And gifts. Where we are lacking is gifts for the children.
So if you can find it in your heart to sponsor one gift for one child, we would truly appreciate it.
For further information, call Area Code 212-340-1196.
That's Area Code 212-340-1196.
This program is done every year by Adam with the cooperation of WBAI 99.5 FM in New York.
And again, happy holidays and thank you.
Live from New York, it's the special Christmas Eve edition of 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.
They cut me at my dress, but if they could they would.
Can't believe I'm for the best, it's getting worse.
I hope that's understood.
I hope that's understood, but we know.
This next song is called American Wasteland.
Something's wrong with my mind this day.
Everywhere I look it's getting lazy.
Can't you tell I'm not the type for lazy?
The little bits of hope in my face they see.
Hands are hanging from the government tree.
Mouthwash, toothbrush, gasoline.
Fingers are pointing at old man's pockets.
Smiling eyes are looking at his socket.
Oh yes, I love holiday music.
And we're getting into the holiday spirit here on Radio Station WBAI
with the holiday edition of Off the Hook coming to you live on this Tuesday night.
We'll be taking many phone calls tonight since we didn't take any last week
and talking about other things that have happened since we were on last week,
including this is probably the most exciting thing that's happened to me in a few months.
I got my Easy Pass device.
I guess it's the only thing you can really refer to this as.
It's bigger than I thought it would be.
For those of you who have played with this program,
it allows you to drive your car through toll booths seemingly without paying,
but of course every time you do this,
something gets deducted from your account in some computer someplace.
We're going to discover where this happens, how this happens,
how the whole thing works, and what kind of security holes they might have.
I've already used it I think around four times, and two of them were by accident.
It's weird. I was wandering around in Westchester at something like 2 o'clock in the morning,
and I got completely, totally lost, and I wound up going through a toll booth,
and I actually felt, wow, this is cool.
I'm going through a toll booth. I'll be able to use my Easy Pass.
It was all of a sudden paying $1.75 or whatever it cost was a good thing,
not a bad thing like it usually is.
It's amazing how technology can alter your perception,
so you actually don't mind spending money.
I was happy to do it. I wanted to drive through and see what happened,
and I did. Whizzed right through the thing, and it worked just great.
At least I think it did.
Anyway, the Easy Pass machine, or I don't know what you call this thing.
I guess it's about three inches by three inches, is that right?
And about half an inch thick.
You stick this on your windshield, and I guess it's transmitting or something.
This is just for those of you who don't know what this thing looks like.
This is what it sounds like when you drop it.
So it's not like a little piece of plastic or anything like that.
It's pretty chunky.
It seems to be a transmitter of some sort,
although we have not yet taken it apart to figure out exactly.
In case you're wondering how I have this with me and on my car at the same time,
I managed to get two of them.
I don't know what happens if you stick two of them on your car.
That's something I'd like to try.
The one I use it on the most is the Midtown Tunnel,
and the problem with that is that there's always a huge traffic jam
for about two miles behind the toll booths,
and then for about the last 30 feet or so, it opens up to about 12 lanes.
So for those 30 feet, I'm going pretty fast,
but for the two miles or so, I'm going just as slow as I always was.
So I don't know if it's really all that worth it.
I don't know. We have some expert-ish type people.
David is here. Do you have any ideas as to how this thing might work?
Well, it either could be a battery inside,
but given that it's sealed and it's supposed to last for life,
I would doubt that they would want people to replace batteries and send it back in.
Now, they said they don't expect to hear from me ever again.
They don't want to hear from me.
They want me to keep this thing on my car forever and not bother them anymore.
So, no, I won't be replacing the battery.
So does that mean it can't be a transmitter?
No, it could be a transmitter.
It simply is getting its power externally,
which means that when you go through the toll booth,
there are little RF transmitters at every toll booth,
at every E-ZPASS booth,
and then it'll transmit a signal,
which will charge up a transmitter inside that tag,
and then it'll rebroadcast back your specific ID.
It's sending electricity through the air.
Yeah, just like this radio station itself is sending electricity through the air.
Well, yeah, but we're not powering anybody's equipment.
We're not turning on their radios.
They have to supply their electricity for that.
This thing is being charged.
Theoretically, it's being charged by machines as I go through them.
Yes, but at a very, very low amount of power.
Is this thing transmitting at all times when I'm in my car?
Am I being hit with radio waves right now as I'm holding it near my face?
Presumably, if it's not self-powered, it isn't transmitting all the time.
It's only transmitting right when it's receiving a signal
and as long as the capacitor inside it lasts.
Right.
How would you go about duplicating one of these?
I guess you've got to open it up first.
Okay, well, somebody wanted to try that, so here you go.
We're going to be experimenting on that throughout the course of the program.
And while that's going on,
and, of course, if anyone else has any kind of experiments that they've engaged in
involving the EasyPass system, please let us know.
You get a little bag to put it in if you don't want it to activate.
So that definitely does lend credence to the theory that it's transmitting, obviously.
So that bag will prevent money from being taken away from you as you go through toll booths.
Okay, there's a number you call to find out the status of your account.
And that's what I'd like to try to do now is find out the status of my account.
Can we get a dial tone?
Okay, there we go.
Let's see if we can get through.
1-800-333-TOLL.
Thank you for calling the MTA Bridges and Tunnels EasyPass Service Center.
In celebration of Christmas, the EasyPass Telephone Service Center is closed until Thursday, December 26, at 7 a.m.
The walk-in service centers will reopen on Thursday at their regularly scheduled times.
If you're calling from a touch-tone phone, press 1 to use our 24-hour information system or to report a lost or stolen tag.
If you're calling from a rotary phone, please call again on December 26 to speak with the customer service representative.
If you're an EasyPass account holder and need to access your account information or activate a tag, press 1.
If you are an individual account holder and want to activate a tag, press 1.
If you are an individual account holder and have questions, press 2.
Your seven-digit EasyPass account number appears on the letter sent with your tag or at the top of your monthly statement.
To obtain account information from our 24-hour information system, enter your account number and press the pound button.
Okay, it's not that I don't trust people, but I have to turn down the microphone as I enter these numbers
because I don't know what you'll be able to do if you have those numbers.
So I have to be very careful not to make sure those numbers are not heard over the air.
No, no, no, don't repeat the numbers I just entered.
Yeah, okay, great.
If this is correct, press the pound button.
Yes, I'll assume it was correct.
Please hold while we access your account.
If you received a low balance light when you drove through the toll plaza, press 1.
For your current available toll balance, press 2.
For your most recent payment information, press 3.
For the most recent toll crossings charged to your account, press 4.
To return to the main menu, press 8.
I'd like to see who was crossing tolls or what tolls they crossed.
For tag number, 0. There are no toll crossings on record.
For tag number, 0. There are no toll crossings on record.
To return to the previous menu, press 8.
To return to the main menu, press 9.
Well, first of all, my tag number is not 0, and second of all, I just passed through it not more than 20 minutes ago.
Okay, well, I guess either their system is all fouled up, or I've got a good deal here.
Maybe I have one of those real easy pass things.
You have two tags.
I have two tags, yes.
These are the same account?
Yes, you see they have the account number on there.
So I wonder if tag 0 and tag 1 mean the different instances that you have.
Well, no, because the tag numbers are actually 11 digits long.
They only gave one digit there, so something's wrong, obviously.
Yeah, but if it's tag number, and whatever your tag number is, and tag 1.
You don't enter the tag number.
You enter the account number.
It tells you the tag number.
It tells you.
I have two tag numbers, and it'll tell you that you crossed this particular bridge on this particular day.
At least theoretically.
I've never actually heard this do this.
But right now, I guess I don't have any outstanding credit or whatever, or bills.
That's kind of neat.
All right, we're going to stay in touch with this situation over the next few weeks.
If anyone else has played around with this system, please let us know.
We'll be taking phone calls in just a little bit.
Can smart guns save many lives?
That's the newest idea for gun control.
It comes from U.S. News and World Report.
How it works, the weapon emits a radio signal picked up by a transmitter receiver
embedded in a ring or a badge worn by the user.
The transmitter sends a code back to the gun.
The weapon recognizes the signal and removes a blocking pin from the trigger mechanism,
allowing the gun to fire.
A laser sight beams a spot of light on the intended target.
I didn't want to get into all the possibilities of what could happen with this particular thing.
I heard some genius had come up with the idea of having a pin, a real four-digit pin on every gun.
So before you fire the gun, you've got to enter the pin.
I mean, I can just imagine people, you know, trying to hack their parents' guns now.
You get a whole new meaning to the kinds of things people do.
I don't know.
We live in an increasingly weird society, that's all I have to say.
Okay, we have a guest tonight.
Actually, we have a guest who is not yet on the phone, so we're going to try and call him live.
In fact, we're going to do this without having the number transmit.
Hopefully he'll pick up the phone.
Hello.
Hi, is this our special guest?
It's a special guest.
Okay, good. We have the right person.
And for our listeners who do not know, on the phone with us right now is the author of the brand-new book called Anarchy Online.
His name is Charles Platt, and he joins us live from New York City.
And how's the weather out there today?
You think I've been out today? I have no idea what's going on out there.
But it sounds bad.
It sounds, you know, like the Christmas spirit has the world in its grip,
and, you know, people are clonking their horns and eager to get wherever they're going.
You know, that or the Rangers one again, one of those.
But tell us something about this book, Anarchy Online.
It's all about pirates, pornographers, feds, freaks, pedophiles, legislators, prosecutors, thieves, Christians,
crackers, hackers, anarchists, supremacists, fetishists, scammers, spammers, and cypherpunks
and their epic struggle to control the Internet.
And you do cover every single one of those subjects.
I did my best, because it seemed to me if you're going to do a book about all the things which we're supposed to be afraid of online,
it would be a shame to miss anything.
I mean, the press has done such an excellent job of demonizing just about everyone.
I felt an obligation to try, basically, to describe it as dispassionately and objectively and sensibly as I could,
which is hard, because I'm not always a dispassionate person, but I did my best.
When did you start work on this?
About two years ago, really.
And, of course, there's some material which was originally published in Wired magazine,
and I redid some of that to sort of fit it in.
Originally, was this supposed to be another book about Kevin Mitnick?
That's exactly right.
The New York publishing business is full of people who are out to make a quick buck, just like any other business,
and as soon as they see some publishing company spending a lot of money purchasing someone's story,
they think to themselves,
hmm, when this book comes out, there's going to be a lot of publicity on this subject,
which can cash in on this publicity, and then we don't actually have to spend anything to promote our book.
We can just benefit from the money that the other publisher spends to promote their book.
Needless to say, this doesn't always work out that way,
and I was quick to point out that there were going to be other people trying to cash in on poor old Kevin Mitnick,
and I was lost in line.
I didn't think this was a good idea at all.
But you do cover Kevin Mitnick's story in the book.
I was obliged to by my contract,
and even there I felt I had something to say, mainly about the other books rather than about Kevin himself.
Yeah, you do cover the books more than you actually cover Kevin, it seems,
and that does seem to be a pretty interesting story.
As you say, how they just rush to cash in on the story.
How much accuracy do you think is lost by doing that?
How much accuracy is lost?
Well, that's a very dangerous question.
I'm referring to the other books.
Yes, of course, but I don't want to be sued by John Markoff.
I'm sure he's a totally accurate writer,
and I'm sure that just because someone pays him a lot of money,
that doesn't necessarily encourage him to make the story more exciting than it should really be.
I'm sure he's got excellent judgment, and money means nothing to him.
Wouldn't you agree?
Well, I don't know if I could agree 100% with that.
I mean, you've got to consider the guy was part of the story, and everybody knows this.
He was actively pursuing Kevin Mitnick and tracked him down,
supposedly as a reporter, and then all of a sudden as a millionaire writing a book about it.
It was the most fascinating case of someone creating news that he could then make a huge amount of money off.
I was amazed by it, and I still am.
And the incredible thing, not to dwell on the Kevin Mitnick story too much,
but Kevin is sitting in prison now.
He's still there, has not ever made a penny out of anything that he has done in the computer hacking world,
and has no idea when he's going to be released.
It seems almost absurd.
I mean, it is absurd.
It seems almost funny how absurd it is.
Of course, it's not funny.
We'll, of course, be trying to bring updates as we get them to the Kevin Mitnick case.
One thing you get reading this book is you realize how many battles there are being fought
in this whole electronic world that we find ourselves in.
It's a strange sensation you get from reading it that you feel you're a part of history being made.
There's a lot of really courageous people out there putting themselves on the line,
standing up for freedom and democracy and things like that,
a lot of people being screwed by the system.
Was that the intended impact you wanted to have on the audience?
That's exactly how I see it.
It's very much like how the West was won.
You know, we've opened up this new territory,
and unfortunately there are a lot of people in the world who love to be in charge of any new territory,
and they also feel very disturbed by the idea of anarchy.
And, in fact, as far as I'm concerned, the title Anarchy Online is not meant to be a scary title.
I think there's a lot of hope in that title because there still is a certain amount of anarchy,
but it's very peaceful anarchy.
No one's being hurt by it.
Certainly a tiny proportion compared with any other environment.
So really what I'm trying to sort of get at is, yes, it's kind of a rough-and-tumble kind of a world there,
but there's no need to be concerned about this because it's all virtual.
It's all basically text with a few pictures, and it should almost all be covered by First Amendment rights.
And as far as I'm concerned, law enforcement just has basically no business being there at all,
although I tried to sort of tone down my feelings a little bit in the book.
That's how I feel, though.
Well, now, at what point do you start to get concerned, though?
When do people feel—when is it right for them to step in and say, well, this is going too far?
Well, who are these people who are going to step in?
The citizens of the country?
Let's say parents concerned about their children, as seems to be the theme over the last four years.
Well, so long as the child is under 18, the parent has a right to basically maintain any kind of control online or elsewhere.
So, you know, I mean, as a parent myself, when I needed to write the section of the book exploring the steamier sections of Internet relay chat,
naturally I turned to my 17-year-old daughter, because she's the one who knows about that stuff.
So you see my attitude, which is that it doesn't particularly bother me,
and she basically said, well, I suppose I can dig out these pedophile discussion groups if that's what you really want.
But then she said, you know, I'm not really interested in that stuff.
So kids generally have enough sense to know what they are too young to read, in my experience.
Now, you tell so many stories in here.
What's one of the more memorable ones, as far as what you had to go through to get the story?
I didn't really have to suffer through very much, except for where I talk about the satellite video piracy,
which is almost like right out of the edge of my subject matter.
That entailed going to the Bahamas and meeting sort of real-life system crackers who made a lot of money out of it.
Now, there's this whole other culture of satellite hacker-type people.
Yeah.
Tell us something about them.
The media are basically controlled by, you know, people in Los Angeles and New York.
And so when a story breaks in the center of the country, often it does not get reported.
And that turned out to be the case with all these people who have satellite dishes, the old, big kind of satellite dish,
who were tapping into HBO and Showtime and doing so without paying,
because their friendly local dealer had modified their set-top box so that they wouldn't have to pay the subscription fee.
And when I started digging into this about three or four years ago,
I found that there were almost a million people across the country, real heartland American types,
who were basically breaking a law, and the penalty for this law was up to $500,000 in fines and, I think, five years in jail.
So this is an amazing story, really, that it should be that widespread and no one knew about it.
And bit by bit, I found, you know, like, who this guy was who was most instrumental in spreading the fixes,
which the dealers then sold to the customers.
And I finally went to the Bahamas and met him and his friend who did the technical work.
And they were very good people. I liked them very much.
They were making money out of an industry which was way overpriced, and it was a monopoly.
And suddenly they were breaking the law, but the law was clearly pushed through Congress by the broadcasters
and done so purely to benefit themselves, so it wasn't a very good law.
So I'm not saying that they were right to break the law, but on the other hand, if you're going to break a law,
this was one of the ones which just asked for it, so to speak.
So that was a fun experience, and I had a good time writing it up, too.
What kind of view have you gotten of the hacker world writing this book?
You seem to return to the same basic phrase that somebody could cause a lot of damage, but they choose not to.
Is that pretty much how it's wrapped up for you?
Yeah, well, all of us are in that situation in daily life.
I could poison my neighbor's drinking water, but I choose not to.
I could throw rocks at cars, but I choose not to.
This is the way the world works, by basically people use self-restraint, because basically we are social creatures.
We get along with each other.
There are sociopaths, and they get written up in the newspapers and put in jail.
But generally speaking, most people don't do that.
They refrain from doing nutty things that will hurt other people.
And for some reason, well, I think for an obvious reason, people don't trust hackers to follow this code.
And the reason they don't trust them is they don't understand them.
And that's really all it is, I think, is fear of the unknown.
And so, yeah, I kept coming back to this theme, yeah, these hackers can do all these scary things,
but all the ones I know have a fairly reasonable attitude in terms of what they do and what they don't do.
And these are not especially malicious people.
Many of them are very decent and generous people, in my experience.
What kind of role do you think, if any, should federal, state, local authorities take with regards to hackers?
Well, first of all, I'm not sure the federal government should have any role in this at all.
When you read the Constitution, there's nothing in there about law enforcement.
It really only was added to the list of federal responsibilities by a cunning misreading of what is called the Commerce Clause.
The federal government has the right to control interstate commerce,
and somehow this gives them the right to have the FBI and the Justice Department and a whole lot of other things.
So, you know, purely on constitutional grounds, I think any kind of federal involvement in hacking is wrong.
On a local basis, I don't know, I mean, I always want to see the damage.
I want to see who has really been harmed.
And none of this nonsense about, oh, we had to institute all this extra security because someone hacked our system.
Obviously, the real way this should be stated is someone hacked our system because we had not instituted proper security.
So I think in most cases, the damage, well, you know, the damage is overrated.
The media gets into the act with some politician who wants to get re-elected.
There's a whole sort of ritual which is played out here, and it has nothing to do with real risks or real dangers.
Well, in many cases, the person, the accused, is sentenced and treated based on what he could have done, not actually what he did.
Precisely.
And, of course, that's why people go to jail for huge amounts of time and are thought to be criminals that steal millions of dollars,
when in actuality they simply were accessing systems that could cause millions of dollars in theoretical damage at one point.
Now, you dwell upon some very important things in the non-hacking world, mainly with regards to bulletin boards, adult-oriented bulletin boards.
And one thing that you stress is that the real threat is not so much from the federal government but from local authorities.
Can you comment to that a little bit?
Well, the ACLU really has an important role to play in cyberspace.
There's a woman there named Anne Beeson who is very smart and very well-informed, and she was one of the people who was involved in defeating the Communications Decency Act.
And she said to me one time, you know, I'm not so worried about the federal law right now, I'm worried about all these state laws.
And I said, well, what state laws?
And she said, yeah, well, that's exactly it.
No one knows about them.
But the ACLU has chapters in every state, and so they are ideally positioned to monitor these things that are pushed through local government and warn the rest of us what's going on.
And you might think this doesn't affect you, but, of course, it does, not only because a law was recently pushed through in New York state,
but also because there are some states which regard you as a criminal no matter where you live if you send an indecent message to a person living in that state.
So, for instance, I think Iowa is one of those states.
If I send email to a person in Iowa, and, of course, I have to realize that we're on the radio now, which is another government-controlled medium, but saying something along the lines of, oh, yeah, exactly, you know, you're full of crap or something like that, I'm probably breaking that state law.
And, technically, I could be extradited, taken to that state, and tried and fined.
Now, it hasn't happened yet, you know, so maybe things are okay.
But, on the other hand, there's a long history of laws that are on the books eventually being used for some reason or other just because they're there.
Well, now, a good example of this, I think, is the Thomas case in Tennessee.
Yeah.
They were taken, weren't they, from California to Tennessee because of their adult bulletin board.
Do you want to tell us something about that story?
That's precisely right.
A postal inspector in Tennessee, who I believe was actually encouraged by the feds, I think this originally came from the federal government, although I can't prove it, became a member of the amateur action bulletin board, which was located in northern California, in a relatively free-thinking part of the world where no one gets very hysterical about pornography.
And the postal inspector downloaded some images over the long-distance telephone lines, and because they arrived on his computer in Tennessee, or now, suddenly, they violated Tennessee community standards.
And, consequently, the Thomases were tried under the prevailing community standards in Tennessee, even though their bulletin board and all its equipment was located in California.
And, obviously, the intention here was to send the usual short, sharp shock to scare other bulletin board owners into censoring themselves, which, of course, is always the intention.
So, now, what has happened with Thomases? Are they still in prison?
Yes, they are.
How come we don't hear anything about this? It seems like a real travesty of justice that somebody be dragged from their home in California to some backwards alley in Tennessee.
Because the media doesn't know how to treat the whole issue of pornography.
This is basically a country with a strong puritanical streak, as everyone is pretty much aware.
And it's very rare that you see any newspaper sort of going out on a limb, even in its editorial, and defending pornography.
But this was something that was very carefully regulated.
The Thomases made sure that no children were on their system.
You had to register your credit card with them and be checked out.
I mean, it's not like they just were wantonly spreading pornography on the net.
No, they were not doing it via the internet at all.
And, of course, this is an important distinction.
You had to register with their bulletin board and dial their bulletin board number direct.
Could you say, by the logic of the authorities, that anybody who is posting anything on the internet now is guilty of at least as much as the Thomases?
Not necessarily.
I think some of the images that the Thomases had on their board were, shall we say, calculated to get a response.
They certainly went as close to the line as they could.
I don't think they actually crossed that line.
Well, first of all, pornography is not illegal.
It's obscenity that is illegal.
But even obscenity, the definition varies state by state.
It really does depend on what a reasonable person, this mythical reasonable person who we never actually meet, would find obscene in that particular neighborhood.
So, you know, there isn't any justice in an absolute sense where sexually explicit material is concerned.
Incredible.
We're speaking with Charles Plant, the author of the new book, Anarchy Online.
And in just a moment, we will be taking some listener phone calls right after this break.
Abarigani.
You're invited to a Kwanzaa cultural celebration to benefit the Patrice Lumumba Coalition's series of weekly African internationalist forums and AfriColitiscope on WBAI.
This spectacular program will feature Kemati Denizulu, organic percussionist, and revolutionary adventures into the spoken word with Abiodun Oyewole, Nzinga Chavis and George Edward Tate.
Plus an extraordinary experience with an Afrocentric fashion and wearable art showcase starring the Amandala Models and New York's leading African fashion designers.
This Saturday, December 28th from 6.30 p.m. until 10 p.m. at the Oberia Dempsey Center, 127 West 127th Street in Harlem.
For tickets and information, call 212-410-7892.
That's 212-410-7892.
Okay, our phone number is 212-279-3400.
We have Charles Plant on the line with us, author of Anarchy Online.
Charles, this book came out when? Or has it come out yet?
It was originally scheduled for publication in September by HarperCollins, but they pushed it into March of next year, so I brought out my own edition.
So that's what's currently on sale.
It's a hardcover edition.
The HarperCollins version will be a paperback.
And currently it's only available by mail order from an 800 number.
And naturally, I'm going to give you that 800 number.
Go right ahead.
800-879-4214.
That's where the stock of copies is.
I would like to say operators are standing by, but I think on Christmas Eve they're probably not.
Well, I guess you can find out by calling and seeing what happens.
Yeah.
But if you call, you better be prepared to buy a copy, because the person there doesn't have any information about the book.
They only take orders, credit card orders.
It's $12.95 if you say you heard about it on the Internet.
If you forget to say that, it's $25, so you better remember to say that.
Wow, okay.
Well, don't say you heard about it on WBAI, because that won't earn you anything.
No, I'm afraid not.
So we're used to that.
Okay, 212-279-3400 is our phone number.
And if you have any questions for Charles Platt or any questions on anything else whatsoever,
how's the destruction of our E-ZPass thing going over on the other side of the room?
Is it getting there?
They haven't even gotten it open yet.
This is incredible.
We're trying to take apart an E-ZPass device that you stick on your windshield, and it's sealed shut pretty good.
So if anyone out there has any hints on how to do that, maybe we'll just have to, you know, use explosives later.
212-279-3400, good evening.
You're on the air.
Hi, Emmanuel.
Merry Christmas.
Well, it's Rebel.
How are you doing?
Good.
It's good to hear your voice on the phone.
Pardon?
It's good to hear your voice on the phone.
Well, it's nice of you to tell me on the IRC, on the Internet, that you're not going to be there, but apparently I'm...
Well, no, I didn't know specifically what was going to happen.
And I didn't want you to come out here if we weren't going to be here.
Okay.
I'd just like to mention that I was on a Colcott phone.
You know how some Colcotts, when you dial an 800 number, they charge you like a quarter or 50 cents, or sometimes they block it?
I've heard rumors, yeah.
All right, well, guess what this one does.
What's that?
This one lets you call the 800 number, and after five minutes, it comes on and says, please deposit a quarter.
Then if you don't deposit the quarter after, like, a certain amount of time, it cuts you off.
I thought I knew the definition of injustice, but you have just set the boundary here.
Right, I mean, I'm talking to a business person about a particular account, you know, a brokerage person.
You're talking business.
We know you're a business person.
You have many important things to do, and you don't need this to get in your way.
It's pretty embarrassing to tell somebody that, you know, that you got cut off from, you know...
I feel your shame.
Especially if it's a person in the financial...
Absolutely.
You don't want to offend them or appear foolish in front of them, because you may never get a second chance.
Well, especially if you're trying to open an account, but...
That's right.
But anyway...
I'm sorry to hear about that.
That sounds horrible.
Now, Rebel, do you remember the Hope Conference?
Yes, I do.
Well, Charles Platt was at the Hope Conference.
In fact, he wrote quite a bit about it in his book, and perhaps the two of you can share memories.
Well, I don't know, I was pretty drunk.
I don't remember very much.
I don't remember.
I mean...
I think Rebel was drunker than you were.
Probably.
Hard to believe, but true.
Well, I remember a guy from the Jewish Defense League...
Yes, I remember that.
You remember that.
That was something.
He wanted hackers to take down some site somewhere.
Well, actually, what happened was that he was trying to get all these racist comment lines off the air.
Right.
Well, I have a number of one, which maybe I shouldn't give it out, but...
You know, one of them, you know, that they talk about the racism, about, you know, being against blacks and Jews and stuff.
So, you know, he wanted help in, you know, getting these off the air, and he came to hackers and said,
Hey, how do you break this voicemail system?
And, Charles, what was the overwhelming response of the hackers to this guy?
Well, shock and disbelief.
I mean, it really took him a while to understand that that was really what he wanted.
And, of course, naturally, they didn't want to do it, because the whole idea is information wants to be free, not actually blocked.
I found that some of them agreed with what he wanted to do, and some of them didn't.
Most of them probably didn't agree, and, you know, but some of us...
Well, I think almost nobody agreed with the viewpoint of the people that he was trying to shut down,
but I think the problem was people didn't agree with the method of shutting them down.
I mean, I think that's, you know, that's just wrong to do that, to silence your opposition, no matter how crazy they may seem to be.
I see.
With that, Rebel, I must let you go.
Okay, and you have a merry Christmas.
All right. Thanks for calling.
Okay.
All right.
212-279-3400 is our phone number.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Yes.
You want to know about the toll tags?
Uh-oh.
This guy sounds like he knows the story here.
Okay.
Tell us about the toll tags.
First of all, they're made by a company down in Dallas called Amtec Corporation.
Amtec.
Okay.
It's got a 64-bit binary code, and the other gentleman was correct.
It's punged with a wideband signal at the sweet spot at 915 megahertz.
Charges up the cap.
Cap charges a transmit circuit.
It's good for about 10 feet.
It's the micro-strip antenna that's mounted in a PC,
the little wave guide built into the toll plaza that picks you up.
That's why if you go too fast, it doesn't work as well.
It works better in Texas because the cards are only good for five years.
They have a five-year lithium battery, which gives them a range of 30 feet
because it basically sits in a sleep mode and then keys up the transmitter.
But New York didn't want to get into that.
They bought the cheaper model, which was the AT5102.
Okay.
Well, you've done a bit of research on this.
So the fastest you can possibly go is about five miles an hour.
Well, you can do up to 25.
It really depends.
You also got to watch out.
Some of the new windshields have a lot of metal oxide in them.
In fact, that's what the sleeve is for, to prevent it from being stimulated.
And if you look in the tinted area of your windshield,
some of them actually have a lot of metal,
and I've had friends tell me on their SOBs and a few other vehicles
that their toll tags don't come off.
Their little license plate shows up in the mail saying you're trying to steal money
from New York State Thruway, et cetera, et cetera.
Wait. What happens?
They photograph your plate.
If you go through an easy pass lane and either your tag is not in place
or it didn't get picked up.
How do you go through it?
Isn't there a gate that doesn't go up?
Sometimes the gate doesn't come all the way down.
There was a couple of broken gates up on the Henry Hudson.
People were like, oh, okay.
I guess it's okay.
The gate's up.
They'll go right after someone else.
Thinking that they're paying.
And on another note, he also received in the mail a $50 speeding ticket.
They clocked him between two toll plazas using his tag.
Are you kidding me?
Nope.
Wow.
So they're using this to get people for speeding as well.
Yeah.
Well, it's just like the same policy of, yeah,
you took a picture of a car going through the red light.
You got a photograph.
You don't know who the driver is.
So, yeah, okay.
It's no points on the license.
So basically they send a little fine to the owner.
But what you're saying is they know the time you went through the first toll station
and the time you went through the second toll station.
Yeah, there's a way to do a time-distance check.
Because the system's being integrated in such a way it's like point-of-sale systems.
Almost like the way cell sites.
You shouldn't be hitting so many cell sites unless your power's way up.
It has that kind of a time versus distance versus position type of resolution.
You know, they don't mention this in the promotional material.
Oh, of course.
And if you notice, they also discontinued all the tokens.
I went to use my token the other day.
Oh, we're not going to be selling any more of these.
Right.
Well, now, the system you're talking about is actually a different E-ZPass system.
It's the New York State Thruway.
Well, the toll tags are the same way, the ones that they're using down here at Port Authority.
Amortek developed both of them.
I don't know if they're exactly on the same frequency.
I know that the original ones, when we, by the way, your best way to take these things apart,
because they're made of polycarbonate,
is simply take a Dremel tool and just, you know, like a dentist,
and drill the entire seam around so you can pop it apart.
Because if you try any other way, you can either crack the components.
You can basically need to shave all the edges off the case
until you've basically got a front half and a back half.
Okay.
And then you've got to watch out.
They may be epoxy some of the new ones.
I was playing with ones that were from two or three years ago.
I think they've gotten smart and started epoxying the components.
Will a standard drill help in this case?
No, that's too brutal.
You really need a Dremel tool, something you've got some control over
in terms of when you break the plastic weld that goes around the edge.
Like I said, you could literally, if you want to take a belt sander,
shave all the sides down until the walls on the edge,
the side walls are all thin enough to start to splinter.
Let me ask our expert here something.
On the Riverside Freeway out of Los Angeles,
they have these sensing grids over the highway which work like the toll plazas
except you can speed on through around 60 miles an hour without any trouble.
Wow.
Are you familiar with those at all?
I've heard of them.
And basically the trick is how much RF do you want to be driving through?
The ones that are overhead on the easy passes are like between 1 and 4 watts.
The ones in Texas are like 5 to 25 watts.
In Los Angeles, no problem.
You put a wire loop down and just pong 100 watts up through every car that goes by.
Yeah, you'll get a response.
And actually there's an entire organization,
actually it's a company that makes this as a website.
It's not much use but it will give you phone numbers and listings.
You can start tracing this stuff down.
Companies who make RFID systems,
their webpage, which is really just one page,
happens to be www.asctmd.com,
and it lists their other affiliates in England and around the world.
In fact, they have affiliates that make the card key identifying cards
that slide through slots for businesses
and also they have the division that makes little tags for the department stores.
Do you have any idea what's wrong with the 800 number,
why they're saying that I didn't pass through anything when I did?
I don't know.
That sounds more like their accounting system.
Apparently the computers they're using, the state already owned.
The only thing they've really interfaced is the cards or these tags.
The integrated reader system, which is also supplied and consulted on by Amtec.
And the rest of it goes basically down their normal, quote-unquote,
channels of communication for how they collect everything else,
like complaints and whatnot via data entry.
They just picked another path.
As far as the main computer,
they didn't buy a new brain to collate all this information,
so it'll be really interesting if the thing can get overloaded
because now they've got all these things feeding in a system input
that the human workers probably weren't typing quite as fast.
They'll probably find themselves running into a storage problem.
But basically you might want to try.
I don't know if anyone's playing with 900 meg transmitters or whatnot.
You can try Pong.
I haven't figured out how to get a response because it should be possible
but I haven't figured out how the Pong response works.
To transmit your own binary, any binary code you want,
bill it to somebody like the mayor or something when you go through.
Well, I guess you'd need the account number.
Actually, yeah, but basically, interestingly enough, when the thing Pongs,
if you're in an adjacent lane and you're not Ponging
or you don't have a card in your account or a card Ponging,
you should be able to hear the echo of the digital signature from the card
when the field collapses.
Sounds like an episode of Star Trek, but yeah, that does sound doable.
Do you have any other ideas as to how maybe to confuse the system?
What would happen if you put two of these things on your windshield?
It'll probably confuse them because with any other RFID systems,
typically when there are two cards adjacent to one another,
discrimination is the biggest problem because basically both the cards get energized
and they send a signal.
It's basically like two digital voices shouting at the same time.
It can't tell whose parity it's reading.
It may work on the one that may be physically closer
because even though it's pulse code modulation,
it may have the same thing as the FM capture effect.
You're listening to a radio on your car and you're between two cities
that maybe have two FM stations in the same.
It kind of sucks into one and sucks into the other.
It may work that way, but I have a suspicion you'll garble it enough
that it'll keep failing CRC checks or whatever else they use for checking
that neither tag will read properly
until they can be resolved and read separately.
Supposing you're standing still in the lane.
There's another problem.
You know what happens then?
There's a refresh rate on the radio transmitter.
I've had friends tell me that they got stuck in traffic.
Some bozo stole in front of them an E-ZPass
and showed that she went through the Verrazano Bridge four times in the same minute.
At what, $7 a pop?
Yeah, right.
Wow.
Basically emptied her account and she couldn't figure out what the hell happened.
Yes.
The problem with that is that the system apparently didn't
I mean, obviously it would have to be in the software or maybe the firmware.
Like, well, I already read this card.
I should know it out.
But the system apparently, you know,
it's right now they're basically doing straight data collection.
Yeah, because that's pretty stupid.
How can you possibly go through the same toll twice?
Well, they gave her a refund right away when they had a human being look.
Oh, yeah, I see what happened.
You know, they gave her a $21 refund.
In some access control systems, the main systems, you know,
they're usually running large Unix platforms or whatnot.
The software engineers that have designed a lot of the access controls,
like, for example, someone swipes their card once.
If the door is already open and they swipe it again, it won't re-unopen the door.
In fact, it'll send an alarm at one, you've swiped your badge twice, and the door is open.
There's all kinds of, like, traps where it sits there and figures out,
is this card being used properly?
Why is it being used twice in the same spot?
It usually alerts an operator, or at least it makes a note in the software
that someone swiped their badge twice.
If it showed that the door opened and closed like the person was bullshitting
and the door closed and then they had to re-swipe,
the system re-allows the card to do something.
Otherwise, it just does another read, makes a note.
A useless read.
I mean, it practically makes a comment like that.
Unnecessary reading.
They use it for statistical analysis at some of the larger banks out west
when they're doing a time and attendance reading
where a person walks around their entire facility,
and it's the basis for their getting paid,
whether they're in the cafeteria or at their work desk or whatnot.
In fact, a lot of them can't even log in unless they swipe their card
on the real reader next to their workstation.
So they clock back into their terminal when they get back to their cubicle.
So they have to be very careful whether, you know,
the double read, because sometimes extra read might be double pay
or no pay for that day.
It became a sticky issue with some of the secretarial unions out west.
Tell me, are you at all familiar with LOJECT?
Do you follow that at all?
That's another subject that we're trying to learn more about.
I've only heard it rumored.
Well, I know it's probably VHF because I woke up to an unmarked police car
that had a LOJECT system and sat there
and whipped out my tape measure, measured the antenna,
and worked my way the quarter wave frequency backwards.
And you live to tell about it, huh?
It's easy to do these things at 3 in the morning.
Anyhow, yeah, I would say they're in the high VHF band.
I know that one of the 2600s, it said like 173 or whatever.
I wrote the frequency down.
I haven't had a chance to really find anyone who's got one.
My friends, usually their PCs cost more than their cars,
so they haven't gone out and bought a LOJECT.
I'm curious how effective LOJECT is for tracking people whose cars are not stolen.
I believe from just sitting there trying to chew the fat with police officers
at various coffee shops,
they basically tell me they practically have to get pretty much on top of the vehicle
before they even get a signal.
So I think between hiding it and the transmitter output,
if a person who's putting it in is an auto alarm installer
and doesn't understand the best place to put the concealed antenna for proper propagation,
it's probably not going to go very far unless it's put into the windshield.
Well, that's supposedly a secret as to where it's installed.
You're not supposed to know where it is.
Believe me.
You've worked on a car.
You know how to pull out kick panels and whatnot
and find things if you really want to find something.
Right, that's certainly true.
Maybe in the bigger cars with 9 million wires and harnesses and computers,
it was a little harder.
In the older cars, yeah, it was a little easier, but even so.
I mean, at worst, you can always buy a big Mylar bag
and bag the entire car if you're going to steal it
because the Mylar will short out the signal.
Interesting.
All right, listen, thanks for all the info.
It's very informative.
Have fun, guys.
All right, take care.
Bye-bye.
Well, that's yet another subject for us to start researching.
Charles, I guess this is sort of the epitome of what hackers are all about
where we just find something
and we just won't let it go until we know every single detail about it.
Well, that's fine as far as I'm concerned.
I mean, information is neutral.
It's what you do with it that is no longer neutral.
And looking at the device that we're trying to take apart,
it doesn't look any more taken apart than it was 20 minutes ago.
Oh, my God, it is.
It looks like they've sort of peeled apart the bottom of it.
Okay, we might have something a little later in the show then.
There are components visible right now.
This thing will probably never work again.
Okay.
It's not going to work again, is it?
No.
Okay.
All right, we've confirmed that.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Hi.
The EasyPass New York State Thruway and the Triborough Bridge,
if you have one from the Thruway,
when you go through the Triborough Bridge, I'll charge you the regular rate,
meaning the $3.50 as opposed to the $3 for the EasyPass from the Triborough.
You're supposed to get a discount, is that right?
You're supposed to, but...
You're saying that the Triborough does not give you a discount?
No, there's two EasyPasses in New York State.
Okay.
The number you called was 333-TOLL.
Yeah, and there's also a 222-TOLL.
Right.
One is for New York State Thruway and one is for the TBTA.
Okay.
This is the Triborough.
Now, if you live upstate and use the New York State Thruway one,
when you go through the Triborough Bridge, one of those bridges,
they charge you $3.50.
I wasn't even sure it would work at all.
Yes, it does.
It does.
But they charge you the higher rate.
Can we use ours to go through the Thruway upstate?
Yes, you could.
Yes, you could because there's no discount, really, with the Thruway.
Now, if I wanted to use both, would I have to get two of these things?
No, they're working out some type of an agreement now where you could use both.
You could get both.
At one time, people were getting both.
But now you can use both on both systems.
I mean, it's kind of neat to be able to just drive through tollbooths
and not have to talk to people or say thank you or you're welcome or any of that business.
I can't stand that.
The problem is if you get the TBTA and you use it on the Thruway, there's no problem.
But if you're using the Thruway one on the TBTA's bridges, there's no discount.
Wow.
It used to be you just got in your car and drove, you know?
Yeah, of course.
Now you've got to figure all this stuff out.
The way with all the tolls, that's what I say.
Yeah.
And with the tokens, I bought a roll of tokens the other day.
The guy says to me, I said to him, what's going to be with the tokens?
He says, listen, you hold on to them.
As long as you have them, they'll be good.
So I don't know what the other guy was telling you before.
Interesting.
Will you be on tomorrow night?
Why would I be on tomorrow night?
I'm never on Wednesday.
Oh, Tuesday, yeah.
I will be on probably next week, New Year's Eve.
Oh, great.
So we'll have some sort of celebration here.
With the redial call, the star 67?
Star 69.
No, no, actually star 66.
66.
Yeah, that's redial.
Now, sometimes I have a call block.
I have to dial star 82.
Star 82 will send your number.
Right, right.
Now, if I call somebody and their line is, let's say a radio station or something, and
the line is busy, I can't use the star 66.
Well, now, they can make it so you can call certain numbers.
But with a radio station, it would be kind of pointless because if you dialed star 66,
it calls you back, you pick up, and then it rings the station again.
Of course, the station would be busy.
No, no.
What I had the other day was I dialed star 82.
I got a busy signal.
Then I figured, let me try star 66.
I tried star 66 and it just gave me a regular dial tone again.
Star 66 got you a regular dial tone?
Yeah.
It shouldn't do that.
It should try to redial.
Because I dialed star 82 and that was the first number.
Right.
All star 82 is going to do is give you a regular dial tone where you can dial and your number won't be blocked.
Right, right.
It unblocks my number.
Right.
It just redialed star 82.
It doesn't redial the other number.
No.
Like 212-279-3400.
Really?
Right.
But the thing is you're dialing star 82-279-3400.
It's a string.
You see what I'm saying?
Yeah, but it gets chopped off.
When you dial star 82, you get that double dial tone.
Why is dialing star 82 important when you're dialing a radio station anyway?
Because they have a block.
They block anonymous calls?
They block anonymous calls.
Boy, that's not nice.
What station is this?
It's on the FM dial.
Oh, it's one of those FM stations.
Lower down the dial.
Really?
Yeah.
Well, there's no reason to block anonymous calls.
I know.
I react with hostility to that.
I talked to the manager today.
He said the previous administration ordered it and it's only on two lines.
So we really don't know your number.
Well, it's a pain in the neck to me every time I call you people.
No, it's totally unnecessary to do that.
All right.
All right.
Thanks for the info.
Take care.
Take care.
By the way, one thing which I've been meaning to point out, and that's a correction from
last week's show.
You would not believe the response that we've gotten to this one innocent mistake.
And I really, you know, I know what Newt Gingrich feels like now, okay?
Because I did not intentionally try to mislead anyone, all right?
I was misinformed.
I was given the wrong information.
And it was my own naivety that allowed me to make this thing go as far as it did.
And I'm sorry it went as far as it did, but these things happen occasionally.
And I think it's just time that we move on.
And what I'm referring to, of course, is the fact that we misstated that Halloween
falls on the same day of the week as New Year's Eve.
It does not.
I know that now.
It was a mistake to say that.
And I'm sorry.
All right.
But what we did find out, and maybe this will sort of make up for it, is that the
4th of July and Halloween are always the same date.
Always the same day of the week.
So if the 4th of July is a Wednesday, that means Halloween is going to be a Wednesday.
And there always has been a bit of a similarity between those two holidays anyway.
So some consolation there.
Again, we're sorry for the misinformation.
Okay.
Charles Platt, hopefully no misinformation in your book.
Any updates on any of the stories that have since come out?
Well, I guess the Communications Decency Act is going to be appealed to the Supreme Court.
And even if it's thrown out, which I think it will be, the righteous forces trying to
protect everyone are going to have another shot.
And this battle is just going to go on forever.
It's going to be like the battle over abortion, I think.
It's never going to be resolved to anyone's satisfaction.
So that's the main thing.
And then, of course, we have the Clinton administration trying very hard to find interesting new ways
of making it illegal to use strong encryption and encouraging everyone to use encryption
that the government can break.
So that's another ongoing saga, which is just going to run and run.
I'm afraid there's no good news that I can think of.
Well, I think the good news is that there's people out there fighting for our rights,
for our freedom of speech, people writing books about this kind of thing, waking people up.
And I think that's really the only way to properly document this is to tell the story
from that point of view.
That's true.
The difference is that the people who want to introduce all these laws actually seem
to enjoy it, whereas the people who are trying to fight it, in my experience, would really
rather be doing something else but someone to go, you know.
Well, I mean, lots of times it comes out of their pocket.
They have to pay expenses, even if they win.
Exactly.
They lose because of all the money they spend.
One story which was not in your book, which maybe if you write a sequel, it can be, is
the whole Bernie S. saga.
You've heard of that.
I met a gentleman from Internet Underground recently who gave me the blow-by-blow account.
It's an amazing story.
It's incredible.
And I'm waiting for the book to come out, but so far no one's rushing to write that one.
But of all the stories you tell, I think that one definitely belongs in there.
And I'm sure there are lots of other stories as well, unfortunately, that are unfolding
right now.
Yes.
And, well, I guess, you know, in a way, there'll be many more books like this to write.
Tell us how to, oh, we have it.
Wow.
This is amazing.
The device has been completely opened.
You cracked it, huh?
Literally, yes.
All right.
Who would like to describe what we have?
David, do you want to give it a shot?
What do we have here?
What kinds of components are those?
It actually says there is a battery in here.
There is a battery.
It says, yeah.
Oh, good luck replacing it.
Well, we had to go through to get that thing open.
This may just be a battery in the sense of this capacitor.
And this is a large capacitor.
And then a transmitter and an IC chip.
And an alarm, which we've just set off.
Well, we're going to take a picture of this and put it up on the website or something
so people can give us ideas as to what to do next.
Do you think it's still functioning at all?
No.
Not with this one.
Oh, what's missing?
Something's missing?
Well, there's a stud.
I mean, this is just a stud to keep the top plastic cover off.
It might still work.
Well, we're going to take a little walk later tonight through the Midtown Tunnel and see what happens.
See if the thing opens up for us.
We're out of time now, but thanks to our experimenters for tearing apart that piece of technology.
And Charles Platt, give us the information for your book one more time.
Yeah, anyone who wants to order a copy of my book should call 800-879-4214.
It's $12.95 for a hardcover edition, provided you say, I heard about it on the Internet.
Okay, those are very important words to say, I guess.
Charles, very good luck to you in the future, I guess.
Thank you.
And hopefully we'll be hearing more updates as far as all the other battles that are taking place.
Absolutely.
All right.
Thanks for calling.
All right, good night.
Bye.
And we'll be back again next week with another fun-filled edition,
the New Year's Eve edition of Off The Hook.
So until then, have a good holiday.
We'll see you next week.
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This is Brother Sean.
I would like to wish all of you a very special and happy holidays.
On December the 29th, Adam will be going into a family shelter with a feast in the
family shelter, with a feast, entertainment, and gifts.
Where we are lacking is gifts for the children.
So if you can find it in your heart to sponsor one gift for one child,
we would truly appreciate it.