Okay, we have two lines available right now.
Okay, once again, this is Dr. Michio Kaku, professor of theoretical physics at the Graduate
Center of the City University of New York.
You've been listening to an hour program devoted to the question of science, war, peace, and
the environment.
Join us every Wednesday evening from 8 o'clock to 9 o'clock when exploration takes you through
a journey to science.
Good evening.
What I said was, and I said this in the middle of 1990, was three things.
I said first of all, I said that many of the nation's largest banks were at or near true
economic insolvency.
I stand by that statement today.
And I don't think there's any doubt to anybody who looks at the fact that the CIA was definitely
using domestic financial institutions.
These people are making the same mistakes that we have made over and over again since
1980.
They're denying the extent of the problem.
They're understating the nature of the problem.
Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, special counsel Bennett, ladies and gentlemen, I come
before you today at your invitation as a witness.
But what's the core of our national cohesion?
Because as you know, this society is visibly splitting apart.
The Collapse of Banking, Thursday, 6 a.m. till noon, and Wednesday, 30th, all day on
WBAI 99.5 FM.
I'm Michael G. Haskins, host of Half Past Three with Michael G. Late night, early morning
radio coming your way alternating Tuesdays, 3.30 to 6 a.m.
The only program in the metropolitan area dedicated to late night workers, early morning
and people who are out where they've got no business being with someone they've got no
business being with.
Good music, additional information, and you on the landline.
Whatever your pleasure, join me every other Tuesday morning, 3.30 to 6, for Half Past
Three with Michael G. Over non-commercial WBAI 99.5 FM in New York.
And you've got all the business in the world being right where you are now, sitting in
front of your radio, listening to WBAI in New York, and preparing for Off the Hook.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving, now I can't make a cost.
It couldn't get much worse, but if they could, they would.
Bondi Libon, for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
Bondi Libo!
Thank you.
And a very good evening to everybody.
The program is Off the Hook.
This is Emanuel Goldstein.
And it's been a busy week.
We're in the second week of our fundraising drive.
And hopefully tonight will be the turning point where things really can turn around for WBAI.
And that would be good for all of us, wouldn't it?
We have an exciting show tonight.
We have some updates, a special guest, and even a couple of surprises.
Stay tuned.
And there are lots of things that have been happening over the past couple of months, actually.
It's been a while since we've updated people on the various computer foul-ups and technical miseries.
And we've got a lot.
You can get it if you really want.
You can get it if you really want.
You can get it if you really want.
But you must try.
Try and try.
Try and try.
You'll succeed at last.
This piece comes from Joseph Nathan Hall and was posted on the Risks Digest.
The son of a former employer of mine was met at the door one Saturday morning by two local police officers
who presented him with a felony arrest warrant and took him off to jail.
You can get it if you really want.
You can get it if you really want.
You can get it if you really want.
But you must try.
Try and try.
Try and try.
You'll succeed at last.
Yeah, but sometimes it doesn't quite work out that way.
In this particular case, the charges involved were something like passing bad commercial paper
and maybe even interstate flight.
Yeah.
He was a little surprised.
And it turns out he had left some money in a checking account in a bank in another state, possibly Missouri.
He left money in his checking account.
And friends, that was his crime.
After a little bit of time, you know how banks are with service charges.
Well, the service charges completely evaporated, wiped out whatever was left in the bank account.
But it didn't stop there.
It kept going.
And the last charge bounced.
And the bank treated that like a bad check.
They charged him.
And he didn't have enough money in his account to pay the charge, so they treated it like a bad check.
And they looked for him for some time.
And since bad checks in that state constitutes a felony,
regardless of the amount,
they passed the info to the local authorities and an arrest warrant resulted.
Now, apparently there was a pretty good interstate commerce and arrest warrants
and somehow the out-of-state warrant wound up at the local police station.
It is the moral of this story.
And just another instance of how the rules are changing.
Remember when you used to leave money in a bank and it accumulated interest and did nice things?
Well, now you can wind up in jail if you leave money in a bank.
This is from the Dutch national paper De Volkskrant of September 3rd.
On Saturday morning, August 29th, the presses at the local newspaper De Gelderlander went down,
causing delivery to be delayed.
I wish we could stop the story there, but it goes on.
Many subscribers called the newspaper at its phone number 650611.
The telephone exchange at the newspaper got jammed
and one of the consequences was that when people tried to call the newspaper,
for some reason, many times only the last four digits 0611 came through.
Now, it just so happens that 0611 is the national emergency number in the Netherlands
and so the police were swamped with calls from people
informing them that their newspaper was not delivered.
And in a reaction, the Dutch telephone company said they would be careful about giving numbers
ending in 0611 to large companies.
Well, this is one to even top the story we started out with
about driving under the influence, known as DUI.
Slightly different from driving while intoxicated.
This comes from Jane Beckman, also posted on the Risks Digest,
which can be obtained by anybody on the Internet
that has Usenet read access by simply subscribing to comp.risks
or just listening to this program.
A friend's husband just recently got a shock.
A notice showed up in the mail that his driver's license was suspended.
He called up the California Department of Motor Vehicles to find out what was going on
and it seems he had recently been involved in a dispute involving his auto
so he suspected it might have something to do with that.
Well, they asked him,
Didn't you recently plead guilty to a charge of reckless driving?
Yes, he said.
Well, that explains it.
Wait a minute, he said. Explains what?
It was his understanding that reckless driving was not normally something they'd pulled your license for.
If it was, he would have fought it.
Oh, no, they said that was for the liquor.
You have a DUI, driving under the influence.
What, he asked?
Your reckless driving in connection with DUI.
At this point, he knew he had a problem since there was no alcohol involved.
He explained to the woman that the reckless driving charge was a plea bargain.
He had been stopped and threatened by a juvenile gang who had blocked his car.
He had stepped on the gas and hit one of them when trying to get out of there.
Kind of like, well, kind of like one of these films that we've seen recently.
He was charged with battery and assault with a deadly weapon, his car,
by the gang member who pressed charges.
His lawyer had advised him that fighting the charge, despite circumstances,
would be a long and costly battle,
especially when juveniles were involved.
It was possible the jury would rule against him.
They plea bargained to a lesser charge of reckless driving.
He was fined $250 and sentenced to do 60 hours of community service work,
which he was doing.
Fine up until that point.
The woman at the DMV insisted that there was a DUI on the record.
He explained all of the above and she asked where the liquor came into it.
He explained that there was never any liquor involved.
Finally, he went down to the office and hassled with the officials there,
and the court records were pulled.
And, yes, there was no DUI.
It was entered into the system again and, bingo, a DUI came up.
Apparently, the system programming on traffic offenses was set up
so that a count of reckless driving automatically entered in a paired count
of driving under the influence.
The programmer had made the assumption that the two counts were so intimately connected
that you would almost never have one without the other.
To enter a count of reckless driving without a DUI,
you had to manually override it,
and the data entry clerk was not instructed on this peculiarity,
nor was there any flag that reckless driving was paired with DUI.
And a guilty on that count was paired to an automatic license suspension.
The problem of overriding the DUI was finally resolved,
but it took several days and a lot of arguing and hyperventilating on this person's part.
And yet another tale of woe having to do with poor programming
and assumptions that are made.
And that's pretty much everything as far as the technical foul-ups of this week
that we like to sort of rub salt into the wound every week about this time.
We've got something else that's kind of interesting.
This is a film review of sneakers written by Don Parker from SRI International,
and this also appeared on the Risks Digest and is being passed all over the place,
and I thought it might be kind of interesting to hear from the view of an expert
the way that sneakers has been perceived.
Well, Don Parker writes,
sneakers starring Robert Redford, Dan Aykroyd, Ben Kingsley, Mary McDonald,
River Phoenix, Sidney Poitier, and David Strathairn,
all that kind of thing, released on September 11, 1992, all the legal business.
The new computer crime movie has been out now for a couple of weeks,
and I'm trying to skip over all the things that people wouldn't be interested in.
Okay, all information security professionals should see this film
and use it to promote security awareness.
Some critics may pan it, but it has all the ingredients for financial success.
It has great chase and other street action scenes in the beautiful San Francisco Bay area.
I should point out, by the way, that if you have not seen this film,
maybe you should go someplace else for the next five minutes
because there will be a lot of things given away in this review.
So if you haven't seen it yet and you don't want it to be completely destroyed for you,
do something else for the next five minutes.
Okay, it also has an interesting but predictable plot.
It has the blind technician who finds the bad guy's hideout from sounds heard from the trunk of a car.
That was a bit of a reach, I guess.
The old technique of the bad guy shooting into the ceiling tiles
at his hidden enemy hiding in ceiling duct area.
Three bloodless murders.
Total unconsciousness produced by simple taps on the head
followed by immediate concussion-less revival with little visible damage.
Great human melodrama with good character development and not too much technical sci-fi stuff.
The good guy and his girlfriend at the mercy of the bad guy in the grand finale.
Cryptography very well explained and used for a general audience.
The proverbial spinning computer tape drive and a moral at the end.
Universal has uniquely teamed up with CompuServe and CompUSA computer stores to promote the movie.
A chat board has been set up to fire questions about the movie
at the director, Mr. Robinson, who has been using CompuServe for eight years.
So you have to know what his mental state is like now.
Anagram and secret password games can be played with prizes,
including trips to Hollywood and Robert Redford's jacket worn in the film.
The film is sure to be a big hit in Europe and Japan as well as in the United States
and should appeal to the juvenile hacker culture throughout the world.
One unbelievable item is the skimpy $175,000 accepted by Redford's security penetration
consulting company for a record-breaking information security project.
Redford's team plus all the high-priced technical equipment were worth much more than that.
They had to steal the universal decryption black box, the Maltese Falcon of the movie,
and then steal it again from the bad guys posing as NSA types who steal it from Redford.
There is a neat shoulder-surfing password pickup by video recording.
There are hacker antics such as a transfer of President Nixon's net worth
to the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.
Normal. Whatever happened to them?
Credit record and license plate registration privacy invasions,
trashing of the NSA, CIA, and FBI,
and liberal politics slams at President Bush and the Republican Party well-timed
for the upcoming national elections.
However, this is all tolerable since it is done by Redford's character
and his team who all have serious criminal and other highly unethical practices in their backgrounds.
A Tiger Team attack on a client bank that has relatively good security is excessively elaborate
and would have left the bank guard in a good position to sue his employer for aggravated assault and mental anguish.
We will probably have to assure our company management people that we don't do things like that,
but the time to justify your budget and staff is soon after they see this movie.
The film ends with the rather patronizing and simplistic advice
that whoever controls the information controls the world.
Just the straightforward action and technology without all the liberal politics and moralizing
would have made it even better.
I don't know if I agree with most of that, but it is an interesting review.
FiberOptics here in the studio, and I asked him last week in three words or less to comment on this film.
This week, maybe we'll go for ten words. What do you think?
Well, I thought Mr. Parker's point of view was kind of interesting.
It's always kind of interesting.
Yeah, but I still think that he's overlooking a lot of the technical pitfalls in the movie
which just simply weren't portrayed in a truthful light,
and I think that the list could go on and on if you really wanted to list them.
Let's give a couple of things from the viewpoint of hackers like us.
What kind of things would not be possible?
Well, there's things that just simply weren't portrayed correctly in the movie,
and then there's things that are simply impossible,
like the box itself that can decrypt anything.
That's complete nonsense.
Oh yeah, but that was the main point of the movie.
You can't take that away.
Yeah, you can't take that away.
So given that, the so-called Maltese Falcon of the movie,
so we'll allow them that one.
Aside from that, the fact that just because...
It's also a holy grail of sorts, too.
Yeah, you could call it that.
But the thing that was kind of silly
is that just because something was completely encrypted
and they were able to decrypt it,
they no longer had to log in or give any sort of password or anything.
And that seemed kind of silly.
Yeah, but that would take more time if they had to do it each and every time.
Yeah.
Then there were things in the movie that simply were never followed up upon.
Like?
Like dangling things.
Uh-huh.
Or things that never really would have happened that way that they used.
The biggest thing that stuck in my mind were the anagrams.
Yeah, the scrabble pieces.
Now, the letters didn't even match, did they?
Yeah, I mean, Robert Redford had an entire table of scrabble pieces.
He could have spelled whatever it was he wanted to spell.
And just because they happen to say that they were doing anagrams of C-Tech astronomy,
and they weren't,
the phrases he was spelling out, which were funny for the moment,
could not possibly have been spelled with those letters.
What about too many secrets?
Could that have been spelled with those letters?
Yeah, no.
Was it too many or no more secrets?
I thought it was too many.
I think it was too many, but I'm not sure.
Okay, whichever it was, if you look at it...
I thought they were missing a letter, or they had an extra letter or something like that.
Yeah, they had extra letters, and they were getting rid of other letters that weren't used.
And like I said, they had a whole table of letters, so it was kind of irrelevant.
Uh-huh.
Then another thing, one of the more obvious things that you see back in War Games,
but when you consider the War Games movie, it was timely, the stuff that was going on in the movie.
The most notable thing to any computer user at all
is the fact of how they portray a modem in the movie.
And they used the typical acoustical coupler that went out of style ten years ago.
Well, no, they used that for the shot in 1969 or whatever, did they not?
They also used it in the present day.
They did?
Yes, they did.
Wow, that's...
And the acoustical coupler, for people that don't know,
is a cradle where you make the call with a telephone, a normal telephone, to a computer,
and you place the telephone on the cradle, the acoustical coupler,
and this modem interprets the sounds coming from the far-end computer
and interprets them for the computer that the acoustic coupler is connected to.
Nowadays, and for at least the past ten years,
we've had direct connect modems that simply plug directly into the phone line and dial for themselves.
I have been informed that it is too many secrets, not no more secrets.
Okay, too many secrets.
Yes.
Thank you.
Back there in the control room.
So, yeah, it's...
You know, the thing that got me, though, and I've said this before,
they were making a series of satellite calls and they were calling the NSA.
Yeah.
There was no delay whatsoever.
Yeah, the whole...
Have you ever talked to somebody on a satellite?
There's always this annoying delay.
The whole...
If you ever watch Ted Koppel...
The whole routing thing, yeah.
Watch Ted Koppel on Nightline,
and the reason why everybody keeps stepping on each other and interrupting each other
is because they're all over the world and they keep talking on satellites,
and when one person stops talking, another person is starting,
and they both stop thinking the other person wants to say something,
and it gets very confusing.
Here, they were using something like five or six satellites.
Yeah, that whole sequence.
And yet it was no delay at all.
Well, it looked really nice on the screen
and might have looked really clever to the people in the audience that didn't know any better.
Satellites are orbiting the...
usually orbiting the equator of the Earth at about 20,000 miles above the equator,
and going through one satellite would produce a noticeable delay,
but four or five, that's something that would be really noticeable.
Yeah, back in the early days...
But that entire sequence...
Back in the early days of alternate long-distance companies,
a bunch of us would route calls through satellites many, many different times,
like about 10 or 12 times,
so you could barely hear the person on the other end,
and the delay was something, well, beyond 30 seconds,
but it was like talking to somebody on the moon.
Well, a common joke some time ago in the olden days of blue-boxing times,
a joke would be to call a phone next to you
and route it through multiple satellites across the world,
call the phone next to you and hold both phones up to your ear
and talk into the first one and see how long it would take your voice to come out the other end.
That's a lot cheaper than the drugs you'd have to take to get that effect.
That's very true.
Okay, we have a special guest who is waiting patiently a couple of thousand miles away from here,
so we're going to be getting to him in just a moment,
but first, before we do that, I want to remind people that it's very important...
That's not our figure, is it?
We didn't make that much by not pitching at all?
I don't think so.
We have zero...
That's right, that's more like it.
We have zero.
We have nothing.
Absolutely not a thing.
We do?
Boy, okay.
Well, we're up to a hundred already.
I don't know how we did that.
But we need to raise money here at WBAI,
as I know to a lot of people it seems like we constantly have to raise money.
Well, ask yourself, how often do you have to pay your electric bill?
How often do you have to pay your phone bill?
You know, it's not something that is a one-time thing.
You pay them and they come back and send you another bill,
and it just never stops.
We'd like it to stop, but it doesn't stop.
They keep demanding things from us.
And the best way for us to go about this
is for everybody to pitch in what they can afford,
and the station will remain strong.
The station will remain here.
It's not an assumption that we will always be here
because we can't make that kind of a promise.
Things change.
Things get very expensive.
Financial institutions go out of business.
I mean, Pan Am went out of business, for God's sake.
Things disappear.
Now, we want to stay around,
and I think the best way for us to stay around
is for everybody to get together on this.
The more people putting their heads together, the better.
That's what has made WBAI such a success so far.
And by calling 212-279-3400 and pledging,
well, the general pledge amount is $50,
but if you can't afford that, we accept $25,
because every little bit adds up.
And we want to add that figure,
make that figure better than it was last week.
Let's put it that way.
212-279-3400, and I know last week I said,
last week I said that we were only offering the videotape
of Dutch hackers breaking into U.S. military computer systems.
We were only offering that last week,
but I'll tell you, enough people acted like real babies
and were whimpering and threatening all kinds of things
that I've decided that it's probably in the best interest
of everybody if we did it one more time this week as well.
Also, there were people that called after the show ended last week,
and it just made a lot more sense to tell them to call this week
during the program, because if you call after 10 o'clock,
you'll get lots of other good deals with the computer program,
but you won't get this particular good deal.
We can only offer it from 9 to 10,
so please, 212-279-3400, 212-279-3400.
We're not a commercial radio station.
You will never hear a corporate view of any sort
expressed in a manner where money is exchanged.
You won't ever hear Exxon giving their editorials on this radio station.
Oh, sure, we will report what Exxon has to say,
because many times that's very newsworthy,
and we'll also report on what other people that could not possibly afford
to pay $300,000 for 30 seconds during an episode of Murphy Brown,
that could never afford to get their particular message across.
We offer a forum, and we do it 24 hours a day
in various manners.
212-279-3400, your pledge will allow us to continue.
You will also get the WBAI folio delivered to your address every month,
and you'll get that special hacker video
that shows you firsthand what happens
from the depths of Holland, from Amsterdam,
to a military computer system.
And this was taped, oh, about a year ago,
and portions of it were aired on that Ghastly Geraldo show.
Now it can be told, but we have the entire thing
without any distortions surrounding it,
and you be the judge as to what exactly went on.
It comes with a little handout as well.
212-279-3400, it's so easy.
Okay, I can demonstrate how easy it is, just like they do on TV.
Hello, I'd like to donate $1,000 to WBAI.
Certainly, sir.
Yes, you see how easy that is?
Actually, it wasn't very easy to do that,
but 212-279-3400, please.
We need your help, and we have two people on the line right now.
Let's make that five people, and we can get on to our special guest
who is waiting for us out on the West Coast.
Hopefully, he's still waiting for us out there.
And in the meantime, I found one other story
that we have not three calls on the line.
Two more calls, and we can go out to California.
This story comes from Germany.
It has to do with the Berlin Fire Department.
The Tagesspiegel announced that the Berlin Fire Department
has been having terrible trouble with its new dispatching system.
It seems they went online after just a few tests
to the, well, they didn't really run the system in parallel
with the old one, they just kind of did it.
And now they have to take care of the whole city,
not just West Berlin, so it's quite a task.
They're having trouble with fire trucks being listed more than once,
some fire trucks disappearing fire trucks and messages,
and the wrong trucks being alerted.
Seems the data entry people or the algorithm
for finding the closest fire station or both are not working,
and trucks are being called from far away,
or they are alerted and then told where to go.
There have been cases of it taking 30 minutes
to get a fire truck to the scene of a fire.
Not a nice thought when yous are increasingly setting fires
to refugee hostels and such.
So that's what's going on over in Germany.
And we're here to bring you the latest information
as it comes in, things you will not hear anywhere else.
212-279-3400, come get one more phone call,
and we'll take that trip out to California
and talk to a person that has made news in his own way.
Everybody's doing their bit to spread education,
spread knowledge, and get a reaction.
212-279-3400.
Thanks to those people who are calling in,
and we will be back in just a moment.
212-279-3400
212-279-3400
212-279-3400
212-279-3400
212-279-3400
212-279-3400
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212-279-3400
212-289-3400
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212-389-3400
Walking down the road, with a pistol in your waist
Jahan here to bang
Walking down the road, with a ratchet in your waist
Jahan here to bang
He's just driving and he's stabbing and he's looting and he's shooting but he's here to bang
He's just driving and he's stabbing and he's looting and he's shooting but he's here to bang
One of these days when the hero voice say come, we gonna run
Oh boy
One of these days when the hero voice say come, we gonna run
Oh boy
We gonna run through the road for a rescue, there will be no road
We gonna run through the road for a rescue, there will be no road
workers, techno wizards, all those kind of people that are thrust into a kind of strange
light sometimes, and an appropriate song for our times.
Again, our phone number, 212-279-3400, please show your support for this radio station,
show your support for this program, and show your support for Freedom of Speech.
Speaking of Freedom of Speech, we have on the line Peter Barnes, who is the president
of Working Assets Long Distance.
Peter has been a guest on this program once before as well, and Peter, I understand something
happened last week involving you and the United States government and the phone company.
Can you fill us in as to what exactly happened?
Yes.
Well, Working Assets Long Distance, every month we have what we call Free Speech Day.
Actually, this month in September, we had four Free Speech Days.
The concept of Free Speech Day is that we invite our customers to call some leader of
government or CEO of a corporation that may be doing, let's say, some not-so-good things,
and speak out en masse, as it were.
We got thousands and thousands of people to call at the same time to the same person.
Last week, we targeted James Baker, the White House Chief of Staff.
And a lot of us were kind of pissed at what's been going on with the Republican campaign,
particularly the way they have been attacking people with different lifestyles, and basically
promoting fear and hate, and in particular, homophobia.
So thousands of people last week called James Baker's office in the White House.
We published his private phone number in our phone bills, and people called him up, and
left messages.
And we'll see what happens.
I think we pretty much melted down his switchboard last Monday.
Now, you managed to do this somehow without the people being charged, is that right?
Yeah.
If they're our customers, the way it works is we just don't charge them for those calls.
This is our contribution to strengthening democracy.
It sounds like you guys should be our phone company.
Well, it's easy to become a working assets customer.
Just call 1-800-CITIZEN, and you can join.
Now, what was it in particular that James Baker said?
Is there a particular quote or something that annoyed working assets?
Well, Baker himself was not quoted, but it's the whole Republican campaign, including Dan
Quayle, Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan, who they put on primetime TV during the Republican
convention.
You know, everybody's heard these people attacking gays and lesbians, attacking single mothers,
people who don't kind of fit this sort of all-white, heterosexual 2.2 kids in a couple
of station wagons in the garage kind of image of family values.
You know, this is a very divisive kind of campaign that they've been waging.
Peter, I've just been informed of something that's kind of interesting here.
You said your phone number was 1-800-CITIZEN, but there's no Z on the telephone.
I'm glad you put that up.
There is no Z.
So it's CITIZEN spelled with an X in place of a Z.
Well, I'm sure glad you put that up.
Someday, we want to put the Z back on the phone keypad.
That's one of our goals in life, but meanwhile, we have to use the X.
The Z for those real phone freaks out there used to be on the O, along with the Q, actually.
Yeah.
It used to say Q and Z.
Those were the days.
Those certainly were.
For all digital phone numbers.
Uh-huh.
Now, tell me, have you ever targeted Dan Quayle?
Oh, yeah.
We've targeted him a couple of times.
Once when he started going on this whole attack thing about people who sort of differ in their
quote, values from his kind of image of the Ozzie and Harriet American family, and another
time on his whole, his Council on Competitiveness, so-called, which is kind of a star chamber
organization that goes around having secret proceedings to undo the regulations of the
Environmental Protection Agency and gut the Clean Air Act and let polluters just spew
out more pollution, basically in violation of the law.
So we asked our customers to call their Congress members, which they did, urging that Congress
cut off the funding for this so-called Council on Competitiveness, and the House of Representatives
actually did that, and it's now sort of up to the Senate to see whether they're gonna
keep funding this Dan Quayle organization.
Now, it's interesting that you provide this service of a free call to the White House,
to Washington, D.C.
Some countries, Canada, for instance, I know has told free numbers to the government offices.
Do you think that they will ever come here?
I don't think they really want to hear from too many people.
Especially not poorer people who can't afford to call the White House.
That's right.
So we do provide this service for free.
I mean, I've noticed that the candidates like Bush now has gotten 800 number, and I think
Clinton had one for a while, but where people can call up and get a copy of their economic
renewal plan.
I think what happened with Clinton, though, was that the Republicans jammed it, you know,
they just kept calling the 800 number and running up the bill for Clinton, so he had
to stop it.
Could something like that also happen with the number you give out, where somebody makes
your company pay through the nose by jamming those numbers?
Well, we don't give out 800 numbers.
I mean, we give out the numbers of the particular officials that we want people to call, and
if somebody's our customer and they call that number, we pay for the call, but there's no
real way that somebody could jam that.
Okay, that sounds like a unique idea.
How much do you figure it costs working assets to do this?
I don't know the exact amount.
It's obviously cost us some multiple thousands of dollars to do this, but, you know, that's
what we're in business for.
We have two bottom lines, and one of them, obviously, is just to make our income exceed
our outgo, so we can stay in business, but the other one is to have a social and political
impact, and we do that in two ways.
One is the one that we've just been talking about, which is helping people talk to the
leaders of this country, and the other is we actually donate 1% of people's phone charges
every time you make a call, except for the free calls, obviously.
We give 1% of the charges at no cost to customers, to non-profit action groups like Greenpeace
and Planned Parenthood and Amnesty International, and a lot of groups, actually, that are working
for human rights, economic justice, the environment, and peace.
Last time we talked, I believe you were using Sprint as your carrier, is that right?
We're using the underlying carriers, the major carriers, to actually complete our calls.
We're a reseller, technically speaking, and we buy in bulk from the major carriers, and
we're able to pass through those savings to our customers, so our base rates are actually
lower than the three major carriers, and then we have volume discounts on top of that, and
we have a 20%, what we call our 20% friendship discount, which is similar to the MCI Friends
and Family, but actually a little better. Basically, if you are a Working Assets customer
and you call anybody else who's also on the Working Assets Network, whether they're friends,
relatives, or just anybody else, we've got over 50,000 people on the network so far,
anyway, on those calls, you just get an additional 20% off, so we're kind of like a community,
and when one member of the community calls another, then they can save at least 20%.
And Working Assets also has credit cards? We have a regular old Visa card, right.
And the same deal applies to that 1%? It's not exactly 1%, it's 5 cents per transaction
every time you make a purchase, whether it's a small or a large purchase, we give 5 cents
to the same non-profit groups that the long-distance calls also support.
I see. One final question, what kind of press coverage have you gotten for this latest venture
of free calling? Well, we got pretty good coverage. We were
in the Washington Post, the San Francisco Examiner, the Boston Globe, a few other newspapers,
so we're trying to promote this concept of the call-in as kind of a tool for citizen
action. In the 90s, you know, we had sit-ins and teach-ins, and we got a lot of call-ins
because call-ins are, well, they're easy. I mean, you can do them from the privacy of
your own home, and they can be effective if lots of people do them together. That's
where the key to it is, is to get thousands of people all calling into the same switchboard
on the same issue, and you get noticed. Right, and I've noticed that, speaking to
congressmen and various people like that, every single phone call does matter, and so
few people actually make those phone calls, even fewer write letters, and if more people
did that, obviously there would be some notice of it.
Yeah, it's tough to make this democratic system work, you know, given the power of money and
the power of lobbyists, and it's going to take a fair amount of change to make our democracy
really work. The power of money has to be diminished, obviously, through some kind of
campaign financing reform, but at the same time, the power of the people has to be strengthened,
the voice of the people has to be heard, and as a phone company, we're sort of a good
instrument for making the voice of the people heard, so that's what we're trying to contribute
to this process. Another thing, the democracy has to become
more accessible to the people, and in this administration, I'm surprised we haven't seen
a 900 number pop up for the White House. Only $2 a minute, and you can register your complaint
with President Bush. Yeah, they could make some money and reduce
the deficit that way, right? People have a lot of complaints.
Exactly. I don't know if people want to pay to pop
off to George Bush. I don't think so, and I think it's commendable
what you've done, and hopefully there'll be more things like that in the future. You planning
more such actions? Oh, well, we do them every month. See, we
use our phone bill, since phone companies have to mail out bills anyway, and bills are
pretty boring. All they do is ask you to pay money, so the first two pages in our bills
are actually these political actions, where we give details about what the two actions
are in any given month, and give the names and the telephone numbers that we are suggesting
that people call. Can we request Al D'Amato for next month?
Sure. Well, hopefully he won't be around to pester too much longer.
That's why we want to hurry and annoy him now, before it's too late.
Right. All in good fun, Al. Yes, we all know that.
Okay, well, thanks very much. Peter Barnes, the President of Working Assets Long Distance.
Again, if you're interested in more information from them, 1-800-CITIZEN, and just substitute
the Z with an X, and you'll get through. Okay.
All right, thanks very much. Thank you.
Take care. Bye-bye.
And that's definitely a progressive phone company, in my opinion. I can't imagine Sprint
or MCI or AT&T doing anything along those lines, and that's the kind of thing we need
more of, upstart phone companies. Well, we need more upstart listeners right now, because
we only have, believe it or not, only have $220 for this hour. It's pathetic. You know
what they're going to do to me when I walk out of this studio? They're going to laugh.
They're going to point. They're going to make phone calls and tell other people how we're
doing. I mean, not to belittle $220, because that will go directly into the radio station
and improve things, but it won't improve things as much as, say, $750, which is sort
of what I was hoping to shoot for.
Now, it's really not that hard to do. We do take Visa and MasterCard and all those nice
things, and for everybody that calls in, we will be sending you as a bonus, and only during
this show, not at 10.01, not any other time, not any other program, only during this show,
we'll be sending you the hacker video that shows Dutch hackers breaking into a U.S. military
system, and don't worry, it's not illegal to have this videotape. Many, many people
around the world already have it. It's just another example of sort of what we do here
at WBAI. We bring you firsthand information and allow you, the listener, to decide for
yourself and make up your own minds.
Now, you know, we might sound sometimes like we're preaching and we have a certain agenda,
and some people, I guess, do have that, but, you know, what it all boils down to is we're
presenting you with alternate information, and it's really up to you what you want to
do with that information, and WBAI is a source for all kinds of groups, all kinds of people
that you just don't hear anyplace else, and if you're open-minded, you'll tune up and
down the radio dial. You won't stay on any one station all the time, but WBAI should
be a place where you spend a lot of time since there's so many diverse programming-type
things coming out of here.
212-279-3400, we have one phone call on the line. I'd really like to get a full switchboard
because, you know, when you get a full switchboard, that means everybody in the tally room is
busy, and right now, well, it sounds like they dropped something in there now, but usually
there's phones ringing, and you see, they're talking to each other, and we don't want that.
We want people to, you know, to be dashing around. We want phones to be ringing off the
hook and, no pun intended, 212-279-3400. Please, we don't have too much time left,
and we don't have too much for this hour either. Now, there's people like Peter Barnes at Working
Assets Long Distance that are doing conscientious things, doing imaginative things, doing things
that nobody else has thought to do before, actually having free phone calls to the government
in Washington, D.C. We've suggested on this radio program several times that somebody
should get an 800 number and just have that forward to the White House so that poor people
too can make phone calls to the White House and voice their opinions. It's a simple thing,
but somebody has to do it. Right now, the simplest thing to do is to make that phone
call, make that pledge, and keep the BBAI going for a little while longer. 212-279-3400.
If you're in 212, of course, you don't dial the 212, and if you're outside the area, you
might have to dial 1 first and things like that, but please do call now. We need your
support. 212-279-3400. We have all kinds of exciting things coming up in future weeks
concerning privacy issues, consumer issues, hacker issues. There are all kinds of things
happening out there, and you just won't hear them anyplace else. How many times have you
heard Peter Barnes talking about what his phone company is doing? Probably not very
often, probably not in very many other places, and things like this need a voice. You need
to be able to hear alternative views. You need to be able to hear what the alternative
community is doing. Whether or not you agree with it, it's important that information get
out. 212-279-3400. Your call is a vote for us to continue and a push for us as well.
It helps give us strength to know that there's people out there that care enough, and when
you think about it, whatever your pledge might be, a $50 pledge, what does that translate
to around the entire year? It costs significantly less than buying a newspaper, and you get
so much out of WBAI. You can always turn on WBAI and hear something different, always,
24 hours a day. 212-279-3400. How many other radio stations will give you that? Well, there's
other radio stations that will play hip-hop, and that's fine. There's radio stations that
play classic rock, and hey, that's good, too. There's classical music, and even some form
of jazz, I understand, but no one's really defined that yet. There's all news, and all
talk, and all sports, and all kinds of things, but they all have commercials, and you have
to sit through those commercials every day of the year. We do this, and we annoy people
by begging for money, but we don't do it as often as commercial stations play commercials,
and there's also an advantage to us doing this in that we don't have to worry about
offending our sponsors. For instance, the interview we just did with Peter Barnes, well,
who would we have offended? We could have offended President Bush if he was running
his election campaign ads on our radio station. We could have offended any other phone company
that might be running ads on our particular station because they don't like to hear the
competition being interviewed, so we can be free. We can talk about things that the oil
companies and all the other large companies in the world are doing, and we can talk freely
without having to worry. I mean, NBC, NBC television network is owned by General Electric. Now,
most people in their right minds would think that is a conflict of interest. Can NBC really
report on the goings-on at General Electric, at defense contractor fraud or pollution or
any of those things? Can they really report it objectively? Well, I have my doubts, and
I think a lot of people do as well. 212-279-3400, cast your vote for non-commercial radio. Cast
your vote for alternative radio. 212-279-3400, we need to get at least a couple more calls.
I mean, we're not doing that well tonight, folks. Remember, everybody that calls in will
get a videotape. It runs about a half hour, and it's not impossible to understand either
for those of you that aren't computer hackers yourself. You'll see how easy it is, how somebody
was able to simply dial in from Holland and get right into a U.S. military computer system.
That simple. 212-279-3400, but don't call just to get a videotape. Call because WBAI
means something to you. I'm not seeing any calls. 212-279-3400. You know, usually we
have a full switchboard. I don't know why this is in particular. I think that we have
the same quality of programming as you. I know things have gotten a little tight financially,
but that's why we have to adjust what we do and donate what we can afford. Okay, we've
got two phone calls on the line. If we can just make that four, we might have a chance
of pulling this off tonight. 212-279-3400. If you feel extremely generous and want to
give more, please do so, because if you're in a position where you can make a difference,
then you really should make a difference. And it feels good to do this, too. When you
call in, you'll speak to somebody here at the radio station who probably is a listener,
either a staff person or a listener to the radio station who has come in and volunteered
time, and it'll only take a couple of minutes. We'll ask you your name and how much you want
to donate and all that kind of thing, and it'll be over before you know it, in case
you don't want to stay on the phone too long. 212-279-3400, and every bit adds up. We've
gotten up to this amount so far, which isn't all that high, but we got there by people
calling in and pledging small amounts, one on top of the other. We need more people to
do that and people to, well, do my eyes deceive me? We have five calls on the line? Wow, how
do we do that? Well, I don't have to ask how we did that. We've got concerned people out
there that care. I always knew that. If I sound desperate, it's because, well, it's
just, it wears on you when you've got to go up here and define what it is that you stand
for and why you're here and what the radio station is all about. I mean, we all know
it. You out there, us in here, we all know what it's about, but it's taxing. It's taxing
for people to hear. It's taxing for people to say, but it's a necessity. It's a necessity
of life. It's something that we have to face, and if we don't face it, well, we'll be swallowed
up by somebody else, some big corporate entity. Folks, we're in the middle. I don't know if
you've noticed this, but we're in the middle of the commercial dial. What is a non-commercial
radio station doing in the middle of the commercial dial? This is unheard of virtually anyplace
else in the country. Usually, non-commercial radio stations are banished to those less
desirable frequencies that have all kinds of spottiness, but WBAI has got a great signal.
We're in the middle of the FM dial, so if you're going from PLJ to KISS, you stumble
upon us and you're hooked, other non-commercial radio stations don't allow that, don't allow
for that. They can't afford to be in a place like that. We lucked out, and we had a radio
station donated to us in the early 1960s, and we've been struggling to stay on at this
frequency ever since. Now, it would be easy to just give away the frequency or sell the
frequency to another classic rock station and move to another part of the dial where
things would be cheaper and the signal wouldn't reach as many people, but that's something
I don't think people really want to do, and I don't think our listeners want us to do
that. I think where we are is where we should be. That sounds like a good slogan, doesn't
it? Where we are is where we should be, and you're the ones that can keep us there. I
always said I had a future on Madison Avenue. 212-279-3400. Please join those people on
the phone, and you'll see it's worth your while. Everybody that calls in will receive
that hacker video, and you'll become part of the elite when you have one of those.
Now, I want to get back to something in sneakers. Somebody was asking me this, and let me bring
FiberOptic back in on this. When the National Security Agency, by the way, I don't know
if you heard about this, but there was a new agency announced last Friday. The government
announced that for 30 years they've been denying the existence of an organization
that really does exist, or at least not commenting on it. I believe it's called the National
Reconnaissance Organization, and they said, yes, for 30 years this organization has existed,
and they're in Washington, D.C., and now we can tell you that as well. But as far as the
NSA goes, when they called to the NSA and routed it over many different satellites,
they did not pick up the phone NSA, did they? They did not say this is the NSA. I don't
think so. And they were very kind of mysterious? Yeah, I guess you could say that. Okay. Well,
what I'd like to try, and this is something that somebody actually dared me to do, is
to see just how true that is, and see what we can get out of this. This is going to take
a little bit of finagling here, so let's just be patient. We're going to, first of all,
find out if I can get a line there. Okay, let's see if we can get a dial tone. We have
a dial tone. Now what we're going to do is call information. Yes, information. Oh, I
hate this phone system. It just keeps hanging up on you. Let's try this one more time. Okay,
hopefully this call will make it through. I should prerecord these segments, shouldn't
we? Okay, secret code time. Here we go. City, please, Roberta speaking. Yes, hello, Fort
George Meade, Maryland, please. Yes. The number for the National Security Agency. Thank you,
ma'am. Thank you. The number is 301-688-6311. Okay, we all heard you. Now what we're going to
try to do is see if they'll tell us who they are, very simply. Okay, let's see how true this report
is or the way it was portrayed in the film. See if the National Security Agency, first of all,
answers the phone with National Security Agency and if they will identify themselves after we
connect with them. I can't believe they're not home.
National Security Agency. Yeah, what did I reach? National Security Agency. Oh dear, I guess I have
the wrong number. What city is this? Maryland. Maryland. Okay, thank you. I got the wrong
number. Oh, the city of Maryland. Okay, that's good to know. They do answer the phone, though,
National Security Agency. I believe in the film they said something like this is the operator or
something rather ominous like that. So, unless they changed their policy since the film came
out, the film being Sneakers, of course, another myth laid to rest. National Security Agency is as
open as Pops Delicatessen down the road. Okay, that's going to be our show for this week. Again,
if you have not called in, you have exactly three minutes to do it. We're up to $555 and I have a
special significance for that kind of number. If you call in the next three minutes, we will be
able to send you that videotape of the Dutch hackers breaking in to military computer systems
in the United States. If you call after 10 o'clock, however, we cannot do that because, well, we just
can't do that. Rules are rules. So, please call in 212-279-3400. And thanks to everybody who did
call in. We'll be back again next week with another program. Stay tuned for the Personal
Computer Show. Again, that phone number 212-279-3400.
On Tuesday, September 29th at 7 p.m., join us for a trip through Norton Juster's The Phantom
Tollbooth. A simple task for a brave lad with a stout heart, a steadfast dog, and a serviceable
small automobile. All that he would have to do is travel through miles of harrowing and hazardous
countryside into unknown valleys and uncharted forests, past yawning chasms and trackless...
Performed live from the stage of the Joppa Public Theater. See the show free or tune in to...