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Time for Off The Hook.
For the best, expect the worst. I hope that's understood.
One, two, three, go!
And a very good evening to everybody. The program is Off The Hook.
Manuel Goldstein here with you, joined this week by none other than Jim.
Hello.
Pretty eager tonight, aren't we? And Mike.
Hi.
Redbird.
Good evening.
Walter.
Hello.
And Bernie S.
Good evening.
Well, it's been an interesting week, as it usually has been.
But first, what's the latest on this breaking story today?
Bernie, I think you might have heard something about this,
about the air marshal going nuts and shooting people. What's happening?
Yeah, apparently this is the first time a U.S. air marshal has actually shot somebody
on a U.S. aircraft or on the jetway.
And apparently, well, according to reports,
a gentleman was shot to death on the jetway, just as he was exiting an airplane.
I've been hearing all kinds of conflicting reports throughout the day on this,
that first it was in the airplane, then it was on the runway,
now it's in, what do you call it, the airway?
The jetway.
Jetway. What is a jetway?
The jetway is that sort of tube that you walk out of or onto to get to the airplane.
It's the sort of the walkway between the bridge, between the airplane and the...
Oh, that little thing. Okay. That's where they shot him, in there?
Well, according to more than one report from more than one media source,
that was where he was shot, as he was reportedly running from the airplane.
Okay, now here's... Okay, I might be a little dense here, so bear with me.
But the guy, supposedly, I had heard that he was somewhat mentally unstable.
He was running back and forth on the actual airplane.
His wife was chasing him.
He was shouting all kinds of gibberish and things like that.
Now, first of all, he's leaving the airplane.
He's walking down the jetway, as it's called,
and he claims to have a bomb or something like that.
Now, if he blows himself up on the jetway, who does he hurt except himself?
That's something I'm wondering right there.
Second of all, he's running away from the airplane,
which is generally a good thing to do if you have a bomb.
I'm just wondering, was it necessary to kill this guy,
especially if he was somewhat mentally unstable?
Well, I don't know if they knew he was mentally unstable at the time,
but his wife is reported to have said afterwards that he did not take his medication
and he suffers from mental illness.
Well, the other thing, too, is, you know, if he's going off the airplane,
presumably his bag has already been checked, the one that he's carrying.
So, I mean, I just think a lot of things add up here
that the guy wasn't really making any sense.
I'm just wondering if it was necessary.
I wasn't there.
I can't really pass judgment, but I'm just...
These are the questions I'm asking.
Was it necessary to kill somebody because they were spouting gibberish?
Well, I see a lot of similarities between this case and the British case,
where in London someone, an innocent man, was shot to death by police
who were overreacting or jumping to conclusions.
I mean, the truth will come out eventually, I hope, on this.
Well, Bernie, it is different, though,
because the guy in London wasn't doing anything.
He was sitting on a subway train, and all he was doing was being Brazilian.
Well, we don't know anything that was being done by this gentleman, either.
Well, according to the initial reports, he was saying he had a bomb.
He was reaching inside something.
So, you know, they did react to something.
One report from a reliable media source, The Wall Street Journal,
said that another passenger claimed that he had a bomb, and not the person himself.
Really?
There's witnesses.
There's a plane full of witnesses.
This will come out.
This is interesting, too, because, you know, whenever a story like this breaks,
you hear all kinds of conflicting things.
And as soon as they said the plane was from Medellin in Colombia,
the CNN reporters were all over it.
Well, this must involve drugs, then,
because what else could possibly be involved from Colombia?
Well, we'll find out.
I mean, one thing to observe with the case in the UK, in London, in fact,
is that the initial reports in that case were that this guy had all kinds of things,
and he was running from the cops,
and he had a bomb under his heavy winter coat in the middle of a hot summer day.
And then as the reports actually started to come in, it seemed that none of this was true.
So here we're starting with a pretty questionable situation.
So it will be interesting to see what emerges in the weeks to come.
Yeah.
And it's also interesting because this is the first time ever
that an air marshal supposedly has discharged a weapon.
And that's, you know, kind of interesting right there, just to see how it all unfolds from this point.
One clue I'd like to point out is along the lines of what Mike just said,
as far as cover-ups and non-accountability goes.
The officials who were asked about this, according to the Wall Street Journal,
refused to be identified.
Why? That makes no sense at all. Who are they trying to protect there?
Wait, like the PR people wouldn't give their names?
Apparently the officials refused to allow their names to be reported
because of an ongoing investigation.
What do the investigators have to lose by having their own names
reported along with their quotations?
Maybe their names are so funny that saying them would detract attention away from the story
and just make us want to make fun of their names.
The silly name defense.
Yeah, that's what it's got to be.
Now they're going to be mad and they're going to want to say their names
because we're saying that their names are silly.
Okay, well, let's move on to something sort of related to that.
We talked about the London bombing.
And it came out last week that the City of London police
called for the mobile phone network to be shut down when London was bombed.
Now that was contrary to the agreed upon procedure.
The police force acted independently to stop mobile phones from working for four hours
within a one mile radius of Aldgate tube station, which was one of the four sites hit.
The London Assembly findings come despite the metropolitan police denying the network was closed
down after July 7th bombing.
Many Londoners were anxious to call family and friends to let them know they were safe,
but they were unsuccessful and told it was due to a system overload.
Now, I'm trying to figure out what is the mentality of shutting down the phone network
because of a crisis like that?
Isn't that exactly when you want people to be able to stay in touch with other people?
Are they concerned that somebody is going to rig up a mobile phone to use it as a timer
to blow up something, which is the silliest thing ever?
Redhack, you join us.
Yeah, well, I mean, again, it's the idea that for some reason,
police seem to think that terrorists are intent upon having these remote controlled
bombs that there are going to be a cell phone attached to something and then they'll set
them off, even though that's kind of a silly concept and easier to just put a timer or
something.
Timers everywhere.
And so, of course, then, well, they have to block the signal.
But as far as doing something after the fact, I mean, I can understand certain cases where,
for example, I don't know what country it was, but there was a country where
an official would go underneath bridges and stuff.
Basically, they had a radio jammer on his car.
And the reason being that there would be remote controlled devices,
bombs in these underpasses, because obviously the timing would be essential.
And the car is under the underpass.
Then they blow it up.
Right.
I think they saved this guy's life.
Was that?
Pakistan.
Pakistan, yeah.
So in that case, it makes sense.
But as when, you know, a certain official or something, but as far as preventing widespread
bombing, I don't think it does any good.
Well, according to Richard Barnes, conservative London assembly member, he said that the city
police, a local police service could make a decision outside the chain of command to
close down the mobile service.
I find it extraordinary.
And when somebody finds something extraordinary in England, they mean it.
They really do.
I was just going to say that there's a trivial countermeasure that a someone who wanted to
assassinate the president of Pakistan, assuming that the system actually works as described,
could simply construct a device that detects when it no longer is receiving cell service
and explode at that moment.
There you go.
That's using your brain there.
It's all kinds of ways.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, you know, they seem to think that preventing terrorism is a very simple, simple thing that
can be done with the most ridiculously easy rules, such as randomly searching people in
New York City subways.
Now, that particular case has been reinforced by a federal judge ruling on Friday.
Police have a constitutional right to randomly search passengers' bags on the New York City
subway.
U.S. District Judge Richard Berman ruled the searches were an effective and appropriate
means to fight terrorism and constituted only a minimal intrusion of privacy.
Oh, my God.
You have a look of astonishment on your face, Redbird.
This surprises you?
I want to know what a maximal intrusion of privacy would be.
I mean, this is.
Well, I guess strip searches on the actual subway cars or something.
I don't know.
But it's just it distracts me as incredibly stupid because, you know, I guarantee you
if any one of us, and we don't, but if we did, if any one of us had a bomb, we could
get it onto any subway train we wanted to extremely easily.
And even if you search every single every single station, which is impossible, there'd
still be a way to do this.
It's incredibly stupid to think that this is in any way battling terrorism.
You simply go to the next station.
You have somebody go down with you.
They see police searching people.
You cross the street, go to the other station, and you're in.
What is this accomplishing?
Then intimidating people.
I mean, moreover, beyond the foolishness of this, the police who are actually doing the
searches seem to pretty much know that it's foolish.
I had the chance to observe them, and I'm not going to say that this is a universal
rule, but as I was watching them for maybe five minutes, they only searched one bag,
and that was the bag of some person who had gone up to the police and handed to them without
being asked.
Just volunteered.
Volunteered.
This person seemed to buy his jacket, says he works for some sort of private security
firm.
So you can see the sort of people who volunteer.
He probably gets money out of this somehow.
But those of us who aren't part of the security apparatus, not one of us was searched.
And again, maybe this is not universal, but it's just this whole thing is inane.
The other thing that no one seems to mention is that it takes cops off the street.
These cops are standing behind a table at a subway station searching people who want
to be searched, and they're not doing their job as a result of that.
And of course, there's also searching.
They're allowed to search within the subway system now, too.
I mean, there's a sign.
I've seen signs.
Has that actually been done?
I haven't seen it, but I have seen in the windows of the booths, the MTA booths, signs
saying all bags are subject to search once on the train.
I've seen that sign for quite a while, so I assume that that's just how they phrase
it, but I have yet to hear of a case.
I heard rumors, but I've yet to hear of a specific case where people are being searched
on the platform, because you're allowed to walk away and go onto the street if you don't
want to be searched.
But as far as that goes, I mean, once you're in the system, if a policeman wants to search
your bag, you're a suicide bomber.
You just detonate it.
Well, yeah, not that we're giving advice to suicide bombers, but it's obvious if you've
been to Suicide Bombing 101, you know that's what you do.
Right.
And even if you do have the option to leave, which you probably don't at that point, you
lose your fare, and it's just a very unfair situation.
Well, unless you have a bomb, then you get, you know, arrested.
Or if you have an unlimited MetroCard, you don't lose your fare.
Yeah, that would be economical in that case.
So you've got to watch out for the people that buy those.
Right.
They could be suspicious.
Everybody take advantage of the half fare this past weekend?
I've got an unlimited MetroCard, the holiday one, actually.
Well, you know, I just want to say there's a strike threat looming here in New York City
with the MTA, with the subways and buses.
And I got to say, you know, these guys, what is it they want exactly?
I mean, you know, the city has been nice enough to lower the fare to a dollar.
I mean, that's really a nice present to give to the people riding the subway.
They have jobs.
They're lucky they have jobs.
So they have to clean up garbage, too, in addition to answering questions and not selling
MetroCards and being in charge of the entire subway station.
You know, it just seems to me that, you know, I can't do it.
I'm trying.
I just cannot take the side of the city on this.
Jim, you take over.
Well, having been a former member of the Transport Workers Union,
I have to pretty much agree with their take on this.
All of a sudden, through either creative accounting or more likely
the fact of life, the Transit Authority has a $1 billion surplus.
And over the years, many of the wage increases for employees have not even kept up with inflation.
Now, yes, you can make arguments for them having been overpaid to start,
and now it's more in line.
But still, now that there's a surplus, they've shared some with the riding public.
They should share some with the working stiffs.
So as a conservative, you're not taking the side of the administration.
I never really bought any conservative or old school Republican anti-union arguments completely.
And actually, having once worked for an organization in which there was one union
and one employer, I can see how a union is generally necessary to
keep the civil rights of the employed.
And this union in particular, I think, is really being stepped upon.
It's unbelievable to me how they are being expected to do so much more.
They don't even call them token booth clerks anymore.
They call them, what, station agents?
Station agents.
Is that why they stand outside the booth?
Oh, yes. This is a new wrinkle.
Now that there are so many Metricard vending machines in the stations,
they want the clerks out of the booth, the station agents out of the booth,
in order to assist people with either the operations of the Metricard vending machines,
or to help them by pointing at the map, or show them how to swipe the card through the turnstile.
And this has caused an interesting wrinkle, which I predicted many years ago,
at, of all places, Mayor Bloomberg's own nearby subway station, 77th Street and Lexington Avenue.
Malcontents, we've talked about people who sell swipes on their Metricards before,
malcontents who plug up all but one of the turnstiles and sell swipes for reduced cost,
but using an unlimited Metricard, the clerk in the booth pretended to take a photo of these people,
because when the cops would come, they would just disappear.
So one day, when she goes to the ladies' room to take care of things,
they proceed to mildly assault her.
Thank God it was just mild.
And what is the point here?
The point is that the TAs' proposed work rules are generally unsafe,
specifically for the employees, and more so for the passengers.
Extend this to the idea of terrorism, okay?
If the clerk is outside the booth, terrorist hits him over the head, takes his uniform.
Your point is that because the clerk is forced to leave the booth,
that somehow that makes it unsafe for them, being out there.
It's unsafe for them, and that extends it to being unsafe for the passenger.
Well, I guess.
I'm just looking at the convenience aspect of it right now.
It just seems that if you go to a token booth and there's no token booth clerk there,
you have to find them somehow.
And according to the MTA, they should be out cleaning garbage on platforms,
or God knows where else.
Subway stations are pretty big.
You don't know where people are in various places.
It just seems like they're trying to scale down as much as possible.
In the meantime, they're lowering fares temporarily,
just to curry good favor with the public.
I predict that in the next two years, they're going to be screaming about a rate increase.
Now, how can they possibly lower the fare and then want a rate increase?
There's a surplus or there's a deficit.
Which is it?
The MTA's accounting is very creative.
Yeah.
We could use some of that around here, you know?
We'd be able to expand the station amazingly if we had their imagination.
Yeah, but we'd have to triple the amount of fundraising days a year to do it.
Yeah, it wouldn't be very pleasant, that's for sure.
But the word today, I was following the story.
There were negotiations today.
And the union representatives described the offer as insulting.
So it looks very positive for a strike in about a week.
And that's going to be a bit of fun.
Now, Bernie, you had a strike down there in Philadelphia, didn't you?
Not too long ago.
We did.
Early November, about a month ago, we had SEPTA,
the Southeast Pennsylvania Transit Authority, was on strike for...
Fortunately, it was only a couple of weeks.
About 11 days was the strike.
And the reason for that strike was that the workers did not want to have to pay
any part of their health care insurance cost.
Personally, I pay a lot of money out of my pocket extra for good health care insurance.
But I guess they're in a different mindset or a different plan or something.
But things were settled, and they had to pay 1% of their income
towards their health care insurance.
And 11 days later, they were back to work.
I found out, having purchased a monthly transpass, though,
that I was told by three different sources within SEPTA that I could not get
a refund for the 11 days of non-availability of service, which I'd paid for.
You're kidding.
Unless I purchased another monthly transpass,
they would give me that much off the next one.
I said, well, what if I don't need another monthly transpass?
What if it was just a one-time use?
They're like, that's too bad.
That's the only way you can get it.
So I went up the ladder and finally talked to the person in charge of the whole refunds
department, a very nice woman, who said I was misinformed by three different people.
And if I wrote her a letter, she would send me a refund check or a certificate that I could use.
Bernie, is it true you spend almost all day fighting bureaucracies,
writing letters, making phone calls, showing up in court?
It's true.
I don't know how you find the time for this.
It's a matter of principle.
Wow.
Well, you've got to get sleep sometime.
You know, it's important.
So what happened in the end?
Did you win?
I did.
And she agreed and gave me your name and all that to refund my, I think it's about $25,
she says I'm due.
So that's good.
That's no small chunk of change there.
That's important.
You should announce her name on air.
I mean, really, when they do write, we should congratulate them.
I will do that when I get the refund.
Yeah, when you actually get it, that would be nice.
So when would this striking supposedly happen?
I think December 15th.
Yeah.
I put a damper on, you know, those holiday reductions.
Well, that's the thing.
You know, it's definitely going to make some New Yorkers hostile.
I predict what the MTA, what the union might do, and this is just a pure prediction.
In order that they don't have a complete public relations disaster,
they might postpone the strike until after the holidays.
That's just my theory, or maybe my suggestion to them if they don't want a complete, you know.
They've tended not to in the past when these, I mean, I guess the contract ends at the same time.
The last strike was 1980.
Well, but there's contract negotiations every two or three years,
and I guess they always fall at the same time of year.
And they've always said, we're going to strike as soon as the contract ends.
Plus, according to the Taylor laws, it's now illegal for them to strike.
Of course, nobody's really going to pay much attention to that.
The Taylor law is an amusing law.
Well, it's actually a very bad law, but it's kind of amusing in that
you just kind of can stay on strike until the city or state agrees not to enforce it, so.
Okay, just one more thing about the MTA.
Did you hear about their plan to reduce the number of drunk drivers in the city on New Year's Eve?
They're going to reduce the number of drunk drivers.
How are they going to do this?
They're going to have free public transportation that night.
Okay, that's a good idea.
To keep people off the road.
Sometimes they come up with good ideas.
That's a good idea.
Just throw that in.
The Rosa Parks tribute was a great idea, where every seat was vacant in back of the...
In fact, it's still that way in the bus I took down here.
They still had the sign up and nobody was sitting there.
I was on a bus where the driver yelled at somebody to get in the back of the bus
because they were sitting in Rosa Parks' seat.
They used that particular phrase?
Yes.
Oh my goodness.
Okay.
This is an interesting story that actually ran last week.
It was a John Markoff story.
John Markoff and Don Schwartz both wrote this in the New York Times.
Shall we hiss or something?
No, it's actually a pretty interesting story.
I mean, you can hiss to people if you want, but the story is pretty interesting.
It basically references a document that's available online called
Signaling Vulnerabilities in Wiretapping Systems,
which was written by Michael Sher, Eric Cronin, Sandy Clark, and Matt Blaze.
And it came out in November.
And you can access that by going to www.crypto.com
slash papers slash wiretapping.
Basically, they found an exploit that they say is present in virtually all
analog loop extender or dial-up slave wiretap systems.
And in at least some systems based on the newer JSTD025A CALEA interfaces,
these systems depend on unsecured in-band signals that can be spoofed
or manipulated by an interception target via his or her own telephone line.
Now, this is fascinating.
And if you don't know what we're talking about here, you'll be fascinated too.
I guarantee it.
In the most serious countermeasures we discovered,
a wiretap subject superimposes a continuous low amplitude C-tone audio signal
over normal call audio on the monitored line.
Now, what's a C-tone?
Every touch-tone phone has actually a four-by-four grid.
You might see a three-by-four grid.
That's because the last row is not on touch-tone phones.
I wish it were.
It's usually very easy to modify a phone to get the tone.
Yeah, it's a simple wiring job to do that.
Every phone is capable of making these tones.
Because basically, DCMF, it means dual-tone multi-frequency.
Dual-tone meaning two tones.
One tone going across, one tone going down.
So you simply have to match the tone going down with the tone going across.
And you have an extra tone.
You have four extra tones.
We call them A, B, C, D.
And back in the old days, that was called a silver box.
In the military, they used it.
What was it?
Flash, flash override, priority, and something else.
Okay, nobody knows anymore.
But they were.
In this order, there was priority, interrupt, flash, and flash override.
That's it.
Yeah.
And you know, I can never tell which one of those is most important.
They all sound important.
Override was like reserved for the president or generals, or maybe Navy admirals and so forth.
But it was the interrupt, the second highest level of the four, that was a C-tone.
And I happen to have a C-tone right here.
Well, I have a C-tone, Bernie.
So I have you beat on this one.
In fact, thanks to FiberOptic, who I talked to before the show, he was able to actually get us
the sound of a C-tone, which we will now present for about 10 seconds over the air.
Uh, no, guess again, the BAI CD player has failed us once again.
I'm going to press this button here.
This is a test.
If this had been an actual emergency, no, that's actually the C-tone,
which is part of the touch tone pad.
Now, if you were to play that tone, let's play it again low in the background,
while we were talking over the phone, and you were being wiretapped by one of these
wiretap instruments, you would be able to defeat that particular wiretap instrument.
And it said low amplitude, right?
So it wouldn't have to be very loud.
No.
In fact, it shouldn't be very loud because you won't be able to hear yourself if you do.
Walter, you have the question?
Why was this feature built into this equipment, or was it?
Ah, it's not.
Well, okay, go ahead, Jim.
Well, apparently this fools the equipment, or certain types of wiretap equipment,
into thinking that the phone is not being used.
It's kind of like, in the old days, 2600 hertz would be fed across the line when a phone line
was not in use.
And that's how you would disconnect a phone line, too, and put it in the non-use mode.
An idle tone.
Idle tone, yes.
That's pretty much what it is.
So 2600.
This is only, this particular trick we're discussing was only useful for the older
types of wiretaps that used a slave line.
Basically, in the old days, up until probably about 5, 10 years ago, depending on where you
are, the authorities would go to the local exchange carrier, the phone company, with a
warrant, a wiretapping warrant, and say, hey, we need a slave line connected to this phone
line number, run to our wiretapping office.
And that's how they did it.
Now they can just, they don't even need to bother taking the warrant to the police, or
to the, the police don't have to take a warrant to the phone company anymore.
They can just type in the phone number on their CALEA wiretapping system and have direct
access to any phone line at all.
So this isn't necessarily as useful as it was.
So had this story broken like 10 years ago, they would have really been scrambling.
And so, of course, this is, sorry, this results because you don't want to be recording a line
that's not in use, right?
So, so that would be why the equipment ignores anything with this tone.
I think one of the, one of the issues that was brought up in the white paper, though,
was that some of the CALEA systems do have backwards compatibility to allow the C-Tone
to designate an on-hook phone.
So I do believe that in some of the CALEA taps it will, it will work, the C-Tone being
played in the background.
Yeah, that's, that's what they said.
That it actually, it actually does work on the JSTD025A CALEA interfaces.
Oh.
So yeah, I'll bet this will be written into a Soprano script to simply blast a C-Tone
and all of a sudden the feds will have a lot of difficulty listening in.
You know, it's just the lessons learned from in-band signaling 20 years ago have yet to
be apparently fully appreciated.
Is it that the feds would have difficulty listening in or is it that the, like, equipment
said to automatically record the line?
The equipment thinks that the phone is on-hook when you play the C-Tone.
Yeah, and you can talk over the tone.
So there wouldn't, there's no way that with a piece of this equipment they could force
it to listen?
Not if that's the equipment they're using.
They could not use that equipment and probably—
Because I feel like it would make sense for equipment to ignore an on-hook phone if, you
know, it was set to automatically record all phone calls.
But I feel like if someone was just listening in, you know—
If there's a human involved, I imagine the human can override.
Okay, that's what I was asking.
But I don't think the human would be able to listen in if the phone line wasn't in use.
I don't think the police do that much live listening.
I think they record it more often.
Okay, moving on.
We had a little scandal involving Wikipedia.
Apparently now you can't just simply start articles in Wikipedia.
You have to register first.
Wikipedia now will require users to register before they can create articles.
People who modify existing articles will still be able to do so without registering.
Now this has all started because some guy named John Siegenthaler, who was a one-time
administrative assistant to Robert Kennedy, found out that he was suspected of killing
John F. Kennedy on the Wikipedia.
He was pretty shocked by this.
And I guess they figured enough is enough that they have to have some kind of accountability.
I'm just a little unclear as to what kind of accountability they actually are gaining
from this.
Does anybody have any idea?
I was wondering the same thing because it's really easy to create an account and create
multiple accounts if you so desire.
Well, I mean, is the IP recorded or something?
If somebody creates this news story saying that George W. Bush is the devil or something
like that, is there any kind of way of tracing who that person was?
Well, that's hardly news.
But yeah, I think it does record the IP address.
I don't think it matters.
It's going to stay up as long as nobody notices.
So yeah, yeah.
Well, there are people out there who do nothing but look for changes in Wikipedia and fix
them.
It's amazingly accurate for the most part.
I'm very surprised.
I didn't think it was going to work.
I found there are mistakes from time to time, but on the whole, it's not bad.
Well, I mean, I just I just figure it would be cool, you know, in kind of a mischievous
way to just simply change minor things, you know, change somebody's eye color from blue
to brown or something like that and see if it takes and becomes history.
And then you have this whole Orwellian type of thing going on.
So the people who replace featured articles with pictures of body parts and things, they
usually get noticed pretty.
Yeah.
Did you see that with pneumonia last week?
Pneumonia was was apparently the front page story and somebody replaced it with pictures
of male genitalia.
And it stayed up for about three minutes, I think.
But how did we find it in those three minutes?
I don't know who we we were.
Well, I was with a group of people.
We had laptops and all of a sudden someone said, hey, look, you know, they must have
done it.
That's the only thing I can think of.
They had to have.
So that's that's how it is.
So somebody else saw that and then changed it back.
I mean, they must have revisions, but it's in the history.
See, Wikipedia has a history file that will show you all the changes, including the things
that are which is why you can revert so quickly.
And but that's what I'm wondering as far as this guy being accused of killing JFK isn't
isn't that still in there?
Isn't it in the history file?
I heard maybe they were going to delete the history file now where it's offensive or
something.
So all of a sudden, Wikipedia is being held a lot more accountable, which takes away.
I think they should leave all the revisions in as long as they don't, you know, like
things like maybe maybe prevent them from being indexed in search engines or something,
because those are I mean, those are where most people will probably stumble across the
stuff.
And so and you can you know, you can tell the search engine to ignore certain pages
so they don't have to.
But a man who called himself Dr.
Chaos online was sentenced on Wednesday to seven years in federal prison for hacking
into computers and causing power failures in northeastern Wisconsin.
This story moved on the Associated Press.
Joseph Konopka, 29 years old, already is serving a 13 year federal prison sentence for pleading
guilty in 2002 to chemical weapons possession for storing cyanide near a Chicago subway.
I seem to remember this story.
Ring a bell, Bernie?
Oh, yes.
All too well.
This was, I think, back in 2002.
A certain reporter, Declan McCullough, reported that this guy had showed up at a 2600 meeting
or two, which are really public, informal gatherings.
Anybody can walk in.
And so then this journalist or loosely called journalist Declan McCullough reported this
guy had ties to 2600 magazine, which definitely did not.
Yeah, well, this is something that the mass media frequently does with someone shows up
at a meeting.
That means they're on our staff.
And that's not how it might work in the corporate world.
But 2600 meetings are not like that.
And anybody with even a glancing familiarity with that should know this.
So anyway, this guy, he caused power outages.
That's kind of the hook of the story here.
Apparently, an anarchist group of boys called Realm of Chaos, according to prosecutors,
were responsible for 28 power outages affecting 30,000 customers and 20 other service
interruptions in 1999.
Damage was estimated at $800,000.
This is the first I'm hearing about power outages being caused by, quote, unquote,
hackers.
But I'd like to know how exactly that happened.
They probably, you know, turned off the fuse.
Some 20 years ago, I discovered a way that this could be done.
It was a substation, an outdoor substation just surrounded by a fence just maybe a couple
hundred feet outside my apartment complex.
And I could see it from my window.
And I noticed during a power outage that there was a thing that looked like an oil derrick
arm going up and down as the breaker was trying to reset during this power outage.
And I happened to have a frequency counter on.
And I picked up the frequency of some audio tone that was telling this breaker to turn
on and off.
So with a two-way radio and the right tone generator, you could actually turn the breakers
on and off in this.
I never tried it, and I didn't want to try it, but it was doable.
I'm sure they use much more secure systems now.
This is like 20 years ago.
I don't know what these guys did, probably something different.
But there's been some insecure systems controlling our power grid, and there may still be.
Yeah, interesting, interesting story.
And of course, that was on the front page of every news site in America, and basically
underlining that hackers cause all kinds of mayhem and chaos, myths we have to dispel
on a daily basis.
OK, we got a lot of feedback to the Google feature we did last week.
Let's go into some of it.
And we have some new information as well.
This from James in London.
Last week's off the hook was a little unfair.
Yes, Google could keep an awful lot of personal information about you, but then so could Yahoo,
MSN, and your own ISP.
Google could scan through all your email and turn it into the authorities without you knowing.
Google could keep a full list of all your web searches, but then so could Yahoo, MSN,
and your own ISP.
If you have a significant problem with Google specifically, then let's hear it.
But from my viewpoint, they're just as evil as some other corporations, and significantly
less evil than others.
And here in Europe, they've just sneaked through a new European law, which means all companies
must keep details about emails I send, websites I visit, and mobile phone calls I make for
up to two years.
And yes, that includes this email.
So if you want someone to call evil, the European government is probably a better target than
Google.
Well, we don't have to use the European government.
We don't have to use Google either, but we're much more likely anywhere in the world to
be using Google at some point.
I'm not saying Google is necessarily evil.
I'm just saying they're a lot more all-encompassing than any government.
True.
Well, the European data retention laws are very bad.
I don't know if we've covered them really in depth on this show.
Maybe we should at some point, although we have mentioned them.
But I think the reason that some of us spend time criticizing Google is that they have
this perceived aura of non-evil when, as far as I can tell, they're just, as you say, as
the writer says, just as evil as anyone else.
And I think it's very important to note that.
Well, I think the most important thing to note is that Google is just so much more popular
than any of those other entities mentioned.
Yahoo, MSN, everybody uses Google.
And so many people are using it now as their default mail address.
And that's what scares me.
That's why I was paying particular attention to them.
I thought the conclusion we came to last week was not that they were necessarily,
they could have the potential to be, but weren't necessarily evil in their own right,
but that the fact that all this data was stored somewhere was a gateway for, I don't know,
improper government investigations or something like that.
That's one of the conclusions we reached.
Okay.
Well, I don't understand how you could, I still don't understand how you could
criticize a company who's offering a free service.
And one of the ways that they make money is by storing this data, analyzing it.
Oh, they're doing exactly what they're supposed to do.
I'm criticizing the people who blindly follow it and not realize the risk that they're putting
them.
I mean, I've seen people use Google Gmail and they think it's great because they can
search their email, they can find, you know, strings, they can find threads.
It's very, it's a very nice interface.
But what they seem to forget, and these are the same people who send me PGP encoded messages,
they seem to forget that all that mail is being stored on someone else's server.
And it's all right there at any time for somebody there or somebody somehow accessing
it from outside to read, to look at, to analyze.
And I just think that's something you need to look at very carefully.
Well, it's true with a lot of ISPs.
If you use, you know, an IMAP service or something, all your email is sitting on
the ISP's server.
You know, at my school, I use an IMAP service.
Well, I think that's bad too.
You know, the thing with Gmail is there are so many people and so many people who are
very smart, who usually take good precautions, aren't thinking about that.
Let's go to something else too.
This is interesting.
I had a friend over who was using his Gmail account because everybody loves to use it,
showing it off, in fact.
And I discovered later when he went home that he had remained logged in.
And you know what?
He didn't auto log out.
Gmail does not have an auto log out feature because they don't want you to log out.
They want your Gmail to be your desktop.
He logged in from his home.
He had no idea that I was still logged in.
I was able to send messages as him.
And because Gmail has this policy of never revealing your IP, which I guess is good for
some cases, bad for others, there's no way to differentiate me from him.
All right.
You see the privacy.
I'm not going to say if I'm still logged in.
But you see the privacy implications here.
You could have somebody else logged in on your account and you would never even know
it.
And there's no way to prove who is the right user and who is the wrong user.
Well, that's a user mistake.
I mean, OK.
That's an interface mistake.
It's not an interface.
Even Hotmail logs you out after a certain amount of time.
You know, I don't understand the mentality.
I mean, I do understand the mentality.
It didn't log him out ever?
No, it doesn't.
It doesn't log you out because it wants that to be on your desktop all the time.
There's an option to save yourself as being logged in.
So if he had checked that, then it would have stayed logged in.
There's an option to what?
There's an option to save you as being.
English here.
What are you talking about?
There's an option to stay logged in on that computer.
There's like a checkbox that says, keep me logged in forever.
I went through all the options.
I saw nothing that would indicate auto logging.
When you log in, when you log in, it asks you if you want to save it on the computer
that you're logged in.
If you want to save your password, maybe so it doesn't ask you for the password.
Just to stay logged in forever.
You show me after the program how you can auto log out because that's what we need in
a situation like this.
I don't think they have that feature.
I still don't think that this is really an important issue.
I mean, you said yourself that you have friends that use the service and they encrypt their
mail with PGP and whatnot.
And that basically prevents everything that we're worried about, which is them storing
your emails, being able to search through them.
They really, really can't do anything about focusing advertisements on you if the email
that you're sending is-
It's great if you encrypt everything and keep it stored that way.
They're not doing that.
They send some things encrypted.
They're very careful with their keys and things like that.
But then they store all their private mail on someone else's server.
Well, it doesn't matter if it's on somebody else's server if it's encrypted.
I mean, that's-
But it's not.
That's my point.
It's not.
Look, Redbird, no one encrypts even a reasonable percentage of their mail who interacts with
the world at large because the world at large doesn't encrypt its mail.
So saying you should use PGP is very nice.
I use it as appropriate.
But pretending that it is going to solve this fundamental
inter-architecture issue is deluding at most yourself.
But it's a free service.
They can do what they'd like to.
Yes, they can.
And what we're doing is telling people about the free service and the risks inherent in
it.
It's a great service.
I'm not going to deny that.
It's really- except for the spam issues, which still piss me off quite a bit when things
get labeled as spam or when they don't take appropriate actions to keep spam from going
out on their servers.
You know, that can be annoying.
Well, that's an issue to bring up with the people who write the algorithms.
But I think inherently what we're focusing more on is a problem with email at large.
I mean, there is no security in email.
You know, you send a message out.
Unless you encrypt it on your- do end-to-end encryption, it's going through however many
different servers.
Whether or not it's stored on Gmail, it could be stored somewhere else along the way.
You don't know that.
There's a problem.
Well, that's illegal.
That's intercepting something and storing it.
They're not allowed to do that.
Whether they get it live as it's going through, yeah, that's something else.
But they have to get it then.
Or it could be stored on the other person's ISP's email server, which is perfectly legal.
But this is one uniform way that so many people seem to be falling into at once.
Well, what about AOL?
Attack them too.
Oh, I have attacked AOL, but they're not nearly as organized.
That's why they're not nearly as dangerous.
I think it's also difficult to define illegal and legal in the context of the internet,
because you could be relaying your email through servers all over the world where
these laws don't even apply.
And people could just store email.
And these servers all over the world are not related to each other.
OK, but Google is.
And if everybody uses the same one, then it becomes a lot more of a privacy issue, I think.
I think the point stands that Google is, in this instance,
no worse than any other large ISP that a lot of people use.
But they have this myth of being somehow less bad, which is very problematic.
Well, I think they are less bad in ideology.
I think they come up with a lot of cool ideas.
And I think the people running it generally don't want to be evil.
But as this reader writes in, named G-Man,
in response to your discussion about Google's do-no-evil philosophy,
people have to remember that Google is now a public corporation and has a legal
responsibility to its shareholders.
In the end, the philosophy behind all corporations is profit.
And I think that's very true.
It's unfortunate, but it's very true.
In response to last week's program, another questionable business practice Gmail does,
they never delete anything, even if you do.
I'd heard this on the podcast, podcast Dignation, actually.
I wasn't so sure.
A quick Google search, notice the irony,
led me to a more or less Google conspiracy site, www.google-watch.org.
They say in their article about Gmail that Google has admitted to never deleting anything
and adds some speculation about why the delete option is hidden in the pull-down menu.
The direct link is www.google-watch.org slash gmail.html.
Signed John from College Station, Texas.
And again, notice the irony.
I'm sending this to you from a Gmail account.
It's interesting because their initial philosophy was that,
OK, you get a Gmail account, you have two gigs of storage,
you never have to delete any of your emails.
Right.
That was the original purpose anyway, because they have these great search features and you
can, you know, anytime you want to find something, you could just search for it.
And if you didn't want to, you just ignore it and it's there anyway.
Now, this reader named Dan writes in something even more interesting.
On last week's broadcast, Emanuel had been talking about the implications of Google scanning
the contents of all Gmail email content.
I'm just curious.
Have any of you consider that because of Gmail's invitation only account registration,
that Google essentially maintains one of the world's largest and least recognized social
networks?
If you are a member, they know who invited you.
They know who you have invited.
They can construct a hell of a lot of really interesting connections based on their user base.
And traffic analysis.
Yeah, and that's maybe at least equally or even more disconcerting than the fact that
they scan my email for marketing purposes.
So good point there.
I hadn't even thought about that one.
I just like the fact that I think, you know, we're going on this conspiracy ideas of, you
know, they'll invade our privacy.
They'll read our email, this, that, and the other.
But I think that as far as profit is concerned, that's not a way to make profit.
That's only going to end up in some sort of scandal.
Look at Sony BMG.
They had all these, you know, the root kits on the CDs, which were, you know, modifying
people's computers.
And that's been a terrible disaster for them.
So I think profit wise, Google doesn't have any advantage in invading your privacy.
Not that we can see.
As far as an aggregate analysis of data and of traffic and of all these different ideas
that people have, then maybe.
But I don't think that looking at a specific person and looking at their email or something
like that is going to give them any gain.
They don't work.
They don't work on individuals.
They work on an aggregate kind of thing.
I agree.
But, you know, the potential is there for this to be abused, especially if, say, the
government gets involved somehow.
Look at the tool.
Look at the tool that is at their disposal.
All the information.
Do you think they can resist asking for this or demanding it or subpoenaing?
But the potential is there to be abused by any company, as long as, with any company,
as long as the company...
But you brought up Sony.
Look how easily Sony was completely diffused by angry consumers.
I don't think it's going to be so easy in something so all-encompassing as this.
I just think that when you, I mean, it seems to be that the root of your argument is that
as soon as the government wants something, then they'll be able to get it.
But in any case, if they're investigating you, they'll know who your ISP is and they'll
be able to get it anyway.
And, you know, you're not safe from them whether you're using Google or using somebody
else.
All right.
Let's read one final email here.
One caller on this week's show is looking for an IT job in the city.
Oh, in keeping with the theme of Google, Google has 97 openings at their New York, New York
location, including an information security engineer.
Good luck getting them.
They get like 1,000 applications a day.
Yeah.
That's from Sam Stone.
Thanks very much for...
Sorry to put a damper on that.
I take it we've tried, huh?
Okay.
This is also kind of interesting.
Completely unrelated, but people are always writing in about smart cars.
If you want to see a smart car, which I have, I have the only smart car in New York, I think.
And if you've seen it driving around New York City, that's probably me behind the wheel.
If not, I'd like to know about it.
You can see a smart car crashing into a concrete wall at 70 miles per hour and surviving very
well.
Go to tinyurl.com slash BR7BT, BR7BT.
And you will see a smart car crashing into a concrete wall at 70 miles an hour.
I would say after watching that, that you'd probably be okay, but you might want another
car.
Yeah, you'd want another car.
But the metal frame really held up extremely well.
And I was quite pleased to see that.
Well, good.
Just don't go hit any concrete walls.
No.
Now, we have something we'd like to demonstrate.
Now, do we have that there?
We've gotten about a million emails concerning this site.
That's a shortcut to get to a human being.
Now, the reason we've gotten a million emails is because it appeared on Slashdot.
I'd like to move for the record here, and hopefully somebody will second this, that
if something appears on Slashdot, okay, let me finish the sentence at least, we probably
already know about it.
And there's no reason to email us about it.
Because what we get is just repeating emails for the same site.
We've gotten this one a whole bunch of times.
Of course, we have to look at Slashdot to see.
But what we'd like to do, send us something that you really do find.
So many people wrote to us saying, I found this.
No, you didn't find it.
You read Slashdot.
You found it there.
That's not finding it.
The guy who sent it there, maybe they found it.
But we got mail about this months ago anyway.
So maybe you guys should be breaking the news, and we'll break it.
And then Slashdot will say, hey, we heard this and off the hook.
I'd just like to say I found this on Slashdot.
Uh-huh.
You found it on Slashdot.
Congratulations.
Some people who wrote us may have found it on a site that found it from Slashdot.
And they don't know about Slashdot.
That's true too.
Okay.
World News Tonight had it.
Yeah, I know.
It was everywhere.
And this site is old.
In fact, I think, and maybe a listener can help us with this because we don't remember
what we say.
Maybe we might have even done this in the past.
I think we might have called one of these numbers and tried to get to an operator by
using shortcuts.
I feel like it.
I feel like we did too.
But I don't know when.
And there's no way we can go through all these shows to figure it out.
But maybe there is somebody out there who knows.
I probably threatened to nuke this site.
But that's another story.
Did you circle the one that I'm supposed to call?
We're supposed to circle?
Well, how am I supposed to know?
I can just read you the number.
We talked, but then everybody's going to call at the same time.
We're on delay.
I'll read it very fast.
Give me the thing.
The phone system isn't going to work.
Just tell me which one it is.
Oh, the second from the bottom.
Second from the bottom.
Okay.
What we're going to do right now.
Got a dial tone?
And people who are on the web.
It's not the second from the bottom on the whole thing.
It's the second from the bottom on our random printer.
So quickly print a page.
Does it matter?
Okay.
We're calling the number now, which actually is a division of Homeland Security.
We're nothing but not brave.
Yeah.
And welcome to USCIS.
For English, press one.
Okay.
After selecting English, it was one, right?
Okay.
Thank you for calling United States Citizenship and Immigration Services or USCIS.
We're a US government agency.
Okay.
What we're supposed to do is with a two second delay between each one,
hit two, six, two, and four.
Let's try this.
Customer service represent.
Thanks.
One, two, six.
We assign most applications and petitions.
We can only give you specific information about your case.
We're sorry, but the key that you pressed is not a valid option at this time of day.
To speak with a customer service representative,
please call back between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. Monday through Friday.
Okay.
We'll play the previous message for you again.
And we won't listen.
So, okay.
I guess it did work.
I guess it did work because they're closed now.
So hitting two, six, two, and four, for some reason, gets you to a human being.
That sounded like it was just going through a bunch of menu options.
And basically they just mapped it out so you didn't have to listen to them.
That's the idea.
It's not like a backdoor or something.
Well, in other cases, you're hitting zero or pound or something that's basically
aggravating the machine until it gives you an operator.
On some airlines, if you scream,
I want a representative, god damn it, and do it really loud,
you get a representative right away.
In fact, you get like Kathy, the little humanist assistant,
saying, I'm sorry, I'll get you an operator now.
Or just gibberish.
Or an air marshal with a gun in his hand.
You can also just say gibberish.
And if you say it enough, it doesn't...
Especially the ones that ask you to speak.
We only have a minute.
So I'm going to give out the phone number.
212-209-2900.
Let's take some quick phone calls.
Well, a lot of these systems are doing is working on algorithms to detect
when you get frustrated and automatically transfer you to a person.
Which seems a little bit silly.
Because then those of us who know we want to talk to a person and aren't yet frustrated
will be forced to make ourselves frustrated artificially just to get the human.
And that poor person can do that.
And why do we have to be unhappy when dealing with these companies?
And that person probably hears you screaming before.
They hear the recording of how angry you are before they actually pick up the phone.
I know directory assistance operators do that as well.
Let's take a couple of calls in the brief time we have left.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Hey, good afternoon.
Good evening.
Yes.
I don't know if you remember me.
This is Bartholomew.
I'm upstate in prison.
I remember you.
Yes, but you won't tell us where.
Auburn, Auburn, Auburn.
Okay, but you're in Auburn.
Bernie, what questions do we have for this guy?
No, no, no.
I got some good news.
Oh, good news.
I'm getting out.
You're out?
I'm not out yet.
I'm getting out at the end of the year, December 31st, New Year's.
Getting out on New Year's.
And you've been in prison now for over 20 years because of blue boxing?
Is that the story?
1975.
Uh-huh.
30 years for blue boxing.
And also for killing that guard.
But that's not the story.
Okay.
Well, thanks.
Thanks for straightening that out.
I think now we understand the whole story.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
I'm killing a guard.
Go ahead.
Hello.
Yes.
Hello.
Yes, you're on the air.
Go ahead.
I'm listening to your story about the token booth clerks.
And my friend warned me she was a token booth clerk and she left the job because she said
basically they would be walking targets.
And I predict that when they start getting sued by the employees, they're going to eliminate that.
And the next thing is it's very inconvenient.
You know, and it's also unsafe because if something happens and now they have to run
back into the token booth and try to find a, call a police officer or.
Right.
You know, and I heard about that incident of the token booth clerk being attacked.
Yeah.
And the thing is, you know, when something happens, you need to know where to go to find
somebody.
Where to find somebody.
The token booth is always the place where somebody should be.
And if there's someplace else cleaning up garbage someplace, you're never going to know
where they are.
And it's going to take valuable seconds or minutes to find that person.
And, and that's also, I, I, I thought it was ridiculous.
I heard my, my, my friend, she said they want us to be clean as I said, but weren't you
hired as a token booth clerk?
And what happened to all the cleaners they hired?
Apparently, I don't know.
They will still keep their position.
And she, you know, because one of the reasons that they're thinking about striking is that
the cleaners feel, and rightly so, you know, that if they have the token booth clerk, token
booth clerk doing their job, they won't be needed.
But the token booth clerk, clerks earn a little more.
So, you know, and also if you have token booth clerk, does that necessarily mean you want
to go around picking up garbage?
No, the thing that I think they need to learn is that you can't run a successful transit
system on automation, which seems to be what they're, they're moving towards.
They're getting rid of, of the conductors who open the doors.
They're getting rid of token booth people.
You need people.
Every mass transit system I visited over the last summer had lots and lots of people helping
the customers.
And that's, that's something that's essential.
You can never take away that human touch.
And I think that's what the MTA is trying to do.
And they're going to learn a valuable lesson.
Right.
It's not sensible.
And, you know, they had a focus group.
I attended a focus group when they first started introducing the MetroCard.
And they asked, you know, disabled riders, how we feel about that.
And we voiced our opinions.
We told them about the, those, um, like jail-like turnstiles.
I caught, well, the cages, I call them.
Right.
You know, you say we going through it and seeing eye dog, you know, how would you get
your dog through there if that's the only entrance or you have to come out of the train
and then walk until you find an entrance that has a regular token booth.
Yeah.
Now, you know.
Well, unfortunately, we're going to have to leave it there, but we're certainly going
to be following that story and, uh, and, and keeping an eye on things.
It's going to be fascinating the next couple of weeks in New York.
Uh, I just, uh, on a personal note, uh, something that's happening.
I've talked about the Verizon DSL debacle that's been going on, uh, since, uh, since
June.
Um, tomorrow is the next scene in this play where Verizon is once again scheduled to show
up to install the DSL line.
Now, the reason they've been so hesitant is because they're not going to be the carrier
in the end.
They have no money to make on this.
So they have, I think, four times now not shown up.
Uh, now, however, there is a complaint into the attorney general of New York who has,
uh, promised to look into this.
Uh, tomorrow is the next showdown and we're going to, uh, to see just what it is that
happens.
Now, well, they make some money, right?
They're leasing the line.
No, they make no money.
They, they basically, well, they install it and that's it.
Then they're out of there and I just, I just pay the carrier and it's, it's, uh, it's
widespread.
This is what they do.
They don't show up.
But I think the carrier has to pay Verizon.
Okay, fine.
But not, not me.
I'm not the one paying them.
That's, that's, that's the thing.
All right, we're out of time and I want to thank everybody for calling.
We'll be back again next week.
Good night.
Thank you.
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City.
Watch that sound.
It's going to be raver creolicious.
The Midnight Ravers, where every show is a special.