You've been listening to Free Speech Radio News, from KPSK in Los Angeles, this is Aura Bogado.
And a very good evening to everybody. The program is Off the Hook, or it's about to be Off the Hook.
You're listening to WBAI in New York. It's 7 o'clock.
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 work, but if they could they would.
Fundidly bond for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood. Fundidly bond!
Fundidly bond!
And a good evening to everybody. The program is Off the Hook.
It's Wednesday night, am I wrong?
Yeah, just past seven.
Well, most of our people seem to be missing.
Maybe they got confused with the daylight saving change.
You know, you joke, but it's entirely possible that someone forgot to set their...
But wouldn't they have been here? Wait, I always get messed up by this.
It's at the clock ahead, so to them it's only six o'clock maybe.
Could be.
Maybe. Even so.
All right, well, skeleton crew tonight. Mike is here.
Hi.
And not given on the other side of the room.
Hello.
And Bernie S., I believe you're joining us from down there in Philadelphia.
I am from a landline, so you'll hear my dry cough with greater fidelity.
Well, of course, Bernie, we insist that you be on the air because of what you bring to the listeners.
And we're all thrilled to have you, sick or not sick.
And your voice sounds, I would say, better than ever.
You mean the pathogens I'll bring to the listening audience?
Well, in all honesty, I can't even tell you're sick.
You sound great.
Give me time.
Okay, you have all the time in the world.
All right, so...
Maybe other people will show up, I don't know.
But we have plenty of things to talk about either way.
And what I'd like to do tonight is talk to a lot of listeners since we weren't on last week.
We have all sorts of things to catch up on, listener mail and listener phone calls.
So our phone number is 212-209-2900.
Please give a call.
And I guess maybe as soon as 15 minutes, we might start taking phone calls, if there are enough people out there.
So, yeah, it'd be nice to have sort of a call-in episode of the program.
We haven't done that in a while.
As far as things that are happening in the world, you've got something there, Mike?
It looks kind of important.
I've got a lot of things.
Well, not all of them look important, though.
That one looks important.
You're saying my printer test page is not important?
Well, you took a printer test page into the station for some reason.
I don't know why.
Well, one of the important things is that there's a lawsuit.
There's many lawsuits going on to get the NSA to stop its program of spying on Americans without warrants.
And a lot of them, the courts are kind of dismissing because they aren't able to prove that they are, in fact, the people suing are the ones being wiretapped.
But there's one interesting case in Washington, D.C., where the guy actually got a copy of a log showing that his calls were being wiretapped.
How did he pull that off?
The government sent it to him by accident.
They marked it top secret.
This was in August 2004.
The guy is an attorney in Washington.
His name is Wendell Belew, B-E-L-E-W.
And they sent it to him by accident.
And then a few months later, they said, oops, can we have that back, please?
Oh, lovely.
And he gave it back.
But he made a copy.
But apparently he had sent a copy to his client who was in Saudi Arabia and all this stuff.
So now he is able to sue the government, and he's able to prove that he was, in fact, wiretapped, although the government is still trying to stop it and all this stuff.
They're trying to say that he shouldn't have had a copy of this document, and therefore he can't possibly use it in court even though they're the ones who gave it to him.
And it's kind of –
And where is this guy based?
In D.C.
Amazing.
Emanuel?
Yes, go ahead, Bernie.
It's really a fortunate error on the government's part that this report was mailed to this gentleman because up until he received that and decided to use it as a basis of his claim against the government, the government said, well, you have no proof that anybody has really been wiretapped.
So nobody can – wiretapped illegally without a warrant.
Therefore, nobody can sue us.
And now, guess what?
They forked it over to one of the victims.
So it'll be really interesting to see where this case comes, but the government may succeed in throwing it out because the evidence itself is top secret.
Well, I think no matter what, though, we can't deny that they have given themselves a black eye over this in the public arena.
They don't really seem to care about that, though.
Yeah, after what they've been through already.
I guess another black eye can't really blemish them too much more.
I mean, seriously, compared to a war, this is nothing.
Well, how about – excuse me – how about the FBI being guilty of serious misuse of the power to secretly obtain private information under the Patriot Act?
That's according to a government audit last Friday.
The Justice Department's inspector general looked at the FBI's use of national security letters in which agents demand personal and business information about individuals such as financial, phone, and Internet records without court orders.
The audit found the letters were issued without proper authority, cited incorrect statutes, or obtained information they weren't supposed to.
As many as 22 percent of national security letters were not recorded, according to the audit.
We concluded that many of the problems we identified constituted serious misuse of the FBI's national security letter authorities, according to Inspector General Glenn A. Fine.
The audit said, though, there were no indications that the FBI's use of the letters constituted criminal misconduct, but come on already.
I mean, I'm not surprised by this, but 22 percent.
It's incredible.
I'm surprised it's that low, quite frankly.
I mean, if I had the power to just sort of write letters and get any kind of data I wanted without having to get any approval, it's amazing that 78 percent of the time they actually did follow the rules.
Well, it's like the rules don't really even seem to exist anymore for them.
They just have to write a couple of letters without warrants and get anything they want, and they can't even follow those guidelines properly.
So you have to wonder, what are they missing?
Anyway, a single letter can contain multiple information requests.
Multiple letters may target one individual.
The audit found that in 2004 and 2005, more than half of the targets of the national security letters were U.S. citizens.
Wow.
More than half.
More than half.
Most, and they're supposed to be only doing international surveillance and no domestic at all.
Well, in case you're looking for somebody to blame, FBI Director Robert Mueller is raising his hand.
I am the person responsible.
I am the person accountable.
I am committed to ensuring that we correct these deficiencies and live up to these responsibilities.
Maybe he's not exactly the right person to do that, considering his prior record.
He's taking responsibility, and yet somehow now we're supposed to find it credible that he'll solve the problem.
It's not been a good week for the administration, has it?
You've got Alberto Gonzalez under fire for, well, I don't really understand this.
When you guys have been following this, apparently prosecutors were being fired because of political reasons.
Isn't that normal?
Isn't that what they always get fired for?
If they don't follow the administration very closely, then they get an early retirement of some sort,
and people who are loyal to the regime, they get bounced up.
Well, some of the offices in the government are political offices in which you're supposed to be loyal to the regime.
Other government employees are basically civil servants or whatever, are not supposed to be so political in nature,
and apparently these U.S. attorneys are not supposed to be political, but they're being fired for political reasons.
That's all I know.
Another big scandal and all sorts of fallout as a result of that, but wow, it's pretty incredible.
You hear what they're doing in Sweden?
What are they doing in Sweden?
Apparently in Sweden they're tapping phones, quote, for decades.
This is according to the deputy prime minister, Maud Olofsson,
and they're having some sort of debate over there about whether or not they should be allowed to tap phones,
and the deputy prime minister is like, well, yeah, we've been doing it for decades.
What's the problem here?
And this is supposed to make people feel better.
Wow.
It's kind of amazing.
So because they've been doing it for decades and we've survived, that means it's okay to keep doing it?
Yeah, something like that, because the phone company there used to be a monopoly controlled by the government,
so they basically could get away with anything they wanted,
and now that the company has been spun off, a private company, they're more closely monitored or something.
So with this logic, if I was, say, siphoning off someone's bank account for years,
like taking a penny a day or something like that and they weren't noticing,
and then one day they finally wake up and see, I can say, hey, I was doing this for years and you survived,
so I'm going to just keep doing it.
If you were a government, you could use that kind of logic.
Wow.
I want to be a government.
It sounds like a lot of fun.
What's the story out of Mumbai involving Google?
Do you have that one?
I don't know if I do.
Okay, I have it here then.
Here, take it.
I can't possibly read it this quickly.
Well, you sent it to the list.
I did, but Google has a service called Orkut, which is a social networking service like MySpace or any of these,
and some of the people on Orkut do not like India.
They are starting Hate India campaigns, whatever that means.
Hate India campaign, wow.
I'm not sure what that means, but the Mumbai police are trying to get Google to give over the information as to who created the Hate India pages
so that they can censor them and whatever.
Some of the people are from India and they want to catch them,
so Google is complying with these rather strange requests.
They're having nice meetings with officials from the U.S. flying over to Mumbai to participate
and help them censor these Hate India people.
So Google doesn't have to do this, but they're just, why?
Why are they helping?
I don't know.
They're also, according to this article, hoping to, quote, rope in YouTube in the future,
but they spelled YouTube with a capital U, not spelling out Y-O-U.
Oh.
I hope it's the same service.
They got so much bad press over what they did with China.
Why are they doing this again?
Well, that was Yahoo.
Oh, Google, too.
Google, too.
Definitely.
I don't know.
Maybe it's their new business model.
We'll have to see.
But, wow, that is disturbing.
Also disturbing is this.
This isn't really that surprising, I guess, but this story that came out today, actually, or late yesterday.
Consumers are bombarded with warnings about identity theft.
Publicized threats range from mailbox thieves and lost laptops
to the higher tech methods of email scams and corporate data invasions.
But now experts are warning that photocopiers could be a culprit as well.
That's because most digital copiers manufactured in the past five years have disk drives,
the same kind of data storage mechanism found in computers,
and they reproduce documents on these drives.
As a result, the seemingly innocuous machines that are commonly used to spit out copies of tax returns
from millions of Americans can retain the data being scanned.
If the data on the copier's disk is not protected with encryption or an overwrite mechanism,
and if someone with malicious motives gets access to the machine,
industry experts say sensitive information from original documents could get into the wrong hands.
You actually have a better chance of winning ten straight rolls of roulette
than getting those hard drives on copiers rewritten, according to Ed McLaughlin,
president of Sharp Document Solutions Company of America.
Many of the digital machines, according to him, have already been found in public venues or business offices,
and they're likely still open targets.
I can't say this is a revelation to me,
but it's surprising that they run their machines this way,
where they actually copy this information onto a hard drive and just leave it there.
I always assumed you had to sort of choose that you want the information to go on a hard drive,
but apparently at least some copiers are that way by default.
It kind of doesn't seem necessary.
But it makes me also want to buy second-hand copiers, you know, see what you can find on them.
How do you actually retrieve the information from the hard drive?
I don't know.
I never owned a copier with a hard drive, but I guess a lot of big businesses do.
Well, maybe they don't tell you when there's a hard drive.
Emmanuel?
Yes, Bernie.
A couple of years ago I purchased a high-end color laser copier printer from a Canon distributor for the company I work for.
And it was a really good deal because this was a cream-puff machine.
It had very little use, and they refurbished it and brought it over.
And they told me, I asked the technician who was setting up where it came out of,
and he said it didn't get a lot of use because it was on a military base,
and it was only used for making copies of classified, like, blueprints from aircraft and stuff like that.
I'm like, well, has this been cleansed of anything that's classified?
It's like, well, we just made sure it works fine.
Now, I don't have the tools at my fingertips to see what was on that drive other than –
this is an older, kind of older machine.
It was high-end, so I don't think there's copies of documents on it.
But it's kind of interesting that they don't really check.
Interesting, but not surprising.
Amazing.
Did you see this story in the Daily Mail about how a security consultant was able to clone a U.K. biometric passport
without even having it be removed from its delivery envelope?
Basically, this exploit draws on previous work by Adam Lorry and others
and puts together vulnerabilities in the chip technology and in the chip security and logistics system
used by the Identity and Passport Service.
The data in the chip is essentially a digital version of what is printed inside the passport itself.
The printed data can be read if the passport is presented and opened,
and the chip security system attempts to duplicate this process.
The chip data can be read wirelessly, but it is encrypted with the key printed inside the passport.
So in theory, although the chip can be read without the passport or, indeed, the delivery envelope being opened,
the data is meaningless without the key.
But the key in this first generation of biometric passport is relatively easy to identify, slash, crack.
It is not random, but consists of the passport number, the passport holder's date of birth, and the passport expiry date.
The Daily Mail found it relatively easy to identify the holder's date of birth,
while the expiry date is 10 years from the issue date,
which for a newly delivered passport would clearly fall within a few days.
The passport number consists of a number of predictable elements,
including an identifier for the issuing office,
so effectively a significant part of the key can be reconstructed from the envelope and its address label.
My God. It's amazing, isn't it?
I'm just glad that they're reporting this, that they're trying to duplicate this.
Probably a crime for them to even attempt it, but at least they're showing how ridiculously simple the system is.
It's kind of amazing, although I guess I shouldn't be amazed.
We see this sort of thing all the time.
These new, secure, hard-to-forge biometric passports,
and apparently unlike previous passports, you don't even have to open the envelope to forge them.
Yeah, and it's all done for our protection, right?
It's all done so that we have more security.
In fact, we have less, less than ever before.
I feel confident that my passport, which is slightly older, so it doesn't have these chips,
you have to actually take it from me to clone it.
You might be able to photocopy it or whatever once you get it from me,
but if it's in my pocket, you can't do that.
Is it in your pocket?
No.
Where is it?
It's on my desk at home.
And you think there are a bunch of people on their way there right now, knowing that you're here?
There could be.
Yeah.
But they'd have to break in.
They have the key, Mike. Come on. They've made copies by now.
All right.
According to the article, it says it takes four hours at least to copy everything off the passport after you break the key,
so it's kind of illogical to follow someone around for four hours.
I suppose.
Or even, you know, say you worked in the post office and you intercepted this package.
Don't you think someone would see you within that four-hour period holding a little RFID reader over an envelope?
Well, I mean, it takes four hours, you're saying.
That's what it says in the article.
Four hours.
I don't know.
I kind of doubt that it takes that long to simply read something like that.
It took the mail less than four hours.
Less than four hours.
They're saying how fast it is, not how slow it is.
Like it takes three hours and 59 minutes.
Okay, well, if you're already in the post office, for instance, or if the thing is just sitting there,
I'm not quite sure what the technology requires.
And also I know that these things get faster with time.
So even if it does take four hours just to read it now, it'll take, you know, a few seconds in a couple of years.
According to the Daily Mail, they're using a simple gadget built from parts bought on the Internet,
which doesn't really tell you anything.
It doesn't tell you a thing at all.
Okay, this is interesting, too, from our friends over at Homeland Stupidity.
Apparently, and I'd like to know, I'd like to have this verified, the post office is removing clocks from their offices.
Yeah, listen to this.
Everyone hates going into the post office, and yet everyone has to do it sooner or later.
The lines are almost always long, and you're guaranteed to be waiting and waiting and waiting,
but never fear, the United States Postal Service is doing something about it.
They're removing their wall clocks.
No big loss since they were always set fast anyway, right?
It turns out that the United States Postal Service is on a drive to standardize the look and feel of all 37,000 of its retail locations,
and part of that makeover involves removing all the clocks from customer-accessible areas.
You heard right.
Instead of making their customer-facing operations more efficient so you move through the line faster,
they remove the clocks, hoping you won't notice how long you're having to wait as if you didn't have a watch.
The idea is that to have you look at the pretty displays of envelopes, stamps, and mailing supplies instead
and perhaps buy more postal supplies you don't need,
and perhaps by the time you get to the counter, forget why you went to the post office in the first place.
Just one second, Bernie.
They've been removed, confirmed Stephen C. Wolster, a Dallas spokesman for the Postal Service,
which is an independent agency of the federal government's executive branch.
We want people to focus on postal service and not the clock.
I'm sorry, Bernie.
Go ahead.
I noticed here in Philadelphia one of the main post offices called the William Penn Annex near 9th and Market Streets,
and I frequent there, and oftentimes I've waited more than half an hour to get to a clerk,
and I noticed there's a glass counter that has a guaranteed five minutes or less sticker on it,
but I've noticed you can only read that from the inside of the glass counter looking through like another pane
because they've pasted another sticker on top of it so you can't read it.
I got the number through a lot of effort, got the number of the postmaster and called,
and I said, do you refer to bring up my concerns about the waiting 30 minutes?
The clerk can't really see how long the line is,
and they don't put enough people in front of the windows to accommodate long lines because they can't see the line,
so it's not a closed feedback loop.
Anyway, I asked him, what about this five-minute guarantee?
I said, is that still valid, or did you paste that over because it's no longer valid?
He said, yep, yep, it's still a valid guarantee.
I said, well, how is this enforced, or how is this quality control done to see that it's met,
and what are the repercussions of not five minutes or less service being provided?
Does it mean you get free service or something?
He said, no.
So apparently there's still the five-minutes-or-less guarantee,
but no one's taking responsibility, even the director of the FBI.
Of the FBI?
The FBI.
Or a director of anybody, like the FBI director is just saying he takes responsibility.
Oh, for that, okay.
It doesn't really mean anything.
No.
It means nothing.
It means nothing.
They take responsibility.
Unless they actually commit Harry Caray or something, which I'd like them to do, or resign like they do in Japan.
They used to commit Harry Caray.
Can you say that on the air?
It doesn't mean anything.
It's meaningless.
Can he say that on the air?
I can't say I wish the president would, and I don't wish he would.
Well, maybe I just can't say that on the air.
I'm going to go ahead and block that out so that doesn't go over the air.
Okay, thank you.
You say that people should commit Harry Caray.
Oh, now I have to block me saying it.
It's a time-honored tradition in Japan.
If you disgrace your public office, you commit suicide by putting a sword through your body.
The button didn't work.
And I think that should really be applied here.
Damn it.
Seems a little harsh.
Maybe they could just fix the problem.
That would be nice.
Well, I mean, if it's an egregious error, maybe.
I don't know.
All right, well, speaking of egregious errors, yeah, okay, let's just all pretend nobody said anything.
Here's bad news.
You know, it never seems like there's no bad news.
There's always too much bad news.
Bad news is always hitting us one way or another.
Is there ever good news?
Well, no, there doesn't seem to be.
There doesn't seem to be.
Just everything is falling apart, deteriorating, being destroyed.
They want to tear down our hotel, for God's sake, or we have our conferences.
You know, how much?
I was just in Austin, and everybody in Austin that I talked to knows about this.
They didn't quite get the story 100 percent right.
It's like some people thought they were trying to tear down our office or something or a building that we own.
But they all know that the HOPE conferences are in great jeopardy.
So it's good that the word is getting out, and we're hoping to get the word out more
and to really stand up against this sort of thing.
Austin was great, by the way.
I went to the South by Southwest conference, hung out with a bunch of people down there.
And, you know, I have to say, I think Austin is like the happiest city in the States.
I really do, because people are just so, I don't know, laid back and I don't want to say carefree,
but they just seem to be in a much better mood.
You know, there's all sorts of places to hang out, places to go late at night, 24-hour places all over,
and Internet cafes and just loungy-type areas.
I guess because it's a college town.
Of course, you have a lot of music being played there as well.
But you wouldn't expect it in Texas, you know.
I always say bad things about Texas, but I keep forgetting that Austin is like stuck there in the middle.
And it merges really well.
It merges with the rest of the States.
So neither of you guys have been there, have you?
Not to Austin, no.
And Bernie, you've never been there either, huh?
Never.
Well, I suggest this.
For people who want to visit the States and maybe see a different part of the States,
a different atmosphere, a different mood, I'd suggest hanging out in Austin for a few days.
You'll be surprised.
You'll feel like you're someplace else.
But I come back here, and what's the first thing I get?
It's more bad news.
Listen to this.
One of our favorite hangouts, one of our staples,
a little cafe on the east side of Manhattan, the East Village, called Alt Coffee,
is announcing that it will be closing its doors on April 8th.
Alt.Coffee closing its doors after nearly 12 years as an Alphabet City institution.
Now, this is unbelievable because this is one of those places you can hang out for hours
and talk about various things, have discussions and debates,
and go on the Internet and drink coffee and have cookies and things like that.
It's really pretty cool.
And, of course, I guess it's too cool because now they have to replace it.
We're going to replace it with this.
After renovating it, it will be reopened and renamed as Hopscotch,
a cafe tailored to the needs of children and families.
Now, I don't have anything against children and families.
Well, actually, you know what?
I do.
I do have something against children and families because I'm fed up with them.
You know, it's bad enough that we have to go on the radio
and talk at the level of a 5-year-old in case a 5-year-old is tuning the dial
and might be offended by something we say.
There's a list of all the words on the wall that we can't say
and all the ideas that we can't possibly express.
There's many lists on the wall.
Many lists, all kinds of things that we can't do
because of the kids that might hear us and go down the wrong road as a result
because it's not family-friendly.
And now our favorite cafe is going to be taken over by a bunch of dribbling toddlers.
I'm sorry.
I just got to stand up and say, no, this is wrong.
This is wrong.
Families and kids, they've got the streets.
They've got the parks.
But come on.
These darkly lit cafes late at night where we discuss our plans for the future
and what we're going to do when the tide starts to turn finally,
that's for adults, man.
That's for us.
But other than that, kids and family are just fine.
I have no real problem with them.
I just take exception to this.
But All That Coffee has been a destination for a cross-section of the East Village,
artists, musicians, revolutionaries, conspiracy theorists, students,
young professionals, and those in need of a computer.
An Internet cafe opening several years before the dot-com era
with the most comfortable chairs of any cafe below 14th Street.
You don't think so?
Well, some of them.
It depends which one you sit in.
The establishment has long occupied a unique spot on the cultural map of the city.
Now, get this.
The closing is going to be marked with a wake on April 7th,
taking place all day and featuring a graffiti wall,
alt memorabilia, and a memorial service beginning at 9 p.m.
All will be welcome to share their alt memories.
This is like a friend dying, you know?
It's worse.
It really is.
I don't know about that.
No, I mean, come on.
I'm just thinking of my friends.
Yeah, living in this place is like having something ripped out of you, you know?
And I don't know how we're going to survive without it.
As the neighborhood has changed,
All That Coffee has become one of the last artifacts of the 90s scene.
Internet cafes have proliferated
while the number of people who need to rent a computer has dropped.
Meanwhile, a need for a place where parents can feel comfortable with their children
has developed and gone unaddressed.
Now, as strollers have become more common on Avenue A than guitar cases,
the owners of All That Coffee will team with a couple other people
to open a new cafe that will again respond to
and anticipate the direction the neighborhood is developing,
which I guess is the yuppie direction.
Sounds like they're going to drive us to Starbucks, which I can't even go into.
Anyway, when Hopscotch opens at the beginning of May,
it will evoke the spirit of alt,
not quite sure what that means,
as a comfortable meeting place for all,
while having a variety of features designed to meet the needs of parents and children.
It will not only be a cafe for parents to go to for coffee and sandwiches,
but also a place for kids to go to watch a movie,
learn to knit, or take guitar lessons.
I guess you'll need those guitar cases coming down Avenue A in order to pull that off.
The new business will also offer organic food,
space rentals for children's birthday parties,
and plenty of toys.
This is the one sentence of hope that I hear.
In the evening, the toys will be put away,
and the focus will shift to adults.
I don't know. How do you read that?
Does that mean that the place is still going to be there in some form?
It's going to be similar to what it is now?
It's going to be called Hopscotch instead of Alt Coffee?
Alt Coffee is a neat name.
I'm going to meet you at Alt Coffee, or just Alt for short.
I can't tell serious people that I'm going to be at Hopscotch.
Meet me there.
We can discuss our plans over at Hopscotch.
I don't know. It doesn't work.
I don't know. We'll see.
I guess. I guess.
We'll be sure to report on this.
They say it's sort of like Alt Coffee has had a baby of its own.
That's the kind of thing that really makes me cringe a little bit.
What does that even mean?
I don't know what it means.
I don't know what it means.
I just want to say, though, that you've got to hold on to these places.
There are so many things that are precious, that are amazing.
Things like our conferences, our hotel, our meeting places, our cafes that we hang out in,
and places like this radio station.
You kind of don't realize until all of a sudden somebody makes an announcement,
and it's over, how valuable they are.
I just hope everybody involved in whatever is going on down there
realizes how important this place is to a lot of people,
and maybe there will be some sort of salvaging of it.
We'll see.
All right.
Letter time.
OTH at 2600.com is our email address.
And our phone number, 212-209-2900.
Taking phone calls as soon as that board lights up.
So far, only Bernie is on the line.
Only me?
Yeah.
You're the only one, and we called you.
No, he called us.
Did he call us?
Yeah.
This time I called in.
Oh, my God.
You're not paying for this, are you, Bernie?
Well, we'll send you a check to cover the cost of the phone call.
No, we insist.
My employer will take care of this.
Okay.
Dear Off the Hook, I'm 14, and I love your show.
It makes my Wednesday night a little better when studying for tests.
You know, you shouldn't listen to us if you're studying for tests
because we're very distracting.
What if it's a test on, like, depressing current events?
Okay.
Then you'll get an A.
But what if it's a math test?
3, 16, 25 times 2, the square root of 19.
You know?
Oh, that's 12.
We just messed up a whole lot of people.
So, no, you know, we're distracting.
We're not like some, you know, radio station you put on in the background
that plays, like, nice, pleasant music that you can have on while, you know, you do anything.
No, people get very distracted by the things we say.
We know because of the letters we get.
Anyway, I remember you guys were talking about allfreecalls.net on the last show.
I actually have to call relatives overseas a lot.
My dad's a computer programmer.
He's Egyptian, and all his siblings are there.
And my mother is Cypriot, and she still has family.
You know, I can imagine the political discussions that take place in your living room.
I found another great service called Future Phone.
If you Google it, you'll see that David Pogue wrote about it in the Times.
A few days ago, it was mysteriously shut down.
If you go to the website futurephone.com, you'll see that, I guess.
My neighbor is a senior citizen from the Czech Republic,
so I gave her the number a few weeks ago to call her family.
She says she talked for an hour and a half, and the call quality was excellent with no limit.
You can also call from your cell phone for free.
I found the company's number online and called them up
and was told that certain charges that the phone company pays to Future Phone are passed on to the consumer,
so the call is effectively free.
They also said they were thinking of putting one five-second ad at the start of the call
because most people would listen to it to make an unlimited free call.
I see both allfreecalls.net and Future Phone do not support African or Asian countries.
I wonder why that is.
Anyway, thanks for airing the show.
I can't wait for tonight.
Well, tonight is here.
Zach, thanks for writing in and telling us all this,
and hopefully these services will be back in strength.
I don't know.
Will you guys listen to a five-second advertisement at the beginning of a phone call?
No.
No.
If it's free, you wouldn't listen to a five-second advertisement?
I guess I don't make enough international phone calls to really care.
If I made a lot, maybe it would be worth it.
I mean, you can always hold the phone away from your ear for five seconds.
Okay.
It's not just that they play the ad,
but the company who plays the ad probably also gets your home phone number
as part of this service, and I would be even more opposed to that.
Well, they could get your phone number without playing you an ad.
Well, basically they'll know.
They probably do test marketing.
They analyze.
This is all part of the whole data mining thing of consumer usage of technologies
where you would make your free international call,
and then the company offering this free service would play an ad,
and then they would look to see if you purchased this product or service
based on your hearing this ad,
and then they would target people even more effectively.
I just don't like it.
Well, what you can always do is forge your caller ID using another service
and call them using the wrong caller ID,
maybe the ID of a friend of yours
or a friend that you'd like to stop being a friend of yours,
and then they'll get all the calls and all the monitoring and things.
Cool.
Yeah.
Here's another letter from John.
A ShopRite cashier asked if the person checking out ahead of me
could borrow my price plus card
before I realized that my number got printed out on his receipt
and he looked kind of sleazy.
Should I be worried?
Wow.
I guess so.
I mean, yeah, why not?
He could probably get information about you that way.
Are you really worried?
I'm not worried.
Well, I mean, it's information that is linked to information about you.
That number, if you call up the store,
you can social engineer them and find out your home address, I'm sure, easily.
You're going to discourage people from sharing their, what is it called, discount card?
Well, I wouldn't discourage people from getting them in the first place
because I think it's ridiculous how everybody has to have loyalty cards to do this.
Yeah, so I don't have one.
How am I supposed to get the discount?
By borrowing the one from the guy behind me.
Now he won't do it.
You get the discount by flashing a nice smile at the cashier saying,
oh, I forgot mine or just being otherwise pleasant,
and sometimes they just give it to you with the default code.
I've never had anybody borrow somebody else's card to do that.
It is a little strange.
Also, John has an audio problem.
He says a large portion of your radio show is much lower.
Other people in the room or on the phone speak at much lower volume in the background.
January's show is particularly annoying,
and he'd like for us to whisper to balance the volume so he could raise it and then hear them.
Well, you know what?
I'm not going to whisper,
and the reason why that happens is because the machine that we record the show on
and then put it on the Internet actually comes before the compression kicks in,
which is what people listening to the radio get to hear.
So to them it sounds perfect,
and on the Internet not quite as perfect.
I'm sorry.
It's just the way it is.
Maybe we can put some digital compression in.
Maybe we could do that just to improve the sound.
Volterra writes in,
on a recent episode of Off the Hook,
someone mentioned that because EasyPass has one's credit card,
they can potentially track and store the movement of all their customers.
Do they implement this?
Do they store the time and location when one goes through a toll booth?
And if so, for how long?
Can or does the government ever subpoena EasyPass for driving records?
Well, Volterra, yes, they certainly do.
I've heard many cases where somebody was convicted of a crime
because of an EasyPass record.
In fact, I've even seen it on cop shows on TV.
And, of course, if you get a bill from EasyPass, you'll see it all printed out.
So I would have to assume they keep it forever,
they keep all that information forever,
and they use it in whatever way they see fit.
And that could certainly be used to track your spending habits
or your buying habits or anything like that.
So, yeah, you've got to be careful.
You're being monitored in so many different ways.
It's almost funny.
Since we're talking about photocopying IDs,
I'd like to mention that when I tried to order stuff from ThinkGeek,
they emailed me saying they needed either a photocopy of my ID
or one of my electricity bills or a similar bill.
Of course I refused, saying that my visa was good everywhere else in the world,
and how could they possibly verify anything from a Swedish electricity bill?
Oh, and they had already taken my money at this point.
I told them that if my money wasn't good enough for them,
they should just cancel the purchase.
They said they would, and they did.
It came back a few days later.
Now, I thought that if I pay ThinkGeek through PayPal,
this wouldn't be an issue.
After all, ThinkGeek shouldn't care.
PayPal is doing the money side of the transaction,
and PayPal have trusted me to do purchases in the past from other places.
But no such luck. The same process repeated itself.
ThinkGeek demanded a copy of my ID or an electricity bill,
and this time I lost $20 or so in PayPal chargeback fees.
Now, I've heard that an electricity bill can be sort of an ID in England and the U.S.,
but what if I don't have one?
Some have electricity included in their rent,
and no phone bill because they use prepaid cell phones,
which most of my friends do, and they aren't the ones paying the rent.
These people's money is apparently no good anymore for ThinkGeek.
Unless they Photoshop a bill, who's going to know?
And, you know, you could Photoshop a bill.
We should have a service for people where they can do that
and get past this silly restriction.
It could work.
I signed up at work for a web hosting plan that we're going to use,
and they wanted us to send them a copy of the passport
and the credit card and the phone bill and all this stuff,
but it was a business account.
The business doesn't have a passport. It's very strange.
Yeah, that's interesting.
Hi, guys.
Related to what you talked about the other week at my job,
it is procedure to ask for the full social security number, date of birth,
username, e-mail, middle initial, and password over the phone,
often all on the same call.
Our most common task is some of the information I listed above
and then tell them there is no way we can ID them
until they send in a scanned copy of their government-issued ID card by fax or e-mail.
This is very pathetic considering the size of the educational institution,
tens of thousands of students.
It's also incredible that we lowly assistants
are trusted with this kind of information without a background check,
signed EXE, West Coast Student Employee.
Interesting. I mean, it just keeps happening.
Our friend Reed writes in,
Hey, Emanuel, I thought you'd like this one.
Talkplus.com allows you to spoof caller ID for as long as you want,
provided that you can answer a call made to that line at least once.
Can we do that? It's not hard, is it?
What line?
Well, you spoof a call.
And then I guess they call you back at that number.
So if you can somehow answer a call to that number...
To the spoof number?
Yeah.
Doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of the spoofing?
Well, in order for you to be able to always call out as that number,
you have to fool these guys once.
So I guess you have to figure out how to do that.
I guess, but there's so many other ways to spoof caller ID.
Well, you could go to somebody's house and simply do it from there, I suppose,
and then you'd be able to use that number forever.
I'm saying that there's other ways to spoof caller ID
that you don't have to go through all this hoopla.
Anyone you'd like to share with us?
Well, we've discussed them on the air in the past.
They're always being developed.
The spoof card, I believe, is one.
A friend of mine actually spoofed caller ID to get satisfaction in a business deal.
He was having renovations done on his house,
and the contractor just stopped picking up his calls.
He wouldn't answer the phone anymore.
He wouldn't show up to do work.
So what does he do? He calls him from his office.
He calls his cell phone from his office.
The number picked up right away.
Before the guy knew what hit him, my friend was asking,
So where have you been? When are you coming back?
When are you going to do the work? What's going on?
And the poor guy, I felt kind of sorry for him
because he was obviously trying to answer these questions,
but also at the same time, you knew that he was wondering,
Is this guy in my office? What's going on?
How is he calling me from this number?
The whole world's falling apart.
It's great. It can be used as a consumer weapon.
Dear Manuel, first off, I want to thank you for all your work.
I've been reading 2600 for over ten years now.
Congratulations.
On your last show, however, I was a bit disturbed by some comments
that were made when I was referring to
a comment made about how you could tell the Feds
by the grateful dead shirts they were wearing,
and another similar comment about having to wear dead shirts to the con.
I've been thinking about going for years now,
and I almost feel like now I might be unwelcome.
And that whole movement, I feel kind of insulted by these comments,
just as people may mock someone in everyday life
for wearing, for example, a Linux shirt.
Should I be mocked for showing up in a dead shirt?
Shouldn't I be judged on what I know rather than what I wear?
Isn't that supposed to be the true spirit of this community?
I traveled from Chicago to New York City for the RNC
and was marching somewhere in there with you.
I hope that the idea that we're on the same side would resonate with you.
I consider myself part of both the tie-dye wearing
and the technology-loving sides of life.
Do we have to be separate?
Signed, Doc.
Well, Doc, you saved yourself a lot of aggravation
and me a lot of emotion here
if you'd just listened to what we said in the first place,
which was our layout guy,
when he was being interviewed for this piece
that was right over the air a couple of weeks ago.
He was talking about how he is always able to tell
the undercover cops in the audience by looking out
and seeing all these idiots out there who are undercover cops
trying to hide by wearing grateful dead shirts.
They're not hippies, they're cops,
and they're doing a bad job.
They're easy to spot because of the grateful dead shirts.
Now, how that's an insult to hippies or grateful dead people is beyond me,
but seriously, you've got to listen carefully
before you decide you've been offended.
I'm sure I offended people with that, but it had to be said.
I'm offended.
I'm already offended.
All right.
Mission accomplished.
Are you offended, Bernie?
Not at all.
Good.
Good.
That's all I want to hear.
And finally here, dear off-the-hook,
the guys in the personal computer show do a podcast-only show
on days that they are preempted.
Why don't you guys, signed Matthew from Columbus?
Well, I know, Mike, you have strong feelings about podcasts,
about the word.
I've gotten over it.
You've gotten over it?
Okay.
I'm tired of fighting that particular battle.
Basically, my view on the whole thing is
we're doing a radio show right now.
I know a lot of people, a lot of people come up to me in Austin
saying, hey, I listen to your podcast, and that's great,
but it's not a podcast.
It's a radio show.
It's a real radio show going out over real radio waves.
And I have nothing against it going out on the Internet as well,
but I don't want the Internet to replace the radio.
And I feel that if we were to just do shows on the Internet
and not on the radio, we'd be taking a big step in that direction.
And to give you an example,
if you listened to Off the Wall last night,
part of it took place in a pirate radio station
that I discovered in Austin.
And what these guys are doing is simply incredible.
When I started driving my rental car,
I just turned on the radio and scanned around,
and I found these guys.
And I was glued to the radio ever since,
listening to the kinds of things they were playing.
It was incredible.
But they actually are a webcasting station.
They're actually broadcasting on the Internet,
and someone else is taking that signal
and putting it out on a micro-broadcasting,
unlicensed transmitter
on a frequency that happens to be open.
So basically what that means is the guys inside the radio station
are completely free and clear of any culpability
as far as doing an unlicensed broadcast.
They're broadcasting on the Internet,
and somebody else has taken the step
of making it go over the radio waves.
Now, all the difference in the world
is the fact that these guys are broadcasting on the radio,
not on the Internet, because on the Internet,
you get a handful of listeners, maybe,
and it has to be people who know exactly what they're looking for.
On the radio, though, you get people like me
who are tuning dials, looking for something interesting.
That's the magic of radio,
and that's something that can never be replaced by the Internet,
where you can have 10 million podcasts going on at once.
So that's one of the reasons why
I don't really want to replace radio signal with a podcast
on those days when we're preempted.
I think a better solution is for us to be on more,
and maybe you guys can ask politely for that to happen.
We won't be preempted quite as much.
Also, incidentally, as long as I spoke on the subject,
the radio station in question is KPWR.
That's not really the call letters,
because it's a KPWR in Los Angeles,
but if you guys want to donate to them,
I believe their website is kpwr.org.
They need equipment, they need all sorts of things.
They're doing a great job,
and I'm sure it would be good to see things like that start to flourish,
because, wow, it made radio interesting to listen to again,
and it was a lot of fun to see what they were up to.
And I guess we'll take phone calls.
212-209-2900 is our phone number.
It looks like we have a pretty full switchboard over there.
I want to pick a number, not Kevin, that one?
Go ahead, press it.
And good evening, you're on the radio.
Yeah, hi, did you get my DVD?
Rebel, you said that you left a DVD for us,
and there was no DVD in the off-the-hook mailbox.
I didn't get one either.
Yeah, so apparently...
I left it at the station today,
and I put Emmanuel Goldstein, and I hope that...
Well, where did you leave it, Rebel?
Up front.
Did you leave it up front with the receptionist?
Or did you leave it to the person
whose job it is to put the mail in the mailbox?
Oh, you didn't know that we have...
Well, I guess he hung up on us,
but the reason he hung up on us
is because he realized that he had made a fatal mistake.
By handing it to somebody here at the radio station
does not guarantee that it's going to make it into our mailbox.
If you hand it to somebody who picks up the phone,
I don't know if it's ever going to make it.
You have to hand it to the person who puts it in the mailbox.
Now, I don't know who that person is.
I've never seen them.
It may not be such a person.
Your best bet is to mail it to us in the mail, using the U.S. mail.
Of course, I have all sorts of horrible things to say about the post office
because of what they did to our last issue overseas,
which, by the way, I think is showing up everywhere.
It went on a nice cruise all around the world.
I heard people in England weren't getting it yet,
but they really should be getting it by now.
It started showing up two weeks ago all over the world.
So, if it's not showing up in England,
that's because the English Postal Service is getting involved in it now.
By Royal Mail.
I mailed a letter to somebody on Wednesday,
last Wednesday, from Long Island.
It still hasn't gotten to Brooklyn.
I don't have much faith in the Post Office.
Someone sent me a letter from Brooklyn to my house on Friday.
I got it Saturday, and they didn't put a stamp on it.
You're getting free mail.
I'm paying for mail, and it's going on voyages around the world
and not showing up in Brooklyn.
The problem is it's still a letter that I did not care to receive.
I think that's the secret.
The person I was sending a letter to cared to receive this and did not.
That's the problem.
You should have sent them something they don't want.
It would have got there faster.
The thing is, there's a reason why post office rates are so low,
as they like to say.
Well, it only costs 39 cents,
and you can send a letter anywhere in the country,
and it magically shows up in somebody's mailbox.
Well, the reason it's so cheap is because oftentimes it doesn't,
and they don't have to do anything when it doesn't.
They're not responsible at all.
That letter is just lost someplace,
and maybe in the year 2060 it's going to show up and be on the news,
but that's not going to do me a whole lot of good.
Anyway, so my point was in all this,
send us mail if you believe it's actually going to get to us.
It's off the hook here at WBAI, 120 Wall Street, New York, New York, 10005,
and write 10th floor on that too somewhere,
because I think that's where we are.
Okay.
Let's take another phone call.
You want to press the button again?
All right.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Hi, guys.
Hi.
Maybe in terms of the whole style issue,
you could start calling it Alt Scotch.
Oh, you mean mix the two names?
Yeah.
Alt.coffee with Hop Scotch.
Yeah.
How about Hop.coffee?
I think Alt Scotch is probably better.
That implies that they sell Scotch too, which would be kind of cool.
Well, at least it doesn't have that dribbling juvenile quality
you were complaining about.
Yeah, you know, it's just the kids are everywhere.
You just can't escape them.
Everything is for the kids.
You've got to protect the kids all the time.
This is our hangout.
This is where we go.
This is where we talk and sometimes use foul language.
I understand.
Now we've got to be careful.
I have a question about open source and when it works, when it doesn't,
how far you should push it.
It relates to the decision by Wikipedia to use Fiora as their video format of choice.
Okay.
Have you ever heard of Fiora?
I have heard of it.
I didn't know that Wikipedia was going to use it.
Yeah.
It seems like they're making that decision out of sort of push the open source
envelope 100% but not really take into consideration the user base
or the available tools.
So basically the question I'm opening to you is whether open source is sort of
an absolute or whether, like the way I look at it,
let's say you have something you really want to do across town.
Now you could walk, which is free and environmentally sound,
but you might not get there in time.
You could take a cab, which is way too expensive these days.
Or you could take a bus, which only takes, you know,
costs two bucks and probably gets you there on time.
And it's a slight compromise of principles, but it works.
I got lost in the bus.
I'm sorry.
The bus is usually slower than walking around here.
The subway then.
The question, you know, if you consider open source,
and we've had Richard Stallman on the show who can talk about this
in far greater depth.
But if you consider it purely as what works, then you're right.
Maybe you should use proprietary software.
But if you believe, as many people do, that it's sort of a better way to work,
then perhaps it doesn't work as well, although in the case of Theora,
it tends to work just fine.
But it's probably worth using.
It's worth encouraging.
It's worth promoting.
So if you concur with that judgment, then they've made the right choice.
Okay.
Thanks for your call.
And this means you probably also call the person the computer folks about
to get their take on it as well.
I'm going to pick one myself.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Speak up, please.
Okay.
That person was in the time zone.
Go ahead.
You pick the other one.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Speak up, please.
Yes, go ahead.
Hi.
I wrote you guys an email a couple of weeks ago and haven't gotten a response,
so I'm glad to get on the air.
I don't know if this is a hacking question, but whenever I've been in the U.K.,
I love to watch their Channel 4, which is fantastic.
And they're now running Channel 4 on the Internet,
and their website is www.channel4.com.
The thing is, is that according to the way that their station has been constructed
and in the rules, they're only allowed to broadcast for the U.K. and Ireland.
So every time I try to pick them up over the Internet,
their system or whatever senses that I'm in the States, obviously,
and so it doesn't allow me to pick up their signal.
My question for you is, is there a way in which a person can have your computer here in New York
fool their computer into thinking this is a computer that's in England, let's say,
and have the video go through?
You can try using a U.K. proxy.
Okay, can you explain to a completely non-technical person,
or could you tell me a website I could go to where I could find out this information?
Well, I can tell you this.
If you simply go on to Google, and you're literate enough to know what Google is, right?
Sure.
Okay.
If you just type proxies, and P-R-O-X-I-E-S, and maybe United Kingdom after that,
you should get a list of a whole bunch of sites that you simply click on,
and then all of a sudden your address appears to be coming from the U.K.
You're joking, really?
Yeah, that's what proxies do, and I can't swear by all of them.
Some of them might be slow.
Some of them might give you all sorts of advertising,
but you'll find some that are actually good, that do what they say they're going to do,
and that's how people get around these things, and you can get around them.
It's easy.
One more thing I just would like to mention to you.
Why is it that while calling and trying to pose this question to you,
I kept not only repeatedly getting hang-ups in this phone call,
but sometimes the phone would only ring like five times, and it would hang up.
Really?
Other times maybe it went up to about 15 times.
I know that this has been talked about occasionally in the past.
However, I've never had it cut me off after like five rings.
Can I ask where you're calling from?
Brooklyn.
You're calling from Brooklyn?
Yeah.
A regular Verizon phone, a landline?
Yep.
That's incredible.
I don't know why.
I know that we don't use Verizon as our local company here.
Maybe there's some kind of argument between those two companies
where they only give them a certain number of rings before they cut off.
All I know is back in the old days, back in the days where things worked right,
a phone would ring forever until somebody picked it up
because there was nothing being lost by the phone company in doing that.
And now if they're not making income on the phone call immediately, they hang up.
You should get at least 20 rings out of it.
Five is incredible.
I don't know what to say.
I'll ask around.
I'll look into how this could be possible, but that is unacceptable.
Thanks for your call.
We're going to try and fit in a couple more in the brief time that we have.
212-209-2900, which I guess I shouldn't give out.
Go ahead.
Pick one.
All right.
Hi, Aaron.
Off the hook.
Hello.
Hi.
Hi there.
Here's a bit of news, Emanuel, that you may not be aware of since you last left.
Okay.
About a week ago, a little more, there was a notice posted to producers
that the shopping cart, the WBAI online shopping cart may have been compromised.
And there's not enough information other than that.
It may have been hacked.
Nobody is sure exactly what's going on.
I know that WNYC had some kind of a problem a year or two ago as well.
Maybe you could use your resources to try to, you know,
reassure people who have donated that way and to see exactly what happened.
Okay.
I will look into this.
I have heard reports of something happening, some kind of problem.
Keep in mind, it may just be that we discovered that something was
potentially a problem.
I'm not sure if it means necessarily that anybody's credit card information was
actually compromised.
But it's something that no matter what service you use, you have to keep your eyes,
your wits about you because your information is out there on somebody's computer.
And if they don't take proper care of it,
then you could be looking at someone using your numbers without authorization.
Of course, you're not liable for this.
But it's something, regardless of whether or not you get a letter from us
or a letter from somebody or no letter at all,
always be looking at your bills and checking to make sure that the charges are appropriate.
Thanks for your call.
I think we can squeeze in one more.
Let's go over here.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Speak up, please.
Oh, hi.
Hi.
What's on your mind?
Well, I was calling.
Hello?
Yes.
Hurry up, please.
Wow, I'm on the air.
Okay.
I was calling.
Regarding a way you can trace your phone,
if it's lost or stolen by punching in the code,
it will read you back the license number or the EIN for your phone.
You've jot it down.
And if your phone gets lost, you can call the cellular carrier and they will.
Okay, you've got to turn on your radio.
It's going to get very confusing for everybody.
And they will be able to block the phone from having a person make outgoing calls.
Well, there are some companies, I imagine, with their phones that have that capability.
For instance, if you lose a Sprint phone or a Verizon phone,
then those phones can't be used anywhere else.
However, a GSM phone, such as the kind you use with T-Mobile or Singular or AT&T,
those phones are designed so that they can be used with different SIM chips, SIM cards,
so they can be used with somebody else's account.
But, yeah, if you just call the company that belongs to the phone,
they should be able to disable it so that that phone,
certainly the phone account can't be used,
and most likely the phone itself won't be able to be used.
Yeah, the companies have these records,
so there's no reason for you to have to go and write this down and keep it.
If you call up and say, my phone's been stolen, they can disable it.
All right, with that, that's going to have to be our final word on the subject.
I want to thank everybody for calling in and writing to us.
Again, our email address, oth at 2600.com.
Love to hear from you.
We'll see you again next week.
Have a good night.
Don't ever ask me how I feel
Don't expect me to cry
Don't expect me to lie
Don't expect me to die for real
Jesus, I don't want to know something
Something's out of my head
Don't expect me to cry
For all the reasons I'd never die
Don't ever ask me how I feel
Don't expect me to cry
Don't expect me to lie
Don't expect me to die for real
Don't ever ask me how I feel
Don't expect me to cry
Don't expect me to lie
Don't expect me to die for real
Jesus, don't want me for something
Something's out of my head
Don't expect me to cry
For all the reasons I'd never die
Don't ever ask me how I feel
Don't expect me to cry
Don't expect me to lie
Don't expect me to die
Don't expect me to cry
Don't expect me to lie
Don't expect me to die for real
You're listening to WBAI New York 99.5 FM
Also streaming on the web at WBAI.org
Also streaming on the web at PCRadioShow.org
And today is March 14th, 2007