UNIQUE appealed for support of the United Nations, the Vatican, and countries like Venezuela,
Spain, and France to assist in setting up a humanitarian prisoner exchange.
However, tomorrow marks Uribe's deadline for the FARC to hand over 63 hostages or face
the U.S. extradition of their commander, Ricardo Palmera.
From Calcutta, I'm Nicole Carson for Free Speech Radio News.
Free Speech Radio News is produced at Pacifica Stations WBAI in New York, KPFA in Berkeley,
and KPFK in Los Angeles, and Community Radio Station WMNF in Tampa, Florida.
For an archive of today's newscast or previous FSRN stories, go to www.fsrn.org.
In New York, I'm Dipa Fernandez.
And it's 7.01 p.m. here on radio station WBAI New York.
Time now for Off the Hook.
Maybe.
Uh-oh.
Okay, our CD player is not really functioning, so we're going to swap them.
Well, it's kind of exciting.
Let's try it again.
Time now 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.
We couldn't get much worse, but if they could, they would.
Bum-diddly-bum for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
Bum-diddly-bum!
Right.
And do we have a manual here with us?
Yes, we do.
And I'm over here in Berlin.
Any notion I might have had that the BAI CD player is going to work properly has vanished.
I actually missed that CD player, the one that's always malfunctioning and not playing
things you want it to play.
But yes, I'm over here in Berlin.
This is going to be a very interesting show because I'm over here with a bunch of people
from the Chaos Communication Congress, which has just ended.
And at the same time, we have Bernie S., who's on a bus heading for Thailand.
And we certainly have a lot of things to talk about tonight.
Bernie, are you with us?
Yes, as you mentioned, I'm on a busload of Chinese people on the way to JFK.
And I'll be leaving in a few hours for Thailand.
The last show was obviously before this huge disaster.
But I'm heading there anyway with a huge bag of relief supplies to try to help out.
Well, we're going to talk about that in a little bit.
You're on a bus with Chinese people, is that what you said?
Well, there's a stopover in Taiwan, Taipei.
So everyone on this bus is going to Taipei.
But I'm getting off there and taking another hop to Bangkok.
OK, I didn't know they put people on buses according to their flights so soon.
Well, it's a special deal that China Airlines has.
They give you a free bus ride from Philadelphia to JFK.
Interesting.
Taking advantage of that.
Well, that's something.
OK, we definitely have a lot of interesting things to talk about as far as that particular situation goes.
Let's deal first with what's happening over here in Europe.
And first, before we get into the CARES Communication Congress that just ended,
I'd like to introduce Ray Ngo, who is going to make a very important announcement about something that is upcoming.
Let me hand the phone over to him.
OK, did you get that OK?
Just fine, yeah.
All right.
Actually, I think we might have a little miscommunication here.
We had an important announcement, and yes, OK.
We're going to make that announcement again with a little modification later on in the program.
But it was a very important announcement.
Trust me on this.
The CCC Congress has just ended.
Note, the CCC Congress is a yearly hacker event that takes place here in Berlin.
It's taken place in a couple of other cities in Germany over the last 21 years.
That's right.
This conference has been going on for 21 years, the longest hacker conference known to man.
And this year's was especially good because it had, and I'm not kidding here, it had over 200 different speakers.
Now, it's a virtual explosion of panels and speakers.
They had about, I think, five tracks going at once from small rooms to big rooms.
They had workshops going.
They had all kinds of demonstrations of hardware happening all throughout this building right here in the middle of Alexanderplatz.
And it was just an incredible event.
I've been to, I think I've been to four of these things now.
And I'd say by far this one was the best programming-wise, attendance-wise, too.
About 500 people show up.
A lot of Americans, a good number of Americans showed up this time.
And I think that's a trend that will continue.
I gave a talk earlier today, just about 12 hours ago, in fact.
And I'd like to get into this a little bit more later, but one of the things I asked people when I was giving my talk was how many people do not want to come to the United States,
specifically because the United States now requires you to give them your thumbprint when you enter the country.
Half the people in the room, it's a pretty large room, raised their hands.
I think that's just a sad comment on where things stand today, that we live in a nation that feels it has to fingerprint people coming into its borders.
A lot of people don't think that's the right thing to do, and they take a very dim view of having to be treated like a criminal.
And I think if this does not stop, a lot of people are not going to be visiting the United States.
Not just computer hackers for our conferences, but tourists of all sorts.
And you're going to see a real economic downturn, you're going to see a real brain drain, many bad things.
Sounds like it.
Is there anything that people can do if they want to not have this happen?
Well, I would imagine, first of all, letting people know in the States,
because obviously we won't be subjected to this having lived in the States.
If you're a citizen, you won't be fingerprinted.
But anybody visiting the country, coming into the country by an airport,
I don't believe this is happening at land borders in Canada and Mexico.
Although I'm sure if you fly into Canada from Europe, you'll have to be fingerprinted at some point if you cross the border.
People need to be educated about this.
People need to know that this is something the U.S. government is doing,
supposedly in the interest of homeland security.
There's no indication such records would ever be destroyed.
And it's a very bad way to address it.
Imagine if you were going someplace.
This is the way to present it to people.
Imagine you're going on vacation and you have to be fingerprinted before you enter the country.
I think most people would find that to be a very offensive way of treating a visitor.
And I think the biggest round of applause came when I suggested that perhaps that's what the EU will do to Americans.
And absolutely, absolutely.
That's something that people think should be done here if it's being done to them.
Of course, I don't think two wrongs make a right.
And I don't think you can fight somebody who's making a mistake by making the same mistake yourself.
This is exactly, I think, what the U.S. government wants is for the Europeans to start fingerprinting everyone.
I don't think it would solve the problem at all.
No, and hopefully the people here will see that and will prevent their governments from instituting such policies
because they certainly have had a history of governments doing horrible things with personal records.
And I think we're entering into a period of that history ourselves.
Anyway, not to leave us on such a somber note.
I'd rather pass the phone around to people who have attended the Congress that has just ended here in Berlin
so that they can give a few summations of their own.
And I'll be back in a few minutes and we can talk about all kinds of other things that have been going on this past week.
First, I'd like to give you over to Hanneke, who is also from Amsterdam.
And she has attended many conferences here in Berlin.
Hanneke, here's the phone.
Hello.
Hey guys, how are you?
How are you?
Hi.
I'm fine.
I've been counting, and this is the 11th CCC Congress I've attended.
And as Emmanuel said, it's absolutely the best one.
They had so many talks and so many people from so many different countries.
There were speakers even from China and Japan, and of course a lot of Americans.
And there were more Dutch people than ever.
And I think the first conference I went to from CCC was in 1991.
And there were about 450 to 500 people.
So now it was seven times as big.
And people have been queuing for hours and hours outside a building on the first day.
And it was raining.
It was cold.
And they have been waiting patiently to get in.
And I think they got rewarded because it was great.
Wow.
Yeah.
Any specific experiences you want to share with our listeners or just the splendor of
the whole thing?
There were a number of interesting talks.
I personally like more the social talks and the political ones than the technical ones.
There was somebody giving a talk about internet censorship in China because he has a friend
who recently moved to China.
And he was very annoyed that his friend couldn't read his weblog anymore.
So they started to do some research.
And in the end, they could paint a whole nice picture of how the Chinese government is centering
the internet and which websites get censored and how they do it and stuff.
So that was very interesting based on their own experiences.
Sounds like it.
Yes, definitely.
All right.
Do you have anything else?
No, I think that's it for now.
And I think I'm going to pass on the phone to...
This is Redbird.
How's it going?
Hey, how are you?
Yes.
Well, this is actually my first trip to Europe.
And it's been a great experience with the CCC.
Previously, the only hacker conferences I've attended were Hope.
And it was actually very similar.
But you hear from a lot more people here.
It seems to have a much more diverse audience, anyway.
Any subway hacking stories of Europe?
Not really.
I mean, it's a very different system here.
They haven't really ridden the subway much.
But the Yubon here is very different than the MTA system.
They don't use magnetic stripe or proximity car technology at all.
And I should mention, this is Bernie S. in Philadelphia.
Actually, closer to New York now.
Bangkok has just completed their first subway system.
It's brand new.
It was just opened this summer.
A special ceremony presided by the king.
And it looks very modern.
This is the most modern subway system on the planet.
And I plan to document how it works.
And bring back some of the RFID fare instruments that are used on it.
And it looks like quite a system.
Oh, good. We look forward to that.
Anything else, Redbird?
Well, not too much. I guess I can pass it back to Emmanuel now.
Yes, actually, I'd like to hand the phone back over to Raynaud.
There was a slight miscommunication before.
And he now has a different version of the announcement that he earlier gave.
I hope it's in Esperanto this time.
Hi.
Hi there.
Hi. It's a...
Get out your agenda and write it down.
July 28th till the 31st, you want to be at the WAPA Hack,
the 5th International Hacker Congress in the Netherlands.
Oh, wow.
What are the dates again?
July 28th till the...
34th, no?
31st.
That is of 2005, yeah?
Yes. So that's four days in July.
Wow. Anything else you can tell us about it, or just that it's happening?
Well, it's now the...
We started doing this in 1998, the Galactic Hacker Party.
And we did hacking at the end of the universe in 1993.
Hacking in programs in 1997.
And hacking at large in 2001.
So it's now the 5th one we're doing.
Becoming bigger and bigger.
And we're following our traditions,
like doing it out on the field in tents.
And this time, we're going to try to broaden our horizons a little bit.
And of course, we're going to do all the hacker stuff
and the open source projects.
But this time, we want to try to include people from the media,
journalists in the fields that have to do their daily work.
They have to hack things themselves to keep it working,
to get energy, things like that.
We want to get people from the environmentalists in
that think about what's happening to our planet and what we can do.
And well, they do things like us, but with the media.
And well, what are the differences and what are the things we do the same?
And what can we learn from each other?
Because I think there's a large group of people
that think about the same lines as the hacker community does.
And we can learn from each other and help each other in these ways.
Sounds like a lot of fun.
Yes, yes, it's generally a lot of fun as well.
Still some months to plan it.
Yes, well, we're now getting up to steam.
And a lot of people who did it the last time
are already eagerly waiting when they get started.
There's lots of things to do, all kinds of crazy ideas,
and people show things.
But also laying out the fields and pulling all the network cables
and getting current and connectivity
and all basic things like toilets.
There's all kinds of things that have to be done
when you want to get as much people there for a week as we do.
Is there a way that people can become involved?
Yes, well, we have not really much on the website now
except for an image of the flyer we handed out here.
We'll get a lot more content in the coming weeks.
If people can come, what we always say,
it's a do-it-yourself event.
If you have a great idea and you can show it to them
and we can help you with the logistics
or provide you with a tent or something,
we can work together and make it a big event.
It's not that we think up everything and we just serve it to you.
Everybody is free to come and organize things themselves.
And what is the website?
Http.whatstheheck.org
And heck with an A, of course.
Of course. I assume with an E, someone else already has it.
And why don't you tell us the dates one more time and the location?
Yes, the date is July 28th until the 31st,
so the last four days of July.
And it's in the south of the Netherlands.
Okay. Unless you have anything else?
Well, not really now, so I'll give you back the manual.
Okay. Well, thanks a lot. I'm looking forward to it.
Yes, okay. Hope to see you.
And actually, I'd like to talk about the new Dutch conference a little more.
But first, I just wanted to ask Reino one question
because he didn't give his impressions of the CCC conference just ended.
I'd like to know what your idea of some of the highlights of it were.
Yeah, well, of course, there were a lot of great talks.
And, well, you always have to choose which one you want to see
and which one you're going to miss.
But the overall atmosphere was really great, too.
There's really what they call the Art and Beauty Center.
And there were, well, almost round-the-clock VJs showing their things,
which was really cool.
And there were the people from the Blinkenlights project
that a few years ago, they hacked an entire building here in the center of Berlin
and with just lighting the lights behind the windows,
they really made a very nice performance.
And after that, they did it a little bit better in Paris.
And they showed their work and how they did it.
And there were the people there that implemented the old, well,
70s or 80s Pong game in hardware, which is really cool if you look at it,
just moving parts and, well, you play it with the game paddles.
And everywhere, people walking around, talking to each other
and typing on the laptops, maybe hacking things,
maybe implementing open-source projects.
And they're lying under their table sleeping or on their table sleeping.
And, well, there's lots of things going on anywhere.
And just being there and meeting the people is really great for four days.
And that pretty much sums it up.
That's what the whole situation was like for the past several days.
Twenty-four hours, round-the-clock, just people hanging out,
doing their own thing, sharing information, playing with technology,
going to talks.
And the atmosphere here in Germany, of course,
is so much more laid-back than it is in the States.
It's just very hard to describe.
You have to experience it for yourself.
And hopefully, next year, many people will.
It's very exciting news, though, about the Dutch conference.
We knew something was going to be happening next summer.
Now we know for sure what it is.
It's called What the Hack.
And it's a great name, I think.
I'd just like to read you a little bit from this flyer.
Times have changed.
Terrorism, metal detectors, special new laws,
and our leaders getting ever closer to their dream of knowing it all.
It's been a crazy almost four years since the last time
all the tribes of the hacker universe camped out in the Netherlands
at HAL 2001.
High time to get together, meet, reflect, show our projects,
and discuss our ideas.
No matter whether you're into figuring out what they're up to,
doing something about it, or having a good time
with some of the smartest and funniest people we know of,
it's taking place from July 28th through July 31st
near Den Bosch, that's D-E-N-B-O-S-C-H, in the Netherlands.
And again, more information, go to whatthehack.org.
And it's going to be a lot of fun.
As I said before, it certainly sounds like it.
I have to interject here that my experiences
at the last two outdoor hacking events,
most recently at the CCC camp, summer before last,
and at HAL, were two of the most amazing experiences of my life.
It's something that really should not be missed.
Anyone listening to this program owes it to themselves
to attend this event this summer,
because you'll remember it the rest of your life, I promise you.
Speaking of things that you're going to remember
for the rest of your life, Bernie,
we were talking about this for the last few weeks,
we were planning this trip to Thailand,
specifically to the resort of Pokhet.
The first thing I heard last week,
which I thought was kind of odd,
was the rebels who are currently fighting in Thailand
specifically mentioned that particular area
as something they would target because of all the tourists that go there.
Then I heard the news of the earthquake,
and it didn't seem so big at the time
when they first made the announcement about it,
but then, of course, the tsunami hit,
and it's just been getting worse and worse.
Here in Germany, over 1,000 tourists are missing in Thailand,
and the flags here are all at half-staff, in fact.
In Sweden, a similar number are missing.
Of course, when I heard this,
an even greater number of Scandinavians,
apparently there are approximately 2,000 Scandinavian tourists
who are missing now and assumed dead,
but they haven't declared them dead yet.
Well, they say for every one Thai person who has been killed,
I think around three or four tourists have been.
It's horrible.
Of course, all the people in all the countries that were affected,
we were just watching BBC before the show,
and the death toll is now up to 80,000.
They think it's going to go over 100,000 pretty easily.
And, of course, the big danger right now is disease
that's going to be overtaking a lot of the people there.
Tsunami is a very scary concept,
something we don't know a whole lot about,
and just looking at the videos of how these amazingly huge waves moved in,
it's quite obvious that there was literally no preparation
for something of that magnitude.
So, now, when I was reading all these newspaper accounts
about what was going on, hearing this on various media outlets,
of course, my thoughts turned to you,
and many of our listeners, in fact, have been writing in asking if you're okay.
You, fortunately, did not go to this place a week earlier
for the Christmas holidays.
You opted instead to go for New Year's.
I'm certain that, well, you know,
it's hard to say what would have happened,
but certainly your life would have been in great danger
had you gone a week earlier.
As a matter of fact, Emanuel, my original plans
were to have gone one week earlier,
and a work commitment obligation kept me here a week longer.
And I'm extremely fortunate because my original plans
were to be there right when this happened.
And it's really amazing.
You don't realize how a simple change in your schedule
could really affect your life, and I feel quite lucky.
There's a lot of finger-pointing I wanted to point out
that has to do with technology, Emanuel,
as to why people were not advised that this was on its way.
The American National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
was aware of the earthquake
and had every reason to believe there would be strong waves
and apparently didn't make much effort
to communicate this to other countries.
I'm sure there's no deliberate attempt
to withhold this information,
but the fact is someone had pointed out that,
well, they could have just called CNN and announced it
and everybody watching CNN would have known about it,
but the American government was saying,
well, there's no infrastructure in place
for us to notify the proper authorities
in these other countries.
They're not as well-equipped as we are
to get information out to people.
But what about this?
Why didn't they just make an announcement
through CNN or something,
which people follow around the world?
They knew hours in advance that this was on its way,
at least a couple of hours.
That's an excellent point.
In fact, when tsunamis hit in the Pacific,
it was a good almost a dozen hours sometimes
before they strike,
and there's plenty of time to evacuate,
and plus they're prepared to do this kind of a thing.
In the Indian Ocean, however,
it's not as common and there's less time.
And yeah, it would have made a lot more sense
to use whatever means were at their disposal
to get the word out,
and it's a horrible tragedy
that it was not done in that particular way.
I wanted to ask you, though,
I would say 999 people out of 1,000,
something like this happening
to a place that they planned on going to,
would have canceled their trip.
Now, you have not done that.
You're on your way to Thailand right now.
Yes, I'll be on my way.
I'll be landing in Bangkok on the 29th.
Actually, no, I'm with 20 to 29th.
I'll be landing on the 31st, New Year's Eve,
spending three days in Bangkok
and going to Koh Chang,
an island off the coast of Cambodia,
for three days.
After that, I was going to go to Phuket,
where the disaster is.
And after that happened,
I thought I would still go there
just to see and do what I could to help out,
even though I was only going to be there about a day.
But I found out yesterday
that it's very difficult to get out of Phuket.
You can get into there now,
but it's almost like the town you can't leave
because everyone else is trying to get out.
And I would be stuck there
for a week or more
in situations where there may not be
enough water for everybody,
food enough for everybody.
So what I did is
I packed a large bag
to check at the airplane.
You're allowed to bring 270-pound bags
on China Airlines.
So I brought one big extra bag
full of all kinds of surgical gloves
and respirators
and sterile bandages
and that sort of thing.
And I'm going to find some relief workers
at the Bangkok airport
and give them to them to take to Phuket.
It's probably not a good idea
for someone who's not really trained
in disaster relief like myself
to just be there.
I'd probably be more in the way,
but at least I can bring supplies to help.
And also, Bernie, the situation of disease.
That's something to really be concerned about.
They're saying that it's possible
to survive from the tsunami.
Yeah, that's the thing.
The potential life loss
that could be coming soon
would be greater than the number of people
who were killed at the moment
the tsunami hit.
And that's where a lot of other governments
could really help out
with helping to provide clean water
and food and medical supplies.
People probably heard on the news today
how a high-ranking UN official
criticized the U.S.
and other large countries
as being stingy for not providing
enough foreign aid
for what's truly the biggest natural disaster
in several generations.
And I think the U.S.
has committed like $45 million.
And I ran some quick figures
with a calculator
and came to the conclusion
that's about what the United States government
spent in about two hours in Iraq.
And we've been doing that
for a year and a half now.
To put things in perspective,
this is how much the U.S. government has committed
is $45 million,
which is what we spend in maybe 100 minutes
in Iraq.
And it seems like such a lopsided
effort.
The United States really wants to help
the world.
I think this would be a better
goal, frankly.
Yeah, I think the world would
be in a lot better shape without the tsunami
as opposed to without Saddam Hussein.
I do want to point out, though,
that you mentioned that
this is the worst natural
disaster to hit.
Actually, there was an earthquake in China, I believe,
in the late 70s, where I think a quarter of a million
people died.
A lot of people don't know about that because
there wasn't very much in the way of news reporting
from there.
But that's something that I find to be
really phenomenal, how many people can lose their lives
in something like this.
Not to be a doomsayer, but
the final count on this could exceed
that number, which would be
really unfortunate.
If
the aid doesn't get there quickly,
the loss of life
just from starvation or disease
could approach or exceed that
number.
I get
the sense that people in the studio want to ask you
questions about this. Yeah, I just wanted to interject
that for our listeners who are interested
in helping, most
international aid organizations are suggesting
that cash would be the most practical
thing to send at this
moment because what they
need is
bulky water and
easily obtainable just
outside the disaster areas
within a few hundred miles.
So what they could best use
is cash. Clothing can be obtained in
India for much cheaper than sending
it would be.
I would suggest dialing the Red Cross
800-HELP-NOW
and asking them what can be sent.
There are many other good relief
organizations, UNICEF and
others, that would love
to hear from your call and can easily be found
by dialing the 800-OPERATOR.
One other organization
I'd like to mention that's very much involved
with this relief effort is CARE.
You can go to CARE.org
and find out what you can do.
But again, what
Jim said is correct. For anyone outside
of Thailand, really the best, or any
of the countries that are affected by this,
a financial contribution is really
the most effective way to get aid there quickly.
I'm just in a unique situation. I'm going
there anywhere anyway. I'll only
be a few hundred miles away and
will actually be bumping into people or headed right
to the disaster site. So
bringing supplies, frankly
it's probably a run
on
the types of things I'm bringing. There may
be a shortage of them right
in Thailand, so that's why I'm bringing them from
the United States. So you didn't know in
advance what to bring?
Oh, I just thought that they could
use a few hundred pairs of surgical gloves
and some
work gloves for people that are trying
to pry apart
so they don't get cut and get infected with that
right antibiotics. There are
a lot of surgical bandages and
the kind of things they're using on ambulances.
You put on a wound and the gelatin
goes into the wound and sort of
seals it
and keeps it from being infected.
Just a huge bag of that kind of stuff.
Now, Bernie, you're going to be
speaking to us from Thailand
next week on Off the Hook.
I'm not going to be
this coming Wednesday. I was going to be on
Island of Phuket, but I will be in
I'll be in
another town that's about
120 miles
north east of Phuket
called Suratami
and there's a train station there
so I'll be
staying there a day in Phuket
and then taking
a Thai railroad from Suratami
back to
Bangkok.
Have you checked to make sure that these things still
exist, such as trains?
Yes.
I heard there's been so much damage to infrastructure over there.
There was a train
there was a railroad line apparently near Phuket
that was off the
north of Phuket
on the west coast
of Thailand that was washed
away, but it's not that railroad I'll be
on, unfortunately.
How long are you going to be over there
for? About nine
days altogether.
Do you know anybody over there?
Are you traveling with people?
I'm traveling with a very close friend
and we hope to
find
as much information as we can
about the situation and other things
in Thailand that aren't related
to this. I mentioned earlier in the show
that Bangkok just finished building
opening a brand new
subway system. They've never had a subway in Bangkok
before. This is the most modern
high-tech subway system on the planet.
It was just completed this July
and uses
RFID fare instruments
and from the pictures I've seen it's really
extremely modern looking and that
is worth checking out as well as some other
infrastructure. I'll be taking a lot of
pictures and taking a lot of notes and
reporting anything that our
listeners might be interested in.
I understand also that
you've been trying to reach somebody via
ham radio. How's that going?
Not well.
I have a friend in Sri Lanka
who
I meet up with every year
or most years who comes to
Pennsylvania for a shortwave radio
conference.
I've not been able to reach him
and
Sri Lanka is a country that
has really
hit even worse than Thailand
in this tragedy. They're looking at
over a million people who are
homeless.
RTC Clark also, many of our
listeners are familiar with, wrote childhood
and some other fine science fiction.
He lives in Sri Lanka and
there's been no word from him.
People have been trying to reach him as well.
They're looking at
tens of thousands of people in Sri Lanka
who were killed and over a million
homeless.
It's not a
I don't want to make any conclusions
yet, but I have not been able to reach my friend Victor
and
of course we care about RTC Clark
and hundreds of thousands of millions
of other people in Sri Lanka who are affected by
this. This is just
nearly a global event.
This is beyond our imagination
as far as how huge this is.
Bernie, I hate to interrupt you
but Ken Gale who is engineering
for us today would like me to remind you
that this is WBAI New York
that you're listening to. Off the hook
99.5 FM.
Now
actually Bernie
on the subject of Sri Lanka
I imagine that reaching anybody
there right now might be very difficult.
I'm not sure if there's been any success
in getting through the telephone system
there.
It's possible that that might be the reason why
we haven't heard from any of these people.
Surprisingly the
telephone infrastructure
just outside of these areas
is still in place.
My friend Victor
is very well equipped
for
radio communications
and through
various gateways, packet gateways
you can normally be reached
without telephone lines
through ham radio. In fact
some of the first communications
out of Thailand
were via ham radio operators
because the phone lines
were just destroyed and the cellular network
was down.
I think I passed on, I don't have the URL
in front of me, but there's
what's called an echo link node
in Thailand where you can
actually log in and listen to
amateur radio communications, ham radio communications
of volunteers
trying to help out.
So I don't know if someone else has
that URL in front of them. I sent it to the
list we all are on.
But it's pretty interesting listening.
Okay, I don't think we have that at the moment
do we? No.
Okay, we'll get that and we'll
hopefully do that on a future show.
It's typical
of ham radio operators, whenever there's a natural
disaster they train for this sort of thing.
Small volunteers.
And when the typical commercial
infrastructure goes down, ham radio operators
are almost always there first
with
acting as a network
to get communications
in and out of these areas.
Okay, well hopefully your friend is
okay, but we'll keep
updating people on that and of course
updating people on
your situation when you get over there.
But now to update people,
you're on a bus heading
to the airport right now on your way to Thailand.
Is that correct?
I'm sorry, I dropped out a minute ago.
You're on a bus
heading for the airport right now.
Yes, I'm on the New Jersey Turnpike.
I'm on a bus with about
20 some Chinese people and
we're getting a JFK probably within
half an hour. So maybe there's a
chance, well probably not, a chance you'd be
going to airport security while on the phone.
No, unfortunately I was
hoping that would happen, but I don't think
it'll work out this time.
Well, we have something almost as good. In fact, I think it's better.
Our friend Redbird
who is here in Berlin went
to airport security
in Newark.
And guess what? He was flagged.
He had the four S's on the bottom
of his boarding pass.
Just like I got both ways to LA.
Just like so many people that have written to us have gotten.
Except
he did something a little bit different. I'm going to hand the phone over
to Redbird who's going to tell you the adventure that he went
through.
Alright, well like Emanuel said,
I was flagged, which I guess is no
surprise to a lot of
people listening on the way
from Newark to Chicago
O'Hare.
And I got the boarding passes and I was flying
on United Airlines. And the boarding passes that United
gives you have a magnetic
stripe. I know not all airlines
have that. But they
use it to speed up boarding a plane.
They stick it through a reader at the
gate. And I guess it just speeds up
everything.
So I was flagged. I had the S's
and I'm not going to go through everything
that they do because I'm sure you've all heard it
before.
It's just a very thorough
searching of everything you're carrying on
and everything on your person.
Redbird, you knew
you were flagged. How long before you actually
were physically pulled aside?
Well, as soon as I get the boarding pass,
which is as soon as I arrive at the
airport and check any luggage that I may have to check.
So you had several hours. If you were someone
with ill intent, which we know you're not,
you would have had several hours to make
alternate plans if you were up to no good, right?
Exactly, exactly. I mean,
you know it when you get the boarding pass.
It is very pointless.
But another interesting thing
is I had
a mag stripe reader.
It's kind of like a custom reader.
And
it's made from cheap surplus parts
which actually this wasn't questioned at all
when they were searching me.
But basically it's a reader
where the magnetic head is
interfaced to the mic input port
of a sound card, which I described this
design vaguely before
on one of the shows. And it uses
custom software to decode
the stripe. And because of this
I'm also able to
use the mic input of an
MP3 recorder
and swipe it and analyze
the stripe later. So I could do this
very compactly without a laptop or anything.
So I brought the boarding pass
into the bathroom so I wasn't spotted,
read the stripe,
and I found a bunch of information
on the two different boarding passes I had.
One boarding pass was from
EWR to
ORD O'Hare and then from there
to Amsterdam. And the one from O'Hare to
Amsterdam I obviously wasn't flagged because
it was already in the secure area.
So one of these boarding passes
had the S's, the other one didn't.
And I scanned both of them.
They all have three tracks
on the magnetic stripe.
And I'll just read some of the data that was on there.
First of all
all the tracks are in IATA
format, which is an alphanumeric format
and this is similar to the format
that you'll find on, actually this is the format
that you'll find on, track one of
standard credit cards, ATM cards that you may have.
The length is 60
alphanumeric digits.
So
I'll read you some of the information that I
found on each track. On track one
the first character is
an S and track one and two seem to start
with the same character. The next three characters
are the initial airport, that is the airport that
you started from. And
the three characters after that are the destination airport
in my case this was EWR and ORD
for the first flight.
The two characters after that seem to be
the airline, which for me was UAE
and I flew on United.
Four characters after that
would be the flight number.
Six characters after that
seem to be some sort of passenger number.
The 26
characters after that seem to be
a slightly different passenger number
and the passenger's name.
The five after that
seem to be the seat number.
And then there's two after that
and this is where it gets interesting.
On the boarding pass
that was flagged for me to be
searched, this was set to an S.
The other one was set to a G.
Kind of funny, stop and go possibly.
So this is marked on the
magnetic stripe, which
it seems to me that if they wanted
to flag people, this would be
a good place to put it and not actually
somewhere where
you can easily read it on the boarding pass.
Anyway,
another interesting thing is on track
two, which was blank on the
boarding pass where it wasn't
flagged. There are no S's on this boarding pass.
There was some extra data on the
boarding pass where it was
flagged and I'll read this as well.
First, it was padded
with 20 spaces. Then
there was a C, a space
13190-2
and
six asterisks.
Then it was padded with 24
more spaces on the right.
This could possibly be some type
of code describing
possibly why the passenger was flagged
or some other data. We don't really know yet.
We may try to get more samples.
Robert, which airline
were these boarding passes issued by?
United.
I'm looking at the China airline
boarding passes I have here.
They have no magnetic stripe on the back of them.
It's kind of interesting that this isn't
standardized across all the airlines yet.
Right. I noticed some airlines
don't have a barcode.
There's no barcode and no
mag stripe on the back.
The front of it is all
OCR characters.
All the alphanumeric characters are printed
in a machine-readable font.
I don't know if they're magnetic
like micro-ink or not.
They could be scanned optically and read that way.
There's no
non-human readable encoding
anywhere on these boarding passes
from China Airlines.
China Airlines is not actually China
that we're used to hearing about.
It's actually Taiwan.
Some people would argue it's part of China
but they would argue otherwise.
It's a Taiwanese airline
and they are not encoding
their boarding passes yet.
Right. It seems to be different
with different airlines.
The last thing I want to mention
as far as any technical details
it is padded
with spaces.
There's just no data there.
If anyone has any suggestions
as to what this could possibly be
what these extra characters could be
only on the
track 2 field
where you are flagged
there's data.
I only have two samples
so I can't verify this
but that seems to be the case.
To any terrorist,
if you manage to scrape the S's
off of your boarding pass
they'll still know you were flagged
because this is encoded on the stripe.
I would like to point out
the New York Times has articles
every Tuesday
on flying and the various security things.
They might be interested
in doing an article
or reporting on you
if you decide to ask
for more samples from our listening public
of boarding passes
There's a problem with that
because they take the boarding pass from you
and actually
there's a perforation through the magnetic stripe
so it's possible
that the magnetic stripe is completely
destroyed after you board the plane.
It's very tough
unless you have a magnetic stripe reader
in the airport itself.
Hanging out near a gate
with a mag stripe reader would eventually
raise someone's curiosity
It's probably not a good idea
Eventually
I will publicize
the design of this
You can make these readers very cheaply
if anybody else wants to do this.
This brings
suspicious bathroom activity
to a new level.
Well, hopefully they don't put cameras
in the bathrooms anytime soon.
But yeah
I can describe this and how to do it
You could really make a reader
for less than $10
if you do have a
laptop or other audio device.
And you wonder why you got flagged.
I'll pass you back to
Emmanuel now.
I really gotta
hand it to Redbird for having the
cool-headedness
after being flagged
if that's not dramatic enough
to take the thing into the bathroom with a card reader
and actually be able to read it
and get the data
That's simply amazing
I think it's in our interest
to send him as many places as we can
so that he'll be flagged in the future
and we can get all kinds of different numbers
But if you're out there
and you're getting flagged and you have a credit card reader
I suggest you do the same thing
give us the information
Or if you're one of those people in the industry that knows
what these digits mean
please let us know as well
We only have a few minutes left
so I would like to open it up to phone calls
212-209-2900
Do you have any comments on the many things we've been talking about
during this radio program?
This is one of those nights I just wish we had a couple of hours
because there's just so much that's been going on
How can people send us
this information should they have it?
Well gosh
We have the email address
that's OTH at 2600.com
2600.com
Or they could
post a letter in the U.S. Postal Service
to off-the-hook
care of WBAI
120 Wall Street, New York
New York
10005 USA
Did you add a zero Jim?
No, three zeros
I thought you added a zero
Maybe it's just the transatlantic echo
Well Ken's counting
and he only spotted three of them
Ok, well that's good then
212-209-2900
Mike do we have any phone calls?
We do and we've taken one
who's on the air now
Hi, I'm a frequent flyer
and I've had the four S's of death before
What I'm wondering is
what would happen if you know when you change your seat
you get a new boarding pass
and I've always meant to try this
and I didn't have a chance
I wonder if they change your boarding pass
for any reason
if the flagging stays along with you
and you still get the four S's
I mean most people don't change boarding passes
but that's what happens
when they issue you a new seat
So if one of you guys on the flight back
gets flagged again
you might want to try changing your seat
and see if the new boarding passes
have it as well
because what's not obvious
is that it's random by individual
and it stays with the individual
although by now you guys may not be so random
or is it just random by
seat almost
and you can change your luck
That's a good experiment
if it is in fact random
and you've got yourself with the four S's
and you have not yet gone through security
yeah why not go back and say
I'd like a different seat
and see what they do
but I imagine that the people behind the counter
are trained to see the four S's
and to act upon it and say
well you're going to get four more S's
when you get a new seat
or maybe a different letter too
on top of that
Although remember they say that
the people at the counter have no control over it
it's actually generated by the computer
I haven't heard that
I think if you look suspicious
they could add as many S's as they want
well
they can do anything they want
but at least that was the understanding
well I'll definitely try it the next time I'm flying
and if I do run into the S's
I'll see what happens
and be glad to email you guys
and report in
and one other point
as we're flying back here from Europe
the reason we don't have any S's
is because the TSA doesn't operate out here
that's true
although if you're flying direct
if you're connecting
there's still always the privilege of the connecting flight
sure
thank you
sounds like he's in a wind tunnel
let's try this one
hello you're on the air
hello
hey guys
greetings from Iraq
hello Will
good
how's it going guys
you seem to have a
hang on
if we're talking to Iraq
and we're in Europe and Bernie's on a bus
heading to an airport
we're all going to have to give each other time
to deal with satellites and things like that
so let's let our caller from Iraq
say the first words here
my voice over IP
okay
that didn't work out too well
Bernie you want to try
well I was just going to say that
I've been corresponding with Will
and forwarding his messages to the OTH at 2600.com
he's using a service
called packet 8
so he can call in
virtually for free from Iraq
can you talk a little bit about that Will
we notice there's a
strong latency
but your audio quality sounds very good from Iraq
audio quality
of the voice over IP box out here
on this packet 8 is actually pretty good
we ended up getting this because we found out
that the government was going to be cutting off
a certain DSN access
from us being able to call back the states
and make morale calls
but for some reason we can attach these boxes
to the network and they're not blocking those at all
so
it's pretty much a popular thing right now
a lot of my co-workers out here are getting these packet 8
boxes and jacking them into the network
and that seems to be the only way we can actually call them
as has been said
the latency on this is not so good
Will is
I would like to point out to our listeners
that Will is the caller
who called last week and we hung up on
accidentally
this week I guess
we're a lot more patient
just a quick couple of seconds is all it was
but it's ok guys I just wanted to give you a call
and give you some shots
and say hey guy at Bernie be safe over there
would you please
before we let Will go
we haven't let him go yet have we?
nope
I guess he let himself go
what I was going to say was
I'd like to hear all the different clicks and things
that might be Bernie
yeah we've lost Bernie
we've lost Bernie and Will I think
they went off together
ok well maybe we can
reach Bernie before the show ends
but you know back in the old days
when people made long distance phone calls
you'd hear all kinds of clicks and tweets
and things like that I was sort of hoping maybe to
take a trip down memory lane
but obviously
that was a call from someone who was
over in Iraq on behalf of the
US government
not somebody who actually lives in Iraq
and it's interesting
that communications
enabled this kind of thing to happen
back in the Vietnam days you certainly couldn't
get calls like that
it's still a big deal obviously
but it's
you're talking to people on IRC and ICQ
and things like that
and they're over there
it's a very strange thing I still can't wrap my head
around it
shall we take another phone call?
we shall and we have Bernie back with us
yeah apparently Sprint PCS
is not as reliable as
a call from Iraq through packet 8
alright
and we've got this person on the air
or not
I know that person
and we are running out of time by the way
we have about 2 minutes
you're on the air
no
I'm just as lucky as you
let's try this one
hi
in response to the frequent flyer
he says that he
has to change your seat
the S's will still be on your
record
and
the magnetic strip
that is behind the boarding card
is a
record of your record locator
your ticket number so that when
we
scan the boarding card at the gate
it takes him off the
check in list and puts him on the
on list that he's on the flight
do you work for an airline?
definitely
wow it sounds like you know what you're talking about there
yes
can you tell us how somebody might be flagged?
yes if they buy a one way
ticket cash I mean you guys already know
that
that's a flash right away
and
if the person behind
the counter sees that
you're questionable your behavior is questionable
they'll flag you
they can flag you yes definitely
that's what I thought
if you don't have your ID
a valid ID
when you're traveling a driver's license
or a passport
they can send you
through security but
they make you go through a selective
process
unfortunately we're out of time but we'd love to hear
more details about this so please call us back
in a future show
thanks so much for
being open with the information
ok take care
and I guess
that's going to just about do it for us here tonight
it's been a fascinating show
Bernie on his way to Thailand we're over here
in Europe and next week I'll be back
in the studio and who knows
what will happen between now and then
thanks again to Ken for engineering
for us this week and last
and this has been off the hook
on WBAI New York 99.5 FM
good night
El día más espectacular
El más bello que hay
Rojo, naranja, amarillo
Subiendo va
Verde, azul, morado
Todos brillan inside
Uno, dos, tres, cuatro
Cinco, sesenta mil
Todos ya listos
Se están
Rojo, naranja, amarillo
Subiendo va
Verde, azul, morado
Todos brillan inside
Uno, dos, tres, cuatro
Cinco, sesenta mil
Por los cuatro rumbos
Alzándose el día de hoy
Hoy es
Tal vez hoy
Es un día especial
Hoy es
El día más espectacular
El más bello que hay
Rojo, naranja, amarillo
Subiendo va
Verde, azul, morado
El más bello que hay
Subtítulos realizados por la comunidad de Amara.org