Build at a small community level, and then through the Internet, through networking,
this thing can become a major force in the society, and in fact, take back the national
government.
Okay.
We're just about out of time.
I want to thank you very much for sharing your experience there in Baltimore, Maryland.
That's quite all right.
I loved it.
And I hope I have a chance to visit you once again.
That was one of the memorable experiences during my life in 1992.
Thank you so much, Jerry.
Thank you.
And let me thank our board op, Barbara Fisher, and the call screener, Carol Joe Papik, and
Tom Wayland, associate producers, Mark Cummings, Georgia Kelly for the bookings, and even Dennis
Chunning out there, who's doing some help.
We appreciate all of it.
And for those of you who want to do, and thank you, Bea, and if you want to do something,
get in touch with us.
You know the number.
It's 800-426-1112.
We're not going to do it all overnight, but we've got to start somewhere.
We've got to start here.
We've got to start now.
So let us hear from you, and thanks for listening.
This is WBAI, listener-sponsored community radio, 99.5 FM, broadcasting from studios
atop beautiful 8th Avenue in dirty old New York.
Coming up next, Emanuel Goldstein and Off The Hook.
Stay tuned.
Ted Menjie here, inviting you to join Ken Gale and me for the next Nuff Said, when we'll
talk live with Mark Hamill, voice of the Joker on the animated Batman, the trickster on the
Flash TV show, and the star of, what was that 70s movie?
I'm Skywalker, I'm here to rescue you.
Oh, that's right, Star Wars.
And he's writing a comic for Dark Horse.
Join us on Tuesdays overnight, November 7th, from 3.30 to 6 a.m. Wednesday morning, for
Nuff Said and our special guest, Mark Hamill, here on WBAI, New York.
Good evening, folks, I'm the Joker, living proof that you don't have to be crazy to host
this show, but it helps.
And we don't need to tell you what it takes to listen to WBAI, but whatever it is, it
certainly helps, too.
It's 8 o'clock, and this is WBAI in New York City.
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 couldn't get much worse.
But if they could, they would.
For Billy Bond, for the best, expect the worst.
Oh, the time is good for Billy Bond.
And a very good evening to everybody.
This is Off The Hook, a special election night edition of Off The Hook, where we will completely
ignore the elections that are going on around us and talk about high technology and the
internet and the telephone systems and all kinds of things like that.
It's been an exciting week.
It's been a memorable week.
It's been a week of learning experiences and scandals and all kinds of revelations.
And you know, tonight is the night that something is going to happen that a lot of us never
thought would happen.
Tonight is the night that I'm going to say something very surprising about 9X.
But that's coming up in just a little bit.
We're here tonight, Fiber's here.
We're both here.
Good evening.
I have to say, you know, this last week, dealing with the ISDN nonsense, and you know, nonsense
is not the word I want to use, but the FCC has decreed that I can't use the word that
I would really like to use.
But I know everyone out there knows the word that I want to be able to use.
So I'd like for everyone out there to think of that word when I say nonsense, okay?
You know what the word is.
You know what I'm thinking.
The ISDN nonsense that I had to go through, for some reason you must be protected from
hearing the other word, even though you all can think it.
So, yes, the nonsense that I had to go through over the past week involving ISDN, I mean,
it's more painful than I think anything I've ever experienced in my life.
And I'm not kidding.
You know, this is more painful than anything I think anyone should have to go through.
I mean, we got our system up and running, and we finally found a net provider that can
provide access to us and is willing to do the 56K data over voice.
You know, everything seemed to be just great.
But then, what happened?
But then, out of nowhere, fate stepped in.
And, I mean, we've been able to get the connection going, okay?
But for some reason, and we had all kinds of problems.
We had all kinds of problems where something was wrong on our provider's router, and then
something was wrong with our hardware settings, and then all these other things were wrong.
And then just to make sure that in case we managed to figure out all that, in case we
managed to solve all those problems, there was still this one glaring problem waiting
for us at the very end.
And that was that if we wanted to call from point A to point B, namely from our office
to where the provider is, for some reason there's like a 1 in 500 chance that you'll
get a line good enough to actually handle 56K.
All the rest will not.
And that one line that's good enough happens to be the last line of all 500 of them, and
you have to hope everyone else is using all the bad ones, and then one day you'll get
the one you want.
And then hopefully you won't ever lose that line.
You'll be able to hold onto it forever.
Well, there might be more than one.
Maybe two.
Maybe two.
But the thing is, you have no trouble connecting from New York City to the site out there in
Western Suffolk.
Right.
Could we use names of towns here?
I guess we might as well do that, although I might point out there'll be some debate
as to the pronunciation of the town you're about to say, which is Comac.
Comac, right.
Well, some people say it's pronounced differently.
Some people say it's comic.
Comic?
All kinds of different...
We'll get letters.
We might even have demonstrators outside next week.
Do you say Comac?
I try not to say it at all.
That's why I said point B, but you sort of forced me into it.
I know people that live in Comac, and they say Comac.
Okay, fine.
Okay.
More power to them.
But the point is, they seem to have a central office that doesn't have very good trunk lines.
Well, it's not necessarily them.
It's the trunks between you and them.
Between the 2600...
Yeah, connecting Port Jefferson and Comac.
The 2600 offices will always get these bad trunks.
Now, you're able to call there from New York City, and you get better trunks.
We're able to call New York City from our office and get good trunks.
We're able to call other places on Long Island and get good trunks.
Now, what we're trying to do, first of all, is play around with call forwarding
so that we're able to call a different place and forward to the place that we really want to call.
But we have to call a place within our local calling zone.
Otherwise, we have to pay a permanent charge.
So far, the evidence that we've seen is that the trunks, which are probably still analog,
going between Port Jefferson and Comac, actually seem incapable of carrying 56K digital data.
And, of course, you can't complain to 9X because they'll turn around and say,
well, you shouldn't have any expectation of being able to pass 56K digital data over a trunk.
You should pay a penny a minute and get 64K.
See, if you place a call at 64K digital, it works fine.
No problems whatsoever.
No problem at all.
No problems.
Yeah, well, you know, I'm not going to buy into that so quickly, okay,
because you've been connected to 56K now for about three months.
I'm in Manhattan, though.
Without any problem.
And all I want is to have it connect for a couple of days at a time.
We've been able to get a few hours at a time, but that's about it.
So if you're trying to get through to 2600.com,
that might be why you don't get through sometimes is because we lost the line and we're trying to get it back.
Well, I think it has a lot to do with the 9X's priorities.
I think they would want to consider all accessibility within, say, Manhattan, within the city, within the five boroughs,
and then, say, next they would consider connections between the five boroughs and the outer boroughs to be a priority.
But as far as connecting to each other within the outer boroughs, they might not consider that as high a priority.
Well, right now what we're looking for is anyone out there that happens to have call forwarding in the western Suffolk area.
Now, the reason we're asking this is because if someone has call forwarding, we're able to call their line.
They forward to the line we want to connect to.
And just for experimental purposes, we want to see if it works.
And if it does work, then we can get a line installed and actually have to call that line to call the one we want.
Well, we know that the actual process works.
Whether or not it'll help you, we have to see.
We have to see about that.
So that's where we're heading on this.
Well, what we're trying to do, basically, is divert the call so that it's not going over the same trunk lines that connect you to COMAC directly.
We want to divert it through another CO, so it takes a different path.
Now, if we had, you know, the equivalent of a blue box or something,
we could somehow route this ISDN call to go the way we want it to go and get there in one piece.
You know, the funny thing is, we routed the call over MCI and Sprint, and it worked perfectly.
Can you imagine that? MCI and Sprint has better voice quality for local calls than 9X does.
Or AT&T.
Or AT&T. We tried AT&T as well.
Yeah, AT&T had the exact same result as 9X.
Unfortunately, they won $0.10 a minute.
$0.10 a minute, yeah, because it's a long-distance company.
I mean, I can understand that, because, I mean, who's going to place a long-distance call to make a local call?
It doesn't really make sense.
But the penny a minute for the 64K is just absolutely absurd.
Yeah.
Now, on to the surprise that I have for everybody today.
I actually think 9X has done something incredibly good for mankind, and let me tell you what it is.
They have this new calling plan that they just introduced, and you might see a couple of ads for it on TV.
It's not very widely known yet.
A caller made reference to it last week.
It's personally customized for everyone's telephone number.
What you do is you call them up, and you ask for information about the flat rate calling plan, and what they give you, there's three plans.
One plan is unlimited time calling anywhere within 516, 212, 718, and I believe most, if not all, of 914, as well as, of course, 917.
You get a flat rate for that.
Now, plan B is everything except your local calling area.
For instance, I guess in our case it would be everything but western Suffolk.
We'd call eastern Suffolk.
We'd call Nassau County.
We'd call New York City, but we would not be able to call a local area.
And plan C is, I think, a flat rate per minute.
I think it's around 5 cents a minute for anything outside your local zone.
So of those, I decided to check out plan B to see what kind of price I could get to, say, call New York City from western Suffolk and stay on forever.
And that's how these people are selling this service.
They say, yeah, you can make a call and stay on until the turn of the century.
It's no skin off our nose.
And then they look at your calling patterns from the period starting in July 94 running until June 95.
And I believe if you have a phone connected for three months during that period, that's enough to qualify you for this.
Now, obviously, people with new lines can't get this, at least not yet.
I had them look up one of my lines, and the price they gave me was something on the order of $95 per month.
For $95 a month, I could stay on all the time to New York City, to Westchester, Nassau County, Suffolk County.
And then I had them check another line which I never used.
And the rate they quoted me was $6.06.
Now, there's obviously a method to doing this.
If you have two phone lines and you use one and you don't use the other, with this plan, you simply call them up and give them the number that you don't use, and you'll get a tremendous rate.
Not that $95 is that bad to be able to call New York City unlimited, because I think ordinarily it would cost you a couple thousand bucks to keep a line open 24 hours a day.
So that's a pretty good deal in itself, but $6.06, that's phenomenal.
So this opens up a whole world of possibilities for everybody.
I mean, you can now, if you're out there on the island someplace, if you're up in Westchester and you've been tearing your hair out because you couldn't call an Internet provider in New York City because of the cost, well, that cost has just gone away.
It's a monthly flat fee.
Does this surprise you?
Well, yeah, but the first thing that comes to my mind is do they re-evaluate your usage after a certain period of time?
Well, I asked them pretty straightforward that question, you know, does this ever change?
They said, no, this never changes.
Now, I've heard from other fairly reliable sources that, yeah, they do re-evaluate, but, you know, even if they do re-evaluate and they say, okay, now you've got to pay this amount of money, you've got to go to the phone line somewhere else.
You know, you can keep playing this game, and I don't know how long it'll take them to do that.
I'm not sure exactly what, you know, what their goal is here, but the way the 9x representatives, I say plural, the way they, more than one of them explained it to me, they want to keep our business.
And what that says to me is that they think competition's right down the road, that we might get some better deals from some other people.
So they see this as a way of keeping 9x customers, and I see it as a really good idea.
It's a way of finally making things accessible.
It's weird, though, because the left hand of 9x doesn't seem to know what the right hand is doing.
On one hand, you have really interesting rate plans like this that are beneficial to consumers.
On the other hand, you have things like the penny a minute surcharge for 64k connections, which pretty much prices ISDN out of anybody's reach.
And I think the two sides need to talk to each other a little bit so that people can benefit.
So that was pretty phenomenal, and that could solve a lot of problems for a lot of people.
Now, on to something that I think is really kind of scary.
Have you read the New York Times this week, Farber?
I try not to.
Well, why's that?
I try to stay away from newspapers and newscasts.
Well, you know, it doesn't change anything.
The news is still out there.
Yeah, but that's just less bad news that I'll hear.
Well, the bad news is still there, though.
Yeah, but I won't know about it.
Ignorance is not bliss.
You have to know about these things.
And yes, folks, we read the New York Times on this show.
And one of the things that you may have seen, had you read the New York Times last week,
FBI wants advanced system to vastly increase wiretapping.
The FBI has proposed a national wiretapping system of unprecedented size and scope
that would give law enforcement officials the capacity to monitor simultaneously
as many as one out of every 100 phone lines in some high-crime areas of the country.
Now, I'm told that this is a front-page article by John Marco.
I'm told that they kind of messed up that story and that it's really one in a thousand phone lines.
Kind of an important fact that got omitted there, if that is true.
Either way, though, one in a hundred, one in a thousand.
We're talking something totally unprecedented, I think, in the history of mankind.
I mean, even Nikolai Chesescu would not be able to accomplish this.
And, you know, in Romania, where they tapped everybody's phones and they recorded it all onto cassettes,
there was no one around to listen to all of them.
You know, it's an incredible amount of stuff that piles up.
You had your phone wiretapped. You saw the transcripts.
Well, technically, I didn't have it wiretapped. It probably was.
It probably was, but you've seen transcripts of wiretapped phones for your case.
I mean, there's a lot of stuff there.
Yeah, it requires an awful lot of time and money and resources.
Piles and piles of paper when they print it out.
Well, the thing that I'm wondering about this statistic, one in a thousand,
is, on the one hand, you could say, does the FBI believe that every one in a thousand people is a criminal?
And then, on the flip side, you could say, is the FBI willing to let 999 criminals go free,
because they're only tapping one in a thousand?
That's an interesting way of looking at it.
But do you know that the FBI says...
Do you know how many wiretaps they say they did in recent years?
An average over a year.
Well, I've seen statistics. I don't know if it was over a year or over a number of years.
But I think the actual number of wiretaps that actually resulted in a prosecution, I think, was about a thousand.
No, actually, according to this, they've conducted an annual average of less than 850 court-authorized wiretaps.
Oh, really? It's even less than that?
It's got to do with whether or not they actually prosecuted.
Although, I understand that when the feds prosecute, they get a 97% conviction rate or something along those lines.
That comes out to be about one in every 174,000 phone lines.
So that's what it is right now.
They tap one in every 174,000.
They want to bring that down to one in every 1,000.
I can't do the math, but that's a phenomenal increase.
That's something that is going to affect a lot of people if it goes through.
And it's all tied into that digital telephony bill.
I'm confused by what the meaning of one in a thousand is.
They say, okay, there are going to be three categorizations of communities.
Category one is going to be made up of urban areas where most electronic surveillance currently takes place.
In these regions, telecommunications carriers will be required to make available up to 1% of their network capacity when sought by law enforcement officials.
Now, that's not a typo.
They said, again, one in a hundred, one percent.
So I don't quite know what this story is.
Maybe this is factual errors in it.
In lower crime urban and suburban areas designated category two, phone companies would need to make available up to 5 tenths of a percent of their network lines.
And while the predominantly rural low crime category three areas require 0.25%.
It seems like they're just bent on categorizing everybody.
Well, percentage of their network available for what exactly?
To do whatever they want with.
To be able to listen, to be able to get numbers that are dialed.
It's all kind of nebulous.
But if they wanted someone out of a thousand, they would just get that someone.
They want the ability to be able to wiretap multiple lines all at the same time.
Right, but they can do that now.
Not to this degree.
Not this number.
We're talking tens of thousands of wiretaps going on at once.
I don't know what it takes to actually conduct a wiretap with a central office.
But it's usually quite a commotion, isn't it?
Well, I mean, I can tell you what's involved in coordinating a wiretap with a central office.
They basically run a leased line to a listening post.
And they have people do shifts.
Various FBI employees come in on various different shifts or secret service, whichever the case may be.
And they listen in, they take notes if things sound interesting.
And all the while this is all being taped.
And they do spot checks to make sure that the recorders are working and so on and so forth.
Well, they're looking at being able to monitor 74,250 phone lines at once.
Hey, there's some employment opportunities for FBI agents out there if they're all going to be sitting around listening to 74,250 phone calls.
Well, to me, what it sounds like is that obviously they can't just use the same 40-year-old analog equipment that they're using to tap analog phone lines.
This is all involving digital telephones.
Right, they want to be able to do it for digital lines easily.
The key word is easily.
They just don't want to have to spend the extra money and the effort that's needed in order to tap a digital line, which isn't any big deal.
Is that to say that us making calls on our ISDN lines will go virtually untapped until all this equipment is ready?
Because our lines are digital?
It's hard to say what the FBI is thinking right now.
It just sounds really efficient.
Yeah.
But if they want to make it as easy as possible, what's considered easy?
Them just dialing up a phone number in the person's central office and entering in a code and then being able to listen?
It could be something like that, and that's what we were concerned about.
Because if it's that easy, anyone can find it and get access to it.
Here's an interesting and kind of ominous story out of Canada.
There's a report that Canadian police chiefs are clamoring for some kind of backdoor into citizen communications
Many other governments put under pressure by the U.S. administration to support its privacy-invasive policies.
Canadian law enforcement may be shying away from clipper-like crypto-key escrow, possibly because they realize what a ridiculous idea it is,
but are already considering a ban on cellular phones that prevent eavesdropping.
Can you imagine that?
First of all, they make it illegal for anybody to listen.
And then they make it illegal to make a phone that you can't listen in on.
Well, it's already illegal here.
To make a cellular phone that you can't listen in on?
Of course it is.
What law is that?
You can't legally obtain a cryptographically secure cellular phone. It's illegal. It's completely illegal.
Under what law?
Under the Munitions Act law.
Doesn't the Munitions Act law prevent you from exporting things?
Yeah, it prevents you from exporting, but also prevents you from using sufficiently strong encryption that would hinder an investigation.
I think you can encrypt whatever you want on your telephone.
If you supply your own device and put that on a telephone, whether it's wired or cellular,
I don't think there's any current law that will prevent you from doing that.
Well, then how come no major manufacturing company makes a phone that's cryptographically secure?
No major manufacturing company has done it, because maybe they're wary.
Because they've been pressured by the government not to.
They've been pressured, but that's different than making it illegal.
You know what I mean?
We can't say that people can't go out there and encrypt things.
I mean, people are using PGP on the net all the time to encrypt things.
It's not illegal.
It's not illegal.
I mean, there's all kinds of possible lawsuits that might be filed and possible criminal cases that might be opened.
But as far as whether or not black and white this is illegal, it has not been settled.
Well, maybe it's not illegal, but I'd like to hear the final word from an attorney.
Yeah.
Because it's awfully fishy that no company throughout history has ever made a cryptographically secure phone.
That's true.
There's a general populace.
That's true. I'd like to see a company do that.
In fact, you know, there's nothing stopping a bunch of people from getting together and doing something like that.
Yeah.
Because there certainly is a need of it.
All right.
We have some other things that are kind of interesting here.
Here's a press release we just got.
The second toll-free exchange is about to hit us, and it's about to hit us hard.
In March 1996, an additional prefix...
I don't know why they call it a prefix.
It's an area code. It's not a prefix.
Yeah.
An additional prefix, 888, becomes available for companies that offer toll-free dialing as a service for their customers and for consumers who wish to set up their own toll-free number.
Is that the right term? Prefix?
Not a prefix. No, it's an area code.
This is AT&T putting out a brochure, and they got the word wrong?
They don't even know what they're talking about.
This doesn't mean 800 numbers are going away.
The new prefix won't affect any of the existing 800 numbers.
Those numbers will remain the same.
It just means that now a toll-free number can start with 888 or it can start with 800.
It doesn't mean that 800 and 888 are interchangeable.
1-800... I'm sorry.
1-888-555-1234 is not the same number as 1-800-555-1234.
And then they have some questions.
Are 800 numbers going to go away?
I guess the person doesn't listen to what we just said.
They were not paying attention.
They weren't paying attention because the same exact questions are being asked again.
Will there be any difference between 800 and 888 toll-free service?
No, both will be completely toll-free to the caller, and both will carry the same features, functions, and quality of service.
When will 888 be available?
Starting March 1, 1996.
We said that already, too.
Can you still get toll-free directory assistance through 1-800-555-1212?
And the answer is yes, you can.
It doesn't say anything about 888, 555, or 1212, which is a much better way of saying that.
Remember, there is no difference in companies or services that use one or the other prefix.
800 numbers are not going away.
AT&T 888 numbers will carry the same competitive price and whatever.
Let's see.
The estimated value of the toll-free market is currently $10 billion.
AT&T invented 800 service in 1967.
I was going to ask you, do you know what the first two 800 prefixes were?
No.
541 and 571.
How do you know that?
When 800s first came out, 541 was for 800 numbers that were considered local, that translated to a local number.
571 was for 800 numbers that translated to a number that wasn't local.
That was it.
There were no other 800 prefixes.
That's pretty incredible.
Well, there are currently more than 6.8 million 800 numbers in service in the United States.
This is out of a total available pool of 7.8 million.
And 9 out of 10 Americans say that they use 800 numbers,
and more than a third estimate they dial 800 more than 60 times a year.
I dialed about six 800 numbers today, but five of them were busy, which is why I couldn't keep dialing.
How about you?
Oh, yeah, I dial 800 numbers all the time, every day.
I call various different companies.
More than half a million businesses and government agencies accept calls in 800 numbers.
AT&T has international 800 service available to 67 countries.
And if you want a free copy of AT&T's brochure, America is getting a second toll-free prefix.
Maybe you could tell them that it's not called a prefix, but never mind that.
You can call 1-800-888-3850.
What do you think of that?
I think that it's really funny that they're unleashing a marketing campaign using the wrong terminology.
We're witnessing some very spectacular times.
We've seen the fall of the Berlin Wall.
We've seen the fall of communism, all kinds of international intrigue,
the Pope coming to New York City, and now this, second toll-free prefix.
Oh, you forgot getting ISDN.
Well, we haven't done that yet entirely.
You've done that pretty much.
Anything new with your service?
Is it pretty much stayed up?
Yeah, it's still pumping along.
Well, that's good. That's good to know.
What happens if you call a 888 area code?
Right now?
Well, I would be concerned, because that little phone system they have here in the station,
surely hasn't been reprogrammed for all the new area codes.
Let's see what happens when you try to jump the gun a little bit.
Let's get our trusty dial tone.
There it is.
Dial 1-888-555-1212.
Dial 1-888-555-1212.
We're sorry. Your call cannot be completed as dialed.
Please check the number and dial again.
Well, I guess it's not going to work yet.
Not yet.
All right, all right, all right.
So you have to wait until March, maybe a little earlier.
And they give you a bunch of handy 800 numbers.
These are the most helpful 800 numbers that AT&T can find.
1-800-1888 Directory Assistance, which is of course 555-1212.
United States Product Safety Commission, 1-800-638-2772.
Missing Children Help Center, 1-800-USA-KIDS.
Social Security Administration Hotline, 1-800-772-1213.
Runaway Hotline, 1-800-231-6946.
Youth Crisis Hotline, 1-800-448-4663.
National Cancer Institute, 1-800-422-6237.
And Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Inspector General Hotline, 1-800-424-4000.
Those are the most important 800 numbers in the eyes of AT&T.
Anything else exciting happening this week?
I'm trying to think.
Open up the phones to the listeners.
I guess things seem more exciting probably as they're happening,
and then they kind of fade in their excitement as time passes.
Well, things certainly do seem exciting for a while,
especially when you're dealing with the phone company.
Look at this.
I got three letters today, actually over the last week, from the phone company.
Unusual letters.
You've never seen a letter like this, have you?
They're kind of long envelopes and thick with a little window in them.
And when I opened this up, I knew something weird was going on
because it looks like it's handmade almost.
This laser-printed letter with a little 9X thing at the top.
Wow.
Not the usual blue 9X.
It looks like it was printed on anyone's laser printer.
And it says this is from the Critical Payments Unit.
Critical Payments.
Yeah, I've never heard of this office before, the Critical Payments Unit.
And basically they indicate a check amount.
They put your name and address there.
And they say we are unable to identify the account
to which the attached check copy is to be applied.
Would you please furnish the information requested below
and return a copy of this form in the self-addressed return envelope provided?
Your assistance will be appreciated.
Did you forget to put your phone number with the extra six digits
in the bottom left corner of the check?
No, I didn't forget.
I never do that.
Why?
I don't believe in expending a whole lot of effort when I don't have to.
Now, I figure the amount of time I've saved over a lifetime
not writing that down each time I pay a phone bill.
Look, I'm enclosing the check with the bill.
How hard is it to keep the two together?
Obviously they threw it up in the air and lost everything
because I never had this happen before in my life.
But all of a sudden I had three of these things show up on one day.
Well, they're acknowledging how disorganized they are
by asking you to put your phone number and those six digits there.
Very disorganized.
And you know what?
You know how disorganized these people are?
These are the people in charge of finding out where the money is supposed to go.
They got my address wrong.
It's a P.O. box, and they inverted two of the numbers.
They didn't even get that right.
I thought both of the numbers were the same.
No, no, no.
No, they inverted the other ones.
Oh, different P.O. box.
Yeah, they inverted.
Believe me, the numbers they inverted were different.
And so it could have gone to the wrong address after all this
with copies of checks and things like that.
And, you know, they tell you to fill out this form and send it back to them.
Well, why don't they just tell you to call them?
Wouldn't that make sense?
They're a phone company after all.
So I called them.
They're up in 518, and I straightened the whole thing out.
Critical payments unit.
It's called Ninex Crips, C-R-I-P-S.
Crips.
The crips and the bloods.
It's kind of interesting.
That's when you thought you knew everything.
You learned something new.
So that's the latest Ninex department that we heard from.
What else?
We heard from some people involving the Long Distance Savings Club.
Remember these guys?
Long Distance Savings Club.
Actually, Long Distance Wholesale Club.
Oh, those are the ones where your dialing instructions have changed.
That's right.
On the envelope it says,
Special Notice to New York Telephone Customers.
Now, you might think that that's a special notice to people who use New York Telephone.
But New York Telephone no longer exists,
so it's a special notice to New York Telephone Customers,
people who use telephones who are customers in New York.
And basically they say that your dialing instructions have changed.
All you have to do is dial 10297 in front of all your long distance calls,
and you will save money.
The question is, do people save money?
I have not yet seen indication that the rates are not what they say they are.
But there was a big article in the New York Times on September 10th
that said that the Long Distance Wholesale Club was being accused of slamming.
Right.
Basically people signed up for them and found that their long distance company had been changed against their will.
Now, that's kind of an interesting thing.
It happens quite a lot.
But supposedly this company wasn't offering that service.
They didn't want people to sign up for their One Plus.
They just wanted people to use their carrier access code.
And there's a whole big article about this company and lots of other companies as well,
including Varitek Telecom, Dial and Save, Great Lakes Telecommunications, Matrix Telecom,
all kinds of companies that send out telemarketing calls and letters and various things like that.
And the way it works, the concept, according to this article, can work to some customers' advantage.
A carrier like the Wholesale Club may buy $100 worth of telephone access from AT&T at a bulk discount rate of $50.
And then they sell that for $75.
They make $25 profit, and you save $25.
So it actually can work is what this article is saying.
But there are complaints about it.
I'd like to hear from some people that have actually used the service.
Are the connections good?
Do you get charged for things you're not supposed to be charged for?
Here's the most interesting thing.
This really surprised me.
How many outstanding complaints would you say a company like Long Distance Wholesale Club has?
Thousands.
You'd think that, wouldn't you?
Yeah.
Do you know what the total number is?
Fourteen.
That's according to who, then?
That's according to the FCC's Common Carrier Bureau.
Yeah.
And they're supposed to tell the truth about this.
Dial and Save, which is a unit of Telco Communications, that's a pretty clever name, has 22 outstanding complaints.
Great Lakes has 27.
Matrix has 58.
Vartek has 97.
And Long Distance Wholesale has just 14.
That goes to show the power of consumers.
You know, only 14 people have outstanding complaints.
How many people actually follow through and file complaints?
I'd like to know how many complaints New York Telephone has, or NYNEX, rather, has outstanding.
But it's probably lower than we think.
It's just like when you go to a representative's office or a senator's office.
You find out the number of letters they actually get.
It's rather small.
People that actually take the time to write letters, they tend to get attention because not that many people write letters.
But one thing a lot of people do is call.
And that's why we have telephones here.
212-279-3400.
We're going to go to the phones and hopefully hear from other people and see what's been happening with them this past week.
Any questions or responses to what we've been saying.
212-279-3400.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Hey, Manuel.
How are you doing?
He did it again.
Okay, I did it again.
I don't even want to know anymore how you do this.
I wanted to tell you about the new yellow phones that NYNEX has.
Well, they're not new anymore.
We've already criticized them to death, and we don't use them.
And every time we see one, we leave it off the hook.
I use them.
Wait, wait, wait.
What do you mean you use them?
I use them when I make calling card calls.
You use them for calling card calls?
They're always free.
Why am I going to wait to use a coin phone if I don't need to use a coin?
Be careful when you say they're always free.
They're not free.
They're always available.
Available.
Available.
That's the word you want to use.
Okay, yeah, they're available.
But they're not cheaper in any way.
No.
You can't place coin calls.
You can't place 9-5-0 calls.
You can't get calls back, although that's the most recent thing NYNEX has done
is cut off incoming service to lots of pay phones.
Yeah.
But all the yellow phones never took incoming calls.
No.
We have to try and get that service back, incoming calls at pay phones.
I can't tell you how many times people beat me from pay phones,
and then they start cussing and swearing at me because I don't call them back.
And there's no way to tell somebody that the number they're calling from isn't callable.
They think it's going to ring, but it doesn't.
I'm sorry.
We left Rebel hanging.
You still there?
Emmanuel, yeah, I'm here.
I just want to know why don't they allow 9-5-0 calls?
I don't know.
Maybe they don't know what they are.
You know, I've run into that a few times at COCOTS and at stupid PBXs
that don't understand what 9-5-0s are,
the fact that they're toll-free, that there's no charging.
Well, those yellow phones actually are COCOTS made by a Japanese company
and resold to NYNEX.
That's interesting.
Let's see, what else did I?
Let's see.
When I would try Netscape, never mind Netscape,
what else can I talk to about the telephones?
A lot of things don't work anymore.
Yes, we've noticed that, and that's an unfortunate sign of the times.
Thanks for calling.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Good evening.
One quick idea.
You know the idea of tapping 74,250 lines at one time?
I think if your line is being tapped right now,
they're not doing a very good job of it.
Okay, go ahead.
One way that could be done is voice recognition and word recognition.
That's a possibility.
What if I called my credit card company and said,
what is this $2,600 I owe you?
The word $2,600 shows up and automatically I hit an alarm.
Uh-oh.
Yes, you've got to be careful about that.
We have to come up with alternative words for everything that we want to talk about.
Another quick thing is that I want to take a question.
When people call up and make these telephone menu bank inquiries into their account
and they press in their PIN number,
assuming that they're not using a cordless phone or a cell phone,
are there people who could have the ability to both tap the PIN and make a card?
Sure.
Yes.
Why not?
Absolutely.
That information is being sent straight out for anybody to be able to hear.
We're going to fade down because that's an atrocious line.
I hope the FBI is bugging that one because they'll get headaches trying to listen.
Here's a couple of things that you should stress.
This is according to some things going out over the net.
Electronic Frontier Foundation and other organizations are doing something about this,
which may be too little too late but may be something effective.
I think that if everyone voices their opinion at this stage, it might do some good.
The FBI has not shown that it effectively uses wiretapping to prevent domestic terrorism.
Despite its claims, despite this being the prime reason the FBI has expressed support for this legislation,
the FBI has not provided the public or Congress any of the information that it claims supports
its outrageous request for wiretapping capacity,
orders of magnitude greater than present-day capacity in many areas.
The FBI may be counter to the specifications.
Entering into negotiations with telecom industry leaders that are hidden from the public,
the FBI has shown no evidence to back up its claims that digital telephone technology
is actually thwarting effective law enforcement.
FOIA-obtained documents, Freedom of Information Act-obtained documents from the FBI itself
indicate that the above-mentioned bureau claim is a complete fabrication anyway,
and citizen privacy is not to be stripped for the convenience of law enforcement.
I like that last one especially.
That's stuff that you should keep in mind if you write letters about this, which you really should do.
Good evening. You're on the air.
Yeah, how you doing?
I'm okay.
Your ass crawler has...
Number one, they've been able to recognize the image of a voice for over 10 years.
I'm in this industry for a long time, so let me tell you how it would work.
For every single digital line, the word is broken down into an 8-bit word.
So if the FBI wanted to monitor 1,000 lines or 100,000 lines,
they would simply have to identify what the digital code of that 8-bit word was.
Fact of the matter is they would have to be doing it on the digital side of a connection.
Nobody can listen to 174 million human voices, but they sure as hell can have a computer
and look for the digital image of the word dope or the word bomb over what's called a DAX,
digital cross-connect system.
It is profoundly easy, and AT&T has had that capacity since 1975.
Interesting. So you think this won't be much of a problem to implement?
Well, do you remember some time ago you had somebody call you and tell you about a line
where you gave a phone number and they gave you back an address?
Yes.
That system is known as a conversion information system.
Every single conversion information system in this country,
every one that says you can either press a button or say the number,
every one that says you can say the number has voice recognition.
You could have one in your own house.
Every single one can do it.
Well, there are a lot of new systems out that say...
They used to say press one to get this.
Now they say press or say one.
That's right.
Well, that's right.
And those that say say have voice recognition built into them,
and they use a thing which is known as an SP card.
An SP card is a card that goes into a computer.
And by the way, the computer can handle 96 simultaneous phone calls for an individual customer
over 800 T1 lines.
It is phenomenally easy, Emanuel.
If you can imagine that a single word...
When I say the word post office, I say it with my own voice.
But when it goes through a digital system in a telephone company,
it kind of becomes a pattern for the word with very slight deviations
which would give the timbre of my voice.
But you take those deviations out for the timbre of my voice,
you're kind of left with the word.
If you wanted to sit and monitor a digital signal,
which is so carefully timed by a cesium clock out in the Midwest,
you could put a computer across that line,
and you could set it up to look for any individual word or phrase you wanted.
And as it passed through, it would be captured,
and it would be so quick that once you captured the word,
you could then key on it and capture the entirety of the rest of the conversation.
Okay, we have a couple of people here that are proposing a solution to this
or maybe a way of fighting back.
What do you guys have?
Hi, this is Blake speaking here.
You might remember Zimmerman who developed the PGP standard of encryption
that's widely available on the Internet.
Well, they've taken that encryption standard one step further
and developed a PGP phone product
that actually allows you to perform point-to-point telephone calls
just like you're dialing a regular phone number,
but you go through your modem, your voice is encrypted with a code
that is later decrypted on the other end
so that the phone message, the entire contents of the voice call,
are completely encrypted from point A to point B.
There's absolutely no way at any point to tap your phone line
in between the caller and the recipient of that call.
And it's called PGP Phone Available at MIT's website.
I downloaded it about three days ago and installed it on my Macintosh
and the thing is working great.
Are they using a T1 type?
No, it's a regular voice line.
Yeah, I'm using a 28.8 modem and a 14.4 actually.
We experimented the other day, a 28.8 to a 14.4,
and we got completely audible, full duplex telephone conversations
going fully encrypted.
Okay, so what you're suggesting is that for Americans to feel
even a little bit secure, they're all going to have to have
a $200 U.S. robotics modem on their telephone.
Most people already have a modem on their phone
and if they're worried about any sort of security
and they're involved in the net, then hopefully they already have that stuff
and within five years everybody's going to have one anyway.
If that's the only price you have to pay to keep FBI wiretaps from affecting you,
then I think it's not that high a price.
During the phone conversation we had, we had it going two ways.
I think there's more than enough money for the ACLU to fight the FBI in court
and not let them do it in the first place.
That's certainly true, but will people give $200 a head to the ACLU to do this?
Take it from me, guys.
Digital telephony is now so...
I'm sitting in a room now with 156 computers,
every one of which can recognize virtually any voice, any word in 11 languages.
You hear this noise behind me?
That's the sound of 18 fans from each of these computers
keeping them cool because they're listening to so many words.
Where exactly do you work?
In New York City on the west side of Manhattan.
And you know what, Emanuel, if you give me a way to reach you privately,
I'll teach you about telephony like you never heard.
Well, that sounds tempting.
I have tried to reach you at 2600, but nobody ever calls me back.
You ought to come to a 2600 meeting because we do get swamped a lot of times,
but you'll definitely find lots of people interested in that, including me.
Well, if you can leave a message with somebody where I can get it to reach you directly,
I will show you things or teach you you won't believe what you're getting.
Well, give us a call at the office, 516-751-2600.
Fiber, you have something.
If I may interject momentarily with the voice of reason,
I don't think we should be spreading fear and paranoia by saying that
law enforcement agents have been using voice recognition since 1975 effectively.
Fiber, you didn't listen.
I said that AT&T has had the capacity, if they wish to,
to select an individual 8-bit word coming down a data stream and examine every part of it.
Have you ever heard of a piece of equipment called a T-Bird?
Yes, I am. I'm familiar with it.
Okay. So tell me, if you put a T-Bird on a T1 line,
can it first break down to an individual voice channel?
It sure can.
And once it breaks down to an individual voice channel, can you sample everything on it?
Sure.
And so if you had a breakdown code on a digital analog converter,
could you then convert it into normal speech?
Sure.
So who's right and who's wrong?
My beef with what you're saying is that
just because you can take a sample of a particular word and take the best average
doesn't mean that it's going to be right 100% of the time all the time.
But if I sample every single carrier feed coming out of the 956 exchange in Manhattan
and I key it to look for the digital image of the word revolution,
there's a good bet that I will be able to find any time that word has been said.
Oh, sure. You'll get hits, but you're not going to get 100% of the people saying that word.
Of course not.
Sir, do you have the ability to do that?
Me, personally?
Yeah. Are you able to do things like that?
I'm sure you can. Absolutely.
No, I'm saying are you able to from where you're working now?
No.
Okay.
Only because I don't have the right test equipment to break it down.
I break down with a T-Bird to the voice level,
but I can't set it up to look at an individual word out of everything there.
But I can assure you that it would be easy as anything for a person.
You know this stuff 9x uses where you can call without dialing?
Yeah, voice dialing.
I forget what you call that.
Voice dialing is what they call it.
But the way you use it is you pick up the phone, right,
and you say the name of the person you want to call, then you put the number in, right?
Right. I have the service myself, and it works fairly well.
It recognizes one person's voice and not another person's voice.
Right.
Well, how tough do you think it would be to make it so that it was not so species-specific but word-specific?
It would be called expensive.
Expensive now, but 10 years down the road, would it be expensive?
No, certainly not.
Of course not.
I think that you have to look at what they want to do.
You know, if they had all their wishes granted,
what would the FBI, what would all these other organizations want out of technology?
Would they want the ability to be able to search for words like the caller is saying?
One percent of all the calls in America and then 100 percent of all the calls?
Remember, once they learn how to do it one hundredth of the time,
they just need 10 more machines, not 10 more people.
Interesting.
Thanks for the info.
Have a pleasant evening.
All right, give us a call.
We'd like to hear from you.
All right.
Take care.
Most interesting call there.
Sure, definitely.
One other thing to say, going back to PGP Phone,
that is that there is going to be an Internet function added to that.
It seems like that iPhone and some other products that have come out
that allow voice-to-voice communications through the Internet,
that too will be able to be fully encrypted
and thereby completely safe from prying ears, eyes, and sniffers.
I saw an advertisement on television today.
I didn't get a chance to write down the number,
but it was something called DigiPhone.
Their slogan was never pay long-distance rates again.
Flat rate anywhere in the country as long as you want.
Yeah, I'll tell you, I think long-distance as an industry is dead.
Yeah.
I think we're seeing a lot of indications of that with things like iPhone
and with things like the new 9x rate structure.
I think a lot of things are changing, and that's good.
It's really good.
Good for everybody.
Okay.
Something that might not be good for everybody involves the religious right,
which certainly does not necessarily speak for all religious people
concerned with any issues.
In a letter to Senator Larry Pressler, who is a Republican of South Dakota,
and Representative Thomas Bliley, a Republican from Virginia,
they requested a new and more restrictive net censorship proposal.
Essentially three dangerous elements of their campaign to shut down cyberspace,
Internet providers, online services, and libraries
will be held criminally liable for expression online.
The religious right has proposed to hold anyone
who provides access to the Internet or other interactive media,
including online services providers, Internet service providers,
BBSs, libraries, schools,
hold them all criminally liable for all speech carried on the network.
In order to avoid liability under this provision,
service providers will be forced to monitor users' electronic communications
to be assured that no indecent material is transmitted across their networks.
This proposal is more restrictive than the Exxon Communications Decency Act
or any other net censorship legislation currently in Congress.
In their letter to Congress, the religious right says
providers would simply be required to avoid knowing violations of the law.
However, the knowing standard is vague enough
that the mere knowledge that such material exists
could be sufficient to trigger criminal liability.
A single complaint, or even a news report,
could force a service provider to take down a webpage,
remove posts to chat rooms or other discussion forums,
or shut down listservs in order to avoid going to jail and facing huge fines.
The proposals pushed by the Christian Coalition relies
on the unconstitutional indecency standard.
Like the Exxon Communications Decency Act,
the Christian Coalition seeks to regulate all indecent speech online.
And indecency is, of course, a broad category
that includes everything from George Carlin's Seven Dirty Words
to such classic novels as The Catcher in the Rye and Lady Chatterley's Lover.
The Christian Coalition's proposal that relies on an indecency restriction
contemplates dumbing down every conversation, webpage, news group,
and mailing list on the internet to the level of what is not offensive to children.
If you're interested in voicing your opinion,
here's two phone numbers that people might be able to make a difference.
Newt Gingrich, telephone number 202-225-4501
or fax number 202-225-4656
and Robert Dole, phone number 202-224-6521
or fax number 202-224-8952.
More on that in the weeks ahead.
We had some news involving the MetroCard this week,
if you read the Daily News.
I actually went out and I bought the Daily News so I could get a copy of this article.
Apparently, some of you out there have been doing your homework
and figuring out ways of thwarting the MetroCard.
We have special guest Jim with us today.
He's going to explain exactly what that article is about
and what the trick is.
Hi, Manuel.
This article in the Sunday Daily News is pretty much a rehashing
of stuff that's been on all 2600, Panic's Chat and NYC Transit.
There's only one minor new item
and a few comments from the Transit Authority's Vice President
in charge of AFC, Automatic Fare Collection.
The old stuff, which I'm sure everyone knows,
is essentially there was a clerk at Whitehall Street
whose computer somehow, there was an error in the software,
where if you hit the right keys, which you normally weren't supposed to hit,
the computer would encode a card but not register the card,
so it would work for a while.
But the clerk would never be held responsible for sending in the cash
that he collected from selling the card.
The other one is that you can essentially copy a MetroCard
so that you have multiple identical cloned MetroCards.
And that works until the computer realizes
that there's more than one card floating around
and then it just, as the phrase goes, negative lists them all.
So you can essentially have as many one-fair cards as you want for a while.
The current new MetroCard hack
is supposedly you use some sort of chemical spray,
as Bill SF suggested at Hope last year,
to make the magnetic stripe,
which the Daily News in its infinite wisdom calls a barcode,
make the magnetic stripe visible.
And through trial and error or esoteric knowledge or whatever,
you figure out which particular magnetized area
tells the computer at the turnstile to debit the card,
and you just erase that,
and your card works supposedly forever.
The flaw in all these instances
is that the way the system works, it's actually very ingenious.
It's not worth what the TA spent,
which is at least three-quarters of a billion.
Yes, that's billion with a B dollars.
I'd like to point out that this fair hike and the next fair hike
would be unnecessary if we just stuck to tokens, but anyway.
The one ingenious thing is that the way the system works,
it looks at your card after it's been encoded at the booth
and you pass it through the turnstile.
It looks at your card and assumes on the first swipe,
if you've swiped it correctly, right speed, right angle,
it assumes that it's good and lets you through.
Every so often, minutes, hours,
it sends back to the transit authority's main computer
at 130 Livingston Street in Brooklyn
a list of the cards that have gone through.
If several turnstiles that are too close together
report the same card going through,
or if they report the same card different times
with the same amount of money on it
and no additional money added in between, etc., etc., etc.,
it negative lists the card.
It's like a blacklist.
Yeah, you can get a hacked card,
but you'll be doing this all the time.
Here's something interesting.
They say that this has happened a total of 11 times,
which I'm not sure if that's correct.
11 seems like a very small number for something like this.
They say that the TA traced one for a while,
attempting to trap the user.
Are they monitoring where people are on the subway system?
Well, yes and no.
They could tell the turnstiles to update more often
to the central computer,
and they could have it on screen
whenever it hits a card with a certain number of the suspect card.
So is this some sort of an office with a map
and a little green light that shows where somebody is?
Transit cops chasing the guy?
It's like that movie that you've seen with the map
where the man has a swallowed transmitter
and he's being tracked inch by inch.
But no, you have an idea of what turnstile he went through at what time,
and you could find out maybe 30 seconds afterwards.
Now, if he's using it at 4 in the morning,
you have a good shot of getting it.
Especially if there are cameras at the stations.
There are very few where that actually happens and where it is.
But if the guy's waiting 20 minutes for a train
and he's the only guy on the platform, you've got a good chance of getting him.
But if he's using it at Times Square at 5 p.m.,
forget it.
I learned this by reading a really good article in the Times last week
about the whole token situation.
I was wondering, they are going around changing every single token booth
to accept the new tokens,
and I was wondering how much does this cost
to upgrade them to MetroCards at the same time.
I learned that the way they tell how the token is supposed to look,
they keep a model token in there, inside the token booth.
And what they do is they simply replace it with a new token.
It has to match whatever is sitting inside that token booth.
Well, that's a little inaccurate.
It's not actually inside the booth.
What you're talking about is what's known as a comparator.
In the new stainless steel AFC or AFC-capable,
or AFC-capable turnstiles,
they're a masterpiece of digital circuitry.
And there's one board called the comparator,
which essentially has a rough idea of a token in it.
And you have to use separate boards for separate tokens,
which is why when the fair goes up,
wherever there's an AFC turnstile, they have to put a different board in.
And what it does is,
since it's too complex,
first of all, if they put in an exact image of a perfectly fine token,
pretty soon tokens will get banged up and bent,
and it won't match that.
So what they do is they put a rough image,
I'm not sure how rough,
but a rough image of the planned token or the current token,
and they let the computer sort of learn
what real tokens look like.
In other words, if you put something in that's way too off,
it simply won't register.
If you put something in that's close,
a banged-up token or a really good slug,
an artificial token that you may have made in Metal Shop,
it'll register it as good,
and it'll sort of make a moving average
of what comes in.
As tokens get older and worse,
it will start, believe it or not, rejecting new tokens.
This has been an occasional problem.
When they first started with the comparator,
I was at a booth that had that problem.
We had one bag of new tokens.
I don't know where we got it, but we did.
And they simply wouldn't register.
We're up to our last minute here,
but I just wanted to ask you, since you know so much about the system,
when is the actual fare increase?
It will be at midnight Saturday night
into Sunday morning, November 11th into the 12th.
That's this weekend, folks.
Is there anything interesting that happens at that particular time,
technology-wise, or is there anything that people can look out for
that are interested in this kind of thing?
Unfortunately, no.
What you might want to do is go to booths a day or two before
in the dead of night and hang out, crazy as that sounds.
And you'll be able to see various turnstile maintainers
opening up the turnstiles on about half the turnstiles,
changing the electronics, poking around.
You might be able to social engineer them for information.
Okay, well that's a call to arms, I guess,
and hopefully hackers around the city will be going out there and learning things.
Getting back to us next week.
We're out of time. Thanks for stopping by, Jim.
And thanks, Blake and Jason, for coming in.
Do you think our ISDN news will be better next week?
Hopefully so, yeah.
I don't think so for a moment, but never mind that.
We'll keep you updated nonetheless.
This is Emanuel Goldstein. We'll be back again next week, same time, same place.
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The time is now 9 o'clock.
Coming up, Housing Notebook.
Paint peeling off the wall
Dirt piling in the hall
Ice on the pipes but no steam at all
Land low
Land low
Low down rotten good for nothing
Gonna raise your rent someday
Kick you out if you can't pay
You and the goddamn OPA
Land low
Land low
Low down rotten good for nothing
He's against public housing
Can't stand the fuss we're rousing
The fuss we're rousing
We'll take care of him later
With a rat exterminator
Pay him a bonus
Give him grease
For the right to sign a lease
You can have dogs but kids must see
Land low
Land low
Land low
This is what the landlord said.
Why you kicking?
She ain't dead.
Landlord.
Landlord.