650 --> 17:41.890]  Wow.
[17:42.430 --> 17:45.630]  And the only international economic law master's program in the West.
[17:45.930 --> 17:46.990]  Wow, that's terrific.
[17:47.170 --> 17:49.830]  There are a dozen of them running for a while now.
[17:50.090 --> 17:53.150]  That's all my new credentials are going to quite measure up to.
[17:54.570 --> 17:57.130]  I teach what you do, but...
[17:57.130 --> 17:57.610]  All right.
[18:05.410 --> 18:05.930]  Um...
[18:05.930 --> 18:06.290]  Yeah.
[18:07.330 --> 18:07.850]  Yeah.
[18:08.570 --> 18:10.350]  So, Columbia University is my alma mater.
[18:10.530 --> 18:11.210]  That'd be the JD.
[18:11.510 --> 18:11.990]  Yes.
[18:19.550 --> 18:29.610]  So, while Bickle Bower is doing his tightrope act, I go over to the conference organizers and I explain that the reason that Brian has a camera is in case of a pie attack.
[18:29.610 --> 18:31.850]  We can identify the assailant.
[18:32.330 --> 18:34.490]  I set up the camera and started taping.
[18:34.710 --> 18:39.410]  I've noticed already, and to make things worse, they're talking about us.
[18:39.410 --> 18:44.330]  If you create an indifference curve about language, if you
[18:48.540 --> 18:57.120]  think, then if you can't reach agreement on one side of words, one phrase, you can reach agreement on the other, and it will meet.
[19:04.380 --> 19:05.020]  Thank you.
[19:05.020 --> 19:10.800]  Our concluding speaker is the distinguished gentleman, Mr. Andreas Fickelbauer from Vienna.
[19:11.260 --> 19:16.620]  He is Austrian by birth, American by training, and Austrian by habitation.
[19:17.180 --> 19:18.560]  So, he's come full circle.
[19:18.560 --> 19:25.260]  He graduated as Juris Doctor from Collegiate University in New York, where he was a legal scholar.
[19:26.720 --> 19:40.800]  He served as a representative of the WTO since 1998, speaking on trade matters before the Royal Union Forum, and is one of the authorized voices within the public relations sector of the WTO.
[19:41.920 --> 19:42.960]  That's fair to do.
[19:43.220 --> 19:46.220]  Thank you
[19:58.100 --> 19:58.600]  very much.
[19:58.780 --> 20:10.820]  It's a great pleasure to be here in Salzburg, and I'd like to thank the organizers, the other hosts, and everybody who's taken the time to listen, even for an hour, to the messages of the WTO.
[20:12.880 --> 20:25.320]  We'll be talking about impediments to trade, about free trade, and a primary focus to begin with will be on a form of trade restriction simply called tariff trade barriers.
[20:28.880 --> 20:33.620]  And the most notorious case is the so-called honest bananas case.
[20:39.440 --> 20:40.680]  We all have a joke.
[20:41.280 --> 20:46.240]  It's not possible to kill a person by hitting that person over the head with a banana.
[20:46.740 --> 20:53.300]  It is, however, possible to kill a person over bananas by hitting that person over the head with a machete.
[20:56.270 --> 20:58.970]  Non-tariff trade barriers are a little more complicated.
[21:00.890 --> 21:09.190]  Customs, or simply the history and personality of locales, takes the place of government in restricting the free flow of goods and money.
[21:10.050 --> 21:15.130]  Not long ago, KLM and Alitalia attempted to merge.
[21:16.430 --> 21:20.950]  Now, in Holland and in most northern countries, people sleep at night.
[21:22.010 --> 21:32.170]  Dear Alice Foley, I do not believe that any of Dr. Bickleby's comments at the conference led to the assault.
[21:32.990 --> 21:40.630]  I would note, however, that if I were Italian, I would have been very insulted by his comments.
[21:40.630 --> 21:49.990]  In Italy, on the other hand, you have a totally different situation in which sleep is, uh, done during the day as much as at night, almost.
[21:50.530 --> 22:01.370]  He basically stated that the KLM, all Italian major, was formed because the Dutch were hard-working and the Italians were too lazy and slept all day.
[22:01.530 --> 22:04.170]  There's conviviality, hilarity, there's...
[22:04.170 --> 22:11.810]  This insult was compounded by the slide he showed of a sleepy Italian worker.
[22:12.230 --> 22:18.150]  And all of these delightful dishes that end up basically getting in the way of work.
[22:18.810 --> 22:22.290]  So, we're faced with a situation in which everything is quite serious.
[22:24.070 --> 22:35.730]  Finally, we'd like to talk about the most mysterious, but strangely the most likely to be solved of all three of these, um, some kinds of barriers.
[22:36.930 --> 22:46.310]  And as in many cases, we can look to the private sector to see emerging solutions to the vast inefficiencies of so-called democratic institutions.
[22:50.490 --> 22:59.050]  One possible solution is being tested in the field of American politics to streamline the grotesquely inefficient system of elections.
[22:59.750 --> 23:04.710]  Let us first look at elections as they currently enroll with all of their inefficiencies in place.
[23:05.430 --> 23:08.170]  At the top, we have a number of corporations.
[23:08.530 --> 23:09.790]  Let's call them corporations A.
[23:10.870 --> 23:15.350]  From the corporation goes a great deal of money to a campaign.
[23:15.990 --> 23:19.710]  From the campaign goes a great deal of money to a PR agency.
[23:19.710 --> 23:30.030]  From the PR agency goes a great deal of money to TV stations who then, finally, relay the information to the consumer with no transfer of money, of course.
[23:30.970 --> 23:32.750]  Now, on the other hand, another model.
[23:33.090 --> 23:36.430]  In this case, you have the corporations paying one entity.
[23:37.730 --> 23:48.130]  VoteAuction.com, in turn, employs only four people to transmit not merely information but actual money directly to the consuming voter.
[23:48.130 --> 23:55.630]  It's a forum for people voluntarily to offer their votes to the highest bidder.
[23:55.930 --> 23:59.870]  My deepest condolences to the family and friends of Dr. Bickelbauer.
[24:00.930 --> 24:03.530]  The only reference in his talk to vote...
[24:03.530 --> 24:03.890]  Okay.
[24:04.330 --> 24:07.250]  Yeah, sorry about the quality of the video there.
[24:07.350 --> 24:09.930]  We must have brought a shitty dub.
[24:10.510 --> 24:23.890]  But anyway, the shocking thing that came out of this is, you know, we expected that we would go into this context where people thought that we were the World Trade Organization, announced all of these plans which satirized existing programs of the WTO.
[24:24.590 --> 24:27.970]  And we expected that people would be shocked and outraged.
[24:28.130 --> 24:30.290]  These were trade law experts in the audience.
[24:30.490 --> 24:36.750]  But instead of being shocked and outraged, they simply applauded politely and gave us a pat on the back.
[24:37.250 --> 24:50.010]  And throughout the rest of our time at this conference, we continued to try to push them and goad them into hating the WTO and doing something that would indicate their displeasure with all of the programs that we were announcing.
[24:51.030 --> 24:53.450]  But all along, we could not push them far enough.
[24:53.550 --> 25:05.030]  We found that we had so much authority as the World Trade Organization that none of these trade law experts were either willing to say anything against what we were saying or were willing to go against it.
[25:05.030 --> 25:12.650]  So this was a sort of shocking social experiment, a little bit like the Milgram experiment, but we're sort of living in it.
[25:14.190 --> 25:24.610]  And after this happened once, we decided that, well, it was easy enough to continue to answer these invitations and go and represent the WTO in a number of different contexts.
[25:24.870 --> 25:29.390]  So this was a sort of underground video that we made that was an afterthought.
[25:29.630 --> 25:32.450]  We just had the video as a sort of witness of the event.
[25:32.450 --> 25:54.190]  And for the following events where we went and represented the WTO in places like a textiles conference in Finland, Andy was on CNBC, Market Rap Europe, debating an anti-globalization activist, among other kind of venues.
[25:54.190 --> 26:17.410]  I mean, it all sort of spiraled out of control and we continued to sort of be the WTO, try to push things further and further, try to push the ideas of the WTO to their logical conclusion, all the while trying to highlight the continued disparity between rich and poor that the WTO policies promote.
[26:18.330 --> 26:35.970]  And, of course, all the while we found out that no matter what we said or what we did, people still simply would agree with what the WTO said, which indicates that we are, of course, in a major crisis of information and ideas in the world, especially in that context,
[26:35.990 --> 26:38.410]  in the context of expert audiences.
[26:40.390 --> 26:46.050]  So, anyway, that's all the subject of a movie that's going to be coming out at the end of the summer.
[26:46.270 --> 26:47.550]  United Artists is putting it out.
[26:47.690 --> 26:52.230]  It's a documentary about these weird social engineering experiments.
[26:54.790 --> 27:00.490]  The name of the movie is The Yes Men.
[27:00.790 --> 27:07.710]  And you can see information about the movie and us at theyesmen.org.
[27:09.290 --> 27:16.250]  And I guess Rich is going to introduce a third group and some events that have befallen them.
[27:16.250 --> 27:28.870]  Another group that does... that, like us and IAA, have taken on a major kind of economic power in the world today and used techniques to clarify them.
[27:29.950 --> 27:34.910]  Yeah, so some of you may have heard about the situation of our friends in Critical Art Ensemble.
[27:35.310 --> 27:38.070]  And it may ring familiar to you.
[27:39.150 --> 27:48.950]  Critical Art Ensemble is a collective, again, of artists working interdisciplinarily with experts in various fields.
[27:49.550 --> 27:55.270]  And for the last five or six years, they've been working specifically in the field of biotechnology.
[27:56.210 --> 28:05.690]  Basically, they're interested in getting people to think critically about how these technologies get used and what sort of agenda is driving their development.
[28:06.310 --> 28:10.370]  But also to educate them and demystify the technologies.
[28:10.370 --> 28:14.730]  So the position is not that any technology is good or bad.
[28:15.070 --> 28:17.910]  It's that the technology should be understood by the public.
[28:18.070 --> 28:21.370]  And we should consider who's in control of that technology.
[28:21.570 --> 28:23.530]  It's a very simple idea.
[28:24.270 --> 28:28.670]  This project that's in the picture here is called Free Range Grains.
[28:28.670 --> 28:38.790]  Now, when they do these performances, quite often they take on the guise of a corporation or a cult in one case.
[28:40.850 --> 28:43.890]  And that's sort of the voice that people are sort of seeing it coming from.
[28:43.970 --> 28:45.070]  They don't see a bunch of artists.
[28:45.070 --> 28:47.450]  They see whatever this identity they're taking on.
[28:47.550 --> 28:49.370]  So there's this element of social engineering there.
[28:49.370 --> 29:02.650]  In this case, they're doing this performance called Free Range Grains, in which they invite people to bring organic produce to the gallery or museum, wherever it is that they're doing this performance.
[29:02.650 --> 29:04.190]  Sometimes they do it at farmer's markets.
[29:05.590 --> 29:07.350]  Bring things that are labeled organic.
[29:07.650 --> 29:16.330]  And they test them genetically for DNA that's present in genetically modified corn or whatever the food is.
[29:16.810 --> 29:20.030]  And quite often, they test positive.
[29:21.170 --> 29:23.570]  In fact, regularly they test positive.
[29:24.290 --> 29:28.050]  So this project they've done kind of in a number of environments.
[29:28.370 --> 29:31.630]  Most recently, this was at the Massachusetts...
[29:31.630 --> 29:32.970]  What is it called?
[29:33.130 --> 29:35.290]  The Massachusetts... Mass MoCA.
[29:36.790 --> 29:37.930]  Big art museum.
[29:38.230 --> 29:47.650]  But if you go there to see this exhibit, you'll see a big empty space, actually, because the entire contents of this exhibit are now in the possession of the FBI.
[29:48.090 --> 29:51.050]  And we'll find out why that is momentarily.
[29:51.890 --> 29:55.590]  Another project, just to give you an idea of the kind of work they do, is called Gen Terra.
[29:56.330 --> 30:02.250]  In this case, they took on the identity of a transgenics corporation.
[30:02.670 --> 30:11.290]  So they're creating genetically modified organisms, taking the DNA from one organism, sticking it into the DNA of another one, seeing what happens.
[30:11.290 --> 30:15.010]  That's basically sort of how transgenics works in a nutshell.
[30:16.050 --> 30:25.890]  And what they do in these performances is they set up as this company, doing this kind of public interactions with people in, like, say, a natural history museum, for example.
[30:26.350 --> 30:27.990]  And it looks a lot like this.
[30:28.190 --> 30:29.590]  They have lab technicians.
[30:30.410 --> 30:35.410]  And people are sort of educated a little bit about how transgenics works.
[30:35.590 --> 30:37.370]  And then they're presented with this machine.
[30:37.370 --> 30:43.330]  And it has a design of a laboratory machine, but it functions also a bit like a roulette wheel.
[30:43.630 --> 30:47.290]  There's a spinning table of petri dishes.
[30:47.550 --> 30:50.450]  And each petri dish contains a bacterial culture.
[30:50.450 --> 30:52.530]  Some of them transgenic, some of them not.
[30:52.850 --> 30:57.710]  But the transgenic ones, like I said, you're taking the DNA out of one thing, sticking it into the other.
[30:57.890 --> 31:00.550]  You don't know necessarily what's going to happen.
[31:01.610 --> 31:06.830]  This process is repeated in transgenics labs all over the world thousands of times a day.
[31:07.250 --> 31:11.790]  There's this very, very slim chance that something bad could happen.
[31:11.810 --> 31:13.790]  It could be a virulent strain that you've created.
[31:13.990 --> 31:18.310]  It's a very small chance, but thousands of times a day, right?
[31:18.610 --> 31:22.130]  There's no sort of oversight, no risk assessment associated with this.
[31:22.130 --> 31:26.570]  So they present people with this dilemma and this kind of roulette wheel.
[31:27.490 --> 31:33.450]  Are they willing to press the button and release this unknown bacterial culture into the atmosphere?
[31:33.710 --> 31:39.010]  It's a very small chance, but the question that they're posing to people is, do you trust the scientists or not?
[31:39.310 --> 31:48.870]  It's one thing to ask that as a theoretical question, but you learn a lot more, and you really consider the issues if you're actually posed with that as a functional question.
[31:50.150 --> 31:54.770]  So this is the kinds of work that they've been doing for the last five or six years.
[31:54.950 --> 32:10.110]  These are dedicated to educating the public about these technologies, demystifying them, so that we don't have the situation where you've got people that have a general fear of biotechnology and genetically modified organisms without understanding why,
[32:10.210 --> 32:15.670]  and you don't have the corporations on the other side that have no oversight, no risk assessment.
[32:15.670 --> 32:19.610]  It's about educating the public so that they can make informed policy decisions.
[32:20.730 --> 32:25.350]  Now, these bacterial cultures were kept in Steve's house.
[32:25.650 --> 32:29.290]  This is where he conducts his lab, as any artist does.
[32:29.570 --> 32:31.150]  He uses the space available to you.
[32:31.310 --> 32:34.010]  If you're a hacker, you've got your computer at home.
[32:34.050 --> 32:37.150]  That's where you do your work, in your studio.
[32:39.690 --> 32:45.550]  And a terrible thing happened May 11th, just a few months ago.
[32:46.090 --> 32:51.570]  Steve Kurtz of Critical Iron Ensemble woke up to find that his wife was no longer breathing.
[32:52.390 --> 32:56.090]  And he called the paramedics, called 911.
[32:56.490 --> 33:01.590]  They came to his house, and they saw these petri dishes.
[33:01.590 --> 33:04.570]  The police also come when there's a dead body in the house.
[33:06.350 --> 33:13.250]  She had died of a heart attack in her sleep, and unrelated to any of this, as everyone agrees at this point.
[33:13.430 --> 33:15.750]  But the police saw the petri dishes they called the FBI.
[33:15.750 --> 33:17.850]  The FBI called the Joint Terrorism Task Force.
[33:18.250 --> 33:21.890]  And before you know it, like, two blocks of Steve's neighborhood are roped off.
[33:22.170 --> 33:34.210]  Steve's in FBI custody, and, you know, there's guys in hazmat suits combing through his house, confiscating the lab, his computers, his books, his wife's body.
[33:37.890 --> 33:41.950]  And after a few days, they announced that the house is clean.
[33:42.150 --> 33:44.890]  It's not... it presented no threat to the public.
[33:45.270 --> 33:48.250]  The bacterial cultures that were present was a strain of E.
[33:48.350 --> 33:54.050]  coli, a strain of Serratia, and a strain of Bacillus atrophius.
[33:54.050 --> 34:01.310]  These are all harmless strains that are available from most scientific distributors who sell this sort of thing.
[34:02.170 --> 34:05.090]  But an FBI investigation continued.
[34:05.970 --> 34:09.390]  And suddenly, people started getting subpoenas.
[34:10.670 --> 34:12.770]  Everybody associated with a group.
[34:12.950 --> 34:14.730]  It was a very wide net that was cast.
[34:14.890 --> 34:21.850]  Everyone from students of Steve to the publisher of his books.
[34:23.610 --> 34:30.590]  And oddly enough, it seemed like everybody that was able to speak publicly about the case started receiving subpoenas as well.
[34:30.850 --> 34:34.290]  And when you get a subpoena, if you don't intend to...
[34:34.290 --> 34:37.170]  if you intend to plead the fifth, you've got to stop talking to the press.
[34:39.850 --> 34:41.010]  So... what's that?
[34:41.490 --> 34:41.930]  Sorry.
[34:42.490 --> 34:50.010]  So a grand jury hearing was formed, and people were... you know, you had to come...
[34:50.010 --> 34:56.630]  I don't know... this process has probably been experienced by a number of people here, and we want to hear from you after we're sort of done telling the tale.
[34:58.130 --> 35:01.930]  But the grand jury hearing was presented with this evidence.
[35:02.130 --> 35:05.650]  They were presented with all these people being subpoenaed and talking about the case.
[35:06.930 --> 35:12.570]  And the charges went from being bioterrorism, which is what was listed on the subpoenas.
[35:12.690 --> 35:13.690]  I'm sorry, I didn't mention that.
[35:14.150 --> 35:28.470]  On the subpoenas, he was being charged with bioterrorism under the Bioterror Weapons Act of 1989, which had been modified by the PATRIOT Act such that you didn't have to actually be in possession of anything dangerous.
[35:28.470 --> 35:33.970]  According to the PATRIOT Act, you only have to be in possession of a biological agent without a peaceful purpose.
[35:33.970 --> 35:38.890]  So if you have yogurt, and you intend to harm someone with yogurt, you're in violation...
[35:38.890 --> 35:40.550]  Actually, you don't even have to intend to harm them.
[35:40.590 --> 35:41.850]  You just can't have a peaceful purpose.
[35:42.010 --> 35:44.430]  You have to have a neutral purpose, and it would still fall into that category.
[35:45.070 --> 35:46.070]  But anyway...
[35:48.230 --> 35:53.950]  So the grand jury hearing was presented with this evidence, and he eventually was indicted recently.
[35:54.270 --> 35:59.710]  But the charge had changed radically from bioterror to male fraud.
[36:00.910 --> 36:10.850]  And that may sound familiar to many of you, because that's the charge they usually use against mobsters, and people for which they can't actually convict of anything else.
[36:10.990 --> 36:13.750]  It's something that just about anybody can get convicted of.
[36:14.750 --> 36:17.890]  And it was related to how he got the bacterial cultures, basically.
[36:18.190 --> 36:19.110]  He called the company.
[36:20.330 --> 36:23.410]  They wouldn't sell them to an individual, because they don't deal with individuals.
[36:23.410 --> 36:28.250]  I mean, there are lots of... you can buy printer toner that won't sell to an individual.
[36:28.410 --> 36:29.170]  They sell to universities.
[36:29.490 --> 36:34.730]  So I had his microbiologist guy that he was collaborating with on the project, had him buy it.
[36:35.670 --> 36:40.190]  Somehow, that's become the core of the case.
[36:41.430 --> 37:04.990]  Anyway, a lot of people have come together all over the world in order to call attention to this case, because it is just the most classical example I know of right now of a politicized voice being silenced as a result of these legislations that were passed under a very paranoid period in our history.
[37:05.950 --> 37:13.170]  So there's a group called the CAE Defense Fund that was formed, CAEDefensefund.org.
[37:14.370 --> 37:16.670]  And you can follow the case in all our press releases.
[37:17.490 --> 37:26.250]  And I'll maybe invite the Yes Men to come up and talk about how that's been organized amongst all these different groups all over the world.
[37:29.980 --> 37:31.960]  Yeah, basically that's the whole story.
[37:31.960 --> 37:42.220]  And the CAE Defense Fund is just doing all it can to make more and more people aware of the situation and all its ramifications.
[37:42.380 --> 37:54.440]  And if there are people here, as I'm sure there are quite a few who have had experiences that this reminds them of in some way with the FBI or other agencies, we'd love to talk to you.
[37:54.440 --> 38:14.940]  If you could write, if you feel like writing to media at CAEDefensefund.org and sharing your information, your ideas, could be useful to perhaps the case itself and perhaps our work in spreading the word and getting it known.
[38:15.140 --> 38:23.200]  We're trying to compile some footage of this into various forms that we could get out there.
[38:23.200 --> 38:27.560]  So, I guess we'll just take questions and clarify what we can clarify.
[38:38.110 --> 38:43.350]  First hand, if you could talk into the mic because they like to record the questions as well.
[38:50.720 --> 38:51.900]  I just have a quick question.
[38:52.040 --> 38:56.120]  You mentioned something about if you want to plead the fifth, you have to give up your right to talk to the press.
[38:56.120 --> 38:59.460]  Is that in the law or is that just something that they hold you to?
[38:59.460 --> 39:01.300]  Or I'm not sure where that comes from.
[39:01.620 --> 39:02.940]  Okay, that's not a legal requirement.
[39:03.120 --> 39:04.600]  It's just sound legal advice.
[39:05.140 --> 39:09.220]  If you continue talking to the press after you've pled the fifth, it's...
[39:09.220 --> 39:17.240]  I mean, pleading the fifth is saying, you know, you have the right not to incriminate yourself by not speaking.
[39:17.240 --> 39:21.080]  So, if you continue to talk to the press, you are...
[39:21.700 --> 39:27.060]  It's hard to make the case in the courtroom that you can't speak about the issue.
[39:30.220 --> 39:35.300]  It's... Potentially, that could be brought into the courtroom and used against you in the future.
[39:35.560 --> 39:40.620]  I mean, the reason people plead the fifth is because during a grand jury hearing, you actually don't know what the charges are.
[39:40.620 --> 39:43.180]  And you don't know if you are, in fact, being charged.
[39:43.460 --> 39:48.300]  You come in as a witness, you don't know how far the dragnet is being cast.
[39:48.440 --> 39:52.320]  For instance, people were brought into the courtroom to talk about bioterrorism.
[39:52.600 --> 39:57.480]  And out the other end, they're talking about a technicality in a mail transaction.
[39:58.820 --> 40:07.620]  And there is no opportunity for your defense to make its position known in a grand jury indictment either.
[40:07.880 --> 40:11.620]  There's a... you can't... your lawyer can't be there to represent your position.
[40:11.620 --> 40:12.800]  It's a one-sided thing.
[40:13.000 --> 40:15.780]  So, the prosecution can ask any question they want.
[40:16.200 --> 40:18.920]  And they'll only ask questions that they know the answer to, of course.
[40:19.160 --> 40:23.900]  So, they can present a very one-sided case to the grand jury.
[40:23.900 --> 40:28.160]  And almost all grand juries end in indictments for that reason.
[40:28.900 --> 40:30.740]  Did we mention that this one... oops.
[40:31.120 --> 40:33.920]  Did we mention that this case is already going forward?
[40:34.040 --> 40:35.360]  The arraignment has just happened.
[40:35.580 --> 40:37.440]  And there might be more charges brought.
[40:37.580 --> 40:38.580]  We don't know what they will be.
[40:38.680 --> 40:40.120]  But there's definitely going to be a trial.
[40:40.600 --> 40:52.840]  It's also worth noting that the mail fraud charge, as a result of the Enron situation, the legislation was amended such that the penalty for a single count, the maximum penalty went from five years to 20 years.
[40:52.840 --> 40:59.400]  So, while under the Bioterror Weapons Act, the maximum penalty was, I believe, 10 years.
[41:00.360 --> 41:00.980]  Oh, yeah.
[41:02.180 --> 41:08.520]  Now, he's being charged with four counts related to this single mail transaction, which has a maximum penalty of 80 years.
[41:10.680 --> 41:11.280]  Good morning.
[41:11.520 --> 41:13.340]  I actually have a question for the Yes Men.
[41:13.700 --> 41:15.640]  I've been following what you've been doing for a long time.
[41:15.780 --> 41:17.060]  I'm a big fan of your work.
[41:17.060 --> 41:26.220]  And I just wanted to know, with the movie coming out soon, do you think that's going to blow things open too far for you to continue doing what it is that you're doing?
[41:27.300 --> 41:28.500]  Probably not, no.
[41:29.120 --> 41:37.620]  There's one point in the movie where we're showing footage of my encounter with the anti-globalization activist on TV.
[41:37.780 --> 41:42.500]  We're showing footage of that encounter to the anti-globalization activist in his office in London.
[41:42.500 --> 41:46.300]  And he doesn't notice, even though I'm dressed exactly the same.
[41:46.500 --> 41:52.860]  And it's just human tendency not to expect that somebody there is...
[41:52.860 --> 41:55.060]  I mean, you just don't think about that sort of thing.
[41:55.260 --> 41:58.040]  So, I think also a fake mustache or something could help.
[41:58.160 --> 42:00.700]  But other people can do it just as easily as we can too.
[42:00.860 --> 42:03.320]  It doesn't take any special talent to do that sort of thing.
[42:03.520 --> 42:08.080]  So, our fondest wish would be that, yes, we won't do it anymore.
[42:08.260 --> 42:09.060]  And other people will.
[42:11.800 --> 42:17.120]  I have a question about why people are so against genetically modified foods in general.
[42:17.420 --> 42:21.380]  I mean, I'm here, I'm of the belief that technology can make the world a better place.
[42:21.740 --> 42:25.840]  You know, I mean, computers are fun toys, but really, you know, it's about making a better world.
[42:25.860 --> 42:31.580]  And I think, you know, people not starving to death makes the world a lot better than anything else we can possibly do.
[42:32.320 --> 42:37.920]  And the only way to feed 6 billion people, I don't think that natural crops can do it.
[42:37.920 --> 42:43.380]  I mean, we've been modifying the foods that we eat over thousands of years of agriculture through selection anyway.
[42:43.860 --> 42:45.980]  You know, why can't technology make this better?
[42:46.160 --> 42:47.680]  You know, why does it have to be evil?
[42:49.200 --> 42:49.560]  Well...
[42:50.220 --> 42:51.880]  See, we all want to answer that one.
[42:52.360 --> 42:55.440]  But we also don't want to like... I mean, it's a big can of worms, right?
[42:57.400 --> 43:01.300]  So it's, like we were saying, it's not a matter of it being good or bad.
[43:01.300 --> 43:03.560]  It's a matter of there being proper oversight.
[43:04.480 --> 43:06.580]  There's no understanding of how...
[43:08.040 --> 43:10.360]  And the critical art ensemble is very clear about that.
[43:10.380 --> 43:10.540]  Yeah.
[43:10.740 --> 43:20.480]  I mean, if you introduce a genetically modified species into the environment, there's very little way of predicting exactly how the rest of the environment is going to react to that species.
[43:21.200 --> 43:26.360]  For that reason, there needs to be a testing period or something.
[43:26.580 --> 43:27.760]  But right now, there is none.
[43:27.840 --> 43:28.920]  There is no oversight of it.
[43:28.980 --> 43:30.380]  You just put your crops out there.
[43:30.860 --> 43:32.340]  You know, Monsanto does their test sites.
[43:32.580 --> 43:38.620]  When their DNA ends up in their neighboring farmer's field, they can actually sue that person for violating their patent.
[43:40.600 --> 43:41.040]  So...
[43:41.040 --> 43:46.420]  So you're saying there should be oversight and there should be testing, and then you're complaining that they're doing testing?
[43:47.720 --> 43:50.040]  You're just talking about a Monsanto test field, so...
[43:50.040 --> 43:51.380]  A test field in the atmosphere.
[43:51.740 --> 43:56.080]  Like an outdoor test field where, you know, it actually interacts with the rest of the environment.
[43:56.340 --> 43:56.420]  Yeah.
[43:56.640 --> 43:58.000]  And there's science and there's science.
[43:58.160 --> 43:59.120]  There's testing and there's testing.
[43:59.120 --> 44:05.480]  When it's under the control entirely of Monsanto, and there's no oversight of that process, I don't know...
[44:05.480 --> 44:16.860]  I don't trust the abstract notions of science enough to assume that Monsanto doing science is the same as, you know, scientists that we all trust doing it.
[44:16.860 --> 44:19.080]  Also keep in mind, Monsanto does not want to feed the world.
[44:19.220 --> 44:21.000]  They want to sell food to the world.
[44:25.160 --> 44:33.960]  And also your idea that crop... that we need genetically modified crops in order to feed the world.
[44:34.180 --> 44:36.160]  There are a lot of experts who dispute that.
[44:36.420 --> 44:39.840]  There's a lot of experts who will dispute anything, but...
[44:44.050 --> 44:46.190]  I was just wondering if...
[44:47.570 --> 44:53.770]  If culture jamming and the use of satire to illustrate a point...
[44:56.190 --> 44:58.830]  Is something that just seems to be...
[44:59.710 --> 45:02.870]  You know, something that people who are left-leaning tend to do.
[45:02.990 --> 45:07.730]  Have you ever heard of any, like, right-wing culture jamming?
[45:08.910 --> 45:12.130]  Or any right-wing equivalents of...
[45:12.970 --> 45:14.170]  You know, of...
[45:14.170 --> 45:18.210]  Any right-wing equivalents who do the kind of satirical stuff that you guys do?
[45:18.210 --> 45:19.730]  And also...
[45:20.690 --> 45:21.210]  Also...
[45:23.250 --> 45:23.770]  How...
[45:24.870 --> 45:25.390]  How...
[45:26.390 --> 45:28.450]  Have you felt any kind of like the...
[45:29.250 --> 45:34.310]  Have you felt like the tentacles of the current administration...
[45:35.590 --> 45:37.710]  You know, getting a little close...
[45:37.710 --> 45:39.650]  You know, too close for you for comfort?
[45:39.890 --> 45:43.810]  Or have you, you know, had unpleasant encounters of that type?
[45:44.630 --> 45:51.050]  I can tell a really strange right-wing culture jamming activism story.
[45:51.330 --> 45:57.110]  We recently went to Chicago to the Heritage Foundation Resource Bank meeting.
[45:57.270 --> 46:00.630]  And the Heritage Foundation is one of the largest right-wing think tanks.
[46:00.830 --> 46:02.650]  They have a $25 million a year budget.
[46:03.230 --> 46:06.810]  We walked in and there was a group there...
[46:06.810 --> 46:09.590]  A group of protesters wearing ostrich suits.
[46:09.590 --> 46:12.370]  And we thought, wow, this is amazing.
[46:12.610 --> 46:19.030]  Protestors, maybe we can go up and talk to them and kind of let them know that we're actually undercover, you know, and see if we have some affinity.
[46:19.250 --> 46:24.550]  And it turned out that there were attempts hired by a group whose goal...
[46:24.550 --> 46:32.710]  A group that's in favor of what's called school choice, but underlying their goals of school choice is what they call dismantling the welfare state.
[46:32.890 --> 46:38.350]  So they want to actually dismantle public education and put it in the hands of private education.
[46:38.350 --> 46:49.490]  But they had hired a bunch of activists who didn't know that they were actually playing the role of supporting an anti-public school initiative.
[46:49.830 --> 46:57.510]  So that might be considered, I don't know, an example of a kind of right-wing culture jamming because they even fooled us.
[46:57.610 --> 47:01.070]  We thought these were genuine activists wearing ostrich suits.
[47:01.210 --> 47:13.250]  It was African-American young women that they had put in these ostrich suits with signs that said, we need to fix, you know, fix public schools and fix social security as well.
[47:13.470 --> 47:16.770]  So it was quite a strange experience.
[47:17.410 --> 47:23.650]  And as for the tentacles, basically this case is the first time we felt really threatened.
[47:23.890 --> 47:30.390]  Like, we set up a website attacking George Bush in the first campaign that he stole.
[47:30.390 --> 47:46.370]  And he lashed out in various ways, including saying there ought to be limits to freedom and asking for the Federal Elections Commission to ban us as a political action committee that wasn't revealing its funding and so on.
[47:47.310 --> 47:49.590]  The $50 I guess we paid for the domain name.
[47:49.590 --> 47:55.690]  But that was the closest we came to, you know, it was just stupid lashing out.
[47:55.930 --> 48:03.730]  So with this case, now we're feeling, wow, they're paying attention to this group in a really heavy-handed, outrageous way.
[48:03.750 --> 48:05.210]  And who knows where that could stop.
[48:05.610 --> 48:07.010]  Now that's our feeling.
[48:07.110 --> 48:10.510]  We've never really felt that before, anything like that.
[48:14.560 --> 48:19.700]  Just for my question, I have a comment for the guy about the genetically modified stuff.
[48:19.900 --> 48:28.040]  Think about how Monsanto's putting pesticides in this genetic engineering versus what was done naturally in the past.
[48:28.320 --> 48:30.900]  Question about the robot painter.
[48:31.160 --> 48:33.380]  Are those plans, detailed plans available on your website?
[48:34.360 --> 48:38.920]  There are plans, but we wrote the plans before we actually made the machine.
[48:40.220 --> 48:42.140]  So use at your own risk.
[48:43.460 --> 48:50.580]  Yeah, but there's like, you know, pseudocode for the software and basic design of how the machine works.
[48:50.960 --> 48:55.080]  We don't have like specific plans for how you machine the individual parts, unfortunately.
[48:56.040 --> 48:58.640]  Do you think it could be done with off-the-shelf?
[48:59.820 --> 49:05.900]  Somebody recently sort of modified our design and seemingly has done it with off-the-shelf parts.
[49:05.900 --> 49:07.100]  It was a student at Parsons.
[49:07.360 --> 49:08.960]  I did it on the back of a bicycle.
[49:09.640 --> 49:13.980]  And I haven't actually seen it up close, but it works really well.
[49:14.180 --> 49:16.380]  So search around for that.
[49:17.840 --> 49:20.520]  I think it was the...I forgot the name of the book.
[49:21.400 --> 49:22.480]  Bikes Against Bush.
[49:22.660 --> 49:23.280]  Oh, right.
[49:23.500 --> 49:25.720]  Bikes Against Bush is the name of the group.
[49:26.280 --> 49:28.720]  So bikes...okay, bikesagainstbush.org.
[49:29.660 --> 49:40.860]  Kurt Vonnegut's book about the guy who was a Nazi plant in Germany who actually inspired a lot of the anti-jewish.
[49:42.040 --> 49:43.800]  Are you guys familiar with that book?
[49:43.920 --> 49:51.340]  And have you thought about...have you inspired anybody who from other countries and you're pretending to be evil people?
[49:51.460 --> 49:53.500]  Has anyone said, oh, that's a really good idea.
[49:53.500 --> 49:55.220]  I think I might bring that back to my country?
[49:57.740 --> 49:58.960]  Not to our face.
[50:01.220 --> 50:08.020]  We did eventually...no, I mean, the answer is interesting.
[50:08.460 --> 50:18.220]  There was a lot of going along with things we were saying, but we didn't get the feeling that anybody was just jumping for joy at our thoughts and expanding on them and so on.
[50:18.220 --> 50:23.360]  Until we took the opposite tack and decided this, we were never going to get through to them.
[50:23.640 --> 50:24.800]  Satire was never going to work.
[50:24.940 --> 50:31.960]  And so we tried to be sincere and express as the World Trade Organization what the World Trade Organization would do if it were us.
[50:32.420 --> 50:38.940]  And so you can see it in the movie, but we disbanded the World Trade Organization and then people really did jump for joy.
[50:39.080 --> 50:47.140]  These accountants that we were speaking to were thrilled and gave us lots of ideas and, you know, probably took it with them in some way.
[50:47.140 --> 50:53.180]  So it's an interesting statement about what makes sense to people.
[50:55.740 --> 50:59.060]  I have an observation to make about genetic engineering.
[51:00.040 --> 51:04.160]  Correct me, anybody, if I misspeak, but it was Watson and Crick who discovered the genome.
[51:04.960 --> 51:06.140]  When they did...
[51:06.140 --> 51:06.400]  They discovered DNA.
[51:06.600 --> 51:06.820]  Huh?
[51:06.960 --> 51:07.600]  They discovered DNA.
[51:07.600 --> 51:08.360]  They discovered DNA.
[51:08.360 --> 51:08.400]  Right.
[51:10.560 --> 51:16.880]  And what the supposition was is that there would be a one-to-one correspondence between genes and proteins.
[51:17.500 --> 51:22.460]  And most of our understanding and knowledge and science is built on that supposition.
[51:22.960 --> 51:30.160]  Well, when they finally decoded the human genome, we discovered that there's two-thirds more proteins than there are genes.
[51:30.780 --> 51:31.360]  Which...
[51:32.520 --> 51:33.300]  Excuse me?
[51:36.520 --> 51:39.200]  They're scrambling like mad to try and come up with something.
[51:39.200 --> 51:40.980]  But basically, we don't know what we're doing.
[51:41.320 --> 51:41.660]  Hmm.
[51:47.920 --> 51:56.540]  I was just wondering if any of you were involved in the recent Canadian Supreme Court case about Roundup Ready crops and if there are any similar cases going on.
[51:56.920 --> 52:04.780]  I don't know about any similar cases going on, but that was an inspiration for doing the Free Range Grains Project for Critical Art Ensemble.
[52:05.460 --> 52:16.860]  If people don't know, aren't familiar with this case, Monsanto managed to sue a neighboring farmer who was an organic farmer because their copyrighted DNA was turning up in his foods.
[52:17.640 --> 52:18.700]  He wasn't planting these.
[52:19.040 --> 52:23.660]  They were just... the seeds were blowing into his fields like seeds tend to do.
[52:25.600 --> 52:29.840]  And I actually don't... do you happen to know what the outcome of that court case was?
[52:29.960 --> 52:30.220]  Because I unfortunately don't...
[52:30.220 --> 52:31.160]  Monsanto won.
[52:32.120 --> 52:32.940]  There you go.
[52:39.080 --> 52:39.600]  Hi.
[52:40.200 --> 52:47.460]  I'm not necessarily against genetic engineering, but I think everyone in this room should know, and I really don't want to beat a dead horse.
[52:47.920 --> 52:52.440]  But America makes enough crops and food to feed the entire world.
[52:54.380 --> 52:55.360]  Not necessarily.
[52:56.640 --> 52:58.980]  I'm a vegetarian, so I really don't care for meat.
[52:59.640 --> 53:02.600]  But the problem is poverty.
[53:03.180 --> 53:06.780]  And America corporations do not want to give away food for free.
[53:13.750 --> 53:18.710]  Your story of what happened to Steve is actually very worrying.
[53:19.070 --> 53:21.410]  It sounds to me as if he's in a really serious situation.
[53:21.410 --> 53:25.390]  Is he in jail now or is he out on bail?
[53:25.670 --> 53:29.950]  And secondly, what kind of... do you have a strong legal assistance here?
[53:30.590 --> 53:32.270]  He's got an excellent attorney.
[53:32.650 --> 53:37.390]  His attorney is also Larry Flint's attorney and Marilyn Manson's attorney.
[53:38.410 --> 53:40.290]  He's not in custody.
[53:40.290 --> 53:41.030]  He's at home.
[53:42.430 --> 53:44.990]  He... the charges were downgraded.
[53:46.010 --> 53:46.650]  Downgraded.
[53:46.750 --> 53:47.310]  They were just chained.
[53:47.310 --> 53:55.130]  I mean, the mail fraud charge, even though it carries a potentially enormous penalty, the bail was extremely small.
[53:55.130 --> 53:58.290]  And he actually only has to post it, I think, if he doesn't show.
[53:58.710 --> 54:01.830]  So it's really only harassment that you're talking about in the end.
[54:01.830 --> 54:02.970]  Well, at this point.
[54:03.270 --> 54:05.510]  But if, you know, he goes to prison.
[54:05.650 --> 54:09.350]  These charges also have mandatory minimums associated with them.
[54:09.410 --> 54:10.350]  And they are felonies.
[54:10.610 --> 54:13.950]  And these aren't necessarily the last charges that will be brought against him.
[54:14.050 --> 54:16.070]  The indictments could continue.
[54:16.770 --> 54:24.730]  I'd like to just recommend that people go check out the updates for this at CAEDefensefund.org.
[54:25.130 --> 54:27.830]  And you can follow the case there.
[54:27.950 --> 54:32.690]  And I think it's a case that does pertain to everybody who is involved in hacking.
[54:32.930 --> 54:40.230]  Because, in a sense, these guys, the Critical Art Ensemble, are doing a kind of wetware hacking.
[54:40.930 --> 54:46.070]  And I think that this case could set precedents that would affect all of us.
[54:46.350 --> 54:47.350]  So, check it out.
[54:47.510 --> 54:48.450]  Follow it, please.
[54:48.770 --> 54:49.110]  Thanks.
[54:56.420 --> 54:59.380]  Coming up in a couple of minutes, we'll have the Retro Computing Panel.
[54:59.380 --> 54:59.520]  Let's go.
[55:00.260 --> 55:00.420]  Thank you.