And you're listening to radio station WBAI New York, where the time is exactly 7 o'clock.
And once again, for Off The Hook.
Oh my goodness. Well, we're sorry to that company for any turmoil that may have been caused by BAI listeners calling, demanding that this be settled.
But there is a website somewhere out there about this, about the strike, correct?
Right. The workers are represented by two unions. There's one in Nova Scotia and a different union in the other three maritime provinces.
The union in Nova Scotia is called the ACTWU, which I'm sure stands for something wonderful.
And their website is, of course, ACTWU.NS.CA.
Okay. Well, that's something. And does that have all the information on the strike?
It's got all kinds of information.
All right. There's no simpler URL for people to find out more information about this?
What's complex about that one?
All right. Well, just type in Alliant, A-L-I-A-N-T, and strike, I guess, into Google, and I'm sure you'll find all kinds of other things as well.
But that strike has been going on for how long now?
Well, it was 14 weeks as of two weeks ago, so I guess 16 now.
Mercy. And we didn't even know about the strike, let alone the company.
Hopefully, we can follow that information and be updated as it progresses or regresses or whatnot.
Now, we had fun with our own phones as we were driving up there.
Now, you have a deal with AT&T. You have AT&T GSM. I have T-Mobile, and I also have Verizon CDMA.
Now, I was surprised by how much CDMA coverage there is up there.
In fact, I had coverage almost the whole time.
It was very reliable as far as figuring out what time zone I was in because there's several different time zones.
There's Atlantic that Nova Scotia is in.
There's Newfoundland time, which is an hour and a half ahead of us as opposed to just an hour.
And then on Saint-Pierre, the French island, they're actually two hours ahead.
Now, there was no coverage at all on Saint-Pierre CDMA-wise, but I was able to pick up a Newfoundland signal for the time at least and get that.
Actually, I was able to make a phone call too. I called to find out what the company was, and they said they were Alliant.
I don't know if we should admit what covered company was provided.
Well, Alliant is the CDMA company up there.
Now, when you were using your GSM on your AT&T GSM, what company were you going through?
I was using either Rogers or Fido slash Microcell.
Okay.
Did it greet you when you went into Canada with an SMS? Because I remember a friend of mine having that happen to him.
I had a greeting from – I think it was Rogers that greeted me, but they greeted me –
No, it was the other one.
Was it the other one, Micro whatever?
Yeah, that was the one that greeted.
Okay. Who's making that noise?
Oh, I'm sorry.
Was that you?
It was my computer telling me I have email.
You have an error tone as your email alert?
A special information tone.
Wow. I was looking for a phone off the hook somewhere.
Well, okay, so I got a greeting from Microtel.
Microcell.
Microcell. These names.
They greeted me a full day after I arrived, so I'd already been receiving phone calls and sending SMSs.
Now, the thing is I couldn't use my phone very much.
Mike was able to use his phone a lot more than me because he has a special deal with AT&T.
You call it the what deal again?
The imperialism plan.
Imperialism plan.
Which is not the official title.
You should not call up and ask for the imperialism plan.
Well, they might get better luck than you have dealing with them.
You have these long conversations with AT&T every time they call.
Every time I call AT&T, I wait 10 minutes on hold, and then no matter what I want from them, it takes a further 10 minutes.
But what I wanted in this particular case was what they call the North America package,
which in terms of telephone service makes Canada part of the United States is the easiest way to explain it.
Isn't that something?
So they just suddenly become part of the U.S., and you can go there and call from there and call to there, and it's like nothing.
It's just part of the free long distance and roaming thing.
So you were able to make phone calls up there, and it just got added to your minutes, or you had free nights and weekends, and you could talk as long as you wanted.
Right.
The one catch is that this apparently doesn't apply to data, so I still got to charge the roaming rate when I use GPRS, which they call M mode in AT&T speak.
Interesting.
Now, me, on the other hand, I had to pay 69 cents a minute.
I had to pay, I think, 20 cents for roaming and 49 cents for long distance or vice versa.
I'm not sure which.
But I called T-Mobile to ask them, do you have such a plan?
And they said right away, no, we don't.
I think they've gotten many calls from people asking about expanding their calling plan to Canada.
So, yeah, a lot of phone calls I didn't make when I was up there because of that.
And it's also expensive on CDMA as well, about the same price.
The one thing, of course, is to remember to cancel the imperialism plan when I got back.
Now, that was the half hour on the phone with AT&T yesterday.
That was another 20 minutes, yeah.
But they did.
They did it.
They almost deleted something you needed though, right?
Well, they were a little confused because I also have the feature where you can just call internationally from the U.S.
That's a feature.
You know, I'm not going to ask questions.
Okay.
I had to just make sure that they didn't delete that.
Okay.
Well, I think we did okay, cell phone-wise.
Now, my SMS messages, because I was communicating with people via SMS when I was up there.
What can I expect to pay for those?
You should look at your phone bill.
Well, I haven't gotten it yet.
Well, when you do, look at it.
All right.
Report back.
So, it's going to be, you know, a big surprise when I find out.
Okay.
So, I guess, and connectivity-wise, how do we do connectivity-wise?
I know we were in one place that had free Wi-Fi.
We went to this bar in St. Pierre that had Internet access.
The main problem with that bar was they had the French-style asserting keyboard.
And so, I didn't know where all the letters were.
It was a little…
It took a very long time to find the keys.
It was over a modem, and who knows where the modem went.
And it was pretty good to get Internet in really the middle of nowhere,
but it was not the most efficient Internet.
What was the name of the phone company there?
Spam was the name of the phone company?
SPM Telecom.
SPM Telecom.
Standing for St. Pierre and Miquelon.
Okay.
All right.
So, leave out the A.
And they, of course, were the GSM provider as well in that area.
When we were on the air last, we made a special offer to people in Halifax
that we would meet them at a particular place.
I believe it was Argyle's, was it?
Yes.
Argyle Street.
The Argyle on Argyle Street.
And we have to apologize because, well, we told people to meet us at 10 o'clock,
which was the exact time that they stopped serving food.
We didn't know that.
We offered to buy people dinner, and at 10 o'clock, precisely on the nose,
that's when the kitchen closes.
We were confused because the night before, we saw people out there until midnight.
I guess they were just drinking.
But it didn't matter anyway because nobody showed up, and we didn't really have to worry.
But we did get a letter from somebody saying,
I'm listening to the show at 4 a.m. on Thursday, July 29th, right now,
and I am in total shock.
I missed meeting Emanuel by only a block.
I went out to downtown Halifax at 1010 and went to a club a block away from the Argyle.
I now sit here at home, writing this completely bummed out that I missed such an opportunity.
I wish Emanuel all the best of luck on his trip,
and I'm sorry to hear he will miss the Tall Ships Festival in Halifax.
Cheers from Wade.
Well, Wade, we're sorry we missed you as well.
But as it turns out, you know, the place wasn't really open anyway.
We had a lot of fun in your city.
I'm sure we'll be back up there again sometime soon.
But the Tall Ships, yeah, we totally missed the Tall Ships.
We saw a couple of them, but we had to leave the day before they actually arrived.
Anything else that we have technology-wise to share with the people from up there?
Do we want to talk about the border?
Yeah, well, we can get right into the border crossings.
We talked about what happened to us when we went over to Yarmouth from Bar Harbor on the Cat Ferry.
We talked about that two weeks ago.
And then what we did was we drove through Nova Scotia.
We took the ferry over to Port-Au-Bas, drove all the way through Newfoundland,
went over to St. Pierre, Miquelon, the French Islands, came back,
drove up to St. John's, wonderful city, great place, I highly recommend it.
And, you know, you don't have to do all this driving.
You could probably just get on an airplane and fly to St. John's
and have a great time up there and be in a completely different place.
But then after that, we took a 14-hour ferry ride from St.—
17-hour.
17 hours because we had a sick passenger and it had to turn around and go back.
And we were asleep. We didn't know that happened.
So that was the longest boat ride I think I've ever taken in my life,
the longest any kind of a ride I think I've ever taken.
We wound up back at North Sydney, Nova Scotia.
We drove through there, through New Brunswick, and then crossing the border.
What was the city we crossed the border at?
I think it's called Houlton, Maine.
Houlton, Maine. Okay.
It's definitely in Maine.
Yeah.
The first indication of trouble came when—
well, the guy was really friendly.
He's like this kind of gruff, bearded guy.
He's like, hey, fellas, how you doing?
He was like kind of a smokey-the-bear kind of guy.
And, you know, when they're that friendly, you know there's something up.
You know there's more to it.
They're never that friendly and they just let you go.
So he started just asking a lot of questions, right?
You remember some of the things he was asking?
What we did for a living, obviously.
Where we had gone.
Where we were going.
If we had any illegal drugs with us.
Illegal drugs, weapons, that kind of thing.
And he looked at our passports.
And I knew there was trouble when he looked at my passport
and he wanted to know the purpose of my visit to Russia last year.
And, you know, what do you say to something like that?
The purpose of my visit to Russia?
Gathering intelligence.
Figuring out ways to subvert the system.
I mean, you know, someone should tell this guy Russia's not even communist anymore.
They're supposedly our friends.
Why would he want to know why I went to Russia?
Really very bizarre.
And then...
So what did you say, Emanuel?
Well, I said I just went there as a tourist.
I was careful to say tourist, not terrorist.
You know, you've got to be careful the way you pronounce things these days.
Extra syllable in there.
Extra syllable, yeah.
And he wanted to search the trunk.
Oh yeah, he asked how many things we were declaring.
And we both got two bottles of wine from St. Pierre's.
And he made sure that we told him that we had that.
You know?
And he wanted to know the total value of everything that we had.
I forgot about the CDs I had in my trunk.
I bought CDs from Newfoundland and Nova Scotia.
But he didn't seem to care about that.
And then he wanted to see my driver's license.
And, okay, this is where things got difficult.
Because, as many people know, I don't carry a wallet.
I just don't.
I don't like carrying wallets.
They're very thick.
They're bulky.
And plus, if you lose them, you lose everything.
And, you know, why should I have to carry a wallet?
Not to mention that your contents of your wallet wouldn't actually fit into it.
I have a lot of credit cards, yes.
You know, some people collect baseball cards.
I collect credit cards.
I'm not ashamed.
That's what I do.
But when I reached for my license, which is what he wanted to see,
well, it wasn't right there.
So I had to reach in and get all my cards.
And his eyes just literally bugged out of his head.
I said, oh, can I see all of those cards?
And I said, yeah, sure.
I don't have anything to hide.
Here, take a look at the cards.
And then he got to the cards that had the funny names on them.
You know, the different.
This is completely legal.
You can go to your credit card company and say,
I'd like to get an extra card for a friend or for a relative
or for, you know, the name of my dog or whatever.
You know, you can do this.
People do it all the time.
Apparently, he never heard of that before.
And immediately, as soon as he saw that I had different names, that was it.
You know, okay, pull your card in there.
And he did say, pull your card into the bay, right?
Yeah.
He said, pull your card into the bay.
And so what I did was I figured, you know,
he was going to come out and tell us to do something else.
And while I was waiting, I made a phone call to a friend of mine just to say,
hey, guess what?
We're being detained again in case something happens to us.
This is the last you may hear.
And as soon as the voicemail picked up, because the person didn't pick up,
the voicemail picked up, and I started leaving a message.
Within one second after that, it turned into a reorder,
a fast, busy signal.
I don't think it's something that came from the actual place.
I just thought it was a bad coincidence because at that very moment,
the guy came up to us and said, sir, I told you to come inside
and put down that phone.
He was very angry that I was making a phone call,
and he had never told us to come inside.
If, Emanuel, they were using a, if he just switched on a cellular jammer,
I don't think you would have heard the reorder.
It just would have gone dead.
That's what I think, too.
I think it would have just given me maybe the drop signal,
signal from my phone itself, or it just might have gone dead completely.
But I wouldn't put it past him to try something like that.
The timing was just rather bad.
So then we had to go inside.
He told me to leave my phones in the car and to lock the car.
No, to unlock.
No, to unlock the car and leave the keys in the car.
They wanted to go for a ride or something.
So then he told us to go into this little lobby area
where they had a couple of suspicious-looking people there.
And what did he say then?
He said to sit in the red chair.
Red chairs, because there were two of us.
There were some red chairs and some blue chairs in the little area.
Just semi-circle.
There were blue chairs on the outside, and then there were red chairs on the inside.
So Mike sat in the last red chair, and I sat in the first blue chair.
To me, that was just a way of exercising defiance.
And, you know, to them it might have seemed like stupidity.
But I just wanted to see if that would set them off.
Because at a stage like that, you know that there's nothing that they can find on you.
You're not doing anything illegal.
And you just want to see what it is that they're going to decide to get angry about.
Now, they were going after the whole credit card thing, and they were freaking out over this.
And I've been through this before.
I've been through this discussion before at border crossings, the Canadian border crossing in particular.
That's the only one that seems to care about this.
And I explained to them exactly how this works.
And they just were not getting it.
They kept asking, well, why would you want to do something like that?
You know, the people I hang out with, they find that kind of thing funny.
Well, the people I hang out with wouldn't find that kind of thing funny.
Well, I don't hang out with the people you hang out with.
There was no nice way of saying that.
You didn't say he has no sense of humor.
I didn't say that.
I tried to be, you know, very up front, honest with them, volunteering information.
Not too much information.
I just wanted to answer their question, but not give information out that they might use in a bad way.
They kept us there for a while.
Meanwhile, George Bush, Dick Cheney, Tom Ridge, and some unidentified person were staring down at us.
They had these pictures.
Dick Cheney on the left, and George W. Bush on the right.
I would think it would be the opposite order.
I think you would put the head of the country to the left.
I think they did.
Because you read left to right.
Yeah.
I guess maybe they did.
You're right.
Those pictures were staring down at us the whole time.
They also had this amazing picture.
Of course, I couldn't take a picture of it because my camera was in the car.
God only knows what they would have done if I tried to take a picture in that place.
They had this picture of the World Trade Center being hit by the terrorist planes.
Except they didn't have the terrorist planes.
They had the stars and stripes.
They had a flag in the background, and it looked in this picture.
If you want to see it for yourself, get pulled over in that particular station and go and look.
It looked like one of the red stripes of the flag was piercing the World Trade Center and causing it to explode.
I couldn't think of a better symbolic picture.
They had it right there.
So, yeah, we were looking at that for a while.
Then they went out to search the car.
That's the part that was kind of troublesome, don't you think?
I think so.
They searched the car without us being there.
When we got searched going into Canada, they were very careful to make sure that we were there at all times and we were watching everything they were doing.
They were telling us what they were doing as they were doing it.
They were kind of almost apologetic.
These guys, they said, you stay there.
Two of them went out, and they searched through our car without us being able to watch what they were doing.
I've been searched before in the United States, and they always allowed you to see what was going on.
Who knows what these people were doing?
Who knows what they could have taken, what they could have planted?
Were you asked for permission to search your car?
No, we were not.
We were not asked for any permission.
You should complain at least about not observing them search the car.
And, in fact, aside from the fact I'm going to say this on the radio, perhaps you should even lie and say things were taken.
But, of course, now that I've said that, they'll come back and get this tape.
Yeah.
You see, that's my policy when I talk to people like this.
Never lie about anything.
It doesn't mean you have to volunteer information, but don't have things that you're trying to hide and, you know, look nervous as a result of it.
It's a felony besides to lie to a law enforcement official.
So, if you say—
That's how they got Martha Stewart for just lying.
Federal level.
Yeah.
That means don't tell them you think they did a good job or anything like that because that is a lie, and you could get in trouble for it.
Well, seriously, you should complain to—this was Border Patrol, INS, Homeland Security?
Yeah.
It says Homeland Security now.
Right.
It's under Homeland Security.
You should complain and say, hey, they searched my car.
I don't—it turns out they didn't take anything, but they could have.
You know, why couldn't you just let me watch them search the car?
Jim, I'm one step ahead of you.
I'm one step ahead of you.
Go ahead.
I already wrote them a letter.
Good.
We'll report back if they reply.
It calls into the question the whole probable cause thing.
I mean, you're a U.S. citizen on U.S., in the U.S., right?
Right.
And your car was searched by law enforcement officials, and you were not asked for in order to give consent,
and that leaves open the thing of whether there was probable cause that you had to believe that you had committed a crime.
Well, you know, they were confused by the whole credit card thing, and I'll give them that.
Fine.
You know, you don't understand that.
I'll explain it to you.
You want to search the car.
I would even give consent.
I didn't like the fact that they were doing it without us being able to watch it like we were able to in the past,
and I tried several times to explain to them, and, you know, eventually I think they understood.
In fact, they might have understood the whole time.
If you're going to steal somebody's identity or commit credit card fraud, you don't carry all the different identities with you,
and you don't have the same account number as the person that you're trying to steal the identity with.
That's not how it works, and they must know this.
And there was one time where one of the guys was coming up to me, and he just was asking me,
have you ever been in trouble with the law for credit card fraud?
And I said, no, and he just kept staring at me like I was going to crack under his, you know,
Kojak stare or whatever he thought he was giving me, and I just said again, no.
Go away now, and he did.
Just to clarify on what Bernie said, when you're crossing the border, you have no rights, basically.
Your normal U.S. citizen rights don't apply when you're at the border crossing legally.
I'm wondering, yeah, I'm wondering about that legal no man's land.
I mean, that's the first I've heard of that.
I mean, you're a U.S. citizen in the United States, so do you relinquish?
I mean, is there a sign or something that says, like, once you cross this line,
you agree to give up your Fourth Amendment rights?
I mean, did you see a sign that said something like that?
No, and I don't agree that that's true.
I think they're violating your rights.
I think so, too.
I don't think you've given up your rights.
I think these people are just overstepping the boundaries.
Speaking purely legally rather than what actually makes sense,
you have not yet entered the United States, and therefore you do not have the legal rights.
Whether or not they have the moral right to be searching you for no good reason is another thing.
Is that what you're saying?
In a legal sense, yes.
In a physical sense, we were.
Yeah.
And there was another thing, too, I did just to test the system,
because I was very confident at that point.
I knew they weren't going to find anything.
I knew everything I was telling them was the truth,
and I knew eventually they had to let us into the damn country.
But I decided I wanted to go to the bathroom.
You know, we were sitting there, and nothing was happening.
They were searching our car.
I figured, you know, I'm going to go to the bathroom.
As soon as I started walking to the bathroom, one of the officers who was left behind said,
Sir, where are you going?
I said, I'm going to the bathroom.
Sir, please sit down.
I'm like, I want to go to the bathroom.
Can I not go to the bathroom?
I have to check to make sure it's okay for you to go to the bathroom.
And so I asked, are we under arrest?
Are we being held here?
And she just ran out to ask the guys if it was okay for me to use the bathroom.
But to be honest, I didn't have to use the bathroom.
I wanted to see if this would be an issue,
if they would actually try to keep me in one position where I couldn't move,
and they wanted to keep an eye on me at all times.
I was trying to assess the situation, and eventually she came back and said,
Yes, it's okay, you can use the bathroom.
When I went in there, I just took a look around to see if they had cameras,
to see if they had somebody watching over me,
to see if they had any way of possibly monitoring somebody in that situation.
It also told me that they didn't think I was a drug mule that was going to flush the evidence.
If they thought that, they would have watched you go to the bathroom,
and the contents of your bowels would have gone into a special chute
that was sprayed with water for inspection later.
Yeah, and I would have noticed that too, and I would have commented on it,
but that did not happen, and I didn't notice anything inside
that looked like it was a way of monitoring.
However, you know, they're very good at this kind of thing, so who knows.
And at the very end, when it was all over, after they had searched our car,
I said to them, I hope we didn't cause too much confusion,
which was my way of saying, Boy, are you stupid.
And they said, Oh, no, not at all.
And they were eager to get us out of there.
It was like, you know, this had never happened.
Please don't ever mention this to anybody.
So that was our little visit through Customs on the way in.
Mike, I'm curious as to what your letter said
and what you find out from this letter.
I will, if you really want, you and anyone else who emails OTH at 2600.com
can receive a copy of my letter, and I will report on the show
if they should say anything interesting in reply.
Okay, we do have other things to discuss tonight.
First of all, one very quick piece of news.
You might have heard this, actually, if you're watching the Weather Channel or something.
There's a potential hurricane building up in the Gulf.
Bonnie, Hurricane Bonnie.
If you recall Freedom Downtime, Hurricane Bonnie hit us in Wilmington, North Carolina.
For the past six years, this storm has been apparently back in the Gulf,
and it's reared its ugly head again.
And now it's heading right for the United States.
I had no idea that storms, I mean, you know, the big spot on Jupiter is a storm.
That's been around for hundreds of years, so I guess it's possible.
But yes, Hurricane Bonnie may be back, so be careful.
I've seen the storm firsthand, and it's something you don't want to mess with.
And it's also the name of Kevin Mitnick's ex-wife, just in case anybody forgot that fact.
I hate to break this to you, but they reused the names.
They reused? Why would they reuse the names?
Unless it's really a gigantic storm, they reused the names.
Okay, well, that's—who's to say?
You know, I'm looking at a map of Bonnie right now, and it's like right over Cuba.
But you never hear that when we listen to U.S. weather forecasts,
they pretend that Cuba doesn't even exist.
You know, typically the weathercaster will, like, stand in front of the map,
like, blocking out Cuba so you can't see it,
and they won't mention anything about all the death and destruction the hurricane is causing in Cuba.
They'll only mention, like, Florida and other Caribbean islands.
You ever notice that?
Well, actually, Bernie, that's not entirely true,
because if it does cause massive death and destruction to Cuba,
we will focus on all the suffering Cubans,
and how they wouldn't be suffering if they were only an American state.
Then the hurricane would avoid them.
Yes.
Or something like that.
We had a 2600 meeting last Friday, as we do the first Friday of every month.
This one was rather unusual.
It was al fresco, was it not?
It was al fresco, all right, but—oh, boy.
Well, as we've been discussing—no, wait, we haven't been discussing.
We haven't been on the air since this happened.
The whole craziness with the new terror threat hitting the financial buildings,
because apparently somebody took pictures of the buildings a couple of years ago,
and they showed up someplace.
Pakistan, I think.
Yeah.
Apparently that's the way to get attention.
If you take a picture of a building and send it to Pakistan, all hell will break loose.
So they closed out the atrium, which is where we have our meetings,
in the Citigroup building, not before they had a press conference.
Is that right, Bernie?
Several.
Yes, there were several press conferences.
In fact, I believe the First Lady and Mayor Bloomsburg and Tom Ridge
actually sat in the atrium the day after the announcement
to reassure everyone that the atrium in the Citicorp Center was a safe place to be,
and then they promptly closed it off to everybody.
Unbelievable.
Well, the first press conference was Monday.
That was Laura Bush and her two daughters and the governor.
The next day it was Tom Ridge and the mayor.
And then they decided that the high-profile people have been there,
let's not tempt fate, and they threw everybody out.
Because when I called them to find out about the meeting,
I mean, if it would be open, and they said,
oh, yeah, no problem, it's open, and it was closed.
Well, you know, part of the problem is that you don't know who to call in that place.
It's very difficult to find somebody who's actually in charge.
Now, I think this is perhaps getting ahead of the story and everything,
but I was thinking we should find a lawyer who specializes in buildings and landmark law.
You may say, what?
Jim has gone off the deep end?
Well, maybe so.
You've said that before.
Well, yeah, exactly.
It hasn't stopped me.
You've been in the water for a while.
But the point is this.
Citibank got a variance to build that tall because of a public atrium.
If the atrium is closed, it is not there.
If it is not there, they should tear down that building.
Let's sue.
Close the whole building.
Yeah, close the whole building.
We must sue.
In all fairness, is this city group doing this,
or are they being ordered to do this by the government?
Irrelevant.
Why is that irrelevant?
It's not irrelevant.
I mean, if they're not allowed to open, you can't really blame them for not being open.
You can blame the government for forcing them not to be open.
I can and do blame them.
Well, we had the meeting on Friday,
and it was a very bizarre meeting because we had to stand outside the whole time.
There were cops.
There were security people.
There were guys walking around with machine guns.
Cops, not just people, random citizens.
I can just see the parents out there freaking out whose kids go to these meetings.
And it was extremely weird.
I mean, people at the meeting were great.
Everybody was having a good time, doing what we usually do.
And I do have to also give credit to the cops because they didn't harass us in any way.
And I was expecting something to happen.
Redhack, you fell asleep at one point sitting on the wall,
which I was sure they were going to say something about,
who's this vagrant sleeping on the wall there?
We even have a picture of it.
And they didn't.
They turned a blind eye to that.
There was an incident.
I got involved in an incident within five minutes of the meeting beginning
because I took a picture of the building.
Well, I think you intentionally got involved.
Well, again, I was testing the limits to see just what I was going to be told not to do.
I took a picture, and sure enough, an employee of Citigroup said,
you can't do that.
Don't take a picture.
And I'm standing on a sidewalk.
I'm standing on a sidewalk taking a picture of a building.
And I said, of course I have the right to take a picture of a building.
And then a minute later, a cop walked over to me and said,
they don't want you to take a picture of the building.
I said, yeah, I know they don't want me to,
but what I'm saying is I have the right to take a picture of the building
despite the fact that they don't want me to.
And he nodded his head and walked away.
So, you know, we understood each other on that level, which was a good thing.
And I think that's important for people to be testing the system
to make sure it's not abusing their rights that way.
Now, we have a lot of reports coming in of people.
There's this guy in Queens who was arrested because he videotaped buildings.
He's in federal custody right now in North Carolina
after being caught videotaping buildings and transportation systems
in several U.S. cities.
His name is Kamran Akhtar.
They say so far they haven't found any ties to terrorism.
And the law enforcement officials are defining him as a video buff.
But he's in custody because apparently he gave,
as Bernie was pointing out, a conflicting statement to a federal official.
And if you do something like that, they'll go after you.
Well, not exactly.
The guy was in, I believe, Charlotte, North Carolina.
And he was, I saw the cop that arrested him on TV last night.
The cop, I believe, said he was in an automobile taking videotapes.
And the cop said, what's up?
And he gave conflicting stories to the cop.
The cop hauled him in.
He's an illegal alien who's been here 16 years
and overstayed his deportation order by six years.
That's why he's in federal lockup now, because he overstayed a deportation order.
The New York cops have no record of him.
They're of the opinion he's a video buff.
But yet the descriptions of the videos seem to suggest
that they're all landmarks and financial institution buildings
in various cities throughout the South.
Dams in Texas, the governor's mansion, assorted buildings in Texas,
Carolinas, and such wise.
So I don't know. This could go either way.
Well, the way the story is being reported throughout the media
is that he was arrested after videotaping buildings
or for videotaping buildings.
So the effect that has on the average person who isn't violating any laws,
who isn't an illegal alien,
is that if I start taking pictures of buildings, I'm going to get in trouble.
So I'm not going to take pictures of buildings.
Well, that's the intention of the news media in this case.
They are trying to tie it in.
Why is that their intention?
They're trying to tie it in to all the other news that's going on.
If it's just video buff gets arrested because he overstayed his detention order,
it's two paragraphs on page 8.
Whereas it's a big story that will sell papers
if it's another terrorist caught perhaps.
Maybe the media wants a monopoly on taking videos.
That's not impossible too, actually.
The point is taking pictures of a building is not, never has been,
and never will be a threat.
Maybe terrorists do take pictures,
but you know terrorists do all sorts of things that average people do as well.
You cannot allow this to stop you from doing things
that are completely within your rights.
And that's why people should continue to take pictures.
In fact, I think people should en masse go out
and start taking pictures of these bridges and buildings and whatnot
just to, what's that beep?
I think it's Bernie.
Are you beeping, Bernie?
It's not bad.
People should be taking pictures.
Busloads of people should descend on financial buildings
and bridges and dams and whatever else,
and people should snap away.
Don't forget the Amtrak, the current still running Amtrak contest.
I think it's called See Yourself on a Train.
And you can, whoever takes the best pictures of Amtrak trains
can win like a nationwide trip on Amtrak.
It's still running.
Yeah, and take pictures of subways.
Inside the subway, outside the subway.
There are no laws prohibiting you from taking pictures
on a public city street
or in any part of non-private property.
Now I know people are going to say
Emanuel's advocating terrorism by telling people to take pictures.
And people will say that.
But I think we have to stand up for what little rights we have left.
Another thing we should possibly do is
we should picket the tip of Manhattan.
Because I don't know if people out in the rest of America know this,
but the Stump of Liberty has reopened.
That's what some people are calling the Statue of Liberty.
Because now, although you can go on the island,
which you could after 9-11,
you can also now go into the base of the statue
and look through a glass ceiling at the stairs
that you're no longer allowed to climb.
Wait, do you mean they opened the Statue of Liberty,
but they didn't open the stairs?
They opened the base.
You can't go up the Statue of Liberty?
Well, you can go into the base.
You can get under her skirt, that's it.
And even for that, don't you need to give them two forms of ID
and go through a bomb-sniffing machine?
Oh, yeah.
Remember we talked about that Amtrak station in New Carrollton, Maryland,
which had the puffer, the device that smells you
to see if you've got explosives?
Well, they've got one of those on Liberty Island now.
Yep.
How about that?
Yeah.
So, what I was thinking is
we buy fireworks in North Carolina or someplace,
take them apart,
and just after it rains,
the evening before, just before sunrise,
around the Statue of Liberty,
where the line will form for Liberty Island,
just throw the gunpowder on the ground in the puddles
so people traipse through the puddles.
You're going to measures that I think are well beyond
what we need to go to.
Just don't do that in an airport.
I'm saying pictures.
I don't know about throwing gunpowder into puddles.
Taking pictures of buildings and bridges and monuments,
but the point is it will get on people's shoes.
The puffer will detect this on a thousand people.
I think it's a great bit of protest.
Well, you can say that, I guess.
It's just a theoretical idea.
Anyway, the point is,
with these meetings that we have once a month,
it's going to get kind of inconvenient
when the weather starts getting bad,
and who knows?
They kept the Statue of Liberty closed for almost three years.
Maybe they're going to close the atrium of the Citigroup building,
and we'll have to meet out in the street every time
with gun-toting cops everywhere.
We don't need this,
and I think we need to get to the bottom of it.
Now, I've tracked down a phone number for Citigroup,
and I called them several times,
have yet to get a call back,
have yet to get any kind of a comment from them
as to just what the plan is.
I've heard a rumor that they're going to reopen it next Monday, maybe,
but that rumor comes from one of the employees inside.
Do you still have the number for their security line I gave you?
I don't have that number
because that number really isn't going anywhere
that anybody can answer questions.
This number, they can answer questions,
but they just aren't doing it.
It's 212-751-1007.
If you call that number,
you'll get somebody at Citigroup,
and maybe they'll answer your question,
maybe they won't,
maybe they'll call you back,
maybe they won't.
We need to know.
We need to know if this public space is going to be open,
and we need to put pressure on them to stop this nonsense.
There is no new threat.
This is something from several years ago,
and threats exist all over the place.
We're told to live our lives normally,
and then this kind of thing happens,
and we can't.
So let us know if you find anything.
Also, if you have any good pictures,
I don't want to start too much trouble here,
but people have the right to take pictures,
people have the right to document things in public spaces.
If you have pictures of buildings and bridges,
send them on in,
and we'll put them on the website if we get enough of them.
And then people don't have to take pictures anymore.
They don't have to take pictures anymore.
And they'll be there,
and everybody can inspect them.
Manuel, I just want to touch briefly on the rationale
behind closing all these buildings,
or for this whole security scare,
was because supposedly this guy in Pakistan
was found to have all these pictures on his laptop hard drive.
And I've heard the media repeatedly report
this guy is an Al-Qaeda-affiliated computer engineer
who was supposedly coordinating secure communications
between Al-Qaeda leadership via encrypted email
or other encrypted messaging methods.
It seems to me that if someone was doing that,
why wouldn't they just encrypt their hard drive?
Because obviously they would be suspecting
they could be a target of investigation.
But I don't know.
It just seems pretty illogical to me
that this guy was supposedly a computer engineer,
security expert for secure communications,
and he doesn't encrypt any of the files on his hard drive.
It's just totally illogical.
I think the story is made up.
Now there's some doubt that he's even that,
that he's even any kind of a consultant at all.
I question this story at all,
and the timing of it,
right after the Democratic National Convention.
The whole thing just seems to smell rotten.
And you can only imagine
what kinds of things are going to be introduced
in the couple of weeks ahead.
We have the Republican Convention,
which will be taking place, what,
is it two weeks from now, or is it three weeks from now?
Two weeks.
Two weeks from now at this time.
28th, 29th, something like that.
There's going to be a convention in this town.
We happen to have some events
that our listeners might be interested in
that was leaked to us by a friendly listener.
And again, if you have things to give to us, please,
you can either email them to us, oth at 2600.com,
or mail them to us at offthehookcareofwbai, 120...
Do you have something to say to interrupt the address?
Go ahead.
I have to start again, though.
offthehookcareofwbai, 120 Wall Street,
10th floor, New York, New York, 10005.
And you know, Jim, we got a piece of email
that a confused listener wrote in.
I don't want to say confused,
but maybe an agitated listener.
He actually wanted us to reply an email about this,
but I think it's something
that we should talk about on the air.
How come you can't have one person read the entire address
if someone wants to send mail?
The zip code is always read by a different person
than reads the rest of the address.
And I can understand why this might upset some people,
but you have to understand that there's...
What we have here is something called compartmentalization,
where certain bits of information
are in the domain of some people and other people.
It's done for everybody's security, actually.
Right, if Al-Qaeda or someone else captures us...
I won't know the zip code.
You won't know the address.
Exactly.
And that's the way I think we should...
The studio there is known as a SCIF,
which is a CIA acronym
for Secure Compartmentalized Information Facility.
Mm-hmm.
And this is necessary for the protection of our listeners
and the staff and, of course,
everybody in this fine city of ours.
And that's... I think you'll find,
if you listen to other radio shows in the city,
that's how everybody else does it.
Go ahead, listen.
When you hear the address, it's mandated.
It's required.
Right.
We have to do it that way.
Right.
All these other stations are in danger.
If you-know-what hits the fan,
only BAI will remain as your source of information.
Why?
Because we're organized in cells.
I hope that puts an end to all the questioning,
because it's really, you know,
it's really a burden, all these questions.
Redhack, you had something to interrupt with a second ago.
There was also...
I remember Mike gave us a copy on Friday
of the Protester's Guide to the RNC.
Is there anywhere where people can get that?
Because that had a lot of the events also.
Yeah, the folks who put this together,
I'm really impressed with how beautifully
this map of Manhattan
with interesting spots for RNC protesters came out.
Their website is rncguide.com,
and if you go there and you can poke around,
there's a PDF up there, I think,
and there's probably some way to get a paper copy.
If you're lucky enough to have a paper copy,
you'll hold dear to your heart for many years to come,
if it's not ripped out of your hands by a cop.
Now, Redhack, you have a list of some things that are going on.
You want to pick a couple at random,
and maybe we can spread more of them later.
Okay.
These are RNC events.
Right.
Or, Jim, if you want to read one, since...
You know, I'm a Republican.
I can't...
Well, just because you're going to all these things
doesn't mean that we can't as well.
Hey, I was invited.
All right, well, go ahead.
I would just like to invite our listeners
to an event on Thursday, September 2nd,
hosted by the New York delegation.
It will be at Madame Tussard's The Wax Museum,
which is 234 West 42nd and near 7th Avenue
from 5 to 7 p.m.,
and it sounds like a fun party.
How will you be able to tell the Republicans from the wax figures?
I don't know.
I'm so nasty.
Don't you guys have anything that you want to share?
Redhack, you look perplexed.
Are they all so good, or are they all so bad?
I'm reading.
I want to pick a good one.
Well, you know what?
Just jump in with something.
Don't mention the ones I'm going to, okay?
Which ones are you going to?
The ones with the stars.
The ones with the stars.
The asterisks, you mean, or the luminaries?
Well, that too.
All right.
Well, we're going to take phone calls to 1-2-2-0-9-2-9-100,
but I also wanted to mention the Olympics are coming up later this week.
Boy, everything's happening at once.
And, oh boy, you want to talk about security.
If you're going to the Olympics,
you'd better be careful what you say and do in public.
Software will be watching and listening.
Recent leaps in technology have paired highly sophisticated software
with street surveillance cameras
to create digital security guards with intelligence-gathering skills.
It is a very vast network,
and it is the first time it is being done on such a scale at an international level,
according to a Greek police spokesman.
The system, developed by a consortium led by San Diego-based
Science Applications International Corp., or SIAC,
cost about $312 million
and took up a sizable chunk of Athens' record security budget
of more than $1.5 billion.
It gathers images and audio from an electronic web
of over 1,000 high-resolution and infrared cameras,
12 patrol boats, 4,000 vehicles,
9 helicopters, a sensor-laden blimp,
and 4 mobile command centers.
Spoken words collected by the cameras,
yes, I said that,
spoken words collected by the cameras
with speech recognition software
are transcribed into text
that is then searched for patterns
along with other electronic communications
entering and leaving the area,
including email and image files.
The system, which includes components
already used by U.S. and British government intelligence agencies,
covers all of greater Athens,
nine ports, airports,
and all other Olympic cities.
Can you imagine they have to scan
all the different languages that must be spoken there
for various words and phrases?
It's really, uh...
They spent, Emmanuel,
well over $50 million
for security at this event.
That's a lot of money.
It is a lot of money,
and according to this here,
they can distinguish the sound of a flat tire
from an explosion or a gunshot
and inform the user at the command center of the incident.
This is also the case with any anomaly in the picture,
such as a traffic jam.
Technology also allows the users of the system
at the main command center
to save and analyze data
from the surveillance network and beyond,
and the material from the closed-circuit cameras
is kept for seven days.
Yeah, right.
So specific incidents can be analyzed in depth.
They're going to have this for years,
and they're probably going to keep it installed.
Much of the analysis is enabled by software
from London-based Autonomy Corporation,
whose clients include
the United States National Security Agency.
They parse words and phrases
collected by surveillance cameras
and in communications traffic.
They've been doing it for years.
In June, the Greek government
expanded surveillance powers
to screen mobile and fixed-line telephone calls
during the Olympics.
It listens, reads, and watches,
according to Autonomy's chief marketing officer.
Then it synthesizes.
Beyond Greek and English,
the software understands Arabic, Farsi,
and all major European languages.
Other companies in the SAIC consortium
include Germany's Siemens, General Dynamics,
and Honeywell International,
and the Israeli company Elbit Systems.
Several Greek companies also are participating.
Wait, so folks who speak like Pashto or something
are immune from this?
Well, they're not saying that specifically,
but you could make that assumption, I suppose.
Okay.
A network of sensors designed to detect chemical agents
has also been deployed near Olympic venues
and around the capital,
including on the security blimp.
Advanced technology is also used
in the creation of the Olympic credentials,
which use such security features as holograms.
Weren't we using those years ago, Bernie?
Yes.
Well, I guess they took notes.
All cardholder information,
such as a person's photo and passport number,
are printed on a very thin film
designed to make the cards impossible to forge.
This really is going to give people nightmares, I think.
I mean, everybody's cellular phone calls
are going to be monitored and listened to.
I mean, that's a phone tap, isn't it?
Yeah.
You're in Greece.
You have no...
It's like Echelon.
It's exactly like Echelon.
In fact, they didn't mention Echelon,
but some of this technology
is precisely what they've been using.
And it's all going to be undone by low-tech.
You have something for us right now?
Okay.
We have some events,
and we're going to take some phone calls.
212-209-2900.
One of them I actually have a question about.
Generally, when does the New York Public Library
close during the week?
Jim?
Well, it depends.
Five o'clock for the main branches, usually.
All right.
Well, if you want to stay late,
they are having a reception and dinner
at the New York Public Library
on Tuesday, the 31st, for...
It doesn't really say, so I know.
I don't know how they're going to decide
who can come in or not.
Maybe you need a badge,
something like that.
Hmm.
Interesting.
Tuesday, the 31st, you say?
Yes.
Well, then that means
it's not two weeks from now, is it?
It's three weeks from now.
If today is the 13th...
Well, Friday is the 13th.
Today is the what?
Today would be the 11th.
Two weeks.
About.
No, three weeks,
because the 18th and the 25th
and the 30th or the 24th...
Someone help us out here with the calendar.
Good God.
Whenever it is.
I think it's three weeks from now.
The 31st.
All right.
I think it's three weeks, not two weeks.
All right.
And then after that,
if you've, you know, gone to the dinner,
you can go to a game at Yankee Stadium
between the Yankees and the Cleveland Indians.
They can't have reserved the whole stadium.
I don't know.
If you're interested in that event, though,
you can call Mary Sue Hempler at...
Let's not give out the phone numbers on the air,
but this will be spread around various ways.
And on the next day,
there's a grill at Bryant Park,
a barbecue, I guess.
Oh, I've been to grills in Bryant Park.
They're very nice.
So that's from 4.30 to 7 p.m.
And there's a phone number associated with that,
I guess, maybe you have to call ahead.
Well, we're going to look into this a little bit more,
and if people have more information to give us,
please forward it on down to the addresses we gave before.
And, of course, if you have any way
of getting us into some of these things,
including the conference itself,
we promise not to cause any problems.
We're just going to be very observant
and tell people what we see,
because that's what we do.
212-209-2900.
Let's take our first listener phone call.
Good evening. You're on.
Oh, good evening.
How are you doing?
This is in relation about the transit systems
getting photographed or filmed or whatever.
Mm-hmm.
Back in August of 2001,
I was filming the last days of the PCC trolleys
in Newark, New Jersey's subway system.
Mm-hmm. Okay.
And I had no problem hanging out the window with my camera.
I had no problem riding up and down the transit system,
like, for hours, filming, videotaping,
and taking still photos.
In fact, train crews were running around with cameras
because they're going to, you know,
at the end of the week,
they're going to be scrapped or whatever.
But I got scolded by a transit cop
in the lobby of Penn Station, Newark,
for videotaping, you know, the lamps
and, you know, the big bullhead over the door
and things like that.
According to cousins of mine who are PATH employees,
there is apparently no legal restriction on photographing,
but they just heavily discourage you from doing this.
They've been doing it for years.
It's like when we were filming Freedom Downtime.
We were told that we were not allowed to film prisons,
even prisons that were visible from city streets.
But there's no law anywhere that says
you're not allowed to do this.
You'll just get scolded.
You'll get yelled at.
You might even get detained.
It's possible.
But I think people need to be willing to take that risk
to preserve their rights.
You are allowed to take pictures of things
that are in public areas.
Yeah, recall the Bureau of Prisons even had a sign
on the new federal facility they built here in Philadelphia
saying that it was against the law to take any photographs.
It was in the Freedom Downtime movie, that sign.
Yeah, I worked outside of the Navy.
When I called the BOP, I talked to five different people
and they all said, well, there really isn't such a law.
We just said that.
Yeah, there's a Navy base near where I work
and they have these signs deep in the woods
saying photography is prohibited.
Well, guess what?
You've got hunters in the perimeter during deer season,
so what the hell is that all about?
Yeah, yeah.
Guns are allowed, but cameras aren't.
Oh, yeah, they're more dangerous.
Thanks for your call.
Quite all right. Have a good one.
212-209-2900 is our phone number.
And good evening, you're on.
That's us.
Speak up, please. You're on.
Hey, how are you?
Pretty good. How are you doing?
I'm actually listening on the Internet.
I don't know if it's delayed.
It's a little bit delayed, yeah, so you want to turn it down
so you don't get confused.
Oh, yeah, I'll just turn it down.
Hey, I'm from Miami.
Just wanted to say hi to you guys.
My name is Brian.
How are you doing?
I was at the HOPE conference.
My first conference since I moved here to the States
two years ago, so I just wanted to thank you guys for everything.
Did you have fun?
Oh, yes, a lot.
Brian, where are you from?
I'm from Argentina.
Wow.
Yeah, so I'm kind of represented that country right now.
Well, I hope you're at the next one, too.
We've heard nothing but good things from people
who had a great time at the conference
and were still getting reports.
Yeah, it was a blast. It really was.
And a lot of people learned all kinds of things.
We are trying to get the audio and video together,
and it's just been a question of catching up
to all kinds of other things,
so that will be available as soon as we can possibly do it.
Yeah, I'm looking up to that.
Took a lot of pictures also,
so I just want to say hi to my friend Jody from Long Island also.
Okay.
And thank you for everything again.
All right. Thanks for calling.
Bye.
212-209-2900.
And good evening. You're on.
Hi, Manuel.
How are you doing?
Hi, this is Gene from Pennsylvania here.
How are you?
Okay.
Yes, on your conference up there,
the very first one that I went to,
the good news is it's fantastic.
The bad news is it wasn't long enough.
Well, it was three days long.
I don't know how much more we could stand
for all this coordination.
Yeah, I know.
It's quite an undertaking.
I know that.
It's just that I wanted to attend
as many of them conferences up there as possible.
You know, the lectures.
The panels, yeah.
Yeah.
And it was a real chore just to, you know,
get the list and go through them
and any changes that came up and all that, you know.
Mm-hmm.
I do have one technical question, though.
Go ahead.
I've been bothered by about the last two,
two and a half, maybe three years,
with a condition that either I get it
when I pick up the phone
or it leaves it on my answering machine.
It's an off-hook signal, okay?
Mm-hmm.
The fast pulsing, right?
It'll get through to my answering machine
and leave it on there.
Now, I phoned the police department about this.
You phoned the police about an off-hook tone
on your answering machine?
Well, the thing of it is,
it came in by itself, okay?
Okay.
And when I talked to him about it,
he says, oh, that's two machines
trying to talk together,
like one of the machines is programmed
one digit off and it automatically got,
you know, it just got through.
And he says, we don't worry about those things.
But what is it?
That's what I'm trying to find out.
I'm not sure if I'm understanding it completely,
but what it sounds like to me
is that something is calling in
and something is not hanging up.
I know this used to happen a lot
on old-fashioned answering machines
that didn't detect when the phone
actually was disconnected
and would just keep recording.
And sometimes you'd get, say, 45 seconds
or a minute of just the off-hook tone
until it timed out.
Gene, is this an old tape-based answering machine?
Oh, what, mine?
Yeah.
No, no, this is the latest,
whatever they're selling around,
you know, digital.
Do you have caller ID?
No.
Well, wait a minute, wait a minute.
Maybe it does.
I don't use it.
Okay.
Well, if you have it,
you might want to see
who called you at that time.
Well, yeah, I went through that.
You know, you call back
or, you know, you use star 67 or whatever.
And?
And, of course, it says
it is not in my territory,
so they can't trace it, you know.
Wow.
But, you know, it bothers me.
I assume other people
have come along with it.
I know one other person
beside myself has gotten this.
And this comes up.
My God, it must be at least,
oh, God, 15, 16 times,
maybe 20 times a month.
And it goes on and on.
Is it about the same time
every day?
No, no, no, no.
It's arbitrary, really.
Is it ever in the middle of the night?
The only time I,
the latest I ever got it
was about 12, 15 a.m.
Interesting.
Yeah, and as I said,
it's been on for about,
oh, two, two and a half years
or so like that.
And I just wondered,
I figured it was a harassment situation.
But this thing has got to,
it's got to call my line.
My line picks up.
And the next thing it does,
it goes right into the off-tone hook
or off-hook tone.
And it goes on and on
until it times out.
Yeah.
Call Verizon's Annoyance Call Bureau.
Yeah, it's in the front of your phone book.
Unfortunately, we're out of time on this.
We can't pursue it anymore.
But I don't know.
You know, it used to be back in the day
when you get phone calls
that were mysterious.
You didn't go and call the cops right away.
I don't know.
This seems kind of strange.
Okay, we're out of time.
We're going to be back again next week.
Mike, you have something for us?
Well, the music that you're going to play,
I just want to point out
that the folks who do this
will be in New York City
on Friday the 20th.
And this is something
we picked up in Newfoundland.
It's a song about Newfoundland
and about how you better not
mess with Newfoundland,
especially you people in Montreal.
Yeah, we hope that the folks
when they come to New York
to do their concert
do not lose their mind.
What's the band name?
The Navigators.
So we've already started.
We'll see you next week.
I'm a Newfoundlander
Born and bred
And I'll be one till I die
I'm proud to be an islander
And here's the reasons why
I'm free as the wind
And the waves wash the sands
There's no place I would rather be
Than here in Newfoundland
Now in Montreal
The Frenchmen say
That they own Labrador
Including Indian Harbor
Where my father fished before
And if they want to fight for her
Well, I'll surely make a stand
And they'll regret the day
They tried to take our Newfoundland
I'm a Newfoundlander
Born and bred
And I'll be one till I die
I'm proud to be an islander
And here's the reasons why
I'm free as the wind
And the waves wash the sands
There's no place I would rather be
Than here in Newfoundland
Now that the oil is on our shore
We'd better take the time
To develop it more carefully
Or else you're going to find
What could have been the answer
To our poor economy
Has changed our way of living
And destroyed our fishery
I'm a Newfoundlander
Born and bred
And I'll be one till I die
I'm proud to be an islander
And here's the reasons why
I'm free as the wind
And the waves wash the sands
There's no place I would rather be
Than here in Newfoundland
I'm a Newfoundlander
Born and bred
And I'll be one till I die
I'm proud to be an islander
And here's the reasons why
I'm free as the wind
And the waves wash the sands
There's no place I would rather be
Than here in Newfoundland
There's no place I would rather be
Than here in Newfoundland