But if they could, they would, Bundy would bomb for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood, Bundy would blow!
And good evening, everybody. This is Emanuel Goldstein.
Off the Hook is the program. We're here until 11 o'clock.
And the topic, as always, is the Internet, the telephone system, how it affects all of us,
and what you can do about it, and what can be done to you through it, and that kind of thing.
A lot of craziness happened this past week over the Internet.
You might have read some things in newspapers and seen things in Time magazine. We're going to get to that.
We have some scary news, as always.
And we have some news updates that involve some people that we know that have been here before.
All that coming up right here on Off the Hook.
Well, we have news out of Pensacola, Florida.
Which seems a bit frightening.
And we should verify, well, we should tell you that this has not been verified.
This has not been confirmed. This is something that is being passed around on the Net.
And as you know, some of the things that get passed along on the Net are not 100% accurate.
But if this is accurate, it's pretty darn scary.
According to this article, there are 25 bulletin board systems operating in Pensacola, Florida, the day before yesterday.
And as of yesterday at 5 p.m., there were 10 fewer.
The FBI descended on 10 bulletin boards in the Pensacola area.
One system operator, a paraplegic, was held by two armed thugs by the arms and grilled with questions for 30 minutes while they ransacked his apartment.
After the first 30 minutes, they sat him down in a chair in the middle of his front lawn, not his wheelchair, without a jacket or coat, in the 43-degree weather yesterday in Pensacola.
For two hours.
In another case, 30-odd stormtroopers descended on a Pensacola computer store as the customers scattered.
After they had succeeded in ruining the business's reputation in its entirety, they moved to the system operator's home.
Equipped with search warrants, they took his home apart and put it back together, again confiscating equipment all the way down to the pencils on his desk.
And in the process, they found that the guy had a bag of marijuana tucked away in a nightstand in his bedroom.
And that got him a night in jail.
One system operator was held at gunpoint as the thought police continued their raid, refusing to allow him to phone his lawyer.
Another area system operator in Pensacola was held with his wife and two children, ages 5 and 7, at gunpoint,
forced to lie face down on the floor in the living room, hands behind their heads, while the FBI raid took place.
And all this supposedly because of some GIF files that were floating around on the Internet.
That's what the word is at this point.
The same files the local university in Pensacola carries.
The university was not one of the systems busted.
A bit of an inequity if we're reading this properly.
According to this writer, he is in favor of declaring cyberspace its own sovereign state.
A nation all its own.
A nation without physical boundaries.
And why not? Isn't that what the church is?
A nation unto itself immune to the interference of the government.
It seems to me that the transfer of ideas and concepts is what the church stands for in the most basic of terms.
It seems to me that cyberspace needs to unite and form its own government.
Well, apart from the fact that I really can't stand the word cyberspace,
there does seem to be some merit to the idea of having some sort of a self-governing society.
There's been talk of all sorts based on past examples.
And one particular bulletin that is floating around has to do with the Digital Liberty Forum.
This is also being sent everywhere on the net.
Friends of Liberty is becoming increasingly apparent that the arrival of cyberspace
is destined to engender a fundamental discontinuity in the course of human relations.
This is a source of great optimism and opportunity for those of us who believe in freedom.
Many of you who participated in the lively debates that take place in these forums
have seen a number of activist organizations spring up claiming to represent the cause of freedom.
And, if you are like me, you have cheered these groups,
only to watch them get bogged down in a quagmire of real politics.
It is a sad fact that the beast in Washington has evolved into a self-perpetuating engine,
expert at co-opting the principles of even the most ardent reformers.
Slowly but surely, all those who engaged the system
are ultimately absorbed into the mainstream of majoritarianism.
I don't think I've ever said that word before.
For example, what can be more discouraging than watching an organization
that started out as a cyber-civil liberties group
—I think they're talking about the Electronic Frontier Foundation here—
shift its focus to creating new forms of government entitlements
while endorsing intrusive wiretap legislation
because they didn't want to jeopardize their influence and prestige
amongst the Washington power elite.
Some of us believe we can seek ultimate redress at the polls.
Many pundits have declared our recent national elections a watershed in politics,
a point that represents the high watermark of big government.
Nonsense.
The names have changed.
The chairs have been rearranged.
But the game remains the same.
The so-called choices we are presented with are false.
Hardly better than the mock one-party elections held by failed totalitarian regimes.
There must be a better way.
I would like to announce the formation of a new group, Digital Liberty,
that has chosen a different path.
By the way, Digital and Liberty share a common L, so it's one word.
We intend to bypass the existing political process.
We reject consensus-building based on the calculus of compromise.
Instead, we plan to leave the past behind,
much as our pioneering forefathers did when they set out to settle new lands.
It is our mission to create the basis for a different kind of society.
And this goes on for quite some pages here.
But basically they say you can join Digital Liberty
if you can honestly answer yes to the following two questions.
Actually, these aren't questions, these are statements,
but I guess if you agree with these two statements.
Number one, I renounce the use of coercive force as a tool of social or economic policy.
No? No? OK. I think we all agree with that.
Number two, I do not derive the majority of my income from funds taken from taxpayers.
I guess. I mean, let's say you work selling hot dogs in the stadium.
Well, who's going to pay you, the people in the stadium and their taxpayers?
But I don't think that's what they mean.
I think they mean from taxes or something like that.
OK. Well, anyway, how do you join Digital Liberty?
If you qualify, send the message to digitalliberty-request at phantom.com.
Remember, Digital and Liberty share a common L and a dash.
Then request at phantom.com with the word subscribe in the subject line
and the message body as follows.
Subscribe Digital Liberty your name and welcome to the future.
I don't know if you have to say that, but I guess you might have to.
And I guess if you don't have access to the net, there's not much point to being in this group.
I'm not really sure. We'll be keeping an eye on that.
It seems like groups are springing up every week.
We talked about the Internet Liberation Front last week,
and boy, they're in all the papers this week, aren't they?
How many of you saw the Josh Quintner piece yesterday?
You saw it? In Swordfiber?
Sure did.
All right. An attack hack hands out a little holiday cheer.
In all fairness to Josh Quintner, he did not write that headline.
He didn't write that.
I mean, I know he didn't write that.
Even without asking him, I can tell.
An attack hack hands out a little holiday cheer.
Apparently what happened to him was that he's got this book coming out,
of which you're a part of.
Yes, that's true.
You play prominently. Your story does.
And I guess certain people didn't like the piece that came out in Wired this past month.
Let me just make it clear, no mistake here.
You hand me a copy of Wired, I will recoil with the same exact motion
as if you hand me a box of Ronald Reagan's feces.
But that's just my personal feeling on that.
Is Wired really a good target for people that are?
I guess they are in a way.
They do commercialize the Net quite a bit.
But as a person, a human being,
one particular individual person, is that really a good target?
I don't know. I don't know about that.
This guy was targeted because he's got this book coming out
and because he's excerpted in Wired this month.
I assume that's the reason.
Maybe there's some grudge from years ago.
And what they did was, first of all, they mail-bombed him.
The thing we read last week.
Well, he says he only got three copies in his mailbox,
and then all of a sudden there were 35 megs of mail in his mailbox.
I guess he just sort of assumed that they were all the same thing.
And what he did was, if you read this article,
which appeared in yesterday's paper in Part 2,
if you sent me email between Wednesday and Monday,
resend it because it's forever gone.
You know, that hurts to see that because there's no reason to do that.
There's no reason to lose all of your mail.
There's always a way around things like that.
If you were mail-bombed, you as a computer expert, Fiber,
there are ways of weeding things out.
Yeah, but 35 megs would take a particularly long time.
And you don't know that...
Well, the big difference is that it didn't go directly to his mailbox.
Josh happens to have a UUCP feed,
which basically means that his mail gets queued up
on a major service provider's computer.
And they take a dim view of having 35 megs.
Oh, they would because he wouldn't even know
until he went to retrieve his mail, which I'm sure didn't even happen.
They probably notified him long before he logged in to pick his mail up.
So, wow.
Well, we had a sort of similar thing happen.
I don't really think it's the same.
What happened on Usenet over this past week
was either done for a different reason or done by different people.
I'm not really sure, but it was kind of interesting.
Somebody in my name decided to post this message
several thousand times on Usenet in three newsgroups.
Alt.2600, which is really an interesting newsgroup most of the time
when the messages are different.
Alt.CurrentEvents-NetAbuse.
Actually, it's Alt.Current-Events.Net-Abuse,
which certainly fit into that category.
And the final newsgroup was Alt.Test,
which was the problematic one because when you post something to Alt.Test,
you get back a reply saying that this message was received
from various machines around the world.
Now, when you post several thousand messages to Alt.Test,
you can imagine what happens.
What someone did somehow was forge a name.
They didn't actually break into the account I've got over on the well.
They were able to forge a posting name
so that everybody thought that's where it came from.
After putting up several thousand of those,
the next step, I believe, was creating gibberish names
so that you couldn't just go out and kill all the messages
from Emanuel at well.sf.ca.us.
These were random names or just gibberish names,
so there was no way to kill them, and the titles were gibberish, too.
So a whole few thousand of those went out.
Then they tied it into the Fortune Program.
Fortune Program is this thing some people use when they log in or log off
that gives them a neat little quote,
like how many Pentium engineers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
1.9, I think, or something close like that.
Basically what happened then was they posted certain fortunes.
You saw posts from Woody Allen and from Orson Welles
and various other famous people
that obviously were not posting to the net,
but since they were being quoted from the Fortune Program, it looked like they were.
It was improving in quality as far as what this particular person was doing
for whatever reason.
So after a while it all stopped,
but messages from Alt.Test machines
were flooding into the well.
I think we got a total of about 25,000 of them.
Through the use of a couple of creative scripts
written by some very valuable people to know,
we were able to pretty much weed out
all of the messages coming from machines
and save the ones that were coming from humans.
When you have computers, when you're working with them,
you can generally make them do what you want.
Or if you don't know what you're doing,
you can be victimized in a bad way.
That's something you've got to know when you get into this.
The other thing that happened to Josh was
he had some phone shenanigans.
Maybe you understand what happened a little bit better than I do.
Why don't you explain it?
Just from speaking with Josh, he explained to me that someone had forwarded his calls
to either an answering machine or a voicemail system
and put up a fake greeting
pretending to be Josh.
From what he said, it was basically just a mockery of him.
The funny part that I saw in the whole thing
was that friends of his calling him
actually left messages after they heard that greeting.
I think he must know some pretty strange people.
The message went something like this.
Hi, this is Josh Quitner.
I'm not half as good a journalist as Paul Tuff.
Then an obscenity, which was deleted from the newspaper.
What he says was...
Paul Tuff, by the way, a journalist for Harper's.
Now some people might find this hack disturbing.
What I found disturbing was the large number of people,
extremely close friends, who left messages.
One of our best friends in Huntington later said she left three messages
and wanted to know why we never called back.
My editor at Wired Magazine left a message.
My mother left a message.
Even Paul Tuff, who is a better journalist than me, left a message.
I don't know. A lot of people, I guess,
nothing surprises them anymore.
Okay, so they remote call forwarded?
I don't know the particulars.
It could either have been remote call forwarding or just normal call forwarding.
Okay, I believe the phone company said it was remote call forwarding.
What is remote call forwarding?
Well, I don't know that we should necessarily believe anything the phone company says.
That's true.
Well, let's go on the assumption that the phone company,
We know it's not true.
Remote call forwarding is a feature that usually normal people don't order.
It's extremely expensive.
Usually businesses order it to have something similar to a foreign exchange number.
It's not only foreign exchange.
It could be anywhere in the country.
And usually with remote call forwarding,
there is no actual physical phone line involved.
All it is is a phone number and an office equipment number at the switching system.
And just by entering in a sequence of commands on the switching computer itself,
they could redirect the calls from that number to anywhere in the country
or really anywhere in the world.
But I've never heard of anyone getting remote call forwarding for somewhere else on the planet.
It usually tends to be in the United States.
Interesting.
How would you turn such a thing off if you did have something on?
You can't.
It's something that's set up by the phone company.
It's a special order.
That's probably why if they use that,
they went out of their way to do that.
What do you think of this kind of shenanigans?
Is this some sort of a prank here?
Are we looking at something more serious?
Should we be calling in storm troopers or what?
In and of itself, it sounds really silly,
but I think in the larger scheme of things,
the MO of everything that's going on
seems to be being perpetrated by the same group of people.
The whole internet liberation front
and the whole posse thing and the not-too-distant past.
And now this business.
Do you think there's reality to it?
Are people just flinging around a bunch of names?
Are there organized groups here?
Or is it just pretty much the way it's been in the past?
I think it's just a loosely knit organization
of friends and friends of friends
that are just causing mischief.
Interesting.
We have also as a guest with us today
somebody who was quite insistent
on being allowed to speak their mind.
Whoops, I'm sorry about that.
Someone who runs an internet site.
Here in New York, actually.
I don't want to give out too many details,
but I believe, sir, you had something
you wanted to read from the Bible
that pertains to these people.
Ezekiel, I believe?
Ezekiel 25, 17.
The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides
by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men.
Very true.
Blessed is he who in the name of charity and good will
shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness.
For he is truly his brother's keeper
and the finder of lost children.
And I will strike down upon thee
with great vengeance and furious anger
those who attempt to poison
and destroy my brothers.
And you will know my name is the Lord
when I lay my vengeance upon thee.
Well, it wasn't really necessary to fire the guns,
but I guess it did add to the point.
Thank you.
One internet provider here in New York.
Wow.
You know it's against FCC rules to fire weapons in the studio.
Well, okay, that's one way of looking at it.
Did you happen to hear what happened to our friends
out in California, Richard Thomas,
amateur action bulletin board system?
Not lately.
This came from the Associated Press dated December 3.
This is pretty sick, if you ask me.
The case involved,
as the case in Pensacola seems to involve,
pornographic or just sexually oriented pictures,
GIFs, being distributed.
In this particular case,
the amateur action bulletin board
was being run out of California.
There was no problem with California laws.
It pretty much fit into the definitions
of what was defined as acceptable in the community there.
But different communities have different standards.
We here at BAI are always thinking about that
because community standards
are what the FCC uses as a virtual crutch
to define what you can and cannot do on the radio.
The community standards of New York are a lot different
than the community standards of Paducah, Kentucky.
So in this particular case,
what's really kind of nutso here
is the fact that this bulletin board
was called by somebody in Memphis, Tennessee
who took offense.
And they actually were able to try
the system operators of a bulletin board in California
based on the community standards of Memphis, Tennessee.
It's sort of like somebody
reaching his arm out of the grave from the 17th century
and pulling you back and saying
I don't like the kind of talk you're spouting here
because it offends me.
Never mind that certain people
have evolved faster than other people
and that some of us are Neanderthals and some of us are Einsteins.
This actually happened.
And it gets worse
because as of December 3rd
the two of them, the couple who we have spoken to
we spoke to Robert Thomas on the radio here
a couple of years ago
they drew sentences of at least two and a half years
in prison for this
for sending pornographic images via computer
in a case that raises questions about how to apply obscenity law
in cyberspace.
The prosecution of Robert Thomas and his wife Carlene
were charged in the place where the material was received
rather than where it originated.
The Thomases were found guilty in July of transmitting obscenity
via interstate telephone lines.
A postal inspector testified that he joined the bulletin board
under a fake name and received the images in his computer in Memphis.
Robert Thomas was sentenced to 37 months in prison.
Carlene received 30 months under federal sentencing rules.
Both must serve the full term.
The judge, Judge Julia Gibbons
said that the government can seize the couple's computers
to use to run the amateur action bulletin board.
And of course their lawyer will be launching an appeal.
One of the appeal arguments will focus on
the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 ruling
that defines obscenity by local community standards.
Critics of the government's case say
that it is a violation of the law
Critics of the government's case say
that with the advent of computer networks which have no boundaries
the meaning of local community is debatable.
A couple argue that the trial they were prosecuted in Memphis
because it was a conservative city
and it increased the chances of a conviction
and lo and behold they got one.
That case really frightens me.
We had something here a couple of years ago.
A satellite channel came out of New York
and somebody I think in Mississippi or Georgia
or someplace like that was upset by the fact
that this pornographic satellite channel
was being rained down from the heavens
and they actually were able to get the thing put out of business.
It really happened.
But the guy didn't go to jail. He lost his business.
That really is terrible.
They have a family.
They are decent people in their community.
And they're being sent to prison for upwards of three years.
It's incredible.
I don't know if they have to go to prison in Tennessee
which would really be the pits.
What do you know about that federal guideline
that says they have to serve the whole thing?
What happened to murderers getting out on parole in 18 months?
I believe they're based on Memphis, Tennessee community standards.
But this kind of thing is being allowed by...
It's not really clear in this article if it's federal or if it's state.
That's a good question.
They just say under federal sentencing rules.
Does it make sense?
If it's federal, how can they be charged according to community standards
in the state of Tennessee?
Whose community standards are the feds going to use?
There's no federal community standards so they have to pick one.
And apparently they said,
okay, you guys can be the community here that we're going to have standards for.
This is something I think everybody should be in an outrage about
because just think of where this is going to lead.
We in New York are always offending people in other parts of the country.
Now we can be sent to jail for it
if we send out a message on the net
or a picture on the net or something like that.
This is where I really veer off the road with the Democrats
who I think are a bunch of wimps.
You've got to fight fire with fire.
You have to start standing up to people that have receding IQs
and want to impose them on everybody else.
They have to start throwing things back in their face.
You don't have to apologize for being liberal.
You don't have to apologize for thinking one way or veering one way.
Just do it. Be proud of it.
As long as people are not forcing others to go live their lifestyle,
there's no problem.
But that's not what's happening.
Conservative views in this country are very aggressive
and they're only going to get more so.
I think we really better take into account
as connectivity increases.
Speaking of feds,
the FCC is auctioning off some more frequencies.
This is one of your favorite things, isn't it?
You don't like the idea of...
Carving up the electromagnetic spectrum like a pizza pie
is a really ridiculous idea.
Like who's going to sell light next or something?
We can all see the sun at the same time.
We can all see a light bulb at the same time.
But if 50 different people are broadcasting on 99.5 at the same time,
it could be problematic, don't you think?
To a degree, yeah.
Inherently, universally wrong with it.
I think there should be a lot more space
on the commercial radio dials for all kinds of variety.
It's amazing how much of the sameness you keep hearing
when you tune the dials.
Of course, maybe more space wouldn't solve that
because with cable now we get something like 750 channels now
and I keep saying the same things over and over again
no matter what and it's all the same crap.
It really is.
You even have stations like Bravo, Fine Arts TV
and they're not allowed to say four-letter words.
Fine Arts, they cuss sometimes.
There was a production of Sid and Nancy the other night.
Can you imagine Sid and Nancy without four-letter words?
They had all these spaces.
It was like somebody turning on and off the knob every two seconds.
It's a farce and this is something you pay for.
You pay for this on cable yet for some reason
somebody in Kansas or some farmer in Ohio or something
is upset and you have to live by his rules.
It's not right.
It's going to be an interesting next couple of years though
with people like Jesse Helms and Newt Gingrich at the forefront.
By the way, I figured something out.
You know the little animal creatures, newts, right?
They're cold-blooded. Think about it.
Newts are cold-blooded.
I see some bumper stickers in that.
The money from the bumper stickers can go to help other liberal-type causes.
Further tear down the fabric of moral upbringing and all that.
Anyway, the phone frequencies.
This is for PCSs, for personal communication services.
This is Star Trek.
This is basically walking around with a communicator
and somebody beeping you and you're there.
It's a phone number you carry around with you all the time.
It's not required by law, but that, of course, is something around the corner.
It's a 2 GHz band of the spectrum.
It's been set aside for the new wireless communication services.
They'll include portable phones, computers, fax machines,
and other imaging devices.
They'll be sold in 30 MHz and 10 MHz slices.
Just like a pizza pie, yes.
MHz and GHz are large and larger units of radio frequency.
That's an official Newsday explanation.
These frequencies are currently used as auxiliary frequencies
for police, fire departments, and the military.
Those services will be relocated to different frequencies
at the expense of the new user.
I don't know what these frequencies are.
If anyone out there knows what the frequencies to these new services are,
I'd love to know.
I'm sure my scanner will get them. I hope so.
It's become so difficult now to find scanners that get 800 MHz.
You can't get those ICOM-R 4SRAs or 2SRAs anymore.
You can get them, but they have 800 MHz blocked out.
I don't know how much a scanner is going to do for you
considering these are probably going to be in the microwave range
if they're finding a spare 2 whole GHz.
They say that this is currently used by fire departments and police.
Are they up that high?
It must be a really huge deal.
I don't know.
It must be a really huge chunk of the spectrum
in the microwave range that's reserved for them.
Interesting.
We'll have to get microwave scanners and little things like that.
There will always be new toys to play with.
I don't know when that's going to actually start,
but it's something that's been on the horizon for a while.
If you're thinking of going out and getting a cellular phone, don't
because they're rip-offs. They're extremely big and bulky
One of the things they say that everybody seems to agree with
is that the cost of cellular phones has to be cut in half.
It's currently something like $60 now. They're talking more like $30.
I think they should cut very definitely the cost of an incoming call.
There's no reason in the world why you should have to pay for that.
I think as more cell sites are put up
and more switching systems to handle those cell sites,
I think that will change.
Hopefully we'll see the same effect that happened with beeper technology.
When beepers first came out, they were really expensive.
They were very expensive.
Usually the only people that ever had beepers were doctors and lawyers.
But as time went by, beepers got smaller,
they got more inexpensive and more ubiquitous.
Now most everyone can have a beeper or does have a beeper
and pays possibly as little as $5 a month.
That's pretty cheap. You can get away with that.
You can get voicemail and those other things as well.
Before we start taking some phone calls here,
this is something that really ticked me off here.
Somebody showed me this article in the New York Post.
This article is based on an ad that appeared in Village Voice.
Front page of the New York Post.
Big letters.
City Spy Cams Baird.
Firm reveals secret traps for drivers.
I don't know if you remember this,
but several months ago,
the summer issue of 2600,
we printed all the addresses of all the cameras in New York City.
Every single one.
We just did it. We didn't make a big deal out of it.
Somebody had an ad in a paper
and they say stop paying tickets.
Learn law enforcement inside secrets. $8.
Find out New York City's hidden red light camera locations.
Unbelievable.
This is Excel Services, Department C.
P.O. Box 120-071, Staten Island.
The New York Post came out
and did an article on it.
One of the city's most closely guarded secrets,
the locations of its hidden traffic light cameras is out.
They explained how it was being done.
Then they went and printed all the addresses right there.
You think they ordered the list?
I guess they must have.
I don't think they subscribed to 2600.
According to the Department of Transportation,
the purpose of not making the locations public
is to have a major deterrent effect.
Those cameras, by the way,
they take pictures of people that run red lights.
Get their license plates and mail you a ticket.
Nice and convenient. No human contact necessary.
The Post answered Excel's ad
the first time it ran and received a list of 18 locations.
The camera box was located at each of the spots
our reporter visited.
The same list is here.
The New York Post gets the credit for it.
This is November 25th.
We had it out 6 months earlier.
Yet another example of the unfairness of society.
I'm ready for some phone calls.
How about you?
Sure.
Our phone number is 212-279-3400.
And you're listening to Off the Hook,
a program that talks about telephones and new technology,
Big Brother, the future, the past,
and whatever else is on your mind.
Good evening.
How is it you're always the first caller?
I wanted to mention some strange phone systems today.
Were you using them?
No.
I hear that's beautiful this time of year.
I'm thinking of going back there.
I would heartily recommend that.
It's really nice.
I think they have their winter festival which begins tomorrow.
Better hurry.
The phone system in the dorms
where the students live,
the whole town's exchange is 684.
315-684.
The dorms have this block of numbers like the last four digits.
The first number is 4.
So it would be 684-4123.
684-4193.
There's less than 1,000 students.
The thing is that when you call 6844-whatever,
you get directly into the dorm,
into the room, whatever room you call.
When you make an outgoing call,
let's say an operator-assisted call,
you don't have to dial 9 or anything.
You just dial the number, meaning O operator number.
They have on their ANI, they have it at 6844,000.
When I tried calling 6844,000,
I get somebody in the central office for some reason,
in the Morrisville Central Office DMS 10 switch.
He must be really thrilled to hear from you.
I talked to the guy. He told me a little about the switch.
That's how I got to see the DMS 10.
DMS 10, can't you hold those in your hands?
I've seen it. I've never seen a 100.
DMS 10 is what they have up in the northern territories of Canada,
serving remote communities.
But they have a thing that's like a host of a DMS 100
out in another town, which I think is in the 607 area code,
if I'm not mistaken.
I don't think they're on a Centrix.
You cannot directly dial calls. You only have to dial 0+.
The operators know that you're calling from a university,
although they know that your phone number is 4844,000.
4844,000, that's probably just the main billing account number.
No, because when you dial 0,
you get regular 9 at the GTE operator.
Okay, but they won't connect you to anything you want, will they?
No. They'll say, oh, sorry, you're calling from a university phone or whatever.
Right. Will they tell you the number you're calling from?
Yeah, they'll say 6844,000.
Right, that's the number that shows up, and that number shows up with a restriction
saying that you can't bill to it.
Right, but why, if my number's 4123, when you dial it,
you'd get like a DID thing?
It doesn't necessarily have to be.
It could be generating different ANI.
It's just specified as the billing telephone number.
That was done to us at 2600 without our knowledge
once our fax machine was turned into...
If you dialed 958, you got a different phone number.
You got our main billing number, and that played havoc with our long-distance company
because they wouldn't allow casual use.
You had to dial direct from the number you were calling from,
and they were seeing the main number and saying, hey, they don't have an account.
So even though we did have an account, we couldn't make any calls.
Wait a minute. Are you saying that you were hooked up to a PBX?
This has to do with ANI.
So when you dial 958, you get a different number?
Yeah, in that particular case.
Now, the other thing that I wanted to mention
is that the public safety department has these walkie-talkies
that when you call them,
their walkie-talkies are hooked up to their telephone or something.
It's like a walkie-talkie. It looks like a scanner,
but it has the numbers of the telephone.
Does that have a switch hook on the side, too?
Well, actually, the switch hook is the button that you push to talk.
You talk, and then you speak,
and then you release it to listen to what the other person is saying.
How does that work?
Well, it sounds like they're just patching phone calls through. Anybody can do that.
Do a walkie-talkie?
Yeah, a lot of hams do that all the time.
But this seems like a special walkie-talkie unit
Any scanner has a touch-tone keypad on it.
Really?
Yeah, they happen to be making use of it.
But do you just hook the base up to your telephone?
No, it has nothing to do with the telephone at all.
Touch-tones are used on ham radio to program repeaters,
to use all kinds of things.
I understand that, but when I called the direct number,
I got the radio, the walkie-talkie.
And have a radio transceiver hooked up to it,
so that they could signal the telephones through their walkie-talkie,
if that's what they're doing.
They can have all kinds of bizarre systems,
because up there, there's a lot of time to think.
You can't figure out that Marshall storm systems, can you?
Storm systems?
Dorm systems.
What is there to figure out?
I can tell you that that's very possible,
just by changing your ANI with the phone company,
for what billing number you want to have shown.
Rather than have 1,000 different numbers showing up on bills,
they decide to have one.
But isn't it easier when you get the bill, that you get the phone number of the exact...
Well, you see, they're not going to be getting a bill that's very big,
because you won't be able to...
No, I'm saying when you make a color call or something.
For their benefit, they're doing it for their benefit.
So yeah, you'll have to get used to that fact,
but they're not doing it for your convenience.
Now, I also want to mention that the new 516 exchange,
which is in New York City,
but it's not an exchange yet.
It's sort of the only exchange for the 25 cents a 30 seconds pay phones.
And when you dial 958, it says 516 whatever.
Where is this located?
Okay. Actually, that's been there for a while, hasn't it?
Well, maybe they don't take incoming calls.
Interesting. We'll check into that.
It could be on an in-house switch that's located in the vicinity.
Hey, it's a DID.
Well, it is at pay phones in Penn Station. I've seen it.
Yeah. I'm saying you can have a small in-house switch
handling or serving all the pay phones in a given area.
That's what they do in the World Trade Center, South Tower.
Well, actually, those are call cops, which is another thing I want to mention.
Is that where you dial 2-1-1 or something for emergency?
I forget. I haven't been to the trade center in a while.
World Trade Center, there's something weird where you didn't dial 9-1-1,
I couldn't quite figure that out. 3-1-1?
Yeah, but now they're on call cops.
Oh, they changed it?
Yeah, TCG call cops.
Used to be able to make free phone calls by dialing the operator
and having her connected with 4-1-1.
The TCG operator used to be able to dial 4-1-1,
and when you got the number, you got the option of connecting.
But that doesn't work anymore.
Well, things are changing for the worse everywhere.
Listen, we're going to get on to another phone call. Thanks for all the info.
Good evening. You're on.
Go ahead.
Hello?
Speak up.
Yes, go ahead.
Hello, how are you doing?
We're fine. How are you?
What can we do for you?
I want to say hi to Fiber first. Welcome back.
Thanks.
Today when I was in the city, I saw a yellow phone near Murray Street.
You saw a yellow phone?
Yes, and it was a 9X phone.
Okay, now you saw a yellow phone that was a 9X phone?
Yes.
I'm not sure I understand. It's a pay phone?
It was a pay phone, I think.
I wasn't able to examine it because I had to get to a certain place.
I was wondering if you knew anything about it.
Well, it was sitting there in the street, a yellow phone?
No, it was just like a regular telephone.
And it was in a public place?
Yes.
I don't know. It sounds like one of those emergency phones.
It had 9X on it, and it was just like a regular pay phone.
Okay, where is this located? We'll send a team out.
Near Murray Street and Chambers Street.
Okay, Murray Street and Chambers. You guys going to take it? Okay.
We're sending a couple of guys out to check it out.
Alright, good luck finding it. I'm sorry I can't tell you better.
No, it's probably wise for you not to get too involved with it,
because these kind of things can be dangerous.
I love playing with pay phones, but still.
Yeah, yeah. Enough is enough. Thanks for calling.
Good evening. You're on the air.
Yeah, I just had a question.
In 516, just recently, we have to dial 1 before we make a long-distance call.
Isn't that inconvenient?
Yeah, it's a pain in the neck.
Join the rest of the country.
No, but you know what? In the switch that I am in,
you don't have to dial 1 before an 800 number,
and if you dial 10XXX for carrier access code,
you don't have to dial 1 before the area code then.
Right. Well, they're making us do it now,
but the other thing that really annoyed me was,
I tried making a collect call,
and now even if you're making a collect call to a phone number
that's within the 516 area code,
you have to dial 0516 and then the number.
That's right. It's part of the same reason.
Next month, January, is when the new area code system is going to go into effect.
That means that area codes no longer will have to have 1 or 0 as the middle digit.
So when you dial 0 plus a number,
how is it going to know what the first three digits are?
Are they an area code or are they not an area code?
You'd have to rely on some sort of a timeout system
where you just dialed 7 digits and it's waiting for the rest
because let's say you were calling a 279 exchange, 0279.
0279 might be an area code next year, too.
Right.
How will it know?
I tried dialing 01516, which would seem to make sense.
No, that's going to connect you overseas
because 011 is how you dial overseas.
01 would be operator-assisted,
and you'd be connecting to whatever country code is 51 or 516.
I see.
Yeah, be careful with that.
I think a lot of people might be making some interesting phone calls
in the next couple of weeks.
Right, yeah. You get an interesting recording when you try that.
What did you get?
I don't even remember. Is this something very weird?
Uh-huh.
I never tried it again because it kind of scared me, actually.
Yeah, well, I think that was probably the intent of the recording
was to scare you out of doing that again.
All right, well, thanks a lot.
Okay, thanks for calling.
Every now and then somebody accidentally calls Australia
when they want to call something in Minnesota,
you know, the 612 area code.
They wind up calling country code 61, winding up down.
And they speak English, so you don't know, you know,
because there's people with Australian accents everywhere.
So it can be frightening.
Good evening.
Hello?
Oh, trying to reach WBAI.
You're on the air.
Oh, how's it going?
Okay, how are you?
Good.
I wanted to ask you guys if you'd heard anything about the NSA
or any information about what they've been up to recently.
What the NSA has been up to recently.
Well, we're not supposed to talk about the NSA.
They don't like it when we do.
Recently, well, they're, you know,
going around listening to things and writing things down everywhere.
That's what they do.
Is there something in particular, something specific?
Yeah, the yellow phone.
Maybe they put the yellow phone downtown.
Yellow phone, maybe, yeah.
Well, I went to their shopping center,
which is in Fort George Meade, Maryland.
It's not really their shopping center.
They share it with a military base.
But it's kind of weird when you're there
and you realize that the butcher who hands you meat
is an employee in the Defense Department.
That's exactly true, though.
Everybody in the supermarket works for the government in some form.
Right.
And everything is really, really cheap there, too.
So you can just walk in off the street in Fort George Meade,
if you can find the place, and you can save, like, at least 20%.
Oh, like a big government town.
I'm thinking of organizing a few field trips down there, some buses.
We can just sort of pile into town and stock up whenever we need.
Exactly, exactly.
Do you know of any sources for information that might be available?
On the NSA?
Yeah.
Well...
The Puzzle Palace and other...
Yeah, the Puzzle Palace, obviously, would be something you would have read.
I imagine there must be news groups about this on the net.
Do you have net access?
Not at the moment.
Okay.
I'm hoping to join to get involved.
Look also in your library, you know, the National Security Agency.
Let's see.
What kind of newsletters?
You can read things like full disclosure.
Oh, all right.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, thank you very much.
I appreciate it.
Okay.
Thanks for calling.
Why is there smoke rising from the board?
Perhaps somebody could look into that.
Uh-oh.
I thought something smelled.
It seems to be on fire here, but technically I'm not supposed to leave the board,
so I'm going to continue as if nothing's on the way.
You guys deal with it.
What could be on fire?
This is a radio station.
We just, uh...
I don't know.
Okay.
We'll just bravely go on and go down with the sinking ship.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
White smoke or is it black smoke?
What color would you say the smoke is, white or black?
It's not black.
It's white.
It's probably white.
Oh, new Pope.
Great show tonight.
New Pope.
Two quick questions about the Internet.
First one, when I send an e-mail message out,
let's say I have an account with Delphi and you have one with Prodigy
and I send a message out, an e-mail message,
what's the physical path of that message?
How does it get from my laptop to your laptop?
The other question is, if I had an unlimited amount of money
and I wanted to be an Internet provider, what would I have to do?
Well, if you wanted to be an Internet provider, actually,
it's too bad Mark's running out into the street waving for the firetrucks
because he can answer this question much better than me.
Oh, got the fire extinguisher.
Are we going to use it?
Are we going to use the fire extinguisher on the air?
I've never seen this happen before.
Oh, great.
Well, more important than putting out the blaze right now,
this guy has a question about Internet access,
which I think that you're best qualified to answer.
Okay.
Let me just move back from the heat a little bit.
What's the question?
I'm sorry.
I'm kind of distracted here.
Can you ask the question again?
First question, real simple.
Let's say I have an account on Delphi and you have an account on Prodigy
and I send you email.
Right.
You get from my account to your account.
What's the physical path that it takes?
The physical path?
Well, what exactly do you mean the physical path?
Well, it doesn't just go up into the ether and magically appear on your computer.
No, of course not.
There's leased lines that are owned by service providers like Sprint
and Alternet and PSI and ANS.
Does the message get split up into packets and sent out?
Yeah, exactly.
It uses the Internet protocol,
and the Internet protocol is the packet switch protocol.
Okay.
If I had an unlimited amount of money and I wanted to become an Internet provider,
I'm trying to get a better idea of what's involved in becoming an Internet provider.
How do you get the leased lines?
What equipment do you need?
Are you interested in reselling?
Yeah.
Okay.
You're interested in reselling Internet service?
Yes.
Well, what you would do is that you'd have to negotiate some kind of deal,
obviously, first with the FCC.
Then after you got that out of the way,
you'd have to get together with the local telephone company
because your leased lines are nothing but big spools of cable
unless you could get permission from the local exchange carrier,
whether it be 9X or whether it be one of the newer companies like Metro Fiber Services or Teleport.
You would actually have to be networked through somebody's central office.
Okay.
Once that happens and I'm an Internet provider,
do other people's messages pass through my equipment,
or am I kind of a head end in things?
No, no, no.
If you're a network provider, if you're a large nationwide service provider,
or even if you're a somewhat large regional provider,
you would have gateways all over within your region that would be routing messages through them.
Okay.
Does that answer your question?
Thanks a lot.
Okay.
Good luck with your fire.
Thank you.
To update people on that, it seems to be out.
Anthony Sloan came in here and did something.
The board was something coming out of the board.
We don't know for sure yet.
A dull moment here.
How many other radio stations burst into flames while you're here?
Not only while you're listening, but while you're talking over the airwaves.
We did mention the NSA.
Maybe one of the callers out there figured out a way,
because it was coming from the phone lines.
It really was.
It was coming from this area right here where the phones come in.
I don't know.
There's some powerful people out there.
Good evening.
You're on the radio.
Hello?
Yeah, go ahead.
Hi.
I want to say something about the yellow phone.
Okay.
Let's hear it.
It comes down across from Stuyvesant.
Basically what it is, it's a credit card phone.
It has a little slot like an ATM.
Stick in your credit card.
What kind of credit card?
I have no idea.
I didn't look that closely.
Is it one of those phones that's like the European phones?
The ones by the Staten Island Ferry?
I'm not sure.
I don't go to the ferry that often.
Does it have a silver receptacle for the credit card to go in at the bottom?
Kind of.
Kind of in the middle.
It's towards the bottom.
It looks like an ATM slot, you know?
You stick in your card like at Citibank.
We're going to have to check this out.
So we're talking about credit cards like Visa and MasterCard?
It could be a calling card, but it's something you just stick in the card.
Well, the European phones take disposable debit cards.
They're not credit cards.
Oh, it looks like a credit card slot, like something for nothing like a MetroCard, like a real card.
Yeah.
Have you actually seen this up close?
Yeah, I went and I don't have a credit card, so I couldn't.
Did they actually mention the names of credit cards that it accepted?
No, I don't believe so.
Does it take coins, too?
I don't think so, no.
Okay, we're going to have to check this thing out.
Yeah, it was pretty exciting.
It was yellow, so.
Wow, that's a bizarre concept.
Right.
Thanks for the call.
Thanks for the info.
Bye.
This goes to show that when you have a question, someone out there has an answer.
And we're at the end of our time.
Hopefully, there will be a studio here next week so that we can do this again.
For now, we're going to put on a repeat of the evening's news and scrounge around for more firefighting equipment.
And, Fiber, thanks for coming in.
We'll see you next week.
Thank you.
The program is Off the Hook.
We're on every Wednesday night from 10 to 11.
See you next week.
Thank you.
I hope that's understood.
Bundling it up.
Good evening.
In the news tonight, we look at the defunding of the Congressional Caucuses, what one Democrat terms
congressional ethnic and philosophical cleansing.
And in New York, the city comes one step closer to banning smoking in virtually all public spaces.
And we hear again from a Puerto Rican prisoner of war speaking to us from behind federal bars.
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, December 7, 1994.
First to Washington for the Pacific National News.
The head of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, told a congressional committee the U.S. economy is doing well.
However, Greenspan warns inflation remains a peril.
Monetary policy works with considerable lags.
And waiting until inflation picks up risks a boom and bust economic cycle inimical to business
to saving an investment and to the longer-term growth of the U.S. economy.
Greenspan did not outline future plans.
Still, many expect the Federal Reserve to once again raise short-term interest rates later this month.
The United Nations wants to pull out some of the 1,200 Bangladeshi peacekeepers from Bihac.
French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé says the U.N. and NATO are drawing up plans to withdraw U.N. peacekeepers from Bosnia.
Juppé blamed the U.S. as well as the Bosnian Serbs and Muslims for what he called the failure of international mediation efforts.
In Juppé's words, we can no longer accept these soldiers being taken hostage and humiliated despite their courage.
State Department spokesperson Christine Shelley told reporters the U.S. supports the continued presence of U.N. peacekeepers.
We hope that the situation on the ground and the incidents of harassment and hostage-taking
could be significantly diminished if not eliminated altogether so that UNPROFOR could get on with its most important tasks,
which are clearly trying to provide a stabilizing presence in Bosnia
and also trying to make sure that the humanitarian goods reach the individuals and areas in question which truly need it.
A U.N. convoy bearing food reportedly has received permission from the Bosnian Serbs to enter Bihac, the first since October 1.
In Mexico, the governor-elect of Chiapas has said he would resign if that were to happen.