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And this is Radio Station WBAI New York, where it's 7 o'clock on a Wednesday night time for
Off the Hook.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving, now I can't make a call.
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.
I do.
I do.
And I remember it wasn't, it didn't seem as hot as it does now.
Maybe global warming has made things hotter or maybe we're just less tolerant.
I think it's a combination of things.
There's an interesting factoid on the weather on various channels that there have been 55,
only 55 days where it's been 100 or more in Central Park since 1870.
That's 136 years and only 55 days has it been over 100 officially in Central Park with scientific
measurement.
I think their thermometer is actually in the shade or something.
Well, it's supposed to be because otherwise you get all sorts of fake effects.
They have all sorts of ways of making it seem hotter or more historic than before.
How many times have you heard, this is the storm of the century, this is the biggest
storm in a hundred years.
Today I heard LaGuardia airport set an all time record for being 101 degrees and this
never happened before.
And I know it's been 101 degrees before, including LaGuardia.
What they mean, and they don't say this, what they mean is it's the hottest it's ever
been on August 2nd.
That's what that means.
So they always have their little ways of making things seem to be more important than they
are.
Yeah, it's hot.
It'll be hot for a couple more days.
We'll deal with it.
Some people's lights will go out.
Right, Walter?
It's weather porn.
Yeah.
My lights were out from Tuesday to Sunday during that blackout in Northwestern Queens.
Now here, some people are still out, are out again in Astoria.
They're really upset at Con Edman.
He must be screaming at his person.
I had a Red Cross van six blocks from my house.
They were giving away food because, you know, supermarkets, the food was spoiled and supermarkets
would just be closed down.
Why not open the supermarkets and let everybody just sort of rummage?
Well, I don't think you want people eating that food, but yeah.
I mean, before that goes bad, obviously, but what was it like?
Ten days without power?
You had to cancel your lecture at Hope.
Yeah, I mean, it's unbearable.
I couldn't use my computers because they would overheat and crash.
Well, you couldn't use them at all, could you, if there's no power?
Well, I had batteries, fridges.
One of our fridges melted.
We had partial power.
I think they had us on the generator.
So one of our refrigerators stayed working, but one of them defrosted itself spontaneously.
So Con Ed has generators just lying around?
Yeah, yeah.
If you walk around Queens, you'll see these, they're, you know, about the size of cars,
blocky things.
Really?
Just sitting out there in the street?
Yeah, they're Marquess generators.
Yeah.
But, you know, I was going to take one, but they-
You're going to take a generator?
They have signs on them saying these are, you know, under video surveillance.
Wow.
Do you remember after 9-11, down here, they brought the power in by cables, heavy cables
on the street?
They have that in Northwestern Queens.
Why don't they just fix the power?
They're working on it.
And that's one of the things, right?
What actually happens?
I mean, this equipment is, what's happening to it?
That's the thing.
It's amazing to me how quickly the infrastructure can just completely fall apart.
All we're talking about is a little heat, you know?
We've been through heat before, but for some reason, this summer, the heat is really making
everything fall apart.
We saw it during Hope.
We saw rivers in the subway.
We saw lights going out.
People just completely at a loss to explain it.
Why don't we find some friends with weaponry and, you know, open a ride, call it the Iraq
experience.
No power and hot weather and bullets going off here and there.
Well, there'll be many thousands of people returning to this country who can help you
live that fantasy out.
Understandably, though, the power requirements go way up when it's hot.
But we had, I mean, how many people did we have at the conference saying like, this never
happens in Europe?
This never happens in the UK.
We never hear of this sort of thing.
It doesn't happen in New York that often either.
Well, I mean, but I was getting comments, you know, along the lines of people don't
even know what blackouts are.
Oh, that's not true.
Well, I know.
There was a blackout in London a couple of years ago.
There's blackouts everywhere.
I don't know.
It just seems a lot more common around here than it should.
Well, it's interesting to see how people deal with it.
The blackout of a couple of years ago, where everybody had to walk across the bridges.
And 9-11, of course, where there was all sorts of disruptions.
Just interesting to see how people are able to cope and make do.
And I'm curious if people have any stories about that.
Bernie, how is it down in Philadelphia?
Are you living through the same kind of mayhem?
I don't know if I'd call it mayhem, but the night before last, I lost power for a couple
of hours in the evening, just around darkness setting, around dusk.
And I didn't know how long I would be off, but I was offline.
Well, I did have a laptop with one of these EVDO cards, so I wasn't completely offline.
I could get on the internet that way.
But I didn't open my refrigerator for fear of letting out all the cold air, not knowing
how long it would last, and fortunately came back a couple hours later.
Well, you should share your cold air with the rest of us, because obviously that's something
that's in great shortage.
There's all sorts of ways you can help.
Turning on your air conditioner and opening up the door so that it permeates into the
atmosphere is one of the best things you can do.
We're all about passing on public service announcements to people that can help.
Is there anything else that we can think of offhand?
They say this is the biggest heat wave of the summer.
They're turning off the colored lights on the Empire State Building to conserve power.
How much do you think that actually takes?
Not a lot.
Not too much.
Is that limiting compared to the air conditioning system in the Empire State Building?
You can calculate some of this, because the bill for the Brooklyn Bridge, I remember hearing
two or three years ago, was $50,000.
That's what?
Your average monthly bill is $100?
So that's 500 times a monthly bill?
So that's the equivalent of 500 months' worth of a home.
They're also limiting air conditioning in the fancy seats of Yankee Stadium.
Did you know there was air conditioning in seats?
No.
They do that exactly.
Ordering some municipal buildings, like the Rikers Island Jail, to use their generators.
Well, that'll show them, won't it?
Make the prisoners sweat.
Well, they're using their generator.
Yeah, but I think we'll have to contestify that's not quite the same thing as having...
Very dangerous heat wave, Mayor Bloomberg says.
It's really more than just uncomfortable.
It can seriously threaten your life.
It's the first time I've heard the weather be referred to as fatal in a while.
Over 400 cooling centers have been opened in New York.
I'm not sure where these cooling centers are.
They never say.
They keep on saying there are cooling centers all over New York, and they never say where
they are.
Well, call 311.
Ask where the nearest cooling center is, and I'm not going to do it now, because it'll
take too long just to get a person.
We should try it after the show.
Yeah, what I'd like to do after the show, though, is do a few things in the interest
of the public, such as, well, we have the TV-B-Gone, all right?
I think it's within everybody's interest for people to go outside, find TVs that are on,
like in stores and display windows and things like that, and just switch them all off.
Saves energy.
Exactly.
Think of all the power that you'll be saving.
So, this is an example of how the TV-B-Gone is a useful product, right, Bernie?
Absolutely.
It's a lot of power, these TVs, especially these big plasma screens.
They're very power inefficient, and, you know, one TV, one plasma TV being shut off
is equal to probably keeping a small refrigerator going, so that would be a worthwhile goal.
And for those who don't know, it's a device we've been playing with for over a year now
that you hold up to most TV sets, and it cycles through a whole bunch of different combinations,
different frequencies, and finds the one that turns the television set off, and bingo, TV
set turned off.
It doesn't matter if you're in a store, a bar, your own home, it suddenly goes away,
and nobody really knows who did it, unless, like Kevin over here had at a rest stop at
the New Jersey Turnpike when we were returning to Segways, he did it, and he has the flashing
one.
It's kind of weird, yeah.
It tells you who's doing it, but I don't think it was that that made the trucker point you
out as the person who turned off Oprah while he was watching it.
You were wearing a big TV BeGone t-shirt and walking around looking smug, right?
Well, yeah, I was getting up to go see if I can turn off the other TV, and it didn't
work out very well.
Yeah, it just got to your head, didn't it?
New devices that I think will be very handy, Neon BeGone, that's to turn off these huge
neon lights on top of buildings, and that would save quite a bit of power.
How about air conditioning in unoccupied rooms BeGone, like big stores and schools
and things like that?
Post offices.
There's a post office on 14th Street, you can stand outside and feel the air conditioning
hitting you on the street when they're closed.
I felt that a lot on Wall Street, too.
Yeah, yeah.
And my favorite, Times Square BeGone.
Just push a button and it all goes out.
Imagine how much power would be saved from that.
We could all run our air conditioning all the time if we turned Times Square off.
I'm for it.
I'm totally for it.
Why aren't they doing that?
Why aren't they limiting power to Times Square?
Well, we're going to go up there with our Times Square BeGone device, which is rather
big.
We need a car to pull it up there, and we're going to push the button.
That sounds really ominous, doesn't it?
That didn't come out quite right, but no, seriously, if they want to save power, turn
the damn lights off in Times Square, and we'll save a lot of power.
But those customers, you know, they've got the cash.
I don't think it's about cash anymore.
I think it's about us all pulling together.
Okay, so what else is going on in the world?
All sorts of other things besides the weather, of course.
That's what's on everybody's mind right now.
Let's see.
A rather scary story came out in the last couple of days.
A federal prosecutor may inspect the telephone records of two New York Times reporters in
an effort to identify their confidential sources.
That happened yesterday in a federal appeals court here in New York.
The two-to-one decision from a court historically sympathetic to claims a journalist should
be entitled to protect their sources reversed the lower court and dealt a further setback
to news organizations, which have lately been on a losing streak in the federal courts.
The case arose from a Chicago grand jury's investigation into who told two reporters,
Judith Miller, once again, and Philip Shennan, about actions the government was planning
to take against two Islamic charities in Illinois.
Although the government contended the calls from reporters tipped off the charities to
impending raids and asset seizures, the investigation appeared to be focused on identifying the
reporters' sources.
No testimony has been sought from the reporters, and there has been no indication that their
actions are a subject of the investigation.
But what's scary here is that imagine how much other information they can get by getting
access to their phone records.
How many other sources contacted these reporters?
How many sources did these reporters call from their phones?
And it's a really scary time where all of a sudden it's sort of like a blank check for
the government to just go in and see, who did these people call?
Who did they speak to?
Who's speaking to them?
I mean, if these reporters are any good, they're on the phone all the time talking to all kinds
of people.
And I assume now all of these people are now suspects.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And the only thing I would hope is that they call from so many different phones that it's
not just the same phone all the time.
I mean, when I talk to people, I'm always talking from different phone lines.
It's not like I try to.
It's just that's how it works.
Sometimes I call people from here at the radio station.
Sometimes I call people from a location someplace else, a different radio station, sometimes
a cell phone, sometimes a different cell phone, sometimes a house, sometimes an apartment,
sometimes a different state, sometimes a satellite phone.
It's always something different.
And to find all those numbers, it would be very difficult, not impossible, but difficult.
So how does something like this affect publications who want to print articles that are submitted
anonymously where you don't have anyone to turn to?
I guess you wouldn't make contacts through the telephone to start with.
And if you did, you'd do it from a number not associated with the publication.
That's what you have to do.
But this is a really bad thing.
This is a really bad thing for all reporters everywhere if you can just access reporter
phone records like that.
It's amazing to me that this is just happening and there aren't shockwaves reverberating
everywhere.
So it's really been just one thing after another with this loss of privacy in the last
years.
There's really not so many more shockwaves left to be emitted.
I guess.
I guess.
But I don't know.
This is something that I think 10 years ago would have been a lot more of a big deal because
people would have said, oh my God, this can't be happening.
But yeah, we've sort of been hardened to it.
We've fallen very far down the slippery slope of metaphor.
Bernie, would you agree with that?
Yes.
I'm slipping as we speak, but I would like to point out that it's not like in the older
days when reporters could be relied upon to keep their mouths shut, to not reveal their
confidential sources.
Now the reporters don't even need to be consulted.
The government can just reach in and grab their telephone records from the local exchange
carrier and peruse them at will.
And that's kind of scary.
So if a reporter says to someone, I promise to keep your information private or keep your
identity private, they really can't make that commitment unless that person calls from a
confidential location that isn't going to be traced back to them.
It's like these tip lines where they say, call this tip line for complete anonymity
and it's a toll-free number.
Well, guess what?
There's a record of who calls toll-free numbers.
Even if you're calling from a phone that has a caller ID blocked, the called party
has in their phone records who called them.
So there's no such thing as very little, there's almost no privacy when it comes to
the public.
That's just stupidity on the part of the person calling in to not even think that calling
a toll-free number would reveal your phone number.
But nobody knows that.
No, it's not stupidity.
I think it's just people don't know.
When these toll-free numbers are promoted, your anonymity is assured, it's a confidential
tip line, it's a toll-free number.
Guess what?
It's not confidential.
They know what number you're calling from.
Yeah, but who actually believes that calling a number like that somehow prevents your number
from going through?
I just can't tell them.
Because someone says it in an advertisement, you're going to believe that?
Yes, because people believe what they hear.
They're assured that their anonymity is ...
Okay, well, that's where I arrive at the conclusion of stupid, because how can you believe things
like that?
Well, unfortunately, too many people do.
All right, well, there's a lot of dumb people around, but we're here to try and knock some
sense into you and let you know that what you're being told is not always the truth.
In fact, most of the time it's not, and if you ever call a toll-free number, your number
is being transmitted, and star 67 is not going to help you, because that technology does
not work there.
I think a lot of reasonable people could not know that toll-free numbers don't support
calling.
Stupid people aren't reasonable.
There can be a lot of reasonable stupid people out there.
We're stupid in different things.
You're not stupid in everything, but there are certain things that you need to be educated
in, and how your privacy is being invaded is certainly one of them.
I think we're kept in a state of perpetual stupidity by not knowing how to keep our information
private.
So true.
Yeah.
All right.
Speaking of stupidity, the UK has started a terrorist threat system very similar to
the United States.
They launched it yesterday.
They rank their terrorist threat as severe, saying an attack was highly likely.
It was the first time the government had published such information.
Until now, it had argued that doing so would cause unnecessary alarm.
Well, now apparently unnecessary alarm is what they want to cause.
Faced with growing criticism that it was failing to spell out the threat from groups
like Al-Qaeda, the government has decided to follow the lead of other countries, namely
the United States, and introduce a graded alert system.
It has five levels, ranging from low, which means attack unlikely, to critical, attack
expected imminently, and is similar to the one used in the United States for the past
four years, although unlike the U.S. model, it is not color-coded.
That's really the only difference.
How do you deal with that?
Severe is the second highest level.
So they're pretty much the same.
Are we orange or yellow?
Well, New York is allegedly always at orange, but the rest of the country, I think, is yellow.
The threat level was posted on a website, www.intelligence.gov.uk, and on the home office
and security service sites.
Would that be MI5 or MI6?
You know, I don't know what they're up to now.
But MI5 is the domestic intelligence, is it not?
Or MI6 is the external, like the CIA, was supposed to be not American, not on our own
citizens, but outside, but now they just surveil everybody.
Which is it?
You know, I think you're right.
I think you're right.
I also think I heard that MI7 is reserved for extraterrestrials, but who knows?
It's the Brits.
They operated a more complex seven-level system in the past, and never told the public what
the level was.
Those were the days.
So yeah, it's...
So the public is not smart enough to understand the two additional levels, is basically what
they're saying.
Well, that's what they're saying, I guess.
But the public never knew about it in the first place.
Hear about this story up in...
Actually, down in Philadelphia, Bernie, about the guy who took a picture of the cops and
got into a lot of trouble.
We heard about that several years ago.
The guy's name is Bernie.
Yeah, well, there's that, of course.
But this is something different.
A Philadelphia family said they are outraged over the arrest of one of their family members.
The family of Naftali Cruz said police had no right to come onto their property and arrest
their 21-year-old son simply because he was using his cell phone's camera.
He said to Channel 10 investigators, this comes from their website, that police arrested
him last Wednesday for taking a picture of police activity with his cell phone.
Police at the 35th District said they were in his neighborhood that night arresting a
drug dealer.
Naftali Cruz said that when he heard the commotion, he walked out of his back door with his cell
phone to see what was happening.
He said that when he saw the street lined with police cars, he decided to take a picture
of the scene.
I opened the phone and took a shot.
Moments later, he got the shock of his life when an officer came to his backyard gate.
He opened the gate and took me by my right hand.
He said the officer threw him into a police car, cuffed him, and took him to jail.
A neighbor said she witnessed the incident and could not believe what she saw.
He opened up the gate and went up to the guy, pulled him down, had him on a car, was
telling him, you should have just went into your house and minded your own business instead
of trying to take pictures off of your picture phone.
I guess that's advice from the Philadelphia police.
According to Cruz, they threatened to charge me with conspiracy, impeding an investigation,
obstruction of an investigation.
They said you were impeding this investigation.
I asked by doing what?
The officer said by taking a picture of the police officers with a camera phone.
When his parents went to get him out of jail, the police told them the same thing.
The incredible thing about this story is there's absolutely no law against this.
You can take pictures of the cops.
You can take pictures of anything on the street.
But what cops tell you and what's actually true are completely different things.
Listeners to the show will know that I very rarely give compliments to the New York Police
Department, but I will say that by and large, they are aware of the law that says you can
take pictures of them.
And I think it's because organizations like NYCLU and National Lawyers Guild have made
it into an issue, have put it into the newspapers, so everybody is aware of this.
I'm not sure.
Bernie, are people aware of this down in Philadelphia?
I don't think so.
In this case, the police certainly aren't aware of it or they're just lying because
in this case, Mr. Cruz said, he's a Penn State student, he's like 19 years old.
He said that the police told him that he broke a new law that prohibits police from
taking pictures of police with cell phones.
Now, I think this comes from the part of many police officers' minds where if there's something
they don't like, it must be illegal.
And they'll just say, that's some new law, you can't do that here, you're handcuffed,
you're arrested, come to this, come get, go to jail.
It doesn't work that way.
It shouldn't work that way.
And I'm hoping that this is a pursuit.
Ultimately, I think the police told this guy that he was lucky that he wasn't jailed
longer because there wasn't a supervisor on duty and that's why they released him.
I think what really happened is the supervisor on duty said, you can't lock this guy up,
he didn't break any laws.
Well, that speaks volumes.
The supervisor's not around, we have to let everybody go.
That's not how it works.
Usually, you have to wait for the supervisor to come back before you can be arraigned or
anything.
So they just were trying to cover their asses, I think.
I mean, as it stands now, police don't really have all that much accountability for things.
And so I think the major threat that they saw was that somebody was taking a picture
and obviously the officer was uncomfortable with that, maybe because he was doing something
wrong, but more so because if anything came of what they were doing in the investigation,
there was actual evidence of them being there and them doing whatever activities they were
doing.
In these days where, as we just read, our rights are being taken away in various ways
that we never would have believed years ago, I think it's very hard for all of us to keep
up with what the new laws are.
Do we have the right to take a picture of a subway train?
Do we have the right to keep our phone records private?
Do we have the right to take a picture of a cop?
You tell somebody there's a new law, it's quite likely they're going to believe you.
And it's in the interest of the police to do whatever they want, whether it's driving
on the wrong side of the road or arresting people just because they don't like the way
they look, and to get away with this by telling people that it's perfectly legal.
And in this state, the way things are today, it's quite likely that that will be believed.
Interestingly enough, I have a couple of stories that are follow-ups to things we've covered
in the past that are also related to what you can or can't record, either by photography
or audio technology, and it's depressing as well.
In New York State, a judge ruled that it was a felony for a mother to hide a tape recorder
in her son's backpack without the bus matron's knowledge.
It turns out that the bus matron had been verbally abusing an autistic boy, seven years
old, and he had managed to get this through to the mother.
The mother was suspicious, I'm not terribly sure because of the story.
Wouldn't the autistic boy be the one to be charged with the felony, though?
No, because he didn't put the tape recorder in his...
But he was the one acting as the bug, you see.
I think they should go after him, not the mother.
They ruled in the trial of the bus matron that the audio tape was inadmissible because
the mother had committed a felony by recording it, going against the general rule.
Was she charged with a felony?
Did they just say that?
Apparently the judge just ruled it inadmissible because it was a felony, didn't decide to...
Didn't have the prosecutor charge her.
But you're allowed to record conversations that you have with other people, so if they
would have just said that...
The mother wasn't there.
Right, but the boy put it in his backpack or whatever, or the mother asked him first.
It seems like it could have been worded very similarly, except without the felony thing.
What state was this in?
New York State.
Now, you have the right to record a phone conversation if one side knows about it.
Does the same law hold...
No, not in Pennsylvania.
In New York State.
Okay.
And do you have the same right to record a conversation if it's in person?
Yes.
All right.
Do you want to give more than just the yes?
Or...
No.
The answer is yes.
According to Mike?
I mean...
Yes, yes, you have the right.
And now is this just a state thing, or is this throughout this glorious country of ours?
I believe, but I'm not certain that it's the same rules that apply to phone conversations
apply in real life as well.
Well those are different by state.
I have another story that illustrates that in a moment.
Let's make that moment happen.
Okay.
California.
The California Supreme Court ruled that Californians' privacy rights are violated when their phone
conversations are recorded by somebody out of state, even if the other state allows callers
to record the conversation secretly.
This was a case where people sued their brokers with Salomon Smith Barney.
The brokers had secretly been recording phone conversations.
The brokers were in Atlanta, and the customers were in California, and they ruled with the
customers that their privacy rights were violated.
So you see there's all kinds of confusion out there as to what's allowed, what's not
allowed.
So if a cop comes up to you and says, you can't do that...
Don't necessarily trust him.
Don't trust him, but at the same time, there's going to be doubt.
There's going to be doubt in your mind.
Is he telling the truth or not?
And that's what they count on.
They count on you not knowing.
So you got to know the law.
It's difficult.
Manuel?
Yes.
I'm just curious about the educational issues involved with what we just heard about from
Jim.
It's like, if you're in another state, but you violate a different state's laws while
you're in the state where that's not illegal, how can the other state rule or say what you're
doing is illegal?
Well, they've already done that years ago.
We addressed this on some of the first shows I was on back in 94.
There was a BBS in, I think, California and they...
West Enidies.
Right.
They dragged them back to Missouri because it violated community standards in Missouri
and they did a lot of hard time.
There's the Amateur Action BBS.
I believe so.
It was an adult-oriented BBS and it was too dirty for Missouri.
I think it was Tennessee, but...
I think you're right.
Yeah.
That was a scary story and remains scary to this day.
Missouri is a show me state.
Okay.
So I guess it wouldn't apply there.
Okay.
Moving on.
Two students each face up to a year in jail for a prank that involved hacking into a professor's
computer, giving grades to other students, and sending pizza, magazine subscriptions,
and CDs to the professor's home.
The two face misdemeanor charges of illegally accessing computers.
The pair, both students of California State University in Northridge, are scheduled to
be arraigned on August 21st.
An investigation showed the professor's network account had been accessed without her permission
and grades were assigned to nearly 300 students.
The professor's campus email was being forwarded to an account established by the two.
Professors also alleged that they used personal identifying information found on the university
system to order food, magazine subscriptions, and a shipment of blank CDs to the professor's
home.
The professor was billed for the purchases, but was not required to pay.
The school would not release the professor's name.
They did release the students' names, both female, and we're not going to release their
names there.
We'll show you.
Now that the statute of limitations for this has expired, I'm going to say, in college,
I did the same thing, except I did it the old-fashioned way.
The little cards that fall out of magazines, you fill them out and you send them, and except
for the use of the computer, this is a prank.
I mean, I think charging them is a shade absurd.
Well, a year in jail is kind of crazy.
The year in jail is excessive, but it's still hard to kind of justify what they did, which
was tampering with, or maybe totally, you know, destroying the records that the professor
had on the students' grades and stuff, and that's, you know, if he didn't make backups
of that, that's not necessarily something that's easy to recover and it's a lot of work
to do.
First off, 300 students got assigned grades.
Do you think maybe they knew they were going to get caught?
300 students?
Oh, yeah.
Well, I mean, that's another thing.
You can't expect to do something like that and not get caught, and this isn't necessarily
one of those typical cases that we always come across where, you know, it was something
innocent or it was something that a student stumbled across, or, I mean, they were actively
trying to cause trouble.
If this was in a movie, we'd be laughing.
We'd be laughing.
Yeah.
So, I mean, that's the mentality now.
Well, we laugh at murder in movies.
I don't.
What's the last murder you laughed at in a movie?
Now you know why I don't get mad at Mike.
Yeah.
Wow.
That's pretty sobering.
But no, I think it's, I think, I don't know the specifics of the case, but to me it sounds
like something that's easily detectable, easily fixable, and just the kind of thing that goes
on in college.
Right.
But not justifiable, although the punishment does not fit the crime.
What do you think a good punishment would be?
I don't know.
But not really a year in jail.
I think, you know, fixing the problem maybe, or writing an essay, or some torture like
that.
Spank them.
I'm turning your microphone down.
Yes.
Okay.
The U.S. government's crackdown on media indecency could prevent World War II veterans from sharing
their stories in an upcoming TV documentary series by Ken Burns.
That's what the head of PBS said last week.
Noted filmmaker Ken Burns' highly anticipated seven-part series, The War, features salty
language used by servicemen and others.
If the expletives make it to air, they could lead to crippling fines for the offending
stations as a result of a new law signed last month by President George W. Bush.
Paula Kerger, the president and CEO of PBS, told reporters that she was reluctant to bleep
the words out because that would diminish the impact of the documentary, and airing
the film after 10 p.m., when the new rules do not apply, would reduce the available audience.
Well, this is, I think, the fight we've been waiting for.
Finally, in the mainstream, somebody is going to challenge this FCC nonsense.
Of course, we have to wait another year for this to actually happen.
But remember, every utterance incurs a fine of up to $325,000.
Now it's incredible that this kind of thing is the law, but everybody has to follow it.
And this is PBS, so it's probably $325,000 per utterance per station.
Per station, yes.
Which is, you know, adds up very swiftly.
Absolutely.
And the FCC is not very clear as to what exactly they mean by indecent language.
They have the list of words, but other things can be seen as indecent as well.
And some things are allowed, such as Saving Private Ryan, which aired over, was NBC that
aired that during prime time?
And they unanimously ruled that it didn't violate broadcast standards, because it was
a work of art, and it was essential to the art.
And this is real-life military personnel, right?
It's a very smart thing to do, actually, because who's going to back PBS up on this?
The veterans.
All the people that fought on these wars are going to be very angry if their words are
tampered with, or if the documentary is not allowed to be aired.
So it's not just the left-wing liberal people that are going to stand up for this.
It's people from all different backgrounds.
So it's a very good fight, and I hope they don't back down.
How do you stand up against that, though, if the fines are between the FCC and PBS?
I mean, how do people get involved in that?
Well, I guess they would call up and call their stations and say, we support you and
we'll be behind you in case this does become an issue.
And you call the FCC and say the same thing to them.
And, you know, it's really all about...
The only reason these crazy fines exist in the first place is because a lot of crazy
people did that.
You know, they signed a big petition and sent the same letter over and over again and said,
My children don't want to see this crap on TV, and how dare you?
And we're going to cause all kinds of problems if you don't clean up your act.
And the FCC said, that's the American public.
These kind of letters define who the American public are, and we have to act upon it.
I'm pretty sure that's how it all turns out each time.
Your mic is still off.
Are you going to make tasteful remarks from now on?
It's relatively tasteful.
We're burning at something.
All right.
Go ahead.
As an aside, two days ago, Jimmy Kimmel managed to get one of George Carlin's seven dirty
words on the air several times.
Don't say it here.
I was stunned.
It was the four-letter word starting with the letter T that reversed to a woman's mammary
glands.
I understand.
And there are ways you can say that too.
No, definitely not.
He was quoting Mel Gibson.
Okay.
Well, that's not a good thing to do these days.
All right.
Bernie, did you have something?
Well, I'm gearing up for getting my federal excise telephone tax refunded.
Oh, boy.
Okay.
Well, it looks like, according to an article in today's Wall Street Journal, this isn't
going to be as hard as a lot of people think.
Supposedly, according to the Wall Street Journal, believe it or not, the Treasury Department
is going to just sort of assign some flat number of refunds that individuals can get
off their phone bills, somewhere between $30 and $70 for the past three years of illegal
taxes that they were charged, even though this tax really went all the way back to the
Spanish-American War.
So I'm going to give you credit for the past three years.
But businesses are going to have to provide excruciating detail with all the phone bills
over the past three years, some of which the carriers are going to charge a lot of
money to fork over to companies, because companies could really recover tens of thousands of
dollars in illegally collected taxes.
But individuals will probably get between $30 and $70, and as this story moves on, we'll
provide more details on how to get your money back.
All right.
That's what it's all about, is getting that money back.
A new emerging press release, which just came out from the Open Voting Foundation, worst
ever security flaw found in Diebold TS voting machine.
Yes.
This may be the worst security flaw we have seen in touchscreen voting machines, says
Open Voting Foundation President Alan Detschert.
Upon examining the inner workings of one of the most popular paperless touchscreen voting
machines used in public elections in the United States, it has been determined that with the
flip of a single switch inside, the machine can behave in a completely different manner
compared to the tested and certified version.
Diebold has made the testing and certification process practically irrelevant.
If you have access to these machines and you want to rig an election, anything is possible
with the Diebold TS.
This sounds like a sales pitch.
Hey, dictators everywhere.
This is the machine you want.
It can be done without leaving a trace.
All you need is a screwdriver.
Not the drink.
Not the actual physical device.
They're touting this as a flaw and not an intentional thing.
That's what they're saying, but let's read on here and see if we can figure out what
exactly is going on.
This model does not produce a voter-verified paper trail, so there is no way to check if
the voters' choices are accurately reflected in the tabulation.
Open Voting Foundation is releasing 22 high-resolution close-up pictures of the system, which you
can see by going to openvotingfoundation.org.
The most serious issue is the ability to choose between EEPROM and flash boot configurations.
Both of these memory sources are present.
All of the switches in question, JP2, JP3, JP8, SW2, and SW4, are physically present
on the board.
It is clear that this system can ship with live boot profiles in two locations, and switching
back and forth could change literally everything regarding how the machine works and counts
votes.
This could be done before or after the so-called logic and accuracy tests.
A third possible profile could be field-added in minutes and selected in the external flash
memory location, the interface for which is present on the motherboard.
This is not a minor variation from the previously documented attack point on the newer D-BOLT
TSX.
To its credit, the TSX can only contain one boot profile at a time.
D-BOLT has ensured that it is extremely difficult to confirm what code is in a TSX or TS at
any one time, but it is at least theoretically possible to do so.
But in the TS, a completely legal and certified set of files can be instantly overridden,
an illegal uncertified code can be made dominant in the system, and then this situation can
be reversed, leaving the legal code dominant again in a matter of minutes.
These findings underscore the need for open testing and certification.
There is no way such a security vulnerability should be allowed.
These systems should be recalled.
This is really, really interesting, because what they're saying now is that you can literally
use some external flash media and completely change the firmware which the system runs.
And this is not, I mean, this is something that, I mean, this is really, really a serious
problem, because there's absolutely no verification that the code that you're running on their
machines is D-BOLT's code.
If you have access to a voting machine, and who has access to the voting machines?
Not people like us.
The kind of people who do rig the elections, they're the ones with the access.
They can do things like that, and as this press release says, it's completely untraceable.
www.openvotingfoundation.org, they'll have more information on this.
It's quite a story.
Maybe it adds new meaning to the phrase, it's not a bug, it's a feature.
Yeah, it really is.
And it's great that they finally have pictures of this, because there's been a lot of people
that have been saying that this sort of thing is possible, and technically, it's always
been possible, but couldn't really back it up.
These are the people I was trying to get to come to hope, or maybe not these specific
people, but people like that who would show something exactly like this in front of thousands
of people, but I'm glad it got out anyway.
Let me try to explain this for the non-technical, and correct me when I'm wrong.
Essentially what this means is that anybody who has a little flash memory with them can
go in with a screwdriver, open it up, put in a program that essentially says ignore
all the votes of X party, and then afterwards, they can get rid of that, and there's no
evidence that that was ever in there, although it was while everyone voted.
It takes premeditation and a lot of planning to be able to get that code to run on the
machine obviously, but definitely possible.
That's what these things are meant for, that's why they're there.
The person in the article said something to the effect that this is showing the need for
externally verifiable something or other, but it's still totally unclear to me why externally
verifiable machines are any better than a pencil and paper, which is the solution that
has worked for centuries.
I love agreeing with you because it happens so rarely, and it's true, low tech is the
way to go.
Low tech can, you cannot hack hand counting a ballot for every office.
Oh, you can, but it's rather different.
You need a lot of people, you need a lot of people with guns, but essentially, it becomes
much more transparent.
How do you work guns into this?
Anyway.
Lawyers, guns, and money, everything.
Okay.
Well, that's definitely something to keep our eyes on.
There's something else I want to try here.
Actually, Bernie, do you have another story just for about 30 seconds while I type something
into the computer?
Well, for all of us who have analog cell phones or dual mode cell phones that work in a digital
or analog mode, get ready to get fined by your local wireless carrier.
Singular, for instance, is planning to start fining users $4.99 a month to use their older
phones, whether they're TDMA or analog.
What they're trying to do is wean people off or strong arm people off the older subnets
of theirs so they can make the system completely digital, which allows them to put ten times
as many customers or several times as many customers in the same amount of bandwidth.
This is outrageous.
The customers are going to be fined $5 a month for doing what their original contract said
they could do.
My phone from Sprint that works on, it's like seven years old, it works both in analog
AMPS mode.
AMPS stands for Advanced Mobile Phone Standard.
It's been around since the mid-'80s, early-'80s, and it works in the digital CDMA mode.
So I'm waiting to see what Sprint's going to do, and if they start charging me, then
I'm going to probably give them an ultimatum, like, well, don't charge me or go.
We'll be going to the phones soon, but I wanted to read a couple of the letters here.
This person wrote in with an interesting site.
It's called ospenterprises.com, and it's basically an automatic prank phone call you can make
to anyone.
Just type in the number you want to call, what you want to appear in the caller ID,
and the computer does the rest.
We're going to test this out right now.
I've typed in a little message that we're going to have read back to us, but the only
question I want to ask you guys is what kind of voice should we use?
We have a choice here.
The default is Diane 35.
I assume that means the age, but we also have David 30, William 30, Emily 30, Frank 35,
Lawrence 55, Millie 45, Isabel 30, French, Katrin 35, German, Marta 30, Spanish, and
Vittoria 30, Italian.
Anybody?
Jim, you're disqualified for the remark you made earlier.
Do the French one.
Do the French one?
Then we'd have to enter a message in French.
It might not work in English.
Choose the 55-year-old guy.
Lawrence 55.
I was thinking the same thing.
Kind of have a craggy sound to his voice.
Okay.
I'm going to hit the call button now, and we should hear a message from Lawrence 55
in just a moment.
Are we calling the studio?
We're calling a special number, which hopefully will begin ringing in a second.
I test.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Hello?
Hello.
Hello.
Thank you for listening to Off the Hook.
Please give us a call now.
This.
Press three to remove your number from our demo system.
From IP 66.95.98.66 demo.
Okay.
Well, we just gave out our IP, which I guess is not such a bad thing.
Bernie, are you still there?
Didn't lose you.
I'm here.
He cut off.
The reason I had added this is not a recording, but he only made it up to this, and then gave
that press three to not get a call from us again.
The interesting thing about that is that I won't be able to do that again from this IP.
It logs your IP and says that, okay, you've done this already.
You have to wait a few more hours before you test it out again.
But if you want to play with it, it's ospenterprises.com slash phone.
What's the actual purpose for this?
I don't know.
I don't know.
He didn't sound 55.
He sounded British.
He sounded like a computer.
Yeah.
He did.
He did.
55-year-old computers can't talk.
No.
No.
That's true, too.
Okay.
Let's take some phone calls.
212-209-2900.
And while these calls are coming in, let's see if we have any interesting letters to
read to the folks.
We sure do.
We have a lot of things that came in.
A lot of people expressing their regrets that they weren't able to make it to the conference.
Well, it's your own damn fault, really.
You should have made it.
You missed a great conference.
Sadly, I could not afford to go to the con this year, so I am not terribly sure what
the numbers that you were assigned were about.
You said that you were number six, which is a number from the number station phone numbers
that you had alluded to sounding like.
Is this a coincidence?
Did I miss something at the con that concerned the number stations?
Great show.
Hope to see you in 2008, signed Eri, I believe.
Well, everybody was assigned a number for administrative purposes.
At birth.
But we happened to have, you know, a lookup table.
Mine happened to be six.
I don't know if there was any connection between that and the voice on the number station.
I really don't.
I really don't.
I don't know if that's my voice.
I don't know if there's any connection.
I don't know what the number stations mean.
There's a whole lot I don't know.
So let's not even draw on that.
You're the only unique number in the studio, I think.
I think everybody else was two.
You were all number twos?
But as speakers, though, you had different numbers, I believe.
I saw different numbers for you guys.
Everybody had a weird...
It's very confusing.
I had a whole series of numbers.
Yeah.
Those numbers, you'll be called by those names.
By those numbers, rather, in the future as well.
And you'll be expected to answer to those.
Okay.
212-209-2900.
Where shall we go?
Let's go over here.
And good evening.
You're on the radio.
Hi.
How you doing?
Turn on your radio, please.
Got it.
Got it.
What's on your mind?
Last show, you had an interview with a guy who was going to be a speaker at Hope, and
he was arrested.
I was never clear on exactly what happened, and I'd like to hear a follow-up on that.
Actually, I'm glad you mentioned that, because we had Steve Rambam on last week, the private
eye who was going to give the talk, Privacy is Dead, Get Over It.
And he was taken away by FBI agents who were accusing him of impersonating an FBI agent
under...
I looked at the charges against him, and basically, there was no information in the charges at
all.
They basically said that somebody, a witness to something, said that he came to their house
and identified himself as a federal agent, and they have proof that he rented a car in
the area at the time, and that somehow proves that he did that.
I think he...
Using an FBI ID or something?
No.
I mean, I don't know.
I assume he was using his ID, which might have a badge on it to start with, and maybe
the people there got confused and thought that he was an FBI agent.
I think they were really confused, because I don't even think they spoke English.
There's that.
I think everything was done through a translator, if I remember correctly.
Again, we don't know the facts.
We just know that he was taken away then.
And what we're trying to do is work out a time when he can give the talk that he wasn't
able to give, thanks to the actions of the FBI that day.
And what we're trying to do is find a space somewhere in the New York area where we can
do that.
We almost had a space at Columbia, and we were trying to get it for mid-August, and
that fell through.
So if you have connections anyplace in the city, some kind of a room where you can hold
a couple hundred people, we'd love to hear from you.
The idea is for us to just do this for the attendees of the conference who missed out
on this because he was taken away, and also to give Steve the chance to say his piece
on those things that he's such an expert on.
Write to us, oth at 2600.com, because we certainly would like to make this up.
Thanks for calling and reminding us of that.
Something else I wanted to mention, too, is so many people, we were thanking people all
last week, and we totally forgot to thank our provider, NAC.net, who was there for us,
as they always are.
Alex from NAC.net, who has been there for just about every single conference, and also
Mark from Rainbow Broadband, who helped us out tremendously with increased bandwidth.
And I hope we're able to work with these people again in the future.
And there were so many other people, the guy who spent endless hours taping all the talks,
the people selling the caffeine beverages downstairs, and the guy who cleaned out the
restrooms.
There's just so many people that helped out in various ways.
So please, if we left you out, let us know, and we'll try to remember to include you.
But you're all in our minds.
All right, 212-209-2900.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Speak up.
Oh, well, you gave up.
Let's try over here.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
A dial tone.
That's weird.
You don't usually get a dial tone.
Let's try down there.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Go ahead.
Okay.
We're having some trouble with the phones today.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
All right.
Apparently, we pissed off the phone company or something.
Are you there?
Good evening.
Hi.
Hi.
How are you doing?
Hi, Emmanuel.
Hi.
Yes, speak up, please.
Oh, sorry.
No, I just wanted to ask about the device.
Who are you calling from?
Hello?
About the TV BeGone?
Yes, go ahead.
About the TV BeGone?
Yes, what about the TV BeGone?
Do you know where do you buy it or where can I find the information on how to make the
device?
Bernie, I believe you have a website, correct?
It's not my website.
No, but you have the website in your head.
You can say it.
It is at tvbegone.com.
Or just do a web search for TV BeGone with the letter B, and you will find lots of information
on it.
It's a lot of fun.
I hope that answers your question.
Really.
Good evening.
You're on the air.
Hello?
Yes.
How are you doing?
Hey.
I'm sorry.
Hey, Emmanuel.
How are you?
Good.
How are you?
Good, guys.
Hey, listen.
Real quick.
Just an incident.
A couple of years ago during the blackout in my little town in New Jersey, Fox News
and Rupert Murdoch's Fascist Network.
I do it whenever I can with Fox News.
Okay.
Well, all that's irrelevant.
What's your story?
All right.
The point I'm trying to get to is that the cops threatened to arrest me.
They said I was creating a nuisance.
You know how you always see people jumping up and down behind the camera, and that's
all I was doing?
Oh, yeah.
Well, that's an incident that I was wondering.
They said I was creating a disturbance and told me to stop.
You were confusing millions of people watching on television.
Yes.
That's always a bad thing to do.
Right.
You know, I don't know.
That's, if someone tells you to move out of the camera range, I guess, you know, you're
supposed to do it, and if you don't, you might be creating a disturbance, but I don't know.
That's something I never really thought of.
You know what the funny thing was?
The reporter was threatening to beat me up whenever he turned the camera off.
Well, there was a Channel 2 reporter who got fired for what he said afterwards.
when someone was doing that to him, he used an expletive and it went out over the air
because they didn't turn off the camera quickly enough.
So this reporter stayed right in line with the Fox idea there.
Really, he got really angry. It was pretty funny.
I think you can find reporters from just about any network, including Pacifica,
who will threaten you if you interfere with their work.
But it's an interesting story nonetheless.
But thanks for sharing it with us.
Let's go over here. Good evening. You're on the air.
Speak up, please.
Hey, Emmanuel. How are you doing? This is Kodak from Rhode Island.
Hi, how are you doing?
I called a couple of weeks ago.
What's on your mind?
I don't know. I just want to know. I really enjoyed myself.
First conference, and I had a blast.
I did end up bringing my laptop down after all.
I don't know if you remember I told you.
Actually, I think you wrote us a letter, I think, right?
Yeah, I wrote you a couple of emails.
Yeah. Okay, so you brought your laptop down, and was it a good idea to do that or not?
Yeah. No, I had a blast.
Actually, I felt safer in downtown New York City than I did coming home in Kennedy Plaza in Providence.
There you go. That's what we're trying to get through to people,
that New York can be a very friendly and safe place,
especially when you're with a couple of thousand of your closest friends.
Right, and I look forward to going back to Mohope's when you have them.
As long as you keep having them, I'll keep going.
Well, hopefully this one wasn't too much of a financial disaster,
so we can do one again in two years.
We'll be updating people about that in months, weeks, years ahead.
I guess we're just about out of time for this show,
but we'll be back again next week.
You can write to us, OTH at 2600.com,
or very quickly, off the hook, care of WBAI,
120 Wall Street,
10th floor,
New York,
New York,
10005.
See you next week.
Let's break the law here tonight
Fuck tonight
Tonight
They wanna lock me out the door with my key
I'm out with my lads and I'm feeding fleas
Well, we ain't that good and we ain't that clean
We don't really care if you're black or white
But we'll do it now until it's night
Well, let's break the law here tonight
Fuck tonight
Tonight
They wanna lock me out the door with my key
Well, let's break the law tonight
Yeah, we'll give up the one for tonight
No, we'll settle that old score tonight
And we'll break the law here tonight
Fuck tonight
Tonight
They wanna lock me out the door with my key
I'm out on the streets and I'm feeling high
But you wanna fight me and I don't know why
Yeah, I wanna get Danny all covered in mud
But you turn on me and I see his blood
Well, let's break the law here tonight
Fuck tonight
Tonight
They wanna lock me out the door with my key
They wanna lock me out the door with my key
They wanna lock me out the door with my key tonight