WBAI 99.5 FM in New York.
Since 1991, Earth Celebrations has been raising awareness to preserve the community gardens of New York City
through educational environmental arts programs for youth and adults,
art and ecology workshops, performances, theatrical pageants,
and partnerships with schools, community centers, and gardens.
On Friday, April 5th, 2002, Earth Celebrations is hosting its 12th Annual Rice to Spring Benefit
Cocktail and Dance Party with a cocktail and performance party from 7 to 8.30 p.m.
and a dance party from 8.30 to 10.30 p.m.
For information and advanced tickets, call 212-777-7969.
That's 212-777-7969.
This has been a public service announcement by WBAI on behalf of Earth Celebrations,
a not-for-profit organization.
It's 8.02 p.m. here on WBAI 99.5 FM.
This would be off the hook, except that Emanuel Goldstein is on the way here.
This is Red Balaclava temporarily filling in for him,
and we're just going to play some public service announcements until he gets here in about 5 minutes.
Do you want to know about changes going on at WBAI?
To learn what's going on and find out about concerned friends of WBAI,
call our hotline 1-800-825-0055.
For meetings, discussions on upcoming elections, bylaws, and governance issues,
now is the chance for you to get involved.
Call 1-800-825-0055.
Keep this number handy and check with us often.
1-800-825-0055.
That's the number.
This is Colleen Kelly of September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows.
As someone who lost a loved one in the World Trade Center disaster,
I am coming together with other activists for the International Socialist Review's
National Anti-War Tour, entitled War and Resistance, Another World Is Possible.
We'll be in New York Saturday, March 30th at 8 p.m. at Barnard College, 117th Street and Broadway.
Join me along with Greg Pallas, Dennis Brutus, Amy Goodman,
Diedrich Mohamed of the National Action Network, and Socialist Worker Columnist Sharon Smith.
For more information, call 212-502-0707 or go to www.isreview.org.
This event is part of the Northeast Coast Socialist Conference,
happening all day at Barnard College.
Together, we can prepare for a better tomorrow.
That's the cast of the Off-Broadway musical, Good Time Blues.
I said I'm going to Chicago, baby.
WBAI is having a night of music and comedy, and the blues company will be there.
So will award-winning jazz singer, Thos Shipley.
And for laughs, there's comics Randy Cretico, Darcy Castellaro,
Barry Crimmins, and Richard Corey, and the Christmas Coup Comedy Troupe.
Hosting will be a bevy of formerly banned, now on-air WBAI personalities.
This WBAI benefit will be Saturday night, April 6, starting at 7 p.m.
We'll gather at the Ethical Culture Society Hall at 2 West 64th Street.
It's $25 a person, unless you want to be a sponsor with a reserve seat for $60.
For ticket information, call 212-209-2820.
WBAI's musical comedy get-together, Saturday night, April 6, at the Ethical Culture Society.
Again, the number is 209-2820.
This is Elambe Brass from Apicalyroscope,
inviting you to attend an African community reception for the Prime Minister of the
Republic of Namibia, Dr. Hage Ganga.
This Wednesday, March 27, from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. at the Adam Clayton Powell Jr.
State Office Building, 125th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard in Harlem.
Admission is free, but donations are gladly accepted.
For further information, call area code 212-663-3805.
That's area code 212-663-3805 or 718-398-1766.
That's area code 718-398-1766.
This program is presented by the Patrice Lumumba Coalition,
in conjunction with the December 12th Movement,
Africans Helping Africans, and the Office of Councilman Bill Perkins.
And for those of you expecting to hear the dulcet tones of Emanuel Goldstein,
this is Red Balaclava holding the fort down for Off the Hook.
We're a little bit delayed because Emanuel is finding a place to park,
and he's running in the door even as we speak.
Emanuel is approaching the desk.
He's on his way to the microphone.
He's sitting down.
He's clearing his throat.
He's getting his headphones on, and...
He's turning down your mic to start with.
Okay, folks, a few apologies are in order.
Number one, for all the good citizens of New York,
I have to put up with the transit authority.
I don't believe...
How, Jim, how could you work for those morons, those liars, those incompetent idiots?
45 minutes it took to get here from the East Village.
45 minutes!
I could walk there in that amount of time.
See?
They indict me unjustly, and see what happens?
Standing at the Astor Place station for over 20 minutes,
they keep telling us the train is approaching.
They don't bother telling us that when the train finally gets there, it's not going to stop.
I was too crowded.
Sorry about that.
Well, we might as well carry on while I get my stuff together.
We have a lot of interesting things to do tonight.
And I don't want to complain for all the time that I have.
So why don't you guys talk about something for a couple of minutes?
We've already failed at that.
Yeah, we really don't have that much to talk about.
There's hearings going on regarding the so-called Children's Internet Protection Act,
which is this law allegedly to protect children for its name,
which mandates that all public libraries which have internet access in them,
which I guess is most libraries by now...
Jim is waving a box cutter at me.
I'm not waving it at you.
I'm waving it at AutoJack so I can cut open the damn tape.
Anyway, this act is being challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union
and a number of other people saying that we should not need to have
filtering software in public libraries.
But the hearings were closed the other day at the request of filtering company N2H2,
which manufactures BESS, a program with which I unfortunately have some experience.
And there was an interesting sort of alliance between the ACLU,
which has brought the suit to challenge the law,
and the Department of Justice, which is defending the law.
Both of them said the courtroom should be opened,
but N2H2 alleges that if the courtroom is open,
then there will be some kind of secret insight into how filtering software works
that we will hear in the courtroom and should not be entered into the public record, they say.
So the courtroom was sealed off at their request.
Okay, with that, we officially begin the show.
We had to run all the way down Wall Street, you know what that looked like?
Oh boy, and then the morons downstairs won't let us up because we have to show ID.
We're in here every week for the last 25 years,
and they still require ID every time we come in.
It's so ridiculous.
BAI has turned sane again, but the people downstairs are still...
I don't know, the bureaucracy, it's an ugly thing.
So that accounts for the flustered sound in our show tonight,
but we do have some interesting material, and we'll be taking phone calls in just a moment.
You hear a strange sound drop to the ground.
A sound? Like what?
Like that.
And this is Off the Hook, the program about high technology, and it's failing sometimes,
but we're all here of sound mind.
And here's a bit of what's been going on in the last week in
the so-called world of high tech and hackers and things like that.
This, according to the Associated Press, hackers operating outside the United States
tried unsuccessfully to enter the computer network at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
That's according to officials.
There were 125,000 attempts made early Friday,
said Lieutenant General Richard Reynolds, commander of the Aeronautical Systems Center.
I don't know whether they wanted to get in and just get information,
or whether they wanted to get in and cripple our network, Reynolds said.
And why do we believe this guy in the first place?
Public Affairs...
That's what?
He's an official.
He's an official.
Well, I don't want to be too nasty here, but we don't know anything other than his word here.
Public Affairs Director Lieutenant Colonel Ed Worley called it a concerted
and directed attack.
And one of the most orchestrated we've seen in about the last six months.
And by we, I mean the Air Force.
Yeah, that was my next question.
The base located east of Dayton is home to the Air Force Material Command Headquarters,
the National Air Intelligence Center, research laboratories,
and the program management offices for the B-2 stealth bomber, F-22 stealth fighter,
and other major weapon systems.
Moving on to more cheerful news.
The 50-cent Verizon rate.
You know, of course, we tried the experiment last week.
Once again, we're...
This has been a series of horrible failures, this experiment.
We think there are successes when we do them,
but we wanted to see if it was possible to make an unlimited call for 25 cents, and...
I'm not going out there again.
No, there's no reason to.
I mean, I think we've...
Pretty much all the phones are converted by now anyway.
They should be.
But we tried two weeks ago from a phone that turned out to be making free phone calls.
We couldn't really prove for sure that we made a free phone call for a quarter
or an unlimited call for a quarter.
Then last week, we found one that actually did require money.
What we didn't realize was that after you made the call, the money came back.
So it's just...
Verizon just doesn't seem to want to take the money to start with,
so it's very hard to prove how much it is that they want.
But this is what's happening.
They're charging 50 cents everywhere, it seems.
And...
It's a crime.
Local calls are unlimited, apparently, one way or another.
This person suggests that we choose a Verizon unlimited pay phone.
Unlimited pay phone.
Is that what they're going to call them?
Verizon unlimited?
Unlimited nothing.
I mean, who wants to spend eternity talking to somebody
who's within shouting distance in the first place?
Deposit the 50 cents, then call the show, leaving it off the hook,
and then announce the location.
Let people use that to call the show, kind of like a kiosk or such.
Well, that's a great idea.
That's from Charles.
And the thing is, I think that maybe, you know,
to save however much it would cost you to call from your home,
if you call from California, it's still going to cost you less than 50 cents.
So, you know, we're investing 50 cents in having people run down to a pay phone.
It's probably going to cost them more to get there in the first place.
And by that time, somebody might have hung up.
So I think it's a lose-lose situation.
We're told, though, that Verizon actually is experimenting with bringing the rates down.
Yeah, Verizon tests lower prices for local pay phone calls.
10 cent and 25 cent local calls now available in the Boston area.
That's right. 10 cent and 25 cents.
And maybe, Mike, next time you're back in Boston, you can check that out.
This is an experiment. This is the way it was for a long time.
This actually is dated January 30th, so it's an old story.
But we dug it up when looking up information about the price increase.
But Verizon on January 30th began a three-month trial.
So it was February, March, the end of April.
This will be going on until a three-month trial.
10 cent and 25 cent local calls from some pay phones in the Boston area.
The 10 cent call buys one minute.
The 25 cent call buys three minutes.
You know, I think that's better, don't you?
I mean, I'd rather pay 10 cents for one minute than pay 50 cents for eternity
because I don't plan on spending eternity on a pay phone.
Besides, as we've proven the last couple of weeks, the pay phones here don't work.
So you're not going to be very happy spending time on those phones.
10 cent call buys one minute.
25 cent call buys three minutes.
This week, the company also launched similar trials in Hampton Roads, Virginia,
and the Tampa Bay area.
About 50 pay phones in the three markets will enable callers to make a quick local call
at a reduced rate.
The trial phones, which are located at urban and suburban high schools and on city sidewalks,
are adjacent to Verizon pay phones charging the standard 50 cents
for a local call of unlimited length.
We believe there's a market for short pay phone calls, said Paul Franchetti,
vice president of marketing and business development.
What a genius.
Yes, we've been saying this for years.
That's why we placed the trial phones at high schools and along community sidewalks.
If all you need to say is, mom, baseball practice is over, come pick me up,
a one minute call will do it, and it only costs 10 cents.
We want to see if this low rate, it's like we're being catapulted back in time.
We want to see if this low rate will be attractive to people who need to make a quick call.
At the same time, we know the 50 cent call of unlimited length is still a good value
for those customers who need to talk longer.
Of course, what they don't tell you is that's 50 cents for a very limited area.
Who makes an extended call from a pay phone?
To somebody local that you can walk over and talk to.
The 25 cent three minute call splits the difference.
That's right, between one minute and infinity.
At each test site, there will be at least one phone with a trial price.
The phones will display bright yellow signs that read special discount offer.
And 10 seconds before the end of the one and three minute calls,
callers will hear a recording letting them know that time is almost up
and prompting them to deposit additional coins or end the call.
Unbelievable.
Verizon claims to be committed to the pay phone business.
Even with the proliferation of wireless phones,
there are still a lot of people who prefer to use pay phones for a number of reasons.
Like, say you're phoning in a bomb threat or something,
or just want to do something anonymous.
You know, it's the way to go.
Also, for high schools, people don't have cell phones.
They're not allowed.
They're not allowed to have cell phones?
They weren't allowed in my high school.
I don't know about all high schools.
That's something.
Let's see, what else is going on?
Skip over a couple of things here because we pressed for time.
Okay, we got the hackers trying to get into the Air Force Base.
That's all, we have a bunch of listener mail from people
that were writing in for various things.
This person wants to let us know that
upon checking out the latest TV guide for my cable TV provider,
I found out that I've got BBC World.
That's right.
The theme of which is coming up underneath us right now.
I live in Sydney, Australia.
Okay, well, that explains it then.
And Telstra Foxtel Cable has BBC World 24-7.
I'd just like to thank you for letting me know about BBC World
as I'm now enjoying their style of reporting as a break from the usual CNN and such.
And that message comes to us from Khan from Australia.
Thank you very much for writing in with that.
And BBC World, as we've been saying for the last, well, a couple of weeks,
but we were talking about it for months before that,
is basically news from a different source other than Fox, MSNBC,
the three major networks, CNN, all the things that say word for word.
The same, they really do.
And I challenge anybody to show us different.
But when you look at something from a different country, such as BBC,
yes, it's run by a government, I suppose, because BBC is government owned.
But it is more in-depth and it is different.
It shows you different perspectives,
especially considering what's going on in this country.
During the recent WEF protest in New York,
there's better coverage on BBC than on any of the domestic networks.
So I just think it's something that people need to see.
Unfortunately, I've yet to find anybody in this country
using any of the satellite networks,
using any of the cable networks or cable systems that is able to get this.
The only way you can get it is by getting Canadian satellite
or being out of the country or something like that.
This person writes in to say,
I agree in thinking that demonstrations, for the most part,
have been devalued and the presses will only ever spin.
Yes.
I suggest alternatives such as some of the ideas from adbusters.org.
In fact, they have a flag in Times Square
that has corporate logos instead of stars.
Have you seen the flag?
Yes.
Nice flag.
I suggest, actually, he just said that.
In fact, they have the flag.
It's very effective.
Disney actually asked them if they would take it down
for the movie they were shooting.
It's like guerrilla marketing, but for activists.
Great show.
I get it every week in Denver via stream.
Thanks for your time.
P.S. I find BBC World to be just another NATO voice box.
I prefer news from the local area, especially African.
Lots of stories there that you will never hear.
Also, there's Indymedia.org.
And that's from Cliche25.
Thank you very much for writing in.
And yeah, like I said, it's biased, definitely biased,
but it's different, different bias.
So it's something that I think people need to hear and see.
Um, and I guess, uh, let's, uh, just finish off with, uh,
I was going to talk about the, uh,
the company that wanted to advertise on tombstones.
Did you hear about that?
No.
Computer games firm, uh, wanted to, uh, advertise, uh, on,
on gravestones.
Acclaim Entertainment said it would pay relatives
of the recently bereaved, uh,
in return for placing small billboards on headstones
and that the offer might particularly interest
poorer families.
All right, that's enough.
This is one time where I agree with the Church of England,
which, uh, apparently smited them or something,
and said that this will never happen.
But it just goes to show how, yeah, you know,
we can say, okay, you know,
we'll trust the big companies to do what's right.
This, I don't think so.
Wait a minute.
Haven't you ever, haven't you ever been out in Brooklyn
and Queens and see all these, uh,
cemeteries that abut major roads
and the back of the headstone faces the road?
These are totally anonymous when you're on the street.
So why not use the back of the, uh,
tombstone to generate ad revenue?
What's the difference between that and the cemetery
putting a solid fence up and having billboards
on that fence next to nothing?
Go home, Jim.
Yeah, go, go home.
No, no, we'll, we'll make that,
we'll make that, uh, part of your last wishes.
What I'm saying is that rather than have the corporation
make the money for the billboard,
let the, each individual family make the money.
I'll bet, I'll bet somebody is going to make money
by having a headstone with their name on it
and engraved in very, you know,
ornate style and just say,
you know, in quotes or something like that,
you know, and Coke will pay the money to say that,
you know, to have a little slogan underneath their name.
Their entire life will be lived for a slogan
for some company.
Okay, this, this is an idea.
This is America, folks.
If there's anybody in marketing or advertising
who's listening and would like my headstone,
okay, I could use money to pay my lawyer.
So, uh, contact.
All right, and you might have some people
after your head now too, so.
Red underscore balaclava.
Could work out.
At hotmail.com.
Oh boy, um, all right.
But no, I, I, I wasn't going to read that story actually
because, uh, well, we're, we're running out of time.
So let's, um, let's, uh, cut it down.
This is, this is a scary letter that we got.
Occasionally we get scary letters.
And this just goes to show you
where people's minds are at these days.
And this person doesn't like what we do.
They say it is good to fight a cause you believe in.
However, to cause damage and or betray your country
is not a way to fight for something you believe in.
Well, I suppose.
I feel, yes, a select few should know what is going on.
But how does the United States government know
who is a friend and who is a foe?
They don't even know if their agents
are out to hurt the country.
How can they trust you?
We do not live in a perfect world.
It is about time you realize that.
And if you're going to do what you do,
you must deal with the fact that the Secret Service
and like agencies don't know
whether you are just someone wanting to know the truth
so you can do something about the things you don't like.
Or if you are out to hurt the citizens of this fine nation.
I may not agree with my elected officials
in the choices they make,
but I am not going to go out on the net
and broadcast to friend and foe
the acts and people's aliases that protect me
and help preserve our republic's system of government.
Now, this person is objected to the fact
that we have on our website
a list of Secret Service aliases,
which is public information and always has been.
You don't like what goes on, run for office,
get in and change the things.
But don't blindly throw the information out
for anyone to get their hands on.
Information is a very dangerous thing.
That is how you who call yourself a hacker
are a danger to society.
You think you are doing good, but you're not.
You are just hurting your country even more.
So we feel you must be put behind bars
to protect not just others,
but yourself from your own stupidity
and or from the potential of terrorism.
The price of knowing things
may be a price you are not willing to pay.
I suggest you think about
what it is going to cost you
to know the truth without permission
and then act accordingly.
And who did that come from?
Oh, it's just some crazy AOL address
that you can't possibly say.
Oh, Jag in the Sky is the name of the person.
Okay.
Well, I don't know.
I don't know.
You know, I find that kind of attitude is out there
a lot more than you might think,
where people say this information
is not for you to know.
This information is something that is dangerous
and must be restricted.
And you're a criminal if you dare
to let this information get out.
And something as innocuous as names,
you know, handles,
that are public information.
This has been on our website since,
I think, 1995.
Yet occasionally people stumble upon it
and think it's some big deal.
Well, it's not.
And it should never be.
Neither should radio frequencies.
Neither should listening to open airwaves
or reading interesting material
or believing different things.
So that's where things stand.
Not a very good place, I don't think.
And I think we have to be very careful
about self-censorship
and about people telling us
that we're not allowed to know certain things
which are out there.
And I guess that's pretty much it
as far as that goes.
We have on the phone with us a special guest
who's been very patient.
Doug Thomas, are you still there?
I sure am.
Okay, I'm sorry about all that.
We had a big misfortune today
with the subway system.
You have just written a book
that I have my hands on
called Hacker Culture.
Now, before we get into the book,
I should say that you're an associate professor
over at the University of Southern California
in the...
What department are you in?
It's the Attenborough School for Communication.
That's right.
Okay, that's part of USC, right?
That's right, yeah.
Okay.
And you've been working on this book
for quite some time.
I know when we were out there
shooting for Freedom Downtime,
which, in fact, you're in.
Yeah.
Have you seen a copy, by the way?
I saw it at H2K.
Oh, that's right.
Okay, you were part of that marathon showing.
Yeah.
Well, it's been cut down a little bit since then,
and we are about to actually start
making it available to people.
But you were working on your book back then,
and the book is out now.
Finally, yeah.
Yeah, and I was thumbing through it before.
It's fascinating.
I guess the history of the hacker culture
and a lot of the people that are involved
in the hacker culture,
which I guess a lot of us have forgotten
that there is a culture at work here.
A lot of it seems to be so commercialized
and sensationalized in the media.
But there really is kind of a homespun
quest for knowledge
that I don't think has totally disappeared.
What do you think about that?
Yeah, and that's one of the things
that I really worked hard to try to draw out
is the consistency of that theme
of the idea starting way back in the computer labs
of East Coast universities in the 60s
that information wants to be free
and the way that that's been followed up.
And I think that over the past decade or so,
there's been a real effort to try to divorce
what we think of as contemporary
or new school hackers from that tradition.
And not a little of it is coming
from those old school hackers
who want nothing to do with what they see
as what's happening today.
But I think that in the best spirit of hacking,
you find that all of that stuff
is still very much there.
It's very much alive and well.
Certainly not practiced by everybody,
but the people that I see
as really being the core of the scene
and really the ones who represent what hacking's about
are the ones that first and foremost
hold those principles to be really, I think, most dear.
How did you go about getting material for your book?
Did you talk to a lot of people
and journey around the world?
Yeah, well, I went all over
and I'd had some familiarity
with things that had been going on way back
when I had my old Atari 400 computer hooked up
and found out that from Baltimore,
it was an expensive call to get to the Pirate's Cove
up in Massachusetts.
So, you know, me and my friends
slowly started finding ways
to circumvent those kind of barriers.
Ah, yes.
And then, you know, we came across Frack
like probably a whole generation of other kids.
So it's something I've always had
a kind of familiarity with.
And then I think like a lot of people that start out there,
I went on to do other things.
And now I've sort of come back to look at it
from a slightly different perspective
to try to understand how that culture was formed,
how it's persisted, what the influences are.
And also, really importantly, what the effects have been.
The end of the book is really a lot
about what happened with Kevin Mitnick
and what happened with Chris Lamprecht
in two cases, which I think were,
you know, really tell us a lot
about contemporary attitudes, legal attitudes
toward technology, toward hackers,
and toward people who are able to use technology
in interesting, but perhaps unconventional ways.
Now, the Chris Lamprecht case, that's a minor threat?
Minor threat.
Now, we talked a lot about Kevin Mitnick over the years.
So tell us something about that case
because we really haven't talked much about that.
Chris had the misfortune of breaking
into a bail control office.
And depending on who you talk to,
he wound up with someone else
stealing a couple of control boards.
So he actually physically broke into a building?
He broke in and actually did commit theft.
He also did something which was very stupid,
which is he crossed state lines to sell them to somebody.
So he was then trafficking,
interstate trafficking and stolen goods.
And he took the money back and put it into the bank,
which then they got him for money laundering.
Wow, was this all in one day?
Yeah, so it was a pretty bad scene.
And like so many hackers have stories like this,
you know, he ended up selling his car to hire a lawyer
who, once he paid him, became really uninterested in his case,
sort of hung him out to dry.
But what was interesting about his case
wasn't that he got caught doing this,
wasn't that he was prosecuted for doing this.
He should have been.
I think everybody would agree that you break
into some place like that and steal something,
you're probably going to go to jail.
The thing was, when he got to his sentencing,
the sentencing portion of his hearing,
the investigators had come across an old issue of Frack
where I think he had been quoted
or discussed as being a hacker.
And the judge, even though Hackey never was spoken
during the trial or in the sentencing
or any other portion, said,
because you're a hacker, I'm giving you extra time.
So essentially he became sentenced for being a hacker.
And also, as a result of that, was prohibited,
which has become pretty standard,
from using a computer for the following three years,
but also from being on any computer networks.
So he was effectively banned from the internet at the time.
And his crime had nothing to do with the internet?
It had nothing to do with it.
And I think everybody, again, would agree that,
you know, if you steal stuff, you go to jail.
That's the way the laws are written,
and we need those laws.
But when you're sitting in front of a judge and he says,
moreover, I'm not going to accept
the state attorney's recommendation,
or the federal attorney's recommendation for your sentence,
which I think was 16 months,
I'm going to give you instead five years
because you're a hacker.
So you find he was, you know, prosecuted for one crime
and then sentenced for being a hacker.
And I thought that was really interesting.
You see, that's a really tough case to present
to the average person, because you have to say,
well, yeah, this person did break into some building
and, you know, committed these crimes.
However, this penalty doesn't...
Most people, unfortunately, once you get to that point,
they kind of say, you know, hang them out to dry, whatever.
They don't care.
I think that's a kind of coldness
that has evolved in this country,
where if you say somebody has committed
a particular kind of crime,
even if it's just, you know, against someone's property,
not something against someone's person,
they're not interested in hearing anymore.
So you could say this person was, you know,
was, you know, tortured.
And they say, well, you know, he committed the crime.
He should have known better.
It's become increasingly difficult
to present cases like this to the average person.
Yeah, and I think 9-1-1's just made that worse
in the sense that people are saying,
well, there are extreme measures that need to be taken now
because, you know, much like the letter you read,
because so much more is at risk.
There's some congressman from Texas named Lamar Smith.
I don't know if you've talked about him on the show or not,
but he's proposed anti-cybercrime legislation now,
which would have a condition for hacking
as an act of cyberterrorism
to be punishable by the death penalty.
How nice.
And, you know, watching what Kevin went through,
you see that there is this kind of ability
to overestimate and inflate what these, you know,
quote-unquote crimes are to such a degree that,
you know, I was sitting in the courtroom
watching the judge during sentencing in Kevin's case say,
you know, $100 billion?
Yes.
Sure.
Absolutely.
Probably more.
Why not $100 trillion?
Exactly.
Infinity plus one.
That's about how it was.
And she was so eager to ramp those numbers up with,
as I think you all kind of made clear,
the flimsiest of evidence and, you know,
letters from, you know, these companies saying,
well, you know, we put $36 million into R&D
for our cell phones.
Therefore, he's made all of that worthless.
You know, so there's 36 million in damages.
Unbelievable.
Who's going to contest this?
You know, how do you contest this?
Well, it's really difficult because I think what I saw,
and I had the good fortune or misfortune,
I'm not sure which,
when I was writing this book to have a number of hackers
who were in jail,
who somehow found out I was writing
what was going to be a sympathetic book,
I would get these collect calls
and they would all say,
you're not going to believe what's happened to me.
And they all told me the same story.
Basically that they were arrested.
They thought they'd be going home that night.
They found out that that wasn't true,
that they were going to be in custody
probably until their hearing,
that they were going to be bullied
in the worst kind of ways by federal or state prosecutors.
And they were going to eventually be forced
to accept a plea bargain,
which probably wasn't in their best interest,
but they were facing such excessive penalties
for such trivial crimes
that it makes absolutely no sense to contest these laws.
So a lot of very bad laws never get tested
because the system is set up so they never will be tested.
Sounds really unbelievable.
It sounds like there's no hope at all too.
I mean...
Well, yeah, that's a sticky problem,
how you address those kinds of concerns.
Because that takes somebody standing up
and facing those kind of absurd...
You know, we're talking 20, 30, 40 years in jail
and fines that can reach into millions of dollars
when all they're asking you to do is say,
yep, I did something wrong.
I'm going to go with time served or an extra three months.
And that kind of bargain makes it really hard
for them to take any other deal or to fight it,
particularly since you have to think
that the jury that's going to be sitting there
listening to your case or the judge
probably is going to be tremendously sympathetic
to your position.
Well, most of the cases never make it
to the jury in the first place.
In fact, I don't really know of any hacker cases
that were heard before a jury, do you?
I don't either.
I can't think of anything that's gone that far.
And that's a pretty chilling thing right there.
The feds like to say that they have something like a...
Do you know what the exact figure is?
90-something percent conviction rate?
Yeah, it's over 90, yeah.
And I think that's the reason,
because they intimidate people so much
into accepting a plea bargain,
because they know that with an infinite budget,
they're going to make them guilty of something
in the eyes of the average person.
And you hear some of the things the average people say,
completely misunderstanding what hackers are all about.
I mean, constantly people think hackers are just out there
to steal or to commit crimes or cause damage,
when in most of the cases, people who do that
are insiders at certain companies
or people that have some axe to grind.
And hackers are the ones that simply figure it all out
and tell people about it, at least the decent hackers.
That's another thing.
So many people today, and you must have come across this,
so many people today call themselves hackers,
basically anybody.
And we get the mail all the time at 2600.
We get every day with thousands,
well, maybe not thousands every day,
but certainly hundreds of people writing in saying,
I want to be a hacker, teach me how to hack,
and wanting all the shortcuts,
not wanting to know how to do anything,
just wanting free stuff,
credit card numbers or phone codes or God knows what.
And that's what they see as hacking,
because that's how hacking has been presented to them
in the mass media, in the movies, on TV, in the news.
And it's sad because that is how hacking is being defined,
because of the way it's being misdefined
by the people who have all the transmitters.
Unfortunately, you have all these people then
that say they're hackers who aren't,
and people believe them.
They go to the conferences and say,
oh, these hackers are there.
They said this, they said that.
Of course, nevermind that what these people said was not true
and it's not what hackers are saying.
Yeah.
I remember when there was a big denial of service attack
that shut down Yahoo and eBay
and a handful of other big high profile sites.
And I'd asked somebody, I think from the loft,
what the reaction was.
And they said, it just wasn't very interesting.
We didn't learn anything about network security
or anything about system security.
And I thought that was the most genuine sort of hacker response,
which was, we learned nothing here.
We knew all of this before.
Those people should have patched these holes.
But it just wasn't an interesting kind of event to them.
If we had learned something,
if it had taught us something about the way networks worked
or TCP IP works or something like that,
then there would have been something valuable there.
But anybody with a free weekend
can sit down with a Microsoft Word macros book
and learn how to write a virus
or go to some website and download some scripts.
And it doesn't take much to figure out how to do damage
or how to break into people's systems.
But that's not what it's about.
And I think more than ever,
with people having Linux on their own desktops,
people really getting into security
from the point of view of making systems better,
not trying to break into them.
That's really what hacking has evolved into,
and I think rightly so,
of trying to make, again, back to that idea,
information wants to be free.
That letter you read, I mean, it really rings true
with a lot of experiences I've had talking to people,
is that the idea of information being free
is an absolutely terrifying prospect
to a large segment of the population.
And that's something that we need to be very careful about.
Well, I think by default, information is free.
I'm not sure if information wants one thing or another.
Yeah, well, that's sort of the Stephen Levy kind of quote
from way back.
But yeah, you're right.
I mean, if it's not free, it's then secret.
And usually good things don't happen when we keep secrets,
as all sorts of recent events have shown us
from Enron down the line.
That's certainly true.
I want to read, we're speaking with Douglas Thomas,
author of the new book, Hacker Culture.
We're going to tell people how to get a hold of it.
Towards the end of the show.
But I want to read a small bit,
which I think is rather revealing.
Somehow you got the full guest list of a hacker convention
of all the people who showed up at a convention called SummerCon.
Some of you might've heard of it.
It still takes place, I think, every year.
But it was back then the biggest,
the biggest hacker convention of the year.
It happened every year, usually in St. Louis.
Later it was moved to other parts of the country as well.
But this is 1987, 15 years ago.
I'm going to read all the people who showed up.
And yeah, it's going to take up the whole rest of the hour
because all the people that showed up at a hacker conference.
Here they are.
These are all the people.
Bill from Arnok, Bitmaster, Cheap Shades, Control C,
Dan the Operator, Dataline, Doom Prophet, Forest Ranger,
Night Lightning, Lex Luthor, Loki, Lucifer 666, Ninja NYC,
Phantom Freaker, Sir Francis Drake, Synthetic Slug,
Terran King, The Disk Jockey, The Leftist, and Tuck.
That's it.
Those are all the people who showed up at SummerCon 1987.
I mean, what has happened?
Now we have thousands of people showing up at these conferences.
Yeah, it's really become out of control as a kind of cultural
and to some degree media event.
People like to show up and do their stories.
But that was the essence of the underground 15 years ago.
And two of those guys are the guys putting out Frack.
And I think that list probably either came out of Frack
or I should also mention the book that I respected greatly
was Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown,
which did a great job of documenting a lot of what happened
with the early underground as well.
And those documents are all out there.
And I think that it's kind of been a problem
that most of the books written about hackers
take the form of either glorifying the then hacker Steve Jobs,
Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates.
I'm not sure that we want to lump him in with the word hacker.
He went to the dark side.
That's right.
Either glorifying that end of it or writing these espionage thrillers,
which are an attempt to track somebody through a system
and make a lot of money selling a spy novel.
But people have really, I think, ignored that middle ground,
which is neither the hype of what's going on
from the hacker's point of view
or the kind of hype that's going on from the media's point of view.
You know, it's interesting because we have a conference coming up this July.
I know there are going to be thousands of people who show up.
But in a way, I think I'd be happier with a group of people
that just was small and very dedicated to what it is that they do
and sharing information.
I mean, I hope we're able to get a good number of people who fit that description.
But I know there are going to be so many people
that just have heard of hackers from the mass media perspective.
And it's going to be frustrating trying to correct all the misassumptions
like we always have to do.
And it bogs you down because when you got together
with a bunch of people like that, you did all kinds of things.
You know, you had all kinds of adventures
and figured out how to, you know, hack certain things.
That's what it's all about, after all, is hacking,
is figuring out how technology works.
You'd share stories.
You'd, you know, play around with things.
And, you know, I don't know.
It just seems like we've lost our innocence somewhere.
I think that generation did its share of mischief.
But I think at the same time,
so did the guys who were working in computer labs in the 60s.
They were notorious pranksters.
And it wasn't a different kind of thing.
You know, there are stories of people from Caltech
sneaking into the Rose Bowl
and changing all the cards under the seats
to read Caltech at halftime when they held it up.
And do you know what would happen if you tried that today?
Oh, you would be, they'd be telling you,
do you know how much money we're losing in revenue
because we're not getting our recruitment
and this was a nationally televised, you know.
And you'd be called a terrorist for doing something like that.
Absolutely.
And I tend to liken that to what people do as, you know,
defacing websites, which is admittedly a juvenile act.
Oftentimes, though, it can be a political act.
Which makes it a kind of different thing.
Right, right.
You know, there's a sense where really what revenue is lost,
really what damage is done.
I know some people I've talked to that have actually defaced web pages
have been very careful to save the original HTML
on a separate file in the same directory.
Yeah.
You know, because they don't want to damage information.
They don't want to damage data.
They think that that's really important,
but they want to make their point.
They want to say the things they need to say.
Yeah, we seem to have lost a lot over the years
and we seem to take things a lot more seriously
and they should be taken.
Well, I'll tell you, one of the things that really thrilled me to see
was as these hearings were going on in Kevin Mitnick's case,
I saw a bunch of kids, and I don't mean that pejoratively,
but I mean 13, 14, 15 year old people
for the first time going back and reading the Constitution.
Figuring out what our government is doing
and maybe it wasn't a pleasant experience for them,
but they learned the fundamentals,
the stuff that I don't think they're getting anymore
in civics classes in high schools.
They're interrogating, they're questioning,
they're trying to figure out how the system works.
And I thought that was a really great sign
to see that people were actually getting involved.
I don't know how many hundreds of kids were out at shopping malls
handing out free Kevin bumper stickers or leaflets.
They were organizing.
And to me, I thought that was the most pure form
of kind of political expression.
And to have it come out of a case
with so many things negative that were happening,
I thought it was kind of a silver lining
to see that people were getting motivated,
were getting active,
and were getting back a sense of politics,
saying this isn't right, this shouldn't go on,
people need to know about this.
And that is the only silver lining, you're right,
because when you push people enough,
eventually they push back
and eventually something good can come of it
if people finally wake up and get angry
when something isn't right.
Yeah, absolutely.
We're speaking with Douglas Thomas,
author of Hacker Culture,
and we can take phone calls, 212-209-2900
if you have questions or comments
about what we're talking about tonight,
which is basically, I guess, the state of hacker culture,
the past of hackers, the future of it.
Well, we haven't really talked about the future.
What do you see as the future, Doug?
Oh, geez, that's, you know, prediction's hard.
Prediction's hard, especially about the future.
Things are changing so quick, it's tough to tell.
I really, I see, on one side,
I see incredibly repressive moves happening
from industry, from the government.
I see things like face recognition becoming standardized.
I see the idea of people implanting chips into their bodies
that identify them to airport security.
And I also see in that the possibility
for all kinds of new acts of resistance,
new ways to start out-thinking the machine.
I also think one of the things that needs to be said
that people aren't talking about
has to do with security as a whole.
And a colleague of mine at UCLA named Phil Eggrey
wrote a really excellent paper on this,
saying security is a design problem.
You need to design it into the system,
because once you start playing catch-up,
you're always going to be behind,
you're always going to lose.
So rather than trying to stop people at the gate
who are going to break down the door in the airplane,
why not make the door stronger?
Build the plane that way.
Build a plane that's safe,
and then those other things become stopgap measures.
You don't have to worry as much about them.
Our impulse is to go the other way
and to sort of load it all on the front end
and try to stop people at the gate,
try to increase the surveillance,
try to ask more questions, and so on.
And as everybody notices,
you end up harassing basically a lot of people
that don't need to be harassed.
You end up imposing things that don't need to be imposed
because you're not taking care of the issue
where it's really central,
which is in the design of the thing.
And we see this with Microsoft, too.
An infinite number of patches
isn't going to make an operating system secure.
If it's insecure to begin with.
So, I mean, I think that people need to have a real shift
in the way they think about security,
envisioning it as a design problem from the ground up.
And I think that hackers think that way.
And I think they have a real contribution to make
by looking at systems,
by looking at how things are put together,
and thinking them through from the beginning.
And I'd really like to see that kind of impulse
embraced and borne out,
whether it's going to be or not.
Who knows?
But I think that there's a real contribution to be made there.
All right, let's take some phone calls.
212-209-2900.
We're on the line with Doug Thomas.
And good evening, you're on the air.
Good evening, Emmanuel.
I wonder if you've seen the game State of Emergency
and have any ideas about how popular culture
is going to change the way people look at hackers.
I think that hackers, to most people,
are the result of popular culture.
I mean, I'm reminded every time there's a hacker story
and the ABC World News Tonight
begins the segment with a clip of war games.
I think one thing that's interesting about the game,
with the video game,
which is a cartoonish game that takes place,
a big riot,
and there's lots of violence going on.
But the hackers are characters
who are important to the success of the forces
that are trying to shut down the corporation.
So they don't take part in the violence.
They have to be protected by the character
that the player is controlling,
who does all the shooting and the killing.
And they have to protect the hacker
so that they can do the nonviolent things
that are actually going to bring about
the evil domination of the corporate culture,
which is responsible for the riot in the first place.
I've heard some things about this game,
many of them not positive.
So I don't know.
I haven't played it myself.
There's lots of games like that.
There's lots of TV shows like that.
There's lots of movies like that.
You know, it's part of the mass culture, I guess.
And that image, too.
I mean, I think another thing
that people don't understand about hackers
is that they don't have
some sort of high-tech wizardry
that's inaccessible to the rest of the world.
It's not about the ability to program
and see in some magical way.
I mean, I just think generally
the hacker mentality is one
that's born out of curiosity.
And it doesn't really matter
what you're curious about.
It's just a kind of persistent
interrogation of problems
in a way and an unusual perspective,
being willing to look at things
from a different vantage point
than most people do.
Curiosity, persistence.
I think those are the two keys.
You don't even need a technical ability.
A lot of people seem to think
that you have to be a technical genius
to be a hacker.
And I don't think that's true at all.
As long as you have that persistence,
as long as you have that curiosity,
you have the hacker spirit,
and you can apply it to any number of things.
It doesn't have to be necessarily
just computers or even phones.
There's all kinds of ways
a hacker mindset can benefit you.
Let's take another phone call.
Let's go over here.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Hello?
Yes.
I'm on the air.
All right.
I'm going to make this quick
because it wasn't really on topic,
but I had a couple of questions
from earlier.
Do you know if Off The Hook
has a PGP key?
Not really.
I mean, we PGP things back and forth,
but we don't have a public one.
And the main reason is that
there's all kinds of backwards
incompatibility with PGP.
It gets to be more of a problem
than it's worth.
Do you have something sensitive
to tell us?
Um, well, I could just send it,
I guess, to probably...
Well, I'll look for another key at 2600.
I'll just send it.
Send it in a sealed envelope.
Why don't you email OTH
and someone will respond
how to contact us securely.
Actually, Mike is the PGP master,
so he can communicate with you
PGP-wise, I think.
Okay.
All right.
Anything else?
Mike at 2600.
Also, you mentioned in the beginning...
OTH at 2600.
OTH at 2600.
Just try that.
Okay.
You mentioned at the beginning
that Red Balaclava
had some legal troubles.
Yes.
Yes, I did.
I don't know if we have time
to go over them all.
Ironically, it touches on
Doug Thomas's book.
Without going too much
and shooting myself in the foot,
we have strong beliefs
that I've been targeted
for being a hacker.
I was in some difficulty
in-house last year
and they shut down a hearing
I was in called by...
I arrived a little late,
but before that,
they had said to my union rep,
hey, you know your boy's a hacker
and he's got a website?
And of course, my union rep,
when I come in,
slams me against the wall and says,
what's going on here?
I said, nothing, nothing.
All right.
Well, unfortunately,
we're running out of time.
So Doug...
How can one obtain this book?
Yeah, I'm going to ask you,
how can listeners obtain
your book, Hacker Culture?
Well, it should be available
in local bookstores.
It's also at Amazon.com
and they have a nice discount,
I guess, up at the moment.
And failing that,
you can go to www.upress.com.
U-M-N dot E-D-U.
And you can find it there
at the University of Minnesota Press' website.
You can order directly from them.
Has it officially been released?
I think it said April.
It has been released
and it's being shipped to stores now.
So it should be showing up
in the next couple of days,
but you can definitely order it in stock
at Barnes and Nobles
and Amazon, both online.
OK, Doug, thanks so much
for being with us tonight
and best of luck.
Hopefully, we'll see you at H2K too.
Maybe you can talk more about this.
Yeah, I hope so.
All right.
And that's going to do it for us here tonight
on this somewhat abbreviated edition
of Off the Hook again.
Sorry, because of the mass transit snafu.
Next week, we'll be back,
hopefully on time
and taking more phone calls
and reading more depressing news items
as they all come in.
They always do for some reason.
Oh, well, see you next week.
Good night.
Oh, give me a poodle
with bushy black hair.
Give me a ring
and a box full of air.
Give me a palace
without any walls.
Give me a pig
and a red rubber ball.
I should be happy
to meet with your mother
and visit the doctor
on this sunny day.
It's very warm
for the middle of winter
and Mexico City
is so far away.
Oh, let me recline
in my chair in the corner.
No one in heaven
or earth is forlorner.
Give me a tree
with an elephant's trunk.
Give me a pearl
in a pile of junk.
I am not overly clever
or precious.
I am not smarter
than any by far,
but I will live here
in my cave by the ocean
and you can reside
in a big plastic jar.
Oh, I will be happy
to sit in the garden
picking the berries
and begging your pardon.
All that I see
is a terrible blur.
Everything seems to be
covered in fur.
We were not meant to be
highly regarded.
We should be humble
and hidden from view.
Try to imagine
a terrible world
in which you became me
and then I became you.
The Concerned Friends
of WBAI and WBIX
PeaceMyths, the Long Island
Progressive Coalition, the Long Island
Alliance for Peaceful Alternatives,
the Fannie Lou Hamer Political Action Committee
and others invite you to a victory
celebration and fundraiser for
WBAI and WBIX
this Saturday, March 30th from 3 to 6pm
at the Ethical Humanist Society
located at 38 Old Country Road
in Garden City, Long Island.
Speakers include Bernard White,
Amy Goodman and others.
You'll be entertained by Bob Lepley
and the Jazz Trio, George and Julius
from the New York City Labor Chorus
and maybe you, so bring your musical instruments.
For more information, call
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