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And it's two weeks after, still trying to regain a sense of normalcy how much we can.
But I'm sure our listeners understand how difficult that is.
Not just because of what's happened, but also because of the proximity to this place, to
this radio station, literally a few hundred feet away, there are still the remains of
thousands of people that have not yet been found.
And it's just something that I just can't seem to resolve.
Well we have a lot of things to cover tonight.
And I don't think any of it is very good, unfortunately.
But it's not completely unexpected, it's not something that, thank you, it's not something
that we didn't see coming.
Whenever you have such events of horror and tragedy and fear, you can always bet that
there are those on the sidelines who are waiting for the opportunity to use those events to
their advantage.
And I think we're starting to see that.
First a couple of stories, as you heard at the top of the hour.
The United States train company Amtrak is now requiring government I.D., I.D. issued
by an authority of some sort, driver's license or passport or something like that before
you can get on a train.
And I had to pass through a checkpoint on the way into the city through the Midtown
Tunnel.
Traffic all over the place.
There's reports that mandatory carpooling is going to be enforced as early as Thursday,
meaning that if you want to drive into the city with yourself and nobody else, you can't
do it unless you take a train or something like that.
The reason for this?
Because of the massive traffic jams that have been taking place, and the reason for the
massive traffic jams is because lots of cars are being searched, people are being questioned.
I'm told that there were delays today of up to three hours getting across some bridges.
And across the river in New Jersey comes news that racial profiling is now okay.
That's right, the Justice Department, FBI pretty much gave the go-ahead to New Jersey
authorities to stop people if they look Middle Eastern.
Yeah, it's pretty amazing that we've actually reached this point.
But yeah, if you're Middle Eastern, you can expect to be stopped by a policeman in New
Jersey and don't claim racial profiling.
They're looking for somebody or looking for evidence, and apparently the color of your
skin or the composition of your face will determine whether or not you know something.
These are dark days indeed, and they're going to get a lot darker, I think, before they
get any lighter.
Mike, you're back.
I'm back.
How are you doing?
You weren't here last week because of the holidays.
Right, right.
And of course, two weeks ago, all hell was breaking loose and none of us were here.
Well, we were outside.
Yeah, we met up afterwards.
And actually, yeah, you and me made it down to the station, but there wasn't a station
to get to.
All the lights were out and the building was closed.
But it's weird.
I mean, you're all the way up in Columbia, but you still feel the effects up there, don't
you?
It's actually rather bizarre because you're in the middle of a big city.
You're in the middle of a big city.
We're about six miles away, which is not very far, but when I come down here to do
the show or for whatever, it's like a foreign country.
It's so strange.
Mm-hmm.
It still is weird walking around the Wall Street area seeing National Guardsmen in their
fatigues and policemen everywhere.
And I have to say, though, that for a time, for a time that I think still continues to
this day, after the events happened, a kind of a peace fell over New York that I've never
seen before, where all of a sudden all the conflicts that you might have been involved
in in the past between the civilian and policemen, between one political party and another, it
all evaporated.
It all went away, and nobody really paid any attention to that anymore.
We were all human beings, and I found nothing painted a better picture of that than Union
Square Park, where everybody is still, from what I understand, just congregating and sharing
whatever it is that they can share, whether it be stories, whether it be pictures.
That's another thing, just walking through the subways and seeing all the pictures of
all the missing people.
I don't know if people out there who aren't in New York have any idea what's going on,
but basically if you go through the subway system throughout the entire system and also
in the streets on just about every light pole, you'll see pictures of people, people
who were in the building, and basically it's just, I'm missing, or have you seen this person?
I was thinking, I was wondering to myself, do these people really hold on to a hope that
their loved one is going to emerge from this?
I think what it is is that they want something, they want a story, they want somebody who
saw them before the buildings collapsed, or something like that, or maybe it's just
a way of releasing something, a way of getting closure by putting up the signs.
I'll tell you, it's really hard to walk through the streets of New York and see this, because
you realize the humanity, you realize the humanity of what has happened here, and it
goes far beyond any kind of a political statement or any kind of military statement or anything
like that.
It's just a human statement, and I don't think the mass media, of course, is paying as much
attention to that as possible.
In fact, I haven't seen any pieces coming out of Union Square Park, which is really
where I think the tragedy of this is centered right now, because that's the real human reaction
to it, and as evidence though, as evidence of just how monumental this has been, I have
to say, and I never thought I'd say this, I have to say that Mayor Giuliani has been
outstanding, he's been amazing, he's really pulled the city together and given us what
we need at this time, which is kind of a father figure, I guess, somebody who will lead us
through the darkness.
I'm not hearing talk of retribution, I'm not hearing talk of violence, I'm hearing talk
of solidarity and strength, and I think that's really what is needed.
I wish Isaac was here to see me saying this, because I'm sure he would get a big kick out
of it, but it wouldn't last long, because I'd continue to say, as I will now, that I
think George Bush has been, George W. Bush, that is, has been extremely weak, ineffective,
you know, not somebody that you want to just stand behind.
I don't know, I'm not sure what it is, just something in the stature, I just don't think
he grasps the entirety, the enormity of the situation.
The program before this one, Expert Witness, really blew me away.
I was driving into the city, and they played a clip from a show a few weeks ago, where
one of the hosts was saying how every action has an opposite and equal reaction, and how
we need to pay attention to what's going on in other parts of the world, and the real
kicker, don't be surprised when the World Trade Center explodes.
I mean, can you believe it?
It's really, I'm sure that person's being questioned now, but that's the kind of thing
that, you know, we should have seen something like this coming, maybe not specifically this,
but I really have my doubts that the answer is to build more barricades, and to make things
impenetrable, because people will always find a way, and as hackers, we know that more than
anybody.
The answer is to know what's going on, the answer is to pay close attention.
Jim, Jim is here too.
Hello.
How you doing?
You had a close call on that Tuesday.
Yeah, I did something I seldom do, which is, I went banking at a branch that was not where
I normally go.
I think I've been there over the last 15 years like five times, but I had to run a couple
of errands in lower Manhattan, and I got off the R train, still the R at that time, at
Cortlandt Street, and the funny thing is, I had heard a noise when we were going through
Rector, and I couldn't place it, I figured it was a train on the other track starting,
you know how that sometimes happens.
And I get out of Cortlandt Street, just south of the Millennium Hotel, I can't remember
what street it is, the exit I got off was on the, across the street, and it's across
Church Street from the World Trade Center site.
And I get up, and I look around, and instead of people walking around, people are pretty
much standing still, and they're looking up.
So of course, what do you do in that case?
You look up.
And there's a lot of smoke coming from the top of the North Tower of the World Trade
Center.
And essentially I said, holy four-letter word, stopped for a minute, walked a block north
to get a better view, asked somebody what happened, of course, you know, sirens are
going off and the fire and police are streaming in, and somebody says, plane just hit.
I said, what?
Plane just hit the World Trade Center.
I said, holy four-letter word once again.
And I remembered that Tom Clancy novel, the title of which escapes me, from several years
ago, which I read the last few pages over someone's shoulder once.
Never read the rest of the book, but in the book, a crazed Japanese pilot puts a, I believe
a 747 loaded with explosives into the Capitol building during the State of the Union address.
So I had read that, and I had been working in the area eight years ago for the 93 attack.
I work nights usually, and I got off that morning and was still in the neighborhood
when that happened.
So I remembered that, I remembered that they said that they wanted to take these buildings
down as a sign, you know, against American imperialism and all that sort of stuff.
So I put two and two together, and I just headed north.
I figured the trains are not going to be running, maybe not now, but definitely sooner or later
I'm going to get on them, I'm going to get a few stops, they're going to stop.
So I figured, get over the bridge into Brooklyn, because I figured there were going to be ten
more planes, because I figured that what they were doing is they were going to try slicing
the towers up, and it would take two, three, four planes per tower to do that.
You had this all figured out after one plane?
That there were going to be multiple planes, or was this after the second plane?
This was after the first plane, because I remembered the Tom Clancy thing, and I looked
up and what you saw was a hole in the thing.
You didn't see the thing teetering like when you take a chunk out of a tree.
And I figured they always wanted to take the whole thing down.
So I figured, well, one plane isn't going to work.
If they're going to try again, they're going to do it.
So they weren't going to do it by half measures, I figured there were going to be a half dozen
or more planes.
And I figured...
Well, it was close.
It was close to a half dozen planes.
Overall, yeah.
What I'm surprised about was that the subway system made it.
You know a lot about the subway system, obviously.
Any trains lost, or any damage of anything?
As far as I know, no train was lost.
Station-wise, Cortland and Point South on the NNR closed, mostly because of debris above
it.
Cortland on the 1 and 9 is closed because of the towers pretty much falling into it.
Points South on the 1 and 9 are relatively intact.
But the subways were evacuated?
Yeah, apparently so.
I didn't get on the subway later that day.
I hightailed it into Brooklyn and got on a bus.
At what point did you find out the second tower was hit?
I was on the bridge and saw it.
Saw it happen?
Yeah.
And that speeded me up even more.
Everyone you know getting out okay?
I'm strangely...
I hate to say this strangely enough, but I'm fortunate I don't believe I know anybody who
was in there.
Yeah.
I mean, that's a selfish thing to say.
I've said it many times myself.
Obviously there are many, many people that can't say that.
But it's a thing that we all keep asking, you know, did I know anybody?
Or do I know anybody?
Who knows anybody?
And yes, I do know somebody.
You know, I know people who know people who were in there.
But I think really we have to be strong on this.
We have to not be cowed.
We have to not let our way of life be destroyed.
And not let certain evil things happen.
And I guess we should get into those evil things.
First let me say a couple of good things.
This is from a story that I found over on the New York Times.
It has to do with Verizon.
One of the first things Verizon communications officials did, and this is something that
you might not think of, but they did.
One of the first things they did after the World Trade Center attack upon arriving at
their heavily damaged switching station at 140 West Street was to begin preserving the
voicemail system that serves thousands of local customers.
On Friday, Verizon asked voicemail customers to delete messages they did not need in order
to avoid overtaxing the system.
But what Verizon did not say was that it wanted as many messages discarded as possible so
it could turn off the so-called electronic janitor that automatically deletes messages
and allow people to retain last-minute messages they receive from loved ones who may have
perished in the Twin Towers.
According to Eric Robb, the chief spokesman for Verizon, unless people deleted the messages
they did not need, servers could have overflowed and crashed, possibly losing all old messages.
And in the meantime, Verizon officials were looking for answers on how customers can store
messages from September 11th forever.
We are trying to think of ways that we can preserve those messages so people can save
them for the long haul.
I think that's an incredibly noble thing to even be thinking of at a time like that, and
something that I guess a lot of us just wouldn't have even considered.
But it's also another reason to have answering machines, isn't it?
Can save them as long as you want.
All right, a couple of listeners wrote in, actually a lot of listeners wrote in, a lot
of readers to our site wrote in, but here's a couple of pieces.
On last week's Off the Hook, you mentioned the idiocy of CNN and BBC showing footage
of Palestinians celebrating last week's tragedy, which was obviously shown, as someone on the
show said, in an effort to foster hatred.
I was listening to the show that comes on WBAI, two shows before, which started at 6
a.m., I believe, that would be the evening news.
One of the hosts mentioned, or it might have been behind the news three hours before then,
one of the hosts mentioned that they heard that some media outlet was using old footage
of Palestinians celebrating from 1991.
Do you know anything about this?
I haven't been able to find any other references online.
Well, I've heard this quite a bit, actually, and I was one of the people that was criticized
in the fact that it was being used in the way that it was being used.
As far as it being footage from 1991, I simply don't buy that for a number of reasons.
CNN has released a statement denying.
Well, that's not one of the reasons, but one of the reasons is that in looking for something
like this, you have to look at the source.
I saw numerous mentions of this, and they all pointed back to the same email message
of one guy saying that he had a professor in Brazil that had the tape.
In other words, the person didn't even see it himself.
That professor in Brazil also released a statement saying, I didn't say that.
If there's any doubt in anyone's mind, it's...
Gave him a failing grade for misrepresenting his statement there, but also you have to
figure in a case like that, if in fact it was something so incredibly stupid, and you
also have to, at that point, suspend your disbelief for a little bit to come up with
why would the major networks make such an organized effort to do this when they probably
could have gotten the footage anyway, it's not that hard to do, and something that would
be very easy to be caught at.
But apart from that, it was just, I don't know, it was just the fact that it was something
that obviously could have been checked into.
A lot of people would have had the same tape.
A lot of people would have said, yeah, I can confirm this, here's a copy of it.
Now, what I did have a problem with was the fact that the same footage is being shown
over and over again, and I don't think it's ever exceeded 15 seconds in length.
You don't hear any audio.
You have no idea what the...
You don't see people, you know, holding pictures of Twin Towers burning and yelling and cheering
and that kind of thing.
You see people waving Palestinian flags and cheering.
You don't know what they're cheering about.
You have no idea.
Why haven't we heard the audio from that?
All right, let's hear the audio.
We'll know what's going on.
And you know, let's just say, even if these people are doing something so horrible as
to cheer the deaths of others, well, they're screwed up people, all right?
That doesn't mean that these people cheering in the West Bank are the ones that are guilty.
It just means that they have a very distorted view of humanity, and maybe that's something
we can address in some other way.
And I, you know, I think that, I'm sorry to say, I think that if tonight U.S. bombers
took out Kabul and killed 100,000 people, they'd be cheering in our streets.
Of course.
Yeah.
And we don't know who did this.
Specifically, we don't know who did this, who organized it.
We have a name of somebody who allegedly financed something, although when evidence is asked
for, the Taliban asked for evidence and George Bush rejected it.
Why?
Why reject giving evidence?
I don't understand that.
The evidence should be on the front page of every newspaper in the world right now.
You know, let the whole world unite against this.
It's not just our fight.
It's the entire world that feels outraged, and let's see that evidence, and when we have
the evidence, let's go forward.
The initial list they produced of suspected hijackers, at least one of the people on that
list is still alive, and they found it.
Only two people are still alive, and yeah, it's because they were sloppy.
They didn't take into consideration that somebody who hijacks an airplane and kills lots of
people might also lie about his identity.
You know, he had a fake, you know, a fake identity card on him.
So yeah, you know, we're, and a lot of this stupidity is continuing to this day.
We're putting in all these, all these extra security precautions, and I heard on television
the other day where somebody was told that they weren't allowed to bring batteries for
some reason or razor blades, which I can understand, onto an airplane, and then after the security
checkpoint, there's a little store that is there that sells razor blades and batteries
after the checkpoint, so I mean, come on.
We have to think a little bit.
Are we really trying to do something, or are we just going through the motions?
You also have the case of employees of various airlines who were attempting to prove that,
hey, the security really sucks.
You know, you have people that are getting paid less than McDonald's workers basically
deciding who gets on an airplane and who doesn't.
You know, I'm not speaking to the intelligence of somebody based on how much they're paid.
I'm speaking to the value that is put on those people by the airline industry by paying them
so little and training them so little.
A friend of mine worked as an airport security guard one summer, and he's very bright, but
when he was sitting there for however many hours a day, he didn't care after a couple
weeks, and no one would.
Yeah, I mean, I could certainly see that, you know, and when you're not treated as if
you matter, you start to act like you don't matter, you know, and that's unfortunately
what we've seen happening, but there were employees at various airlines that said, okay,
we're going to prove that the security is terrible, and they actually were able to get
box cutters onto an airplane, and what do you think happened?
They were arrested.
They were arrested.
It's the same thing we see in the hacker world constantly.
You show that there are security holes, and you're blamed for them as if you made them,
and that is the reaction of somebody who has no control, somebody who fears being found
out for not being able to control whatever it is that they're in charge of, and it scares
me to death that the people in charge of our safe passage on airlines feel the same
way as people running shoddy computer systems.
They don't want to be found out how easy it is to bypass security.
Well, I think we need to know how easy it is to bypass security.
You know, maybe there are some things that we can just never control, and if that's the
case, then we have to live with that and figure out a way to maybe make people not want to
blow up airliners, you know.
I think maybe you have to look at that as the real problem, you know, because you can
make as many security barriers as you want, but there's always going to be a way.
You know, you could probably rip off a piece of the chair you're sitting in and turn that
into a weapon, you know, so it's, who knows.
Anyway, let's look at a couple of other things, and we have an important part of the program
to get into.
Here are some quotes.
This comes from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a great bunch of people, and they released
a media advisory called the Media March to War.
Listen to some of these quotes.
This is from the former Secretary of State, Lawrence Eagleburger, said this on September
11th.
There is only one way to begin to deal with people like this, and that is you have to
kill some of them even if they are not immediately directly involved in this thing.
These are our leaders saying things like this.
Steve Dunleavy from the New York Post says, the response to this unimaginable 21st century
Pearl Harbor should be as simple as it is swift, kill the bastards, a gunshot between
the eyes, blow them to smithereens, poison them if you have to.
As for cities or countries that host these worms, bomb them into basketball courts.
This from the editor of the National Review, Rich Lowry.
America aroused to a righteous anger has always been a force for good.
States that have been supporting, if not Osama Bin Laden, people like him, need to feel pain.
If we flatten part of Damascus or Tehran or whatever it takes, that is part of the
solution.
Tehran.
Part of Iran, which is taking our side on this and helping us out.
I haven't seen a Syrian connection to all of this.
I have no idea why they would want to help us out, but they probably just don't want
to be flattened.
Because they're human beings, that's why.
Because this is a human thing.
This is not about politics or about one country versus another.
This is a human thing and that's the only way we're going to be able to address this
is as humans, not as one country over another.
This from former Defense Intelligence Agency officer Thomas Woodrow.
At a bare minimum, tactical nuclear capabilities should be used against the Bin Laden camps
in the desert of Afghanistan.
To do less would be rightly seen by the poisoned minds that orchestrated these attacks as cowardice
on the part of the United States and the current administration.
Tactical nuclear capabilities.
This was a dialogue from the Fox News channel, the program The O'Reilly Factor.
This is the guy Bill O'Reilly speaking to Sam Husseini, Institute for Public Accuracy.
Listen to this conversation.
O'Reilly says, if the Taliban government of Afghanistan does not cooperate, then we will
damage that government with air power probably.
We will blast them because, and then Husseini says, who will you kill in the process?
O'Reilly doesn't make any difference.
He's probably right.
It probably doesn't make any difference.
We could probably go to some country and just bomb them into the Stone Age, assuming they're
not already there, and people here would be satisfied with that.
I'm sitting here looking at a map that we have in the BAI studios of the Middle East.
You could pick one of these countries most Americans have never heard of and blame it
and bomb them.
Some of these people you're mentioning would be very happy.
Yeah.
Yeah, throw a dart and hit something.
I'm sure somebody would want to, yeah, crazy.
And finally, from syndicated columnist Ann Coulter from the New York Daily News, this
is no time to be precious about locating the exact individuals directly involved in this
particular terrorist attack.
Why would we want to do that?
We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity.
We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers.
We carpet bombed German cities.
We killed civilians.
That's war, and this is war.
And that makes us no better than the people that destroyed the Twin Towers.
Okay, moving on to something even worse, if you can believe that.
There is legislation pending of all sorts, but the one that we really are focusing on
tonight is the Anti-Terrorism Act.
The Anti-Terrorism Act is something that came directly out of the events of September 11th.
And with us on the telephone, waiting very patiently, is Cindy Cohen from the Electronic
Frontier Foundation.
Cindy, you're still there?
I sure am.
Sorry for the long delay there, but maybe you could tell us something about this Anti-Terrorism
Act.
Well, this was, it's gone under a couple names.
The current name is the Anti-Terrorism Act.
It was previously called the Mobilization Against Terrorism Act.
It is a very large and complex bill that was thrown together immediately after the attacks
that contains many, many changes to our laws, and specifically to the balance between civil
liberties that we have in our society right now.
And it does it all over the place.
It's really difficult to characterize with one phrase what this bill is, except to perhaps
say that it appears to be the wish list of law enforcement in areas completely unrelated
to terrorism, but introduced under the cloak of this awful attack.
What strikes me is that a lot of this comprises things that we've heard already, right?
Yeah, there's very little in this bill that we haven't seen before.
In fact, a big chunk of it was introduced after the Oklahoma City bombing, and Congress
refused to adopt it.
Some of it was tried as early as last year, I think they tried to get the roving wiretap
part of this through.
This is all new.
And this is, again, that's why I say, I mean, it was introduced very, very quickly, because
I think these were already proposals that law enforcement wanted to see enacted.
And again, I think that they went together and threw together their biggest wish list
and put it into one bill and tried to rush it through Congress.
This was introduced yesterday.
Attorney General Ashcroft testified as to it, and they wanted it voted on before the
end of the week.
Luckily, there was a coalition of over 100 different civil liberties organizations, of
which the EFF is one, that pushed very, very hard for delay, saying, you know, this is
crazy.
You know, we haven't even had a chance to read this.
I'm sure that most of the members of Congress haven't had a chance to read it, and nobody's
had a chance to think about it.
This is not how you should create permanent changes in the law, and this is a permanent
bill.
This is not temporary measures.
As a result of that, we had, I guess, what we could maybe, you know, optimistically call
a small victory, and they delayed this for a week.
But it's going to be up for markup next Wednesday or Thursday.
And I think they're still going to push for a very quick passage of it.
But for people who are alarmed about this, like we are, there is a small window now where
you can begin to make some noise to members of Congress, especially members of the Judiciary
Committee, that you really want them to slow down and think carefully about these things,
and you want them to pull out the pieces of this bill that don't have anything to do with
terrorism.
Well, can you give us some idea of the highlights?
Sure.
I think that I know that your community is the hacking community, and I think they have
very, very much to fear from this bill.
They have added hacking crimes, low-level hacking crimes under something called the
Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to the list of terrorist acts.
The definition, you know, the violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is to exceed
the authority on a computer system and cause $5,000 worth of damage.
It is, you know, something that is criminal, but it is, you know, essentially electronic
graffiti or defacement.
It's very low-level things.
It's things that I think, you know, it's reasonable to say maybe ought to be illegal.
But now we're making them terrorist offenses.
That means that people who are convicted of these offenses are subject to life in prison.
It means that there's no statute of limitations, which is the time limit for when they can
prosecute you for it.
It includes making illegal providing expert advice or assistance to somebody who is engaging
in, you know, website defacement.
It includes criminalizing the harboring of suspected offenders, which I guess could mean,
you know, if you're a kid who's doing some hacking, your mom can be prosecuted, right,
because she harbors you in the basement probably.
It includes making conspiracy to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the same as
actually violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
I mean, it brings this low-level offense into, you know, the kind of penalties and punishment
and scope of prosecution that we reserve for the absolutely most serious crimes.
And what gets me is what a slap in the face to the thousands of people who lost their
lives down the road to this horrible act of terrorism to equate something so trivial as
defacing a website with something so horrendous.
I think that's right, and I don't know where this, in some levels I'm a little puzzled
by this.
Obviously, law enforcement doesn't like hackers, and they've, you know, they've long been on
the kind of short list of enemies.
But to equate it with terrorism strikes me as just crazy.
It also includes adding the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to the list of things that you
can get an Article 3 wiretap with, which is the broad wiretap authority that lets you
get the content of messages, so now allegations that you're engaging in, again, low-level
web defacement or low-level hacking offenses, could be the basis on which to get a broad
wiretap against you.
It also has been added to the, normally we only allow wiretapping authority for very
serious offenses.
The second thing that it adds, that same statutory Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to the basis
on which you can get what we call a pen trap order, which means that you can get the telephone
numbers dialed in and out of a phone.
They are simultaneously trying to get the definition of what you get with a pen trap
order in emails to include all of the header information plus tracking your web browsing,
your websites on the Internet, which, you know, is a sub-problem in terms of expanding
what pen trap authority is.
But what that means is that they can do a lot of surveillance against people, even without
a court order or a very minimal court review, for very, very low-level offenses.
Again, the kinds of things that we don't normally allow the government to do wiretapping.
See, personally, I have no trouble, if they're tracking somebody that they know is a suspected
terrorist in the traditional sense of the word, I have no problem with them being able
to monitor cell phone calls as well as wire phone calls and whatever else.
What I have a problem with is, A, defining other acts as terrorism, which are very, as
you say, low-level, and B, affecting other people who aren't at all related to this by
simply saying, okay, this person talked to somebody else who talked to this person, so
person C is also going to be under surveillance.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, they've always had the authority to do the kind of tracking that you talk about.
I mean, they don't need additional authority to be able to do that.
And in fact, one of the things that they tried to do is to lower the level for what we call
FISA wiretaps, which are the kind of wiretaps that the NSA can do.
Normally, the NSA can't monitor U.S. citizens.
If they're tracking somebody, you know, who might be a foreign terrorist and they need
to monitor a U.S. citizen in order to further track that person, they have to go to a special
court and get a special order, and it's called a FISA warrant, which the Federal Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act is what FISA stands for.
They already have that authority, and indeed, what we've heard is that within hours after
the World Trade Center attack, FISA warrants had been issued and were served on lots and
lots of American ISPs.
That in and of itself was completely within their authority already.
They didn't need any additional authority, and there's no indication that the way the
law stands now is any burden on them, that that was one of the obstacles to investigating
this crime.
Well, Cindy, let me ask you this.
Do you think the majority of the American public is going to buy into this?
Well, you know, I'm a bit more hopeful now than I was last week, mainly because I think
we were successful yesterday in Congress in getting a whole lot of senators and representatives
to say, wait a minute, we think there are serious civil liberties problems here, and
we're not just going to rubber stamp whatever you want, Attorney General.
That to me was a great victory, and the ACLU and EPIC, the Electronic Privacy Information
Center, have actually gathered statements from lots of members of Congress and the editorial
boards of lots of major newspapers saying exactly that, that we need to be careful that
in the aftermath of this, we don't, you know, this was an attack on our freedoms, we need
to be careful that in the aftermath of it, we don't do further damage to those freedoms
ourselves.
So I'm hopeful.
I think there is a window for people to be able to have a voice here and to be able to
say, you know, we don't want you to do just anything in response to these attacks.
We want you to do careful things that are targeted at this problem and not waste time
and energy and resources on things that aren't related to this problem.
We want you to focus on it.
So I think there's a window if people want to make their voices heard.
I'm not overly confident that we can bat away everything that's being suggested, but I think
we can bat away the most egregious parts.
I have to tell you, after the tragedy of two weeks ago, I got, after a couple of hours
even, spam from people that were trying to capitalize on it, saying that they were going
to donate a certain percentage of all the sales, so if you buy all this stuff from us
now, you'll be actually supporting these people rather than just support them directly, support,
you know, our product, and that got me extremely upset and angry, almost as angry as I was
at the people that perpetrated this in the first place.
I feel the same way about this, because this is taking something that these authority figures
wanted and using this horrible act to get it, you know, to, I mean, how in the world
would you say that, you know, hacking a webpage or writing, even writing a computer virus
or figuring out a way to, you know, to get around some kind of security system, how does
that equate to a terrorist act?
And listen to this, as a federal, this is from the article that Kevin Paulson wrote
for securityfocus.com, which I think he's the one that actually found all of this inside
the text of the Anti-Terrorism Act, as a federal terrorism offense, the five-year statute of
limitations for hacking would be abolished retroactively, allowing computer crimes committed
decades ago to be prosecuted today, and the maximum prison term for a single conviction
would be upped to life imprisonment, and there is no parole in the federal justice system.
Unbelievable, unbelievable what we're seeing here, and this combined with all the other
things that are going on, people being attacked in the streets or stopped because of their
racial composition, I think, you know, if we keep going along these roads, the terrorists
will have won.
They will have completely destroyed any sense of a free society that we have, and they'll
leave us in far worse shape than we were.
Well, let's take some phone calls.
We're talking to Cindy Cohn from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Is there anything that we as citizens can do?
Call our representatives, I assume?
Yeah, I think emails, although the hierarchy of the ways to communicate with Congress folks,
I think regular letters get more authority than come faxes and then come emails, but
I think sending them.
We have on our website a pretty easy form thing, although we also encourage people to
write their own letters because, you know, it has more strength if it comes from an individual
than if it looks like a form letter, but for those who are pressed for time, we do have
form letters that we make available that you can use or you can modify as you'd like.
We are especially targeting members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees because
they are the first place that these bills have to go to get approval, and we have a
list of those members up on our website, so that would be the best thing I think that
folks can do.
And your website, of course, EFF.org?
Correct.
It's right on the front page.
It's easy to get to.
Our phone number is area code 212.
And remember, this is a different phone number because our phone system is still out, 9680500.
That's our phone number, 212-9680500.
And a couple of other things that I noticed, I know that there have been several polls
posted that indicate that the majority of Americans favor some kind of government control
over encryption now because encryption is seen as something that terrorists can use
in a bad way.
And another poll that appeared in yesterday's Newsday, and this is unbelievable, claims
a third of New Yorkers favor establishing internment camps for anyone the government
defines as being sympathetic to terrorist causes.
Now you add in the hacking being terrorism, and God knows, we're all going to be going
to camp together someplace.
Scary times indeed.
All right.
Let's take some phone calls.
We're with Cindy Cohen from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
And let's see who's out there.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Speak up, please.
Hi.
Hi.
What's up?
Yeah.
This reminds me of when George Bush lured that person up to sell the cocaine.
He lured him up across from the White House.
And then they passed this big kingpin law.
And everyone said, yeah, yeah, kingpins.
And the next thing you know, everybody was in prison for 15, 20 years.
He's the little, the smallest guy that the police could lure into selling them drugs
under the pretext that they were going to now get out of their squalor.
And they're just taking advantage of this to pass that similar types of law.
And they're going to wrap everybody up in them.
Okay.
Thank you.
I think that's right.
You mentioned encryption.
And one of the things that happened immediately after the Oklahoma City bombing was that there
was immediate rush in Congress to try to control encryption.
As it turned out, there was no encryption technology used at all by the folks involved
with the Oklahoma City bombing.
The other thing that happened after Oklahoma City was all these broad restrictions on immigration.
And of course, as we learned, the person and the people who did that offense were not immigrants
either.
So, you know, there's a long and very not so proud history in the U.S. of people capitalizing
on horrific events to try to pass pet legislation.
Another thing also that came out of Oklahoma City and was developing before then are all
the barriers, barriers around all the buildings and fences and gates.
It's just, you have to wonder, how far are we going to go with this?
We're building these, you know, these walled cities of governmental buildings.
You know, it's, I mean, obviously you have to react against the terrorist threat, but
is this an appropriate way to do it in a free society?
You know, I just don't see where we can possibly be 100% safe from some idiot who wants to
do something.
Well, and it's a road that we've seen, you know, internationally.
There are plenty of countries in this world that, you know, are the subject of internal
wars or insurgencies where people do effectively live in a police state with checkpoints everywhere
and walls everywhere and razor wire everywhere.
And, you know, I don't think that you can look at those situations and say that all
of those kinds of limitations on people's liberty have a dramatic impact on the fights
that they're battling against terrorists or criminal attacks.
But they do have a dramatic impact on the society and on how we get through the day
and how we view ourselves.
And that's that's what we really have to watch out for.
Let's take another phone call.
Good evening. You're on the air.
Hello. Yes, go ahead.
Yeah, I'm not sure if I saw this right, but I did see the clip of the Palestinian
celebrating. I only watched about an hour of this whole thing and I saw it at about
noon. And it seems to me that there was a very bright sunlight in the clip, which
would either we have two suns in this world or it had to be file footage.
So I'm just curious if anyone else had seen it.
Well, the attack happened at about 9 a.m.
So what time is it?
Well, I thought it about I saw it after, you know, I heard about it on the radio.
I don't have a TV, so I went to a neighbor's house to see it.
So I saw it at about 11 or maybe 1130.
And the clip that I saw, it looked like it was high noon.
Well, they taped it in the morning our time.
They could show it again at noon.
Wait a second. I'm saying that the clip that I saw, they were they were celebrating.
Well, let's let's say they began celebrating immediately.
It would still be about late afternoon their time, right?
The nine thirty our time.
There's a seven hour difference.
I believe four thirty their time.
Four thirty. OK, so it just be a matter of you'd have to be.
OK, so that doesn't really.
I think I think we should go on the assumption that that is real footage.
But my my question is, what is it that they're really celebrating?
What were they told? Who told them?
How were they told?
Did the reporter actually go up there and say, hey, guess what I just heard, guys?
Yeah. You know, who knows how it was done?
I think, you know, there's more of this tape, obviously, because they're playing it.
So let's hear the whole thing.
Right. And I also agree with your point that there wasn't any audio.
That's you know, that's a little little suspect once or twice.
I could see it. But every time I've seen that clip, it's no audio.
There must be a reason.
The other thing is, you know, it's you know, it's not really it doesn't it
isn't really the point whether or not there were people celebrating.
The point is that they took, you know, ten people celebrating and made it into
a thousands and thousands of people celebrating by showing it over and over again.
And plus, what they don't tell you is is how other people reacted
and how the vast majority of people there reacted.
For one thing, you had lots of people donating blood.
You had people just kind of retreating into their into their homes in shock
and unprecedented.
You had people just laying down their arms and saying, stop, stop fighting.
Stop. You know, even Yasser Arafat said, if someone shoots at you, don't shoot back.
I mean, that's unprecedented.
And we need to take that opportunity.
If there's anything that we can gain out of this,
maybe the horror will actually shock people into realizing that
the only way to solve these problems is to just work it out somehow.
The fighting is not going to accomplish anything.
Yeah. All right. Thanks for your thanks for your call. OK, take care.
Good evening. You're on the air.
Yes, I have a I want to make a sort of a point about the
how society views the World Trade Center situation.
From my viewpoint, I work in a federal building
that actually I had worked across the street from the World Trade for a number of years.
And now I work a few miles away from there.
It just seems that I don't know if you'll agree with me,
but this is just what my how I've been, you know, the just what I've been getting lately.
I came back to work two days after the World Trade Center incident
and not even a word was mentioned about it
where I have where in the place I work at.
What kind of place do you work at?
Well, OK, basically, I work amongst a large African-American population.
And it just seems that.
They didn't have very much to say about it.
I mean, I'm sure they were saddened by it, but you had to sort of bring it up to them.
Well, I have it on good authority.
A lot of African-Americans lost their lives that day.
So I don't think it's it's the racial makeup that is responsible for this.
I mean, what kind of what kind of the only reason the only reason I just sort of come
to my mind to make a remark like that was because I had heard on another program
WBAI about a week and a half ago or what to say about a few days after the incident.
Someone had called and she was an African-American woman
and she made a remark that and let me just make mention that before
she had made this remark, I had this wasn't even in my mind at all.
But she said that the World Trade Center is a money making haven for white America.
And I really bothered me to hear that.
I mean, it was like, you know, what is this world coming to?
It has to be, you know, a certain amount of whites have to work in a certain place.
OK, I mean, anyone who would say something like that has lost sight of the humanity
aspect of this. All right.
And I happen to know that that everybody in the city, most everybody in the city has
not lost sight of that. So, yeah, you'll find some cynical people that might say
something like that, but that by no means represents any kind of community.
I know it sounds there are crazy people out there, but even to hear it from one person
after a tragedy like that, six thousand lives taken, possibly more.
I mean, to even permit a remark like that to be made on WBI, which I know is a free
form listener sponsored radio.
And, you know, it's right.
Well, you just made the same remark, though.
You see, the thing is, we have to we have to discuss this and say this is this is
wrong to view something this way.
And why is it wrong?
You know what I mean? I'm just under the impression that there seems to
be a big gap between the races because I go into a different vicinity and a
supermarket in Long Island, for instance, a predominantly white area.
That's all they're talking about in the supermarket.
Why isn't this conversation mentioned in the place that I work at?
Why is it just business as usual talking about soap operas, nails,
you know, the general talk which would come as to if
something like this had never occurred or happened?
Well, I agree with you that there are insensitive people, but I strongly disagree that
it's that you can define it based on on someone's background in any way, whether it
be racial, religious or whatnot.
Thanks for your call. We do have to move on.
And we are we are still speaking with Cindy Cohen from the Electronic Frontier
Foundation. We only have a couple of minutes left.
Let's see if we can get anybody else on topic with that.
Good evening. You're on the air.
I'd like to ask you guys a question.
I realize it's a bad tragedy and all like that, but
has there been any like stupid question, any kind of closure involved?
I mean, people keep talking about it and all it seems to me is bringing up a
bad memory, keeping something that's not going to go away.
And, you know, granted, like what the gentleman was saying before, I live on Long
Island, too, and he's saying the truth.
I heard the same thing.
I heard, you know, in the mall, you know, what's you know, who's got a new album out
or whatever it is. Most people are trying to watch.
We're trying to I don't want to say forget because we're never going to forget.
But they just want to sort of move on and try to provide some sort of closure.
I mean, there are ways of doing that.
There are ways of doing that without being disrespectful.
That's what I figured. But I don't really know.
You know, I try to like I said, I don't bring it up.
Oh, did you hear? Did you hear?
Look at the pictures. You know, that's getting old.
You know, it's the same thing.
The other thing I wanted to mention is I notice all the good little lefties here, you
know, anti-war. We don't want a war, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
What what else is there to do?
I'm curious about that.
If if you if you want to fight a war, you need an enemy.
You need a clear cut enemy. And who is the enemy here?
Is it one person? How does a nation fight a war against one person?
Is it a country or which country is it?
Where is the evidence? Let's see it.
Let's decide as a nation what it is that we want to do.
You know what the best way to deal with this right now?
I'm seeing a lot of saber rattling and people, you know, basically picking a country
at random and saying we're going to bomb them back to the Stone Age.
You know, it seems to be settling it on an emotional scale, but not on a logical scale.
And it's not going to do anything to prevent this in the future.
You know, I don't think they pick Afghanistan or whatever country is going to do all this
bombing. I don't think they just pick that out of a hat.
Well, it's where Osama bin Laden is.
But to say that he represents the Afghan people is completely inaccurate because obviously
he doesn't. There are many, many people there who are trying to topple the Taliban regime.
Well, they are now because they know they're going to be level in a couple of hours.
No, they've been trying for quite some time.
They've been trying for a very long time.
In fact, what you also have to keep in mind is that the United States helped support Osama
bin Laden in the first place.
You keep creating these monsters.
That's true. That I do.
And that's sort of annoying me.
Yeah. And if we do the same thing again to somebody else who's going to topple him and
then they turn against us years from now, where does the cycle end?
Unfortunately, this conversation is going to have to end, though, because we're we're out of
time. Cindy, I'm sorry we didn't get to talk more about this, but maybe you can give out
some some key information for people who want to help.
Sure. The best place to go is the EFF website, www.effforelectronicfrontierfoundation.org.
And there are links all over the front page about all the things that you can do in order
to support the effort.
There is a large coalition called the In Defense of Freedom Coalition.
I think they have indefensivefreedom.org as a website.
If not, you can go to the epic.org website and find them and you can find a list of over
100 organizations that are working to try to bring some sanity into this particular bill
and to anything else that the government wants to do in response to these attacks.
All of those organizations do very good work.
Some focus on immigration, some focus on money laundering, some focus on other things.
Our organization focuses on digital rights and things, how they impact people in the
use of email and other digital technologies.
But it's a large coalition and all of us could use the support of people who care about
this stuff.
Thanks so much for helping out and for being a part of this and for keeping your eyes
open. And we'll certainly be following up on this in the weeks ahead.
That's our show for for tonight.
I just want to close by by reading something, actually reading something from, believe it
or not, a TV show that I think really captured a lot of this spirit that's that's out
there, that needs to be out there, things that we have to to keep in mind.
The program is Babylon 5 and it's a quote from the book of Jaquan.
That's right. A piece of fiction quoting another piece of fiction.
There is a greater darkness than the one we fight.
It is the darkness of the soul that has lost its way.
The war we fight is not against powers and principalities.
It is against chaos and despair.
Greater than the death of flesh is the death of hope, the death of dreams against this
peril. We can never surrender.
The future is all around us waiting in moments of transition to be born in moments of
revelation. No one knows the shape of that future or where it will take us.
We only know that it is always born in pain.
That's our show for tonight.
We'll be back again next week with more updates on what's going on and more in the
world of technology, freedom and all the associated things.
So then for Jim, for Mike, it's Emanuel Goldstein.
Have a good night.
She went down last October in a pouring, driving rain.
The skipper, he'd been drinking and the matey felt no pain.
Too close to three mile rock and she was dealt her mortal blow and the Mary Ellen
Carter settled low.
There was just us five aboard her when she finally was awash.
We'd work like hell to save her all heedless of the cost.
And the groan she gave as she went down, it caused us to proclaim that the Mary Ellen
Carter would rise again.
Well, the owners wrote her off, not a nickel with this man.
She gave 20 years of service, boys that met her sorry end.
But insurance paid the loss to us, so let her rest below.
Then they laughed at us and said we had to go.
But we talked of her all winter.
Some days around the clock, she's worth a quarter million afloat and at the dock.
And with every jar that hit the bar, we swore we would remain and make the Mary
Ellen Carter rise again.
Rise again.
Rise again.
That her name not be lost to the knowledge of men.
All of those who loved her best and were with her till the end will make the Mary
Ellen Carter rise again.
Moorish.
Orthodox.
Radio.
Crusade.
Anarchism for the global.