How Did This Happen Anyway, by Carla Richmond.
This is Janice K. Bryant.
For a good time, meet me on the Blue Light Corner between 7 p.m. and midnight, Thursday,
February 25th, for an evening of passion, sex, and romantic love with the women of the
Blue Light Corner, an anthology of writings from black women.
That's Thursday, February 25th, 7 p.m. to midnight.
The Blue Light Corner is a marathon special.
You'll hear it here on listener-sponsored WBAI 99.5 FM in New York.
See you on the corner.
And it's just about 8 o'clock, which means it's time for another 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.
It could be that much worse, but if they could, they would.
For Billy Bumper, the best expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
I'm Billy Bumper.
I'm Billy Bumper.
I'm Billy Bumper.
I'm Billy Bumper.
And a very good evening to everybody.
This is Emanuel Goldstein with another edition of Off the Hook, coming to you live this week,
as we do every week, actually, between the hours of 8 and 9 p.m.
Actually, we won't be here next week because next week is a fundraising week.
However, we will be back the week after that.
And I had initially thought that we weren't going to be here this week, so unfortunately,
I went out and caught the flu, thinking that I wouldn't have to worry about this week.
But, oh well, you know, we all make our mistakes.
Anyway, we have a lot of interesting things to talk about tonight.
Porkchop is here.
Hello, world.
How are you doing?
Flew in from New Jersey, and how are things going with you?
Everything's normal.
Real audio is working, even though you're here.
That is right.
Okay.
Well, that's certainly a relief.
Anything we have to look forward to in the future, as far as the real audio world?
Well, actually, Off the Hook may be broadcasting in coming weeks on MPEG-3 streaming.
Ooh.
This is supposedly higher quality than real audio.
We're just testing it out now.
There might be a server right now doing it.
I'm not sure.
You can go into poundoffthehook on EFnet and ask if there's an MPEG server.
That's IRC, obviously.
Yes.
If it works out well, maybe next week and weeks in the future we'll have an MPEG server.
Well, not next week.
Not next week.
The week after that.
That's true.
Sorry.
But if it works out well, we'll have it for weeks to come.
And we'll keep real audio, by the way, just for all the real audio people and people who can't.
But MP3, that'll allow you to listen in, I guess, FM quality.
Yeah, supposedly.
I haven't heard it myself.
It's exactly the way they sound over the FM airwaves.
That was the idea behind real audio as well.
Well, no, it's not really exactly the way it sounds.
It's close.
It's close, but it's not exact.
Although the early days of real audio, I remember things were just so incredible.
It was worse than AM.
It was worse than shortwave.
Well, we were happy to get anything back then.
That's true.
That's true.
I mean, I was overjoyed with real audio version 2.
We had low expectations, but now we are a little bit fussier, and we won't tolerate anything that doesn't sound perfect.
Right.
Okay.
Well, I don't sound very perfect tonight.
That's for sure.
I don't feel very perfect, but we're going to try and get through this as best we can.
We have a couple of stories.
We have a special guest on the line who will be joining in a moment.
Of course, we're going to take phone calls at 212-209-2900.
A bit of a nightmare over at Hallmark.
I don't know if people heard about this one, but apparently, there are a bunch of Valentines that got to be public.
Yeah, they have some sort of an online service where people can send Valentines back and forth on their website.
They weren't aware, however, that these little Valentines actually had an audience of millions.
That's right.
A programming error at Hallmark.com allowed anyone with a computer and some curiosity to search the website for private love notes,
and in many cases, the sender's name, home, and e-mail addresses, and place of employment.
This is just about as bad as it can get.
The security breach surprised customers and executives at the Kansas City-based company,
which this week scrambled to modify the computer program after the Kansas City Star reported the problem.
Technicians have since deleted all of the old messages.
A Hallmark official said the problem involved only greetings sent a year or more ago.
I don't know how much consolation that is for people that sent those a year or more ago.
It was a programming error, company spokeswoman Julie O'Dell said.
We certainly are committed to providing privacy.
We just aren't very good at it.
The recipient of a cyber Hallmark greeting card first gets an e-mail from the company, including a password.
Then he or she clicks on a web address to view the card.
But until this week, all those messages were available to anyone who used the site's search engine, according to the newspaper.
What if the word bear was typed?
For example, Hallmark's computer would have given you a list of web pages including that word,
including one page featuring a sweet message from Teddy Bear to his honey.
I had no idea, said Gary Harders of Chicago, who sent one of the cards to his wife.
Thank God. I assumed it was private.
It defeats the whole purpose of sending someone a personal card if everybody and his brother is going to get a hold of it.
It could be embarrassing.
Well, you know, folks, when you do things on the World Wide Web, there's a reason why they call it the World Wide Web.
Because it goes all over the place.
And if you think for one moment that your privacy is guaranteed on a computer that's attached to a device
which allows it to be read by anybody from Pakistan to Brooklyn, well, you got some waking up to do.
Ms. O'Dell said she had no idea how many people might have clicked through the greetings.
This new system has built in a new standard to ensure this kind of thing doesn't happen again,
at least not in exactly the same way.
We don't want a lot of people worried.
None of the recent electronic greetings were in that file.
You won't have to worry for another year, probably.
According to the Star, some of the messages were obviously not meant for mass consumption.
Here are a few choice ones.
Larry and I have been having secret cyber sex via computer.
I've seen you swing a sledgehammer, and the way your muscles ripple is amazing.
You deserve an extra foot massage tonight.
Another writer emailed an intimate message and a photo of a flower to a woman friend
trying to entice her into a romantic rendezvous.
You will have the greatest time you've had in 15 years.
He assured his friend the must the other man in her life persuaded her to stay home with him and their children instead.
I think of the children.
For God's sake.
This from today's abcnews.com.
It really messed up a Mitnick story a few weeks ago,
but then they quickly corrected it after people started complaining.
They posted the same old thing about how he was in prison for credit card fraud.
I think when the fans started up, they quickly replaced that paragraph.
Which, you know, I have a problem with that.
That's called revisionism.
That's changing something that happened, rather than correcting it.
I mean, it'd be nice if we could go back and correct the July 4th, 1994 story by John Markoff in the New York Times
and make all the things he said that were wrong into things that were right.
But then, you know, people have still read the things that were wrong.
They're just not there anymore.
It's like I was watching that program, Saturday Night Live.
You know, that thing they have on Saturday nights that's live.
And do you remember the one that they had when Sinead O'Connor was on and she ripped up a picture of the Pope and everybody got upset?
Oh, I remember hearing about that, yeah.
Well, I was watching that episode yesterday and I was looking forward to seeing this because I'd never seen it before.
And you know what? She didn't rip it up.
She held up a picture of a kid instead and didn't rip it up and the audience applauded.
And I was like, wait a minute.
I know this happened. This is the same show.
How in the world did they do this?
Turns out what happened, because I asked on the Internet,
and that's where you get the information is on the Internet.
And I found out very quickly that they substituted the dress rehearsal for all the repeats
so that it wouldn't defend anybody in the future.
It's a live show.
You know, it's a live show. You're supposed to keep it the way it was when it aired live.
Instead, they changed it.
They took out the thing that made them look bad, the thing that was unpopular,
and replaced it with something that was completely different.
Remember the book 1984?
Yeah, yeah. I'm sort of thinking about that.
They sort of changed a couple of things when they found out that it wasn't a sunny day after all.
Well, it was disturbing to say the least.
If anybody has a tape of the original, I'd sure like to talk to you.
Over to the Pentagon.
This is the news from abcnews.com I was alluding to.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff looked on
as Pentagon cyberwarriors clicked away at their laptops
and showed how would-be terrorists could find his son's home address.
My eyes and my ears.
Army General Henry Shelton then got a demonstration
of how a skilled adversary might combine publicly available biographies
and contractor information on military websites with a few well-placed phone calls
to pin down the dates of highly classified nuclear exercises.
The classified briefing held in Shelton's Pentagon office
whose address is not here
was then given to other generals and admirals as well as senior civilians
generating a momentum that has led the military to order a massive scrub
of its vast network of internet sites.
Deputy Defense Secretary John Hammer said
military websites offered adversaries a potent instrument
to obtain, correlate and evaluate an unprecedented volume of aggregated information
that could, when combined with other sources of information,
endanger Department of Defense personnel and their families.
Well, you know what else? The phone book could do that.
Libraries can do that. You know, people talking in the street can do that.
I thought that was the definition of the internet.
Yeah, you know, I don't know what exactly they want.
They want us to redefine free speech, I guess.
Just keep everything that could possibly be used.
I mean, yeah, you know, if you give someone's name out,
maybe all the people in the Pentagon, their name should be kept secret.
That way their families won't be at risk from some, you know, some terrorist someplace.
And how many times has this happened?
How many times have the families of Pentagon people?
And I'm not counting in films.
I understand there's a problem in films.
There are lots of terrorists that are doing bad things in fiction.
But this is real life.
In real life, how many times has it happened?
You know, I know a lot of us have trouble separating the two,
but it's just an important question that needs to be asked.
Let's classify the name of Bill Clinton.
That would be something, wouldn't it?
Yeah, if Harris can't get him.
As of December 7th, the policy change has touched off a debate.
As some critics argue, the Pentagon went too far
in restricting the information it makes public on the Internet.
In response, defense and national security officials have become more willing to discuss,
on condition of not being identified by name,
the nature of the risk their detailed review of military websites revealed.
There was information that was potentially tactically useful to an adversary,
the kind of thing where if someone really wanted to do harm to your personnel,
it could facilitate them in undertaking an attack.
Boy, there's a lot of clauses in that sentence.
Said one senior defense official working on Internet security issues.
Another national security official called the briefings
eye-openers that startled commanders.
The briefings stem from work done in 1997 and 1998 by Pentagon red teams.
Those are the people that broke in 250,000 times, supposedly.
A term associated with a notional enemy force in war games.
Team members tried to learn how much mischief they could do
by skillfully scanning military websites without any sophisticated hacking.
They showed Shelton himself, a former special operations specialist,
how his own biography posted on a military website,
combined with non-military databases,
could quickly lead a terrorist to the home address of one of his sons living in Florida.
I got a level of people here.
If someone really wants to do something, they'll find a way to do it.
There's no question about that.
If someone really wants to target the family of an employee of some agency,
they will find a way to do this.
The web is not your enemy.
The Internet is not your enemy.
Free information is not your enemy.
Fortunately, we're making a lot of new enemies here.
Anyone see yesterday's Newsday?
Look at this front page headline here.
The Dark Side of the Net.
That's the most important thing to Newsday yesterday.
The Dark Side of the Net.
Threats, accusations, vicious gossip, the small but growing world of cyber-smearing.
Cyber-smearing.
And they have a story in here about this kid, Alexander Looney,
a 15-year-old Eagle Scout, didn't even have an online account
when his scout leader angrily confronted him about sending an email
threatening to sodomize the man's son and rape the wife of another scout leader.
Uh-oh.
Yeah.
Well, guess what?
Someone apparently used his name on an email service.
And now, this is the thing that really gets me.
His family, four years later, his family still doesn't know who did it,
and they're locked in an expensive, long-running lawsuit
seeking compensation from Prodigy for the humiliation they say they've suffered.
Oh, my God.
Now, these people have got to be the dumbest, stupid idiots.
And I say this with all due respect.
I'm not trying to start legal action here.
But, I mean, come on already.
This is the Internet.
These are names being bandied about.
Lawsuits don't solve things like this.
They just don't.
There's really no reason to have excess litigation
every time someone says something that you don't like on the Internet.
You basically have to correct the record and say,
No, that wasn't me.
It's very easy for anybody to say that you're anybody on the Net.
That's the nature of the Net,
trying to sue people and make everything work out that way.
It's using old-fashioned tactics in a newfangled world,
and they just don't work, as I'm sure they're learning now.
The whole article is interesting.
It goes on about how this is an increasing problem,
how people are being nastier and nastier,
because the Net is becoming bigger and bigger.
More people are joining.
It's not like a small town anymore.
It's like a big city,
and in a big city you have murders and rapes and things like that,
and that's the same thing that's going on in cyberspace.
Yeah, okay.
But you know what?
It's not the same thing.
It's different.
It's cyberspace.
The only thing that's the same are the penalties.
Did you just refer to the Internet as cyberspace?
Well, I'm using their lexicon here,
because I had to demote myself to their level.
They're getting to you.
I am starting to think that way.
That's not a good thing.
Anyway, that's a brief look at the news for this week.
Let's take a look at the telephone over here.
We have with us on the phone from an undisclosed location
a hacker named Bronk.
Bronk, are you there?
Yep, I'm right here.
How are you doing?
I'm all right.
How are you fellas doing tonight?
We're doing pretty good.
We're just frustrated with the overall stupidity
of most of the things we've talked about so far.
I've been listening.
Now, people who have been following the hacker world
in the last few months,
your name might ring a bell for them.
You're the person that has been accused
of hacking Chinese websites throughout China
and really incurring their wrath.
Is that an accurate statement?
Yeah, pretty much.
They've been getting pretty mad at me.
I've been messing with some of their websites
and some of their firewalls.
It's more of a pie-in-the-face thing
than any real damage being done.
Now, we learned pretty recently
that there was actually a bulletin issued
by the Chinese authorities
to look out for anything coming from you.
Is that a fair way of saying it?
Yeah, that's pretty much.
It was like the way I see it,
some sort of internal memo that was sent around.
I was given a copy of it.
That's so internal, then.
Yeah, I need more.
What kind of people have seen the memo so far?
Not very many people.
I'm not talking about the hacker community.
I'm talking about who is it intended for?
As far as I can tell,
to people in the Public Security Bureau
computer monitoring department.
I guess they have them all over China.
To monitor computer and internet use.
Do you have it in front of you?
Yes, I sure do.
I know you can't read Chinese,
but we had a cursory translation made before.
I can read the brief translation over here.
It says,
The Internet has both good and bad elements.
On the one hand,
it fosters economic development
and helps China build a spiritual civilization
and socialism with Chinese characteristics.
On the other hand,
the Internet is a source of spiritual pollution
that can be used by...
I think someone stepped on you there.
Pick up where you said spiritual pollution.
Okay.
And helps China build a social,
spiritual civilization and socialism
with the Chinese characteristics.
It says,
On the other hand,
the Internet is a source of spiritual pollution
that can be used by agents of the United States
to spread peaceful revolution.
We must be on the guard
against this type of foreign subversion
and actively seek to prevent the intrusion
of this type of destructive elements into China.
It is difficult to identify
whether this subversion
originally came from the United States,
but we cannot assume that it does not.
These so-called hacker groups,
or they call them black eyes,
often work in concert
with Chinese counter-revolutionaries
to attempt to overthrow the Chinese Communist Party
and the People's Democratic Dictatorship in China.
And it has, for example,
one group calling itself LOU,
Legion of the Underground,
has declared war on China.
And the true affiliation of this group are unknown,
although they have successfully carried out
an information warfare attack against networks
and it lists some networks that we've messed with.
And it says,
they've allegedly been criticized
by other so-called hacker groups
for their threats against China.
All of our Public Security Bureau
computer monitoring department units
must be vigilant against attacks from abroad.
And here's where it worries me,
because it says,
any communications that contain the names
Legion of the Underground,
Bronc Buster, or Zyklon
must be reported to the relevant office in Beijing.
And it says,
further directives on this issue will follow.
Well, that sure sounds ominous,
the further directives will follow.
Yeah.
I'm trying to get some of those further directives
and see what they say.
You think they might send a death squad over or something?
I hope not.
Sounds kind of ominous there.
Now, what's this Black Eyes?
Where'd that come from?
I guess that's their term for hacker groups.
Black Eyes?
Yeah.
That's a great name.
Yeah.
Well, they got a piney eye.
I think they're the ones
that wind up with the black eyes, though,
to their integrity when their websites get hacked.
That's the truth.
That's interesting.
It's got to be kind of frightening
when you have a nation of a billion people
that supposedly is calling for,
I don't know what they're calling for.
I understand that you've learned
that ambassadors to this country
have been contacted by Chinese nationals.
Any truth to that?
Yeah.
The Chinese embassy and the Chinese consulate,
consulates across the United States
and some of them Canada,
have been calling people
that I've been talking to,
various reporters
or people in the computer security area,
people I've had contact with.
They've been calling them
and giving them the third degree,
wanting information about us,
who we are, where we are.
Wait.
What you're saying is
that if somebody interviews you,
then a day or so later,
they get interrogated?
Uh-uh.
Who set this up?
Al McKay from Wired.
He got four calls
the day after he ran the first interview.
Oh, this is just great.
I'm going to get interrogated now
by the Chinese.
Isn't that nice?
Yeah.
I've got to check the itinerary
before I come in here in the future.
Oh, boy.
Here they are now.
Yep, it's coming from China.
Yep, no question about it.
It's a China caller ID.
Oh, boy.
Well, anyway.
All right, so now,
it must be kind of distressing
to see all this reaction.
When you first started doing this,
when the first Chinese...
First of all, why did you pick China?
It was kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing.
When I first started in college,
I had done some research
and some papers on them,
just because I was forced
to write a paper on them.
And I learned what was going on over there.
And then I read about their human rights site
and the human rights convention
that was going on over there.
And I decided,
well, this isn't right.
So I went in there
and we changed the page around a little bit.
And I had no idea
it would be the big impact that it was.
It was really shocking.
Tell us about the page that got changed
and what was changed in it.
Initially, they had a human rights site
they put up,
which basically said, you know,
there are no human rights violations here in China
and the Chinese government, you know,
supports human rights.
It had a bunch of pictures
of the happy children running around.
It was a total bogus site.
It was like the Nazis saying, you know,
hey, the Holocaust never happened.
Everything's good and fine over here.
And I basically changed it saying,
hey, that's BS and you know it.
And I provided some links to sites
that provide truthful information
on what's happening over there.
What kind of response did that get?
From them?
That's when they started contacting people
and looking for me.
I have been contacted by the sites
that I provided links to.
And they've all thanked me immensely.
The human rights in China group
in New York City,
they say that one day that site was up.
They had 5,000 more hits than they usually get
and they continued that way
for days after the hack.
Really?
They were ecstatic.
They said they had more traffic in that week
than they've had since their site has been up.
What kind of response from the media did you get?
It was kind of shocking at first.
I thought no one would really care.
And then I started getting floods of email
from every news group you can think of,
from WIRED to ZDNM to LA Times,
Boston Globe.
I've even contacted by 60 Minutes in 2020.
Everyone wants to know what's going on.
Are they going to do a story,
60 Minutes 2020, those people?
60 Minutes is still researching it.
2020 kind of backed off
and I thought 60 Minutes was going to do it.
Yeah, 60 Minutes is the big kid on the block
if you don't mess with them.
Well, that's interesting.
Now, of the media coverage you got,
how much of it demonized hackers
and how much of it saw you as kind of a savior?
There were two sides to the coverage, really.
There was one that was covering
the hacktivist side of it.
It was portrayed in a really positive manner.
I saw just a few articles that were saying,
hey, he was wrong.
He basically censored people
who were censoring other people.
I guess some people were saying
two wrongs don't make a right,
but the majority of the response was positive.
When you actually hacked the site,
what did you do to the old stuff that was there?
I just moved it.
You moved it?
You moved the index to index.old
and just replaced it.
And that said you didn't destroy anything?
Oh, no.
Do you think that's an important part?
Let's say something really hated,
like the Klan or the Nazi Party,
people who hack those sites,
and people are hacking those sites.
Oh, yeah.
Do you think it's right to delete things like that
if they're really offensive,
or should that never happen?
I don't think you should destroy anything.
The great power of the Internet
is that it lets one person
possess the same power as a big world government.
That's the Chinese hack proof.
One person,
and I've put down one of the biggest nations in the world.
They put you on the same level with them.
If you really want to destroy things,
you just vilify yourself.
You're that guy standing in front of their virtual tank,
I guess.
Yeah.
That's not a good image for that.
Interesting.
Now, let's move ahead.
How many Chinese sites got hacked in total?
The total domains got taken down with three.
We got human rights in China.
Our human rights, China.org,
and ChinaTibet.org,
and we took down a monitoring service
they had in one of their provinces,
which controlled several of the firewalls
they used to filter sites.
We took down five of the firewalls
by just going into the configuration file
and telling it basically not to block any sites at all.
What effect did that have?
It let the people in that province
that were going through those firewalls
in or out through those proxy firewalls
to surf freely.
So basically you opened up the Internet
to a bunch of Chinese people over there.
Yeah.
And they could go anywhere.
Oh, boy.
Well, even the sites that were hacked got blocked,
so the people probably didn't even know it at the time.
Maybe, you know, I'm not sure how long they were up,
because I didn't specify which ones were,
and we didn't do anything
except change the configuration file,
so the walls were still running.
So I guess until the time it took for them
to find out which one had been tampered with,
people had free access,
but whether or not they knew about it, I'm not sure.
What would you say the state of their security is in general?
Extremely poor.
Yeah.
It has to be one of the poorest
of any powerful world government that I've seen.
And I guess you've seen a few.
Yeah.
Wow.
With the ease that we did what we did over there,
I'm surprised that people that have, like, unlimited resources,
the CIA, the NSA,
they're probably running the show over there
as far as the Chinese Internet is concerned.
Have things gotten better, though, since your attacks?
After my attack,
the trial for Lin Hai came up
about him sending the e-mail addresses to the United States,
and he was facing life in prison.
And after my hacks,
the U.S. State Department made a direct appeal on his behalf.
Once I mentioned him in my second hack.
And it ended up being only two years instead of life.
And now I just heard from people in Shanghai
that something unprecedented has happened,
and they granted him an appeal,
which is, I guess, unheard of over there.
Well, you know, world attention does tend to make these unprecedented things happen.
Yeah.
No question about that.
I'm glad it's happening.
I'm glad something positive came of this.
So you're in touch with people over there in China?
A few people, and a few in the United States.
I try to keep a semi-low profile on how to find me.
I've been contacted by various human rights groups
that operate in the United States,
that have agents in China
and people out of Singapore and Hong Kong.
Has anyone actually, apart from e-mail,
has anyone actually contacted you,
rung your phone, knocked on your door,
to talk about this?
So no governmental agencies have actually pursued this, apparently.
No.
I know our government knows who I am.
I'm former military,
and I've worked with the FBI on cases in the past.
So I know they know who I am.
They're just choosing not to act.
And apparently they weren't cooperating with the Chinese government either,
otherwise they wouldn't have been searching so hard for me.
Which kind of gives me that warm feeling.
Now let's talk about what's happened since then.
We have the legions of the underground
declaring their virtual war against China and Iraq.
And of course that led to condemnation by other hacker groups,
2600 included.
What was your involvement in that?
None, really, until it came to defending the group.
It was one member,
not even the leader,
got a wild hair
and started shooting his mouth off,
and said it was from us.
And in fact, no one at all else in the group had any idea what was going on.
Even the night that he had a little press conference online,
when all the members came in, they were asking what's going on.
And so he spent the rest of the time saying, you know, this isn't our position.
And once Wired got a hold of it, it totally blew that up a portion.
That and the National Post up in Toronto were interviewing people
that we didn't even know who they were.
Saying they were us, and they were causing all kinds of destruction.
Then all the code keys from the bandwagon
and started taking out sites all over the place over there.
Like a domino effect.
Really?
Now, where do you draw the line though?
I mean, you're hacking Chinese websites,
but you're condemning people declaring this kind of virtual cyber war
against a particular nation.
So where is that line for you?
Oh, you know, the simple protests and stuff that I do.
You do one thing and it causes a great deal of attention.
You know, that's all right.
You don't destroy anything.
You don't harm anybody.
But declaring war is something totally different.
I mean, war is something that the governments do.
You know, saying you're going to go to war, a cyber war,
where you're planning on destroying infrastructures
and computer networks, that's just wrong.
Plus, it allows us to play into the hands of all those people
that say hackers are a real threat to society,
because by destroying things, by being used as military tools,
we can be seen in just that light.
It's kind of frightening.
That's the truth, too.
That's definitely the truth.
It all comes down to what you know
and what your ethics and what your morals are.
And so far, I think that the hacking community that stands today
has done a pretty good job of portraying itself
in a really positive light.
Are there other things going on besides China?
There's another project I'm working on,
but I'd rather keep it kind of secret.
And me and the LLU have parted ways.
Now they're going in one direction.
The stuff I'm trying to do is in the other direction.
So I thought it would be better that we part.
Is it a friendly split?
Yeah. We're still friends.
I still hang out with those guys every once in a while.
They come and see me.
We're still on speaking terms.
That's good, I suppose.
Interesting.
This whole story has been fascinating from the start.
Of course, there are a lot of human rights violations
here in the United States.
You go around hacking sites here in this country,
I'll bet the same authorities that aren't pursuing you now
will certainly take an interest
and track you down like a dog, right?
Oh, that's the truth.
But then again, that's kind of the advantage
of being overseas sites,
or sites that are out of our country,
especially with countries that don't have
any tradition treaties in the United States.
Even if our government did want to do something about it,
there's no treaties, there's no law governing it.
It would be kind of hard for them to give me away
just to the Chinese.
Let's say, you know, pull a kidnapping stunt
or something like that.
That would be very bad if they did something like that.
Kind of unprecedented, too,
at least as far as I can see in this particular context.
We're going to take phone calls.
212-209-2900.
What do you recommend to those people out there
who know how to hack web pages
and are poised on the keyboard
waiting to play with some sites someplace?
Don't do it unless it's your own,
or unless you really know what you're doing.
Because if you do something and it's wrong
and you mess something up,
you're going to get in trouble.
That's all there is to it.
It's been proven over and over again.
One thing I've noticed with a lot of the hacked sites
is that there is no real message.
The message is basically just a lot of posturing
and bragging and putting down other groups
and things like that.
But in your particular case,
what you did was you sent out a very strong message
about a human rights violation.
You may have actually saved somebody's life by doing that.
Of course, by the same token,
you could also get somebody killed doing this
because someone might overreact.
For instance, people looking at the wrong websites in China.
Who knows what the penalty for that is?
The thing is there are a lot of issues out there
that need to be brought out.
Basically, by using the tools of the people
who you're opposed to
to spread the very message that they're against,
you reach a lot of people.
Yes.
Like I was saying,
that's the whole power of the Internet.
It can put one person on the level playing field
with a powerful government.
That hack was just an example of that.
A regular protest,
if I were to run around outside
in front of the Chinese embassy,
no one would have cared.
Whatever I said.
I could have told them the sky was falling,
no one would have cared.
But you hack a site on the Internet
of some powerful government,
and all of a sudden,
everyone looks and listens.
That's true.
It's an inspiration for individuals on the net
that their word actually can count for something.
But you've got to be really careful doing this.
They're playing for keeps over there.
That's where I think a lot of the
core code kiddies,
the new groups with all the young kids
that are hacking sites and putting up,
you know, we're elite,
and we hate this group,
and we like that group.
Why be part of a group?
You joined a group,
so what's the reason behind that?
We all had a lot of common interests
when I first joined them.
A lot of their friends were friends
of people I was with,
and some of them lived in a near vicinity to me.
We were all interested in just common things.
That's the only reason I could see
them join a group group.
How do you avoid groups that get involved
in these rivalries where they basically
just put each other down
and act like people in a mall or something?
It's easy to tell.
Once you start talking to people,
either they're mature,
and you can tell they're mature,
even in IRC,
or if they're not mature.
If you walk in,
they're walking like an IRC channel,
or if you're in a list server
or something like that,
and it's just a flame war going on,
you can tell what kind of environment
you've walked into.
If you talk to people
and they sound intelligent and mature,
that's a different story.
So you talked to people in different groups
while you were in LOU?
Yes.
And there were no problems crossing lines
or things like that?
Not really.
There are some groups,
the smaller, newer groups,
the people with less skill,
that see a semi-well-established group
that has done something
and have gotten some media coverage for it,
and they always want a piece of it,
so they take shots at you.
Or they say something in your name,
which in the world of the Internet
is very hard to disprove.
As we've said a couple of times tonight,
you can say something
and say that you're a particular person
or part of a particular group,
and how do you deny it?
All I've been doing
up until a few weeks ago
was basically writing reporters,
writing people who have talked
to the wrong people
and setting them straight.
Well, that's a full-time job,
let me tell you.
Oh, yeah.
It just got so bad
that I just stopped talking to people altogether.
I spent more time defending our position,
more time telling reporters
that you talk to the wrong people,
you got it wrong.
It just got out of hand.
I was doing that more
than telling the facts of the story anymore.
Okay, are you going to stay on the line
for some phone calls?
Sure.
Okay, we're talking to Bronk,
a hacker who has hacked Chinese webpages
and put examples of human rights abuses
right there for everybody to see.
Exactly the kind of thing
that the Chinese government did not want.
Opens up all kinds of doors
for net activism.
Our phone number is 212-209-2900.
Let's take some phone calls.
Good evening, you're on the air.
Hey, Daniel.
Hi, Porkchop.
It's Farrah.
How are you doing?
Good.
First off, the MP3 stream is working.
Okay, three streamers are working.
Yep.
And I have two more questions
to ask from last time.
Is there anything going on against Guinness
about their false printings about McNick?
Well, interesting thing that you mentioned that.
We have a site.
We've grabbed a site.
If you look at Guinness Book of World Records,
their page is www.guinnessrecords.com.
Now, interesting thing.
Spell Guinness, all right?
How many N's do you put in it?
One or two?
Isaac, you're here?
I'm imagining one.
You put one, Porkchop?
I'd probably put two.
Two.
All right.
Isaac, when you enter your version,
you'll get our webpage instead of their webpage
because they didn't register the one with one N.
And on that webpage, which we just got,
it's not up yet.
It will be up probably within 24 hours.
You will see the corrected Kevin McNick piece.
And of course, we'll also give them the opportunity
to move on to their site as well.
Okay.
Because the book is supposed to be based on facts,
but if they lie about the stuff with Kevin,
we don't know if they're lying about something else.
It's awfully weird because a book of world records,
I don't know how they come up with something like
this guy is the most notorious hacker.
There's no facts to support that.
Yeah.
It's not a quantitative item.
Yeah, it's not.
Definitely not.
The second thing is, I know on the McNick mailing list
that people have been writing to 2020 and Dateline
requesting a show about Kevin.
Is there any more news on this and what's going on with it?
I hear things back and forth from reporters
occasionally interested in the McNick case,
but nothing really concrete.
I mean, there are people who write newspaper stories
occasionally, but as far as the major media,
no, I haven't heard anything that they will be doing.
I imagine as the trial gets closer,
which is April 20th, you're going to see
more media coverage, but it's probably
not going to be the most enlightened.
Because it's a very...
It's popular, it'd be a good show
if they would say the right stuff.
Yeah, exactly, if they say the right stuff.
But then look at Mamiya Abu-Jamal,
the things they've said about him
on various news programs or news magazines,
and you'll see that they virtually leave out
all the information that the rest of the world
is talking about.
Can I say thanks to Mastermind, Squire, and Telefreak
for helping spread the word about Kevin?
I prefer you didn't.
Thanks for calling anyway.
Should we let him say that?
No, let's not let him say that.
Good evening, you're on the air.
Hey, Emmanuel, it's Tommy.
How you doing, Tommy?
It's been a long time, we haven't spoken,
and I haven't seen you at the meetings lately.
Well, I was in the Boston meeting last time,
that's where I picked up the flu,
and I brought it back here.
Well, no, I don't think we can do that anymore.
I think we fixed that little problem.
All right, well, two things.
Too bad I don't feel like talking about
the China thing right now, because I have
no idea what to talk about on that.
But as the Village Voice quotes and I knew about,
was on Monday, where the president
of the New York Linux Users Group says,
if you boot up your computer with a boot floppy
that isn't a Windows floppy,
put on a different operating system
other than Microsoft, what you can do
is you're actually not agreeing to their user license,
and you can go to the person you bought
that new computer from and demand a refund
for the Windows portion, which the Voice
is quoting anywhere on the testimonials,
it's either $5 to $200.
Interesting.
So that was like $5 from Toshiba
to a possible $200 from Dell,
which is a very interesting story,
so I wanted to spread that out to the other users.
That's in this week's Village Voice?
Yeah, well, if you go online to www.villagevoice.com,
it's under cop slash column slash 9906
slash B-A-R-L-I-A-N-T dot S-H-T-M-L.
That's where the actual story is.
It's the second story on that page.
That's their Machine Age little page there
of this week's Voice.
It was also published in the Voice,
as I understood, last week's Voice.
I can't testify to that because I didn't see it in there.
Okay, we'll take a look.
And the second issue is I want everybody
to start getting their money together
because we want to take a group trip this year
out to DEF CON.
I put up a page that you can get to
from the planning page,
and we're going to try to get a whole plane maybe
to go out to DEF CON.
Well, that's something.
Why don't you take a bus?
It's a lot cheaper and it's a lot more fun.
Well, we might want to do that, too,
depending on who wants to get together.
Everyone can send me an email again
at freekevin at netscape.net.
And we're going to bring some battery-powered hubs
to bring with us so we can have some
networking fun on the buses.
Well, you know, people might also want to do
something like that for the trial.
That's going to be pretty interesting
coming up in April.
Yeah, I'm really hoping that the trial goes well.
I'm sorry for the four-year anniversary now.
I'm really disliking the government.
I'm glad you brought that up.
That's something I totally forgot about.
But on Monday, yesterday,
it marked the fourth anniversary
Kevin Mitnick has been in prison.
February 15, 1995 is when he was arrested.
It was reported right here in WBAI on that day.
And, boy, it's just unbelievable.
That's gone on for so long,
and he still has not had a trial.
It boggles your imagination.
It's longer than his sentence.
It's really going to be longer than his sentence.
So they should just acquit him right now
and let him out
because there's no way he could be serving
more than four years for his crimes.
That's if he's found guilty of everything they're saying.
And I know he's not guilty of most of the things
that they're saying about him.
Exactly.
So the possibility of him even serving four years
is, like, not even correct.
It would have been less than that.
Right.
Hopefully, people get that word out there, too.
Okay.
Hey, thanks for calling.
Thanks for reminding me of that.
All right.
Bronk, you must be kind of quivering there
to hear something like this
about Kevin being locked up four years without a trial.
And here you are, a nation of a billion people,
you know, at your throat there.
Yeah.
You worried at all?
I was at first, but as of late,
things have really died down.
The media coverage has died down.
I haven't heard anything from the Chinese government in a while.
I think it's pretty much starting to blow over.
Are you going to leave them alone?
I plan on it.
You know, for right now,
I mean, me and Zipan have normal lives.
We don't need some samurais barging in the door
and chopping our heads off or slicing and dicing us.
Chinese samurais, they're pretty nasty.
Are there other countries that you think are also on the net
and fairly hypocritical as far as their human rights?
The United States.
Besides the United States, obviously.
Well, you know, Serbia and the Yugoslavia Republic
are a mess over there.
And there's a lot of stuff happening in Africa,
but in the third world,
they don't even have telephones over there.
There isn't much on the net for that.
But for countries that are on the net,
Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe,
that whole place is a mess over there.
There are a lot of sites that are being hacked almost every day.
In fact, we had a bunch of Mexican sites getting hacked
yesterday and the day before when President Clinton was down there.
And it's really something.
A lot of things coming out of South America.
The net activism really seems to have stepped up
in the last couple of months.
You can look at...
We keep an archive of these sites on our website, www.2600.com,
and you can see just how it's grown in the past couple of months
and certainly in the past couple of years
where it virtually wasn't happening at all.
Where is this going to go? Where is it going to end?
It seems like it just keeps getting more and more popular.
People are now starting to realize what I was saying earlier.
The net can put one person on the same level as the world government.
I'm surprised with how long people have been hacking sites for Kevin,
putting free Kevin banners up on really high-profile sites.
I'm surprised it took around my time,
me and other people that were starting to hack government sites,
for people to realize, hey, this is a way to get our message across
without having to go march in the rain or have tear gas shot at us.
I don't see nothing but an escalation of this, really.
Okay, we're going to take another phone call.
212-209-2900.
Good evening, you're on the air.
Hi, this is Alan.
How are you doing?
Good.
I just wanted to mention the correction I emailed you about this.
Concerning last week's episode, you mentioned fcc.org.
Sorry, could you repeat that?
Yeah, on last week's show, you mentioned fcc.org.
Oh, yeah, I made a mistake. It should be fcc.gov, right?
Yes.
And also to let you know, thanks to Calibran,
I have apparently found a home for the mailing list archive.
For the Mitnick mailing list archive?
Yes.
Okay, do you have an address for us?
Not yet. We're still working it out.
Okay.
He's going to give me space on darklog.com, apparently.
Great, great.
So all our messages on there will be saved for eternity.
Yeah.
That's a real comfort.
Okay, thanks for calling and spreading the information.
Good evening, you're on off the hook.
Oh, listen to this.
Hear that? It's like feedback.
No, it's more irritating.
I didn't...
Whoa, that is feedback.
Wow.
No, I didn't do that. I really didn't.
You saw me. I didn't touch anything.
No, you didn't touch anything.
That's a mental thing.
Somehow I got him to hang up, but it's by thinking.
Do it again.
Well, I'm sure he's going to call again, so I'll do it again.
Good evening, you're on the air.
Yeah, hi.
See?
Hold on, I'm thinking really hard now.
Okay, yeah.
No, you're not supposed to help me here.
I don't think this is off the hook anymore.
You don't think this is off the hook anymore?
Yeah, because we don't talk about telephones anymore?
Well, we're talking on the telephone, aren't we?
Yeah, but we don't...
What is this, the China show and the tell superstitious...
Well, you know, it's more than just telephones.
It's computers, it's the internet, it's freedom of speech, it's hackers.
You know, I think maybe a little...
Yeah, but...
You know, one interest there might not be talked about as much.
Hey, but nothing for nothing, Emmanuel.
First of all, the U.S. doesn't touch nuclear bombs anymore.
Second of all, China's not communist anymore.
Yeah, you need to move your phone away from...
Well, hold on a second.
Before I jump into you on this, you need to move your phone away from the radio
so you don't get that nasty feedback.
Now, what was this, China's not communist anymore?
Right.
What are they, then?
A monarchy?
What did I miss?
China's definitely like us.
What are you talking about?
China's like us now.
Communism...
You know, I need to read more, obviously.
Yeah, you need to read more instead of reading Kevin Mitnick's story.
Yeah, no, obviously I've been in a hole somewhere.
You know how I know?
How do you know?
I called China.
You called China, okay.
And you asked them?
Yeah, they haven't been communist for the past ten years.
Gee whiz.
What are you on?
I want some of that.
No, really, I think you guys are on something.
And second of all, have you ever heard of the Non-Nuclear Proliferation Treaty,
the Tuspan Treaty?
Yeah.
So?
When was the first time the U.S. tested a nuclear bomb?
It was in the 70s.
What does that have to do with anything?
Are you talking about an air burst?
Are you talking about a ground test?
No, you were saying people are hacking into computers
that they can see where they test the nuclear something or another?
There are still nuclear sites.
I'm not sure what it is you're debating here.
The DOE still does tests, not actual burst tests,
whether air or underground.
They do small-scale reaction tests, and they're still doing them in the Southwest.
I thought they were not allowed to do that.
No, they're not bombs.
They're just...
There's all kinds of tactical things.
If you think there are no tactical things going on, you're not paying attention.
Did you know that they're going to cancel the Internet?
The government's going to say no more Internet?
Okay, I do want what he's on right now.
I want a piece of that.
That'll be interesting.
My point is the following.
I'm going to write to the president of the Internet
and make sure that that does not...
No, I urge everyone to do the same thing.
That's right.
Actually, you know what?
I wanted to do this a few weeks ago,
and I think this is actually a good idea.
I wanted to declare myself president of the Internet
because no one else has done it yet.
Really? Can I be vice president?
Can I make a point?
I'll get back to you on that.
I have to think about it.
I don't want to make a rash decision here,
but right now I have declared myself the president of the Internet.
Since no one else has done it,
that's how kings and queens get made, after all.
Emmanuel.
Yes.
You want to declare yourself something before someone else does?
My point is as follows.
I live...
There's an army base.
There used to be a fair every year, every summer,
with all the rides and carnival and stuff.
They don't have it anymore.
You know why?
Communists?
They're not communists.
No, they're afraid of terrorists.
That's another story.
That's something.
I was reading.
You should read the Harper's Review.
No, not that.
The Harper's Index is what I meant to say.
They gave the shocking statistics about terrorism
in the last 12 years or so.
How it's increased so incredibly, world terrorism.
How much do you think terrorism has increased worldwide
in the last 12 years?
Give me a percentage.
I don't know.
I'll give you this.
It's shocking.
You will be shocked.
It's increased, I'm sure.
Give me a figure.
Do you think it's increased?
I'd say in the past 12 years, maybe 15, 20%.
Really?
You think it's only 15 or 20%?
Worldwide?
Worldwide.
The entire world.
I have no idea.
They say 20%.
It's gone down over 50%.
That's right.
All this reaction is to something that's going away,
that's depleting.
There's only been one act of international terrorism
on our soil.
That's the World Trade Center bombing,
unless you want to count people insulting each other
or something like that as terrorism.
Of course, there's Oklahoma City, which is domestic terrorism.
But it's gone down, folks.
It really has.
All these barricades in front of the White House
and all these crackdowns on the Internet,
I don't know what their reaction is.
Their reaction is against imagination, I suppose.
Manuel, do you cancel things?
Can we cancel all the planes,
no more flying on planes internationally
because we're afraid of terrorism?
Well...
You know what my point is?
I don't know what your point is.
Why do you cancel good things because we're afraid of terrorism,
because it's on an army base?
We're afraid that terrorists may target an army base.
We're afraid of that, so we're going to cancel the fare.
It's sad.
It's sad, yeah, you're right.
It is.
Okay.
All right, well...
Can we move on?
Yeah, well, actually, we can't really move on much more,
but thanks for calling, Rebel,
and let's see if we can get one more phone call in.
He's an interesting character, to say the least.
Well, let's keep that at the least
and move on to another call.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Hello?
Yeah, speak up, please.
Make it quick.
Hi, this is Trecker with 1K.
Trecker with 1K.
Okay.
Concerning your previous statement about governments,
what's the Internet a perfect example of?
Communism.
Well, there is no perfect example of communism in the real world,
so maybe you're right about that,
because all communist...
I don't want to get too political here,
but all communist regimes have gone corrupt in one way or another.
Maybe the Internet...
I'd have to study it a bit more to see if it actually fit,
but I also think it's also the positive view of anarchy,
which when people say anarchy,
they think of everyone just running around hitting each other.
That's not what anarchy is at all.
It's a lot more peaceful than that
and a lot more individual-based.
That's something we've been learning in our social studies class.
Okay, well, thanks for sharing it with us.
Unfortunately, we're out of time.
Ronk, I just wanted to give you the last word here.
Anything you want to pass on to people?
Not really.
I've had my say.
Yeah, you certainly have.
You've reached probably a couple billion people with your message.
That's two points, sir.
Yeah, and I hope if you have any messages in the future,
they continue to be right on track and relevant to various issues,
as I hope anyone who takes it upon themselves to hack a page,
think about what you're doing before you do it.
Obviously, there's a risk involved.
There's definitely a risk involved,
but also there's an opportunity to get a message across,
and that message is something you should be willing to be penalized for spreading.
It should be something you believe in,
just like any activist would do.
There's a lot of parallels to activism from the 60s and 70s
that you could draw from here.
Activism on the net is probably the next step.
Anyway, our next step is going to be to walk out of here.
We'll be back in two weeks with another program.
Until then, I advise people to please keep listening to the radio station,
pledge your support for the fundraising drive,
which will be taking place over the next 11 days starting tomorrow,
and your pledge makes a place possible where we can talk about things like this.
If you tune around, you will find that people don't talk about this anywhere else.
There's a reason for that.
It's corporate interest, but that's another show.
Okay, I'm going to go home and recover from whatever it is I have here
and hopefully not spread it around too much more.
Until two weeks from now, this is Emanuel Goldstein.
Have a good night.
Let's go!
Let's go!
And this is WBI 99.5 FM in New York.
Stay tuned for Tahrir, your weekly Arab and Muslim magazine.
As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullah.
Peace and blessings upon all.
This is Ibrahim Gonzalez, sitting in for Barbara Nimri-Aziz.
And as-salamu alaykum, Mahmood.
Wa alaykum as-salam. Thank you very much for that.
Yeah, wa alaykum as-salam and peace to everyone out there.
And we know that we're sitting in with Nadja Middleton.
In lieu of Barbara Nimri-Aziz being here,
who is still out in the field collecting sound and gathering information,
she generally leaves us and goes to the Middle East,
so she can collect all that wonderful material to bring back.
So we do appreciate the opportunity to be here.
Tonight we're going to be listening to several segments.