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The Creative Unity Collective show, alternating Fridays from midnight to 3, on listener sponsored
WBAI 99.5 FM in New York.
And this is listener sponsored WBAI radio in New York, it's 10 o'clock, time for Off
The Hook.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall, I cut myself while shaving,
now I can't make a call, it could be yet much worse, but if it could they would, for Billy
Bond for the best, expect the worst, I hope that's understood, for Billy Bond.
For Billy Bond.
For Billy Bond.
And this is Off The Hook, the weekly program on WBAI where we talk about technology of
various sorts, telephones, computers, and all the implications and applications therein.
And this week is going to be rather interesting because we'll be talking about some current
events, and how they affect various individuals, famous ones and non-famous ones.
First, a bit of news, we have the brand new issue of 2600 Magazine, which has just come
out, the Summer of 94 edition, in it complete details on the Hope Conference, and some other
interesting bits of information, for instance, well, do you remember a few weeks ago, they
had this big hoopla on the TV about traffic cameras, and about how they take people's
pictures when they run through red lights.
It's gotten people very concerned, because you never know where these cameras are, you
know, you go through a red light, and for whatever reason, you might be waved through
by a traffic cop or something, but it's programmed to snap a flash and grab your license plate
and send you a little ticket in the mail, which is very, very hard to dispute.
Never mind the fact that it's impossible to prove who was driving the car in the first
place, or perhaps somebody got a fake license plate and put your license on it, who knows,
there's all kinds of possibilities, photographs can be doctored, but the upshot of the matter
was that people throughout New York City, throughout the five boroughs, were becoming
incredibly paranoid, I saw this, I saw people stopping at yellow lights, cab drivers stopping
at yellow lights, it's not natural, it's not normal, and fortunately, we at 2600 have done
our bit to help out by letting people know exactly where those cameras are.
That's right, people thought they could be at every intersection, well no, they're not,
they're at a few intersections.
In Manhattan, we're not going to tell you where, here, if you call up, if you call the
show and ask, is it at this intersection, we will tell you yes or no, but we're not
going to read all the intersections, however, we will tell you that in the borough of Manhattan,
you want to know how many of them there are?
A hundred?
A hundred and fifty?
Three hundred?
Uh-uh.
Four.
There are four cameras in the entire borough of Manhattan, so, cabbies, go back to the
way you were.
Certain things you just have to learn to live with, you know?
Anyway, that's one thing, we also have a bunch of quotes from what we call admins without
a clue, system administrators, who insist that their systems are secure, yes, and that
there's no problem, no problem at all with people getting into a computer system and
possibly tampering with things.
This gem, for instance, from a particular system administrator, you'll have to read
the issue to see who said these things, if someone's hacked our system, we'd certainly
like to know about it, although it's very doubtful.
More likely, this is just someone trying to make you nervous.
And, uh, one of my all-time favorites, the system is secure from everyone who is properly
using the system.
Yeah, okay, great, well, those aren't the people we're concerned with, are they?
No, the people we're concerned with are those who aren't properly using the system, and,
uh, obviously, it's not secure against them.
So, that's, uh, in the latest 2600, which is about to hit the stands, and the subscribers
and everybody else, uh, who happens to fall into its path.
We also have the Hope bumper stickers, which, uh, will be popping up on stop signs and various
other vehicles throughout the neighborhood, I guess.
Yes, uh, and that's, uh, to herald the, um, the first United States Hacker Congress,
massive gathering of people from all over the world to talk about and demonstrate issues
of hacking, and again, if you're, um, not aware of this, it's taking place in August,
August 13th and 14th at the Hotel Pennsylvania here in New York City.
If you want more information, give a call to 516-751-2600, or if you're on the Internet,
you can send email to our brand-new Hope address, info at hope.net, H-O-P-E dot N-E-T.
And if you need to contact me personally, you can contact me at Emanuel at hope.net,
and, uh, there is one thing in particular that I would like people to contact me on.
This is something that we are going to be doing at Hope.
I visited, um, FiberOptic, um, over the weekend, and we were talking about this at great length
because he's very, um, interested in, in the, um, evolution of technology,
and one of the things that has occurred since he went away, uh, was the MetroCard,
which is being introduced at 69 stations throughout this city,
and how does this MetroCard work?
You know, what kind of a system does it use?
How secure is it?
Well, we've mentioned before in this program that, uh, a large part of the Hope Conference
is going to be dedicated to figuring out how to crack that system
or giving it our seal of approval and saying this system is secure.
One thing we were, uh, trying to figure out, though, was how the magnetic strip works.
Now, we've been doing some experimentation with it,
so what we're asking people, asking listeners to do is share whatever information they have.
Uh, I talked about last week when I went down to the, um, 34th Street station
and got my own, uh, MetroCard, which is about the fifth or sixth one I've gotten,
and I watched what the person was doing, and they seemed very confused as far as what they were typing,
but in the end, they did take the card and swipe it through a particular machine.
Well, after talking about this for some time with a number of people,
I have a theory, and the theory is that this magnetic strip
is never actually written to after the card is made.
Rather, the information from this magnetic strip is simply read
and then fed into a computer, and, uh, the computer does all of the work.
For example, the person who issues the card types in the serial number of the card,
which is a nine-digit number, or maybe she types in the batch number,
which is a six-digit number, and then the value of that particular card.
Then she takes the card and swipes it through.
The machine reads the card and sends that information to the computer,
sends the information, verifying whatever the, um, the number is on the card
and the amount that's attached to it,
and then that becomes part of an account on a computer system,
and whenever the card is used from then on,
it's accessed to that particular bit of data.
Now, it became pretty obvious.
We've had these debates at the 2600 meetings as to how exactly these cards work.
You know, when you swipe them through the turnstile,
is it deducting something from the card?
Is it, uh, is it making a change?
And there's been some pretty passionate arguments saying that, yes,
that's in fact what is happening,
but it became very evident, talking this over with Fiber,
that, uh, that's not what's happening at all.
When you swipe a card, you can't quickly read and write,
not at that speed.
There is just simply no way.
So if it is reading, it is definitely not writing,
and it can't be writing without reading.
Otherwise, it wouldn't know how much value is attached.
So, um, it looks like these cards are read-only cards.
Another thing, we tried erasing one of these cards here at the radio station.
We have a magical bulk eraser, which will erase any tape in a fraction of a second,
and we put the magnetic strip on top of that and hit the button.
It did not erase it.
So even though this looks exactly like a magnetic stripe,
and it may very well be, there's something strange about it
that somehow protects it from being erased.
Again, this is all information that we need to share and trade prior to Hope
that at the conference, we'll be able to pretty much lay it all out
and see if the system is secure or is not secure.
What I would like people to do, if they have these MetroCards,
so we can see if there's any kind of a correlation between numbers.
If you look on the back, you'll see an expiration date.
You'll see a six-digit number to the right of that,
which is known as the batch number,
and then at the bottom, you'll see a correction,
a ten-digit account code, not nine, ten-digit account code.
What I would like people to do is send us that information,
if you have a card.
Now, nobody knows yet how to compromise that information,
so it's not dangerous to do that.
No one has yet cracked this system.
To be safe, though, I wouldn't buy these cards in any more than $5 increments,
just to be safe, because we don't know quite yet what the implications are.
However, if people send us that information, the expiration date,
the batch number, the identification number,
we'll be able to look at those numbers,
see if there's any kind of a correlation,
any kind of an algorithm at work here,
and that will give us a bit more information about how the system works.
You can mail that information to the Internet address,
Emanuelathope.net.
You can call up the 2600 answering machine, 516-751-2600,
and leave it there.
You can mail it to us here at WBAI,
care of off-the-hook, 505, actually, reverse,
off-the-hook, care of WBAI, 505 8th Avenue, New York, New York, 10018.
And just to show my good spirit here,
I'll give you all my information,
so that I'm not keeping anything from anybody.
My expiration date on the back of this card is 08-31-95,
August 31st, 1995.
The batch number is 073-292,
and the account number is 00174,
which I believe is what they all begin with,
81215.
So we'd like to figure this out and see what is on there.
Also, if anyone has figured out a way yet to read the actual card
and see what data is on that strip,
people have been unable to do that so far.
It's not using a standard system.
And finally, very important,
what does the little hole at the top mean, anyway?
They say that's going to be for buses next year,
and we do know that the buses have radio scanners in them.
They will be transmitting information over the air.
So we don't quite know what that's going to do,
how it's going to work,
but that's going to be happening next year.
So just living proof of how hackers can figure things out
and spread the information around.
All right, something else which a lot of people have been talking about
over the past several days is the OJ Simpson case.
A lot of people have been asking,
what's with those cellular phones?
As you recall, OJ was driving around with his friend
and using a cellular telephone.
The LA police say that it was because he was using a cellular telephone
they were able to track him.
Now, what does that mean?
What does that mean as far as people's privacy
when they use cellular phones?
In this particular case, of course, it worked out for the best,
but what happens when you pick up a cellular phone?
Can the police just track you like that?
Will they know exactly where you are?
What procedures are in place to see that they do this?
And what happens, what changes if the clipper chip comes into play
years down the road or months down the road?
With us on the telephone from Philadelphia is our cellular expert, Bernie S.
Bernie, you there?
Good evening, Emanuel.
How are you?
All right.
I imagine you were following that story with a great deal of interest.
Yeah.
Actually, when I first heard Mr. Simpson was on the run,
I figured the police would probably first be tapping the phones
as well as tracking his cellular phone if he was in a vehicle.
I mean, that's just pretty much standard operating procedure these days
when it's somebody that they really, really want,
and obviously they really, really needed to get him
for fear of looking bad in the press or losing their man.
But, yes, when I heard that,
what surprised me so much was not the fact that they did this,
but what surprised me was that someone in the LAPD leaked the fact
that they actually did do this.
Well, there's so many people in the LAPD leaking things
that I'm not surprised by anything they do anymore.
Although it was very surreal watching this whole car chase on nationwide TV.
You have to wonder, when I was in L.A.,
I was amazed at the surveillance capabilities that the city has.
Helicopters everywhere, not just police, but traffic helicopters,
and apparently this is not the first time they've done something like this.
They've had car chases on TV before
where they're able to just spot a car and just follow it everywhere,
and that kind of makes the whole thing a bit silly.
What's the point of even being on a car chase
if everybody can watch it on nationwide TV?
I mean, now everybody knows how to get to O.J. Simpson's house
because they pretty much drew a map for you.
If you're watching the TV, you just have to follow the roads.
I mean, privacy is going out the window with this kind of thing.
Well, it's gone out the window quite a while ago,
but most people just aren't aware of it.
I think if there's anything good that came out of this whole story
with O.J. Simpson is it's made people aware of the fact
that if they have a cellular phone,
not only are their conversations pretty much public record,
at least not private,
but their whereabouts is also very easily ascertained
by anyone who has the technical desire to find this out.
What about the rumors I've been hearing
that O.J.'s conversations were grabbed over scanners
and people have recordings of them? Anything to that?
I think it's extremely unlikely that hundreds of people
did not record O.J. Simpson's telephone conversations.
It was a national story.
Everybody was either watching on TV or listening to the radio
or out in the streets watching for O.J. Simpson.
Yeah, but you know what?
Probably everybody else was on the cellular phone talking about it too,
which made it extremely difficult to find it.
I'm sure a lot of people were talking about it, looking for him.
But any one of the literally tens of thousands of people in the valley there
who have scanners capable of receiving cellular frequencies,
I'm sure were trying to use them to do just that.
So I would be very surprised if there already aren't
dozens of bootleg tapes floating around the area
with the contents of not only those communications
between O.J. Simpson and whoever he was talking to,
but the ones between the police and the driver of the vehicle,
his friend, I forget who that was,
and also cellular phone conversations
and scanner interceptions of the police radio communications.
So I'm sure a lot of hobbyists have all this stuff on tape.
Unfortunately, it's against federal law to listen to cellular radio frequencies.
Since something called the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986
was sort of bought into law by the cellular industry,
it has been illegal and it's been a federal crime
to listen to radio signals in the 800 MHz frequency range.
Prior to that, we were all operating off of a previous law
of the Communications Act of 1934,
which was very simple and seemed to work very well
and I think would still work well.
The Communications Act of 1934 simply stated that
anyone can listen to any radio frequency they want to
as long as they do not divulge the contents of the communication
that they heard or profit in any way
from the information that they gathered from hearing the information.
That seems to make a lot of sense.
If a radio signal is just floating around in the air
and passing through my house and my body,
if I have a radio receiver, why shouldn't I be able to pick it up?
But the cellular industry was very paranoid about
people not buying cellular phones for fear of lack of privacy,
so they basically contributed a lot of money
to certain key congressmen and senators' re-election campaigns
and got this law put into effect,
making it illogically illegal to listen to a certain part of the radio spectrum.
But it's totally unenforceable,
and it's like saying that a part of the electromagnetic spectrum
is illegal to listen to is akin to saying
that it's illegal to look at a certain color blue
or listen to a certain musical note.
Radio frequencies are all part of a vast spectrum of signals
that start from sound all the way up to light waves.
Well, if you talk to the PMRC and certain preachers that I know,
listening to certain musical notes is illegal,
but that's a whole other meaning there.
Now, if I understand this law correctly, though,
it is illegal to actually intercept the transmission
or passively listen to it,
but it is not illegal to pass on that information afterwards
if you didn't actually grab it yourself.
It's not illegal to pass around tapes.
Is that correct or not?
My understanding is that the only part that's illegal
is the actual act of receiving the signal.
So if somebody conceivably were to come to the HOPE conference
with O.J. Simpson calls on a cassette,
we would not be breaking any laws.
I don't believe so.
I would want to talk to a communications lawyer about that, but I would be...
Yeah, we will. We will definitely check into that.
I'd be very surprised if this information which has gotten out
would not be just publicly legal to listen to.
I remember a few years ago, I don't know how many of the listeners recall,
the whole cellular snafu with, I think, Douglas Wilder,
I think the governor of the state of Virginia.
Yes.
His nemesis or the person who was running against him,
I think Charles Robb, am I correct?
I may be mistaken about that.
I don't know who was running against him.
In any case, whoever was running against him
evidently the governor was having a cellular phone conversation one day
and saying some really nasty things about his opponent.
And somebody evidently picked this up on their scanner
and recorded it on a cassette tape and mailed it to the opposing campaign.
And maybe I have the sides reversed.
But in any case, one of the campaigns, I guess it was the Wilder campaign,
had this tape, transcribed it, and kept it in their files.
And there was a big snafu about that
when somebody leaked that this was in their files
and they had to make all kinds of apologies.
And the person who actually did the recording and passed it on to someone,
they actually were arrested and fined.
I don't think they served any time,
but they got something like a big fine and so many years of probation.
Do you realize how many different little, I guess,
violations of etiquette took place just then?
I mean, you had somebody, first of all,
that said something really rude that they shouldn't have said.
Then you had somebody recording that.
Then you had somebody giving it to the governor's office and then accepting it.
You had somebody transcribing it.
You had someone else locking that away.
And you had somebody else taking it out and leaking it.
I mean, that's incredible.
Really, the only thing I think is the least impolite about all of those acts
is the actual just happening to receive the signal on a radio.
And that's the one that got prosecuted?
The guy that got the fine and the prosecution.
Bernie, let me get back to the O.J. Simpson case.
Now, how would they have had to have gone about getting the location of the car?
Well, it's not as difficult as one might think.
A cellular telephone is not really a telephone,
although it looks like a telephone and it works like a telephone.
It's not a telephone.
It's really a combination of a two-way radio that operates in the 800 megahertz band
and a computer slash terminal that's built into certain chips inside the phone
that communicates with something called the mobile telephone switching office,
which basically is a computer system.
When a cellular phone is turned on, not when you make a call,
but when it's turned on, when it's just the power's on and the lights are on,
generally speaking, people have their phone on all the time.
When they turn the ignition on in the car, the phone comes on ready to receive a call.
When a cellular phone is powered up, like when you turn your key on your ignition,
the first thing it does is it sends two pieces of information to the cellular system.
Actually, at first it listens for something called the initial paging channel,
which all these cellular cell sites, which are like radio towers
that are strategically placed around an area that has cellular service,
some of them are sending a beacon signal out.
And the first thing a cellular phone does is it listens for the strongest beacon signal
and then when it finds that channel that the strongest beacon signal is,
the closest cell site, it will send a signal to that cell site saying,
this is my electronic serial number, which is an eight-digit hexadecimal number.
It will send that number and it will also send its telephone number,
the area code and the exchange and the last four digits, to the cell site.
The cell site then responds saying, sending the same information back to the phone
just for verification and the phone then confirms that yes,
he indeed is this phone number with electronic serial number.
And then the cellular system knows where that phone is.
The reason the cellular system needs to know,
the computer needs to know where the phones are at all times
so that if a telephone call is made to the cellular phone,
say you call a friend's phone and he's somewhere in New York somewhere,
the cellular system needs to know which of the hundreds of radio towers,
of cellular radio cell site towers, need to send the signal to that cellular phone
and establish a communications link with it.
It doesn't send out the call to all the towers.
It just sends it out to the tower where that particular phone happens to be located.
So the cellular system knows at all times basically where the phone is located.
It doesn't know within a few feet.
It probably knows within a mile or so depending on how big the cells are.
In some areas, cells are as small as half a mile in diameter.
In other areas, in rural areas, some cell sites may be 20 miles across.
But with the right information, one can, if they have a map,
have a pretty good idea of where an individual is
depending on if they have a map showing where the cell sites are
and if there's a major highway and there's cell sites going across this highway,
if they know that this person's location is going from this cell to this cell,
they can pretty much tell they're on Highway 495 heading east or whatever.
So it's not very difficult to do.
You can do this right at the cellular phone company,
or there are several companies that sell equipment to law enforcement
and other people to make this very simple to do.
Now, if somebody is driving around and their phone is on but it's not in use,
are they taking up some sort of a radio frequency by transmitting the location
or the nearest cell site that they're at?
They're only taking up a very brief amount of time on a particular radio frequency.
How often is it updated then?
It really depends on the signal strength that the cellular phone is receiving the paging channel on.
When the phone starts receiving a weak paging signal from the cell site,
it sends out its identification again saying,
here I am, I may be getting into a weak area, do you want me to switch channels to the next cell?
Every cellular cell site has a different frequency assigned to it.
Actually, each cell site has a number of frequencies assigned to it
because that's how several people can be in the same cell
and all be on their phones at the same time.
Now, there could be cells that are maybe three or four cells away from a particular cell
that are using the same frequencies as another cell that's three or four cells away.
The whole beauty of cellular is that you can have a whole bunch of people on,
there's only 832 cellular channels,
but you can have literally tens of thousands of people on the phones at the same time.
The reason for that is that several people can be on the same frequency at the same time
because the phones are low in power and only strong enough to transmit to the nearest cell site.
They're not strong enough to transmit a few miles to the next cell site.
The cell site actually, the system actually controls the transmitter power of the cellular phone itself.
Cellular phones transmit from a maximum power of about three watts,
which is a little less powerful than a CB radio, if anybody's familiar with the power in CB radios,
all the way down to as low as 10 milliwatts or one hundredth of a watt.
If you happen to be just a block away from one of these towers,
your cellular phone's only going to be transmitting an extremely weak signal
because that's all that's necessary for the cell site to pick it up.
This system is programmed to keep all the phones on as low a power as possible
so as not to cause interference with each other.
Now this information, though, that's passed along as to where the phone is and all that,
now is that being transmitted in the same 800 megahertz range?
Well, the actual location information isn't being transmitted.
The software in the cellular system, in this computer,
actually has the information of the coordinates of the phone.
The system, I'm trying to think of a way to explain this,
if you were just listening to cellular frequencies,
you would not be able to tell right off the bat where a particular caller was
because it's not sending out its physical location,
it's just talking to the closest cell site judged from the strongest paging channel.
Well, it's telling you the nearest cell site, which very often can narrow it down to a few miles.
Right. Now, for instance, I have a radio scanner here.
This is one that I purchased at Radio Shack.
In fact, I'm just going to turn it on now, and you'll hear a couple of conversations.
Okay, well, we're not really supposed to be doing this.
That's an example of a cell site.
Simulated cellular phone calls, we'll call those.
Well, in any case, this frequency that I'm listening to is 883.02 megahertz.
Now, I happen to have a computer printout that I got from an unnamed person at a local cellular phone company
showing what cell sites are assigned which frequencies.
Now, judging from that frequency, I can look it up on this chart here
and determine that this particular cell site is probably the one that's located over in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania,
which is about 10 minutes from where I live, so 10-minute drive.
So these people are probably in the Bryn Mawr area.
Now, if I were to keep listening to them, when they got out of range of Bryn Mawr,
their cellular phone would switch frequencies.
I don't know if you ever notice when you're on a cellular phone that every once in a while
the signal drops out for a brief second, for maybe half a second or a third of a second.
What it's doing is it's switching channels at the same time that the cellular system is telling it to switch channels
to the next cell site, which is in a different frequency.
Now, if I were to scan around with a scanner, after this person's conversation just suddenly would stop
dead in its tracks, I'd know they switched channels, and I'd scan around,
and if I recognized those voices again, I could stop and make note of the frequency they're on then
look it up on the chart again and see, okay, well, now they're in Ardmore, Pennsylvania.
But when you're tracking somebody, you don't really have time to go through the whole spectrum.
It's not that difficult to do, because if you have a fast scanner,
you can go through the whole spectrum in about 20 or 30 seconds.
But you still have to listen to all the conversations and decide who it is.
You can pretty much scan through them.
Now, that's how an amateur would do it, someone who has just a limited amount of equipment.
It's a low-budget method.
I could pretty much tell just with the crude equipment I have,
just a chart and a $200 scanner that I got at RadioShack,
generally this person has driven from Bryn Mawr west on Lancaster Avenue towards Ardmore,
just from looking at the chart and looking at the frequency on the radio.
Now, if somebody wanted to be sophisticated,
they could either have connections at the Cellular Telephone Company,
and at the Cellular Telephone Company, they have a big chart on the wall.
Excuse me just a second here. I need to set the phone down.
Sorry about that. I had to turn off the other phone. It was ringing.
As I was saying, someone at the Cellular Telephone Company provided the police,
supplied them with a warrant showing that they have authorization to get this information.
They can look up on a computer screen or on a big light board
and actually physically track where a particular phone is going.
Years ago, I walked into the mobile telephone switching office of a company called Metrophone,
which is the non-wireline, the non-phone company, cellular phone company in the Philadelphia region.
And they have a great big board on the wall with LEDs, little red lights, where every cell site is.
And they can program the thing to light up the lights.
They can enter a particular cellular phone number, and it will light up on this board
what cell site that particular phone is communicating on.
So you can look at this board and follow the lights and see where it's going from here to here to here
and get a general idea of what highway they're on and what direction they're heading.
It's not going to give you an exact location,
but it'll give you enough to send out some police cars and pretty much hone in on the guy.
So all they need to do then is enter the phone number, and they can track the person like that.
That's right. They can do that at the Cellular Phone Company.
Now, in this particular case in Los Angeles, they were presented, the cellular phone company was presented
with a court order of some sort saying that they had to help the police out.
Do you think it's likely they were able to get a court order that quickly?
I highly doubt that. Have you heard for a fact that that is what happened?
That's what people are saying happened. I have not confirmed it.
Sure. Typically, for a law enforcement agency to legally do this,
they have to prepare an affidavit, a written document,
and present it to a judge requesting a warrant to listen to cellular phone calls of their target.
Now, typically, this legal process takes a few days. I mean, it's not a quick process.
Now, in this case, because of the rapid turn of events,
I think it's highly unlikely that the LEPD went to this much trouble
since they just didn't have enough time.
Instead, they just chose to violate federal law by just going ahead and monitoring
Mr. Simpson's cellular phone signals without any regard to the federal laws that are in place.
What do you mean modifying his signals?
Monitoring.
Oh, monitoring. I'm sorry.
It's possible also that they might have anticipated something like this
and been tapping his phone for a while.
It seemed that they were very surprised when he disappeared.
Right.
So I doubt very much that they would have had time from the point where they realized...
I don't think they had any reason to do all this groundwork ahead of time
since they had every reason to believe his attorney was going to have the guy turn himself in.
I really doubt that they had the time to go get the court order before turning on their equipment.
Now, they wouldn't have had to go to the cellular telephone company to do this.
There's plenty of ways a law enforcement agency, the police or whoever,
can not only listen to cellular, track individual cellular conversations,
but also their location without even the cellular phone company being aware of it.
There are two companies I'm aware of.
One of them is called Harris Corporation.
They're a big manufacturer of military communications equipment.
They manufacture a law enforcement device called a...
and their trade name for it is called the Triggerfish.
It's about $8,000.
And what it is, it's a computer and a UHF receiver that receives the 800 MHz range.
And it's a very comprehensive system.
You can feed in parameters as to what...
map basically the location in latitude and longitude of where the cell sites are
and what frequencies are assigned to which cell sites.
And it will...you can enter the telephone number or a group of telephone numbers
and whenever one of the...and just leave the thing on,
and it will record on a tape not only the conversations that are ever made by phones in a certain area,
but the coordinates on another part of...another track on the tape
records the coordinates assigned to the cell sites that that particular call happened to be on.
So not only do you have the vulnerability of the conversation being eavesdropped on,
but where you happen to be when you're having this conversation.
There's another company called TSR Technologies in Blacksburg, Virginia
that sells a device called a CellScope 2000.
This is a lower-budget version of the same kind of thing.
It consists of a laptop computer and a radio receiver made by a company called ICOM Corporation,
which sells for about $800.
They sell the whole package for about $3,500.
And it pretty much does about 90% of what the Harris Triggerfish does.
Neither of these two systems require any interaction with a cellular telephone company
or anybody else for that matter.
I could go out and buy one of these things and use it,
and nobody would know that I'm tracking people or listening to their cellular phone calls.
So it's pretty easy to listen to cellular phone calls if you have a scanner,
but because the cells and frequencies switch very often,
in one particular conversation you might switch between different cells maybe 10 different times.
So it's really hard to follow a particular conversation.
It just keeps changing frequencies, and it's a hassle.
If you have this equipment, you can actually have the equipment change frequencies
at the same moment that the cellular phone is changing frequencies.
So you can actually record the whole conversation and know where the phones are.
Well, let me ask you one more question before we go to the telephones.
You've described a system which seems pretty easy to be able to track people.
What could Clipper do, if the Clipper chip is ever introduced,
to make that even easier or more methodical?
Really, it's so easy to do now.
I don't see Clipper making it any more likely to be easier.
Clipper is going to be marketed or is trying to be marketed to the American citizen by the government
as something to make all their phone calls secure.
However, as you and I know, the federal government is the one who holds the keys to the encryption code,
the encryption algorithm that the Clipper chip uses.
So if the government wants to listen to any conversation that is encrypted with the Clipper chip,
they could do so, ostensibly only with a court order.
But as we know, technically there's no reason they couldn't do it with a court order from an engineering standpoint.
If a Clipper chip were used on a cellular phone, which it could be done,
it could potentially make the contents of a particular telephone conversation more secure
because your general law enforcement agency is not going to have the capability
of decoding or decrypting a Clipper chip conversation.
You'd have to be more of a wanted person, I think.
I think you'd have to be really wanted by either the FBI or the CIA or the HEF or somebody
for them to consider breaking the law and breaking the Clipper encryption.
I think maybe the biggest danger to Clipper is that it would create the illusion of security
by encrypting phone calls and people would think that they could not be listened to.
Unlike today when it's so incredibly easy and you can see how easy it is just by demonstrating it yourself,
the biggest difference with the Clipper chip in this particular scenario with the OJ case, for instance,
would be that law enforcement would not have to have any interaction with the cellular phone company.
Well, they don't have to now.
If the cellular phone company, if the cellular phone user, if OJ Simpson had a Clipper chip in his phone
and the person who he was talking to had a Clipper chip at the other end,
their conversation would in all likelihood have been relatively secure.
However, the information contained, the data part of the conversation,
was not concerned with the voice conversation.
In other words, the system information that defined where the phone is at any particular time
would still have been available to them.
That part of it would not have been encrypted.
The Clipper chip will only encrypt the voice conversation.
So they could still very easily have tracked OJ Simpson, even if he had a Clipper chip in his phone.
They wouldn't have been able to hear what he was saying,
but they would still know exactly pretty much where he was,
depending on how big the soft sites were and which direction he was heading.
They could find that much out.
Well, theoretically, if they had gone through the proper procedures,
they would be able to hear what he was saying by simply applying.
But, again, that's going to take some time to go through the procedures to get the warrants and all that.
In this case, I don't think they went to that much trouble.
I think it's extremely unlikely that they had the time to go through that.
Now, I'm sure they've already, they've straightened out the paperwork since then after the fact,
and nobody may know, really, the real story, but that's how things go.
Okay. For the record, we did contact the Los Angeles Police Department.
They declined to be on tonight to describe any of this.
It was hard enough finding somebody that even knew what I was talking about.
The cellular phone company was AirTouch Cellular.
They're a spinoff of Pactel, and that's the name of that company out there.
We're taking phone calls, 212-279-3400.
We're talking with Bernie S. from Philadelphia about the OJ case and cellular tracking,
how it was used in this particular adventure, which we all witnessed live on TV.
212-279-3400. Good evening. You're on the air.
Hi. How are you doing? Do I have to talk about what your guest is talking about?
Well, it helps, but if not, what's on your mind?
Well, I just wanted to mention that I've had a large amount of difficulty with the telephone company
trying to get what they call a gold number,
and it seems to me like they have a certain number of these numbers that they're just holding,
and they don't let anyone, certainly not any residents unless they want to bribe them with a lot of cash, get these numbers.
Well, now, is it a particular type of, I mean, what kind of last four digits are we talking about?
Well, I'd ask for anything that's memorable, 1-2-3-4, 1-1-1-1, any repeating number,
any number followed by three zeros, any number followed by two zeros.
I started dialing these numbers, and I noticed that there were a bunch of them with no customers, absolutely vacant,
and they wouldn't give me one of these numbers, and I said I would pay the gold fee.
What are they saying to you? What exactly are they saying?
They're saying to me that, well, first of all, it was really weird
because my business office person told me that I got three free tries, three selections of a number of my choice,
and after that, every time I wanted to select a number for them to test out whether it would be available or not,
it would cost me $25.
Oh, that's nonsense.
Oh, man.
They can't do that.
That's their own system.
I'm not kidding.
That is incredible.
You should do that. Tape it in a studio one time and play it back on one of your shows.
Well, I mean, we recently got a gold number, and it wasn't that difficult to do, so that's why I'm very surprised.
What I would suggest you do is just call back and get another representative.
I did that. I asked for the supervisor.
I got in touch with the supervisor.
The supervisor gave me another three free tries.
Each and every time she came back to me with the same answer,
that these numbers were reserved for corporations who would pay an extra premium for the numbers.
Now, I live in a part of Long Island that's a very non-commercial district,
and there aren't banks or a lot of businesses with a lot of big switchboards that need three zeros, two zeros at the end and whatnot.
So I was like, you know, listen, in my exchange, which happens to be 484-621-626,
there are plenty of these numbers available.
Why can't I get them?
She's like, well, each time I try it, I have to charge you.
That's nonsense.
We had no difficulty at all as far as that.
The way we did it was we said what numbers are available that sound kind of neat.
And they're able to do that.
They're able to look at what is available and tell you.
And I suggest that if you keep getting this, just keep calling back until you get somebody else.
Call after hours. They're open until 8 o'clock.
You will eventually get somebody that isn't such a, for lack of a better word, nasty person.
What is the president's helpline? What is that all about?
That allows you to complain to the phone company, the higher-ups at the phone company,
if you feel that you've been abused by an underling of some sort.
A step above that is the Public Service Commission,
which is where you go if you feel that nobody is helping you at the phone company.
I usually skip the president's helpline and go right to the PSC when I'm really upset by something.
You'll have better results going with the PSC.
Yeah.
Listen, I love your show. You're the best.
I wouldn't know what to do with my Wednesday night without you.
Please do me a favor.
Do a show one time where you play around with voicemail systems.
I know you did way back a show on that, but I wish you'd do it again because they're really fascinating and interesting.
Sure. A tour of voicemail systems. You got it.
Thanks a lot.
All right.
Bye.
Bernie, yes, you were saying something.
I was starting to say, if I were in his shoes, I would have the particular service representative just keep trying numbers,
let her charge me as many $25 fees as she wants, just not pay them.
When you contest that, when you contest something with a public service commission,
here in Pennsylvania it's the Public Utilities Commission,
they, by law, have to suspend those charges until the issue is resolved.
What amazes me is that when I did this,
never was it even mentioned that there would be a charge to see if a number was available.
I mean, that's highway robbery. It's their own system.
Sure.
It's like, you know, is there a charge to call this number?
Well, I can tell you, but there will be a charge to tell you that information.
I mean, come on. We have to not tolerate certain things, and this is certainly one of them.
Good evening. You're on the air.
Hello?
Yes, go ahead.
Okay. Well, I wanted to mention a couple of things.
I was monitoring the conversation you guys were having as far as Bernie and the Simpson case and all that.
Monitoring our conversation, huh?
Well, on the radio, of course.
Oh, legally. All right. Fine.
Okay. First of all, there are other factors involved here.
First of all, you can easily take a pretty good guess on what cell sites are local cell sites
because you pretty much can look at a map and just guess,
okay, this site is local, and there are generic charts of omni-cells.
So you can pretty much make up your own chart.
It's better if you have a local cell company like he does, but you can do it without it.
That's one.
Two, you can get for less than $500 from Canada a little decoder board that will tell you,
that will decode the data, that little blip or brap, I should say, that's sent
just before the phone switches cell sites.
In fact, it'll even tune certain radios like the Spectrum Pro 2006, for example.
Uh-huh.
A little modification.
I've not seen this in person.
I'm told it works quite well, and I'm hearing rumors that there's even a cheaper one
that's going to work through a Sound Blaster card on a computer and decode the brap the same way,
give you a little display on your screen saying what's going on.
Anything on that, Bernie, yes?
Well, there is a device called a DDI, a digital data interpreter,
which is available for around $300.
In fact, a friend of mine owns one.
We've had quite a bit of luck.
It will actually display the telephone number that the cellular phone caller has dialed
and display the channel that they happen to be on.
Now, if we wanted to spend the time to write the software,
we could integrate that with a computer mapping program,
which there are plenty of those in the market already,
to pretty much show you which particular cell site a particular person is in.
You could put together a system like this with a little bit of work for a few hundred dollars.
The other thing I was trying to bring out is that if you're local enough to somebody,
you can actually narrow it down probably even closer than the cell site,
because what you can do is you can track 45 megs
from whatever the base frequency you're monitoring is and listen to the mobile frequency.
If you can hear that, you can then use a directional antenna
and narrow it down even further to the point you might be able to almost triangulate it.
In fact, you have two sites, you could triangulate it
and get almost an exact position on a map.
So if somebody wants to spend the effort, they'll seem totally insecure.
What's worse is, as you did point out, you don't have to be using the phone.
If it's turned on and active, it is regularly pinging the site back and forth
every so often to get the position straight.
That's very true.
People don't realize that it's totally open in that respect.
It's bad enough the calls can be monitored,
but Big Brothers can monitor your position quite accurately.
Not to the inch or the foot, no,
but they can get a pretty good idea where you are if they want to do so.
It's just not all that difficult.
Bernie, what about the sound blaster rumors?
My only concern would be that I know that the digital data is being sent
at approximately 10,000 bits per second.
Right.
Whether a sound blaster audio input port is capable of working reliably,
decoding phased data signals at that rate is a matter of conjecture.
I can tell you that I know there are a lot of people working on similar solutions
because there are these things called digital signal processor chips
which are becoming quite the hot item in the semiconductor market right now.
Makes sense, and that would probably be very easy to patch to set that up for that.
The other thing is, what is the difference between trunk switching
and the polling used by a cellular phone as far as the cell sites?
In other words, a decoder that will tell you where a cell phone just switched to
will probably not work on, say, trunk 800 or 900 business bands,
but what is the difference? How different are they?
They're very different.
They work on the same principle, but the data encoding schemes is different
and the channel arrangement is different.
There's no reason one couldn't put together similar hardware.
Do both, or do either, right?
Track the trunk systems.
Trunk systems, for people who aren't aware of,
are the new rage in two-way radios to make more efficient use of the radio spectrum.
Taxi companies, police departments, public service agencies, and so forth
are starting to use these what are called trunk 800 MHz systems.
A trunk system works by you could have several different users sharing the same frequency.
Every time you key the microphone and say something,
it sends a little data signal along with it
telling the system that it's going to be transmitting at a certain frequency,
and it just chooses the first available frequency that happens to be open.
So you could be listening to a particular trunk frequency
and in one minute's time hear five different voices in sequence
with different people talking.
It is a very efficient use of the radio.
It's sort of like a sampler of 800 potential.
You just listen to a frequency and hear a taxi, and then a police, and then something else.
Some systems are worse than others.
Some have as few as five channels, some have as many as 20.
Obviously the bigger ones may have more services,
and it can be almost nerve-wracking to try to keep track of anything.
You can have all different things mixed.
Even, of course, if you can't follow it,
if you can at least know which entity is on at that moment,
it isn't quite as bad because you can narrow it down.
Again, there's probably some experimental gear out there, but I've not seen it.
It's certainly doable.
Of course, it gets a little more complicated than with cellular phones
because there's one standard for U.S. cellular phones, the AMPS system.
But on trunk 800 and 900, there's at least two different systems.
You have Motorola, 93, you have Motorola, GE, and Johnson,
and they're all absolutely different and totally compatible with each other
as far as decoding goes.
We're talking about beepers here, right?
No, we're talking about trunk 800.
Oh, trunk 800, okay.
Because I know that there's several different beeper standards as well.
Yeah, they are, but that's not what I'm referring to.
Okay.
In fact, there probably is at least two different,
there's ACARS and POCSEC, I believe, are the two main ones,
one more used for alphanumeric,
but there may also be others I'm not familiar with.
But I'm talking about something similar.
I mean, simpler.
Yeah.
Okay.
In other words, again, let's say you have a trunk 800 meg or 900 meg system.
You might have, say, 10 channels.
One of them being used, the data channel.
Usually they rotate it, by the way, day for day.
So what will happen is that will be taking the next clear channel,
and whatever keys is mic next will get the next clear channel.
And it might be shared by a dozen different agencies, theoretically.
I mean, it could be.
It might not be, but it can be shared by multiple groups.
And because each radio is looking at the data channel for the day,
the person using the radio has no idea that it's going from channel to channel to channel.
It's totally transparent, except when all the trunks are busy
and the radio goes boop when you push the mic button,
which happens on some of them occasionally.
I've seen that myself, actually.
But, in general, it's pretty transparent.
But if you're monitoring it on a scanner, you're not tracking the changes.
And then the cab company you're listening to, let's say,
suddenly might jump to another channel next time he keys up.
And now, instead, on the channel you're listening to, you might think totally different.
Most people don't.
Most private individuals don't have trunk radios.
So it's not as big a privacy concern of the trunk things, in my mind.
It's not a matter of privacy.
It's obviously a matter of that it's hard to keep track of conversations.
Not conversations, but communications on them,
because you may have multiple users on the same system.
And unless you have some kind of gear to somehow tell you who's going where
and where they just were, tracking those things can be a bit of a headache, obviously.
The federal law enforcement agencies, in cooperation with the FCC,
do have equipment in place in monitoring vans designed to do that sort of tracking.
Well, they can do it, of course.
Needless to say, they can do it if they want to.
I'm sure equipment is readily available to the right person.
In fact, obviously, if you knew the right person,
you could obviously get the data and program a trunk radio to monitor the system.
And for any individual group, maybe not for every group,
because you might not be able to put one in one group in a radio,
but you can set up any one group.
Guys, we have to move on because it's getting a little bit too specific for most of the audience, I think.
You could easily set up a radio for it to monitor it.
It would be nice if we had a phone system where we could hear each other.
Emmanuel, you mentioned something interesting when you asked about pagers.
A lot of people, a lot of individuals, private individuals, do have pagers.
And there's a big security issue at hand with pagers as well.
It is not difficult to have someone's pager transmissions monitored as well.
Most people have these display pagers that show not just the phone number of the person calling,
but also a text message.
If it all works out, we're going to be demonstrating all these things at HOPE.
You can actually see for yourself what it looks like.
You can buy little decoders that will handle the standard pager formats plus the one the aircraft use,
which is a third one.
I'll give them the name of it now.
But basically, you'll get up to your radio.
It takes that rap you're hearing on the frequency that you're monitoring in question,
and it gives you out a response.
And it's not even that expensive.
It's still a few hundred dollars, but it's nothing outrageous.
I mean, if you wanted to sit and monitor these things, you could.
I don't know.
In New York City, I'm sure if you wanted to be persistent enough, you could find something interesting.
I'd love to see what you'd see in Washington, D.C., let's say, though,
where almost everything is probably official.
Most people have no idea that these things are totally, totally open.
I mean, there's no privacy at all if you have a relatively simple decoder.
And, again, that's another thing where a little simple modem hooked to a computer,
assuming you've obviously a modem set to the right standards, can be used to decode that.
You don't even need a fancy decoder.
Somebody could easily come up tomorrow with a little $50 box that would basically be just a fancy modem,
a simple fancy modem in the sense that it would be working on those standards,
and special software similar to the almost fully software-based version of amateur packet radio standards,
like one system that's almost all software.
And the modem is like it fits into a serial port plug.
The entire modem is in the plug.
Okay, we have to move on.
This is going on way too long.
So we're going to continue this discussion, I'm sure, at a future date.
But we're going to try to fit in a few more phone calls.
Thanks very much for that call.
You're on the air.
Yes, Emmanuel?
Yes, go ahead.
Yes, I'm calling in reference to Echo.
I called the voice number that you gave out over three weeks ago.
Echo or Escape?
Oh, I'm sorry, Escape.
Yeah.
I'm sorry, Escape.
And I got a message.
I left my name and my telephone number.
I never got a reply.
And also I was hoping that I'd get some literature in the mail.
Are you logged down over there?
Well, quite a few people took advantage of that offer a few weeks ago, but that's really no excuse.
Are you one of the people that subscribed?
That's correct.
Okay, why don't you e-mail to me, and I'll make sure it gets forwarded over to the right people.
I wish I could.
Oh, you don't have an e-mail?
Okay.
All right, give a call to the 2600 office, and I'll make sure I pass it on personally.
What office is that?
516.
516.
751.
751.
2600.
2600.
2600.
And we'll make sure that it gets passed on to the right people.
And if anyone else is having any problems, too, feel free to call us there and leave a message, and we'll pass it on.
Okay.
The thing is, I'm not really in a hurry.
It's just that I'd like some acknowledgement that they have my name.
Well, yeah, I mean, if you paid your pledge, obviously there's no reason why you should not be on the system right now.
So that's certainly true.
Okay.
Enjoy your program.
Okay.
Thanks for calling.
Thank you very much.
See if we can squeeze in another phone call.
Hello?
Yes, go ahead.
Hi.
I was wondering.
Go ahead.
Hello?
Turn down your radio.
Okay.
Hi.
I was wondering if. . .
It's going to get very confusing if you don't turn down your radio.
Okay.
All right.
Well, maybe next time you'll know better.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Oh, hi.
Oh, I squeezed in at the last second here.
Only because of someone who didn't know how to turn down their radio.
Yes.
Yes, I'm a pro at this.
I talk to you all the time.
Just let me speak fast.
The discussion was very interesting on the cellular phones.
I learned a lot about how the technology works.
But I worked as a bike messenger for a while with the 800 trunk radios.
And I was curious. . .
How do all the radios know to go to the right frequency when you're on the same company?
You know, I mean, I work with one company.
And how do all the radios know to go to the right frequency all at the same time?
Basically, the scanner. . .
There's a computer in the phone.
Or in the radio, rather, that scans for an available open channel.
And it sends, along with your voice, a signal saying that this radio is sending the signal on this channel.
And then the trunking system knows, you know, basically knows who's on what channel.
And if someone else is transmitting on the other channel, the computer at the trunking system handles all the details.
Right.
But how do the folks that are listening on my company, you know, my brothers on the other radios on my company,
how do their radios get the right frequency all the time?
Oh, they're all listening to. . .
The other person on the call had mentioned that there's a data channel.
Every trunk system, along with all the voice channels, has a single data channel.
And that data channel contains the information.
It's constantly rotating over and over again of what radios are on what particular channel at any given second.
So when your brother turns his radio on and he's listening for you, it listens to the data channel
and knows that if you make a transmission to tune to that proper channel, it only takes a split second for that to happen.
Very smart.
Welcome to the 90s.
We're out of time. Thanks for calling.
Bernie, yes, I want to thank you very much for stopping in and answering all these questions about monitoring.
Brief word of advice to anybody who's concerned about their cellular phone security.
At the very least, unless you're going to be using your cellular phone and having a conversation on it, leave the phone turned off.
No one will track you if the phone is turned off.
But nobody will be able to call you either, right?
Well, generally speaking, I only give people my pager number, and if they're worth talking to, then I call them back.
Uh-huh, okay.
You've got a point there.
If you're waiting to receive a call, you're going to have to have it on.
But if you're really concerned about security, carry a pager and a cellular phone.
And if you want, you give everyone the pager number, and then just call them when...
Yeah, because pagers work on a totally different system, which is why they can't be used to track people.
Right. You can actually be tracked.
However, someone could easily figure out what your pager ID number is
and make note of, record all the paging numbers that are being sent to your pager.
That's very simple to do.
That's right.
We could have gone into that if we had more time.
Hopefully, we'll be demonstrating that in August, too, how to do that to someone's pager.
Okay, well, thanks very much for stopping in and warning us of all these dangers of high technology.
We'll talk to you again at some point in the future.
Great. Have a good night.
Okay, take care.
That's going to do it for us here tonight on Off the Hook.
I want to thank everybody for calling in and for being a part of the program.
Tune in again next week, next Wednesday night, 10 o'clock, when we'll be talking about something else.
Good night.
This weekend, tune to WBAI Pacifica Radio
as we bring you sounds from Stonewall.
Special Gay and Lesbian Programming begins on Saturday at 10.30 a.m.
when WBAI takes a look into the gay and lesbian community
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Good evening.
In the news tonight, memories of the Stonewall Rebellion
from those who helped make it happen and those who wish it hadn't.
A frank discussion with the author of Just As I Am, who talks about being gay and black.
And in New York, a settlement in the Love Canal case
and a move to get tough on those found guilty of abusing their spouses.
With these and other stories, I'm Jose Santiago in New York
with Verna Avery-Brown in Washington.
And this is the news for Wednesday, June 22, 1994.
First to Washington for the Pacifica National News.
President Clinton has stepped up the economic pressure on wealthy Haitians
who oppose the return of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Clinton has ordered U.S. banks to freeze the assets of all Haitians.
The executive order bans transfers, withdrawals, and other financial transactions
for all Haitian deposits in foreign and domestic branches of U.S. banks.
In Haiti, the military coup leaders and their supporters
continue to express defiance against international sanctions.
Roosevelt Jean-Francois has details from Port-au-Prince.
FRAP's leader, Emmanuel Constant, demands that public offices
and private enterprises be shut down Friday,
the day the U.S. ban on commercial flights to and from Haiti will go into effect.
Constant said that this will prove to President Clinton
and to the international community that Haitians inside Haiti
don't agree with their policy towards Haiti.
Constant also told reporters that FRAP is now an armed group
which will support the army against international military intervention.
Meanwhile, soldiers put sandbags in the streets close to the military barracks
in Port-au-Prince to protect themselves in case of intervention.
Roosevelt Jean-Francois, Pacifica Network News in Port-au-Prince.
Attorney General Janet Reno has invoked her right to humanitarian parole,
in effect granting special permission for about 80 Haitians,
most of them children, to join their families in Florida.
A spokesperson for Reno says the decision to reunite the families
was a special case and not a precedent.
The murder of O.J. Simpson's former wife, Nicole Brown,
has focused media attention on the issue of violence against women.
At a Capitol Hill news conference, speakers urged Congress
to pass the Violence Against Women Act, which is part of the crime bill.
D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton.
I have spent most of my life as a civil rights and women's rights lawyer.
I know a civil rights problem when I see one.
The domestic violence epidemic against women will not end
unless we give women more legitimate tools with which to protect themselves.
The Violence Against Women Act would give civil rights protection to women
who face gender-based violence, provide training programs for police and judges,
and allocate monies for women's shelters.
French troops will begin their humanitarian mission in Rwanda tomorrow morning,
according to the French defense minister.
This follows today's 10-0 vote at the U.N. Security Council approving the mission.
China, Pakistan, Brazil, New Zealand, and Nigeria abstained.
The two-month French operation will involve up to 2,500 troops
and include soldiers from Senegal and possibly Italy.
French officials say the mission aims to save civilian lives
and set up safe havens for refugees.
Some Rwandan rebels have vowed to fight the French troops,
maintaining France has long favored the Hutu-dominated government.
In South Africa, President Nelson Mandela has unveiled his first budget.
James Lorimer has the story from Johannesburg.
One financial expert has described the new government spending plan
as a mildly Robin Hood budget.
It imposes a 5% once-off tax levy on middle and upper income earners and businesses.
It also reduces the amount of money spent on defense, which took the biggest cuts.
That will pay for the costs of April's first democratic elections
and other transition mechanisms.
That means the government can go ahead with its planned allocation of large sums of money
to the African National Congress plan for reconstruction and development.
Money is being set aside to build houses and create jobs.
While social spending has increased,
the government has also tried hard to attract foreign investors.
Company taxes are down and the deficit is in line with IMF recommendations.
For Pacifica Network News, I'm James Lorimer in Johannesburg.
And those are the stories topping the news.
Amnesty International charged today
that the U.S. is still sending money in arms to nations that violate human rights.
This, the group says, despite the administration's claim
that it is placing greater emphasis on human rights.
The State Department replies it will study the group's latest report.
Pacifica's John Rush has the story.
There were 19 countries on Amnesty International's list.
They include democracies, monarchies, and dictatorships.
They range from Israel and Saudi Arabia to Indonesia and Turkey.
They all had serious human rights violations,
and they all received U.S. military assistance.
William Schultz, head of Amnesty International in the United States.
While the United States cannot be its brother's keeper all over the world,
it can surely avoid being the supplier of its brother's killers.
This is a smarmy business,
a pitiful, unseemly way for a great democracy to forward its interests
or make a fast buck.
Topping the list were Israel and Egypt,
the two largest recipients of U.S. military aid.
Israel gets more than $4 billion.
Egypt receives $2.5 billion.
Amnesty said it had documented the systematic use of torture in both countries.
But there were two other nations where Amnesty believed U.S. equipment
was being used for direct violation or suppression of human rights.
One is Turkey, where there are reports of foreign-supplied aircraft and bombs
being used to destroy Kurdish villages.
And there is Colombia, where the drug war has produced accounts
of massive human rights violations.
Schultz says the U.S. must monitor more closely these two situations
and use the Colombian anti-narcotics effort as an example.
The United States government needs to know whether the aid which has been supplied
under that guise is or is not being used to commit human rights violations.
And until that end-use monitoring is in place and until we can be assured
that that is not the case or that those who have committed those kinds of abuses
will be brought to justice, then we are recommending that until that point
no further aid go forward.
Other countries in the report included Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, South Korea,
Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand, among others.
Much of the aid is being handed out under the guise of new programs,
such as democracy building and promoting peace.
Amnesty International says little has changed under the new administration.
Amnesty's Jim O'Day says the Bush administration ignored Iraq's human rights record
before the Persian Gulf War.
A few months before the invasion, this myopia of U.S. interest
was really clearly at the expense of the people and clearly very short-sighted
because Iraq then exported its terror.
And when other interests were considered greater, the oil and other interests,
the U.N. then used human rights to say we have to stop this man
because of human rights abuse.
Much of the rationale for maintaining military assistance
is based on securing strategic U.S. interests,
and those interests require strong and stable regimes.
But Shultz with Amnesty says the U.S. military assistance programs
are doing just the opposite.
To ignore human rights abuses within a country, Egypt, Turkey, or wherever,
is in fact to destabilize that country further internally.
And if Turkey or Egypt or any other country is a strategic ally of the United States,
we surely don't want to see that country unstable.
But conservatives counter those like Amnesty are not being realistic.
I think they give too much credit to the United States.
Bernie Wei with the American Defense Institute.
A lot of that instability is not United States created.
That instability predates the United States.
Countries have never really been democracies.
Many of them have been autocracies or perhaps even theocracies
or some form of monarchy at one point or another.
Wei maintains that military support for these regimes is essential.
But critics of the increasing U.S. military sales abroad
think there's another reason for the drive to arm these regimes,
the shrinking defense budget.
Caleb Rossiter with a project on...
.