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One, two, three, go!
And you're listening to Off The Hook here on WBAI New York 90.5 FM.
Emanuel Goldstein is out of town, but he's on the phone.
Are you there?
I am here.
I'm actually standing in the middle of a very unusual setting in rural Germany.
It's the Chaos Communications Camp 2007.
We're on a military base, if you can believe this.
We're on a military base.
It used to belong to the former East Germany.
There are fighter jets on the ground surrounding me.
There's one of those little round devices on top of a hill that's used for listening,
things like the NSA has, except in this case it was their version of the NSA.
And right now the whole place is filled with thousands of hackers
taking over the airplane hangars, taking over the fields, camping out all over the place.
It is an incredible sight, an incredible event, and it's going on for the next five days.
Today was day one.
And in this hour we're going to talk to a bunch of people who are a part of this whole thing.
So who do we have in the studio?
Well, we've got Jim.
Hello!
Arseny.
Hi.
And I'm Redbird.
That's all for now.
What about Bernie?
Bernie is in Philadelphia.
Bernie's not in the studio.
How could you forget Bernie is in Philadelphia?
You asked about the studio.
You know, you've got to be specific here.
All right, we're here in Germany.
As I said, we've got a whole crowd of people here,
so we're going to try and get through everybody as quickly as possible.
Basically, I've been traveling with NotKevin over the past week or so.
We were in London only a few days ago, actually.
And I've got to tell you, man, the city there is out of its mind as far as surveillance goes.
You cannot walk a meter down the street without being on a different camera.
They're everywhere.
They're on the buses.
They're on the lampposts.
They're in the buildings.
They're in the sky.
They're every place you can possibly imagine.
You're constantly being watched.
I'm going to put NotKevin on for a second just to give his experiences
because it was the first time he's ever been in London.
And it was kind of, I guess, shocking.
Is that the right word?
Shocking would be the right word, almost an understatement.
One example I can give is the first train station I was in,
I stood in one spot and was able to turn around and see 32 different cameras without moving.
I mean, I thought New York was bad,
but now that they're thinking about bringing the Ring of Steel, I'm a little scared.
Have you experienced any of the talking cameras while you've been there?
And Mike is here as well.
He has journeyed over to Germany for this hacker gathering.
This actually is the last time this happened in Germany was four years ago.
There was one in Holland two years ago,
and that's basically how it works.
Every four years in each of the countries is an outdoor hacker event.
So I'm going to put Mike on now with his observations so far.
Hi, folks.
I've just arrived today at the camp here outside of Berlin,
and I've been sort of wandering around today and this evening.
There's a lot of neat stuff.
There's any sort of blinking light you could imagine.
They have it probably here.
I saw today something similar to the Graffiti Research Labs project
with the laser pointer that writes on walls,
and instead of any old wall, they're writing on the side of an old aircraft hangar,
an old East German aircraft hangar.
So that was pretty cool.
I was playing a sort of air hockey earlier,
but instead of physical objects because that's just so 20th century,
there was a big table with lights on it,
and you sort of took your hand and moved it,
and the controller moved with your hand,
and you could hit the ball and all this stuff.
So there's just all these amazing projects going on.
Apparently the developers of a free software telephone are in attendance.
All kinds of things are happening,
and I'm looking forward to seeing more over the coming days.
I could answer any questions or give you back to Emmanuel.
Yeah, well, some of us went to the What the Hack conference and some of the CCC congresses.
What are the major differences in terms of size and the number of people who are there
and the number of projects?
Is it much bigger than the previous conferences?
Well, it's hard to say.
Definitely the venue is very different or at least somewhat different.
As I said before, it's on a former East German Air Force base,
so there's all these crazy hangars that a lot of the things are in.
There's an airplane sitting just maybe 10 meters away from me in the ceiling of this hangar that we're in.
There's other airplanes and helicopters and whatnot all over this place.
In terms of number of attendees, I don't really know,
but projects are just getting started.
Today is the first day of a five-day camp, so things are getting started,
but already so many things that I've seen.
So it's really hard to compare in that way, but it's definitely an interesting experience.
Now, does the camp have an Internet presence where our listeners can go and check out?
Back here, Emmanuel. Arseny, are you in the studio?
Yes, I'm here.
Oh, we have a special guest for you.
I don't know if you remember Mescalito from Paris, but he's here.
Oh, hi.
I'm going to put him on right now and he's going to give us his opinion as to what he's seen so far in this place.
Mescalito from Paris.
Hey. I just arrived this morning, and it was really amazing
because Tim Pritlove did an amazing job on the place he chose for the event.
I usually come for seeing friends.
I don't see in another place.
I only see every two years at the hack or the city camp.
As usual, there is a lot of projects and very interesting people.
I'm working in the security field my day, but I also work in the parapsychological field,
and I have the chance to meet Mitch Hartman today, who worked on an amazing device.
I think he will tell you more about this in one second.
It's definitely a good place to be.
There is a lot of things to do, a lot of parties, a lot of projects, and a lot of ideas floating around.
Okay. Also joining us today is Mitch Altman, who has been on the show many times.
Mitch has set up, I guess, a whole group of people here.
I just see them all day long at this table in the hack center.
The hack center, I guess, can hold, what would you say, Mike, a couple hundred people in this place?
At least that, maybe even more.
Basically, people can hook into the Internet either by wireless or by plugging a wire into their computer.
That doesn't sound good. We'll work to try to get Emanuel back on the line.
Well, in the meantime, we'll cover some other news stories that are going on.
The man who invented the workable reverse directory died.
Jack Cole, former IBM employee, came upon this idea in the early 60s when he was assigned to Dallas.
He hired typists to take the old key punch cards and punch in names, addresses, and phone numbers on the cards,
creating essentially a workable database.
The directory is still published in print and digital versions.
Reverse directories were nothing new.
Many of the early directories from the 1880s, when the phone was just four or five years old, were reverse directories.
But in those days, you had cities such as Boston with maybe 200 telephones.
We're about to get Emanuel back on.
He's back.
Are you back?
Emanuel, are you there?
Are you back?
Okay, now he should be there.
I'm here. I'm sorry, I don't know what happened. We were just talking and all of a sudden...
What's the last thing you guys heard?
We had just gotten the phone back from a gentleman from Paris.
From Mescalito. Okay, it's interesting because it sort of brings back memories.
I don't know if you guys...
It was around four years ago when we were doing a similar broadcast from a German camp.
And we talked for about 20 minutes before we realized that we weren't even on the air.
And we had to go back and do all the interviews over again.
So it worked out better this time. At least I heard a little beep.
That told me we were a bit hung up on.
You said Mitch was there at a table getting people to be on the show or something?
Yeah, well basically the Hack Center is comprised of several hundred people
that just come in and set up their laptops.
And they can either hook in via wireless connection
or they can plug an Ethernet cable into their computer and be on the Internet.
Or they can just hang out and talk to people, drink a beer or have a snack.
And it's just one of many buildings where people can do their thing in this place.
It happens to be an old airplane hangar as well for the East German government.
So it's a very weird kind of situation.
Now Mitch has had sort of a table of a dozen or so people over the entire day.
And basically those people have been very focused on a task.
And Mitch is here.
I'm going to ask Mitch just what it is that these people have been doing all day long
and focused so intently on their projects.
And then you guys in the studio, if you have any questions, just ask away to Mitch.
Here he is.
Yeah, well the Hacker Center has a whole bunch of tables.
And I commandeered a few of them with many people's blessing to set up a hardware lab.
And I have a whole bunch of people interested in making projects
that I hacked from the mini POV kit, which you can buy from Lady Atta's website really cheaply.
She set this kit up for beginners to make microcontroller projects,
even if they're total beginners.
So I expanded upon that to have a whole bunch of different projects people could build.
The most popular one is the Brain Machine,
which I wrote an article for in the current Make Magazine number 10.
It's a, let's see, how can I say it really quickly,
blinking lights and pulsing sound at brainwave frequencies.
And it has programmed into it a 10-minute meditation.
It goes through the sequence of brainwave frequencies to bring you into meditation
and out again feeling really fabulous.
And along the way you hallucinate really wild patterns and colors.
And it's been very popular at every party I've been to since I first made it.
And it's really popular here.
And there's been probably several thousand more pictures of people wearing blinking red light goggles
just today added to the pool of however many there used to be.
The second most popular one is an open source TV be gone that I hacked out of this kit as well.
And so a bunch of people have been making these things all day.
And here it is, one in the morning, our time, and I haven't eaten.
I haven't peed. I haven't drank enough water.
It's just been really crazy.
And you can't say pee.
Sorry, I won't say it again.
And so I have a bunch of other projects too that people have been building,
a little robot bug and an RGB little light that's really trippy.
All these things you can enhance your experience without doing any drugs
and not needing to come down from them.
That sounds like a lot of fun.
Now I'm curious about the open source TV be gone
because I was always wondering about the microcontroller code that went into that.
Is that something you opened up?
The actual TV be gone is a custom chip.
So the firmware for it isn't really all that interesting.
The code is sort of embedded in there.
And I use Zilog's library, and that's only usable on their chip.
So my license is that I can't use that on any other chip.
However, I can use the database that I collected, which is all those same codes,
and use it on any chip of my choice.
And so I'm using it on the Atmel chip that's in the mini POV kit.
And I have that on my website if anyone wants to look for it,
cornfieldelectronics.com, and there's a Maker Faire button.
And I have the firmware on there and the top 40 codes for Europe and for North America.
That website is spelled what, corn, like the fruit of the vegetable corn,
and fields like fields of corn, or how?
Yeah, that's exactly it.
It's just like fields of corn.
I named the company back when I lived in Urbana, Illinois,
and looked out my window when I needed a name.
Very good.
So I'd imagine that other people brought their own hacks along with them.
One of the popular ones was adding arrays of very bright infrared LEDs to the TV-B-Gone
to control televisions from much further away than originally designed for.
Is that kind of stuff there, too?
Yeah, and just before I left for Europe for this,
I finished the first super high-power TV-B-Gone prototype,
and I've been testing it around in Paris and in Berlin and Potsdam, a town nearby here.
I haven't tested anything further than 50 meters,
but 50 meters through glass has been very easy and very gratifying.
Sounds like a lot of fun.
Yeah, this has been tons of fun.
I'd recommend it to anybody ever.
Anything else you want to share with us?
That's all I can think about now because my brain is actually broken.
So I'll give you back to Emmanuel.
Thanks a lot.
Okay, speaking of broken brains,
not Kevin here has one of those glasses.
Sorry, brain machine?
Brain machine.
Okay, I'm kind of frightened of this.
But basically I've been walking by here throughout the day,
and you just would see people sitting at the table wearing,
imagine this, wearing glasses with just flashing lights in the lens area,
staring straight ahead, not moving for a long period of time.
And apparently this is what I'm supposed to try right now, live on the air,
and I have no idea what's going to happen.
Maybe now, Kevin, you could explain to me what to expect from this.
It's kind of hard to explain what happens and how you feel.
It really differs from every person,
but it's kind of flashes of color and just a complete relaxed feeling through sound.
Okay, so I'm going to attempt to speak while that's happening, I guess,
which is probably what you're not supposed to do.
But I'm supposed to wear headphones as well?
Yes, you are supposed to wear headphones.
Make sure you close your eyes.
So picture this, if you will, as a radio first.
We're going to try and describe what it's like to be wearing glasses
and flashing red lights in front of your eyes while wearing headphones
and being on a 50,000-watt radio station back in New York.
And before I waste my time doing this,
I just want to make sure you guys are still there in New York.
We're here, but I don't think you're going to be able to hear us while you're trying this.
No, you won't be able to hear anything. I know that.
But you might be able to hear me trying to describe what's going on in my head.
All right, so Mitch, are you going to turn this on?
I'm going to turn it on.
Here we go. Close your eyes.
I'm just going to close my eyes. All right.
Right now, all I can say is, wow, my eye is closed,
but it's as bright as anything I've ever seen.
Just an incredible pulsating white and red and kind of black in the background,
if you can believe that.
And I guess if I was just not standing up and being quiet and shutting up,
it would be very, very relaxing.
I just...
No, I mean it.
I'm going to sit down just for a second.
Is there a chair underneath me? Good. Okay.
This is just... Wow, this is just really, really cool.
No other way to describe this.
I imagine if you were in New York City and you were sitting in a chair
and you had a flashing red light in front of your eyes
and you just had this glazed look on your face,
the police would probably be called right away.
The police would probably call beforehand.
But here, it's okay.
You know, it just suddenly changed. Is it supposed to do that?
Yes.
Why is it... The patterns are changing?
They're changing.
Is that my brain or is that the glass doing that?
Both.
It's both?
All right.
There's all kinds of weird things going on there.
And this is not a drug.
This is nothing illegal here.
This is just basically flashing lights in front of your eyes.
What I'm going to do now is I'm going to sit back
and let you guys in New York ask questions.
And hopefully, I'll be able to give you some sort of perspective
as to just what it is I'm going through right now.
You're listening to Off The Hook on WBAI New York 99.5 FM.
I'd like to actually maybe get Mitch back on the phone
and get more of a technical explanation of what's going on now.
I believe one of the popular terms for this is called synchronicity.
And a lot of people have experimented with it in the past
where you actually have two tones played, one in each ear,
where the difference in frequency is one of your natural...
I guess the term would be brainwave frequencies,
which induces a state based on the frequency
that's the difference between the two frequencies in each ear.
And this kind of incorporates light into the mix.
And maybe Mitch can actually explain it better for us.
But it is an effect that's been pretty well documented
and experienced by a lot of people.
Oh, wow, man. This is just cosmic.
Yes.
All right. I'm going to attempt to find Mitch somewhere in the stratosphere,
which I can't see anything, keep in mind.
I can just barely hear you guys in New York.
You're just a little fraction of my brain right now.
But Mitch, are you out here? He's behind my head.
Okay. They want a more technical explanation
as to just what I'm going through right now.
Why don't you give that to them and then hand the phone back to me
and I'll try to yank myself out of this, wherever I am right now.
Hang on.
Well, what Emanuel is actually going through is
synchronizing his brain to a brainwave sequence,
which is programmed into the hacked mini-POV kit,
which is now a brain machine.
And it starts off at waking conscious kind of brainwave frequencies,
which is called beta,
and gradually brings his brain down into alpha, theta,
and then some pulsing delta,
while keeping all the other parts of his brain stimulated.
So really that's what meditation is all about,
where he's connecting with deep subconscious and unconscious activity
while being aware to some extent.
And he says maybe not totally aware.
But one of the things that's really different about this
than with normal meditation
is that it's being stimulated externally by pulsing lights,
and that stimulates the visual cortex with frequencies that it's used to,
but not from the outside.
So it doesn't really know what to do with that information,
so the huge bulk of the visual cortex is going,
I think I'll hallucinate.
So that's what it does,
and everyone experiences something different.
So it changes its frequencies,
which changes what goes on with the hallucinations,
and that's why Emanuel was earlier saying,
is this my brain or is this the thing?
It's both.
Everyone experiences something different.
I often see mandalas.
Someone else might see a heart.
Someone else might see paisleys.
Someone else said they're seeing like a waterfall.
Hundreds of people have tried it out today,
and everyone describes it differently.
Can I ask you something?
Yes, you can ask me something.
Mitch, if you close your eyes really, really tight on this thing,
you lose the color.
It gets like sort of a darkish, greenish,
maybe even black and white image.
Is that normal?
It probably means you have brain cancer.
That's real nice to know.
It's awfully strange,
but I'm going to try and take this off my head now.
Should I do this slowly or I don't want to shock?
Oh, he just turned it off,
and all of a sudden I'm back here on planet Earth.
Well, do you guys have any further questions for Mitch
on this amazing device?
Let's just point out Mitch was saying
that he wrote an article about it in Make Magazine,
and if anyone wants any further information about it,
the article really is in depth,
and he did spend a long time on it.
I read it.
It's in Make No. 10,
which is still in stores now,
so if you want, you can get it.
And there's a little picture of Mitch in the top right corner.
Yeah, I've got to say, being back down here now after all that,
it's a bit of a letdown,
but it's something I definitely recommend.
Still not knowing exactly what it is I just went through.
It's certainly a weird experience,
and when you're at a camp for five days with a bunch of hackers,
you're going to go through a lot of weird experiences,
so for that reason alone, it's also worth it.
Hey, we also have Bill from No Storage Press here,
who has come from America to be part of this whole hacker thing,
and Bill wanted to tell us something
about what you've experienced so far in this place.
So I came over with about 39 of the people
on something we called Hackers on a Plane.
So we flew from DEFCON to Dusseldorf,
and then I think we took, I don't know,
a 10-hour bus ride from Dusseldorf to Finnever,
I guess that's how you pronounce it where we are now.
So we figured it was like 26 hours of travel,
and this is quite an experience,
nothing like any hacking con that I've seen to date.
It seems to never end.
I think it just sort of starts on Monday
and then ends five days later with no breaks in between.
So I'm a book publisher,
so I'm here looking for people to write stuff
and just get a sense of the kind of things
that people might want to read.
I don't have any funny glasses, though,
or any interesting tools.
I just have books.
So that's what I do.
Do you have any highlights of the conference
that you want to share with us,
any projects that you like in particular?
Yeah, I actually just had...
Oh, this is Bernie.
No, this is Robert in the studio.
Oh, this is Bernie. Hello, Bill.
Oh, that's Bernie. Hi, Bernie.
So I just talked to the WRT guys
who have an open firmware for...
well, it started with Linksys routers.
I don't know if you guys are familiar with that,
but you basically custom-build your router
and add all those features into your router.
What was really exciting to me is, I guess,
they're extending it.
In fact, they don't even focus on the Linksys router now.
There are all kinds of routers that you can do
all kinds of cool things to,
and I don't know yet what those cool things are,
hardware you can play with.
So I generally like hardware.
But I talked also to a guy today
who builds robots that play soccer,
and apparently very effectively.
They pass, they sense the goal,
they develop characteristics,
they use neural networks.
There's a whole variety of people here
coming from all different backgrounds.
I think probably more scientific
than many hacking cons,
but it's something that I think
we can learn from the U.S.,
a group of people who often come from
graduate schools, university,
and I think hacking, from what I understand,
at least in Germany, has a lot more respect
than hacking in the U.S. gets.
That's something that personally concerned me
because I think that there's an awful lot to be gained
by supporting people who are doing all kinds of hacking,
and that's one thing that's a primary interest of mine
in the books that we do.
How's that?
Sounds good.
That is definitely something
that almost everyone who we've talked to
has observed, the lack of conferences like that
and lack of groups in the United States
that are really interested in showcasing their projects
and putting on conferences like this.
It's something that is definitely...
Go ahead.
I would like to see more of this kind of thing
in hacking conferences in the U.S.,
certainly this caliber of people,
the seriousness with which they take their work,
but also, let's not make the mistake,
there's a hard-partying crowd that really...
I think I started drinking it, probably.
Don't tell my wife, but I think around noon today.
I'm not actually drunk, but that's because
if you spread it out over 13 hours, it wears off.
But it's a little bit Burning Man
and, I don't know, some parts of DEF CON,
and I would say conferences like TORCON.
I'm probably missing some good ones,
but it's...
Hope. Hope, yes, of course,
which I've attended three times now.
But with...
You know, everyone stuck in the woods
camping out on hard ground in the rain
with, you know, over...
Not the nicest facilities, I should say.
I mean, they're a little dirty.
But...
I'll live.
Okay, so...
I don't...
Should I keep prattling on?
If there's anything else you'd like to share, otherwise...
No, I mean, it's a great experience.
It happens only every four years,
and it's a very exciting...
It's a very exciting group, and it's...
I mean, I could be up till five in the morning exhausted
and just be learning stuff day and night.
It's a fascinating experience.
So I'll give this back to Manuel.
All right, thanks a lot.
Yeah.
All right, thanks, Bill.
And Bill's just one of many people
that have come from the States
and people have come from all over the world
to be here.
And it's just, as he was saying,
it's just incredible.
You can be up all night, all day,
and there are an unlimited number of experiences
you can have.
You can be drunk.
You can be just eating all kinds of weird food
that they have here.
You can just be exploring
the various military facilities
that happen to be around here,
or just camping out in the forest
or in a field of your choice.
It's just...
I mean, most of you guys...
Has there anybody in the studio
not been to one of these hacker events?
I guess, Jim, you haven't been,
but I think Arseny and Redbird,
have you been to a hacker camp?
We've both been to WhatTheHack, right?
Yeah, we were at WhatTheHack,
and hearing you talk about this now,
I really want to go there.
Yeah, what's wrong with you guys?
Why aren't you here?
We have to work.
Since I can't attend one of these
for the next eight or nine months,
is there a website,
especially one that would give an idea
of the flavor of the projects
and interesting things that are going on?
Well, if you go to ccc.de,
that's Chaos Communications Camp,
I guess, at this stage, ccc.de,
and you click on whatever the first thing is
that shows up on the screen,
you'll see something for the camp,
and that'll have a schedule,
that'll have all sorts of maybe simulcasts
of various talks, I'm not exactly sure.
But seriously, it's going for another five days.
If you have any way of getting to Germany
in that time period,
it is so worth it just to be a part of this,
because as Bill said,
it only happens once every four years,
in Germany at least.
It happens once every four years in Holland,
on alternate years.
What city?
Well, that's just it.
It's not really in a city.
It's two train stops away from Berlin.
So we're practically on the Polish border.
But we might as well just be anywhere in the world
because it's just so,
I don't want to say desolate,
but just away from everything.
You can see the stars at night,
you can hear the crickets,
and occasionally it rains,
but that's part of the whole experience.
You're in a tent,
and you hear the rain coming down on your tent,
and hopefully, if you set it up right,
it won't leak,
and you'll make it through the night okay.
It's all part of the experience,
trying to get a shower,
or find a clean toilet,
or anything like that.
It's just fun.
Yes, go ahead.
I had a question.
Like the HOPE conferences
and DEF CON conferences
and other hacker conferences,
there were a long string of panel discussions
on various topics of interest
to hackers and everybody else,
how technology impacts society,
politics, law, that sort of thing.
What are some of the panel discussion topics
that interested you most
that are going to be presented at this conference?
Well, apart from the opening ceremonies,
we've had a couple of tracks of talks today,
things about surveillance.
There's one talk about hacking space,
which is basically the aerospace industry.
There are going to be people here
from the Monochrome Collective.
Basically, some of the panels are in German,
some are in English,
some are in all different languages,
but I think it basically represents
a very wide range of things
computer hackers are into,
whether it be exploits on a computer system
or how to use VoIP technology
to do voice over IP.
Basically, a lot of the same topics
that we discuss at the HOPE conferences
I see being discussed here as well.
There's one about net activism in Estonia.
I think we talked about this a couple of months ago
where there was some kind of controversy
between Russia and Estonia.
It had taken place in a cyber world
where people from one country
were attacking the resources of the other country,
and that's going to be talked about as well.
So there's a very wide range of topics,
and it kind of reflects the international crowd that's here.
Wow.
And people who are interested in these various topics
can get more information about them
or maybe hear them live
if they go to ccc.de.
It's a wealth of knowledge
streaming from rural Germany.
Is that right?
Absolutely.
And again, people from all over the place.
In fact, we have a listener from Ireland who's here now.
James is joining us.
I forgot.
You told me to tell...
What's your name?
S25.
S25?
S25.
This is for the people on IRC
so that they know that he's here.
But James, I just want to ask you
how long you've been here for,
what it is that made you come to Germany
for this particular hacker event.
I've been here a day.
We arrived relatively early yesterday, about 12 o'clock.
I decided to come to Germany
because I'd never been to anything like this,
and I always looked at the videos from Hope
or listened to the talk and stuff,
and DEF CON and all that,
and I always really wanted to go,
but I couldn't quite afford a plane ticket to New York
or to Las Vegas or anything.
Not yet anyways.
So we arrived.
It's actually a bit of an interesting story.
We set up our tent on top of the bunker,
on top of one of the bunkers here,
and during the open ceremony today
we were informed that no one's allowed to climb the bunker,
even though our whole camp is up there,
me and two other fellas.
But security told us to take down our tent earlier,
but I was too busy making one of these brainwave generators
with not Kevin for about six hours.
So I think I'll be sneaking up there tonight
to go to sleep before moving in tomorrow morning.
So that's about it.
If you have any questions, ask away.
Yeah, so what are your impressions of the conference?
Everyone gives a different viewpoint,
so we'd like to hear them.
Yeah, oh, it's amazing.
It really is.
It's hard to explain, really,
when you get in here and you see it.
And I mean, chatting away with people on the Camp IRC channel
is amazing because twice now I've been chatting with a guy
and he asks me, where are you?
I told him where I was,
and then he calls me and he'll meet me in the flesh, you know?
The camp itself is mad.
I mean, you walk around,
and regardless of the time of day or night,
there's people everywhere.
There's someone doing something interesting.
There's always something here, somewhere,
that you can do that you're interested in.
It's an amazing experience.
Yeah, and that always seems to be one of the great things
is meeting all these people that you've known online
and you've had Internet relationships with
in terms of working on projects and sharing ideas and stuff.
It's a very cool place to get together
and meet everybody in person.
Oh, absolutely.
I met a good friend of mine who I've been chatting to online for...
Well, I chatted with him the first few years ago,
and then I met him again.
I was chatting to him for the last few weeks,
and I've been getting on great with him.
I mean, that is really part of the experience, you know?
So I'll hand you back to Emmanuel.
All right, thanks again for the feedback.
All right, thanks very much. Bye.
I think that's incredible, what James was telling us,
how he's able to pitch a tent on top of a bunker.
It's kind of a unique setup here
because basically there's grass on top of these airplane hangers,
and some people have actually gone up there and pitched tents.
But as the organizers of the camp have said,
it's probably not the safest thing in the world to do
because you are on top of a building
that might not be able to hold all that weight,
so they're encouraging people not to do things like that,
and for the most part, people are cooperating.
But it's, like I said, a very unique kind of setup.
Actually, here's a familiar face that's joining us now.
Rob from Amsterdam is stopping by.
I want to make sure we're still connected
before we do a whole big thing with Rob.
We're still connected.
Okay, good. It's always good to be sure about that.
Rob is here. Rob has been at all of these things.
I don't think he's ever missed one.
And he's going to, I guess, give some of his impressions.
Hello there.
Hello.
Well, my impressions. I only arrived last night.
I wasn't here for the preparations, which is not normal.
I usually come a week early and help out,
but I was abroad at conferences doing other things.
This is pretty amazing.
There's lots of things.
There's interesting light installations.
I'm sorry, everybody's already talked about that.
And just lots of people I know are here,
and interesting discussions are happening.
Campfires.
It's a lot freer here than it is in the Netherlands, unfortunately.
People can actually pitch a fire if they want one,
or they can put their tent where they want
instead of where the police rules decide that they must be.
So a lot more is possible here,
especially in the east of Germany.
And the surroundings are very nice.
There's a MIG park next to my camper van.
Now, Rob, you're always working on some really cool projects.
Last year, or two years ago, I think it was mesh networking,
and now I'm hearing rumors of voting machines.
Is there anything you want to tell us about that you're working on specifically?
Well, the past year I've been sort of working as a full-time voting activist.
Only part of that was hacking.
Only part of that was taking apart an actual voting machine
and figuring out how it worked and why it was completely insecure.
But a large part of that was just political campaigning,
and talking to the media, building websites,
talking to other organizations.
So I've been more or less a full-time political campaigner for the past year.
Sorry.
Do you find that conferences like this help you get the word out
about stuff that you've discovered and vulnerabilities
in the voting machines that you've been working on,
and all that research?
Oh, yeah. Well, these conferences here,
it's just about meeting people and building new networks
and thinking about new things.
The electronic voting thing has gotten a lot of attention lately
in the U.S. and in Europe,
and it's only becoming more.
I think the combined weight of all the walls
that are presently falling down in the electronic voting building
are sufficient to take the entire building down.
But we're going to have to continue to be vigilant,
and we're going to have to make sure that this industry really disappears,
or at least everything becomes verifiable.
All right. Well, is there anything else you want to share about the conference?
Anything unique about this specific conference
or stuff that we haven't heard in the past?
Oh, it's just, I think the unique thing is mostly the surroundings.
It's the way we sit in these concrete shelters
and the aircraft parked outside.
There's something about the environment
and the way they've dressed it up
that really gives it a special atmosphere.
Other than that, the lectures are good.
I've only attended a few, like three or four this afternoon,
but, yeah, it was fun.
Very good.
And it's going to continue to be fun for the next couple of days.
And you're listening to Off the Hook on WBAI New York 99.5 FM.
Who else do you got there, Emanuel?
I'm here.
I just want to say one thing to Rob.
I think this is the most optimistic I've seen you in a while
as far as actually talking about this electronic voting situation.
It seems like you believe there's hope that there can be some kind of a change.
Is that true?
Well, I've been very pessimistic about a number of other issues
that we've all been working on.
The whole privacy thing, as far as I'm concerned,
is pretty much a lost cause.
I have been personally very depressed over that
and also the political situation in my particular country.
The Netherlands hasn't always been that optimistic
over the past couple of years.
In terms of electronic voting,
we have really accomplished a lot in the past year.
A year ago, DRE or black box voting was the norm
and where it was going, and lots of countries were doing it
and states were doing it.
And right now, it's a very controversial thing
and a lot has changed in the past year.
So I think, yes, you can achieve real change,
but whether or not that's going to help us
in the short and medium term, I don't know.
So it really depends.
But personally, the past year has been a very productive year for me
and that's always a good and happy thing.
Okay.
So that's just one of the many things that we've been discussing here
in all my conversations out in the camp fields.
And I can only imagine what's going to happen in the days ahead.
We're going to be here until Sunday, at least.
And I'm sure there's going to be some inclement weather during all that
so it'll make it even more interesting.
So guys, in New York, any questions for us here
as far as what's going on?
Can you just give us a sense of the scope of the whole thing?
How big is it?
How big is this place?
Gosh, I'm bad with sizes.
Rob, do you have any sense as to how big the whole area is?
I mean, there is an airport next...
There is actually an active runway.
It's not that active, but I saw a plane taking off before.
It was a little propeller plane.
They're giving tours.
In fact, Redbird, you'd love this.
They're giving tours of the campground by plane.
If you want to pay 30 euros, I think,
you just basically get a tour on a little prop plane
and buzz around in the sky for a while and then land.
That's cheaper than I expected.
Yeah, it's quite an experience.
So this is right next door to a runway.
You have all these old buildings,
old concrete bunker, hangar-looking type structures.
Shelters.
Shelters.
I saw at least one concrete entrance to something underground.
I'm not sure what that was all about.
There's airplanes on display.
There's an old police helicopter.
For some reason, there's an old bus hanging out as well
in one of the back areas.
And fields and forests and places to pitch tents.
And it's just somehow, despite all that, it's very pristine.
And you can hear nature.
You can see the stars.
So you're kind of reliving history
but also going back to nature at the same time.
So it's really a very cool type of situation,
as opposed to camps of the past
where we were just in the middle of a farm someplace.
And that's nice too, but this is incredibly different.
I honestly don't know how the Germans are able to do this,
but they're able to make things happen that are really impossible.
And I think, as Tim, one of the organizers,
actually technically he's not the organizer of this conference,
but he's one of the main organizers of CCC,
he said it this morning, that this is impossible.
What's happening here is impossible.
Yet it happens anyway.
And I think that just sort of sums up
what these guys have done over the years.
About how many attendees are there?
And are they almost exclusively German or what?
Oh no, definitely not exclusively German.
You have people from all over the world here.
I've seen representatives of just about every country I can think of
in Europe or Asia, South America even.
And it's really quite a representation of a large part of the globe.
A lot of Germans as well, but a good mix.
And you have people, it's broken up in many ways,
male, female, children, people bring their families,
there's dogs here, there's all sorts of interesting people wandering around.
And you get to meet so many of them too.
You don't know where somebody is from when you start a conversation with them
and then you find out and you learn something about their country
and they learn something about yours.
And it just kind of progresses from there.
As far as attendance, I would say I'm not good at that either,
figuring out how many people are in a big area
and I'd have to ask the organizers how many are here,
but I'd say several thousand at least at this stage.
And we still have several days to go.
Emanuel?
Yes.
One of the things that always fascinates me about these European outdoor hacker camps,
which I've been to several of and enjoyed every one immensely,
I just couldn't make it this time, unfortunately,
is the quick build-out of infrastructure that's necessary to support
so many thousand people in the middle of nowhere.
Electricity, connectivity, food, water, alcohol, other things.
It's just an amazing build-out in just a matter of days,
the infrastructure necessary to support somebody.
What have your impressions been of this rapid infrastructure build-out?
Well, I'm going to put Mike on to talk about the actual infrastructure,
what's here and what's working and how quickly it worked.
But I think it's a good contrast to the infrastructure back home in the States,
things I've been hearing about ever since I left home.
And it never fails to amaze me.
Whenever I leave the country, there's always a disaster,
whether it's Katrina or some election that brings somebody to power that shouldn't be there,
or the most recent one, that horrible bridge collapse out of Minnesota
because of the crumbling infrastructure.
And just today, what I'm reading about in the paper,
you guys in New York, you had a little bit of rain in every single subway line,
ground to a halt, and there's flooding every place,
and people are running around in a panic.
It's all falling apart.
But here, things just seem to be getting built out of nothing.
But I'm going to hand the phone over to Mike to give a description.
Hi. Is there a specific question about the infrastructure here at the camp
or in Germany generally?
Just an overview, Mike, of what have your impressions been of this infrastructure build-out.
I guess you got there before this thing started. Is that right?
No, I got here today, this afternoon.
There was actually supposed to be a train strike here in Germany,
so I was a bit worried I wouldn't make it.
But apparently today at least the strike is affecting only freight trains.
So those of us who are human beings, we're still allowed to travel by train.
There is power and Internet everywhere,
both wired and wireless Internet here at the camp.
And I've heard some complaints, but I've been able to get online whenever I've tried,
so it's definitely working.
We got an apology from the organizers on their website
that there was only 300 megabits of connectivity available at this camp,
which I guess is less than at some previous camps, but still quite a lot.
In addition to the technical infrastructure, there's people selling food.
There's, of course, showers and toilets, and lecture halls have been set up.
Mike, I just wanted to point out as a frame of reference for some of our listeners
that 300 megabits per second is more connectivity than some small countries have.
Is that right?
You know, I don't have the complete list, but I would certainly imagine so.
It's certainly plenty fast. It's certainly more than any reasonable gathering of this size would need,
but this is not a reasonable gathering by any standard.
There's some very large file servers where people are able to put and retrieve files
of whatever nature here at the camp, so you don't even have to use the connectivity for that.
There's just all kinds of things.
There's this weird little, I don't know if you'd call it a golf cart or a golf bus or whatever it is,
that's been sort of running around the camp.
There's just all kinds of things.
I understand there's plenty of food and water, and there's a lake there.
Tell me about what else is there.
The lake is actually a couple kilometers away, so I haven't actually yet seen it.
There's facilities to rent bikes, so if you want to go to the lake, you can either bike or walk.
There's a number of food vendors.
There's someone who sold me some Indian curry for lunch today,
and these people, I guess, they just travel around and go to festivals like this,
and they're always very friendly and selling all kinds of things.
There's water available.
Four years ago at the camp, it was very hot and some people were getting sunstroke,
so the organizers have learned that lesson and made water available for free all over the place,
so that's nice.
It's just everything that you could possibly really want has been set up,
and the organizers of the camp have been working for months and months to plan this,
and also for several weeks on site to start setting things up.
I don't know if we've talked yet about this telephone network,
because those of us who've been to these camps have started to almost take it for granted,
but there's this crazy cordless telephone network that we're actually talking to you on right now,
where you can get one of these standardized, they're called DECT phones,
and register it with the network, and a lot of Europeans already have them,
so they just bring them from home.
And then you have a PBX inside the camp where you can call anyone.
We're receiving calls from the outside.
I understand you can call within Germany for free from any of these phones,
although not to the rest of the world, although you can of course receive calls.
And all this is just set up, used for five days, and then torn down.
It's really amazing in that regard, that this stuff can just be created.
It's like a mini-city that springs out of nowhere and then disappears.
Yeah, and one of the other amazing things that is always to be found
is that the people here are very friendly.
I know even at the HOPE conferences, which are a different class of creature,
the amount of trust that one is able to have for the fellow attendees is amazing.
No conference of this size, in their right mind, would have volunteer security guards
instead of paid security staff.
But here, that's what they do, and it works.
There's a volunteer fire and ambulance brigade.
If you should injure yourself, there's people that will help you.
The spirit of community is really here,
which is what enables the creation of all this infrastructure in such a short time.
That's actually one of the really amazing things about a lot of the conferences in Europe
that I noticed is the amount of trust.
You see people walking away from their laptops that they leave on desks,
and all this expensive equipment that they're doing, projects that they're working on.
You can just walk away, come back after chatting with your friends or grabbing a drink
or doing whatever you want to do.
You can walk away, come back, and it's actually still there,
which is something that really is very unheard of in the conferences that we have in the States.
I'm back here, and I echo everything Mike said.
I should point out, though, this is the first full day of the conference.
We have another four full days to go,
but I think it's going to be a communal experience of a very positive nature throughout
because these things tend to go that way.
I hope we see many more of these over the years to come, and other places as well.
I believe we're pretty much running out of time, are we not?
We've only got a couple of minutes left.
Let me just take this opportunity to give special thanks to the people who joined us here tonight
from this special program, live from the camp field in Germany.
Mescalito from Paris, Mitch Altman, Bill from No Starch Press,
of course, Rob from Amsterdam, James from Ireland,
as well as Mike and not Kevin, who joined me out here in Germany.
Of course, thanks to you guys, Arseny Redbird and Jim,
for keeping things going down there in New York, despite all the crumbling infrastructure.
Things really bad over there?
It was an interesting storm. It was very loud.
A lot of people were woken up at night.
The building I work in was flooded, so I didn't go to work today.
The power was out there, so I couldn't even connect remotely.
I'm just going to point out that I, coming from New Jersey, was the first person at my work.
So, Jersey gets some credit.
Everyone else is about an hour late.
There was a possible tornado about a mile from me.
However, you guys get lucky.
At the end of the week, the Perseid meteor shower should be visible from where you are and around the world.
Is that true?
Yeah.
The Perseid meteor shower is this week?
Yeah, I believe the 10th, possibly the 11th.
All right, well, I'm going to start looking into that and get some people together,
and we'll go out to a hill someplace and look at the meteor shower.
Or bunker.
Yeah, I'm sorry that it rained today in New York and caused all this confusion and mayhem.
Hopefully, us here in our tents in Germany will be able to get through whatever storms lie ahead.
I think we will.
Also, I want to give a special thank you to Ken Gale for making this all possible by engineering the program this week and last week.
And next week, if all works out,
Matt, Kevin, and myself will be running into the station just as the show begins, getting off an airplane.
Hopefully, we have to go through Heathrow, which is the craziest airport in the world, we're told,
and we'll see if we actually are able to make it in time.
So we'll see what kind of crazy show we have next week.
But this has been one of the more interesting ones.
All right, well, we certainly appreciate you sharing your thoughts of the conference there and all the guests that you've had sharing their ideas.
Just wish you guys could have been here with us.
Yeah, we do, too.
We'll just go to CCC.
We would if we could.
We'll just have to go to ccc.de.
Yes.
All right, we'll see you here next time in four years, hopefully, and maybe in Holland in two.
All right, have a good night.
This is Off the Hooks, WBAI, New York, 99.5 FM.
Now, I can't make a call.
We couldn't get much worse.
But if they could, they would.
Bum-diddly-bum for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
Bum-diddly-bum.
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