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for Off The Hook.
We couldn't get much worse. But if they could, they would. On Diddly Bum for the best, expect the worst. I hope that's understood. On Diddly Bum!
On Diddly Bum!
On Diddly Bum!
And this is Off The Hook on WBAI New York. Emmanuel, are you there? I guess not.
Well, as you know, the show is Off The Hook. I'm Redbird, joined in the studio
with Jim over here. Jim. And Emmanuel, now you're there, right? I'm here now, yes. I
heard you, but you couldn't hear me. I'm actually up in Montreal in an airport in
between planes. Actually, it's going to be kind of interesting because technically
my plane boards during the show. So I'm going to have to do the show while I'm
walking and maybe do the show while I'm on the airplane and do the show until
the flight attendant tells me to turn it off. I could see this turning ugly very
soon. It could. We have a potential for an international incident here. I'm on my
way to the Chaos Communications Camp, which is taking place in early August.
And again, I urge people, if they have not already made their plans to go there, to
do so because it's a once-in-a-four-year hacker event. It takes place outside in a
campground over in Germany. It's five days of fun. And we're going to be
talking to all kinds of people about that over the next couple of weeks. I'm
up here in Montreal. I'm also with Non Kevin, who is traveling with me. We're
going over to London. We'll be at the 2600 meeting this Friday over there. But
I believe in the studio we have... I heard your voice, Jim. But yes, you did, and
that's because I'm in the studio. All right, and I think Redbird is there as
well. I'm here. Welcome to you as well. And we've got two additional guests on the
phone today. As usual, we have Bernie in Philadelphia. Yes, we have Bernie in
Philadelphia. Bernie is from Philadelphia. And welcome, Bernie. Hello. And Mike
should be here too. Oh, is Mike here now? He should be. Mike, are you there? I think Mike is on
super delay. Okay, Mike, what we're gonna do is we're gonna let you... we're gonna
leave a space after someone talks for you to finish. Mike, hello. Hello, how are
you? Oh, it didn't really take you that long, did it? Seven seconds. My goodness.
This is gonna be tough. Okay, so we have... and Mike, where are you right now? I am on
an island that holds a former prison in Stockholm, Sweden. Did you get into some
trouble over there or something? No, no, no. It's no longer a prison. It's just a
nice island these days. Okay. Mike, you're using an interesting calling method. Well,
actually, we're sort of combining two different calling methods to
communicate with you. You want to tell us something about the worldwide SIM
thing you've got going? Yeah, well, apparently there's this great delay, as
you've noticed today, although previous calls I've been making with it haven't
had this problem. I got... there's a company called Global SIM Card that
makes a SIM card that I put in my phone, and it gives me a phone number on the
Isle of Man, which is part of the United Kingdom, apparently. I don't really know
what it is. And the interesting thing about it is that people, if they want to
reach me, they just have to dial the United Kingdom. They get charged to call
United Kingdom Mobile, which from the United States is maybe, I don't know, 20,
30 cents, depending on their plan. And then anywhere in Europe, I can receive
that call without incurring any additional charge. So it's kind of nice. I
can also make calls from it. For some reason, here in Sweden, the rate is 88
cents a minute, but elsewhere in Western Europe, the rate is 30 to 40, maybe 50
cents a minute. So maybe this thing just doesn't like Sweden. I don't know. But
it's a sort of interesting SIM chip. It's sort of like the one that you've used in
the past from Lichtenstein, except that you don't have to call Lichtenstein, you
just have to call the UK. Well, why is it any better to call the UK than to call
Lichtenstein? I mean, the rate is about the same, isn't it? Well, at least in the
past when we've tried, it's been very expensive to call Lichtenstein, as much
as a dollar a minute, although I think that's changing for some unknown reasons.
Well, what we're also doing is we've combined technology. So we're using this
other service that we've utilized many times in the past, where we have a toll-
free number that we can forward to any number in the world. And it's a very
useful service to have. In fact, it's something that, I'm surprised, local phone
companies don't provide. Basically, we're able to call a particular set phone
number, and that phone could ring in China, it could ring in England, it can
ring in the United States, wherever we decide to program it. And it's very handy
for when we need to get somebody like we're getting you tonight. However,
there is a problem with that. I'm not sure if that's where the delay is
coming from. I suspect not, because we've used this system many times before. But what
happens is it takes your phone a very long time to ring, sometimes up to 45
seconds. And the service that we're using, after 45 seconds, says your party's not
answering. So it's kind of a catch-22. Your phone hasn't rung, and yet you're
being accused of not answering your phone. So we have to try you multiple
times in order to get you to answer.
Whatever you do, you can't win. No, it appears not. You know, I got to tell you,
we had quite an adventure. Actually, you know, technically they're boarding my
flight now, but I'm going to stay here, because we have plenty of time. But not
Kevin and I, we're traveling up here earlier this afternoon from
Newark Airport, but we really ran into a bit of a snag. The unthinkable happened.
We were supposed to meet at the airport, and well, we both went to the
airline that we were supposed to go to. And I knew something was odd when
Kevin told me that he couldn't find Terminal A. He could find Terminal 7, but
not Terminal A. I'm like, why do you have numbers instead of letters? Well, it turns
out that through a colossal misunderstanding, he wound up at JFK, and
I wound up at Newark. And we had less than two hours to figure out how to
bring us together so we could make our flight. I'm going to put not Kevin on to
explain how that was accomplished, but I got to tell you, it was an epic story.
Well, the first thing Manuel told me to do was to run downstairs and grab a taxi,
so I found the craziest Russian guy I could, told him to drive as fast as he could to
Newark, and I'd pay him extra money. Basically, that turned out into a, you know,
one-and-a-half-hour car ride through New Jersey of him taking wrong turns and
illegal U-turns in the middle of highways. But I did get there with ten minutes of
air before we boarded our flight, rushed through the boarding, people were nice
enough to let us cut through security, and we made the flight a hundred and
forty-five dollars later. When you say cut through security, does that mean
that they really should have shut the airport down and evacuated everyone? No,
the people in line were nice enough to let us cut through. Oh, okay. Just want to
establish to everybody that it's not us hackers that cause these problems. Well,
like Kevin said, the people were very nice. It was incredible. Everyone said,
yeah, I've been there, I understand, but it's something that we'll permit this
time. And we got to cut ahead of maybe thirty or forty people, and everybody was
just so very nice to us. So a big thank you to the people waiting in line at
Newark Airport, who basically saved our asses, because we would have missed two
planes and would have definitely cast a shadow over this whole thing. So anyway,
that's where we are right now. We'll be in London shortly, I guess, and
we'll be boarding this plane any moment now. Now, Bernie, I believe you're down
there in Philadelphia, correct? That's right. I saw an interesting story about
surveillance cameras down there. I want to read you a little bit of this.
Apparently, residents down there are staging a protest, calling the
surveillance camera program set up by the Philadelphia Commercial Development
Corporation, maybe you can tell us something about who they are, calling
that program a joke and calling for an investigation. They had members of the
Philadelphia Alliance Against Drugs and Violence, as well as others at the rally
who were outraged to learn that once again, the five surveillance cameras set
up to monitor crime were down, and none of them recorded a shooting death that
took place early Sunday morning. The new executive director of PCDC blamed a
lightning strike and hackers for the cameras not working since May 30th.
That's right, hackers and lightning, those are the two things. Now, basically what
the story that I'm seeing here claims that residents are not buying the hacker
story, didn't say anything about the lightning story, but one of the
residents of the community said, why would somebody hack the cameras in
Wingfield all of a sudden? It's just incredible how hackers always get blamed,
but I think what's more interesting about this story is the fact that now
people are saying, yeah, surveillance cameras, why aren't they working? We need
them to work, whereas a year or two ago, the question would have been, do we
really want all these surveillance cameras watching us all the time? It
seems like we've accepted that now, and now we're demanding that they work all
the time. Do you get the same impression? I do, I think that might have been fueled
by a district attorney's statement. Her name is Lynn Abraham. She's also known as
America's deadliest DA because she calls for the death penalty and everything but
traffic citations. She said that there's a no acceptable excuse for those
cameras not working, and if they had been working, we would know the identity of
the murderer. That's what the DA is saying. This Philadelphia Community
Development Corporation is really sort of a political organization headed by
now City Councilman Curtis Jones, who managed to get over half a million
dollars in federal funding from the Justice Department to have these cameras
installed several months ago, and they've been having problems with them ever since.
The local ABC News affiliate here, TV station, Channel 6, found out
these cameras were not working months ago and brought it to the Philadelphia
Community Development Corporation's attention. They didn't even know they
weren't working almost three weeks after they went down. So they've been
going down repeatedly for months, and now when a man gets shot in the head in
front of a Chinese grocery store and none of the five cameras right there
record the activity, Curtis Jones and the Philadelphia
Development Corporation are blaming hackers and a
logging strike all of a sudden as having caused this problem. As you
pointed out, Emanuel, Philadelphia residents are not buying the hacker
story. I doubt they're buying the lightning story either. And frankly, these
cameras are just not managed well, which is, I think, the whole problem with
these surveillance cameras. Nobody knows how to manage them properly, or if they
do know how to manage them, they're not doing it properly. And so here's a good
example. Well, I think this also was underlined by a different story
that came out this week, where it turns out that Americans buy a three-to-one
margin, three-to-one, now support the increased use of surveillance cameras,
which I don't think was true a couple of years ago. I think after the whole
London story of less than a month ago took place, where bombs were thwarted
and people were identified through the cameras, I think that's doing a lot to
convince people that, yes, surveillance cameras are good things to have.
Basically, they see it as a way to help solve crimes, and they're not too
concerned about the government intrusion on privacy. Seventy-one percent
of Americans favor increased use of surveillance cameras. Only 25 percent
oppose it. Now, London Surveillance Network, which is known as the Ring of
Steel, is said to have aided in the capture of those suspects, including
those that were trying to perform those car bombings in June. Now, a similar
system, this is kind of interesting, a similar system is coming to New York
City. They plan 100 new surveillance cameras in downtown Manhattan by the end
of the year, and 3,000 public and private. By 2010, Chicago and Baltimore
also plan expanded surveillance systems as well. Now, last week we were talking
about how surveillance was a part of the proposed congestion fee that New York
mayor wants to have implemented, and it seems like that's not really
essential to the surveillance plan. Yeah, the congestion fee would be a nice
thing to keep pollution down. It would be bad if surveillance came in as a
result of having to keep track of where everybody is driving. But if the
congestion fee does not happen, it looks like the surveillance cameras are
going to come through some other door. I don't know. Mike, is that how you see
things? I think it's pretty clear that the interests of the state actors just
want to have cameras everywhere all the time, and they're using any excuse they
can to get those cameras. I certainly don't think that the folks who are
opposing congestion charging to ensure their privacy will succeed in
ensuring their privacy if that's their only tactic. Well, it's interesting
because there's a story that's directly related to this coming
out of Oakland, California, and I'll just read a couple of paragraphs from that.
Privacy advocates have long viewed red-light cameras with the suspicion
that the devices were the first step down a path of increased surveillance.
Those fears may come true as the city of Oakland, California, has revealed that it
is working with state legislature to secure a change in the law that will
allow red cameras to be used, red-light cameras, to become a full-scale
surveillance camera. In the memo from the Oakland Police Department dated June 26,
Police Chief Wayne G. Tucker recommended that the city's lobbyists be ordered to
advocate the new law in Sacramento. The legislation would allow the use of those
red-light camera images for purposes other than the enforcement of red-light
violations such as reckless driving assaults, public nuisance activity, drug
dealing, etc. So it's important to remember that it's not just that
people are saying, hey, you know, security cameras are a good idea, we should
really have, you know, government surveillance all over the place, but
they're converting cameras that were specifically geared for
another purpose into surveillance cameras, and it's, you know, it's not
something that the people originally agreed for. It seems to me that
regardless, we're getting surveillance cameras, and it doesn't seem like we're
going to be able to stop it. The government is intent on doing this,
Homeland Security is going to get their way no matter what, and now 75% of the
people support it. How do you fight something like that? It's difficult to
make people aware of situations like just happened here in Philadelphia, which
proved that these surveillance cameras, one, do not deter crime. There were five
cameras right at that same intersection where this person was shot in the head
in front of a grocery store. Obviously that was not a deterrent to a violent
crime, and how many times are we actually aware of the fact of when
cameras fail to catch a crime in the act? I mean, I would hazard to guess that
it's orders of magnitude of more instances where these cameras really did
not do what they've been sold to us as being able to do. I would
assume that's far more common than actually the few isolated incidents
where you actually are able to track down and lock up somebody who
allegedly committed a murder or some other violent crime. I just think it's a
wrong-headed approach to crime, frankly. Yeah, I think we're going to rue the day.
Now I know, Mike, you've been looking into some of the congestion systems that
are in place. I think Stockholm has something like that? Yes, if you still
consider today to be Wednesday, which I guess it is in the United States, although
it's just past 1 a.m. here, so technically Thursday. So Wednesday, the
first of August, was the first day in Stockholm of the congestion charging,
with the caveat that last year, for about six months from January to July, they had
a trial period, and they deemed the trial to be a success. Apparently they were able
to cut down traffic in the city center by 22 percent, so they decided, again
starting just today, to make the system permanent. I was able to speak
this afternoon with a spokesperson for the congestion pricing division of the
road authority, I guess, who's responsible for it, and asked, you know, sort of how
the data is maintained, and basically the rules here in Sweden are that the data
of sort of which toll booth you go under and all this is accessible only to you,
or to the police with this sort of court order. The legal process is a little bit
different than seems to be the equivalent of a court order or a warrant.
The police don't have a direct link to the congestion pricing system. There's
one sort of interesting privacy loophole, and that is if you, in order to pay for
your tolls, you have to go into either a 7-Eleven or there's another Swedish chain
of sort of similar stores called Presbyron. You have to go into one of
those and give your license plate number and the money, so this produces the
interesting side effect that anyone can walk into one of these stores anywhere
in the city and say, you know, give a license plate number and find out how
much that person owes. So I'm kind of curious, those of you who drive, if you
consider this a privacy violation or not, that this sort of information about how
much you owe is publicly accessible.
Before we start the debate on this, I just want to inform people that I'm now walking onto the
airplane, so you might not hear my voice for a little while, but yeah, let's
definitely ask some questions about the whole driving versus privacy versus
pollution question.
Well, it actually turns out that a lot of the databases, when you have a license
plate number, there's a lot of sources that we've found over the
years where you can actually access information about the owner and the
address that the vehicle is registered to and all sorts of information
unintentionally, and I think the most recent one, Emanuel, that we ran
across was in California, is that right?
I think so, but you'll have to refresh my memory.
Yeah, it was a site, and I believe it was for emissions control, where you can
actually see the emissions history of a vehicle by entering its license plate
number, and not only did it give you the current owner and address, if I remember
correctly, this was a number of months ago, but it gave all the past owners as
well who have ever had that license plate number.
So it's interesting.
You know, this is just another bit of information from another source that you
can get on someone based on some other piece of information that you have on
them.
So, you know, in terms of social engineering, it's probably nothing new,
and you can probably invade someone's privacy much more, you know, through
other methods, and probably even at the DMV, but, you know, it's something, you
know, it's definitely going down the wrong path in terms of not securing
information, just like everything else seems to be doing, so.
It certainly seems that there's yet another way that the information will be
leaked, but I'm not convinced that that's a reason to not have something as
ecologically friendly as congestion pricing.
I just wish it had a bit more teeth in it, but I guess this is a debate we're
going to be seeing for some time.
I know we're going to be seeing a lot more surveillance cameras.
Go ahead, Mike.
One thing that I thought was interesting is that the prices for the
congestion charging here are actually pretty low.
You have to pay, when you enter the central district and when you leave, the
exact price varies between the time of day, but it's between 10 and 20 crowns,
which is, you know, at most $3.
It's actually less than the price of a single subway ride, so it's very little
money, and still, it's able to reduce the traffic by such a large amount that I
think your cause for pessimism may be unfounded.
I think the $8 fee may actually be enough in New York.
Changing gears a little bit, actually, I'm on the airplane right now, and I just
took my seat, but I understand that we have a clip that we're going to play of
an incredibly bizarre and crazy story that appeared on Fox concerning hackers
and the threat that they pose, the threat that some of them apparently pose.
This is something that aired on television, but I think the sound effects
and I think the hysteria and the tones will definitely convey the overall mood
of the story without the video portion.
Ken, do we have that available to play?
You sure do.
All right, let's take a listen to this.
Here it is.
They call themselves Anonymous.
They are hackers on steroids, treating the web like a real-life video game,
sacking websites, invading MySpace accounts, disrupting innocent people's
lives, and if you fight back, watch out, push you and tracks down the hacker
gangs in this Fox 11 investigation.
Destroy, die, attack, threats from a gang of computer hackers calling
themselves Anonymous.
I've had seven different passwords, and they've got them all so far.
They attack innocent people like an internet hate machine.
We are Anonymous.
We are strong.
We do not forgive.
We do not forgive.
Those who fight back face death threats.
Anonymous has even threatened to bomb sports stadiums.
I believe they're domestic terrorists.
Their name comes from their secret websites.
It requires anyone posting on the site to remain anonymous.
MySpace users are among their favorite targets, people like David.
The next thing I know, I had a bunch of naked guys on my profile.
Anonymous hacked his site and plastered it with gay sex pictures.
His girlfriend left him.
She thought that I was cheating on her with guys.
They crashed his computer with a virus and used his own email
to infect everyone on his friends list.
Out of 90 friends, they killed 32 of my friends' computers.
Now, David was apparently just a random victim.
We found his MySpace password on an underground hacker
site linked to Anonymous.
There were literally thousands of stolen passwords on that site.
And victims are left wondering, why is all this happening to me?
They will tell you we want to create chaos and disorder
and ruin people's lives.
This hacker, who wants us to hide his identity,
spent months checking out sites linked to Anonymous.
They get laughs.
They enjoy doing this.
And they get what they call lulls.
Lulls is a corruption of L-O-L, which stands for laugh out loud.
Anonymous gets big lulls from pulling random pranks.
For example, messing with online children's games like Habbo Hotel.
The pranks are often anti-Semitic or racist
and always posted on the internet.
But truly epic lulls come from raids and invasions
branded on the Anonymous websites with an I,
like their nationwide campaign to spoil the new Harry Potter book ending.
Attention children's, Voldemort kills.
Their most notorious stunt, a bomb threat
against seven football stadiums, which drew national media attention.
The claim is that trucks loaded with radioactive material
would be detonated in the stadiums.
One man was arrested last year after posting the threat,
now thought to be a hoax.
He's pleaded not guilty and awaits trial.
This hacker finally got fed up.
I decided to either shut them down or stop them
or simply prevent as many raids as possible.
Anonymous branded him as a Lowe's killer,
accusing him of ruining their fun.
They said they would rape me, they would kill me.
This mother's also fighting Anonymous.
Her whole family's been under attack.
They posted pictures of all of us.
Anonymous also posted their home address and phone numbers.
They pretty much said that, you've got the information now,
do what you need to do, go, go, go.
Death threats started pouring in.
They're gonna f**k people, bitch, I'm gonna f**k you.
Your heart is breaking, you need to keep your family safe.
She installed electronic security, a phone tracing system and bought a dog.
Then she started tracking down Anonymous members,
called in the FBI, but fears they won't act until it's too late.
Would you do something about it if one of us ended up dead?
Probably.
Some victims told us they just hope Anonymous will get bored
and forget about them, but insiders say, don't count on that.
According to her, they never forget.
Phil Schumann, Fox 11 News.
Oh, my God.
What do you say to a piece like that?
Bernie, do you have any thoughts?
So, I mean, I was just going to comment that this is so amusing that,
I mean, it almost seems like the story itself could be a hack
in terms of, you know, getting the reporters to believe that,
you know, this is actually a serious thing.
Well, to say a phrase like truly epic lulls, I think, yeah.
To buy into that a little bit.
Bernie, what do you think about it so far?
I thought it was really hilarious.
You can just tell from the tone of it that this was,
this is just really sort of contrived.
And, you know, they don't offer any specifics about any facts in the investigation.
It's just, it's a hack job is what it is on hackers is what I think it is.
But I think there's also, there's also a more serious side to all this
in that people see a story like this, people who are not informed,
and they just associate hackers with the worst possible things.
Does somebody have to crawl over this?
Okay. I think somebody needs to get to the other side.
But people see this.
They see words like anonymous associated with, well, with the T word,
which I'm not going to say on an airplane, and with hackers.
And basically, that sticks in their minds.
And the end result is that when somebody.
Oh, okay.
I'll move over there then.
I'm in the wrong seat.
Sorry. So basically, if you could grab my bag, too, that would be nice.
Basically, I'm sorry, this was bound to happen.
What happened is that people will see a story like this,
and they'll think being anonymous is evil.
It's tantamount to making all sorts of threats and terrorizing people.
And, yeah, we have to outlaw anonymity as a result, right?
What other thing could you do?
And hackers, too.
We should outlaw hackers.
It sure seems that way based on that story.
I mean, it was just incredible how long it went.
But I think the point that a lot of people miss is that this kind of thing has been going on forever.
I mean, back in the old days with BBS, does anybody remember the whole teletrial thing
on the old BBS systems where these people were considered to be out of control
because they could do whatever they want and say whatever they want?
People have been engaged in pranks and mischief and stupidity.
Yes, it's all combined for a long, long time.
And I think what they're doing here is they're elevating its status to a point
where it becomes something it's not.
And, Emanuel, I thought it was noteworthy that Fox News failed to report the claim
that the hackers had been redirecting and repositioning satellites,
government and commercial satellites in outer space.
I understand this.
I didn't really delve into the story that deeply.
I was laughing too hard.
But what was the connection?
I'm sorry, Bernie, what?
I was just making a reference to other outlandish claims that were made literally decades ago
against hackers, I guess, in the 1980s, that they were doing other outrageous things,
which turned out to be completely untrue,
like they were repositioning satellites orbiting the Earth.
Yes, well, that was our own bulletin board system in New Jersey that was accused
of being part of a plot to move satellites.
And it was seen as extremely stupid and crazy back in, what, 1985 when that happened?
Yeah, you have the same basic mentality today.
But what I was wondering was, what is the connection?
I just saw this being passed by very fleetingly.
They were talking about the stadium threat.
Now, how in God's name does that relate to these people or to hackers or to anybody?
I don't know.
I mean, I haven't actually seen anonymous associate.
I mean, the word anonymous in terms of a group associated with any bomb threats that I can recall.
At least it wasn't made a point in any of the news stories that I saw.
Something that's a little bit related to this, though,
is something that came down from the United States Postal Service.
You know, there's a new regulation, in effect, took effect on July 30th.
And this new Postal Service rule applies for packages and envelopes that weigh more than 13 ounces
if they're being mailed with only stamps as postage at a location other than a post office.
Basically, starting this Monday, customers can use only one of...
Actually, I'm going to phrase it the way they phrase it because it's from a press release.
They can use one of several convenient online postage applications available 24-7
or an automated postal center
if they wish to mail items that weigh more than 13 ounces
in postal service collection boxes or post office lobby mail slots
or if they wish to leave the items to pick up by their letter carriers.
If a customer is unable to use one of the above methods to prepare and affix postage,
items weighing more than 13 ounces must be presented for mailing to an employee
at a post office retail service counter.
It seems to me like anonymous mailing is slowly becoming illegal.
I mean, am I being paranoid in thinking this?
No, it seems to be quite the case.
They're lowering the poundage involved.
A number of years ago, it used to be that if your item weighed 16 ounces, one pound,
you couldn't put it in a postal box.
Now it's down to 13 ounces unless you have one of these e-stamps or something similar on it.
And the people who have the ability to do this are...
Traceable.
Yeah, and basically, if you don't live near a post office, you're just an average person,
doesn't have access to a mail meter or anything like that,
you cannot mail something that's above 13 ounces if you just put it in a mailbox.
The funny thing is, they say if you do this, it will be returned.
And I just wonder, what is the logic behind that?
Apparently, they want to keep these things out of the system because of some kind of
safety threat that they imagine.
But isn't it just as much inside the system if they are returning it to the return address?
Well, even more interesting, what if you're a terrorist and you decide to go to the mailbox
down the street from, let's say, Goldman Sachs, and you put in your 14-ounce letter bomb,
and it has regular stamps on it, and it gets returned to the crafty address that you've
put in the return space, Goldman Sachs.
I see a flaw here.
I'm glad you're the one using those words and not me here on this airplane.
But, yeah, no, you've raised some very good points there.
By the way, we are scheduled to take off fairly soon, so you might lose me.
I'll let you know if they tell me to turn the phone off.
Basically, again, I'm here with Nat Kevin.
We're in Montreal, heading over to England on an airplane, as we speak, but we're still
on the ground, so we'll be leaving pretty soon.
Mike joins us from—you're in Stockholm, Sweden?
I am, yes.
Okay.
Mike is on a very long delay.
It's bouncing over every conceivable satellite, apparently.
Bernie S., down there in Philadelphia, really spanning the globe tonight.
And we have Redbird, and we have Joe—Redbird, I'm Jim, rather—in the studio, and we have
Ken, our faithful engineer, making it all possible.
Thank you, Ken.
You're welcome.
Now, we also have stories about Google, Google's in the news, as they always are.
Now, what's this about them wanting Spectrum?
Bernie, I think you've been following this story.
They want to provide something to everybody for a fair price, or—what is it that they're
up to?
Well, it's an intriguing offer that Google has made.
The federal government, the FCC, is going to basically auction off a large chunk of
the radio spectrum in the 1,700 meg—I'm sorry, in the 700 megahertz band.
These are frequencies that will be left over when the FCC forces all the commercial television
stations to turn off their analog transmitters in early 2009, I think it is, about a year
and a half, and 18 months yet.
When that happens, the FCC is going to auction off this spectrum to, ostensibly, the cell
phone companies, who are standing to make the most money from it, and they're hoping
to—the FCC is hoping to raise several billion dollars.
They're hoping to raise, like, $15 billion from this auction.
And Google, who has very deep pockets, has said, wait a minute, we'll start the bidding
at five, which is more than anybody else has agreed to bid yet, if you, FCC, make a couple
of changes to how this spectrum must be used.
One, we would like the FCC to mandate that this spectrum allow any device to be used.
In other words, if you buy a cell phone from one cell phone company, you should be able
to move it to this other cell phone company.
Right now, you can't do that, because the handsets are locked, you use a different protocol
or whatever.
Another thing that Google would like is to allow any kind of application to run on these
devices, not just those that are dictated by Verizon or whoever your wireless carrier
happens to be.
And three, to make this spectrum, whoever wins the auction for it, to force that company
to sell access to this wireless network to third-party wireless providers on a wholesale
basis.
And we talked about naked DSL several shows ago, which is where, like, Verizon would have
to resell their DSL service to another company at a discount rate that that other company
could then sell to you or me without having to bundle, have to pay for unnecessary phone
services or whatever.
So all these things sound like good ideas, and it's driving the wireless carriers crazy
that Google is saying that this all should be done, one, because Google has more money
than them, and it drives them crazy, and two, because all of these things are exactly what
the wireless phone companies don't want.
They want to control what phone you use, they want to control what applications you use,
and they don't want any other companies to access their network, even if they sell it
at a wholesale basis.
So it's really interesting to see how this is going to happen.
And today I heard the FCC granted all of these wishes, rule-change wishes, except for
the one that says that the carriers will have to resell, have to make this spectrum re-available
to other carriers at a wholesale discount.
So two out of three ain't bad, and it's going to be interesting to see how this works out.
What's interesting is that Google wasn't just asking for open access to the network.
They were asking for open access to their services as well, which means that the providers
bidding on this spectrum would have to actually sell their services, not just access to the
spectrum at wholesale rates, which is really not like any typical business model that any
company is really used to, which just proves that you can have open access, you can have
networks and services that are available to the public without them paying a fee if you
just shift your business model.
And Google specifically happens to be relatively privacy-invasive in terms of selling advertising
data and data mining all of your stuff for their internal use in order to, whatever,
in their words, improve services and, again, offer advertising to other clients who are
actually paying for it.
But one of the big things that people keep touting about the spectrum, and I'm not entirely
sure about its truth, because I've been looking or I've been searching for technical data
regarding this, and everybody's saying that the 700 megahertz chunk of spectrum is somehow
really useful and has all these great building penetration characteristics, and I haven't
seen any technical data to back that up yet.
So Bernie, do you know anything about that?
It's not really that true.
It's no more true than it is for cell phone service, as opposed to, there's cellular service
and there's PCS service.
There's companies like Sprint PCS and a lot of the GSM carriers like T-Mobile and some
of the other, I guess Singular has some 1900 megahertz frequencies.
There's basically two wireless phone bands, 1900 megahertz, which is called PCS, and then
there's the 800 megahertz band, which is the old leftover frequencies from the old
analog cell phones that Verizon uses, AT&T has a bunch of 800 megahertz spectrum, and
basically all the local phone carriers in whatever area you lived in once had that 800
megahertz spectrum, or still do operate it, and it doesn't really penetrate buildings
all that well, and 700 megahertz is just very close to 800 megahertz, so no, it doesn't
have magical powers that are going to punch through buildings much better than your existing
cell phone, like if your cell phone is Verizon, it ain't going to work any better than a Verizon
cell phone now, because it's very close to that in frequency.
My question about this whole spectrum, 700 megahertz, what was on there before?
It was all UHF television stations, yeah.
Oh, I see.
So that's all getting shut down because of the HD broadcasts, in 2009 I believe they're
shutting it down, and now they're auctioning it off to corporations, and they're actually,
this specific chunk that they're auctioning off with these rules is only a 22 megahertz
chunk of that, they're going to reserve, I think the total was 62, or something like
that, maybe more, I don't have that figure in front of me now, but they're only offering
this 20, okay, so we just lost Mike, okay, so Mike's not with us anymore, but they're
only auctioning off this 22 megahertz portion of the spectrum, which is going to cause the
bidders to be in compliance with these rules.
Now there's going to be portions of this spectrum allocated to emergency management and municipalities
and whoever else they decide to issue it to in terms of government, but they're supposedly
wanting to develop some sort of nationwide network, and it's not really clear on what
the details are about that yet.
Another interesting point is that this is just the United States, this isn't something
that's going to allow services to be developed to be used all over the world, I mean you're
going to have the same problems that you have now with the CDMA providers and TDMA and all
the other non-universal, in terms of global communications providers, so.
Yeah, that's true, but Redford, I wanted to ask you something, is ham radio, ham radio
people getting involved in this, are they going to get a chunk of that spectrum for
their own use?
Unfortunately it doesn't seem like we're ever really going to get all that much more spectrum,
in fact a lot of it's trying to be taken away from us, you know, the FCC doesn't have as
much of a concern as it should against a whole lot of interference problems that are using
portions of our spectrum, BPL is a great example of this, they're using portions of the amateur
radio and the entire HF spectrum actually, so this affects shortwave listeners as well,
and they're broadcasting this on their power lines, which are probably the most incredible
antennas that anybody can have, I mean these things span thousands and thousands of miles
and just radiate the crap that they're putting on these lines, which were never designed
to carry RF, and it's just pumping all this crap and digital noise into the HF portions
of the radio spectrum, and the FCC doesn't seem very concerned about that, a number of
years ago they gave away a portion of the 1.25 meter band to corporations, I think specifically
UPS, and we never got that back, so it doesn't look as though we're going to get any of this,
no.
I've just been handed a copy of the Daily Telegraph from London, it's Britain's best
selling quality daily they claim, and well there's absolutely nothing here that I can
see that I'd like to read on the air, but I figured I'd mention that they're handing
out British newspapers, so yeah this is really happening, we're really going to England.
Emmanuel?
Yes.
I just also wanted to mention that the FCC is touting that these spectrum auctions are
really good things for the public, because they're going to raise so many billions of
tax dollars that aren't going to come out of the taxpayers' pockets, this is basically
free money they're saying, we're generating money out of thin air to put into the general
fund so you don't have to pay more taxes, which is a complete ruse, that's a complete
falsehood and a shell game that the FCC and the federal government are pulling on us.
This radio spectrum is public property, these are the public airwaves that the FCC is saying,
well we're just going to sell this to some private company, and guess where the money
that has to pay for the billions or tens of billions of dollars that's going to be spent
on this spectrum, guess who's going to ultimately pay out of their pockets to use what truly
is public property?
That's right, you and me, instead of it coming out of our pockets as tax dollars, it's going
to come out even more in the form of higher fees to access a public resource, the radio
airwaves.
So this is really a great fraud and a shell game that the FCC is foisting on the American
public and I think we should be upset about that.
Let me just jump in here, because I do see a story on the front page of today's Daily
Telegraph that might be a little bit interesting, the headline is, office printers just as risky
as smoking.
That's right, the office printer causes frustration when it's not working, but it may be posing
as big a health risk to staff as smoking a cigarette when it is.
Research published today shows that 17 out of 62 laser printers tested released high
amounts of minute toner particles into the air which are breathed into office workers'
lungs.
So now we have something else to worry about.
I don't believe it.
You don't want to believe it, that's true.
I guess you just go around your printer, if you wipe your finger around your office laser
printer to see if there's like a thin layer of black toner powder, it ain't there.
I think this is, I really question the validity of this study.
All right, well I'll give you the address for the Telegraph, you can write them a letter
and complain about that.
But basically what we've just been talking about, I think it boils down to who do we
trust more?
Do we trust the existing wireless phone companies or do we trust Google?
And I got to put my bet with Google at the moment, but it's not really very confident
because they do kind of scare me, but I do think they have better ideas than the old
dinosaurs that are out there now running the industry.
Well I think they have better ideas in terms of equal access to people who wouldn't necessarily
be able to afford services in the past, but they don't necessarily have any better ideas
than other corporations in terms of benefiting the customer instead of themselves.
They certainly are making a ton of money off of this and they absolutely will make a ton
of money when it comes to advertising and selling the data on wireless access use because
right now that's all controlled by a very small number of corporations who own the spectrum.
So it'll be interesting to see what they do with this data and if you read their privacy
policies, which is something we can bring up again in the future as they acquire more
services and one of their most recent acquisitions is Grand Central.
If you read their privacy policies, you'll see that it's not consumer friendly.
They're using your data and to some that's probably a good tradeoff in terms of getting
the service for free, but they do have a business strategy behind it and they are ultimately
looking after themselves.
Redbird, let me just jump in here.
You're a pilot and we've started moving, so I assume that means I should turn my cell
phone off, right?
I have had problems with cell phone interference in the avionics, yes.
Okay, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to leave you guys with a story of Google taking
over another company called Postini.
I believe Bernie has some information on that.
I'm going to leave you now because I'm on a commercial airline and we're about to start
taking off and I don't want to be rude and cause all kinds of mayhem and problems.
I will be on next week from Germany and stay with the Off The Hook folks for the rest of
the hour and thanks everybody.
Have a good flight.
Bon voyage.
So Bernie.
Bernie's still on.
Okay, so we'll get rid of this.
All right.
Bernie, are you still there?
I'm still here.
I heard a French flight attendant just a moment ago.
That was kind of interesting.
Or French speaking anyway.
Emanuel just mentioned this story about Google just spending, what was it, I think $265 million
in cash a week or two ago for a company called Postini.
And I've actually been using Postini for several years at the company I work for.
They're basically a spam filtering company.
If you have a company with probably more than 10 employees, I don't know what the minimum
is, but if you have more than a handful of employees, you can have all your mail filtered
through Postini's servers and they do a very, very good job.
They have large teams of people who are very smart at figuring out the techniques that
spammers use to get junk mail or mail that has malicious attachments like viruses or
worms or worse attached to email.
They're very good at blocking this from getting onto your mail server.
And they have a very low, I don't own stock in this company, Postini, but they do a very
good job.
The point is their technology is so good that Google just bought them for over a quarter
million dollars in cash.
And now that raises an interesting privacy question.
Now Google will be reading all these companies' email, thousands and thousands of companies
across the United States and around the world have their mail filtered through Postini,
and now Google is going to have access to that content.
Now whether Google is really going to actually read and search through all that email and
market and use that to make money somehow, I don't know, but they have access to all
that.
And that's what concerns me a little bit.
And one of the main things about Google as opposed to individual companies that they're
acquiring is that not only do they have access now to your email filtering and all the content
of your email in order to provide that service, but they have access to your web searches.
They have access, if you're using the new Grand Central thing that they acquired, to
everybody you call.
They have access to your personal email if you're using Gmail.
They have access to any queries that you do on the internet, really.
The majority of them go through Google now.
I mean it's, you know, they have a majority.
And I actually have some quotes here from the Grand Central privacy policy.
I mean Grand Central is a service they just acquired which allows you to do cool things
with your phone and literally route your phone calls through Google in order to, well, you
can look at their website for the features and this isn't really necessarily meant to
promote that.
But when you use Grand Central, Grand Central servers automatically record certain information
about your use of Grand Central.
Similar to other web services, Grand Central records information such as account activity,
including storage usage, number of logins, data displayed or clicked on, including UI
links, ads links, et cetera.
Other log information including browser type, IP address, date and time of access, cookie
ID and referrer URL.
And telephony log information, including calling party number, forwarding numbers, time and
date of calls, duration of calls, and types of calls, dot, dot, dot.
We do not sell, rent, or otherwise share your personal information with any third parties
except in the limited circumstances described in the Google privacy policy, such as when
we believe we are required to do so by law.
Not even necessarily when they are actually required to do so, but only when they believe
they are required to do so.
You may terminate your account by contacting support at grandcentral.com.
Such deletions or terminations will take immediate effect in your account view.
Residual copies of deleted messages and accounts may take up to 60 days to be deleted from
our active servers and may remain in our offline backup systems.
So really they have a record of all your information, you know, everything forever.
I mean it's, it's, they probably have amazing backup facilities just because of the amount
of data that they, that they retain and the service that they provide to your users.
So you can bet that any queries you make in any of the Google services, any of their forwarding
services, Grand Central, email filtering, whatever, they've got logs of it.
So when, when they have so much information from, from so many different aspects of the
things that you do on the internet, it's, you know, it, it really becomes dangerous
in terms of violating your privacy and that data getting into the wrong hands.
And it sounds like the level of data mining that they're doing is rivaling the NSA's National
Security Agency's data mining, which apparently is so important to, to this administration
that they'll try to take advantage of a, of a sick man in intensive care to get him to
extend the policy, as has been accused, been alleged, Attorney General Gonzalez and former
White House Chief of Staff Andy Card did a couple years ago.
So this is a, this is really interesting.
All this data mining is not just the federal government spying on you, it's a, it's corporations
like Google who supposedly do no evil.
They're data mining your, your every move as well.
It's fascinating what's going on and it'll be even more fascinating to see where it goes.
You know, there's just a couple minutes left in the show and I figured this would be a
good time for a couple of announcements and one of which I've been wanting to make all
through the show because it is just such an ironical contrast to just about everything
we've mentioned.
Tomorrow evening in New York City, the former founder of PayPal, Peter Thiel, is going to
be speaking on how new technologies thwart governments and promote freedom.
Clearly something that we've shown today, as in almost every show, is very useful.
This will be, the door's open at 7pm.
This is at the General Society Library at 20 West 44th Street.
He is going to discuss how computers, the internet, and international electronic money
transfers have circumvented government power to monitor, tax, or control human activity.
First of all, it should be interesting and second of all, it should be fascinating because
it's ironic even within the talk.
PayPal, if you recall, pretty much acquiesced to the Fed's request to not conduct transactions
which were perfectly legal involving gambling in any way and a number of other transactions
that the government simply opposed.
So for him to give this speech is kind of fascinating.
Sponsored by an organization called NYCJUNTO, J-U-N-T-O dot com, for more information.
Alright, sounds good.
Do you have any other announcements?
Oh yeah, this coming Friday is the first Friday of the month, so 2600 meets in various locations
around the world.
And one last announcement, which is totally unrelated to anything else, but in New York
City, like every summer, there's a blood shortage.
So please, if you can be a blood donor, be one.
You never know when it might be useful for general people or your friends and relatives.
And Jim, can you give blood at the 2600 meeting this Friday?
We make you sweat, but we don't make you give blood.
Okay.
Alright, and it looks like we're just about out of time right now, so I guess this is
as good a time as any to say goodnight and thanks for listening.
But if they could, they would.
On Diddley Bound for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
On Diddley Bound!
On Diddley Bound!