The Council called for stricter disciplinary measures against sexual exploitation of women
and girls during peace and humanitarian operations.
For Free Speech Radio News, I'm Susan Wood at the United Nations.
Free Speech Radio News is produced at Pacifica Stations KPFA in Berkeley and WBAI in New
York and Community Radio Station WMNF in Tampa.
I'm Max Pringle.
Thanks for listening.
And you're listening to radio station WBAI in New York.
The time is 7 o'clock.
Time for Off The Hook.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving, now I can't make a call.
I couldn't get much worse, but if they could they would.
Bondedly bond for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
Bondedly bond.
And the program is Off The Hook.
Emmanuel Goldstein here with you on this Wednesday night.
So happy to be here.
And for those of you tuning in, expecting to hear something other than us, surprise.
It's been so long.
It really has been so long.
We haven't been on the air since mid-October, I think.
In fact, as I see the small group of people here, I'm sort of embarrassed because I don't
remember who you are.
So why don't you all introduce yourselves.
You are, yes?
At the moment I'm Jim.
Jim!
How you doing?
Let me reach over.
Shake your hand.
It's been such a long time since I've seen you.
How am I doing?
You're doing good.
No, not that good.
And who are you?
I'm Mike.
Mike.
How you doing?
How are you?
I'm good.
And you?
Jeff.
Jeff.
How you doing?
Good.
All right.
Now who are you?
Oh, please, don't ask me the hard questions.
At least wait until I get settled in.
It's been such a long time.
Yeah, we've been off the air for a few weeks.
And hopefully, hopefully we'll finish out the year without being preempted yet again.
But who knows?
Who knows what surprises lurk?
Just to set the record straight, we were preempted for the last couple weeks because of the marathon.
It's kind of weird how this came about, though.
As you know, a few weeks ago we had Kevin Mitnick on.
We only had two hours to do the whole Kevin Mitnick thing.
We would have loved to have had more time than that.
But we had Kevin on.
He signed a bunch of books and magazines and things like that.
The week after that, we were supposed to be preempted for a special.
Unfortunately, the person doing the special never showed up or didn't show up for that hour.
So there was music.
So for those of you wondering why you heard music instead of us that week, that's why.
Because the special didn't happen or whatever.
And then last week, the marathon was supposed to be over, but it wasn't.
It turned out that they had to raise more money.
And I don't know why.
I don't know why we weren't asked to be the ones raising the money because we seem to do a pretty good job.
Or you seem to do a pretty good job, listeners out there.
But instead, we were preempted.
But then I got a phone call at around 2 or 3 o'clock on Wednesday of last week saying,
Oh, guess what?
You're not preempted after all.
We'd like you to do a two-hour special.
But I didn't get the message thanks to voicemail notification until evening.
And plus, it would have been a very haphazard type of a thing to organize something that quickly.
So I don't know.
It's like one hand doesn't know what the other hand is doing.
But we're here tonight.
That's what's important.
And, yeah, we're going to read some of the hate mail.
Every time this happens, we get hate mail and suggestions and offers and things like that.
And, of course, we want to take phone calls as well.
We only have an hour.
So we got to move quickly.
Let me go around the board and ask people if anything is new in their particular worlds
because since we don't socialize outside the show, I have no idea what's going on.
Jim, what's up with you?
Oh, another pretrial hearing tomorrow, and they'll probably set a trial date.
This is for the MetroCard case.
This is for my alter ego, Red Balaclava.
Not a split personality, just my alter ego.
And it's not really technically hacking related, but it's MetroCard related.
Is there anything people can do?
Aside from the obvious, like pay for my lawyer.
No, not really, except I don't have a working computer.
Well, maybe someone could become your lawyer if there's a lawyer out there listening.
That would be good.
If there's a criminal defense attorney in the state of New York who is not doing anything tomorrow.
Well, this is just the kind of crazy audience that we have that might actually be able to pull this off.
So is there a way they can reach you in case there is?
Oh, that's a problem.
Yeah, you see.
Yeah.
Can't really race downtown to meet you outside the station after the show.
No.
There must be a way, a hotmail address?
No, currently all my email is defunct.
A corner you hang around on?
Anything?
Uh, actually.
How about if they meet you in court?
They could do that.
They could do that.
I'd have to give my last name on the air.
But on the other hand, technically, criminal proceedings are a matter of public records.
And when we get the news story about it, we're going to read your last name on the air.
Oh, that's thrilling.
Well, it's a matter of process.
Yeah, okay.
And please, I don't need vast numbers of people showing up for support that might actually be counterproductive.
Like I said, this is not the DCS case.
But if you're a criminal attorney and don't have anything to do tomorrow, I think it's
120 Center Street, the State Supreme Court in Manhattan.
Last name is V-I-C-H-E-N-C-H.
Okay.
And hopefully you'll be here next week to tell us what took place.
Yeah, like I said, this is just a set of trial data, I believe.
Okay.
I've been indicted.
What thrills.
All right.
Let's see.
What else is going on?
Well, Mike, what's up with you?
Not much.
Not much.
Well, you know, you always say that, but I have to say that something had to have happened
in the last, whatever, three weeks.
There was the election day break.
Oh, what a catastrophe.
Yeah.
Do you realize that we now have a Republican mayor, a Republican governor, a Republican
president, a Republican Senate, and a Republican House?
Yeah.
Talk about your one-party state.
I mean, this is insane.
Heaven.
It's the Republicans.
I'm in heaven.
And we have a Republican in the studio.
That might be the worst of all.
Well, you know, it makes organizing a lot easier because, you know, it's everywhere.
It's all around you.
You can't escape it.
So you have to do something or just like go on a world trip for a few years.
Remember, if the Democrats were in there, it would be all better.
No, that's not true.
At least we're not thinking that it's all better by having a Democratic president or
mayor or whatever.
At least we can say they're all evil because they're all Republicans.
We can say something short-sighted like that and it might just get more people together.
But then, of course, they're going to vote in Democrats and think they solved the problem.
In other election news, the Green Party did not get the 50,000 votes they needed to stay
on the ballot.
You know why?
Because in this country, voting for a third party is considered bad.
You know, if you don't vote for the major candidate, then there's something wrong with you.
It sounds a lot like Iraq, actually.
Except they're a lot more honest about it there.
They have one person and 100% of the people have to vote for him or they get shot.
But here, we have two people that are basically mirror images of each other and, you know,
you have to vote for one of them or there's something wrong with you.
When I voted out in Suffolk County, I noticed that there were several candidates, minor
ones, but it was really bizarre going down the polling thing, whatever you call it, the machine.
They were running Democratic, they were running Republican, they were running Conservative,
Right to Life.
Every single party, except for Green, was the same person and there was no opposition.
I mean, that's insane.
That was probably a judgeship.
Well, it was at least two different things.
When I voted later in the city, I noticed that it wasn't as much of a problem.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
What?
I hate to tell you this, that's illegal.
What's illegal?
Voting twice in two jurisdictions.
No, it's not.
If you get mail in two places, you can vote in both places.
No, no, no.
You're kidding.
No, I'm not.
Let's talk about this after the show.
I always thought, should I get mail here at BAI, I can vote locally at BAI, get mail at the IMC, I vote up there too.
You're saying all these years...
Yeah.
You're one person, you get one vote.
Yeah, that sounds nice and pretty, but that doesn't exactly work, does it?
That's only the case if you're not very wealthy.
What's the point of having P.O. boxes then?
I wasted a lot of gas money, if that's true.
We'll talk after the show.
I hope you've done what friends of mine have done, at least used a different name.
If that criminal attorney contacts you...
I'll give him your number too.
Thank you, thank you very much.
Not that my voting made any difference whatsoever.
I don't think a single person I voted for won.
Or even got mentioned.
Okay, let's look at some of the news that's going on in the world of stupidity and technology.
You heard about the story about the FBI snooping in libraries?
Yeah, this is interesting.
This comes out of a Connecticut newspaper.
This person claims, I have uncovered information that persuades me that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has bugged the computers at the Hartford Public Library.
And it's probable that other libraries around the state have also been bugged.
Many members of the public regularly use computers and libraries to access the Internet for research purposes or to locate information about particular interests.
And it's also not uncommon for students and others to communicate with relatives and friends through email from there.
The FBI system apparently involves the installation of special software on the computers that lets the FBI copy a person's use of the Internet.
And their email addresses, or email messages rather.
Basically, when this person asked a librarian in Hartford whether this was happening, the answer was, I can't disclose that we were presented with anything.
He then asked Mary Billings, the library's technical services manager, if the FBI had given her a subpoena or a court order for library information.
Her response, I cannot answer that question.
She did confirm that in recent months, the FBI made two separate visits to the Hartford Library and there were discussions about computer-related information.
On one visit, an agent asked to speak to the library staff, a request that was turned down.
Interestingly, Billings said the library is now working on a public notice that it can't guarantee that there isn't third-party monitoring for people who use computers.
A library staffer also remarked, you know there is software that can grab everybody's Internet use.
Very disturbing.
And I think a lot is being said in the statements that they're giving.
They cannot reveal this information.
If it wasn't happening, they could say no.
And since it is happening, they have to say, I can't tell you that.
No, I hate to make it even worse than it is, but this is old news.
A year before 9-11, there was some law where the FBI was going to be granted the right to go into bookstores and libraries and ask about people's...
reading and purchasing habits.
And the law also said that the librarian or bookseller could not even reveal the FBI's visit.
Okay, but this is installing software onto computers in a library that basically grabs every...
not certain people that read, you know, Catch-22 or something pervasive like that.
But no, this is... everybody using a computer will have all their Internet usage tracked.
I would not doubt that that happens, but the quality of answers given as related in that story...
are the same sort of generic things that you would get either way.
They're like, you know, the Fifth Amendment.
Once you plead the Fifth Amendment, you have to keep pleading it.
Even if they ask you, your name is Emanuel Goldstein, I plead the Fifth Amendment.
These librarians are not on trial here. They're being asked by human beings in the street.
Exactly, but the law applies.
They cannot discuss any of this, therefore they have to give the same stock answer.
So you're saying until the end of time, every time somebody asks a librarian if the FBI is monitoring something...
they're going to have to say that they can't discuss it?
Right, because they can't say that the FBI has been there.
And they can't say the FBI hasn't been there either.
But they did say the FBI was there. That was another answer to the question, that the FBI was there...
and they got turned down with a meeting for the whole staff.
Oh, okay.
I don't know, I think librarians are a bit more intelligent.
I think they're sending a message, a coded message through the fog.
And it's being received loud and clear.
...said the spokesman, who would not give his name.
While China has 45 million regular internet users...
the communist authorities are intent on preventing the net from becoming a forum for free speech...
as well as blocking access to gambling, pornography and extremist websites, such as CNN.
Sites run by foreign media, religious and human rights groups are also blocked.
If anybody in China is listening now, tell us if we're blocked.
I'm curious if 2600.com is blocked.
I don't think it is.
If they're listening, we're not blocked.
That's true, yeah.
If they're listening, we're not...
Well, they could have a copy of the show emailed to them sometime in the future.
I suppose.
Yeah, in which case you'll have to email us.
Internet cafes have spread from the cities to small towns across China...
though most Chinese access the internet at home or at work.
Embraced for their commercial potential, they are also viewed as possible havens...
for gambling, pornography and online gaming.
Speaking of which, I have never gotten so many comments on anything...
as I've gotten in the last week or so.
You know about the Grand Theft Auto thing, the latest one.
The Miami one?
Yeah.
I hear about it.
City Vice?
Vice City.
Okay, everybody knows about this, all right?
You don't know the capital of Uzbekistan, but you know the name of the newest Grand Theft Auto game.
I'm not targeting people in this room.
Actually, Jim, you probably do know the capital.
Actually, I knew you were going to ask that.
I do not know.
Okay.
I'm so ashamed.
When you appeared on Jeopardy, you should have all the facts.
Uzbekistan was part of the Soviet Union.
Give me a break.
Yeah, that's true.
At least you know that.
Most people don't even know that.
There used to be a map on that very wall right there...
that the people in the audience can't see, but it's no longer there.
Hey, wait a minute.
You're Russian.
You should know this.
I'm not from Kazakhstan.
Yeah, I know that, but I know what the capital of Wyoming is, and I'm not from there.
I left Russia when I was eight years old, so...
This is why they lost the republics, because they couldn't know the basic facts about them.
Well, okay, never mind that.
The fact is, everybody knows about Grand Theft Auto, that it's out, and somehow...
That's all I'm here for.
Well, somehow my voice is on it.
Just like Bernie S.'s voice is on the last one, Grand Theft Auto 3,
somehow, I don't know how this happened, my voice is on there, and I'm talking on the radio, apparently.
Would you like to know?
Well, no, not really.
There's a little bit of mystery in my voice.
Do you have a tape?
No, I don't have a tape.
In fact, I have a copy of the game, which I can't even play, because I don't have a PlayStation.
How's that for ironic?
It's very good for ironic.
Yeah, it's pretty good for ironic.
So, yeah, I've never gotten so many comments from people who had to say something about that.
What do they say?
I don't know.
I guess they just mention that I'm on there.
I know I'm on there.
You can't really say good job or something like that.
You can't say, yeah, that was cool.
I guess you could say it was cool, but, you know, it's just a voice.
I mean, we do voices every week, or almost every week.
Do they pay you?
No, of course not.
I never get paid for anything I do.
Lawsuit?
No, not really.
It kind of was done with my permission, so I don't think that's necessary.
Police in a western Ukrainian region will appeal to local authorities to issue a ban on children.
Let me finish the sentence, for God's sake.
A ban on children visiting Internet cafes during school hours and after 10 p.m.
to increase control over their activities.
It's like a world theme here.
We must control people's activities and keep them off the Internet.
Police detained some 80 children over the past week who were supposed to be at classes in schools
but were instead at Internet cafes playing games in the Ivano-Frankivsk western city.
That's according to the Interfax News Agency.
Police are increasingly alarmed that children are missing their studies
and in the evening are not under adult supervision.
A total of 293 crimes have been committed by teenagers in this western region
in the first nine months of this year.
You actually count their blessings, 293 crimes in the whole nine months of this year,
mostly due to parental negligence of their activities in an environment that is often criminal.
Is there any correlation between those 293 crimes and Internet cafes?
No, not at all.
But I'm more curious to this thing where they're saying an environment which is often criminal.
What environment are they talking about?
The Ukrainian environment? The Internet environment?
The teen environment? I'm not sure what they mean by that.
The other thing is that the kids that were in the library obviously weren't out committing crimes.
Or the Internet cafes.
Yeah, exactly.
It could have been monitored by the FBI in their libraries.
You know, they've done things a little better.
You see, we're trying to send our kids to the library so we can watch what they're doing.
A whole different cultural, you know.
Local police in Massachusetts want to question a Peabody man.
This actually was dated October 17th, so it probably has been solved by now,
but just to give you some background.
They want to question a Peabody man who has taken photographs of a number of places
both Tuesday and Wednesday of that week.
The man travels in a black 1995 Dodge Neon with an American flag flying upside down,
according to persons who found his activities suspicious.
Local detectives learned that a man in a car matching that description had been taking pictures in Salem.
And I don't have to tell you, the parallels to the Salem witch trials are just unbelievable here.
Basically, you have a guy here taking pictures.
The authorities are looking for him because they don't even know what he took pictures of.
He's taking pictures of a number of places.
Now, apparently, that's enough to have an alert issued.
Unreal. It's unreal what we're living in these days.
And expect more of it, because there's not going to be any more arguing in Congress.
Everyone's going to be agreeing on whatever happens.
It's going to be fun.
Oh, man.
Let's see what else.
I guess we should read some listener mail since we haven't had very much as far as listeners in the last few weeks.
And, of course, we'll be taking phone calls, 212-209-2900.
Especially I'd like to hear from the people who are listening to the radio.
Not that we don't want to hear from the people who are on the Internet,
but considering that some of the people out there in the radio audience might not have access to the Internet,
they can't send us e-mail.
They have no way of feeding back to us.
And they don't know what was going on for the last few weeks,
so this might be their only chance to get some answers.
Again, 212-209-2900.
If you're in 212, you have the option of dialing 212 now.
And in a couple of months, you will have to dial 212.
And we don't know if you'll have to dial a 1.
We're going to have to... The jury's still out on that one.
I've heard a few theories as to why you have to dial the 1.
The main one being that it indicates long distance,
and that you'll have to dial a 1 to call, say, New Jersey 201,
but you won't have to dial a 1 to call 212 from 212.
I don't know what the difference between long distance and local is anymore.
I think it's cheaper to call long distance than local,
but that might be phone company logic.
Unfortunately, we could not announce Kevin Mitnick's book tour,
which started two weeks ago.
It would have been nice to let people know that he appeared at the Citigroup building
a couple of Mondays ago and signed books and gave a talk,
and it was really kind of neat.
And currently he's in Massachusetts.
He's been all throughout the Northeast.
He was in D.C. and Virginia.
And he's going to be in California.
And if you want the last remaining dates on his tour,
go to our website, www.twentysixhundred.com,
look for the story about Kevin Mitnick's book tour.
Something interesting happened in the last few days.
We talked a little bit about this when he was on the air,
that there was a chapter of his book which was not published.
You might call it the banned chapter because it was taken out of the book
for a couple of reasons.
Wiley claims to have taken it out independently,
and John Markoff, the reporter from the New York Times
that has followed Kevin for a long, long time
and never actually talked to him and written stories
that Kevin has taken great exception to,
sent the threatening letter to Wiley,
or had his lawyer send a threatening letter to Wiley
concerning that chapter which he said was libelous.
Well, I guess you can judge for yourself now since it's out on the Internet.
It got released somehow.
It's not surprising, actually.
The only thing that surprised me is how long it took for this to happen.
It was in the Galley copies, or some of the Galley copies.
It wasn't in the one I saw.
I got one of the later ones, I guess.
And somebody apparently scanned it and put it up on the net
and it's being passed around all over the place.
The funny thing is, if this hadn't been made such a big deal,
it probably wouldn't be as popular as it is right now.
That's the nature of threatening letters and things like that.
And somebody sent us mail asking why we are linking.
It's on a Yahoo News group,
and they asked why we're linking to a Yahoo News group that requires cookies
and why don't we put it up on our own site.
Well, I think the answer to why we don't put it up on our own site is kind of obvious.
It's something rather touchy.
And if you put something that has been banned or forbidden,
I think history has taught us that lawyers will come after you.
But since it's already out there, there's nothing wrong with telling people about that.
And as a news agency, that's what we have done.
This person has more suspicions about us.
This person was just told that certain 2600 web pages send out secret cookies
to identify and track the visitor.
I say secret because when you access the home page and various other pages,
you are not requested to accept the cookie
and are given a false sense of freedom and security at the 2600 site.
But seriously, why, with everything going on in our world today,
would you of all people do this?
So many letters start out nice, you know,
where they're asking a question and they reach a conclusion
and then they accuse us of being part of that conclusion.
And of course, hey, Seraph's here.
How are you doing?
What's up?
Hi.
Maybe you can answer this question.
Well, we don't use cookies.
Okay, that's a good answer to the question.
That's just about it.
Secret cookie, we don't use secret cookies either.
No.
The ones that don't announce their presence.
No, and more generally, we don't do anything to track users from page to page
and we don't do anything to collect personal information.
We're against that sort of thing.
Yeah, so any more clarification on that?
I don't know if it's possible, but...
Not even chocolate chip cookies.
We don't have...
That's very good.
We don't have the manpower to do this.
We don't have the time, you know?
We don't have the interest either.
So, yeah, you can visit our site and feel nice and secure.
Let's see.
This person writes in saying,
I was listening to the show and heard about the telemarketing to the US
from overseas that we were talking about.
A friend of mine in Melbourne, Australia, is working at a telemarketing place.
At the moment, he's selling SBC Yahoo DSL to people in the US.
Apparently, they do this because people with Australian accents
are less likely to be hung up on.
Do you know that?
I do now.
Oh, that's interesting.
I don't hang up on them.
I just ask them to hold on when I put the phone down and walk away.
It sure doesn't work the other way when you call Australia.
They hang up on you really quick.
In fact, they don't even let you finish a sentence sometimes when you hear the accent.
I don't blame them.
Okay, this person actually is asking about the...
We talked about this too, the GSM phone situation here in New York.
Actually, I don't know where I did with my phone, but it doesn't matter anyway.
I can tell you exactly what happens.
This person writes from the UK saying,
the networks I show on my phone are BT, CellNet, Vodafone, Orange, and 1to1,
which sounds exactly like what it was when I was over there.
I can only register on the one that I'm on.
Do you know how to unlock it or why it's locked?
It all has to do with roaming agreements
and what your particular company allows you to do
and what the other companies allow your company to do.
In most countries, I had no trouble going from one to another when I was over there,
but in most countries, you can do this without a problem.
You can go from between two and six different phone companies
and simply change the company that's on your phone.
Here in the United States, since we have T-Mobile
and since AT&T has just started service in this area and some areas as well,
for the first time ever, people can see two different phone companies on their phones.
On my phone, it shows up as USA380.
Now, 380 is the number of the company.
Every company has a three-digit number, and every country has a three-digit number as well.
The three-digit number for the United States is...
Yes, Klaas, anybody know?
Would it be 001?
No, that's incorrect, Jim.
You sit down.
Nobody?
What you mentioned was the country code for the telephone network,
but we're talking about GSM network.
It's different.
111?
No.
I said sit down.
Anybody else?
Nobody else?
Okay.
I'm sure some of those little lights on the switchboard there know the answer.
You know what?
I'm not going to say the answer.
I'll say it later, and it's not important to the story.
We'll see if any of the listeners know this.
But basically, you have two choices now here in New York,
but if you try to register for AT&T and you use T-Mobile,
it'll try to register, and then it'll just bounce you back to T-Mobile
or it might even say VoiceStream on your phone.
The reason, by the way, why it says USA instead of AT&T,
I believe from having intense discussions about this with a number of people,
is because there's a little lookup table that's on every phone
that has every possible phone company on it,
and AT&T was not on there originally,
so what you get is the country instead of the company.
Yes, Jeff?
Is the number 666?
No.
Join Jim over there in the corner.
666.
What kind of country would name itself 666?
I was thinking of the business.
Okay, so the problem is,
and I had a long conversation with a technical person over at T-Mobile about this.
It's good to talk to technical people who actually understand what's going on,
and he said basically we're in kind of the toddler stage of GSM right now
where we want to deny access to other companies
and we don't want to cooperate.
We want to try to crowd them out,
whereas in Europe it's a lot more mature
and you can basically pick whatever company you want and compete in that way.
He said in a few years maybe you'll actually be able to switch
from one company to another on our phone,
but that's the way it is.
You should put pressure on your local companies to do that,
on your GSM companies to allow roaming agreements between T-Mobile and AT&T.
Singular also offers service in some areas,
but Singular uses the T-Mobile network,
and in those singular areas T-Mobile uses the Singular network.
So you don't have both of them competing against each other.
You have one using the other's network.
What I'd like people to try,
anybody with a GSM phone in the United States listening right now,
if you could all try this all at once,
simply if you know how to do this on your phone,
there's an option to scan for networks,
and if you scan for networks,
you should be able to,
if you're in one of these areas that has more than one company,
you should see more than one company.
Try to switch to the other company if you see a second one,
and let us know if you're actually able to change your company onto your other phone.
I'd like to know if anybody succeeds in doing this in the United States.
I know people in Europe can do this, no problem,
but I'd like to know if anyone in the States can do that.
Let's see.
This person writes in saying,
I heard on the show that you were giving away signed 2600 magazines for donations.
I called and donated,
but the guy said that I wasn't supposed to get the magazine.
What is up?
Am I misinformed?
No, you are not misinformed, actually.
You are informed properly.
What happened was that that was kind of a spur of the moment thing on our part,
where we said everybody who calls in is going to get an autographed 2600.
So basically what we did was we signed a whole bunch of them after the show,
and not everybody in the tally room knew that.
So when we receive your payment,
then we send out the premiums,
and that's what's going to go out to you.
That's what's supposed to happen anyway.
This person hates to be a bother,
but he's wondering when I can expect to receive the premiums offered for my donation in May.
I had a copy of Freedom Downtime and a t-shirt coming your way.
There were a few people who slipped through the cracks.
If you are one of them,
please contact us in one of two ways,
either by emailing us, oth at 2600.com,
or by calling us at 631-474-2677
and speaking to one of our representatives about that particular item.
And just have some information available so that we know that you're telling the truth and all that.
Okay.
That's where that stands.
Sorry for any inconvenience.
Every once in a while,
this is another letter,
every once in a while,
it seems like it's happening a lot more now.
I get weird phone rings from telemarketers.
It's not your normal ring.
It's the ring that sounds after someone uses the star 69 feature,
and the phone rings you back.
Basically, you get three quick rings.
I've never seen this feature used,
and I'm wondering how the telemarketers are able to do this.
Does owning their own PBX give them the option to do this,
or can anyone just do this with some sort of a box?
This is from Oklahoma City.
Well, actually, what I think is happening in this case
is that you have a phone number you don't know about.
What the phone company does in order to use up all the area codes really quickly
is sometimes give out three different phone numbers,
sometimes more to people,
and give them distinctive rings.
So you may have a couple of numbers associated with your phone number
that when those numbers are dialed, you get a distinctive ring.
It happens to me all the time.
I get a weird distinctive ringing because people are calling the wrong number.
I don't even know what the phone number is.
And it's kind of hard to find out because it's not a real phone line.
You can't dial an A&I identifier and get the number that way.
It's just sort of a software extension that rings funny.
So I think what's happening is someone is calling that line.
The way to find out, call your local phone company
and ask them if, in fact, they have that service attached to your line.
Jeff, you had some kind of crazy story.
It was only in your head, though, right?
I didn't bring the papers with me. I apologize.
But I heard about it, so I know it's true.
Yeah, because the same person that sent it to you had told me about it.
So I went to the site, and evidently in Germany,
there were the Secret Service over there, the police,
basically were tapping phones,
and it was showing up on the subscribers' bills.
So they would look and see a voice box on there,
and they'd go to ask the phone company,
I want to access this number.
No, you can't. You don't have access to that.
They had the phone number? What did they have on the phone bill?
They had the option or the charge for the voicemail on there.
How were they monitoring people? Through voicemail?
What they were doing is evidently everything was being recorded
and sent to a voicemail box, and they had access to it.
I see.
The article went on to talk about the fact
that over 20,000 phone taps.
Now, they said that in Germany,
it's supposed to be limited to murderers and money launderers
and all these heinous crimes,
but evidently 20,000 people have their phones tapped over there.
And now, of course, everybody knows
if their phone was tapped because it appeared on the bill.
Well, they didn't say everyone.
They did say that quite a few people had gotten the information.
Ingenious.
If only the U.S. government were this inept.
Yeah. We can only hope.
Another question about a T-Mobile phone.
This person claims to still get the number of the person who calls
when I check voicemail.
As we mentioned a few weeks ago,
people who have T-Mobile have lost that ability with their voicemail.
It doesn't identify the number unless you try to call the person back.
And this person also says that he still has to put in a password.
Another option that was installed
was the option where you can simply call the voicemail number
and not have to enter your password,
and that was switched on for everybody in the New York area.
So basically, yes, people in the Midwest,
people in other parts of the country have not had this happen to them yet,
but it will happen.
They are in the process of upgrading.
They call it an upgrade of their voicemail system,
but I think it's a real downgrade.
Sprint, on the other hand,
started telling me the phone numbers just recently.
Well, they've always told me the phone numbers.
No, they stopped for a while, and then it came back.
They did stop for a while.
Now they, yeah.
It's kind of annoying when they tell you all this information,
the message received by, and then the phone number before.
You just want to hear the message, you know?
It's a life or death situation.
You don't care where they're calling from.
All right, speaking of calls,
212-209-2900 is our phone number.
We have a pretty full switchboard,
but let's get everybody on board.
Read some of the hate mail.
It's not hate mail towards us.
I want to make sure that people understand
that there's not some kind of antagonism going on
between us and the station.
It's just that we're very, I guess,
upset at the fact that we're preempted so many times,
and there's so much to talk about.
There's so many things going on revolving around technology,
national security, hackers.
I mean, just listing the topics alone
could probably take a good part of the hour.
Let's read some of the suggestions from people.
Basically...
Before you do that.
If you have hate mail directed at us, we welcome also.
We do, we do.
We don't get enough of it.
This person says,
I don't understand why we don't have a show again this week.
I had one week of vacation,
so I thought I could listen to it.
I live in the Netherlands,
and it always starts at 1 a.m.,
which is when I go to sleep
because I have to work the next day.
How can BAI call itself free speech radio
when they take Off the Hook off the air every time?
It's one of the few programs on WBAI
that really discusses important issues in the computer world.
I really think it's time for Off the Hook
to move somewhere else.
The problem is that we get taken off the air every time,
and the next week they ask us to pledge.
Why would I pledge my favorite show gets taken off every time
when there are other shows that air more than once a week
and don't get taken off?
Maybe it's time to move to another station.
There must be others out there that have a spot
for Off the Hook one time a week
or just go with the internet.
Nico from Holland.
Well, okay.
A couple of points here.
First of all,
I share the frustration
that so many listeners have been feeling.
There are no other radio stations.
Even in New York,
there are no other radio stations
that I can think of anyway,
unless I'm really misunderstanding
what KROQ is all about
or all these other crazy stations.
Basically, this is the only bastion of free speech
on the FM dial,
and certainly the only bastion
in the commercial area of the FM dial.
And that's why I feel that it's important
to hash this out here in this locale
rather than just walk away
and be weakened by it.
That leads to the issue
of just doing the show on the internet.
That's fine,
but I get the impression
that the people who want us to do the show
just on the internet
are people with internet access.
It seems like you guys can all listen to the program,
but not everybody has that ability.
And the magic of what we do here at BAI
is the fact that we're on a 50,000-watt radio station
in the middle of New York City
getting people in their cars,
getting people in their convalescent homes,
getting people in their nurseries,
getting people in all kinds of places
that you would not be able to get internet connections.
And it's important to reach those people.
It's vital to reach those people.
And I don't think if we suddenly said
we're not going to do internet streaming anymore
because we don't like the internet
and it's too expensive
or it's not a friendly environment,
I think you'd be upset by that.
So we have to solve this as a community,
the on-air listeners
and the on-the-internet listeners
as well as people who listen in the future on Archived.
I like to think of it as our commitment
to let no child be left behind.
Yeah, what, is that something Bush said?
Yeah, it's like the education initiative.
What's his excuse, then?
Well, okay, yeah, it's a good feeling, though.
Basically, we've got so many letters
and we don't have nearly enough time to get through them all,
so what I'll try to do is read one occasionally
as we take phone calls.
This person says,
I'm feeling as frustrated as all of you must be feeling.
I think part of the problem is that
BAI might be getting too multicultural.
It's fine and good that other cultures get to be heard,
but we need to be heard, too.
Not to sound conspiratorial,
but how do we know that BAI isn't getting leaned on
by some big government agency?
After all, we're the third part of the trinity
of the world's most wanted.
Signed, Gonzo.
And yeah, that's something to think about.
And a lot of people do think
there's some kind of conspiracy theory
that has some water to be held.
Those who think it's a conspiracy
are unfamiliar with the wonderful ability
of progressive folk to just screw things up on their own.
Yeah, you need to see how unconspiratorial people are.
But I also don't want to pit this
against any other program or any other group
or anything like that.
I think there's enough time on this station
for a lot of different groups to be heard,
but that said, I think there's a lot that is overdone.
We try to squeeze everything into an hour,
and we always sound kind of frantic and rushed
because an hour goes by very, very fast,
and it really is not enough time for what we have to do.
Like this listener said,
we're number three in the trinity.
Number three in the world's most wanted.
That's what the FBI's new mission is.
Terrorism, and what was the other one?
What was number two?
Terrorist spies?
Yeah, espionage and cyber crime,
hacking as they define it.
You forgot about political activism.
I'm sorry, you moved to a different microphone.
You forgot about political activism.
Now that's interesting.
Tell us about that.
That was a story that ran on 2600 This Week.
Right, well, there's a site called intelligence.gov
that just popped up a few weeks ago.
Intelligence.gov.
Right, and it's supposed to represent
all of these different intelligence agencies,
the NSA and the CIA and the FBI
and all of those other ones that you never even hear about.
And there's this page called The Threat.
The Threat, yes. Yes, The Threat.
And what's listed under The Threat?
Well, I mean, The Threat,
this whole page is very frightening.
There are pictures of exploding cars at the top,
these little white passenger cars on fire,
and there are some guys who look like Gulf War soldiers
wearing those gas masks and all of that stuff.
And one of the headings is Internet Infrastructure Attack.
Uh-huh.
And, I mean, what would you expect to read right there?
Well, I would expect that the worst kind of cyberterrorism
that you might see on UPN, like, you know,
Prime Time would be on there.
Right.
But instead, it goes a little bit more general than that.
Right, it says that political activism is the threat.
And there's really nothing else there.
There's nothing about cyberattacks
the way we hear about them all the time.
There's so much talking about hacktivism and nothing else.
Go to the page yourself.
If you're online now, you can see it for yourself,
intelligence.gov, and just look for The Threat,
and you'll see what The Threat is in their eyes.
An arguably greater threat to Internet infrastructure
is, of course, government censorship,
which, you know, there's some story about Panama
that I don't know the details of recently.
Well, now, Panama has started to basically ban
certain ports from being used on computers.
I don't know how they plan on doing this,
but they decree that certain ports, I guess,
that are used for nefarious purposes in their eyes
simply will be illegal to use.
Now, Panama, as far as I know,
is owned and operated by the United States.
Is that not correct?
I mean, the last I checked,
we pretty much, you know, had control there.
I think it's really a matter of commerce.
The Panama government is telling Internet service providers
that they have to block ports
that are used for voiceover IP,
which is ways that people can inexpensively, you know,
talk to each other using computers instead of telephones.
I see.
And it's vested interest in the telephone companies.
Okay, which are probably also owned and operated
by the United States.
So any listeners in Panama who are able to listen to us,
let us know more about that.
But I have seen that story floating around,
and it's just indicative of a lot of the evil things happening.
All right, let's take some phone calls.
1-2-2-0-9-2-9-100.
Where should I go first?
Let's go over here.
And good evening.
You're on the air.
Hey, Manuel.
This is Zephyr in New York.
Great show all the time.
Thanks.
I'm going to be quick.
Okay.
First of all, when they give you your number that you're calling,
you know, they tell you the number, you know, in your voicemail.
Okay, yeah.
To me, it's like they just want to make more money
because in the time it takes for them to tell you the number,
the incoming call is more time on your bill.
Well, if you have the kind of plan that your time runs out that quickly,
yes, that would happen.
They'd drag it out.
Well, I mean, it increases your usage time.
I mean, you were complaining that you just want to hear the message.
Right, I think there should be an option to do that.
I mean, I want to hear the message, too.
I don't care what number they're calling from.
I want to just hear who's calling me.
But also, it's time, which translates to money for them.
I mean, that's how I see it.
Anyway.
Well, that's nothing new with the phone companies of the world.
But, yeah, I see the point.
Right.
Also, telecom, for fans of professional bike racing, bicycle racing,
that's a big tour team in the Tour de France and everything.
They actually won the Tour de France like five years ago.
So telecom, that's a big still.
Anyway, fans of bicycle racing, they know of telecom.
Telecom as in T-Mobile?
Yes, T-Mobile.
They sponsor huge outfit, huge bicycle racing.
Right, it's Deutsche Telekom.
It's a German telephone company.
And also, man, I love you.
I love your show.
But your picture was in The Voice, wasn't it, a couple summers ago?
Yeah, it was on the front cover.
Dude, you are a scary-looking guy.
Yeah, I know.
It was pretty scary seeing people holding that in front of their faces as well.
Right.
Anyway, I'm an old friend of Don Letts.
I've known him for over 20 years.
You know Don Letts?
I know Don, yeah.
In fact, I'm in the Clash documentary he did.
Really?
Yeah, doing graffiti, like 20 years ago when they played at Bonds.
No kidding, wow.
I did the banner.
They dropped the banner.
The fire department made them take down the next day.
I did the banner, and then you see me up also at one point on a scaffold.
Anyway, back then, he was following the Clash around filming a lot of stuff in New York and everything.
Well, that's great.
Anyway, I'm an old friend of Don's.
I'm still in touch with him.
Great, great.
Well, say hi for me.
I certainly will.
And what's your name?
I'm Zephyr.
Zephyr.
I've seen your name.
I've seen your name around.
So that's great.
Well, it's good to hear from you.
Good to hear from you.
Okay.
All right, man.
Take care.
Take care.
Blast from the past.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Yeah, hi there.
What's up?
I was just wondering maybe you could clear something up for me.
A friend of mine noticed a few more charges for calls on his phone bill than he thought he'd made.
It turns out, or what he told me, is that Verizon is now charging for busy signals when you call.
Is there any truth to this?
I have never heard that, but I have heard a disturbing rumor.
Okay, I'm hearing someone here is nodding their head, so maybe there is some truth to that.
But I've also heard a rumor that Verizon is going to start charging for calls to cellular phones.
And if that's true, who knows what kind of bills we're going to start seeing.
There was some cryptic message a few months ago in one of the leaflets that they hand out saying that, you know,
toll calls may apply to certain wireless devices or whatever.
I haven't seen a bill yet where this happens, but I've heard rumors that they're planning on doing that,
which would be very disturbing since we also…
Toll charges?
Just not charging it as a local call.
Again, I don't have anything to back this up yet, and I intend to keep a very keen eye out for this kind of a thing.
If anyone sees anything, please let us know.
But, you know, they do that in some countries, but in those countries where they do it,
you don't get charged for airtime when you're on the phone because people pay extra to call you.
So that's the tradeoff.
Now, Jeff, what do you have on this?
I have Verizon, and any time I make a call, from the time it starts ringing, I get…
Are you talking about Verizon Wireless or…?
Yes.
Oh, okay. I wasn't sure if you meant wireless. Do you mean wireless or…?
I'm talking about Landline.
Landline. He's talking about it.
Oh.
They do provide land service.
That's true.
Yeah, in their spare time.
I don't think anyone has encountered that, sir.
Okay. Well, if you do, please let us know.
Oh, we certainly will.
Thanks so much.
All right. That's like one of the nightmares of the apocalypse, the day they start charging for busy signals.
Good evening. You're on the air.
Hi, Emmanuel. Hi, guys.
How are you doing?
Did you manage to catch Michio Kaku's show today?
I caught bits of it in between cursing at motorists while I was driving in, yes.
I was talking about text messaging.
Text messaging, political activism.
He was also talking about government surveillance using this stuff.
And I was just wondering what you thought of this guy's vision of the future.
Well, he was talking to, I think, Howard Rheingold, who was part of HoloLens Review, actually, years ago.
I wasn't able to catch his entire train of thought,
as to the potential for what you can do with SMS messages and text-based things,
and just used as a way of organizing people, used as a way of spreading a message around really, really quickly.
What were the examples he used of political activism?
Well, he was talking about people contacting each other and getting an organization done without an organizer, basically.
Yeah.
Everybody go to Tiananmen Square today.
Somebody's showing up or whatever.
Right.
And, of course, that the government can do the same thing to monitor who's going to be going to the same demonstration.
Yeah, the flip side to all of these things, and yes, that's definitely the case, that the information can be used against people.
But he painted a rosy picture in some ways and a really nasty picture in others,
and it seems to me that one or the other is probably going to dominate.
And I was just wondering what your opinion was, or Mike's opinion, or Jim?
Well, I think it really depends on who's got more of a command of the technology.
There's always ways to outsmart people using technology,
but there's also ways to be outsmarted if you don't know the potential and capability of being monitored.
And that's something that we try to let people know that, yeah, you can do this,
but someone can also listen in and someone can defeat you in this particular way.
Do you think individuals will win out over government bureaucrats?
Yeah, I think individuals will always win in the end.
But, I don't know, you sort of have to know that in order to give yourself strength to keep going.
If you think that, you know, it's a hopeless situation, you're never going to win.
If you think that, you know, you're always going to figure out a way around it,
then, you know, it's kind of like the hacker mentality, then you'll succeed somehow in the end.
It might not be you that succeeds, but overall individuals will win.
Any word from the panel here?
I think it's complicated.
Yeah, nobody has any opinions.
I hope that answers your question.
Yeah, that's cool.
Okay, thanks for calling.
We're going to move on.
Let's go over here.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Hi.
I'd like to talk about public phones.
Okay, public phones.
This disappearing breed.
They are a disappearing breed.
I don't know if I've been out of the country in the last year a lot,
but I have noticed that now Verizon charges $0.50 for a call at selected locations,
which happen to be almost all over.
I thought they got rid of the $0.50 rate.
No, no.
It's still there.
Yeah, it's still there.
And what's more, now you have to pay for information, which you didn't use to pay at Verizon.
But now there is a plan B.
That is, you know, naturally I switch to the phones where I never went before,
operated by shadow companies, whatever, where the toll was still $0.25.
So now they have a new regulation that says that they have to get rid of phones.
I think it's a city law recently passed or a mayoral ordinance.
They are not properly maintained,
which I take it to mean if there is a sticker or any kind of unsightly messaging,
you know, that the people sometimes use these as posts for.
So all they have to do is not maintain them, and then they have to get rid of them.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So basically it means if you don't have a cell phone, you're out of luck.
That's true.
Well, but, you know, I think it shouldn't be true.
And I think you should also have to disseminate the information
that there is still a public service commission
and that people should call, email, write letters to,
and express their dissatisfaction with the service.
And the way of getting a hold of the public service commission is
it should be on every one of those pay phones,
and it also should be in the front of every phone book.
And, yeah, you're right.
People should be contacting them and, you know,
protecting these pay phones from being taken away because, yeah,
there are cases where you need things like that,
and there are lots of people who don't have cell phones,
and they need a way of talking to people as well.
That's true.
And I have one more suggestion about your show.
Yes.
That is, BAI is certainly an institution, although it's so balkanized sometimes.
You know, I basically, your show is one of the two,
Meet Show being the other one that I listen to regularly,
and the news, of course.
But I think you should syndicate your show around in places like FMU.
FMU will give you a spot, you know, in a second.
Well, yeah, no, FMU is a great station.
The problem is their signal doesn't really get past New York to the east,
so obviously we'd have to figure out multiple ways of doing that.
But BAI has got a great signal.
We've got a great audience, and we've got great people here,
and I think we can all work together.
We just have to start listening to each other.
And you're right.
It's balkanized.
It's something that, you know, has always been a problem.
But I wouldn't say ditch BAI, go to FMU.
I'm saying perhaps you can do both things.
And you can listen to both BAI and FMU on the net,
which is always something else.
And I want to finish with just one warning.
You said that whoever controls the technology is going to win the day.
So basically, you know, the individual is not going to win.
The machine is going to win, and whoever controls the machine.
And at this point, it seems to be pretty clear that it's the government.
Well, the machine doesn't control the machine.
No, but the people who control the machine will win the day.
Well, let's let people be us, you know.
I hope so.
We can try.
Education is the first step.
I hope we got a big wake-up call yesterday
and that we're going to all go out and do mischief.
At least, you know, what the government thinks is mischief
and assert our rights.
All right.
Well, let's not conspire too much on the air.
I'm in enough trouble for the election as it is.
But thanks for that call, 212-209-2900.
We only have time for a couple more.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Yeah.
All right.
Now time for that.
Silliness.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
All right.
That's a little better, but let's try it over here.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Yes.
Hello.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Good to talk to you.
I was wondering, speaking of radio stations,
whatever happened to the Columbia radio station, WKCR?
Any idea?
Yeah, WKCR, their transmitter was on top of the World Trade Center,
so that should probably answer that question.
They have a new transmitter.
It's in your room, isn't it, at Columbia?
I've moved a block away from it, but it used to be right outside my window.
50,000 watts right in the middle of the college campus at Columbia University.
That's unsafe.
But the latest word I've heard about them is that they're going to be moving to a site,
I believe, on the Empire State Building right with us.
There's room for four more stations.
Still going to be 89.9?
Yeah.
No, the frequency hasn't changed.
It's still on the air.
Where are you located?
I'm out in Suffolk County.
I haven't tried it lately.
I'll have to try it again.
Yeah, well, the thing is you have another NPR clone station out there in eastern Suffolk
that might be overriding its signal because it's been weakened.
But they're back?
They never left.
It's just they've been weakened a little bit.
When they get on the Empire State Building, you should probably hear them a lot further.
The building they're on is significantly shorter than the World Trade Center,
and I believe the signal is less powerful.
So if you don't live right outside the window, you may have more trouble hearing them.
I've had a great power before.
I do a public access show out here on Long Island called Show for the Workers.
I send you a copy of a tape I shot at the HOPE Conference.
I saw that, yes.
It was really good.
Well, thank you, and I appreciate the copy of Freedom Downtime,
so I may be airing that sometime coming up pretty soon.
Okay, well, let us know so we can help you out.
And stick to it, BAR, and let's pull it together.
Definitely BAR rules.
All right.
Okay.
Thanks.
My daughter wants to say hello.
Hello.
How are you doing?
Good.
Welcome to the radio.
There's going to be this new show called Kitty World.
It's coming up soon.
It's coming on Thursday, 5 o'clock.
Could you put it on the radio, please?
I think you just did.
Goodbye.
Okay, goodbye.
Okay, that's probably our youngest listener.
I think that's pretty much it for us.
We're out of time.
But I want to thank everybody for calling in.
I want to thank everybody for writing in as well.
And please keep the support out there.
It does matter to us.
Thanks to everybody who pledged during the last marathon.
We'll be back next week, from what I understand.
And the Personal Computer Show is up next.
Until then, this is Manuel Goldstein.
For everybody else, have yourselves a good night and stay awake.
This is ZQI.
Communication.
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