And of course, she's the star of the show.
For TV viewers who would like to do their own ratings
and let networks know how they feel about programming
that their kids watch or that they watch
or that's available, what can they do?
They can certainly get together in groups
and decide what they want to address in terms of viewing.
I think it's a very important thing to do.
Part of the responsibility that networks have to us
is to give us some socially responsible programming.
They need to provide a public service to us
because they get the airways for free.
ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox get these airways
for free from our government.
And in return, they're supposed to be providing us
with a service.
Karen Johnson is the vice president
for membership of the National Organization for Women.
She spoke with WBAI's Leslie George.
And finally, these regional environmental items,
the American Lung Association says
that in New Jersey, the worst ozone concentrations
are in Camden and Ocean counties.
The association analyzed air quality reports
from across the country during the years 1996 and 98.
Camden was the 21st in the nation.
Analysts gave failing grades to a dozen New Jersey counties.
Only Bergen County passed with the grade D.
And the state Supreme Court in Connecticut
has heard claims of environmental damage
by Northeast Utilities and the Millstone Nuclear Power Plant.
An attorney for Fish Unlimited and other environmental groups
says that the hearing is historic
because it's the first time the high court has
heard those matters.
They're claiming collusion between Northeast Utilities
and state environmental officials.
One case involves a 1998 settlement
over violations of Millstone's water discharge permit.
Northeast Utilities spokespeople
say that the push by the group is
aimed at shutting down the Millstone Nuclear Power Plant.
And that's some of the news of this Tuesday, May 23, 2000.
The news was engineered by Jared Scott Keyes
and produced with Leslie George, Nadja Middleton,
and Jose Santiago.
I'm Robert Knight for the WBAI Evening News.
I think I understand the reason you won't stay with me.
You think a ring upon your hand will solve your insecurities,
so go ahead and play your game.
That's what you must do.
And you're listening to radio station WBAI in New York.
It's 7 o'clock.
Stay tuned for an expanded three-hour edition
of Off the Hook.
Oh, and by the way, we don't have the theme this week,
so we'll have to survive on malfunctioning CD players that
don't play when you press the button.
So this is sounding really smooth already.
Just bear with us while we put the CD in a different player
and press the button over here.
Yep.
Yeah, this is the best we can do, not having a theme. It's just a regular dial tone.
What do you think, Laszlo?
Where's the theme, dude?
Well, the theme is actually sitting in my house. I ran out in a bit of a hurry.
Because, you know, when you're doing a three-hour fundraiser for WBAI,
it's something that you have to take very seriously.
Have you ever thought to just leave the theme here?
Um, yeah. Yeah, I guess I should do that.
But then I can't find it when I come in sometimes,
because we have so many shows, but there's so many themes,
and all the themes start to blend into each other after a while.
Don't you have a box?
No, I could get a box if I wanted to.
Locker?
It's so impersonal to have a locker, you know.
But, yeah, anyway, the dial tone is there to remind everybody that we're here.
We're a radio show about telephones, about technology,
about hackers and issues of privacy and freedom and various things like that.
So we are here for three hours tonight.
We're usually on from 8 to 9 every Tuesday night,
but this week we're on from 7 to 10.
We have a lot of people stopping in to say hello.
And, uh, no, that's me. I did that.
Yeah, no, that's, I'm explaining why the dial tone's going out over there.
Yeah, no, it's okay.
That shows that we always listen to our station,
because we know when something bad is happening,
like a dial tone going out over there.
I'm going to hit a tone.
There, now the dial tone's gone. See?
It's that easy.
That easy to take care of problems.
All right, we're doing a fundraiser for the radio station,
because we need to do that.
That's how we stay on the air.
Leslie, you come from commercial radio.
You don't mind my saying that.
No, that's all right.
You work in commercial radio.
You do commercial radio-type things.
What's that like?
It must be hard if you have ideals, if you have, you know, a conscience.
You have something you want to express, but they won't let you express it.
Do you ever run into that?
Well, sometimes we'll do a feature on something.
It's a computer feature, obviously,
and we'll do a feature on something like a Gateway computer
that we give a bad review to,
and we'll get a call from an affiliate saying we won't run that,
because Gateway spends a lot of money on this station.
So you get censored at the local level a lot.
Another problem is just in terms of it used to be if you did radio
and you did radio features and you did news features,
you could pretty much get on any radio station nationwide,
and since the Communications Act allowed three companies
to buy every radio station in the United States,
those stations now will tell you,
I really like your content and I really like what you do,
but we've got a director on high that says if we don't own it, don't run it.
You know, I hear the same thing on network television now.
I think it's CBS.
They won't air any program that they don't own now.
So the result of that is that you have programs like, you know,
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and things like that on every day of the week,
or Dateline NBC, things that are owned and run by the network,
and you don't have any kind of production that has independence from that.
And it means less voices on the air.
Well, you see, the reason that can't happen here at BAI is because, well,
we don't own the radio programs.
The radio programs come out of individual producers.
And it's not sponsored by Monsanto, like NPR.
That's right.
And Archer Daniels Midland.
In fact, I want to say it's not sponsored by anybody, but that's not true
because it's sponsored by the listeners.
Unlike other places where they may say, you know,
call in, pledge us money, pledge money to us,
that's also sponsored by corporate interest as well.
Any time something is underwritten, any time you hear other names being given
at the end of a program or even see advertisements,
some of them have the nerve to run advertisements and ask for money.
It's unbelievable.
Or, you know, if you're selling a product,
if you're engaged in just selling something, that's, you know,
it's the same basic thing.
You already have a sponsor for the show, so you don't need listeners.
Here we need listeners.
Without listeners, we're nothing.
Without listeners, we can't air the things we air.
What we're going to air right about now is something really amazing,
something that we're offering as a premium here at the radio station.
In fact, this is going out for anybody who pledges tonight
at the various levels that we have at 212-209-2950.
You might want to listen to it first and get all fired up and charged up about it
because, well, this is interesting stuff.
As you know, we've done a lot of coverage of WTO, of all kinds of things,
activism going on throughout the world, actually,
but throughout the nation in the past six months.
In fact, it was on this show back in November, late November,
that we had some really amazing coverage live from the streets of Seattle
where Amy Goodman was basically dodging rubber bullets.
You can hear that show on the website, or you can pledge for CD-ROM
and get all the shows that we have up until 1997
and hear some of the amazing things that have gone out over these airways.
But that was one of the most incredible things I think I've ever taken part in,
just hearing somebody going through that.
It really tied it together.
It tied it into what we talk about, tied it into technology, tied it into privacy issues
and the fact that a lot of computer hackers are having their rights taken away constantly.
Like prisoners, hackers have their rights taken away first, kind of like as a test.
They test it out on prisoners, and there's two million of them now.
They test it out and they say, well, let's give these people badges and ankle bracelets and things like that.
In the end, in a few years, they start testing these things out in the corporate environment.
Then they start testing it out on school kids.
Before you know it, everybody in the world is being treated like a prisoner in some way.
Same thing with hackers.
Basically, rights are being taken away left and right, and who's going to speak up for them?
Who's going to speak up?
We have to.
That's why we're here, and that's what we try to do with this radio program.
That's how I believe we tie into bigger issues as well.
WTO was one of those issues that was incredibly big and still is and will be for many years to come.
We have a conference coming up in July in New York,
and our keynote speaker is Jell-O Biafra, who is the person we're going to be hearing from.
He just put out a CD, just came out the last couple of days, I think,
and we're offering this as our first premium.
I'd like people to listen to what Jell-O has to say.
This was done while it was going on in Seattle.
Basically, it says, recorded live, surrounded by cops and tear gas,
at the Showbox Theater, Seattle, Washington, December 1st, 1999.
Really some incredible things.
Now, what we had to do to get this to you, because it's not exactly what you would call a clean piece,
Porkchop is here.
He battled long and hard to make it technically possible to bring this CD to us
without violating any of the FCC rules, any of the many FCC rules that exist out there.
So what did we have to do to get this to work?
Well, originally, we took it in from a CD, put it into the editing Mac that we're using to edit the documentary together.
Which will be premiered at the conference.
At the conference, that's right.
We'll have more information for you on that later.
And then ran it through a sound program and replaced all the certain sounds that you wouldn't be hearing with another sound.
Four-letter words, basically, we're replacing with a special, unique sound.
What's the sound that we're replacing it with?
The sound is a tone you might be familiar with, the 2600 tone.
2600 hertz, okay.
Yeah, so if you don't know what that tone sounds like, then, well, just listen for the curses.
Well, when you don't hear them, you'll hear 2600 hertz instead, which to some people is a curse.
But we'll just have to deal with that now.
Okay, so basically, we have it on the computer right now.
Yes.
We somehow patched this computer into the board.
That's pretty jury-rigged.
Hopefully, I won't mess it up too badly.
I think you have to press that button there.
All right, and what we have here, what we have here is Jelebi Alfred giving a talk to a rather enthusiastic crowd as all the mayhem of Seattle is taking place.
And again, 212-209-2950 is our phone number.
If you want information on how to receive this as a premium, please call us while it's playing.
But I suggest you listen to it because there's a lot more to this.
We're just playing a brief excerpt of it.
I've got a telephone call.
I've got to go.
So let's play this now.
Hear ye, hear ye.
Put down your crack pipes and get up here.
Well, what can we say about the past couple days besides the people have spoken.
The cardboard turtle insurrection has begun.
Yesterday, as far as I'm concerned, the cops were pretty well behaved compared to what would have happened in San Francisco, let alone L.A.
But now that I hear people are being pepper sprayed inside of buses, law and order broke down among the police department today.
Yeah, they did overreact today.
I mean, way less protesters, way more arrests.
Channel 7 clearly had footage of them pepper spraying people who were shopping or trying to get home from work for the office.
Some of it maybe was because they had so many other cops from other departments.
It was that old who's on first, who's on second.
Oh, I don't know.
I think I'll just fuck some people up.
Spray, spray, spray, spray, spray.
It only takes one rogue attacking Starbucks to taint a whole protest.
And it only takes one rogue cop to fuck it up even worse.
And there were quite a few today, from what I understand.
Again, nowhere near as horrific as what would happen in California or New York, let alone China.
And we should be thankful for that.
And the fact that everybody who had the balls to come down to this show was able to come down without getting taken away and pepper sprayed in a fucking bus.
So the people have spoken.
And this is a kind of a shot across the bow or even the first shot hole in the side, direct hit in the good ship, or should we say bad Exxon Valdez or toxic waste barge called the WTO.
This is step one.
And we have won one major, maybe two major victories.
Number one, the biggest weapon the WTO creatures had is that nobody knew who they were.
Well, some of us did, but hardly anybody knew who they were, what they were up to, or all the way they've been fucking up people's lives and the planet all over the world.
Just so people who already have so much money they don't know what the fuck to do with it can make more money and more money and more money.
It's almost like an addiction, right?
Wealth addiction.
Who is more dangerous to public order, a crack addict or a wealth addict?
Our government's own statistics from the Federal Reserve Board, we're talking Alan Greenspan here, admit that 80% of the American people have seen dick all from this supposed economic boom.
It's the other 20% who are gentrifying the buildings, forcing poor people and artists and people of color out in the street, tootling along in their sport utility vehicles, running red lights while they're talking on their cell phones because the laws don't apply to them.
That's 20%.
The other 80% are in the same boat we are and don't even know it.
Or do they?
The other great victory that's given me so much energy and yes, even optimism from what's gone down in this town is you got people who one side was dismissed as tree huggers marching along side by side, people that they would dismiss as rednecks or hardhats.
Finally we are communicating with each other, I hope.
The WTO and the upward flow of money to people who don't need it, that's not some bullshit left wing, right wing issue, that is the top versus the bottom.
And the top is even less than 20% of the population, ain't it?
So, here we have all this energy, all these different kinds of people who we might not agree with on everything, all focused on the same thing.
That is why Seattle, the battle in Seattle is a shot heard around the world.
We are making history, isn't it better than staying home and watching it on TV?
Isn't it better to follow Nike's suggestion and just do it than to be a spectator in your own life?
So, now what do we do?
The most important thing we can take from this, how many of you came here from outside of Seattle?
Okay, this applies to inside Seattle too.
After a couple of days and a few more TV people say, the protesters ruined Christmas, there's no shopping downtown.
Once that's not the flavor of the hour anymore, WTUTO may disappear off the radar screen and they'll be telling us it's much more important to worry about how many millions of dollars Toy Story 2 took in this week.
Or what's Brad Pitt up to now?
You know, the other things that they push at us, celebrities, icons, and no issues in the regular press.
Can George, King George II beat Al Gore or Bill Bradley?
But nothing about the issues, they don't want to say that because all those people agree with each other too much anyway.
Especially when it comes to phony free trade.
Anyway, that's what we're being presented with, so our job now to keep this pot, keep the stove boiling, don't hate the media, become the media.
Take what you felt here, what you've learned here, what you know about the WTO, this ain't the X-Files, this is not black helicopters, this is real and this is worse.
Take this out to the people you know, who you don't necessarily normally agree with or shoot the shit with.
Family, people at work, people at school, you hear people spouting Rush Limbaugh bullshit or Pat Buchanan bullshit or Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Bill Bradley bullshit.
Communicate with them, don't dismiss them as stupid or rednecks or hopelessly unreachable.
If they're frustrated because they can't put food on the table, that's our big fucking wedge issue and everybody's fucking reachable.
Tell them what the WTO is, how it's designed to let tin horn dictators from one country in the pay of American or Europe-based multinationals go clear across our borders or someone else's borders and nuke their democratically enacted sovereign laws.
This isn't democracy, this isn't even capitalism, this is feudalism.
New feudalism, remember that phrase, new feudalism.
Because this isn't barons and lords in high castles with little peasants, terrified peasants on the other side of the moat tilling the land anymore.
New feudalism means we know who the people in the high castles are and every time we buy anything from Exxon or Microsoft or Time Warner or Blockbuster Video or Walmart or Home Depot or Toys R Us or Buns and New Bile Books or whatever, we are their serfs.
And nobody can divorce themselves from corporate feudalism all the way unless you want to be as pure and politically correct as the Unabomber.
Maybe not everybody wants that.
So this means when we become the media and take this knowledge of the WTO and turn around and fuck shit up in a good way and go after their agenda and fuck with it, we can't come from a fundamentalist radical point of view.
You gotta pick a moral code and a lifestyle you can not only live with but live up to and then you won't become as miserable as Ted Kaczynski or see things in such black and white issues that if this cramps your style you figure, oh, I don't like this anymore, I guess I'll just become a computer yuppie instead.
If you don't go so far over this way you're less likely to spring like a rubber band and turn into this on the other side.
And so the multinationals, the chains, the arms of the new feudalist WTO, don't give them your money to the degree that you can boycott all chains, all corporations that support local businesses, local bookstores, local music stores, local organic markets, local organic farmers, things like that.
No one can do it 100%, but the more you do and the more you encourage other people to do, the less money they can make off of you.
For crying out loud, don't work for them.
But knowing how hard it is to pay skyrocketing rents and find meaningful work you can actually live on, well, if you must work for them, at least remember that the computer age has ushered in a whole new frontier of sabotage on the job.
A prank a day keeps the dog leash away. Think about it.
And if you do wind up in a lucrative career, computer whiz, lawyer, doctor, dentist, contractor, whatever, there's still a way to give back to the community by giving back to the community and providing your services for people who can't afford it for free every once in a while.
That's the way to give something back.
And don't forget where you came from.
Don't be like the people in the 60s and the 70s who decided that once the Vietnam War was over, they didn't have to work to change things anymore.
Those people became the yuppie monsters and the Clintonoids who fuck our lives up today on a daily basis.
Remember this. Remember who you are and why you feel who you are.
And if and when you have kids, pass that on to your kids.
And here's how to do it.
Every time something unpleasant comes on the news and your kid's watching it, don't change the channel.
Talk to them about it. Talk intelligently about it.
Explain it to them. Share the knowledge with them.
I mean, my parents were very open. I knew what race riots were. I knew what the Vietnam War was.
I knew what all kinds of shit was when I was real small.
I dug it. I've always been a news hound.
But people I know now, I'm 41 now, a lot of people I know or people my age have no tangible personal memory of Vietnam or even Watergate.
And I think that's because their Eisenhower brainwashed parents decided to put the blinders on.
Whenever the Biafra War or the Vietnam or anything that they didn't want them to see came on TV, they changed the channel.
Don't make your kids stupid.
The more the schools and the TV does it, the more you gotta counter that.
And that's how to be good parents.
So on that note, we got a lot of work to do.
Right now, let's face it, it's Advantage WTO.
They have the money. They have the power. They have the guns. They have the organization.
This is the same situation we in this country faced with the Vietnam War.
And guess what? We stopped the Vietnam War.
It can be done. And it must be done.
And if we sustain our energy and our vision and spread the positive disease,
one thing this visit to Seattle has given me, I think it may take as long as Vietnam,
as much work as Vietnam, as much not giving up as Vietnam,
but in the end, the wealth addicts have gotten carried away.
We're gonna win.
We're gonna win.
So if you're after me, follow the bouncing pincer.
No. No. WTO.
No. No. WTO.
No. No. WTO.
No. No. WTO.
Everybody.
No. No. WTO.
No. No. WTO.
No. No. WTO.
No. No. No. No. No.
And you're listening to Off the Hook here on radio station WBAI in New York.
That was an excerpt from a brand new CD which has just been released by Alternative Tentacles,
the No WTO combo featuring Angelo Biafra, who we all know and love from Dead Kennedys,
Chris Novoselic, Kim Thiel, and Gina Minewell as well.
And you can get a copy of this simply by pledging right now,
and please show your support for this radio station.
We were talking earlier about how certain things are simply not heard,
and Laszlo, you're from the commercial radio world.
This kind of thing wouldn't be heard no matter how cool your alternative rock station is.
They wouldn't place one like this, would they?
No. I mean, now music is not even spun at a lot of radio stations.
It's on a hard drive.
That's right.
Well, this was on a hard drive too.
Well, I know, but the hard drive is basically controlled from –
there's a station in L.A. that all the DJs and all the music is done in Colorado,
and they just ship it to a server that plays it out over the radio.
Well, what we had to do was we had to put it on the hard drive.
Now we censored out the four-letter words, which obviously aren't censored out on the CD,
and hopefully our 2600 hertz tones didn't offend anybody,
or hopefully the remnants of whatever words were there didn't offend anybody either.
But the idea, the important thing –
see, in this country we seem to worry too much about the words and not what the words say,
and I hope people listened and listened to what the words said.
And if they were upset by that, fine, but at least know why you were upset by what was being said.
Now, just so people know, if they give a call, 212-209-2950,
we have a special deal for off-the-hook listeners.
As we mentioned, Gerald Biafra will be our keynote speaker at H2K,
taking place this summer in New York, July 14th through 16th,
and his keynote will be taking place July 15th at noon at the Hotel Pennsylvania.
If you call now and pledge $100, you'll get two tickets to that,
and you'll also get – you know, your ear's perked up, that's a good deal, isn't it?
And you'll also get a copy of the CD. Can't beat that, huh? A $100 pledge.
How much?
A hundred bucks, you get two – you know, this is actually –
the reason for calling into a radio station is not to shop around for a good deal.
You should be making a contribution.
But if you were to buy these things, you'd pay the same amount of money.
So it really is kind of – if you're interested in these things,
you really should go ahead and give a call for that.
212-209-2950.
For a pledge of $100, you'll get two tickets to H2K, which takes place this summer,
and you can stay the entire time.
You don't just go for the speech.
You go for the three days of all kinds of activities,
including the mock trial for 2600 and the MPAA, which we'll get into a little bit later.
And in addition, you'll get a copy of the CD, which has a lot more on it than what we played,
and it's really pretty inspiring stuff,
and there's a whole booklet inside, too, that has all kinds of neat pictures.
We have one – oh, I'm looking at the wrong phone line.
Oh, okay, we have one phone call up there, too.
But I know there's more people interested in these affairs
that can call up and show support for the radio station,
show support for Off the Hook,
and for the ideas that we present here on this radio program on this radio station.
212-209-2950.
Any pledge $50 or more, by the way, you will get a copy of the CD as well.
But for the $100, it really does pay off, I think, especially if you're in the New York area.
Two tickets to the H2K conference, which is our third conference.
The first one was in 1994, second in 1997, and this is our third one.
And they always wind up making history as far as the kinds of people who show up and share ideas.
And in addition to those two tickets, you'll get a copy of the CD.
Is it tax-deductible?
Oh, yeah, of course. You're going to pledge now, aren't you?
So, well, because I'm all about the taxes, but if you think about it that way,
instead of paying taxes, you're supporting alternative voices.
That's right. That's right. Absolutely. Tax-deductible?
Instead of giving it to the Defense Department, you're giving it to the WBAI Department.
That's right. Not to WTO, WBAI.
Yeah, exactly.
212-209-2950, three calls on the line.
You see, dude, tax deduction, that's what I'm telling you.
This is the strategy. As soon as you say tax deduction, the phone lines blow up.
There's a special button in here that allows you to hear the phones ringing,
and I never know which button it is.
But if anybody out there in the studio knows which button it is,
please run in and show me because it's kind of cool to hear the phones ringing.
212-209-2950, think of where you would be without a radio station like this.
Would you have even heard of the kinds of things going on in Seattle,
the kinds of things going on in Washington,
and the kinds of things that we've talked about before that
and the kinds of things we'll talk about after that involving the computer world,
involving people like Kevin Mitnick, like Bernie S., like FiberOptic,
stories that just aren't told anywhere.
Why aren't they told? I don't know.
What do you think? They're just not convenient?
They don't back up the picture that the corporate media wants to paint?
I don't know. What picture is that?
You're in the corporate media. What is it that they want us to think?
Ah, what button is it?
That one there. Oh, thank you very much.
Okay, so now we can hear the phones in the tally room. Thank you very much.
212-209-2950, please call to make a pledge, not just to make the phone ring.
So what is this like paradise image that we're supposed to be getting?
I just want to know what it is I'm missing.
A paradise image of what?
Of America, of the way things are.
I mean, we're supposed to be in a prosperous age.
Everything's supposed to be working out really nicely.
We don't talk about two million prisoners.
We don't talk about horrible things happening in the streets of various cities
and evil organizations meeting behind closed doors, deciding the fate of the world.
We don't talk about that.
We play music, we read the news off the Associated Press,
and we give a lot of time to business and sports updates and, of course, the weather.
Stock market.
Stock market, yeah. That's all it's about.
I mean, I remember when I first started watching CNN back in 1980.
Is that when they went on the air?
It was about news.
And now, every time you turn it on, it's about stocks.
It's about business. That's all they care about is business.
And then it's a fashion report right after that.
Exactly.
And, you know, I feel kind of weird.
We're on Wall Street right now as we speak.
We're sitting right here on Wall Street.
It's a little odd.
It's very odd, but it's also kind of cool because you get to see things right up front.
We say we're in the belly of the beast, but we certainly are,
and they're not too happy about that either.
But when there's a demonstration on Wall Street,
we're able to cover it immediately because we're right here as it is.
In fact, we can also get past the police barricades because we belong here,
so that's kind of neat as it is.
That's what you have to do.
You have to infiltrate.
You have to figure out ways of getting the word to the people,
and that's what we try to do here at this program,
and that's what a lot of other people try to do at this radio station.
It's important because without listeners, we're really nothing.
I mean, that's true of any radio station.
That's true of commercial radio as well as non-commercial radio.
But I think with BAI's case, the listeners are a lot more present
because we interact with them.
They pledge something, and we see that,
and that translates into something for the radio station,
which allows them to keep going.
Commercial radio, well, it's not really about that.
It's about cumulative shares, arbitrons, market research,
and all kinds of things that don't really translate into individual people.
They're just numbers.
You get numbers from a computer.
In fact, these days you get everything from a computer at a radio station,
don't you?
You get the songs.
You get the news.
You get the figures, the format, the hiring practices, whatever.
It all comes to you.
You don't need people anymore.
You don't need people, exactly.
And a lot of the people I know that work in commercial radio,
the few people that are left,
because a lot of people have just gotten so sick of it that they're out.
But program directors now are saying,
don't even talk between songs.
You come out of a song, and instead of making a comment,
maybe about something political or whatever,
they want to hear,
that was squeezed, coming up, it's the cure.
Hit the song, bam.
Is that what people want?
I mean, is that really what people want?
Well, you know what?
If you don't call, you're saying that's what you want.
Because you don't want an alternative.
That's the important thing.
If you're driving around wondering, hey, should I call?
You should, because your voice matters.
Everyone's voice matters.
And if you think your voice doesn't matter,
you know you've been programmed to believe that.
You've been programmed to not want to vote.
You've been programmed to think that you don't count
in the masses of people out there,
that your voice will never mean anything.
I used to think that way until I turned on the radio
and heard alternative voices.
I heard other people saying different things,
controversial things,
things I didn't necessarily agree with,
but, wow, it was something to listen to.
And if you're listening now,
then you are listening, aren't you?
It means something to you.
212-209-2950.
Pledge of $100 gets you into H2K and a friend.
Gets you and a friend into H2K.
The perfect date.
Yeah.
I don't know about that,
but it certainly will be something that you remember
for ages to come.
Yes, and that's an entire weekend right there,
Friday, Saturday, Sunday, July 14th through 16th.
Where we'll be premiering the 2600 documentary
called Freedom Downtown.
Oh, wow, listen to that, dude.
That's pretty cool.
There's the phone.
Okay, that's one phone call there.
Now, a lot of people listen to the show online.
That's true.
They can still call and contribute.
We get a couple hundred people listening
every week around the world.
Right.
I would like one of those people
to pick up the phone now and call.
You know, if you're overseas, don't worry.
Country Code 1.
That's all you have to remember.
But, if somebody's in California,
they'd still get the tickets.
They could fly in for the weekend
and come to the conference.
That's true.
We won't pay your airfare.
Okay, come on.
There's only so much we can do.
But, you know, you could always
sell the tickets on eBay.
You could do that.
Yeah.
Well, actually, what you get is
you get a little confirmation slip.
But you could sell the confirmation slip
just as easily.
You know, we have a special trademark
way of doing that.
But, yeah, you know, it's that one.
We don't want to suggest that people
not fly in from California
because we have people flying in
from all over the world.
Really?
We see the people that are registering
for this thing already.
I got to tell you, you know,
we've done two of these before.
And we have more people registered now
than we had for the two of them combined
on the day before the conference.
And, I mean, when you add all that up,
a lot of people are going to be there.
We're expecting about 3,000 people
to show up, which is more than
any hacker event has ever drawn.
It was a great one last time.
It was.
I played my favorite game,
Spot the Pig,
trying to guess which one was undercover.
Uh-huh.
And did you?
Huh?
Well, the one guy that I thought
as soon as he went by,
his name tag said Bernie S.,
so I was...
Uh-oh.
You and he aren't speaking, are you?
What?
No, we are.
He called me from that stupid
hamvention all weekend,
going, hey, I found an antenna, dude.
You want to buy it?
You know, I'm really upset
I wasn't able to make it this year.
But I've been to the last two
hamventions in Dayton,
and it was great to go.
And maybe next year.
We're just so busy with the film.
Porkchop, we're working on the film
in the last bunch of,
I don't know how long, years.
Yeah, it's been a long, long time.
Yeah.
I know I am.
Well, it's going to be done.
It's going to be done,
and we'll be premiering it
at the conference.
If you call up 212-209-2950,
you know, it's like you get
a ticket to that as well,
because, well, you have entry
to the whole area
for the entire weekend.
So two tickets to the H2K conference
and one CD that we just played
an excerpt from.
We'll play a couple more
excerpts from that
throughout the evening.
212-209-2950.
We have two calls on the line.
You know, last year
when we did this,
I think we had more
at this time.
Yeah, so I know there's
people out there.
I know the show
means something to them.
This isn't our regular time.
Usually Expert Witness is on now.
So it's all important.
We all support each other.
We all support different opinions,
different radio shows
here on the radio station.
The important thing is
that what we are doing
counts for the entire station.
So please help us out.
Keep us going.
Remember, we don't have
commercials here.
We could not possibly air
something like what we just heard
if we had commercials,
even a small amount
of commercials.
Even if it was an NPR affiliate.
That's right.
There's no way.
That's right.
I mean, you know,
I'm not knocking NPR,
but man, I mean, come on already.
They are as corporate
as anything.
Right, and what really
disappoints me,
the difference between
NPR stations and this station,
is that you don't see
stations like this
getting together.
I've got people starting.
Okay, let's talk about NPR.
We'll talk about NPR.
And opposing low power FM.
That was really, really upsetting.
National public radio,
community radio,
these stations across the nation
that are supposed to be
the public's voice,
are voting against, you know,
are pressuring members of Congress
not to let churches
and community groups
and activist groups
have a tiny signal
that's only going to have
a few miles of reach,
but regardless,
still have a voice
in the community.
We're talking about
10-watt radio stations.
We're talking about
40-watt radio stations.
Things like,
we used to have a radio station
down in the village.
It was great.
It was at 88.7
and Steel Dis Radio.
They have not been on
in over a year now
because of FCC crackdowns.
We're on the verge,
on the verge of having,
having actual laws passed
to allow micro-broadcasting,
finally,
as if we have to go through
this kind of song and dance
just to get a voice,
but we do, unfortunately.
And it gets down to the wire.
Everybody supports it.
And all of a sudden,
NAB manages to step in
and get Congress to defeat it.
That's what we're dealing with here.
That's the kind of, yeah,
okay, you play by the rules.
You get people to sign on
and agree,
and you change the system,
and then they just step in
and take it away from you.
And that's what's happening
with micro-broadcasting.
NPR...
Was right there with the NAB,
with the National Association
of Broadcasters.
It was really...
Right there.
And it made me say,
because I would usually
give money to NPR,
and then I was like,
I got to give it all to BAI now,
because that really upsets me.
Yeah, it is.
I mean, if you believe
in freedom of speech,
believe in it.
Practice it.
Give other people the chance.
There's no way
a 40-watt radio station
is going to interfere with you.
A 50,000-watt radio station
is just not going to happen.
And there are certain
rules and regulations.
I think the FCC knows
a little bit about
how to allocate frequencies.
I don't think they're going to,
you know,
put another 99.5 radio station
in the same city
or put a station
that is too powerful
at 99.3 somewhere else
that would interfere.
You know,
it's ridiculous to think
that that is even
a remote danger
in this day and age.
Yeah,
if you have a radio
from, say, 1945,
maybe you'll have
a little trouble
tuning it
and separating the stations.
But, you know,
I think you might have
a little trouble with it, period.
In this day and age,
the vast majority of people
are able to,
the vast majority,
I mean,
99.9% of people
are able to
be able to tune
radio stations
and not get interference
from stations
that are nearby.
So that's the kind
of thing we support,
freedom of speech
for lots of different
kinds of people,
lots of different
kinds of opinions.
You have entities
like NPR,
and I don't want to spend
a night knocking NPR,
but that really
annoyed me a lot,
to see them actually
stand up and say
that low-power FM
was a threat,
you know.
If anything,
if anything is a threat,
if anything is a threat,
it's the idea that
you have to saturate
the market.
I mean,
you listen to
National Public Radio
programming,
it's everywhere.
It really is.
No matter where you are
in the country,
you can get it
at least three times
on three different stations,
which is all fine and good.
I have no problem with that.
But when you start
taking it away from students,
when you start taking away
college radio stations
and turning them
into NPR stations,
when you start opposing
low-power radio
and replacing that
with FM stations
that are powerful
that broadcast
certain programs,
then, you know,
you may say you stand
for freedom of speech,
but you know,
you're really practicing
what the enemy does,
which is silencing people,
which is controlling everything.
And that's what we have
to stand and oppose
in whatever way possible.
212-209-2950.
Please call in
with your pledge
to support this kind of thing.
We're going to play
one more track
from the Jell-O-Be-Out
for CD,
and then we're going
to move on
to a special guest,
special couple of guests,
actually.
Please, 212-209-2950.
Only up to $450.
We should be
well over the $1,000 mark
by now,
so I hope
while this track is playing,
some of you will rethink
what you're doing here.
Hey, how you doing?
One of our special guests
actually is here,
so we're going to
un-muzzle this special guest
when you give us a call.
Now, we don't like
to threaten people like that.
That's not nice.
But please, please,
give us a call,
212-209-2950
to take us to H2K
and a copy
of the Jell-O-Be-Out
for CD
for every pledge
of $100
and every pledge
of $50 or more,
you'll get a copy
of the Jell-O-Be-Out
for CD.
And even if you just call
and give $10,
you don't have to give $50
or $100.
You can call and give $5,
whatever.
Yeah, every little amount
counts, absolutely.
It all builds up.
I like to demonstrate this.
When we do these kind of shows,
we start off at zero
and by a bunch of individuals
getting together
and pledging support,
we build up to a number
that we didn't think
we would be able
to get up to.
It's that simple.
212-209-2950.
It has one call
on the line.
I kind of prefer
not having the phone there
because I'm aware
of it not ringing too much.
Whereas when it's not there,
I just look up occasionally
and the number
keeps moving up.
This is good, too, though.
If the phone
keeps ringing like this,
it's good,
but you have to kind of
get people
to motivate themselves.
And at least during this,
you have content.
Usually, during Megathons,
they have two people
that are on the phone
and they're on the phone
and they're on the phone
and they're on the phone
and they're on the phone
and they're on the phone
and they're on the phone
and they're on the phone
up.
They have two people
that say the phone number
80,000 million times.
Yeah.
That's no good for anybody.
And they just keep doing that.
209-2950.
We have four calls
on the line.
No, it's down to three
I guess.
That person...
Wrong number.
No, no.
It's a quick thing.
It doesn't take very long.
You know, I pledged myself
about a week or so ago.
This is a true story.
I was driving around
where I live
and I heard...
I do that.
I heard the most amazing piece.
Actually, I heard this in the morning,
and I heard more of it in the afternoon.
It's in the afternoon I finally broke down and pledged.
Now, you can't do that out there now
because we're not gonna be on again,
so please call and pledge now.
I was just listening,
and they were talking about the Birmingham Church bombings,
which took place back in the early 60s.
And there's a documentary that they were offering.
They were playing bits of the documentary.
It was the most compelling radio I think I've heard in ages.
And I just had to pull over to the side of the road
because when you're on a cell phone,
you really should pull over to the side of the road,
especially if you sprint
because if you go more than 20 feet, you'll lose the signal.
So I called up, and it really felt great to pledge,
to know that I was adding my voice to the people
that were keeping this place going.
And it couldn't have been a more pleasant experience
if you're worried about people being harsh and unpleasant
because this is New York
and you're calling from somewhere else in the world.
No, it's not like that at all, basically.
They're very friendly people on the other end of the line.
It doesn't take very long at all.
And that's basically what it's all about.
212-209-2950, please give a call to the radio station,
show your support, keep us going,
keep programs like this coming your way.
We're going to play another bit of the Jebel Biafra CD,
which you'll get with any pledge, $50 or more,
or with a pledge of $100, two tickets to H2K as well.
And-
A much cooler way.
Shana.
Yes, all right, hi.
Welcome.
I just popped up here.
What a much better way though
to get a Jebel Biafra CD, by the way,
by pledging to BAI as opposed to going to Tower or HMB
or someplace like that.
Absolutely, absolutely.
I mean, it's so contradictory
if you were to go to Mass Record Store
and go and get Jebel Biafra.
Well, good luck finding it there, you know?
It's not like they have them advertised in the windows
or anything like that.
This is a true labor of love.
I think there's more love going on here than anything.
Jebel Biafra putting out something like this,
showing up at a demonstration,
risking his life because everybody in Seattle,
as far as I'm concerned, was risking their lives.
And us here on the radio station,
basically spending a lot of time making this place go
and joining hands with the listeners who help us survive,
help us keep going.
212-209-2950.
Let's hear the last bit, then we'll proceed with the show.
We're up to, is that a six or an eight?
I think it's $650.
I sure like to see that crest over a thousand
during this break.
212-209-2950.
You can make it happen.
Yeah, of course, the CD didn't play again.
Okay, hold on, hold on, I'll figure it out.
I think I have to, that's CD number four.
I think I have to physically press the button over here.
So let me reach over.
I did it.
212-209-2950.
This is another new one I brought up with me
about something that might be dear to the hearts of people
living in the shadow of Redmond.
And a man who really thinks he needs $73 billion.
And lots of great new technology,
lots of fun things to do with it,
but their idea of what to do with it
is put everybody in a little cubicle with a keyboard
where it's all temporary jobs so they can wake up any time
and find out they don't have a job.
No raises, no unions, no benefits,
no health insurance.
Unlike other civilized countries
where healthcare is a basic human right by law,
but here we have a disease industry instead.
So, I mean, some of these people
are even putting little badges on the employees
to monitor where they are in the building at all times,
monitor the seconds of time they leave their chair,
monitor their phone calls,
anything where they might be leaving their desk
and wasting precious company time.
Kind of like an electronic sweatshop.
Kind of like an electronic plantation.
That's what this song is called.
♪ Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh ♪
♪
♪ Ha ha ha, ho ho ho, shift your job to Mexico. ♪
♪ We got time for all of you to retrain. ♪
♪ The whole world against each other. ♪
♪ For the worst, for the lowest wage. ♪
♪ Let's give you kabob, it's epidemic forage. ♪
♪ We've had all your life, now you must go online. ♪
♪ We stare all day at a little plastic screen. ♪
♪ Electronic vipation. Electronic vipation. ♪
♪
♪ Same old job, now you're just a temp. ♪
♪ Cut your pay, cut your benefits. No raise, no pay. ♪
♪ Patient or sick leave day. Shameless slaves to the oars. ♪
♪ Faster, faster, roast the boar. Carpool, carnal caverns. ♪
♪ Get a real break. Ha ha ha, I deter you all. ♪
♪ Every time you leave the chair, drop on the phone. ♪
♪ One minute in the time at the toilet and you're fired. Ha! ♪
♪ Electronic vipation. Electronic vipation. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. ♪
♪ Old pleas we bless the new, old new and old peers. ♪
In the research triangle,
sickness fires flames
Lots of people need your job
and you can be replaced
Replaced
Replaced
Replaced
Replaced
Replaced
On a point and a round of applause, Frank!
🎵
Slackers who gave their lives
to workers and human rights
That don't mean nothing anymore
Got some fat down on the floor
Do the WTO
Rich get richer, poor get poorer
Factory, R.P.H.D.
You are all out of termites now
Laptop is your falling shade
Till we downsize you away
Chocolate home is your reward
Your best friend is your spouse
Electronic vipation
of, off the hook, Electronic Plantation. Again, 212-209-2950, you'll get a copy of that CD
with any pledge of $50 or more, and for a pledge of $100, you'll get two passes to H2K,
the Hackers on Planet Earth conference taking place in New York City, where Jello is giving
the keynote address this July 15th at 12 noon here in New York City. Again, you get a pass
for the entire weekend and a copy of the CD for every pledge of $100. But again, as we
said, we accept any call, any pledge, it all adds up. We're up to $850 so far. Didn't
quite crack the $1,000 mark, but please, a couple of calls will do it. 212-209-2950.
We have a bunch of people here in the studio with us. Actually, we have a whole lot of
people here in the studio with us. Isaac over on the far left.
Hi. How you doing?
Actually, Isaac's on the far right, but he's sitting on the left.
Well, he's on the far right as he's sitting.
Oh, har, har, har.
As far as I'm looking at him, he's on the far left. Yeah. And Porkchop just center of
left. And our special guest, Ed Hernstead, one of our lawyers for the MPAA case. We'll
talk about that in just a moment. We have Laszlo, Alex, and Shana all here at the same
time in the studio. And we all want you to call 212-209-2950. Please. Turned off the
phone ringer thing because I found it distracting. What we'd like to get, we have one call on
the line. That's good. Let's make it five calls. Why not? We can do it. We know there's
people out there. We know you're driving around listening to the radio station. People do
that all the time. We've got a great signal, but you know, don't take the place for granted
because good things have a tendency of disappearing if you take them for granted. Like, you know,
patches of forest, things that are on the side of the road that get taken over and turned
into, you know, chains that you see every place. Same thing happens in radio. You have
a radio station that you like and all of a sudden it switches format, changes. I used
to work for a station like that, didn't you, Laszlo? Yeah. They switched format several
times. Are you at liberty to talk about that? You know, when they were really cool? Yeah.
They were a cool station. And then they switched. You know, all these listeners had all these
people following them, begging, screaming, threatening, all kinds of things. But it didn't
matter. They just changed the station over. They changed it to some other format. That's
the way it is. That's the way it goes. Somebody told me one day when I was complaining about
issues in commercial radio, they said, Laszlo, it ain't about the music. It's about the commercials.
That's right. That's exactly what it is. Now, think of it this way. You listeners are the
commercials. Would you rather be the commercials or would you rather we have commercials? We
have to break every five minutes to sell something. And when we can't talk about things that are
in the slightest bit controversial. Now, you know, the WTO things that we were playing
just now, they're quite controversial to many people. What we're about to talk about now
with the Motion Picture Association of America, that's extremely controversial to many corporate
interests. We would not be allowed to have this discussion either on any commercial
radio station. It just wouldn't happen. And I offer as proof the radio dial to simply
cruise around and see what you find. 212-209-2950. Think of it as a vote of support, a vote to
keep us going. It makes a big difference. All right, we have Ed Hernsten, who is one
of the prestigious legal team representing us in court as we face charges against us
by the Motion Picture Association and the various film houses out there.
Thank you. Thank you for that kind word.
Well, thank you for being there for us. It makes a lot of difference. And you're not
just there for us. You're there for a lot of people. How do you see this case? I also
want to introduce Mackie, who's joining us on the phone line from California. Mackie,
you there?
Hi there.
So we have a lot of people here. How do you see this as influencing just by the eight
largest studios, most of which are members of the MPAA, in order to validate and get
a judicial ruling that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is good law? And they picked
the defendants very carefully. I think they picked 2600 because you're perceived to be
on the edge, someone who pushes the envelope, someone who, or a magazine that's out there
with an Internet site that's out there talking about important issues that are not conventional
issues, let's say. The other two defendants who are no longer part of the case are people
who put up websites or were the ISP for websites that called the MPAA very rude names or put
up content like, hey, steal your DVD here. Obviously, 2600 is very different. It's a
media defendant. It's a journal. It's a magazine. And it's a webcaster as well or a web publisher
as well. And the issues that 2600 addresses are issues that are political and of social
import. Some of these other defendants were just there because they look bad. And what
the plaintiffs, I believe, intend to accomplish here is to get this new law, this Digital
Millennium Copyright Act, rubber stamped by the courts. And what this act does for the
first time is it makes illegal conduct that has nothing to do with copying. The Copyright
Act is about protecting copyrights. And I think everybody has agreed, certainly everyone
I have talked to on the side of the defendants, as well as on the side of the plaintiffs,
are agreed that copyright's important and that if someone writes a book or writes a
song or makes a movie that they should enjoy certain special rights, at least for a limited
period of time, as conceived within the Constitution, as set forth in the Copyright Act. What's
different about this Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which is an amendment to the main Copyright
Act, is that what it makes illegal is evasion, circumvention of encryption technologies that
protect copyrighted material. So in this case, 2600, you, Emanuel, or the defendants that
left, no one has been accused of copyright infringement.
What's especially interesting about that is it's one step removed now. Now instead of
just copyright infringement, if you figure out how to break encryption that protects
copyright infringement, then you're guilty under the DMCA. But we didn't even do that.
All we did was tell people about it, was show people how it had been done. And that, that's
two steps removed as far as I'm concerned.
Well, that's actually only partially right, because it's not yet illegal to circumvent
encryption. That, that, the Congress wasn't quite sure how to handle this, so they, they
broke up the Act. And part of it, which deals with what individuals do, circumventing encryption,
they sort of punted on it. And they, they created a two-year rulemaking procedure, gave
it over to the Register of Copyrights in the Library of Congress, and they're, they're
continuing the rulemaking procedures right now. There were hearings in Washington at
the beginning of this month. Just a couple of days ago, there were hearings out at Sanford
in California. And not until October will it be illegal for an individual to do, to
use DCSS. It's right now, the only thing that's prohibited is the providing of or trafficking
in or offering of a utility or a device that enables someone to circumvent encryption.
So if this, if this goes a step further than in October, what kinds of things can we look
forward to seeing? Individuals being punished for doing what 2600 has been alleged to do.
And the way they've sort of brought you guys in there is by posting the DCSS utility, they're
saying that that constitutes providing or trafficking in or offering to the public a
utility that can be used to evade, to circumvent encryption devices that protect copyrighted
material. Didn't the New York Times do the exact same thing a couple of weeks ago when
they linked to our link? Sure. New York Times did it. CNN, CNBC have either linked directly
or linked to links where DCSS can easily be found. In other words, they link to a link
that, that, or they link to a site that links to DCSS. And it's hard to say whether that
isn't the same thing. Their point is that you've got to stop linking. This is their
new motion. Originally, they got an injunction against posting. And now they've made a motion
to expand that injunction to include linking. And that's the one that's really particularly
frightening because where does it stop? The reason, I mean, they seem to be suggesting
that the First Amendment is something that can be measured by convenience or by clicks
on a mouse, that if it takes one click, i.e. a direct link, well, then the First Amendment
sort of is outweighed by the need to protect the DMCA. But if it's three clicks, you know,
highlight an address and copy and paste it into the location bar, then that's okay. I
mean, that, of course, doesn't make any sense at all. No. When you consider the net is there
for linking, that's what the net is. It's a bunch of links to actually start regulating
them. I can imagine, I mean, you'll be tied up every single day in court cases. Yeah,
that's right. I think what's at stake and why everybody should care about what this
case is about and what the result of this case turns out to be is really control of
copyrighted materials, control of intellectual property. Historically, the exclusivity given
to an author under the Copyright Act is limited. It's limited in duration, although with the
Sonny Bono Amendment to the Copyright Act, that's now 95 years. That's, you know, that
seems... I still laugh every time I hear Sonny Bono Amendment. I don't know. I just can't
get that in my head. There's sort of cognitive dissonance. But the other limitations have
been court-created, but they're very real, too, and those are limitations of fair use.
And historically, that's been the most important one because, you know, if you think about
it, copyright, the exclusivity, the monopoly over expression of ideas that you get in copyright
is completely contradictory to the First Amendment right of freedom of speech. If you have freedom
of speech guaranteed by the Constitution, then how can anyone say, no, you can't use
my words? And that's, you know, they're directly in conflict, the exclusivity of copyright
and the freedom of speech of the First Amendment. That's historically been resolved by two different
mechanisms. One is the sort of idea-expression dichotomy, which basically says that nobody
owns an idea, but you can own the expression of an idea. So the idea to have a sitcom where,
you know, a very prejudiced head of a family lives in a neighborhood in Queens and makes
jokes about people isn't protectable, but all in the family, that expression would be.
The other one is fair use, which says that people can make fair use of copyrighted material
under certain circumstances, for parody purposes, for academic, scholarly purposes, to, you
know, a whole variety of purposes that are set out in the Copyright Act. One thing that
this encryption that the plaintiffs have put in, that the movie studios have put in on
all the DVDs is that you can't get at the material at all. You can't make any use of
it. And they're on record, as recently as two or three weeks ago, at an event at Yale
University, the assistant or the deputy general counsel, Gerald Gochner, is on record as saying
that if you want to make fair use of materials on a DVD first, you should try and find it
on a videocassette. And, of course, there's stuff that is original to DVDs, and then the
quality is different. And then, second, he said, get a license. So it seems to be the
MPA's point of view that fair use doesn't exist anymore.
What do you have to do to get a license?
That wasn't got into, but I would imagine one thing you got to do is pay, which you
never had to do before. And just the transactional cost. If you're an artist, the person who
asked the question of the deputy general counsel was a visual artist, and she said, I typically
use snips from music, from CDs, from videocassettes, from movies in my art. And, obviously, particularly
for a visual artist, the quality of the digital image on a DVD would be very attractive.
What you're supposed to do, apply to Warner Brothers and say, I want to use 10 seconds
of a particular movie for my art piece, and then they will determine whether it's art,
whether it's deserving of fair use. It adds levels of oversight and control that have
never existed.
I imagine they'll make this argument that, well, we just want to get paid for our work.
Otherwise, you're ripping us off. You're getting something from us for nothing. We'll starve.
The answer to that, I think, is pretty obvious. What we're talking about here are people who
bought DVDs and who want to play them and who want to use them in legal ways. If people
are stealing, that's illegal. That's copyright infringement. That's already illegal. It will
be illegal. The studios spend a great deal of money and are very good at policing it.
Within the limits of man's ingenuity and men and women's ingenuity, people are very good
at figuring out ways of making copies, and particularly offshore copies. There's not
much they can do about piracy.
They seized, we've recently learned, I can't get into the specifics, but many, many millions
of pirated copies just last year, which I think tells us that there's a lot more of
them out there. DCSS is not a threat for piracy for a whole lot of reasons, most of which
are very technical. Mackie is probably better equipped to describe it than I am.
This case isn't about piracy. It's not about copying. It's about control over copyrighted
material. It's about control of intellectual property. It's about changing the ground rules
for everybody.
Of course, they didn't start off by saying it's about control. They said it was about
piracy. The MPAA said that when they brought the charges against us. I think now a lot
of people are seeing that it's not about that at all. It's about control. Mackie, do you
have any kind of technical explanation as to why DCSS is not the choice for pirates?
Well, primarily, it's not needed to... DCSS first decrypts the DVD movies. If you're a
big-time pirater in Asia, you're just stamping out DVDs. You don't care to decrypt them before
you make your bit-for-bit copy. If you are copying it, as they allege, to transmit over
the internet, first of all, you're probably making it into a VCD, which is about a tenth
of the quality on average. DCSS isn't even needed in order to do that. There's been many
different ways of doing it, which we even reported off the hook back in 1997, that there
was a DVD ripper, as they're called. It doesn't make any sense to use DCSS for that.
Interesting. Of course, that's been listed as the scapegoat, as it were, for all these
cases of piracy. The MPA wants you to believe that that's the case.
We might as well throw in some of the fun facts and figures of copying using DCSS. If
you want to rip a DVD using DCSS, first of all, you've got to have a hard drive with
at least six, seven, or as many as eight open gigabytes of space. If you went out and bought
a new computer today, you could probably get a 20-gig hard drive. Even as recently as six
months ago, they're probably the biggest ones available. Mac, you can correct me on this
for 12 or maybe even 16?
You could buy a 40-gig hard drive, but most standard computers aren't going to come with
one by default.
Yeah, that's right. Every few months, the size of the standard default hard drive gets
bigger. It basically eliminates people who bought their computer, let's say, a year ago
or earlier, unless they went out and bought the biggest hard drive humanly available.
The reason for that is that DVDs are huge. They have a tremendous amount of information
on them. The average is about six gigabytes, which is unspeakably large. You use the DCSS
to copy and decrypt the files, and then on your hard drive, you've got six gigabytes
of information that you could then play. Probably, you've got a DVD player that's got CSS on
it, so you didn't have to do this exercise in the first place.
But if you want to, say, sell it to somebody, you have several options. One is you could
sell them your computer for, I guess, the fair market value of the computer plus five
bucks for the movie, but that's pretty silly. You could put it on a DAT tape, but you're
not going to have a lot of flexibility because you've got to rewind it and go forward and
backwards, and there's a lot of trouble synchronizing the sound, and the quality is not going to
be quite as good. Then you've got to go out and buy a DAT tape drive, and you've got to
install that, and you've got to have an extra piece of equipment that costs not an insignificant
sum. You can't really burn it onto a DVD because, first of all, DVD burners are almost impossible
to find. Second of all, they cost $4,000, $5,000. One was announced, I guess, within
the last couple of days for $2,300.
A lot of big corporations have these, ironically enough.
The burners?
Yeah.
Yeah, funny.
It is. We can't get a hold of them, but I know they're out there.
Well, the consumer ones are useless pretty much because they still haven't decided on
a standard, so you're not sure if the DVDs you burn on your DDRW drive are going to work
on the next one. Also, they pre-burn out the bits used to store the keys so that you can't
just copy a DVD directly to another consumer DVD.
Right. Also, the media aren't big enough. The writable DVDs, the biggest one out there
I think presently available is 5.4 gigabytes. You get some movies on that, which would only
play on a handful of players. It wouldn't play on every player, just the ones that are
formatted and that have that standard. As Mackie points out, it's not a uniform standard
but there's a lot of movies that wouldn't fit on it. Or if you really want to save some
time, you'd send it to your pal on the internet. You'd sort of upload it to a website. The
problem with that is that if you're using a 56K modem, it's going to take you about
two weeks. Okay? And then don't forget, Michael Eisner, for example, is on record as saying
that this DCSS is piracy, like in the old days, piracy on the high seas because you
can make copies of movies and email them to your friends instantly.
Do you think there's a chance that the people launching this lawsuit don't really understand
the technology themselves?
I think that it's likely that not everybody involved knows exactly what's going on.
I like to think that Jack Valente maybe has been kind of misinformed, doesn't really
understand the technology involved with DCSS. Maybe Michael Eisner doesn't realize that
he's being manipulated and told that certain things do certain things and they really don't
do those things. I'd like one last chance before we go to trial to just say, look guys,
you sure you understand what it is you're accusing us here? Because it really is kind
of preposterous.
Yeah, I agree.
I highly recommend everyone go to the 2600 website and read the letter that Michael Eisner
sent to all the Disney employees because it's really hilarious. Even the way that he talks
to them is very condescending, like they're all his little children. He used the Pirates
of the Caribbean analogy, which I thought was particularly priceless.
Yeah, that was a highlight for me too, Mackey.
Oh boy. We got a copy of that from a Disney employee, right?
Right.
And there's others out on the net. Of the thousands and thousands of employees, several
have released it.
And Jack Valenti gave a speech to the University of Oklahoma a couple of weeks ago, a graduation
speech. I didn't hear a report from that. I don't know if he talked about this issue
at all there, but I wouldn't be surprised if he made some allusion to it. If anybody
was there, please let us know. Email oth at 2600.com or you can give us a call. If we take calls
later, we'll give out the number. But it's a frightening thing. I mean, I guess, Ed,
you're used to it. You go to federal court a lot, but we've gone as spectators a couple
of times, never as defendants.
Yeah, it's not a lot of fun to be part of a lawsuit. And in a case like this, it's the
kind of case where it's easy to get ramped up. I mean, we're up against, on the one side
is 2600 Magazine, which I think is a great journal, but it doesn't have the same resources
as the eight largest motion picture studios in America. We're talking Walt Disney Company,
nighttime Warner Entertainment, Inc., LP, Sony. I mean, we're talking megabucks on the
other side.
It's like going up against foreign nations that are powerful and want to destroy you
and things like that.
Well, I guess their probably annual income is larger than many foreign nations' annual
GNP.
Yeah, that's what you're dealing with. You're dealing with massive amounts of wealth and
power and just intent to get their way by any means possible. And I've got to admit,
it's a frightening thing. When this all started back in January, we didn't really know what
we were facing, what kinds of things would be wrong. I mean, they tried to disqualify
you as our lawyers, and I have to say, we won yesterday. Want to tell us something about
that?
Well, there was a disqualification motion made because our firm was in the process of
representing, as a sort of passive second plaintiff, Time Warner. It's almost impossible
to avoid. There are a certain number of firms that do entertainment work that represent
Time Warner and all the other big entertainment companies. And it is a fairly normal event
that you'll be on one side of a deal with them day one and day two, or maybe even the
same day, you'll be on the other side of a deal with them. That happens a lot.
Plus, with all the companies that they own and control.
Right. I mean, they're huge, and it's very hard to avoid them.
You may not even know that this company happens to be owned by this other entity.
Right.
Well, and also, you might be dealing with music, with Warner Chappell, and it'll have
nothing in the least to do. The other case had to do with a book. It wasn't a movie,
it wasn't a movie yet.
Scholastic Book Services, what's that?
Well, Scholastic Books publishes the Harry Potter books, only the most popular books
on Earth these days. And Time Warner has some secondary, some residual interest in
the Harry Potter books. Probably, I think, the rights to make the movies. I don't know
exactly. I try to stay as far away from that case as possible, obviously, because I was
working on the case, on your case. But I think at the end of the day, the fact that the two
cases had absolutely nothing to do with each other, that it was impossible, as they acknowledged,
and fair play to them for acknowledging it. It's nice to see when someone says, well,
yeah, in fact, there's nothing they can learn from that case that will hurt us in this case.
And the fact that they waited for a month until we had come in, until they had said,
we're ready to go to trial next week, and we said, no, no, no, no, we've got to do some
discovery, we need some time to get the facts out on this case, until after they'd made
the motion to expand the injunction to include linking. They waited for all that until they
finally said, oh, and by the way, there's a conflict here.
Well, I think what they did was they saw that you guys were serious, that we actually have
a competent defense team, that we're going to fight them tooth and nail, and then they
said, uh-oh, we've got to come up with something to stop this, because we're going to be made
fools of.
Well, I'm not going to disagree with you there.
It also makes it very difficult to find a firm to represent you against the major motion
picture industry, because so many of them are afraid that if they represent someone
against Time Warner, that then they'll never get another Time Warner contract, or they
may already have a conflict of interest.
It kind of ties into what we were saying before about independence in media. They can do this
to us, and it doesn't really bother us that much if we make mortal enemies out of Time
Warner. Any other publishing entity, broadcasting entity, that might keep them up at night,
worrying about just what it is they had done, what kind of grave they're digging for
themselves. But 2600 BAI, we kind of have a parallel in that way, that we can thumb
our nose at the big guys and face off against them on our terms and make it about the issues.
Well, one thing I think it's important to recognize here is that education is about
what this case is about and what's at stake is very important, because just as you hope,
and I share that hope, that when this case started, that the heads of the studios and
the Jack Valenti didn't really know that the allegation that you could transmit a DVD
movie instantaneously across the internet was complete and utter nonsense. What they're
protecting is very sympathetic to a lot of people. Their position is, hey, it costs us
$100 million to make a movie. We need to have some kind of exclusive rights in that movie
in order to make the money back so we can make these movies. We need to have copyright
in a movie and we need to be able to enforce a copyright in a movie. And the thing that's
important and that everybody should know is that I don't think anybody disagrees with
that, but that that's not what this case is about. They haven't alleged copyright infringement.
It is simply not part of this case. What this case is about is whether individuals, groups,
entities, students, teachers, artists, whomever, will have access to copyrighted materials
if any kind of an encryption or protective system is put around it.
I think in some ways, though, they're projecting. They're projecting their fears of technology
and saying, well, what if tomorrow it is possible to transmit an entire film in one second across
the internet? We have to be prepared for that. How would you answer them if that is their concern?
Yeah, that's a tough question. I mean, the legal answer is certainly easier than any
other answer, which is that's not this case. And when that happens, then you'll have a case.
I think the real answer is that's something that's been coming down the pike for years.
There's nothing new about that anticipation. And it's still several years off where you
have that kind of national, basically backbone connection, that everybody's got a T3 line
connecting them to each other. Because all you need is one place in the connection where
the information would back up, and suddenly it's going to take days to upload or download
a movie when you're talking about 6 gigabyte. But at some point in the next few years,
then that reality will be here. They'll have had years to prepare for that. That's number one.
Number two, infringement will still be illegal. There's no changing that.
And three is we don't know. But that said, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act cannot mean
that, as opposed to any other form of copyrighted material, that DVDs are out of the hands
of the public, that nobody has any rights with respect to DVDs.
Yeah, I think that's what we have to keep coming back to is that this is a case about
people who have already bought the DVDs, people who have already bought the computers
and are being told, you're not allowed to use the DVD in this computer, period.
One of the favorite analogies they make is that nobody has a right, and this is in the fair use
context, is that nobody has a right to break into a bookstore to make fair use of the text
in some book. And that was quoted by the judge in this opinion. And you see it all over the place.
That's not what's going on. What they're saying here is you can buy the book, but you can only
read it if you're in a room that some licensed room builder made, sitting in a chair built
by a licensed chair builder, using a lamp that the licensed lamp manufacturer constructed,
wearing reading glasses that were put together by the licensed glasses manufacturer.
What they're saying is they want to control every single aspect of how you view what you already bought.
I'll go on record as saying I don't think it's right to break into a video store and steal a DVD
and use DECSS on it. I don't think that's right at all. But I do think once you've bought the DVD,
you can do whatever you want with it. It's your DVD. If you want to look at it, figure out a way
to play it on your toaster, fine, go ahead. It's something that you have bought.
But no, we don't support breaking into stores and doing things like that.
I don't know why they would make that kind of an analogy because it's got nothing to do with it.
It's completely alien.
Well, we have to take a short break to appeal to our listeners to help us out here.
We have a couple of packages we're offering for our fundraiser today.
As you know, every few months, three times a year actually, we have to ask our listeners to help us
keep the radio station going. We've had some calls while we were talking up to $1,350 now.
So that's not bad. That's not bad. Maybe we should just talk more often about the issues.
We'd like to do that. And that's what we do virtually every other week of the year.
And it's for that that we're asking you to call up and pledge.
And you won't walk away empty-handed because what we do is we make donations to the station
of the things that we have. In fact, one of the things that we have right here are the anti-MPAA shirts.
And I believe, Ed, you got a copy of one of those, didn't you?
Oh, yeah.
You wear it with pride, right?
Absolutely.
Some kids have gotten into trouble for wearing them in school. Can you believe that?
How dare you criticize the MPAA on a shirt?
It's like, what kind of sick society are we turning into? You can't even say something on a shirt.
There's not even obscenity on it or anything.
It's just a big R-rated symbol. The symbol isn't R-rated.
It's what you see on the screen with a big R on it when it's red and all that kind of thing.
It's a takeoff of that.
And it looks a lot like the cover of the Spring 2600.
We're offering that along with our other t-shirts.
It's the Off the Hook t-shirt package.
We have a blue box t-shirt. We have an encryption t-shirt.
And we have the brand-new MPAA t-shirt.
And we also have, we still have those CDs, the Jell-O Be Out for CDs.
And those all together for a $75 pledge, you'll get all of that.
But more importantly, I don't want you to call up just because you're adding it all up and saying,
Hey, yeah, that's a good deal. I think I'm going to buy some shirts.
You're not buying shirts. You're investing in the radio station as one of our sponsors.
Because every single one of our listeners is a sponsor, either through your ideas,
through your input, or through your financial contributions,
which allow us to continue to pay the rent to keep this place going.
Nobody on this show gets paid to do anything.
Well, except their jobs, which are independent of the radio station.
But we do this basically just as a labor of love to get the word out,
to spread ideas, to talk about the issues that we find important.
We hope you feel the same way.
We hope you believe these things are important, important enough to give us a call,
pledge some support, show that it means something to you.
Again, we take Visa, MasterCard, American Express, or we'll send you a bill.
You can pay whenever you have the funds.
Again, we accept any amount.
But for the pledge of $75, you get the three T-shirts and the CD that we're offering.
We also have the pledge of $50, where you get the Jell-O-Bee Offer CD,
pledge of $100, and you'll get two admissions to H2K plus the Jell-O-Bee Offer CD.
A lot of different things.
I don't want to spend too much time talking about all the different packages we have,
because we have a lot of material we have to cover tonight.
We want to stay on topic.
That's why we want to see a bunch of calls.
We have no calls.
I thought you said the phone number, dude.
I thought I said the phone number.
See, I don't like to say the phone number too much.
You know what?
Since I work in commercial radio, if you want to just point over to me.
You be the phone number.
Right, and I'll be like, you know what, Emmanuel, that number is 212-209-2950.
Right, right.
Yeah, I forgot to say it.
I'm sorry.
I'm just so caught up in why, why we have to.
And you got a phone call.
Do it again.
See if you can get another one.
212-209-2950.
See, you probably wouldn't hear about this DECSS hoo-ha on other radio stations,
because they're owned by ABC, Disney, Time Warner, big corporations.
You know, every time somebody interviews us,
and people are always interviewing us about the latest virus that's being spread around.
Right, because that's your fault, dude.
Yeah, everything is a hacker's fault, absolutely.
We always make a point of saying to them, you know, you guys are suing us.
No, it's not us.
We're not suing you.
The people upstairs, they're the ones that do that kind of evil stuff.
And I'm like, well, you know, if they're doing that,
do you think maybe they could be influencing the kinds of things that you cover,
the assignments that you get, the stories that you ignore?
You think maybe there's a slight correlation there?
They're like, well, I just have a couple of questions.
Please answer them.
You know, it's sad.
I feel sorry for people that work in the corporate media,
because they have no control over what it is that they do.
You know, and that's a very scary thing.
212-209-2950.
We have two phone calls.
Dude, you're stepping on my.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Yeah, it's your job.
Go ahead.
212-209-2950.
Okay.
Ed, we want to thank you very much for coming by.
Ed Hernstein still is our lawyer and has been our guest tonight.
And thanks for stopping in and updating us on what's been going on.
It's a pleasure.
As far as cases rank, this is one of the more interesting ones.
Oh, this is up there.
This is a fascinating case.
It's the first time.
This legal issue has never been litigated before.
So that's what litigators look for is a case of first impression
where you can sort of take the law and point it in the direction it should go
rather than let someone else do it wrong.
Yeah, absolutely.
So thank you for that.
Well, thanks for being there.
We have to stand up to injustice,
and I think that's sort of the theme tonight that people are doing that.
And, you know, it's a risk.
It's a big risk.
You're definitely taking a risk whenever you do this.
So I want to thank you for being there, and we'll be in touch.
We'll let people know what's going on.
Of course.
Good night.
Ed Hernstein, one of our lawyers fighting with us for justice and the American way.
How many people are suing you right now, dude?
Well, that's an interesting question there, Laszlo.
He doesn't have that many fingers.
I don't have that many.
Why should I?
I do have just that many fingers.
I think there's something like five separate lawsuits right now.
Well, threats of lawsuits.
Threats of lawsuits.
Well, that's what I mean by facing them because, you know, we've been –
and this doesn't count all the ones that we've been threatened with in the past.
It just never went anywhere.
But the most recent one, of course, was Verizon,
which is the company that doesn't really even yet exist.
But they're already pissed off at us.
Right.
Peace, man.
We're going to sue you into the ground.
What is up with that with the peace sign?
I mean, I don't know if everybody has seen these commercials,
but they're all over the place.
I think it's a V for Verizon.
V for victory.
Well, Mac, you're out in California.
Do you have Verizon ads out there?
Yes, we do.
Why do you have Verizon ads?
It's three different companies have joined.
Bell Atlantic.
It's not the whole AirTouch thing because we have AirTouch out here.
All right, wait.
So, Laszlo, who's joined?
I don't know the three companies.
Bell Atlantic, GTE.
Isaac?
Bell Atlantic, AirTouch, and GTE.
Your microphone's not working.
Wait, you're the –
He's the red one.
I'm the red one.
I'm always the red one.
You crossed the microphone over like that.
I know because I'm always the red one.
That was his idea.
Superstition.
Can you believe this?
He crossed the microphone over.
Okay, go ahead.
Bell Atlantic, AirTouch, and I believe the third is GTE.
Yeah, the third is GTE.
Unbelievable.
Wasn't it Nixon who got in trouble for the victory sign or something
and it got banned in other countries?
Because doesn't it mean something offensive in other places?
Well, if you turn your hand around in the U.K.,
I know that's like giving somebody the finger, right?
Yeah, so you're giving them two fingers.
But, yeah, that's true.
It does mean something.
So be careful of the way you're facing.
We should take one of their commercials and, like, intersperse clips of Nixon.
You see, now, even discussing this kind of thing is something that, you know,
could be over the line for a lot of people.
You've got to, you know, tread lightly and not offend the wrong people.
Don't say anything bad about corporations because you'll get sued.
Exactly.
That's what we're moving towards.
And, you know, we've been doing this.
We've been publishing now since 1984.
We've been threatened several times, but nothing like this year.
Nothing like this year.
Verizon is saying that by having our website, VerizonReallySucks.com,
we couldn't get VerizonSucks.com because they already took it
for whatever purpose they want to use it for.
They're saying that we're infringing on their copyright by making a comment,
by saying they suck.
Now, Alex, you registered a site recently, too.
What's your site?
The name of the site is VerizonEatsPoop.com.
I registered it yesterday.
I just wanted to note also that—
A real threat to corporate America there.
Oh, absolutely.
Wow.
The word poop.
Actually, VerizonSucks.cc is still available.
It's a new .cc domain.
Both of those cost $100?
Yeah, they're pretty expensive.
Yeah, isn't this a—
How much money has been spent on these domains?
Well, it only cost me $15.
All right, $15.
Well, how many other people are doing this?
I mean, isn't it a little childish?
Well, Verizon.
Oh, Verizon.
Yeah, they're probably spending quite a lot of money.
Yeah, Verizon has registered hundreds of sites.
I heard VerizonIsCrap.com is taken.
Hey, how about a website called CallNow2092950
and pledge the money or we'll go off the air
and all the corporate oppressors will really be a drag?
That's .com.
Do you know how much this radio frequency would be worth to them?
Millions.
No, tens of millions.
Tens of millions.
Hundreds of millions.
There's another New York frequency, 104.3,
that went for almost $100 million.
Now, we operate at the same power.
Right.
We reach the same area that that station reaches.
We could sell easily for that amount of money.
Now, we would never do that because this radio station belongs to the people.
Why does it belong to the people?
Because the people, like you, call us up and pledge and keep us going.
We don't go to Time Warner.
We don't go to Disney.
We don't get money from them.
We get money from you, and everything we broadcast on the air is your fault.
So you should call 212-209-2950.
That's right.
Because it's really depressing watching this number not move, dude.
Well, we do have two phones.
I like to think the reason it's not moving is because people are so busy,
and they're answering the phone.
That does happen sometimes.
I see two calls are on the line.
Right.
But there's like eight people in there.
If you think about how much money you waste on a weekly basis,
just, oh, I'll grab a Diet Coke.
Oh, I'll grab a six-pack of beer.
Da-da-da.
You can't even shoot off $10 to a station.
It's shameful.
Well, you know why they won't do it.
Why?
Because they don't think it matters.
They don't think their voice will count.
And that's the thing.
Once you realize that your voice does count, you get kind of impatient.
You wonder how can people not believe that their voice matters.
You've got to jump on the bandwagon and say,
which is kind of funny because you're not really jumping on a bandwagon,
but by being an individual, your voice does matter.
It makes a difference.
And you have to do it in order to see that that's true.
And it's not just a question of spending money because, you know,
that's one unpleasant reality of life that you have to do these things.
But it's voicing your opinion in all different ways,
starting organizations, starting movements,
just doing things that everybody tells you is a bad idea that will never work.
Well, do it anyway and see for yourself.
Lots of times it does work.
Lots of times you can start an environmental group
and save that patch of trees that's going to turn into a 7-Eleven otherwise.
You know, you can do things like that.
And the reason you can do things is because most people won't.
It's as simple as that.
212-209-2950, four calls on the line.
You see, Laszlo, that's how you get calls.
Now, go ahead.
Go ahead.
Make that eight.
Make that eight, Laszlo.
I just went from two to four.
See if you can go from four to eight.
Oh, no, dude.
Yeah.
Well, the number went up a lot.
It went up a lot.
Yeah, not bad.
Yeah.
And we're up to 1,670.
That's what it was.
Right.
So that'll pay for about a half hour of broadcasting.
Mackey, you're out there in California.
You can't get to BBAI there.
No, I can't.
Except on the Internet.
Yeah.
Well, that's something, I guess.
Perhaps shortwave.
Uh-huh.
Well, now, tell us what the radio scene is like there.
I mean, are you able to get any cool stations at all?
Oh, most of the time, most of the year, I'm way up north, quasi-rural area.
But there's a university there.
So you have lots of awful country stations.
And there's, like, three modern rock stations that play the exact same playlist
and are owned by the same people over and over again.
It's absolutely awful.
Is that Infinity?
Are they Infinity stations?
I'm really not sure of the name offhand.
Because both K-Rock's are programmed by the same guy.
Yes, he is.
K-Rock LA and K-Rock.
He is K-Rock.
Oh, well, see, I guessed it.
Ding-dong.
And he also programs the same station up in San Francisco, Live 105.
Oh, man, that's terrible.
It's scary when you realize this.
Now, maybe people don't know this in New York,
but in New York alone, we have a lot of competing radio stations
that are owned by the same people.
Now, where do you go for news?
Where do you listen to news?
WCBS radio or something like that?
News Radio 88?
That's where a lot of people go.
Well, do you know what?
Who's their competition?
1010 wins.
They're owned by the same people.
They're owned by the same company, which is Infinity Broadcasting.
Wait, who owns what?
Is it CBS owns Infinity or Infinity owns CBS?
I don't even know.
I don't know, but in February, actually January,
I got to experience where all that money actually goes.
Really?
Because, yes, every tour, I'll never be invited back again,
but two or three times a year,
all the CBS radio stations nationwide actually invite people
that spend lots of money to come on trips,
and I went down to Atlanta for the Super Bowl,
and I kind of weaseled in on this Infinity trip,
but literally they fly in thousands of people,
media buyers, people that spend lots of money on the stations and so forth,
and party them into the floor for a week,
and I was talking to some of these people,
and they're there every year.
Sometimes they go to two or three trips a year.
This is why regular people can't get tickets to the Super Bowl because of all this.
Right.
I've never been to the Super Bowl,
and I've never really been into professional sports,
but it really upset me.
There was all these kids outside begging for tickets.
They were huge fans.
They drove all the way from St. Louis or wherever,
and there's all these media fat cats and guys that are basically being,
if you keep spending money with us,
we'll keep getting you tickets to the Super Bowl every year.
The ticket was like $350 or something,
and we sat like three rows from the very top,
and that was the $350 seats.
That's a real microcosm of the problems facing us today.
It's like the average person is at such a disadvantage because they play by the rules,
because they wait in line at Ticketron and try to buy tickets to something,
but it doesn't matter because if you're part of the elite crowd,
you'll just get right in.
You'll just skip over everybody.
And they spent millions.
You were part of that elite crowd.
Yeah, I was.
I broke in and offended a lot of people.
You could be part of a more elite crowd.
212-209-2950.
We have six.
Well, we had six calls on the line.
I guess we're processing very quickly,
so please continue to call up.
$75.
You'll get all three 2600 shirts,
including the brand-new anti-MPAA shirt.
Make a lot of friends with these.
Actually, well, people will stop you in the street.
I wore mine at a conference last week.
Really?
Yeah.
What kind of reaction did you get?
Well, I was at the Electronic Entertainment Expo,
and I stepped onto the PlayStation booth,
which is about the size of a football field,
where they have big DVD symbols everywhere
because the new PlayStation 2 is DVD format
and got some knowing glances from people.
See, that's just that there are people there
that know what's going on.
There's like 2600 people in all these big companies
that kind of give you a wink, you know,
and send you the nice corporate memo every now and then
that applies to you.
It's really cool.
There's a lot of cool people out there.
We're not knocking the individuals at all,
and we understand why sometimes people have to
make deals with the devil to survive
and why you have to work for some of these evil places.
But the important thing is,
whether you're part of that or not,
you can still be part of us.
You can still keep this place going
because this place is unique,
and when it's gone, it's gone.
Believe me.
If this station were to fall into the wrong hands
and go to some commercial entity,
we wouldn't be able to just change our mind
and go back and say,
hey, you know, give us our station back.
It doesn't work that way.
Otherwise, you'd see BAIs all over the place.
Why do you think you don't see them anyplace?
Why do you think all the radio sounds the same
no matter where you go?
I guarantee you,
if you tune up and down the dial right now,
you'll basically hear the same voice over and over again.
You'll hear accents on the radio.
Why is it you don't hear accents on the radio?
Because everybody's got to sound white.
There's no ethnicity here.
Do they tell you that?
How do they phrase it?
You know, when I first moved to New York,
they actually kind of harassed me.
You're not from New York?
No, dude.
I'm from Oklahoma.
You don't have an Oklahoma accent?
Right.
But every now and then,
I would slip and say y'all or something like that,
and they would...
No.
You can say y'all here anytime you want.
Absolutely.
You want to say y'all, don't you, Isaac?
Oh, all the time.
Okay.
212-209-2950.
Bernie S. joins us now from Philadelphia.
Hi, Emanuel.
How you doing?
I'm doing great.
I actually feel very privileged to be on the air tonight
with such an illustrious crowd and for such a good cause.
Oh, don't be silly.
We're privileged to be in your presence.
Okay.
Enough of this.
Right.
You've been in prison longer than any of us.
That's true.
Actually, that's not going to last much longer
because we'll have Kevin on later on the show as well.
We can't associate.
Yeah, you can't associate,
so you can't be on at the same time, unfortunately.
But you can be on at the same time as Mackie,
who is also with us from California.
Hi, Mackie.
Hello there.
Good to hear your voice again.
Now that that's out of the way.
Okay.
The magic of technology.
212-209-2950.
Again, three 2600 t-shirts.
I believe everybody on the phone at least
has all three of the shirts, right?
I don't have them yet.
You don't have them?
I just pledged $100, Emanuel.
So I guess I'll be getting the shirts.
He keeps pledging and registering for conferences
that he doesn't have to pledge and register for.
I can't believe it.
All right.
Well, that's the kind of motivation
that I guess we really need to have.
If people who are part of the radio show themselves
pledge to the radio show, that's great.
That really is great.
Thanks, Bernie.
Sure.
Please tell the other people why that's important.
Well, personally, I owe a huge debt of gratitude
to WBAI listeners, to yourself, Emanuel, and to the station,
because about three and a half years ago,
I was in a much worse place than I am now.
I was in near-dungeon conditions in a prison
with major injuries caused by the prison system.
And I fully believe I would not have been released
when I was from that situation
had it not been for the efforts of WBAI listeners
who had heard about my plight on the air
and who made a lot of phone calls and faxes and letters
to prison officials.
And I was released in an unprecedented manner
by a judge who previously was dead-bed against me
getting out any time soon.
So it was beyond words how I felt
when I realized I had so much support out there.
And I will never forget that,
and I feel forever obligated to this station and to its listeners.
So that's why I just pledged.
Bernie, I should point out that for people out there
who think that only hardened criminals wind up in prison
and people are in prison for a reason.
When you were in jail, I think the prison population
was somewhere around the 1 million mark.
Now it's just past 2 million.
2 million people.
And I don't think there are that many more criminals,
and I certainly don't think that you did anything
that was anywhere remotely criminal.
The federal government stated in the sentencing report
that there were no victims in the offense.
But the offense itself was not, in my eyes, an offense.
Why don't you describe for the people just what it is
that they did to you, what they accused you of?
Well, it's not too different from what we're hearing today
with this MPAA action.
I was charged with the possession of hardware or software,
possession, not use of it for anything,
for the modification of telecommunications instruments
for the unauthorized access to telecommunications services.
And a lot of people would say, well, what does that mean?
Well, it was software, basically,
could allow someone to program a cellular phone
so you could have two phones on the same account,
still pay for all your bills.
It didn't give anybody the ability to even steal service
because that would require theft of something else first,
which I was never charged with having anything to do with.
But regardless, it was possession of a piece of software.
And in this case, today we have this DCSS program,
the mere possession of which can constitute a crime.
I mean, this is crazy.
This software doesn't victimize anyone, this DCSS,
and yet people are facing their livelihoods
and possibly their lives being ruined
as a result of a simple program that doesn't do anything
that up until very recently copyright law encouraged.
So it's very scary.
The more things change, the more they stay the same,
but it indicates that the powerful entities,
telcos, motion picture companies,
can really have an effect on people's lives
that are very negative.
And I think this particular program, Off the Hook,
does a good job of educating people about these abuses of power.
It's quite a saga.
And it's something that we went through with you
on the air here on the radio show back in, what was it, 96?
It was 95 and 96.
95, 96.
Those two years where my life was pretty much a living hell.
The best part of every week was being on Off the Hook
from a prison phone.
Those weeks when I was actually able to get to a prison phone.
Wow.
I can't imagine.
I visited you there a few times,
but I can't imagine what that was like.
And I think a lot of us don't, I guess it's a defense mechanism,
we just don't think about what's really going on in the world.
Kevin can imagine it, I'm sure.
It's too painful.
Who can imagine it?
Kevin.
Well, Kevin's not with us right now.
He'll be with us later and he can tell us a lot of things.
But even Kevin did not go through the brutality that you went through.
I don't think it could match that,
especially the later part.
I mean, were it not for the publicity
that we were able to get for you through WBAI,
you could have been in prison a lot longer, don't you think?
Definitely.
My parole date had come and gone,
and months and months had passed since my parole date
and nothing was happening.
It was very strange.
Clearly, the Secret Service had some influence
in seeing that my parole papers never even made it near the top of the pile.
But for some reason,
I was transferred between five different maximum security prisons,
and the conditions in some of those were pretty awful.
You got to see the visiting areas.
You didn't get to see the office.
It was sickening just seeing that,
but maybe for the benefit of the listeners,
you could describe kind of what everyday conditions were like.
And before you do that, please give us a call,
212-209-2950.
We're at $1,995.
That means one more caller will get us over the top of the $2,000 mark,
which is great.
That's $2,000 more for the radio station to keep going.
It's expensive to run this place,
but it's worth it.
It's worth whatever it is we have to spend to keep the place going,
because we'll have a voice forever into the future
to talk about things like this.
Unfortunately, we're going to have more injustices like the Bernie Yes case,
like the Kevin Mitnick case,
and like all the other things that have been happening,
will continue to happen.
There are things we can't even imagine that are coming down the pike.
If we're not here to talk about it,
you won't find out about it.
You'll have to trust the same people who are right now suing us
to get us not to reveal how things work.
You'll have to trust them to bring you the truth,
and that's something that I know I don't want to trust them.
The drummer might be lost.
Did you switch your mic, too?
No, I didn't. I'm still at the...
He's white.
Oh, you're white. I'm sorry. I thought you were gray.
Okay, you're white. Go ahead.
I'm not gray.
The drummer is, I'm sure, lost in the radio world,
but since I'm a student, I can only...
Oh, that's money. Cool.
I can only afford a little bit, but there is $50.
$50 on the table.
$50 on the table. It's going...
A pledge person, please come and take Porkchop's money from him.
Oh, no.
They're like a half mile down the studio.
I'll go over to them later if they don't want to come up here.
All right.
But there's $50, I believe, in this radio station.
I believe that it must be here.
You've got six calls on the line for that act of generosity.
For that act, yes.
Thank you very much.
That $50 is no longer in my wallet.
Now, if anybody should be paid for what it is that they're doing, it's you.
I mean, people put in their heart and soul into this place,
and they get nothing but the satisfaction of knowing they did something,
and I think that's really great when people can do that and figure out ways to survive
because you do need to survive in this world.
The reason that we have a place to go to, that is entirely because of the listeners.
If they weren't there, we wouldn't be here.
If we weren't here, then stories like Bernie S's would not get out,
and then people like Bernie S wouldn't get out because they'd be stuck in prison
and all kinds of horrible things would happen.
212-209-2950.
I'm sorry, Laszlo, that's your job.
No, I just wanted to bring it up that it's quite ironic that when Bernie S was in prison,
even the Secret Service called BAI to say,
you know, we'd really appreciate it if you didn't have him on there anymore.
Yeah, they wanted us to give them tapes and everything.
I mean, talk about conspiracy theories, dude.
I mean, that is insane.
It's scary.
It should be like WBAI, the station that the Secret Service doesn't want you to listen to.
But, you know, the thing that inspires me is that there are people out there,
a lot of them high school kids, that have such courage to stand up to things like that.
When I was in high school, I don't think I had that much guts to stand up to, you know,
even a county cop or anything like that.
But they're standing up to the Secret Service.
They're standing up to the FBI.
They're standing up to all these people putting up Web pages that, you know,
they could get in trouble for, you know, I mean, in this country,
you should be able to criticize whoever you want.
But face it, Bernie, if you criticize the wrong people,
I mean, what's the real reason you went to prison?
We all know what that was.
Well, this isn't a speculation.
This is coming from a prosecutor who used to work with my attorney when he was a prosecutor.
And she told him that the real reason, and I quote,
the real reason that Ed is still in prison has to do with photographs,
surveillance photographs of undercover Secret Service agents picking their noses.
And I had other materials in my personal files,
like names and addresses of Secret Service agents, phone numbers, that sort of thing.
People were like, why would I be collecting this information?
Well, because the Secret Service had already shown themselves to have some sort of a plan
to violate the rights of the hacker community.
Hello?
Yeah, we're here.
Okay, I heard a loud click.
I didn't know if it was cut off.
That would be the Secret Service.
They're tapping in.
Yeah, they're tapping in now.
It's the new equipment that doesn't click.
The CALEA switch hasn't been installed yet.
Bernie, it sounds funny to us.
You have pictures of Secret Service agents picking their noses.
At the time, these pictures ended up broadcast through the grapevine here.
They got broadcast on the local Fox TV affiliate on the evening news.
Now, we all thought it was very funny here at the 2600 meeting here in Philadelphia at the time.
That was in 1994.
Apparently, and I heard this from one of the Secret Service agents as they were driving me to the federal building,
that they took a lot of heat for that, and there was a cause of great embarrassment.
So they weren't aware until my home was searched.
They weren't aware that I was in some way responsible for these photographs ending up on the evening news
of Secret Service agents picking their noses in an undercover facility.
Well, I think they were upset that the covers were blown,
and too that they were blown in an embarrassing manner.
Now, the prosecutor told my attorney that that was the real reason that the Secret Service took an interest in my case.
And you were there, Emanuel.
You heard how hard the Secret Service fought to keep me locked up.
So that's what the case was about.
It clearly wasn't about victimizing anyone, because the federal sentencing report even said there were no victims in the case.
But frankly, my case is not unique.
It may have been unique in that it was a special law, and I was the first person charged with it and all that stuff.
But there are abuses of the justice system every day, every hour.
It was unbelievable, because I was there in court that time,
and they were talking about all the things that they were accusing you of or speculating that you may have done.
I remember one of them was that – I don't think I was there for this one,
but it was something that was well-recorded in the history books –
that they thought that you might have possessed C-4 explosives, plastic explosives.
And in actuality, this material that they thought was C-4 turned out to be dental putty,
because, well, you happen to live in a house that the previous occupant was a dentist,
and he happened to have all these chemicals in the basement that were just left over and sitting there.
So they find this material they think is C-4 plastic explosives.
They test it.
They realize it's not as dental putty, but – and they said this in front of –
Months later.
In front of the judge, months later, they said this,
that the fact that it could have been concerned them greatly,
and for that reason you should continue to be locked up.
And the judge just accepted it, just accepted it, and kept you in prison based on that.
How are such things even possible?
I imagine if you sat through most court cases,
you would find equally ludicrous misrepresentations of the facts by law enforcement officials and by prosecutors.
I mean, that's their job.
I mean, I don't think it should – that's how they view their jobs.
I think they think that, well, so many people escape justice,
so they're going to bend the rules and twist the truth a little bit just to get somebody they really feel should be locked up even longer.
How much of your life did you lose because of this?
Fourteen months in total in five different maximum security institutions.
But frankly, you know, I don't feel my case is special anyway.
There are people who are serving much longer sentences in prison who harmed no one.
I mean, like at least 60 percent of the people, probably 65 percent of the people I saw in prison were there for –
well, maybe not that many, maybe like 50 percent were there for simple drug possession, not even selling it.
And that's – it's nuts.
I mean, it's just victimless crimes.
People should not be locked in cages for long periods of time or for any period of time in my opinion.
Absolutely.
So I don't think my case or Kevin's case are unique in the fact that prosecutors and law enforcement officials
basically committed perjury, falsified information, or misrepresented information at least in order to get convictions.
That happens.
That's the standard operating procedure.
So my case is not special in that respect.
What was special is that I happened to know you.
I happened to know about – off the hook.
I was on the air long before that whole ordeal started.
And what was unusual about my case is that people became aware of it on a large scale.
And that's the only reason I got out when I did, out of that nightmare.
Because I had 52 stitches on my body from that ordeal.
And I was – I couldn't even open my mouth.
It was wired shut.
So –
You want to tell us how that happened?
Let me just make a programming note.
We're running an extra hour tonight.
If you're tuning in for Talk Rear, the Voice of the Arab Community will be on next week at this time.
We're going an extra hour with Off the Hook.
Hoping for listener support.
Please call us while Bernie S. is telling his story because –
Oh, I'm sorry, Laszlo.
That's your job.
Go ahead.
Right.
You should call 212-209-2950.
209-2950.
Thanks to the people on the line already.
We're up to $2,765, which is great.
We want to thank people for calling in.
Let's keep that number going up.
You passed $2,600.
Yeah, we passed $2,600.
It just went right by.
We didn't even see it.
212 – oh, I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
Oh, 212-209-2950.
Damn unions.
Can't even see your phone number.
Let me – Bernie, I want you to continue with your story, but I want to thank some people.
I don't want to bore people with this stuff.
They've heard it before.
I don't think – well, first of all, what you have to understand about radio,
and I think Laszlo understands this perfectly well, is that a lot of people tune in and out.
A lot of people come and go.
Some people may be hearing this station for the first time ever,
and certainly this program for the first time ever.
A lot of people haven't heard your story.
It's very compelling.
And, you know, I've heard your story a thousand times,
and it's still interesting every time I listen to it.
So don't sell yourself short like that.
Definitely an interesting story, and we're going to continue with that in just a moment.
Let's thank some people first.
Laura from Long Beach, thank you very much for something particularly funny, Laszlo.
Yeah.
Okay, well, maybe you can share it later.
Duke from New York, thanks for your pledge.
Robert from Sound Beach, thank you very much for calling up.
Lonnie from Indianapolis.
Indianapolis, what do you think about that?
Indianapolis representing at 212-209-2950.
Yeah.
Represent your city.
That's right.
That's right.
That's great.
I'm really happy to hear from people from other parts of the country as well.
Doesn't mean any people in New York are off the hook, though, no pun intended.
No.
212.
I really didn't mean it when I said that.
I really didn't.
That's my quality.
That's pretty bad.
212-209-2950, please, let's get those phone lines lit up.
We have $75 package, three T-shirts, 2600 Blue Box shirt, beautiful shirt there.
It's a blue rectangle, which is a blue box, but in addition to that, it's a schematic for a blue box,
which, of course, blue boxes were used in the past to make free phone calls from phone freaks
and basically explore the phone network.
I don't think you could even talk about that these days without getting in trouble.
But back in the 60s and 70s, that was kind of a rite of passage of a lot of people.
So you get that shirt.
You get the encryption shirt, which has all kinds of algorithms and things on there that I don't even understand,
and people can use that to decrypt things and encrypt things.
And the most recent shirt, the MPAA, the anti-MPAA shirt that has a really scary picture of Jack Valente on the back.
Have you seen that?
It's really scary.
Squashing a hacker.
Yeah, yeah.
Strangling him for daring to watch a DVD that he owns.
You want to tell us how that happened?
Let me take a programming note.
We're running an extra hour tonight.
If you're tuning in for Talk Rear, the Voice of the Hour community will be on next week at this time.
We're going an extra hour with Off the Hook.
Hoping for listener support.
Please call us while Bernie S. is telling his story.
Oh, I'm sorry, Laszlo.
That's your job.
Go ahead.
Right.
You should call 212-209-2950.
209-2950.
Thanks to the people on the line already.
We're up to $2,765, which is great.
We want to thank people for calling in.
Let's keep that number going up.
You passed $2,600.
Yeah, we passed $2,600.
It just went right by.
We didn't even see it.
212.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
Oh, 212-209-2950.
Damn unions.
Can't even see the phone number.
Let me, Bernie, I want you to continue with your story, but I want to thank some people.
I don't want to bore people with this stuff.
They've heard it before.
I don't think, well, first of all, what you have to understand about radio, and I think
Laszlo understands this perfectly well, is that a lot of people tune in and out.
A lot of people come and go.
Some people may be hearing this station for the first time ever, and certainly this program
for the first time ever.
A lot of people haven't heard your story.
It's very compelling.
And, you know, I've heard your story a thousand times, and it's still interesting every time
I listen to it.
So don't sell yourself short like that.
Definitely, yeah.
Definitely an interesting story, and we're going to continue with that in just a moment.
Let's thank some people first.
Laura from Long Beach, thank you very much for something particularly funny, Laszlo.
Yeah.
Okay, well, maybe you can share it later.
Duke from New York, thanks for your pledge.
Robert from Sound Beach, thank you very much for calling up.
Lonnie from Indianapolis.
Indianapolis, what do you think about that?
Indianapolis representing at 212-209-2950.
Yeah.
Represent your city.
That's right.
That's right.
That's great.
I'm really happy to hear from people from other parts of the country as well.
Doesn't mean any people in New York are off the hook, though.
No pun intended.
No.
212.
I really didn't mean that when I said that.
I really didn't.
That's almost my quality.
No, that's pretty bad.
212.
212-209-2950.
Please, let's get those phone lines lit up.
We have $75 package, three T-shirts, 2600 Blue Box shirt.
Beautiful shirt there.
It's a blue rectangle, which is a blue box.
But in addition to that, it's a schematic for a blue box,
which, of course, blue boxes were used in the past to make free phone calls
from phone freaks and basically explore the phone network.
And I don't think you could even talk about that these days without getting in trouble.
But back in the 60s and 70s, that was kind of a rite of passage for a lot of people.
So you get that shirt.
You get the encryption shirt, which has all kinds of algorithms and things on there
that I don't even understand.
And people can use that to decrypt things and encrypt things.
And the most recent shirt, the MPAA, the anti-MPAA shirt,
that has a really scary picture of Jack Valente on the back.
Have you seen that?
It's really scary.
Squashing a hacker.
Yeah, yeah.
Strangling him for daring to watch a DVD that he owns.
Hits close to home.
And, of course, on the front of that, you have the big rated R screen with a few modifications.
That's all yours for a pledge of $75.
Plus, the No WTO combo.
Jill will be out for a brand-new CD coming out.
Jill will be out for being our keynote speaker at H2K.
That's for a $75 pledge at 212-209-2950.
And if you donate $20, you feel really warm and fuzzy.
That's right.
If you donate anything, you feel great.
You really do.
People think I'm just saying that, but it's a good experience.
It's not like getting mugged.
It's basically you're contributing something.
You feel like your voice matters, and it does.
And when you're talking to somebody and they bring up the station, you say,
Yeah, I'm a member.
I support that.
That's a little pride there.
Right.
I want to talk to a lot of people who don't agree with everything they hear,
because I don't agree with everything I hear on the station.
Nobody does.
I think it would be impossible to agree with everything,
because we have such widely diverging groups of people from all different walks of life.
So, basically, if you listen to the station and you get something out of it,
you like something you hear, you learn something, that's worth supporting.
And it's one less station that's running Rush Limbaugh.
209-2950.
I want to thank Mike from New York for his pledge.
And Peter from – oh, wow, this is a good one.
Peter from Woodsley, Ontario.
Oh, we're going international.
That's in Canada, yes.
Not bad.
That's really cool.
Now, you see, this is the power of the net.
The net is being used to bring the signal WBAI out to people around the world,
and I think that's really great.
That shows you how important this place is for people in other countries to show their support.
You know?
Where do you go online to hear this thing, anyway?
Well, for this show, you listen to www.2600.com off the hook,
and on there you'll find all the shows from the past as well.
And while we're on the air, we broadcast with the help of a lot of really dedicated servers and coders out there.
And we owe them a great debt of gratitude for making this possible every week.
Just by hooking together computers and talking to each other and just making it all happen,
we get a couple hundred more people that would not have been part of this as a result.
And that's such a valuable thing, is people donate their time, their machines, just for this.
And that, I think, is incredible.
Speaking of which, we do have the need for more coders.
Yes, we have lots of servers.
The servers are the ones that actually receive the encoded audio streams from the coders.
The coders only need a 56k modem, or even less.
If you happen to be in the listening area, normal radio area of WBAI, and you want to help us out,
please help us out.
Please email oth at 2600.com, and I'll forward your email to Juntz,
who is right now coordinating all of the coders and streamers and all of those people,
and getting this out to everybody in the world, really.
That's right.
And you can listen to it all over the world.
You can listen to it any place, as long as you have a connection to the Internet.
That's real power right there.
That's able to reach people and get input from people as well.
Where have some of our listeners been, Emmanuel?
Where have some of our...
Our international listeners.
We got a call once from Singapore, I remember.
That was kind of cool.
I remember that.
We got a guy from Ireland call a while back.
Ireland, Scotland, Israel, Japan, Australia, all over the place.
So, yes, it's definitely getting out there.
It definitely works.
Somebody asked before where you can listen to WBAI, period.
I believe wbaifree.org is the website that broadcasts our signal 24 hours.
If that's not working, go to realradio.org, www.realradio.org,
and that has a link to a bunch of different radio stations.
We're one of them.
And you can listen 24 hours a day.
That's not even to mention all the people who listen in the archives from all over the world all the time.
That's right.
Sorry, I have to excuse myself.
I've got to run.
Ah, okay.
It was great being on.
Thank you for the privilege.
Well, Mackie, thanks for joining us.
Thanks for all your hard work.
Mackie, the webmaster of 2600.com.
And I'll see everyone at home.
All right.
Take care.
212-209-2950.
That's right.
Hey, you know what?
I think we're learning something.
Remember last week, or two weeks ago, we had Kevin and Bernie on at the same time,
and we thought Bernie didn't hang up?
Well, Mackie just hung up, and we didn't hear the little Fast Busys thing.
Oh, there it is.
Wait a minute.
Oh, well.
I've got to get rid of this.
Where is it?
Make it stop.
Make it go away.
Bernie, you're back.
I was trying to clear your name there, but all right.
All right.
Well, I guess you do get the Fast Busy when you make an outgoing call.
I didn't know for sure.
Now we know that's true.
Let's continue thanking people.
Hey, look, a pledge from Bernie S.
Thank you very much for your generous pledge, Bernie.
No problem.
Thanks to Alan from Clifton, New Jersey.
Thanks to Bernice from Plainfield, New York.
Hey, Bernie S., maybe you can go and get some action with Bernice.
Plainfield, New Jersey.
Thank you, New Jersey.
I'm sorry.
Bernice and Bernie in three names apart.
I want to thank Nick from Sandy Hook, Connecticut.
All right.
And Dino from Brooklyn, thank you for your pledge.
John from Broad.
I don't know where this is.
This is bad handwriting, folks.
I can't read this.
I can't read the state.
I think it's.
What zip code would be 20 series?
Is that Virginia?
I think it's Virginia.
Yeah.
What do you think this is?
A town.
Oh, boy.
Brother.
Yeah, that's Virginia, dude.
It's Virginia.
But what's the name of the town?
Broad.
Broadside.
Broad Run.
Broad Run.
Okay.
Thank you very much for the pledge from Virginia.
And I also want to thank Juan from Brooklyn.
First person to call from Virginia, it says here.
Wow.
That's pretty cool.
I also want to thank Adam from Red Bank.
Boris from Woodcliffe Lake.
Alan from New York.
And let's see.
This person wants to be known as Intuition from Haddon Heights, New Jersey.
Okay.
That's fine with us.
You can be known as whatever you want to be known as.
A lot of people here to thank.
Katie from.
Here's another bad handwriting thing.
Something in New Jersey.
Might I say that when you hear your name on the radio, it's a very special feeling.
Why not call now and donate?
212-209-2950.
That's right.
That's my little pledge for you.
You can't get your name read on other radio stations no matter how much money you give.
Yeah, call K-Rock and try to get your name read.
It's not going to happen.
That was Pearl Jam.
Great.
Or they make you look like real idiots when you do call in.
That's because they're so cool, Gen X, man.
Yeah, they sure are.
Can you read that town?
Oh, I'm sorry.
You can probably read that.
C-Gert, New Jersey.
Does it have to replace C-Gert?
C-Gert?
S-E-A space G-I-R-T.
I don't think that's the right spelling.
Well, it'll get to you no matter what because the zip code is right.
I've heard of that town.
You've heard of C-Gert?
I have heard of it.
Okay.
I don't know what it means, but I've heard it before.
Katie will be coming to the Off the Hook conference, so we can ask Katie there.
It's really the H2K conference, but if you ask anybody in the city, they'll direct you to the right one.
The Off the Hook conference, yeah.
That's fine.
I got in on the show a bit late, Emanuel, but did you talk to people about the H2K conference coming up?
We mentioned it a bit.
We mentioned the keynote speaker.
We mentioned the fact we'll be debuting the film and a bunch of other things.
But if you want to talk about it at all, go right ahead.
Well, there's almost too much to – we couldn't cover everything in the rest of the show that's going to be happening at H2K.
It's going to be three days of nonstop stimulation.
Yeah, I guess that's one way of putting it.
It's certainly going to be draining on us, I'll say that, because we'll probably be up for three days straight.
Oh, you know what that is?
That noise is my beeper in vibrate mode.
Wow.
It's kind of funny when he says nonstop stimulation and everything vibrates.
That's kind of cool.
See how right I was?
That is something, all right.
Bernie, did you do that?
It's a special guest that beeped us who we're going to be calling a surprise guest.
Is it Jack Valente?
Wouldn't you like to know?
Yeah, this person willingly wants to be on the air, so don't worry about that.
We're going to call Jack's house.
Let me finish thanking people, then we can get to our special guest.
And please, what's that phone number again?
That would be 212-209-2950.
Sorry, I caught you drinking something.
209-2950.
Won't you call now?
Yes.
We have three calls on the line.
We're over $3,000.
Yay.
And we want to thank everybody really a lot for supporting the station and supporting the show,
telling people that it matters because it means something to us to know that it matters to other people,
just not us.
When we're talking about the Bernie S. case and the Kevin case and all kinds of other things,
it's good to know people are out there who are listening, and it does matter.
It really does.
Let me thank Arnell from New York and Karen from St. Albans, and also Mike from New York City.
Thanks very much for calling in and showing your support, showing that it matters.
Our number again?
212-209-2950.
And what's that country code?
That would be 01.
No.
No?
No, just one.
I never called the United States.
Dude, I'm here.
That's just it.
When we go overseas, we don't know how to call back because we don't know our own country code,
but, yeah, the whole country code is one.
Actually, I think we're the only country that doesn't have its own country code,
which we share with Canada.
Right.
We need somebody out there that's listening internationally to at least call and give 10.
Canada is another nation.
I know that, dude.
They know that, too.
Right, but you don't have to show your passport.
You know what I'm saying?
Actually, there's a hard-ass at the Buffalo Crossing I had to show my passport to.
Well, except for that guy.
I'm talking about Singapore.
I'm talking about Australia.
Somebody's got to give some Deutschmarks or some Euros or something.
Before they devalue anymore, give them to BAI.
212-209-2950.
That would be really cool just to get one guy from somewhere just donating $10, $15.
15 Euros.
15 Euros, yeah.
What is 15 Euros?
Like 10 cents?
Actually, speaking of devaluation, did that gentleman pledge in American dollars or Canadian dollars from Canada?
I don't know.
I was on the phone with Canada today actually having to deal with that whole thing.
How much is a Canadian dollar worth?
$1.51 Canadian dollars to $1.
That says that today at 5 o'clock.
Wow.
So it's always doing a minor exchange there, I see.
Well, see, the deal is that all the actors in the United States are on strike.
Yes.
Yeah, so you have to go to Canada to produce radio commercials.
It's good fun.
It's also a wonderful way to break in as a new voiceover person.
Fine time.
All right.
That number once again, Laszlo, is?
212-209-2950.
Please join the three people on the phone and pledge your support.
Again, we have a $75 pledge.
You'll get all three existing 2600 T-shirts, blue box shirt, encryption shirt, and anti-MPAA shirt.
And again, I should point out the anti-MPAA shirt was made so that we could raise funds for the defense of 2600
and of all the other people who will be prosecuted as a result of this kind of a precedent being set.
We're donating these shirts to WBAI because we realize that WBAI is important to our defense.
It all goes into the same basic thing.
If we have a voice here to speak out and to spread the word about what's happening in the community, we are all the better for it.
And that's why it's important that you call 212-209-2950, show your support for that as well.
And we also have a new package, too.
This is the final one of the night, so we just want to make sure people know about all the different packages available.
This one, if I can find it, let's see.
Yes, this is for $125.
You'll get all four existing CD-ROMs that we have of Off the Hook.
That's every show that we've done from 1988 to 1997.
We don't have it yet from 1997 to now because, well, we just didn't get around to making it.
But we will. We promise.
And, well, in fact, maybe what we'll do is have a DVD-ROM if we're allowed to do that,
if Jack Valenti doesn't sue us for even considering doing that.
Four CD-ROMs of shows from all over the place, all over.
Vintage Bernie S. material.
Exactly.
If you want to hear the whole Bernie S. saga unfold live, that's the way to do it.
And we're going to go back to Bernie S. and hear some more of his story in just a moment.
But in addition to those four CD-ROMs, you also get the CD from Jello B. Alford, the brand-new WTL combo that just came out from Alternative Tentacles.
That's for a pledge of $125.
Pledge of $75, three T-shirts and the CD.
And pledge of $100, two admissions to H2K as well as the CD.
And for $20, we'll say your name on the radio.
That's right.
For any pledge, we'll say your name on the radio.
212-209-2950.
Please, our Euro-wielding listeners, call now.
212-209-2950.
We're at $3,315.
We have one call on the line.
Let's please add to that.
Let's make some more calls come in.
212-209-2950.
Country Code 1.
I don't know where else you could possibly be calling from.
You might have to dial 9 if you have to get out of the switchboard or something like that.
If you're on a cell phone, just drive carefully and, you know, don't cause any accidents while you're pledging.
Have your credit card in hand or whatever it is that you want to pay with.
Cheshire Catalyst joins us from Florida.
Cheshire.
Hi there.
How are you doing?
I'm doing fine, thanks.
You're in a very special area, Code.
Do you want to tell us something about this?
Well, yes.
Last year when the Public Service Commission put out a call that they were having a hearing on splitting the 407 area code,
I went up on the Internet.
Being a bit of a phone freak, I needed to look on the website of the North American Numbering Plate Administration,
NANPA.org, no, NANPA.com, excuse me, and found the page with all of the area codes on it,
201-New Jersey, 202-DC, blah, blah, blah.
Got down and saw one that was available for geographic relief, and it was the number 321.
Well, I moved down here, folks, to watch things go up.
And it struck me that 321 would be respectful of the countdowns that go on around here.
Right.
So at that point, I turned off the web browser, powered up the word processor, and prepared my testimony.
Well, the Public Service Commission loved the idea from the get-go, and I am now being able to receive calls in area code 321.
And it's all because of you.
No one else thought of this?
No one at NASA said, hey, yeah, 321 area code would be perfect for us?
Well, as a matter of fact, I got to the Public Service Commission hearing scared that someone else had come up with the idea
because, to me, it was too simple an idea.
But no one else had looked at the list.
No one knew that this number was available.
No one realized that, yes, it could be done.
So I went to them.
I asked for it.
They approved it.
So it must be my area code, because I asked for it, right?
What did I share?
Well, I think that's brilliant testimony to the fact that a hacker or a phone freak will figure things out before other people
and use them for good, and he certainly used them for good.
It affects billions of people.
Well, the trick is that you get a good idea, you get it at the right time, and you get it to the right people at the right time.
The right time was the Public Service Commission series of hearings about the split.
Now, this is like way back when, when 212 was splitting up.
I was living in New York City at the time.
I was one of the few people that went to the Public Service Commission there in favor of the split.
I was saying, yes, let them put in the 718 area code, but in return, we want you to remove that $1 a month charge on TouchTone
so that we can TouchTone in those extra four digits, and it wouldn't be so much of a hardship.
And that didn't go at the time.
Since then, of course, they have realized the folly of still having the extra charge for TouchTone after all these decades.
Do you know there are some places that still have the charge?
Yes, I do.
They still charge you for TouchTones?
Yes, they still charge in 201.
Did you know that, Cheshire?
That's silly.
It is.
In 1964, when TouchTones were a novelty and you had to keep people from everybody wanting it too fast before they could install the equipment,
yeah, there was a reason to put a premium on it.
But today, they have to go in and change the hardware to take it off if you're going to be using rotary dialing.
Absolutely, absolutely.
That's something, Cheshire.
Now, you've been around for a while doing this kind of thing.
Where did you get your start in the hacker world?
Oh, well, I started playing with telephones at age 12, and I don't want to go into how long ago that was,
considering I just went to the AARP convention for the first time this year.
Oh, my goodness.
Just qualified for that.
Did you go to Winnebago?
No, no.
Living here in Florida, it was easy to just pop over to Orlando for a day at the conference.
What a surprise they had the AARP convention in Florida.
Oh, yeah.
Did they have a good brunch, a good buffet?
Well, it was quite interesting.
It was amazing who was showing up there.
I even spoke to the loneliest man in town, the fellow at the exhibit hall booth from the IRS.
Nobody was talking to him.
I can imagine.
Yeah.
The folks at the Social Security Administration were pretty busy,
and even NASA had a very large exhibit there because they wanted to explain to their constituents, to the taxpayers,
what NASA is about.
What all that noise is passing over their heads.
Yes, exactly, and to explain that the space program is important to America.
And, you know, like I said, it's one of the reasons I'm down here.
I like to help support that space program and get the word out,
and that's why I put in for the 321 area code to let people know this is where it all happens.
You moved down there basically to watch things get launched.
How many launches have you seen?
Oh, too many.
I've never really kept count.
Really?
You have to remember that I used to spend money to come down here when I lived in New York to come down to watch launches.
I saw the last Saturn V go up, the one carrying the Skylab.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, that was back in 1975.
Did you see it come back down?
No, no.
I did not go to Australia for that.
And I didn't want it to go down.
In fact, I had once met Nikolai Rukavishnikov, a Russian cosmonaut,
at the Convocation on Communications honoring the 100th anniversary of the telephone in Cambridge, Mass., at MIT.
And having met him, I sent him a letter when Skylab was coming back asking if maybe the Russians couldn't give it a reboost
because my fondest hope at that time was to make the Skylab an orbiting branch of the National Air and Space Museum.
Of course, that never happened.
But I got back to it soon enough to do it any good, and it orbited back into the atmosphere.
You've got an area code under your belt.
Maybe people will listen to your ideas and take them more seriously now because you've come up with some really good ideas.
Oh, yes.
Thank you.
In fact, I've set up a website, spaceyideas.com.
If you go to spaceyideas.com slash 321, it will tell you the adventure of getting my area code.
That's great.
And, of course, you'll be describing this at H2K, right?
Yes.
Great.
So five-part harmony and full orchestration is what we'll go through with today.
All right.
We look forward to that.
I understand Captain Crunch is going to be here, too.
He'll be on a panel with you talking about the old days.
Yes.
We're hoping to get him back here in time so we can both sit around and talk about the old days, the bad old days in some cases,
especially for the captain at his trials and tribulations over the years.
But there were some good times, too, especially some of the Friday nights with the gang around the pizza table at TAP.
Yeah.
Follow TAP.
Now, those are the old days back when TAP used to be published, I believe, up until 1983.
I remember going – I'm sure there are some listeners out there who used to go to the TAP meetings in New York.
They're the precursor to the 2600 meetings, which started in New York
and then spread like a virus throughout the whole world.
But they used to be – was it every Friday night?
Yeah, they were weekly.
Every Friday night.
The idea was that out-of-towners who would come in for the weekend could get to come in
and hit our meeting before hitting the night on the town.
And so you would meet at – I remember you used to meet at the place called Eddie's when it was called Adam and Eve's, right?
No, I think it was always called Eddie's when we were there.
Really?
Okay.
Yeah.
We'll have to look into that.
NYU section of town.
There were some other restaurants that we used to frequent before that,
and a couple of the places have reincarnated so many times now nobody knows what they were.
But you've got quite a wide variety of people showing up at those things.
And I have to say, without TAP, there wouldn't have been a 2600
because we wouldn't have even thought of the idea.
Hey, yeah, a newsletter.
What a great thing to do.
Sometimes it takes somebody just to do the obvious,
and then you realize, yeah, that's something that would work.
Let's try it.
It's that simple.
Hey, Bernie S. is on the phone with us.
Bernie, are you still there?
I'm still here in Philadelphia.
All right.
You guys know each other, right?
Yeah.
Hey, Bob, or Cheshire.
How are you doing?
Whoopsie.
All right.
You know, there was a good article in the Wall Street Journal.
I'm sure you saw it, but I learned about your 321 coup through Wall Street Journal.
I happened to see that.
They had a great article.
Yes, Wall Street Journal covered it.
There was an article in the New York Times.
I have them linked from the Spacey Ideas homepage.
That's spacey, S-P-A-C-E-Y ideas.com.
If you run down the column there on the right, I've got links to New York Times, Wall Street Journal,
and As It Happens, which is a Canadian radio program,
which growing up on the Canadian border was something I always loved listening to.
To finally be interviewed by those people was really a bit of a thrill for me.
Definitely.
Bernie and I, you were finishing up your story, I believe.
What have we gotten to?
We've gotten to the point where—
Nobody wants to hear about it.
Oh, that's not true.
My jaws were wired shut.
Oh, of course.
We all want to hear that.
Basically, what we want to hear is how it ended,
how you managed to finally get out of your ordeal in prison,
and what it is that you learned from it and what maybe we accomplished.
Well, I learned that people can make a difference.
It's as simple as that.
There are a lot of people languishing behind bars who really no one speaks out for,
and that's very sad.
I saw many, many cases like that.
Fortunately, people knew about my situation, and they didn't like it,
and they made that known to important people, and it really made a difference.
I was in bad shape.
My arm was broken in three places.
My jaw was broken in two places.
I had just undergone seven hours of major surgery under general anesthesia
while chained to the operating table because I was such a dangerous person, you see,
even though I was out cold.
It was only a week, week and a half after that that people just said,
this is just, we heard it was bad, but this is just inhumane.
And it made a lot of noise.
And, in fact, I think you had even organized a contingent of buses to come down.
Isn't that the case?
Yeah.
We had gotten to the point where we actually had the contact information
and we were making reservations.
And then, of course, we got the surprising news.
I think that might have had something to do with it.
But I really think that the county officials in Easton, Pennsylvania,
where I was held last, did not want to.
And they clearly knew what was going on.
They weren't immune to all this media attention.
Yeah, that's the point that we've been trying to make tonight
is that this is the way to get the word out.
This is the way to let people know what's happening.
Now, if we were able to bother the Secret Service enough so that they were, you know,
requesting that we stop or wanted us to provide them with copies of everything you said
or that a judge in Easton, Pennsylvania, would feel the effects of what was happening
from our end through this radio station, that means the word's getting out.
That means people are listening to the station.
That means we actually have a voice and we can affect change.
Basically, there are some people who don't want ideas to get out,
and it takes a station like WBAI to get those ideas out.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Now, Chancellor, when you lived in New York, when was it you last lived in New York?
Back in the 80s?
I moved down to Florida in 87.
87.
So BAI was around then.
Oh, it was.
In fact, I remember answering phones up there on Pledge Nights.
Wow.
It's amazing how the world's—
Is Fred still on the switchboard?
What's that?
Is Fred still on the switchboard?
Is Fred still on the switchboard?
Of course Fred's still on the switchboard.
Well, tell Fred that I said hello.
Not right now.
He went home.
Oh, no, of course not.
Now.
But he'll be back tomorrow.
Yeah, of course.
You know, there are some things that just, you know, BAI is known for.
Oh, absolutely.
And that's one of them.
But yeah.
There's a lot of heritage in this station, which is why people should call.
Dude, make my mic louder so I can be louder.
Oh, you want to be like commercial radio loud?
Right.
People should call.
That's too loud.
Wow, that's really loud.
That's too loud.
All right, never mind.
People should call and keep the heritage alive, you know.
Don't let it go down in flames just because you didn't pick up the phone.
Guys, give them the numbers so they know what to call.
Dude, I'm getting to that, man.
I got to do the pre—I got to do the pre-sell.
Yeah, the pre-sell.
212-209-2950.
212-209-2950.
What are some other, like, commercial radio words?
Just the pre-sell?
What's the thing they call when you're playing the music and it's—
The post.
When you play a song, the idea is to talk all the way up to the first word of the song so that there's no—
Uh-huh.
So that there's always somebody talking.
So you call that hitting the post, right?
When your last word ends just as, you know, Scott Weiland starts—
But if you hit the post in football, it's no good, right?
No, bad.
All right.
What else?
Anything else?
I don't know.
I'm so entrenched in it.
I just—it's difficult.
I can't view reality anymore.
Wow.
Well, that's where they want you.
What's the buzzword and what's the language?
Exactly.
I've always been fascinated by the 7-second delay.
Is it actually 7 seconds?
I think it is.
The one I used to work with was 7-second delay.
I think there's one that's a 6-second delay.
But, you know, when—I think Saturday Night Live has, like, a 2- or 3-second delay.
There's different ones.
But 7 seconds generally tends to be radio.
What are they afraid is going to happen on Saturday Night Live that they're going to have to censor?
Mm-hmm.
Well, things do happen, and they do censor things occasionally there.
Yeah.
But 7 seconds is a long reaction time.
Yeah, it is.
Oh, yeah.
Well, you know, some people are slow.
This is true, especially the guys that need that kind of reaction time.
That's right.
Wasn't it 12 FBI at one point?
Are you talking into your microphone?
I'm talking into my microphone.
Okay, that's right.
All right.
You probably turned Isaac's little red, relocated microphone.
He crossed all the microphones.
I don't know which one is which.
Okay.
What were you saying?
Wasn't the machine here?
I remember we had a couple of—maybe even a year ago, there was, you know, some nights the delay machine was on.
Sometimes it wasn't.
Wasn't it 12 seconds?
No.
You dumped 12 seconds?
No, it wasn't that.
That's a long time.
We dumped 12 seconds when we hit the button and forgot to un-hit it.
Oh, maybe that was it.
Sometimes there was a long period of dead air.
We were trying to figure out what went wrong, and, yeah, that happens sometimes.
But that's just seven seconds delay, five seconds incompetence.
But it's been known to happen.
212-209-2950, we have four calls on the line.
We're up to $3,715, which I'll tell you, you know, to commercial radio, that's nothing.
To us, that's everything.
So please add to that number.
Make it go up.
Just so you know, dot-coms are spending—the old money of radio used to be car dealers and soda and beer.
And radio stations made most of their money during the summer.
Dot-coms now are spending so much money that Boston radio station recently, unprecedented,
sold a 60-second commercial for over $6,000, which is what, like, TV time used to go for a few years ago.
$100 a second.
$6,000 for 60 seconds.
Put that into perspective.
$6,000 for 60 seconds.
WBAI has given us three hours tonight.
And raising whatever it is that we raise, people will be happy with.
If it stops right here at $3,700, that's great.
But look at the difference.
$3,700 over three hours versus $6,000 in 60 seconds.
And you'll see what we're up against.
You'll see the forces out there that drive the marketplace.
They have a lot behind them.
They're at a tremendous disadvantage because all we have are our values and our intent
and, you know, kind of an insane desire to keep going on.
And people are like, well, that's crazy, all the money that they're spending on that.
But guess whose money that is.
It's your money because every time you buy a Diet Coke, 95% of the money you're spending goes toward an ad budget.
And every time you buy Nike shoes, the money is going toward an ad budget.
It's not going to labor, I'll tell you that.
So, you know, vote with your dollars.
209-2950.
Area code 212, country code 1.
Please give us a call.
Add to the number.
Make it go up as high as it possibly can go.
Let's give the commercial radio people a run for their money.
And, you know, we're-
Nike and all those commercial companies that want to trade with China now,
I think I'm getting ready to write my congressman and say, go ahead and vote for regular trade with China.
Let them join the World Trade Organization because unless they join the WTO,
unless Chinese goods are coming into this country, we can't boycott them.
All right, that's one way of looking at it.
I thought Chinese goods were coming into this country.
Some are.
The thing is that we don't know what's Chinese and what has a Taiwan label
or is being shipped through Hong Kong with a Hong Kong label on it.
If they join WTO, they've got to put a China label on it.
We know what is coming from China.
Then we know what to start boycotting again.
And then they'll know what a consumer boycott is about.
When they're making the goods, shipping the goods here, and they're not selling.
Well, that's an idea.
But, you know, the thing is consumer boycotts, I don't know, sometimes they work, sometimes they don't.
Sometimes you know something is really evil, but people keep buying it anyway.
And I've seen that happen more times than not.
Because they say, what are you going to do?
Yeah, and then, you know, once you play that card, once you say, yeah, well, we'll boycott you,
and it doesn't happen, then, you know, you've pretty much given it away.
You're pretty much lost because they know they can survive and you're kind of irrelevant.
The important thing, though, is that you never stop talking about it.
You never stop presenting your ideas and trying to make things better.
That's what we try to do here.
212-209-2950.
We have two calls on the line, and I think we have more than $3,700
because we had some calls on and it hasn't been updated yet.
But speaking of, Cheshire, you mentioned the most lonely person in the world down there at the IRS booth.
Did you hear about the most lonely pay phone in the world?
Yes, I'm so sad.
Oh, I heard something about that on the radio this morning, and I didn't catch the whole article on NPR.
Well, basically, there's this pay phone in the middle of the Mojave Desert that everybody knew about.
People would call it from around the world, and it was the most isolated place.
You'd drive there and you'd pick up the phone, see who was calling it.
It was great.
They took it away.
It was originally put there for miners, wasn't it?
Yes.
They were working with a cinder cone.
It was installed in the 60s.
It was used by miners digging volcanic cinder nearby.
Yes.
It's actually kind of interesting because do you have the number there?
Well, no.
It wouldn't do any good anyway.
I actually have it.
Do you have the number?
Of course I have the number.
It's just a piece of concrete there.
He's got it in his cell phone like he's calling it all the time.
You can call it.
You can get the error.
All right.
Let's hear the error.
The other interesting part is you'll hear it.
7-6-0.
Hang on.
Folks, don't mind the dial tone.
Hopefully we won't lose anybody.
Here we go.
Go ahead.
7-6-0.
1-7-6-0.
1-7-6-0.
I'm sorry.
Yes.
7-3-3.
Now, here's the interesting part.
9-9-6-9.
Interesting.
Well, a lot of pay phones do begin with 9-9.
That's like a loop number to me.
Exactly.
Yes.
It's odd.
It's a what?
Official 6-9.
Yes.
I have to enter a secret code in a second so everybody...
Close your ears.
Yes.
Close your ears when you get the special tone.
Do we need to give the number again?
You can get the special tone now.
Yes.
While we're calling the middle of the Mojave Desert, why don't you call into the station?
It costs money to do phone pranks like this, I might add.
All right.
I'm not sure if I hit the tone in time.
There's the tone.
Hold on.
Do we create a distraction?
You know what?
No.
I'm dialing a crazy number.
Hold on a second.
Let me put it right in hold.
Whoa.
Dude.
This is getting crazy.
This is getting crazy.
Okay.
There's sparks coming out of the phone.
Hang on.
Hang on.
All right.
Duck.
Now, we're going to try this all over again.
This time we're going to do it without everybody on the phone at the same time.
All right.
Number is 7-6-0.
7-6-0?
Yes.
7-3-3.
9-9-6-9.
All right.
I don't think it heard all the numbers, which is why I didn't get the tone.
Okay.
Now we dial a special code.
Let's hear it.
Is this your idea of a joke, Isaac?
No.
No.
There's actually a recording that's very sad that's supposed to come on.
Well, I sure hope it comes on.
Hope nobody answers.
Yeah.
That would be interesting.
How many rings does it take to get the recording?
I don't know.
Well, Isaac, what did the recording say?
At 10 o'clock.
We have to stop this.
Okay.
You can just hang up.
Anyway, it was just very depressing.
It was a standard, you know, this number is no longer in service sort of thing.
We went through all this to hear the boop, boop, boop.
Yes.
Dude.
You mean it doesn't say anything?
Because it's a hobby phone booth.
Dude, we just spent $3 calling there.
We got to reconnect that money.
Actually, we haven't spent anything until it connects.
And even if there was an error, we wouldn't pay at all.
Okay.
Listen.
Don't get technical on me.
I'm not being charged.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's right.
I'm going to turn this off.
I made a phone faux pas.
I was trying to, like, segue into give us money.
Who did you lose?
I lost some.
Well, I hit the hold button.
Oh, you know what?
I hit the off button.
I'm sorry.
Stop.
Who's there?
Hello?
Who's there?
Well, one of you is there because I see the light lit.
Well, Tessar is there.
Tessar is there.
Ah, okay.
All right.
You're there.
We're going to put you on hold.
And we're going to call back Bernie.
Let me remind you that the number is 212-209-2950.
Tessar, are you still there?
I'm still here.
Okay.
Hold on.
I'm going to put you on hold again.
Maybe we can pay for some training for a good old evangelist.
Right.
It's not me.
It's the phone.
All right?
It's the craziest phone I've ever seen.
Can't even hack a paper bag.
I was juggling three calls at once, one of which never answered.
What happened to anybody?
All right.
Let's get Bernie back on the line.
All right.
Bernie's phone is ringing now.
Oh, it's nice to be back.
I'm sorry.
It was not intentional.
Although it will be intentional in a couple of minutes because we have to get rid of you
because Kevin's coming on.
Oh, good.
I'm glad he's coming on.
Yeah.
I'm getting another beep.
It's you.
Why are you beeping me, Bernie?
I wasn't aware that you were.
You think I forgot about you?
It's telecommunications hijinx.
I didn't know if you knew I'd been cut off.
I'm not quite that senile.
Yes.
I realized the light went off and you weren't there.
All right.
If somebody was smart, they'd get that Mojave Payphone phone number.
I'm not quite that senile.
Yes.
I realized the light went off and you weren't there.
All right.
I'm not quite that senile.
Yes.
I realized the light went off and you weren't there.
All right.
If somebody was smart, they'd get that Mojave Payphone phone number for their very own.
Actually.
Well, now we've given out the number over the air.
I'm sure somebody will.
I'm interested if the pair is still sitting there.
So somebody could just drive out.
I was wondering that, too.
Someone suggested we put our own coke out there.
But the thing is, it's not the phone company.
Get one of the BT boxes?
Apparently, it's the National Park Service that wanted it out of there because apparently
people were coming from all over the place causing a ruckus.
I'm not quite that senile.
Yes.
I realized the light went off and you weren't there.
All right.
But the thing is, it's not the phone company.
Get one of the BT boxes?
Apparently, it's the National Park Service that wanted it out of there because apparently
people were coming from all over the place causing a ruckus and sort of not paying attention
to why the place was there in the first place.
Mojave National Preserve wasn't there just to, I guess, drink beers and talk on the phone.
But regardless, still, we don't have very many national treasures.
And I think that Payphone was one of them.
All right.
And I really think they should put it back.
Let's start a drive to get that Payphone put back in.
All right.
I'm interested if the pair is still sitting there.
Yes.
I realized the light went off and you weren't there.
All right.
But the thing is, it's not the phone company.
Yes.
I realized the light went off and you weren't there.
All right.
But the thing is, it's not the phone company.
Yes.
I realized the light went off and you weren't there.
All right.
But the thing is, it's not the phone company.
All right.
I'm actually tired of talking about it.
I want to hear positive things.
I want to hear Isaac's pledge.
And is it Isaac's turn to pledge?
Yes, I'm going to pledge.
Yeah.
Pledge now.
That means something.
All right.
Ooh.
Thank you very much.
All right.
Bernie, this is your last chance to get people to call and say goodbye because we have to
get Kevin on the line.
And you can't talk to him because of federal law.
Well, folks, this station really makes a difference.
And I know that from first-hand experience.
It has a life-changing effect.
And I know that from first-hand experience.
But that is a positive development.
That's good.
You have to keep fighting these things to make sure that you get some rights.
Yeah, just recently I received a letter from the probation department
wanting me to detail my daily activities in looking for an eight-hour-a-day job.
And even though I have several offers to work as a journalist
and for public speaking opportunities,
they apparently don't feel that I should be pursuing those endeavors
and want me to pursue, I don't know, employment in, I guess, fast food or something like that.
Who knows?
But, in fact, I was at my attorney's office today,
and we're reviewing a letter that's a draft of a brief that's being submitted by Floyd Abrams,
who was retained by Brill's content, to help resolve this issue.
Well, I sure hope it gets resolved.
Because, I mean, you went through five years in prison,
and now to have to deal with this kind of garbage when you're out,
not to be able to pursue the career of your choice,
having to get a menial job because they want you to get a menial nine-to-five job,
it's, I mean, you might as well still be in prison.
I mean, I'm glad you're not, but, I mean, you're not living a free life.
Well, I think it's part of a setup is what they're trying to do is set me up to go back.
You can understand that they probably don't want me to work with computer-related equipment,
but when they interpret the judge's conditions so overbroadly
and unreasonably as to prohibit me speaking or writing about computer technology
and the probation department's construing it as computer consulting is absurd.
And, again, I believe it's part of a setup in the hopes that I'll not do what they are telling me to do
so they can put me back in prison.
That is the goal, actually.
It's a horrible thing, but it's true.
When someone is on supervised release, the people who are supervising them get points.
They definitely get promotions, points, all kinds of praise
if they're able to take a potentially dangerous criminal off the streets and put them back into prison.
They look for things like that, and they really do have a vested interest.
Fiber was telling us that.
What I'm learning is all probation officers are police or policemen in probation officer suits,
and apparently the vast majority of them,
and I don't believe my particular probation officer is included in this category,
but probably the people above him are just interested in not having the probationer succeed,
that they view their job as to be punitive in measure and not advancing the goal
of trying to help the offender reintegrate back into society.
It's weird, but I'm just having to deal with it, and it's really unfortunate.
I believe there could be more productive things I could be doing
than again fighting the government because I've already did my time,
and all I'm trying to do is be a productive member of society,
and they're throwing a monkey wrench in it.
That's how I see it.
They're using their broad interpretation of the conditions as a tool of harassment.
When you consider the amount of time you were in prison for the kind of a crime that you were accused of
and that you committed, which are two widely different things,
it's all the worse because you've been through hell already.
I have an anomaly with these people.
Everything in my case has been extraordinarily off kilter,
held without bail, hearing, or trial for four and a half years as a pretrial detainee.
Just everything in this case has been, it seems like, yeah, I broke the law,
but the punishment definitely hasn't fit the crime.
What's really shocking to me is the disregard of my constitutional rights
because if my rights could be disregarded by federal prosecutors in the court system,
then certainly if they can do it to Kevin Mitnick, they can do it to anybody else.
Absolutely.
What I'm learning is our Bill of Rights is really a facade,
and only the people that really have the rights are the people who could afford adequate defense in protecting those rights.
That's true.
Well, I wish we had more time to get into this.
We are running into the last few minutes of our three-hour show.
I think your radio show with WBA has been extremely important in enabling me to speak my view
and get the word out about the issues in my case.
I think it's really important that there be communication mechanisms such as this radio station
to be able to allow just the average Joe on the street like me to be able to communicate one's views.
I think you're doing a good job.
Well, thanks.
You're far from the average Joe on the street, I'll tell you that.
It's good to be able to have people.
I just consider myself just a regular guy.
It's unfortunate the federal government doesn't do that, but maybe someday they'll leave you alone.
That would be nice.
212-209-2950.
We only have five minutes left to get your support.
Boy, we're kind of tired here from begging for money for three hours straight,
but there's some people that have to do it every day, all day long.
So it's an exhausting thing.
Think about that.
It's something that's a necessity of life.
One thing I wanted to mention is about my news.
I get most of mine off of National Public Radio because it's all I've got in this part of Florida.
But I don't like television news, and the reason is if they couldn't get a camera there,
then it probably didn't happen.
I know WBAI from when I used to live up that way,
that they will pick up the news from sources that even NPR won't go anywhere near.
They will bring you the kind of news and reporting and information
and knowledge that the listenership has come to know and expect,
and they need to support that kind of information now.
Now is the time to do that.
I didn't mean to be rude.
I'd like to introduce you to Cheshire Catalyst Kevin Mitnick.
Do you know each other?
Hi there.
I've heard of you, but I don't know you personally.
Are you going to be at H2K?
I want to go, and I'm really wondering if the probation department will allow me to travel there.
I understand.
It's kind of a great concern for me.
I hope I can come.
It would be exciting to meet all the different people that will be there.
We'll have you participate one way or another.
Even if it's by Morse code, we'll do it somehow.
I know Morse code.
I'm a ham operator.
I'm a ham operator, too.
All right.
You two have a lot to talk about then.
I do want to meet you and shake your hand because those rights that they took from you I may need someday.
I don't do anything nasty, but they may think I do something nasty.
I certainly want those rights protected.
I just hope what's happened to me doesn't happen to anybody else down the road.
You also hear of people that are convicted of really heinous crimes
and end up getting the death penalty, and then later on they find out they're innocent,
and luckily they haven't been put to death yet and they're released from prison.
But it's pretty scary that things happen in that context.
Four calls on the line, 212-209-2950.
Please add to those four people and show your support.
Help get our numbers up there.
We have three packages.
Actually, we have four packages.
For $50 you can get the Say No to WTO combo CD by Jello Biafra, keynote speaker at H2K.
For $75 you'll get three of the off-the-hook t-shirt package.
You'll get three t-shirts, a 2600 shirt, an encryption shirt, and the anti-NPAA shirt,
NPAA, of course, being the entity suing us, the latest entity suing us.
And also you'll get the Alternative Tentacles CD along with that.
That's for a pledge of $75.
For $100 you'll get two passes to H2K, Hackers on Planet Earth,
taking place in July in New York City, as well as the Jello Biafra CD.
And for $125, in addition to the CD, you'll get a set of four CD-ROMs
with off-the-hook episodes from 1988 to 1997.
Portia, do you have something queued up for us?
Yeah.
Is this going to go through the board or is this going to go through your speaker?
This is going to go through the board.
Okay, so let me punch it up properly.
But this is basically what you will hear if you select a show from 19—what year are we going back to?
We're going back to October 6, 1998.
No, it couldn't be because it only goes up to 1997.
Sorry, 1988.
1988, okay.
1988.
What did you say, 68?
No, 1988.
Okay, well, we only have about 10 seconds to do this, so hopefully your computer is fast enough to—
Yeah, hopefully I can locate this.
Where did it go?
All right, well, you keep looking for that while we say goodnight to Cheshire and Kevin.
Guys, I want to thank you both for coming in or being on the phone
and showing your support for the station and just doing the things you do.
It really is an inspiration to a lot of us.
Thank you for being there, and thank WBAI for being there as well.
Yeah, thank you, Manuel.
I appreciate your support, and I'm glad that WBAI is able to allow you to have this program on the air.
Okay, again, thanks for you guys for coming in.
We'll be talking to you again in weeks to come, and we'll see you at H2K in one form or another.
Laszlo, what is that phone number one more time?
You know, I'm kind of glad you asked, and it would be 212-209-2950.
All right, join the two people on the line now and show your support.
Get that number up there up to just about $4,300.
It would be nice if we could hit $5,000, wouldn't it?
I think if a bunch of people called in in the last minute of the show, we could actually do that.
It's not that unattainable.
Porkchop, do you have that audio piece for us?
It should be running right now.
I don't hear it.
Well, that would be a problem, wouldn't it?
Yeah. Oh, wait a minute. Wait, wait, wait. I think I have to hit this button. Hang on.
Hang on. There it is.
Hey, it's our theme.
Hey, we get our theme.
Yeah, we forgot the theme. We don't have it.
So now we're listening to the theme on real audio over the air,
which I imagine, what does it sound like over real audio now?
It probably sounds a little bit worse, a little bit more degraded.
It's actually the middle of the show in here.
What part of the show are we in?
This is right after the first quarter is over for some reason.
Is this the very first show?
The very first show back in 1988.
It was, I think, a three-hour special or something.
And you really haven't figured the buttons out in that period of time in the last 12 years.
These are different buttons.
You're listening to Off the Hook here on WBAI in New York.
I'm Emmanuel Goldstein, and we've been listening to a barrage of teleconferences
and party lines and all kinds of things like that.
And now, folks, it's your turn.
If you'd like to be a part of what could perhaps be a unique radio experience.
All right.
Well, that was a unique radio experience 12 years ago.
That was a fun show.
It's a different unique radio experience now, but it's over for us.
Nuff said is up next.
Are they standing outside?
Yes, I believe so.
Have them come in.
Come on in.
Come on in, guys.
Coming to keep you off your own air time.
Especially since you're on their air time now, dude.
That's what the big clock says.
One of the many really cool shows on this radio station.
Yeah.
Stay tuned.
We're going to have to stay a little bit longer.
Oh, okay.
All right.
How nice.
Yeah.
We can say goodbye, then.
We can say goodbye.
Yeah, that's the important thing.
Is it still playing?
Yeah.
Okay.
Back to 1988.
We certainly deserve it, I think.
For the price of that one phone call, just call us up, and we will link you together.
And not only will you be linked to other fascinating people.
You know they have to be fascinating if they're listening to a fascinating radio station such as this.
Boy, I'm getting carried away here, aren't I?
Yeah, you certainly are.
I don't know what's going to happen, but you'll be put on the air.
Live, over the air.
And, you know, you probably have to sort out through.
I don't mean to sort through a lot of people, but...
Well, it's very interesting.
That's part of what you get for pledging.
$125, you'll get four CD-ROMs with 100 hours of audio each.
That's 400 hours of audio.
And you can listen to Off the Hook Till the Cows Come Home.
Of course, you can listen on the net.
It's all up there on the net anyway, but you have to download them, and it takes time.
And, you know, this way you'll have it with you no matter where you go.
So if you really want shows from 1988 to 1997, this is your best bet.
And we have all kinds of other packages.
I don't want to list them all again because it takes too long,
but the people in the pledge room know them well.
Maslow, the phone number?
212-209-2950.
All right.
I want to give a special thank you to all the people who took part in the show tonight.
Our lawyer, Ed Herrnst.
Ed, thank you very much for coming in.
Bernie S., Cheshire Catalyst, Kevin Mitnick, Mackie, Isaac, Porkchop, Shana, Maslow, and Alex.
Did I leave anybody out?
You had to write that down, didn't you?
Yeah.
And Chris, thank you.
He didn't say anything.
Thanks for being there.
All right.
Stay tuned for Enough Said.
We'll be back again next week.
Until then, have a good night.
We don't have a theme, so I don't know how to go out of the show.
I'll play a card to stop this madness.
Good night, everybody.
Hey, this is Armand DeMille.
When there's a trauma, there's an energetic response which may or may not turn into a long-term reaction.
If you're experiencing strange symptoms that no one seems to be able to explain,
they could be arriving from a traumatic reaction to a past event that you may not even remember.
On Wednesday, May 24th, Dr. Peter Levine, author of Waking the Tiger, and Jeanette Mason, author of Shattered,
will talk for four hours about trauma, the symptoms of trauma, and trauma recovery.
Mark it down Wednesday, May 24th, from 2 to 6 p.m. here on WBAI 99.5 FM on your dial.
WBAI 99.5 FM
Community residents once again took to the streets today to protest the latest police killing,
this time the shooting death of African immigrant Amadou Diallo, who died in a hail of 41 police bullets.
...turns out today for the funeral of William Whitfield, shot to death on Christmas Day by New York City police.
Diallo and Whitfield were shot to death...
...look at you see, look at you see...
...a police call of Anthony Baez, a young black man...
...he's in my seat, get the best of me...
...accidentally struck a police car...
...my brother's dying...
...is there anybody trying...
...devil's in a blue dress...
As in so many other cases, the evidence presented by the district attorney to a grand jury was not sufficient to warrant an indictment.
An officer walked away a free man.
...look at you see, look at you see...
...sirens in my sleep, get the best of me...
...my brother's dying...
...is there anybody trying...
...devil's in a blue dress...
...I see Louis Giuliani runs this mob like a mafia don...
...and this mob's called the NY Police Squad...
...devils in a blue dress, they backed by the King Pataki...
...sly like walkers and sting like a German Nazi...
...earth to burning grounds below, heaven and angels...
...they put a Glock slug in the back of Kevin to Daniel...
...I see a black man on death row...
...took me for defending himself against the devil...
...yo, his name's Mamiya...
...took him to slave, he's six days from grave...
...before the day he victimized Mamiya...
...it's real, on Christmas day...
...they go shot, William Whitfield...
...the pig's healed...
...do they consider it a big deal...
...it's about time they locked up LaVoldi...
...put him with my homies...
...I bet the devil got an eye for me...
...bet he's serious, got him really vexed...
...but to be damned by the devil...
...to be truly blessed...
...while others are dying...
...is there anybody trying...
...the devil's in a blue dress...
...as dark clouds follow...
...I think of Amadou Diallo...
...and it's still a hard pill to swallow...
...how can the acts of men be so cold...
...taking the life of any African...
...only this time the city replied...
...nevermore would another man die...
...without the city's pride...
...reeling the crime...
...forty shots hit an innocent man...
...nineteen struck his body unarmed...
...without a gun in his hand...
...and to the devil in his blue chariot...
...blue dress, he's ruthless...
...so who's next, he ain't having it...
...this heart of swine is companion...
...with the hungry nine...
...vexed at the tongue of mine...
...damn, I should've kept quiet...
...blessed so swift with the night stick...
...the devil's for me...
...the city's held...
...and the king's in New York...
...you got bloods, latin kings, and yeti...
...PP's, macadonas, and quips...
...for which gang I fit...
...DNY's to the PD...
...badges and sticks, word up...
...Mr. C for the B-I-G...
...the B-I-G's, they can't speak...
...not so friendly when it comes to the beat...
...walkie-talkies in my sleeve...
...B-T's runnin' the streets...
...they funding my theft...
...feel the ice cold breath...
...in the back of my neck...
...mother sent to the devil...
...in the name of blue dress...
...I want to be like them...
...from the age of six and then ten...
...I want to be like them...
...I want to be a comic book hero...
...left my mother on the loose...
...I want to be a comic book hero...
...comic book hero...
...of Disney...
...and it's never been just fantastic four...
...I want to be like them...
...can't save the world...
...we could ask for more...
...I want to be like them...
...I want to be a comic book hero...
...well, I'm not too much of an actor, but...
...I want to be a comic book hero...
...comic book hero...
...of Disney...
...comic book hero...
...dark eyes from the room and the mirror...
...I want to be like them...
...but I've got to stop the world now that I'm three...
...oh...
...I want to be like them...
...oh, I want to be a comic book hero...
...a flash in my fucking room...
...I want to be...
...I want to be a comic book hero...
...comic book hero...
...about a race...
...about a race...
...about a race...
...about a race...
...sorry...
...about a race...
Okay, so we started a couple of minutes late.
We're going for two hours tonight.
What the heck?
In a way, it's nice, you know, following Off The Hook.
Although, it's bad in a way, too, because we don't have the time to hang out in the reception.
We have an hour between shows, and we usually hang out, but not this time.
Why not? Bring him in here. Let's do it on air.
Anyway, this is, as I said, tonight going until midnight.
Because of our pledge drive, our membership drive, our fundraising event,
which takes place occasionally, a little too occasionally for most.
Three times a year. It's not that often.
Most stations do their fundraising every five minutes.
We do it every three months. Come on.
So the phone number for pledges is 209-295-0.
295-0.
I've got to remember that tonight.
Right, Isaac? We got that right?
209-295-0.
Isaac, you're on. Isaac's in the other room. Right, this is Emmanuel.
But anyway, 209-295-0 is the number to pledge.
We've got some comics and t-shirts and stuff, and we'll talk about that in a little while.